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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Little Sister, by Elizabeth Robins
+
+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: My Little Sister
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins
+
+Release Date: May 25, 2011 [EBook #36220]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LITTLE SISTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by C.S. Beers, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
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+
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            MY LITTLE SISTER
+
+
+
+
+               _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+    GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND
+
+    THE NEW MOON
+
+    THE OPEN QUESTION
+
+    BELOW THE SALT
+
+    THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+
+    THE DARK LANTERN
+
+    COME AND FIND ME
+      (PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM HEINEMANN)
+
+    THE CONVERT (METHUEN)
+
+    VOTES FOR WOMEN: A Play in Three Acts
+      (MILLS & BOON)
+
+    THE FLORENTINE FRAME
+      (JOHN MURRAY)
+
+    WOMEN'S SECRET
+      (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY)
+
+    WHY?
+      (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY)
+
+    UNDER HIS ROOF
+      (WOMAN WRITER'S LEAGUE, 12 HENRIETTA ST.)
+
+
+
+
+                            MY LITTLE SISTER
+
+                                   BY
+
+                            ELIZABETH ROBINS
+
+
+                              [Decoration]
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                         DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+                                  1913
+
+
+
+
+                          COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913
+                         BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
+
+                         PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1913
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+                    CHAPTER                     PAGE
+
+             I FIRST IMPRESSIONS                   1
+
+            II LESSONS                             6
+
+           III A THUNDER-STORM                    13
+
+            IV NIMBUS                             16
+
+             V THE MOTHER'S VOW                   24
+
+            VI MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING      33
+
+           VII A SHOCK                            45
+
+          VIII ANNAN                              51
+
+            IX ERIC                               59
+
+             X THE BUNGALOW                       68
+
+            XI AWAKENING                          83
+
+           XII OUR FIRST BALL                     94
+
+          XIII THE CLOUD AGAIN                   108
+
+           XIV "WHERE IS BETTINA?"               120
+
+            XV MY SECRET                         137
+
+           XVI THE YACHTING PARTY                150
+
+          XVII THE EMERALD PENDANT               161
+
+         XVIII RANNY                             169
+
+           XIX ANOTHER GIRL                      178
+
+            XX TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS      186
+
+           XXI AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER           198
+
+          XXII PLANTING THYME                    209
+
+         XXIII ERIC'S SECRET                     215
+
+          XXIV MADAME AURORE                     224
+
+           XXV GOING TO LONDON                   244
+
+          XXVI AUNT JOSEPHINE                    253
+
+         XXVII THE DINNER PARTY                  266
+
+        XXVIII THE GREY HAWK                     287
+
+          XXIX WHERE?                            303
+
+           XXX THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL             310
+
+          XXXI THE MAN WITH THE SWORD            322
+
+         XXXII DARKNESS                          329
+
+        XXXIII A STRANGE STEP                    336
+
+         XXXIV THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING   341
+
+
+
+
+                            MY LITTLE SISTER
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+She is very fair, my little sister.
+
+I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and
+golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without
+touching the quick.
+
+I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and
+then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written
+"was" or "seems."
+
+And that, in sum, is my story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot
+clearly remember what life was like before.
+
+Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my
+father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these
+were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen,
+I cannot tell. I do not think I imagined the confused picture of dark
+faces and a ship.
+
+My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A
+house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is
+wide and green.
+
+As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse;
+always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with
+the infinite possibilities of existence--from the discovery of a
+wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the
+horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on
+horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of
+the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and
+vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing,
+leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.
+
+We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the
+cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of
+hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his
+own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and kicked
+their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at
+Bettina.
+
+To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina.
+
+And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass
+by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill.
+
+Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by
+before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at
+large in our green dominions was an enemy.
+
+So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all
+in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in
+the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate.
+My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm.
+And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock
+blew across her face.
+
+Mélanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A
+lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Mélanie could not even
+understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been
+there with my mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the
+knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use
+to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as
+the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right
+was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch
+pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby.
+Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy.
+
+Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were
+on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had
+no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond.
+
+I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in
+stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away.
+Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange
+woman kissed Bettina?
+
+The new nurse lied.
+
+And I said no word.
+
+But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at
+Duncombe was ever to kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me--which I remember
+thinking a pity.
+
+Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness
+of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare
+confess it.
+
+For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge
+of the lie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LESSONS
+
+
+There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our
+mother as fledglings in a nest.
+
+Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite
+young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the
+beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But
+this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came
+in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness.
+
+In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's
+mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she
+taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in
+our lessons--so much so that we were a long time in finding out the
+dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because
+our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made
+stimulating, and the easy things she made delight.
+
+No; there was an exception to this.
+
+Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely
+patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister.
+
+Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my
+"Étude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a
+gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle."
+
+"Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge."
+
+I began again--_allegro_, as I thought.
+
+But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands.
+
+"How _can_ I? You expect me to be as quick as God!"
+
+I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense
+of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my
+fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always
+the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if
+there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her
+playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought
+down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord.
+
+Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And
+better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she
+was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her
+green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery
+rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections
+of old English song:
+
+      "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_"
+
+We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the
+first thing she sang in English.
+
+I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first
+language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us
+to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All
+the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the
+mythology stories were in French.
+
+And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went
+collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium.
+
+We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long
+were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited
+than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large
+country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other
+small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green--brave
+little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be
+wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had
+been taken from the people.
+
+Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been
+only a superior sort of farmhouse.
+
+Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as
+children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we
+thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted
+but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did.
+
+We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards
+those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our
+wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds. The proper
+thing to do, on catching sight of any stranger, was to start with an
+aversion suggested by our mother's, but improved upon--more pictorial.
+We would all three stare at the intruder, and then allow our eyes to
+travel to the nearer of the signs, "Trespassers," etc. If this pantomime
+did not convince the creature of the impropriety of his presence, we
+would look at one another with wide eyes, as though inquiring: "Can such
+things be? Are these, then, deliberate criminals? If so"--our looks
+agreed--"the company of outlaws is not for us." We turned our backs and
+went home. I was twelve before I realised that we ourselves were
+trespassers.
+
+The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone.
+
+That was a blow.
+
+Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not
+our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the
+motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as
+little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as
+heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit
+less to those broad acres rolling away--with foam of gorse and broom on
+the crests of their green waves--rolling northward towards London and
+the future.
+
+Two miles to the south was our village--source of such supplies as did
+not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the
+village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus,
+the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as
+many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower
+came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first
+to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the
+lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people
+would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come
+to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a
+children's school-treat?
+
+And she never did any of these things.
+
+Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha
+Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going
+to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had
+beguiled Bettina with chocolate.
+
+I was furious and miserable.
+
+I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream.... But
+the servants' gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I
+thought about little else in our walks.
+
+Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my
+head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I
+persist."
+
+Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of
+my mother's character.
+
+I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in.
+
+But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of--I knew not what. But I
+knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our
+walks were different, because we were always thinking we might meet him.
+
+I prayed God to give my mother strength--for Christ's sake not to let it
+happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer.
+
+Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken
+the matter in hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A THUNDER-STORM
+
+
+Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going
+out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So
+Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it
+grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on
+the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite
+suddenly the _croisée_ of the casement showed as ink-black lines
+crossing a square of blue-white fire.
+
+The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The
+moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it
+seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain.
+Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight.
+
+Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full
+upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her
+paleness ghostlike.
+
+She drew back from the window. Before the lightning died I had seen
+that she was frightened. I had been frightened, too, till I saw that she
+was. In the impulse to reassure her, my own fear left me. I went to her
+in that second blackness and put my hand in hers. When I could see again
+I looked through the streaming window-pane, as we stood there, and I saw
+a man sheltering under the chestnut-tree at our gate. He lifted his
+umbrella, and seemed to make a sign: "May I come in?"
+
+"Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue.
+My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen.
+
+I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed
+so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A
+blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of
+sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging
+together.
+
+"That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought
+the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and
+daylight struggled back. We went on with our playing. I noticed, as my
+mother went downstairs, that she kept her head turned away from the
+window.
+
+Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and
+scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being
+carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were
+wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with
+fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother,
+with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the
+drawing-room door for the bearers to pass.
+
+Their feet left muddy marks in the hall....
+
+We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had
+been taken away.
+
+People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric
+current.
+
+I knew God had heard my prayer.
+
+But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was
+riven from foot to crotch.
+
+That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You
+expect me to be as quick as God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+NIMBUS
+
+
+I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No.
+He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying
+more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else
+understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon.
+
+Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet
+there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of
+fear.
+
+I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A
+thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A
+fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger
+with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones.
+
+We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people
+are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships.
+
+My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who
+heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade.
+
+More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our
+walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have
+seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now,
+little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."
+
+I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The
+forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of
+the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer,
+nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things
+taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull
+oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.
+
+I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace
+that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would
+hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew
+themselves pursued.
+
+Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew
+that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears.
+Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to
+strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven
+of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and
+flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about
+the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to
+let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains.
+
+"_Now_ we are safe and sound!" she would say.
+
+I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though
+we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger.
+
+In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of
+game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House
+for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had
+escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had
+barred him out.
+
+That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden
+shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy,
+craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got
+into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when
+lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his
+breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was
+behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes
+and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch
+at your bare feet as you jumped in.
+
+I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was
+there.
+
+Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact
+that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the
+house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to
+bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only
+some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children
+the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless.
+
+As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean
+children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at
+Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds
+were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter
+evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind
+instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the
+organ's playing."
+
+Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and
+listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a
+something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and
+often seemed upon the verge of understanding.
+
+There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than
+that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off
+her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that
+look, listening, foreboding.
+
+There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in
+the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It
+caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively,
+to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast
+of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look
+when the fringe of shadow lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to
+the light.
+
+There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or
+moods. She was merely gentle and aloof.
+
+She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes
+most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times
+when she must have been unhappy, too.
+
+She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after
+Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we
+had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs
+to do lessons in the morning-room--which was our schoolroom under the
+cheerfuller name.
+
+Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing
+for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we
+were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side
+in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we
+heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that?
+
+I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons, listening to that music
+she never made for us.
+
+And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast.
+
+Then I would shut the window.
+
+Bettina ought never to hear such music.
+
+For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful
+world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it
+"between the lights."
+
+As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper
+still.
+
+As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy
+places.
+
+Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and
+consolatory suggestions of supper.
+
+Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our
+mother--when she would break off and come to find us--help us to hurry
+through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite
+knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us
+see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our
+father's order and his watch. We had turned over the pretty things he
+had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew
+up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two
+brass buttons we might never touch.
+
+We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them
+wonderfully--as though they were alive.
+
+And we, too--we were always happier after we had seen them.
+
+We knew that she felt, somehow, safer.
+
+So did we.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MOTHER'S VOW
+
+
+We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own.
+But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by
+following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent
+distance, but with a closeness of devotion.
+
+In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless
+springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family.
+
+The reason for the first is clear.
+
+As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and
+intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a
+commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort.
+
+Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the
+Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour,
+partly as symbols of our national greatness.
+
+From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter,
+or to her sailor-son, the Prince of Wales. His wife, that Princess of
+Wales, who even before her marriage had been the idol of England was our
+idol too--apart from her high destiny as mother of the future King, (the
+little Prince born in the same year as Bettina)--and mother of that
+fascinating figure in the story, the solitary Princess of her house,
+three years younger than the youngest of our family. Our interest in
+them all received a fresh accession at the birth of Prince Henry; we
+hailed the advent of Prince George; we felt the succession trebly sure
+in the fortunate arrival of Prince John. We saw them safely christened;
+we consulted the bulletins in the _Standard_ and the _Queen_ about their
+health; we followed their august comings and goings with an enthusiasm
+undampened by hearing how well they were all being brought up on the
+incomparable "White Lodge" system, which had been so successfully
+applied to the little royalties' mamma.
+
+Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the
+unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing
+fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath.
+
+It was let to different people, from time to time, for the hunting. If
+the people had children, they were of palpitating interest to us, even
+though we never saw much of the children.
+
+Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother.
+
+If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would
+stop to ask how my mother was.
+
+The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother
+ought to have a nurse. She said she had me.
+
+That was the proudest moment of my childhood.
+
+I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such
+delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed
+to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her.
+
+Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick
+room.
+
+In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape,
+and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to
+the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching
+Bettina play at church-choir with all our dolls in a row, and tiny
+home-made hymn-books in their laps.
+
+When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in
+chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously:
+"Someone must go down and bring Bettina back."
+
+I could not bear to see Loring, or Mélanie, doing anything for my
+mother. I think they humoured me, and that Mélanie performed her service
+chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid
+was able to come downstairs.
+
+She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her
+hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different.
+
+Not only thin. Different.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people
+who "called to inquire."
+
+We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such
+meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon
+"indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her
+malady.
+
+We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our
+inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought.
+
+When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought
+their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with
+the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return
+your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children.
+
+In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty
+used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most
+glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look.
+I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring
+Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?"
+
+One day Dora shook her head.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+She was going back to school. "Aren't _you_ going back to school?" she
+asked.
+
+"Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school."
+
+Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us.
+
+"You _like_ having to go to school!" I said.
+
+She loved it. "So would you."
+
+"I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction.
+
+She couldn't think why.
+
+Neither could I--beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And
+that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of
+pity--"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at
+home."
+
+Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified
+to hear we had never had one.
+
+Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the
+riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for
+her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she
+had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a
+strange woman those hours she spent with us.
+
+We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to
+sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so hopeless. Or she
+would sit under the wild broom in Cæsar's Camp watching the birds; or
+lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors or
+out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that
+was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure,"
+our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any
+pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all.
+
+Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not
+the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the
+circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in
+all things else.
+
+I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I
+recognised her accomplishments as among our best family
+assets--reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect
+shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my
+thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger,
+soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care
+of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the
+paths appointed.
+
+Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected
+against colds, against fatigue.
+
+There is, in almost every house, one main concern.
+
+When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If
+she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable.
+
+But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable.
+
+I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or
+away from our mother, until--but that is to come later.
+
+I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing
+the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car--the first we had
+encountered at close quarters--a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling
+apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded
+her dreadful errand--to invite us children to come and stay at her house
+in Brighton from Friday to Monday!
+
+We stood there, blank, speechless.
+
+Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she
+could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse.
+
+Relief and pride rushed together. I could have kissed my mother's feet.
+My own could hardly keep from dancing.
+
+"Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor.
+
+The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs.
+
+Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will
+not let anyone take you away--no, never. Very well, you shall not pay
+visits."
+
+And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not _never_?"
+
+"Not never."
+
+Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING
+
+
+When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had
+been with us since she was fifteen--at first a little scullery-maid.
+Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of
+her youth and her love of fun.
+
+We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She
+was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of
+ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted
+person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he
+used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring
+us our presents at the same time--perhaps out of fear of the cook, who
+held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was
+elderly, and very easily annoyed.
+
+She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over
+the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the
+hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if ever we spoke of
+these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any
+more. So we were most careful.
+
+So was Peter.
+
+So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to
+go down the garden and wait for them--wait so long, sometimes, that we
+fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning.
+
+Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were
+impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence
+into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our
+mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye--though she
+wasn't ever coming back, the cook said.
+
+Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room.
+
+In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom
+what had become of Martha.
+
+Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone
+under.
+
+"Under? Under what?"
+
+Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!"
+
+I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what
+had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where
+she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed
+themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person.
+
+I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She
+chased me out with a hot frying-pan.
+
+We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found
+out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with
+the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife
+ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter.
+
+As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go
+near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon
+she went away.
+
+We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a
+dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.
+
+Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of
+gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow
+our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid
+us back.
+
+I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole
+year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died.
+And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the
+horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they
+had four little children left. And one or other of the children was
+always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would
+tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen
+for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for
+plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a
+fearful lot of poultices.
+
+Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a
+peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had
+admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too,
+and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book
+thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called
+"Household Medicine." I read it a great deal--especially when one of the
+little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother
+and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them
+back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that
+the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I
+glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the
+specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their
+sufferings.
+
+One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on
+slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs.
+Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr.
+Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had
+Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all
+crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had
+been like this for two days.
+
+"Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted
+upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a
+warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper; and the thing for me to do
+was to send him some proper food--all of which was done in collusion
+with Martha.
+
+I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my
+mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages.
+Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those
+thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.
+
+I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to.
+That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite
+natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner
+clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common
+clay, Martha Loring.
+
+The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two
+years or more after she "went under."
+
+Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well
+again--so well that she insisted on going for a walk.
+
+My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings
+and overshoes.
+
+But, after all, we only stayed out about ten minutes. My mother said
+the air was raw, and "not safe."
+
+At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed
+quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal
+appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be
+prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be
+obvious later--I remember we had delicious things to eat that day.
+Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being
+urged to eat more than she wanted.
+
+My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take.
+
+When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic,
+because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had
+gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire.
+We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there
+had been this trouble to make Bettina eat--specially breakfast. My
+mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in
+her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow
+cold. So a punishment had to be invented. Bettina, who dearly loved
+society, must be left alone to finish breakfast--a plan that seemed to
+work, for when one of us went back in a few minutes, Bettina's plate
+would be bare. Then the awful discovery one day, in cleaning out a
+seldom-opened part of the side-board--a great collection of toast and
+bits of mouldy bacon, pushed quite to the back of the capacious drawer.
+
+While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now
+and superior, a face looked in at the window--a pinched, unhappy face,
+with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a
+shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down--heavy
+leaden drops out of a leaden sky.
+
+I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily.
+The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She
+had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as
+far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the
+hop-fields.
+
+At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What _are_ you doing? Shut
+the window instantly!" And as I was not quick about it, she came behind
+me and shut the window sharply. What was I thinking of? Had I no regard
+for my little sister, sitting there in the current of raw air? Really,
+she had thought me old enough by now to be trusted!
+
+Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I
+remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head.
+"Go away!"
+
+"Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story.
+My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were
+dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases.
+
+"Go away!" she said. And again that gesture.
+
+I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered.
+
+My mother measured out the tonic.
+
+My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other,
+lesser instances, came back to me--strange lapses into hardness on the
+part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm,
+she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words.
+If Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to
+sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's
+sensitiveness shared. And yet....
+
+The woman with her burden had moved away--a draggled figure in the rain.
+
+A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart--an impulse of actual hatred
+towards my mother--as the hop-picker disappeared.
+
+Hatred of Bettina, too.
+
+I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If
+Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food
+to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright
+above the greyness of that wretched time.
+
+Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of
+the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where
+she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered,
+something of her spirit still survived.
+
+Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with
+the misery of having to admit the sentence just.
+
+I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of
+Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink.
+
+It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort
+of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted
+libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina.
+
+Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions
+dawning--wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal?
+
+The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course,
+Bettina must not tease the cat."
+
+With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very
+gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety.
+
+But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it.
+
+The hop-picker haunted me.
+
+Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow,
+to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I
+addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for
+yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others."
+
+The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back.
+
+In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind
+deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow
+prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I
+didn't know about had made her like that.
+
+In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and
+my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind.
+
+Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any
+connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures,
+and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one
+guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of
+Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick
+world's infection through our windows.
+
+To-morrow?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A SHOCK
+
+
+When to-morrow came we knew.
+
+We had been using up our capital.
+
+Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of
+us?
+
+Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked.
+
+Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone.
+
+But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on
+living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of
+three.
+
+For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow.
+
+And should we always have the pension?
+
+Yes, as long as she lived.
+
+Not "always" then.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world
+and of our littleness, came down upon me.
+
+We seemed to have almost no relations.
+
+We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We
+heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all.
+
+My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the
+past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we
+grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis
+of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with
+the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs.
+Harborough.
+
+"Aunt Josephine?"
+
+"Well, your father's step-sister."
+
+All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she
+had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly.
+
+"She couldn't have known you," Bettina said.
+
+"That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with
+unwonted bitterness.
+
+Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were
+troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial
+condition was to harass and depress my mother. The condition was bad.
+Therefore it was best covered up.
+
+"We shall manage," she said.
+
+I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I
+knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite
+incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts.
+Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed to be out of
+mind. Out of my mother's mind.
+
+I thought constantly about these things.
+
+One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die
+together. My mother was horrified.
+
+"But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live--Bettina and I,
+without the pension?"
+
+"You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you."
+
+I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence.
+
+My mother went alone into the garden.
+
+She came in looking tired and white.
+
+Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring
+up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went
+upstairs "quite goodly," as we used to say. She looked back and smiled.
+She was still the most beautiful person we knew. But it was a very waxen
+beauty now. I must learn not to weary her with insoluble riddles. I went
+into the dining-room to make her tray ready--I liked doing it myself.
+Bettina's voice came floating in. She had grown tired of playing proper
+music. She was singing the nursery rhyme which my mother had set to
+variations of the tinkling old-world tune:
+
+      "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_"
+
+I thought how strange and wonderful was the simplest, most ordinary
+little life. There must always be that question: what is going to become
+of me? I had long known what was the proper thing to happen. I ought to
+marry Lord Helmstone's heir. And Bettina should marry a prince.
+
+But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a
+family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest
+Hall--since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently
+came my lady. Very smart, with amazing clothes; and some married
+daughters with babies. There were two daughters unmarried, who seemed to
+be always abroad or in London. We liked Lord Helmstone; even my mother
+liked him. But she criticised his "noisy friends." These were the
+golfers who motored down from London. Broad-shouldered men, in tweeds
+that made them seem broader still. They would pass by our garden-wall
+and look at Bettina. Often when they had passed they looked back.
+Secretly, I wondered if any of them were those "husbands" who were going
+to take care of us. Some lodged in the village. The noisiest stayed at
+the Hall.
+
+Bettina's singing had broken off abruptly. I heard her running upstairs.
+
+And then a cry.
+
+"Come--oh, quickly, _quickly_!"
+
+Bettina had heard the fall overhead.
+
+Our mother lay on the floor, Bettina standing over her, agonised,
+helpless.
+
+We lifted her on to the bed. We loosened her clothing, and brought
+water, and bathed her temples.
+
+She opened her eyes and smiled--then the lids went down. Still that
+look, the look that made her a stranger.
+
+Was this death?...
+
+Bettina shrank from it. But I told her not to leave the room a second. I
+would bring the doctor quickly.
+
+Bettina's face.... "I cannot stay alone," she whispered.
+
+"I will send up one of the servants."
+
+She held my arm. "Suppose ... while you are gone---- Oh, I am afraid."
+
+"I will run all the way," I said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ANNAN
+
+
+I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water.
+
+I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I
+could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our
+touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece
+that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for
+other people, we said. "Other people must take their chance." I
+remembered that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the
+postmaster wrote out a telegram. _We_ were "taking the chance" now. Such
+a little thing--my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my
+mother her life.
+
+The postmaster rang up Brighton.
+
+The doctor was out.
+
+What could be done but leave a message!
+
+I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not
+thought of that before?
+
+Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London
+that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. He recommended
+the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would
+come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the
+driver to Littlecombe.
+
+"Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too,
+waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted
+mind.
+
+That new acquaintance of the Helmstones'! Was he not a sort of a doctor?
+"The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken
+rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch
+arrogance--"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We
+had not seen him--at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from
+other golfers.
+
+I ran most of the way to the farm.
+
+As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with
+golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very
+un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the
+pathway with a sort of rigidity of gait, I received an impression of
+something so restrained and chilling that I hoped he was not the man I
+had come for. In any case this was not a person before whom one would
+care to show emotion. I asked if he were Mr. Annan. Yes, his name was
+Annan. His tone asked: and what business was it of mine? But he halted
+there, below me, as I stood on the step explaining very briefly my
+errand.
+
+He did not want to come; I could see that.
+
+He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner.
+
+I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given
+him no idea of the urgency of our need. I had to explain that all we
+asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our
+regular doctor would be with us very soon.
+
+He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free
+hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish-brown.
+
+"We mustn't lose time," I said.
+
+As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf
+clubs thrown down in a stone passage.
+
+He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big
+Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a
+moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry
+had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the
+mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for
+a warning.
+
+The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed,
+at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.
+
+What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a
+great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a
+general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered
+young golfers in Norfolk jackets--far too like them, to help in so dire
+a need as ours.
+
+I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of
+him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with
+enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps,
+why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan
+would go far." He had gone too far in the direction of overwork. He had
+been urged to come down here and play golf. Still, he worked long
+hours....
+
+And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept
+repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help."
+
+We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my
+younger sister was not to know if my mother----
+
+"Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster--almost at a
+run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me
+without an effort.
+
+Mother, mother!----
+
+Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever
+noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning
+never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing.
+"Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning."
+
+Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children.
+
+Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles?
+
+"I am taking you the short cut," I said.
+
+"Of course."
+
+We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn
+foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all
+those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All
+that gentleness and beauty----
+
+What a richness had been lavished on our lives!
+
+I had never begun to understand it before this evening--never once had
+thanked her.
+
+Mother, mother!----
+
+The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare
+larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet
+of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was
+nearly over now. And her time---- Was that nearly over too? Where would
+she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch
+stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the
+first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked
+back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet ... and
+that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that
+evening.
+
+"Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the
+flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once
+who was always made faint by it."
+
+He did not look at me again.
+
+But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now we could see the red tile roof.
+
+Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my
+running.
+
+As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of
+Duncombe garden.
+
+Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before I entered the house a strange thing happened.
+
+A great peace fell on me.
+
+I knew, without asking, that all was well.
+
+Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic
+light was this, then, that was shining on the world?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He saw my mother, and told us what to do.
+
+Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his
+verdict.
+
+As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me--eyes
+suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh.
+
+"You don't think she is going to die?"
+
+"Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always
+hope----"
+
+"Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My
+mother!..."
+
+He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's
+life--and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and
+soul.
+
+Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into
+intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald
+and red-gold and azure--a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was
+like the quickness of God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ERIC
+
+
+For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some
+direction.
+
+There seemed no need to talk.
+
+Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him
+walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It
+came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it.
+
+Then it would come again.
+
+He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a
+great misery behind him.
+
+No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I
+pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of
+longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I
+hadn't the heart to worry her with questions.
+
+We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to
+them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's
+had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from
+touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the
+plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we
+thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was
+striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at
+pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an
+air.
+
+She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But
+my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite
+of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips
+and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you
+understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She
+took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young
+Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs.
+
+There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as
+engaged, she said, to Guy Whitby-Dawson. He was in the Guards.
+
+We were all agog. When was she going to be married?
+
+She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards.
+
+Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so
+many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to
+give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it
+was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance.
+
+I wished we three had a pittance.
+
+For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So
+she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would
+die. Then he would have plenty.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged, Hermione flirted a good
+deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young
+men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I
+were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought
+over some of his photographs for us to look at. We did not admire him
+at all.
+
+But we never told Hermione.
+
+As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really
+thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was
+always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing.
+
+If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses
+were up--all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I
+grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful
+when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord
+Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way
+to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just
+for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would
+find I had been gone for hours.
+
+The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old
+devotions paled.
+
+Mercifully, nobody knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked for him all the next spring. In the summer I said to myself, I
+shall never see him again.
+
+Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and
+the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my
+mother.
+
+I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of
+the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of
+sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.
+
+No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.
+
+I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.
+
+I had not dreamed him. He was true.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day brought him.
+
+I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The
+others seemed gladder to see him than I.
+
+He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her
+being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited
+Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe, instead of tramping all
+that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse
+even than the Club House brew.
+
+The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round
+after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord
+Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a
+holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But
+he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt
+flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there
+in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.
+
+Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite
+wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made
+him confess he could not tell Indian from China.
+
+"Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and
+upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no
+one noticed.
+
+It was wonderful to see him again--to verify all those things I had been
+thinking about him for the year and four months since he went away.
+
+But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at
+once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of
+words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been
+compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such
+commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a
+wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with
+reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more
+uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without
+embarrassment.
+
+I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in
+the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him,
+too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that
+Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird.
+Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any
+sisters."
+
+He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But
+he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.
+
+But the confession seemed to have brought him nearer, to make him more
+human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had
+grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh,
+happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about
+them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like?
+
+"Oh----" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were
+"all right."
+
+The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was
+only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could
+learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.
+
+My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was
+"like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he
+liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to
+know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling
+still to keep up the property--a losing battle. And a second brother,
+not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the
+navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was
+"trying to grow tea in Ceylon."
+
+Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our
+friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any
+terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of
+studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one
+thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.
+
+I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in
+that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing
+out the word _research_ with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which
+must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.
+
+That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve--a forefinger
+sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper
+lip--and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep
+absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce
+the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the
+great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner
+of the Hidden Field--that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BUNGALOW
+
+
+My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the
+_dévot_, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or
+a saint.
+
+I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for
+people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish
+moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.
+
+Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate
+little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady
+Barbara's unblushing _Schwärmerei_, was less a trial to me than the talk
+about saints and ascetics.
+
+The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our
+tea and our visitor.
+
+Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.
+
+But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.
+
+She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going
+to stay?"--a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to
+put.
+
+"Three weeks."
+
+"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her
+confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much
+of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."
+
+He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life
+nowadays--thank God!--in a laboratory.
+
+Which was scarcely polite.
+
+"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."
+
+He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.
+
+"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half
+so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of
+romance--oh, naturally, not _her_ kind.
+
+What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.
+
+Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed
+that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented
+Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed
+at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants'
+hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room
+at the Carlton--Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a
+thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss
+of the most expensive brand."
+
+They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind.
+For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."
+
+"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made
+in the feuilleton of a certain paper.
+
+Hermione was not a bit dashed. "_You_ may look for romance in bottles if
+you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.
+
+"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"
+
+"Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain."
+
+He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of
+his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said,
+would be waiting for his foursome.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of
+"story-telling."
+
+"You said you were only going to stay three weeks."
+
+To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three
+weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."
+
+"----and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."
+
+I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady
+Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.
+
+"What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.
+
+"Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in
+the country?"
+
+"Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody
+in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.
+
+As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara
+seemed to speak for him. "----just to live in for a while," she said
+quite gently.
+
+"Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag
+over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.
+
+"What do you want a bungalow _for_, then?" Hermione's teasing voice
+followed after him.
+
+"----mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned
+round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on
+Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had
+never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.
+
+Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put
+things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have
+some place to keep one's traps," he called back.
+
+Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the
+retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face
+almost beautiful.
+
+I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all
+mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his
+special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron,
+painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set
+up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard.
+
+The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.
+
+Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go
+over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.
+
+As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with
+the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he
+couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken
+of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let
+down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on.
+And those noises--which he was, strangely, still more sensitive
+to--produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and
+by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the
+house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at
+"country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that
+reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as
+on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us--Eric rather
+out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit:
+
+"----wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At
+four, this kind of thing----" In a quiet, meditative way he would begin
+clucking. Then quacking, almost sleepily at first; then with more and
+more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy
+of a loud, exuberant crow. All this not the least in the sketchy,
+impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble
+noises, but with a precision and vigour that first startled you, and
+then made you feel that you were being given, not only an absolutely
+faithful reproduction of the sound those creatures make, but in the
+oddest way given their point of view as well. We laughed the more, I
+think, because the comedy seemed to come out of the revelation of the
+immense seriousness of the animals. Eric's commentary seemed so fair. It
+seemed to admit that the importance to ducks and cocks and hens of
+_their_ goings on was at least as great as the importance of peace and
+quiet to him. With an air of doing it against the grain, he gave you
+(with a rueful kind of honesty) the duck's sentiments in a series of
+depressed little quacks that hardly needed the translation: "'Been all
+over this repulsive pond; turned myself and all my family upside down
+for hours. Nothing!'" Then indignant quacks, and: "'Silly new servant
+can't tell time. Past five o'clock, and no sharps!'" Then a single
+jubilant "'Quack! There she is----'" and a rising chorus, till anyone
+not in the room would be ready to swear we kept as many ducks as Big
+Klaus. A moment's silence, and in his own person Eric would say with a
+sigh: "_Now_, perhaps, I can tackle that German review." "'Buck! Buck!
+Buck!'"--or rather a series of sounds that defies the alphabet. Then the
+interruption: "'My-wife's-laid-an-egg!'" and the shrill rapture of a
+loud crow of great authority.
+
+The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given
+that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When
+Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him.
+
+And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked.
+
+I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable.
+
+She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in
+at first one window and then another. She said there was nothing but a
+stove and packing-cases in the room she could see into. And she brought
+back a bewildering account of what had been done to the windows of the
+other room. There were no curtains and no blinds, but thick brown paper
+had been pasted over the glass of each lower sash. You could no more see
+in than you could see through the wall.
+
+The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be
+there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after
+all, she said.
+
+Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him
+about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?"
+
+"Oh, quite well, thank you."
+
+"Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read
+the whole day and half the night."
+
+No, he didn't read all the time.
+
+"What do you do then?"
+
+Ah, there was no telling.
+
+And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he
+didn't want to.
+
+Hermione announced that she had been to call.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I heard you call."
+
+She stared.
+
+"You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?"
+
+"Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at
+his ease.
+
+Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my
+life I ever saw Hermione blush.
+
+"What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!"
+
+"Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I always _am_ busy when I'm at
+the Bungalow."
+
+She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard
+me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.)
+
+"Yes, I heard you try the door."
+
+"Well, you _are_ an extraordinary being--shutting yourself up with brown
+paper pasted over the windows----"
+
+"----only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."
+
+"Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"
+
+He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."
+
+"I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."
+
+"Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."
+
+She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he
+makes bombs."
+
+"Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to
+where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.
+
+"No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make
+counterfeit money."
+
+"If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be
+counterfeit."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came
+flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He
+was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture
+chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the
+platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of
+creatures--poor little darling guinea-pigs.
+
+She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.
+
+"No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do
+with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"
+
+He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think
+he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at
+shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her
+friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery
+with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.
+
+But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You
+know perfectly well the Chows are pets."
+
+"Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never
+heard of keeping guinea-pigs."
+
+"'Keeping them'--I used to have them to play with; but you know quite
+well you don't mean to 'keep' them."
+
+"Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."
+
+Of course she hadn't been able to keep them beyond their natural span.
+"But I never did anything horrible to them."
+
+Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer
+under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her
+anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in
+her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets
+that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and
+kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed.
+
+Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only
+a child."
+
+But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said,
+that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were
+warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the
+dogs such whippings as you do."
+
+Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded
+of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now
+and then, they'd get out of hand.
+
+"Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For _your_ pleasure. And
+profit. Not theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in
+house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point
+in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione
+was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to
+keep them?
+
+In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.
+
+Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said.
+"I shall just notice how long you keep them."
+
+"Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."
+
+Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air,
+she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them
+for?"
+
+"Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect,
+after all, to make my fortune."
+
+Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how
+fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well,
+here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs
+are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My idea
+is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a
+day----"
+
+"But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they
+run away? Ours did."
+
+While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures
+with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply
+move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in
+guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief
+Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go
+into the Bungalow.
+
+This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more
+accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived
+altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he
+never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the
+Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech
+was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said,
+according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could
+pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the
+Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle
+eyes and very long arms and legs.
+
+Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of
+Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite
+imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.
+
+"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a
+deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he
+seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.
+
+"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to
+speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know
+our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we
+found it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric
+as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's
+back--the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a
+parson, or some professor-person.
+
+We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones
+came.
+
+That pleased me more than anything.
+
+He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient,
+and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his
+about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful
+laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I,
+too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.
+
+Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they
+"proved the spirit."
+
+A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric
+said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was
+worse--long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a
+risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse;
+they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire
+hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes---- Then he died.
+
+Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It
+was a fine way to die."
+
+He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become
+the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had
+been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long
+grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the
+governing class, out of touch with the real work of the world--no
+wonder they still groped after the military idea.
+
+They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other,
+wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in
+Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with
+those other "preachers"--in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches
+were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of
+merely living off the sheep of his pasture.
+
+But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional
+politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of
+all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused
+from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of
+talking.
+
+We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied
+a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were shown the
+Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh
+over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished
+personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed
+up his moustache and began to heckle him. What had he _done_--except to
+use his great position as a rostrum? What had been done by all the
+members of the Lords and Commons put together comparable to the
+achievements of--for instance, Sanitary Science? Ha, _Science_! No
+phrase-making. No flourish of fine feelings. Just Sanitation--the force
+that had done more in fifty years to improve the condition of the poor
+than all the philanthropy since the birth of Christ. And what had the
+Government done even for Science?
+
+Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the
+sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of
+wisdom.
+
+"When I ope my mouth let no dog bark."
+
+No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his
+work--humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact--these kept
+him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or
+pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had
+to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away
+from the limelight. He was unwritten about--unknown. Even when, after
+years of toil, your man of science came out of obscurity with some great
+gift for the world in his hand, no one except other men of science was
+the least excited. The _Daily Mail_ was quite unmoved. The service done
+mankind by science left the general public in the state of Pet Majorie's
+turkey:
+
+      "----she was more than usual calm,
+       She did not give a single damn."
+
+He was not complaining.
+
+All this was wholesome.
+
+"Science!"
+
+      _"No high-piled monuments are theirs who chose
+          Her great inglorious toil--no flaming death.
+        To them was sweet the poetry of prose,
+          And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath."_
+
+"Who wrote that?" my mother asked.
+
+With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of
+the human race."
+
+And he told us about him.
+
+I asked to have the verse written down.
+
+Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; but still, a splendour only
+to dazzle me--not to light and lead.
+
+When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then
+to steal a look.
+
+When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go
+over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon
+that background.
+
+My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption--the
+long, blessed hours while other people slept.
+
+To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric,
+had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as
+seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint,
+this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my
+fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had
+pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret
+drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since
+she was born--till that afternoon when I began to think furiously about
+her again.
+
+Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Monmouth and carried Eric off. I
+thought they had all three gone to the links.
+
+I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the
+garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the
+gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall
+I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this
+side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect
+it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers
+wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The
+old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said,
+rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the
+more delicate fruits on the wall.
+
+All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the
+lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out
+clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started,
+and stood as still as the apple-tree.
+
+Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other
+bending down. He kissed her--Eddie Monmouth.
+
+I turned and fled back to the house.
+
+The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of
+my dreaming.
+
+Bettina!--old enough to be kissed by a man!
+
+So she was the first to be engaged ... my little sister, who had only
+just had her sixteenth birthday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I tried that night to lead up to a confidence.
+
+But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to
+tell me her great secret just at first.
+
+So I waited.
+
+Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up
+to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding.
+
+Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for
+India. The bride a girl they had never heard of.
+
+I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up
+courage to steal a glance--not a cloud on Betty's face.
+
+Here was courage!
+
+But what the poor child must be going through.--I could not leave her to
+bear this awful thing alone....
+
+When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew.
+
+She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little.
+Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mind _like that_!" she said. "He was very
+nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas."
+
+At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering
+alone.
+
+But I was wrong.
+
+Bettina _did_ like Ranny Dallas best!
+
+He liked Bettina, and flirted with her.
+
+I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I saw more than that.
+
+I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us
+were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in
+her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or
+with waking now and then to thrill at stories about other people's
+courage, insight, indomitable patience. Why should _I_ not rouse myself
+and nerve myself? Why should not I, too, scorn delight and live
+laborious days?
+
+It was then the Great Idea came to me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+OUR FIRST BALL
+
+
+Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away
+without a word about the radical change that had come over a life
+outwardly the same.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my
+mother--French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me
+leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to
+surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me.
+
+I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to
+breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work
+behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the
+Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be
+when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall.
+
+I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he
+was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "liked
+him best"--liked him more than the man she had allowed to kiss her, and
+who had not cared for her at all.
+
+I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny
+Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione
+sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder
+brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny.
+
+All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young
+as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was
+"chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son
+to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed
+Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of
+marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member
+of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about
+such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into
+the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this
+by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants."
+
+I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All
+that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who
+was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of
+being so--chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean.
+And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a
+nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather
+nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the
+plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if
+I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't
+long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he
+looked.
+
+I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and
+more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they
+couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed
+quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up
+and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn.
+Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say that _he_ wouldn't be seen
+riding such a bicycle--"no, not on a dark night!" Ranny, as we knew,
+had two motor-cars of his own, and was very particular about their every
+detail. But he said all that the much-abused "bike" needed was a brake.
+Even without a brake it was "a lot better," he said, "than having to
+think about the shover-chap."
+
+After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the
+Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them--and, for all I could
+do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina.
+
+I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her
+or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He
+used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there
+Ranny got the chaffing.
+
+"What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd
+only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what
+he'd come for.
+
+"Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship."
+
+"Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would
+say to us: "Here's a fella usen't to care a doit for golf--and now this
+passion!"
+
+When Lord Helmstone said that--which, in the way of facetious persons
+secure from criticism, he did a great many times--a colour like a girl's
+would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication
+being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention
+to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his
+keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh----?"
+
+"In this weather?"
+
+"Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to
+your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep
+down superfluous tissue. Eh--what?"
+
+People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly.
+
+When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well,
+but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone,
+she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way.
+
+I said that was quite different, and we very nearly had a serious
+quarrel. When I saw that Betty really couldn't see the vast difference
+between making fun of that boy and making fun of a man like Eric Annan,
+I began to feel more anxious than ever about Betty.
+
+This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South.
+
+They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New
+Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not
+even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had
+taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew
+anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step."
+
+Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two.
+There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers,
+and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever
+seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night
+long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it
+was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the
+admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behave rather badly to
+Ranny. When she had danced three times with the oldest sailor--Captain
+Gerald Boyne--Ranny took her into a corner and remonstrated. I saw he
+looked pretty serious, but I didn't know till she and I were undressing
+in our own room that night, or rather morning--I didn't know how
+strongly he had spoken.
+
+We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little
+remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you
+know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they
+had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians
+went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us.
+
+My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were
+to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in
+the morning."
+
+So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked
+different to me--this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The
+ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very
+white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of the
+dimity curtains. Yes, the moon was brighter than ever! Betty threw open
+the window and leaned out. Oh, what a pity to go to bed when the world
+was looking like this!
+
+We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold;
+but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out
+of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We
+quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was
+still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what
+had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air
+of justification--"such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss,
+just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so
+divinely!"
+
+I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said.
+
+"Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of
+course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had
+promised him----" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so
+reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent
+her dancing _at all_ with Captain Boyne.
+
+"But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded
+her.
+
+"Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And
+instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very
+bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that
+he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw
+Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she
+forgot to keep her voice down.
+
+My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called.
+
+We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But
+she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he
+say?"
+
+I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in
+particular--he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he
+danced badly.
+
+"Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I
+think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me."
+
+"Yes," I admitted, "he does dance best with you."
+
+Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione,
+and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on.
+Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny
+coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she
+expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to
+having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione
+said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up.
+
+And he began badly: "'You've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'"
+
+Betty said "No."
+
+"'Why not? _Why_ haven't you told him?'"
+
+"He would ask for a reason."
+
+"'Very well, give it'"
+
+"'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said.
+
+"'The reason is....' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He
+began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And
+then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and--we waltzed that
+time too."
+
+"Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I
+didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that."
+
+No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the
+cotillion."
+
+"Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain
+Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous."
+
+She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting
+as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was
+furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there."
+
+"I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that horrid waltz
+after he had said he 'made a point of it'--I wasn't to dance again with
+'that fellow.' And then, what do you think I said?" Bettina took hold of
+my arm, so I couldn't go on braiding my hair. "I said he was jealous of
+Captain Boyne, or why should he call him 'that fellow'? Even at the
+moment I felt how horrid that was of me; for it's not a bit like Ranny
+to be jealous in a horrid way, calling people 'fellows.' So I said: 'If
+the Boynes aren't nice, why are they here?' And Ranny said: 'Oh, Gerald
+Boyne's people are all right. His brother is all right. But I shouldn't
+want you to dance with Gerald if you were my sister. And if you were my
+wife, I should forbid it.'"
+
+"'But,' I said, 'I'm _not_ your sister!'--Betty tossed her head,
+laughing softly--'and I'm not your wife----'"
+
+I asked her if she had said it like that?
+
+Yes, she had. "And I said, too--I said it was 'fortunate.'" Then without
+the least warning, poor Betty sat down on the foot of her bed and began
+to cry.
+
+I put my arm round her. And she pulled her bare shoulders away. "You
+needn't think I'm crying about Ranny," she said. "I suppose it's being
+so angry makes me cry."
+
+"You are crying because you are over-tired," I said, and I began to take
+off her shoes and stockings.
+
+"I'm _not_ crying because I'm tired, but because"--she wiped her eyes on
+the sleeve of her nightgown--"it's a disappointment to see anyone so
+silly ... making 'points' of such things as waltzes."
+
+When she was ready for bed, she stood meditating a moment. And then:
+"Ranny has never struck me as one of the horrid, unforgiving sort of
+people. Has he you?"
+
+"Oh, no," I said, and I made her get into bed. I covered her up. But it
+was no use; she threw back the eiderdown, and sat bolt upright.
+
+"----asking me like that, _at a ball_, if I liked Captain Boyne best--a
+man I'd never seen before--don't you call it very rude?"
+
+"No; only a little foolish----"
+
+Another knock on the communicating door. "If you children keep on
+talking I shall have to come in."
+
+We promised we wouldn't say another word. But more than once Betty
+began: "Ranny----"
+
+"Sh!" I said.
+
+The quarrel about the window had ended in our leaving it a couple of
+inches open, and the curtains looped back. As we lay there, the room
+grew brighter; so bright that every little treasure on the long, narrow
+shelf above each bed could be plainly seen. All the small vases and
+pictures and china animals--all the odds and ends we had cherished most
+since we were babies.
+
+When Bettina had come in that night, the first thing she did was to
+clear a space for her cotillion favours. The moonlight showed the
+brilliant huddle of fan and bonbon-basket tied with rose-colour, and,
+most conspicuous of all, the silver horn hung with parti-coloured
+ribbons.
+
+When we had lain quiet in our beds for ten minutes or so, Bettina pulled
+out a pillow from under her head, and propped it so that the moon
+couldn't shine any longer on the be-ribboned horn. And neither could
+Betty's eyes rest on it any more. She lay still for some time, and I was
+falling asleep, when I heard her bed creak. She had pulled herself half
+out of the covers, and was leaning over the pillow-barrier. She took the
+horn and the other favours, one by one, and with much gravity thrust
+them under the bed.
+
+A sigh of satisfaction and a settling down again.
+
+I turned and smiled into my pillow. It was so exactly the sort of thing
+Bettina used to do when she was in the nursery--punishing her toys when
+things went wrong.
+
+What a blessing, I said to myself, that I was coming to like Ranny
+Dallas. For, quite certainly, he was going to be my brother-in-law.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CLOUD AGAIN
+
+
+The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the
+North.
+
+Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was.
+
+"Perhaps he will write," I said.
+
+"He isn't the sort that writes--not even when he's friends with a
+person." Then, with a rather miserable laugh, Betty added: "He _says_ he
+can't spell."
+
+So I gathered that she had asked him to try.
+
+And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the
+ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two,
+and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne.
+
+We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely what would happen--all,
+that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter.
+
+It was a somewhat subdued Bettina who began that year; but I don't think
+it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long.
+
+(Oh, Bettina! how is it now?)
+
+I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being
+actively unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did
+not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father
+was very ill. Ranny's place was at home.
+
+Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in
+common. And she spoke as though any week-end that found his father
+better, Ranny might motor down.
+
+So we waited.
+
+Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends.
+
+As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that
+year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced
+prematurely.
+
+I, too.
+
+I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of
+all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love
+me for finding--all alone like this.
+
+I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I
+had been "good" and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to
+go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the
+Great Secret.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so
+much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I
+thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm.
+
+My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that
+if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to
+Betty?
+
+"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding
+look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my
+mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"
+
+"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and
+dogs."
+
+"Oh, as for dogs!----" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an
+unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one
+dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they
+discuss?"
+
+"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."
+
+She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."
+
+When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as
+though she might be feeling "out of things."
+
+Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking
+Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."
+
+"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."
+
+At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, _I_ have been
+away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is
+the one they chiefly want."
+
+She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she
+said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my
+mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she
+added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."
+
+As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away
+from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of
+the difficulty of confidence on our part--of how our very devotion and
+craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling
+her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own
+age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist
+between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about
+it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her
+know about Ranny."
+
+"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"
+
+I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did
+she feel so?
+
+Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could
+tell her about myself.
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."
+
+"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."
+
+And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved
+with me too.
+
+I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I
+learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least
+interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics" to tell. The
+very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the
+emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of
+girls!--girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother
+didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate.
+I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens,
+have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet....
+
+"Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new
+insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in
+another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her
+own.
+
+I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small
+Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she
+lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been
+happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved
+fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But
+try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled
+against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions
+but those at Duncombe. Feeling myself incredibly bold, I reminded her
+of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am
+always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said
+(unconscious at the moment of the lie)--"you know all that happens to
+us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you
+except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big."
+
+I could not have approached her in any way more telling than to make
+confidence on her part seem a corollary to confidence on ours. She cast
+about with an indulgent air for something new. And then I heard for the
+first time of the "sort of cousin" who had come to keep house for my
+grandfather, and to bring up the little girl of four. I wondered the
+more at so important a figure having been left out of all previous
+pictures, when I heard that my grandfather had cared more for this "sort
+of cousin" than he had cared for his only child. The cousin must have
+been a horrible woman, though my mother told me so little about her, I
+cannot think how I knew. The most definite thing that was said was: "She
+brought out all that was least good in your grandfather." And when he
+ceased to care for the cousin in one way, she made him care for her in
+another. "She ministered to all his whims and perversities." My mother
+dismissed the first sixteen years of her life with: "I had seen a great
+deal of evil before I was grown; mercifully, I met your father when I
+was still very young."
+
+He was the one man, I gathered, whom she had ever found worthy of all
+trust, all love; and she had been so glad to leave home--to leave
+England!
+
+But out there in India she must have seen plenty of nice army people.
+
+Oh, plenty of army people.
+
+She seemed not to want to dwell much even on the happy time. She had her
+two children in three years. The babies kept her at home, and she had
+loved being at home with the babies--and above all with my father in his
+spare hours. Then, as we knew, he had been killed out tiger-hunting. And
+she broke off, "Now go on about the Boynes."
+
+I asked her, mischievously, why she took such an interest in the Boynes,
+as though I had not tried to bring that very thing about. Her ideal of
+"the confidence that should exist" broke down even here; the navy, she
+said evasively, was "the finest of the services."
+
+"Not finer than the army," I protested.
+
+"Yes, finer than the army. Peace was the real 'enemy' to soldiers; but
+peace did not demoralise sailors, for there was always the sea for them
+to conquer. Was Hermione expecting to see the Boynes soon again?"
+
+I smiled inwardly. She might as well have confessed that she thought the
+older Boyne might "do" for me, and the younger Boyne for Betty.
+
+But what had become of the ideal of confidence?
+
+Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not
+been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy
+hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face
+of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the
+faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass
+on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or--mercifully--more than a
+pale reflection of past Despair.
+
+There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately
+behind. They may put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they
+are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed.
+
+The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the
+immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue,
+stand appalled.
+
+The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I
+felt about---- No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes
+raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing
+ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look
+like this.
+
+I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how,
+when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your
+father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the
+lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those
+far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me--days which our mother
+must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the
+key to--there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an
+echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the
+beauty of life to those two lovers in the gorgeous East; and out of
+starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone
+sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended.
+
+The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I
+should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at
+the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour.
+
+Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the
+sadness of life to older people.
+
+Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of
+older women--that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded
+little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch
+had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed.
+
+She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was
+with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang
+to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness--and a
+fear.
+
+Not even my secret could console me at such moments.
+
+Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a
+wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother--where was
+Betty?
+
+She was late.
+
+She was very late.
+
+Unaccountably, alarmingly late.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WHERE IS BETTINA?
+
+
+She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we
+mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why
+Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she
+had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina
+waited--nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went
+away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case."
+
+She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked
+nor stirred.
+
+We went out in the hall and held a whispered conference. "She won't mind
+a bit," Bettina was sure. "It isn't as if it would do another time"--for
+the Helmstones were off again to-morrow. To clinch the argument, Betty
+told me that Hermione was expecting a letter, by the last post, from a
+friend of Ranny's; the one chance of hearing anything for Heaven knew
+how long.
+
+So I let Bettina go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother never woke till nearly nine, and of course the first thing she
+asked was, "Where is Betty?"
+
+I said the maid had taken her, and Lady Helmstone had promised to send
+her home.
+
+My mother was extremely ill-pleased that Bettina had gone. I had hoped
+that after that profound sleep she would wake up feeling better, as I
+have noticed the books nearly always say is what will happen. But I have
+noticed, since, that people who have been sleeping heavily at some
+unseasonable hour will often waken not refreshed and calmed, but out of
+sorts, and easily fretted by quite small things. They seem to require
+time before they can collect themselves and see the waking world in true
+proportion.
+
+"We thought you wouldn't mind," I said.
+
+And why _should_ we? Why, above all, should I, who was so much older...?
+
+"To go anywhere else ... I should have been against it," I said, "but to
+the Helmstones--where you let her go so constantly."
+
+Saying that was a mistake.
+
+Did not Betty know, above all, did not I know, the feeling of all the
+proper sort of mothers about young girls being away from home at night?
+Day-visiting--a totally different matter.
+
+It was "the last evening for weeks," I reminded her. The Helmstones were
+going back to town....
+
+"I am not sorry," said my mother.
+
+To my surprise the circumstance that seemed to annoy her most was that I
+had not gone with Bettina. She spoke to me in such a way I felt the
+tears come into my eyes. "I stayed on your account," I said.
+
+"I have told you before"--and she told me again.
+
+The supper tray came up, and went down scarcely touched. I asked if I
+should read to her.
+
+No. There had been reading enough for that day.
+
+So I mended the fire and brought some sewing.
+
+She lay with the candle alight on the night table, waiting, listening.
+
+"Who is to be there?"
+
+"Oh, just the family, I suppose."
+
+"Did you ask?"
+
+"No--but Betty would have said, if...."
+
+"----_never even asked!_"
+
+We sat in silence.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"A quarter to ten."
+
+"It is not like Bettina," she said presently. Bettina had never in her
+life done such a thing before.
+
+I agreed she never had. If Bettina transgressed (and I admit that this
+was seldom), she never did so outright. And she was not sly. She did not
+so much evade as avoid an inconvenient rule.
+
+My mother remembered, no doubt, that any sin of deliberate disobedience
+was far more likely to be mine. "I suppose the child, not able to ask my
+permission, came to you."
+
+Yes, she had consulted me.
+
+"And you took it upon yourself----"
+
+I sat there, in disgrace.
+
+Presently: "Perhaps the Boynes have motored down. Or one of them."
+
+I said I had no reason to think so. All the same, I couldn't help
+welcoming the suggestion. For the idea that the Boynes, "or one of
+them," might be there, seemed, oddly enough, to excuse Bettina in my
+mother's eyes. And she was moved to make me understand why I had been
+reproached. We had to be far more careful than most girls. I heard about
+the heavy responsibility of bringing up "girls without a father."
+
+I wondered in what way our father's being here would have altered the
+events of this particular evening. And since he had been quoted to
+justify anxiety, I made bold to go to him for cheer. At times of stress
+before, I had invoked my father. Not often, and all-cautiously. And
+never yet in vain. That night I wondered aloud what were the kind of
+things our father would have done.
+
+"His mere being here would make all the difference."
+
+His mere name certainly did much. Once again I had cause to bless him
+for taking the chill out of the domestic atmosphere.
+
+She talked more about him and, by implication, more about herself that
+night than ever before or after. She told me of the mistakes he had
+saved her from. The things he had warned her against. Though he was
+brave as a lion, she would have me believe that he was afraid of
+trusting people. He had said to her after a certain occurrence----
+
+"What occurrence?" I interrupted.
+
+"No need to go into that," she said hurriedly. The point lay in his
+comment: "The safe course is not to trust anyone."
+
+"That is very uncomfortable," I said.
+
+It was better, she answered, to be less comfortable and safe, than to be
+more comfortable and----
+
+"And what?"
+
+She had stopped suddenly, and felt for her watch on the night table.
+"Ten minutes past. They will surely see that she starts for home by ten
+o'clock."
+
+We sat for five minutes without speaking. I thinking of my father.
+
+Then we heard the maids making the nightly round, shutting and locking
+up the house.
+
+"Look out of the window," my mother said.
+
+I could see nothing. The night was dark and still.
+
+"She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may
+bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk."
+
+She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the
+door."
+
+Oh, the times we had been told that!
+
+Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The
+maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature
+stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back
+into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on
+her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that?
+
+If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful
+sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very
+quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened.
+
+Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white
+of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my
+narrower range.
+
+I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke--until I,
+unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on
+the familiar Magic--my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred.
+She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a
+different key.
+
+"The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more
+I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow
+plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of
+nice equilibrium."
+
+"I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said.
+
+"The fall?"
+
+"Yes--when father was killed--and all the happiness fell down."
+
+Then she said something wholly incomprehensible at the time, but which I
+understand better now. "Perhaps," she said, "I would have borne what you
+call 'the fall' less well if I hadn't known ... there are worse than
+tigers in the world's jungle."
+
+I felt I was on the track of some truer understanding, and a secret
+excitement took hold of me. "How was it you came to know that?" I asked.
+
+"It is a thing," she said, "that even happy women learn." Then,
+hurriedly, she went on: "And it ended--my happiness--before any stain or
+tarnish dimmed it. All bright and shining one moment, the next all
+vanished."
+
+I watched the face I knew so well. Covertly, I watched it. Saw the
+delicate lineaments a little pinched with anxiety. The eyes veiled one
+moment, the next lifting wide as at a sudden call.
+
+"What was that?" she said.
+
+I heard nothing.
+
+Oftenest that quick lift of heavy eyelids, and the flash of bright
+fixity, would come without any following of speech. And the eloquence of
+that silence, tense, glittering, wrought more upon my nerves than any
+words. All my body strung to attention, I listened with my soul.
+
+No sound.
+
+No sound at all. Then, inwardly, I rebelled against the tyranny and
+waste of this emotion.
+
+Why was she like this?
+
+"Have they put on the chain?" she asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And bolted the door?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How do you know they have bolted it?"
+
+"I heard them."
+
+"Heard _them_?"
+
+"Heard the bolt."
+
+"One may easily think a stiff bolt has gone home, and all the
+while----"
+
+"But I am sure."
+
+My easy certainty seemed to anger her. "I thought so, too, once." She
+said it with a vehemence that startled me.
+
+After a moment: "Was that here?" I asked.
+
+"No, no, no"--she shook it off.
+
+I went and knelt down by the bed. "Tell me about it, mother."
+
+"No, no. It is not the kind of thing you need ever know."
+
+"How can you be sure? _You_ weren't expecting anything to happen." I
+felt my way by the shrinking in her face. "Yet someone came to the
+unbolted door----?"
+
+"What makes you think that!" she exclaimed, and I was hot and cold under
+her look.
+
+"It--it only came into my head"; and then, with fresh courage, or
+renewed curiosity, "But I am right!" I said, with sudden firmness.
+"Isn't it so? You were horribly frightened, _weren't_ you?" I touched
+her hand, expecting she would draw it away from me, but the fingers had
+locked on the silk frill of the quilt. They were cold; they made me
+think of death.
+
+"Yes," she said, very low, "I was horribly frightened." I felt the
+shuddering that ran along her wrist, and the chill of that old fear of
+hers crept into my blood, too. She looked through me, as though I were
+vapour, as though the bodyless Dread her eyes were fixed on once again
+for that instant--as though _that_ were the most real presence in the
+room.
+
+"Tell me," I whispered, "tell me what it was."
+
+"----impossible to talk about such things." She drew away her hand. "All
+you need to know is ... the need of taking care. Of never running risks.
+What time is it?"
+
+"Five minutes past eleven."
+
+"Did Lady Helmstone say she and Hermione would walk back with Bettina?"
+
+"No, she didn't say that."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"Just that she would send Betty home."
+
+After some time she said quite suddenly: "That might mean alone in the
+motor."
+
+I was going to say "Why not?" But as I looked up from my work at the
+face under the candle light, a most foolish and indefinable fear flashed
+across my mind--a feeling too ridiculous to own--sudden, indefinable
+dread of that inoffensive man, the Helmstones' head chauffeur. I had no
+sooner cast out the childish thought than I remembered the two under
+men. One only a sort of motor-house "odd man." To that hangdog creature
+might fall the task of driving Betty home! I had thought of this man
+vaguely enough before, yet with some dash of human sympathy, for it was
+common talk that he was "put upon" by the other men. He was a weakling,
+and unhappy; now I suddenly felt him to be evil--desperate.
+
+Oh, why had I let Bettina go!
+
+Even if the chauffeurs, all three, were decent enough ordinarily, what
+if just to-night they had been drinking?
+
+Betty coming across the deserted heath with a drunken driver----
+
+Oh, God, I prayed, don't let anything happen to Bettina....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A quarter past eleven.
+
+I put on a bold face. "They wouldn't, I think, have a motor-car out for
+Betty at this hour, and the reason she is late is because she has told
+them she would like the walk."
+
+"They will hardly send a woman with her at this time of night."
+
+We both started violently, and all because a coal had fallen out of the
+grate on the metal fender.
+
+My mother was the first to speak: "They are haphazard people, I
+sometimes think.... You don't suppose they would send her back with a
+groom...?"
+
+I said I was sure they would not, though an hour before I would have
+asked, Why not?
+
+"Lord Helmstone couldn't be expected to put himself out. I _wish_ I had
+not let the servants go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you think of
+it? Of course, _they_ should have gone and brought Bettina home."
+
+I saw now how right and proper this would have been.
+
+Half past eleven.
+
+"It is very strange," I said.
+
+"Go and look out again, you may see a lantern, or the motor-lamps."
+
+I leaned out into the fresh-smelling darkness, and I saw nothing, I
+heard nothing.
+
+I hung there, unwilling to draw in my head and admit the world without
+was empty of Bettina. She had been thrown out of the car. She was lying
+by the roadside somewhere, dead, that was why she didn't come home.
+
+Suddenly I thought of Gerald Boyne. What if, after all, he had been
+dining there. He would be sure to want to bring Bettina home. Yes, and
+those casual Helmstones would turn Bettina over to him without a
+thought. A man Ranny wouldn't let his sister dance with in a room full
+of her friends.... Bettina, setting out with Gerald Boyne to cross the
+lonely heath--and never reaching home.
+
+I knew all this was wild and foolish ... then why did these imaginings
+make me feel I could not bear the suspense another moment? I shut the
+window and turned round. "You must let me go for her," I said.
+
+The same suggestion must have been that moment on her lips. "Go, wake
+the servants," she said, "tell them to dress quickly. Get your cloak and
+light the lantern." She gave her short sharp directions. The young
+servant was to go with me. The old one was to lock the door behind us,
+and wait up with my mother. I went with a candle through silent
+passages, and knocked on doors.
+
+I left the lantern burning down in the hall, and in my cloak went back
+to my mother's room.
+
+She was leaning out, over the side of the bed listening.
+
+"Aren't they ready?"
+
+"They are only just roused."
+
+"Servants take ten times as long to dress as----Hark. Look out!"
+
+I went back to the window and peered between the close-drawn curtains,
+with hands at my temples on either side of my eyes.
+
+Nothing.
+
+Except.... Yes, I could hear the heavy step of the older woman down in
+the hall unlocking, unbolting, unchaining the door ... that the
+housemaid and I might lose no time when she was ready.
+
+The old woman must be waiting for us there below, with the lantern in
+her hand. A faint light was lying on the path. Not a sound now in all
+the world except my mother's voice behind me:
+
+"You will take the short cut."
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+"And as you go don't talk--_listen_."
+
+"Listen!" I echoed, with mounting horror. "What should I hear?"
+
+"How do we know?"
+
+A chill went down my back.
+
+The bedroom-door opened, and Bettina walked in.
+
+"Such a nice evening! They've been teaching me bridge. Why have you put
+on your cloak? Why are you looking--oh! what has happened to you?"
+
+Not very much was said to Bettina that night. She and two of the
+Helmstones' maids had come round by the orchard-gate, walking softly on
+the grass, "so as not to waken mother."
+
+Only a little crestfallen, she was sent away to bed. My mother had
+motioned me to wait. As I watched Bettina making her apologies and her
+good-night, I thought how worse than useless had been all that anxiety
+and strain. "I shall remember to-night," I said to myself, "whenever I
+am frightened again."
+
+But this, I could see before she spoke, was not the moral my mother was
+drawing. "Shut the door," she signed. And when I had come back to her,
+she drew herself up in bed and laid her hand on mine. "I want you to
+make me a promise," she said. "It is not fair to girls not to let them
+know that terrible things _can_ happen. Promise me that you will take
+better care of Bettina. Never let anyone make you forget----"
+
+I promised--oh, I promised that!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MY SECRET
+
+
+Eric, like the violets and primroses, came earlier that third spring.
+
+He seemed an old friend now, with an established footing in the house.
+Yet I had never been alone with him for more than five minutes before
+the day I told him my secret.
+
+I had imagined it all so different from the way it fell out. I said to
+myself that I would meet him on his way home some evening, after he had
+played the last round. He would never know that I had been waiting for
+him in the copse; but that would be where I should tell him, standing by
+the nearer stile, where I had first seen kindness in his eyes.
+
+My mother's health was worse again that spring, and when I wasn't
+studying I was much with her. After Eric came I stayed with her even
+more, for he said she had lost ground.
+
+He discouraged her from coming downstairs. I believe he prevailed on her
+to keep her room chiefly by coming constantly to see her, bringing
+books and papers. My mother's sick-room was not like any other I have
+seen. It was full of light and air, and hope and pleasantness. She would
+lie on the sofa in one of the loose gowns she looked so lovely in, and
+we would have tea up there.
+
+Nearly always I managed to go down to the door with Eric.
+
+One day, that very first week, he came a good hour before we expected
+him. Bettina had shut herself up to write to Hermione, "----and I am
+afraid my mother is asleep," I said.
+
+"Well, you are not," he answered. I saw his eyes fall on the books and
+papers that littered the morning-room sofa, and I felt myself grow red.
+The books would betray me!
+
+The strange thing was that he pushed them away without ever looking at
+them! And he sat down beside me.
+
+He had never been so close to me before. I think I was outwardly quite
+unmoved. But I could not see him, even at a distance, without inward
+commotion. When he sat down so near me, a great many pulses I had not
+known before were in my body began to beat and hammer. I felt my heart
+grow many sizes too big, and my breast-bone ache under the pressure. I
+said to myself the one essential was that he should not suspect--for him
+to guess the state he had thrown me into would be the supreme disaster.
+He might despise me. Almost certainly he would think I was hysterical. I
+knew the contempt he felt for hysterical women. Never, never should he
+think me one! I would rather die, sitting rigidly in my corner without a
+sign, than let him think I had any taint of the hysterical in me!
+
+Above all, for my Great Secret's sake, I must show self-command. Upon
+that I saw, in a flash, this was the ideal moment for telling him about
+The Plan.
+
+He asked how had my mother slept. I don't know what I said. But I
+remember that he spoke very gently of her. And he said I must husband my
+strength. I stayed too much indoors, he said. Hereafter I was to take an
+hour's brisk walk every day of my life.
+
+I told him I couldn't always do that in these days.
+
+"You must," he said.
+
+I thought of my books, and shook my head.
+
+"Won't you do it if I ask you to?" he said.
+
+He leaned a little towards me. I dared not look up.
+
+"I understand your not wanting to leave your mother," he said. "But
+couldn't your sister----" Then, before I could answer, "No," he said,
+smiling a little, "I suppose she couldn't."
+
+There was something in his tone that did not please me. "You mean Betty
+is too young?"
+
+No; he didn't mean that, he said.
+
+What _did_ he mean?
+
+"Well, she has other preoccupations, hasn't she?" he said lightly.
+
+"You mean Hermione? Hermione and all the family are in London."
+
+No; he didn't mean Hermione. I was in too much inner turmoil to
+disentangle his meaning then. For he went on quickly to say: "Suppose I
+sit with your mother for that hour, while you go out and get some
+exercise?"
+
+I was to lose an hour of him--tramping about alone! The very thought
+gave me an immense self-pity. My eyes grew moist.... "Come, come!" I
+said to myself, "keep a tight rein!"
+
+Just as I was getting myself under control again, he undid it all by
+laying his hand over mine.
+
+"Let me help you," he said.
+
+"Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being
+kind; don't think it is more--don't _dare_ think it is more!"
+
+Though I couldn't help thinking it _was_ more, I turned to the thought
+of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming
+to be faced.
+
+And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of
+the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me
+catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something
+about: "If you really do want to help me----"
+
+But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand.
+The words I had rehearsed and meant to say--they flew away. I felt my
+thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water.
+
+With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul
+and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those
+few seconds' contact we two seemed to have grown into one. I found I
+had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of
+having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an
+immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early
+struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time--questions that
+made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said
+I imagined it would be like that.
+
+"Well, it _was_ like that."
+
+"And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one
+of your family."
+
+He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not
+very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented.
+
+"I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people."
+
+What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me.
+
+"Why, that you have the most interesting profession in the world," I
+said.
+
+"You don't mean the practice of medicine!--mere bread-and-butter."
+
+"You don't love your profession!"
+
+He smiled, and that time the smile was less ungenial. But I had not
+liked the tone of patronage about his work.
+
+"They were all wasted on you, then--those splendid opportunities--the
+clinic in Hamburg, the years in Paris----"
+
+"Oh, well"--he looked taken aback at my arraignment--"I mayn't be a
+thundering success, but I won't say I'm a waster."
+
+"If you don't love and adore the finest profession in the world----!
+Yes, somebody else ought to have had your chances. Me, for instance."
+
+"You! Oh, I dare say," his smile was humorous and humouring.
+
+"You think I'm not in earnest. But I am." I went to the cupboard where
+Bettina and I each had a shelf, and brought out an old wooden workbox. I
+opened it with the little key on my chain. I took out papers and
+letters. "These are from the Women's Medical School in Hunter Street"--I
+laid the letters open before him--"answers to my inquiries about terms
+and conditions."
+
+He glanced through one or two. "What put this into your head?" he said,
+astonished, and not the least pleased so far as one could see. "How did
+you know of the existence of these people?"
+
+"You left a copy of the _Lancet_ here once." Something in his face made
+me add: "But I should have found a way without that."
+
+"What way--way to what?" He spoke irritably in a raised voice. I looked
+anxiously at the door. "We won't say anything just yet to my mother," I
+begged. "My mother wouldn't--understand."
+
+"What wouldn't she understand?" All his kindness had gone. He was once
+more the cold inaccessible creature I had seen that first day stalking
+up to Big Klaus's door.
+
+"What I mean is," I explained, quite miserably crestfallen, "my mother
+wouldn't understand what I feel about studying medicine. But _you_"--and
+I had a struggle to keep the tears back--"I've looked forward so to
+telling you----"
+
+He turned the papers over with an odd misliking expression.
+
+"For one thing, you could never pass the entrance examination," he said.
+I asked why he thought that.
+
+"Do you see yourself going to classes in London, cramming yourself with
+all this?"--his hand swept the qualifications list.
+
+"Not classes in London," I said. "But people do the London Matriculation
+without that. I am taking the University Tutorial Correspondence
+Course," I said.
+
+I was swallowing tears as I boasted myself already rather good at Botany
+and French. My mother thought even my German tolerable.
+
+I picked up the little pamphlet issued by the University of London on
+the subject of Matriculation Regulations, and I pointed out Section
+III., "Provincial Examinations." The January and June Matriculation
+Examinations were held at the Brighton Municipal Technical College. He
+could see that made it all quite convenient and easy.
+
+"I can see it is all quite mad," he answered. "Suppose by some miracle
+you were to pass the entrance exams.--have you any idea how long they
+keep you grinding away afterwards?"
+
+"Five to seven years," I said.
+
+"Well! Can't you see what a wild idea it is?"
+
+I said to myself: he knows about our straitened means. "You mean it
+costs such a great deal."
+
+"It costs a great deal more than you think," he said, shifting about
+discontentedly in his chair.
+
+Then I told him that my mother had some jewels. "I am sure that when she
+sees I am in earnest, when I have got my B. A., she will be willing I
+should use the jewels----"
+
+"It's a dog's life," he said, "for a woman."
+
+I gathered my precious papers together. "You think I shall mind the hard
+work. But I shan't."
+
+"It isn't the hard work," he said, "though it's not easy for a man. For
+a woman----" he left the woman medical-student hanging over the abyss.
+
+For all my questions I could not bring him to the point of saying what
+these bugbears were.
+
+He was plainly tired of the subject.
+
+My first disappointment had yielded to a spiritless catechism of how
+this and how that.
+
+My persistent canvass of the matter brought him nearer a manifestation
+of ill-temper than I had ever seen in him.
+
+There was a great deal, he said, that he couldn't talk about to a girl
+of eighteen. But had I or anybody else ever heard of a man who was a
+doctor himself wanting his sister, or his daughter to study medicine? He
+had never known one. _Not one._
+
+I confessed I couldn't think why that was, except that nobody belonging
+to a girl ever wanted her to do anything, except--I stopped short and
+then hurried on.... "But after all, you know that women do go through
+the medical schools and come out all right."
+
+He shook his head. "They've lost something. Though I admit most of the
+women you mean, never had the thing I mean."
+
+I said I didn't understand.
+
+"Well, you ought to. You've got it." He looked at me with an odd
+expression and asked how long I'd had this notion in my head. I said a
+year. "All this time! You've been full of this ever since I was here
+last!"
+
+I lied. I said I had thought of absolutely nothing else all that time.
+He stood up ... but I still sat there wondering what had made me tell
+him that lie.
+
+"You won't go," I said, "without seeing my mother."
+
+To-day--he hadn't time.
+
+I went down with him as usual to the front door, weeping inwardly, yet
+hoping, praying, that before the door closed he would say something that
+would help--something kind.
+
+He often said the best things of all just as he was going--as though he
+had not dared to be half so interesting, or a tenth so kind, but in the
+very act of making his escape.
+
+To-day he put on his covert coat in a moody silence. Still silent, he
+took his hat.
+
+I stood with the door-knob in my hand. "You think, then, even if Aunt
+Josephine helped----"
+
+"Who is Aunt Josephine?"
+
+"My father's step-sister. She is well off."
+
+Aunt Josephine's riches made no impression upon him. He was going away a
+different man from the one who had come in and pushed away my papers, to
+sit beside me and to take my hand. He pulled his stick out of the
+umbrella-stand.
+
+"You feel sure I couldn't?" I pleaded at the door.
+
+"I feel sure you could do something better."
+
+He was out on the step. "Good-bye," he said, with the look that hurt me,
+so tired--disappointed.
+
+He had come for peace--for my mother's tranquil spirit to bring rest to
+his tired mind. And all he had found here was my mother's daughter
+fretting to be out in the fray! I had not even listened. I had
+interrupted and pulled away my hand.
+
+After I shut the door, I opened it again, and called out: "Oh, what was
+it you were going to tell me?"
+
+"It wouldn't interest you," he said, without even turning round.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE YACHTING PARTY
+
+
+I had to make use of Eric's old plea, "pressure of work," to account for
+his going away without seeing my mother.
+
+I watched the clock that next afternoon in a state of fever. Would he
+come again at three, so that we might talk alone? No. The torturing
+minute-hand felt its way slowly round the clock-face, its finger, like a
+surgeon's on my heart, pressing steadily, for all my flinching, to
+verify the seat and the extent of pain.
+
+Four o'clock. Five. Half-past. No hope now of his coming, I told myself,
+as those do who cannot give up hope.
+
+My mother questioned me. What had Mr. Annan said the day before? Had he,
+then, come so early for "nothing in particular"? I said that I supposed
+he had come early because he found he could not come late.
+
+About six o'clock, as I was counting out some drops for my mother, a
+ring at the front door made me start and spill the liquid on the table.
+He had relented! He was coming to say the things I had been so mad as to
+prevent his saying yesterday. We listened. My heart fell down as a
+woman's voice came up. Lady Helmstone! Wanting to see my mother "very
+particularly." We wondered, while the maid went down to bring her, what
+the errand might be which could not be entrusted to Bettina. For,
+wonderful to say, Bettina was to be allowed to go to a real dinner-party
+that night at the Hall. Hermione had written from London, begging that
+Betty might come and hear all about the yachting party.
+
+This was not the first we had heard of the project. It had been
+introduced in a way never to be forgotten. We had counted on hearing
+from the Helmstones all the thrilling details about the Coronation which
+was fixed for the coming June. We felt ourselves sensibly closer to the
+august event through our acquaintance with the Helmstones. Lesser folk
+than they might hope to see the great Procession going to the
+Abbey--King and Queen in the golden Coach of State, our particular
+friends the little Princes and the young Princess in yet another shining
+chariot, followed by the foreign Potentates, the State officials, and by
+_our_ Peer of the Realm with all his brother Lords and Barons in
+scarlet and ermine; and the flower of the British Army, a glancing,
+flaming glory in the rear.
+
+The highly fortunate might see this Greatest Pageant of the Age on its
+return from the Abbey, when the Sovereigns would be wearing their crowns
+and their Coronation robes.
+
+But the Helmstones! They would actually see the anointing and the
+crowning from their High Seats in the Abbey. Even a girl like Hermione
+would be asked to the State Ball.
+
+Never before had we realised so clearly the advantages of being a Peer.
+
+We thought the Helmstones very modest not to be talking continually
+about the Coronation. While we waited, impatient to hear more on the
+great theme, they had introduced the subject of the yachting trip. I
+remembered this while Lady Helmstone was coming up the stair--I
+remembered our bewilderment at learning that they hoped to sail "about
+Easter," and to be cruising in the Ægean at the end of June.
+
+They had forgotten the Coronation!
+
+Then the shock of hearing Lord Helmstone thank God that he would "be
+well out of it." London, he said, would be intolerable this season. He
+had let the house in Grosvenor Square "at a good round Coronation
+figure" to a new-made law-lord--"sort of chap who'll revel in it all."
+Many of the greatest houses in London were to be let to strangers.
+
+The yachting trip was one of many arranged that people might escape "the
+Coronation fuss."
+
+According to my mother, Lord Helmstone and his like showed a kind of
+treason to the country in not doing their share to make the symbolic act
+of Coronation a public testimony to English devotion to the Monarchy.
+What would become of the significance of the occasion if the aristocracy
+(upholders of that order typified by the King) deserted the King on a
+day when the eyes of the world would be upon the English throne.
+
+Oh, it was pitiable! this leaving the great inherited task to the
+upstart rich. Lord Helmstone's act showed blacker in the light of
+remembered honour done him both by the present King and by his father.
+We knew Lord Helmstone had liked the late King best. Yet even of him we
+had heard this unworthy subject speak with something less than
+reverence. With bated breath Bettina and I had reported these lapses,
+as well as the late ironic reference to "the bourgeois standards of the
+present Court." Our mother said that only meant that the life of the
+King and Queen was a model for their people. "But Lord Helmstone
+laughed," we persisted--"they all laughed."
+
+We saw we were wrong to dwell upon so grave a lapse. Lord Helmstone's
+taste was questionable, we heard. "He does not scorn the distinctions
+His Majesty confers." There were people--my mother was sorry if Lord
+Helmstone was one--who thought it superior to smile at the Fount of
+Honour.
+
+Smiling at Founts was one thing. But to go a-yachting when you might
+help to crown the King of England, Emperor of India, Defender of the
+Faith...!
+
+Bettina and I had agreed privately that the reason she was allowed the
+unheard-of licence of dining out alone was that she might embrace this
+final opportunity of probing the mystery before the Helmstones vanished.
+They had come down from London for their last week-end before going to
+Marseilles to join the _Nautch Girl_.
+
+And now Lady Helmstone was passing our bedroom, where Bettina on the
+other side of the closed door sat working feverishly to finish putting
+some fresh lace on the gown she was to wear at dinner.
+
+Lady Helmstone came into my mother's room, very smart and smiling, and
+without preamble proposed to take Bettina along as one of her party.
+Equally without hesitation my mother said the idea was quite
+impracticable.
+
+Lady Helmstone was a person accustomed to having her own way. "You
+cannot expect," she said, "you cannot _want_ to keep your girls at home
+for ever."
+
+"N-no," my mother agreed, with that old look of shrinking. But Bettina
+was far too young----
+
+A niece of Lord Helmstone's, just Bettina's age, was to be of the party.
+
+Ah, well, Bettina was different. Bettina was the sort of child who had
+never been able to face the idea of a single night away from home. And
+this was a question of a cruise of--how many weeks?
+
+"Six months," said Lady Helmstone cheerfully.
+
+My mother stared. Lady Helmstone could not have meant the proposal
+seriously--"Bettina would die of home-sickness."
+
+Lady Helmstone ventured to think not. As I have said, she was
+ill-accustomed to seeing her invitations set aside. She spoke of
+Hermione's disappointment ... they were all so fond of Bettina. She
+should have every care.
+
+My mother made her acknowledgments--the suggestion was most kind; most
+hospitably meant. But Lady Helmstone had only to put it to Bettina. She
+would soon see.
+
+Lady Helmstone smiled. "I think you will find Bettina would like to come
+with us."
+
+I was annoyed at her way of saying that, as if she knew Bettina better
+than we. I went into the next room, and got out my school-books. I left
+the door open in case my mother should need me, and I heard them talking
+about "daughters."
+
+There was much to be said, Lady Helmstone thought, for the way they did
+things in France. My mother preferred the English way.
+
+"And yet you will not take it," said the other, with that suavity that
+allowed her to be impertinent without seeming so. "I don't think--living
+as you do--you quite realise the trouble mothers take to give their
+girls the sort of opportunity you are refusing." There were
+changes--"great and radical changes," she said--changes which my mother,
+leading this life of the religieuse, was possibly not aware of.
+
+My mother deprecated as much as she had heard of these changes.
+
+"Ah, but, _necessary_--a question of supply and demand. You can afford
+to disregard them only if you do not expect your daughters to marry."
+
+My mother said stiffly that she saw no reason to suppose her daughters
+would not marry--"all in good time." They were very young, Bettina a
+child----
+
+"She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were
+yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still
+silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best
+"opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety
+girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably
+more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty--I may say of
+patriotism--have to think seriously about these things." She herself,
+having married off three daughters and two nieces, might be considered
+something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised
+hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at
+all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls
+about London.... _Three!_ Conceive the indiscretion!--only the young one
+really caring about balls--the other two going stolidly through with it,
+season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard--I
+changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took
+turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'and _never_ more than two
+at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke
+impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and
+ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's
+position to do--I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in
+London."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a
+tone of perfunctory politeness.
+
+"_All the other women leave_," said Lady Helmstone, with a rusé
+significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when
+the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men
+have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation
+they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June. _August is the time._ I
+made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden,
+cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef--cordon bleu. 'You must give
+better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did."
+
+There was another significant pause.
+
+"The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young
+barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh
+rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for
+Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those
+girls would be manoeuvring for partners at balls still, and their mother
+would be in her grave, but for...."
+
+The interview ended stiffly.
+
+The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her
+suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know
+there had been any question of her going. "The child is already
+disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione."
+
+When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and
+said: "If Betty never went _anywhere_, I should not want her to go away
+in the care of a woman like that."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE EMERALD PENDANT
+
+
+I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that
+night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and
+looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.
+
+While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.
+
+"I look dreadfully missish," she said.
+
+When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a
+school-treat!"
+
+We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard
+Hermione behind Betty's voice.
+
+She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's
+going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant."
+That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only
+natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too,
+begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in
+her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.
+
+"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"
+
+Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?
+
+My mother wouldn't say....
+
+After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.
+
+My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I
+asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600.
+
+She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose
+real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.
+
+I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and
+important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the
+jewels be sold?
+
+My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a
+shield before the other.
+
+She spoke my name and I started--the voice sounded odd. I went back to
+the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me
+to sit down.
+
+Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.
+
+The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth
+selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.
+
+We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.
+
+I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against
+the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt
+Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and
+sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that
+army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high
+companionship ... marching to the world's relief.
+
+In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London
+University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful
+work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might
+help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering
+over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud
+of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all
+the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!
+
+It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never!
+
+"Not--not female doctor," I protested. "That _does_ sound----"
+
+"Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it----"
+
+I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But
+there was no necessity to emphasise "woman" at all; the only thing
+important was whether the person was qualified to treat the sick. People
+did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough."
+
+I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor"
+_was_ male, and everyone understood that.
+
+I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I
+hadn't any accomplishments--no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative
+one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be
+people like that.
+
+It was all no use.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That confession of mine, more than hers about the jewels, goaded my
+mother into taking a step which even we, blind as we were, felt to be
+epoch-making in our history.
+
+That same evening she began to talk about Aunt Josephine--to excuse her.
+Mrs. Harborough had been so wrapped up in her brilliant young
+step-brother (and Aunt Josephine would never allow the "step") that _any_
+other person's coming in must inevitably have been resented. "She
+idolised your father." A woman of high character. Given to good works.
+Busied about the redemption of long-shoremen and about country treats
+for jam-factory girls. Knee-deep in philanthropy. And childless. She
+_could_ not, especially now after that old first anger had long cooled,
+she could not be indifferent to the fate of her brother's children.
+
+"Are you thinking of writing to her?" I said. She explained that for her
+to address Mrs. Harborough was, under the circumstances, hardly
+possible. But there was no reason in the world why I should not.
+
+I felt there were reasons, but I could not think what they were. My
+mother, meanwhile, grew almost cheerful, outlining the sort of thing I
+might say. No requests in this first communication. A letter, merely--if
+it found her so inclined--merely to open a long-closed door.
+
+I did not like my task. I decided I would put it off till morning,
+though I knew that at any time I should find it easier to write:
+"Please lend me £1,000 for a course of study," than write such a letter
+as my mother had dictated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Betty came back from her dinner-party in great excitement. Ranny Dallas
+had motored over from Dartmoor that very day--with a man friend. They
+had been at the Helmstones' to tea.
+
+I wondered, dully, that Lady Helmstone had said nothing whatever about
+Ranny during her visit. She must have just parted from him. Another
+curious thing was that Ranny had not stayed for the dinner-party. He and
+his friend were at the inn.
+
+"What in the world do you think that means?" I asked Bettina, glad
+enough to escape from my own thoughts.
+
+She was smiling. "I think it is very natural."
+
+And why was it natural for a luxurious young man to put up with tough
+mutton and watery potatoes at a village inn, when he and any friend of
+his were certain of a welcome, and the best possible dinner, in a house
+like the Helmstones'?
+
+Betty merely continued to smile in that beatific, but somewhat foolish
+fashion. I said, rather more to make her speak than for any soberer
+reason, "Perhaps he isn't so sure of his welcome"; and then in a flash I
+saw quite clearly something I had been blind to till that instant. For
+all the liking the Helmstones felt for Betty they may not have liked
+being undeceived about Ranny's supposed devotion to Hermione. That this
+idea had never occurred to me before showed me stupid, I saw, as well as
+self-absorbed. But the idea would not have occurred to me at all, I
+think, but for some of the things Lady Helmstone had said to my mother
+that afternoon.
+
+Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that
+Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a
+dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little
+tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There
+was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any
+sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as
+happy as Betty looked.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+The next morning, still in a mood of the deepest dejection, I dated a
+sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine."
+
+I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense
+unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the
+impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or
+trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr.
+Annan."
+
+Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face
+another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my
+own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to
+clock--from clock to window, hour after hour.
+
+      DEAR MR. ANNAN,--I have told my mother. She feels as you do.
+      She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not
+      to think about it any more.
+
+I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+RANNY
+
+
+I imagined that day I should never again have to live through a time of
+such suspense.
+
+Waiting, till I could get away without being noticed, to carry my note
+to Kleiner Klaus's.
+
+Waiting, for the Klaus's boy to come home.
+
+Waiting, while his mother brushed his clothes and cuffed him. Waiting,
+while he recovered his spirits. Waiting, while slowly, slowly, his mind
+took in the particulars of his errand, and the most particular part of
+it, in his eyes--the penny he should have when he brought me back an
+answer.
+
+And the long hours of that afternoon waiting for the answer, or even for
+the errand-boy to come back. When I was not looking out of the window my
+mind was still so bent on listening for one particular footstep on the
+brick walk, and at the door his voice--the only voice in the world with
+meaning in it--that scarcely any impression was made on me by other
+steps and other voices. I heard them, subconsciously, to dismiss them;
+for everything was irrelevance that wasn't Eric.
+
+But my mother interrupted my mechanical reading aloud. "Who," (with her
+air of listening to sounds beyond my ken) "who can all those people be?"
+
+There was Bettina in the passage making frantic signs that I was to
+hurry out and speak to her. And voices of men and women came up from the
+open door. I recognised Lord Helmstone's. I heard him asking the maid if
+Mr. Annan were here.
+
+"No? That's very odd," said Hermione in her sceptical way--"Perhaps he's
+come in without your knowing. Will you just find out?"
+
+My mother, too, had heard Lord Helmstone's cheerful bass, suggesting
+that his party might take shelter here. I had not noticed before the
+slight rain falling. "Go and ask him to come upstairs," my mother said.
+And lower: "I don't want _him_ to take it amiss." I saw she was thinking
+of her refusal to let Betty go on the yacht.
+
+Betty was waiting for me in ambush near the head of the stair: "You must
+come down and help me. Ranny is there, too."
+
+I was bewildered at finding so many at the door. For besides Lord
+Helmstone and Hermione, there was Lady Barbara, and Ranny Dallas and his
+friend--a cheerful, talkative, red-haired man they called Courtney.
+
+The Helmstones were still discussing whether they should come in.
+Hermione said it was only a slight sprinkle, and her mother was
+expecting them back to tea. Lady Barbara, with engaging simplicity,
+insisted there was no object in going back without Mr. Annan.
+
+I saw at once that Ranny looked different. Just in what way, or to what
+extent, I could not at first have said. A very little thinner, too
+little to account for the change I was dimly conscious of. And when he
+first came in, he came with some nonsense, and that pleasant laugh, that
+always "started things" in an easy harmonious key.
+
+"We've descended on you," Lord Helmstone said, "like a posse of
+detectives. Sleuth-hounds on that fella Annan's track. We've our
+instructions to bag him and carry him home to tea."
+
+Bettina (oh, I could have beaten her for that!) said Mr. Annan would
+very probably come in presently. And she led the way into the
+drawing-room, while I took Lord Helmstone upstairs. By the time I came
+down again Bettina had ordered tea.
+
+Hermione turned round as I came in. "What have you done with my father!
+Now father's disappeared!"--as if she had only just grasped the fact.
+"Didn't I tell you," she said to Ranny, "Duncombe is a place where if a
+man goes in, he doesn't come out?"
+
+Betty and I gave them tea.
+
+I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never
+guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for
+pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were
+so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for
+an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as
+the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note
+in answer to mine.
+
+As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged,
+too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet,
+looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As
+though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turning his
+way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him,
+the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of
+that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very
+laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring--his laugh most of all
+gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed
+just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than
+anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer.
+
+When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that
+blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to
+myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way
+probably more imbecile than pleasing.
+
+I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much
+noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to
+Bettina and to the other, newer, swain--one of the apparently endless
+supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them.
+
+Under cover of Hermione's gaiety, I managed to ask Bettina what was the
+matter with Ranny.
+
+"I don't know," she whispered.
+
+I saw it was true. Bettina did not know.
+
+She leaned across me to find a place on the crowded table for her teacup
+and the low voice was earnest enough: "_Find out._"
+
+The rain had been only a passing shower.
+
+"Oh, yes, the sun has come out--but my father hasn't! Didn't I say,"
+Hermione laughed, "no man ever knows when to come away from this place?"
+Then she swept us all into the garden. "If he doesn't come soon I shall
+throw gravel up at the window. Isn't it this window?"
+
+Bettina said very likely Lord Helmstone was having tea upstairs and that
+it had not gone up till after ours. Ranny and I left the new young man
+and Bettina trying to prevent Hermione from carrying out her audacious
+plan and apparently succeeding. For Lord Helmstone did not appear for
+another half-hour. And still no sign of Eric.
+
+Ranny asked me how the sunk garden was coming on. I didn't like going so
+far from the gate, but Betty's earnest "find out" was ringing in my
+ears. I sent a searching look across the heath, and then Ranny and I
+left the others and went down to the rock-quadrangle that used to be so
+tidily affluent in stone-loving mosses, sedums and suchlike. The weeds
+were fast driving the more delicate things out of the neglected tangle.
+For the old gardener had been gone a year, now, and there was overmuch
+for a jobbing person to do in a day or two a week.
+
+I apologised for the poor unkempt place, thinking how different I might
+have made it, but for the hours I spent over books. And would Eric have
+liked me better if----
+
+I craned my neck, uneasy at not being able to see the gate nor any part
+of the bypath. Only the higher reach of heath road.
+
+Ranny had not pretended to be listening. I don't think he so much as saw
+how changed the garden was. We talked about the new young man--"awful
+good sort," according to Ranny. But that testimony, too, he gave in an
+absent-minded, perfunctory way.
+
+"Can't we sit down?" he said, looking blindly at a garden seat still
+shining-wet.
+
+I said we'd better walk. I lead him back near enough the house to see if
+the others had waylaid Eric.
+
+No, just the same group under my mother's window--Hermione and Babs
+arguing hotly about something. The red-haired young man aiming at an
+imaginary golf-ball with the crook-handle of his heavy walking-stick,
+and swinging it violently over his shoulder, that Bettina might see the
+approved position of feet and body before, and after, a furious drive.
+Whether Bettina made a practice of asking for this information I cannot
+say. But every man who came our way, young or old, was seized with an
+uncontrollable desire to teach Bettina the difference between good form
+and bad form at the game of golf.
+
+Ranny had been walking with his head bent and no pretence at making
+conversation. When I stopped, he looked up suddenly and caught sight of
+the group. He wheeled about, and stood with his back to the house and
+his face averted from me as well.
+
+"Look here," he said, "why shouldn't we go and meet Annan?--warn
+him--eh?"
+
+My heart leapt at the suggestion. And yet.... "Why should you want to do
+that?" I said suspiciously.
+
+"Oh, well, I don't care where we go--only ..." His voice sounded so
+queer I felt frightened.
+
+"I don't think I'll go back to _them_ just yet," he managed to bring
+out. "Do you mind?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+ANOTHER GIRL
+
+
+We turned off through the shrubbery, and went out by the side gate along
+the bypath to the links.
+
+Ranny walked behind, absolutely silent, till he burst out: "May I
+smoke?"
+
+When he had lit a cigarette, I glanced back. I thought he looked a shade
+less miserable. I could see the four figures standing out against the
+house, and still no sign anywhere of Eric.
+
+I asked Ranny if he was to be one of the yachting party.
+
+"Lord, no!"
+
+Perhaps they had not asked him. Maybe that was it. I said something
+about how we should miss Hermione.
+
+"Er--yes," he said. "I suppose you will," and I noticed his voice was
+steadier.
+
+"Don't be ungrateful," I said. "So will you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+Then, as I reproached him, he said: "Oh, yes; awfully nice people the
+Helmstones. I used to be rather fond of Lady Helmstone. But she's a
+woman who doesn't know how to take 'No.' That's partly why I came."
+
+I looked back again: "Is that the only reason?"
+
+"Well, she kept writing, and making out, in spite of what I'd said, that
+she was expecting me to join them at Marseilles. And had put off
+somebody else who wanted to go. If I backed out--I had never backed
+in--I would be breaking up the party and behaving like the devil." He
+spoke more ill-temperedly than I had ever heard him.
+
+"How will it end?" I asked.
+
+"End? I'm hanged if I'll go. I've told her I wouldn't, from the
+beginning. But I only convinced her yesterday."
+
+We walked on.
+
+"They've asked Betty," I said.
+
+"_No!_" He caught me up and walked at my side. "When did they do that?"
+
+"Yesterday evening."
+
+"Is Betty going?"
+
+"No," I said.
+
+And very sharp on that: "Why not?" he asked. "Doesn't she want to?"
+
+"She doesn't know anything about it. My mother doesn't want her to go."
+And while he fell into silence again, I sent my eyes about the heath. No
+sign.
+
+Suddenly I remembered Betty's "find out." I had not found out. I hadn't
+even tried, and I realised myself for a monster of selfishness--thinking
+Eric, Eric, and nothing but Eric the livelong day.
+
+I pulled myself together and asked Ranny what he had been doing since
+Christmas.
+
+"Since New Year's Eve, you mean." He frowned, and threw away a cigarette
+half-smoked, and lit another. When he had puffed and frowned a little
+more he said he had been going through a ghastly experience with a great
+friend of his. "Not a bad chap on the whole," he said, in a hesitating,
+almost appealing voice. But this not bad chap had "got himself badly
+bunkered." Ranny hesitated, and then: "Yes, I've been thinking I'd tell
+you about it, and see if--if you thought I've advised him right...." The
+friend, he said, had been "one of a house party at a place up in
+Norfolk. He'd gone for the fag end of the shooting. Last month it was.
+Beastly dull people. Awful good shooting--as a rule. But the weather
+was rotten. All shut up together in that beastly dull house. Nothing
+earthly to do, except rag, and--you know the kind of thing."
+
+I didn't know a bit, but I said I did.
+
+"Well, his friend had nothing to do, and he got it into his head that
+the girl of the house rather liked him. And there wasn't another blessed
+thing to do, so---- Oh, well, they got engaged."
+
+He waited for a moment, and then he said that when his friend went back
+to Aldershot he found "he wasn't any more in love with that girl than he
+was with the cat. It was all just a beastly mistake. So he got leave and
+went home to think it out. _Couldn't_ think it out. Felt he'd better go
+and talk it over with somebody----" Ranny hesitated again. "Awful hole
+to be in, isn't it?"
+
+I agreed it must have been very dreadful for his friend to have to tell
+the girl he'd made a mistake.
+
+"Oh, but he couldn't do _that_!" With a shocked look, Ranny stopped dead
+for a second. Then, as he went on, he said that he had told his friend
+of course he'd have to go through with it.
+
+"You don't mean," I said, "that when he was feeling like that you think
+he ought to let the poor girl marry him!"
+
+He said I didn't see the point. It would probably spoil the girl's life
+if his friend drew back.
+
+I said he would spoil her life if he didn't draw back.
+
+Ranny looked merely bewildered. "Oh ... but ..." then he caught hold of
+a mainstay, "my friend--he isn't a cad you know. A man _can't_ back out
+of a thing like that."
+
+Then I told him, without the names, about Guy Whitby-Dawson. Guy had
+"backed out." Guy had made up his mind to the sacrifice of "running in
+single harness," and had said so, frankly. I praised him.
+
+"Naturally," Ranny answered, "if people hadn't enough money to marry,
+nobody would expect them to marry. But in the case I'm talking about,"
+he said gloomily, "the man, my friend, is an eldest son. He is going to
+have--oh, it's rotten luck!"
+
+I asked him if he really thought that not to have enough money to keep
+house on was worse than not to have enough love to keep house on. He
+said that what _he_ thought wasn't the question. The question was what
+the girl would think. And what the girl's family would think. I asked
+how anybody was to know what the girl would think unless she was asked.
+Ranny gave his rough head a despairing shake.
+
+Of course I couldn't tell him half of what I felt about that girl, but I
+kept seeing her. Very happy. Never dreaming what her lover was feeling.
+I saw them going up the church aisle to be married. All the smiling and
+congratulating afterwards. I saw them "going away." And I felt sick.
+
+But I did try to make him feel a little for the girl. He said that
+"feeling for the girl" was precisely what had decided the business. The
+girl _couldn't_ be told the truth.
+
+"She'll guess it!"
+
+But that didn't comfort him as I had expected. "Even if she guesses she
+couldn't be expected to release--m--my friend."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because," said Ranny with his childlike air, "because she'll probably
+never have as good an offer again."
+
+I was conscious of an inner fury when he said that. I turned on him.
+And all of a sudden, quite curiously, my feeling changed. His face
+showed not only utter innocence of any arrogance, the expression on it
+was of great misery. And this was so at odds with the roundness and the
+hint of dimples, the roughened hair that the damp air had begun to curl,
+that as I looked at him, I felt the queer, stirring-at-the-heart sort of
+softness perhaps only women know, when they catch a glimpse in some
+man's face of the child that died when he grew up. I could see just what
+Ranny had been like when he was in short dresses. Full of laughter; as
+he was still when we first knew him. And in face of those earlier bumps
+and bruises, just this bewilderment overmastering the pain of the baby
+who is outraged at the disproportion between desert and reward--the baby
+who thinks, if he doesn't say: "I never did a single thing, and here all
+this has tumbled down on my head."
+
+In that instant I saw how lovable Ranny Dallas was, and instead of
+reproaching him, I found myself saying: "If that's true--what you
+say--it is very horrible for the girl, but I see it is probably nearly
+as horrible for the man."
+
+And Ranny sat down on the wet heather under a gorse bush and buried his
+face in his hands.
+
+"Get up," I said; "here's my handkerchief. Get up quickly. Lady
+Helmstone is coming."
+
+But who was the man with her?
+
+It was Eric Annan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS
+
+
+Before those two were visible to the group round Duncombe front door, or
+within hailing distance of us, they turned into the bypath leading to
+Big Klaus's.
+
+I could not tell whether Eric had seen us. But I was quite sure Lady
+Helmstone had. Sure, too, that she had deliberately avoided us.
+
+Ranny didn't want to come back with me, and I didn't press him. I
+promised him I would say he was going to walk across the heath to the
+inn--"_had_ to get back--expecting a telegram."
+
+I stayed behind in the gorse bushes alone, till I saw Lord Helmstone and
+all his party going home.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+I couldn't bear the thought of meeting Betty.
+
+I went round by the kitchen and crept up the back stairs. I listened at
+my mother's door.
+
+Not a sound. Then I heard Betty downstairs playing the accompaniment to
+a song she and Ranny used to sing.
+
+So I opened my mother's door and went in.
+
+The first thing she said was, without any preface, "I know, now, why
+Lady Helmstone invited a child like Bettina to go yachting for six
+months rather than you."
+
+"So do I," I answered; "they all adore Bettina. And then she is
+Hermione's special friend."
+
+"There is another reason," my mother said, looking out of the window. "A
+reason that concerns--Lady Barbara." Then she glanced at me, a little
+shyly, and away her eyes went again to the window. "Lord Helmstone
+thinks a sea-voyage would be the best thing in the world for Mr. Annan.
+They are asking him to be one of the party."
+
+I felt as if some hard substance had struck me violently in the face.
+But I managed to bring out the words: "Is he going, do you think?"
+
+"No doubt he will go," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already I seemed to have lost him as utterly as though he had died. Yet
+with none of that sad comfort my mother had spoken of--the comfort of
+knowing one's possession safe beyond all risk of loss or tarnishing.
+
+I had never been on a yacht.
+
+I had never seen a yacht.
+
+Yet I could see Eric on the _Nautch Girl_. And Lady Barbara!
+
+Her mother's words came back: "Very little is done at balls." Very much,
+the story-books had told me, was done by throwing people together on a
+long voyage. My own heart told me the same.
+
+Yes, I had lost him.
+
+And I had lost myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day was Sunday. In the morning Hermione came to carry Bettina
+off for their last day together. I had to promise that, if Ranny should
+come to Duncombe, I would send for Betty.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+As I sat with my mother, that same afternoon, the door opened, and there
+was the maid bringing in Mr. Annan.
+
+I think I scarcely spoke or moved.
+
+It was my mother who said: "I thought you would come to say good-bye."
+
+"'Good-bye'?" Then, with unusual _brusquerie_ where my mother was
+concerned, he added: "When _I_ come to see people, what I say is, 'How
+do you do?'"
+
+"But aren't you going away to-morrow?"
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"Why, to catch the _Nautch Girl_."
+
+"I can't think of a girl I should so little care to catch."
+
+And he wasn't going at all! Had never contemplated it for a moment!
+
+The weight of the world fell off my shoulders. And for nearly five
+minutes of a joy almost too great to be borne, I believed that it was
+because of me he wasn't going.
+
+Then he told my mother it was because of his work. And so it was that,
+unconsciously, he made good the excuse I had offered for his bolting off
+the afternoon I told him my secret. He seemed to have forgotten that
+episode. At least, he behaved as though it had never happened.
+
+He laughed a little over his interview with her ladyship. "Very
+determined individual, Lady Helmstone." He had told her, finally, that
+he hadn't time even to go to his sister's wedding. He had not thought it
+necessary, he said to add that he wouldn't have gone to his sister's
+wedding however much time he had.
+
+Of course, my mother asked why such unbrotherly behaviour? He told us
+that he didn't approve of the marriage. There was nothing against the
+man's character. He was a "Writer to the Signet," which seemed in
+Scotland to mean a sort of barrister. I said "Writer to the Signet"
+sounded much finer than "barrister." I was told that Maggie Annan could
+not be expected to live on a fine sound. And that was about all they
+would have. This particular "Writer to the Signet" was poor. "Oh, poorer
+than poor!"
+
+I didn't like his way of saying that.
+
+As we went downstairs I was rather glad of being able to disagree with
+him about something. It would keep me from being foolish. I had that
+feeling of the creature who has been straining long at bonds, and finds
+the sudden loosing a test of equilibrium. For fear I should seem too
+gloriously content with him, I taxed Eric with thinking over much about
+money. He said a man may put up with any sort of hardship he likes for
+himself. But no man had a right to marry till he could support a wife in
+some sort of comfort. I suggested that perhaps Maggie Annan cared less
+about comfort than she cared about other things. He retorted that Maggie
+probably hadn't thought it out at all. She was acting on impulse. "To
+think it out--that was the man's business." And so on.
+
+I felt myself growing impatient when he said "comfort" for the second
+time.
+
+"When people are old, yes! 'Comfort' then. But when they're young, what
+_does_ it matter?"
+
+He leaned against the newel of the staircase and looked at me, quite
+surprised. "I thought you were more practical," he said.
+
+"I _am_ practical. That's why I say comfort is wasted on the young. They
+don't even want it--unless they're rather horrid sort of young people."
+
+"Thank you," he said, laughing, and I felt hot. I tried to explain. Such
+a lot of things were fun when you were young, especially when they were
+shared. I had noticed that. Things that made you cross, and made you ill
+when you were older---- Suddenly I stopped, saying in my heart:
+"Heavens! isn't this the kind of foolishness I was hoping to be saved
+from? Or is it worse?..." For Eric was smiling in such a disconcerting
+way.
+
+I said primly that Miss Maggie did not need me to defend her, and that I
+must not keep him from his work.
+
+That word was like the touch of a whip. In two seconds he was gone.
+
+The next day, Monday, just the same. He ran in only for a moment to see
+my mother. He could not sit down; he could not do this, nor that. Work,
+work! It had seized him in a fresh grip.
+
+I was thankful to the work for having carried him away that Monday
+afternoon, when Betty came back from seeing the Helmstones off. It was a
+Betty we had never seen before. I don't know what else Hermione had said
+to her, but Betty had been told that she, too, might have gone yachting.
+
+It was like a stab to see my mother's face now, and to remember the
+confidence with which she had quoted the old story about Bettina's
+insisting on the promise that she should not be made to pay visits: "Not
+_never_?" "Not never!"
+
+I had hated Lady Helmstone for saying that Bettina would, in her
+ladyship's opinion, be found to have outgrown her reluctance.
+
+It was true.
+
+Bettina wanted to go!
+
+My mother, unwisely I felt, reminded Betty of the old pledge.
+
+"I was a baby then. What did I know?"
+
+And now there were tears in Bettina's eyes because she was _not_ going
+to leave her mother.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I don't like to think of those next days. They were all a strain and a
+tangle.
+
+I cannot imagine what we should have done without Eric. For the way
+Bettina took her disappointment made my mother positively ill. Eric's
+prescription was hard to fill: "Peace of mind--absolute quiet and
+tranquillity."
+
+"You are less alarmed," he said in that direct way of his, "than you
+were that first day you brought me here. But you have more reason."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not want Bettina fully to realise the cloud that was so surely
+gathering to burst--and yet I was angry at her failure to realise. So
+unreasonable, so unkind I found I could be! Oh, I lost patience more
+than once. But my mother, never.
+
+"You will see all the beautiful places some day, my darling."
+
+Bettina was sure she never should. This had been her one chance--who
+else was likely to take her?
+
+"The fit and proper person. Your husband will take you, as your father
+took me."
+
+That answer surprised us both.
+
+I could not blame Bettina for feeling that it seemed to postpone the
+delights of travel overlong.
+
+The strange new Bettina went about the house, settling to nothing, at
+once restive and idle. All on edge. The worst sign of all was that she
+neglected her music. My mother remonstrated.
+
+"What's the use?"
+
+"You will find your music a very important part of your equipment."
+
+"Equipment!" said the new Bettina scornfully. "Equipment for what?"
+
+"For taking your place in the world."
+
+"The world!" Bettina exchanged looks with me. Yes, the world seemed far
+away. Inaccessible.
+
+"If we never go anywhere--never see anyone, what is the use in being
+equipped?"
+
+I think Bettina was sorry she said that. The effect of it was as though
+some rude hand had thrown down a screen. My mother looking up with
+hollow, startled eyes must have caught a glimpse of something that she
+dreaded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Don't put it off," she whispered. "Write to your Aunt Josephine
+to-night."
+
+I composed my letter very carefully.
+
+My sister and I had often wished, I wrote, that we had some acquaintance
+with our only relation. Especially as she and our father had been so
+much to each other. Our mother was in poor health. We lived very
+quietly. But we all hoped if ever Aunt Josephine came to this part of
+the world--a very pretty part--she would come to see us. I was nearly
+nineteen now, and I was hers "affectionately."
+
+Feeling myself very diplomatic and "deep," I enclosed the last
+photograph Hermione had taken of Bettina. I wrote on it "Betty at
+sixteen--but it does not do her justice."
+
+If anything could win her over, it would be that snapshot of Betty
+dancing on Duncombe lawn.
+
+I posted the letter in an access of remorse and wretchedness--afraid I
+had left it too late. For my mother had said, "After all, instead of
+your leaving me, I shall have to leave you."
+
+That same night Eric told me that he had sent to London for a
+heart-specialist. And the heart-specialist had answered he would be down
+on Thursday, which was the day after to-morrow. I saw in Eric's face
+that he was anxious at the delay. He admitted that he was "afraid" to
+wait. Yes, he would wire for another man.
+
+Eric--"afraid"!
+
+"You don't," I whispered, "you don't mean ... quite soon?"
+
+He repeated that he was "afraid."
+
+Then I felt I knew all that any specialist could tell me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was the day I came to know the steadying influence of a call to
+face great issues. They bring their own greatness with them. They wrap
+it round our littleness. Only afterwards, thinking how gentle and
+watchful Eric looked in telling me, I remembered that people were
+supposed to faint when they heard news like that. For myself I had never
+felt so clear-headed. Never felt the responsibility of life so great.
+Never felt that for us to fail in bearing our share was so unthinkable.
+
+If this Majesty of Death were soon to clothe my mother, her children
+must not hide and weep. They must help her, help each other to meet the
+Great King at the gate.
+
+All the little troubles fell away. I was kind again to Betty.
+
+I called my lover "Eric." He called me by my name. Just that.
+
+No more passed between him and me. But I felt I had taken this man and
+that he had taken this woman "for better or worse."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER
+
+
+Bettina came into the room and handed me a letter.
+
+"Mrs. Harborough!"--my mother drew herself up on the pillow with an
+animation I had not thought to see again.
+
+I opened and read: "My dear niece----"
+
+"Ah!" my mother brought out the ejaculation with an effect of having
+doubted if the relationship would be owned.
+
+That introductory phrase turned out to be the most comprehensible part
+of the first half of Aunt Josephine's letter. As for me, I was
+completely floored by "the Dynamism of Mind," after I had stumbled over
+a cryptic reference to my mother's state--"which you must not expect me
+to call sickness. There is no such thing. There is only harmony or
+unharmony, whether of the so-called body or the soul."
+
+On the third page, the writer descended from these Alpine heights, to
+say that it had been "inspirationally borne in upon" her that the time
+was come for her brother's daughters to widen their horizon, and
+incidentally, to see something of their father's world.
+
+The implied slur upon our mother's world was, to my surprise, not
+resented.
+
+"Go on. Go on."
+
+The letter ended by saying that, in spite of very grave and urgent
+preoccupations, Aunt Josephine would endeavour to draw a little of the
+old life round her, if her nieces would come and stay with her in
+Lowndes Square for a few weeks.
+
+"A London season!" Bettina cried.
+
+I looked up from the letter and saw my mother watching with hungry
+delight Bettina's face of rapture. Bettina had not looked like that
+since the Helmstones went away.
+
+But the most marked change, after all, was in my mother herself.
+
+When Eric came he was staggered. "I'll believe in miracles after
+this!"--and we joked about the Dynamism of Mind.
+
+My mother had taken for granted that both Bettina and I would accept
+Aunt Josephine's invitation, though I said at once _I_ could not leave
+home. My mother put this aside with: "Bettina go alone! A wild idea."
+
+When the question came up again in Eric's presence I did not press it
+far. But, going downstairs, I asked him how _was_ I to put it to my
+mother?
+
+"Put what?" he asked.
+
+"Why, the fact that we can't leave her. Or, at least, that I can't." I
+agreed Betty must go.
+
+"So must you," he said. My heart beat faster. His villeggiatura was near
+the end. London, for me, meant Eric. "You need the change," he said,
+"more than Betty does."
+
+"You forget," I said, a little sadly, "what we've been facing here. The
+specialist coming----"
+
+"Well, he will find she has rallied."
+
+Nevertheless, she was in no condition, Eric said, to be crossed. Had she
+not told me herself that my first duty was to take care of Betty? That
+was not how he would put it--all the same, the change would do me good.
+Then a word about our "trustworthy servants." In any event I was not to
+say any more about not going, till we had seen the "London chap."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went on quite wonderfully.
+
+We were positively gay again--she and I and Bettina--the three of us
+laying plans.
+
+We talked about clothes, and planned how we should look very nice on
+very little money.
+
+When the great specialist came, he found my mother sitting up in a bed
+covered with old evening-gowns, old laces, and embroidered muslins;
+things she had worn long ago in India, and which should help to make us
+brave for our first London season. Smart little blouses, morning-gowns
+and afternoon-gowns, could be made in the house or in the village. But
+who was worthy to make an evening-frock fit for London? My mother was
+much more concerned about this than about the great specialist, whom she
+received rather as a friend of Eric's. He echoed all that Eric had said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother had made me write to Aunt Josephine on the evening of the same
+day that brought her letter. I did not tell anyone, but I put off
+posting my answer till the London doctor had gone.
+
+My letter was not only thanks and acceptance. I felt I ought, in common
+civility, to try to make some more or less intelligent rejoinder to the
+odd part of my aunt's letter. And this modest effort seemed not to
+displease her. For she replied in eight pages of cloudy metaphysic and a
+highly lucid cheque. The cheque alone supported us in our attempt to
+grapple with those eight bewildering pages. The first introduced us, by
+way of the Psychology of the Solar Plexus, to the Self-Superlative:
+
+      "If this view-point interests you, I will later explain to
+      you--in terms of inclusiveness and totalism--the mystical
+      activities of the Ever-Creative Self."
+
+"Isn't she awfully learned!" said Bettina in a scared voice.
+
+      "On your return home, having 'contacted,' as we say, the
+      talents and the tranquillity of others--instead of contacting
+      things of lack and fear--you will be able to think happily and
+      sweetly about matters that formerly disturbed you. All the ills
+      of life are curable from within. Complete health is wisdom. I
+      do not go so far as to predict that you will find yourself
+      instantly able to adopt the bio-vibratory sympathism which
+      habitualises thought to the Majesty of Choice. But I _do_ say
+      that after giving the deeper and sweeter Self a chance to unite
+      the self of common consciousness, constructively, with the
+      Powers Within, that you, too, may find yourself a Healer--that
+      is, Harmoniser--clothed in the Regal Now."
+
+After that plunge, Aunt Josephine came to the surface for breath, so to
+speak, and to say that she thought it only fair to tell us that she
+herself had seen almost nothing of general society for the past ten
+years. She had her work. She had her classes in which we might take some
+interest. I was to tell "the musical one" that Self-Expression, through
+voice-culture and pianoforte playing, was one of the Keys to the
+Biosophian System.
+
+Aunt Josephine had already taken opera-tickets for the season. And we
+should go to as many concerts as we liked. We should see pictures and we
+should see people. We should "learn to use the plus sign in thought." We
+should "recognise the cosmic truth that ALL IS GOOD."
+
+This concluding phrase was underscored three times. And still, despite
+its provokingly obvious aspect, I felt that I had not a notion what
+Aunt Josephine meant by it. My mother said the reason was that I knew
+nothing of mysticism. Eric said neither did he. But he knew stark,
+staring lunacy when he saw it. And he was more than doubtful if we ought
+to be entrusted to this demented step-aunt.
+
+My mother reproved Eric's flippancy. Either she really did see daylight,
+and most excellent meaning, in the Biosophical Theory, or she concerned
+herself to make out a case for the defence of Aunt Josephine. She told
+Eric she was surprised that a man of science should at this time of the
+day cast ridicule on the doctrine of an essential harmony between "soul
+states" and the health of the body. For her part, she felt the
+attraction of this idea of ceasing the little lonely personal fight
+against overwhelming odds--this putting oneself into direct relation
+with the Infinite.
+
+Eric stared.
+
+Yes, my mother maintained, there was much to be said for Mrs.
+Harborough's idea that each individual should learn to think of his life
+in connection with this underlying force. If, instead of denying God we
+affirmed Him ... refusing to accept or to believe in evil----
+
+"All very jolly for us," Eric said, "but what about the poor cancerous
+devils in our hospital? I see us looking in on them and saying: 'Oh,
+you're all right! Three cheers for harmony. Come out and play golf with
+the staff.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Eric had gone my mother lay back on the pillow, her shining eyes
+on Bettina pirouetting noiselessly about the room. I begged Bettina to
+stop her gyrating.
+
+She explained she was doing the cheque dance. Mercifully there was this
+antidote--I mean postscript to Aunt Josephine's letter. "Nearer the
+time" she would send us the money for our tickets. The enclosed £40 was
+for clothes.
+
+Now the way was clear!
+
+No.
+
+The question still was, Who, this side of London, could be trusted to
+make our frocks? The seriousness of the consideration brought the cheque
+dance to an end. We sat and thought.
+
+The precise date of this visit was not yet fixed. Aunt Josephine had
+asked what time would suit us best.
+
+With one voice, Betty and I cried, "_June!_"
+
+But we were promptly told (and we agreed) that to suggest June would be
+too grasping. Aunt Josephine would have other, more important, guests
+eager to come to her for the Coronation month. So we answered: Any time
+convenient to her.
+
+Then that admirable Aunt wrote back: "Would next month do?" And would we
+stay for the Coronation?
+
+In spite of the breathless shortness of the time of preparation, Bettina
+composed Coronation dances and practised curtseying to the Queen, though
+she knew quite well that she would only see Her Majesty at a distance
+driving by in her golden coach.
+
+The one consideration that sobered Bettina was who, _who_--on this short
+notice, with all the feminine world crying passionately for frocks--who
+could be found to make ours? The more plain and simple, the more
+important was style and cut. Nobody in the country-side was competent
+for such an undertaking.
+
+Brighton? Very dear, and not first-rate.
+
+Suddenly Bettina clapped her hands.
+
+"The little French dressmaker Hermione told us about."
+
+The very person! Only, wouldn't she be up to the eyes in work? We
+remembered, too, she was said to be "not strong." She didn't care, as a
+rule, to work out of London. But she had come to sew for those horrid
+people Lord Helmstone let the Pond House to the year before. The people
+turned out to be badly off, and, after doing some damage, they had gone
+away without paying their rent. A law-suit was pending between them and
+Lord Helmstone. We had never known them, but we could not help noticing
+their clothes. They were beautiful. Even my mother said so.
+
+Hermione had played golf once or twice with the boy and girl. One day
+she had admired openly something the girl was wearing.
+
+"Yes, looks quite Bond Street, doesn't it?" the girl said. "And all done
+at home by a little dressmaker at four-and-six a day."
+
+Hermione had got the woman's address, specially for us, she
+said--meaning for Bettina. Hermione was always advising Bettina about
+her clothes and making the child discontented with what she had.
+
+We had not wanted any "little tame dressmaker" at the time, but we were
+enchanted now, when Bettina turned up the card inscribed:
+
+    "MADAME AURORE,
+     "87, CRUTCHLEY STREET,
+      "LEICESTER SQUARE."
+
+"Madame Aurore!" my mother echoed. "No doubt a cockney of the cockneys!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was not a cockney. And she was a great surprise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PLANTING THYME
+
+
+The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few
+days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to
+bring.
+
+And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of
+the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.
+
+The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly
+after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats--a
+business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to
+finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south
+bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying
+under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I
+worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds'
+singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many
+days like this--with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the
+sheltered south-west corner, were the bees in any number tuning up
+their fiddles.
+
+I looked up from my work and saw--at that most unusual hour--Eric Annan
+at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd--excited. I dropped the
+garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.
+
+"Matter? What should be the matter?"
+
+I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had
+betrayed himself.
+
+"I thought you looked as if--as if something had happened," I said. What
+I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I
+thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious
+morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the
+heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.
+
+But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not
+like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down
+over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them
+firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their
+roots.
+
+"What are you planting there?" he asked.
+
+"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last
+year.
+
+"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
+
+I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He
+looked astonished.
+
+I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early
+to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking
+delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I
+confessed the walks.
+
+"You ought not to have told me," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."
+
+I went on planting thyme.
+
+"Promise me, for these next days _you_ won't go either."
+
+"Why?" I asked again.
+
+"Because my thoughts might go wandering."
+
+I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.
+
+"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me."
+He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.
+
+"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next--how many
+days am I to be cooped up when the morning is at its best?"
+
+"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing
+other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you
+going to put in?"
+
+"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.
+
+"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.
+
+"So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They
+'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my
+mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're
+annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue
+butterflies would be a poor sort of place."
+
+We talked irrelevancies for a moment more--the passion of the
+convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts
+of moths and butterflies preferred.
+
+He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that
+trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and
+painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to
+please my mother. "Personally," I had never bothered much about the
+butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.
+
+I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and
+sybarites--all for colour and sweet scents.
+
+He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the
+rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies
+were much misunderstood. "In their way--and a very good way, too--they
+answer to the call."
+
+"What call?"
+
+"The call to serve the ends of life."
+
+I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general
+moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"
+
+"More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said butterflies were
+no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more
+immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers.
+
+It was such solemn talk for butterflies. I told him the two sulphur
+yellows reeling in the sunshine were laughing at him. "'Ends of life'
+indeed! They simply _love_ bright colour and things that smell
+sweet...."
+
+"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than
+any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all
+life comes from lovers."
+
+At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange
+thing was it seemed to frighten him.
+
+We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the
+honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited--holding breath.
+
+Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his
+collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had
+noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors,
+Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the
+thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room.
+
+"What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I
+asked, I thought I knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+ERIC'S SECRET
+
+
+My sister and I breakfasted in the morning-room in those days, and we
+always had a fire for Bettina's sake on chilly mornings.
+
+In the back of my mind I was hoping Eric's complaint of cold was an
+excuse. If my first impression had been right, if he had something to
+tell me, he would tell it better indoors. I should hear it better,
+sitting beside him.
+
+The pang when he passed the sofa by! I was wrong.... I was an idiot....
+
+He drew up before the ungenerous little fire and began at once to speak
+with suppressed excitement of a "secret."
+
+"----the sort of thing that--well, I wouldn't trust my own brother with
+it." And upon that he stopped short.
+
+I did not say: "You can trust me." But I hardly breathed in the pause. I
+felt it all hung on whether he told me. What hung? Why,
+everything--whether life was going to be kind to me some day ...
+whether it was well or ill that I had been born.
+
+He seemed to be content with having told me there was a secret. For he
+changed the subject abruptly to the Bungalow, and what an adept Bootle
+was at inoculation and the preparation of cultures. Bootle possessed the
+great and glorious faculty of accuracy! One of the few men on earth
+whose account of a thing did not need to be checked.
+
+Sitting over the fire that morning, Eric told me that the Bungalow was a
+laboratory. Very important work had been done there last autumn. (So
+_that_ was why he had stayed on!) "Tentative but highly significant
+results" had been arrived at--results which all these months of contest
+and putting to proof, in London and on the Continent, had not been able
+to upset.
+
+"Gods!" Eric exclaimed, with a startling vehemence. But this was a
+glorious place to work in! The best air in England! And the Bungalow had
+been an inspiration from on high! Far away from noise and interruption;
+and not merely for a few paltry hours. Great stretches of time to
+himself! Then you were so fit here. You slept. You had all your wits
+about you. As we knew, it was Hawkins's idea in the first place--that
+Eric should come down and rest. Well, now I was to hear something more
+about Hawkins. Hawkins was a kind of mascot. He not only was the best
+man they'd ever had in that chair at the University. He wasn't only a
+first-rate bacteriologist, and first-rate all-round man. There was
+something about Hawkins that struck fire out of other people. His rooms
+were a meeting-place for chaps keen about--well, about the things that
+matter. Hawkins gave a dinner at his club one night to some London
+University men and a couple of distinguished foreigners.
+
+"Of course, we talked shop. We argued and stirred one another up, and
+the sparks flew. When the rest had gone Hawkins and I stayed talking in
+the smoking-room. About an idea"--Eric looked round to see that the door
+was shut--"a new idea I was working at for dealing with cancer."
+
+"Dealing!" I echoed, leaning forward. "You mean curing?"
+
+"----I told Hawkins about an experiment I'd been making. As I've said,
+Hawkins is very intelligent. But he contested my conclusions. I grew
+hot. We argued. I told him more and more. Hawkins thought my experiments
+too rough-and-ready. Even if they weren't rough-and-ready, to be
+conclusive they must be tried on an extended scale. I stood up for the
+validity of tests, on a small scale, done with an infinity of care--a
+ruthless spending of the investigator rather than multiplication of the
+subject. All the same, I couldn't deny that precious time was being
+wasted and many lives. Hawkins was right. I did need a trained staff,
+and I needed--oh, masses of things I had not got, and had no prospect of
+getting. We had tried the forlorn hope of a Government grant--and
+failed. We agreed that, in working out an idea like mine, the crucial
+danger lay in premature publicity. We are in a cleft stick in these
+matters. Without the right people knowing, believing, helping, it is
+hard--pretty nearly impossible--to go forward. I sat, rather dejected,
+and stared at the fire. The smoking-room had been empty except for a
+little, dried-up old man, who was half asleep over the evening papers. A
+few minutes after Hawkins had gone out to pay his bill, the little old
+man waked up and went to a writing-table. In a half-minute or so I
+looked round, and he was standing quite near me, warming his back at the
+fire.
+
+"'I've been eavesdropping,' he said. Lord! I was scared. How much had I
+given away? 'I don't know anything about this subject,' he said. 'But
+I've an idea you do. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on it. My name's
+Pearmain,' he said, and he showed me the signature on a cheque. 'A
+thousand pounds to start you.' He laid the cheque down on the little
+table among the matches and cigar-ends. 'You can let me know when you
+need more,' he said. He fished a card out of an inside pocket, and
+chucked it on top of the cheque. Naturally I was staggered. He _seemed_
+right enough in his head, but I was sure he couldn't be.... When Hawkins
+came back I introduced him. We talked awhile longer. Then the old man
+said good-night. The next day I cashed the cheque. I gave up my post in
+the hospital, and I gave up ... a lot of things. After that I invested
+every ounce of energy I had in this undertaking. For three solid years
+I've done nothing, thought about nothing, except the one thing."
+
+His eyes were shining as a lover's might, I thought. The sting of
+jealousy poisoned my pleasure in being taken into his confidence--a
+renewed antagonism to the work, work, always work, that made its
+triumphant claim.
+
+"You pretend to be more inhuman than you are," I said. "For you don't
+forget that you can help people who have only ordinary everyday
+troubles."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," he laughed. "I'll have nothing to do with ordinary,
+everyday troubles."
+
+"You helped us----"
+
+"Oh, that's different--an exception. Just for once...." He seemed to
+excuse himself, for wasting time on us. He said the most extravagant
+things. "A revolution might have swept England. I should have gone on
+attenuating serums and inoculating guinea-pigs."
+
+It may have been something in my manner, or just my silence, that pulled
+him up. He spoke of the share we at Duncombe had had in "what's
+happened."
+
+"When I was clean worked out and dead-beat, I came here."
+
+We hadn't any notion of the "rest and refreshment--the----" He looked
+at me out of those clear red-brown eyes of his, and seemed to
+deliberate.
+
+A sense of delicious panic seized me. "And--the--the experiments. How do
+they come on?" I asked, but I wasn't thinking of them at all.
+
+"That," he said, sinking his voice--"that's just what I'm coming to;
+though I hoped I shouldn't tell you. I didn't mean to say anything at
+all this morning, except that I was going to be a hermit for these next
+days. But you aren't a chatterbox. The fact is ... last night I believe
+I stumbled on the secret."
+
+I don't know what I said, but it pleased him. His eyes were full of
+gentle brilliancy. "Yes, yes," he said. "I knew _you'd_ understand."
+
+Oh, it was good to see him with that light in his face!
+
+And we sat there, with the morning sun shining over us, and just looked
+gladness at each other. Then I said I thought he must be the happiest
+man in England.
+
+He half put out his hand, and drew it back. "I am to find that out, too,
+very soon," he said. The clock downstairs chimed ten. Eric jumped up
+like a person with a train to catch.
+
+He had taken me into his counsels prematurely like this, he said,
+because he wanted to feel sure that I wasn't putting any wrong
+construction on the fact of his burying himself for these next days. "I
+like to think you are understanding. If I have any good news, I'll come
+and tell you. If you don't hear, you'll know I don't dare let go my clue
+even for an hour, except to sleep."
+
+And now he must go.
+
+I went with him as far as the gate.
+
+He walked with head bent, and eyes that saw things hidden from me.
+Already he was back in the Bungalow.
+
+I felt the misery of being deserted. But I felt, too, the strong
+intelligence, the iron purpose, in the man. And though I was torn and
+aching, I was proud. For all my jealousy, as I saw the mouth so firm-set
+under the red-brown thatch, saw the colour in his face, something
+reached me, too, of the heat of this passion to find out--something of
+the absorption of the man of science in his task. Here was the new kind
+of soldier going to his post.
+
+I held out my hand. "Good luck!"
+
+He took it, then dropped it quickly.
+
+And quickly, without once looking back, he walked away.
+
+I watched him hurrying across the links till one of the heath hollows
+swallowed him up.
+
+As I turned to go back to my thyme-planting, I heard the dog-cart
+rattling along the stony road.
+
+Madame Aurore!
+
+I never finished planting the thyme.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+MADAME AURORE
+
+
+Madame Aurore was little and wasted and shrill.
+
+She had deep scars in her neck, and dead-looking yellow hair.
+
+She was drenched in cheap scent.
+
+Her untidy, helter-skelter dress gave no hint of the admirable taste she
+lavished upon others.
+
+She saw at once what we ought to have, and she talked about our clothes
+with an enthusiasm as great as Betty's own.
+
+"Ah, but _Madame_!" she remonstrated dramatically, when my mother showed
+her the new white satin, which was for me, and a creamy lace gown which
+was to be modernised for Bettina--"not _böt_ vhite!"
+
+My mother explained that my gown was to have rose-coloured garnishing.
+
+"Mais non! mais _non_!" Madame must pardon her for the liberty, but she,
+Madame Aurore, could not bring herself to see our chief advantage thrown
+away.
+
+What, then, was our chief advantage? Betty demanded.
+
+What indeed, but the contrast between us. The moment she laid eyes on
+the hair of Mademoiselle Bettina she had said to herself: the frock of
+Mademoiselle Bettina should be that tender green of tilleul--with just a
+note of bleu de ciel. Oh, a dress of spring-time--an April dress, a gay
+little dress, for all its tenderness! A dress to make happy the heart of
+all who look thereon.
+
+But "green!" We had sent all the way to London for the white satin, and
+we had no green.
+
+Then 'twas in truth une bonne chance that Madame Aurore _had_! She often
+bought up bargains and gave her clients an opportunity to acquire them.
+She rushed out of the room, and returned with a piece of silk chiffon of
+the most adorable hue. She showed us the effect over white satin. My
+satin. But then, as Madame Aurore said, we could so easily send to Stagg
+and Mantle's for more.
+
+She looked at me out of snapping black eyes--eyes like animated
+boot-buttons. "Yes, yes; for you, Mademoiselle, ze note sall be sérénité
+... hein? Zis priceless old lace over ivory satin. Ah...." She struck
+an attitude. "I _see_ it. So ... and so. A ceinture panne, couleur de
+feuille d'automne touched with gold broderie. Hein? Oh, very distingué,
+hein?"
+
+"It must not be expensive"; we had to say that to Madame Aurore all that
+first day, at regular intervals. But she had her way. She sewed hard,
+and she chattered as hard as she sewed.
+
+Bettina ran across her in the passage that first evening as Madame
+Aurore came up from supper. And they began instantly on the fruitful
+theme of "green gown." My mother called out to Bettina that she had
+talked enough about clothes for one day, and in any case she had left us
+to go early to bed. Bettina regretted her rash promise--wasn't the least
+tired, and could have talked clothes till cock-crow! There was some
+argument on this head at the door, in which Madame Aurore joined, with
+too great a freedom, and an elaborate air of ranging herself on my
+mother's side. This pleased, least of all, the person Madame Aurore
+designed to propitiate.
+
+Madame Aurore, I am sure, had not been in the house an hour before she
+had taken the measure of our main preoccupation. Mademoiselle Bettina
+ought to be grateful, she said, to have a mother so devoted, so
+solicitous. Standing near the open door, she piled up an exaggerated
+case of maternal love. There was nothing in life like the love between
+mother and child. Ah, didn't she know! Her own little girl----
+
+My mother said she must have the door shut now, and I was sent to undo
+Betty's gown.
+
+Bettina thought it angelic of Madame Aurore not to resent our mother's
+lack of interest in the small Aurore. According to Bettina, Madame
+showed a wonderfully nice disposition in not withdrawing her interest
+from us after that. She seemed rather to imply: very well, you don't
+care about my child ... but I am still ready to care about yours.
+
+"Parfaitement!" ... the little dressmaker remembered Bettina's passing
+Dew Pond House the summer before. It was true what Hermione had
+reported. Madame Aurore had leaned out of the window to watch Bettina.
+She had even expressed the wish that she might have the dressing of
+cette jolie enfant.
+
+Oh, but life was a droll affair!
+
+Bettina thought it entirely delightful. She went about the house
+singing. The first time Madame Aurore heard Bettina she arrested the
+rapid stab of her basting needle: "Who ees dat?"
+
+"That is my youngest daughter."
+
+"She tink to go on ze stage?"
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Not? It ess a vast, zat."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was always cold.
+
+Whenever we were out of the morning-room she piled on the coal. On the
+second day I remonstrated. Fuel, I explained, was very expensive so far
+from the coal-fields. She smiled. "You are ze careful one, hein?" and
+she looked at me in a way which made me uncomfortable.
+
+But I did not feel about the poor little creature as my mother did.
+
+My mother went so far as to wish we had not sent for her. She would
+never have allowed her to come if she had seen her first. I thought my
+mother severe.
+
+Everybody else, including the servants, liked Madame Aurore. No wonder.
+She spent her life doing things for people. Sewing for us all day like
+mad, so that our two best frocks might be finished in spite of the
+shortness of the time; and still ready at nightfall to show the cook how
+to make p'tite marmite, or sauce à la financière--equally ready to
+advise the housemaid how to give the Bond Street, not to say the Rue de
+la Paix, touch to her Sunday alpaca, and chic to old Ransom's beehive
+hat.
+
+If she asked them one and all more questions in a minute than they could
+answer in a month, what did that show but the generous interest she took
+in her fellow-beings?
+
+Bettina, with her little air of large experience, said that Madame
+Aurore was the most "sympathetic" person she had ever met. Madame
+Aurore's benevolent concern about our clothes, our soups, sauces, and
+servants, and everything that was ours, extended to our friends and
+relations and everything that was theirs. She had never, she said, known
+people--let alone such charming people as we--with so few acquaintances.
+Bettina thought Madame Aurore was sorry for us.
+
+She asked a great deal about the Helmstones. "Ze only friends and zey
+are avay for seex mont!" Ah, it was well we were going to London. We
+should die, else, of aloneness. Aunt Josephine plainly was the one ray
+of light in our grey existence. Where did she live? Lowndes Square! Ah,
+but a very expensive and splendid part of London! No news to us, who had
+our own private measure for social altitudes. Bettina had looked out
+Lowndes Square on our faded map of London. Aunt Josephine was only a
+private person, but she lived nearer the King and Queen than the
+Helmstones did.
+
+And for all her being a Biosophist she had asked us to stay for the
+Coronation. Bettina frequently led the conversation to the great event
+of June. But this queer little Frenchwoman was more interested in Aunt
+Josephine than she was in the King and Queen. Here was distinction for
+an Aunt!
+
+And what was she like--this lady? We must have a picture of our only and
+so valuable relation.
+
+Bettina went and rooted about in the deep print and photograph drawer,
+till she brought Aunt Josephine to light. Very faded and old-fashioned
+looking, but Madame Aurore regarded the face with a respectful
+enthusiasm. "Oh, une grande dame! une vraie grande dame!" Madame Aurore
+understood better now what was required.
+
+We repudiated, on our aunt's behalf, the idea that she was so much
+grande dame as philanthropist, thinker, recluse. We did not deny her
+grandeur. We but clarified it; or, at least, Bettina did.
+
+"Bettina talks too much to that woman," my mother said to me privately.
+She sent for Bettina and told her she was not to speak to Madame Aurore
+about anything except her work.
+
+Bettina thought to interpret this order literally would be inhuman.
+Besides, she considered it very nice of Madame Aurore to take such an
+interest in us. "_I_ am grateful when people take an interest," said
+Bettina with her air of superiority.
+
+When my mother heard that Bettina had been discussing Aunt Josephine,
+and had unearthed the photograph to show to Madame Aurore, she was
+annoyed. "Go and bring me the picture," she said.
+
+Bettina went into the morning-room, and looked about for some minutes.
+The little dressmaker sat there, in a litter of white and green, sewing
+furiously. Bettina said at last that she hated most dreadfully to bother
+Madame Aurore, but where was that old photograph?
+
+Madame Aurore looked up absently. "Had Mademoiselle Bettina not taken it
+out?"
+
+"Perhaps I did----" Bettina scoured the house.
+
+Aunt Josephine's photograph was never found.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was glad our mother did not know that Bettina had told Madame Aurore
+about the pendant and the diamond star. Bettina excused herself by
+saying Madame Aurore had been so certain a lady like our mother must
+have jewels, and that she would lend them to her daughters, in order to
+put the finishing touch of elegance to our toilette. Betty had felt it
+due to our mother to acknowledge that a part, at least, of this exalted
+expectation was not so wide of the mark. And Bettina endorsed Madame
+Aurore's opinion that a diamond star certainly _would_ "light up" my
+ivory satin and old lace. Also--but no, we must do without.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The green frock was all but finished. We had brought the cheval glass
+out of my mother's room. She was "not strong enough to stand the
+patchouli," so she missed the great moment of the final trying on.
+Bettina stood before the glass, looking somehow more childish than ever,
+or rather seeming less of common earth and more of fairyland, in the
+tunic-frock of green, her short curls on her neck.
+
+My fancy that she was like somebody out of "The Midsummer Night's
+Dream," was set to flight by Madame Aurore's shower of couturière's
+compliment, mixed with highly practical considerations, such as: "See
+how it falls when you sit down. Parfaitement! And can you valk in it?
+But _wis grace_!" Bettina proved she could. "A merveille! Sapristi!
+Mademoiselle Bettine would see the sensation she was going to create in
+London. Could she lift ze arm--hein?" Mais belle comme un ange!--many
+makers of quite beautiful gowns studied the effect seulement en repos.
+Mademoiselle Bettine would, without doubt, dance in that frock. Let us
+see, did it lend itself? Bettina moved about the morning-room to waltz
+time--laughing at and with Madame Aurore; stopping to make court
+curtsies; watching in the glass if green frock had pretty manners.
+
+One thing more, its maker said, and behold Perfection! It needed ... it
+cried aloud for a single jewel.
+
+"Ah, yes." Bettina's look fell. No doubt the finishing touch would have
+been a pearl and emerald pendant. But----
+
+Madame Aurore struck in with a torrential rapture, drowning explanation
+and regret. Life, Madame Aurore shrilled, was for ever using her, humble
+instrument though she was--for the working out of these benevolences.
+There had she--but three days ago--all innocent, unknowing--tossed that
+piece of chiffon tilleul into her trunk. Or rather, not her hand
+performed the act--not hers at all. The hand of Fate! And now, _The
+Finger!_ ... pointing straight at the pearl and emerald pendant. But,
+instantly, must Mademoiselle Bettine go and get the ravishing jewel--the
+diamond star, as well, while she was about it.
+
+Then poor Betty had to say these glories were no more.
+
+Madame Aurore snapped her boot-button eyes, and rolled them up. Our
+poor, _poor_ mother! Deeply, ah! but profoundly, Madame Aurore
+commiserated une dame si distinguée, si élégante, being in straitened
+circumstances. Ah, Madame Aurore understood! She would be most
+economical with the coals.
+
+All the same she wasn't.
+
+But what did it matter! since she turned us out dresses that we were
+sure Hermione, herself, would have characterised as "Dreams." Bettina
+went about the house, singing:
+
+      "'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?'
+       'Going to London, Sir,' she said...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Madame Aurore even managed to put the finishing touches to the two
+frocks made in the village, which Bettina called our Coronation
+robes--just white muslin, but not "just muslin" at all, after they had
+passed through Madame Aurore's hands. She listened indulgently while
+Bettina wondered how the young Princes would like driving through London
+in a gold coach, and above all how the little Princess would feel; and
+how she would look; and how did Madame Aurore think she would do her
+hair?
+
+"I don't like that woman," my mother observed pointedly to Bettina.
+
+"Oh, dearest, she feels it. I know from something----"
+
+"I do not object to her knowing. But I am not interested in Madame
+Aurore." My mother dismissed her.
+
+The fact was that none of the torrent of talk (carried on now in a
+whisper, with elaborate deference to the chère malade)--none of it had
+to do with Madame Aurore herself. We had had to ask her all of the
+little we came to know about her. She had no regular business in London.
+Ah, no, she was too often ill. She merely went out to work when she was
+"strong enuss."
+
+"Zen too, ze leedle gal. I haf to sink about her." The thought seemed
+one to harass. All would be different if Mme. Aurore had a shop.
+
+We agreed that to have a shop full of lovely French models, would be
+delightful. And by-and-by the little Aurore would help in the shop.
+
+"_Nevair!_" said Mme. Aurore with sudden passion. She knew all about
+being in shops. It was to prevent her daughter from knowing, too, that
+Mme. Aurore must make money. The little Aurore should go to the Convent
+school--which seemed somehow an odd destination for the daughter of
+Madame Aurore. She spoke of it as a far dream, beckoning.
+
+"Nossing--but _nossing_ can be done in zis world vidout monny." And what
+people will do for money--oh, little did we know! But the world was like
+that. Eh bien, Madame Aurore had not made it. _Had_ she done so, it
+would be a better place.
+
+Betty and I smiled at the pains taken to make this clear. Madame Aurore
+professed herself revolted by an arrangement which made "ze goodness or
+ze badness of a pairson" dependent upon where you happened to find
+yourself.
+
+"Par example you can be extrêmement good _here_." More. She would go so
+far as to say you must be a genius to discover how to be bad here.
+
+Through Betty's laughing protest, the little woman went on with
+seriousness to assure us it was "une chose bien différente dans ..." she
+checked herself, bit off the end of her thread, and spat it out.
+
+"It is different, you mean, in Crutchley Street?" Betty asked. And,
+though she got no answer, I think we both understood the anxious mother
+to be thinking of the small Aurore left all alone in one of the world's
+Mean Streets. Perhaps the reason Betty got no answer to her question was
+that she had slightly raised her voice in putting it, and I had said,
+"Sh!"
+
+"What ees it?" Madame Aurore demanded, looking round.
+
+"I was only reminding Betty," I said. "We mustn't disturb my mother."
+
+Hah! naturally not. _Whatever_ happened, she was not to be disturbed!
+
+I was afraid, from the tone in which Madame Aurore said this, that she
+thought I had been reproving her. And, to divert her thoughts, I asked:
+"Who takes care of her--the little daughter--while you are away?"
+
+Again she bit viciously at the thread. "Not motch 'care'!" The small
+eyes snapped as she drew the thread through the needle's eye. I had
+never seen even her hands fly so fast, or her whole feverish little body
+attack the basting with such fury of energy as after that reference to
+the child left behind in Crutchley Street.
+
+Bettina said soothingly: "I suppose you left her with some good friend?"
+
+"Ze best I haf."
+
+The admission was made in an accent so coldly hopeless that Bettina,
+round-eyed, said: "Oh, dear, isn't she a nice friend?"
+
+"She is like ozzers. She is as nice as she can afford." Madame Aurore
+had recovered her shrill vivacity. She had not, after all, taken to
+heart my hint about keeping our voices down. "In some parts of ze
+vorld," she went on, in that raised, defiant note, "you might be quite
+good for a week; wis luck for a few months; but you could not be good
+from year's end to year's end."
+
+"Why was that?" Bettina asked softly.
+
+Madame Aurore laughed out. "Ze climat!" she said, in a voice that must
+certainly have penetrated the next room. "Somesing in ze air." Then
+lower, with a tigerish swiftness: "I shall not ron ze risk for _my_
+liddle gal! _Non!_" She tossed the satin on the machine, thrust it under
+the needle, and seemed to work the treadle by dint of compressing lips
+and knitting brows.
+
+Bettina and I agreed we would not talk to her any more about her
+daughter, since, unlike most mothers, the thought of her child did not
+soften Madame Aurore, but made her hard and angry.
+
+We put this down to wounded feelings at my mother's curt dismissal of
+the theme.
+
+Surreptitiously--for she knew leave would be refused--Bettina gave
+Madame Aurore some of our old toys, and other little gifts, to take home
+to her daughter.
+
+I did not prevent this, for I, too, felt uneasily that we ought somehow
+to make up for our mother's nervous detestation of Madame Aurore.
+
+Had this, as the little dressmaker hinted, something of sheer sickness
+in it--an invalid's caprice? Bettina said lightheartedly: "Oh, it's only
+because Aurore is a foreigner. Mother admits she never did like
+foreigners."
+
+After the first day there was almost no personal interchange between
+Madame Aurore and her employer. Yet I had a queer feeling that a silent
+drama was being played out between those two who, without meeting, were
+acting and reacting upon each other.
+
+Madame Aurore asked each day, How was madame? in a voice of extremest
+solicitude--nay, of gloomiest apprehension.
+
+I found myself wrestling with an uncomfortable feeling that this
+hopeless view of my mother's health was somehow prompted by a desire "to
+get even" with the one unresponsive member of our little circle--to get
+even in the only way open to Madame Aurore. I knew she advised the
+housemaid to look out for another place, and offered to find her one in
+London, where she would be paid double, and have almost nothing to do.
+The housemaid was greatly tempted, but I was told she said she wouldn't
+go till her mistress was better.
+
+"Bettair! She vill not last a mont!" said Madame Aurore.
+
+At first such echoes as reached me of these prognostications made me
+merely angry. But I could not quite cast them aside. I began to wonder
+miserably if there were anything in this view. After all we, too--even
+Eric--had held it ourselves, only such a little while before!
+
+I wrote to Aunt Josephine to say that if my mother were not better by
+Monday morning, I should bring Bettina as arranged; but I would stay
+only one night and go home the next day.
+
+The question rose on Friday as to whether Madame Aurore should return
+to London on Saturday night, or some time on Sunday.
+
+"Saturday night," said my mother with decision.
+
+Bettina ventured to urge the Sunday alternative. "The poor little thing
+is so tired after sewing all day----"
+
+To which my mother responded by ordering the cart for Saturday evening.
+
+"I cannot sleep with that woman in the house."
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+Bettina ran in to say Madame Aurore was ready to say good-bye. To our
+embarrassment, our mother would not permit Madame Aurore to enter the
+room, even for the purpose of taking leave.
+
+We went out and did what we could to soften the refusal. "She has not
+been sleeping...." "She is trying to rest...." "She is so much obliged
+to you...."
+
+Ah, Madame Aurore understood. Our poor, poor mother was undoubtedly
+failing. We were adjured to take every care. Certainly we should not
+both leave the poor lady.
+
+We told Madame Aurore that we should never forget her. "I shall take
+good care of the address," Bettina said.
+
+No, Madame Aurore would send us a new address. She was looking for
+larger rooms. She believed she was going to be stronger now. She meant
+to take on two or three hands. In that case, she would not be able to go
+out any more to people's houses. She would let us know....
+
+She filled the hall with her patchouli and shrill vivacity, and
+presently was gone.
+
+When we went back into my mother's room, we found her telling the
+housemaid to hang our gowns in a draught "to purify them."
+
+Betty was moved to some final remonstrance.
+
+My mother cut her short: "That was a horrible woman!"
+
+"Well, well," I said, "she's gone."
+
+"Yes. That is the best that can be said of Madame Aurore. We are done
+with her for ever."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+GOING TO LONDON
+
+
+Mercifully, no soul can stand at the pitch of tension long. Those too
+frail snap. The strong relax. As I have learned since, few who have to
+do with lingering illness but come to know the gradual, inevitable
+dulling of apprehension in the watchers. Eric says the power of human
+adaptability sees to it that the abnormal state of the sufferer shall
+come by mere continuance to wear an air of the normal. And so the
+watcher, with no violence to loyalty, or conscience, is relieved of the
+sharper sympathy.
+
+Certainly, my mother seemed to us in no worse case than many a time
+before. Bettina and I agreed that she began to improve the moment
+Duncombe air was no longer poisoned for her by the presence of poor
+Madame Aurore. What Eric had said of our trustworthy servants was true.
+Yet I had brought my mother to agree that my absence, now, was to be a
+matter only of hours, even if I went back for the Coronation.
+
+And still I was not spared a profound sinking of the heart at the
+moment of leave-taking. I put my misgiving down to the fear that parting
+from Bettina for four long weeks, would be more than my mother's scant
+reserve of strength could bear.
+
+As for Bettina (oh, when I remember that!)--Bettina showed the bravest
+front; calling back from the door: "I shall write you every blessed
+day."
+
+"Yes," my mother steadied her voice to answer. "I shall want to hear
+everything. The good and--the less good."
+
+"There won't be any 'less good.' It's all going to be glorious."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Big Klaus's dog-cart took us across the heath I strained my eyes for
+some glimpse of Eric. A week that day since he had come and shared his
+secret! He could never mean to let me go without a word. Not till the
+train was in motion could I give up hope. I stood a moment longer at the
+window looking back. No sign.
+
+I took my seat between Betty and an old gentleman; she and I both too
+stirred and excited to talk. Betty, half-turned away, looked out of her
+window, and I, across her shoulder and over the flying hedges, looked
+still for a man who might be walking the field-paths, looked for the
+bright green roof of his Bungalow, looked for the chimneys of the farm.
+
+No sign.
+
+I sat fighting down my tears.
+
+Not an hour of these bustling days had been so full, but I had felt the
+blank of Eric's silence. And now again I met the ache of loss with: This
+will teach you! You were dreading a little time away. He adds a week to
+our parting. _He_ doesn't mind. It's only you, poor fool--only you who
+mind.
+
+I looked round, in a sudden terror, lest anyone should be noticing that
+my eyes were wet.
+
+Mercifully, the people were all looking at Betty. I looked at Betty,
+too. I could not see her eyes, but the nearer cheek was that lovely
+colour whose name she gave once to an evening sky. We had come up on the
+top of a knoll and stood for a moment, breathless. My mother had said no
+painter could get such a colour. And neither were there any words in the
+language to describe it. For it was not red, not flame, not pink, nor
+orange. But Betty, looking steadily, had found the right words for it:
+"A fiery rose."
+
+And that was the colour in Betty's cheeks on the way to London.
+
+No wonder people looked at her. There was a man who got out of the
+first-class carriage next us at every station, and walked by our window.
+He looked in at Bettina. I was glad our carriage was full. I felt sure,
+if it had not been, he would have come in. I could see Bettina did not
+resent the staring. And then I saw her look out of the corner of her
+eyes.
+
+"Bettina!" I whispered. "Don't encourage that strange man to stare in
+here."
+
+"_Me?_" she said. "What am I doing?"
+
+I told her again that she encouraged him. But I was handicapped by not
+being able to say just how. I admitted that what she did was very
+slight. But it was enough. "It was what you did to Eddie Monmouth."
+Then, because she pretended not to understand, I told her that she was
+falling into bad deceitful ways. I knew she had written to Ranny
+Dallas.... Yes, and kept writing, though the moment I realised what was
+going on I wrote to Ranny myself. I said if any more letters came from
+him, I should have to tell Betty about the girl in Norfolk. Ranny wrote
+back that he had told Betty himself! And still they went on
+corresponding, secretly. I said to her now, that I should hardly be
+surprised if she was hoping to meet Ranny in London.
+
+"Oh, one may 'hope' almost anything," said Betty airily.
+
+"Not of a man who is engaged to another girl!"
+
+"Yes," said Betty; "as long as he isn't married...."
+
+Then, rather frightened, I asked outright if she was really expecting to
+meet Ranny somewhere.
+
+"How can I say? He is fond of the opera," she said in a very superior,
+grown-up way. "I _might_ happen to see him some night in the throng----"
+
+"In the throng! Betty," I said. "You have given Ranny Dallas your
+address."
+
+"No," she said; "but I've given it to Tom Courtney."
+
+Tom Courtney was Ranny's red-haired friend. "If you had watched," Betty
+said, "you would know that I was corresponding with Tom Courtney, too.
+Chiefly about Ranny. Tom Courtney is a splendid friend. He explains
+things much better than Ranny can. And then" (Betty's momentary
+annoyance vanished in laughter)--"then, too, Tom can spell--beautifully!"
+
+I refused to laugh.
+
+"I knew you'd be horrified," Betty said again, "and that is why I have
+to keep things from you. You are a sort of nun. _You_ never feel as if
+all your blood had been whipped to a syllabub. And besides----"
+
+"Besides?"
+
+"I do like nice men. I don't mind their knowing. And I don't mean to be
+an old maid. _You_ wouldn't care."
+
+"You think I wouldn't?" I had no time to say more, for the train
+stopped. We thought at first we had reached Victoria Station, but it was
+only Clapham Junction. The "staring" man passed once more, with a porter
+behind carrying golf-clubs and portmanteau. Our carriage, too, was
+emptying. The people stood and reached things down from the racks, and
+then filed out. When the train went on we were alone.
+
+Betty was still excited, but more grave, even harassed--a look that sat
+rather pitiful on her babyish face.
+
+I moved up close to her again, and I told her there was something I had
+to say before we got to London. "You and I, you see, we don't know very
+much, and we get carried away."
+
+"You mean me," said Betty. "You are thinking about Eddie Monmouth
+and----"
+
+Then I told her I did not mean her alone. "I don't know how it is," I
+said, remembering Mr. Whitby-Dawson and Captain Monmouth and Ranny--yes,
+and others--"I don't know how it is, but girls seem to 'care' more than
+men do."
+
+"I've thought that, too," Bettina said.
+
+I said I was sure it was true. Men had so much to do. Life was so full
+for them ... perhaps that took their minds off. I put my arm round
+Bettina and held her close. "I am going to confess something," I said,
+"that most older sisters would deny. But you have got nobody but me. And
+I have nobody but you. We must help each other."
+
+"I shall have Aunt Josephine," Betty reminded me.
+
+"A stranger--and too old besides." I dismissed Aunt Josephine for the
+particular purpose in view. "I am going to tell you something
+very--particular." Then, while she looked at the cushions opposite, and
+I looked out of the window, I told her I had learned from Eric Annan
+what she had learned through the others. "We'll say it just this once,
+and never, never again so long as we live! And we may have to deny it,"
+I warned her. "But I think, if I'm honest about it with you, maybe you
+won't feel that I don't understand ... or that I am, as you say,
+'different.' You will feel closer to me," I pleaded. "And maybe we shall
+both be stronger for that." I waited a moment. I was glad Betty still
+stared straight in front of her. "We don't only care more than men do,"
+I said. "We _need_ men more than they need us."
+
+Bettina turned at that. I felt her eyes on me. Then she looked down and
+stroked my hand.
+
+"I think Mr. Annan does care about you," she said.
+
+"A little," I said. "Not enough. Not as I care."
+
+Bettina pointed out that Eric Annan was not so young as we. "Why, he
+must be thirty. Perhaps when he was our age"--our eyes met in the new
+comradeship, and then fell--"he may have taken more interest in--more
+interest in the things we think about."
+
+Then she took it back. "No, no. You may depend it's only girls who are
+like that--caring so terribly much. I thought it was only me. But if you
+are like that too, maybe there are others." After a moment: "You were
+good to tell me," she said. "I don't feel so--unnatural."
+
+The train was slowing. The light grew grey. We were in a dim place,
+between a smoky wall and a rattling train going out as we came in. Then
+the platform, and the porters running along by our windows. "Luggage,
+miss?"
+
+Bettina started up.
+
+"Aunt Josephine!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+AUNT JOSEPHINE
+
+
+She was an imposing figure, beautifully dressed in black. She was
+handsomer than her picture, and younger-looking than we expected. It
+occurred to me that bio-vibratory sympathism had a thinning effect.
+
+Her manner was more decisive than I had expected from a dreamer. Very
+commanding and important, she stood there with her liveried servant
+behind her. Bettina had known her instantly by the grey hair rolled high
+and the pear-shaped earrings.
+
+She kissed us, and said I was more like my mother. And were our boxes
+labelled?
+
+She hardly waited for us to answer. She did not wait at all for our
+little trunk.
+
+"A footman will attend to the luggage," she said. As she led us down the
+platform, her eyes kept darting about in a way that made me think she
+must be expecting someone else by that train. I looked round, too. But
+nobody else seemed to be expecting Aunt Josephine, though a woman
+towards the end of the platform looked very searchingly at our party as
+we passed. Aunt Josephine did not seem to notice. She was busy putting
+on a thick motor-veil over the lace one that was tied round her hat--her
+lovely hat, that, as Betty said afterwards, was "boiling over with black
+ostrich-feathers."
+
+A wonderful scent had come towards us with Aunt Josephine--nothing the
+least like that faint garden-smell that clung to our linen, from the
+sprays of lavender and dried verbena our mother put newly each year
+under the white paper of our wardrobe-shelves. Such a ghost of fragrance
+could never have survived here. This perfume of Aunt Josephine's--not so
+much strong as dominant--routed the sooty, acrid smell of the station.
+When she lifted her arms to put the chiffon over her face, fresh waves
+of the rich, mysterious scent came towards us.
+
+She seemed in haste to leave so mean a place as Victoria. She spoke a
+little sharply to the footman. He explained--and, indeed, we could
+see--that a great, shining motor-car was threading its way as well as it
+could through a tangle of taxi-cabs and inferior cars. Aunt Josephine
+stood frowning under her double veil, and once I saw her eyes go towards
+the woman who had noticed us. The woman was speaking to one of the
+porters. The porter, too, looked at Aunt Josephine and nodded. The dowdy
+woman gave the porter a tip, and sent him on an errand. I was far too
+excited to notice such uninteresting people, but for the curious
+personal kind of detestation in the look the dowdy woman fixed upon Aunt
+Josephine.
+
+"We won't wait," said our aunt. "We'll take this taxi."
+
+But just then the beautiful shining car swerved free, and we were
+hurried in. The footman spread a rug over our knees. As we glided out of
+the station I noticed the dowdy woman asking her way of a policeman.
+
+And the policeman didn't know the way. He shook his head. And both of
+them looked after us.
+
+As we whirled through the crowded streets I felt how everyone must be
+envying Bettina and me.
+
+Presently we came to a quiet corner. The houses stood back from the
+street, in gardens. Our aunt's was one of these.
+
+I was too excited to notice much about the outside. But the inside!
+
+Betty and I exchanged looks. We had no idea Aunt Josephine was so rich.
+There were more big footmen--foreigners; very quick and quiet.
+
+The entrance-hall and stairs were wide and dim. When the front-door was
+shut, the house seemed as silent as a church on a week-day, and the
+soft-footed servants rather like the sidesmen who show strangers to
+their places. The very window was like a window in a church. It had
+stained glass in it, and black lines divided it from top to bottom, into
+sections, like church windows.
+
+If I had ventured to speak I should have whispered. Not even at Lord
+Helmstone's had we trodden on such carpets. No wonder our footsteps made
+no sound. Going upstairs we seemed like a procession in a picture. That
+was because the walls were immense mirrors separated by gilded columns.
+
+Aunt Josephine had taken off her motor-veil. She had certainly grown
+much thinner since she had the photograph taken. That accounted for her
+being a more "aquiline" aunt than we expected. Her nose curved down,
+especially when she smiled. And her eyes were not sleepy at all--a full
+yellow eye, the iris almost black.
+
+We followed her along a corridor till she threw open a door. "This is
+yours," she said in the voice that was both sharp and quick.
+
+I looked into the wonderful pink and white room. Instead of two little
+beds, as we had at home, was one very large one. It looked like an
+Oriental throne with rose-silk hangings.
+
+"I will send you up some tea," she said. "And you must rest. I am having
+a friend or two to dine. So wear your smartest gown. Come," she said to
+Betty.
+
+"Betty is the one who ought to rest," I said.
+
+"And so she shall," our aunt said. "I will show Betty her room."
+
+Betty looked blank.
+
+"We are not to be together?" she asked.
+
+"Together!" Aunt Josephine repeated the word with the smile that drew
+her nose down. "Oh, you shall have a room of your own."
+
+Betty moved a little nearer me.
+
+I explained that she and I always had the same room.
+
+"Yes, in a small house. Here there is no need."
+
+I wanted to tell her that it was not need that made us share things. But
+though poor Betty looked cast down, all I said was that I should come to
+her in plenty of time to do her hair.
+
+"A maid will do that," my aunt said.
+
+But I managed to tell her quite firmly that I must show the maid how.
+
+Aunt Josephine looked at me a moment.
+
+She doesn't like me, I thought. And I felt uncomfortable.
+
+As she followed her out, Betty made a sign over her shoulder that I was
+to come now.
+
+But after that look Aunt Josephine had given me, I felt I must walk
+warily. So I only signalled back, as much as to say "by-and-by."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A woman in a cap and apron brought me tea.
+
+I asked if she would mind taking the tray to my sister's room so we
+could have tea together.
+
+The woman said madam's orders were that the young ladies should rest. I
+reflected that Bettina would probably rest better if she did not talk,
+so I said no more.
+
+The woman had a face like wood.
+
+Two of the big footmen brought in our little trunk. I got out Bettina's
+dressing-gown and slippers, and asked the wooden woman to take them to
+my sister.
+
+I was so tired with all the excitement that I went to sleep on the pink
+satin sofa.
+
+The wooden woman waked me.
+
+"Time to dress," she said, and she had the bath ready. I looked round
+for our little trunk.
+
+"Oh, you couldn't have a thing like that standing about in here," the
+wooden woman said.
+
+And, indeed, I had felt, as I saw it coming in, how out of keeping its
+shabbiness was with all the satin damask, the gilding, and the lace.
+
+She had done the unpacking, the wooden woman said. And there were my
+white satin frock and silk stockings on the bed. "But half the things in
+the trunk are my sister's," I said.
+
+She had taken the other young lady what was needed, the woman answered.
+And whatever I wanted I was to ring for.
+
+I felt that this was no doubt the way of London ladies. But I longed
+for our shabby little trunk. It seemed the last link with home. I looked
+round the beautiful room with a sense of distaste.
+
+This feeling must be the homesickness I had read about.
+
+I went to the window. The lines that divided the long panes into panels,
+the lines that I had thought of as purely decorative were rods of iron.
+
+"You'll be late," the wooden woman said, and she drew the silk curtains
+over the lace ones, and switched on the electric light.
+
+She came back while I was brushing my hair. She offered to do it for me.
+I was so glad to be able to do it myself. I would not have liked her to
+touch me.
+
+I hurried with my dressing so that I could go to Bettina.
+
+The woman tried to prevent me. But I was firm. "Show me the way, will
+you? Or shall I ask someone else?"
+
+She hesitated, and then seemed to think she had best do as she was told.
+
+Half-way down a long, soft-carpeted passage she asked me to wait an
+instant.
+
+She knocked at one of the many doors.
+
+I heard my aunt's voice inside. And whispering. Only one of the electric
+lights was turned on here, in the corridor. The air was heavy. The "Aunt
+Josephine" scent, foreign, dizzily sweet, was everywhere. A light-headed
+feeling came over me. I longed for an open window. They must all be shut
+as well as curtained. Between the many doors, paintings were hung. I had
+been vaguely conscious of these as we came up. I saw now they were
+pictures of women. Most of them seemed to be in different stages of the
+bath. One was asleep in a strange position, with nothing on. I was going
+past that one when I noticed the opposite door ajar. I stopped and
+listened.
+
+"Bettina," I said softly.
+
+A voice very different from Bettina's answered in some language I did
+not know. I started back and, as I was going on, the door was opened
+wide. A lady stood on the threshold in a flood of light. A lady with a
+dazzling complexion. Her lips were so brightly red, they looked bloody.
+She had diamonds in her ears, and a diamond necklace on a neck as white
+and smooth as china. Her yellow hair was disarranged as though she had
+been asleep. She was wearing a kimono of scarlet silk embroidered in
+silver.
+
+She asked me something, not in French, not German, and not, I think,
+Italian. I said I was afraid I did not understand.
+
+My aunt came noiseless down the long corridor, and the foreign lady
+hastily shut her door.
+
+This other guest must be some very great person!
+
+My aunt was dressed for dinner in a gown all covered with little shining
+scales, like a snake's skin.
+
+"What are you doing?" she said, in an odd tone as if she had caught me
+in something underhand. I explained that I was looking for Bettina. And
+I found courage to say that I was sorry our rooms were so far apart.
+
+She took no notice of that. "You will see Bettina at dinner," she said,
+and it struck me she could be very stern.
+
+I felt my heart begin to beat, but I managed to say that I was sure
+Betty would wait for me to help her to dress.
+
+"I have told you she will have a maid to do all that is necessary."
+
+"I hope you won't mind," I said, "just for to-night. It is always my
+mother, or me, who dresses Bettina...."
+
+She seemed to consider. I said to myself again: "Oh, dear, she doesn't
+like me at all."
+
+"Take her, Curran," she said. The hard-faced woman came and piloted me
+round the angle of the corridor to Betty's door.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+We fell into each other's arms, and laughed and kissed, as though we had
+been parted for weeks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was determined not to let her know that Aunt Josephine and I were not
+liking one another. I only said I didn't like her taste in pictures.
+
+Betty tried to stand up for her. She reminded me of the statues and
+casts from the antique at Lord Helmstone's. She asked me suddenly if I
+wasn't well. I complained a little of the air. I thought we might have
+the window open while I did her hair. But Betty said, no. She had tried,
+and found she didn't understand London fastenings. So she had rung for
+the maid, and the maid had said: "This isn't the country"--and that
+people didn't like their windows open in London. Betty thought it quite
+reasonable. London dust and "blacks" would soon ruin this pretty white
+room.
+
+Betty defended everything.
+
+When I complained that the scent everywhere was making me headachy,
+Betty said she liked it. She wished our mother would let us use scent.
+The only thing Betty found the least fault with was the way I was doing
+her hair. She wanted it put up "in honour of London." But she looked
+such a darling with her short curls lying on her neck that I was doing
+it in the everyday way. And there wasn't time now for anything more than
+to fasten on the little wreath, for the woman came to say madam had sent
+up for us. So I hurried Betty into her frock, the woman watching out of
+those hard eyes of hers. Nobody in the whole of Betty's life had looked
+at her like that. The woman didn't want us to stop even to find a
+handkerchief. And after all, just as Betty was coming, the woman said:
+"Wait a minute," and wanted to shut the door. I stood on the threshold
+waiting. A gentleman was coming upstairs. With his hat on! He stared at
+me as he went by, and so did the footman who followed him. I drew back
+into the room and the woman shut the door.
+
+"Who was that gentleman?" I asked. She seemed not to hear. So I asked
+again.
+
+"_That_--oh, that is the doctor," she said. Naturally we asked if
+somebody was ill.
+
+"Not very," she answered in such a peculiar way we said no more.
+
+She stood and watched us as we went downstairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Our first London dinner-party," Bettina whispered.
+
+We took hands. We were shaking with excitement.
+
+We saw ourselves going by in the mirrors between the golden columns.
+
+The whole place was full of tall girls in white, and little girls in
+apple-green, wearing forget-me-not wreaths in their hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+AT DINNER
+
+
+Down in the lower hall were the men-servants with their watchful eyes.
+
+They showed us the drawing-room door.
+
+As we came in, I was conscious again of Aunt Josephine's appraising
+look. Then of the elaborate grey head turning towards an old man, as if
+to ask: Well, what do you think of my nieces? He had a red blotchy face.
+The kind of red that is crossed by little purple lines like the tracery
+of very tortuous rivers on a map. The lines ran zigzagging into his
+nose, which was thick at the end, round and shining. He had no hair
+except a sandy fringe, and his eyes, which had no lashes, looked as if
+he had a cold. He was introduced as "an old friend of mine"--but she
+forgot to tell us his name. We heard him called Colonel. Through all the
+scent we could not help noticing that he smelled of brandy.
+
+I looked round for the beautiful foreign lady. But I was prepared to
+find her late, after seeing her idling at her door, in a dressing-gown,
+so near the dinner-hour.
+
+There was only one other person. A man of about thirty-six. Good-looking
+I thought--and not happy. He had a clear face, quite without colour. The
+skin very smooth and tight. His dry brown hair was thinning on the
+crown. He had nice hands. I noticed that when he stroked his
+close-fitting moustache. I did not like him because of his manner. I did
+not know what was wrong with it. Perhaps he was only absent-minded. But
+when I tried to imagine him talking to my mother I could not.
+
+He was introduced first to Bettina. The others treated him as if he were
+very important. They talked about his new Rolls Royce, which turned out
+to be a motor-car. The Colonel tried to get him to say how many times he
+had been fined for "exceeding speed limit." Then they talked about "The
+Tartar." How he was always late. It would be a chance if he came at all.
+Aunt Josephine was positive he would appear. "I wired to say it was all
+right."
+
+"Just as well, perhaps, if he doesn't come to-night," the good-looking
+man said. He would be in a devil of a temper.
+
+Betty asked why would he? They said because his favourite horse had been
+"scratched." Betty thought it was nice of him to be so fond of his
+horse. But if it was only a scratch----
+
+We did not know why they laughed. But we laughed too. We tried not to
+show how unintelligible the talk was. I listened very hard. I felt like
+a learner in a foreign tongue. I understood the words but not the
+sentences.
+
+The Colonel looked at his watch in a discontented way. Then we went in
+to dinner.
+
+I don't think we sat in the order Aunt Josephine had meant. But the
+absent-minded man, who had taken me in, refused to change, or to let me.
+I had the old Colonel on my left. Aunt Josephine of course at the head.
+The empty place was between her and Betty.
+
+The table was glittering and magnificent. We had little helpings of
+strange, strong-tasting food before the soup. And caviar.
+
+"You like caviar?" the Colonel said.
+
+I said I didn't know, for in my heart I felt it looked repulsive.
+
+"Don't know caviar?"
+
+I said of course I had heard of it. He asked where. And I said, "In
+Shakespeare." The old Colonel choked, and they all laughed to see how
+apoplectic he looked--all except Betty and me.
+
+I caught Betty's eye. She had that fiery-rose in her cheeks. I felt
+excited, too, and "strange." But I hoped they didn't notice. Betty and I
+had agreed that we must try not to show how unused we were to the ways
+of a great London house. So I made conversation. I asked about the
+absent guest.
+
+My good-looking man pretended to be annoyed. He called, in his slightly
+husky voice, across the table to Aunt Josephine: "Already she wants to
+talk about The Tartar!" I explained that I meant the foreign lady--the
+very beautiful lady I had seen upstairs looking out of her door.
+
+Again my man exchanged glances with Aunt Josephine. He was smiling
+disagreeably. Aunt Josephine did not smile at all. But the old Colonel
+laughed his croaking laugh, and said the lady upstairs expected people
+to go to her.
+
+"Does she expect dinner to go to her, too?" Betty asked. And something
+in their faces made Betty blush, though she didn't know why, as I saw.
+I believed they were teasing Betty, just for fun, and to see that
+beautiful colour in her cheeks flicker and deepen.
+
+So I leaned towards her, and across the flowers and the dazzling lights
+I told her the foreign lady was not very well. That was why she was not
+coming down.
+
+The Colonel asked me why I thought the lady wasn't well. So I said:
+"Because I saw the doctor going up to her."
+
+They were all quite still for a second or two. I looked at Aunt
+Josephine. Why was it wrong to mention the doctor's visit? Was she
+afraid of making these friends of the beautiful lady anxious about her?
+My man still was smiling, but not pleasantly. I couldn't tell whether
+the strange noises the Colonel made were choking or laughing. But I felt
+more and more miserably shy; And I had no clear idea of why I should
+feel so--unless it was that nothing these people said meant what it
+seemed to mean.
+
+I could see that Betty was bewildered, too.
+
+We knew we should feel strange; we did not know we should feel like
+this.
+
+I was thankful when they all turned round and called out. "The Tartar"
+had come, after all.
+
+He made no apology for being late, nor for not having dressed. He
+strolled in as if the place belonged to him--a great broad-shouldered
+young man in a frock-coat. He had a round, black, cannon-ball of a head,
+and his eyebrows nearly joined. His moustache was like a little
+blacking-brush laid back against the lip, with the bristles sticking
+straight out. But he seemed to be making this effect deliberately, by
+pushing out his mouth like a pouting child; or, even more, like a person
+with swollen lips. I felt sure I could not have seen him before; but
+there was something oddly familiar about him.
+
+He nodded to the others.
+
+When Aunt Josephine said, "My nieces," he said, "Oh," stared a moment,
+and then, as he lounged into the empty place, said it had been a rotten
+race. I thought how astonished my mother would have been at such
+behaviour. Betty must have been thinking of her, too, for she put on our
+mother's manner. It was a beautiful manner, but it sat oddly on my
+little sister; it made her seem more self-possessed than she was. She
+turned and said: "I think you must be Mr. Whitby-Dawson."
+
+The young man stared.
+
+Everybody stared.
+
+He turned sharply from Betty to his hostess. She shook her head. But the
+yellow part of her big eyes had turned reddish. She looked very strange.
+
+A creepy feeling came over me.
+
+I remembered she had been "most eccentric" twenty years ago. Was
+eccentricity the sort of thing that grew worse as people grew older?
+
+I looked round at the company and met the eyes of the neighbour on my
+right. They were unhappy eyes; but they reassured me.
+
+"What put such an idea into your head?" Aunt Josephine was asking Betty.
+
+"Because," Betty said, and she looked at the young man again, "only
+because I saw so many of your--of Mr. Whitby-Dawson's photographs----"
+
+"Really?" the young man said, in a bored voice. "That was, no doubt, a
+great privilege. My name's Williams."
+
+In her embarrassment Betty turned to the man who sat between us. "He
+has even the little scar," she said, like a person defending herself.
+"Mr. Whitby-Dawson got his scar in a duel with a student at Heidelberg.
+He studied at the University there part of one year----"
+
+"Studied duelling?" the Colonel chuckled. Our absent-minded man was not
+absent-minded any more. He was listening, with a look I could not
+understand, as if he took a malicious pleasure in poor Betty's mistake.
+Such a trifling slip to have taken the young man for Guy Whitby-Dawson,
+and yet it seemed to have put the company out of tune. Or perhaps it was
+the loss of the race. All except my man seemed to care very much about
+the lost race. The Tartar, in his annoyed voice, told his hostess and
+the Colonel how it happened. He leaned his elbow on the table, and
+almost turned his back on poor Bettina.
+
+I thought I could see that my man seemed not to like The Tartar; and
+that gave me a kindlier feeling towards him; I wondered what had made
+him unhappy.
+
+I felt I wanted to justify Bettina to him.
+
+I felt, too, that she would recover herself sooner if we broke the
+silence at our end. So I said--in a voice too low, I thought, for the
+others to hear--that I also had noticed the resemblance to Mr.
+Whitby-Dawson. Lower still, he asked me how we came "to hear of
+Mr.--of--the gentleman in question." Then Betty and I between us told
+about Hermione Helmstone's engagement--only we did not, of course, give
+her name.
+
+"The faithless Whitby!" our man said, with the tail of his eye on the
+young gentleman opposite. As for him, he tried to go on talking about
+"Black Friar," as though he heard nothing of the history being retailed
+on the other side. But I had a feeling that he was listening all the
+time.
+
+Bettina's loyalty to Hermione made her object to hearing Guy called
+faithless. "They would have had only £400 a year between them. And he
+said--Mr. Whitby-Dawson said--they couldn't possibly live on that. He
+was miserable, poor man!"
+
+"I should say so! Poor and miserable."
+
+"Oh, you laugh," Bettina protested. "But I saw a heart-broken letter
+about the poverty that kept them apart and condemned him 'to run in
+single harness.'"
+
+"'Single harness!'" the husky voice said. And he repeated it: "'Single
+harness,' eh?"
+
+Bettina was recovering her spirits. She said something about Duncombe.
+And I don't know what reminded her of the collie-dog story; but she told
+it very well, though she did "pile it on." She made me out an immense
+heroine, and I am afraid I looked sheepish.
+
+The husky voice said "Good!" and "Pretty cool." The story seemed to
+remind him of something. He looked at his plate, and he looked at
+Bettina and me.
+
+Betty was amused at having made me feel shy, and she laughed that
+bubbling laugh of hers.
+
+The Tartar turned his head.
+
+He did not take away his elbow. But he looked over his shoulder down on
+Bettina's apricot-coloured hair. The fillet showed the shape of her
+head. It defined the satiny crown, where the hair lay as close as a
+red-gold skull-cap. The forget-me-nots and the little green leaves held
+all smooth and tight except the heavy, shining rings. They fell out and
+lay on her neck.
+
+The Tartar stopped talking about the race.
+
+He still ate his food condescendingly--with one hand. But he drank with
+great good-will.
+
+He called to the butler, who had been going round with a gold-necked
+bottle in a napkin. He was to come back, The Tartar said, and fill the
+ladies' glasses.
+
+I said no. Bettina said she, too, drank water.
+
+The Tartar said "Nonsense!"--quite as though the matter were for him to
+decide. The servant filled Bettina's tall, vaselike glass. Bettina
+looked alarmed. Already she had displeased this dreadful Tartar once.
+
+"Ought I?" she telegraphed across to me. I shook my head.
+
+"There is one woman in London"--The Tartar made a motion towards the
+head of the table--"one woman who's got a decent cellar." The Tartar was
+almost genial. He raised his glass to my aunt. "I approve of the new
+coiffure, too. Rippin'!"
+
+The Colonel was not to be diverted from the subject of the wine. "Take
+an old man's advice," he said to me. "It's a chancy sort of world. Make
+sure of a little certain bliss." He lifted his own glass and drained
+it.
+
+The Tartar said something to Bettina which I could not hear. She looked
+up at him with a kind of wonder in her eyes, and with that "fiery rose"
+quite suddenly overspreading her face again. She put out her hand to the
+tall glass, hesitated, and then looked at the head of the table. Perhaps
+Bettina saw what all of a sudden was clear to me. Aunt Josephine was
+like a huge grey hawk. The head craning out; the narrow forehead, all
+grey crest; the face falling away from the beak. How she had changed
+from the days when she had a double chin! The tilt of the outstretched
+head was exactly like a bird's. Watching sideways--watching ... for
+what?
+
+The eye made me shrink. It made Bettina set her lips, obedient, to the
+glass. She looked apologetic over the rim at me.
+
+Mine stood untouched.
+
+"I see you have a will of your own," the voice on my right said in my
+ear.
+
+The London way seemed to be that ladies did not leave the table while
+men smoked. The talk was about wines, but it flagged. The Tartar kept
+looking at Bettina. The fitful colour in her cheeks had paled again. The
+scent of flowers, and that other all-pervading perfume, mixed with the
+tobacco, was making Bettina faint.
+
+My man noticed it. "You aren't accustomed to smoke," he said to Bettina,
+and he twisted his cigar round on his fruit-plate till he crushed out
+the burning. But the others took no notice.
+
+I was sure Bettina was trying hard to throw off her oppression. I
+thought of our mother; and the thought of her sent sharp aching through
+me. Bettina and I looked at each other. I knew by her lip she had great
+trouble not to cry.
+
+"Do you think," I whispered to my man, "you could ask to have a window
+opened?"
+
+He said we would be going into the drawing-room soon. "Drink that black
+coffee," he recommended.
+
+He seemed not unkind, so I tried to think why he would not do so small a
+thing for us as ask to have a window opened. "Are the downstairs windows
+barred with iron, too?"
+
+He looked sharply at me.
+
+"I believe so," he said.
+
+I thought it must be because of all the silver and valuables in the
+house. But he glanced at me again, as if he thought I was still
+wondering and might ask someone else. Then he said he had heard "it
+used to be a private madhouse."
+
+"_This house?_"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You needn't say I told you."
+
+That, then, was what I had been feeling. The poor mad people who used to
+be shut up here--they had left this uncanny influence behind. A
+strangeness and a strain.
+
+The Colonel was speaking irritably to one of the footmen. Something had
+gone wrong with an electric-light bulb over the sideboard.
+
+"Send for Waterson to-morrow to attend to that!"
+
+No one but me seemed at all surprised to hear the Colonel giving orders
+in my aunt's house.
+
+As I sat there in the midst of all the contending scents, with the soft
+clash of silver, glass, and voices in my ears, a train of ideas raced
+through my brain as crazy as any that could have been harboured here in
+the days when....
+
+The letters that had come out of this house Eric had called "demented."
+
+All the windows were still barred.
+
+What if it were a private madhouse still! Before my eyes the watchful
+big footmen turned into keepers to the Grey Hawk and to the lady
+upstairs. The doctor--he was for those too dangerous to trust
+downstairs. That was why they had laughed at my inquiry--such
+callousness had familiarity bred. The Colonel might be the proprietor of
+the house. My aunt was well off. No doubt they humoured her. With a
+keeper dressed like a footman, they allowed her certain liberties--to
+write crazy letters in her harmless intervals ... friends to dine ...
+nieces to divert her. They would do almost anything to keep that red
+look out of her eyes.
+
+"There is one thing I don't understand," I began to say to the man at my
+side.
+
+But he was nervous too, and jumped down my throat: "Don't ask me
+questions! I never passed an examination in my life," he pulled out his
+watch. "And I've got an engagement to keep in exactly three minutes'
+time."
+
+No wonder I stared. One man comes when dinner is half done, and one
+wants to go before the hostess had risen. For my part I wanted him _not_
+to go ... I told him so.
+
+"Why?" he turned suddenly and faced me.
+
+I said it was perhaps because I felt I knew him best. "Anyway," I
+persisted, "don't go!" He hesitated. "_Please_ don't go," I said. I was
+relieved when he said, very well, he would "see it out." For I knew, had
+he gone, my aunt would think I had driven him away.
+
+There was a rustle, and I saw Aunt Josephine rising. My man left me
+instantly. He went and opened the door. As we filed out he turned
+towards my aunt. I heard him whisper, "_Je vous fais mes compliments,
+madame_." He looked at Betty.
+
+Aunt Josephine nodded. "But...." her face changed.
+
+What was wrong? For whom was that "but"? I turned quickly and caught the
+yellow eyes leaving my back. I was "but." But why? What had I done? The
+Colonel talked to Betty and The Tartar, as he led the way back to the
+drawing-room. The other man still was behind with my aunt. He seemed to
+be reassuring her. His curious low voice kept going off the register. At
+a break I heard the words: "Doucement" enunciated with an emphasis that
+carried.
+
+I kept thinking how all the softly-draped windows had iron bars behind
+the silk.
+
+In the drawing-room, my aunt was saying to The Tartar, "Oh, yes, Bettina
+sings and dances."
+
+"She sings," I said.
+
+"Don't you skirt-dance?" The Tartar asked.
+
+Bettina looked sorry. "I can dance ordinary dances," she said. "But what
+sort is a skirt-dance?"
+
+The men made a semicircle round her to explain.
+
+Betty said she hadn't done any skirt-dances since she was a little girl.
+
+"Oh, and what are you now?" the Colonel said, grinning horribly.
+
+They made Bettina tell about the action-songs our mother had taught us
+in the nursery. They asked her to do one.
+
+Of course Bettina refused. "They're only for children," she said with
+that little air borrowed from our mother.
+
+The Tartar threw back his bullet head and roared. The Colonel said they
+were sick, in London, of sophisticated dancing. What they wanted was
+Bettina's sort. Bettina shook her head.
+
+The Grey Hawk said it was too soon after dinner. But they went across
+the room towards the piano.
+
+I was following, when the man who had taken me in to dinner said: "This
+is a comfortable chair." So I sat down.
+
+He said something about the strangeness of London "just at first." It
+would pass away.
+
+I told him I hoped Bettina would find it so. As for me, I was only
+staying till to-morrow.
+
+He looked so surprised that I explained I had to go back and take care
+of my mother.
+
+"You have never been to London since you were a child--and you come all
+this way just for a few hours?"
+
+"I came to take care of Betty," I said. "She has never travelled alone."
+
+He looked at me: "And you?"
+
+"Oh, I haven't either. To-morrow will be the first time. But then, I am
+older."
+
+He said nothing for several moments. I looked across the room to where I
+could see the back of Bettina's head, between the bare crown of the
+Colonel and The Tartar's black bullet. The Tartar was bending over
+towards Bettina. Aunt Josephine sat near them, facing the door, and us.
+
+My man looked up suddenly and saw the eyes of the Grey Hawk on us.
+
+"We must talk!" he said, with a laugh, "or they will think we aren't
+getting on. That isn't a comfortable chair after all." He stood up. I
+said it was quite comfortable. While he was insisting, a servant came in
+to speak to my aunt. I caught a glimpse through the door of a footman
+going upstairs with a short, fattish young man. Too young, I thought, to
+be another doctor.
+
+We went to the end of the room, and we sat on a sofa near the
+fireplace--one of those sofas you sink down in till you feel half
+buried. I didn't like to say I hated it, for he was taking so much
+trouble. He put a great down cushion at my back, as if I were an
+invalid.
+
+"There! Now, can you sit quite still for a few minutes? As still as if I
+were taking your picture?" I said I supposed I could. "And must I look
+pleasant?" I laughed. He hesitated and then: "How good are your nerves?"
+he asked.
+
+"Very good," I boasted.
+
+But he was grave.
+
+"Have you ever fainted?"
+
+"Never!" I said, a little indignantly.
+
+"Could you hear something very unexpected, even horrible, and not cry
+out?"
+
+"You know something!" I thought of an accident to my mother. "You have
+news for me...."
+
+"Careful," he said in a sharp whisper. "You told me you could keep
+perfectly still. If you can't I won't go on." I begged him to go on, and
+I kept my face a blank. He turned his head slightly and took in the
+group at the other end of the room. He sat so a moment, with his eyes
+still turned away, while he said: "Everything--more than life, depends
+on your self-control during the next few minutes."
+
+I sat staring at him.
+
+"Have you any idea where you are?"--and still he looked not at me but
+towards the others.
+
+My first bewilderment was giving way to fear. No fear now of anything he
+could tell me. Fear of the man himself. I saw it all. Not that iron-grey
+woman who had left the room with the servant, not the brilliant lady
+upstairs, but the person who had set me thinking wild thoughts at dinner
+about barred windows and private lunatic asylums.
+
+The man sitting not three feet way from me--was mad.
+
+I calculated the distance between me and the other group, while I
+answered him: "I am at my aunt's--Mrs. Harborough's."
+
+"Where does your aunt live?"
+
+"At 160 Lowndes Square."
+
+"You are twenty minutes from Lowndes Square. You are in one of the most
+infamous houses in Europe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE GREY HAWK
+
+
+Minutes seemed to go by. Vague hints from servants, things I had read in
+the papers--and still I sat there, not moving by so much as a hair.
+
+He was looking at me now and telling me to "keep cool." And then: "I
+suppose you know there _are_ such places----" He interrupted himself to
+say: "Remember! A careless look or move would mean--well, it would mean
+ruin. _Now_ do you understand?"
+
+Beyond a doubt I did. If I moved or cried for help, he would kill me
+before my aunt could get back; before I could cross the room. Though why
+he should wish to kill me I could form no idea.
+
+"You must have time to recover," he said, in that muted, uneven voice.
+"I will shield you while you pull yourself together." He had bent
+forward till his shoulders shut out my view of the group at the other
+end of the room.
+
+I shrank further back into the cushions. But: "I have myself in hand,
+now," I said; for I remembered you must never let the insane know you
+are afraid.
+
+Betty's laughter sounded far away.
+
+"Take your time," he said. "They're enjoying themselves. They haven't
+even rung for the cognac and liqueurs yet." They would make Bettina and
+me drink a liqueur, he said. Or if they failed in that, they'd say, "'a
+thimble-full of coffee, then.'" And our coffee would be "doctored."
+
+"But we've had coffee," I said, in a new access of terror. Was it
+drugged coffee that made me feel so lamed?
+
+"That was all right," he said. "That was to steady _us_."
+
+He did not look as if he needed steadying. What if he were not mad?
+
+"Be careful," he said again. "Remember I am running a ghastly risk in
+telling you. But you are facing a ghastly certainty if I don't."
+
+I sat in that stillness of stark terror--staring at him.
+
+And as I stared I found myself clinging to the thought that had been
+horror's height a little while before. "Pray God he's mad," I kept
+saying inwardly.
+
+If I could keep my head, he said, I had no cause to be so frightened. It
+would be some little time before he could give me up without rousing
+suspicion.
+
+"Before you give me up!" I imagined the Grey Hawk swooping to snatch me.
+
+"Before I help you to get out of this," he explained. "And when I do,
+you will perhaps remember it is at a sacrifice. Greater than I supposed
+I could feel."
+
+I moved at that--but like a sleep-walker on the edge of waking.
+
+I asked him in a whisper what we were to do. I meant Betty and me. But
+he said: "When she begins to play, or to sing, you are to get up quite
+quietly--_can_ you?"
+
+I made a sign for yes.
+
+"No haste ... you must do it languidly--go out of the room."
+
+"But my----" (I suppressed "my aunt" with an inward twist of questioning
+anguish) "----shall I not be asked where I am going and why?"
+
+He said no. Because he would make the others a sign. He thought my
+sister was too excited to take any notice of my going. "But if she does,
+I'll tell her you wanted her to go on singing. I shall seem to be coming
+after you. But I'll stop to explain that we've had an argument about one
+of the pictures in the hall." He told me what I was to do.
+
+"If, after all, they were to prevent me--what, what then?"
+
+"They won't--they will leave you to me." He said it with a look that
+stopped the heart.
+
+I implored him to let me go out alone.
+
+He fixed his unhappy eyes on mine. "You would never be allowed out of
+this room alone."
+
+"I could say I must post a letter."
+
+"They would ring for a servant."
+
+I measured the long room. "If once I got as far as the door I could
+run."
+
+"----as far as the front door perhaps. You would find it locked. No
+servant would open it for you."
+
+"Will they for you?"
+
+"I can do it for you," he said, under his breath, and he stood up.
+
+I thought he meant I was to make trial then of that terrible passage to
+the door. But was it not better to be where Betty was, whatever
+came--Betty and I together--than Betty alone with those devouring-eyed
+men, and I with a maniac out in the hall!
+
+"I cannot leave my sister!" I said.
+
+He stood in front of me, masking me from the others. "Haven't I made you
+understand? If you don't leave the room with me, _she_ will leave it
+with Whitby-Dawson."
+
+"No! No!"
+
+He hushed me. "She won't know why--but she'll do it. And she won't come
+back again. She would probably be on her way to Paris this time
+to-morrow." He pulled a great cushion up to hide my face. And then he
+turned and made a feint of getting an illustrated paper off the table.
+He kept his eye on the others. There was some little commotion, during
+which Betty had risen. She left the sofa and sat on the piano-stool. She
+was laughing excitedly.
+
+The man came back to me with the illustrated paper. He sat down closer
+to me, and held the paper open for a shield. But he held it strangely,
+with his arm across the picture. The reading part was in French. I had
+to crane to see over the top--Betty twisting round on the piano-stool,
+and touching the keys in a provoking way; the two men teasing her to
+sing.
+
+I have lived over every instant of that hour, until the smallest detail
+is a stain indelible upon my mind. I have no trouble in remembering. My
+trouble is to be able to forget.
+
+I hear again that muted voice behind the paper saying: "But for the
+collie-dog story, I wouldn't have dared to risk this. Everything depends
+on your nerve." And then he looked at me curiously, and wanted to know
+if I had not heard there were such places---- "I won't say like this.
+This is a masterpiece of devilry. And masterpieces are never plentiful."
+
+He waited for me to say something. If I had known what, I could not have
+said it. I tried hard to speak. But I could only look dumbly in his
+face. And I saw there was no madness in the unhappy eyes.
+
+"You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he
+insisted.
+
+Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able
+to think. I had been imagining other people insane. But perhaps it was
+I....
+
+I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up
+and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have
+said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a
+shock--that's all."
+
+I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the
+man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him.
+
+"I am sorry I told you," he said.
+
+What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand.
+
+"You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of
+violation. You implicate me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made
+when you begged me not to go. You make _me_, after all, an instrument of
+initiation."
+
+Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak height of later
+knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish of the moment. Heaven forgive
+me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had
+come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious, I
+think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin
+ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice.
+And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked
+about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?"
+
+"Call in her bullies to beat me to a jelly."
+
+He was more and more unwilling to seem a mere adjunct of the baseness he
+unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"--he nodded
+towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one--"all this, far more
+crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world--in every capital of
+every nation on the earth. And it has always been so."
+
+He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was
+being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other
+things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more--"help
+me quickly to get help!"
+
+He said I must trust him. Everything depended on choosing the right
+moment. "If you went out now, with that face, you'd pull the house about
+our ears."
+
+He was doing all he could to calm and steady me, he said. And certainly
+he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare,
+an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought--it was all
+a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human
+nature!"--like the tolling of a muffled bell. Bishops and old ladies
+imagined you could alter these things. Take India--"I've been there. I
+knew an official who'd had charge of the chaklas. You don't know what
+chaklas are? Your father knew. If you'd gone riding round any one of the
+cantonments you'd have seen. Little groups of tents. A hospital not far
+off. Women in the tents. Out there it's no secret. They're called
+"Government women." The women are needed by the army. So there they
+are."
+
+Women are "needed." Through the chaos came back clear the memory of my
+talk with Betty in the train: "Men don't need us as much as we need
+them."
+
+Even Governments, he said, had to recognise human nature, and shape
+their policies accordingly. I was too young to remember all that talk
+in the press some years ago, about the mysterious movements of British
+battleships in the Mediterranean. Instead of hanging about Malta, the
+ships had gone cruising round the Irish coast. Why? The officials said,
+for good and sufficient reasons. The chorus of criticism died down. The
+"reasons" were known to those who had to know. Not enough women at
+Malta. The British fleet spent some time about the Irish coasts. "Human
+nature----"
+
+"I can do it now!" I cried under my breath, and I stood up.
+
+He shot out a hand and pulled me back. "Christ! not while the grey hawk
+is hovering outside! And your lips are livid." A good thing, he said,
+that I had still a few minutes. "You have your sister to thank. She is a
+success. She piles up anticipation. The value of that, to the jaded, is
+the stock-in-trade of people like our hostess. At a time when her
+profession is a hundred per cent. more dangerous than it's ever been
+since the world began, she perfects it--makes it pay in proportion to
+its danger." Couldn't I trust him to know? He gave me his word: "No
+indecent haste here. They are adepts. They have learned that the climax
+is less to the sated than the leading up. The leading up is all." After
+a second: "How did she get hold of you?"
+
+I knew no more than the dead.
+
+"Through someone very well informed...." He probed and questioned. I
+could only shake my head. But my tortured mind flung itself
+spasmodically from one figure to another in our little world, and felt
+each one's recoil from my mere unspoken thought. Until--_the little
+dressmaker_! Her questions ... her pains to establish the fact of our
+isolation, of our poverty ... her special interest in our aunt. "You haf
+a photografie--hein?" And then the picture's vanishing. Had it come to
+this house to serve as model? The Tartar liked "the new coiffure----"
+
+Two servants came in. One carried a great silver tray.
+
+"Oh, leave that a bit!" The Tartar, over the back of the sofa, waved the
+footman off.
+
+They came towards us, and were told: "Put it there on the table." The
+man beside me made a show of welcoming it. He dropped the illustrated
+paper on my lap. "Bend down--bend down low," he whispered.
+
+I bent over the swimming page.
+
+"What will you have?" he called out to me, as the footmen were leaving
+the room.
+
+I tried to answer. No sound.
+
+"Oh, you prefer crême de menthe, do you?" he said quite loud. "Yes,
+there's crême de menthe." He filled a glass and brought it to me.
+"Cognac," he whispered. "It will steady you."
+
+I put my shaking lips to the glass. I did not drink.
+
+"Ah, you are afraid," he said. And he looked at me with his unhappy
+eyes.
+
+My hand was shaking. Some of the stuff spilt out on my new dress.
+
+"Give it to me," he said, and he drank it off--"just to show" me.
+
+I was conscious that Betty was singing--And that the door had opened.
+The Grey Hawk stood there with, as I thought at first, a thick-set boy
+dressed in a man's evening clothes. As she dismissed him I saw he was a
+hunchback. She shut the door behind the hunchback and the Colonel left
+the piano and came towards her. He was laughing. They stood and talked.
+
+"Bend down. Bend low----" the voice said in my ear.
+
+The Colonel's croaking laugh came nearer.
+
+The man at my side called out: "Look here, Colonel. No poaching on my
+preserves. We are deep in a discussion about Art. You're not to
+interrupt."
+
+"Oh, Art is it?" The old man had come behind our sofa, and was leaning
+down between us. I smelt a foul breath. With a sense of choking I lifted
+my head. The Colonel's watery eyes went from me to the strange ugly
+picture in the illustrated paper. I did not understand it. I do not
+think I would have been conscious of having looked at it, but for the
+expression on the Colonel's face.
+
+Bettina finished her song. They all clapped. In the buzz, Bettina raised
+her voice. No, no. She couldn't dance, and sing, as well as accompany
+herself, she said.
+
+"What time is it in?" the grey woman asked. She took Bettina's place at
+the piano.
+
+Still Bettina hesitated, while The Tartar urged.
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't mind," Bettina said, "if you like such babyish songs."
+
+"Of course we do,"--the Colonel went back to them.
+
+Bettina said pertly: "I should think you'd be ashamed." She stood beside
+the grey woman and hummed the old tune. She helped by striking a few
+notes.
+
+"Now!" the grey woman said to Betty.
+
+The word was echoed in my ear.
+
+"Now?" I repeated.
+
+"But first"--he caught my hand. "Bite your lip a little.... Ah! not
+blood." He smuggled his handkerchief to me behind the cushion. "You'll
+be all right," he whispered. "But I wish I could go with you! You see
+that I must stay behind----"
+
+"Yes, oh yes," I looked at Betty.
+
+"I must stay," he said, "to give you time. Then when I've seen you out
+of this ... a door open, a door shut--and I shall never see you
+again...."
+
+"Now! _Now!_" I hardly noticed that he took his blood-stained
+handkerchief out of my hand. For Bettina had come forward and stood
+poised, holding her green skirt with both hands, like a child about to
+curtsey. I stood up. All the room was dancing with my little sister. I
+got to the door.
+
+      "_Where are you going to...?_"
+
+Betty sang. But she was too amused and excited to notice me.
+
+My companion had crossed the room, and was bending over the Grey Hawk.
+She looked round at him surprised, mocking....
+
+Some power came to help me across the threshold. A footman started up
+out of the floor and stood before me. "Where are you going?" He echoed
+Betty.
+
+"I am waiting for--one of the gentlemen," I said, and I steadied myself
+against a chair. If Betty's song stopped, I should know we had failed.
+
+I held my breath, as I leaned over and took my last look into the room.
+Our friend was leaving the grey woman. She played on. Bettina was
+dancing, a hand on her hip, the other twirling moustachios--playing the
+gallant. Such a baby she looked!
+
+And I had done her hair like that----
+
+      "_What is your fortune, my pretty maid?_"
+
+The man had come out and softly shut the door. He gave the footman a
+strange look and passed him something. "It's all right," he said.
+
+The footman looked in his hand and stared. "Mais, merci--merci,
+monsieur." He vanished.
+
+I went towards the stairs.
+
+"_That's_ not the way," the voice said harshly.
+
+"Shan't I get a cloak----"
+
+"For God's sake, no! It's a question of moments now." He was undoing the
+door. "Run for your life. First to the left--second to the right--a
+cab-rank."
+
+I fled out of the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+WHERE?
+
+
+I stood ringing. I thundered at the knocker.
+
+I beat the door with my fist.
+
+An old man opened at last.
+
+"Mrs. Harborough! Where is she?" The old man tried to keep me out. But
+he was gentle and frail. I forced my way past. I called and ran along a
+passage, trying doors that opened into the darkness.
+
+At last! A room where a woman sat alone--reading by a shaded light.
+
+"Who are you?" I cried out. She laid her book in her lap. "Are _you_
+Mrs. Harborough? Then come--come quickly ... I'll tell you on the
+way----"
+
+The old woman lifted the folds of her double chin and looked at me
+through spectacles.
+
+"You must come and help me to get Bettina...." I broke into distracted
+sobbing on the name. "Bettina----! Bettina----!" I seized the lady's
+hand and tried to draw her out of her chair.
+
+But I was full of trembling. She sat there massive, calm, with a power
+of inert resistance, that made me feel I could as easily drag her house
+out of the Square by its knocker, as move the woman planted there in her
+chair.
+
+Neither haste nor perturbation in the voice that asked me: "What has
+happened?"
+
+"_Not yet!_" I cried out. "Nothing has happened yet! But we must be
+quick. Oh, God, let us be quick----"
+
+The butler had followed me in and was asking something. "Yes," said the
+quiet voice, "pay the cabman."
+
+"No!" I shrieked. "Keep him! I must go back, instantly...." And through
+my own strange-sounding voice, hers reached me.
+
+"You must see that you are quite unintelligible. Sit down and collect
+yourself."
+
+"Sit down! Isn't it enough that _one_ woman sits still,
+while--while----"
+
+She was putting questions.
+
+I heard a reproach that seemed to fill the house: "You never came to
+meet us!"
+
+And while the charge was ringing I felt, with anguish, the injustice of
+it. How could one have expected this woman to come!
+
+But she should be moved and stirred at last!
+
+"I sent my maid," she was defending herself, "--only a minute or two
+late."
+
+"The other woman was not late!"
+
+"Who?"
+
+I begged the butler to get a cloak for Mrs. Harborough. She was saying
+Bettina and I should have waited. And again that I must calm myself and
+tell her----
+
+"Someone pretended to be you!" I hurled it at her. "She took us to a
+house--a place where they do worse than murder. Betty is there now----"
+I told her all I could pack into a few sentences.
+
+"It isn't possible," my aunt said. "This is England."
+
+"_Come and see!_ Betty----" But they only thought me mad; they tortured
+me with questions.
+
+I caught her by the arm. "God won't forgive you if you wait an instant
+more."
+
+Oh, but she was old and unbelieving! So old, I felt she had looked on
+unmoved at evil since the world began.
+
+But she was sending for wraps, sending messages. Still she sat there, in
+the heavy, square-backed chair, her hands upon her knees, her two feet
+side by side as motionless as the footstool, her heavy shoulders high
+and square, her lace cap with square ends falling either side her face,
+like the head-dress of an Egyptian, her air of monumental calm more like
+a Theban statue than a living woman.
+
+I turned away.
+
+The figure in the chair rose up at last.
+
+Oh, but slowly--slow, and stiff, and ponderous.
+
+I felt in her all the heaviness of the acquiescent since Time began.
+
+"That is right," she said to the old man who had brought the maid.
+
+And the maid was old, too.
+
+Three helpless ghosts.
+
+Like death the sense came over me that I was as badly off with these
+three, as I had been alone. Again I turned from them, frantic.
+
+"I will go out," I cried, "and find help." I ran towards the door.
+
+It was then the old man made the first sane suggestion. We could
+telephone to the police.
+
+That would save time! The police would meet us outside Betty's prison.
+
+I followed the butler into the hall. We all stood there, by the
+telephone. Ages seemed to go by while he was getting the number. And
+when he had got the number, he could not hear the questions that were
+put. I tore the receiver out of his hand--I pushed him aside. But I had
+never used the telephone before, and I spoke too loudly. When they told
+me so, I sobbed. The voice at the other end was faint and cool. Oh, the
+easy way the world was taking Betty's fate!
+
+And then the faint cool voice at the other end said something which
+showed me I was not believed.
+
+He, too, was thinking I was out of my mind.
+
+The receiver dropped from my hand.
+
+"They cannot understand," I said. I told Mrs. Harborough that she must
+go to Bettina, and I would bring the police.
+
+Some objection was made. I did not stop to hear it: "I cannot wait for
+any words! And I will not wait another second for any human soul!"
+
+Then, running beside me as I made for the front door, the old butler
+spoke again: "----a policeman in our square." He would call the
+policeman in.
+
+The old man was right. A policeman stood at the corner, watching that no
+harm should come to the ladies of Lowndes Square.
+
+I had run out, with the butler protesting at my heels: "_Not in the
+street_, miss!" he said, with the first hint of emotion I had found in
+him.
+
+I did not wait; but he must have brought the policeman in during my
+outpouring, for the look of the hall during those swift seconds is
+stamped on my brain. The elderly maid kneeling at her mistress's feet,
+changing her shoes; the policeman facing my aunt, helmet in hand, his
+reverent eye falling before the dignity of Mrs. Harborough, while I, at
+his elbow, poured out broken sentences, interlarded with: "I'll tell you
+the rest as we go----"
+
+My strained voice was grown weak. I wondered, suddenly, if it had ever
+really reached their ears.
+
+I was like a person down under the sea, trying to make my voice heard
+through a mile of murky water.
+
+I was like a woman buried alive, who, in the black middle of the night,
+beats at her coffin-lid in some deserted graveyard.
+
+"It is no use!" I cried. "I shall go back alone."
+
+At last we were all going out of the door. The policeman put on his
+helmet.
+
+"And where is this house?" he asked.
+
+"It is--it is----"
+
+A pit of blackness opened. I felt myself falling headlong. I heard a cry
+that made my flesh writhe--as though the cry had been Bettina's, and not
+mine.
+
+A voice said: "It is not possible you have forgotten the address!"
+
+I had never known it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL
+
+
+It must have been half an hour before reason came back. A strange man
+was there, lean and grey. A friend, I heard--a Healer.
+
+All those old, old faces!
+
+What had they done?
+
+What could they do?--except telephone again to the police the vague and
+non-committal fact of a girl decoyed and lost to sight in the labyrinth
+of London.
+
+They dared to think they could get me to bed. They found me, not a
+girl--more a wild animal!
+
+Out, out I must go.
+
+The outward struggle was matched by the one in my mind. Where should I
+go? To whom? There must be somebody who would care. Somebody who had
+Power to give effect to caring. Wildly my ignorance cast about. Who had
+Power?
+
+The King--yes; and surely the Queen would "care." But who was I to reach
+the Queen? Her sentinels and servants would thrust me out. All my
+crying would never reach the Queen. Then, the only thing that was left
+was for me to go out and cry the horror in the street.
+
+They held the door while they told me there had been telephoning back
+and forth. And someone had already gone to Alton Street.
+
+"Is that where Betty is?"
+
+No. Alton Street was the nearest police-station. The person who had been
+sent there had not yet come back.
+
+Then I, too, must go to Alton Street to learn what they were doing.
+
+The power of the police still loomed immense. At Alton Street I would
+hear they had already found Betty. She might even be there at this
+moment....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My aunt, the Healer and I driving through deserted streets. How long was
+it since I had been away from Bettina?
+
+"Oh, not long," they said. And the police beyond a doubt had turned the
+time to good account.
+
+I had a vision of the Betty I should find at Alton Street. Fainting,
+ministered to by men, reverent of her youth and terror....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A grimy room with a counter running down its length. No sign of Betty;
+only men in uniform grouped in twos and threes behind the counter.
+
+They listened. Yes, my aunt's messenger "had been in." They shook their
+heads.
+
+The Healer did most of the talking.
+
+A man with a sallow face put a question now and then. He was the
+inspector.
+
+Although there were only policemen there besides ourselves, the
+inspector talked quite low, as though he was afraid someone might come
+to know a girl was lost.
+
+"I can't hear what you are saying!" I said. "She is _my_ sister. You
+must tell me what you are doing to find her."
+
+They had so little to go upon. "The only clue, and that a very slight
+one," was the cabman. Could I remember what he was like?
+
+The strangeness of the question! Taxi-drivers were as much alike to
+country eyes as the cabs they drove---- But why ask me? "Bring the man
+in, and let the inspector see him."
+
+Then they told me. The man who was waiting there outside was not the one
+who had taken me to Lowndes Square.
+
+But where _was_ our "slight and only clue"?
+
+They said that while they all were busied over me, unconscious, the
+butler had paid the cabman and let him go. He had never thought to take
+the number. The slight, the only clue, was lost.
+
+But no. The inspector said they would circulate an inquiry for a cabman
+who had brought a young lady of my description to Lowndes Square that
+night.
+
+I tried to learn how long this would take--what we could do meanwhile.
+What had been already done.
+
+They seemed to be saying things which had no meaning. Except one thing.
+The great difficulty was that I could not describe the outside of the
+house, nor even the general locality. Which way had we driven from
+Victoria?
+
+I had no idea.
+
+But surely I had looked about. What had I noticed as we drove away from
+the station?
+
+I do not know whether at another time I might have answered better, but
+I could remember only a confused crowd of passengers, porters,
+taxi-cabs, and motors. Yes, and the woman who had looked after us while
+she asked her way of a policeman.
+
+Why had she looked after us?
+
+I could no more tell them that than I could tell why both she and the
+policeman had followed us with such unfriendly eyes.
+
+"Ah!"--the inspector exchanged glances with the Healer--"a possible clue
+there."
+
+I could not imagine what he meant. I could not believe that he meant
+anything when I saw the expressionless yellow face turned to Mrs.
+Harborough to say that "in any case" the Victoria policeman would not be
+on duty now. The inspector talked about what they would do to-morrow.
+
+"To-night--to-night; what can we do to-night?"
+
+He brought a piece of yellow paper. He put the questions over again, and
+this time he wrote the answers down with a stump of worn lead-pencil.
+The glazed paper was like the man, it took impressions grudgingly; it
+held them very faint.
+
+While the blunt lead-pencil laboured across the sheet, something that
+other man had said to me in the house of horror flashed back across my
+mind. I had not believed him at the time, still less now, in the
+presence of the guardians of the City--all these grave and decent
+people.
+
+Shamefaced I asked Mrs. Harborough if the inspector knew of "any house
+where a woman takes young girls."
+
+She and all the rest were one as silent as the other, till I steadied my
+voice to say again, this time to the man himself: "You have no
+knowledge, then, of 'such a place'?"
+
+"I don't say that," he answered.
+
+I looked at him bewildered. "You mean you do know of a house--a house
+where----"
+
+He hesitated too. "We know some," he said.
+
+"You don't mean there are many?"
+
+Again the hesitation. "Not many of the sort you describe." He took up
+the stump of pencil hurriedly and held it poised. "Try to recollect some
+landmark," he said--"some building, some statue that you passed."
+
+I did my best to obey--to wrench my mind away from the inside of that
+place where Betty was ... to think of what we had seen on the way.
+
+"Did you drive through the Park?" said my aunt.
+
+"No," the inspector answered for me, "she wouldn't take them through the
+Park; she would go as fast as possible--by side streets----"
+
+But I told them we had passed the Park. We had seen flower-beds through
+a tall iron railing. She said it was Hyde Park, and the flowers were on
+our left.
+
+"Hamilton Place. Park Lane." The inspector punctuated my phrases.
+"Driving north. You crossed Oxford Street?"
+
+I could not say. Other questions, too, I had no answer for. I held my
+head between my hands trying to force the later impressions out--trying
+to recover something of that drive I seemed to have taken a hundred
+years ago in some other state of being. And as I stood so, sobbing
+inwardly and praying God to let me remember, I heard the inspector say
+the most horrible thing of all. And it was the horrible thing that gave
+me a moment of hope. He told my aunt that the police kept a list of
+"these houses."
+
+A list.
+
+He said the police were "expected to have an eye on such places." And no
+one contradicted him.
+
+"Even if there are many," I burst out--"you have all these policemen
+here. You have hundreds more. Those houses in the list must all be
+searched----"
+
+They would do what they could, he said.
+
+I did not know why they should at the same time speak of doing all they
+could, and yet should look so hopeless. But I saw that nobody moved. My
+two companions talked in undertones. The men in uniform still stood in
+twos and threes. One near a high desk drummed with his fingers on an
+open book. The Healer folded his thin long hands upon the counter. In
+that horrible stillness I said suddenly, "Look at the clock!" The
+clock's hands too were folded, praying people to notice it was midnight.
+
+They stirred a little at my voice. They looked at me and at the clock.
+The inspector said they were waiting for Mrs. Harborough's messenger.
+The messenger had gone out with a constable to make inquiry at the
+nearest cab shelter.
+
+Why had they not told us that before!
+
+My two companions followed me, talking low.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were driven to a little wooden house, set close against the curb. Two
+or three men inside, and one behind an urn was pouring coffee.
+
+Yes, yes, a gentleman had "called." Each one there had been questioned.
+Others, besides, who had been in and out. No one had taken a lady to
+Lowndes Square that night.
+
+The door shut behind us. We were out again, in the street.
+
+Two taxi-cabs in the rank, and ours at the curb? Besides our driver and
+ourselves not a soul afoot, outside the little wooden shelter.
+Betty--Betty, what am I to do? I looked up at the houses. In almost any
+one of them must be some good man, who, if he knew, would help me. But
+the houses were curtained, and dark.
+
+The silence of the streets seemed a deeper silence than any the country
+knows. The only sound, my two companions whispering. "He" would no doubt
+be waiting for them at Lowndes Square, they said. Could they mean,
+then, to go home...?
+
+Betty--Betty---- I looked up again at the houses--houses of great folk,
+I felt sure. Officials, perhaps; equerries; people about the
+Court--people whose names we had often seen in the paper as going here
+and there with the King and Queen. People who would not be turned back
+at any time of night if they went to the Palace on an errand of life and
+death. Should I run along the street ringing at all the bells?
+
+I may have made some movement, for Mrs. Harborough took my arm and drew
+me towards the cab. No, the people in the great houses would be sleeping
+too far away from those blank doors. Deafness had fallen on the world,
+and on the houses of good men a great darkness.
+
+A light--at last, a light! shining out of a house on a far corner which
+had been masked by the cab shelter. And people awake there, for a taxi
+waited at the door--the door of hope. Above it an electric burner made a
+square of brightness. In that second of tense listening, my foot on the
+step of the cab, a raised voice reached me faintly.
+
+I dragged my arm free and went, blind and stumbling, towards the sound.
+I shall find someone to go to the Queen...!
+
+The Healer had followed quickly: "What are you doing! That's a
+public-house."
+
+They took me back, they put me in the cab. I hardly knew why I resisted,
+except that I was looking wildly about for someone to appeal to, and I
+kept childishly repeating: "The Queen ... the Queen."
+
+While Mrs. Harborough was being helped into the cab after me, I leaned
+out of the window on the opposite side, looking up the street and down.
+The wind blew cold on my wet face.
+
+"The Queen, the Queen! Oh, why are you Queen of England, if you can't
+help Betty?"
+
+The door of the public-house opened, and a man reeled out. A man in
+chauffeur's dress. A man--with crooked shoulders!
+
+I remembered now.
+
+I opened the cab-door on my side, and tore across the street with voices
+calling after me.
+
+The unsteady figure had stooped down by the waiting taxi, and set the
+machinery whirring.
+
+"Tell me," I bent over him. "Are you the man who brought me to Lowndes
+Square an hour or so ago?"
+
+The man looked up. As the cab light fell on his face I recognised him.
+
+Oh, God, the relief!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE MAN WITH THE SWORD
+
+
+"Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the
+stooping figure.
+
+The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was
+drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him.
+
+He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't
+say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of
+them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station.
+
+In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a
+horror of losing him.
+
+"I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough.
+
+And all the while---- But we are coming, Betty! Coming....
+
+The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of
+police-stations. They settled which would be the one.
+
+"Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I will give you all I have if
+you'll drive fast."
+
+The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned
+out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my
+eyes away from the only clue.
+
+Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out
+of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He
+ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on
+at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt
+corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked
+up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door.
+
+The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street.
+
+And Betty wasn't there.
+
+Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured
+man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come
+I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector."
+
+The young man said he was the inspector.
+
+Among us we told him.
+
+The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke quite differently. Sensible,
+alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of
+the inspector. This man was human.
+
+"You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?"
+
+I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An
+inspector's post was the station.
+
+But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for
+with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the
+telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound
+some great alarum, summoning a legion of police.
+
+He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of
+yellow paper. Precisely such a piece of paper as that on which already,
+there in Alton Street, the miserable story was set down. I shall not be
+believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed surface with a
+stump of blunt lead-pencil.
+
+"_Don't_ wait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...."
+
+But he, too, made little of the need for haste. He, too, made much of
+what I had noticed as we left Victoria--the homely woman and the
+policeman watching as we drove away.
+
+"You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?"
+
+"No doubt--and no doubt the policeman was suspicious too." The inspector
+spoke with pride: "Oh, we get to know those people! They meet the
+trains. They're at the docks when ships come in."
+
+It was then I saw that Mrs. Harborough could be stirred too. "If the
+policeman knew," she said--"if he so much as suspected, why did he not
+stop the motor?"
+
+The inspector shook his head.
+
+"Why didn't he arrest the woman?"
+
+"He is not allowed," said the inspector.
+
+I was sure he couldn't be telling us the truth. A creeping despair came
+over me. My first impression had been right. This man was too young, too
+ignorant, to help in such appalling trouble as ours. He was speaking
+kindly still. I might be sure they would do all they could to discover
+the house----
+
+"When? When?"
+
+And if they did discover it, he said, they would watch it.
+
+"'_Watch it!_'" I could not think I had heard right. "You don't mean
+stand outside and wait!--while all the time inside----"
+
+They tried to make me calmer. The inspector said, under certain
+circumstances, a warrant could be obtained to search the house....
+
+And was the warrant ready?
+
+Everything possible would be done. Oh, the times they said that! Then
+the inspector, a little wearied, told Mrs. Harborough "it might be
+advisable to go and see the man who is in charge of all these cases."
+
+Not only I, Mrs. Harborough heard him. For she repeated, "'All these
+cases!' You don't mean such a thing has happened before?"
+
+"Oh, yes," the young man said. "But usually it's poor girls. This is the
+gentleman who has charge of all that." He turned and pointed to the
+left. Beyond a board where keys were hanging, under two crossed swords,
+the electric light shone clear on the picture of a man in an officer's
+uniform. A man wearing a sword and a cocked hat with plume--the sort of
+dress Lord Helmstone wore when he went to the King's Levée.
+
+"When is he here?" Mrs. Harborough asked.
+
+"Oh, he never comes here. He's at Scotland Yard."
+
+"Scotland!" I cried.
+
+They told me Scotland Yard was in London.
+
+Then we'll go to Scotland Yard!
+
+He wouldn't be at Scotland Yard now. "He _might_ be there in the
+morning" ... this man, in charge of all such cases!
+
+The young inspector spoke his superior's name with awe. Oh, a person
+very great and powerful, and his hand was on his sword. I put my empty
+hands over my face and wept aloud.
+
+Betty--Betty--who will help us?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not need their foolish words to realise, at last, that I should
+have as much help (_now_, when help was any good)--as much help from the
+sword in the picture as from this man with three stripes on his sleeve
+and the blunt lead-pencil in his hand.
+
+Who was there in all the world who really cared?
+
+A vision of my mother rose to stab at me.
+
+No other friend? Eric!--as far away as heaven.
+
+The inspector and the man in leather were lifting me into a cab. The
+electric light was fierce in their faces. Then the light and they were
+gone. We were driving in silence through streets of shadow sharply
+streaked with light. I crouched in the corner, and fought the flames
+that shrivelled up my flesh.
+
+Torment! Torment!
+
+Betty with a hundred faces. And every one a separate agony. Betty
+beginning to understand. Betty looking for her sister--calling out for
+me. No sister! No friend! Only the fiends of hell!
+
+Torment! Torment!
+
+I was crying fiercely again, and beating with clenched fists. I heard a
+crash.
+
+The cab was stopped, and strange faces crowded. I was being held. "She
+has lost her mind," one said.
+
+But no, it wasn't lost! It was serving me with devilish clearness. More
+pictures, and still more.
+
+Well, well--Betty would die soon!
+
+Like cool water--holy water--came the thought of death. Perhaps she was
+already dead. Oh, my God, make it true! Let her be dead!
+
+Here was healing at last. Betty was dead!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+DARKNESS
+
+
+But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead.
+
+They brought me a telegram.
+
+In wrenching the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could
+hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe
+housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected
+back by the night train.
+
+The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes
+Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had
+lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even
+to-day could I go home.
+
+I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the
+end would very quickly come. There was mercy there.
+
+As for me--I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of
+the world. As though to our best, our only friend, I turned to the
+thought of her physical weakness.
+
+But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in
+her arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was ill a long, long while.
+
+Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again,
+what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead--there were the
+others.
+
+The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others.
+
+So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up
+in her little world, to help her to find a mate--that light was pale
+beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.
+
+And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the
+people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in
+London.
+
+Who would help me to find mine?--or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina
+safely dead!
+
+Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face
+alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my
+waking. Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge.
+There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace!
+peace!--and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst
+open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears,
+and then would cease.
+
+Who else?
+
+Not her friend, the Healer--whose way of healing was to look away from
+the wound.
+
+Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his
+love--who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the
+house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'--I'd
+let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret
+home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the
+other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set
+himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world.
+
+Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my
+heart)--_they all knew_.
+
+And they accepted this thing.
+
+That was the thought that again and again tore me out of my bed, and
+brought the great Darkness down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the grey intervals I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more
+and more in the room. I came to look for her.
+
+She spoke sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think
+that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light.
+
+I wondered about the doctor. How had she been brought to have someone
+tending me who did not call himself a Healer, yet who I felt might well
+have cured any malady but mine?
+
+She had forbidden the nurse to talk to me about my sister, so that I was
+the more surprised the day Mrs. Harborough spoke of Betty of her own
+accord. "If you will try to get strong," she said, "I will tell you what
+has been done to find her. And when you are really well I will do all
+that any one woman can to help."
+
+So we talked a little--just a little now and then, about the things I
+thought of endlessly. And not vaguely either. She saw how vagueness
+maddened me. We faced things. How she had misunderstood my mother. That
+could never be made up now. My mother never knew why we were not with
+her, nor even that we were not there. Consciousness had never come back
+to her. I heard of all that Eric had done, and that his was the last
+face she knew. He had stayed with her all that night, to the end.
+
+There were letters for me from him. Soon, now, I should have my letters.
+
+He had been many times to ask about me.
+
+About _me_! What was he doing about.... But no, that was for me alone.
+Up and down the streets I should go, looking into the eyes of outcasts
+under city lamps--looking for the eyes I knew.
+
+Nor could I wait till I was well. Night by night I went upon the quest.
+Catching distant glimpses of Bettina in my dreams, struggling to reach
+her, for ever losing her in the turmoil of streets and the roar of
+stations, till the thought of Bettina was merged in overmastering terror
+of the noise and evil which was London.
+
+The moment I was a little better they tried to get me to sleep without
+an opiate. The doctor made so great a point of this, I did all in my
+power not to disappoint him, and for no reason in the world but that
+something in his voice reminded me of Eric--just a little. Nobody knew
+how much of the time, behind closed eyes, my mind was broad awake....
+
+Oh, the London nights!--airless, endless. And the anguish of those
+haunted hours before dawn. My country ears, so used to silence or the
+note of birds, strained to interpret London sounds before break of day.
+
+Hardly any honest, individual voices, and yet no moment quiet.
+Incessantly the distant rumbling of ... _something_. I could never tell
+what. It was the roar of London streets by day, attenuated, held at bay,
+but never conquered--the bustle and clang muffled in the huge blanket of
+the night.
+
+The strongest impression about it was just of the vague, unverifiable
+thing being _there_--an enemy breathing in the dark. Sometimes it
+started up with a rattle of chains.
+
+"Mail-carts," said the nurse.
+
+And that other sound--like one's idea of battering-rams thundering at
+fortress walls--the nurse would have me believe that to such an
+accompaniment did milk make entry into London! Sometimes the thick air
+was so sharply torn by horn, or pierced by whistle, that I would start
+up in my bed trembling, listening, till the dying clamour sunk once more
+to the level of the giant's breathing.
+
+When I was not delirious, the reason I lay still was sometimes half a
+nightmare reason; a feeling that the muffled night-sounds were like the
+bees at home in the rhododendron, drumming softly so long as we sat
+still. The moment we rose up the bees rose too, with angry commotion,
+ready to fly in our faces and sting. Just so with that muted hum of
+London. If I were not very still, if I were to rise and venture out, all
+the stinging, angry noises would rise, too, and overwhelm me.
+
+And out there in the heart of the swarm, Bettina. Being stung and stung,
+till feeling died.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A STRANGE STEP
+
+
+One day, when my head was clearer, I seemed to have lain a great while
+waiting for someone to come. I asked where Mrs. Harborough was.
+
+She was "engaged for the moment."
+
+Presently I asked what kept her. The nurse rang and sent a message.
+
+Mrs. Harborough came up at once. She had been talking to Mr. Annan, she
+said. And would I like to see him?
+
+No. I shrank under the bedclothes, and turned my face to the wall.
+
+An afternoon, soon after that, brought me the sudden clear sense of
+Eric's being again in the house. I was sure that he timed his visits so
+that he might see the doctor. When the doctor left the room that
+afternoon I asked if Mr. Annan had been again.
+
+Yes; and did I want to see him now?
+
+No.
+
+"He has come to-day with another friend of yours," said Mrs. Harborough,
+lingering.
+
+"One of the Helmstones?" I asked dully.
+
+"No; Mr. Dallas."
+
+Ranny! Ranny was downstairs. The happy, care-free people were going
+still about the world.
+
+"Is he married?" I asked.
+
+"Married?" Mrs. Harborough seemed surprised. Certainly, he seemed free
+to devote a great deal of time to us. Mr. Annan and he between them had
+left no means untried, she said.
+
+"I have been told a thousand times," I interrupted, "that everything has
+been done, but no one ever tells me what." I fell to crying.
+
+Looking more stirred than I had ever thought to see her, she told me
+that young Dallas had offered rewards, and had gone from place to place
+in search....
+
+I seized her hands. I made her sit by the bedside.
+
+Yes, and always he had come back here, making his report and asking
+questions.
+
+Eric brought the doctors and the nurses ... but Ranny had done better.
+Ranny had stirred up Scotland Yard. When Eric told him the nurse had
+said I was for ever raving about barred windows, Ranny had flung out of
+my aunt's drawing-room and was gone a day and a night.
+
+Yes, he came back. He had found the house. He got a warrant, and he went
+with the police when they made their search. He had seen the woman. She
+brazened it out. She had never heard of either Bettina or me.
+
+_My_ story? Oh, very possible, she said, that I and my sister had been
+"seeing life." No uncommon thing for young women to lie about their
+escapades. "Drugged?" the usual excuse.
+
+The next day I asked them to let me see Ranny. They refused.
+
+I did not sleep that night.
+
+The doctor came earlier the next morning and was troubled. "What is it?"
+he said.
+
+I told him. "I will promise to be very quiet," I said. I would promise
+anything if they would only let me see Ranny.
+
+Mrs. Harborough went out and sent a message. Mr. Dallas was staying
+quite near, she said. But I waited for him for a thousand years. And
+then ... a footstep on the stair.
+
+My heart drew quivering back from the two-edged knife of Wanting-to-know
+and Dreading-to-know. Then all that poignancy of feeling fell to
+dulness, for the step was not Ranny's and not Eric's. I had never heard
+this slow, uncertain footfall.
+
+The door opened, and it was Ranny.
+
+He did not look at me.
+
+His eyes went circling low, like swallows before rain. They settled on
+the coverlid till, slowly, he had come and stood beside me.
+
+Then Ranny lifted his eyes....
+
+Oh, poor eyes! Poor soul looking out of them!
+
+"Ranny," I whispered, "speak to me."
+
+"I have failed," he said. He leaned heavily against the chair.
+
+"I have heard," I managed to say, "how hard you have been trying...."
+
+"But I have failed!" he said once more; and I hope I may never again
+hear such an accent.
+
+I pointed to the chair ... we could neither of us speak for a while. And
+then he cleared his throat.
+
+"They took her out of that house and hid her," he said. "And then they
+took her abroad. I traced her to their house in Paris. But she had
+gone. Always I have been too late."
+
+When I could speak I said: "You are a good friend, Ranny...."
+
+He made an impatient gesture. "Nothing is any good!" He stood up. "But I
+wanted you to know that I am trying.... Trying still. Nothing that you
+could do but I am doing it. Will you believe that?"
+
+"But, Ranny," I said, "how can you do all this? Haven't you ... other
+claims?"
+
+"Other claims?" he said, as though he had never heard of them.
+
+"You surely did have other claims?"
+
+"I thought I had. But when this came I saw they were nothing." He
+stopped an instant near the door. "You don't believe I would lie to
+you?"
+
+"No," I said.
+
+"Then get well. _You_ have something to live for. You and Annan. Not
+like me."
+
+He went out with that strange-sounding step.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING
+
+
+They were sorry they had let him come. A new night nurse was sent. Two
+doctors, now. And, either I dreamed it or, at the worse times, Eric was
+there as well. But always when I was myself, and the haunted night had
+given way to day, his face was gone. Yet his care was all about me. The
+doctors were friends of his; the nurses of his choosing.
+
+I cannot explain why, but ferreting out these facts gave me something
+less than the comfort they might be thought to bring. Why was he
+troubling about me? Why was he not spending every thought and every hour
+in trying to find Bettina?
+
+Ranny had meant it well, telling me I had something to live for besides
+Betty, and giving that something a name. But it was an ill turn; a sword
+in my side for many a day and night. It gave me a ceaseless smart of
+anger against Eric. I was jealous, too, that it had been Ranny, and not
+Eric, who had been taking all these journeys. Ranny had been working
+day and night. Ranny was the person we owed most to--Betty and I.
+
+And was I to lie there, suffocated by all this care, and leave a boy
+like Ranny (a boy I had expected so little of) to spend himself, soul
+and substance, for my sister?
+
+How dared Eric think that he and I were going to be happy, while Ranny
+searched the capitals of Europe, and while Bettina....
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+One night, or early morning rather, stands out clear.
+
+Vaguely I remembered a renewed struggle, and a fresh defeat. Now,
+strangely, unaccountably, I had waked out of deep sleep with a feeling
+quite safe and sure, at last, that Betty was free.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+The night-light had burned out. A pearly greyness filled the room.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+The nurse was sitting by the window, wrapped in a shawl.
+
+Her head, leaning against the window-frame, was thrown back as though to
+look at something.
+
+I don't know whether it was the shawl drawn about drooped shoulders, or
+the association of a lifted face by the window, but I thought of the
+hop-picker. And of the promise I had made. Yes, and kept.
+
+As long as I had been at Duncombe after that haggard woman passed, no
+other with my knowing had gone hungry away.
+
+Not all suffering, then, was utterly vain.
+
+What was the white-capped figure looking at--so steadily, so long?
+
+I raised myself on my elbow, and leaned forward till I, too, could see.
+A tracery of branches, bare, against a clear-coloured sky; and through
+the crossing lines, a little white moon looked through its sky-lattice
+into the open window of my room.
+
+I got up, so weak I had to cling hold of table and chair, till I stood
+by the nurse. She was asleep, poor soul! But I hardly noticed her then.
+I was looking up in a kind of ecstasy, for it seemed to me that a pale
+young face--not like the Bettina I had known, and still Bettina's face,
+was leaning down out of Heaven to bring me comfort.
+
+But as I looked I saw there was high purpose as well as a world of pity
+in the face--as though she would have me know that not in vain her
+innocence had borne the burden of sin.
+
+And I was full of wondering. Till, suddenly, I realised that not to
+comfort me alone, nor mainly, was Betty leaning out of heaven ... _she
+was come to do for others what no one had done for her_.
+
+Then the agony of the sacrifice swept over me afresh. I remembered I had
+gone back into that last Darkness saying, as I had said ten thousand
+times before: "Why had this come to Betty?"
+
+And now again I asked: "Why had it to be you?"
+
+Through the gentle grey of morning Betty seemed to be leading me into
+the Light. For the answer to my question was that the suffering of
+evil-doers had never been fruitful as the suffering of the innocent had
+been.
+
+Was there, then, some life-principle in such pain?
+
+A voice said: "You shall find in mortal ill, the seed of Immortal Good."
+
+I knelt down by the window and thanked my sister.
+
+Others shall thank her, too.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Italics are indicated by _underscores_. Small caps are indicated by ALL
+CAPS. In the original, mid-chapter breaks are indicated by either
+asterisks (retained here) or by double-spaced lines (a row of dots
+here).
+
+Variations in spelling, hyphenation, and use of accents appear as in the
+original. End-of-line hyphenations in the original are rejoined here.
+Obvious typographical errors have been changed.
+
+Contents: "NUMBUS" to "NIMBUS"
+Page 2:  "wheat-ears'" to "wheat-ear's" (a wheat-ear's hidden)
+Page 12: "servants" to "servants'"  (the servants' gossip)
+Page 24: "Fairly" to "Fairy" (the Fairy Tale element)
+Page 49: period added (my mother liked him.)
+Page 52: "Helmstone's" to "Helmstones'" (acquaintance of the Helmstones')
+Page 88: quote added (fragrance to their breath.")
+Page 93: removed hyphen from "live-laborious days"
+Page 175: "seedums" to "sedums" (mosses, sedums and suchlike)
+Page 226: "d'automme" to "d'automne" (feuille d'automne touched)
+Page 227: "Drew" to "Dew" (Dew Pond House)
+Page 259: "then" to "them" (take them to my sister)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Little Sister, by Elizabeth Robins
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Little Sister, by Elizabeth Robins
+
+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: My Little Sister
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins
+
+Release Date: May 25, 2011 [EBook #36220]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LITTLE SISTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by C.S. Beers, Suzanne Shell and the Online
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover3.jpg" alt="cover" /></div>
+
+
+
+<div class="halftitle">
+<h3>MY LITTLE SISTER</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="center"><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="center">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+<ul>
+<li class="marbot">GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND</li>
+
+<li class="marbot">THE NEW MOON</li>
+
+<li class="marbot">THE OPEN QUESTION</li>
+
+<li class="marbot">BELOW THE SALT</li>
+
+<li class="marbot">THE MAGNETIC NORTH</li>
+
+<li class="marbot">THE DARK LANTERN</li>
+
+<li class="marbot">COME AND FIND ME<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;" class="smcap">(Published by William Heinemann)</span></li>
+
+<li class="marbot">THE CONVERT <span class="smcap">(Methuen)</span></li>
+
+<li class="marbot">VOTES FOR WOMEN: A Play in Three Acts<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;" class="smcap">(Mills &amp; Boon)</span></li>
+
+<li class="marbot">THE FLORENTINE FRAME<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;" class="smcap">(John Murray)</span></li>
+
+<li class="marbot">WOMEN'S SECRET<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;" class="smcap">(Woman's Press, Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway)</span></li>
+
+<li class="marbot">WHY?<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;" class="smcap">(Woman's Press, Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway)</span></li>
+
+<li class="marbot">UNDER HIS ROOF<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;" class="smcap">(Woman Writer's League, 12 Henrietta St.)</span></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h1>
+<span>MY LITTLE SISTER</span>
+<br />
+<span id="id1">BY</span>
+
+<span class="medium">ELIZABETH ROBINS</span>
+</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+	<img src="images/tp1crop.png" alt="Printers device" width="76" height="200" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="center">
+NEW YORK<br />
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY<br />
+1913
+</div>
+<hr />
+
+<div class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1912, 1913</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">By DODD, MEAD &amp; COMPANY</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap"><i>Published, January, 1913</i></span><br />
+</div>
+<hr />
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<div>
+<p class="left20">CHAPTER<span class="ralign">PAGE</span></p>
+
+
+<ol class="toc">
+
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_I">First Impressions</a><span class="ralign">1</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_II">Lessons</a><span class="ralign">6</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_III">A Thunder-storm</a><span class="ralign">13</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Nimbus</a><span class="ralign">16</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_V">The Mother's Vow</a><span class="ralign"> 24</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">Martha's Going&mdash;Yet Remaining</a><span class="ralign">33</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">A Shock</a><span class="ralign">45</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">Annan</a><span class="ralign">51</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_IX">Eric</a><span class="ralign">59</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_X">The Bungalow</a><span class="ralign">68</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">Awakening</a><span class="ralign"> 83</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XII">Our First Ball</a><span class="ralign">94</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">The Cloud Again</a><span class="ralign">108</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">"Where is Bettina?"</a><span class="ralign">120</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XV">My Secret</a><span class="ralign">137</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">The Yachting Party</a><span class="ralign">150</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">The Emerald Pendant</a><span class="ralign"> 161</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">Ranny</a><span class="ralign">169</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">Another Girl</a><span class="ralign">178</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XX">Two Invitations and a Crisis</a><span class="ralign">186</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">Aunt Josephine's Letter</a><span class="ralign">198</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">Planting Thyme </a><span class="ralign">209</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">Eric's Secret</a><span class="ralign">215</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">Madame Aurore</a><span class="ralign">224</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">Going to London</a><span class="ralign">244</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">Aunt Josephine</a><span class="ralign">253</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">The Dinner Party</a><span class="ralign">266</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">The Grey Hawk</a><span class="ralign">287</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">Where?</a><span class="ralign">303</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">The Blunt Lead-Pencil</a><span class="ralign">310</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">The Man with the Sword</a><span class="ralign">322</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">Darkness</a><span class="ralign">329</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII">A Strange Step</a><span class="ralign">336</span></li>
+<li> <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV">The End Which Was the Beginning</a><span class="ralign">341</span></li>
+
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center"><b>MY LITTLE SISTER</b></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><span class="medium">FIRST IMPRESSIONS</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">She is very fair, my little sister.</p>
+
+<p>I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and
+golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without
+touching the quick.</p>
+
+<p>I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and
+then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written
+"was" or "seems."</p>
+
+<p>And that, in sum, is my story.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot
+clearly remember what life was like before.</p>
+
+<p>Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my
+father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these
+were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen,
+I cannot tell. I do not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> think I imagined the confused picture of dark
+faces and a ship.</p>
+
+<p>My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A
+house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is
+wide and green.</p>
+
+<p>As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse;
+always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with
+the infinite possibilities of existence&mdash;from the discovery of a
+wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the
+horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on
+horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of
+the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and
+vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing,
+leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.</p>
+
+<p>We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the
+cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of
+hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his
+own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> kicked
+their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at
+Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass
+by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill.</p>
+
+<p>Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by
+before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at
+large in our green dominions was an enemy.</p>
+
+<p>So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all
+in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in
+the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate.
+My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm.
+And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock
+blew across her face.</p>
+
+<p>Mélanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A
+lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Mélanie could not even
+understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been
+there with my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the
+knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use
+to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as
+the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right
+was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch
+pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby.
+Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy.</p>
+
+<p>Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were
+on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had
+no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond.</p>
+
+<p>I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in
+stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away.
+Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange
+woman kissed Bettina?</p>
+
+<p>The new nurse lied.</p>
+
+<p>And I said no word.</p>
+
+<p>But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at
+Duncombe was ever to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me&mdash;which I remember
+thinking a pity.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness
+of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare
+confess it.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge
+of the lie.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><span class="medium">LESSONS</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our
+mother as fledglings in a nest.</p>
+
+<p>Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite
+young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the
+beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But
+this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came
+in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness.</p>
+
+<p>In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's
+mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she
+taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in
+our lessons&mdash;so much so that we were a long time in finding out the
+dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because
+our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made
+stimulating, and the easy things she made delight.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No; there was an exception to this.</p>
+
+<p>Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely
+patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister.</p>
+
+<p>Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my
+"Étude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy&mdash;a
+gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge."</p>
+
+<p>I began again&mdash;<i>allegro</i>, as I thought.</p>
+
+<p>But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands.</p>
+
+<p>"How <i>can</i> I? You expect me to be as quick as God!"</p>
+
+<p>I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense
+of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my
+fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always
+the hand of a very young child&mdash;so soft and pliant that you wondered if
+there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her
+playing, and saw the way in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> which, when she was stirred, she brought
+down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord.</p>
+
+<p>Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And
+better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she
+was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her
+green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery
+rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections
+of old English song:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"<i>Where are you going to, my pretty maid?</i>"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the
+first thing she sang in English.</p>
+
+<p>I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first
+language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us
+to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All
+the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the
+mythology stories were in French.</p>
+
+<p>And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went
+collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long
+were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited
+than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large
+country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other
+small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green&mdash;brave
+little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be
+wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had
+been taken from the people.</p>
+
+<p>Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been
+only a superior sort of farmhouse.</p>
+
+<p>Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as
+children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we
+thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted
+but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did.</p>
+
+<p>We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards
+those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our
+wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> The proper
+thing to do, on catching sight of any stranger, was to start with an
+aversion suggested by our mother's, but improved upon&mdash;more pictorial.
+We would all three stare at the intruder, and then allow our eyes to
+travel to the nearer of the signs, "Trespassers," etc. If this pantomime
+did not convince the creature of the impropriety of his presence, we
+would look at one another with wide eyes, as though inquiring: "Can such
+things be? Are these, then, deliberate criminals? If so"&mdash;our looks
+agreed&mdash;"the company of outlaws is not for us." We turned our backs and
+went home. I was twelve before I realised that we ourselves were
+trespassers.</p>
+
+<p>The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone.</p>
+
+<p>That was a blow.</p>
+
+<p>Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not
+our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the
+motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as
+little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as
+heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit
+less to those broad acres rolling away&mdash;with foam of gorse and broom on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+the crests of their green waves&mdash;rolling northward towards London and
+the future.</p>
+
+<p>Two miles to the south was our village&mdash;source of such supplies as did
+not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the
+village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus,
+the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as
+many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower
+came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first
+to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the
+lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people
+would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come
+to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a
+children's school-treat?</p>
+
+<p>And she never did any of these things.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha
+Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going
+to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had
+beguiled Bettina with chocolate.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was furious and miserable.</p>
+
+<p>I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream.... But
+the servants' gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I
+thought about little else in our walks.</p>
+
+<p>Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my
+head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I
+persist."</p>
+
+<p>Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of
+my mother's character.</p>
+
+<p>I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in.</p>
+
+<p>But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of&mdash;I knew not what. But I
+knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our
+walks were different, because we were always thinking we might meet him.</p>
+
+<p>I prayed God to give my mother strength&mdash;for Christ's sake not to let it
+happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken
+the matter in hand.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><span class="medium">A THUNDER-STORM</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going
+out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So
+Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it
+grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on
+the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite
+suddenly the <i>croisée</i> of the casement showed as ink-black lines
+crossing a square of blue-white fire.</p>
+
+<p>The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The
+moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it
+seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain.
+Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight.</p>
+
+<p>Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full
+upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her
+paleness ghostlike.</p>
+
+<p>She drew back from the window. Before the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> lightning died I had seen
+that she was frightened. I had been frightened, too, till I saw that she
+was. In the impulse to reassure her, my own fear left me. I went to her
+in that second blackness and put my hand in hers. When I could see again
+I looked through the streaming window-pane, as we stood there, and I saw
+a man sheltering under the chestnut-tree at our gate. He lifted his
+umbrella, and seemed to make a sign: "May I come in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue.
+My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen.</p>
+
+<p>I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed
+so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A
+blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of
+sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging
+together.</p>
+
+<p>"That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought
+the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and
+daylight struggled back. We went on with our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> playing. I noticed, as my
+mother went downstairs, that she kept her head turned away from the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and
+scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being
+carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were
+wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with
+fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother,
+with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the
+drawing-room door for the bearers to pass.</p>
+
+<p>Their feet left muddy marks in the hall....</p>
+
+<p>We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had
+been taken away.</p>
+
+<p>People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric
+current.</p>
+
+<p>I knew God had heard my prayer.</p>
+
+<p>But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was
+riven from foot to crotch.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You
+expect me to be as quick as God."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><span class="medium">NIMBUS</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No.
+He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying
+more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else
+understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon.</p>
+
+<p>Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet
+there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of
+fear.</p>
+
+<p>I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A
+thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A
+fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger
+with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones.</p>
+
+<p>We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people
+are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships.</p>
+
+<p>My mother seemed to hug the thought of home<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> as those in old days who
+heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade.</p>
+
+<p>More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our
+walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have
+seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now,
+little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."</p>
+
+<p>I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The
+forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of
+the hollows&mdash;a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer,
+nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things
+taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull
+oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.</p>
+
+<p>I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace
+that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would
+hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew
+themselves pursued.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew
+that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> in her ears.
+Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to
+strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven
+of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and
+flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about
+the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to
+let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Now</i> we are safe and sound!" she would say.</p>
+
+<p>I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though
+we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of
+game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House
+for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had
+escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had
+barred him out.</p>
+
+<p>That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden
+shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy,
+craftier, deadlier than any that might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> haunt the heath at dusk, had got
+into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when
+lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his
+breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was
+behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes
+and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch
+at your bare feet as you jumped in.</p>
+
+<p>I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact
+that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the
+house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to
+bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only
+some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children
+the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless.</p>
+
+<p>As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing&mdash;I mean
+children&mdash;every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at
+Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds
+were out. You heard a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> kind of unearthly music played there on winter
+evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind
+instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the
+organ's playing."</p>
+
+<p>Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and
+listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we&mdash;a
+something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and
+often seemed upon the verge of understanding.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than
+that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off
+her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that
+look, listening, foreboding.</p>
+
+<p>There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in
+the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It
+caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively,
+to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast
+of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look
+when the fringe of shadow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to
+the light.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or
+moods. She was merely gentle and aloof.</p>
+
+<p>She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes
+most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times
+when she must have been unhappy, too.</p>
+
+<p>She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after
+Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we
+had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs
+to do lessons in the morning-room&mdash;which was our schoolroom under the
+cheerfuller name.</p>
+
+<p>Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing
+for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we
+were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side
+in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we
+heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that?</p>
+
+<p>I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> listening to that music
+she never made for us.</p>
+
+<p>And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast.</p>
+
+<p>Then I would shut the window.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina ought never to hear such music.</p>
+
+<p>For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful
+world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it
+"between the lights."</p>
+
+<p>As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper
+still.</p>
+
+<p>As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy
+places.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and
+consolatory suggestions of supper.</p>
+
+<p>Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our
+mother&mdash;when she would break off and come to find us&mdash;help us to hurry
+through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite
+knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us
+see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our
+father's order and his watch. We had turned over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> pretty things he
+had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew
+up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two
+brass buttons we might never touch.</p>
+
+<p>We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them
+wonderfully&mdash;as though they were alive.</p>
+
+<p>And we, too&mdash;we were always happier after we had seen them.</p>
+
+<p>We knew that she felt, somehow, safer.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">So did we.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><span class="medium">THE MOTHER'S VOW</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own.
+But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by
+following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent
+distance, but with a closeness of devotion.</p>
+
+<p>In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless
+springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family.</p>
+
+<p>The reason for the first is clear.</p>
+
+<p>As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and
+intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a
+commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort.</p>
+
+<p>Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the
+Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour,
+partly as symbols of our national greatness.</p>
+
+<p>From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter,
+or to her sailor-son,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> the Prince of Wales. His wife, that Princess of
+Wales, who even before her marriage had been the idol of England was our
+idol too&mdash;apart from her high destiny as mother of the future King, (the
+little Prince born in the same year as Bettina)&mdash;and mother of that
+fascinating figure in the story, the solitary Princess of her house,
+three years younger than the youngest of our family. Our interest in
+them all received a fresh accession at the birth of Prince Henry; we
+hailed the advent of Prince George; we felt the succession trebly sure
+in the fortunate arrival of Prince John. We saw them safely christened;
+we consulted the bulletins in the <i>Standard</i> and the <i>Queen</i> about their
+health; we followed their august comings and goings with an enthusiasm
+undampened by hearing how well they were all being brought up on the
+incomparable "White Lodge" system, which had been so successfully
+applied to the little royalties' mamma.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the
+unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing
+fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath.</p>
+
+<p>It was let to different people, from time to time,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> for the hunting. If
+the people had children, they were of palpitating interest to us, even
+though we never saw much of the children.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother.</p>
+
+<p>If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would
+stop to ask how my mother was.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother
+ought to have a nurse. She said she had me.</p>
+
+<p>That was the proudest moment of my childhood.</p>
+
+<p>I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such
+delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed
+to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick
+room.</p>
+
+<p>In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape,
+and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to
+the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching
+Bettina play at church-choir<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> with all our dolls in a row, and tiny
+home-made hymn-books in their laps.</p>
+
+<p>When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in
+chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously:
+"Someone must go down and bring Bettina back."</p>
+
+<p>I could not bear to see Loring, or Mélanie, doing anything for my
+mother. I think they humoured me, and that Mélanie performed her service
+chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid
+was able to come downstairs.</p>
+
+<p>She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her
+hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different.</p>
+
+<p>Not only thin. Different.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people
+who "called to inquire."</p>
+
+<p>We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such
+meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon
+"indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her
+malady.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our
+inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought.</p>
+
+<p>When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought
+their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with
+the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return
+your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children.</p>
+
+<p>In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty
+used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most
+glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look.
+I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring
+Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>One day Dora shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>She was going back to school. "Aren't <i>you</i> going back to school?" she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school."</p>
+
+<p>Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us.</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>like</i> having to go to school!" I said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She loved it. "So would you."</p>
+
+<p>"I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction.</p>
+
+<p>She couldn't think why.</p>
+
+<p>Neither could I&mdash;beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And
+that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of
+pity&mdash;"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at
+home."</p>
+
+<p>Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified
+to hear we had never had one.</p>
+
+<p>Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the
+riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for
+her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she
+had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a
+strange woman those hours she spent with us.</p>
+
+<p>We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to
+sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so hopeless. Or she
+would sit under the wild broom in Cæsar's Camp watching the birds; or
+lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> or
+out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that
+was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure,"
+our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any
+pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all.</p>
+
+<p>Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not
+the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the
+circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in
+all things else.</p>
+
+<p>I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I
+recognised her accomplishments as among our best family
+assets&mdash;reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect
+shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my
+thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger,
+soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care
+of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the
+paths appointed.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected
+against colds, against fatigue.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There is, in almost every house, one main concern.</p>
+
+<p>When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If
+she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or
+away from our mother, until&mdash;but that is to come later.</p>
+
+<p>I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing
+the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car&mdash;the first we had
+encountered at close quarters&mdash;a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling
+apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded
+her dreadful errand&mdash;to invite us children to come and stay at her house
+in Brighton from Friday to Monday!</p>
+
+<p>We stood there, blank, speechless.</p>
+
+<p>Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she
+could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse.</p>
+
+<p>Relief and pride rushed together. I could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> have kissed my mother's feet.
+My own could hardly keep from dancing.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor.</p>
+
+<p>The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will
+not let anyone take you away&mdash;no, never. Very well, you shall not pay
+visits."</p>
+
+<p>And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not <i>never?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Not never."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><span class="medium">MARTHA'S GOING&mdash;YET REMAINING</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had
+been with us since she was fifteen&mdash;at first a little scullery-maid.
+Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of
+her youth and her love of fun.</p>
+
+<p>We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She
+was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of
+ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted
+person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he
+used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring
+us our presents at the same time&mdash;perhaps out of fear of the cook, who
+held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was
+elderly, and very easily annoyed.</p>
+
+<p>She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over
+the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the
+hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> ever we spoke of
+these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any
+more. So we were most careful.</p>
+
+<p>So was Peter.</p>
+
+<p>So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to
+go down the garden and wait for them&mdash;wait so long, sometimes, that we
+fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were
+impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence
+into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our
+mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye&mdash;though she
+wasn't ever coming back, the cook said.</p>
+
+<p>Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom
+what had become of Martha.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone
+under.</p>
+
+<p>"Under? Under what?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!"</p>
+
+<p>I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what
+had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where
+she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed
+themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person.</p>
+
+<p>I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She
+chased me out with a hot frying-pan.</p>
+
+<p>We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found
+out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with
+the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife
+ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter.</p>
+
+<p>As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go
+near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon
+she went away.</p>
+
+<p>We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a
+dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of
+gorse. And she would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow
+our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid
+us back.</p>
+
+<p>I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole
+year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died.
+And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the
+horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they
+had four little children left. And one or other of the children was
+always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would
+tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen
+for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for
+plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a
+fearful lot of poultices.</p>
+
+<p>Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a
+peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had
+admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too,
+and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book
+thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> The book was called
+"Household Medicine." I read it a great deal&mdash;especially when one of the
+little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother
+and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them
+back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that
+the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I
+glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the
+specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their
+sufferings.</p>
+
+<p>One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on
+slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs.
+Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr.
+Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had
+Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all
+crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had
+been like this for two days.</p>
+
+<p>"Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted
+upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a
+warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> and the thing for me to do
+was to send him some proper food&mdash;all of which was done in collusion
+with Martha.</p>
+
+<p>I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my
+mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages.
+Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those
+thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.</p>
+
+<p>I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to.
+That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite
+natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner
+clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common
+clay, Martha Loring.</p>
+
+<p>The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two
+years or more after she "went under."</p>
+
+<p>Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well
+again&mdash;so well that she insisted on going for a walk.</p>
+
+<p>My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings
+and overshoes.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, we only stayed out about ten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> minutes. My mother said
+the air was raw, and "not safe."</p>
+
+<p>At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed
+quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal
+appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be
+prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be
+obvious later&mdash;I remember we had delicious things to eat that day.
+Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being
+urged to eat more than she wanted.</p>
+
+<p>My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take.</p>
+
+<p>When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic,
+because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had
+gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire.
+We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there
+had been this trouble to make Bettina eat&mdash;specially breakfast. My
+mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in
+her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow
+cold. So a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> punishment had to be invented. Bettina, who dearly loved
+society, must be left alone to finish breakfast&mdash;a plan that seemed to
+work, for when one of us went back in a few minutes, Bettina's plate
+would be bare. Then the awful discovery one day, in cleaning out a
+seldom-opened part of the side-board&mdash;a great collection of toast and
+bits of mouldy bacon, pushed quite to the back of the capacious drawer.</p>
+
+<p>While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now
+and superior, a face looked in at the window&mdash;a pinched, unhappy face,
+with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a
+shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down&mdash;heavy
+leaden drops out of a leaden sky.</p>
+
+<p>I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily.
+The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She
+had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as
+far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the
+hop-fields.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What <i>are</i> you doing? Shut
+the window instantly!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> And as I was not quick about it, she came behind
+me and shut the window sharply. What was I thinking of? Had I no regard
+for my little sister, sitting there in the current of raw air? Really,
+she had thought me old enough by now to be trusted!</p>
+
+<p>Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I
+remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head.
+"Go away!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story.
+My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were
+dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases.</p>
+
+<p>"Go away!" she said. And again that gesture.</p>
+
+<p>I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered.</p>
+
+<p>My mother measured out the tonic.</p>
+
+<p>My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other,
+lesser instances, came back to me&mdash;strange lapses into hardness on the
+part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm,
+she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words.
+If<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to
+sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's
+sensitiveness shared. And yet....</p>
+
+<p>The woman with her burden had moved away&mdash;a draggled figure in the rain.</p>
+
+<p>A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart&mdash;an impulse of actual hatred
+towards my mother&mdash;as the hop-picker disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Hatred of Bettina, too.</p>
+
+<p>I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If
+Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food
+to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright
+above the greyness of that wretched time.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of
+the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where
+she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered,
+something of her spirit still survived.</p>
+
+<p>Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with
+the misery of having to admit the sentence just.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of
+Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort
+of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted
+libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions
+dawning&mdash;wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal?</p>
+
+<p>The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course,
+Bettina must not tease the cat."</p>
+
+<p>With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very
+gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety.</p>
+
+<p>But that haggard hop-picker&mdash;no, I couldn't understand it.</p>
+
+<p>The hop-picker haunted me.</p>
+
+<p>Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow,
+to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I
+addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for
+yourself,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> you will be the means of giving bread to others."</p>
+
+<p>The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back.</p>
+
+<p>In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind
+deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow
+prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I
+didn't know about had made her like that.</p>
+
+<p>In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and
+my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind.</p>
+
+<p>Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any
+connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures,
+and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one
+guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of
+Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick
+world's infection through our windows.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">To-morrow?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><span class="medium">A SHOCK</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">When to-morrow came we knew.</p>
+
+<p>We had been using up our capital.</p>
+
+<p>Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of
+us?</p>
+
+<p>Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone.</p>
+
+<p>But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on
+living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of
+three.</p>
+
+<p>For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow.</p>
+
+<p>And should we always have the pension?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, as long as she lived.</p>
+
+<p>Not "always" then.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world
+and of our littleness, came down upon me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We seemed to have almost no relations.</p>
+
+<p>We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We
+heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all.</p>
+
+<p>My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the
+past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we
+grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis
+of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with
+the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs.
+Harborough.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Josephine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, your father's step-sister."</p>
+
+<p>All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she
+had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>"She couldn't have known you," Bettina said.</p>
+
+<p>"That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with
+unwonted bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were
+troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial
+condition was to harass and depress my mother. The condition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> was bad.
+Therefore it was best covered up.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall manage," she said.</p>
+
+<p>I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I
+knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite
+incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts.
+Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed to be out of
+mind. Out of my mother's mind.</p>
+
+<p>I thought constantly about these things.</p>
+
+<p>One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die
+together. My mother was horrified.</p>
+
+<p>"But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live&mdash;Bettina and I,
+without the pension?"</p>
+
+<p>"You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you."</p>
+
+<p>I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence.</p>
+
+<p>My mother went alone into the garden.</p>
+
+<p>She came in looking tired and white.</p>
+
+<p>Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring
+up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+upstairs "quite goodly," as we used to say. She looked back and smiled.
+She was still the most beautiful person we knew. But it was a very waxen
+beauty now. I must learn not to weary her with insoluble riddles. I went
+into the dining-room to make her tray ready&mdash;I liked doing it myself.
+Bettina's voice came floating in. She had grown tired of playing proper
+music. She was singing the nursery rhyme which my mother had set to
+variations of the tinkling old-world tune:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"<i>Where are you going to, my pretty maid?</i>"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I thought how strange and wonderful was the simplest, most ordinary
+little life. There must always be that question: what is going to become
+of me? I had long known what was the proper thing to happen. I ought to
+marry Lord Helmstone's heir. And Bettina should marry a prince.</p>
+
+<p>But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a
+family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest
+Hall&mdash;since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently
+came my lady. Very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> smart, with amazing clothes; and some married
+daughters with babies. There were two daughters unmarried, who seemed to
+be always abroad or in London. We liked Lord Helmstone; even my mother
+liked him. But she criticised his "noisy friends." These were the
+golfers who motored down from London. Broad-shouldered men, in tweeds
+that made them seem broader still. They would pass by our garden-wall
+and look at Bettina. Often when they had passed they looked back.
+Secretly, I wondered if any of them were those "husbands" who were going
+to take care of us. Some lodged in the village. The noisiest stayed at
+the Hall.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina's singing had broken off abruptly. I heard her running upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>And then a cry.</p>
+
+<p>"Come&mdash;oh, quickly, <i>quickly!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Bettina had heard the fall overhead.</p>
+
+<p>Our mother lay on the floor, Bettina standing over her, agonised,
+helpless.</p>
+
+<p>We lifted her on to the bed. We loosened her clothing, and brought
+water, and bathed her temples.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes and smiled&mdash;then the lids went down. Still that
+look, the look that made her a stranger.</p>
+
+<p>Was this death?...</p>
+
+<p>Bettina shrank from it. But I told her not to leave the room a second. I
+would bring the doctor quickly.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina's face.... "I cannot stay alone," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"I will send up one of the servants."</p>
+
+<p>She held my arm. "Suppose ... while you are gone&mdash;&mdash; Oh, I am afraid."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"I will run all the way," I said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><span class="medium">ANNAN</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water.</p>
+
+<p>I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I
+could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our
+touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece
+that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for
+other people, we said. "Other people must take their chance." I
+remembered that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the
+postmaster wrote out a telegram. <i>We</i> were "taking the chance" now. Such
+a little thing&mdash;my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my
+mother her life.</p>
+
+<p>The postmaster rang up Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor was out.</p>
+
+<p>What could be done but leave a message!</p>
+
+<p>I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not
+thought of that before?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London
+that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. He recommended
+the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would
+come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the
+driver to Littlecombe.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too,
+waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>That new acquaintance of the Helmstones'! Was he not a sort of a doctor?
+"The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken
+rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch
+arrogance&mdash;"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We
+had not seen him&mdash;at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from
+other golfers.</p>
+
+<p>I ran most of the way to the farm.</p>
+
+<p>As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with
+golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very
+un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the
+pathway with a sort of rigidity of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> gait, I received an impression of
+something so restrained and chilling that I hoped he was not the man I
+had come for. In any case this was not a person before whom one would
+care to show emotion. I asked if he were Mr. Annan. Yes, his name was
+Annan. His tone asked: and what business was it of mine? But he halted
+there, below me, as I stood on the step explaining very briefly my
+errand.</p>
+
+<p>He did not want to come; I could see that.</p>
+
+<p>He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner.</p>
+
+<p>I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given
+him no idea of the urgency of our need. I had to explain that all we
+asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our
+regular doctor would be with us very soon.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free
+hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish-brown.</p>
+
+<p>"We mustn't lose time," I said.</p>
+
+<p>As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf
+clubs thrown down in a stone passage.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big
+Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a
+moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry
+had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the
+mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for
+a warning.</p>
+
+<p>The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed,
+at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.</p>
+
+<p>What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a
+great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a
+general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered
+young golfers in Norfolk jackets&mdash;far too like them, to help in so dire
+a need as ours.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of
+him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with
+enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps,
+why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan
+would go far." He had gone too<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> far in the direction of overwork. He had
+been urged to come down here and play golf. Still, he worked long
+hours....</p>
+
+<p>And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept
+repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help."</p>
+
+<p>We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my
+younger sister was not to know if my mother&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster&mdash;almost at a
+run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me
+without an effort.</p>
+
+<p>Mother, mother!&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever
+noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning
+never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing.
+"Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children.</p>
+
+<p>Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles?</p>
+
+<p>"I am taking you the short cut," I said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn
+foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all
+those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All
+that gentleness and beauty&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>What a richness had been lavished on our lives!</p>
+
+<p>I had never begun to understand it before this evening&mdash;never once had
+thanked her.</p>
+
+<p>Mother, mother!&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare
+larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet
+of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was
+nearly over now. And her time&mdash;&mdash; Was that nearly over too? Where would
+she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch
+stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the
+first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked
+back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet ... and
+that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that
+evening.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the
+flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once
+who was always made faint by it."</p>
+
+<p>He did not look at me again.</p>
+
+<p>But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Now we could see the red tile roof.</p>
+
+<p>Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my
+running.</p>
+
+<p>As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of
+Duncombe garden.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Before I entered the house a strange thing happened.</p>
+
+<p>A great peace fell on me.</p>
+
+<p>I knew, without asking, that all was well.</p>
+
+<p>Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic
+light was this, then, that was shining on the world?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>He saw my mother, and told us what to do.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his
+verdict.</p>
+
+<p>As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me&mdash;eyes
+suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't think she is going to die?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always
+hope&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My
+mother!..."</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's
+life&mdash;and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and
+soul.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into
+intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald
+and red-gold and azure&mdash;a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was
+like the quickness of God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><span class="medium">ERIC</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed no need to talk.</p>
+
+<p>Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him
+walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It
+came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it.</p>
+
+<p>Then it would come again.</p>
+
+<p>He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a
+great misery behind him.</p>
+
+<p>No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I
+pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of
+longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I
+hadn't the heart to worry her with questions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to
+them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's
+had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from
+touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the
+plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we
+thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was
+striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at
+pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an
+air.</p>
+
+<p>She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But
+my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite
+of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips
+and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you
+understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She
+took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young
+Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as
+engaged, she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> said, to Guy Whitby-Dawson. He was in the Guards.</p>
+
+<p>We were all agog. When was she going to be married?</p>
+
+<p>She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards.</p>
+
+<p>Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so
+many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to
+give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it
+was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance.</p>
+
+<p>I wished we three had a pittance.</p>
+
+<p>For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So
+she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would
+die. Then he would have plenty.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged, Hermione flirted a good
+deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young
+men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I
+were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought
+over some of his photographs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> for us to look at. We did not admire him
+at all.</p>
+
+<p>But we never told Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really
+thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was
+always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing.</p>
+
+<p>If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses
+were up&mdash;all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I
+grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful
+when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord
+Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way
+to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just
+for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would
+find I had been gone for hours.</p>
+
+<p>The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old
+devotions paled.</p>
+
+<p>Mercifully, nobody knew.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I looked for him all the next spring. In the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> summer I said to myself, I
+shall never see him again.</p>
+
+<p>Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and
+the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of
+the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of
+sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.</p>
+
+<p>No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.</p>
+
+<p>I had not dreamed him. He was true.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The next day brought him.</p>
+
+<p>I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The
+others seemed gladder to see him than I.</p>
+
+<p>He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her
+being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited
+Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> instead of tramping all
+that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse
+even than the Club House brew.</p>
+
+<p>The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round
+after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord
+Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a
+holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But
+he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt
+flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there
+in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite
+wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made
+him confess he could not tell Indian from China.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and
+upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no
+one noticed.</p>
+
+<p>It was wonderful to see him again&mdash;to verify all those things I had been
+thinking about him for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> the year and four months since he went away.</p>
+
+<p>But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at
+once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of
+words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been
+compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such
+commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a
+wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with
+reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more
+uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without
+embarrassment.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in
+the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him,
+too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that
+Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird.
+Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any
+sisters."</p>
+
+<p>He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But
+he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.</p>
+
+<p>But the confession seemed to have brought him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> nearer, to make him more
+human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had
+grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh,
+happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about
+them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like?</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;&mdash;" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were
+"all right."</p>
+
+<p>The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was
+only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could
+learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.</p>
+
+<p>My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was
+"like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he
+liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to
+know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling
+still to keep up the property&mdash;a losing battle. And a second brother,
+not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the
+navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was
+"trying to grow tea in Ceylon."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our
+friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any
+terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of
+studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one
+thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.</p>
+
+<p>I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in
+that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing
+out the word <i>research</i> with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which
+must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve&mdash;a forefinger
+sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper
+lip&mdash;and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep
+absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce
+the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the
+great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner
+of the Hidden Field&mdash;that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><span class="medium">THE BUNGALOW</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the
+<i>dévot</i>, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or
+a saint.</p>
+
+<p>I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for
+people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish
+moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate
+little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady
+Barbara's unblushing <i>Schwärmerei</i>, was less a trial to me than the talk
+about saints and ascetics.</p>
+
+<p>The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our
+tea and our visitor.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.</p>
+
+<p>But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.</p>
+
+<p>She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going
+to stay?"&mdash;a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to
+put.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Three weeks."</p>
+
+<p>"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her
+confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much
+of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."</p>
+
+<p>He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life
+nowadays&mdash;thank God!&mdash;in a laboratory.</p>
+
+<p>Which was scarcely polite.</p>
+
+<p>"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half
+so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of
+romance&mdash;oh, naturally, not <i>her</i> kind.</p>
+
+<p>What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed
+that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented
+Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed
+at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants'
+hall. A marble terrace by moonlight....<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> No? Well, then, the supper-room
+at the Carlton&mdash;Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a
+thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss
+of the most expensive brand."</p>
+
+<p>They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind.
+For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made
+in the feuilleton of a certain paper.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was not a bit dashed. "<i>You</i> may look for romance in bottles if
+you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"</p>
+
+<p>"Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of
+his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said,
+would be waiting for his foursome.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of
+"story-telling."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You said you were only going to stay three weeks."</p>
+
+<p>To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three
+weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."</p>
+
+<p>I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady
+Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in
+the country?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody
+in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.</p>
+
+<p>As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara
+seemed to speak for him. "&mdash;&mdash;just to live in for a while," she said
+quite gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag
+over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want a bungalow <i>for</i>, then?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> Hermione's teasing voice
+followed after him.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned
+round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on
+Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had
+never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.</p>
+
+<p>Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put
+things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have
+some place to keep one's traps," he called back.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the
+retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face
+almost beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all
+mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his
+special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron,
+painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set
+up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.</p>
+
+<p>Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go
+over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.</p>
+
+<p>As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with
+the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he
+couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken
+of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let
+down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on.
+And those noises&mdash;which he was, strangely, still more sensitive
+to&mdash;produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and
+by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the
+house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at
+"country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that
+reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as
+on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us&mdash;Eric rather
+out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit:</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At
+four, this kind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> thing&mdash;&mdash;" In a quiet, meditative way he would begin
+clucking. Then quacking, almost sleepily at first; then with more and
+more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy
+of a loud, exuberant crow. All this not the least in the sketchy,
+impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble
+noises, but with a precision and vigour that first startled you, and
+then made you feel that you were being given, not only an absolutely
+faithful reproduction of the sound those creatures make, but in the
+oddest way given their point of view as well. We laughed the more, I
+think, because the comedy seemed to come out of the revelation of the
+immense seriousness of the animals. Eric's commentary seemed so fair. It
+seemed to admit that the importance to ducks and cocks and hens of
+<i>their</i> goings on was at least as great as the importance of peace and
+quiet to him. With an air of doing it against the grain, he gave you
+(with a rueful kind of honesty) the duck's sentiments in a series of
+depressed little quacks that hardly needed the translation: "'Been all
+over this repulsive pond; turned myself and all my family upside down
+for hours. Nothing!'" Then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> indignant quacks, and: "'Silly new servant
+can't tell time. Past five o'clock, and no sharps!'" Then a single
+jubilant "'Quack! There she is&mdash;&mdash;'" and a rising chorus, till anyone
+not in the room would be ready to swear we kept as many ducks as Big
+Klaus. A moment's silence, and in his own person Eric would say with a
+sigh: "<i>Now</i>, perhaps, I can tackle that German review." "'Buck! Buck!
+Buck!'"&mdash;or rather a series of sounds that defies the alphabet. Then the
+interruption: "'My-wife's-laid-an-egg!'" and the shrill rapture of a
+loud crow of great authority.</p>
+
+<p>The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given
+that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When
+Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him.</p>
+
+<p>And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked.</p>
+
+<p>I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable.</p>
+
+<p>She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in
+at first one window and then another. She said there was nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> but a
+stove and packing-cases in the room she could see into. And she brought
+back a bewildering account of what had been done to the windows of the
+other room. There were no curtains and no blinds, but thick brown paper
+had been pasted over the glass of each lower sash. You could no more see
+in than you could see through the wall.</p>
+
+<p>The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be
+there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after
+all, she said.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him
+about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, quite well, thank you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read
+the whole day and half the night."</p>
+
+<p>No, he didn't read all the time.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you do then?"</p>
+
+<p>Ah, there was no telling.</p>
+
+<p>And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he
+didn't want to.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione announced that she had been to call.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, "I heard you call."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She stared.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at
+his ease.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my
+life I ever saw Hermione blush.</p>
+
+<p>"What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I always <i>am</i> busy when I'm at
+the Bungalow."</p>
+
+<p>She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard
+me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.)</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I heard you try the door."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you <i>are</i> an extraordinary being&mdash;shutting yourself up with brown
+paper pasted over the windows&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."</p>
+
+<p>"Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."</p>
+
+<p>She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he
+makes bombs."</p>
+
+<p>"Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to
+where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make
+counterfeit money."</p>
+
+<p>"If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be
+counterfeit."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came
+flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He
+was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture
+chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the
+platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of
+creatures&mdash;poor little darling guinea-pigs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.</p>
+
+<p>"No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do
+with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think
+he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at
+shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her
+friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery
+with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.</p>
+
+<p>But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You
+know perfectly well the Chows are pets."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never
+heard of keeping guinea-pigs."</p>
+
+<p>"'Keeping them'&mdash;I used to have them to play with; but you know quite
+well you don't mean to 'keep' them."</p>
+
+<p>"Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."</p>
+
+<p>Of course she hadn't been able to keep them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> beyond their natural span.
+"But I never did anything horrible to them."</p>
+
+<p>Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer
+under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her
+anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in
+her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets
+that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and
+kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only
+a child."</p>
+
+<p>But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said,
+that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were
+warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the
+dogs such whippings as you do."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded
+of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now
+and then, they'd get out of hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For <i>your</i> pleasure. And
+profit. Not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in
+house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point
+in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione
+was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to
+keep them?</p>
+
+<p>In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said.
+"I shall just notice how long you keep them."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air,
+she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them
+for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect,
+after all, to make my fortune."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how
+fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well,
+here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs
+are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> idea
+is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a
+day&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they
+run away? Ours did."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures
+with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply
+move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in
+guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><span class="medium">AWAKENING</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief
+Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go
+into the Bungalow.</p>
+
+<p>This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more
+accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived
+altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he
+never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the
+Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech
+was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said,
+according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could
+pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the
+Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle
+eyes and very long arms and legs.</p>
+
+<p>Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of
+Mr. Bootle that he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> looked like the kind of person she could quite
+imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a
+deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he
+seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione&mdash;not to
+speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know
+our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we
+found it."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric
+as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's
+back&mdash;the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a
+parson, or some professor-person.</p>
+
+<p>We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones
+came.</p>
+
+<p>That pleased me more than anything.</p>
+
+<p>He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient,
+and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful
+laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I,
+too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they
+"proved the spirit."</p>
+
+<p>A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric
+said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was
+worse&mdash;long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a
+risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse;
+they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire
+hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes&mdash;&mdash; Then he died.</p>
+
+<p>Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It
+was a fine way to die."</p>
+
+<p>He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become
+the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had
+been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long
+grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the
+governing class, out of touch with the real work of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> world&mdash;no
+wonder they still groped after the military idea.</p>
+
+<p>They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other,
+wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in
+Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with
+those other "preachers"&mdash;in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches
+were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of
+merely living off the sheep of his pasture.</p>
+
+<p>But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional
+politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of
+all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused
+from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of
+talking.</p>
+
+<p>We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied
+a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were shown the
+Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh
+over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished
+personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed
+up his moustache and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> began to heckle him. What had he <i>done</i>&mdash;except to
+use his great position as a rostrum? What had been done by all the
+members of the Lords and Commons put together comparable to the
+achievements of&mdash;for instance, Sanitary Science? Ha, <i>Science!</i> No
+phrase-making. No flourish of fine feelings. Just Sanitation&mdash;the force
+that had done more in fifty years to improve the condition of the poor
+than all the philanthropy since the birth of Christ. And what had the
+Government done even for Science?</p>
+
+<p>Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the
+sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of
+wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>"When I ope my mouth let no dog bark."</p>
+
+<p>No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his
+work&mdash;humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact&mdash;these kept
+him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or
+pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had
+to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away
+from the limelight. He was unwritten about&mdash;unknown. Even when,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> after
+years of toil, your man of science came out of obscurity with some great
+gift for the world in his hand, no one except other men of science was
+the least excited. The <i>Daily Mail</i> was quite unmoved. The service done
+mankind by science left the general public in the state of Pet Majorie's
+turkey:</p>
+
+<p class="nodent">
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"&mdash;&mdash;she was more than usual calm,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">She did not give a single damn."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He was not complaining.</p>
+
+<p>All this was wholesome.</p>
+
+<p>"Science!"</p>
+
+<p class="nodent">
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><i>"No high-piled monuments are theirs who chose</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><i>Her great inglorious toil&mdash;no flaming death.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;"><i>To them was sweet the poetry of prose,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><i>And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Who wrote that?" my mother asked.</p>
+
+<p>With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of
+the human race."</p>
+
+<p>And he told us about him.</p>
+
+<p>I asked to have the verse written down.</p>
+
+<p>Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> still, a splendour only
+to dazzle me&mdash;not to light and lead.</p>
+
+<p>When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then
+to steal a look.</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go
+over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon
+that background.</p>
+
+<p>My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption&mdash;the
+long, blessed hours while other people slept.</p>
+
+<p>To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric,
+had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as
+seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint,
+this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my
+fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had
+pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret
+drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since
+she was born&mdash;till that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> afternoon when I began to think furiously about
+her again.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Monmouth and carried Eric off. I
+thought they had all three gone to the links.</p>
+
+<p>I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the
+garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the
+gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall
+I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this
+side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect
+it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers
+wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The
+old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said,
+rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the
+more delicate fruits on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the
+lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out
+clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started,
+and stood as still as the apple-tree.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other
+bending down. He kissed her&mdash;Eddie Monmouth.</p>
+
+<p>I turned and fled back to the house.</p>
+
+<p>The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of
+my dreaming.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina!&mdash;old enough to be kissed by a man!</p>
+
+<p>So she was the first to be engaged ... my little sister, who had only
+just had her sixteenth birthday.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I tried that night to lead up to a confidence.</p>
+
+<p>But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to
+tell me her great secret just at first.</p>
+
+<p>So I waited.</p>
+
+<p>Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up
+to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for
+India. The bride a girl they had never heard of.</p>
+
+<p>I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up
+courage to steal a glance&mdash;not a cloud on Betty's face.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Here was courage!</p>
+
+<p>But what the poor child must be going through.&mdash;I could not leave her to
+bear this awful thing alone....</p>
+
+<p>When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little.
+Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mind <i>like that!</i>" she said. "He was very
+nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas."</p>
+
+<p>At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>But I was wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina <i>did</i> like Ranny Dallas best!</p>
+
+<p>He liked Bettina, and flirted with her.</p>
+
+<p>I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But I saw more than that.</p>
+
+<p>I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us
+were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in
+her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or
+with waking now and then to thrill at stories about other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> people's
+courage, insight, indomitable patience. Why should <i>I</i> not rouse myself
+and nerve myself? Why should not I, too, scorn delight and live
+laborious days?</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">It was then the Great Idea came to me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><span class="medium">OUR FIRST BALL</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away
+without a word about the radical change that had come over a life
+outwardly the same.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my
+mother&mdash;French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me
+leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to
+surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me.</p>
+
+<p>I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to
+breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work
+behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the
+Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be
+when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall.</p>
+
+<p>I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he
+was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "liked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+him best"&mdash;liked him more than the man she had allowed to kiss her, and
+who had not cared for her at all.</p>
+
+<p>I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny
+Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione
+sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder
+brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny.</p>
+
+<p>All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young
+as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was
+"chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son
+to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed
+Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of
+marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member
+of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about
+such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into
+the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this
+by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All
+that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who
+was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of
+being so&mdash;chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean.
+And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a
+nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather
+nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the
+plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if
+I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't
+long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he
+looked.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and
+more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they
+couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed
+quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up
+and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn.
+Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say that <i>he</i> wouldn't be seen
+riding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> such a bicycle&mdash;"no, not on a dark night!" Ranny, as we knew,
+had two motor-cars of his own, and was very particular about their every
+detail. But he said all that the much-abused "bike" needed was a brake.
+Even without a brake it was "a lot better," he said, "than having to
+think about the shover-chap."</p>
+
+<p>After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the
+Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them&mdash;and, for all I could
+do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her
+or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He
+used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there
+Ranny got the chaffing.</p>
+
+<p>"What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd
+only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what
+he'd come for.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would
+say to us: "Here's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> a fella usen't to care a doit for golf&mdash;and now this
+passion!"</p>
+
+<p>When Lord Helmstone said that&mdash;which, in the way of facetious persons
+secure from criticism, he did a great many times&mdash;a colour like a girl's
+would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication
+being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention
+to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his
+keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"In this weather?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to
+your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep
+down superfluous tissue. Eh&mdash;what?"</p>
+
+<p>People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly.</p>
+
+<p>When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well,
+but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone,
+she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way.</p>
+
+<p>I said that was quite different, and we very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> nearly had a serious
+quarrel. When I saw that Betty really couldn't see the vast difference
+between making fun of that boy and making fun of a man like Eric Annan,
+I began to feel more anxious than ever about Betty.</p>
+
+<p>This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South.</p>
+
+<p>They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New
+Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not
+even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had
+taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew
+anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step."</p>
+
+<p>Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two.
+There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers,
+and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever
+seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night
+long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it
+was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the
+admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> rather badly to
+Ranny. When she had danced three times with the oldest sailor&mdash;Captain
+Gerald Boyne&mdash;Ranny took her into a corner and remonstrated. I saw he
+looked pretty serious, but I didn't know till she and I were undressing
+in our own room that night, or rather morning&mdash;I didn't know how
+strongly he had spoken.</p>
+
+<p>We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little
+remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you
+know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they
+had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians
+went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us.</p>
+
+<p>My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were
+to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in
+the morning."</p>
+
+<p>So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked
+different to me&mdash;this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The
+ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very
+white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+dimity curtains. Yes, the moon was brighter than ever! Betty threw open
+the window and leaned out. Oh, what a pity to go to bed when the world
+was looking like this!</p>
+
+<p>We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold;
+but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out
+of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We
+quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was
+still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what
+had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air
+of justification&mdash;"such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss,
+just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so
+divinely!"</p>
+
+<p>I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of
+course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had
+promised him&mdash;&mdash;" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so
+reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent
+her dancing <i>at all</i> with Captain Boyne.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And
+instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very
+bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that
+he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw
+Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she
+forgot to keep her voice down.</p>
+
+<p>My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called.</p>
+
+<p>We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But
+she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he
+say?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in
+particular&mdash;he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he
+danced badly.</p>
+
+<p>"Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I
+think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I admitted, "he does dance best with you."</p>
+
+<p>Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione,
+and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on.
+Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny
+coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she
+expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to
+having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione
+said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up.</p>
+
+<p>And he began badly: "'You've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'"</p>
+
+<p>Betty said "No."</p>
+
+<p>"'Why not? <i>Why</i> haven't you told him?'"</p>
+
+<p>"He would ask for a reason."</p>
+
+<p>"'Very well, give it'"</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said.</p>
+
+<p>"'The reason is....' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He
+began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And
+then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and&mdash;we waltzed that
+time too."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I
+didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that."</p>
+
+<p>No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the
+cotillion."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain
+Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous."</p>
+
+<p>She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting
+as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was
+furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that horrid waltz
+after he had said he 'made a point of it'&mdash;I wasn't to dance again with
+'that fellow.' And then, what do you think I said?" Bettina took hold of
+my arm, so I couldn't go on braiding my hair. "I said he was jealous of
+Captain Boyne, or why should he call him 'that fellow'? Even at the
+moment I felt how horrid that was of me; for it's not a bit like Ranny
+to be jealous in a horrid way, calling people 'fellows.' So I said: 'If
+the Boynes aren't nice, why are they here?' And Ranny said: 'Oh,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> Gerald
+Boyne's people are all right. His brother is all right. But I shouldn't
+want you to dance with Gerald if you were my sister. And if you were my
+wife, I should forbid it.'"</p>
+
+<p>"'But,' I said, 'I'm <i>not</i> your sister!'&mdash;Betty tossed her head,
+laughing softly&mdash;'and I'm not your wife&mdash;&mdash;'"</p>
+
+<p>I asked her if she had said it like that?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, she had. "And I said, too&mdash;I said it was 'fortunate.'" Then without
+the least warning, poor Betty sat down on the foot of her bed and began
+to cry.</p>
+
+<p>I put my arm round her. And she pulled her bare shoulders away. "You
+needn't think I'm crying about Ranny," she said. "I suppose it's being
+so angry makes me cry."</p>
+
+<p>"You are crying because you are over-tired," I said, and I began to take
+off her shoes and stockings.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm <i>not</i> crying because I'm tired, but because"&mdash;she wiped her eyes on
+the sleeve of her nightgown&mdash;"it's a disappointment to see anyone so
+silly ... making 'points' of such things as waltzes."</p>
+
+<p>When she was ready for bed, she stood meditating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> a moment. And then:
+"Ranny has never struck me as one of the horrid, unforgiving sort of
+people. Has he you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," I said, and I made her get into bed. I covered her up. But it
+was no use; she threw back the eiderdown, and sat bolt upright.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;asking me like that, <i>at a ball</i>, if I liked Captain Boyne best&mdash;a
+man I'd never seen before&mdash;don't you call it very rude?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; only a little foolish&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Another knock on the communicating door. "If you children keep on
+talking I shall have to come in."</p>
+
+<p>We promised we wouldn't say another word. But more than once Betty
+began: "Ranny&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sh!" I said.</p>
+
+<p>The quarrel about the window had ended in our leaving it a couple of
+inches open, and the curtains looped back. As we lay there, the room
+grew brighter; so bright that every little treasure on the long, narrow
+shelf above each bed could be plainly seen. All the small vases and
+pictures and china animals&mdash;all the odds and ends we had cherished most
+since we were babies.</p>
+
+<p>When Bettina had come in that night, the first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> thing she did was to
+clear a space for her cotillion favours. The moonlight showed the
+brilliant huddle of fan and bonbon-basket tied with rose-colour, and,
+most conspicuous of all, the silver horn hung with parti-coloured
+ribbons.</p>
+
+<p>When we had lain quiet in our beds for ten minutes or so, Bettina pulled
+out a pillow from under her head, and propped it so that the moon
+couldn't shine any longer on the be-ribboned horn. And neither could
+Betty's eyes rest on it any more. She lay still for some time, and I was
+falling asleep, when I heard her bed creak. She had pulled herself half
+out of the covers, and was leaning over the pillow-barrier. She took the
+horn and the other favours, one by one, and with much gravity thrust
+them under the bed.</p>
+
+<p>A sigh of satisfaction and a settling down again.</p>
+
+<p>I turned and smiled into my pillow. It was so exactly the sort of thing
+Bettina used to do when she was in the nursery&mdash;punishing her toys when
+things went wrong.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">What a blessing, I said to myself, that I was coming to like Ranny
+Dallas. For, quite certainly, he was going to be my brother-in-law.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><span class="medium">THE CLOUD AGAIN</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the
+North.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he will write," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"He isn't the sort that writes&mdash;not even when he's friends with a
+person." Then, with a rather miserable laugh, Betty added: "He <i>says</i> he
+can't spell."</p>
+
+<p>So I gathered that she had asked him to try.</p>
+
+<p>And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the
+ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two,
+and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne.</p>
+
+<p>We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely what would happen&mdash;all,
+that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter.</p>
+
+<p>It was a somewhat subdued Bettina who began that year; but I don't think
+it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>(Oh, Bettina! how is it now?)</p>
+
+<p>I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being
+actively unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did
+not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father
+was very ill. Ranny's place was at home.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in
+common. And she spoke as though any week-end that found his father
+better, Ranny might motor down.</p>
+
+<p>So we waited.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends.</p>
+
+<p>As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that
+year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced
+prematurely.</p>
+
+<p>I, too.</p>
+
+<p>I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of
+all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love
+me for finding&mdash;all alone like this.</p>
+
+<p>I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I
+had been "good"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to
+go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the
+Great Secret.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so
+much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I
+thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm.</p>
+
+<p>My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that
+if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to
+Betty?</p>
+
+<p>"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding
+look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my
+mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and
+dogs."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, as for dogs!&mdash;--" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an
+unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one
+dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they
+discuss?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."</p>
+
+<p>When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as
+though she might be feeling "out of things."</p>
+
+<p>Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking
+Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."</p>
+
+<p>At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, <i>I</i> have been
+away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is
+the one they chiefly want."</p>
+
+<p>She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she
+said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my
+mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she
+added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."</p>
+
+<p>As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away
+from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of
+the difficulty of confidence on our part&mdash;of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> how our very devotion and
+craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling
+her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own
+age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist
+between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about
+it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her
+know about Ranny."</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"</p>
+
+<p>I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did
+she feel so?</p>
+
+<p>Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could
+tell her about myself.</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."</p>
+
+<p>And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved
+with me too.</p>
+
+<p>I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I
+learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least
+interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> to tell. The
+very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the
+emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of
+girls!&mdash;girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother
+didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate.
+I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens,
+have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet....</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new
+insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in
+another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her
+own.</p>
+
+<p>I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small
+Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she
+lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been
+happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved
+fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But
+try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled
+against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions
+but those at Duncombe. Feeling myself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> incredibly bold, I reminded her
+of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am
+always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said
+(unconscious at the moment of the lie)&mdash;"you know all that happens to
+us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you
+except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big."</p>
+
+<p>I could not have approached her in any way more telling than to make
+confidence on her part seem a corollary to confidence on ours. She cast
+about with an indulgent air for something new. And then I heard for the
+first time of the "sort of cousin" who had come to keep house for my
+grandfather, and to bring up the little girl of four. I wondered the
+more at so important a figure having been left out of all previous
+pictures, when I heard that my grandfather had cared more for this "sort
+of cousin" than he had cared for his only child. The cousin must have
+been a horrible woman, though my mother told me so little about her, I
+cannot think how I knew. The most definite thing that was said was: "She
+brought out all that was least good in your grandfather."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> And when he
+ceased to care for the cousin in one way, she made him care for her in
+another. "She ministered to all his whims and perversities." My mother
+dismissed the first sixteen years of her life with: "I had seen a great
+deal of evil before I was grown; mercifully, I met your father when I
+was still very young."</p>
+
+<p>He was the one man, I gathered, whom she had ever found worthy of all
+trust, all love; and she had been so glad to leave home&mdash;to leave
+England!</p>
+
+<p>But out there in India she must have seen plenty of nice army people.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, plenty of army people.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed not to want to dwell much even on the happy time. She had her
+two children in three years. The babies kept her at home, and she had
+loved being at home with the babies&mdash;and above all with my father in his
+spare hours. Then, as we knew, he had been killed out tiger-hunting. And
+she broke off, "Now go on about the Boynes."</p>
+
+<p>I asked her, mischievously, why she took such an interest in the Boynes,
+as though I had not tried to bring that very thing about. Her ideal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> of
+"the confidence that should exist" broke down even here; the navy, she
+said evasively, was "the finest of the services."</p>
+
+<p>"Not finer than the army," I protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, finer than the army. Peace was the real 'enemy' to soldiers; but
+peace did not demoralise sailors, for there was always the sea for them
+to conquer. Was Hermione expecting to see the Boynes soon again?"</p>
+
+<p>I smiled inwardly. She might as well have confessed that she thought the
+older Boyne might "do" for me, and the younger Boyne for Betty.</p>
+
+<p>But what had become of the ideal of confidence?</p>
+
+<p>Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not
+been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy
+hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face
+of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the
+faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass
+on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or&mdash;mercifully&mdash;more than a
+pale reflection of past Despair.</p>
+
+<p>There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately
+behind. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> may put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they
+are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed.</p>
+
+<p>The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the
+immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue,
+stand appalled.</p>
+
+<p>The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I
+felt about&mdash;&mdash; No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes
+raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing
+ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look
+like this.</p>
+
+<p>I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how,
+when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your
+father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the
+lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those
+far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me&mdash;days which our mother
+must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the
+key to&mdash;there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an
+echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the
+beauty of life to those two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> lovers in the gorgeous East; and out of
+starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone
+sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended.</p>
+
+<p>The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I
+should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at
+the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the
+sadness of life to older people.</p>
+
+<p>Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of
+older women&mdash;that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded
+little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch
+had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed.</p>
+
+<p>She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was
+with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang
+to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness&mdash;and a
+fear.</p>
+
+<p>Not even my secret could console me at such moments.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a
+wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother&mdash;where was
+Betty?</p>
+
+<p>She was late.</p>
+
+<p>She was very late.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">Unaccountably, alarmingly late.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><span class="medium">WHERE IS BETTINA?</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we
+mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why
+Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she
+had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina
+waited&mdash;nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went
+away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case."</p>
+
+<p>She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked
+nor stirred.</p>
+
+<p>We went out in the hall and held a whispered conference. "She won't mind
+a bit," Bettina was sure. "It isn't as if it would do another time"&mdash;for
+the Helmstones were off again to-morrow. To clinch the argument, Betty
+told me that Hermione was expecting a letter, by the last post, from a
+friend of Ranny's; the one chance of hearing anything for Heaven knew
+how long.</p>
+
+<p>So I let Bettina go.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My mother never woke till nearly nine, and of course the first thing she
+asked was, "Where is Betty?"</p>
+
+<p>I said the maid had taken her, and Lady Helmstone had promised to send
+her home.</p>
+
+<p>My mother was extremely ill-pleased that Bettina had gone. I had hoped
+that after that profound sleep she would wake up feeling better, as I
+have noticed the books nearly always say is what will happen. But I have
+noticed, since, that people who have been sleeping heavily at some
+unseasonable hour will often waken not refreshed and calmed, but out of
+sorts, and easily fretted by quite small things. They seem to require
+time before they can collect themselves and see the waking world in true
+proportion.</p>
+
+<p>"We thought you wouldn't mind," I said.</p>
+
+<p>And why <i>should</i> we? Why, above all, should I, who was so much older...?</p>
+
+<p>"To go anywhere else ... I should have been against it," I said, "but to
+the Helmstones&mdash;where you let her go so constantly."</p>
+
+<p>Saying that was a mistake.</p>
+
+<p>Did not Betty know, above all, did not I know, the feeling of all the
+proper sort of mothers about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> young girls being away from home at night?
+Day-visiting&mdash;a totally different matter.</p>
+
+<p>It was "the last evening for weeks," I reminded her. The Helmstones were
+going back to town....</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sorry," said my mother.</p>
+
+<p>To my surprise the circumstance that seemed to annoy her most was that I
+had not gone with Bettina. She spoke to me in such a way I felt the
+tears come into my eyes. "I stayed on your account," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I have told you before"&mdash;and she told me again.</p>
+
+<p>The supper tray came up, and went down scarcely touched. I asked if I
+should read to her.</p>
+
+<p>No. There had been reading enough for that day.</p>
+
+<p>So I mended the fire and brought some sewing.</p>
+
+<p>She lay with the candle alight on the night table, waiting, listening.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is to be there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, just the family, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;but Betty would have said, if...."</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;<i>never even asked!</i>"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We sat in silence.</p>
+
+<p>"What time is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"A quarter to ten."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not like Bettina," she said presently. Bettina had never in her
+life done such a thing before.</p>
+
+<p>I agreed she never had. If Bettina transgressed (and I admit that this
+was seldom), she never did so outright. And she was not sly. She did not
+so much evade as avoid an inconvenient rule.</p>
+
+<p>My mother remembered, no doubt, that any sin of deliberate disobedience
+was far more likely to be mine. "I suppose the child, not able to ask my
+permission, came to you."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, she had consulted me.</p>
+
+<p>"And you took it upon yourself&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I sat there, in disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>Presently: "Perhaps the Boynes have motored down. Or one of them."</p>
+
+<p>I said I had no reason to think so. All the same, I couldn't help
+welcoming the suggestion. For the idea that the Boynes, "or one of
+them," might be there, seemed, oddly enough, to excuse Bettina in my
+mother's eyes. And she was moved<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> to make me understand why I had been
+reproached. We had to be far more careful than most girls. I heard about
+the heavy responsibility of bringing up "girls without a father."</p>
+
+<p>I wondered in what way our father's being here would have altered the
+events of this particular evening. And since he had been quoted to
+justify anxiety, I made bold to go to him for cheer. At times of stress
+before, I had invoked my father. Not often, and all-cautiously. And
+never yet in vain. That night I wondered aloud what were the kind of
+things our father would have done.</p>
+
+<p>"His mere being here would make all the difference."</p>
+
+<p>His mere name certainly did much. Once again I had cause to bless him
+for taking the chill out of the domestic atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>She talked more about him and, by implication, more about herself that
+night than ever before or after. She told me of the mistakes he had
+saved her from. The things he had warned her against. Though he was
+brave as a lion, she would have me believe that he was afraid of
+trusting people. He had said to her after a certain occurrence&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What occurrence?" I interrupted.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No need to go into that," she said hurriedly. The point lay in his
+comment: "The safe course is not to trust anyone."</p>
+
+<p>"That is very uncomfortable," I said.</p>
+
+<p>It was better, she answered, to be less comfortable and safe, than to be
+more comfortable and&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"And what?"</p>
+
+<p>She had stopped suddenly, and felt for her watch on the night table.
+"Ten minutes past. They will surely see that she starts for home by ten
+o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>We sat for five minutes without speaking. I thinking of my father.</p>
+
+<p>Then we heard the maids making the nightly round, shutting and locking
+up the house.</p>
+
+<p>"Look out of the window," my mother said.</p>
+
+<p>I could see nothing. The night was dark and still.</p>
+
+<p>"She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may
+bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk."</p>
+
+<p>She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the
+door."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Oh, the times we had been told that!</p>
+
+<p>Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The
+maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature
+stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back
+into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on
+her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that?</p>
+
+<p>If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful
+sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very
+quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white
+of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my
+narrower range.</p>
+
+<p>I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke&mdash;until I,
+unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on
+the familiar Magic&mdash;my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred.
+She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a
+different key.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more
+I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow
+plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of
+nice equilibrium."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"The fall?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;when father was killed&mdash;and all the happiness fell down."</p>
+
+<p>Then she said something wholly incomprehensible at the time, but which I
+understand better now. "Perhaps," she said, "I would have borne what you
+call 'the fall' less well if I hadn't known ... there are worse than
+tigers in the world's jungle."</p>
+
+<p>I felt I was on the track of some truer understanding, and a secret
+excitement took hold of me. "How was it you came to know that?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a thing," she said, "that even happy women learn." Then,
+hurriedly, she went on: "And it ended&mdash;my happiness&mdash;before any stain or
+tarnish dimmed it. All bright and shining one moment, the next all
+vanished."</p>
+
+<p>I watched the face I knew so well. Covertly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> I watched it. Saw the
+delicate lineaments a little pinched with anxiety. The eyes veiled one
+moment, the next lifting wide as at a sudden call.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>I heard nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Oftenest that quick lift of heavy eyelids, and the flash of bright
+fixity, would come without any following of speech. And the eloquence of
+that silence, tense, glittering, wrought more upon my nerves than any
+words. All my body strung to attention, I listened with my soul.</p>
+
+<p>No sound.</p>
+
+<p>No sound at all. Then, inwardly, I rebelled against the tyranny and
+waste of this emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Why was she like this?</p>
+
+<p>"Have they put on the chain?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And bolted the door?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know they have bolted it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I heard them."</p>
+
+<p>"Heard <i>them?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Heard the bolt."</p>
+
+<p>"One may easily think a stiff bolt has gone home, and all the
+while&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But I am sure."</p>
+
+<p>My easy certainty seemed to anger her. "I thought so, too, once." She
+said it with a vehemence that startled me.</p>
+
+<p>After a moment: "Was that here?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no"&mdash;she shook it off.</p>
+
+<p>I went and knelt down by the bed. "Tell me about it, mother."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. It is not the kind of thing you need ever know."</p>
+
+<p>"How can you be sure? <i>You</i> weren't expecting anything to happen." I
+felt my way by the shrinking in her face. "Yet someone came to the
+unbolted door&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you think that!" she exclaimed, and I was hot and cold under
+her look.</p>
+
+<p>"It&mdash;it only came into my head"; and then, with fresh courage, or
+renewed curiosity, "But I am right!" I said, with sudden firmness.
+"Isn't it so? You were horribly frightened, <i>weren't</i> you?" I touched
+her hand, expecting she would draw it away from me, but the fingers had
+locked on the silk frill of the quilt. They were cold; they made me
+think of death.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, very low, "I was horribly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> frightened." I felt the
+shuddering that ran along her wrist, and the chill of that old fear of
+hers crept into my blood, too. She looked through me, as though I were
+vapour, as though the bodyless Dread her eyes were fixed on once again
+for that instant&mdash;as though <i>that</i> were the most real presence in the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," I whispered, "tell me what it was."</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;impossible to talk about such things." She drew away her hand. "All
+you need to know is ... the need of taking care. Of never running risks.
+What time is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Five minutes past eleven."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Lady Helmstone say she and Hermione would walk back with Bettina?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, she didn't say that."</p>
+
+<p>"What did she say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just that she would send Betty home."</p>
+
+<p>After some time she said quite suddenly: "That might mean alone in the
+motor."</p>
+
+<p>I was going to say "Why not?" But as I looked up from my work at the
+face under the candle light, a most foolish and indefinable fear flashed
+across my mind&mdash;a feeling too ridiculous to own&mdash;sudden, indefinable
+dread of that inoffensive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> man, the Helmstones' head chauffeur. I had no
+sooner cast out the childish thought than I remembered the two under
+men. One only a sort of motor-house "odd man." To that hangdog creature
+might fall the task of driving Betty home! I had thought of this man
+vaguely enough before, yet with some dash of human sympathy, for it was
+common talk that he was "put upon" by the other men. He was a weakling,
+and unhappy; now I suddenly felt him to be evil&mdash;desperate.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, why had I let Bettina go!</p>
+
+<p>Even if the chauffeurs, all three, were decent enough ordinarily, what
+if just to-night they had been drinking?</p>
+
+<p>Betty coming across the deserted heath with a drunken driver&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Oh, God, I prayed, don't let anything happen to Bettina....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A quarter past eleven.</p>
+
+<p>I put on a bold face. "They wouldn't, I think, have a motor-car out for
+Betty at this hour, and the reason she is late is because she has told
+them she would like the walk."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"They will hardly send a woman with her at this time of night."</p>
+
+<p>We both started violently, and all because a coal had fallen out of the
+grate on the metal fender.</p>
+
+<p>My mother was the first to speak: "They are haphazard people, I
+sometimes think.... You don't suppose they would send her back with a
+groom...?"</p>
+
+<p>I said I was sure they would not, though an hour before I would have
+asked, Why not?</p>
+
+<p>"Lord Helmstone couldn't be expected to put himself out. I <i>wish</i> I had
+not let the servants go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you think of
+it? Of course, <i>they</i> should have gone and brought Bettina home."</p>
+
+<p>I saw now how right and proper this would have been.</p>
+
+<p>Half past eleven.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very strange," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and look out again, you may see a lantern, or the motor-lamps."</p>
+
+<p>I leaned out into the fresh-smelling darkness, and I saw nothing, I
+heard nothing.</p>
+
+<p>I hung there, unwilling to draw in my head and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> admit the world without
+was empty of Bettina. She had been thrown out of the car. She was lying
+by the roadside somewhere, dead, that was why she didn't come home.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly I thought of Gerald Boyne. What if, after all, he had been
+dining there. He would be sure to want to bring Bettina home. Yes, and
+those casual Helmstones would turn Bettina over to him without a
+thought. A man Ranny wouldn't let his sister dance with in a room full
+of her friends.... Bettina, setting out with Gerald Boyne to cross the
+lonely heath&mdash;and never reaching home.</p>
+
+<p>I knew all this was wild and foolish ... then why did these imaginings
+make me feel I could not bear the suspense another moment? I shut the
+window and turned round. "You must let me go for her," I said.</p>
+
+<p>The same suggestion must have been that moment on her lips. "Go, wake
+the servants," she said, "tell them to dress quickly. Get your cloak and
+light the lantern." She gave her short sharp directions. The young
+servant was to go with me. The old one was to lock the door behind us,
+and wait up with my mother. I went with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> candle through silent
+passages, and knocked on doors.</p>
+
+<p>I left the lantern burning down in the hall, and in my cloak went back
+to my mother's room.</p>
+
+<p>She was leaning out, over the side of the bed listening.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't they ready?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are only just roused."</p>
+
+<p>"Servants take ten times as long to dress as&mdash;&mdash;Hark. Look out!"</p>
+
+<p>I went back to the window and peered between the close-drawn curtains,
+with hands at my temples on either side of my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Except.... Yes, I could hear the heavy step of the older woman down in
+the hall unlocking, unbolting, unchaining the door ... that the
+housemaid and I might lose no time when she was ready.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman must be waiting for us there below, with the lantern in
+her hand. A faint light was lying on the path. Not a sound now in all
+the world except my mother's voice behind me:</p>
+
+<p>"You will take the short cut."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And as you go don't talk&mdash;<i>listen</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen!" I echoed, with mounting horror. "What should I hear?"</p>
+
+<p>"How do we know?"</p>
+
+<p>A chill went down my back.</p>
+
+<p>The bedroom-door opened, and Bettina walked in.</p>
+
+<p>"Such a nice evening! They've been teaching me bridge. Why have you put
+on your cloak? Why are you looking&mdash;oh! what has happened to you?"</p>
+
+<p>Not very much was said to Bettina that night. She and two of the
+Helmstones' maids had come round by the orchard-gate, walking softly on
+the grass, "so as not to waken mother."</p>
+
+<p>Only a little crestfallen, she was sent away to bed. My mother had
+motioned me to wait. As I watched Bettina making her apologies and her
+good-night, I thought how worse than useless had been all that anxiety
+and strain. "I shall remember to-night," I said to myself, "whenever I
+am frightened again."</p>
+
+<p>But this, I could see before she spoke, was not the moral my mother was
+drawing. "Shut the door," she signed. And when I had come back to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> her,
+she drew herself up in bed and laid her hand on mine. "I want you to
+make me a promise," she said. "It is not fair to girls not to let them
+know that terrible things <i>can</i> happen. Promise me that you will take
+better care of Bettina. Never let anyone make you forget&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">I promised&mdash;oh, I promised that!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><span class="medium">MY SECRET</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Eric, like the violets and primroses, came earlier that third spring.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed an old friend now, with an established footing in the house.
+Yet I had never been alone with him for more than five minutes before
+the day I told him my secret.</p>
+
+<p>I had imagined it all so different from the way it fell out. I said to
+myself that I would meet him on his way home some evening, after he had
+played the last round. He would never know that I had been waiting for
+him in the copse; but that would be where I should tell him, standing by
+the nearer stile, where I had first seen kindness in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>My mother's health was worse again that spring, and when I wasn't
+studying I was much with her. After Eric came I stayed with her even
+more, for he said she had lost ground.</p>
+
+<p>He discouraged her from coming downstairs. I believe he prevailed on her
+to keep her room chiefly by coming constantly to see her, bringing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+books and papers. My mother's sick-room was not like any other I have
+seen. It was full of light and air, and hope and pleasantness. She would
+lie on the sofa in one of the loose gowns she looked so lovely in, and
+we would have tea up there.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly always I managed to go down to the door with Eric.</p>
+
+<p>One day, that very first week, he came a good hour before we expected
+him. Bettina had shut herself up to write to Hermione, "&mdash;&mdash;and I am
+afraid my mother is asleep," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you are not," he answered. I saw his eyes fall on the books and
+papers that littered the morning-room sofa, and I felt myself grow red.
+The books would betray me!</p>
+
+<p>The strange thing was that he pushed them away without ever looking at
+them! And he sat down beside me.</p>
+
+<p>He had never been so close to me before. I think I was outwardly quite
+unmoved. But I could not see him, even at a distance, without inward
+commotion. When he sat down so near me, a great many pulses I had not
+known before were in my body began to beat and hammer. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> felt my heart
+grow many sizes too big, and my breast-bone ache under the pressure. I
+said to myself the one essential was that he should not suspect&mdash;for him
+to guess the state he had thrown me into would be the supreme disaster.
+He might despise me. Almost certainly he would think I was hysterical. I
+knew the contempt he felt for hysterical women. Never, never should he
+think me one! I would rather die, sitting rigidly in my corner without a
+sign, than let him think I had any taint of the hysterical in me!</p>
+
+<p>Above all, for my Great Secret's sake, I must show self-command. Upon
+that I saw, in a flash, this was the ideal moment for telling him about
+The Plan.</p>
+
+<p>He asked how had my mother slept. I don't know what I said. But I
+remember that he spoke very gently of her. And he said I must husband my
+strength. I stayed too much indoors, he said. Hereafter I was to take an
+hour's brisk walk every day of my life.</p>
+
+<p>I told him I couldn't always do that in these days.</p>
+
+<p>"You must," he said.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of my books, and shook my head.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Won't you do it if I ask you to?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He leaned a little towards me. I dared not look up.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand your not wanting to leave your mother," he said. "But
+couldn't your sister&mdash;&mdash;" Then, before I could answer, "No," he said,
+smiling a little, "I suppose she couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>There was something in his tone that did not please me. "You mean Betty
+is too young?"</p>
+
+<p>No; he didn't mean that, he said.</p>
+
+<p>What <i>did</i> he mean?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she has other preoccupations, hasn't she?" he said lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean Hermione? Hermione and all the family are in London."</p>
+
+<p>No; he didn't mean Hermione. I was in too much inner turmoil to
+disentangle his meaning then. For he went on quickly to say: "Suppose I
+sit with your mother for that hour, while you go out and get some
+exercise?"</p>
+
+<p>I was to lose an hour of him&mdash;tramping about alone! The very thought
+gave me an immense self-pity. My eyes grew moist.... "Come, come!" I
+said to myself, "keep a tight rein!"</p>
+
+<p>Just as I was getting myself under control<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> again, he undid it all by
+laying his hand over mine.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me help you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being
+kind; don't think it is more&mdash;don't <i>dare</i> think it is more!"</p>
+
+<p>Though I couldn't help thinking it <i>was</i> more, I turned to the thought
+of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming
+to be faced.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of
+the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me
+catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something
+about: "If you really do want to help me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand.
+The words I had rehearsed and meant to say&mdash;they flew away. I felt my
+thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water.</p>
+
+<p>With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul
+and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those
+few seconds' contact we two seemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> to have grown into one. I found I
+had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of
+having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an
+immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early
+struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time&mdash;questions that
+made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said
+I imagined it would be like that.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it <i>was</i> like that."</p>
+
+<p>"And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one
+of your family."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not
+very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people."</p>
+
+<p>What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that you have the most interesting profession in the world," I
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean the practice of medicine!&mdash;mere bread-and-butter."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't love your profession!"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, and that time the smile was less<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> ungenial. But I had not
+liked the tone of patronage about his work.</p>
+
+<p>"They were all wasted on you, then&mdash;those splendid opportunities&mdash;the
+clinic in Hamburg, the years in Paris&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well"&mdash;he looked taken aback at my arraignment&mdash;"I mayn't be a
+thundering success, but I won't say I'm a waster."</p>
+
+<p>"If you don't love and adore the finest profession in the world&mdash;&mdash;!
+Yes, somebody else ought to have had your chances. Me, for instance."</p>
+
+<p>"You! Oh, I dare say," his smile was humorous and humouring.</p>
+
+<p>"You think I'm not in earnest. But I am." I went to the cupboard where
+Bettina and I each had a shelf, and brought out an old wooden workbox. I
+opened it with the little key on my chain. I took out papers and
+letters. "These are from the Women's Medical School in Hunter Street"&mdash;I
+laid the letters open before him&mdash;"answers to my inquiries about terms
+and conditions."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced through one or two. "What put this into your head?" he said,
+astonished, and not the least pleased so far as one could see. "How did
+you know of the existence of these people?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You left a copy of the <i>Lancet</i> here once." Something in his face made
+me add: "But I should have found a way without that."</p>
+
+<p>"What way&mdash;way to what?" He spoke irritably in a raised voice. I looked
+anxiously at the door. "We won't say anything just yet to my mother," I
+begged. "My mother wouldn't&mdash;understand."</p>
+
+<p>"What wouldn't she understand?" All his kindness had gone. He was once
+more the cold inaccessible creature I had seen that first day stalking
+up to Big Klaus's door.</p>
+
+<p>"What I mean is," I explained, quite miserably crestfallen, "my mother
+wouldn't understand what I feel about studying medicine. But <i>you</i>"&mdash;and
+I had a struggle to keep the tears back&mdash;"I've looked forward so to
+telling you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He turned the papers over with an odd misliking expression.</p>
+
+<p>"For one thing, you could never pass the entrance examination," he said.
+I asked why he thought that.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see yourself going to classes in London, cramming yourself with
+all this?"&mdash;his hand swept the qualifications list.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Not classes in London," I said. "But people do the London Matriculation
+without that. I am taking the University Tutorial Correspondence
+Course," I said.</p>
+
+<p>I was swallowing tears as I boasted myself already rather good at Botany
+and French. My mother thought even my German tolerable.</p>
+
+<p>I picked up the little pamphlet issued by the University of London on
+the subject of Matriculation Regulations, and I pointed out Section
+III., "Provincial Examinations." The January and June Matriculation
+Examinations were held at the Brighton Municipal Technical College. He
+could see that made it all quite convenient and easy.</p>
+
+<p>"I can see it is all quite mad," he answered. "Suppose by some miracle
+you were to pass the entrance exams.&mdash;have you any idea how long they
+keep you grinding away afterwards?"</p>
+
+<p>"Five to seven years," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well! Can't you see what a wild idea it is?"</p>
+
+<p>I said to myself: he knows about our straitened means. "You mean it
+costs such a great deal."</p>
+
+<p>"It costs a great deal more than you think," he said, shifting about
+discontentedly in his chair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then I told him that my mother had some jewels. "I am sure that when she
+sees I am in earnest, when I have got my B. A., she will be willing I
+should use the jewels&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a dog's life," he said, "for a woman."</p>
+
+<p>I gathered my precious papers together. "You think I shall mind the hard
+work. But I shan't."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't the hard work," he said, "though it's not easy for a man. For
+a woman&mdash;&mdash;" he left the woman medical-student hanging over the abyss.</p>
+
+<p>For all my questions I could not bring him to the point of saying what
+these bugbears were.</p>
+
+<p>He was plainly tired of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>My first disappointment had yielded to a spiritless catechism of how
+this and how that.</p>
+
+<p>My persistent canvass of the matter brought him nearer a manifestation
+of ill-temper than I had ever seen in him.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great deal, he said, that he couldn't talk about to a girl
+of eighteen. But had I or anybody else ever heard of a man who was a
+doctor himself wanting his sister, or his daughter to study medicine? He
+had never known one. <i>Not one.</i></p>
+
+<p>I confessed I couldn't think why that was, except<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> that nobody belonging
+to a girl ever wanted her to do anything, except&mdash;I stopped short and
+then hurried on.... "But after all, you know that women do go through
+the medical schools and come out all right."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. "They've lost something. Though I admit most of the
+women you mean, never had the thing I mean."</p>
+
+<p>I said I didn't understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you ought to. You've got it." He looked at me with an odd
+expression and asked how long I'd had this notion in my head. I said a
+year. "All this time! You've been full of this ever since I was here
+last!"</p>
+
+<p>I lied. I said I had thought of absolutely nothing else all that time.
+He stood up ... but I still sat there wondering what had made me tell
+him that lie.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't go," I said, "without seeing my mother."</p>
+
+<p>To-day&mdash;he hadn't time.</p>
+
+<p>I went down with him as usual to the front door, weeping inwardly, yet
+hoping, praying, that before the door closed he would say something that
+would help&mdash;something kind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He often said the best things of all just as he was going&mdash;as though he
+had not dared to be half so interesting, or a tenth so kind, but in the
+very act of making his escape.</p>
+
+<p>To-day he put on his covert coat in a moody silence. Still silent, he
+took his hat.</p>
+
+<p>I stood with the door-knob in my hand. "You think, then, even if Aunt
+Josephine helped&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Aunt Josephine?"</p>
+
+<p>"My father's step-sister. She is well off."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Josephine's riches made no impression upon him. He was going away a
+different man from the one who had come in and pushed away my papers, to
+sit beside me and to take my hand. He pulled his stick out of the
+umbrella-stand.</p>
+
+<p>"You feel sure I couldn't?" I pleaded at the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel sure you could do something better."</p>
+
+<p>He was out on the step. "Good-bye," he said, with the look that hurt me,
+so tired&mdash;disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>He had come for peace&mdash;for my mother's tranquil spirit to bring rest to
+his tired mind. And all he had found here was my mother's daughter
+fretting to be out in the fray! I had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> not even listened. I had
+interrupted and pulled away my hand.</p>
+
+<p>After I shut the door, I opened it again, and called out: "Oh, what was
+it you were going to tell me?"</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"It wouldn't interest you," he said, without even turning round.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><span class="medium">THE YACHTING PARTY</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">I had to make use of Eric's old plea, "pressure of work," to account for
+his going away without seeing my mother.</p>
+
+<p>I watched the clock that next afternoon in a state of fever. Would he
+come again at three, so that we might talk alone? No. The torturing
+minute-hand felt its way slowly round the clock-face, its finger, like a
+surgeon's on my heart, pressing steadily, for all my flinching, to
+verify the seat and the extent of pain.</p>
+
+<p>Four o'clock. Five. Half-past. No hope now of his coming, I told myself,
+as those do who cannot give up hope.</p>
+
+<p>My mother questioned me. What had Mr. Annan said the day before? Had he,
+then, come so early for "nothing in particular"? I said that I supposed
+he had come early because he found he could not come late.</p>
+
+<p>About six o'clock, as I was counting out some drops for my mother, a
+ring at the front door made me start and spill the liquid on the table.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+He had relented! He was coming to say the things I had been so mad as to
+prevent his saying yesterday. We listened. My heart fell down as a
+woman's voice came up. Lady Helmstone! Wanting to see my mother "very
+particularly." We wondered, while the maid went down to bring her, what
+the errand might be which could not be entrusted to Bettina. For,
+wonderful to say, Bettina was to be allowed to go to a real dinner-party
+that night at the Hall. Hermione had written from London, begging that
+Betty might come and hear all about the yachting party.</p>
+
+<p>This was not the first we had heard of the project. It had been
+introduced in a way never to be forgotten. We had counted on hearing
+from the Helmstones all the thrilling details about the Coronation which
+was fixed for the coming June. We felt ourselves sensibly closer to the
+august event through our acquaintance with the Helmstones. Lesser folk
+than they might hope to see the great Procession going to the
+Abbey&mdash;King and Queen in the golden Coach of State, our particular
+friends the little Princes and the young Princess in yet another shining
+chariot, followed by the foreign Potentates, the State officials, and by
+<i>our</i> Peer of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> Realm with all his brother Lords and Barons in
+scarlet and ermine; and the flower of the British Army, a glancing,
+flaming glory in the rear.</p>
+
+<p>The highly fortunate might see this Greatest Pageant of the Age on its
+return from the Abbey, when the Sovereigns would be wearing their crowns
+and their Coronation robes.</p>
+
+<p>But the Helmstones! They would actually see the anointing and the
+crowning from their High Seats in the Abbey. Even a girl like Hermione
+would be asked to the State Ball.</p>
+
+<p>Never before had we realised so clearly the advantages of being a Peer.</p>
+
+<p>We thought the Helmstones very modest not to be talking continually
+about the Coronation. While we waited, impatient to hear more on the
+great theme, they had introduced the subject of the yachting trip. I
+remembered this while Lady Helmstone was coming up the stair&mdash;I
+remembered our bewilderment at learning that they hoped to sail "about
+Easter," and to be cruising in the Ægean at the end of June.</p>
+
+<p>They had forgotten the Coronation!</p>
+
+<p>Then the shock of hearing Lord Helmstone thank God that he would "be
+well out of it."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> London, he said, would be intolerable this season. He
+had let the house in Grosvenor Square "at a good round Coronation
+figure" to a new-made law-lord&mdash;"sort of chap who'll revel in it all."
+Many of the greatest houses in London were to be let to strangers.</p>
+
+<p>The yachting trip was one of many arranged that people might escape "the
+Coronation fuss."</p>
+
+<p>According to my mother, Lord Helmstone and his like showed a kind of
+treason to the country in not doing their share to make the symbolic act
+of Coronation a public testimony to English devotion to the Monarchy.
+What would become of the significance of the occasion if the aristocracy
+(upholders of that order typified by the King) deserted the King on a
+day when the eyes of the world would be upon the English throne.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, it was pitiable! this leaving the great inherited task to the
+upstart rich. Lord Helmstone's act showed blacker in the light of
+remembered honour done him both by the present King and by his father.
+We knew Lord Helmstone had liked the late King best. Yet even of him we
+had heard this unworthy subject speak with something less than
+reverence. With bated breath<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> Bettina and I had reported these lapses,
+as well as the late ironic reference to "the bourgeois standards of the
+present Court." Our mother said that only meant that the life of the
+King and Queen was a model for their people. "But Lord Helmstone
+laughed," we persisted&mdash;"they all laughed."</p>
+
+<p>We saw we were wrong to dwell upon so grave a lapse. Lord Helmstone's
+taste was questionable, we heard. "He does not scorn the distinctions
+His Majesty confers." There were people&mdash;my mother was sorry if Lord
+Helmstone was one&mdash;who thought it superior to smile at the Fount of
+Honour.</p>
+
+<p>Smiling at Founts was one thing. But to go a-yachting when you might
+help to crown the King of England, Emperor of India, Defender of the
+Faith...!</p>
+
+<p>Bettina and I had agreed privately that the reason she was allowed the
+unheard-of licence of dining out alone was that she might embrace this
+final opportunity of probing the mystery before the Helmstones vanished.
+They had come down from London for their last week-end before going to
+Marseilles to join the <i>Nautch Girl</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And now Lady Helmstone was passing our bedroom, where Bettina on the
+other side of the closed door sat working feverishly to finish putting
+some fresh lace on the gown she was to wear at dinner.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Helmstone came into my mother's room, very smart and smiling, and
+without preamble proposed to take Bettina along as one of her party.
+Equally without hesitation my mother said the idea was quite
+impracticable.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Helmstone was a person accustomed to having her own way. "You
+cannot expect," she said, "you cannot <i>want</i> to keep your girls at home
+for ever."</p>
+
+<p>"N-no," my mother agreed, with that old look of shrinking. But Bettina
+was far too young&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>A niece of Lord Helmstone's, just Bettina's age, was to be of the party.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, well, Bettina was different. Bettina was the sort of child who had
+never been able to face the idea of a single night away from home. And
+this was a question of a cruise of&mdash;how many weeks?</p>
+
+<p>"Six months," said Lady Helmstone cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>My mother stared. Lady Helmstone could not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> have meant the proposal
+seriously&mdash;"Bettina would die of home-sickness."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Helmstone ventured to think not. As I have said, she was
+ill-accustomed to seeing her invitations set aside. She spoke of
+Hermione's disappointment ... they were all so fond of Bettina. She
+should have every care.</p>
+
+<p>My mother made her acknowledgments&mdash;the suggestion was most kind; most
+hospitably meant. But Lady Helmstone had only to put it to Bettina. She
+would soon see.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Helmstone smiled. "I think you will find Bettina would like to come
+with us."</p>
+
+<p>I was annoyed at her way of saying that, as if she knew Bettina better
+than we. I went into the next room, and got out my school-books. I left
+the door open in case my mother should need me, and I heard them talking
+about "daughters."</p>
+
+<p>There was much to be said, Lady Helmstone thought, for the way they did
+things in France. My mother preferred the English way.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you will not take it," said the other, with that suavity that
+allowed her to be impertinent without seeming so. "I don't think&mdash;living
+as you do&mdash;you quite realise the trouble<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> mothers take to give their
+girls the sort of opportunity you are refusing." There were
+changes&mdash;"great and radical changes," she said&mdash;changes which my mother,
+leading this life of the religieuse, was possibly not aware of.</p>
+
+<p>My mother deprecated as much as she had heard of these changes.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but, <i>necessary</i>&mdash;a question of supply and demand. You can afford
+to disregard them only if you do not expect your daughters to marry."</p>
+
+<p>My mother said stiffly that she saw no reason to suppose her daughters
+would not marry&mdash;"all in good time." They were very young, Bettina a
+child&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were
+yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still
+silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best
+"opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety
+girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably
+more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty&mdash;I may say of
+patriotism&mdash;have to think seriously about these things." She herself,
+having married off three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> daughters and two nieces, might be considered
+something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised
+hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at
+all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls
+about London.... <i>Three!</i> Conceive the indiscretion!&mdash;only the young one
+really caring about balls&mdash;the other two going stolidly through with it,
+season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard&mdash;I
+changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took
+turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'and <i>never</i> more than two
+at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke
+impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and
+ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's
+position to do&mdash;I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in
+London."</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause.</p>
+
+<p>"Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a
+tone of perfunctory politeness.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>All the other women leave</i>," said Lady Helmstone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> with a rusé
+significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when
+the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men
+have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation
+they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June. <i>August is the time.</i> I
+made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden,
+cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef&mdash;cordon bleu. 'You must give
+better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did."</p>
+
+<p>There was another significant pause.</p>
+
+<p>"The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young
+barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh
+rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for
+Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those
+girls would be man&oelig;uvring for partners at balls still, and their
+mother would be in her grave, but for...."</p>
+
+<p>The interview ended stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her
+suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know
+there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> had been any question of her going. "The child is already
+disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and
+said: "If Betty never went <i>anywhere</i>, I should not want her to go away
+in the care of a woman like that."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br/><span class="medium">THE EMERALD PENDANT</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that
+night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and
+looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.</p>
+
+<p>While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.</p>
+
+<p>"I look dreadfully missish," she said.</p>
+
+<p>When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a
+school-treat!"</p>
+
+<p>We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard
+Hermione behind Betty's voice.</p>
+
+<p>She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's
+going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant."
+That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only
+natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too,
+begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in
+her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"</p>
+
+<p>Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?</p>
+
+<p>My mother wouldn't say....</p>
+
+<p>After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.</p>
+
+<p>My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I
+asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600.</p>
+
+<p>She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose
+real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.</p>
+
+<p>I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and
+important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the
+jewels be sold?</p>
+
+<p>My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a
+shield before the other.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke my name and I started&mdash;the voice sounded odd. I went back to
+the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me
+to sit down.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.</p>
+
+<p>The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth
+selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.</p>
+
+<p>We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.</p>
+
+<p>I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against
+the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt
+Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and
+sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that
+army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high
+companionship ... marching to the world's relief.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London
+University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful
+work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might
+help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering
+over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud
+of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all
+the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never!</p>
+
+<p>"Not&mdash;not female doctor," I protested. "That <i>does</i> sound&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But
+there was no necessity to emphasise "woman" at all; the only thing
+important was whether the person was qualified to treat the sick. People
+did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough."</p>
+
+<p>I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor"
+<i>was</i> male, and everyone understood that.</p>
+
+<p>I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I
+hadn't any accomplishments&mdash;no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative
+one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be
+people like that.</p>
+
+<p>It was all no use.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>That confession of mine, more than hers about the jewels, goaded my
+mother into taking a step which even we, blind as we were, felt to be
+epoch-making in our history.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That same evening she began to talk about Aunt Josephine&mdash;to excuse her.
+Mrs. Harborough had been so wrapped up in her brilliant young
+step-brother (and Aunt Josephine would never allow the "step") that <i>any</i>
+other person's coming in must inevitably have been resented. "She
+idolised your father." A woman of high character. Given to good works.
+Busied about the redemption of long-shoremen and about country treats
+for jam-factory girls. Knee-deep in philanthropy. And childless. She
+<i>could</i> not, especially now after that old first anger had long cooled,
+she could not be indifferent to the fate of her brother's children.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you thinking of writing to her?" I said. She explained that for her
+to address Mrs. Harborough was, under the circumstances, hardly
+possible. But there was no reason in the world why I should not.</p>
+
+<p>I felt there were reasons, but I could not think what they were. My
+mother, meanwhile, grew almost cheerful, outlining the sort of thing I
+might say. No requests in this first communication. A letter, merely&mdash;if
+it found her so inclined&mdash;merely to open a long-closed door.</p>
+
+<p>I did not like my task. I decided I would put it off till morning,
+though I knew that at any time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> I should find it easier to write:
+"Please lend me £1,000 for a course of study," than write such a letter
+as my mother had dictated.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Betty came back from her dinner-party in great excitement. Ranny Dallas
+had motored over from Dartmoor that very day&mdash;with a man friend. They
+had been at the Helmstones' to tea.</p>
+
+<p>I wondered, dully, that Lady Helmstone had said nothing whatever about
+Ranny during her visit. She must have just parted from him. Another
+curious thing was that Ranny had not stayed for the dinner-party. He and
+his friend were at the inn.</p>
+
+<p>"What in the world do you think that means?" I asked Bettina, glad
+enough to escape from my own thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>She was smiling. "I think it is very natural."</p>
+
+<p>And why was it natural for a luxurious young man to put up with tough
+mutton and watery potatoes at a village inn, when he and any friend of
+his were certain of a welcome, and the best possible dinner, in a house
+like the Helmstones'?</p>
+
+<p>Betty merely continued to smile in that beatific,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> but somewhat foolish
+fashion. I said, rather more to make her speak than for any soberer
+reason, "Perhaps he isn't so sure of his welcome"; and then in a flash I
+saw quite clearly something I had been blind to till that instant. For
+all the liking the Helmstones felt for Betty they may not have liked
+being undeceived about Ranny's supposed devotion to Hermione. That this
+idea had never occurred to me before showed me stupid, I saw, as well as
+self-absorbed. But the idea would not have occurred to me at all, I
+think, but for some of the things Lady Helmstone had said to my mother
+that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p class="marbigbot">Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that
+Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a
+dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little
+tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There
+was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any
+sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as
+happy as Betty looked.</p>
+
+
+<p>The next morning, still in a mood of the deepest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> dejection, I dated a
+sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine."</p>
+
+<p>I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense
+unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the
+impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or
+trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr.
+Annan."</p>
+
+<p>Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face
+another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my
+own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to
+clock&mdash;from clock to window, hour after hour.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">Dear Mr. Annan</span>,&mdash;I have told my mother. She feels as you do.
+She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not
+to think about it any more.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><span class="medium">RANNY</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">I imagined that day I should never again have to live through a time of
+such suspense.</p>
+
+<p>Waiting, till I could get away without being noticed, to carry my note
+to Kleiner Klaus's.</p>
+
+<p>Waiting, for the Klaus's boy to come home.</p>
+
+<p>Waiting, while his mother brushed his clothes and cuffed him. Waiting,
+while he recovered his spirits. Waiting, while slowly, slowly, his mind
+took in the particulars of his errand, and the most particular part of
+it, in his eyes&mdash;the penny he should have when he brought me back an
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>And the long hours of that afternoon waiting for the answer, or even for
+the errand-boy to come back. When I was not looking out of the window my
+mind was still so bent on listening for one particular footstep on the
+brick walk, and at the door his voice&mdash;the only voice in the world with
+meaning in it&mdash;that scarcely any impression was made on me by other
+steps and other voices. I heard them, subconsciously, to dismiss them;
+for everything was irrelevance that wasn't Eric.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But my mother interrupted my mechanical reading aloud. "Who," (with her
+air of listening to sounds beyond my ken) "who can all those people be?"</p>
+
+<p>There was Bettina in the passage making frantic signs that I was to
+hurry out and speak to her. And voices of men and women came up from the
+open door. I recognised Lord Helmstone's. I heard him asking the maid if
+Mr. Annan were here.</p>
+
+<p>"No? That's very odd," said Hermione in her sceptical way&mdash;"Perhaps he's
+come in without your knowing. Will you just find out?"</p>
+
+<p>My mother, too, had heard Lord Helmstone's cheerful bass, suggesting
+that his party might take shelter here. I had not noticed before the
+slight rain falling. "Go and ask him to come upstairs," my mother said.
+And lower: "I don't want <i>him</i> to take it amiss." I saw she was thinking
+of her refusal to let Betty go on the yacht.</p>
+
+<p>Betty was waiting for me in ambush near the head of the stair: "You must
+come down and help me. Ranny is there, too."</p>
+
+<p>I was bewildered at finding so many at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> door. For besides Lord
+Helmstone and Hermione, there was Lady Barbara, and Ranny Dallas and his
+friend&mdash;a cheerful, talkative, red-haired man they called Courtney.</p>
+
+<p>The Helmstones were still discussing whether they should come in.
+Hermione said it was only a slight sprinkle, and her mother was
+expecting them back to tea. Lady Barbara, with engaging simplicity,
+insisted there was no object in going back without Mr. Annan.</p>
+
+<p>I saw at once that Ranny looked different. Just in what way, or to what
+extent, I could not at first have said. A very little thinner, too
+little to account for the change I was dimly conscious of. And when he
+first came in, he came with some nonsense, and that pleasant laugh, that
+always "started things" in an easy harmonious key.</p>
+
+<p>"We've descended on you," Lord Helmstone said, "like a posse of
+detectives. Sleuth-hounds on that fella Annan's track. We've our
+instructions to bag him and carry him home to tea."</p>
+
+<p>Bettina (oh, I could have beaten her for that!) said Mr. Annan would
+very probably come in presently. And she led the way into the
+drawing-room, while I took Lord Helmstone upstairs. By<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> the time I came
+down again Bettina had ordered tea.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione turned round as I came in. "What have you done with my father!
+Now father's disappeared!"&mdash;as if she had only just grasped the fact.
+"Didn't I tell you," she said to Ranny, "Duncombe is a place where if a
+man goes in, he doesn't come out?"</p>
+
+<p>Betty and I gave them tea.</p>
+
+<p>I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never
+guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for
+pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were
+so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for
+an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as
+the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note
+in answer to mine.</p>
+
+<p>As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged,
+too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet,
+looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As
+though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> his
+way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him,
+the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of
+that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very
+laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring&mdash;his laugh most of all
+gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed
+just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than
+anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer.</p>
+
+<p>When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that
+blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to
+myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way
+probably more imbecile than pleasing.</p>
+
+<p>I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much
+noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to
+Bettina and to the other, newer, swain&mdash;one of the apparently endless
+supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them.</p>
+
+<p>Under cover of Hermione's gaiety, I managed to ask Bettina what was the
+matter with Ranny.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>I saw it was true. Bettina did not know.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned across me to find a place on the crowded table for her teacup
+and the low voice was earnest enough: "<i>Find out.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The rain had been only a passing shower.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, the sun has come out&mdash;but my father hasn't! Didn't I say,"
+Hermione laughed, "no man ever knows when to come away from this place?"
+Then she swept us all into the garden. "If he doesn't come soon I shall
+throw gravel up at the window. Isn't it this window?"</p>
+
+<p>Bettina said very likely Lord Helmstone was having tea upstairs and that
+it had not gone up till after ours. Ranny and I left the new young man
+and Bettina trying to prevent Hermione from carrying out her audacious
+plan and apparently succeeding. For Lord Helmstone did not appear for
+another half-hour. And still no sign of Eric.</p>
+
+<p>Ranny asked me how the sunk garden was coming on. I didn't like going so
+far from the gate, but Betty's earnest "find out" was ringing in my
+ears. I sent a searching look across the heath, and then Ranny and I
+left the others and went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> down to the rock-quadrangle that used to be so
+tidily affluent in stone-loving mosses, sedums and suchlike. The weeds
+were fast driving the more delicate things out of the neglected tangle.
+For the old gardener had been gone a year, now, and there was overmuch
+for a jobbing person to do in a day or two a week.</p>
+
+<p>I apologised for the poor unkempt place, thinking how different I might
+have made it, but for the hours I spent over books. And would Eric have
+liked me better if&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>I craned my neck, uneasy at not being able to see the gate nor any part
+of the bypath. Only the higher reach of heath road.</p>
+
+<p>Ranny had not pretended to be listening. I don't think he so much as saw
+how changed the garden was. We talked about the new young man&mdash;"awful
+good sort," according to Ranny. But that testimony, too, he gave in an
+absent-minded, perfunctory way.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't we sit down?" he said, looking blindly at a garden seat still
+shining-wet.</p>
+
+<p>I said we'd better walk. I lead him back near enough the house to see if
+the others had waylaid Eric.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No, just the same group under my mother's window&mdash;Hermione and Babs
+arguing hotly about something. The red-haired young man aiming at an
+imaginary golf-ball with the crook-handle of his heavy walking-stick,
+and swinging it violently over his shoulder, that Bettina might see the
+approved position of feet and body before, and after, a furious drive.
+Whether Bettina made a practice of asking for this information I cannot
+say. But every man who came our way, young or old, was seized with an
+uncontrollable desire to teach Bettina the difference between good form
+and bad form at the game of golf.</p>
+
+<p>Ranny had been walking with his head bent and no pretence at making
+conversation. When I stopped, he looked up suddenly and caught sight of
+the group. He wheeled about, and stood with his back to the house and
+his face averted from me as well.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," he said, "why shouldn't we go and meet Annan?&mdash;warn
+him&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>My heart leapt at the suggestion. And yet.... "Why should you want to do
+that?" I said suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, I don't care where we go&mdash;only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> ..." His voice sounded so
+queer I felt frightened.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"I don't think I'll go back to <i>them</i> just yet," he managed to bring
+out. "Do you mind?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><span class="medium">ANOTHER GIRL</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">We turned off through the shrubbery, and went out by the side gate along
+the bypath to the links.</p>
+
+<p>Ranny walked behind, absolutely silent, till he burst out: "May I
+smoke?"</p>
+
+<p>When he had lit a cigarette, I glanced back. I thought he looked a shade
+less miserable. I could see the four figures standing out against the
+house, and still no sign anywhere of Eric.</p>
+
+<p>I asked Ranny if he was to be one of the yachting party.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord, no!"</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps they had not asked him. Maybe that was it. I said something
+about how we should miss Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"Er&mdash;yes," he said. "I suppose you will," and I noticed his voice was
+steadier.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be ungrateful," I said. "So will you."</p>
+
+<p>"Me?"</p>
+
+<p>Then, as I reproached him, he said: "Oh, yes; awfully nice people the
+Helmstones. I used to be rather fond of Lady Helmstone. But she's a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+woman who doesn't know how to take 'No.' That's partly why I came."</p>
+
+<p>I looked back again: "Is that the only reason?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she kept writing, and making out, in spite of what I'd said, that
+she was expecting me to join them at Marseilles. And had put off
+somebody else who wanted to go. If I backed out&mdash;I had never backed
+in&mdash;I would be breaking up the party and behaving like the devil." He
+spoke more ill-temperedly than I had ever heard him.</p>
+
+<p>"How will it end?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"End? I'm hanged if I'll go. I've told her I wouldn't, from the
+beginning. But I only convinced her yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>We walked on.</p>
+
+<p>"They've asked Betty," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>No!</i>" He caught me up and walked at my side. "When did they do that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yesterday evening."</p>
+
+<p>"Is Betty going?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said.</p>
+
+<p>And very sharp on that: "Why not?" he asked. "Doesn't she want to?"</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't know anything about it. My<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> mother doesn't want her to go."
+And while he fell into silence again, I sent my eyes about the heath. No
+sign.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly I remembered Betty's "find out." I had not found out. I hadn't
+even tried, and I realised myself for a monster of selfishness&mdash;thinking
+Eric, Eric, and nothing but Eric the livelong day.</p>
+
+<p>I pulled myself together and asked Ranny what he had been doing since
+Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>"Since New Year's Eve, you mean." He frowned, and threw away a cigarette
+half-smoked, and lit another. When he had puffed and frowned a little
+more he said he had been going through a ghastly experience with a great
+friend of his. "Not a bad chap on the whole," he said, in a hesitating,
+almost appealing voice. But this not bad chap had "got himself badly
+bunkered." Ranny hesitated, and then: "Yes, I've been thinking I'd tell
+you about it, and see if&mdash;if you thought I've advised him right...." The
+friend, he said, had been "one of a house party at a place up in
+Norfolk. He'd gone for the fag end of the shooting. Last month it was.
+Beastly dull people. Awful good shooting&mdash;as a rule. But the weather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+was rotten. All shut up together in that beastly dull house. Nothing
+earthly to do, except rag, and&mdash;you know the kind of thing."</p>
+
+<p>I didn't know a bit, but I said I did.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, his friend had nothing to do, and he got it into his head that
+the girl of the house rather liked him. And there wasn't another blessed
+thing to do, so&mdash;&mdash; Oh, well, they got engaged."</p>
+
+<p>He waited for a moment, and then he said that when his friend went back
+to Aldershot he found "he wasn't any more in love with that girl than he
+was with the cat. It was all just a beastly mistake. So he got leave and
+went home to think it out. <i>Couldn't</i> think it out. Felt he'd better go
+and talk it over with somebody&mdash;&mdash;" Ranny hesitated again. "Awful hole
+to be in, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>I agreed it must have been very dreadful for his friend to have to tell
+the girl he'd made a mistake.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but he couldn't do <i>that!</i>" With a shocked look, Ranny stopped dead
+for a second. Then, as he went on, he said that he had told his friend
+of course he'd have to go through with it.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean," I said, "that when he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> feeling like that you think
+he ought to let the poor girl marry him!"</p>
+
+<p>He said I didn't see the point. It would probably spoil the girl's life
+if his friend drew back.</p>
+
+<p>I said he would spoil her life if he didn't draw back.</p>
+
+<p>Ranny looked merely bewildered. "Oh ... but ..." then he caught hold of
+a mainstay, "my friend&mdash;he isn't a cad you know. A man <i>can't</i> back out
+of a thing like that."</p>
+
+<p>Then I told him, without the names, about Guy Whitby-Dawson. Guy had
+"backed out." Guy had made up his mind to the sacrifice of "running in
+single harness," and had said so, frankly. I praised him.</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," Ranny answered, "if people hadn't enough money to marry,
+nobody would expect them to marry. But in the case I'm talking about,"
+he said gloomily, "the man, my friend, is an eldest son. He is going to
+have&mdash;oh, it's rotten luck!"</p>
+
+<p>I asked him if he really thought that not to have enough money to keep
+house on was worse than not to have enough love to keep house on. He
+said that what <i>he</i> thought wasn't the question.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> The question was what
+the girl would think. And what the girl's family would think. I asked
+how anybody was to know what the girl would think unless she was asked.
+Ranny gave his rough head a despairing shake.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I couldn't tell him half of what I felt about that girl, but I
+kept seeing her. Very happy. Never dreaming what her lover was feeling.
+I saw them going up the church aisle to be married. All the smiling and
+congratulating afterwards. I saw them "going away." And I felt sick.</p>
+
+<p>But I did try to make him feel a little for the girl. He said that
+"feeling for the girl" was precisely what had decided the business. The
+girl <i>couldn't</i> be told the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"She'll guess it!"</p>
+
+<p>But that didn't comfort him as I had expected. "Even if she guesses she
+couldn't be expected to release&mdash;m&mdash;my friend."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said Ranny with his childlike air, "because she'll probably
+never have as good an offer again."</p>
+
+<p>I was conscious of an inner fury when he said<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> that. I turned on him.
+And all of a sudden, quite curiously, my feeling changed. His face
+showed not only utter innocence of any arrogance, the expression on it
+was of great misery. And this was so at odds with the roundness and the
+hint of dimples, the roughened hair that the damp air had begun to curl,
+that as I looked at him, I felt the queer, stirring-at-the-heart sort of
+softness perhaps only women know, when they catch a glimpse in some
+man's face of the child that died when he grew up. I could see just what
+Ranny had been like when he was in short dresses. Full of laughter; as
+he was still when we first knew him. And in face of those earlier bumps
+and bruises, just this bewilderment overmastering the pain of the baby
+who is outraged at the disproportion between desert and reward&mdash;the baby
+who thinks, if he doesn't say: "I never did a single thing, and here all
+this has tumbled down on my head."</p>
+
+<p>In that instant I saw how lovable Ranny Dallas was, and instead of
+reproaching him, I found myself saying: "If that's true&mdash;what you
+say&mdash;it is very horrible for the girl, but I see it is probably nearly
+as horrible for the man."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And Ranny sat down on the wet heather under a gorse bush and buried his
+face in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Get up," I said; "here's my handkerchief. Get up quickly. Lady
+Helmstone is coming."</p>
+
+<p>But who was the man with her?</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">It was Eric Annan.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><span class="medium">TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Before those two were visible to the group round Duncombe front door, or
+within hailing distance of us, they turned into the bypath leading to
+Big Klaus's.</p>
+
+<p>I could not tell whether Eric had seen us. But I was quite sure Lady
+Helmstone had. Sure, too, that she had deliberately avoided us.</p>
+
+<p>Ranny didn't want to come back with me, and I didn't press him. I
+promised him I would say he was going to walk across the heath to the
+inn&mdash;"<i>had</i> to get back&mdash;expecting a telegram."</p>
+
+<p class="marbigbot">I stayed behind in the gorse bushes alone, till I saw Lord Helmstone and
+all his party going home.</p>
+
+
+<p>I couldn't bear the thought of meeting Betty.</p>
+
+<p>I went round by the kitchen and crept up the back stairs. I listened at
+my mother's door.</p>
+
+<p>Not a sound. Then I heard Betty downstairs playing the accompaniment to
+a song she and Ranny used to sing.</p>
+
+<p>So I opened my mother's door and went in.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The first thing she said was, without any preface, "I know, now, why
+Lady Helmstone invited a child like Bettina to go yachting for six
+months rather than you."</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," I answered; "they all adore Bettina. And then she is
+Hermione's special friend."</p>
+
+<p>"There is another reason," my mother said, looking out of the window. "A
+reason that concerns&mdash;Lady Barbara." Then she glanced at me, a little
+shyly, and away her eyes went again to the window. "Lord Helmstone
+thinks a sea-voyage would be the best thing in the world for Mr. Annan.
+They are asking him to be one of the party."</p>
+
+<p>I felt as if some hard substance had struck me violently in the face.
+But I managed to bring out the words: "Is he going, do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt he will go," she said.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Already I seemed to have lost him as utterly as though he had died. Yet
+with none of that sad comfort my mother had spoken of&mdash;the comfort of
+knowing one's possession safe beyond all risk of loss or tarnishing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I had never been on a yacht.</p>
+
+<p>I had never seen a yacht.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I could see Eric on the <i>Nautch Girl</i>. And Lady Barbara!</p>
+
+<p>Her mother's words came back: "Very little is done at balls." Very much,
+the story-books had told me, was done by throwing people together on a
+long voyage. My own heart told me the same.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I had lost him.</p>
+
+<p>And I had lost myself.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p class="marbigbot">The next day was Sunday. In the morning Hermione came to carry Bettina
+off for their last day together. I had to promise that, if Ranny should
+come to Duncombe, I would send for Betty.</p>
+
+
+<p>As I sat with my mother, that same afternoon, the door opened, and there
+was the maid bringing in Mr. Annan.</p>
+
+<p>I think I scarcely spoke or moved.</p>
+
+<p>It was my mother who said: "I thought you would come to say good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>"'Good-bye'?" Then, with unusual <i>brusquerie</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> where my mother was
+concerned, he added: "When <i>I</i> come to see people, what I say is, 'How
+do you do?'"</p>
+
+<p>"But aren't you going away to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, to catch the <i>Nautch Girl</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't think of a girl I should so little care to catch."</p>
+
+<p>And he wasn't going at all! Had never contemplated it for a moment!</p>
+
+<p>The weight of the world fell off my shoulders. And for nearly five
+minutes of a joy almost too great to be borne, I believed that it was
+because of me he wasn't going.</p>
+
+<p>Then he told my mother it was because of his work. And so it was that,
+unconsciously, he made good the excuse I had offered for his bolting off
+the afternoon I told him my secret. He seemed to have forgotten that
+episode. At least, he behaved as though it had never happened.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed a little over his interview with her ladyship. "Very
+determined individual, Lady Helmstone." He had told her, finally, that
+he hadn't time even to go to his sister's wedding. He had not thought it
+necessary, he said to add<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> that he wouldn't have gone to his sister's
+wedding however much time he had.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, my mother asked why such unbrotherly behaviour? He told us
+that he didn't approve of the marriage. There was nothing against the
+man's character. He was a "Writer to the Signet," which seemed in
+Scotland to mean a sort of barrister. I said "Writer to the Signet"
+sounded much finer than "barrister." I was told that Maggie Annan could
+not be expected to live on a fine sound. And that was about all they
+would have. This particular "Writer to the Signet" was poor. "Oh, poorer
+than poor!"</p>
+
+<p>I didn't like his way of saying that.</p>
+
+<p>As we went downstairs I was rather glad of being able to disagree with
+him about something. It would keep me from being foolish. I had that
+feeling of the creature who has been straining long at bonds, and finds
+the sudden loosing a test of equilibrium. For fear I should seem too
+gloriously content with him, I taxed Eric with thinking over much about
+money. He said a man may put up with any sort of hardship he likes for
+himself. But no man had a right to marry till he could support a wife in
+some sort of comfort. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> suggested that perhaps Maggie Annan cared less
+about comfort than she cared about other things. He retorted that Maggie
+probably hadn't thought it out at all. She was acting on impulse. "To
+think it out&mdash;that was the man's business." And so on.</p>
+
+<p>I felt myself growing impatient when he said "comfort" for the second
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"When people are old, yes! 'Comfort' then. But when they're young, what
+<i>does</i> it matter?"</p>
+
+<p>He leaned against the newel of the staircase and looked at me, quite
+surprised. "I thought you were more practical," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>am</i> practical. That's why I say comfort is wasted on the young. They
+don't even want it&mdash;unless they're rather horrid sort of young people."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he said, laughing, and I felt hot. I tried to explain. Such
+a lot of things were fun when you were young, especially when they were
+shared. I had noticed that. Things that made you cross, and made you ill
+when you were older&mdash;&mdash; Suddenly I stopped, saying in my heart:
+"Heavens! isn't this the kind of foolishness I was hoping to be saved
+from? Or is it worse?..." For Eric was smiling in such a disconcerting
+way.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I said primly that Miss Maggie did not need me to defend her, and that I
+must not keep him from his work.</p>
+
+<p>That word was like the touch of a whip. In two seconds he was gone.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, Monday, just the same. He ran in only for a moment to see
+my mother. He could not sit down; he could not do this, nor that. Work,
+work! It had seized him in a fresh grip.</p>
+
+<p>I was thankful to the work for having carried him away that Monday
+afternoon, when Betty came back from seeing the Helmstones off. It was a
+Betty we had never seen before. I don't know what else Hermione had said
+to her, but Betty had been told that she, too, might have gone yachting.</p>
+
+<p>It was like a stab to see my mother's face now, and to remember the
+confidence with which she had quoted the old story about Bettina's
+insisting on the promise that she should not be made to pay visits: "Not
+<i>never?</i>" "Not never!"</p>
+
+<p>I had hated Lady Helmstone for saying that Bettina would, in her
+ladyship's opinion, be found to have outgrown her reluctance.</p>
+
+<p>It was true.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bettina wanted to go!</p>
+
+<p>My mother, unwisely I felt, reminded Betty of the old pledge.</p>
+
+<p>"I was a baby then. What did I know?"</p>
+
+<p>And now there were tears in Bettina's eyes because she was <i>not</i> going
+to leave her mother.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I don't like to think of those next days. They were all a strain and a
+tangle.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot imagine what we should have done without Eric. For the way
+Bettina took her disappointment made my mother positively ill. Eric's
+prescription was hard to fill: "Peace of mind&mdash;absolute quiet and
+tranquillity."</p>
+
+<p>"You are less alarmed," he said in that direct way of his, "than you
+were that first day you brought me here. But you have more reason."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I did not want Bettina fully to realise the cloud that was so surely
+gathering to burst&mdash;and yet I was angry at her failure to realise. So
+unreasonable, so unkind I found I could be! Oh, I lost patience more
+than once. But my mother, never.</p>
+
+<p>"You will see all the beautiful places some day, my darling."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bettina was sure she never should. This had been her one chance&mdash;who
+else was likely to take her?</p>
+
+<p>"The fit and proper person. Your husband will take you, as your father
+took me."</p>
+
+<p>That answer surprised us both.</p>
+
+<p>I could not blame Bettina for feeling that it seemed to postpone the
+delights of travel overlong.</p>
+
+<p>The strange new Bettina went about the house, settling to nothing, at
+once restive and idle. All on edge. The worst sign of all was that she
+neglected her music. My mother remonstrated.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the use?"</p>
+
+<p>"You will find your music a very important part of your equipment."</p>
+
+<p>"Equipment!" said the new Bettina scornfully. "Equipment for what?"</p>
+
+<p>"For taking your place in the world."</p>
+
+<p>"The world!" Bettina exchanged looks with me. Yes, the world seemed far
+away. Inaccessible.</p>
+
+<p>"If we never go anywhere&mdash;never see anyone, what is the use in being
+equipped?"</p>
+
+<p>I think Bettina was sorry she said that. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> effect of it was as though
+some rude hand had thrown down a screen. My mother looking up with
+hollow, startled eyes must have caught a glimpse of something that she
+dreaded.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"Don't put it off," she whispered. "Write to your Aunt Josephine
+to-night."</p>
+
+<p>I composed my letter very carefully.</p>
+
+<p>My sister and I had often wished, I wrote, that we had some acquaintance
+with our only relation. Especially as she and our father had been so
+much to each other. Our mother was in poor health. We lived very
+quietly. But we all hoped if ever Aunt Josephine came to this part of
+the world&mdash;a very pretty part&mdash;she would come to see us. I was nearly
+nineteen now, and I was hers "affectionately."</p>
+
+<p>Feeling myself very diplomatic and "deep," I enclosed the last
+photograph Hermione had taken of Bettina. I wrote on it "Betty at
+sixteen&mdash;but it does not do her justice."</p>
+
+<p>If anything could win her over, it would be that snapshot of Betty
+dancing on Duncombe lawn.</p>
+
+<p>I posted the letter in an access of remorse and wretchedness&mdash;afraid I
+had left it too late. For<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> my mother had said, "After all, instead of
+your leaving me, I shall have to leave you."</p>
+
+<p>That same night Eric told me that he had sent to London for a
+heart-specialist. And the heart-specialist had answered he would be down
+on Thursday, which was the day after to-morrow. I saw in Eric's face
+that he was anxious at the delay. He admitted that he was "afraid" to
+wait. Yes, he would wire for another man.</p>
+
+<p>Eric&mdash;"afraid"!</p>
+
+<p>"You don't," I whispered, "you don't mean ... quite soon?"</p>
+
+<p>He repeated that he was "afraid."</p>
+
+<p>Then I felt I knew all that any specialist could tell me.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>That was the day I came to know the steadying influence of a call to
+face great issues. They bring their own greatness with them. They wrap
+it round our littleness. Only afterwards, thinking how gentle and
+watchful Eric looked in telling me, I remembered that people were
+supposed to faint when they heard news like that. For myself I had never
+felt so clear-headed. Never felt the responsibility of life so great.
+Never felt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> that for us to fail in bearing our share was so unthinkable.</p>
+
+<p>If this Majesty of Death were soon to clothe my mother, her children
+must not hide and weep. They must help her, help each other to meet the
+Great King at the gate.</p>
+
+<p>All the little troubles fell away. I was kind again to Betty.</p>
+
+<p>I called my lover "Eric." He called me by my name. Just that.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">No more passed between him and me. But I felt I had taken this man and
+that he had taken this woman "for better or worse."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><span class="medium">AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Bettina came into the room and handed me a letter.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Harborough!"&mdash;my mother drew herself up on the pillow with an
+animation I had not thought to see again.</p>
+
+<p>I opened and read: "My dear niece&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" my mother brought out the ejaculation with an effect of having
+doubted if the relationship would be owned.</p>
+
+<p>That introductory phrase turned out to be the most comprehensible part
+of the first half of Aunt Josephine's letter. As for me, I was
+completely floored by "the Dynamism of Mind," after I had stumbled over
+a cryptic reference to my mother's state&mdash;"which you must not expect me
+to call sickness. There is no such thing. There is only harmony or
+unharmony, whether of the so-called body or the soul."</p>
+
+<p>On the third page, the writer descended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> from these Alpine heights, to
+say that it had been "inspirationally borne in upon" her that the time
+was come for her brother's daughters to widen their horizon, and
+incidentally, to see something of their father's world.</p>
+
+<p>The implied slur upon our mother's world was, to my surprise, not
+resented.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on. Go on."</p>
+
+<p>The letter ended by saying that, in spite of very grave and urgent
+preoccupations, Aunt Josephine would endeavour to draw a little of the
+old life round her, if her nieces would come and stay with her in
+Lowndes Square for a few weeks.</p>
+
+<p>"A London season!" Bettina cried.</p>
+
+<p>I looked up from the letter and saw my mother watching with hungry
+delight Bettina's face of rapture. Bettina had not looked like that
+since the Helmstones went away.</p>
+
+<p>But the most marked change, after all, was in my mother herself.</p>
+
+<p>When Eric came he was staggered. "I'll believe in miracles after
+this!"&mdash;and we joked about the Dynamism of Mind.</p>
+
+<p>My mother had taken for granted that both Bettina and I would accept
+Aunt Josephine's invitation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> though I said at once <i>I</i> could not leave
+home. My mother put this aside with: "Bettina go alone! A wild idea."</p>
+
+<p>When the question came up again in Eric's presence I did not press it
+far. But, going downstairs, I asked him how <i>was</i> I to put it to my
+mother?</p>
+
+<p>"Put what?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, the fact that we can't leave her. Or, at least, that I can't." I
+agreed Betty must go.</p>
+
+<p>"So must you," he said. My heart beat faster. His villeggiatura was near
+the end. London, for me, meant Eric. "You need the change," he said,
+"more than Betty does."</p>
+
+<p>"You forget," I said, a little sadly, "what we've been facing here. The
+specialist coming&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he will find she has rallied."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, she was in no condition, Eric said, to be crossed. Had she
+not told me herself that my first duty was to take care of Betty? That
+was not how he would put it&mdash;all the same, the change would do me good.
+Then a word about our "trustworthy servants." In any event I was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> not to
+say any more about not going, till we had seen the "London chap."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>She went on quite wonderfully.</p>
+
+<p>We were positively gay again&mdash;she and I and Bettina&mdash;the three of us
+laying plans.</p>
+
+<p>We talked about clothes, and planned how we should look very nice on
+very little money.</p>
+
+<p>When the great specialist came, he found my mother sitting up in a bed
+covered with old evening-gowns, old laces, and embroidered muslins;
+things she had worn long ago in India, and which should help to make us
+brave for our first London season. Smart little blouses, morning-gowns
+and afternoon-gowns, could be made in the house or in the village. But
+who was worthy to make an evening-frock fit for London? My mother was
+much more concerned about this than about the great specialist, whom she
+received rather as a friend of Eric's. He echoed all that Eric had said.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My mother had made me write to Aunt Josephine on the evening of the same
+day that brought her letter. I did not tell anyone, but I put off<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+posting my answer till the London doctor had gone.</p>
+
+<p>My letter was not only thanks and acceptance. I felt I ought, in common
+civility, to try to make some more or less intelligent rejoinder to the
+odd part of my aunt's letter. And this modest effort seemed not to
+displease her. For she replied in eight pages of cloudy metaphysic and a
+highly lucid cheque. The cheque alone supported us in our attempt to
+grapple with those eight bewildering pages. The first introduced us, by
+way of the Psychology of the Solar Plexus, to the Self-Superlative:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"If this view-point interests you, I will later explain to
+you&mdash;in terms of inclusiveness and totalism&mdash;the mystical
+activities of the Ever-Creative Self."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"Isn't she awfully learned!" said Bettina in a scared voice.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"On your return home, having 'contacted,' as we say, the
+talents and the tranquillity of others&mdash;instead of contacting
+things of lack and fear&mdash;you will be able to think happily and
+sweetly about matters that formerly disturbed you. All the ills
+of life are curable from within. Complete health is wisdom. I
+do not go so far as to predict<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> that you will find yourself
+instantly able to adopt the bio-vibratory sympathism which
+habitualises thought to the Majesty of Choice. But I <i>do</i> say
+that after giving the deeper and sweeter Self a chance to unite
+the self of common consciousness, constructively, with the
+Powers Within, that you, too, may find yourself a Healer&mdash;that
+is, Harmoniser&mdash;clothed in the Regal Now."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>After that plunge, Aunt Josephine came to the surface for breath, so to
+speak, and to say that she thought it only fair to tell us that she
+herself had seen almost nothing of general society for the past ten
+years. She had her work. She had her classes in which we might take some
+interest. I was to tell "the musical one" that Self-Expression, through
+voice-culture and pianoforte playing, was one of the Keys to the
+Biosophian System.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Josephine had already taken opera-tickets for the season. And we
+should go to as many concerts as we liked. We should see pictures and we
+should see people. We should "learn to use the plus sign in thought." We
+should "recognise the cosmic truth that <span class="smcap">all is good</span>."</p>
+
+<p>This concluding phrase was underscored three times. And still, despite
+its provokingly obvious aspect, I felt that I had not a notion what
+Aunt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> Josephine meant by it. My mother said the reason was that I knew
+nothing of mysticism. Eric said neither did he. But he knew stark,
+staring lunacy when he saw it. And he was more than doubtful if we ought
+to be entrusted to this demented step-aunt.</p>
+
+<p>My mother reproved Eric's flippancy. Either she really did see daylight,
+and most excellent meaning, in the Biosophical Theory, or she concerned
+herself to make out a case for the defence of Aunt Josephine. She told
+Eric she was surprised that a man of science should at this time of the
+day cast ridicule on the doctrine of an essential harmony between "soul
+states" and the health of the body. For her part, she felt the
+attraction of this idea of ceasing the little lonely personal fight
+against overwhelming odds&mdash;this putting oneself into direct relation
+with the Infinite.</p>
+
+<p>Eric stared.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, my mother maintained, there was much to be said for Mrs.
+Harborough's idea that each individual should learn to think of his life
+in connection with this underlying force. If, instead of denying God we
+affirmed Him ... refusing to accept or to believe in evil&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"All very jolly for us," Eric said, "but what about the poor cancerous
+devils in our hospital? I see us looking in on them and saying: 'Oh,
+you're all right! Three cheers for harmony. Come out and play golf with
+the staff.'"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>After Eric had gone my mother lay back on the pillow, her shining eyes
+on Bettina pirouetting noiselessly about the room. I begged Bettina to
+stop her gyrating.</p>
+
+<p>She explained she was doing the cheque dance. Mercifully there was this
+antidote&mdash;I mean postscript to Aunt Josephine's letter. "Nearer the
+time" she would send us the money for our tickets. The enclosed £40 was
+for clothes.</p>
+
+<p>Now the way was clear!</p>
+
+<p>No.</p>
+
+<p>The question still was, Who, this side of London, could be trusted to
+make our frocks? The seriousness of the consideration brought the cheque
+dance to an end. We sat and thought.</p>
+
+<p>The precise date of this visit was not yet fixed. Aunt Josephine had
+asked what time would suit us best.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With one voice, Betty and I cried, "<i>June!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>But we were promptly told (and we agreed) that to suggest June would be
+too grasping. Aunt Josephine would have other, more important, guests
+eager to come to her for the Coronation month. So we answered: Any time
+convenient to her.</p>
+
+<p>Then that admirable Aunt wrote back: "Would next month do?" And would we
+stay for the Coronation?</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the breathless shortness of the time of preparation, Bettina
+composed Coronation dances and practised curtseying to the Queen, though
+she knew quite well that she would only see Her Majesty at a distance
+driving by in her golden coach.</p>
+
+<p>The one consideration that sobered Bettina was who, <i>who</i>&mdash;on this short
+notice, with all the feminine world crying passionately for frocks&mdash;who
+could be found to make ours? The more plain and simple, the more
+important was style and cut. Nobody in the country-side was competent
+for such an undertaking.</p>
+
+<p>Brighton? Very dear, and not first-rate.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Bettina clapped her hands.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The little French dressmaker Hermione told us about."</p>
+
+<p>The very person! Only, wouldn't she be up to the eyes in work? We
+remembered, too, she was said to be "not strong." She didn't care, as a
+rule, to work out of London. But she had come to sew for those horrid
+people Lord Helmstone let the Pond House to the year before. The people
+turned out to be badly off, and, after doing some damage, they had gone
+away without paying their rent. A law-suit was pending between them and
+Lord Helmstone. We had never known them, but we could not help noticing
+their clothes. They were beautiful. Even my mother said so.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had played golf once or twice with the boy and girl. One day
+she had admired openly something the girl was wearing.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, looks quite Bond Street, doesn't it?" the girl said. "And all done
+at home by a little dressmaker at four-and-six a day."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had got the woman's address, specially for us, she
+said&mdash;meaning for Bettina. Hermione was always advising Bettina about
+her clothes and making the child discontented with what she had.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We had not wanted any "little tame dressmaker" at the time, but we were
+enchanted now, when Bettina turned up the card inscribed:</p>
+
+<p class="nodent">
+<span style="margin-left: 5.75em;" class="smcap">"MADAME AURORE,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">"87, Crutchley Street,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"Leicester Square."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Madame Aurore!" my mother echoed. "No doubt a cockney of the cockneys!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p class="chapend">She was not a cockney. And she was a great surprise.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><span class="medium">PLANTING THYME</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few
+days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to
+bring.</p>
+
+<p>And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of
+the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.</p>
+
+<p>The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly
+after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats&mdash;a
+business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to
+finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south
+bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying
+under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I
+worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds'
+singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many
+days like this&mdash;with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the
+sheltered south-west corner, were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> the bees in any number tuning up
+their fiddles.</p>
+
+<p>I looked up from my work and saw&mdash;at that most unusual hour&mdash;Eric Annan
+at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd&mdash;excited. I dropped the
+garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Matter? What should be the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had
+betrayed himself.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you looked as if&mdash;as if something had happened," I said. What
+I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I
+thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious
+morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the
+heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.</p>
+
+<p>But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not
+like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down
+over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them
+firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their
+roots.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you planting there?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last
+year.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He
+looked astonished.</p>
+
+<p>I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early
+to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking
+delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I
+confessed the walks.</p>
+
+<p>"You ought not to have told me," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."</p>
+
+<p>I went on planting thyme.</p>
+
+<p>"Promise me, for these next days <i>you</i> won't go either."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" I asked again.</p>
+
+<p>"Because my thoughts might go wandering."</p>
+
+<p>I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me."
+He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next&mdash;how many
+days am I to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> cooped up when the morning is at its best?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing
+other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you
+going to put in?"</p>
+
+<p>"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.</p>
+
+<p>"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.</p>
+
+<p>"So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They
+'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my
+mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're
+annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue
+butterflies would be a poor sort of place."</p>
+
+<p>We talked irrelevancies for a moment more&mdash;the passion of the
+convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts
+of moths and butterflies preferred.</p>
+
+<p>He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that
+trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and
+painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to
+please my mother.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> "Personally," I had never bothered much about the
+butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.</p>
+
+<p>I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and
+sybarites&mdash;all for colour and sweet scents.</p>
+
+<p>He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the
+rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies
+were much misunderstood. "In their way&mdash;and a very good way, too&mdash;they
+answer to the call."</p>
+
+<p>"What call?"</p>
+
+<p>"The call to serve the ends of life."</p>
+
+<p>I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general
+moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"</p>
+
+<p>"More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said butterflies were
+no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more
+immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers.</p>
+
+<p>It was such solemn talk for butterflies. I told him the two sulphur
+yellows reeling in the sunshine were laughing at him. "'Ends of life'
+indeed! They simply <i>love</i> bright colour and things that smell
+sweet...."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than
+any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all
+life comes from lovers."</p>
+
+<p>At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange
+thing was it seemed to frighten him.</p>
+
+<p>We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the
+honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited&mdash;holding breath.</p>
+
+<p>Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his
+collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had
+noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors,
+Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the
+thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I
+asked, I thought I knew.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><span class="medium">ERIC'S SECRET</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">My sister and I breakfasted in the morning-room in those days, and we
+always had a fire for Bettina's sake on chilly mornings.</p>
+
+<p>In the back of my mind I was hoping Eric's complaint of cold was an
+excuse. If my first impression had been right, if he had something to
+tell me, he would tell it better indoors. I should hear it better,
+sitting beside him.</p>
+
+<p>The pang when he passed the sofa by! I was wrong.... I was an idiot....</p>
+
+<p>He drew up before the ungenerous little fire and began at once to speak
+with suppressed excitement of a "secret."</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;the sort of thing that&mdash;well, I wouldn't trust my own brother with
+it." And upon that he stopped short.</p>
+
+<p>I did not say: "You can trust me." But I hardly breathed in the pause. I
+felt it all hung on whether he told me. What hung? Why,
+everything&mdash;whether life was going to be kind to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> me some day ...
+whether it was well or ill that I had been born.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to be content with having told me there was a secret. For he
+changed the subject abruptly to the Bungalow, and what an adept Bootle
+was at inoculation and the preparation of cultures. Bootle possessed the
+great and glorious faculty of accuracy! One of the few men on earth
+whose account of a thing did not need to be checked.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting over the fire that morning, Eric told me that the Bungalow was a
+laboratory. Very important work had been done there last autumn. (So
+<i>that</i> was why he had stayed on!) "Tentative but highly significant
+results" had been arrived at&mdash;results which all these months of contest
+and putting to proof, in London and on the Continent, had not been able
+to upset.</p>
+
+<p>"Gods!" Eric exclaimed, with a startling vehemence. But this was a
+glorious place to work in! The best air in England! And the Bungalow had
+been an inspiration from on high! Far away from noise and interruption;
+and not merely for a few paltry hours. Great stretches of time to
+himself! Then you were so fit here.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> You slept. You had all your wits
+about you. As we knew, it was Hawkins's idea in the first place&mdash;that
+Eric should come down and rest. Well, now I was to hear something more
+about Hawkins. Hawkins was a kind of mascot. He not only was the best
+man they'd ever had in that chair at the University. He wasn't only a
+first-rate bacteriologist, and first-rate all-round man. There was
+something about Hawkins that struck fire out of other people. His rooms
+were a meeting-place for chaps keen about&mdash;well, about the things that
+matter. Hawkins gave a dinner at his club one night to some London
+University men and a couple of distinguished foreigners.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, we talked shop. We argued and stirred one another up, and
+the sparks flew. When the rest had gone Hawkins and I stayed talking in
+the smoking-room. About an idea"&mdash;Eric looked round to see that the door
+was shut&mdash;"a new idea I was working at for dealing with cancer."</p>
+
+<p>"Dealing!" I echoed, leaning forward. "You mean curing?"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;I told Hawkins about an experiment I'd been making. As I've said,
+Hawkins is very intelligent.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> But he contested my conclusions. I grew
+hot. We argued. I told him more and more. Hawkins thought my experiments
+too rough-and-ready. Even if they weren't rough-and-ready, to be
+conclusive they must be tried on an extended scale. I stood up for the
+validity of tests, on a small scale, done with an infinity of care&mdash;a
+ruthless spending of the investigator rather than multiplication of the
+subject. All the same, I couldn't deny that precious time was being
+wasted and many lives. Hawkins was right. I did need a trained staff,
+and I needed&mdash;oh, masses of things I had not got, and had no prospect of
+getting. We had tried the forlorn hope of a Government grant&mdash;and
+failed. We agreed that, in working out an idea like mine, the crucial
+danger lay in premature publicity. We are in a cleft stick in these
+matters. Without the right people knowing, believing, helping, it is
+hard&mdash;pretty nearly impossible&mdash;to go forward. I sat, rather dejected,
+and stared at the fire. The smoking-room had been empty except for a
+little, dried-up old man, who was half asleep over the evening papers. A
+few minutes after Hawkins had gone out to pay his bill, the little old
+man waked up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> and went to a writing-table. In a half-minute or so I
+looked round, and he was standing quite near me, warming his back at the
+fire.</p>
+
+<p>"'I've been eavesdropping,' he said. Lord! I was scared. How much had I
+given away? 'I don't know anything about this subject,' he said. 'But
+I've an idea you do. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on it. My name's
+Pearmain,' he said, and he showed me the signature on a cheque. 'A
+thousand pounds to start you.' He laid the cheque down on the little
+table among the matches and cigar-ends. 'You can let me know when you
+need more,' he said. He fished a card out of an inside pocket, and
+chucked it on top of the cheque. Naturally I was staggered. He <i>seemed</i>
+right enough in his head, but I was sure he couldn't be.... When Hawkins
+came back I introduced him. We talked awhile longer. Then the old man
+said good-night. The next day I cashed the cheque. I gave up my post in
+the hospital, and I gave up ... a lot of things. After that I invested
+every ounce of energy I had in this undertaking. For three solid years
+I've done nothing, thought about nothing, except the one thing."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His eyes were shining as a lover's might, I thought. The sting of
+jealousy poisoned my pleasure in being taken into his confidence&mdash;a
+renewed antagonism to the work, work, always work, that made its
+triumphant claim.</p>
+
+<p>"You pretend to be more inhuman than you are," I said. "For you don't
+forget that you can help people who have only ordinary everyday
+troubles."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, I do," he laughed. "I'll have nothing to do with ordinary,
+everyday troubles."</p>
+
+<p>"You helped us&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's different&mdash;an exception. Just for once...." He seemed to
+excuse himself, for wasting time on us. He said the most extravagant
+things. "A revolution might have swept England. I should have gone on
+attenuating serums and inoculating guinea-pigs."</p>
+
+<p>It may have been something in my manner, or just my silence, that pulled
+him up. He spoke of the share we at Duncombe had had in "what's
+happened."</p>
+
+<p>"When I was clean worked out and dead-beat, I came here."</p>
+
+<p>We hadn't any notion of the "rest and refreshment&mdash;the&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> He looked
+at me out of those clear red-brown eyes of his, and seemed to
+deliberate.</p>
+
+<p>A sense of delicious panic seized me. "And&mdash;the&mdash;the experiments. How do
+they come on?" I asked, but I wasn't thinking of them at all.</p>
+
+<p>"That," he said, sinking his voice&mdash;"that's just what I'm coming to;
+though I hoped I shouldn't tell you. I didn't mean to say anything at
+all this morning, except that I was going to be a hermit for these next
+days. But you aren't a chatterbox. The fact is ... last night I believe
+I stumbled on the secret."</p>
+
+<p>I don't know what I said, but it pleased him. His eyes were full of
+gentle brilliancy. "Yes, yes," he said. "I knew <i>you'd</i> understand."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, it was good to see him with that light in his face!</p>
+
+<p>And we sat there, with the morning sun shining over us, and just looked
+gladness at each other. Then I said I thought he must be the happiest
+man in England.</p>
+
+<p>He half put out his hand, and drew it back. "I am to find that out, too,
+very soon," he said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> The clock downstairs chimed ten. Eric jumped up
+like a person with a train to catch.</p>
+
+<p>He had taken me into his counsels prematurely like this, he said,
+because he wanted to feel sure that I wasn't putting any wrong
+construction on the fact of his burying himself for these next days. "I
+like to think you are understanding. If I have any good news, I'll come
+and tell you. If you don't hear, you'll know I don't dare let go my clue
+even for an hour, except to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>And now he must go.</p>
+
+<p>I went with him as far as the gate.</p>
+
+<p>He walked with head bent, and eyes that saw things hidden from me.
+Already he was back in the Bungalow.</p>
+
+<p>I felt the misery of being deserted. But I felt, too, the strong
+intelligence, the iron purpose, in the man. And though I was torn and
+aching, I was proud. For all my jealousy, as I saw the mouth so firm-set
+under the red-brown thatch, saw the colour in his face, something
+reached me, too, of the heat of this passion to find out&mdash;something of
+the absorption of the man of science in his task. Here was the new kind
+of soldier going to his post.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I held out my hand. "Good luck!"</p>
+
+<p>He took it, then dropped it quickly.</p>
+
+<p>And quickly, without once looking back, he walked away.</p>
+
+<p>I watched him hurrying across the links till one of the heath hollows
+swallowed him up.</p>
+
+<p>As I turned to go back to my thyme-planting, I heard the dog-cart
+rattling along the stony road.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore!</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">I never finished planting the thyme.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><span class="medium">MADAME AURORE</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Madame Aurore was little and wasted and shrill.</p>
+
+<p>She had deep scars in her neck, and dead-looking yellow hair.</p>
+
+<p>She was drenched in cheap scent.</p>
+
+<p>Her untidy, helter-skelter dress gave no hint of the admirable taste she
+lavished upon others.</p>
+
+<p>She saw at once what we ought to have, and she talked about our clothes
+with an enthusiasm as great as Betty's own.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but <i>Madame!</i>" she remonstrated dramatically, when my mother showed
+her the new white satin, which was for me, and a creamy lace gown which
+was to be modernised for Bettina&mdash;"not <i>böt</i> vhite!"</p>
+
+<p>My mother explained that my gown was to have rose-coloured garnishing.</p>
+
+<p>"Mais non! mais <i>non!</i>" Madame must pardon her for the liberty, but she,
+Madame Aurore, could not bring herself to see our chief advantage thrown
+away.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What, then, was our chief advantage? Betty demanded.</p>
+
+<p>What indeed, but the contrast between us. The moment she laid eyes on
+the hair of Mademoiselle Bettina she had said to herself: the frock of
+Mademoiselle Bettina should be that tender green of tilleul&mdash;with just a
+note of bleu de ciel. Oh, a dress of spring-time&mdash;an April dress, a gay
+little dress, for all its tenderness! A dress to make happy the heart of
+all who look thereon.</p>
+
+<p>But "green!" We had sent all the way to London for the white satin, and
+we had no green.</p>
+
+<p>Then 'twas in truth une bonne chance that Madame Aurore <i>had!</i> She often
+bought up bargains and gave her clients an opportunity to acquire them.
+She rushed out of the room, and returned with a piece of silk chiffon of
+the most adorable hue. She showed us the effect over white satin. My
+satin. But then, as Madame Aurore said, we could so easily send to Stagg
+and Mantle's for more.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me out of snapping black eyes&mdash;eyes like animated
+boot-buttons. "Yes, yes; for you, Mademoiselle, ze note sall be sérénité
+... hein? Zis priceless old lace over ivory satin.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> Ah...." She struck
+an attitude. "I <i>see</i> it. So ... and so. A ceinture panne, couleur de
+feuille d'automne touched with gold broderie. Hein? Oh, very distingué,
+hein?"</p>
+
+<p>"It must not be expensive"; we had to say that to Madame Aurore all that
+first day, at regular intervals. But she had her way. She sewed hard,
+and she chattered as hard as she sewed.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina ran across her in the passage that first evening as Madame
+Aurore came up from supper. And they began instantly on the fruitful
+theme of "green gown." My mother called out to Bettina that she had
+talked enough about clothes for one day, and in any case she had left us
+to go early to bed. Bettina regretted her rash promise&mdash;wasn't the least
+tired, and could have talked clothes till cock-crow! There was some
+argument on this head at the door, in which Madame Aurore joined, with
+too great a freedom, and an elaborate air of ranging herself on my
+mother's side. This pleased, least of all, the person Madame Aurore
+designed to propitiate.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore, I am sure, had not been in the house an hour before she
+had taken the measure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> of our main preoccupation. Mademoiselle Bettina
+ought to be grateful, she said, to have a mother so devoted, so
+solicitous. Standing near the open door, she piled up an exaggerated
+case of maternal love. There was nothing in life like the love between
+mother and child. Ah, didn't she know! Her own little girl&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>My mother said she must have the door shut now, and I was sent to undo
+Betty's gown.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina thought it angelic of Madame Aurore not to resent our mother's
+lack of interest in the small Aurore. According to Bettina, Madame
+showed a wonderfully nice disposition in not withdrawing her interest
+from us after that. She seemed rather to imply: very well, you don't
+care about my child ... but I am still ready to care about yours.</p>
+
+<p>"Parfaitement!" ... the little dressmaker remembered Bettina's passing
+Dew Pond House the summer before. It was true what Hermione had
+reported. Madame Aurore had leaned out of the window to watch Bettina.
+She had even expressed the wish that she might have the dressing of
+cette jolie enfant.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, but life was a droll affair!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bettina thought it entirely delightful. She went about the house
+singing. The first time Madame Aurore heard Bettina she arrested the
+rapid stab of her basting needle: "Who ees dat?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is my youngest daughter."</p>
+
+<p>"She tink to go on ze stage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no."</p>
+
+<p>"Not? It ees a vast, zat."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>She was always cold.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever we were out of the morning-room she piled on the coal. On the
+second day I remonstrated. Fuel, I explained, was very expensive so far
+from the coal-fields. She smiled. "You are ze careful one, hein?" and
+she looked at me in a way which made me uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>But I did not feel about the poor little creature as my mother did.</p>
+
+<p>My mother went so far as to wish we had not sent for her. She would
+never have allowed her to come if she had seen her first. I thought my
+mother severe.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody else, including the servants, liked Madame Aurore. No wonder.
+She spent her life doing things for people. Sewing for us all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> day like
+mad, so that our two best frocks might be finished in spite of the
+shortness of the time; and still ready at nightfall to show the cook how
+to make p'tite marmite, or sauce à la financière&mdash;equally ready to
+advise the housemaid how to give the Bond Street, not to say the Rue de
+la Paix, touch to her Sunday alpaca, and chic to old Ransom's beehive
+hat.</p>
+
+<p>If she asked them one and all more questions in a minute than they could
+answer in a month, what did that show but the generous interest she took
+in her fellow-beings?</p>
+
+<p>Bettina, with her little air of large experience, said that Madame
+Aurore was the most "sympathetic" person she had ever met. Madame
+Aurore's benevolent concern about our clothes, our soups, sauces, and
+servants, and everything that was ours, extended to our friends and
+relations and everything that was theirs. She had never, she said, known
+people&mdash;let alone such charming people as we&mdash;with so few acquaintances.
+Bettina thought Madame Aurore was sorry for us.</p>
+
+<p>She asked a great deal about the Helmstones. "Ze only friends and zey
+are avay for seex mont!" Ah, it was well we were going to London. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+should die, else, of aloneness. Aunt Josephine plainly was the one ray
+of light in our grey existence. Where did she live? Lowndes Square! Ah,
+but a very expensive and splendid part of London! No news to us, who had
+our own private measure for social altitudes. Bettina had looked out
+Lowndes Square on our faded map of London. Aunt Josephine was only a
+private person, but she lived nearer the King and Queen than the
+Helmstones did.</p>
+
+<p>And for all her being a Biosophist she had asked us to stay for the
+Coronation. Bettina frequently led the conversation to the great event
+of June. But this queer little Frenchwoman was more interested in Aunt
+Josephine than she was in the King and Queen. Here was distinction for
+an Aunt!</p>
+
+<p>And what was she like&mdash;this lady? We must have a picture of our only and
+so valuable relation.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina went and rooted about in the deep print and photograph drawer,
+till she brought Aunt Josephine to light. Very faded and old-fashioned
+looking, but Madame Aurore regarded the face with a respectful
+enthusiasm. "Oh, une<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> grande dame! une vraie grande dame!" Madame Aurore
+understood better now what was required.</p>
+
+<p>We repudiated, on our aunt's behalf, the idea that she was so much
+grande dame as philanthropist, thinker, recluse. We did not deny her
+grandeur. We but clarified it; or, at least, Bettina did.</p>
+
+<p>"Bettina talks too much to that woman," my mother said to me privately.
+She sent for Bettina and told her she was not to speak to Madame Aurore
+about anything except her work.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina thought to interpret this order literally would be inhuman.
+Besides, she considered it very nice of Madame Aurore to take such an
+interest in us. "<i>I</i> am grateful when people take an interest," said
+Bettina with her air of superiority.</p>
+
+<p>When my mother heard that Bettina had been discussing Aunt Josephine,
+and had unearthed the photograph to show to Madame Aurore, she was
+annoyed. "Go and bring me the picture," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina went into the morning-room, and looked about for some minutes.
+The little dressmaker sat there, in a litter of white and green, sewing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+furiously. Bettina said at last that she hated most dreadfully to bother
+Madame Aurore, but where was that old photograph?</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore looked up absently. "Had Mademoiselle Bettina not taken it
+out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I did&mdash;&mdash;" Bettina scoured the house.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Josephine's photograph was never found.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I was glad our mother did not know that Bettina had told Madame Aurore
+about the pendant and the diamond star. Bettina excused herself by
+saying Madame Aurore had been so certain a lady like our mother must
+have jewels, and that she would lend them to her daughters, in order to
+put the finishing touch of elegance to our toilette. Betty had felt it
+due to our mother to acknowledge that a part, at least, of this exalted
+expectation was not so wide of the mark. And Bettina endorsed Madame
+Aurore's opinion that a diamond star certainly <i>would</i> "light up" my
+ivory satin and old lace. Also&mdash;but no, we must do without.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The green frock was all but finished. We had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> brought the cheval glass
+out of my mother's room. She was "not strong enough to stand the
+patchouli," so she missed the great moment of the final trying on.
+Bettina stood before the glass, looking somehow more childish than ever,
+or rather seeming less of common earth and more of fairyland, in the
+tunic-frock of green, her short curls on her neck.</p>
+
+<p>My fancy that she was like somebody out of "The Midsummer Night's
+Dream," was set to flight by Madame Aurore's shower of couturière's
+compliment, mixed with highly practical considerations, such as: "See
+how it falls when you sit down. Parfaitement! And can you valk in it?
+But <i>wis grace!</i>" Bettina proved she could. "A merveille! Sapristi!
+Mademoiselle Bettine would see the sensation she was going to create in
+London. Could she lift ze arm&mdash;hein?" Mais belle comme un ange!&mdash;many
+makers of quite beautiful gowns studied the effect seulement en repos.
+Mademoiselle Bettine would, without doubt, dance in that frock. Let us
+see, did it lend itself? Bettina moved about the morning-room to waltz
+time&mdash;laughing at and with Madame Aurore; stopping to make court
+curtsies;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> watching in the glass if green frock had pretty manners.</p>
+
+<p>One thing more, its maker said, and behold Perfection! It needed ... it
+cried aloud for a single jewel.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes." Bettina's look fell. No doubt the finishing touch would have
+been a pearl and emerald pendant. But&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore struck in with a torrential rapture, drowning explanation
+and regret. Life, Madame Aurore shrilled, was for ever using her, humble
+instrument though she was&mdash;for the working out of these benevolences.
+There had she&mdash;but three days ago&mdash;all innocent, unknowing&mdash;tossed that
+piece of chiffon tilleul into her trunk. Or rather, not her hand
+performed the act&mdash;not hers at all. The hand of Fate! And now, <i>The
+Finger!</i> ... pointing straight at the pearl and emerald pendant. But,
+instantly, must Mademoiselle Bettine go and get the ravishing jewel&mdash;the
+diamond star, as well, while she was about it.</p>
+
+<p>Then poor Betty had to say these glories were no more.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore snapped her boot-button eyes, and rolled them up. Our
+poor, <i>poor</i> mother!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> Deeply, ah! but profoundly, Madame Aurore
+commiserated une dame si distinguée, si élégante, being in straitened
+circumstances. Ah, Madame Aurore understood! She would be most
+economical with the coals.</p>
+
+<p>All the same she wasn't.</p>
+
+<p>But what did it matter! since she turned us out dresses that we were
+sure Hermione, herself, would have characterised as "Dreams." Bettina
+went about the house, singing:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?'</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Going to London, Sir,' she said...."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Madame Aurore even managed to put the finishing touches to the two
+frocks made in the village, which Bettina called our Coronation
+robes&mdash;just white muslin, but not "just muslin" at all, after they had
+passed through Madame Aurore's hands. She listened indulgently while
+Bettina wondered how the young Princes would like driving through London
+in a gold coach, and above all how the little Princess would feel; and
+how she would look; and how did Madame Aurore think she would do her
+hair?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't like that woman," my mother observed pointedly to Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dearest, she feels it. I know from something&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not object to her knowing. But I am not interested in Madame
+Aurore." My mother dismissed her.</p>
+
+<p>The fact was that none of the torrent of talk (carried on now in a
+whisper, with elaborate deference to the chère malade)&mdash;none of it had
+to do with Madame Aurore herself. We had had to ask her all of the
+little we came to know about her. She had no regular business in London.
+Ah, no, she was too often ill. She merely went out to work when she was
+"strong enuss."</p>
+
+<p>"Zen too, ze leedle gal. I haf to sink about her." The thought seemed
+one to harass. All would be different if Mme. Aurore had a shop.</p>
+
+<p>We agreed that to have a shop full of lovely French models, would be
+delightful. And by-and-by the little Aurore would help in the shop.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Nevair!</i>" said Mme. Aurore with sudden passion. She knew all about
+being in shops. It was to prevent her daughter from knowing, too,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> that
+Mme. Aurore must make money. The little Aurore should go to the Convent
+school&mdash;which seemed somehow an odd destination for the daughter of
+Madame Aurore. She spoke of it as a far dream, beckoning.</p>
+
+<p>"Nossing&mdash;but <i>nossing</i> can be done in zis world vidout monny." And what
+people will do for money&mdash;oh, little did we know! But the world was like
+that. Eh bien, Madame Aurore had not made it. <i>Had</i> she done so, it
+would be a better place.</p>
+
+<p>Betty and I smiled at the pains taken to make this clear. Madame Aurore
+professed herself revolted by an arrangement which made "ze goodness or
+ze badness of a pairson" dependent upon where you happened to find
+yourself.</p>
+
+<p>"Par example you can be extrêmement good <i>here</i>." More. She would go so
+far as to say you must be a genius to discover how to be bad here.</p>
+
+<p>Through Betty's laughing protest, the little woman went on with
+seriousness to assure us it was "une chose bien différente dans ..." she
+checked herself, bit off the end of her thread, and spat it out.</p>
+
+<p>"It is different, you mean, in Crutchley<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> Street?" Betty asked. And,
+though she got no answer, I think we both understood the anxious mother
+to be thinking of the small Aurore left all alone in one of the world's
+Mean Streets. Perhaps the reason Betty got no answer to her question was
+that she had slightly raised her voice in putting it, and I had said,
+"Sh!"</p>
+
+<p>"What ees it?" Madame Aurore demanded, looking round.</p>
+
+<p>"I was only reminding Betty," I said. "We mustn't disturb my mother."</p>
+
+<p>Hah! naturally not. <i>Whatever</i> happened, she was not to be disturbed!</p>
+
+<p>I was afraid, from the tone in which Madame Aurore said this, that she
+thought I had been reproving her. And, to divert her thoughts, I asked:
+"Who takes care of her&mdash;the little daughter&mdash;while you are away?"</p>
+
+<p>Again she bit viciously at the thread. "Not motch 'care'!" The small
+eyes snapped as she drew the thread through the needle's eye. I had
+never seen even her hands fly so fast, or her whole feverish little body
+attack the basting with such fury of energy as after that reference to
+the child left behind in Crutchley Street.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bettina said soothingly: "I suppose you left her with some good friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ze best I haf."</p>
+
+<p>The admission was made in an accent so coldly hopeless that Bettina,
+round-eyed, said: "Oh, dear, isn't she a nice friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is like ozzers. She is as nice as she can afford." Madame Aurore
+had recovered her shrill vivacity. She had not, after all, taken to
+heart my hint about keeping our voices down. "In some parts of ze
+vorld," she went on, in that raised, defiant note, "you might be quite
+good for a week; wis luck for a few months; but you could not be good
+from year's end to year's end."</p>
+
+<p>"Why was that?" Bettina asked softly.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore laughed out. "Ze climat!" she said, in a voice that must
+certainly have penetrated the next room. "Somesing in ze air." Then
+lower, with a tigerish swiftness: "I shall not ron ze risk for <i>my</i>
+liddle gal! <i>Non!</i>" She tossed the satin on the machine, thrust it under
+the needle, and seemed to work the treadle by dint of compressing lips
+and knitting brows.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina and I agreed we would not talk to her any more about her
+daughter, since, unlike most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> mothers, the thought of her child did not
+soften Madame Aurore, but made her hard and angry.</p>
+
+<p>We put this down to wounded feelings at my mother's curt dismissal of
+the theme.</p>
+
+<p>Surreptitiously&mdash;for she knew leave would be refused&mdash;Bettina gave
+Madame Aurore some of our old toys, and other little gifts, to take home
+to her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>I did not prevent this, for I, too, felt uneasily that we ought somehow
+to make up for our mother's nervous detestation of Madame Aurore.</p>
+
+<p>Had this, as the little dressmaker hinted, something of sheer sickness
+in it&mdash;an invalid's caprice? Bettina said lightheartedly: "Oh, it's only
+because Aurore is a foreigner. Mother admits she never did like
+foreigners."</p>
+
+<p>After the first day there was almost no personal interchange between
+Madame Aurore and her employer. Yet I had a queer feeling that a silent
+drama was being played out between those two who, without meeting, were
+acting and reacting upon each other.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Aurore asked each day, How was madame? in a voice of extremest
+solicitude&mdash;nay, of gloomiest apprehension.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I found myself wrestling with an uncomfortable feeling that this
+hopeless view of my mother's health was somehow prompted by a desire "to
+get even" with the one unresponsive member of our little circle&mdash;to get
+even in the only way open to Madame Aurore. I knew she advised the
+housemaid to look out for another place, and offered to find her one in
+London, where she would be paid double, and have almost nothing to do.
+The housemaid was greatly tempted, but I was told she said she wouldn't
+go till her mistress was better.</p>
+
+<p>"Bettair! She vill not last a mont!" said Madame Aurore.</p>
+
+<p>At first such echoes as reached me of these prognostications made me
+merely angry. But I could not quite cast them aside. I began to wonder
+miserably if there were anything in this view. After all we, too&mdash;even
+Eric&mdash;had held it ourselves, only such a little while before!</p>
+
+<p>I wrote to Aunt Josephine to say that if my mother were not better by
+Monday morning, I should bring Bettina as arranged; but I would stay
+only one night and go home the next day.</p>
+
+<p>The question rose on Friday as to whether<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> Madame Aurore should return
+to London on Saturday night, or some time on Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>"Saturday night," said my mother with decision.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina ventured to urge the Sunday alternative. "The poor little thing
+is so tired after sewing all day&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>To which my mother responded by ordering the cart for Saturday evening.</p>
+
+<p class="marbigbot">"I cannot sleep with that woman in the house."</p>
+
+
+<p>Bettina ran in to say Madame Aurore was ready to say good-bye. To our
+embarrassment, our mother would not permit Madame Aurore to enter the
+room, even for the purpose of taking leave.</p>
+
+<p>We went out and did what we could to soften the refusal. "She has not
+been sleeping...." "She is trying to rest...." "She is so much obliged
+to you...."</p>
+
+<p>Ah, Madame Aurore understood. Our poor, poor mother was undoubtedly
+failing. We were adjured to take every care. Certainly we should not
+both leave the poor lady.</p>
+
+<p>We told Madame Aurore that we should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> never forget her. "I shall take
+good care of the address," Bettina said.</p>
+
+<p>No, Madame Aurore would send us a new address. She was looking for
+larger rooms. She believed she was going to be stronger now. She meant
+to take on two or three hands. In that case, she would not be able to go
+out any more to people's houses. She would let us know....</p>
+
+<p>She filled the hall with her patchouli and shrill vivacity, and
+presently was gone.</p>
+
+<p>When we went back into my mother's room, we found her telling the
+housemaid to hang our gowns in a draught "to purify them."</p>
+
+<p>Betty was moved to some final remonstrance.</p>
+
+<p>My mother cut her short: "That was a horrible woman!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well," I said, "she's gone."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"Yes. That is the best that can be said of Madame Aurore. We are done
+with her for ever."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV<br /><span class="medium">GOING TO LONDON</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Mercifully, no soul can stand at the pitch of tension long. Those too
+frail snap. The strong relax. As I have learned since, few who have to
+do with lingering illness but come to know the gradual, inevitable
+dulling of apprehension in the watchers. Eric says the power of human
+adaptability sees to it that the abnormal state of the sufferer shall
+come by mere continuance to wear an air of the normal. And so the
+watcher, with no violence to loyalty, or conscience, is relieved of the
+sharper sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, my mother seemed to us in no worse case than many a time
+before. Bettina and I agreed that she began to improve the moment
+Duncombe air was no longer poisoned for her by the presence of poor
+Madame Aurore. What Eric had said of our trustworthy servants was true.
+Yet I had brought my mother to agree that my absence, now, was to be a
+matter only of hours, even if I went back for the Coronation.</p>
+
+<p>And still I was not spared a profound sinking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> of the heart at the
+moment of leave-taking. I put my misgiving down to the fear that parting
+from Bettina for four long weeks, would be more than my mother's scant
+reserve of strength could bear.</p>
+
+<p>As for Bettina (oh, when I remember that!)&mdash;Bettina showed the bravest
+front; calling back from the door: "I shall write you every blessed
+day."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," my mother steadied her voice to answer. "I shall want to hear
+everything. The good and&mdash;the less good."</p>
+
+<p>"There won't be any 'less good.' It's all going to be glorious."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>As Big Klaus's dog-cart took us across the heath I strained my eyes for
+some glimpse of Eric. A week that day since he had come and shared his
+secret! He could never mean to let me go without a word. Not till the
+train was in motion could I give up hope. I stood a moment longer at the
+window looking back. No sign.</p>
+
+<p>I took my seat between Betty and an old gentleman; she and I both too
+stirred and excited to talk. Betty, half-turned away, looked out of her
+window,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> and I, across her shoulder and over the flying hedges, looked
+still for a man who might be walking the field-paths, looked for the
+bright green roof of his Bungalow, looked for the chimneys of the farm.</p>
+
+<p>No sign.</p>
+
+<p>I sat fighting down my tears.</p>
+
+<p>Not an hour of these bustling days had been so full, but I had felt the
+blank of Eric's silence. And now again I met the ache of loss with: This
+will teach you! You were dreading a little time away. He adds a week to
+our parting. <i>He</i> doesn't mind. It's only you, poor fool&mdash;only you who
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>I looked round, in a sudden terror, lest anyone should be noticing that
+my eyes were wet.</p>
+
+<p>Mercifully, the people were all looking at Betty. I looked at Betty,
+too. I could not see her eyes, but the nearer cheek was that lovely
+colour whose name she gave once to an evening sky. We had come up on the
+top of a knoll and stood for a moment, breathless. My mother had said no
+painter could get such a colour. And neither were there any words in the
+language to describe it. For it was not red, not flame, not pink, nor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+orange. But Betty, looking steadily, had found the right words for it:
+"A fiery rose."</p>
+
+<p>And that was the colour in Betty's cheeks on the way to London.</p>
+
+<p>No wonder people looked at her. There was a man who got out of the
+first-class carriage next us at every station, and walked by our window.
+He looked in at Bettina. I was glad our carriage was full. I felt sure,
+if it had not been, he would have come in. I could see Bettina did not
+resent the staring. And then I saw her look out of the corner of her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Bettina!" I whispered. "Don't encourage that strange man to stare in
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Me?</i>" she said. "What am I doing?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her again that she encouraged him. But I was handicapped by not
+being able to say just how. I admitted that what she did was very
+slight. But it was enough. "It was what you did to Eddie Monmouth."
+Then, because she pretended not to understand, I told her that she was
+falling into bad deceitful ways. I knew she had written to Ranny
+Dallas.... Yes, and kept writing, though the moment I realised what was
+going on I wrote to Ranny myself. I said<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> if any more letters came from
+him, I should have to tell Betty about the girl in Norfolk. Ranny wrote
+back that he had told Betty himself! And still they went on
+corresponding, secretly. I said to her now, that I should hardly be
+surprised if she was hoping to meet Ranny in London.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, one may 'hope' almost anything," said Betty airily.</p>
+
+<p>"Not of a man who is engaged to another girl!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Betty; "as long as he isn't married...."</p>
+
+<p>Then, rather frightened, I asked outright if she was really expecting to
+meet Ranny somewhere.</p>
+
+<p>"How can I say? He is fond of the opera," she said in a very superior,
+grown-up way. "I <i>might</i> happen to see him some night in the throng&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"In the throng! Betty," I said. "You have given Ranny Dallas your
+address."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said; "but I've given it to Tom Courtney."</p>
+
+<p>Tom Courtney was Ranny's red-haired friend. "If you had watched," Betty
+said, "you would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> know that I was corresponding with Tom Courtney, too.
+Chiefly about Ranny. Tom Courtney is a splendid friend. He explains
+things much better than Ranny can. And then" (Betty's momentary
+annoyance vanished in laughter)&mdash;"then, too, Tom can
+spell&mdash;beautifully!"</p>
+
+<p>I refused to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you'd be horrified," Betty said again, "and that is why I have
+to keep things from you. You are a sort of nun. <i>You</i> never feel as if
+all your blood had been whipped to a syllabub. And besides&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Besides?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do like nice men. I don't mind their knowing. And I don't mean to be
+an old maid. <i>You</i> wouldn't care."</p>
+
+<p>"You think I wouldn't?" I had no time to say more, for the train
+stopped. We thought at first we had reached Victoria Station, but it was
+only Clapham Junction. The "staring" man passed once more, with a porter
+behind carrying golf-clubs and portmanteau. Our carriage, too, was
+emptying. The people stood and reached things down from the racks, and
+then filed out. When the train went on we were alone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Betty was still excited, but more grave, even harassed&mdash;a look that sat
+rather pitiful on her babyish face.</p>
+
+<p>I moved up close to her again, and I told her there was something I had
+to say before we got to London. "You and I, you see, we don't know very
+much, and we get carried away."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean me," said Betty. "You are thinking about Eddie Monmouth
+and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Then I told her I did not mean her alone. "I don't know how it is," I
+said, remembering Mr. Whitby-Dawson and Captain Monmouth and Ranny&mdash;yes,
+and others&mdash;"I don't know how it is, but girls seem to 'care' more than
+men do."</p>
+
+<p>"I've thought that, too," Bettina said.</p>
+
+<p>I said I was sure it was true. Men had so much to do. Life was so full
+for them ... perhaps that took their minds off. I put my arm round
+Bettina and held her close. "I am going to confess something," I said,
+"that most older sisters would deny. But you have got nobody but me. And
+I have nobody but you. We must help each other."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall have Aunt Josephine," Betty reminded me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A stranger&mdash;and too old besides." I dismissed Aunt Josephine for the
+particular purpose in view. "I am going to tell you something
+very&mdash;particular." Then, while she looked at the cushions opposite, and
+I looked out of the window, I told her I had learned from Eric Annan
+what she had learned through the others. "We'll say it just this once,
+and never, never again so long as we live! And we may have to deny it,"
+I warned her. "But I think, if I'm honest about it with you, maybe you
+won't feel that I don't understand ... or that I am, as you say,
+'different.' You will feel closer to me," I pleaded. "And maybe we shall
+both be stronger for that." I waited a moment. I was glad Betty still
+stared straight in front of her. "We don't only care more than men do,"
+I said. "We <i>need</i> men more than they need us."</p>
+
+<p>Bettina turned at that. I felt her eyes on me. Then she looked down and
+stroked my hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I think Mr. Annan does care about you," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"A little," I said. "Not enough. Not as I care."</p>
+
+<p>Bettina pointed out that Eric Annan was not so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> young as we. "Why, he
+must be thirty. Perhaps when he was our age"&mdash;our eyes met in the new
+comradeship, and then fell&mdash;"he may have taken more interest in&mdash;more
+interest in the things we think about."</p>
+
+<p>Then she took it back. "No, no. You may depend it's only girls who are
+like that&mdash;caring so terribly much. I thought it was only me. But if you
+are like that too, maybe there are others." After a moment: "You were
+good to tell me," she said. "I don't feel so&mdash;unnatural."</p>
+
+<p>The train was slowing. The light grew grey. We were in a dim place,
+between a smoky wall and a rattling train going out as we came in. Then
+the platform, and the porters running along by our windows. "Luggage,
+miss?"</p>
+
+<p>Bettina started up.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"Aunt Josephine!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI<br /><span class="medium">AUNT JOSEPHINE</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">She was an imposing figure, beautifully dressed in black. She was
+handsomer than her picture, and younger-looking than we expected. It
+occurred to me that bio-vibratory sympathism had a thinning effect.</p>
+
+<p>Her manner was more decisive than I had expected from a dreamer. Very
+commanding and important, she stood there with her liveried servant
+behind her. Bettina had known her instantly by the grey hair rolled high
+and the pear-shaped earrings.</p>
+
+<p>She kissed us, and said I was more like my mother. And were our boxes
+labelled?</p>
+
+<p>She hardly waited for us to answer. She did not wait at all for our
+little trunk.</p>
+
+<p>"A footman will attend to the luggage," she said. As she led us down the
+platform, her eyes kept darting about in a way that made me think she
+must be expecting someone else by that train. I looked round, too. But
+nobody else seemed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> be expecting Aunt Josephine, though a woman
+towards the end of the platform looked very searchingly at our party as
+we passed. Aunt Josephine did not seem to notice. She was busy putting
+on a thick motor-veil over the lace one that was tied round her hat&mdash;her
+lovely hat, that, as Betty said afterwards, was "boiling over with black
+ostrich-feathers."</p>
+
+<p>A wonderful scent had come towards us with Aunt Josephine&mdash;nothing the
+least like that faint garden-smell that clung to our linen, from the
+sprays of lavender and dried verbena our mother put newly each year
+under the white paper of our wardrobe-shelves. Such a ghost of fragrance
+could never have survived here. This perfume of Aunt Josephine's&mdash;not so
+much strong as dominant&mdash;routed the sooty, acrid smell of the station.
+When she lifted her arms to put the chiffon over her face, fresh waves
+of the rich, mysterious scent came towards us.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed in haste to leave so mean a place as Victoria. She spoke a
+little sharply to the footman. He explained&mdash;and, indeed, we could
+see&mdash;that a great, shining motor-car was threading its way as well as it
+could through a tangle of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> taxi-cabs and inferior cars. Aunt Josephine
+stood frowning under her double veil, and once I saw her eyes go towards
+the woman who had noticed us. The woman was speaking to one of the
+porters. The porter, too, looked at Aunt Josephine and nodded. The dowdy
+woman gave the porter a tip, and sent him on an errand. I was far too
+excited to notice such uninteresting people, but for the curious
+personal kind of detestation in the look the dowdy woman fixed upon Aunt
+Josephine.</p>
+
+<p>"We won't wait," said our aunt. "We'll take this taxi."</p>
+
+<p>But just then the beautiful shining car swerved free, and we were
+hurried in. The footman spread a rug over our knees. As we glided out of
+the station I noticed the dowdy woman asking her way of a policeman.</p>
+
+<p>And the policeman didn't know the way. He shook his head. And both of
+them looked after us.</p>
+
+<p>As we whirled through the crowded streets I felt how everyone must be
+envying Bettina and me.</p>
+
+<p>Presently we came to a quiet corner. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> houses stood back from the
+street, in gardens. Our aunt's was one of these.</p>
+
+<p>I was too excited to notice much about the outside. But the inside!</p>
+
+<p>Betty and I exchanged looks. We had no idea Aunt Josephine was so rich.
+There were more big footmen&mdash;foreigners; very quick and quiet.</p>
+
+<p>The entrance-hall and stairs were wide and dim. When the front-door was
+shut, the house seemed as silent as a church on a week-day, and the
+soft-footed servants rather like the sidesmen who show strangers to
+their places. The very window was like a window in a church. It had
+stained glass in it, and black lines divided it from top to bottom, into
+sections, like church windows.</p>
+
+<p>If I had ventured to speak I should have whispered. Not even at Lord
+Helmstone's had we trodden on such carpets. No wonder our footsteps made
+no sound. Going upstairs we seemed like a procession in a picture. That
+was because the walls were immense mirrors separated by gilded columns.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Josephine had taken off her motor-veil. She had certainly grown
+much thinner since she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> had the photograph taken. That accounted for her
+being a more "aquiline" aunt than we expected. Her nose curved down,
+especially when she smiled. And her eyes were not sleepy at all&mdash;a full
+yellow eye, the iris almost black.</p>
+
+<p>We followed her along a corridor till she threw open a door. "This is
+yours," she said in the voice that was both sharp and quick.</p>
+
+<p>I looked into the wonderful pink and white room. Instead of two little
+beds, as we had at home, was one very large one. It looked like an
+Oriental throne with rose-silk hangings.</p>
+
+<p>"I will send you up some tea," she said. "And you must rest. I am having
+a friend or two to dine. So wear your smartest gown. Come," she said to
+Betty.</p>
+
+<p>"Betty is the one who ought to rest," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"And so she shall," our aunt said. "I will show Betty her room."</p>
+
+<p>Betty looked blank.</p>
+
+<p>"We are not to be together?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Together!" Aunt Josephine repeated the word with the smile that drew
+her nose down. "Oh, you shall have a room of your own."</p>
+
+<p>Betty moved a little nearer me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I explained that she and I always had the same room.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, in a small house. Here there is no need."</p>
+
+<p>I wanted to tell her that it was not need that made us share things. But
+though poor Betty looked cast down, all I said was that I should come to
+her in plenty of time to do her hair.</p>
+
+<p>"A maid will do that," my aunt said.</p>
+
+<p>But I managed to tell her quite firmly that I must show the maid how.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Josephine looked at me a moment.</p>
+
+<p>She doesn't like me, I thought. And I felt uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>As she followed her out, Betty made a sign over her shoulder that I was
+to come now.</p>
+
+<p>But after that look Aunt Josephine had given me, I felt I must walk
+warily. So I only signalled back, as much as to say "by-and-by."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A woman in a cap and apron brought me tea.</p>
+
+<p>I asked if she would mind taking the tray to my sister's room so we
+could have tea together.</p>
+
+<p>The woman said madam's orders were that the young ladies should rest. I
+reflected that Bettina<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> would probably rest better if she did not talk,
+so I said no more.</p>
+
+<p>The woman had a face like wood.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the big footmen brought in our little trunk. I got out Bettina's
+dressing-gown and slippers, and asked the wooden woman to take them to
+my sister.</p>
+
+<p>I was so tired with all the excitement that I went to sleep on the pink
+satin sofa.</p>
+
+<p>The wooden woman waked me.</p>
+
+<p>"Time to dress," she said, and she had the bath ready. I looked round
+for our little trunk.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you couldn't have a thing like that standing about in here," the
+wooden woman said.</p>
+
+<p>And, indeed, I had felt, as I saw it coming in, how out of keeping its
+shabbiness was with all the satin damask, the gilding, and the lace.</p>
+
+<p>She had done the unpacking, the wooden woman said. And there were my
+white satin frock and silk stockings on the bed. "But half the things in
+the trunk are my sister's," I said.</p>
+
+<p>She had taken the other young lady what was needed, the woman answered.
+And whatever I wanted I was to ring for.</p>
+
+<p>I felt that this was no doubt the way of London<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> ladies. But I longed
+for our shabby little trunk. It seemed the last link with home. I looked
+round the beautiful room with a sense of distaste.</p>
+
+<p>This feeling must be the homesickness I had read about.</p>
+
+<p>I went to the window. The lines that divided the long panes into panels,
+the lines that I had thought of as purely decorative were rods of iron.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be late," the wooden woman said, and she drew the silk curtains
+over the lace ones, and switched on the electric light.</p>
+
+<p>She came back while I was brushing my hair. She offered to do it for me.
+I was so glad to be able to do it myself. I would not have liked her to
+touch me.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried with my dressing so that I could go to Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>The woman tried to prevent me. But I was firm. "Show me the way, will
+you? Or shall I ask someone else?"</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated, and then seemed to think she had best do as she was told.</p>
+
+<p>Half-way down a long, soft-carpeted passage she asked me to wait an
+instant.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She knocked at one of the many doors.</p>
+
+<p>I heard my aunt's voice inside. And whispering. Only one of the electric
+lights was turned on here, in the corridor. The air was heavy. The "Aunt
+Josephine" scent, foreign, dizzily sweet, was everywhere. A light-headed
+feeling came over me. I longed for an open window. They must all be shut
+as well as curtained. Between the many doors, paintings were hung. I had
+been vaguely conscious of these as we came up. I saw now they were
+pictures of women. Most of them seemed to be in different stages of the
+bath. One was asleep in a strange position, with nothing on. I was going
+past that one when I noticed the opposite door ajar. I stopped and
+listened.</p>
+
+<p>"Bettina," I said softly.</p>
+
+<p>A voice very different from Bettina's answered in some language I did
+not know. I started back and, as I was going on, the door was opened
+wide. A lady stood on the threshold in a flood of light. A lady with a
+dazzling complexion. Her lips were so brightly red, they looked bloody.
+She had diamonds in her ears, and a diamond necklace on a neck as white
+and smooth as china. Her yellow hair was disarranged as though she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> had
+been asleep. She was wearing a kimono of scarlet silk embroidered in
+silver.</p>
+
+<p>She asked me something, not in French, not German, and not, I think,
+Italian. I said I was afraid I did not understand.</p>
+
+<p>My aunt came noiseless down the long corridor, and the foreign lady
+hastily shut her door.</p>
+
+<p>This other guest must be some very great person!</p>
+
+<p>My aunt was dressed for dinner in a gown all covered with little shining
+scales, like a snake's skin.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you doing?" she said, in an odd tone as if she had caught me
+in something underhand. I explained that I was looking for Bettina. And
+I found courage to say that I was sorry our rooms were so far apart.</p>
+
+<p>She took no notice of that. "You will see Bettina at dinner," she said,
+and it struck me she could be very stern.</p>
+
+<p>I felt my heart begin to beat, but I managed to say that I was sure
+Betty would wait for me to help her to dress.</p>
+
+<p>"I have told you she will have a maid to do all that is necessary."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I hope you won't mind," I said, "just for to-night. It is always my
+mother, or me, who dresses Bettina...."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to consider. I said to myself again: "Oh, dear, she doesn't
+like me at all."</p>
+
+<p class="marbigbot">"Take her, Curran," she said. The hard-faced woman came and piloted me
+round the angle of the corridor to Betty's door.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>We fell into each other's arms, and laughed and kissed, as though we had
+been parted for weeks.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I was determined not to let her know that Aunt Josephine and I were not
+liking one another. I only said I didn't like her taste in pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Betty tried to stand up for her. She reminded me of the statues and
+casts from the antique at Lord Helmstone's. She asked me suddenly if I
+wasn't well. I complained a little of the air. I thought we might have
+the window open while I did her hair. But Betty said, no. She had tried,
+and found she didn't understand London fastenings. So she had rung for
+the maid, and the maid had said: "This isn't the country"&mdash;and that
+people didn't like their windows open in London.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> Betty thought it quite
+reasonable. London dust and "blacks" would soon ruin this pretty white
+room.</p>
+
+<p>Betty defended everything.</p>
+
+<p>When I complained that the scent everywhere was making me headachy,
+Betty said she liked it. She wished our mother would let us use scent.
+The only thing Betty found the least fault with was the way I was doing
+her hair. She wanted it put up "in honour of London." But she looked
+such a darling with her short curls lying on her neck that I was doing
+it in the everyday way. And there wasn't time now for anything more than
+to fasten on the little wreath, for the woman came to say madam had sent
+up for us. So I hurried Betty into her frock, the woman watching out of
+those hard eyes of hers. Nobody in the whole of Betty's life had looked
+at her like that. The woman didn't want us to stop even to find a
+handkerchief. And after all, just as Betty was coming, the woman said:
+"Wait a minute," and wanted to shut the door. I stood on the threshold
+waiting. A gentleman was coming upstairs. With his hat on! He stared at
+me as he went by, and so did the footman who followed him. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> drew back
+into the room and the woman shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was that gentleman?" I asked. She seemed not to hear. So I asked
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>That</i>&mdash;oh, that is the doctor," she said. Naturally we asked if
+somebody was ill.</p>
+
+<p>"Not very," she answered in such a peculiar way we said no more.</p>
+
+<p>She stood and watched us as we went downstairs.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"Our first London dinner-party," Bettina whispered.</p>
+
+<p>We took hands. We were shaking with excitement.</p>
+
+<p>We saw ourselves going by in the mirrors between the golden columns.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">The whole place was full of tall girls in white, and little girls in
+apple-green, wearing forget-me-not wreaths in their hair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII<br /><span class="medium">AT DINNER</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Down in the lower hall were the men-servants with their watchful eyes.</p>
+
+<p>They showed us the drawing-room door.</p>
+
+<p>As we came in, I was conscious again of Aunt Josephine's appraising
+look. Then of the elaborate grey head turning towards an old man, as if
+to ask: Well, what do you think of my nieces? He had a red blotchy face.
+The kind of red that is crossed by little purple lines like the tracery
+of very tortuous rivers on a map. The lines ran zigzagging into his
+nose, which was thick at the end, round and shining. He had no hair
+except a sandy fringe, and his eyes, which had no lashes, looked as if
+he had a cold. He was introduced as "an old friend of mine"&mdash;but she
+forgot to tell us his name. We heard him called Colonel. Through all the
+scent we could not help noticing that he smelled of brandy.</p>
+
+<p>I looked round for the beautiful foreign lady.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> But I was prepared to
+find her late, after seeing her idling at her door, in a dressing-gown,
+so near the dinner-hour.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one other person. A man of about thirty-six. Good-looking
+I thought&mdash;and not happy. He had a clear face, quite without colour. The
+skin very smooth and tight. His dry brown hair was thinning on the
+crown. He had nice hands. I noticed that when he stroked his
+close-fitting moustache. I did not like him because of his manner. I did
+not know what was wrong with it. Perhaps he was only absent-minded. But
+when I tried to imagine him talking to my mother I could not.</p>
+
+<p>He was introduced first to Bettina. The others treated him as if he were
+very important. They talked about his new Rolls Royce, which turned out
+to be a motor-car. The Colonel tried to get him to say how many times he
+had been fined for "exceeding speed limit." Then they talked about "The
+Tartar." How he was always late. It would be a chance if he came at all.
+Aunt Josephine was positive he would appear. "I wired to say it was all
+right."</p>
+
+<p>"Just as well, perhaps, if he doesn't come to-night,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> the good-looking
+man said. He would be in a devil of a temper.</p>
+
+<p>Betty asked why would he? They said because his favourite horse had been
+"scratched." Betty thought it was nice of him to be so fond of his
+horse. But if it was only a scratch&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>We did not know why they laughed. But we laughed too. We tried not to
+show how unintelligible the talk was. I listened very hard. I felt like
+a learner in a foreign tongue. I understood the words but not the
+sentences.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel looked at his watch in a discontented way. Then we went in
+to dinner.</p>
+
+<p>I don't think we sat in the order Aunt Josephine had meant. But the
+absent-minded man, who had taken me in, refused to change, or to let me.
+I had the old Colonel on my left. Aunt Josephine of course at the head.
+The empty place was between her and Betty.</p>
+
+<p>The table was glittering and magnificent. We had little helpings of
+strange, strong-tasting food before the soup. And caviar.</p>
+
+<p>"You like caviar?" the Colonel said.</p>
+
+<p>I said I didn't know, for in my heart I felt it looked repulsive.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't know caviar?"</p>
+
+<p>I said of course I had heard of it. He asked where. And I said, "In
+Shakespeare." The old Colonel choked, and they all laughed to see how
+apoplectic he looked&mdash;all except Betty and me.</p>
+
+<p>I caught Betty's eye. She had that fiery-rose in her cheeks. I felt
+excited, too, and "strange." But I hoped they didn't notice. Betty and I
+had agreed that we must try not to show how unused we were to the ways
+of a great London house. So I made conversation. I asked about the
+absent guest.</p>
+
+<p>My good-looking man pretended to be annoyed. He called, in his slightly
+husky voice, across the table to Aunt Josephine: "Already she wants to
+talk about The Tartar!" I explained that I meant the foreign lady&mdash;the
+very beautiful lady I had seen upstairs looking out of her door.</p>
+
+<p>Again my man exchanged glances with Aunt Josephine. He was smiling
+disagreeably. Aunt Josephine did not smile at all. But the old Colonel
+laughed his croaking laugh, and said the lady upstairs expected people
+to go to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Does she expect dinner to go to her, too?" Betty asked. And something
+in their faces made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> Betty blush, though she didn't know why, as I saw.
+I believed they were teasing Betty, just for fun, and to see that
+beautiful colour in her cheeks flicker and deepen.</p>
+
+<p>So I leaned towards her, and across the flowers and the dazzling lights
+I told her the foreign lady was not very well. That was why she was not
+coming down.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel asked me why I thought the lady wasn't well. So I said:
+"Because I saw the doctor going up to her."</p>
+
+<p>They were all quite still for a second or two. I looked at Aunt
+Josephine. Why was it wrong to mention the doctor's visit? Was she
+afraid of making these friends of the beautiful lady anxious about her?
+My man still was smiling, but not pleasantly. I couldn't tell whether
+the strange noises the Colonel made were choking or laughing. But I felt
+more and more miserably shy; And I had no clear idea of why I should
+feel so&mdash;unless it was that nothing these people said meant what it
+seemed to mean.</p>
+
+<p>I could see that Betty was bewildered, too.</p>
+
+<p>We knew we should feel strange; we did not know we should feel like
+this.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was thankful when they all turned round and called out. "The Tartar"
+had come, after all.</p>
+
+<p>He made no apology for being late, nor for not having dressed. He
+strolled in as if the place belonged to him&mdash;a great broad-shouldered
+young man in a frock-coat. He had a round, black, cannon-ball of a head,
+and his eyebrows nearly joined. His moustache was like a little
+blacking-brush laid back against the lip, with the bristles sticking
+straight out. But he seemed to be making this effect deliberately, by
+pushing out his mouth like a pouting child; or, even more, like a person
+with swollen lips. I felt sure I could not have seen him before; but
+there was something oddly familiar about him.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded to the others.</p>
+
+<p>When Aunt Josephine said, "My nieces," he said, "Oh," stared a moment,
+and then, as he lounged into the empty place, said it had been a rotten
+race. I thought how astonished my mother would have been at such
+behaviour. Betty must have been thinking of her, too, for she put on our
+mother's manner. It was a beautiful manner, but it sat oddly on my
+little sister; it made her seem more self-possessed than she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> was. She
+turned and said: "I think you must be Mr. Whitby-Dawson."</p>
+
+<p>The young man stared.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody stared.</p>
+
+<p>He turned sharply from Betty to his hostess. She shook her head. But the
+yellow part of her big eyes had turned reddish. She looked very strange.</p>
+
+<p>A creepy feeling came over me.</p>
+
+<p>I remembered she had been "most eccentric" twenty years ago. Was
+eccentricity the sort of thing that grew worse as people grew older?</p>
+
+<p>I looked round at the company and met the eyes of the neighbour on my
+right. They were unhappy eyes; but they reassured me.</p>
+
+<p>"What put such an idea into your head?" Aunt Josephine was asking Betty.</p>
+
+<p>"Because," Betty said, and she looked at the young man again, "only
+because I saw so many of your&mdash;of Mr. Whitby-Dawson's photographs&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Really?" the young man said, in a bored voice. "That was, no doubt, a
+great privilege. My name's Williams."</p>
+
+<p>In her embarrassment Betty turned to the man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> who sat between us. "He
+has even the little scar," she said, like a person defending herself.
+"Mr. Whitby-Dawson got his scar in a duel with a student at Heidelberg.
+He studied at the University there part of one year&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Studied duelling?" the Colonel chuckled. Our absent-minded man was not
+absent-minded any more. He was listening, with a look I could not
+understand, as if he took a malicious pleasure in poor Betty's mistake.
+Such a trifling slip to have taken the young man for Guy Whitby-Dawson,
+and yet it seemed to have put the company out of tune. Or perhaps it was
+the loss of the race. All except my man seemed to care very much about
+the lost race. The Tartar, in his annoyed voice, told his hostess and
+the Colonel how it happened. He leaned his elbow on the table, and
+almost turned his back on poor Bettina.</p>
+
+<p>I thought I could see that my man seemed not to like The Tartar; and
+that gave me a kindlier feeling towards him; I wondered what had made
+him unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>I felt I wanted to justify Bettina to him.</p>
+
+<p>I felt, too, that she would recover herself sooner if we broke the
+silence at our end. So I said&mdash;in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> a voice too low, I thought, for the
+others to hear&mdash;that I also had noticed the resemblance to Mr.
+Whitby-Dawson. Lower still, he asked me how we came "to hear of
+Mr.&mdash;of&mdash;the gentleman in question." Then Betty and I between us told
+about Hermione Helmstone's engagement&mdash;only we did not, of course, give
+her name.</p>
+
+<p>"The faithless Whitby!" our man said, with the tail of his eye on the
+young gentleman opposite. As for him, he tried to go on talking about
+"Black Friar," as though he heard nothing of the history being retailed
+on the other side. But I had a feeling that he was listening all the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina's loyalty to Hermione made her object to hearing Guy called
+faithless. "They would have had only £400 a year between them. And he
+said&mdash;Mr. Whitby-Dawson said&mdash;they couldn't possibly live on that. He
+was miserable, poor man!"</p>
+
+<p>"I should say so! Poor and miserable."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you laugh," Bettina protested. "But I saw a heart-broken letter
+about the poverty that kept them apart and condemned him 'to run in
+single harness.'"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'Single harness!'" the husky voice said. And he repeated it: "'Single
+harness,' eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Bettina was recovering her spirits. She said something about Duncombe.
+And I don't know what reminded her of the collie-dog story; but she told
+it very well, though she did "pile it on." She made me out an immense
+heroine, and I am afraid I looked sheepish.</p>
+
+<p>The husky voice said "Good!" and "Pretty cool." The story seemed to
+remind him of something. He looked at his plate, and he looked at
+Bettina and me.</p>
+
+<p>Betty was amused at having made me feel shy, and she laughed that
+bubbling laugh of hers.</p>
+
+<p>The Tartar turned his head.</p>
+
+<p>He did not take away his elbow. But he looked over his shoulder down on
+Bettina's apricot-coloured hair. The fillet showed the shape of her
+head. It defined the satiny crown, where the hair lay as close as a
+red-gold skull-cap. The forget-me-nots and the little green leaves held
+all smooth and tight except the heavy, shining rings. They fell out and
+lay on her neck.</p>
+
+<p>The Tartar stopped talking about the race.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He still ate his food condescendingly&mdash;with one hand. But he drank with
+great good-will.</p>
+
+<p>He called to the butler, who had been going round with a gold-necked
+bottle in a napkin. He was to come back, The Tartar said, and fill the
+ladies' glasses.</p>
+
+<p>I said no. Bettina said she, too, drank water.</p>
+
+<p>The Tartar said "Nonsense!"&mdash;quite as though the matter were for him to
+decide. The servant filled Bettina's tall, vaselike glass. Bettina
+looked alarmed. Already she had displeased this dreadful Tartar once.</p>
+
+<p>"Ought I?" she telegraphed across to me. I shook my head.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one woman in London"&mdash;The Tartar made a motion towards the
+head of the table&mdash;"one woman who's got a decent cellar." The Tartar was
+almost genial. He raised his glass to my aunt. "I approve of the new
+coiffure, too. Rippin'!"</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel was not to be diverted from the subject of the wine. "Take
+an old man's advice," he said to me. "It's a chancy sort of world. Make
+sure of a little certain bliss." He lifted his own glass and drained
+it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Tartar said something to Bettina which I could not hear. She looked
+up at him with a kind of wonder in her eyes, and with that "fiery rose"
+quite suddenly overspreading her face again. She put out her hand to the
+tall glass, hesitated, and then looked at the head of the table. Perhaps
+Bettina saw what all of a sudden was clear to me. Aunt Josephine was
+like a huge grey hawk. The head craning out; the narrow forehead, all
+grey crest; the face falling away from the beak. How she had changed
+from the days when she had a double chin! The tilt of the outstretched
+head was exactly like a bird's. Watching sideways&mdash;watching ... for
+what?</p>
+
+<p>The eye made me shrink. It made Bettina set her lips, obedient, to the
+glass. She looked apologetic over the rim at me.</p>
+
+<p>Mine stood untouched.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you have a will of your own," the voice on my right said in my
+ear.</p>
+
+<p>The London way seemed to be that ladies did not leave the table while
+men smoked. The talk was about wines, but it flagged. The Tartar kept
+looking at Bettina. The fitful colour in her cheeks had paled again. The
+scent of flowers, and that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> other all-pervading perfume, mixed with the
+tobacco, was making Bettina faint.</p>
+
+<p>My man noticed it. "You aren't accustomed to smoke," he said to Bettina,
+and he twisted his cigar round on his fruit-plate till he crushed out
+the burning. But the others took no notice.</p>
+
+<p>I was sure Bettina was trying hard to throw off her oppression. I
+thought of our mother; and the thought of her sent sharp aching through
+me. Bettina and I looked at each other. I knew by her lip she had great
+trouble not to cry.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think," I whispered to my man, "you could ask to have a window
+opened?"</p>
+
+<p>He said we would be going into the drawing-room soon. "Drink that black
+coffee," he recommended.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed not unkind, so I tried to think why he would not do so small a
+thing for us as ask to have a window opened. "Are the downstairs windows
+barred with iron, too?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked sharply at me.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe so," he said.</p>
+
+<p>I thought it must be because of all the silver and valuables in the
+house. But he glanced at me again, as if he thought I was still
+wondering and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> might ask someone else. Then he said he had heard "it
+used to be a private madhouse."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>This house?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't say I told you."</p>
+
+<p>That, then, was what I had been feeling. The poor mad people who used to
+be shut up here&mdash;they had left this uncanny influence behind. A
+strangeness and a strain.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel was speaking irritably to one of the footmen. Something had
+gone wrong with an electric-light bulb over the sideboard.</p>
+
+<p>"Send for Waterson to-morrow to attend to that!"</p>
+
+<p>No one but me seemed at all surprised to hear the Colonel giving orders
+in my aunt's house.</p>
+
+<p>As I sat there in the midst of all the contending scents, with the soft
+clash of silver, glass, and voices in my ears, a train of ideas raced
+through my brain as crazy as any that could have been harboured here in
+the days when....</p>
+
+<p>The letters that had come out of this house Eric had called "demented."</p>
+
+<p>All the windows were still barred.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What if it were a private madhouse still! Before my eyes the watchful
+big footmen turned into keepers to the Grey Hawk and to the lady
+upstairs. The doctor&mdash;he was for those too dangerous to trust
+downstairs. That was why they had laughed at my inquiry&mdash;such
+callousness had familiarity bred. The Colonel might be the proprietor of
+the house. My aunt was well off. No doubt they humoured her. With a
+keeper dressed like a footman, they allowed her certain liberties&mdash;to
+write crazy letters in her harmless intervals ... friends to dine ...
+nieces to divert her. They would do almost anything to keep that red
+look out of her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one thing I don't understand," I began to say to the man at my
+side.</p>
+
+<p>But he was nervous too, and jumped down my throat: "Don't ask me
+questions! I never passed an examination in my life," he pulled out his
+watch. "And I've got an engagement to keep in exactly three minutes'
+time."</p>
+
+<p>No wonder I stared. One man comes when dinner is half done, and one
+wants to go before the hostess had risen. For my part I wanted him <i>not</i>
+to go ... I told him so.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why?" he turned suddenly and faced me.</p>
+
+<p>I said it was perhaps because I felt I knew him best. "Anyway," I
+persisted, "don't go!" He hesitated. "<i>Please</i> don't go," I said. I was
+relieved when he said, very well, he would "see it out." For I knew, had
+he gone, my aunt would think I had driven him away.</p>
+
+<p>There was a rustle, and I saw Aunt Josephine rising. My man left me
+instantly. He went and opened the door. As we filed out he turned
+towards my aunt. I heard him whisper, "<i>Je vous fais mes compliments,
+madame</i>." He looked at Betty.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Josephine nodded. "But...." her face changed.</p>
+
+<p>What was wrong? For whom was that "but"? I turned quickly and caught the
+yellow eyes leaving my back. I was "but." But why? What had I done? The
+Colonel talked to Betty and The Tartar, as he led the way back to the
+drawing-room. The other man still was behind with my aunt. He seemed to
+be reassuring her. His curious low voice kept going off the register. At
+a break I heard the words: "Doucement" enunciated with an emphasis that
+carried.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I kept thinking how all the softly-draped windows had iron bars behind
+the silk.</p>
+
+<p>In the drawing-room, my aunt was saying to The Tartar, "Oh, yes, Bettina
+sings and dances."</p>
+
+<p>"She sings," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you skirt-dance?" The Tartar asked.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina looked sorry. "I can dance ordinary dances," she said. "But what
+sort is a skirt-dance?"</p>
+
+<p>The men made a semicircle round her to explain.</p>
+
+<p>Betty said she hadn't done any skirt-dances since she was a little girl.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, and what are you now?" the Colonel said, grinning horribly.</p>
+
+<p>They made Bettina tell about the action-songs our mother had taught us
+in the nursery. They asked her to do one.</p>
+
+<p>Of course Bettina refused. "They're only for children," she said with
+that little air borrowed from our mother.</p>
+
+<p>The Tartar threw back his bullet head and roared. The Colonel said they
+were sick, in London, of sophisticated dancing. What they wanted was
+Bettina's sort. Bettina shook her head.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Grey Hawk said it was too soon after dinner. But they went across
+the room towards the piano.</p>
+
+<p>I was following, when the man who had taken me in to dinner said: "This
+is a comfortable chair." So I sat down.</p>
+
+<p>He said something about the strangeness of London "just at first." It
+would pass away.</p>
+
+<p>I told him I hoped Bettina would find it so. As for me, I was only
+staying till to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>He looked so surprised that I explained I had to go back and take care
+of my mother.</p>
+
+<p>"You have never been to London since you were a child&mdash;and you come all
+this way just for a few hours?"</p>
+
+<p>"I came to take care of Betty," I said. "She has never travelled alone."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me: "And you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I haven't either. To-morrow will be the first time. But then, I am
+older."</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing for several moments. I looked across the room to where I
+could see the back of Bettina's head, between the bare crown of the
+Colonel and The Tartar's black bullet. The Tartar was bending over
+towards Bettina. Aunt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> Josephine sat near them, facing the door, and us.</p>
+
+<p>My man looked up suddenly and saw the eyes of the Grey Hawk on us.</p>
+
+<p>"We must talk!" he said, with a laugh, "or they will think we aren't
+getting on. That isn't a comfortable chair after all." He stood up. I
+said it was quite comfortable. While he was insisting, a servant came in
+to speak to my aunt. I caught a glimpse through the door of a footman
+going upstairs with a short, fattish young man. Too young, I thought, to
+be another doctor.</p>
+
+<p>We went to the end of the room, and we sat on a sofa near the
+fireplace&mdash;one of those sofas you sink down in till you feel half
+buried. I didn't like to say I hated it, for he was taking so much
+trouble. He put a great down cushion at my back, as if I were an
+invalid.</p>
+
+<p>"There! Now, can you sit quite still for a few minutes? As still as if I
+were taking your picture?" I said I supposed I could. "And must I look
+pleasant?" I laughed. He hesitated and then: "How good are your nerves?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Very good," I boasted.</p>
+
+<p>But he was grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever fainted?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Never!" I said, a little indignantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Could you hear something very unexpected, even horrible, and not cry
+out?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know something!" I thought of an accident to my mother. "You have
+news for me...."</p>
+
+<p>"Careful," he said in a sharp whisper. "You told me you could keep
+perfectly still. If you can't I won't go on." I begged him to go on, and
+I kept my face a blank. He turned his head slightly and took in the
+group at the other end of the room. He sat so a moment, with his eyes
+still turned away, while he said: "Everything&mdash;more than life, depends
+on your self-control during the next few minutes."</p>
+
+<p>I sat staring at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any idea where you are?"&mdash;and still he looked not at me but
+towards the others.</p>
+
+<p>My first bewilderment was giving way to fear. No fear now of anything he
+could tell me. Fear of the man himself. I saw it all. Not that iron-grey
+woman who had left the room with the servant, not the brilliant lady
+upstairs, but the person who had set me thinking wild thoughts at dinner
+about barred windows and private lunatic asylums.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The man sitting not three feet way from me&mdash;was mad.</p>
+
+<p>I calculated the distance between me and the other group, while I
+answered him: "I am at my aunt's&mdash;Mrs. Harborough's."</p>
+
+<p>"Where does your aunt live?"</p>
+
+<p>"At 160 Lowndes Square."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">"You are twenty minutes from Lowndes Square. You are in one of the most
+infamous houses in Europe."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /><span class="medium">THE GREY HAWK</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">Minutes seemed to go by. Vague hints from servants, things I had read in
+the papers&mdash;and still I sat there, not moving by so much as a hair.</p>
+
+<p>He was looking at me now and telling me to "keep cool." And then: "I
+suppose you know there <i>are</i> such places&mdash;&mdash;" He interrupted himself to
+say: "Remember! A careless look or move would mean&mdash;well, it would mean
+ruin. <i>Now</i> do you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>Beyond a doubt I did. If I moved or cried for help, he would kill me
+before my aunt could get back; before I could cross the room. Though why
+he should wish to kill me I could form no idea.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have time to recover," he said, in that muted, uneven voice.
+"I will shield you while you pull yourself together." He had bent
+forward till his shoulders shut out my view of the group at the other
+end of the room.</p>
+
+<p>I shrank further back into the cushions. But:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> "I have myself in hand,
+now," I said; for I remembered you must never let the insane know you
+are afraid.</p>
+
+<p>Betty's laughter sounded far away.</p>
+
+<p>"Take your time," he said. "They're enjoying themselves. They haven't
+even rung for the cognac and liqueurs yet." They would make Bettina and
+me drink a liqueur, he said. Or if they failed in that, they'd say, "'a
+thimble-full of coffee, then.'" And our coffee would be "doctored."</p>
+
+<p>"But we've had coffee," I said, in a new access of terror. Was it
+drugged coffee that made me feel so lamed?</p>
+
+<p>"That was all right," he said. "That was to steady <i>us</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He did not look as if he needed steadying. What if he were not mad?</p>
+
+<p>"Be careful," he said again. "Remember I am running a ghastly risk in
+telling you. But you are facing a ghastly certainty if I don't."</p>
+
+<p>I sat in that stillness of stark terror&mdash;staring at him.</p>
+
+<p>And as I stared I found myself clinging to the thought that had been
+horror's height a little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> while before. "Pray God he's mad," I kept
+saying inwardly.</p>
+
+<p>If I could keep my head, he said, I had no cause to be so frightened. It
+would be some little time before he could give me up without rousing
+suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>"Before you give me up!" I imagined the Grey Hawk swooping to snatch me.</p>
+
+<p>"Before I help you to get out of this," he explained. "And when I do,
+you will perhaps remember it is at a sacrifice. Greater than I supposed
+I could feel."</p>
+
+<p>I moved at that&mdash;but like a sleep-walker on the edge of waking.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him in a whisper what we were to do. I meant Betty and me. But
+he said: "When she begins to play, or to sing, you are to get up quite
+quietly&mdash;<i>can</i> you?"</p>
+
+<p>I made a sign for yes.</p>
+
+<p>"No haste ... you must do it languidly&mdash;go out of the room."</p>
+
+<p>"But my&mdash;&mdash;" (I suppressed "my aunt" with an inward twist of questioning
+anguish) "&mdash;&mdash;shall I not be asked where I am going and why?"</p>
+
+<p>He said no. Because he would make the others<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> a sign. He thought my
+sister was too excited to take any notice of my going. "But if she does,
+I'll tell her you wanted her to go on singing. I shall seem to be coming
+after you. But I'll stop to explain that we've had an argument about one
+of the pictures in the hall." He told me what I was to do.</p>
+
+<p>"If, after all, they were to prevent me&mdash;what, what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"They won't&mdash;they will leave you to me." He said it with a look that
+stopped the heart.</p>
+
+<p>I implored him to let me go out alone.</p>
+
+<p>He fixed his unhappy eyes on mine. "You would never be allowed out of
+this room alone."</p>
+
+<p>"I could say I must post a letter."</p>
+
+<p>"They would ring for a servant."</p>
+
+<p>I measured the long room. "If once I got as far as the door I could
+run."</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;as far as the front door perhaps. You would find it locked. No
+servant would open it for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Will they for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can do it for you," he said, under his breath, and he stood up.</p>
+
+<p>I thought he meant I was to make trial then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> of that terrible passage to
+the door. But was it not better to be where Betty was, whatever
+came&mdash;Betty and I together&mdash;than Betty alone with those devouring-eyed
+men, and I with a maniac out in the hall!</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot leave my sister!" I said.</p>
+
+<p>He stood in front of me, masking me from the others. "Haven't I made you
+understand? If you don't leave the room with me, <i>she</i> will leave it
+with Whitby-Dawson."</p>
+
+<p>"No! No!"</p>
+
+<p>He hushed me. "She won't know why&mdash;but she'll do it. And she won't come
+back again. She would probably be on her way to Paris this time
+to-morrow." He pulled a great cushion up to hide my face. And then he
+turned and made a feint of getting an illustrated paper off the table.
+He kept his eye on the others. There was some little commotion, during
+which Betty had risen. She left the sofa and sat on the piano-stool. She
+was laughing excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>The man came back to me with the illustrated paper. He sat down closer
+to me, and held the paper open for a shield. But he held it strangely,
+with his arm across the picture. The reading part<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> was in French. I had
+to crane to see over the top&mdash;Betty twisting round on the piano-stool,
+and touching the keys in a provoking way; the two men teasing her to
+sing.</p>
+
+<p>I have lived over every instant of that hour, until the smallest detail
+is a stain indelible upon my mind. I have no trouble in remembering. My
+trouble is to be able to forget.</p>
+
+<p>I hear again that muted voice behind the paper saying: "But for the
+collie-dog story, I wouldn't have dared to risk this. Everything depends
+on your nerve." And then he looked at me curiously, and wanted to know
+if I had not heard there were such places&mdash;&mdash; "I won't say like this.
+This is a masterpiece of devilry. And masterpieces are never plentiful."</p>
+
+<p>He waited for me to say something. If I had known what, I could not have
+said it. I tried hard to speak. But I could only look dumbly in his
+face. And I saw there was no madness in the unhappy eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he
+insisted.</p>
+
+<p>Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able
+to think. I had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> imagining other people insane. But perhaps it was
+I....</p>
+
+<p>I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up
+and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have
+said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a
+shock&mdash;that's all."</p>
+
+<p>I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the
+man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry I told you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand.</p>
+
+<p>"You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of
+violation. You implicate me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made
+when you begged me not to go. You make <i>me</i>, after all, an instrument of
+initiation."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak height of later
+knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish of the moment. Heaven forgive
+me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had
+come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> I
+think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin
+ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice.
+And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked
+about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Call in her bullies to beat me to a jelly."</p>
+
+<p>He was more and more unwilling to seem a mere adjunct of the baseness he
+unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"&mdash;he nodded
+towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one&mdash;"all this, far more
+crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world&mdash;in every capital of
+every nation on the earth. And it has always been so."</p>
+
+<p>He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was
+being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other
+things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more&mdash;"help
+me quickly to get help!"</p>
+
+<p>He said I must trust him. Everything depended on choosing the right
+moment. "If you went out now, with that face, you'd pull the house about
+our ears."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was doing all he could to calm and steady me, he said. And certainly
+he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare,
+an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought&mdash;it was all
+a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human
+nature!"&mdash;like the tolling of a muffled bell. Bishops and old ladies
+imagined you could alter these things. Take India&mdash;"I've been there. I
+knew an official who'd had charge of the chaklas. You don't know what
+chaklas are? Your father knew. If you'd gone riding round any one of the
+cantonments you'd have seen. Little groups of tents. A hospital not far
+off. Women in the tents. Out there it's no secret. They're called
+"Government women." The women are needed by the army. So there they
+are."</p>
+
+<p>Women are "needed." Through the chaos came back clear the memory of my
+talk with Betty in the train: "Men don't need us as much as we need
+them."</p>
+
+<p>Even Governments, he said, had to recognise human nature, and shape
+their policies accordingly. I was too young to remember all that talk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+in the press some years ago, about the mysterious movements of British
+battleships in the Mediterranean. Instead of hanging about Malta, the
+ships had gone cruising round the Irish coast. Why? The officials said,
+for good and sufficient reasons. The chorus of criticism died down. The
+"reasons" were known to those who had to know. Not enough women at
+Malta. The British fleet spent some time about the Irish coasts. "Human
+nature&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I can do it now!" I cried under my breath, and I stood up.</p>
+
+<p>He shot out a hand and pulled me back. "Christ! not while the grey hawk
+is hovering outside! And your lips are livid." A good thing, he said,
+that I had still a few minutes. "You have your sister to thank. She is a
+success. She piles up anticipation. The value of that, to the jaded, is
+the stock-in-trade of people like our hostess. At a time when her
+profession is a hundred per cent. more dangerous than it's ever been
+since the world began, she perfects it&mdash;makes it pay in proportion to
+its danger." Couldn't I trust him to know? He gave me his word: "No
+indecent haste here. They are adepts. They have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> learned that the climax
+is less to the sated than the leading up. The leading up is all." After
+a second: "How did she get hold of you?"</p>
+
+<p>I knew no more than the dead.</p>
+
+<p>"Through someone very well informed...." He probed and questioned. I
+could only shake my head. But my tortured mind flung itself
+spasmodically from one figure to another in our little world, and felt
+each one's recoil from my mere unspoken thought. Until&mdash;<i>the little
+dressmaker!</i> Her questions ... her pains to establish the fact of our
+isolation, of our poverty ... her special interest in our aunt. "You haf
+a photografie&mdash;hein?" And then the picture's vanishing. Had it come to
+this house to serve as model? The Tartar liked "the new coiffure&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Two servants came in. One carried a great silver tray.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, leave that a bit!" The Tartar, over the back of the sofa, waved the
+footman off.</p>
+
+<p>They came towards us, and were told: "Put it there on the table." The
+man beside me made a show of welcoming it. He dropped the illustrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+paper on my lap. "Bend down&mdash;bend down low," he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>I bent over the swimming page.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you have?" he called out to me, as the footmen were leaving
+the room.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to answer. No sound.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you prefer crême de menthe, do you?" he said quite loud. "Yes,
+there's crême de menthe." He filled a glass and brought it to me.
+"Cognac," he whispered. "It will steady you."</p>
+
+<p>I put my shaking lips to the glass. I did not drink.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you are afraid," he said. And he looked at me with his unhappy
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>My hand was shaking. Some of the stuff spilt out on my new dress.</p>
+
+<p>"Give it to me," he said, and he drank it off&mdash;"just to show" me.</p>
+
+<p>I was conscious that Betty was singing&mdash;And that the door had opened.
+The Grey Hawk stood there with, as I thought at first, a thick-set boy
+dressed in a man's evening clothes. As she dismissed him I saw he was a
+hunchback. She shut the door behind the hunchback and the Colonel left
+the piano and came towards her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> He was laughing. They stood and talked.</p>
+
+<p>"Bend down. Bend low&mdash;&mdash;" the voice said in my ear.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel's croaking laugh came nearer.</p>
+
+<p>The man at my side called out: "Look here, Colonel. No poaching on my
+preserves. We are deep in a discussion about Art. You're not to
+interrupt."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Art is it?" The old man had come behind our sofa, and was leaning
+down between us. I smelt a foul breath. With a sense of choking I lifted
+my head. The Colonel's watery eyes went from me to the strange ugly
+picture in the illustrated paper. I did not understand it. I do not
+think I would have been conscious of having looked at it, but for the
+expression on the Colonel's face.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina finished her song. They all clapped. In the buzz, Bettina raised
+her voice. No, no. She couldn't dance, and sing, as well as accompany
+herself, she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What time is it in?" the grey woman asked. She took Bettina's place at
+the piano.</p>
+
+<p>Still Bettina hesitated, while The Tartar urged.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>I</i> don't mind," Bettina said, "if you like such babyish songs."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course we do,"&mdash;the Colonel went back to them.</p>
+
+<p>Bettina said pertly: "I should think you'd be ashamed." She stood beside
+the grey woman and hummed the old tune. She helped by striking a few
+notes.</p>
+
+<p>"Now!" the grey woman said to Betty.</p>
+
+<p>The word was echoed in my ear.</p>
+
+<p>"Now?" I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"But first"&mdash;he caught my hand. "Bite your lip a little.... Ah! not
+blood." He smuggled his handkerchief to me behind the cushion. "You'll
+be all right," he whispered. "But I wish I could go with you! You see
+that I must stay behind&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, oh yes," I looked at Betty.</p>
+
+<p>"I must stay," he said, "to give you time. Then when I've seen you out
+of this ... a door open, a door shut&mdash;and I shall never see you
+again...."</p>
+
+<p>"Now! <i>Now!</i>" I hardly noticed that he took his blood-stained
+handkerchief out of my hand. For Bettina had come forward and stood
+poised,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> holding her green skirt with both hands, like a child about to
+curtsey. I stood up. All the room was dancing with my little sister. I
+got to the door.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"<i>Where are you going to...?</i>"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Betty sang. But she was too amused and excited to notice me.</p>
+
+<p>My companion had crossed the room, and was bending over the Grey Hawk.
+She looked round at him surprised, mocking....</p>
+
+<p>Some power came to help me across the threshold. A footman started up
+out of the floor and stood before me. "Where are you going?" He echoed
+Betty.</p>
+
+<p>"I am waiting for&mdash;one of the gentlemen," I said, and I steadied myself
+against a chair. If Betty's song stopped, I should know we had failed.</p>
+
+<p>I held my breath, as I leaned over and took my last look into the room.
+Our friend was leaving the grey woman. She played on. Bettina was
+dancing, a hand on her hip, the other twirling moustachios&mdash;playing the
+gallant. Such a baby she looked!</p>
+
+<p>And I had done her hair like that&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"<i>What is your fortune, my pretty maid?</i>"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The man had come out and softly shut the door. He gave the footman a
+strange look and passed him something. "It's all right," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The footman looked in his hand and stared. "Mais, merci&mdash;merci,
+monsieur." He vanished.</p>
+
+<p>I went towards the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>That's</i> not the way," the voice said harshly.</p>
+
+<p>"Shan't I get a cloak&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, no! It's a question of moments now." He was undoing the
+door. "Run for your life. First to the left&mdash;second to the right&mdash;a
+cab-rank."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">I fled out of the house.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX<br /><span class="medium">WHERE?</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">I stood ringing. I thundered at the knocker.</p>
+
+<p>I beat the door with my fist.</p>
+
+<p>An old man opened at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Harborough! Where is she?" The old man tried to keep me out. But
+he was gentle and frail. I forced my way past. I called and ran along a
+passage, trying doors that opened into the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>At last! A room where a woman sat alone&mdash;reading by a shaded light.</p>
+
+<p>"Who are you?" I cried out. She laid her book in her lap. "Are <i>you</i>
+Mrs. Harborough? Then come&mdash;come quickly ... I'll tell you on the
+way&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The old woman lifted the folds of her double chin and looked at me
+through spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>"You must come and help me to get Bettina...." I broke into distracted
+sobbing on the name. "Bettina&mdash;&mdash;! Bettina&mdash;&mdash;!" I seized the lady's
+hand and tried to draw her out of her chair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But I was full of trembling. She sat there massive, calm, with a power
+of inert resistance, that made me feel I could as easily drag her house
+out of the Square by its knocker, as move the woman planted there in her
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>Neither haste nor perturbation in the voice that asked me: "What has
+happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Not yet!</i>" I cried out. "Nothing has happened yet! But we must be
+quick. Oh, God, let us be quick&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The butler had followed me in and was asking something. "Yes," said the
+quiet voice, "pay the cabman."</p>
+
+<p>"No!" I shrieked. "Keep him! I must go back, instantly...." And through
+my own strange-sounding voice, hers reached me.</p>
+
+<p>"You must see that you are quite unintelligible. Sit down and collect
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down! Isn't it enough that <i>one</i> woman sits still,
+while&mdash;while&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She was putting questions.</p>
+
+<p>I heard a reproach that seemed to fill the house: "You never came to
+meet us!"</p>
+
+<p>And while the charge was ringing I felt, with anguish, the injustice of
+it. How could one have expected this woman to come!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But she should be moved and stirred at last!</p>
+
+<p>"I sent my maid," she was defending herself, "&mdash;only a minute or two
+late."</p>
+
+<p>"The other woman was not late!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who?"</p>
+
+<p>I begged the butler to get a cloak for Mrs. Harborough. She was saying
+Bettina and I should have waited. And again that I must calm myself and
+tell her&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Someone pretended to be you!" I hurled it at her. "She took us to a
+house&mdash;a place where they do worse than murder. Betty is there now&mdash;&mdash;"
+I told her all I could pack into a few sentences.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't possible," my aunt said. "This is England."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Come and see!</i> Betty&mdash;&mdash;" But they only thought me mad; they tortured
+me with questions.</p>
+
+<p>I caught her by the arm. "God won't forgive you if you wait an instant
+more."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, but she was old and unbelieving! So old, I felt she had looked on
+unmoved at evil since the world began.</p>
+
+<p>But she was sending for wraps, sending messages. Still she sat there, in
+the heavy, square-backed chair, her hands upon her knees, her two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> feet
+side by side as motionless as the footstool, her heavy shoulders high
+and square, her lace cap with square ends falling either side her face,
+like the head-dress of an Egyptian, her air of monumental calm more like
+a Theban statue than a living woman.</p>
+
+<p>I turned away.</p>
+
+<p>The figure in the chair rose up at last.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, but slowly&mdash;slow, and stiff, and ponderous.</p>
+
+<p>I felt in her all the heaviness of the acquiescent since Time began.</p>
+
+<p>"That is right," she said to the old man who had brought the maid.</p>
+
+<p>And the maid was old, too.</p>
+
+<p>Three helpless ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>Like death the sense came over me that I was as badly off with these
+three, as I had been alone. Again I turned from them, frantic.</p>
+
+<p>"I will go out," I cried, "and find help." I ran towards the door.</p>
+
+<p>It was then the old man made the first sane suggestion. We could
+telephone to the police.</p>
+
+<p>That would save time! The police would meet us outside Betty's prison.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I followed the butler into the hall. We all stood there, by the
+telephone. Ages seemed to go by while he was getting the number. And
+when he had got the number, he could not hear the questions that were
+put. I tore the receiver out of his hand&mdash;I pushed him aside. But I had
+never used the telephone before, and I spoke too loudly. When they told
+me so, I sobbed. The voice at the other end was faint and cool. Oh, the
+easy way the world was taking Betty's fate!</p>
+
+<p>And then the faint cool voice at the other end said something which
+showed me I was not believed.</p>
+
+<p>He, too, was thinking I was out of my mind.</p>
+
+<p>The receiver dropped from my hand.</p>
+
+<p>"They cannot understand," I said. I told Mrs. Harborough that she must
+go to Bettina, and I would bring the police.</p>
+
+<p>Some objection was made. I did not stop to hear it: "I cannot wait for
+any words! And I will not wait another second for any human soul!"</p>
+
+<p>Then, running beside me as I made for the front door, the old butler
+spoke again: "&mdash;&mdash;a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> policeman in our square." He would call the
+policeman in.</p>
+
+<p>The old man was right. A policeman stood at the corner, watching that no
+harm should come to the ladies of Lowndes Square.</p>
+
+<p>I had run out, with the butler protesting at my heels: "<i>Not in the
+street</i>, miss!" he said, with the first hint of emotion I had found in
+him.</p>
+
+<p>I did not wait; but he must have brought the policeman in during my
+outpouring, for the look of the hall during those swift seconds is
+stamped on my brain. The elderly maid kneeling at her mistress's feet,
+changing her shoes; the policeman facing my aunt, helmet in hand, his
+reverent eye falling before the dignity of Mrs. Harborough, while I, at
+his elbow, poured out broken sentences, interlarded with: "I'll tell you
+the rest as we go&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>My strained voice was grown weak. I wondered, suddenly, if it had ever
+really reached their ears.</p>
+
+<p>I was like a person down under the sea, trying to make my voice heard
+through a mile of murky water.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was like a woman buried alive, who, in the black middle of the night,
+beats at her coffin-lid in some deserted graveyard.</p>
+
+<p>"It is no use!" I cried. "I shall go back alone."</p>
+
+<p>At last we were all going out of the door. The policeman put on his
+helmet.</p>
+
+<p>"And where is this house?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It is&mdash;it is&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A pit of blackness opened. I felt myself falling headlong. I heard a cry
+that made my flesh writhe&mdash;as though the cry had been Bettina's, and not
+mine.</p>
+
+<p>A voice said: "It is not possible you have forgotten the address!"</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">I had never known it!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX<br /><span class="medium">THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">It must have been half an hour before reason came back. A strange man
+was there, lean and grey. A friend, I heard&mdash;a Healer.</p>
+
+<p>All those old, old faces!</p>
+
+<p>What had they done?</p>
+
+<p>What could they do?&mdash;except telephone again to the police the vague and
+non-committal fact of a girl decoyed and lost to sight in the labyrinth
+of London.</p>
+
+<p>They dared to think they could get me to bed. They found me, not a
+girl&mdash;more a wild animal!</p>
+
+<p>Out, out I must go.</p>
+
+<p>The outward struggle was matched by the one in my mind. Where should I
+go? To whom? There must be somebody who would care. Somebody who had
+Power to give effect to caring. Wildly my ignorance cast about. Who had
+Power?</p>
+
+<p>The King&mdash;yes; and surely the Queen would "care." But who was I to reach
+the Queen? Her sentinels and servants would thrust me out.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> All my
+crying would never reach the Queen. Then, the only thing that was left
+was for me to go out and cry the horror in the street.</p>
+
+<p>They held the door while they told me there had been telephoning back
+and forth. And someone had already gone to Alton Street.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that where Betty is?"</p>
+
+<p>No. Alton Street was the nearest police-station. The person who had been
+sent there had not yet come back.</p>
+
+<p>Then I, too, must go to Alton Street to learn what they were doing.</p>
+
+<p>The power of the police still loomed immense. At Alton Street I would
+hear they had already found Betty. She might even be there at this
+moment....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My aunt, the Healer and I driving through deserted streets. How long was
+it since I had been away from Bettina?</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not long," they said. And the police beyond a doubt had turned the
+time to good account.</p>
+
+<p>I had a vision of the Betty I should find at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> Alton Street. Fainting,
+ministered to by men, reverent of her youth and terror....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A grimy room with a counter running down its length. No sign of Betty;
+only men in uniform grouped in twos and threes behind the counter.</p>
+
+<p>They listened. Yes, my aunt's messenger "had been in." They shook their
+heads.</p>
+
+<p>The Healer did most of the talking.</p>
+
+<p>A man with a sallow face put a question now and then. He was the
+inspector.</p>
+
+<p>Although there were only policemen there besides ourselves, the
+inspector talked quite low, as though he was afraid someone might come
+to know a girl was lost.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't hear what you are saying!" I said. "She is <i>my</i> sister. You
+must tell me what you are doing to find her."</p>
+
+<p>They had so little to go upon. "The only clue, and that a very slight
+one," was the cabman. Could I remember what he was like?</p>
+
+<p>The strangeness of the question! Taxi-drivers were as much alike to
+country eyes as the cabs they drove&mdash;&mdash; But why ask me? "Bring the man
+in, and let the inspector see him."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then they told me. The man who was waiting there outside was not the one
+who had taken me to Lowndes Square.</p>
+
+<p>But where <i>was</i> our "slight and only clue"?</p>
+
+<p>They said that while they all were busied over me, unconscious, the
+butler had paid the cabman and let him go. He had never thought to take
+the number. The slight, the only clue, was lost.</p>
+
+<p>But no. The inspector said they would circulate an inquiry for a cabman
+who had brought a young lady of my description to Lowndes Square that
+night.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to learn how long this would take&mdash;what we could do meanwhile.
+What had been already done.</p>
+
+<p>They seemed to be saying things which had no meaning. Except one thing.
+The great difficulty was that I could not describe the outside of the
+house, nor even the general locality. Which way had we driven from
+Victoria?</p>
+
+<p>I had no idea.</p>
+
+<p>But surely I had looked about. What had I noticed as we drove away from
+the station?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether at another time I might have answered better, but
+I could remember only a confused crowd of passengers, porters,
+taxi-cabs, and motors. Yes, and the woman who had looked after us while
+she asked her way of a policeman.</p>
+
+<p>Why had she looked after us?</p>
+
+<p>I could no more tell them that than I could tell why both she and the
+policeman had followed us with such unfriendly eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"&mdash;the inspector exchanged glances with the Healer&mdash;"a possible clue
+there."</p>
+
+<p>I could not imagine what he meant. I could not believe that he meant
+anything when I saw the expressionless yellow face turned to Mrs.
+Harborough to say that "in any case" the Victoria policeman would not be
+on duty now. The inspector talked about what they would do to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>"To-night&mdash;to-night; what can we do to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>He brought a piece of yellow paper. He put the questions over again, and
+this time he wrote the answers down with a stump of worn lead-pencil.
+The glazed paper was like the man, it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> took impressions grudgingly; it
+held them very faint.</p>
+
+<p>While the blunt lead-pencil laboured across the sheet, something that
+other man had said to me in the house of horror flashed back across my
+mind. I had not believed him at the time, still less now, in the
+presence of the guardians of the City&mdash;all these grave and decent
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Shamefaced I asked Mrs. Harborough if the inspector knew of "any house
+where a woman takes young girls."</p>
+
+<p>She and all the rest were one as silent as the other, till I steadied my
+voice to say again, this time to the man himself: "You have no
+knowledge, then, of 'such a place'?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't say that," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>I looked at him bewildered. "You mean you do know of a house&mdash;a house
+where&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated too. "We know some," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean there are many?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the hesitation. "Not many of the sort you describe." He took up
+the stump of pencil hurriedly and held it poised. "Try to recollect some
+landmark," he said&mdash;"some building, some statue that you passed."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I did my best to obey&mdash;to wrench my mind away from the inside of that
+place where Betty was ... to think of what we had seen on the way.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you drive through the Park?" said my aunt.</p>
+
+<p>"No," the inspector answered for me, "she wouldn't take them through the
+Park; she would go as fast as possible&mdash;by side streets&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But I told them we had passed the Park. We had seen flower-beds through
+a tall iron railing. She said it was Hyde Park, and the flowers were on
+our left.</p>
+
+<p>"Hamilton Place. Park Lane." The inspector punctuated my phrases.
+"Driving north. You crossed Oxford Street?"</p>
+
+<p>I could not say. Other questions, too, I had no answer for. I held my
+head between my hands trying to force the later impressions out&mdash;trying
+to recover something of that drive I seemed to have taken a hundred
+years ago in some other state of being. And as I stood so, sobbing
+inwardly and praying God to let me remember, I heard the inspector say
+the most horrible thing of all. And it was the horrible thing that gave
+me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> a moment of hope. He told my aunt that the police kept a list of
+"these houses."</p>
+
+<p>A list.</p>
+
+<p>He said the police were "expected to have an eye on such places." And no
+one contradicted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Even if there are many," I burst out&mdash;"you have all these policemen
+here. You have hundreds more. Those houses in the list must all be
+searched&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>They would do what they could, he said.</p>
+
+<p>I did not know why they should at the same time speak of doing all they
+could, and yet should look so hopeless. But I saw that nobody moved. My
+two companions talked in undertones. The men in uniform still stood in
+twos and threes. One near a high desk drummed with his fingers on an
+open book. The Healer folded his thin long hands upon the counter. In
+that horrible stillness I said suddenly, "Look at the clock!" The
+clock's hands too were folded, praying people to notice it was midnight.</p>
+
+<p>They stirred a little at my voice. They looked at me and at the clock.
+The inspector said they were waiting for Mrs. Harborough's messenger.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+The messenger had gone out with a constable to make inquiry at the
+nearest cab shelter.</p>
+
+<p>Why had they not told us that before!</p>
+
+<p>My two companions followed me, talking low.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>We were driven to a little wooden house, set close against the curb. Two
+or three men inside, and one behind an urn was pouring coffee.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, yes, a gentleman had "called." Each one there had been questioned.
+Others, besides, who had been in and out. No one had taken a lady to
+Lowndes Square that night.</p>
+
+<p>The door shut behind us. We were out again, in the street.</p>
+
+<p>Two taxi-cabs in the rank, and ours at the curb? Besides our driver and
+ourselves not a soul afoot, outside the little wooden shelter.
+Betty&mdash;Betty, what am I to do? I looked up at the houses. In almost any
+one of them must be some good man, who, if he knew, would help me. But
+the houses were curtained, and dark.</p>
+
+<p>The silence of the streets seemed a deeper silence than any the country
+knows. The only sound, my two companions whispering. "He" would no doubt
+be waiting for them at Lowndes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> Square, they said. Could they mean,
+then, to go home...?</p>
+
+<p>Betty&mdash;Betty&mdash;&mdash; I looked up again at the houses&mdash;houses of great folk,
+I felt sure. Officials, perhaps; equerries; people about the
+Court&mdash;people whose names we had often seen in the paper as going here
+and there with the King and Queen. People who would not be turned back
+at any time of night if they went to the Palace on an errand of life and
+death. Should I run along the street ringing at all the bells?</p>
+
+<p>I may have made some movement, for Mrs. Harborough took my arm and drew
+me towards the cab. No, the people in the great houses would be sleeping
+too far away from those blank doors. Deafness had fallen on the world,
+and on the houses of good men a great darkness.</p>
+
+<p>A light&mdash;at last, a light! shining out of a house on a far corner which
+had been masked by the cab shelter. And people awake there, for a taxi
+waited at the door&mdash;the door of hope. Above it an electric burner made a
+square of brightness. In that second of tense listening, my foot on the
+step of the cab, a raised voice reached me faintly.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I dragged my arm free and went, blind and stumbling, towards the sound.
+I shall find someone to go to the Queen...!</p>
+
+<p>The Healer had followed quickly: "What are you doing! That's a
+public-house."</p>
+
+<p>They took me back, they put me in the cab. I hardly knew why I resisted,
+except that I was looking wildly about for someone to appeal to, and I
+kept childishly repeating: "The Queen ... the Queen."</p>
+
+<p>While Mrs. Harborough was being helped into the cab after me, I leaned
+out of the window on the opposite side, looking up the street and down.
+The wind blew cold on my wet face.</p>
+
+<p>"The Queen, the Queen! Oh, why are you Queen of England, if you can't
+help Betty?"</p>
+
+<p>The door of the public-house opened, and a man reeled out. A man in
+chauffeur's dress. A man&mdash;with crooked shoulders!</p>
+
+<p>I remembered now.</p>
+
+<p>I opened the cab-door on my side, and tore across the street with voices
+calling after me.</p>
+
+<p>The unsteady figure had stooped down by the waiting taxi, and set the
+machinery whirring.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," I bent over him. "Are you the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> man who brought me to Lowndes
+Square an hour or so ago?"</p>
+
+<p>The man looked up. As the cab light fell on his face I recognised him.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">Oh, God, the relief!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER XXXI<br /><span class="medium">THE MAN WITH THE SWORD</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">"Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the
+stooping figure.</p>
+
+<p>The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was
+drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him.</p>
+
+<p>He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't
+say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of
+them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a
+horror of losing him.</p>
+
+<p>"I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough.</p>
+
+<p>And all the while&mdash;&mdash; But we are coming, Betty! Coming....</p>
+
+<p>The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of
+police-stations. They settled which would be the one.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> will give you all I have if
+you'll drive fast."</p>
+
+<p>The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned
+out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my
+eyes away from the only clue.</p>
+
+<p>Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out
+of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He
+ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on
+at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt
+corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked
+up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door.</p>
+
+<p>The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street.</p>
+
+<p>And Betty wasn't there.</p>
+
+<p>Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured
+man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come
+I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector."</p>
+
+<p>The young man said he was the inspector.</p>
+
+<p>Among us we told him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke quite differently. Sensible,
+alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of
+the inspector. This man was human.</p>
+
+<p>"You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?"</p>
+
+<p>I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An
+inspector's post was the station.</p>
+
+<p>But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for
+with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the
+telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound
+some great alarum, summoning a legion of police.</p>
+
+<p>He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of
+yellow paper. Precisely such a piece of paper as that on which already,
+there in Alton Street, the miserable story was set down. I shall not be
+believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed surface with a
+stump of blunt lead-pencil.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Don't</i> wait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...."</p>
+
+<p>But he, too, made little of the need for haste.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> He, too, made much of
+what I had noticed as we left Victoria&mdash;the homely woman and the
+policeman watching as we drove away.</p>
+
+<p>"You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?"</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt&mdash;and no doubt the policeman was suspicious too." The inspector
+spoke with pride: "Oh, we get to know those people! They meet the
+trains. They're at the docks when ships come in."</p>
+
+<p>It was then I saw that Mrs. Harborough could be stirred too. "If the
+policeman knew," she said&mdash;"if he so much as suspected, why did he not
+stop the motor?"</p>
+
+<p>The inspector shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't he arrest the woman?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is not allowed," said the inspector.</p>
+
+<p>I was sure he couldn't be telling us the truth. A creeping despair came
+over me. My first impression had been right. This man was too young, too
+ignorant, to help in such appalling trouble as ours. He was speaking
+kindly still. I might be sure they would do all they could to discover
+the house&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"When? When?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And if they did discover it, he said, they would watch it.</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>Watch it!</i>'" I could not think I had heard right. "You don't mean
+stand outside and wait!&mdash;while all the time inside&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>They tried to make me calmer. The inspector said, under certain
+circumstances, a warrant could be obtained to search the house....</p>
+
+<p>And was the warrant ready?</p>
+
+<p>Everything possible would be done. Oh, the times they said that! Then
+the inspector, a little wearied, told Mrs. Harborough "it might be
+advisable to go and see the man who is in charge of all these cases."</p>
+
+<p>Not only I, Mrs. Harborough heard him. For she repeated, "'All these
+cases!' You don't mean such a thing has happened before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," the young man said. "But usually it's poor girls. This is the
+gentleman who has charge of all that." He turned and pointed to the
+left. Beyond a board where keys were hanging, under two crossed swords,
+the electric light shone clear on the picture of a man in an officer's
+uniform. A man wearing a sword and a cocked hat with plume&mdash;the sort of
+dress Lord Helmstone wore when he went to the King's Levée.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"When is he here?" Mrs. Harborough asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he never comes here. He's at Scotland Yard."</p>
+
+<p>"Scotland!" I cried.</p>
+
+<p>They told me Scotland Yard was in London.</p>
+
+<p>Then we'll go to Scotland Yard!</p>
+
+<p>He wouldn't be at Scotland Yard now. "He <i>might</i> be there in the
+morning" ... this man, in charge of all such cases!</p>
+
+<p>The young inspector spoke his superior's name with awe. Oh, a person
+very great and powerful, and his hand was on his sword. I put my empty
+hands over my face and wept aloud.</p>
+
+<p>Betty&mdash;Betty&mdash;who will help us?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I did not need their foolish words to realise, at last, that I should
+have as much help (<i>now</i>, when help was any good)&mdash;as much help from the
+sword in the picture as from this man with three stripes on his sleeve
+and the blunt lead-pencil in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Who was there in all the world who really cared?</p>
+
+<p>A vision of my mother rose to stab at me.</p>
+
+<p>No other friend? Eric!&mdash;as far away as heaven.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The inspector and the man in leather were lifting me into a cab. The
+electric light was fierce in their faces. Then the light and they were
+gone. We were driving in silence through streets of shadow sharply
+streaked with light. I crouched in the corner, and fought the flames
+that shrivelled up my flesh.</p>
+
+<p>Torment! Torment!</p>
+
+<p>Betty with a hundred faces. And every one a separate agony. Betty
+beginning to understand. Betty looking for her sister&mdash;calling out for
+me. No sister! No friend! Only the fiends of hell!</p>
+
+<p>Torment! Torment!</p>
+
+<p>I was crying fiercely again, and beating with clenched fists. I heard a
+crash.</p>
+
+<p>The cab was stopped, and strange faces crowded. I was being held. "She
+has lost her mind," one said.</p>
+
+<p>But no, it wasn't lost! It was serving me with devilish clearness. More
+pictures, and still more.</p>
+
+<p>Well, well&mdash;Betty would die soon!</p>
+
+<p>Like cool water&mdash;holy water&mdash;came the thought of death. Perhaps she was
+already dead. Oh, my God, make it true! Let her be dead!</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">Here was healing at last. Betty was dead!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXII" id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a>CHAPTER XXXII<br /><span class="medium">DARKNESS</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead.</p>
+
+<p>They brought me a telegram.</p>
+
+<p>In wrenching the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could
+hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe
+housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected
+back by the night train.</p>
+
+<p>The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes
+Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had
+lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even
+to-day could I go home.</p>
+
+<p>I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the
+end would very quickly come. There was mercy there.</p>
+
+<p>As for me&mdash;I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of
+the world. As though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> to our best, our only friend, I turned to the
+thought of her physical weakness.</p>
+
+<p>But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in
+her arms.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I was ill a long, long while.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again,
+what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead&mdash;there were the
+others.</p>
+
+<p>The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others.</p>
+
+<p>So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up
+in her little world, to help her to find a mate&mdash;that light was pale
+beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.</p>
+
+<p>And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the
+people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>Who would help me to find mine?&mdash;or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina
+safely dead!</p>
+
+<p>Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face
+alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my
+waking.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge.
+There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace!
+peace!&mdash;and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst
+open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears,
+and then would cease.</p>
+
+<p>Who else?</p>
+
+<p>Not her friend, the Healer&mdash;whose way of healing was to look away from
+the wound.</p>
+
+<p>Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his
+love&mdash;who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the
+house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'&mdash;I'd
+let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret
+home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the
+other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set
+himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my
+heart)&mdash;<i>they all knew</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And they accepted this thing.</p>
+
+<p>That was the thought that again and again tore<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> me out of my bed, and
+brought the great Darkness down.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In the grey intervals I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more
+and more in the room. I came to look for her.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think
+that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light.</p>
+
+<p>I wondered about the doctor. How had she been brought to have someone
+tending me who did not call himself a Healer, yet who I felt might well
+have cured any malady but mine?</p>
+
+<p>She had forbidden the nurse to talk to me about my sister, so that I was
+the more surprised the day Mrs. Harborough spoke of Betty of her own
+accord. "If you will try to get strong," she said, "I will tell you what
+has been done to find her. And when you are really well I will do all
+that any one woman can to help."</p>
+
+<p>So we talked a little&mdash;just a little now and then, about the things I
+thought of endlessly. And not vaguely either. She saw how vagueness
+maddened me. We faced things. How she had misunderstood<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> my mother. That
+could never be made up now. My mother never knew why we were not with
+her, nor even that we were not there. Consciousness had never come back
+to her. I heard of all that Eric had done, and that his was the last
+face she knew. He had stayed with her all that night, to the end.</p>
+
+<p>There were letters for me from him. Soon, now, I should have my letters.</p>
+
+<p>He had been many times to ask about me.</p>
+
+<p>About <i>me</i>! What was he doing about.... But no, that was for me alone.
+Up and down the streets I should go, looking into the eyes of outcasts
+under city lamps&mdash;looking for the eyes I knew.</p>
+
+<p>Nor could I wait till I was well. Night by night I went upon the quest.
+Catching distant glimpses of Bettina in my dreams, struggling to reach
+her, for ever losing her in the turmoil of streets and the roar of
+stations, till the thought of Bettina was merged in overmastering terror
+of the noise and evil which was London.</p>
+
+<p>The moment I was a little better they tried to get me to sleep without
+an opiate. The doctor made so great a point of this, I did all in my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>
+power not to disappoint him, and for no reason in the world but that
+something in his voice reminded me of Eric&mdash;just a little. Nobody knew
+how much of the time, behind closed eyes, my mind was broad awake....</p>
+
+<p>Oh, the London nights!&mdash;airless, endless. And the anguish of those
+haunted hours before dawn. My country ears, so used to silence or the
+note of birds, strained to interpret London sounds before break of day.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly any honest, individual voices, and yet no moment quiet.
+Incessantly the distant rumbling of ... <i>something</i>. I could never tell
+what. It was the roar of London streets by day, attenuated, held at bay,
+but never conquered&mdash;the bustle and clang muffled in the huge blanket of
+the night.</p>
+
+<p>The strongest impression about it was just of the vague, unverifiable
+thing being <i>there</i>&mdash;an enemy breathing in the dark. Sometimes it
+started up with a rattle of chains.</p>
+
+<p>"Mail-carts," said the nurse.</p>
+
+<p>And that other sound&mdash;like one's idea of battering-rams thundering at
+fortress walls&mdash;the nurse would have me believe that to such an
+accompaniment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> did milk make entry into London! Sometimes the thick air
+was so sharply torn by horn, or pierced by whistle, that I would start
+up in my bed trembling, listening, till the dying clamour sunk once more
+to the level of the giant's breathing.</p>
+
+<p>When I was not delirious, the reason I lay still was sometimes half a
+nightmare reason; a feeling that the muffled night-sounds were like the
+bees at home in the rhododendron, drumming softly so long as we sat
+still. The moment we rose up the bees rose too, with angry commotion,
+ready to fly in our faces and sting. Just so with that muted hum of
+London. If I were not very still, if I were to rise and venture out, all
+the stinging, angry noises would rise, too, and overwhelm me.</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">And out there in the heart of the swarm, Bettina. Being stung and stung,
+till feeling died.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII<br /><span class="medium">A STRANGE STEP</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">One day, when my head was clearer, I seemed to have lain a great while
+waiting for someone to come. I asked where Mrs. Harborough was.</p>
+
+<p>She was "engaged for the moment."</p>
+
+<p>Presently I asked what kept her. The nurse rang and sent a message.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Harborough came up at once. She had been talking to Mr. Annan, she
+said. And would I like to see him?</p>
+
+<p>No. I shrank under the bedclothes, and turned my face to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>An afternoon, soon after that, brought me the sudden clear sense of
+Eric's being again in the house. I was sure that he timed his visits so
+that he might see the doctor. When the doctor left the room that
+afternoon I asked if Mr. Annan had been again.</p>
+
+<p>Yes; and did I want to see him now?</p>
+
+<p>No.</p>
+
+<p>"He has come to-day with another friend of yours," said Mrs. Harborough,
+lingering.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"One of the Helmstones?" I asked dully.</p>
+
+<p>"No; Mr. Dallas."</p>
+
+<p>Ranny! Ranny was downstairs. The happy, care-free people were going
+still about the world.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he married?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Married?" Mrs. Harborough seemed surprised. Certainly, he seemed free
+to devote a great deal of time to us. Mr. Annan and he between them had
+left no means untried, she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been told a thousand times," I interrupted, "that everything has
+been done, but no one ever tells me what." I fell to crying.</p>
+
+<p>Looking more stirred than I had ever thought to see her, she told me
+that young Dallas had offered rewards, and had gone from place to place
+in search....</p>
+
+<p>I seized her hands. I made her sit by the bedside.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, and always he had come back here, making his report and asking
+questions.</p>
+
+<p>Eric brought the doctors and the nurses ... but Ranny had done better.
+Ranny had stirred up Scotland Yard. When Eric told him the nurse had
+said I was for ever raving about barred windows,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> Ranny had flung out of
+my aunt's drawing-room and was gone a day and a night.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, he came back. He had found the house. He got a warrant, and he went
+with the police when they made their search. He had seen the woman. She
+brazened it out. She had never heard of either Bettina or me.</p>
+
+<p><i>My</i> story? Oh, very possible, she said, that I and my sister had been
+"seeing life." No uncommon thing for young women to lie about their
+escapades. "Drugged?" the usual excuse.</p>
+
+<p>The next day I asked them to let me see Ranny. They refused.</p>
+
+<p>I did not sleep that night.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came earlier the next morning and was troubled. "What is it?"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>I told him. "I will promise to be very quiet," I said. I would promise
+anything if they would only let me see Ranny.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Harborough went out and sent a message. Mr. Dallas was staying
+quite near, she said. But I waited for him for a thousand years. And
+then ... a footstep on the stair.</p>
+
+<p>My heart drew quivering back from the two-edged knife of Wanting-to-know
+and Dreading-to-know.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> Then all that poignancy of feeling fell to
+dulness, for the step was not Ranny's and not Eric's. I had never heard
+this slow, uncertain footfall.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and it was Ranny.</p>
+
+<p>He did not look at me.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes went circling low, like swallows before rain. They settled on
+the coverlid till, slowly, he had come and stood beside me.</p>
+
+<p>Then Ranny lifted his eyes....</p>
+
+<p>Oh, poor eyes! Poor soul looking out of them!</p>
+
+<p>"Ranny," I whispered, "speak to me."</p>
+
+<p>"I have failed," he said. He leaned heavily against the chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard," I managed to say, "how hard you have been trying...."</p>
+
+<p>"But I have failed!" he said once more; and I hope I may never again
+hear such an accent.</p>
+
+<p>I pointed to the chair ... we could neither of us speak for a while. And
+then he cleared his throat.</p>
+
+<p>"They took her out of that house and hid her," he said. "And then they
+took her abroad. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> traced her to their house in Paris. But she had
+gone. Always I have been too late."</p>
+
+<p>When I could speak I said: "You are a good friend, Ranny...."</p>
+
+<p>He made an impatient gesture. "Nothing is any good!" He stood up. "But I
+wanted you to know that I am trying.... Trying still. Nothing that you
+could do but I am doing it. Will you believe that?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Ranny," I said, "how can you do all this? Haven't you ... other
+claims?"</p>
+
+<p>"Other claims?" he said, as though he had never heard of them.</p>
+
+<p>"You surely did have other claims?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I had. But when this came I saw they were nothing." He
+stopped an instant near the door. "You don't believe I would lie to
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Then get well. <i>You</i> have something to live for. You and Annan. Not
+like me."</p>
+
+<p class="chapend">He went out with that strange-sounding step.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV<br /><span class="medium">THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="nodent">They were sorry they had let him come. A new night nurse was sent. Two
+doctors, now. And, either I dreamed it or, at the worse times, Eric was
+there as well. But always when I was myself, and the haunted night had
+given way to day, his face was gone. Yet his care was all about me. The
+doctors were friends of his; the nurses of his choosing.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot explain why, but ferreting out these facts gave me something
+less than the comfort they might be thought to bring. Why was he
+troubling about me? Why was he not spending every thought and every hour
+in trying to find Bettina?</p>
+
+<p>Ranny had meant it well, telling me I had something to live for besides
+Betty, and giving that something a name. But it was an ill turn; a sword
+in my side for many a day and night. It gave me a ceaseless smart of
+anger against Eric. I was jealous, too, that it had been Ranny, and not
+Eric, who had been taking all these journeys.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> Ranny had been working
+day and night. Ranny was the person we owed most to&mdash;Betty and I.</p>
+
+<p>And was I to lie there, suffocated by all this care, and leave a boy
+like Ranny (a boy I had expected so little of) to spend himself, soul
+and substance, for my sister?</p>
+
+<p class="marbigbot">How dared Eric think that he and I were going to be happy, while Ranny
+searched the capitals of Europe, and while Bettina....</p>
+
+
+
+<p>One night, or early morning rather, stands out clear.</p>
+
+<p class="marbigbot">Vaguely I remembered a renewed struggle, and a fresh defeat. Now,
+strangely, unaccountably, I had waked out of deep sleep with a feeling
+quite safe and sure, at last, that Betty was free.</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="marbigbot">The night-light had burned out. A pearly greyness filled the room.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>The nurse was sitting by the window, wrapped in a shawl.</p>
+
+<p>Her head, leaning against the window-frame, was thrown back as though to
+look at something.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know whether it was the shawl drawn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> about drooped shoulders, or
+the association of a lifted face by the window, but I thought of the
+hop-picker. And of the promise I had made. Yes, and kept.</p>
+
+<p>As long as I had been at Duncombe after that haggard woman passed, no
+other with my knowing had gone hungry away.</p>
+
+<p>Not all suffering, then, was utterly vain.</p>
+
+<p>What was the white-capped figure looking at&mdash;so steadily, so long?</p>
+
+<p>I raised myself on my elbow, and leaned forward till I, too, could see.
+A tracery of branches, bare, against a clear-coloured sky; and through
+the crossing lines, a little white moon looked through its sky-lattice
+into the open window of my room.</p>
+
+<p>I got up, so weak I had to cling hold of table and chair, till I stood
+by the nurse. She was asleep, poor soul! But I hardly noticed her then.
+I was looking up in a kind of ecstasy, for it seemed to me that a pale
+young face&mdash;not like the Bettina I had known, and still Bettina's face,
+was leaning down out of Heaven to bring me comfort.</p>
+
+<p>But as I looked I saw there was high purpose as well as a world of pity
+in the face&mdash;as though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> she would have me know that not in vain her
+innocence had borne the burden of sin.</p>
+
+<p>And I was full of wondering. Till, suddenly, I realised that not to
+comfort me alone, nor mainly, was Betty leaning out of heaven ... <i>she
+was come to do for others what no one had done for her</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Then the agony of the sacrifice swept over me afresh. I remembered I had
+gone back into that last Darkness saying, as I had said ten thousand
+times before: "Why had this come to Betty?"</p>
+
+<p>And now again I asked: "Why had it to be you?"</p>
+
+<p>Through the gentle grey of morning Betty seemed to be leading me into
+the Light. For the answer to my question was that the suffering of
+evil-doers had never been fruitful as the suffering of the innocent had
+been.</p>
+
+<p>Was there, then, some life-principle in such pain?</p>
+
+<p>A voice said: "You shall find in mortal ill, the seed of Immortal Good."</p>
+
+<p>I knelt down by the window and thanked my sister.</p>
+
+<p>Others shall thank her, too.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h4>Transcriber's Notes:</h4>
+<p class="nodent">Variations in spelling, hyphenation, and use of accents appear as in the
+original.<br />End of line hyphenations have been rejoined.<br /> Obvious typographical errors have been changed.</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Contents:  "NUMBUS" to NIMBUS"</li>
+<li>Page 2: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "wheat-ears'" to "wheat-ear's" (a wheat-ear's hidden)</li>
+<li>Page 12: &nbsp; "servants" to "servants'"  (the servant's gossip)</li>
+<li>Page 24: &nbsp; "Fairly" to "Fairy" (the Fairy Tale element)</li>
+<li>Page 49: &nbsp; period added after "my mother liked him"</li>
+<li>Page 52: &nbsp; "Helmstone's" to "Helmstones'" (acquaintance of the Helmstones')</li>
+<li>Page 88: &nbsp; quote added after "fragrance to their breath"</li>
+<li>Page 93: &nbsp; removed hyphen from "live-laborious days"</li>
+<li>Page 175:  "seedums" to "sedums" (mosses, sedums and suchlike)</li>
+<li>Page 226:  "d'automme" to "d'automne" (feuille d'automne touched)</li>
+<li>Page 227:  "Drew" to "Dew" (passing Dew Pond House)</li>
+<li>Page 259:  "then" to "them" (take them to my sister)</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Little Sister, by Elizabeth Robins
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Little Sister, by Elizabeth Robins
+
+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: My Little Sister
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins
+
+Release Date: May 25, 2011 [EBook #36220]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LITTLE SISTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by C.S. Beers, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
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+
+
+                            MY LITTLE SISTER
+
+
+
+
+               _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+    GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND
+
+    THE NEW MOON
+
+    THE OPEN QUESTION
+
+    BELOW THE SALT
+
+    THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+
+    THE DARK LANTERN
+
+    COME AND FIND ME
+      (PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM HEINEMANN)
+
+    THE CONVERT (METHUEN)
+
+    VOTES FOR WOMEN: A Play in Three Acts
+      (MILLS & BOON)
+
+    THE FLORENTINE FRAME
+      (JOHN MURRAY)
+
+    WOMEN'S SECRET
+      (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY)
+
+    WHY?
+      (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY)
+
+    UNDER HIS ROOF
+      (WOMAN WRITER'S LEAGUE, 12 HENRIETTA ST.)
+
+
+
+
+                            MY LITTLE SISTER
+
+                                   BY
+
+                            ELIZABETH ROBINS
+
+
+                              [Decoration]
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                         DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+                                  1913
+
+
+
+
+                          COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913
+                         BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
+
+                         PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1913
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+                    CHAPTER                     PAGE
+
+             I FIRST IMPRESSIONS                   1
+
+            II LESSONS                             6
+
+           III A THUNDER-STORM                    13
+
+            IV NIMBUS                             16
+
+             V THE MOTHER'S VOW                   24
+
+            VI MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING      33
+
+           VII A SHOCK                            45
+
+          VIII ANNAN                              51
+
+            IX ERIC                               59
+
+             X THE BUNGALOW                       68
+
+            XI AWAKENING                          83
+
+           XII OUR FIRST BALL                     94
+
+          XIII THE CLOUD AGAIN                   108
+
+           XIV "WHERE IS BETTINA?"               120
+
+            XV MY SECRET                         137
+
+           XVI THE YACHTING PARTY                150
+
+          XVII THE EMERALD PENDANT               161
+
+         XVIII RANNY                             169
+
+           XIX ANOTHER GIRL                      178
+
+            XX TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS      186
+
+           XXI AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER           198
+
+          XXII PLANTING THYME                    209
+
+         XXIII ERIC'S SECRET                     215
+
+          XXIV MADAME AURORE                     224
+
+           XXV GOING TO LONDON                   244
+
+          XXVI AUNT JOSEPHINE                    253
+
+         XXVII THE DINNER PARTY                  266
+
+        XXVIII THE GREY HAWK                     287
+
+          XXIX WHERE?                            303
+
+           XXX THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL             310
+
+          XXXI THE MAN WITH THE SWORD            322
+
+         XXXII DARKNESS                          329
+
+        XXXIII A STRANGE STEP                    336
+
+         XXXIV THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING   341
+
+
+
+
+                            MY LITTLE SISTER
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+She is very fair, my little sister.
+
+I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and
+golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without
+touching the quick.
+
+I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and
+then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written
+"was" or "seems."
+
+And that, in sum, is my story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot
+clearly remember what life was like before.
+
+Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my
+father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these
+were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen,
+I cannot tell. I do not think I imagined the confused picture of dark
+faces and a ship.
+
+My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A
+house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is
+wide and green.
+
+As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse;
+always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with
+the infinite possibilities of existence--from the discovery of a
+wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the
+horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on
+horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of
+the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and
+vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing,
+leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.
+
+We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the
+cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of
+hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his
+own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and kicked
+their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at
+Bettina.
+
+To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina.
+
+And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass
+by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill.
+
+Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by
+before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at
+large in our green dominions was an enemy.
+
+So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all
+in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in
+the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate.
+My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm.
+And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock
+blew across her face.
+
+Melanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A
+lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Melanie could not even
+understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been
+there with my mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the
+knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use
+to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as
+the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right
+was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch
+pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby.
+Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy.
+
+Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were
+on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had
+no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond.
+
+I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in
+stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away.
+Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange
+woman kissed Bettina?
+
+The new nurse lied.
+
+And I said no word.
+
+But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at
+Duncombe was ever to kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me--which I remember
+thinking a pity.
+
+Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness
+of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare
+confess it.
+
+For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge
+of the lie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LESSONS
+
+
+There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our
+mother as fledglings in a nest.
+
+Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite
+young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the
+beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But
+this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came
+in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness.
+
+In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's
+mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she
+taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in
+our lessons--so much so that we were a long time in finding out the
+dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because
+our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made
+stimulating, and the easy things she made delight.
+
+No; there was an exception to this.
+
+Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely
+patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister.
+
+Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my
+"Etude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a
+gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle."
+
+"Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge."
+
+I began again--_allegro_, as I thought.
+
+But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands.
+
+"How _can_ I? You expect me to be as quick as God!"
+
+I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense
+of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my
+fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always
+the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if
+there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her
+playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought
+down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord.
+
+Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And
+better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she
+was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her
+green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery
+rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections
+of old English song:
+
+      "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_"
+
+We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the
+first thing she sang in English.
+
+I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first
+language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us
+to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All
+the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the
+mythology stories were in French.
+
+And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went
+collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium.
+
+We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long
+were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited
+than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large
+country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other
+small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green--brave
+little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be
+wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had
+been taken from the people.
+
+Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been
+only a superior sort of farmhouse.
+
+Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as
+children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we
+thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted
+but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did.
+
+We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards
+those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our
+wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds. The proper
+thing to do, on catching sight of any stranger, was to start with an
+aversion suggested by our mother's, but improved upon--more pictorial.
+We would all three stare at the intruder, and then allow our eyes to
+travel to the nearer of the signs, "Trespassers," etc. If this pantomime
+did not convince the creature of the impropriety of his presence, we
+would look at one another with wide eyes, as though inquiring: "Can such
+things be? Are these, then, deliberate criminals? If so"--our looks
+agreed--"the company of outlaws is not for us." We turned our backs and
+went home. I was twelve before I realised that we ourselves were
+trespassers.
+
+The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone.
+
+That was a blow.
+
+Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not
+our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the
+motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as
+little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as
+heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit
+less to those broad acres rolling away--with foam of gorse and broom on
+the crests of their green waves--rolling northward towards London and
+the future.
+
+Two miles to the south was our village--source of such supplies as did
+not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the
+village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus,
+the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as
+many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower
+came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first
+to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the
+lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people
+would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come
+to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a
+children's school-treat?
+
+And she never did any of these things.
+
+Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha
+Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going
+to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had
+beguiled Bettina with chocolate.
+
+I was furious and miserable.
+
+I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream.... But
+the servants' gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I
+thought about little else in our walks.
+
+Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my
+head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I
+persist."
+
+Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of
+my mother's character.
+
+I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in.
+
+But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of--I knew not what. But I
+knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our
+walks were different, because we were always thinking we might meet him.
+
+I prayed God to give my mother strength--for Christ's sake not to let it
+happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer.
+
+Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken
+the matter in hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A THUNDER-STORM
+
+
+Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going
+out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So
+Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it
+grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on
+the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite
+suddenly the _croisee_ of the casement showed as ink-black lines
+crossing a square of blue-white fire.
+
+The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The
+moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it
+seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain.
+Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight.
+
+Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full
+upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her
+paleness ghostlike.
+
+She drew back from the window. Before the lightning died I had seen
+that she was frightened. I had been frightened, too, till I saw that she
+was. In the impulse to reassure her, my own fear left me. I went to her
+in that second blackness and put my hand in hers. When I could see again
+I looked through the streaming window-pane, as we stood there, and I saw
+a man sheltering under the chestnut-tree at our gate. He lifted his
+umbrella, and seemed to make a sign: "May I come in?"
+
+"Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue.
+My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen.
+
+I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed
+so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A
+blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of
+sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging
+together.
+
+"That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought
+the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and
+daylight struggled back. We went on with our playing. I noticed, as my
+mother went downstairs, that she kept her head turned away from the
+window.
+
+Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and
+scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being
+carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were
+wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with
+fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother,
+with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the
+drawing-room door for the bearers to pass.
+
+Their feet left muddy marks in the hall....
+
+We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had
+been taken away.
+
+People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric
+current.
+
+I knew God had heard my prayer.
+
+But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was
+riven from foot to crotch.
+
+That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You
+expect me to be as quick as God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+NIMBUS
+
+
+I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No.
+He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying
+more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else
+understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon.
+
+Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet
+there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of
+fear.
+
+I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A
+thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A
+fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger
+with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones.
+
+We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people
+are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships.
+
+My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who
+heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade.
+
+More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our
+walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have
+seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now,
+little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."
+
+I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The
+forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of
+the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer,
+nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things
+taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull
+oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.
+
+I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace
+that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would
+hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew
+themselves pursued.
+
+Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew
+that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears.
+Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to
+strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven
+of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and
+flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about
+the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to
+let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains.
+
+"_Now_ we are safe and sound!" she would say.
+
+I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though
+we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger.
+
+In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of
+game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House
+for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had
+escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had
+barred him out.
+
+That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden
+shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy,
+craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got
+into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when
+lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his
+breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was
+behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes
+and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch
+at your bare feet as you jumped in.
+
+I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was
+there.
+
+Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact
+that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the
+house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to
+bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only
+some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children
+the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless.
+
+As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean
+children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at
+Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds
+were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter
+evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind
+instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the
+organ's playing."
+
+Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and
+listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a
+something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and
+often seemed upon the verge of understanding.
+
+There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than
+that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off
+her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that
+look, listening, foreboding.
+
+There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in
+the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It
+caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively,
+to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast
+of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look
+when the fringe of shadow lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to
+the light.
+
+There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or
+moods. She was merely gentle and aloof.
+
+She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes
+most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times
+when she must have been unhappy, too.
+
+She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after
+Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we
+had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs
+to do lessons in the morning-room--which was our schoolroom under the
+cheerfuller name.
+
+Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing
+for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we
+were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side
+in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we
+heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that?
+
+I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons, listening to that music
+she never made for us.
+
+And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast.
+
+Then I would shut the window.
+
+Bettina ought never to hear such music.
+
+For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful
+world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it
+"between the lights."
+
+As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper
+still.
+
+As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy
+places.
+
+Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and
+consolatory suggestions of supper.
+
+Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our
+mother--when she would break off and come to find us--help us to hurry
+through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite
+knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us
+see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our
+father's order and his watch. We had turned over the pretty things he
+had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew
+up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two
+brass buttons we might never touch.
+
+We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them
+wonderfully--as though they were alive.
+
+And we, too--we were always happier after we had seen them.
+
+We knew that she felt, somehow, safer.
+
+So did we.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MOTHER'S VOW
+
+
+We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own.
+But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by
+following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent
+distance, but with a closeness of devotion.
+
+In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless
+springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family.
+
+The reason for the first is clear.
+
+As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and
+intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a
+commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort.
+
+Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the
+Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour,
+partly as symbols of our national greatness.
+
+From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter,
+or to her sailor-son, the Prince of Wales. His wife, that Princess of
+Wales, who even before her marriage had been the idol of England was our
+idol too--apart from her high destiny as mother of the future King, (the
+little Prince born in the same year as Bettina)--and mother of that
+fascinating figure in the story, the solitary Princess of her house,
+three years younger than the youngest of our family. Our interest in
+them all received a fresh accession at the birth of Prince Henry; we
+hailed the advent of Prince George; we felt the succession trebly sure
+in the fortunate arrival of Prince John. We saw them safely christened;
+we consulted the bulletins in the _Standard_ and the _Queen_ about their
+health; we followed their august comings and goings with an enthusiasm
+undampened by hearing how well they were all being brought up on the
+incomparable "White Lodge" system, which had been so successfully
+applied to the little royalties' mamma.
+
+Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the
+unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing
+fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath.
+
+It was let to different people, from time to time, for the hunting. If
+the people had children, they were of palpitating interest to us, even
+though we never saw much of the children.
+
+Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother.
+
+If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would
+stop to ask how my mother was.
+
+The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother
+ought to have a nurse. She said she had me.
+
+That was the proudest moment of my childhood.
+
+I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such
+delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed
+to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her.
+
+Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick
+room.
+
+In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape,
+and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to
+the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching
+Bettina play at church-choir with all our dolls in a row, and tiny
+home-made hymn-books in their laps.
+
+When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in
+chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously:
+"Someone must go down and bring Bettina back."
+
+I could not bear to see Loring, or Melanie, doing anything for my
+mother. I think they humoured me, and that Melanie performed her service
+chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid
+was able to come downstairs.
+
+She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her
+hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different.
+
+Not only thin. Different.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people
+who "called to inquire."
+
+We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such
+meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon
+"indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her
+malady.
+
+We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our
+inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought.
+
+When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought
+their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with
+the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return
+your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children.
+
+In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty
+used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most
+glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look.
+I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring
+Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?"
+
+One day Dora shook her head.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+She was going back to school. "Aren't _you_ going back to school?" she
+asked.
+
+"Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school."
+
+Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us.
+
+"You _like_ having to go to school!" I said.
+
+She loved it. "So would you."
+
+"I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction.
+
+She couldn't think why.
+
+Neither could I--beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And
+that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of
+pity--"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at
+home."
+
+Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified
+to hear we had never had one.
+
+Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the
+riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for
+her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she
+had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a
+strange woman those hours she spent with us.
+
+We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to
+sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so hopeless. Or she
+would sit under the wild broom in Caesar's Camp watching the birds; or
+lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors or
+out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that
+was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure,"
+our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any
+pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all.
+
+Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not
+the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the
+circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in
+all things else.
+
+I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I
+recognised her accomplishments as among our best family
+assets--reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect
+shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my
+thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger,
+soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care
+of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the
+paths appointed.
+
+Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected
+against colds, against fatigue.
+
+There is, in almost every house, one main concern.
+
+When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If
+she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable.
+
+But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable.
+
+I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or
+away from our mother, until--but that is to come later.
+
+I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing
+the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car--the first we had
+encountered at close quarters--a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling
+apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded
+her dreadful errand--to invite us children to come and stay at her house
+in Brighton from Friday to Monday!
+
+We stood there, blank, speechless.
+
+Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she
+could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse.
+
+Relief and pride rushed together. I could have kissed my mother's feet.
+My own could hardly keep from dancing.
+
+"Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor.
+
+The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs.
+
+Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will
+not let anyone take you away--no, never. Very well, you shall not pay
+visits."
+
+And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not _never_?"
+
+"Not never."
+
+Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING
+
+
+When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had
+been with us since she was fifteen--at first a little scullery-maid.
+Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of
+her youth and her love of fun.
+
+We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She
+was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of
+ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted
+person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he
+used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring
+us our presents at the same time--perhaps out of fear of the cook, who
+held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was
+elderly, and very easily annoyed.
+
+She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over
+the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the
+hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if ever we spoke of
+these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any
+more. So we were most careful.
+
+So was Peter.
+
+So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to
+go down the garden and wait for them--wait so long, sometimes, that we
+fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning.
+
+Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were
+impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence
+into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our
+mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye--though she
+wasn't ever coming back, the cook said.
+
+Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room.
+
+In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom
+what had become of Martha.
+
+Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone
+under.
+
+"Under? Under what?"
+
+Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!"
+
+I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what
+had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where
+she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed
+themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person.
+
+I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She
+chased me out with a hot frying-pan.
+
+We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found
+out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with
+the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife
+ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter.
+
+As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go
+near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon
+she went away.
+
+We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a
+dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.
+
+Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of
+gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow
+our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid
+us back.
+
+I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole
+year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died.
+And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the
+horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they
+had four little children left. And one or other of the children was
+always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would
+tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen
+for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for
+plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a
+fearful lot of poultices.
+
+Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a
+peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had
+admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too,
+and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book
+thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called
+"Household Medicine." I read it a great deal--especially when one of the
+little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother
+and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them
+back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that
+the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I
+glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the
+specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their
+sufferings.
+
+One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on
+slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs.
+Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr.
+Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had
+Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all
+crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had
+been like this for two days.
+
+"Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted
+upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a
+warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper; and the thing for me to do
+was to send him some proper food--all of which was done in collusion
+with Martha.
+
+I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my
+mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages.
+Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those
+thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.
+
+I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to.
+That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite
+natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner
+clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common
+clay, Martha Loring.
+
+The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two
+years or more after she "went under."
+
+Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well
+again--so well that she insisted on going for a walk.
+
+My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings
+and overshoes.
+
+But, after all, we only stayed out about ten minutes. My mother said
+the air was raw, and "not safe."
+
+At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed
+quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal
+appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be
+prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be
+obvious later--I remember we had delicious things to eat that day.
+Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being
+urged to eat more than she wanted.
+
+My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take.
+
+When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic,
+because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had
+gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire.
+We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there
+had been this trouble to make Bettina eat--specially breakfast. My
+mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in
+her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow
+cold. So a punishment had to be invented. Bettina, who dearly loved
+society, must be left alone to finish breakfast--a plan that seemed to
+work, for when one of us went back in a few minutes, Bettina's plate
+would be bare. Then the awful discovery one day, in cleaning out a
+seldom-opened part of the side-board--a great collection of toast and
+bits of mouldy bacon, pushed quite to the back of the capacious drawer.
+
+While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now
+and superior, a face looked in at the window--a pinched, unhappy face,
+with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a
+shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down--heavy
+leaden drops out of a leaden sky.
+
+I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily.
+The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She
+had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as
+far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the
+hop-fields.
+
+At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What _are_ you doing? Shut
+the window instantly!" And as I was not quick about it, she came behind
+me and shut the window sharply. What was I thinking of? Had I no regard
+for my little sister, sitting there in the current of raw air? Really,
+she had thought me old enough by now to be trusted!
+
+Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I
+remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head.
+"Go away!"
+
+"Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story.
+My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were
+dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases.
+
+"Go away!" she said. And again that gesture.
+
+I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered.
+
+My mother measured out the tonic.
+
+My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other,
+lesser instances, came back to me--strange lapses into hardness on the
+part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm,
+she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words.
+If Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to
+sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's
+sensitiveness shared. And yet....
+
+The woman with her burden had moved away--a draggled figure in the rain.
+
+A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart--an impulse of actual hatred
+towards my mother--as the hop-picker disappeared.
+
+Hatred of Bettina, too.
+
+I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If
+Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food
+to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright
+above the greyness of that wretched time.
+
+Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of
+the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where
+she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered,
+something of her spirit still survived.
+
+Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with
+the misery of having to admit the sentence just.
+
+I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of
+Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink.
+
+It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort
+of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted
+libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina.
+
+Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions
+dawning--wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal?
+
+The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course,
+Bettina must not tease the cat."
+
+With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very
+gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety.
+
+But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it.
+
+The hop-picker haunted me.
+
+Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow,
+to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I
+addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for
+yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others."
+
+The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back.
+
+In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind
+deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow
+prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I
+didn't know about had made her like that.
+
+In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and
+my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind.
+
+Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any
+connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures,
+and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one
+guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of
+Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick
+world's infection through our windows.
+
+To-morrow?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A SHOCK
+
+
+When to-morrow came we knew.
+
+We had been using up our capital.
+
+Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of
+us?
+
+Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked.
+
+Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone.
+
+But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on
+living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of
+three.
+
+For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow.
+
+And should we always have the pension?
+
+Yes, as long as she lived.
+
+Not "always" then.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world
+and of our littleness, came down upon me.
+
+We seemed to have almost no relations.
+
+We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We
+heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all.
+
+My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the
+past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we
+grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis
+of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with
+the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs.
+Harborough.
+
+"Aunt Josephine?"
+
+"Well, your father's step-sister."
+
+All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she
+had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly.
+
+"She couldn't have known you," Bettina said.
+
+"That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with
+unwonted bitterness.
+
+Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were
+troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial
+condition was to harass and depress my mother. The condition was bad.
+Therefore it was best covered up.
+
+"We shall manage," she said.
+
+I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I
+knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite
+incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts.
+Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed to be out of
+mind. Out of my mother's mind.
+
+I thought constantly about these things.
+
+One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die
+together. My mother was horrified.
+
+"But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live--Bettina and I,
+without the pension?"
+
+"You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you."
+
+I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence.
+
+My mother went alone into the garden.
+
+She came in looking tired and white.
+
+Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring
+up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went
+upstairs "quite goodly," as we used to say. She looked back and smiled.
+She was still the most beautiful person we knew. But it was a very waxen
+beauty now. I must learn not to weary her with insoluble riddles. I went
+into the dining-room to make her tray ready--I liked doing it myself.
+Bettina's voice came floating in. She had grown tired of playing proper
+music. She was singing the nursery rhyme which my mother had set to
+variations of the tinkling old-world tune:
+
+      "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_"
+
+I thought how strange and wonderful was the simplest, most ordinary
+little life. There must always be that question: what is going to become
+of me? I had long known what was the proper thing to happen. I ought to
+marry Lord Helmstone's heir. And Bettina should marry a prince.
+
+But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a
+family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest
+Hall--since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently
+came my lady. Very smart, with amazing clothes; and some married
+daughters with babies. There were two daughters unmarried, who seemed to
+be always abroad or in London. We liked Lord Helmstone; even my mother
+liked him. But she criticised his "noisy friends." These were the
+golfers who motored down from London. Broad-shouldered men, in tweeds
+that made them seem broader still. They would pass by our garden-wall
+and look at Bettina. Often when they had passed they looked back.
+Secretly, I wondered if any of them were those "husbands" who were going
+to take care of us. Some lodged in the village. The noisiest stayed at
+the Hall.
+
+Bettina's singing had broken off abruptly. I heard her running upstairs.
+
+And then a cry.
+
+"Come--oh, quickly, _quickly_!"
+
+Bettina had heard the fall overhead.
+
+Our mother lay on the floor, Bettina standing over her, agonised,
+helpless.
+
+We lifted her on to the bed. We loosened her clothing, and brought
+water, and bathed her temples.
+
+She opened her eyes and smiled--then the lids went down. Still that
+look, the look that made her a stranger.
+
+Was this death?...
+
+Bettina shrank from it. But I told her not to leave the room a second. I
+would bring the doctor quickly.
+
+Bettina's face.... "I cannot stay alone," she whispered.
+
+"I will send up one of the servants."
+
+She held my arm. "Suppose ... while you are gone---- Oh, I am afraid."
+
+"I will run all the way," I said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ANNAN
+
+
+I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water.
+
+I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I
+could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our
+touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece
+that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for
+other people, we said. "Other people must take their chance." I
+remembered that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the
+postmaster wrote out a telegram. _We_ were "taking the chance" now. Such
+a little thing--my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my
+mother her life.
+
+The postmaster rang up Brighton.
+
+The doctor was out.
+
+What could be done but leave a message!
+
+I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not
+thought of that before?
+
+Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London
+that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. He recommended
+the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would
+come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the
+driver to Littlecombe.
+
+"Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too,
+waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted
+mind.
+
+That new acquaintance of the Helmstones'! Was he not a sort of a doctor?
+"The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken
+rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch
+arrogance--"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We
+had not seen him--at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from
+other golfers.
+
+I ran most of the way to the farm.
+
+As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with
+golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very
+un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the
+pathway with a sort of rigidity of gait, I received an impression of
+something so restrained and chilling that I hoped he was not the man I
+had come for. In any case this was not a person before whom one would
+care to show emotion. I asked if he were Mr. Annan. Yes, his name was
+Annan. His tone asked: and what business was it of mine? But he halted
+there, below me, as I stood on the step explaining very briefly my
+errand.
+
+He did not want to come; I could see that.
+
+He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner.
+
+I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given
+him no idea of the urgency of our need. I had to explain that all we
+asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our
+regular doctor would be with us very soon.
+
+He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free
+hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish-brown.
+
+"We mustn't lose time," I said.
+
+As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf
+clubs thrown down in a stone passage.
+
+He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big
+Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a
+moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry
+had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the
+mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for
+a warning.
+
+The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed,
+at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.
+
+What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a
+great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a
+general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered
+young golfers in Norfolk jackets--far too like them, to help in so dire
+a need as ours.
+
+I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of
+him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with
+enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps,
+why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan
+would go far." He had gone too far in the direction of overwork. He had
+been urged to come down here and play golf. Still, he worked long
+hours....
+
+And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept
+repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help."
+
+We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my
+younger sister was not to know if my mother----
+
+"Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster--almost at a
+run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me
+without an effort.
+
+Mother, mother!----
+
+Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever
+noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning
+never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing.
+"Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning."
+
+Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children.
+
+Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles?
+
+"I am taking you the short cut," I said.
+
+"Of course."
+
+We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn
+foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all
+those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All
+that gentleness and beauty----
+
+What a richness had been lavished on our lives!
+
+I had never begun to understand it before this evening--never once had
+thanked her.
+
+Mother, mother!----
+
+The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare
+larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet
+of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was
+nearly over now. And her time---- Was that nearly over too? Where would
+she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch
+stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the
+first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked
+back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet ... and
+that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that
+evening.
+
+"Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the
+flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once
+who was always made faint by it."
+
+He did not look at me again.
+
+But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now we could see the red tile roof.
+
+Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my
+running.
+
+As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of
+Duncombe garden.
+
+Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before I entered the house a strange thing happened.
+
+A great peace fell on me.
+
+I knew, without asking, that all was well.
+
+Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic
+light was this, then, that was shining on the world?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He saw my mother, and told us what to do.
+
+Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his
+verdict.
+
+As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me--eyes
+suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh.
+
+"You don't think she is going to die?"
+
+"Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always
+hope----"
+
+"Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My
+mother!..."
+
+He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's
+life--and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and
+soul.
+
+Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into
+intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald
+and red-gold and azure--a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was
+like the quickness of God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ERIC
+
+
+For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some
+direction.
+
+There seemed no need to talk.
+
+Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him
+walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It
+came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it.
+
+Then it would come again.
+
+He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a
+great misery behind him.
+
+No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I
+pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of
+longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I
+hadn't the heart to worry her with questions.
+
+We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to
+them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's
+had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from
+touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the
+plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we
+thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was
+striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at
+pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an
+air.
+
+She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But
+my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite
+of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips
+and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you
+understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She
+took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young
+Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs.
+
+There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as
+engaged, she said, to Guy Whitby-Dawson. He was in the Guards.
+
+We were all agog. When was she going to be married?
+
+She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards.
+
+Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so
+many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to
+give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it
+was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance.
+
+I wished we three had a pittance.
+
+For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So
+she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would
+die. Then he would have plenty.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged, Hermione flirted a good
+deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young
+men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I
+were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought
+over some of his photographs for us to look at. We did not admire him
+at all.
+
+But we never told Hermione.
+
+As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really
+thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was
+always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing.
+
+If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses
+were up--all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I
+grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful
+when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord
+Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way
+to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just
+for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would
+find I had been gone for hours.
+
+The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old
+devotions paled.
+
+Mercifully, nobody knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked for him all the next spring. In the summer I said to myself, I
+shall never see him again.
+
+Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and
+the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my
+mother.
+
+I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of
+the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of
+sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.
+
+No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.
+
+I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.
+
+I had not dreamed him. He was true.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day brought him.
+
+I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The
+others seemed gladder to see him than I.
+
+He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her
+being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited
+Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe, instead of tramping all
+that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse
+even than the Club House brew.
+
+The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round
+after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord
+Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a
+holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But
+he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt
+flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there
+in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.
+
+Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite
+wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made
+him confess he could not tell Indian from China.
+
+"Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and
+upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no
+one noticed.
+
+It was wonderful to see him again--to verify all those things I had been
+thinking about him for the year and four months since he went away.
+
+But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at
+once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of
+words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been
+compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such
+commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a
+wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with
+reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more
+uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without
+embarrassment.
+
+I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in
+the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him,
+too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that
+Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird.
+Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any
+sisters."
+
+He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But
+he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.
+
+But the confession seemed to have brought him nearer, to make him more
+human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had
+grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh,
+happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about
+them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like?
+
+"Oh----" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were
+"all right."
+
+The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was
+only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could
+learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.
+
+My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was
+"like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he
+liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to
+know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling
+still to keep up the property--a losing battle. And a second brother,
+not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the
+navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was
+"trying to grow tea in Ceylon."
+
+Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our
+friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any
+terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of
+studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one
+thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.
+
+I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in
+that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing
+out the word _research_ with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which
+must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.
+
+That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve--a forefinger
+sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper
+lip--and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep
+absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce
+the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the
+great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner
+of the Hidden Field--that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BUNGALOW
+
+
+My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the
+_devot_, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or
+a saint.
+
+I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for
+people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish
+moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.
+
+Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate
+little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady
+Barbara's unblushing _Schwaermerei_, was less a trial to me than the talk
+about saints and ascetics.
+
+The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our
+tea and our visitor.
+
+Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.
+
+But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.
+
+She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going
+to stay?"--a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to
+put.
+
+"Three weeks."
+
+"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her
+confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much
+of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."
+
+He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life
+nowadays--thank God!--in a laboratory.
+
+Which was scarcely polite.
+
+"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."
+
+He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.
+
+"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half
+so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of
+romance--oh, naturally, not _her_ kind.
+
+What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.
+
+Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed
+that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented
+Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed
+at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants'
+hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room
+at the Carlton--Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a
+thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss
+of the most expensive brand."
+
+They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind.
+For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."
+
+"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made
+in the feuilleton of a certain paper.
+
+Hermione was not a bit dashed. "_You_ may look for romance in bottles if
+you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.
+
+"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"
+
+"Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain."
+
+He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of
+his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said,
+would be waiting for his foursome.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of
+"story-telling."
+
+"You said you were only going to stay three weeks."
+
+To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three
+weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."
+
+"----and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."
+
+I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady
+Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.
+
+"What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.
+
+"Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in
+the country?"
+
+"Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody
+in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.
+
+As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara
+seemed to speak for him. "----just to live in for a while," she said
+quite gently.
+
+"Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag
+over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.
+
+"What do you want a bungalow _for_, then?" Hermione's teasing voice
+followed after him.
+
+"----mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned
+round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on
+Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had
+never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.
+
+Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put
+things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have
+some place to keep one's traps," he called back.
+
+Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the
+retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face
+almost beautiful.
+
+I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all
+mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his
+special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron,
+painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set
+up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard.
+
+The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.
+
+Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go
+over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.
+
+As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with
+the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he
+couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken
+of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let
+down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on.
+And those noises--which he was, strangely, still more sensitive
+to--produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and
+by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the
+house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at
+"country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that
+reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as
+on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us--Eric rather
+out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit:
+
+"----wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At
+four, this kind of thing----" In a quiet, meditative way he would begin
+clucking. Then quacking, almost sleepily at first; then with more and
+more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy
+of a loud, exuberant crow. All this not the least in the sketchy,
+impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble
+noises, but with a precision and vigour that first startled you, and
+then made you feel that you were being given, not only an absolutely
+faithful reproduction of the sound those creatures make, but in the
+oddest way given their point of view as well. We laughed the more, I
+think, because the comedy seemed to come out of the revelation of the
+immense seriousness of the animals. Eric's commentary seemed so fair. It
+seemed to admit that the importance to ducks and cocks and hens of
+_their_ goings on was at least as great as the importance of peace and
+quiet to him. With an air of doing it against the grain, he gave you
+(with a rueful kind of honesty) the duck's sentiments in a series of
+depressed little quacks that hardly needed the translation: "'Been all
+over this repulsive pond; turned myself and all my family upside down
+for hours. Nothing!'" Then indignant quacks, and: "'Silly new servant
+can't tell time. Past five o'clock, and no sharps!'" Then a single
+jubilant "'Quack! There she is----'" and a rising chorus, till anyone
+not in the room would be ready to swear we kept as many ducks as Big
+Klaus. A moment's silence, and in his own person Eric would say with a
+sigh: "_Now_, perhaps, I can tackle that German review." "'Buck! Buck!
+Buck!'"--or rather a series of sounds that defies the alphabet. Then the
+interruption: "'My-wife's-laid-an-egg!'" and the shrill rapture of a
+loud crow of great authority.
+
+The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given
+that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When
+Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him.
+
+And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked.
+
+I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable.
+
+She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in
+at first one window and then another. She said there was nothing but a
+stove and packing-cases in the room she could see into. And she brought
+back a bewildering account of what had been done to the windows of the
+other room. There were no curtains and no blinds, but thick brown paper
+had been pasted over the glass of each lower sash. You could no more see
+in than you could see through the wall.
+
+The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be
+there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after
+all, she said.
+
+Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him
+about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?"
+
+"Oh, quite well, thank you."
+
+"Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read
+the whole day and half the night."
+
+No, he didn't read all the time.
+
+"What do you do then?"
+
+Ah, there was no telling.
+
+And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he
+didn't want to.
+
+Hermione announced that she had been to call.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I heard you call."
+
+She stared.
+
+"You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?"
+
+"Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at
+his ease.
+
+Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my
+life I ever saw Hermione blush.
+
+"What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!"
+
+"Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I always _am_ busy when I'm at
+the Bungalow."
+
+She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard
+me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.)
+
+"Yes, I heard you try the door."
+
+"Well, you _are_ an extraordinary being--shutting yourself up with brown
+paper pasted over the windows----"
+
+"----only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."
+
+"Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"
+
+He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."
+
+"I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."
+
+"Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."
+
+She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he
+makes bombs."
+
+"Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to
+where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.
+
+"No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make
+counterfeit money."
+
+"If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be
+counterfeit."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came
+flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He
+was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture
+chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the
+platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of
+creatures--poor little darling guinea-pigs.
+
+She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.
+
+"No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do
+with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"
+
+He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think
+he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at
+shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her
+friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery
+with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.
+
+But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You
+know perfectly well the Chows are pets."
+
+"Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never
+heard of keeping guinea-pigs."
+
+"'Keeping them'--I used to have them to play with; but you know quite
+well you don't mean to 'keep' them."
+
+"Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."
+
+Of course she hadn't been able to keep them beyond their natural span.
+"But I never did anything horrible to them."
+
+Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer
+under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her
+anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in
+her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets
+that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and
+kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed.
+
+Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only
+a child."
+
+But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said,
+that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were
+warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the
+dogs such whippings as you do."
+
+Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded
+of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now
+and then, they'd get out of hand.
+
+"Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For _your_ pleasure. And
+profit. Not theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in
+house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point
+in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione
+was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to
+keep them?
+
+In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.
+
+Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said.
+"I shall just notice how long you keep them."
+
+"Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."
+
+Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air,
+she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them
+for?"
+
+"Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect,
+after all, to make my fortune."
+
+Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how
+fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well,
+here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs
+are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My idea
+is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a
+day----"
+
+"But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they
+run away? Ours did."
+
+While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures
+with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply
+move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in
+guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief
+Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go
+into the Bungalow.
+
+This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more
+accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived
+altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he
+never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the
+Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech
+was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said,
+according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could
+pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the
+Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle
+eyes and very long arms and legs.
+
+Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of
+Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite
+imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.
+
+"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a
+deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he
+seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.
+
+"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to
+speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know
+our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we
+found it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric
+as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's
+back--the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a
+parson, or some professor-person.
+
+We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones
+came.
+
+That pleased me more than anything.
+
+He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient,
+and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his
+about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful
+laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I,
+too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.
+
+Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they
+"proved the spirit."
+
+A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric
+said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was
+worse--long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a
+risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse;
+they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire
+hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes---- Then he died.
+
+Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It
+was a fine way to die."
+
+He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become
+the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had
+been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long
+grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the
+governing class, out of touch with the real work of the world--no
+wonder they still groped after the military idea.
+
+They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other,
+wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in
+Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with
+those other "preachers"--in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches
+were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of
+merely living off the sheep of his pasture.
+
+But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional
+politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of
+all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused
+from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of
+talking.
+
+We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied
+a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were shown the
+Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh
+over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished
+personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed
+up his moustache and began to heckle him. What had he _done_--except to
+use his great position as a rostrum? What had been done by all the
+members of the Lords and Commons put together comparable to the
+achievements of--for instance, Sanitary Science? Ha, _Science_! No
+phrase-making. No flourish of fine feelings. Just Sanitation--the force
+that had done more in fifty years to improve the condition of the poor
+than all the philanthropy since the birth of Christ. And what had the
+Government done even for Science?
+
+Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the
+sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of
+wisdom.
+
+"When I ope my mouth let no dog bark."
+
+No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his
+work--humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact--these kept
+him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or
+pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had
+to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away
+from the limelight. He was unwritten about--unknown. Even when, after
+years of toil, your man of science came out of obscurity with some great
+gift for the world in his hand, no one except other men of science was
+the least excited. The _Daily Mail_ was quite unmoved. The service done
+mankind by science left the general public in the state of Pet Majorie's
+turkey:
+
+      "----she was more than usual calm,
+       She did not give a single damn."
+
+He was not complaining.
+
+All this was wholesome.
+
+"Science!"
+
+      _"No high-piled monuments are theirs who chose
+          Her great inglorious toil--no flaming death.
+        To them was sweet the poetry of prose,
+          And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath."_
+
+"Who wrote that?" my mother asked.
+
+With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of
+the human race."
+
+And he told us about him.
+
+I asked to have the verse written down.
+
+Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; but still, a splendour only
+to dazzle me--not to light and lead.
+
+When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then
+to steal a look.
+
+When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go
+over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon
+that background.
+
+My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption--the
+long, blessed hours while other people slept.
+
+To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric,
+had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as
+seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint,
+this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my
+fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had
+pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret
+drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since
+she was born--till that afternoon when I began to think furiously about
+her again.
+
+Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Monmouth and carried Eric off. I
+thought they had all three gone to the links.
+
+I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the
+garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the
+gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall
+I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this
+side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect
+it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers
+wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The
+old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said,
+rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the
+more delicate fruits on the wall.
+
+All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the
+lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out
+clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started,
+and stood as still as the apple-tree.
+
+Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other
+bending down. He kissed her--Eddie Monmouth.
+
+I turned and fled back to the house.
+
+The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of
+my dreaming.
+
+Bettina!--old enough to be kissed by a man!
+
+So she was the first to be engaged ... my little sister, who had only
+just had her sixteenth birthday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I tried that night to lead up to a confidence.
+
+But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to
+tell me her great secret just at first.
+
+So I waited.
+
+Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up
+to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding.
+
+Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for
+India. The bride a girl they had never heard of.
+
+I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up
+courage to steal a glance--not a cloud on Betty's face.
+
+Here was courage!
+
+But what the poor child must be going through.--I could not leave her to
+bear this awful thing alone....
+
+When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew.
+
+She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little.
+Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mind _like that_!" she said. "He was very
+nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas."
+
+At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering
+alone.
+
+But I was wrong.
+
+Bettina _did_ like Ranny Dallas best!
+
+He liked Bettina, and flirted with her.
+
+I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I saw more than that.
+
+I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us
+were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in
+her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or
+with waking now and then to thrill at stories about other people's
+courage, insight, indomitable patience. Why should _I_ not rouse myself
+and nerve myself? Why should not I, too, scorn delight and live
+laborious days?
+
+It was then the Great Idea came to me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+OUR FIRST BALL
+
+
+Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away
+without a word about the radical change that had come over a life
+outwardly the same.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my
+mother--French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me
+leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to
+surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me.
+
+I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to
+breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work
+behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the
+Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be
+when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall.
+
+I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he
+was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "liked
+him best"--liked him more than the man she had allowed to kiss her, and
+who had not cared for her at all.
+
+I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny
+Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione
+sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder
+brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny.
+
+All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young
+as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was
+"chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son
+to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed
+Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of
+marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member
+of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about
+such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into
+the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this
+by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants."
+
+I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All
+that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who
+was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of
+being so--chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean.
+And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a
+nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather
+nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the
+plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if
+I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't
+long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he
+looked.
+
+I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and
+more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they
+couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed
+quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up
+and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn.
+Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say that _he_ wouldn't be seen
+riding such a bicycle--"no, not on a dark night!" Ranny, as we knew,
+had two motor-cars of his own, and was very particular about their every
+detail. But he said all that the much-abused "bike" needed was a brake.
+Even without a brake it was "a lot better," he said, "than having to
+think about the shover-chap."
+
+After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the
+Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them--and, for all I could
+do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina.
+
+I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her
+or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He
+used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there
+Ranny got the chaffing.
+
+"What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd
+only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what
+he'd come for.
+
+"Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship."
+
+"Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would
+say to us: "Here's a fella usen't to care a doit for golf--and now this
+passion!"
+
+When Lord Helmstone said that--which, in the way of facetious persons
+secure from criticism, he did a great many times--a colour like a girl's
+would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication
+being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention
+to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his
+keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh----?"
+
+"In this weather?"
+
+"Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to
+your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep
+down superfluous tissue. Eh--what?"
+
+People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly.
+
+When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well,
+but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone,
+she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way.
+
+I said that was quite different, and we very nearly had a serious
+quarrel. When I saw that Betty really couldn't see the vast difference
+between making fun of that boy and making fun of a man like Eric Annan,
+I began to feel more anxious than ever about Betty.
+
+This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South.
+
+They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New
+Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not
+even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had
+taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew
+anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step."
+
+Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two.
+There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers,
+and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever
+seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night
+long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it
+was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the
+admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behave rather badly to
+Ranny. When she had danced three times with the oldest sailor--Captain
+Gerald Boyne--Ranny took her into a corner and remonstrated. I saw he
+looked pretty serious, but I didn't know till she and I were undressing
+in our own room that night, or rather morning--I didn't know how
+strongly he had spoken.
+
+We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little
+remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you
+know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they
+had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians
+went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us.
+
+My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were
+to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in
+the morning."
+
+So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked
+different to me--this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The
+ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very
+white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of the
+dimity curtains. Yes, the moon was brighter than ever! Betty threw open
+the window and leaned out. Oh, what a pity to go to bed when the world
+was looking like this!
+
+We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold;
+but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out
+of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We
+quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was
+still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what
+had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air
+of justification--"such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss,
+just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so
+divinely!"
+
+I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said.
+
+"Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of
+course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had
+promised him----" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so
+reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent
+her dancing _at all_ with Captain Boyne.
+
+"But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded
+her.
+
+"Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And
+instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very
+bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that
+he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw
+Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she
+forgot to keep her voice down.
+
+My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called.
+
+We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But
+she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he
+say?"
+
+I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in
+particular--he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he
+danced badly.
+
+"Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I
+think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me."
+
+"Yes," I admitted, "he does dance best with you."
+
+Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione,
+and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on.
+Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny
+coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she
+expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to
+having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione
+said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up.
+
+And he began badly: "'You've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'"
+
+Betty said "No."
+
+"'Why not? _Why_ haven't you told him?'"
+
+"He would ask for a reason."
+
+"'Very well, give it'"
+
+"'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said.
+
+"'The reason is....' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He
+began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And
+then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and--we waltzed that
+time too."
+
+"Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I
+didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that."
+
+No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the
+cotillion."
+
+"Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain
+Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous."
+
+She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting
+as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was
+furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there."
+
+"I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that horrid waltz
+after he had said he 'made a point of it'--I wasn't to dance again with
+'that fellow.' And then, what do you think I said?" Bettina took hold of
+my arm, so I couldn't go on braiding my hair. "I said he was jealous of
+Captain Boyne, or why should he call him 'that fellow'? Even at the
+moment I felt how horrid that was of me; for it's not a bit like Ranny
+to be jealous in a horrid way, calling people 'fellows.' So I said: 'If
+the Boynes aren't nice, why are they here?' And Ranny said: 'Oh, Gerald
+Boyne's people are all right. His brother is all right. But I shouldn't
+want you to dance with Gerald if you were my sister. And if you were my
+wife, I should forbid it.'"
+
+"'But,' I said, 'I'm _not_ your sister!'--Betty tossed her head,
+laughing softly--'and I'm not your wife----'"
+
+I asked her if she had said it like that?
+
+Yes, she had. "And I said, too--I said it was 'fortunate.'" Then without
+the least warning, poor Betty sat down on the foot of her bed and began
+to cry.
+
+I put my arm round her. And she pulled her bare shoulders away. "You
+needn't think I'm crying about Ranny," she said. "I suppose it's being
+so angry makes me cry."
+
+"You are crying because you are over-tired," I said, and I began to take
+off her shoes and stockings.
+
+"I'm _not_ crying because I'm tired, but because"--she wiped her eyes on
+the sleeve of her nightgown--"it's a disappointment to see anyone so
+silly ... making 'points' of such things as waltzes."
+
+When she was ready for bed, she stood meditating a moment. And then:
+"Ranny has never struck me as one of the horrid, unforgiving sort of
+people. Has he you?"
+
+"Oh, no," I said, and I made her get into bed. I covered her up. But it
+was no use; she threw back the eiderdown, and sat bolt upright.
+
+"----asking me like that, _at a ball_, if I liked Captain Boyne best--a
+man I'd never seen before--don't you call it very rude?"
+
+"No; only a little foolish----"
+
+Another knock on the communicating door. "If you children keep on
+talking I shall have to come in."
+
+We promised we wouldn't say another word. But more than once Betty
+began: "Ranny----"
+
+"Sh!" I said.
+
+The quarrel about the window had ended in our leaving it a couple of
+inches open, and the curtains looped back. As we lay there, the room
+grew brighter; so bright that every little treasure on the long, narrow
+shelf above each bed could be plainly seen. All the small vases and
+pictures and china animals--all the odds and ends we had cherished most
+since we were babies.
+
+When Bettina had come in that night, the first thing she did was to
+clear a space for her cotillion favours. The moonlight showed the
+brilliant huddle of fan and bonbon-basket tied with rose-colour, and,
+most conspicuous of all, the silver horn hung with parti-coloured
+ribbons.
+
+When we had lain quiet in our beds for ten minutes or so, Bettina pulled
+out a pillow from under her head, and propped it so that the moon
+couldn't shine any longer on the be-ribboned horn. And neither could
+Betty's eyes rest on it any more. She lay still for some time, and I was
+falling asleep, when I heard her bed creak. She had pulled herself half
+out of the covers, and was leaning over the pillow-barrier. She took the
+horn and the other favours, one by one, and with much gravity thrust
+them under the bed.
+
+A sigh of satisfaction and a settling down again.
+
+I turned and smiled into my pillow. It was so exactly the sort of thing
+Bettina used to do when she was in the nursery--punishing her toys when
+things went wrong.
+
+What a blessing, I said to myself, that I was coming to like Ranny
+Dallas. For, quite certainly, he was going to be my brother-in-law.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CLOUD AGAIN
+
+
+The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the
+North.
+
+Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was.
+
+"Perhaps he will write," I said.
+
+"He isn't the sort that writes--not even when he's friends with a
+person." Then, with a rather miserable laugh, Betty added: "He _says_ he
+can't spell."
+
+So I gathered that she had asked him to try.
+
+And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the
+ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two,
+and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne.
+
+We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely what would happen--all,
+that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter.
+
+It was a somewhat subdued Bettina who began that year; but I don't think
+it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long.
+
+(Oh, Bettina! how is it now?)
+
+I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being
+actively unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did
+not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father
+was very ill. Ranny's place was at home.
+
+Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in
+common. And she spoke as though any week-end that found his father
+better, Ranny might motor down.
+
+So we waited.
+
+Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends.
+
+As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that
+year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced
+prematurely.
+
+I, too.
+
+I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of
+all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love
+me for finding--all alone like this.
+
+I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I
+had been "good" and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to
+go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the
+Great Secret.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so
+much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I
+thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm.
+
+My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that
+if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to
+Betty?
+
+"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding
+look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my
+mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"
+
+"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and
+dogs."
+
+"Oh, as for dogs!----" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an
+unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one
+dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they
+discuss?"
+
+"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."
+
+She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."
+
+When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as
+though she might be feeling "out of things."
+
+Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking
+Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."
+
+"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."
+
+At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, _I_ have been
+away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is
+the one they chiefly want."
+
+She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she
+said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my
+mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she
+added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."
+
+As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away
+from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of
+the difficulty of confidence on our part--of how our very devotion and
+craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling
+her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own
+age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist
+between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about
+it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her
+know about Ranny."
+
+"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"
+
+I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did
+she feel so?
+
+Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could
+tell her about myself.
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."
+
+"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."
+
+And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved
+with me too.
+
+I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I
+learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least
+interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics" to tell. The
+very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the
+emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of
+girls!--girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother
+didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate.
+I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens,
+have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet....
+
+"Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new
+insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in
+another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her
+own.
+
+I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small
+Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she
+lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been
+happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved
+fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But
+try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled
+against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions
+but those at Duncombe. Feeling myself incredibly bold, I reminded her
+of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am
+always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said
+(unconscious at the moment of the lie)--"you know all that happens to
+us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you
+except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big."
+
+I could not have approached her in any way more telling than to make
+confidence on her part seem a corollary to confidence on ours. She cast
+about with an indulgent air for something new. And then I heard for the
+first time of the "sort of cousin" who had come to keep house for my
+grandfather, and to bring up the little girl of four. I wondered the
+more at so important a figure having been left out of all previous
+pictures, when I heard that my grandfather had cared more for this "sort
+of cousin" than he had cared for his only child. The cousin must have
+been a horrible woman, though my mother told me so little about her, I
+cannot think how I knew. The most definite thing that was said was: "She
+brought out all that was least good in your grandfather." And when he
+ceased to care for the cousin in one way, she made him care for her in
+another. "She ministered to all his whims and perversities." My mother
+dismissed the first sixteen years of her life with: "I had seen a great
+deal of evil before I was grown; mercifully, I met your father when I
+was still very young."
+
+He was the one man, I gathered, whom she had ever found worthy of all
+trust, all love; and she had been so glad to leave home--to leave
+England!
+
+But out there in India she must have seen plenty of nice army people.
+
+Oh, plenty of army people.
+
+She seemed not to want to dwell much even on the happy time. She had her
+two children in three years. The babies kept her at home, and she had
+loved being at home with the babies--and above all with my father in his
+spare hours. Then, as we knew, he had been killed out tiger-hunting. And
+she broke off, "Now go on about the Boynes."
+
+I asked her, mischievously, why she took such an interest in the Boynes,
+as though I had not tried to bring that very thing about. Her ideal of
+"the confidence that should exist" broke down even here; the navy, she
+said evasively, was "the finest of the services."
+
+"Not finer than the army," I protested.
+
+"Yes, finer than the army. Peace was the real 'enemy' to soldiers; but
+peace did not demoralise sailors, for there was always the sea for them
+to conquer. Was Hermione expecting to see the Boynes soon again?"
+
+I smiled inwardly. She might as well have confessed that she thought the
+older Boyne might "do" for me, and the younger Boyne for Betty.
+
+But what had become of the ideal of confidence?
+
+Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not
+been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy
+hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face
+of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the
+faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass
+on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or--mercifully--more than a
+pale reflection of past Despair.
+
+There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately
+behind. They may put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they
+are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed.
+
+The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the
+immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue,
+stand appalled.
+
+The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I
+felt about---- No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes
+raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing
+ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look
+like this.
+
+I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how,
+when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your
+father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the
+lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those
+far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me--days which our mother
+must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the
+key to--there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an
+echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the
+beauty of life to those two lovers in the gorgeous East; and out of
+starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone
+sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended.
+
+The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I
+should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at
+the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour.
+
+Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the
+sadness of life to older people.
+
+Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of
+older women--that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded
+little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch
+had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed.
+
+She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was
+with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang
+to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness--and a
+fear.
+
+Not even my secret could console me at such moments.
+
+Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a
+wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother--where was
+Betty?
+
+She was late.
+
+She was very late.
+
+Unaccountably, alarmingly late.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WHERE IS BETTINA?
+
+
+She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we
+mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why
+Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she
+had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina
+waited--nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went
+away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case."
+
+She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked
+nor stirred.
+
+We went out in the hall and held a whispered conference. "She won't mind
+a bit," Bettina was sure. "It isn't as if it would do another time"--for
+the Helmstones were off again to-morrow. To clinch the argument, Betty
+told me that Hermione was expecting a letter, by the last post, from a
+friend of Ranny's; the one chance of hearing anything for Heaven knew
+how long.
+
+So I let Bettina go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother never woke till nearly nine, and of course the first thing she
+asked was, "Where is Betty?"
+
+I said the maid had taken her, and Lady Helmstone had promised to send
+her home.
+
+My mother was extremely ill-pleased that Bettina had gone. I had hoped
+that after that profound sleep she would wake up feeling better, as I
+have noticed the books nearly always say is what will happen. But I have
+noticed, since, that people who have been sleeping heavily at some
+unseasonable hour will often waken not refreshed and calmed, but out of
+sorts, and easily fretted by quite small things. They seem to require
+time before they can collect themselves and see the waking world in true
+proportion.
+
+"We thought you wouldn't mind," I said.
+
+And why _should_ we? Why, above all, should I, who was so much older...?
+
+"To go anywhere else ... I should have been against it," I said, "but to
+the Helmstones--where you let her go so constantly."
+
+Saying that was a mistake.
+
+Did not Betty know, above all, did not I know, the feeling of all the
+proper sort of mothers about young girls being away from home at night?
+Day-visiting--a totally different matter.
+
+It was "the last evening for weeks," I reminded her. The Helmstones were
+going back to town....
+
+"I am not sorry," said my mother.
+
+To my surprise the circumstance that seemed to annoy her most was that I
+had not gone with Bettina. She spoke to me in such a way I felt the
+tears come into my eyes. "I stayed on your account," I said.
+
+"I have told you before"--and she told me again.
+
+The supper tray came up, and went down scarcely touched. I asked if I
+should read to her.
+
+No. There had been reading enough for that day.
+
+So I mended the fire and brought some sewing.
+
+She lay with the candle alight on the night table, waiting, listening.
+
+"Who is to be there?"
+
+"Oh, just the family, I suppose."
+
+"Did you ask?"
+
+"No--but Betty would have said, if...."
+
+"----_never even asked!_"
+
+We sat in silence.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"A quarter to ten."
+
+"It is not like Bettina," she said presently. Bettina had never in her
+life done such a thing before.
+
+I agreed she never had. If Bettina transgressed (and I admit that this
+was seldom), she never did so outright. And she was not sly. She did not
+so much evade as avoid an inconvenient rule.
+
+My mother remembered, no doubt, that any sin of deliberate disobedience
+was far more likely to be mine. "I suppose the child, not able to ask my
+permission, came to you."
+
+Yes, she had consulted me.
+
+"And you took it upon yourself----"
+
+I sat there, in disgrace.
+
+Presently: "Perhaps the Boynes have motored down. Or one of them."
+
+I said I had no reason to think so. All the same, I couldn't help
+welcoming the suggestion. For the idea that the Boynes, "or one of
+them," might be there, seemed, oddly enough, to excuse Bettina in my
+mother's eyes. And she was moved to make me understand why I had been
+reproached. We had to be far more careful than most girls. I heard about
+the heavy responsibility of bringing up "girls without a father."
+
+I wondered in what way our father's being here would have altered the
+events of this particular evening. And since he had been quoted to
+justify anxiety, I made bold to go to him for cheer. At times of stress
+before, I had invoked my father. Not often, and all-cautiously. And
+never yet in vain. That night I wondered aloud what were the kind of
+things our father would have done.
+
+"His mere being here would make all the difference."
+
+His mere name certainly did much. Once again I had cause to bless him
+for taking the chill out of the domestic atmosphere.
+
+She talked more about him and, by implication, more about herself that
+night than ever before or after. She told me of the mistakes he had
+saved her from. The things he had warned her against. Though he was
+brave as a lion, she would have me believe that he was afraid of
+trusting people. He had said to her after a certain occurrence----
+
+"What occurrence?" I interrupted.
+
+"No need to go into that," she said hurriedly. The point lay in his
+comment: "The safe course is not to trust anyone."
+
+"That is very uncomfortable," I said.
+
+It was better, she answered, to be less comfortable and safe, than to be
+more comfortable and----
+
+"And what?"
+
+She had stopped suddenly, and felt for her watch on the night table.
+"Ten minutes past. They will surely see that she starts for home by ten
+o'clock."
+
+We sat for five minutes without speaking. I thinking of my father.
+
+Then we heard the maids making the nightly round, shutting and locking
+up the house.
+
+"Look out of the window," my mother said.
+
+I could see nothing. The night was dark and still.
+
+"She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may
+bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk."
+
+She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the
+door."
+
+Oh, the times we had been told that!
+
+Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The
+maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature
+stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back
+into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on
+her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that?
+
+If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful
+sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very
+quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened.
+
+Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white
+of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my
+narrower range.
+
+I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke--until I,
+unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on
+the familiar Magic--my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred.
+She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a
+different key.
+
+"The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more
+I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow
+plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of
+nice equilibrium."
+
+"I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said.
+
+"The fall?"
+
+"Yes--when father was killed--and all the happiness fell down."
+
+Then she said something wholly incomprehensible at the time, but which I
+understand better now. "Perhaps," she said, "I would have borne what you
+call 'the fall' less well if I hadn't known ... there are worse than
+tigers in the world's jungle."
+
+I felt I was on the track of some truer understanding, and a secret
+excitement took hold of me. "How was it you came to know that?" I asked.
+
+"It is a thing," she said, "that even happy women learn." Then,
+hurriedly, she went on: "And it ended--my happiness--before any stain or
+tarnish dimmed it. All bright and shining one moment, the next all
+vanished."
+
+I watched the face I knew so well. Covertly, I watched it. Saw the
+delicate lineaments a little pinched with anxiety. The eyes veiled one
+moment, the next lifting wide as at a sudden call.
+
+"What was that?" she said.
+
+I heard nothing.
+
+Oftenest that quick lift of heavy eyelids, and the flash of bright
+fixity, would come without any following of speech. And the eloquence of
+that silence, tense, glittering, wrought more upon my nerves than any
+words. All my body strung to attention, I listened with my soul.
+
+No sound.
+
+No sound at all. Then, inwardly, I rebelled against the tyranny and
+waste of this emotion.
+
+Why was she like this?
+
+"Have they put on the chain?" she asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And bolted the door?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How do you know they have bolted it?"
+
+"I heard them."
+
+"Heard _them_?"
+
+"Heard the bolt."
+
+"One may easily think a stiff bolt has gone home, and all the
+while----"
+
+"But I am sure."
+
+My easy certainty seemed to anger her. "I thought so, too, once." She
+said it with a vehemence that startled me.
+
+After a moment: "Was that here?" I asked.
+
+"No, no, no"--she shook it off.
+
+I went and knelt down by the bed. "Tell me about it, mother."
+
+"No, no. It is not the kind of thing you need ever know."
+
+"How can you be sure? _You_ weren't expecting anything to happen." I
+felt my way by the shrinking in her face. "Yet someone came to the
+unbolted door----?"
+
+"What makes you think that!" she exclaimed, and I was hot and cold under
+her look.
+
+"It--it only came into my head"; and then, with fresh courage, or
+renewed curiosity, "But I am right!" I said, with sudden firmness.
+"Isn't it so? You were horribly frightened, _weren't_ you?" I touched
+her hand, expecting she would draw it away from me, but the fingers had
+locked on the silk frill of the quilt. They were cold; they made me
+think of death.
+
+"Yes," she said, very low, "I was horribly frightened." I felt the
+shuddering that ran along her wrist, and the chill of that old fear of
+hers crept into my blood, too. She looked through me, as though I were
+vapour, as though the bodyless Dread her eyes were fixed on once again
+for that instant--as though _that_ were the most real presence in the
+room.
+
+"Tell me," I whispered, "tell me what it was."
+
+"----impossible to talk about such things." She drew away her hand. "All
+you need to know is ... the need of taking care. Of never running risks.
+What time is it?"
+
+"Five minutes past eleven."
+
+"Did Lady Helmstone say she and Hermione would walk back with Bettina?"
+
+"No, she didn't say that."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"Just that she would send Betty home."
+
+After some time she said quite suddenly: "That might mean alone in the
+motor."
+
+I was going to say "Why not?" But as I looked up from my work at the
+face under the candle light, a most foolish and indefinable fear flashed
+across my mind--a feeling too ridiculous to own--sudden, indefinable
+dread of that inoffensive man, the Helmstones' head chauffeur. I had no
+sooner cast out the childish thought than I remembered the two under
+men. One only a sort of motor-house "odd man." To that hangdog creature
+might fall the task of driving Betty home! I had thought of this man
+vaguely enough before, yet with some dash of human sympathy, for it was
+common talk that he was "put upon" by the other men. He was a weakling,
+and unhappy; now I suddenly felt him to be evil--desperate.
+
+Oh, why had I let Bettina go!
+
+Even if the chauffeurs, all three, were decent enough ordinarily, what
+if just to-night they had been drinking?
+
+Betty coming across the deserted heath with a drunken driver----
+
+Oh, God, I prayed, don't let anything happen to Bettina....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A quarter past eleven.
+
+I put on a bold face. "They wouldn't, I think, have a motor-car out for
+Betty at this hour, and the reason she is late is because she has told
+them she would like the walk."
+
+"They will hardly send a woman with her at this time of night."
+
+We both started violently, and all because a coal had fallen out of the
+grate on the metal fender.
+
+My mother was the first to speak: "They are haphazard people, I
+sometimes think.... You don't suppose they would send her back with a
+groom...?"
+
+I said I was sure they would not, though an hour before I would have
+asked, Why not?
+
+"Lord Helmstone couldn't be expected to put himself out. I _wish_ I had
+not let the servants go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you think of
+it? Of course, _they_ should have gone and brought Bettina home."
+
+I saw now how right and proper this would have been.
+
+Half past eleven.
+
+"It is very strange," I said.
+
+"Go and look out again, you may see a lantern, or the motor-lamps."
+
+I leaned out into the fresh-smelling darkness, and I saw nothing, I
+heard nothing.
+
+I hung there, unwilling to draw in my head and admit the world without
+was empty of Bettina. She had been thrown out of the car. She was lying
+by the roadside somewhere, dead, that was why she didn't come home.
+
+Suddenly I thought of Gerald Boyne. What if, after all, he had been
+dining there. He would be sure to want to bring Bettina home. Yes, and
+those casual Helmstones would turn Bettina over to him without a
+thought. A man Ranny wouldn't let his sister dance with in a room full
+of her friends.... Bettina, setting out with Gerald Boyne to cross the
+lonely heath--and never reaching home.
+
+I knew all this was wild and foolish ... then why did these imaginings
+make me feel I could not bear the suspense another moment? I shut the
+window and turned round. "You must let me go for her," I said.
+
+The same suggestion must have been that moment on her lips. "Go, wake
+the servants," she said, "tell them to dress quickly. Get your cloak and
+light the lantern." She gave her short sharp directions. The young
+servant was to go with me. The old one was to lock the door behind us,
+and wait up with my mother. I went with a candle through silent
+passages, and knocked on doors.
+
+I left the lantern burning down in the hall, and in my cloak went back
+to my mother's room.
+
+She was leaning out, over the side of the bed listening.
+
+"Aren't they ready?"
+
+"They are only just roused."
+
+"Servants take ten times as long to dress as----Hark. Look out!"
+
+I went back to the window and peered between the close-drawn curtains,
+with hands at my temples on either side of my eyes.
+
+Nothing.
+
+Except.... Yes, I could hear the heavy step of the older woman down in
+the hall unlocking, unbolting, unchaining the door ... that the
+housemaid and I might lose no time when she was ready.
+
+The old woman must be waiting for us there below, with the lantern in
+her hand. A faint light was lying on the path. Not a sound now in all
+the world except my mother's voice behind me:
+
+"You will take the short cut."
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+"And as you go don't talk--_listen_."
+
+"Listen!" I echoed, with mounting horror. "What should I hear?"
+
+"How do we know?"
+
+A chill went down my back.
+
+The bedroom-door opened, and Bettina walked in.
+
+"Such a nice evening! They've been teaching me bridge. Why have you put
+on your cloak? Why are you looking--oh! what has happened to you?"
+
+Not very much was said to Bettina that night. She and two of the
+Helmstones' maids had come round by the orchard-gate, walking softly on
+the grass, "so as not to waken mother."
+
+Only a little crestfallen, she was sent away to bed. My mother had
+motioned me to wait. As I watched Bettina making her apologies and her
+good-night, I thought how worse than useless had been all that anxiety
+and strain. "I shall remember to-night," I said to myself, "whenever I
+am frightened again."
+
+But this, I could see before she spoke, was not the moral my mother was
+drawing. "Shut the door," she signed. And when I had come back to her,
+she drew herself up in bed and laid her hand on mine. "I want you to
+make me a promise," she said. "It is not fair to girls not to let them
+know that terrible things _can_ happen. Promise me that you will take
+better care of Bettina. Never let anyone make you forget----"
+
+I promised--oh, I promised that!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MY SECRET
+
+
+Eric, like the violets and primroses, came earlier that third spring.
+
+He seemed an old friend now, with an established footing in the house.
+Yet I had never been alone with him for more than five minutes before
+the day I told him my secret.
+
+I had imagined it all so different from the way it fell out. I said to
+myself that I would meet him on his way home some evening, after he had
+played the last round. He would never know that I had been waiting for
+him in the copse; but that would be where I should tell him, standing by
+the nearer stile, where I had first seen kindness in his eyes.
+
+My mother's health was worse again that spring, and when I wasn't
+studying I was much with her. After Eric came I stayed with her even
+more, for he said she had lost ground.
+
+He discouraged her from coming downstairs. I believe he prevailed on her
+to keep her room chiefly by coming constantly to see her, bringing
+books and papers. My mother's sick-room was not like any other I have
+seen. It was full of light and air, and hope and pleasantness. She would
+lie on the sofa in one of the loose gowns she looked so lovely in, and
+we would have tea up there.
+
+Nearly always I managed to go down to the door with Eric.
+
+One day, that very first week, he came a good hour before we expected
+him. Bettina had shut herself up to write to Hermione, "----and I am
+afraid my mother is asleep," I said.
+
+"Well, you are not," he answered. I saw his eyes fall on the books and
+papers that littered the morning-room sofa, and I felt myself grow red.
+The books would betray me!
+
+The strange thing was that he pushed them away without ever looking at
+them! And he sat down beside me.
+
+He had never been so close to me before. I think I was outwardly quite
+unmoved. But I could not see him, even at a distance, without inward
+commotion. When he sat down so near me, a great many pulses I had not
+known before were in my body began to beat and hammer. I felt my heart
+grow many sizes too big, and my breast-bone ache under the pressure. I
+said to myself the one essential was that he should not suspect--for him
+to guess the state he had thrown me into would be the supreme disaster.
+He might despise me. Almost certainly he would think I was hysterical. I
+knew the contempt he felt for hysterical women. Never, never should he
+think me one! I would rather die, sitting rigidly in my corner without a
+sign, than let him think I had any taint of the hysterical in me!
+
+Above all, for my Great Secret's sake, I must show self-command. Upon
+that I saw, in a flash, this was the ideal moment for telling him about
+The Plan.
+
+He asked how had my mother slept. I don't know what I said. But I
+remember that he spoke very gently of her. And he said I must husband my
+strength. I stayed too much indoors, he said. Hereafter I was to take an
+hour's brisk walk every day of my life.
+
+I told him I couldn't always do that in these days.
+
+"You must," he said.
+
+I thought of my books, and shook my head.
+
+"Won't you do it if I ask you to?" he said.
+
+He leaned a little towards me. I dared not look up.
+
+"I understand your not wanting to leave your mother," he said. "But
+couldn't your sister----" Then, before I could answer, "No," he said,
+smiling a little, "I suppose she couldn't."
+
+There was something in his tone that did not please me. "You mean Betty
+is too young?"
+
+No; he didn't mean that, he said.
+
+What _did_ he mean?
+
+"Well, she has other preoccupations, hasn't she?" he said lightly.
+
+"You mean Hermione? Hermione and all the family are in London."
+
+No; he didn't mean Hermione. I was in too much inner turmoil to
+disentangle his meaning then. For he went on quickly to say: "Suppose I
+sit with your mother for that hour, while you go out and get some
+exercise?"
+
+I was to lose an hour of him--tramping about alone! The very thought
+gave me an immense self-pity. My eyes grew moist.... "Come, come!" I
+said to myself, "keep a tight rein!"
+
+Just as I was getting myself under control again, he undid it all by
+laying his hand over mine.
+
+"Let me help you," he said.
+
+"Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being
+kind; don't think it is more--don't _dare_ think it is more!"
+
+Though I couldn't help thinking it _was_ more, I turned to the thought
+of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming
+to be faced.
+
+And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of
+the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me
+catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something
+about: "If you really do want to help me----"
+
+But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand.
+The words I had rehearsed and meant to say--they flew away. I felt my
+thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water.
+
+With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul
+and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those
+few seconds' contact we two seemed to have grown into one. I found I
+had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of
+having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an
+immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early
+struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time--questions that
+made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said
+I imagined it would be like that.
+
+"Well, it _was_ like that."
+
+"And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one
+of your family."
+
+He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not
+very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented.
+
+"I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people."
+
+What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me.
+
+"Why, that you have the most interesting profession in the world," I
+said.
+
+"You don't mean the practice of medicine!--mere bread-and-butter."
+
+"You don't love your profession!"
+
+He smiled, and that time the smile was less ungenial. But I had not
+liked the tone of patronage about his work.
+
+"They were all wasted on you, then--those splendid opportunities--the
+clinic in Hamburg, the years in Paris----"
+
+"Oh, well"--he looked taken aback at my arraignment--"I mayn't be a
+thundering success, but I won't say I'm a waster."
+
+"If you don't love and adore the finest profession in the world----!
+Yes, somebody else ought to have had your chances. Me, for instance."
+
+"You! Oh, I dare say," his smile was humorous and humouring.
+
+"You think I'm not in earnest. But I am." I went to the cupboard where
+Bettina and I each had a shelf, and brought out an old wooden workbox. I
+opened it with the little key on my chain. I took out papers and
+letters. "These are from the Women's Medical School in Hunter Street"--I
+laid the letters open before him--"answers to my inquiries about terms
+and conditions."
+
+He glanced through one or two. "What put this into your head?" he said,
+astonished, and not the least pleased so far as one could see. "How did
+you know of the existence of these people?"
+
+"You left a copy of the _Lancet_ here once." Something in his face made
+me add: "But I should have found a way without that."
+
+"What way--way to what?" He spoke irritably in a raised voice. I looked
+anxiously at the door. "We won't say anything just yet to my mother," I
+begged. "My mother wouldn't--understand."
+
+"What wouldn't she understand?" All his kindness had gone. He was once
+more the cold inaccessible creature I had seen that first day stalking
+up to Big Klaus's door.
+
+"What I mean is," I explained, quite miserably crestfallen, "my mother
+wouldn't understand what I feel about studying medicine. But _you_"--and
+I had a struggle to keep the tears back--"I've looked forward so to
+telling you----"
+
+He turned the papers over with an odd misliking expression.
+
+"For one thing, you could never pass the entrance examination," he said.
+I asked why he thought that.
+
+"Do you see yourself going to classes in London, cramming yourself with
+all this?"--his hand swept the qualifications list.
+
+"Not classes in London," I said. "But people do the London Matriculation
+without that. I am taking the University Tutorial Correspondence
+Course," I said.
+
+I was swallowing tears as I boasted myself already rather good at Botany
+and French. My mother thought even my German tolerable.
+
+I picked up the little pamphlet issued by the University of London on
+the subject of Matriculation Regulations, and I pointed out Section
+III., "Provincial Examinations." The January and June Matriculation
+Examinations were held at the Brighton Municipal Technical College. He
+could see that made it all quite convenient and easy.
+
+"I can see it is all quite mad," he answered. "Suppose by some miracle
+you were to pass the entrance exams.--have you any idea how long they
+keep you grinding away afterwards?"
+
+"Five to seven years," I said.
+
+"Well! Can't you see what a wild idea it is?"
+
+I said to myself: he knows about our straitened means. "You mean it
+costs such a great deal."
+
+"It costs a great deal more than you think," he said, shifting about
+discontentedly in his chair.
+
+Then I told him that my mother had some jewels. "I am sure that when she
+sees I am in earnest, when I have got my B. A., she will be willing I
+should use the jewels----"
+
+"It's a dog's life," he said, "for a woman."
+
+I gathered my precious papers together. "You think I shall mind the hard
+work. But I shan't."
+
+"It isn't the hard work," he said, "though it's not easy for a man. For
+a woman----" he left the woman medical-student hanging over the abyss.
+
+For all my questions I could not bring him to the point of saying what
+these bugbears were.
+
+He was plainly tired of the subject.
+
+My first disappointment had yielded to a spiritless catechism of how
+this and how that.
+
+My persistent canvass of the matter brought him nearer a manifestation
+of ill-temper than I had ever seen in him.
+
+There was a great deal, he said, that he couldn't talk about to a girl
+of eighteen. But had I or anybody else ever heard of a man who was a
+doctor himself wanting his sister, or his daughter to study medicine? He
+had never known one. _Not one._
+
+I confessed I couldn't think why that was, except that nobody belonging
+to a girl ever wanted her to do anything, except--I stopped short and
+then hurried on.... "But after all, you know that women do go through
+the medical schools and come out all right."
+
+He shook his head. "They've lost something. Though I admit most of the
+women you mean, never had the thing I mean."
+
+I said I didn't understand.
+
+"Well, you ought to. You've got it." He looked at me with an odd
+expression and asked how long I'd had this notion in my head. I said a
+year. "All this time! You've been full of this ever since I was here
+last!"
+
+I lied. I said I had thought of absolutely nothing else all that time.
+He stood up ... but I still sat there wondering what had made me tell
+him that lie.
+
+"You won't go," I said, "without seeing my mother."
+
+To-day--he hadn't time.
+
+I went down with him as usual to the front door, weeping inwardly, yet
+hoping, praying, that before the door closed he would say something that
+would help--something kind.
+
+He often said the best things of all just as he was going--as though he
+had not dared to be half so interesting, or a tenth so kind, but in the
+very act of making his escape.
+
+To-day he put on his covert coat in a moody silence. Still silent, he
+took his hat.
+
+I stood with the door-knob in my hand. "You think, then, even if Aunt
+Josephine helped----"
+
+"Who is Aunt Josephine?"
+
+"My father's step-sister. She is well off."
+
+Aunt Josephine's riches made no impression upon him. He was going away a
+different man from the one who had come in and pushed away my papers, to
+sit beside me and to take my hand. He pulled his stick out of the
+umbrella-stand.
+
+"You feel sure I couldn't?" I pleaded at the door.
+
+"I feel sure you could do something better."
+
+He was out on the step. "Good-bye," he said, with the look that hurt me,
+so tired--disappointed.
+
+He had come for peace--for my mother's tranquil spirit to bring rest to
+his tired mind. And all he had found here was my mother's daughter
+fretting to be out in the fray! I had not even listened. I had
+interrupted and pulled away my hand.
+
+After I shut the door, I opened it again, and called out: "Oh, what was
+it you were going to tell me?"
+
+"It wouldn't interest you," he said, without even turning round.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE YACHTING PARTY
+
+
+I had to make use of Eric's old plea, "pressure of work," to account for
+his going away without seeing my mother.
+
+I watched the clock that next afternoon in a state of fever. Would he
+come again at three, so that we might talk alone? No. The torturing
+minute-hand felt its way slowly round the clock-face, its finger, like a
+surgeon's on my heart, pressing steadily, for all my flinching, to
+verify the seat and the extent of pain.
+
+Four o'clock. Five. Half-past. No hope now of his coming, I told myself,
+as those do who cannot give up hope.
+
+My mother questioned me. What had Mr. Annan said the day before? Had he,
+then, come so early for "nothing in particular"? I said that I supposed
+he had come early because he found he could not come late.
+
+About six o'clock, as I was counting out some drops for my mother, a
+ring at the front door made me start and spill the liquid on the table.
+He had relented! He was coming to say the things I had been so mad as to
+prevent his saying yesterday. We listened. My heart fell down as a
+woman's voice came up. Lady Helmstone! Wanting to see my mother "very
+particularly." We wondered, while the maid went down to bring her, what
+the errand might be which could not be entrusted to Bettina. For,
+wonderful to say, Bettina was to be allowed to go to a real dinner-party
+that night at the Hall. Hermione had written from London, begging that
+Betty might come and hear all about the yachting party.
+
+This was not the first we had heard of the project. It had been
+introduced in a way never to be forgotten. We had counted on hearing
+from the Helmstones all the thrilling details about the Coronation which
+was fixed for the coming June. We felt ourselves sensibly closer to the
+august event through our acquaintance with the Helmstones. Lesser folk
+than they might hope to see the great Procession going to the
+Abbey--King and Queen in the golden Coach of State, our particular
+friends the little Princes and the young Princess in yet another shining
+chariot, followed by the foreign Potentates, the State officials, and by
+_our_ Peer of the Realm with all his brother Lords and Barons in
+scarlet and ermine; and the flower of the British Army, a glancing,
+flaming glory in the rear.
+
+The highly fortunate might see this Greatest Pageant of the Age on its
+return from the Abbey, when the Sovereigns would be wearing their crowns
+and their Coronation robes.
+
+But the Helmstones! They would actually see the anointing and the
+crowning from their High Seats in the Abbey. Even a girl like Hermione
+would be asked to the State Ball.
+
+Never before had we realised so clearly the advantages of being a Peer.
+
+We thought the Helmstones very modest not to be talking continually
+about the Coronation. While we waited, impatient to hear more on the
+great theme, they had introduced the subject of the yachting trip. I
+remembered this while Lady Helmstone was coming up the stair--I
+remembered our bewilderment at learning that they hoped to sail "about
+Easter," and to be cruising in the AEgean at the end of June.
+
+They had forgotten the Coronation!
+
+Then the shock of hearing Lord Helmstone thank God that he would "be
+well out of it." London, he said, would be intolerable this season. He
+had let the house in Grosvenor Square "at a good round Coronation
+figure" to a new-made law-lord--"sort of chap who'll revel in it all."
+Many of the greatest houses in London were to be let to strangers.
+
+The yachting trip was one of many arranged that people might escape "the
+Coronation fuss."
+
+According to my mother, Lord Helmstone and his like showed a kind of
+treason to the country in not doing their share to make the symbolic act
+of Coronation a public testimony to English devotion to the Monarchy.
+What would become of the significance of the occasion if the aristocracy
+(upholders of that order typified by the King) deserted the King on a
+day when the eyes of the world would be upon the English throne.
+
+Oh, it was pitiable! this leaving the great inherited task to the
+upstart rich. Lord Helmstone's act showed blacker in the light of
+remembered honour done him both by the present King and by his father.
+We knew Lord Helmstone had liked the late King best. Yet even of him we
+had heard this unworthy subject speak with something less than
+reverence. With bated breath Bettina and I had reported these lapses,
+as well as the late ironic reference to "the bourgeois standards of the
+present Court." Our mother said that only meant that the life of the
+King and Queen was a model for their people. "But Lord Helmstone
+laughed," we persisted--"they all laughed."
+
+We saw we were wrong to dwell upon so grave a lapse. Lord Helmstone's
+taste was questionable, we heard. "He does not scorn the distinctions
+His Majesty confers." There were people--my mother was sorry if Lord
+Helmstone was one--who thought it superior to smile at the Fount of
+Honour.
+
+Smiling at Founts was one thing. But to go a-yachting when you might
+help to crown the King of England, Emperor of India, Defender of the
+Faith...!
+
+Bettina and I had agreed privately that the reason she was allowed the
+unheard-of licence of dining out alone was that she might embrace this
+final opportunity of probing the mystery before the Helmstones vanished.
+They had come down from London for their last week-end before going to
+Marseilles to join the _Nautch Girl_.
+
+And now Lady Helmstone was passing our bedroom, where Bettina on the
+other side of the closed door sat working feverishly to finish putting
+some fresh lace on the gown she was to wear at dinner.
+
+Lady Helmstone came into my mother's room, very smart and smiling, and
+without preamble proposed to take Bettina along as one of her party.
+Equally without hesitation my mother said the idea was quite
+impracticable.
+
+Lady Helmstone was a person accustomed to having her own way. "You
+cannot expect," she said, "you cannot _want_ to keep your girls at home
+for ever."
+
+"N-no," my mother agreed, with that old look of shrinking. But Bettina
+was far too young----
+
+A niece of Lord Helmstone's, just Bettina's age, was to be of the party.
+
+Ah, well, Bettina was different. Bettina was the sort of child who had
+never been able to face the idea of a single night away from home. And
+this was a question of a cruise of--how many weeks?
+
+"Six months," said Lady Helmstone cheerfully.
+
+My mother stared. Lady Helmstone could not have meant the proposal
+seriously--"Bettina would die of home-sickness."
+
+Lady Helmstone ventured to think not. As I have said, she was
+ill-accustomed to seeing her invitations set aside. She spoke of
+Hermione's disappointment ... they were all so fond of Bettina. She
+should have every care.
+
+My mother made her acknowledgments--the suggestion was most kind; most
+hospitably meant. But Lady Helmstone had only to put it to Bettina. She
+would soon see.
+
+Lady Helmstone smiled. "I think you will find Bettina would like to come
+with us."
+
+I was annoyed at her way of saying that, as if she knew Bettina better
+than we. I went into the next room, and got out my school-books. I left
+the door open in case my mother should need me, and I heard them talking
+about "daughters."
+
+There was much to be said, Lady Helmstone thought, for the way they did
+things in France. My mother preferred the English way.
+
+"And yet you will not take it," said the other, with that suavity that
+allowed her to be impertinent without seeming so. "I don't think--living
+as you do--you quite realise the trouble mothers take to give their
+girls the sort of opportunity you are refusing." There were
+changes--"great and radical changes," she said--changes which my mother,
+leading this life of the religieuse, was possibly not aware of.
+
+My mother deprecated as much as she had heard of these changes.
+
+"Ah, but, _necessary_--a question of supply and demand. You can afford
+to disregard them only if you do not expect your daughters to marry."
+
+My mother said stiffly that she saw no reason to suppose her daughters
+would not marry--"all in good time." They were very young, Bettina a
+child----
+
+"She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were
+yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still
+silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best
+"opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety
+girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably
+more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty--I may say of
+patriotism--have to think seriously about these things." She herself,
+having married off three daughters and two nieces, might be considered
+something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised
+hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at
+all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls
+about London.... _Three!_ Conceive the indiscretion!--only the young one
+really caring about balls--the other two going stolidly through with it,
+season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard--I
+changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took
+turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'and _never_ more than two
+at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke
+impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and
+ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's
+position to do--I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in
+London."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a
+tone of perfunctory politeness.
+
+"_All the other women leave_," said Lady Helmstone, with a ruse
+significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when
+the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men
+have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation
+they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June. _August is the time._ I
+made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden,
+cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef--cordon bleu. 'You must give
+better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did."
+
+There was another significant pause.
+
+"The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young
+barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh
+rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for
+Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those
+girls would be manoeuvring for partners at balls still, and their mother
+would be in her grave, but for...."
+
+The interview ended stiffly.
+
+The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her
+suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know
+there had been any question of her going. "The child is already
+disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione."
+
+When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and
+said: "If Betty never went _anywhere_, I should not want her to go away
+in the care of a woman like that."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE EMERALD PENDANT
+
+
+I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that
+night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and
+looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.
+
+While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.
+
+"I look dreadfully missish," she said.
+
+When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a
+school-treat!"
+
+We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard
+Hermione behind Betty's voice.
+
+She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's
+going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant."
+That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only
+natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too,
+begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in
+her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.
+
+"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"
+
+Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?
+
+My mother wouldn't say....
+
+After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.
+
+My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I
+asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as L600.
+
+She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose
+real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.
+
+I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and
+important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the
+jewels be sold?
+
+My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a
+shield before the other.
+
+She spoke my name and I started--the voice sounded odd. I went back to
+the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me
+to sit down.
+
+Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.
+
+The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth
+selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.
+
+We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.
+
+I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against
+the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt
+Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and
+sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that
+army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high
+companionship ... marching to the world's relief.
+
+In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London
+University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful
+work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might
+help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering
+over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud
+of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all
+the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!
+
+It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never!
+
+"Not--not female doctor," I protested. "That _does_ sound----"
+
+"Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it----"
+
+I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But
+there was no necessity to emphasise "woman" at all; the only thing
+important was whether the person was qualified to treat the sick. People
+did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough."
+
+I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor"
+_was_ male, and everyone understood that.
+
+I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I
+hadn't any accomplishments--no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative
+one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be
+people like that.
+
+It was all no use.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That confession of mine, more than hers about the jewels, goaded my
+mother into taking a step which even we, blind as we were, felt to be
+epoch-making in our history.
+
+That same evening she began to talk about Aunt Josephine--to excuse her.
+Mrs. Harborough had been so wrapped up in her brilliant young
+step-brother (and Aunt Josephine would never allow the "step") that _any_
+other person's coming in must inevitably have been resented. "She
+idolised your father." A woman of high character. Given to good works.
+Busied about the redemption of long-shoremen and about country treats
+for jam-factory girls. Knee-deep in philanthropy. And childless. She
+_could_ not, especially now after that old first anger had long cooled,
+she could not be indifferent to the fate of her brother's children.
+
+"Are you thinking of writing to her?" I said. She explained that for her
+to address Mrs. Harborough was, under the circumstances, hardly
+possible. But there was no reason in the world why I should not.
+
+I felt there were reasons, but I could not think what they were. My
+mother, meanwhile, grew almost cheerful, outlining the sort of thing I
+might say. No requests in this first communication. A letter, merely--if
+it found her so inclined--merely to open a long-closed door.
+
+I did not like my task. I decided I would put it off till morning,
+though I knew that at any time I should find it easier to write:
+"Please lend me L1,000 for a course of study," than write such a letter
+as my mother had dictated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Betty came back from her dinner-party in great excitement. Ranny Dallas
+had motored over from Dartmoor that very day--with a man friend. They
+had been at the Helmstones' to tea.
+
+I wondered, dully, that Lady Helmstone had said nothing whatever about
+Ranny during her visit. She must have just parted from him. Another
+curious thing was that Ranny had not stayed for the dinner-party. He and
+his friend were at the inn.
+
+"What in the world do you think that means?" I asked Bettina, glad
+enough to escape from my own thoughts.
+
+She was smiling. "I think it is very natural."
+
+And why was it natural for a luxurious young man to put up with tough
+mutton and watery potatoes at a village inn, when he and any friend of
+his were certain of a welcome, and the best possible dinner, in a house
+like the Helmstones'?
+
+Betty merely continued to smile in that beatific, but somewhat foolish
+fashion. I said, rather more to make her speak than for any soberer
+reason, "Perhaps he isn't so sure of his welcome"; and then in a flash I
+saw quite clearly something I had been blind to till that instant. For
+all the liking the Helmstones felt for Betty they may not have liked
+being undeceived about Ranny's supposed devotion to Hermione. That this
+idea had never occurred to me before showed me stupid, I saw, as well as
+self-absorbed. But the idea would not have occurred to me at all, I
+think, but for some of the things Lady Helmstone had said to my mother
+that afternoon.
+
+Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that
+Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a
+dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little
+tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There
+was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any
+sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as
+happy as Betty looked.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+The next morning, still in a mood of the deepest dejection, I dated a
+sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine."
+
+I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense
+unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the
+impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or
+trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr.
+Annan."
+
+Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face
+another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my
+own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to
+clock--from clock to window, hour after hour.
+
+      DEAR MR. ANNAN,--I have told my mother. She feels as you do.
+      She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not
+      to think about it any more.
+
+I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+RANNY
+
+
+I imagined that day I should never again have to live through a time of
+such suspense.
+
+Waiting, till I could get away without being noticed, to carry my note
+to Kleiner Klaus's.
+
+Waiting, for the Klaus's boy to come home.
+
+Waiting, while his mother brushed his clothes and cuffed him. Waiting,
+while he recovered his spirits. Waiting, while slowly, slowly, his mind
+took in the particulars of his errand, and the most particular part of
+it, in his eyes--the penny he should have when he brought me back an
+answer.
+
+And the long hours of that afternoon waiting for the answer, or even for
+the errand-boy to come back. When I was not looking out of the window my
+mind was still so bent on listening for one particular footstep on the
+brick walk, and at the door his voice--the only voice in the world with
+meaning in it--that scarcely any impression was made on me by other
+steps and other voices. I heard them, subconsciously, to dismiss them;
+for everything was irrelevance that wasn't Eric.
+
+But my mother interrupted my mechanical reading aloud. "Who," (with her
+air of listening to sounds beyond my ken) "who can all those people be?"
+
+There was Bettina in the passage making frantic signs that I was to
+hurry out and speak to her. And voices of men and women came up from the
+open door. I recognised Lord Helmstone's. I heard him asking the maid if
+Mr. Annan were here.
+
+"No? That's very odd," said Hermione in her sceptical way--"Perhaps he's
+come in without your knowing. Will you just find out?"
+
+My mother, too, had heard Lord Helmstone's cheerful bass, suggesting
+that his party might take shelter here. I had not noticed before the
+slight rain falling. "Go and ask him to come upstairs," my mother said.
+And lower: "I don't want _him_ to take it amiss." I saw she was thinking
+of her refusal to let Betty go on the yacht.
+
+Betty was waiting for me in ambush near the head of the stair: "You must
+come down and help me. Ranny is there, too."
+
+I was bewildered at finding so many at the door. For besides Lord
+Helmstone and Hermione, there was Lady Barbara, and Ranny Dallas and his
+friend--a cheerful, talkative, red-haired man they called Courtney.
+
+The Helmstones were still discussing whether they should come in.
+Hermione said it was only a slight sprinkle, and her mother was
+expecting them back to tea. Lady Barbara, with engaging simplicity,
+insisted there was no object in going back without Mr. Annan.
+
+I saw at once that Ranny looked different. Just in what way, or to what
+extent, I could not at first have said. A very little thinner, too
+little to account for the change I was dimly conscious of. And when he
+first came in, he came with some nonsense, and that pleasant laugh, that
+always "started things" in an easy harmonious key.
+
+"We've descended on you," Lord Helmstone said, "like a posse of
+detectives. Sleuth-hounds on that fella Annan's track. We've our
+instructions to bag him and carry him home to tea."
+
+Bettina (oh, I could have beaten her for that!) said Mr. Annan would
+very probably come in presently. And she led the way into the
+drawing-room, while I took Lord Helmstone upstairs. By the time I came
+down again Bettina had ordered tea.
+
+Hermione turned round as I came in. "What have you done with my father!
+Now father's disappeared!"--as if she had only just grasped the fact.
+"Didn't I tell you," she said to Ranny, "Duncombe is a place where if a
+man goes in, he doesn't come out?"
+
+Betty and I gave them tea.
+
+I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never
+guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for
+pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were
+so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for
+an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as
+the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note
+in answer to mine.
+
+As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged,
+too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet,
+looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As
+though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turning his
+way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him,
+the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of
+that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very
+laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring--his laugh most of all
+gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed
+just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than
+anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer.
+
+When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that
+blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to
+myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way
+probably more imbecile than pleasing.
+
+I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much
+noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to
+Bettina and to the other, newer, swain--one of the apparently endless
+supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them.
+
+Under cover of Hermione's gaiety, I managed to ask Bettina what was the
+matter with Ranny.
+
+"I don't know," she whispered.
+
+I saw it was true. Bettina did not know.
+
+She leaned across me to find a place on the crowded table for her teacup
+and the low voice was earnest enough: "_Find out._"
+
+The rain had been only a passing shower.
+
+"Oh, yes, the sun has come out--but my father hasn't! Didn't I say,"
+Hermione laughed, "no man ever knows when to come away from this place?"
+Then she swept us all into the garden. "If he doesn't come soon I shall
+throw gravel up at the window. Isn't it this window?"
+
+Bettina said very likely Lord Helmstone was having tea upstairs and that
+it had not gone up till after ours. Ranny and I left the new young man
+and Bettina trying to prevent Hermione from carrying out her audacious
+plan and apparently succeeding. For Lord Helmstone did not appear for
+another half-hour. And still no sign of Eric.
+
+Ranny asked me how the sunk garden was coming on. I didn't like going so
+far from the gate, but Betty's earnest "find out" was ringing in my
+ears. I sent a searching look across the heath, and then Ranny and I
+left the others and went down to the rock-quadrangle that used to be so
+tidily affluent in stone-loving mosses, sedums and suchlike. The weeds
+were fast driving the more delicate things out of the neglected tangle.
+For the old gardener had been gone a year, now, and there was overmuch
+for a jobbing person to do in a day or two a week.
+
+I apologised for the poor unkempt place, thinking how different I might
+have made it, but for the hours I spent over books. And would Eric have
+liked me better if----
+
+I craned my neck, uneasy at not being able to see the gate nor any part
+of the bypath. Only the higher reach of heath road.
+
+Ranny had not pretended to be listening. I don't think he so much as saw
+how changed the garden was. We talked about the new young man--"awful
+good sort," according to Ranny. But that testimony, too, he gave in an
+absent-minded, perfunctory way.
+
+"Can't we sit down?" he said, looking blindly at a garden seat still
+shining-wet.
+
+I said we'd better walk. I lead him back near enough the house to see if
+the others had waylaid Eric.
+
+No, just the same group under my mother's window--Hermione and Babs
+arguing hotly about something. The red-haired young man aiming at an
+imaginary golf-ball with the crook-handle of his heavy walking-stick,
+and swinging it violently over his shoulder, that Bettina might see the
+approved position of feet and body before, and after, a furious drive.
+Whether Bettina made a practice of asking for this information I cannot
+say. But every man who came our way, young or old, was seized with an
+uncontrollable desire to teach Bettina the difference between good form
+and bad form at the game of golf.
+
+Ranny had been walking with his head bent and no pretence at making
+conversation. When I stopped, he looked up suddenly and caught sight of
+the group. He wheeled about, and stood with his back to the house and
+his face averted from me as well.
+
+"Look here," he said, "why shouldn't we go and meet Annan?--warn
+him--eh?"
+
+My heart leapt at the suggestion. And yet.... "Why should you want to do
+that?" I said suspiciously.
+
+"Oh, well, I don't care where we go--only ..." His voice sounded so
+queer I felt frightened.
+
+"I don't think I'll go back to _them_ just yet," he managed to bring
+out. "Do you mind?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+ANOTHER GIRL
+
+
+We turned off through the shrubbery, and went out by the side gate along
+the bypath to the links.
+
+Ranny walked behind, absolutely silent, till he burst out: "May I
+smoke?"
+
+When he had lit a cigarette, I glanced back. I thought he looked a shade
+less miserable. I could see the four figures standing out against the
+house, and still no sign anywhere of Eric.
+
+I asked Ranny if he was to be one of the yachting party.
+
+"Lord, no!"
+
+Perhaps they had not asked him. Maybe that was it. I said something
+about how we should miss Hermione.
+
+"Er--yes," he said. "I suppose you will," and I noticed his voice was
+steadier.
+
+"Don't be ungrateful," I said. "So will you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+Then, as I reproached him, he said: "Oh, yes; awfully nice people the
+Helmstones. I used to be rather fond of Lady Helmstone. But she's a
+woman who doesn't know how to take 'No.' That's partly why I came."
+
+I looked back again: "Is that the only reason?"
+
+"Well, she kept writing, and making out, in spite of what I'd said, that
+she was expecting me to join them at Marseilles. And had put off
+somebody else who wanted to go. If I backed out--I had never backed
+in--I would be breaking up the party and behaving like the devil." He
+spoke more ill-temperedly than I had ever heard him.
+
+"How will it end?" I asked.
+
+"End? I'm hanged if I'll go. I've told her I wouldn't, from the
+beginning. But I only convinced her yesterday."
+
+We walked on.
+
+"They've asked Betty," I said.
+
+"_No!_" He caught me up and walked at my side. "When did they do that?"
+
+"Yesterday evening."
+
+"Is Betty going?"
+
+"No," I said.
+
+And very sharp on that: "Why not?" he asked. "Doesn't she want to?"
+
+"She doesn't know anything about it. My mother doesn't want her to go."
+And while he fell into silence again, I sent my eyes about the heath. No
+sign.
+
+Suddenly I remembered Betty's "find out." I had not found out. I hadn't
+even tried, and I realised myself for a monster of selfishness--thinking
+Eric, Eric, and nothing but Eric the livelong day.
+
+I pulled myself together and asked Ranny what he had been doing since
+Christmas.
+
+"Since New Year's Eve, you mean." He frowned, and threw away a cigarette
+half-smoked, and lit another. When he had puffed and frowned a little
+more he said he had been going through a ghastly experience with a great
+friend of his. "Not a bad chap on the whole," he said, in a hesitating,
+almost appealing voice. But this not bad chap had "got himself badly
+bunkered." Ranny hesitated, and then: "Yes, I've been thinking I'd tell
+you about it, and see if--if you thought I've advised him right...." The
+friend, he said, had been "one of a house party at a place up in
+Norfolk. He'd gone for the fag end of the shooting. Last month it was.
+Beastly dull people. Awful good shooting--as a rule. But the weather
+was rotten. All shut up together in that beastly dull house. Nothing
+earthly to do, except rag, and--you know the kind of thing."
+
+I didn't know a bit, but I said I did.
+
+"Well, his friend had nothing to do, and he got it into his head that
+the girl of the house rather liked him. And there wasn't another blessed
+thing to do, so---- Oh, well, they got engaged."
+
+He waited for a moment, and then he said that when his friend went back
+to Aldershot he found "he wasn't any more in love with that girl than he
+was with the cat. It was all just a beastly mistake. So he got leave and
+went home to think it out. _Couldn't_ think it out. Felt he'd better go
+and talk it over with somebody----" Ranny hesitated again. "Awful hole
+to be in, isn't it?"
+
+I agreed it must have been very dreadful for his friend to have to tell
+the girl he'd made a mistake.
+
+"Oh, but he couldn't do _that_!" With a shocked look, Ranny stopped dead
+for a second. Then, as he went on, he said that he had told his friend
+of course he'd have to go through with it.
+
+"You don't mean," I said, "that when he was feeling like that you think
+he ought to let the poor girl marry him!"
+
+He said I didn't see the point. It would probably spoil the girl's life
+if his friend drew back.
+
+I said he would spoil her life if he didn't draw back.
+
+Ranny looked merely bewildered. "Oh ... but ..." then he caught hold of
+a mainstay, "my friend--he isn't a cad you know. A man _can't_ back out
+of a thing like that."
+
+Then I told him, without the names, about Guy Whitby-Dawson. Guy had
+"backed out." Guy had made up his mind to the sacrifice of "running in
+single harness," and had said so, frankly. I praised him.
+
+"Naturally," Ranny answered, "if people hadn't enough money to marry,
+nobody would expect them to marry. But in the case I'm talking about,"
+he said gloomily, "the man, my friend, is an eldest son. He is going to
+have--oh, it's rotten luck!"
+
+I asked him if he really thought that not to have enough money to keep
+house on was worse than not to have enough love to keep house on. He
+said that what _he_ thought wasn't the question. The question was what
+the girl would think. And what the girl's family would think. I asked
+how anybody was to know what the girl would think unless she was asked.
+Ranny gave his rough head a despairing shake.
+
+Of course I couldn't tell him half of what I felt about that girl, but I
+kept seeing her. Very happy. Never dreaming what her lover was feeling.
+I saw them going up the church aisle to be married. All the smiling and
+congratulating afterwards. I saw them "going away." And I felt sick.
+
+But I did try to make him feel a little for the girl. He said that
+"feeling for the girl" was precisely what had decided the business. The
+girl _couldn't_ be told the truth.
+
+"She'll guess it!"
+
+But that didn't comfort him as I had expected. "Even if she guesses she
+couldn't be expected to release--m--my friend."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because," said Ranny with his childlike air, "because she'll probably
+never have as good an offer again."
+
+I was conscious of an inner fury when he said that. I turned on him.
+And all of a sudden, quite curiously, my feeling changed. His face
+showed not only utter innocence of any arrogance, the expression on it
+was of great misery. And this was so at odds with the roundness and the
+hint of dimples, the roughened hair that the damp air had begun to curl,
+that as I looked at him, I felt the queer, stirring-at-the-heart sort of
+softness perhaps only women know, when they catch a glimpse in some
+man's face of the child that died when he grew up. I could see just what
+Ranny had been like when he was in short dresses. Full of laughter; as
+he was still when we first knew him. And in face of those earlier bumps
+and bruises, just this bewilderment overmastering the pain of the baby
+who is outraged at the disproportion between desert and reward--the baby
+who thinks, if he doesn't say: "I never did a single thing, and here all
+this has tumbled down on my head."
+
+In that instant I saw how lovable Ranny Dallas was, and instead of
+reproaching him, I found myself saying: "If that's true--what you
+say--it is very horrible for the girl, but I see it is probably nearly
+as horrible for the man."
+
+And Ranny sat down on the wet heather under a gorse bush and buried his
+face in his hands.
+
+"Get up," I said; "here's my handkerchief. Get up quickly. Lady
+Helmstone is coming."
+
+But who was the man with her?
+
+It was Eric Annan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS
+
+
+Before those two were visible to the group round Duncombe front door, or
+within hailing distance of us, they turned into the bypath leading to
+Big Klaus's.
+
+I could not tell whether Eric had seen us. But I was quite sure Lady
+Helmstone had. Sure, too, that she had deliberately avoided us.
+
+Ranny didn't want to come back with me, and I didn't press him. I
+promised him I would say he was going to walk across the heath to the
+inn--"_had_ to get back--expecting a telegram."
+
+I stayed behind in the gorse bushes alone, till I saw Lord Helmstone and
+all his party going home.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+I couldn't bear the thought of meeting Betty.
+
+I went round by the kitchen and crept up the back stairs. I listened at
+my mother's door.
+
+Not a sound. Then I heard Betty downstairs playing the accompaniment to
+a song she and Ranny used to sing.
+
+So I opened my mother's door and went in.
+
+The first thing she said was, without any preface, "I know, now, why
+Lady Helmstone invited a child like Bettina to go yachting for six
+months rather than you."
+
+"So do I," I answered; "they all adore Bettina. And then she is
+Hermione's special friend."
+
+"There is another reason," my mother said, looking out of the window. "A
+reason that concerns--Lady Barbara." Then she glanced at me, a little
+shyly, and away her eyes went again to the window. "Lord Helmstone
+thinks a sea-voyage would be the best thing in the world for Mr. Annan.
+They are asking him to be one of the party."
+
+I felt as if some hard substance had struck me violently in the face.
+But I managed to bring out the words: "Is he going, do you think?"
+
+"No doubt he will go," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already I seemed to have lost him as utterly as though he had died. Yet
+with none of that sad comfort my mother had spoken of--the comfort of
+knowing one's possession safe beyond all risk of loss or tarnishing.
+
+I had never been on a yacht.
+
+I had never seen a yacht.
+
+Yet I could see Eric on the _Nautch Girl_. And Lady Barbara!
+
+Her mother's words came back: "Very little is done at balls." Very much,
+the story-books had told me, was done by throwing people together on a
+long voyage. My own heart told me the same.
+
+Yes, I had lost him.
+
+And I had lost myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day was Sunday. In the morning Hermione came to carry Bettina
+off for their last day together. I had to promise that, if Ranny should
+come to Duncombe, I would send for Betty.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+As I sat with my mother, that same afternoon, the door opened, and there
+was the maid bringing in Mr. Annan.
+
+I think I scarcely spoke or moved.
+
+It was my mother who said: "I thought you would come to say good-bye."
+
+"'Good-bye'?" Then, with unusual _brusquerie_ where my mother was
+concerned, he added: "When _I_ come to see people, what I say is, 'How
+do you do?'"
+
+"But aren't you going away to-morrow?"
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"Why, to catch the _Nautch Girl_."
+
+"I can't think of a girl I should so little care to catch."
+
+And he wasn't going at all! Had never contemplated it for a moment!
+
+The weight of the world fell off my shoulders. And for nearly five
+minutes of a joy almost too great to be borne, I believed that it was
+because of me he wasn't going.
+
+Then he told my mother it was because of his work. And so it was that,
+unconsciously, he made good the excuse I had offered for his bolting off
+the afternoon I told him my secret. He seemed to have forgotten that
+episode. At least, he behaved as though it had never happened.
+
+He laughed a little over his interview with her ladyship. "Very
+determined individual, Lady Helmstone." He had told her, finally, that
+he hadn't time even to go to his sister's wedding. He had not thought it
+necessary, he said to add that he wouldn't have gone to his sister's
+wedding however much time he had.
+
+Of course, my mother asked why such unbrotherly behaviour? He told us
+that he didn't approve of the marriage. There was nothing against the
+man's character. He was a "Writer to the Signet," which seemed in
+Scotland to mean a sort of barrister. I said "Writer to the Signet"
+sounded much finer than "barrister." I was told that Maggie Annan could
+not be expected to live on a fine sound. And that was about all they
+would have. This particular "Writer to the Signet" was poor. "Oh, poorer
+than poor!"
+
+I didn't like his way of saying that.
+
+As we went downstairs I was rather glad of being able to disagree with
+him about something. It would keep me from being foolish. I had that
+feeling of the creature who has been straining long at bonds, and finds
+the sudden loosing a test of equilibrium. For fear I should seem too
+gloriously content with him, I taxed Eric with thinking over much about
+money. He said a man may put up with any sort of hardship he likes for
+himself. But no man had a right to marry till he could support a wife in
+some sort of comfort. I suggested that perhaps Maggie Annan cared less
+about comfort than she cared about other things. He retorted that Maggie
+probably hadn't thought it out at all. She was acting on impulse. "To
+think it out--that was the man's business." And so on.
+
+I felt myself growing impatient when he said "comfort" for the second
+time.
+
+"When people are old, yes! 'Comfort' then. But when they're young, what
+_does_ it matter?"
+
+He leaned against the newel of the staircase and looked at me, quite
+surprised. "I thought you were more practical," he said.
+
+"I _am_ practical. That's why I say comfort is wasted on the young. They
+don't even want it--unless they're rather horrid sort of young people."
+
+"Thank you," he said, laughing, and I felt hot. I tried to explain. Such
+a lot of things were fun when you were young, especially when they were
+shared. I had noticed that. Things that made you cross, and made you ill
+when you were older---- Suddenly I stopped, saying in my heart:
+"Heavens! isn't this the kind of foolishness I was hoping to be saved
+from? Or is it worse?..." For Eric was smiling in such a disconcerting
+way.
+
+I said primly that Miss Maggie did not need me to defend her, and that I
+must not keep him from his work.
+
+That word was like the touch of a whip. In two seconds he was gone.
+
+The next day, Monday, just the same. He ran in only for a moment to see
+my mother. He could not sit down; he could not do this, nor that. Work,
+work! It had seized him in a fresh grip.
+
+I was thankful to the work for having carried him away that Monday
+afternoon, when Betty came back from seeing the Helmstones off. It was a
+Betty we had never seen before. I don't know what else Hermione had said
+to her, but Betty had been told that she, too, might have gone yachting.
+
+It was like a stab to see my mother's face now, and to remember the
+confidence with which she had quoted the old story about Bettina's
+insisting on the promise that she should not be made to pay visits: "Not
+_never_?" "Not never!"
+
+I had hated Lady Helmstone for saying that Bettina would, in her
+ladyship's opinion, be found to have outgrown her reluctance.
+
+It was true.
+
+Bettina wanted to go!
+
+My mother, unwisely I felt, reminded Betty of the old pledge.
+
+"I was a baby then. What did I know?"
+
+And now there were tears in Bettina's eyes because she was _not_ going
+to leave her mother.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I don't like to think of those next days. They were all a strain and a
+tangle.
+
+I cannot imagine what we should have done without Eric. For the way
+Bettina took her disappointment made my mother positively ill. Eric's
+prescription was hard to fill: "Peace of mind--absolute quiet and
+tranquillity."
+
+"You are less alarmed," he said in that direct way of his, "than you
+were that first day you brought me here. But you have more reason."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not want Bettina fully to realise the cloud that was so surely
+gathering to burst--and yet I was angry at her failure to realise. So
+unreasonable, so unkind I found I could be! Oh, I lost patience more
+than once. But my mother, never.
+
+"You will see all the beautiful places some day, my darling."
+
+Bettina was sure she never should. This had been her one chance--who
+else was likely to take her?
+
+"The fit and proper person. Your husband will take you, as your father
+took me."
+
+That answer surprised us both.
+
+I could not blame Bettina for feeling that it seemed to postpone the
+delights of travel overlong.
+
+The strange new Bettina went about the house, settling to nothing, at
+once restive and idle. All on edge. The worst sign of all was that she
+neglected her music. My mother remonstrated.
+
+"What's the use?"
+
+"You will find your music a very important part of your equipment."
+
+"Equipment!" said the new Bettina scornfully. "Equipment for what?"
+
+"For taking your place in the world."
+
+"The world!" Bettina exchanged looks with me. Yes, the world seemed far
+away. Inaccessible.
+
+"If we never go anywhere--never see anyone, what is the use in being
+equipped?"
+
+I think Bettina was sorry she said that. The effect of it was as though
+some rude hand had thrown down a screen. My mother looking up with
+hollow, startled eyes must have caught a glimpse of something that she
+dreaded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Don't put it off," she whispered. "Write to your Aunt Josephine
+to-night."
+
+I composed my letter very carefully.
+
+My sister and I had often wished, I wrote, that we had some acquaintance
+with our only relation. Especially as she and our father had been so
+much to each other. Our mother was in poor health. We lived very
+quietly. But we all hoped if ever Aunt Josephine came to this part of
+the world--a very pretty part--she would come to see us. I was nearly
+nineteen now, and I was hers "affectionately."
+
+Feeling myself very diplomatic and "deep," I enclosed the last
+photograph Hermione had taken of Bettina. I wrote on it "Betty at
+sixteen--but it does not do her justice."
+
+If anything could win her over, it would be that snapshot of Betty
+dancing on Duncombe lawn.
+
+I posted the letter in an access of remorse and wretchedness--afraid I
+had left it too late. For my mother had said, "After all, instead of
+your leaving me, I shall have to leave you."
+
+That same night Eric told me that he had sent to London for a
+heart-specialist. And the heart-specialist had answered he would be down
+on Thursday, which was the day after to-morrow. I saw in Eric's face
+that he was anxious at the delay. He admitted that he was "afraid" to
+wait. Yes, he would wire for another man.
+
+Eric--"afraid"!
+
+"You don't," I whispered, "you don't mean ... quite soon?"
+
+He repeated that he was "afraid."
+
+Then I felt I knew all that any specialist could tell me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was the day I came to know the steadying influence of a call to
+face great issues. They bring their own greatness with them. They wrap
+it round our littleness. Only afterwards, thinking how gentle and
+watchful Eric looked in telling me, I remembered that people were
+supposed to faint when they heard news like that. For myself I had never
+felt so clear-headed. Never felt the responsibility of life so great.
+Never felt that for us to fail in bearing our share was so unthinkable.
+
+If this Majesty of Death were soon to clothe my mother, her children
+must not hide and weep. They must help her, help each other to meet the
+Great King at the gate.
+
+All the little troubles fell away. I was kind again to Betty.
+
+I called my lover "Eric." He called me by my name. Just that.
+
+No more passed between him and me. But I felt I had taken this man and
+that he had taken this woman "for better or worse."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER
+
+
+Bettina came into the room and handed me a letter.
+
+"Mrs. Harborough!"--my mother drew herself up on the pillow with an
+animation I had not thought to see again.
+
+I opened and read: "My dear niece----"
+
+"Ah!" my mother brought out the ejaculation with an effect of having
+doubted if the relationship would be owned.
+
+That introductory phrase turned out to be the most comprehensible part
+of the first half of Aunt Josephine's letter. As for me, I was
+completely floored by "the Dynamism of Mind," after I had stumbled over
+a cryptic reference to my mother's state--"which you must not expect me
+to call sickness. There is no such thing. There is only harmony or
+unharmony, whether of the so-called body or the soul."
+
+On the third page, the writer descended from these Alpine heights, to
+say that it had been "inspirationally borne in upon" her that the time
+was come for her brother's daughters to widen their horizon, and
+incidentally, to see something of their father's world.
+
+The implied slur upon our mother's world was, to my surprise, not
+resented.
+
+"Go on. Go on."
+
+The letter ended by saying that, in spite of very grave and urgent
+preoccupations, Aunt Josephine would endeavour to draw a little of the
+old life round her, if her nieces would come and stay with her in
+Lowndes Square for a few weeks.
+
+"A London season!" Bettina cried.
+
+I looked up from the letter and saw my mother watching with hungry
+delight Bettina's face of rapture. Bettina had not looked like that
+since the Helmstones went away.
+
+But the most marked change, after all, was in my mother herself.
+
+When Eric came he was staggered. "I'll believe in miracles after
+this!"--and we joked about the Dynamism of Mind.
+
+My mother had taken for granted that both Bettina and I would accept
+Aunt Josephine's invitation, though I said at once _I_ could not leave
+home. My mother put this aside with: "Bettina go alone! A wild idea."
+
+When the question came up again in Eric's presence I did not press it
+far. But, going downstairs, I asked him how _was_ I to put it to my
+mother?
+
+"Put what?" he asked.
+
+"Why, the fact that we can't leave her. Or, at least, that I can't." I
+agreed Betty must go.
+
+"So must you," he said. My heart beat faster. His villeggiatura was near
+the end. London, for me, meant Eric. "You need the change," he said,
+"more than Betty does."
+
+"You forget," I said, a little sadly, "what we've been facing here. The
+specialist coming----"
+
+"Well, he will find she has rallied."
+
+Nevertheless, she was in no condition, Eric said, to be crossed. Had she
+not told me herself that my first duty was to take care of Betty? That
+was not how he would put it--all the same, the change would do me good.
+Then a word about our "trustworthy servants." In any event I was not to
+say any more about not going, till we had seen the "London chap."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went on quite wonderfully.
+
+We were positively gay again--she and I and Bettina--the three of us
+laying plans.
+
+We talked about clothes, and planned how we should look very nice on
+very little money.
+
+When the great specialist came, he found my mother sitting up in a bed
+covered with old evening-gowns, old laces, and embroidered muslins;
+things she had worn long ago in India, and which should help to make us
+brave for our first London season. Smart little blouses, morning-gowns
+and afternoon-gowns, could be made in the house or in the village. But
+who was worthy to make an evening-frock fit for London? My mother was
+much more concerned about this than about the great specialist, whom she
+received rather as a friend of Eric's. He echoed all that Eric had said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother had made me write to Aunt Josephine on the evening of the same
+day that brought her letter. I did not tell anyone, but I put off
+posting my answer till the London doctor had gone.
+
+My letter was not only thanks and acceptance. I felt I ought, in common
+civility, to try to make some more or less intelligent rejoinder to the
+odd part of my aunt's letter. And this modest effort seemed not to
+displease her. For she replied in eight pages of cloudy metaphysic and a
+highly lucid cheque. The cheque alone supported us in our attempt to
+grapple with those eight bewildering pages. The first introduced us, by
+way of the Psychology of the Solar Plexus, to the Self-Superlative:
+
+      "If this view-point interests you, I will later explain to
+      you--in terms of inclusiveness and totalism--the mystical
+      activities of the Ever-Creative Self."
+
+"Isn't she awfully learned!" said Bettina in a scared voice.
+
+      "On your return home, having 'contacted,' as we say, the
+      talents and the tranquillity of others--instead of contacting
+      things of lack and fear--you will be able to think happily and
+      sweetly about matters that formerly disturbed you. All the ills
+      of life are curable from within. Complete health is wisdom. I
+      do not go so far as to predict that you will find yourself
+      instantly able to adopt the bio-vibratory sympathism which
+      habitualises thought to the Majesty of Choice. But I _do_ say
+      that after giving the deeper and sweeter Self a chance to unite
+      the self of common consciousness, constructively, with the
+      Powers Within, that you, too, may find yourself a Healer--that
+      is, Harmoniser--clothed in the Regal Now."
+
+After that plunge, Aunt Josephine came to the surface for breath, so to
+speak, and to say that she thought it only fair to tell us that she
+herself had seen almost nothing of general society for the past ten
+years. She had her work. She had her classes in which we might take some
+interest. I was to tell "the musical one" that Self-Expression, through
+voice-culture and pianoforte playing, was one of the Keys to the
+Biosophian System.
+
+Aunt Josephine had already taken opera-tickets for the season. And we
+should go to as many concerts as we liked. We should see pictures and we
+should see people. We should "learn to use the plus sign in thought." We
+should "recognise the cosmic truth that ALL IS GOOD."
+
+This concluding phrase was underscored three times. And still, despite
+its provokingly obvious aspect, I felt that I had not a notion what
+Aunt Josephine meant by it. My mother said the reason was that I knew
+nothing of mysticism. Eric said neither did he. But he knew stark,
+staring lunacy when he saw it. And he was more than doubtful if we ought
+to be entrusted to this demented step-aunt.
+
+My mother reproved Eric's flippancy. Either she really did see daylight,
+and most excellent meaning, in the Biosophical Theory, or she concerned
+herself to make out a case for the defence of Aunt Josephine. She told
+Eric she was surprised that a man of science should at this time of the
+day cast ridicule on the doctrine of an essential harmony between "soul
+states" and the health of the body. For her part, she felt the
+attraction of this idea of ceasing the little lonely personal fight
+against overwhelming odds--this putting oneself into direct relation
+with the Infinite.
+
+Eric stared.
+
+Yes, my mother maintained, there was much to be said for Mrs.
+Harborough's idea that each individual should learn to think of his life
+in connection with this underlying force. If, instead of denying God we
+affirmed Him ... refusing to accept or to believe in evil----
+
+"All very jolly for us," Eric said, "but what about the poor cancerous
+devils in our hospital? I see us looking in on them and saying: 'Oh,
+you're all right! Three cheers for harmony. Come out and play golf with
+the staff.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Eric had gone my mother lay back on the pillow, her shining eyes
+on Bettina pirouetting noiselessly about the room. I begged Bettina to
+stop her gyrating.
+
+She explained she was doing the cheque dance. Mercifully there was this
+antidote--I mean postscript to Aunt Josephine's letter. "Nearer the
+time" she would send us the money for our tickets. The enclosed L40 was
+for clothes.
+
+Now the way was clear!
+
+No.
+
+The question still was, Who, this side of London, could be trusted to
+make our frocks? The seriousness of the consideration brought the cheque
+dance to an end. We sat and thought.
+
+The precise date of this visit was not yet fixed. Aunt Josephine had
+asked what time would suit us best.
+
+With one voice, Betty and I cried, "_June!_"
+
+But we were promptly told (and we agreed) that to suggest June would be
+too grasping. Aunt Josephine would have other, more important, guests
+eager to come to her for the Coronation month. So we answered: Any time
+convenient to her.
+
+Then that admirable Aunt wrote back: "Would next month do?" And would we
+stay for the Coronation?
+
+In spite of the breathless shortness of the time of preparation, Bettina
+composed Coronation dances and practised curtseying to the Queen, though
+she knew quite well that she would only see Her Majesty at a distance
+driving by in her golden coach.
+
+The one consideration that sobered Bettina was who, _who_--on this short
+notice, with all the feminine world crying passionately for frocks--who
+could be found to make ours? The more plain and simple, the more
+important was style and cut. Nobody in the country-side was competent
+for such an undertaking.
+
+Brighton? Very dear, and not first-rate.
+
+Suddenly Bettina clapped her hands.
+
+"The little French dressmaker Hermione told us about."
+
+The very person! Only, wouldn't she be up to the eyes in work? We
+remembered, too, she was said to be "not strong." She didn't care, as a
+rule, to work out of London. But she had come to sew for those horrid
+people Lord Helmstone let the Pond House to the year before. The people
+turned out to be badly off, and, after doing some damage, they had gone
+away without paying their rent. A law-suit was pending between them and
+Lord Helmstone. We had never known them, but we could not help noticing
+their clothes. They were beautiful. Even my mother said so.
+
+Hermione had played golf once or twice with the boy and girl. One day
+she had admired openly something the girl was wearing.
+
+"Yes, looks quite Bond Street, doesn't it?" the girl said. "And all done
+at home by a little dressmaker at four-and-six a day."
+
+Hermione had got the woman's address, specially for us, she
+said--meaning for Bettina. Hermione was always advising Bettina about
+her clothes and making the child discontented with what she had.
+
+We had not wanted any "little tame dressmaker" at the time, but we were
+enchanted now, when Bettina turned up the card inscribed:
+
+    "MADAME AURORE,
+     "87, CRUTCHLEY STREET,
+      "LEICESTER SQUARE."
+
+"Madame Aurore!" my mother echoed. "No doubt a cockney of the cockneys!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was not a cockney. And she was a great surprise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PLANTING THYME
+
+
+The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few
+days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to
+bring.
+
+And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of
+the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.
+
+The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly
+after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats--a
+business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to
+finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south
+bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying
+under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I
+worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds'
+singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many
+days like this--with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the
+sheltered south-west corner, were the bees in any number tuning up
+their fiddles.
+
+I looked up from my work and saw--at that most unusual hour--Eric Annan
+at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd--excited. I dropped the
+garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.
+
+"Matter? What should be the matter?"
+
+I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had
+betrayed himself.
+
+"I thought you looked as if--as if something had happened," I said. What
+I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I
+thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious
+morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the
+heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.
+
+But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not
+like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down
+over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them
+firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their
+roots.
+
+"What are you planting there?" he asked.
+
+"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last
+year.
+
+"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
+
+I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He
+looked astonished.
+
+I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early
+to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking
+delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I
+confessed the walks.
+
+"You ought not to have told me," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."
+
+I went on planting thyme.
+
+"Promise me, for these next days _you_ won't go either."
+
+"Why?" I asked again.
+
+"Because my thoughts might go wandering."
+
+I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.
+
+"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me."
+He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.
+
+"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next--how many
+days am I to be cooped up when the morning is at its best?"
+
+"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing
+other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you
+going to put in?"
+
+"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.
+
+"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.
+
+"So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They
+'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my
+mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're
+annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue
+butterflies would be a poor sort of place."
+
+We talked irrelevancies for a moment more--the passion of the
+convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts
+of moths and butterflies preferred.
+
+He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that
+trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and
+painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to
+please my mother. "Personally," I had never bothered much about the
+butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.
+
+I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and
+sybarites--all for colour and sweet scents.
+
+He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the
+rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies
+were much misunderstood. "In their way--and a very good way, too--they
+answer to the call."
+
+"What call?"
+
+"The call to serve the ends of life."
+
+I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general
+moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"
+
+"More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said butterflies were
+no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more
+immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers.
+
+It was such solemn talk for butterflies. I told him the two sulphur
+yellows reeling in the sunshine were laughing at him. "'Ends of life'
+indeed! They simply _love_ bright colour and things that smell
+sweet...."
+
+"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than
+any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all
+life comes from lovers."
+
+At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange
+thing was it seemed to frighten him.
+
+We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the
+honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited--holding breath.
+
+Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his
+collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had
+noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors,
+Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the
+thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room.
+
+"What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I
+asked, I thought I knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+ERIC'S SECRET
+
+
+My sister and I breakfasted in the morning-room in those days, and we
+always had a fire for Bettina's sake on chilly mornings.
+
+In the back of my mind I was hoping Eric's complaint of cold was an
+excuse. If my first impression had been right, if he had something to
+tell me, he would tell it better indoors. I should hear it better,
+sitting beside him.
+
+The pang when he passed the sofa by! I was wrong.... I was an idiot....
+
+He drew up before the ungenerous little fire and began at once to speak
+with suppressed excitement of a "secret."
+
+"----the sort of thing that--well, I wouldn't trust my own brother with
+it." And upon that he stopped short.
+
+I did not say: "You can trust me." But I hardly breathed in the pause. I
+felt it all hung on whether he told me. What hung? Why,
+everything--whether life was going to be kind to me some day ...
+whether it was well or ill that I had been born.
+
+He seemed to be content with having told me there was a secret. For he
+changed the subject abruptly to the Bungalow, and what an adept Bootle
+was at inoculation and the preparation of cultures. Bootle possessed the
+great and glorious faculty of accuracy! One of the few men on earth
+whose account of a thing did not need to be checked.
+
+Sitting over the fire that morning, Eric told me that the Bungalow was a
+laboratory. Very important work had been done there last autumn. (So
+_that_ was why he had stayed on!) "Tentative but highly significant
+results" had been arrived at--results which all these months of contest
+and putting to proof, in London and on the Continent, had not been able
+to upset.
+
+"Gods!" Eric exclaimed, with a startling vehemence. But this was a
+glorious place to work in! The best air in England! And the Bungalow had
+been an inspiration from on high! Far away from noise and interruption;
+and not merely for a few paltry hours. Great stretches of time to
+himself! Then you were so fit here. You slept. You had all your wits
+about you. As we knew, it was Hawkins's idea in the first place--that
+Eric should come down and rest. Well, now I was to hear something more
+about Hawkins. Hawkins was a kind of mascot. He not only was the best
+man they'd ever had in that chair at the University. He wasn't only a
+first-rate bacteriologist, and first-rate all-round man. There was
+something about Hawkins that struck fire out of other people. His rooms
+were a meeting-place for chaps keen about--well, about the things that
+matter. Hawkins gave a dinner at his club one night to some London
+University men and a couple of distinguished foreigners.
+
+"Of course, we talked shop. We argued and stirred one another up, and
+the sparks flew. When the rest had gone Hawkins and I stayed talking in
+the smoking-room. About an idea"--Eric looked round to see that the door
+was shut--"a new idea I was working at for dealing with cancer."
+
+"Dealing!" I echoed, leaning forward. "You mean curing?"
+
+"----I told Hawkins about an experiment I'd been making. As I've said,
+Hawkins is very intelligent. But he contested my conclusions. I grew
+hot. We argued. I told him more and more. Hawkins thought my experiments
+too rough-and-ready. Even if they weren't rough-and-ready, to be
+conclusive they must be tried on an extended scale. I stood up for the
+validity of tests, on a small scale, done with an infinity of care--a
+ruthless spending of the investigator rather than multiplication of the
+subject. All the same, I couldn't deny that precious time was being
+wasted and many lives. Hawkins was right. I did need a trained staff,
+and I needed--oh, masses of things I had not got, and had no prospect of
+getting. We had tried the forlorn hope of a Government grant--and
+failed. We agreed that, in working out an idea like mine, the crucial
+danger lay in premature publicity. We are in a cleft stick in these
+matters. Without the right people knowing, believing, helping, it is
+hard--pretty nearly impossible--to go forward. I sat, rather dejected,
+and stared at the fire. The smoking-room had been empty except for a
+little, dried-up old man, who was half asleep over the evening papers. A
+few minutes after Hawkins had gone out to pay his bill, the little old
+man waked up and went to a writing-table. In a half-minute or so I
+looked round, and he was standing quite near me, warming his back at the
+fire.
+
+"'I've been eavesdropping,' he said. Lord! I was scared. How much had I
+given away? 'I don't know anything about this subject,' he said. 'But
+I've an idea you do. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on it. My name's
+Pearmain,' he said, and he showed me the signature on a cheque. 'A
+thousand pounds to start you.' He laid the cheque down on the little
+table among the matches and cigar-ends. 'You can let me know when you
+need more,' he said. He fished a card out of an inside pocket, and
+chucked it on top of the cheque. Naturally I was staggered. He _seemed_
+right enough in his head, but I was sure he couldn't be.... When Hawkins
+came back I introduced him. We talked awhile longer. Then the old man
+said good-night. The next day I cashed the cheque. I gave up my post in
+the hospital, and I gave up ... a lot of things. After that I invested
+every ounce of energy I had in this undertaking. For three solid years
+I've done nothing, thought about nothing, except the one thing."
+
+His eyes were shining as a lover's might, I thought. The sting of
+jealousy poisoned my pleasure in being taken into his confidence--a
+renewed antagonism to the work, work, always work, that made its
+triumphant claim.
+
+"You pretend to be more inhuman than you are," I said. "For you don't
+forget that you can help people who have only ordinary everyday
+troubles."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," he laughed. "I'll have nothing to do with ordinary,
+everyday troubles."
+
+"You helped us----"
+
+"Oh, that's different--an exception. Just for once...." He seemed to
+excuse himself, for wasting time on us. He said the most extravagant
+things. "A revolution might have swept England. I should have gone on
+attenuating serums and inoculating guinea-pigs."
+
+It may have been something in my manner, or just my silence, that pulled
+him up. He spoke of the share we at Duncombe had had in "what's
+happened."
+
+"When I was clean worked out and dead-beat, I came here."
+
+We hadn't any notion of the "rest and refreshment--the----" He looked
+at me out of those clear red-brown eyes of his, and seemed to
+deliberate.
+
+A sense of delicious panic seized me. "And--the--the experiments. How do
+they come on?" I asked, but I wasn't thinking of them at all.
+
+"That," he said, sinking his voice--"that's just what I'm coming to;
+though I hoped I shouldn't tell you. I didn't mean to say anything at
+all this morning, except that I was going to be a hermit for these next
+days. But you aren't a chatterbox. The fact is ... last night I believe
+I stumbled on the secret."
+
+I don't know what I said, but it pleased him. His eyes were full of
+gentle brilliancy. "Yes, yes," he said. "I knew _you'd_ understand."
+
+Oh, it was good to see him with that light in his face!
+
+And we sat there, with the morning sun shining over us, and just looked
+gladness at each other. Then I said I thought he must be the happiest
+man in England.
+
+He half put out his hand, and drew it back. "I am to find that out, too,
+very soon," he said. The clock downstairs chimed ten. Eric jumped up
+like a person with a train to catch.
+
+He had taken me into his counsels prematurely like this, he said,
+because he wanted to feel sure that I wasn't putting any wrong
+construction on the fact of his burying himself for these next days. "I
+like to think you are understanding. If I have any good news, I'll come
+and tell you. If you don't hear, you'll know I don't dare let go my clue
+even for an hour, except to sleep."
+
+And now he must go.
+
+I went with him as far as the gate.
+
+He walked with head bent, and eyes that saw things hidden from me.
+Already he was back in the Bungalow.
+
+I felt the misery of being deserted. But I felt, too, the strong
+intelligence, the iron purpose, in the man. And though I was torn and
+aching, I was proud. For all my jealousy, as I saw the mouth so firm-set
+under the red-brown thatch, saw the colour in his face, something
+reached me, too, of the heat of this passion to find out--something of
+the absorption of the man of science in his task. Here was the new kind
+of soldier going to his post.
+
+I held out my hand. "Good luck!"
+
+He took it, then dropped it quickly.
+
+And quickly, without once looking back, he walked away.
+
+I watched him hurrying across the links till one of the heath hollows
+swallowed him up.
+
+As I turned to go back to my thyme-planting, I heard the dog-cart
+rattling along the stony road.
+
+Madame Aurore!
+
+I never finished planting the thyme.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+MADAME AURORE
+
+
+Madame Aurore was little and wasted and shrill.
+
+She had deep scars in her neck, and dead-looking yellow hair.
+
+She was drenched in cheap scent.
+
+Her untidy, helter-skelter dress gave no hint of the admirable taste she
+lavished upon others.
+
+She saw at once what we ought to have, and she talked about our clothes
+with an enthusiasm as great as Betty's own.
+
+"Ah, but _Madame_!" she remonstrated dramatically, when my mother showed
+her the new white satin, which was for me, and a creamy lace gown which
+was to be modernised for Bettina--"not _boet_ vhite!"
+
+My mother explained that my gown was to have rose-coloured garnishing.
+
+"Mais non! mais _non_!" Madame must pardon her for the liberty, but she,
+Madame Aurore, could not bring herself to see our chief advantage thrown
+away.
+
+What, then, was our chief advantage? Betty demanded.
+
+What indeed, but the contrast between us. The moment she laid eyes on
+the hair of Mademoiselle Bettina she had said to herself: the frock of
+Mademoiselle Bettina should be that tender green of tilleul--with just a
+note of bleu de ciel. Oh, a dress of spring-time--an April dress, a gay
+little dress, for all its tenderness! A dress to make happy the heart of
+all who look thereon.
+
+But "green!" We had sent all the way to London for the white satin, and
+we had no green.
+
+Then 'twas in truth une bonne chance that Madame Aurore _had_! She often
+bought up bargains and gave her clients an opportunity to acquire them.
+She rushed out of the room, and returned with a piece of silk chiffon of
+the most adorable hue. She showed us the effect over white satin. My
+satin. But then, as Madame Aurore said, we could so easily send to Stagg
+and Mantle's for more.
+
+She looked at me out of snapping black eyes--eyes like animated
+boot-buttons. "Yes, yes; for you, Mademoiselle, ze note sall be serenite
+... hein? Zis priceless old lace over ivory satin. Ah...." She struck
+an attitude. "I _see_ it. So ... and so. A ceinture panne, couleur de
+feuille d'automne touched with gold broderie. Hein? Oh, very distingue,
+hein?"
+
+"It must not be expensive"; we had to say that to Madame Aurore all that
+first day, at regular intervals. But she had her way. She sewed hard,
+and she chattered as hard as she sewed.
+
+Bettina ran across her in the passage that first evening as Madame
+Aurore came up from supper. And they began instantly on the fruitful
+theme of "green gown." My mother called out to Bettina that she had
+talked enough about clothes for one day, and in any case she had left us
+to go early to bed. Bettina regretted her rash promise--wasn't the least
+tired, and could have talked clothes till cock-crow! There was some
+argument on this head at the door, in which Madame Aurore joined, with
+too great a freedom, and an elaborate air of ranging herself on my
+mother's side. This pleased, least of all, the person Madame Aurore
+designed to propitiate.
+
+Madame Aurore, I am sure, had not been in the house an hour before she
+had taken the measure of our main preoccupation. Mademoiselle Bettina
+ought to be grateful, she said, to have a mother so devoted, so
+solicitous. Standing near the open door, she piled up an exaggerated
+case of maternal love. There was nothing in life like the love between
+mother and child. Ah, didn't she know! Her own little girl----
+
+My mother said she must have the door shut now, and I was sent to undo
+Betty's gown.
+
+Bettina thought it angelic of Madame Aurore not to resent our mother's
+lack of interest in the small Aurore. According to Bettina, Madame
+showed a wonderfully nice disposition in not withdrawing her interest
+from us after that. She seemed rather to imply: very well, you don't
+care about my child ... but I am still ready to care about yours.
+
+"Parfaitement!" ... the little dressmaker remembered Bettina's passing
+Dew Pond House the summer before. It was true what Hermione had
+reported. Madame Aurore had leaned out of the window to watch Bettina.
+She had even expressed the wish that she might have the dressing of
+cette jolie enfant.
+
+Oh, but life was a droll affair!
+
+Bettina thought it entirely delightful. She went about the house
+singing. The first time Madame Aurore heard Bettina she arrested the
+rapid stab of her basting needle: "Who ees dat?"
+
+"That is my youngest daughter."
+
+"She tink to go on ze stage?"
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Not? It ess a vast, zat."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was always cold.
+
+Whenever we were out of the morning-room she piled on the coal. On the
+second day I remonstrated. Fuel, I explained, was very expensive so far
+from the coal-fields. She smiled. "You are ze careful one, hein?" and
+she looked at me in a way which made me uncomfortable.
+
+But I did not feel about the poor little creature as my mother did.
+
+My mother went so far as to wish we had not sent for her. She would
+never have allowed her to come if she had seen her first. I thought my
+mother severe.
+
+Everybody else, including the servants, liked Madame Aurore. No wonder.
+She spent her life doing things for people. Sewing for us all day like
+mad, so that our two best frocks might be finished in spite of the
+shortness of the time; and still ready at nightfall to show the cook how
+to make p'tite marmite, or sauce a la financiere--equally ready to
+advise the housemaid how to give the Bond Street, not to say the Rue de
+la Paix, touch to her Sunday alpaca, and chic to old Ransom's beehive
+hat.
+
+If she asked them one and all more questions in a minute than they could
+answer in a month, what did that show but the generous interest she took
+in her fellow-beings?
+
+Bettina, with her little air of large experience, said that Madame
+Aurore was the most "sympathetic" person she had ever met. Madame
+Aurore's benevolent concern about our clothes, our soups, sauces, and
+servants, and everything that was ours, extended to our friends and
+relations and everything that was theirs. She had never, she said, known
+people--let alone such charming people as we--with so few acquaintances.
+Bettina thought Madame Aurore was sorry for us.
+
+She asked a great deal about the Helmstones. "Ze only friends and zey
+are avay for seex mont!" Ah, it was well we were going to London. We
+should die, else, of aloneness. Aunt Josephine plainly was the one ray
+of light in our grey existence. Where did she live? Lowndes Square! Ah,
+but a very expensive and splendid part of London! No news to us, who had
+our own private measure for social altitudes. Bettina had looked out
+Lowndes Square on our faded map of London. Aunt Josephine was only a
+private person, but she lived nearer the King and Queen than the
+Helmstones did.
+
+And for all her being a Biosophist she had asked us to stay for the
+Coronation. Bettina frequently led the conversation to the great event
+of June. But this queer little Frenchwoman was more interested in Aunt
+Josephine than she was in the King and Queen. Here was distinction for
+an Aunt!
+
+And what was she like--this lady? We must have a picture of our only and
+so valuable relation.
+
+Bettina went and rooted about in the deep print and photograph drawer,
+till she brought Aunt Josephine to light. Very faded and old-fashioned
+looking, but Madame Aurore regarded the face with a respectful
+enthusiasm. "Oh, une grande dame! une vraie grande dame!" Madame Aurore
+understood better now what was required.
+
+We repudiated, on our aunt's behalf, the idea that she was so much
+grande dame as philanthropist, thinker, recluse. We did not deny her
+grandeur. We but clarified it; or, at least, Bettina did.
+
+"Bettina talks too much to that woman," my mother said to me privately.
+She sent for Bettina and told her she was not to speak to Madame Aurore
+about anything except her work.
+
+Bettina thought to interpret this order literally would be inhuman.
+Besides, she considered it very nice of Madame Aurore to take such an
+interest in us. "_I_ am grateful when people take an interest," said
+Bettina with her air of superiority.
+
+When my mother heard that Bettina had been discussing Aunt Josephine,
+and had unearthed the photograph to show to Madame Aurore, she was
+annoyed. "Go and bring me the picture," she said.
+
+Bettina went into the morning-room, and looked about for some minutes.
+The little dressmaker sat there, in a litter of white and green, sewing
+furiously. Bettina said at last that she hated most dreadfully to bother
+Madame Aurore, but where was that old photograph?
+
+Madame Aurore looked up absently. "Had Mademoiselle Bettina not taken it
+out?"
+
+"Perhaps I did----" Bettina scoured the house.
+
+Aunt Josephine's photograph was never found.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was glad our mother did not know that Bettina had told Madame Aurore
+about the pendant and the diamond star. Bettina excused herself by
+saying Madame Aurore had been so certain a lady like our mother must
+have jewels, and that she would lend them to her daughters, in order to
+put the finishing touch of elegance to our toilette. Betty had felt it
+due to our mother to acknowledge that a part, at least, of this exalted
+expectation was not so wide of the mark. And Bettina endorsed Madame
+Aurore's opinion that a diamond star certainly _would_ "light up" my
+ivory satin and old lace. Also--but no, we must do without.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The green frock was all but finished. We had brought the cheval glass
+out of my mother's room. She was "not strong enough to stand the
+patchouli," so she missed the great moment of the final trying on.
+Bettina stood before the glass, looking somehow more childish than ever,
+or rather seeming less of common earth and more of fairyland, in the
+tunic-frock of green, her short curls on her neck.
+
+My fancy that she was like somebody out of "The Midsummer Night's
+Dream," was set to flight by Madame Aurore's shower of couturiere's
+compliment, mixed with highly practical considerations, such as: "See
+how it falls when you sit down. Parfaitement! And can you valk in it?
+But _wis grace_!" Bettina proved she could. "A merveille! Sapristi!
+Mademoiselle Bettine would see the sensation she was going to create in
+London. Could she lift ze arm--hein?" Mais belle comme un ange!--many
+makers of quite beautiful gowns studied the effect seulement en repos.
+Mademoiselle Bettine would, without doubt, dance in that frock. Let us
+see, did it lend itself? Bettina moved about the morning-room to waltz
+time--laughing at and with Madame Aurore; stopping to make court
+curtsies; watching in the glass if green frock had pretty manners.
+
+One thing more, its maker said, and behold Perfection! It needed ... it
+cried aloud for a single jewel.
+
+"Ah, yes." Bettina's look fell. No doubt the finishing touch would have
+been a pearl and emerald pendant. But----
+
+Madame Aurore struck in with a torrential rapture, drowning explanation
+and regret. Life, Madame Aurore shrilled, was for ever using her, humble
+instrument though she was--for the working out of these benevolences.
+There had she--but three days ago--all innocent, unknowing--tossed that
+piece of chiffon tilleul into her trunk. Or rather, not her hand
+performed the act--not hers at all. The hand of Fate! And now, _The
+Finger!_ ... pointing straight at the pearl and emerald pendant. But,
+instantly, must Mademoiselle Bettine go and get the ravishing jewel--the
+diamond star, as well, while she was about it.
+
+Then poor Betty had to say these glories were no more.
+
+Madame Aurore snapped her boot-button eyes, and rolled them up. Our
+poor, _poor_ mother! Deeply, ah! but profoundly, Madame Aurore
+commiserated une dame si distinguee, si elegante, being in straitened
+circumstances. Ah, Madame Aurore understood! She would be most
+economical with the coals.
+
+All the same she wasn't.
+
+But what did it matter! since she turned us out dresses that we were
+sure Hermione, herself, would have characterised as "Dreams." Bettina
+went about the house, singing:
+
+      "'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?'
+       'Going to London, Sir,' she said...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Madame Aurore even managed to put the finishing touches to the two
+frocks made in the village, which Bettina called our Coronation
+robes--just white muslin, but not "just muslin" at all, after they had
+passed through Madame Aurore's hands. She listened indulgently while
+Bettina wondered how the young Princes would like driving through London
+in a gold coach, and above all how the little Princess would feel; and
+how she would look; and how did Madame Aurore think she would do her
+hair?
+
+"I don't like that woman," my mother observed pointedly to Bettina.
+
+"Oh, dearest, she feels it. I know from something----"
+
+"I do not object to her knowing. But I am not interested in Madame
+Aurore." My mother dismissed her.
+
+The fact was that none of the torrent of talk (carried on now in a
+whisper, with elaborate deference to the chere malade)--none of it had
+to do with Madame Aurore herself. We had had to ask her all of the
+little we came to know about her. She had no regular business in London.
+Ah, no, she was too often ill. She merely went out to work when she was
+"strong enuss."
+
+"Zen too, ze leedle gal. I haf to sink about her." The thought seemed
+one to harass. All would be different if Mme. Aurore had a shop.
+
+We agreed that to have a shop full of lovely French models, would be
+delightful. And by-and-by the little Aurore would help in the shop.
+
+"_Nevair!_" said Mme. Aurore with sudden passion. She knew all about
+being in shops. It was to prevent her daughter from knowing, too, that
+Mme. Aurore must make money. The little Aurore should go to the Convent
+school--which seemed somehow an odd destination for the daughter of
+Madame Aurore. She spoke of it as a far dream, beckoning.
+
+"Nossing--but _nossing_ can be done in zis world vidout monny." And what
+people will do for money--oh, little did we know! But the world was like
+that. Eh bien, Madame Aurore had not made it. _Had_ she done so, it
+would be a better place.
+
+Betty and I smiled at the pains taken to make this clear. Madame Aurore
+professed herself revolted by an arrangement which made "ze goodness or
+ze badness of a pairson" dependent upon where you happened to find
+yourself.
+
+"Par example you can be extremement good _here_." More. She would go so
+far as to say you must be a genius to discover how to be bad here.
+
+Through Betty's laughing protest, the little woman went on with
+seriousness to assure us it was "une chose bien differente dans ..." she
+checked herself, bit off the end of her thread, and spat it out.
+
+"It is different, you mean, in Crutchley Street?" Betty asked. And,
+though she got no answer, I think we both understood the anxious mother
+to be thinking of the small Aurore left all alone in one of the world's
+Mean Streets. Perhaps the reason Betty got no answer to her question was
+that she had slightly raised her voice in putting it, and I had said,
+"Sh!"
+
+"What ees it?" Madame Aurore demanded, looking round.
+
+"I was only reminding Betty," I said. "We mustn't disturb my mother."
+
+Hah! naturally not. _Whatever_ happened, she was not to be disturbed!
+
+I was afraid, from the tone in which Madame Aurore said this, that she
+thought I had been reproving her. And, to divert her thoughts, I asked:
+"Who takes care of her--the little daughter--while you are away?"
+
+Again she bit viciously at the thread. "Not motch 'care'!" The small
+eyes snapped as she drew the thread through the needle's eye. I had
+never seen even her hands fly so fast, or her whole feverish little body
+attack the basting with such fury of energy as after that reference to
+the child left behind in Crutchley Street.
+
+Bettina said soothingly: "I suppose you left her with some good friend?"
+
+"Ze best I haf."
+
+The admission was made in an accent so coldly hopeless that Bettina,
+round-eyed, said: "Oh, dear, isn't she a nice friend?"
+
+"She is like ozzers. She is as nice as she can afford." Madame Aurore
+had recovered her shrill vivacity. She had not, after all, taken to
+heart my hint about keeping our voices down. "In some parts of ze
+vorld," she went on, in that raised, defiant note, "you might be quite
+good for a week; wis luck for a few months; but you could not be good
+from year's end to year's end."
+
+"Why was that?" Bettina asked softly.
+
+Madame Aurore laughed out. "Ze climat!" she said, in a voice that must
+certainly have penetrated the next room. "Somesing in ze air." Then
+lower, with a tigerish swiftness: "I shall not ron ze risk for _my_
+liddle gal! _Non!_" She tossed the satin on the machine, thrust it under
+the needle, and seemed to work the treadle by dint of compressing lips
+and knitting brows.
+
+Bettina and I agreed we would not talk to her any more about her
+daughter, since, unlike most mothers, the thought of her child did not
+soften Madame Aurore, but made her hard and angry.
+
+We put this down to wounded feelings at my mother's curt dismissal of
+the theme.
+
+Surreptitiously--for she knew leave would be refused--Bettina gave
+Madame Aurore some of our old toys, and other little gifts, to take home
+to her daughter.
+
+I did not prevent this, for I, too, felt uneasily that we ought somehow
+to make up for our mother's nervous detestation of Madame Aurore.
+
+Had this, as the little dressmaker hinted, something of sheer sickness
+in it--an invalid's caprice? Bettina said lightheartedly: "Oh, it's only
+because Aurore is a foreigner. Mother admits she never did like
+foreigners."
+
+After the first day there was almost no personal interchange between
+Madame Aurore and her employer. Yet I had a queer feeling that a silent
+drama was being played out between those two who, without meeting, were
+acting and reacting upon each other.
+
+Madame Aurore asked each day, How was madame? in a voice of extremest
+solicitude--nay, of gloomiest apprehension.
+
+I found myself wrestling with an uncomfortable feeling that this
+hopeless view of my mother's health was somehow prompted by a desire "to
+get even" with the one unresponsive member of our little circle--to get
+even in the only way open to Madame Aurore. I knew she advised the
+housemaid to look out for another place, and offered to find her one in
+London, where she would be paid double, and have almost nothing to do.
+The housemaid was greatly tempted, but I was told she said she wouldn't
+go till her mistress was better.
+
+"Bettair! She vill not last a mont!" said Madame Aurore.
+
+At first such echoes as reached me of these prognostications made me
+merely angry. But I could not quite cast them aside. I began to wonder
+miserably if there were anything in this view. After all we, too--even
+Eric--had held it ourselves, only such a little while before!
+
+I wrote to Aunt Josephine to say that if my mother were not better by
+Monday morning, I should bring Bettina as arranged; but I would stay
+only one night and go home the next day.
+
+The question rose on Friday as to whether Madame Aurore should return
+to London on Saturday night, or some time on Sunday.
+
+"Saturday night," said my mother with decision.
+
+Bettina ventured to urge the Sunday alternative. "The poor little thing
+is so tired after sewing all day----"
+
+To which my mother responded by ordering the cart for Saturday evening.
+
+"I cannot sleep with that woman in the house."
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+Bettina ran in to say Madame Aurore was ready to say good-bye. To our
+embarrassment, our mother would not permit Madame Aurore to enter the
+room, even for the purpose of taking leave.
+
+We went out and did what we could to soften the refusal. "She has not
+been sleeping...." "She is trying to rest...." "She is so much obliged
+to you...."
+
+Ah, Madame Aurore understood. Our poor, poor mother was undoubtedly
+failing. We were adjured to take every care. Certainly we should not
+both leave the poor lady.
+
+We told Madame Aurore that we should never forget her. "I shall take
+good care of the address," Bettina said.
+
+No, Madame Aurore would send us a new address. She was looking for
+larger rooms. She believed she was going to be stronger now. She meant
+to take on two or three hands. In that case, she would not be able to go
+out any more to people's houses. She would let us know....
+
+She filled the hall with her patchouli and shrill vivacity, and
+presently was gone.
+
+When we went back into my mother's room, we found her telling the
+housemaid to hang our gowns in a draught "to purify them."
+
+Betty was moved to some final remonstrance.
+
+My mother cut her short: "That was a horrible woman!"
+
+"Well, well," I said, "she's gone."
+
+"Yes. That is the best that can be said of Madame Aurore. We are done
+with her for ever."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+GOING TO LONDON
+
+
+Mercifully, no soul can stand at the pitch of tension long. Those too
+frail snap. The strong relax. As I have learned since, few who have to
+do with lingering illness but come to know the gradual, inevitable
+dulling of apprehension in the watchers. Eric says the power of human
+adaptability sees to it that the abnormal state of the sufferer shall
+come by mere continuance to wear an air of the normal. And so the
+watcher, with no violence to loyalty, or conscience, is relieved of the
+sharper sympathy.
+
+Certainly, my mother seemed to us in no worse case than many a time
+before. Bettina and I agreed that she began to improve the moment
+Duncombe air was no longer poisoned for her by the presence of poor
+Madame Aurore. What Eric had said of our trustworthy servants was true.
+Yet I had brought my mother to agree that my absence, now, was to be a
+matter only of hours, even if I went back for the Coronation.
+
+And still I was not spared a profound sinking of the heart at the
+moment of leave-taking. I put my misgiving down to the fear that parting
+from Bettina for four long weeks, would be more than my mother's scant
+reserve of strength could bear.
+
+As for Bettina (oh, when I remember that!)--Bettina showed the bravest
+front; calling back from the door: "I shall write you every blessed
+day."
+
+"Yes," my mother steadied her voice to answer. "I shall want to hear
+everything. The good and--the less good."
+
+"There won't be any 'less good.' It's all going to be glorious."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Big Klaus's dog-cart took us across the heath I strained my eyes for
+some glimpse of Eric. A week that day since he had come and shared his
+secret! He could never mean to let me go without a word. Not till the
+train was in motion could I give up hope. I stood a moment longer at the
+window looking back. No sign.
+
+I took my seat between Betty and an old gentleman; she and I both too
+stirred and excited to talk. Betty, half-turned away, looked out of her
+window, and I, across her shoulder and over the flying hedges, looked
+still for a man who might be walking the field-paths, looked for the
+bright green roof of his Bungalow, looked for the chimneys of the farm.
+
+No sign.
+
+I sat fighting down my tears.
+
+Not an hour of these bustling days had been so full, but I had felt the
+blank of Eric's silence. And now again I met the ache of loss with: This
+will teach you! You were dreading a little time away. He adds a week to
+our parting. _He_ doesn't mind. It's only you, poor fool--only you who
+mind.
+
+I looked round, in a sudden terror, lest anyone should be noticing that
+my eyes were wet.
+
+Mercifully, the people were all looking at Betty. I looked at Betty,
+too. I could not see her eyes, but the nearer cheek was that lovely
+colour whose name she gave once to an evening sky. We had come up on the
+top of a knoll and stood for a moment, breathless. My mother had said no
+painter could get such a colour. And neither were there any words in the
+language to describe it. For it was not red, not flame, not pink, nor
+orange. But Betty, looking steadily, had found the right words for it:
+"A fiery rose."
+
+And that was the colour in Betty's cheeks on the way to London.
+
+No wonder people looked at her. There was a man who got out of the
+first-class carriage next us at every station, and walked by our window.
+He looked in at Bettina. I was glad our carriage was full. I felt sure,
+if it had not been, he would have come in. I could see Bettina did not
+resent the staring. And then I saw her look out of the corner of her
+eyes.
+
+"Bettina!" I whispered. "Don't encourage that strange man to stare in
+here."
+
+"_Me?_" she said. "What am I doing?"
+
+I told her again that she encouraged him. But I was handicapped by not
+being able to say just how. I admitted that what she did was very
+slight. But it was enough. "It was what you did to Eddie Monmouth."
+Then, because she pretended not to understand, I told her that she was
+falling into bad deceitful ways. I knew she had written to Ranny
+Dallas.... Yes, and kept writing, though the moment I realised what was
+going on I wrote to Ranny myself. I said if any more letters came from
+him, I should have to tell Betty about the girl in Norfolk. Ranny wrote
+back that he had told Betty himself! And still they went on
+corresponding, secretly. I said to her now, that I should hardly be
+surprised if she was hoping to meet Ranny in London.
+
+"Oh, one may 'hope' almost anything," said Betty airily.
+
+"Not of a man who is engaged to another girl!"
+
+"Yes," said Betty; "as long as he isn't married...."
+
+Then, rather frightened, I asked outright if she was really expecting to
+meet Ranny somewhere.
+
+"How can I say? He is fond of the opera," she said in a very superior,
+grown-up way. "I _might_ happen to see him some night in the throng----"
+
+"In the throng! Betty," I said. "You have given Ranny Dallas your
+address."
+
+"No," she said; "but I've given it to Tom Courtney."
+
+Tom Courtney was Ranny's red-haired friend. "If you had watched," Betty
+said, "you would know that I was corresponding with Tom Courtney, too.
+Chiefly about Ranny. Tom Courtney is a splendid friend. He explains
+things much better than Ranny can. And then" (Betty's momentary
+annoyance vanished in laughter)--"then, too, Tom can spell--beautifully!"
+
+I refused to laugh.
+
+"I knew you'd be horrified," Betty said again, "and that is why I have
+to keep things from you. You are a sort of nun. _You_ never feel as if
+all your blood had been whipped to a syllabub. And besides----"
+
+"Besides?"
+
+"I do like nice men. I don't mind their knowing. And I don't mean to be
+an old maid. _You_ wouldn't care."
+
+"You think I wouldn't?" I had no time to say more, for the train
+stopped. We thought at first we had reached Victoria Station, but it was
+only Clapham Junction. The "staring" man passed once more, with a porter
+behind carrying golf-clubs and portmanteau. Our carriage, too, was
+emptying. The people stood and reached things down from the racks, and
+then filed out. When the train went on we were alone.
+
+Betty was still excited, but more grave, even harassed--a look that sat
+rather pitiful on her babyish face.
+
+I moved up close to her again, and I told her there was something I had
+to say before we got to London. "You and I, you see, we don't know very
+much, and we get carried away."
+
+"You mean me," said Betty. "You are thinking about Eddie Monmouth
+and----"
+
+Then I told her I did not mean her alone. "I don't know how it is," I
+said, remembering Mr. Whitby-Dawson and Captain Monmouth and Ranny--yes,
+and others--"I don't know how it is, but girls seem to 'care' more than
+men do."
+
+"I've thought that, too," Bettina said.
+
+I said I was sure it was true. Men had so much to do. Life was so full
+for them ... perhaps that took their minds off. I put my arm round
+Bettina and held her close. "I am going to confess something," I said,
+"that most older sisters would deny. But you have got nobody but me. And
+I have nobody but you. We must help each other."
+
+"I shall have Aunt Josephine," Betty reminded me.
+
+"A stranger--and too old besides." I dismissed Aunt Josephine for the
+particular purpose in view. "I am going to tell you something
+very--particular." Then, while she looked at the cushions opposite, and
+I looked out of the window, I told her I had learned from Eric Annan
+what she had learned through the others. "We'll say it just this once,
+and never, never again so long as we live! And we may have to deny it,"
+I warned her. "But I think, if I'm honest about it with you, maybe you
+won't feel that I don't understand ... or that I am, as you say,
+'different.' You will feel closer to me," I pleaded. "And maybe we shall
+both be stronger for that." I waited a moment. I was glad Betty still
+stared straight in front of her. "We don't only care more than men do,"
+I said. "We _need_ men more than they need us."
+
+Bettina turned at that. I felt her eyes on me. Then she looked down and
+stroked my hand.
+
+"I think Mr. Annan does care about you," she said.
+
+"A little," I said. "Not enough. Not as I care."
+
+Bettina pointed out that Eric Annan was not so young as we. "Why, he
+must be thirty. Perhaps when he was our age"--our eyes met in the new
+comradeship, and then fell--"he may have taken more interest in--more
+interest in the things we think about."
+
+Then she took it back. "No, no. You may depend it's only girls who are
+like that--caring so terribly much. I thought it was only me. But if you
+are like that too, maybe there are others." After a moment: "You were
+good to tell me," she said. "I don't feel so--unnatural."
+
+The train was slowing. The light grew grey. We were in a dim place,
+between a smoky wall and a rattling train going out as we came in. Then
+the platform, and the porters running along by our windows. "Luggage,
+miss?"
+
+Bettina started up.
+
+"Aunt Josephine!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+AUNT JOSEPHINE
+
+
+She was an imposing figure, beautifully dressed in black. She was
+handsomer than her picture, and younger-looking than we expected. It
+occurred to me that bio-vibratory sympathism had a thinning effect.
+
+Her manner was more decisive than I had expected from a dreamer. Very
+commanding and important, she stood there with her liveried servant
+behind her. Bettina had known her instantly by the grey hair rolled high
+and the pear-shaped earrings.
+
+She kissed us, and said I was more like my mother. And were our boxes
+labelled?
+
+She hardly waited for us to answer. She did not wait at all for our
+little trunk.
+
+"A footman will attend to the luggage," she said. As she led us down the
+platform, her eyes kept darting about in a way that made me think she
+must be expecting someone else by that train. I looked round, too. But
+nobody else seemed to be expecting Aunt Josephine, though a woman
+towards the end of the platform looked very searchingly at our party as
+we passed. Aunt Josephine did not seem to notice. She was busy putting
+on a thick motor-veil over the lace one that was tied round her hat--her
+lovely hat, that, as Betty said afterwards, was "boiling over with black
+ostrich-feathers."
+
+A wonderful scent had come towards us with Aunt Josephine--nothing the
+least like that faint garden-smell that clung to our linen, from the
+sprays of lavender and dried verbena our mother put newly each year
+under the white paper of our wardrobe-shelves. Such a ghost of fragrance
+could never have survived here. This perfume of Aunt Josephine's--not so
+much strong as dominant--routed the sooty, acrid smell of the station.
+When she lifted her arms to put the chiffon over her face, fresh waves
+of the rich, mysterious scent came towards us.
+
+She seemed in haste to leave so mean a place as Victoria. She spoke a
+little sharply to the footman. He explained--and, indeed, we could
+see--that a great, shining motor-car was threading its way as well as it
+could through a tangle of taxi-cabs and inferior cars. Aunt Josephine
+stood frowning under her double veil, and once I saw her eyes go towards
+the woman who had noticed us. The woman was speaking to one of the
+porters. The porter, too, looked at Aunt Josephine and nodded. The dowdy
+woman gave the porter a tip, and sent him on an errand. I was far too
+excited to notice such uninteresting people, but for the curious
+personal kind of detestation in the look the dowdy woman fixed upon Aunt
+Josephine.
+
+"We won't wait," said our aunt. "We'll take this taxi."
+
+But just then the beautiful shining car swerved free, and we were
+hurried in. The footman spread a rug over our knees. As we glided out of
+the station I noticed the dowdy woman asking her way of a policeman.
+
+And the policeman didn't know the way. He shook his head. And both of
+them looked after us.
+
+As we whirled through the crowded streets I felt how everyone must be
+envying Bettina and me.
+
+Presently we came to a quiet corner. The houses stood back from the
+street, in gardens. Our aunt's was one of these.
+
+I was too excited to notice much about the outside. But the inside!
+
+Betty and I exchanged looks. We had no idea Aunt Josephine was so rich.
+There were more big footmen--foreigners; very quick and quiet.
+
+The entrance-hall and stairs were wide and dim. When the front-door was
+shut, the house seemed as silent as a church on a week-day, and the
+soft-footed servants rather like the sidesmen who show strangers to
+their places. The very window was like a window in a church. It had
+stained glass in it, and black lines divided it from top to bottom, into
+sections, like church windows.
+
+If I had ventured to speak I should have whispered. Not even at Lord
+Helmstone's had we trodden on such carpets. No wonder our footsteps made
+no sound. Going upstairs we seemed like a procession in a picture. That
+was because the walls were immense mirrors separated by gilded columns.
+
+Aunt Josephine had taken off her motor-veil. She had certainly grown
+much thinner since she had the photograph taken. That accounted for her
+being a more "aquiline" aunt than we expected. Her nose curved down,
+especially when she smiled. And her eyes were not sleepy at all--a full
+yellow eye, the iris almost black.
+
+We followed her along a corridor till she threw open a door. "This is
+yours," she said in the voice that was both sharp and quick.
+
+I looked into the wonderful pink and white room. Instead of two little
+beds, as we had at home, was one very large one. It looked like an
+Oriental throne with rose-silk hangings.
+
+"I will send you up some tea," she said. "And you must rest. I am having
+a friend or two to dine. So wear your smartest gown. Come," she said to
+Betty.
+
+"Betty is the one who ought to rest," I said.
+
+"And so she shall," our aunt said. "I will show Betty her room."
+
+Betty looked blank.
+
+"We are not to be together?" she asked.
+
+"Together!" Aunt Josephine repeated the word with the smile that drew
+her nose down. "Oh, you shall have a room of your own."
+
+Betty moved a little nearer me.
+
+I explained that she and I always had the same room.
+
+"Yes, in a small house. Here there is no need."
+
+I wanted to tell her that it was not need that made us share things. But
+though poor Betty looked cast down, all I said was that I should come to
+her in plenty of time to do her hair.
+
+"A maid will do that," my aunt said.
+
+But I managed to tell her quite firmly that I must show the maid how.
+
+Aunt Josephine looked at me a moment.
+
+She doesn't like me, I thought. And I felt uncomfortable.
+
+As she followed her out, Betty made a sign over her shoulder that I was
+to come now.
+
+But after that look Aunt Josephine had given me, I felt I must walk
+warily. So I only signalled back, as much as to say "by-and-by."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A woman in a cap and apron brought me tea.
+
+I asked if she would mind taking the tray to my sister's room so we
+could have tea together.
+
+The woman said madam's orders were that the young ladies should rest. I
+reflected that Bettina would probably rest better if she did not talk,
+so I said no more.
+
+The woman had a face like wood.
+
+Two of the big footmen brought in our little trunk. I got out Bettina's
+dressing-gown and slippers, and asked the wooden woman to take them to
+my sister.
+
+I was so tired with all the excitement that I went to sleep on the pink
+satin sofa.
+
+The wooden woman waked me.
+
+"Time to dress," she said, and she had the bath ready. I looked round
+for our little trunk.
+
+"Oh, you couldn't have a thing like that standing about in here," the
+wooden woman said.
+
+And, indeed, I had felt, as I saw it coming in, how out of keeping its
+shabbiness was with all the satin damask, the gilding, and the lace.
+
+She had done the unpacking, the wooden woman said. And there were my
+white satin frock and silk stockings on the bed. "But half the things in
+the trunk are my sister's," I said.
+
+She had taken the other young lady what was needed, the woman answered.
+And whatever I wanted I was to ring for.
+
+I felt that this was no doubt the way of London ladies. But I longed
+for our shabby little trunk. It seemed the last link with home. I looked
+round the beautiful room with a sense of distaste.
+
+This feeling must be the homesickness I had read about.
+
+I went to the window. The lines that divided the long panes into panels,
+the lines that I had thought of as purely decorative were rods of iron.
+
+"You'll be late," the wooden woman said, and she drew the silk curtains
+over the lace ones, and switched on the electric light.
+
+She came back while I was brushing my hair. She offered to do it for me.
+I was so glad to be able to do it myself. I would not have liked her to
+touch me.
+
+I hurried with my dressing so that I could go to Bettina.
+
+The woman tried to prevent me. But I was firm. "Show me the way, will
+you? Or shall I ask someone else?"
+
+She hesitated, and then seemed to think she had best do as she was told.
+
+Half-way down a long, soft-carpeted passage she asked me to wait an
+instant.
+
+She knocked at one of the many doors.
+
+I heard my aunt's voice inside. And whispering. Only one of the electric
+lights was turned on here, in the corridor. The air was heavy. The "Aunt
+Josephine" scent, foreign, dizzily sweet, was everywhere. A light-headed
+feeling came over me. I longed for an open window. They must all be shut
+as well as curtained. Between the many doors, paintings were hung. I had
+been vaguely conscious of these as we came up. I saw now they were
+pictures of women. Most of them seemed to be in different stages of the
+bath. One was asleep in a strange position, with nothing on. I was going
+past that one when I noticed the opposite door ajar. I stopped and
+listened.
+
+"Bettina," I said softly.
+
+A voice very different from Bettina's answered in some language I did
+not know. I started back and, as I was going on, the door was opened
+wide. A lady stood on the threshold in a flood of light. A lady with a
+dazzling complexion. Her lips were so brightly red, they looked bloody.
+She had diamonds in her ears, and a diamond necklace on a neck as white
+and smooth as china. Her yellow hair was disarranged as though she had
+been asleep. She was wearing a kimono of scarlet silk embroidered in
+silver.
+
+She asked me something, not in French, not German, and not, I think,
+Italian. I said I was afraid I did not understand.
+
+My aunt came noiseless down the long corridor, and the foreign lady
+hastily shut her door.
+
+This other guest must be some very great person!
+
+My aunt was dressed for dinner in a gown all covered with little shining
+scales, like a snake's skin.
+
+"What are you doing?" she said, in an odd tone as if she had caught me
+in something underhand. I explained that I was looking for Bettina. And
+I found courage to say that I was sorry our rooms were so far apart.
+
+She took no notice of that. "You will see Bettina at dinner," she said,
+and it struck me she could be very stern.
+
+I felt my heart begin to beat, but I managed to say that I was sure
+Betty would wait for me to help her to dress.
+
+"I have told you she will have a maid to do all that is necessary."
+
+"I hope you won't mind," I said, "just for to-night. It is always my
+mother, or me, who dresses Bettina...."
+
+She seemed to consider. I said to myself again: "Oh, dear, she doesn't
+like me at all."
+
+"Take her, Curran," she said. The hard-faced woman came and piloted me
+round the angle of the corridor to Betty's door.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+We fell into each other's arms, and laughed and kissed, as though we had
+been parted for weeks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was determined not to let her know that Aunt Josephine and I were not
+liking one another. I only said I didn't like her taste in pictures.
+
+Betty tried to stand up for her. She reminded me of the statues and
+casts from the antique at Lord Helmstone's. She asked me suddenly if I
+wasn't well. I complained a little of the air. I thought we might have
+the window open while I did her hair. But Betty said, no. She had tried,
+and found she didn't understand London fastenings. So she had rung for
+the maid, and the maid had said: "This isn't the country"--and that
+people didn't like their windows open in London. Betty thought it quite
+reasonable. London dust and "blacks" would soon ruin this pretty white
+room.
+
+Betty defended everything.
+
+When I complained that the scent everywhere was making me headachy,
+Betty said she liked it. She wished our mother would let us use scent.
+The only thing Betty found the least fault with was the way I was doing
+her hair. She wanted it put up "in honour of London." But she looked
+such a darling with her short curls lying on her neck that I was doing
+it in the everyday way. And there wasn't time now for anything more than
+to fasten on the little wreath, for the woman came to say madam had sent
+up for us. So I hurried Betty into her frock, the woman watching out of
+those hard eyes of hers. Nobody in the whole of Betty's life had looked
+at her like that. The woman didn't want us to stop even to find a
+handkerchief. And after all, just as Betty was coming, the woman said:
+"Wait a minute," and wanted to shut the door. I stood on the threshold
+waiting. A gentleman was coming upstairs. With his hat on! He stared at
+me as he went by, and so did the footman who followed him. I drew back
+into the room and the woman shut the door.
+
+"Who was that gentleman?" I asked. She seemed not to hear. So I asked
+again.
+
+"_That_--oh, that is the doctor," she said. Naturally we asked if
+somebody was ill.
+
+"Not very," she answered in such a peculiar way we said no more.
+
+She stood and watched us as we went downstairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Our first London dinner-party," Bettina whispered.
+
+We took hands. We were shaking with excitement.
+
+We saw ourselves going by in the mirrors between the golden columns.
+
+The whole place was full of tall girls in white, and little girls in
+apple-green, wearing forget-me-not wreaths in their hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+AT DINNER
+
+
+Down in the lower hall were the men-servants with their watchful eyes.
+
+They showed us the drawing-room door.
+
+As we came in, I was conscious again of Aunt Josephine's appraising
+look. Then of the elaborate grey head turning towards an old man, as if
+to ask: Well, what do you think of my nieces? He had a red blotchy face.
+The kind of red that is crossed by little purple lines like the tracery
+of very tortuous rivers on a map. The lines ran zigzagging into his
+nose, which was thick at the end, round and shining. He had no hair
+except a sandy fringe, and his eyes, which had no lashes, looked as if
+he had a cold. He was introduced as "an old friend of mine"--but she
+forgot to tell us his name. We heard him called Colonel. Through all the
+scent we could not help noticing that he smelled of brandy.
+
+I looked round for the beautiful foreign lady. But I was prepared to
+find her late, after seeing her idling at her door, in a dressing-gown,
+so near the dinner-hour.
+
+There was only one other person. A man of about thirty-six. Good-looking
+I thought--and not happy. He had a clear face, quite without colour. The
+skin very smooth and tight. His dry brown hair was thinning on the
+crown. He had nice hands. I noticed that when he stroked his
+close-fitting moustache. I did not like him because of his manner. I did
+not know what was wrong with it. Perhaps he was only absent-minded. But
+when I tried to imagine him talking to my mother I could not.
+
+He was introduced first to Bettina. The others treated him as if he were
+very important. They talked about his new Rolls Royce, which turned out
+to be a motor-car. The Colonel tried to get him to say how many times he
+had been fined for "exceeding speed limit." Then they talked about "The
+Tartar." How he was always late. It would be a chance if he came at all.
+Aunt Josephine was positive he would appear. "I wired to say it was all
+right."
+
+"Just as well, perhaps, if he doesn't come to-night," the good-looking
+man said. He would be in a devil of a temper.
+
+Betty asked why would he? They said because his favourite horse had been
+"scratched." Betty thought it was nice of him to be so fond of his
+horse. But if it was only a scratch----
+
+We did not know why they laughed. But we laughed too. We tried not to
+show how unintelligible the talk was. I listened very hard. I felt like
+a learner in a foreign tongue. I understood the words but not the
+sentences.
+
+The Colonel looked at his watch in a discontented way. Then we went in
+to dinner.
+
+I don't think we sat in the order Aunt Josephine had meant. But the
+absent-minded man, who had taken me in, refused to change, or to let me.
+I had the old Colonel on my left. Aunt Josephine of course at the head.
+The empty place was between her and Betty.
+
+The table was glittering and magnificent. We had little helpings of
+strange, strong-tasting food before the soup. And caviar.
+
+"You like caviar?" the Colonel said.
+
+I said I didn't know, for in my heart I felt it looked repulsive.
+
+"Don't know caviar?"
+
+I said of course I had heard of it. He asked where. And I said, "In
+Shakespeare." The old Colonel choked, and they all laughed to see how
+apoplectic he looked--all except Betty and me.
+
+I caught Betty's eye. She had that fiery-rose in her cheeks. I felt
+excited, too, and "strange." But I hoped they didn't notice. Betty and I
+had agreed that we must try not to show how unused we were to the ways
+of a great London house. So I made conversation. I asked about the
+absent guest.
+
+My good-looking man pretended to be annoyed. He called, in his slightly
+husky voice, across the table to Aunt Josephine: "Already she wants to
+talk about The Tartar!" I explained that I meant the foreign lady--the
+very beautiful lady I had seen upstairs looking out of her door.
+
+Again my man exchanged glances with Aunt Josephine. He was smiling
+disagreeably. Aunt Josephine did not smile at all. But the old Colonel
+laughed his croaking laugh, and said the lady upstairs expected people
+to go to her.
+
+"Does she expect dinner to go to her, too?" Betty asked. And something
+in their faces made Betty blush, though she didn't know why, as I saw.
+I believed they were teasing Betty, just for fun, and to see that
+beautiful colour in her cheeks flicker and deepen.
+
+So I leaned towards her, and across the flowers and the dazzling lights
+I told her the foreign lady was not very well. That was why she was not
+coming down.
+
+The Colonel asked me why I thought the lady wasn't well. So I said:
+"Because I saw the doctor going up to her."
+
+They were all quite still for a second or two. I looked at Aunt
+Josephine. Why was it wrong to mention the doctor's visit? Was she
+afraid of making these friends of the beautiful lady anxious about her?
+My man still was smiling, but not pleasantly. I couldn't tell whether
+the strange noises the Colonel made were choking or laughing. But I felt
+more and more miserably shy; And I had no clear idea of why I should
+feel so--unless it was that nothing these people said meant what it
+seemed to mean.
+
+I could see that Betty was bewildered, too.
+
+We knew we should feel strange; we did not know we should feel like
+this.
+
+I was thankful when they all turned round and called out. "The Tartar"
+had come, after all.
+
+He made no apology for being late, nor for not having dressed. He
+strolled in as if the place belonged to him--a great broad-shouldered
+young man in a frock-coat. He had a round, black, cannon-ball of a head,
+and his eyebrows nearly joined. His moustache was like a little
+blacking-brush laid back against the lip, with the bristles sticking
+straight out. But he seemed to be making this effect deliberately, by
+pushing out his mouth like a pouting child; or, even more, like a person
+with swollen lips. I felt sure I could not have seen him before; but
+there was something oddly familiar about him.
+
+He nodded to the others.
+
+When Aunt Josephine said, "My nieces," he said, "Oh," stared a moment,
+and then, as he lounged into the empty place, said it had been a rotten
+race. I thought how astonished my mother would have been at such
+behaviour. Betty must have been thinking of her, too, for she put on our
+mother's manner. It was a beautiful manner, but it sat oddly on my
+little sister; it made her seem more self-possessed than she was. She
+turned and said: "I think you must be Mr. Whitby-Dawson."
+
+The young man stared.
+
+Everybody stared.
+
+He turned sharply from Betty to his hostess. She shook her head. But the
+yellow part of her big eyes had turned reddish. She looked very strange.
+
+A creepy feeling came over me.
+
+I remembered she had been "most eccentric" twenty years ago. Was
+eccentricity the sort of thing that grew worse as people grew older?
+
+I looked round at the company and met the eyes of the neighbour on my
+right. They were unhappy eyes; but they reassured me.
+
+"What put such an idea into your head?" Aunt Josephine was asking Betty.
+
+"Because," Betty said, and she looked at the young man again, "only
+because I saw so many of your--of Mr. Whitby-Dawson's photographs----"
+
+"Really?" the young man said, in a bored voice. "That was, no doubt, a
+great privilege. My name's Williams."
+
+In her embarrassment Betty turned to the man who sat between us. "He
+has even the little scar," she said, like a person defending herself.
+"Mr. Whitby-Dawson got his scar in a duel with a student at Heidelberg.
+He studied at the University there part of one year----"
+
+"Studied duelling?" the Colonel chuckled. Our absent-minded man was not
+absent-minded any more. He was listening, with a look I could not
+understand, as if he took a malicious pleasure in poor Betty's mistake.
+Such a trifling slip to have taken the young man for Guy Whitby-Dawson,
+and yet it seemed to have put the company out of tune. Or perhaps it was
+the loss of the race. All except my man seemed to care very much about
+the lost race. The Tartar, in his annoyed voice, told his hostess and
+the Colonel how it happened. He leaned his elbow on the table, and
+almost turned his back on poor Bettina.
+
+I thought I could see that my man seemed not to like The Tartar; and
+that gave me a kindlier feeling towards him; I wondered what had made
+him unhappy.
+
+I felt I wanted to justify Bettina to him.
+
+I felt, too, that she would recover herself sooner if we broke the
+silence at our end. So I said--in a voice too low, I thought, for the
+others to hear--that I also had noticed the resemblance to Mr.
+Whitby-Dawson. Lower still, he asked me how we came "to hear of
+Mr.--of--the gentleman in question." Then Betty and I between us told
+about Hermione Helmstone's engagement--only we did not, of course, give
+her name.
+
+"The faithless Whitby!" our man said, with the tail of his eye on the
+young gentleman opposite. As for him, he tried to go on talking about
+"Black Friar," as though he heard nothing of the history being retailed
+on the other side. But I had a feeling that he was listening all the
+time.
+
+Bettina's loyalty to Hermione made her object to hearing Guy called
+faithless. "They would have had only L400 a year between them. And he
+said--Mr. Whitby-Dawson said--they couldn't possibly live on that. He
+was miserable, poor man!"
+
+"I should say so! Poor and miserable."
+
+"Oh, you laugh," Bettina protested. "But I saw a heart-broken letter
+about the poverty that kept them apart and condemned him 'to run in
+single harness.'"
+
+"'Single harness!'" the husky voice said. And he repeated it: "'Single
+harness,' eh?"
+
+Bettina was recovering her spirits. She said something about Duncombe.
+And I don't know what reminded her of the collie-dog story; but she told
+it very well, though she did "pile it on." She made me out an immense
+heroine, and I am afraid I looked sheepish.
+
+The husky voice said "Good!" and "Pretty cool." The story seemed to
+remind him of something. He looked at his plate, and he looked at
+Bettina and me.
+
+Betty was amused at having made me feel shy, and she laughed that
+bubbling laugh of hers.
+
+The Tartar turned his head.
+
+He did not take away his elbow. But he looked over his shoulder down on
+Bettina's apricot-coloured hair. The fillet showed the shape of her
+head. It defined the satiny crown, where the hair lay as close as a
+red-gold skull-cap. The forget-me-nots and the little green leaves held
+all smooth and tight except the heavy, shining rings. They fell out and
+lay on her neck.
+
+The Tartar stopped talking about the race.
+
+He still ate his food condescendingly--with one hand. But he drank with
+great good-will.
+
+He called to the butler, who had been going round with a gold-necked
+bottle in a napkin. He was to come back, The Tartar said, and fill the
+ladies' glasses.
+
+I said no. Bettina said she, too, drank water.
+
+The Tartar said "Nonsense!"--quite as though the matter were for him to
+decide. The servant filled Bettina's tall, vaselike glass. Bettina
+looked alarmed. Already she had displeased this dreadful Tartar once.
+
+"Ought I?" she telegraphed across to me. I shook my head.
+
+"There is one woman in London"--The Tartar made a motion towards the
+head of the table--"one woman who's got a decent cellar." The Tartar was
+almost genial. He raised his glass to my aunt. "I approve of the new
+coiffure, too. Rippin'!"
+
+The Colonel was not to be diverted from the subject of the wine. "Take
+an old man's advice," he said to me. "It's a chancy sort of world. Make
+sure of a little certain bliss." He lifted his own glass and drained
+it.
+
+The Tartar said something to Bettina which I could not hear. She looked
+up at him with a kind of wonder in her eyes, and with that "fiery rose"
+quite suddenly overspreading her face again. She put out her hand to the
+tall glass, hesitated, and then looked at the head of the table. Perhaps
+Bettina saw what all of a sudden was clear to me. Aunt Josephine was
+like a huge grey hawk. The head craning out; the narrow forehead, all
+grey crest; the face falling away from the beak. How she had changed
+from the days when she had a double chin! The tilt of the outstretched
+head was exactly like a bird's. Watching sideways--watching ... for
+what?
+
+The eye made me shrink. It made Bettina set her lips, obedient, to the
+glass. She looked apologetic over the rim at me.
+
+Mine stood untouched.
+
+"I see you have a will of your own," the voice on my right said in my
+ear.
+
+The London way seemed to be that ladies did not leave the table while
+men smoked. The talk was about wines, but it flagged. The Tartar kept
+looking at Bettina. The fitful colour in her cheeks had paled again. The
+scent of flowers, and that other all-pervading perfume, mixed with the
+tobacco, was making Bettina faint.
+
+My man noticed it. "You aren't accustomed to smoke," he said to Bettina,
+and he twisted his cigar round on his fruit-plate till he crushed out
+the burning. But the others took no notice.
+
+I was sure Bettina was trying hard to throw off her oppression. I
+thought of our mother; and the thought of her sent sharp aching through
+me. Bettina and I looked at each other. I knew by her lip she had great
+trouble not to cry.
+
+"Do you think," I whispered to my man, "you could ask to have a window
+opened?"
+
+He said we would be going into the drawing-room soon. "Drink that black
+coffee," he recommended.
+
+He seemed not unkind, so I tried to think why he would not do so small a
+thing for us as ask to have a window opened. "Are the downstairs windows
+barred with iron, too?"
+
+He looked sharply at me.
+
+"I believe so," he said.
+
+I thought it must be because of all the silver and valuables in the
+house. But he glanced at me again, as if he thought I was still
+wondering and might ask someone else. Then he said he had heard "it
+used to be a private madhouse."
+
+"_This house?_"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You needn't say I told you."
+
+That, then, was what I had been feeling. The poor mad people who used to
+be shut up here--they had left this uncanny influence behind. A
+strangeness and a strain.
+
+The Colonel was speaking irritably to one of the footmen. Something had
+gone wrong with an electric-light bulb over the sideboard.
+
+"Send for Waterson to-morrow to attend to that!"
+
+No one but me seemed at all surprised to hear the Colonel giving orders
+in my aunt's house.
+
+As I sat there in the midst of all the contending scents, with the soft
+clash of silver, glass, and voices in my ears, a train of ideas raced
+through my brain as crazy as any that could have been harboured here in
+the days when....
+
+The letters that had come out of this house Eric had called "demented."
+
+All the windows were still barred.
+
+What if it were a private madhouse still! Before my eyes the watchful
+big footmen turned into keepers to the Grey Hawk and to the lady
+upstairs. The doctor--he was for those too dangerous to trust
+downstairs. That was why they had laughed at my inquiry--such
+callousness had familiarity bred. The Colonel might be the proprietor of
+the house. My aunt was well off. No doubt they humoured her. With a
+keeper dressed like a footman, they allowed her certain liberties--to
+write crazy letters in her harmless intervals ... friends to dine ...
+nieces to divert her. They would do almost anything to keep that red
+look out of her eyes.
+
+"There is one thing I don't understand," I began to say to the man at my
+side.
+
+But he was nervous too, and jumped down my throat: "Don't ask me
+questions! I never passed an examination in my life," he pulled out his
+watch. "And I've got an engagement to keep in exactly three minutes'
+time."
+
+No wonder I stared. One man comes when dinner is half done, and one
+wants to go before the hostess had risen. For my part I wanted him _not_
+to go ... I told him so.
+
+"Why?" he turned suddenly and faced me.
+
+I said it was perhaps because I felt I knew him best. "Anyway," I
+persisted, "don't go!" He hesitated. "_Please_ don't go," I said. I was
+relieved when he said, very well, he would "see it out." For I knew, had
+he gone, my aunt would think I had driven him away.
+
+There was a rustle, and I saw Aunt Josephine rising. My man left me
+instantly. He went and opened the door. As we filed out he turned
+towards my aunt. I heard him whisper, "_Je vous fais mes compliments,
+madame_." He looked at Betty.
+
+Aunt Josephine nodded. "But...." her face changed.
+
+What was wrong? For whom was that "but"? I turned quickly and caught the
+yellow eyes leaving my back. I was "but." But why? What had I done? The
+Colonel talked to Betty and The Tartar, as he led the way back to the
+drawing-room. The other man still was behind with my aunt. He seemed to
+be reassuring her. His curious low voice kept going off the register. At
+a break I heard the words: "Doucement" enunciated with an emphasis that
+carried.
+
+I kept thinking how all the softly-draped windows had iron bars behind
+the silk.
+
+In the drawing-room, my aunt was saying to The Tartar, "Oh, yes, Bettina
+sings and dances."
+
+"She sings," I said.
+
+"Don't you skirt-dance?" The Tartar asked.
+
+Bettina looked sorry. "I can dance ordinary dances," she said. "But what
+sort is a skirt-dance?"
+
+The men made a semicircle round her to explain.
+
+Betty said she hadn't done any skirt-dances since she was a little girl.
+
+"Oh, and what are you now?" the Colonel said, grinning horribly.
+
+They made Bettina tell about the action-songs our mother had taught us
+in the nursery. They asked her to do one.
+
+Of course Bettina refused. "They're only for children," she said with
+that little air borrowed from our mother.
+
+The Tartar threw back his bullet head and roared. The Colonel said they
+were sick, in London, of sophisticated dancing. What they wanted was
+Bettina's sort. Bettina shook her head.
+
+The Grey Hawk said it was too soon after dinner. But they went across
+the room towards the piano.
+
+I was following, when the man who had taken me in to dinner said: "This
+is a comfortable chair." So I sat down.
+
+He said something about the strangeness of London "just at first." It
+would pass away.
+
+I told him I hoped Bettina would find it so. As for me, I was only
+staying till to-morrow.
+
+He looked so surprised that I explained I had to go back and take care
+of my mother.
+
+"You have never been to London since you were a child--and you come all
+this way just for a few hours?"
+
+"I came to take care of Betty," I said. "She has never travelled alone."
+
+He looked at me: "And you?"
+
+"Oh, I haven't either. To-morrow will be the first time. But then, I am
+older."
+
+He said nothing for several moments. I looked across the room to where I
+could see the back of Bettina's head, between the bare crown of the
+Colonel and The Tartar's black bullet. The Tartar was bending over
+towards Bettina. Aunt Josephine sat near them, facing the door, and us.
+
+My man looked up suddenly and saw the eyes of the Grey Hawk on us.
+
+"We must talk!" he said, with a laugh, "or they will think we aren't
+getting on. That isn't a comfortable chair after all." He stood up. I
+said it was quite comfortable. While he was insisting, a servant came in
+to speak to my aunt. I caught a glimpse through the door of a footman
+going upstairs with a short, fattish young man. Too young, I thought, to
+be another doctor.
+
+We went to the end of the room, and we sat on a sofa near the
+fireplace--one of those sofas you sink down in till you feel half
+buried. I didn't like to say I hated it, for he was taking so much
+trouble. He put a great down cushion at my back, as if I were an
+invalid.
+
+"There! Now, can you sit quite still for a few minutes? As still as if I
+were taking your picture?" I said I supposed I could. "And must I look
+pleasant?" I laughed. He hesitated and then: "How good are your nerves?"
+he asked.
+
+"Very good," I boasted.
+
+But he was grave.
+
+"Have you ever fainted?"
+
+"Never!" I said, a little indignantly.
+
+"Could you hear something very unexpected, even horrible, and not cry
+out?"
+
+"You know something!" I thought of an accident to my mother. "You have
+news for me...."
+
+"Careful," he said in a sharp whisper. "You told me you could keep
+perfectly still. If you can't I won't go on." I begged him to go on, and
+I kept my face a blank. He turned his head slightly and took in the
+group at the other end of the room. He sat so a moment, with his eyes
+still turned away, while he said: "Everything--more than life, depends
+on your self-control during the next few minutes."
+
+I sat staring at him.
+
+"Have you any idea where you are?"--and still he looked not at me but
+towards the others.
+
+My first bewilderment was giving way to fear. No fear now of anything he
+could tell me. Fear of the man himself. I saw it all. Not that iron-grey
+woman who had left the room with the servant, not the brilliant lady
+upstairs, but the person who had set me thinking wild thoughts at dinner
+about barred windows and private lunatic asylums.
+
+The man sitting not three feet way from me--was mad.
+
+I calculated the distance between me and the other group, while I
+answered him: "I am at my aunt's--Mrs. Harborough's."
+
+"Where does your aunt live?"
+
+"At 160 Lowndes Square."
+
+"You are twenty minutes from Lowndes Square. You are in one of the most
+infamous houses in Europe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE GREY HAWK
+
+
+Minutes seemed to go by. Vague hints from servants, things I had read in
+the papers--and still I sat there, not moving by so much as a hair.
+
+He was looking at me now and telling me to "keep cool." And then: "I
+suppose you know there _are_ such places----" He interrupted himself to
+say: "Remember! A careless look or move would mean--well, it would mean
+ruin. _Now_ do you understand?"
+
+Beyond a doubt I did. If I moved or cried for help, he would kill me
+before my aunt could get back; before I could cross the room. Though why
+he should wish to kill me I could form no idea.
+
+"You must have time to recover," he said, in that muted, uneven voice.
+"I will shield you while you pull yourself together." He had bent
+forward till his shoulders shut out my view of the group at the other
+end of the room.
+
+I shrank further back into the cushions. But: "I have myself in hand,
+now," I said; for I remembered you must never let the insane know you
+are afraid.
+
+Betty's laughter sounded far away.
+
+"Take your time," he said. "They're enjoying themselves. They haven't
+even rung for the cognac and liqueurs yet." They would make Bettina and
+me drink a liqueur, he said. Or if they failed in that, they'd say, "'a
+thimble-full of coffee, then.'" And our coffee would be "doctored."
+
+"But we've had coffee," I said, in a new access of terror. Was it
+drugged coffee that made me feel so lamed?
+
+"That was all right," he said. "That was to steady _us_."
+
+He did not look as if he needed steadying. What if he were not mad?
+
+"Be careful," he said again. "Remember I am running a ghastly risk in
+telling you. But you are facing a ghastly certainty if I don't."
+
+I sat in that stillness of stark terror--staring at him.
+
+And as I stared I found myself clinging to the thought that had been
+horror's height a little while before. "Pray God he's mad," I kept
+saying inwardly.
+
+If I could keep my head, he said, I had no cause to be so frightened. It
+would be some little time before he could give me up without rousing
+suspicion.
+
+"Before you give me up!" I imagined the Grey Hawk swooping to snatch me.
+
+"Before I help you to get out of this," he explained. "And when I do,
+you will perhaps remember it is at a sacrifice. Greater than I supposed
+I could feel."
+
+I moved at that--but like a sleep-walker on the edge of waking.
+
+I asked him in a whisper what we were to do. I meant Betty and me. But
+he said: "When she begins to play, or to sing, you are to get up quite
+quietly--_can_ you?"
+
+I made a sign for yes.
+
+"No haste ... you must do it languidly--go out of the room."
+
+"But my----" (I suppressed "my aunt" with an inward twist of questioning
+anguish) "----shall I not be asked where I am going and why?"
+
+He said no. Because he would make the others a sign. He thought my
+sister was too excited to take any notice of my going. "But if she does,
+I'll tell her you wanted her to go on singing. I shall seem to be coming
+after you. But I'll stop to explain that we've had an argument about one
+of the pictures in the hall." He told me what I was to do.
+
+"If, after all, they were to prevent me--what, what then?"
+
+"They won't--they will leave you to me." He said it with a look that
+stopped the heart.
+
+I implored him to let me go out alone.
+
+He fixed his unhappy eyes on mine. "You would never be allowed out of
+this room alone."
+
+"I could say I must post a letter."
+
+"They would ring for a servant."
+
+I measured the long room. "If once I got as far as the door I could
+run."
+
+"----as far as the front door perhaps. You would find it locked. No
+servant would open it for you."
+
+"Will they for you?"
+
+"I can do it for you," he said, under his breath, and he stood up.
+
+I thought he meant I was to make trial then of that terrible passage to
+the door. But was it not better to be where Betty was, whatever
+came--Betty and I together--than Betty alone with those devouring-eyed
+men, and I with a maniac out in the hall!
+
+"I cannot leave my sister!" I said.
+
+He stood in front of me, masking me from the others. "Haven't I made you
+understand? If you don't leave the room with me, _she_ will leave it
+with Whitby-Dawson."
+
+"No! No!"
+
+He hushed me. "She won't know why--but she'll do it. And she won't come
+back again. She would probably be on her way to Paris this time
+to-morrow." He pulled a great cushion up to hide my face. And then he
+turned and made a feint of getting an illustrated paper off the table.
+He kept his eye on the others. There was some little commotion, during
+which Betty had risen. She left the sofa and sat on the piano-stool. She
+was laughing excitedly.
+
+The man came back to me with the illustrated paper. He sat down closer
+to me, and held the paper open for a shield. But he held it strangely,
+with his arm across the picture. The reading part was in French. I had
+to crane to see over the top--Betty twisting round on the piano-stool,
+and touching the keys in a provoking way; the two men teasing her to
+sing.
+
+I have lived over every instant of that hour, until the smallest detail
+is a stain indelible upon my mind. I have no trouble in remembering. My
+trouble is to be able to forget.
+
+I hear again that muted voice behind the paper saying: "But for the
+collie-dog story, I wouldn't have dared to risk this. Everything depends
+on your nerve." And then he looked at me curiously, and wanted to know
+if I had not heard there were such places---- "I won't say like this.
+This is a masterpiece of devilry. And masterpieces are never plentiful."
+
+He waited for me to say something. If I had known what, I could not have
+said it. I tried hard to speak. But I could only look dumbly in his
+face. And I saw there was no madness in the unhappy eyes.
+
+"You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he
+insisted.
+
+Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able
+to think. I had been imagining other people insane. But perhaps it was
+I....
+
+I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up
+and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have
+said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a
+shock--that's all."
+
+I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the
+man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him.
+
+"I am sorry I told you," he said.
+
+What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand.
+
+"You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of
+violation. You implicate me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made
+when you begged me not to go. You make _me_, after all, an instrument of
+initiation."
+
+Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak height of later
+knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish of the moment. Heaven forgive
+me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had
+come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious, I
+think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin
+ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice.
+And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked
+about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?"
+
+"Call in her bullies to beat me to a jelly."
+
+He was more and more unwilling to seem a mere adjunct of the baseness he
+unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"--he nodded
+towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one--"all this, far more
+crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world--in every capital of
+every nation on the earth. And it has always been so."
+
+He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was
+being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other
+things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more--"help
+me quickly to get help!"
+
+He said I must trust him. Everything depended on choosing the right
+moment. "If you went out now, with that face, you'd pull the house about
+our ears."
+
+He was doing all he could to calm and steady me, he said. And certainly
+he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare,
+an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought--it was all
+a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human
+nature!"--like the tolling of a muffled bell. Bishops and old ladies
+imagined you could alter these things. Take India--"I've been there. I
+knew an official who'd had charge of the chaklas. You don't know what
+chaklas are? Your father knew. If you'd gone riding round any one of the
+cantonments you'd have seen. Little groups of tents. A hospital not far
+off. Women in the tents. Out there it's no secret. They're called
+"Government women." The women are needed by the army. So there they
+are."
+
+Women are "needed." Through the chaos came back clear the memory of my
+talk with Betty in the train: "Men don't need us as much as we need
+them."
+
+Even Governments, he said, had to recognise human nature, and shape
+their policies accordingly. I was too young to remember all that talk
+in the press some years ago, about the mysterious movements of British
+battleships in the Mediterranean. Instead of hanging about Malta, the
+ships had gone cruising round the Irish coast. Why? The officials said,
+for good and sufficient reasons. The chorus of criticism died down. The
+"reasons" were known to those who had to know. Not enough women at
+Malta. The British fleet spent some time about the Irish coasts. "Human
+nature----"
+
+"I can do it now!" I cried under my breath, and I stood up.
+
+He shot out a hand and pulled me back. "Christ! not while the grey hawk
+is hovering outside! And your lips are livid." A good thing, he said,
+that I had still a few minutes. "You have your sister to thank. She is a
+success. She piles up anticipation. The value of that, to the jaded, is
+the stock-in-trade of people like our hostess. At a time when her
+profession is a hundred per cent. more dangerous than it's ever been
+since the world began, she perfects it--makes it pay in proportion to
+its danger." Couldn't I trust him to know? He gave me his word: "No
+indecent haste here. They are adepts. They have learned that the climax
+is less to the sated than the leading up. The leading up is all." After
+a second: "How did she get hold of you?"
+
+I knew no more than the dead.
+
+"Through someone very well informed...." He probed and questioned. I
+could only shake my head. But my tortured mind flung itself
+spasmodically from one figure to another in our little world, and felt
+each one's recoil from my mere unspoken thought. Until--_the little
+dressmaker_! Her questions ... her pains to establish the fact of our
+isolation, of our poverty ... her special interest in our aunt. "You haf
+a photografie--hein?" And then the picture's vanishing. Had it come to
+this house to serve as model? The Tartar liked "the new coiffure----"
+
+Two servants came in. One carried a great silver tray.
+
+"Oh, leave that a bit!" The Tartar, over the back of the sofa, waved the
+footman off.
+
+They came towards us, and were told: "Put it there on the table." The
+man beside me made a show of welcoming it. He dropped the illustrated
+paper on my lap. "Bend down--bend down low," he whispered.
+
+I bent over the swimming page.
+
+"What will you have?" he called out to me, as the footmen were leaving
+the room.
+
+I tried to answer. No sound.
+
+"Oh, you prefer creme de menthe, do you?" he said quite loud. "Yes,
+there's creme de menthe." He filled a glass and brought it to me.
+"Cognac," he whispered. "It will steady you."
+
+I put my shaking lips to the glass. I did not drink.
+
+"Ah, you are afraid," he said. And he looked at me with his unhappy
+eyes.
+
+My hand was shaking. Some of the stuff spilt out on my new dress.
+
+"Give it to me," he said, and he drank it off--"just to show" me.
+
+I was conscious that Betty was singing--And that the door had opened.
+The Grey Hawk stood there with, as I thought at first, a thick-set boy
+dressed in a man's evening clothes. As she dismissed him I saw he was a
+hunchback. She shut the door behind the hunchback and the Colonel left
+the piano and came towards her. He was laughing. They stood and talked.
+
+"Bend down. Bend low----" the voice said in my ear.
+
+The Colonel's croaking laugh came nearer.
+
+The man at my side called out: "Look here, Colonel. No poaching on my
+preserves. We are deep in a discussion about Art. You're not to
+interrupt."
+
+"Oh, Art is it?" The old man had come behind our sofa, and was leaning
+down between us. I smelt a foul breath. With a sense of choking I lifted
+my head. The Colonel's watery eyes went from me to the strange ugly
+picture in the illustrated paper. I did not understand it. I do not
+think I would have been conscious of having looked at it, but for the
+expression on the Colonel's face.
+
+Bettina finished her song. They all clapped. In the buzz, Bettina raised
+her voice. No, no. She couldn't dance, and sing, as well as accompany
+herself, she said.
+
+"What time is it in?" the grey woman asked. She took Bettina's place at
+the piano.
+
+Still Bettina hesitated, while The Tartar urged.
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't mind," Bettina said, "if you like such babyish songs."
+
+"Of course we do,"--the Colonel went back to them.
+
+Bettina said pertly: "I should think you'd be ashamed." She stood beside
+the grey woman and hummed the old tune. She helped by striking a few
+notes.
+
+"Now!" the grey woman said to Betty.
+
+The word was echoed in my ear.
+
+"Now?" I repeated.
+
+"But first"--he caught my hand. "Bite your lip a little.... Ah! not
+blood." He smuggled his handkerchief to me behind the cushion. "You'll
+be all right," he whispered. "But I wish I could go with you! You see
+that I must stay behind----"
+
+"Yes, oh yes," I looked at Betty.
+
+"I must stay," he said, "to give you time. Then when I've seen you out
+of this ... a door open, a door shut--and I shall never see you
+again...."
+
+"Now! _Now!_" I hardly noticed that he took his blood-stained
+handkerchief out of my hand. For Bettina had come forward and stood
+poised, holding her green skirt with both hands, like a child about to
+curtsey. I stood up. All the room was dancing with my little sister. I
+got to the door.
+
+      "_Where are you going to...?_"
+
+Betty sang. But she was too amused and excited to notice me.
+
+My companion had crossed the room, and was bending over the Grey Hawk.
+She looked round at him surprised, mocking....
+
+Some power came to help me across the threshold. A footman started up
+out of the floor and stood before me. "Where are you going?" He echoed
+Betty.
+
+"I am waiting for--one of the gentlemen," I said, and I steadied myself
+against a chair. If Betty's song stopped, I should know we had failed.
+
+I held my breath, as I leaned over and took my last look into the room.
+Our friend was leaving the grey woman. She played on. Bettina was
+dancing, a hand on her hip, the other twirling moustachios--playing the
+gallant. Such a baby she looked!
+
+And I had done her hair like that----
+
+      "_What is your fortune, my pretty maid?_"
+
+The man had come out and softly shut the door. He gave the footman a
+strange look and passed him something. "It's all right," he said.
+
+The footman looked in his hand and stared. "Mais, merci--merci,
+monsieur." He vanished.
+
+I went towards the stairs.
+
+"_That's_ not the way," the voice said harshly.
+
+"Shan't I get a cloak----"
+
+"For God's sake, no! It's a question of moments now." He was undoing the
+door. "Run for your life. First to the left--second to the right--a
+cab-rank."
+
+I fled out of the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+WHERE?
+
+
+I stood ringing. I thundered at the knocker.
+
+I beat the door with my fist.
+
+An old man opened at last.
+
+"Mrs. Harborough! Where is she?" The old man tried to keep me out. But
+he was gentle and frail. I forced my way past. I called and ran along a
+passage, trying doors that opened into the darkness.
+
+At last! A room where a woman sat alone--reading by a shaded light.
+
+"Who are you?" I cried out. She laid her book in her lap. "Are _you_
+Mrs. Harborough? Then come--come quickly ... I'll tell you on the
+way----"
+
+The old woman lifted the folds of her double chin and looked at me
+through spectacles.
+
+"You must come and help me to get Bettina...." I broke into distracted
+sobbing on the name. "Bettina----! Bettina----!" I seized the lady's
+hand and tried to draw her out of her chair.
+
+But I was full of trembling. She sat there massive, calm, with a power
+of inert resistance, that made me feel I could as easily drag her house
+out of the Square by its knocker, as move the woman planted there in her
+chair.
+
+Neither haste nor perturbation in the voice that asked me: "What has
+happened?"
+
+"_Not yet!_" I cried out. "Nothing has happened yet! But we must be
+quick. Oh, God, let us be quick----"
+
+The butler had followed me in and was asking something. "Yes," said the
+quiet voice, "pay the cabman."
+
+"No!" I shrieked. "Keep him! I must go back, instantly...." And through
+my own strange-sounding voice, hers reached me.
+
+"You must see that you are quite unintelligible. Sit down and collect
+yourself."
+
+"Sit down! Isn't it enough that _one_ woman sits still,
+while--while----"
+
+She was putting questions.
+
+I heard a reproach that seemed to fill the house: "You never came to
+meet us!"
+
+And while the charge was ringing I felt, with anguish, the injustice of
+it. How could one have expected this woman to come!
+
+But she should be moved and stirred at last!
+
+"I sent my maid," she was defending herself, "--only a minute or two
+late."
+
+"The other woman was not late!"
+
+"Who?"
+
+I begged the butler to get a cloak for Mrs. Harborough. She was saying
+Bettina and I should have waited. And again that I must calm myself and
+tell her----
+
+"Someone pretended to be you!" I hurled it at her. "She took us to a
+house--a place where they do worse than murder. Betty is there now----"
+I told her all I could pack into a few sentences.
+
+"It isn't possible," my aunt said. "This is England."
+
+"_Come and see!_ Betty----" But they only thought me mad; they tortured
+me with questions.
+
+I caught her by the arm. "God won't forgive you if you wait an instant
+more."
+
+Oh, but she was old and unbelieving! So old, I felt she had looked on
+unmoved at evil since the world began.
+
+But she was sending for wraps, sending messages. Still she sat there, in
+the heavy, square-backed chair, her hands upon her knees, her two feet
+side by side as motionless as the footstool, her heavy shoulders high
+and square, her lace cap with square ends falling either side her face,
+like the head-dress of an Egyptian, her air of monumental calm more like
+a Theban statue than a living woman.
+
+I turned away.
+
+The figure in the chair rose up at last.
+
+Oh, but slowly--slow, and stiff, and ponderous.
+
+I felt in her all the heaviness of the acquiescent since Time began.
+
+"That is right," she said to the old man who had brought the maid.
+
+And the maid was old, too.
+
+Three helpless ghosts.
+
+Like death the sense came over me that I was as badly off with these
+three, as I had been alone. Again I turned from them, frantic.
+
+"I will go out," I cried, "and find help." I ran towards the door.
+
+It was then the old man made the first sane suggestion. We could
+telephone to the police.
+
+That would save time! The police would meet us outside Betty's prison.
+
+I followed the butler into the hall. We all stood there, by the
+telephone. Ages seemed to go by while he was getting the number. And
+when he had got the number, he could not hear the questions that were
+put. I tore the receiver out of his hand--I pushed him aside. But I had
+never used the telephone before, and I spoke too loudly. When they told
+me so, I sobbed. The voice at the other end was faint and cool. Oh, the
+easy way the world was taking Betty's fate!
+
+And then the faint cool voice at the other end said something which
+showed me I was not believed.
+
+He, too, was thinking I was out of my mind.
+
+The receiver dropped from my hand.
+
+"They cannot understand," I said. I told Mrs. Harborough that she must
+go to Bettina, and I would bring the police.
+
+Some objection was made. I did not stop to hear it: "I cannot wait for
+any words! And I will not wait another second for any human soul!"
+
+Then, running beside me as I made for the front door, the old butler
+spoke again: "----a policeman in our square." He would call the
+policeman in.
+
+The old man was right. A policeman stood at the corner, watching that no
+harm should come to the ladies of Lowndes Square.
+
+I had run out, with the butler protesting at my heels: "_Not in the
+street_, miss!" he said, with the first hint of emotion I had found in
+him.
+
+I did not wait; but he must have brought the policeman in during my
+outpouring, for the look of the hall during those swift seconds is
+stamped on my brain. The elderly maid kneeling at her mistress's feet,
+changing her shoes; the policeman facing my aunt, helmet in hand, his
+reverent eye falling before the dignity of Mrs. Harborough, while I, at
+his elbow, poured out broken sentences, interlarded with: "I'll tell you
+the rest as we go----"
+
+My strained voice was grown weak. I wondered, suddenly, if it had ever
+really reached their ears.
+
+I was like a person down under the sea, trying to make my voice heard
+through a mile of murky water.
+
+I was like a woman buried alive, who, in the black middle of the night,
+beats at her coffin-lid in some deserted graveyard.
+
+"It is no use!" I cried. "I shall go back alone."
+
+At last we were all going out of the door. The policeman put on his
+helmet.
+
+"And where is this house?" he asked.
+
+"It is--it is----"
+
+A pit of blackness opened. I felt myself falling headlong. I heard a cry
+that made my flesh writhe--as though the cry had been Bettina's, and not
+mine.
+
+A voice said: "It is not possible you have forgotten the address!"
+
+I had never known it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL
+
+
+It must have been half an hour before reason came back. A strange man
+was there, lean and grey. A friend, I heard--a Healer.
+
+All those old, old faces!
+
+What had they done?
+
+What could they do?--except telephone again to the police the vague and
+non-committal fact of a girl decoyed and lost to sight in the labyrinth
+of London.
+
+They dared to think they could get me to bed. They found me, not a
+girl--more a wild animal!
+
+Out, out I must go.
+
+The outward struggle was matched by the one in my mind. Where should I
+go? To whom? There must be somebody who would care. Somebody who had
+Power to give effect to caring. Wildly my ignorance cast about. Who had
+Power?
+
+The King--yes; and surely the Queen would "care." But who was I to reach
+the Queen? Her sentinels and servants would thrust me out. All my
+crying would never reach the Queen. Then, the only thing that was left
+was for me to go out and cry the horror in the street.
+
+They held the door while they told me there had been telephoning back
+and forth. And someone had already gone to Alton Street.
+
+"Is that where Betty is?"
+
+No. Alton Street was the nearest police-station. The person who had been
+sent there had not yet come back.
+
+Then I, too, must go to Alton Street to learn what they were doing.
+
+The power of the police still loomed immense. At Alton Street I would
+hear they had already found Betty. She might even be there at this
+moment....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My aunt, the Healer and I driving through deserted streets. How long was
+it since I had been away from Bettina?
+
+"Oh, not long," they said. And the police beyond a doubt had turned the
+time to good account.
+
+I had a vision of the Betty I should find at Alton Street. Fainting,
+ministered to by men, reverent of her youth and terror....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A grimy room with a counter running down its length. No sign of Betty;
+only men in uniform grouped in twos and threes behind the counter.
+
+They listened. Yes, my aunt's messenger "had been in." They shook their
+heads.
+
+The Healer did most of the talking.
+
+A man with a sallow face put a question now and then. He was the
+inspector.
+
+Although there were only policemen there besides ourselves, the
+inspector talked quite low, as though he was afraid someone might come
+to know a girl was lost.
+
+"I can't hear what you are saying!" I said. "She is _my_ sister. You
+must tell me what you are doing to find her."
+
+They had so little to go upon. "The only clue, and that a very slight
+one," was the cabman. Could I remember what he was like?
+
+The strangeness of the question! Taxi-drivers were as much alike to
+country eyes as the cabs they drove---- But why ask me? "Bring the man
+in, and let the inspector see him."
+
+Then they told me. The man who was waiting there outside was not the one
+who had taken me to Lowndes Square.
+
+But where _was_ our "slight and only clue"?
+
+They said that while they all were busied over me, unconscious, the
+butler had paid the cabman and let him go. He had never thought to take
+the number. The slight, the only clue, was lost.
+
+But no. The inspector said they would circulate an inquiry for a cabman
+who had brought a young lady of my description to Lowndes Square that
+night.
+
+I tried to learn how long this would take--what we could do meanwhile.
+What had been already done.
+
+They seemed to be saying things which had no meaning. Except one thing.
+The great difficulty was that I could not describe the outside of the
+house, nor even the general locality. Which way had we driven from
+Victoria?
+
+I had no idea.
+
+But surely I had looked about. What had I noticed as we drove away from
+the station?
+
+I do not know whether at another time I might have answered better, but
+I could remember only a confused crowd of passengers, porters,
+taxi-cabs, and motors. Yes, and the woman who had looked after us while
+she asked her way of a policeman.
+
+Why had she looked after us?
+
+I could no more tell them that than I could tell why both she and the
+policeman had followed us with such unfriendly eyes.
+
+"Ah!"--the inspector exchanged glances with the Healer--"a possible clue
+there."
+
+I could not imagine what he meant. I could not believe that he meant
+anything when I saw the expressionless yellow face turned to Mrs.
+Harborough to say that "in any case" the Victoria policeman would not be
+on duty now. The inspector talked about what they would do to-morrow.
+
+"To-night--to-night; what can we do to-night?"
+
+He brought a piece of yellow paper. He put the questions over again, and
+this time he wrote the answers down with a stump of worn lead-pencil.
+The glazed paper was like the man, it took impressions grudgingly; it
+held them very faint.
+
+While the blunt lead-pencil laboured across the sheet, something that
+other man had said to me in the house of horror flashed back across my
+mind. I had not believed him at the time, still less now, in the
+presence of the guardians of the City--all these grave and decent
+people.
+
+Shamefaced I asked Mrs. Harborough if the inspector knew of "any house
+where a woman takes young girls."
+
+She and all the rest were one as silent as the other, till I steadied my
+voice to say again, this time to the man himself: "You have no
+knowledge, then, of 'such a place'?"
+
+"I don't say that," he answered.
+
+I looked at him bewildered. "You mean you do know of a house--a house
+where----"
+
+He hesitated too. "We know some," he said.
+
+"You don't mean there are many?"
+
+Again the hesitation. "Not many of the sort you describe." He took up
+the stump of pencil hurriedly and held it poised. "Try to recollect some
+landmark," he said--"some building, some statue that you passed."
+
+I did my best to obey--to wrench my mind away from the inside of that
+place where Betty was ... to think of what we had seen on the way.
+
+"Did you drive through the Park?" said my aunt.
+
+"No," the inspector answered for me, "she wouldn't take them through the
+Park; she would go as fast as possible--by side streets----"
+
+But I told them we had passed the Park. We had seen flower-beds through
+a tall iron railing. She said it was Hyde Park, and the flowers were on
+our left.
+
+"Hamilton Place. Park Lane." The inspector punctuated my phrases.
+"Driving north. You crossed Oxford Street?"
+
+I could not say. Other questions, too, I had no answer for. I held my
+head between my hands trying to force the later impressions out--trying
+to recover something of that drive I seemed to have taken a hundred
+years ago in some other state of being. And as I stood so, sobbing
+inwardly and praying God to let me remember, I heard the inspector say
+the most horrible thing of all. And it was the horrible thing that gave
+me a moment of hope. He told my aunt that the police kept a list of
+"these houses."
+
+A list.
+
+He said the police were "expected to have an eye on such places." And no
+one contradicted him.
+
+"Even if there are many," I burst out--"you have all these policemen
+here. You have hundreds more. Those houses in the list must all be
+searched----"
+
+They would do what they could, he said.
+
+I did not know why they should at the same time speak of doing all they
+could, and yet should look so hopeless. But I saw that nobody moved. My
+two companions talked in undertones. The men in uniform still stood in
+twos and threes. One near a high desk drummed with his fingers on an
+open book. The Healer folded his thin long hands upon the counter. In
+that horrible stillness I said suddenly, "Look at the clock!" The
+clock's hands too were folded, praying people to notice it was midnight.
+
+They stirred a little at my voice. They looked at me and at the clock.
+The inspector said they were waiting for Mrs. Harborough's messenger.
+The messenger had gone out with a constable to make inquiry at the
+nearest cab shelter.
+
+Why had they not told us that before!
+
+My two companions followed me, talking low.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were driven to a little wooden house, set close against the curb. Two
+or three men inside, and one behind an urn was pouring coffee.
+
+Yes, yes, a gentleman had "called." Each one there had been questioned.
+Others, besides, who had been in and out. No one had taken a lady to
+Lowndes Square that night.
+
+The door shut behind us. We were out again, in the street.
+
+Two taxi-cabs in the rank, and ours at the curb? Besides our driver and
+ourselves not a soul afoot, outside the little wooden shelter.
+Betty--Betty, what am I to do? I looked up at the houses. In almost any
+one of them must be some good man, who, if he knew, would help me. But
+the houses were curtained, and dark.
+
+The silence of the streets seemed a deeper silence than any the country
+knows. The only sound, my two companions whispering. "He" would no doubt
+be waiting for them at Lowndes Square, they said. Could they mean,
+then, to go home...?
+
+Betty--Betty---- I looked up again at the houses--houses of great folk,
+I felt sure. Officials, perhaps; equerries; people about the
+Court--people whose names we had often seen in the paper as going here
+and there with the King and Queen. People who would not be turned back
+at any time of night if they went to the Palace on an errand of life and
+death. Should I run along the street ringing at all the bells?
+
+I may have made some movement, for Mrs. Harborough took my arm and drew
+me towards the cab. No, the people in the great houses would be sleeping
+too far away from those blank doors. Deafness had fallen on the world,
+and on the houses of good men a great darkness.
+
+A light--at last, a light! shining out of a house on a far corner which
+had been masked by the cab shelter. And people awake there, for a taxi
+waited at the door--the door of hope. Above it an electric burner made a
+square of brightness. In that second of tense listening, my foot on the
+step of the cab, a raised voice reached me faintly.
+
+I dragged my arm free and went, blind and stumbling, towards the sound.
+I shall find someone to go to the Queen...!
+
+The Healer had followed quickly: "What are you doing! That's a
+public-house."
+
+They took me back, they put me in the cab. I hardly knew why I resisted,
+except that I was looking wildly about for someone to appeal to, and I
+kept childishly repeating: "The Queen ... the Queen."
+
+While Mrs. Harborough was being helped into the cab after me, I leaned
+out of the window on the opposite side, looking up the street and down.
+The wind blew cold on my wet face.
+
+"The Queen, the Queen! Oh, why are you Queen of England, if you can't
+help Betty?"
+
+The door of the public-house opened, and a man reeled out. A man in
+chauffeur's dress. A man--with crooked shoulders!
+
+I remembered now.
+
+I opened the cab-door on my side, and tore across the street with voices
+calling after me.
+
+The unsteady figure had stooped down by the waiting taxi, and set the
+machinery whirring.
+
+"Tell me," I bent over him. "Are you the man who brought me to Lowndes
+Square an hour or so ago?"
+
+The man looked up. As the cab light fell on his face I recognised him.
+
+Oh, God, the relief!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE MAN WITH THE SWORD
+
+
+"Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the
+stooping figure.
+
+The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was
+drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him.
+
+He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't
+say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of
+them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station.
+
+In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a
+horror of losing him.
+
+"I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough.
+
+And all the while---- But we are coming, Betty! Coming....
+
+The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of
+police-stations. They settled which would be the one.
+
+"Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I will give you all I have if
+you'll drive fast."
+
+The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned
+out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my
+eyes away from the only clue.
+
+Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out
+of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He
+ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on
+at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt
+corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked
+up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door.
+
+The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street.
+
+And Betty wasn't there.
+
+Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured
+man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come
+I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector."
+
+The young man said he was the inspector.
+
+Among us we told him.
+
+The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke quite differently. Sensible,
+alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of
+the inspector. This man was human.
+
+"You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?"
+
+I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An
+inspector's post was the station.
+
+But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for
+with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the
+telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound
+some great alarum, summoning a legion of police.
+
+He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of
+yellow paper. Precisely such a piece of paper as that on which already,
+there in Alton Street, the miserable story was set down. I shall not be
+believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed surface with a
+stump of blunt lead-pencil.
+
+"_Don't_ wait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...."
+
+But he, too, made little of the need for haste. He, too, made much of
+what I had noticed as we left Victoria--the homely woman and the
+policeman watching as we drove away.
+
+"You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?"
+
+"No doubt--and no doubt the policeman was suspicious too." The inspector
+spoke with pride: "Oh, we get to know those people! They meet the
+trains. They're at the docks when ships come in."
+
+It was then I saw that Mrs. Harborough could be stirred too. "If the
+policeman knew," she said--"if he so much as suspected, why did he not
+stop the motor?"
+
+The inspector shook his head.
+
+"Why didn't he arrest the woman?"
+
+"He is not allowed," said the inspector.
+
+I was sure he couldn't be telling us the truth. A creeping despair came
+over me. My first impression had been right. This man was too young, too
+ignorant, to help in such appalling trouble as ours. He was speaking
+kindly still. I might be sure they would do all they could to discover
+the house----
+
+"When? When?"
+
+And if they did discover it, he said, they would watch it.
+
+"'_Watch it!_'" I could not think I had heard right. "You don't mean
+stand outside and wait!--while all the time inside----"
+
+They tried to make me calmer. The inspector said, under certain
+circumstances, a warrant could be obtained to search the house....
+
+And was the warrant ready?
+
+Everything possible would be done. Oh, the times they said that! Then
+the inspector, a little wearied, told Mrs. Harborough "it might be
+advisable to go and see the man who is in charge of all these cases."
+
+Not only I, Mrs. Harborough heard him. For she repeated, "'All these
+cases!' You don't mean such a thing has happened before?"
+
+"Oh, yes," the young man said. "But usually it's poor girls. This is the
+gentleman who has charge of all that." He turned and pointed to the
+left. Beyond a board where keys were hanging, under two crossed swords,
+the electric light shone clear on the picture of a man in an officer's
+uniform. A man wearing a sword and a cocked hat with plume--the sort of
+dress Lord Helmstone wore when he went to the King's Levee.
+
+"When is he here?" Mrs. Harborough asked.
+
+"Oh, he never comes here. He's at Scotland Yard."
+
+"Scotland!" I cried.
+
+They told me Scotland Yard was in London.
+
+Then we'll go to Scotland Yard!
+
+He wouldn't be at Scotland Yard now. "He _might_ be there in the
+morning" ... this man, in charge of all such cases!
+
+The young inspector spoke his superior's name with awe. Oh, a person
+very great and powerful, and his hand was on his sword. I put my empty
+hands over my face and wept aloud.
+
+Betty--Betty--who will help us?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not need their foolish words to realise, at last, that I should
+have as much help (_now_, when help was any good)--as much help from the
+sword in the picture as from this man with three stripes on his sleeve
+and the blunt lead-pencil in his hand.
+
+Who was there in all the world who really cared?
+
+A vision of my mother rose to stab at me.
+
+No other friend? Eric!--as far away as heaven.
+
+The inspector and the man in leather were lifting me into a cab. The
+electric light was fierce in their faces. Then the light and they were
+gone. We were driving in silence through streets of shadow sharply
+streaked with light. I crouched in the corner, and fought the flames
+that shrivelled up my flesh.
+
+Torment! Torment!
+
+Betty with a hundred faces. And every one a separate agony. Betty
+beginning to understand. Betty looking for her sister--calling out for
+me. No sister! No friend! Only the fiends of hell!
+
+Torment! Torment!
+
+I was crying fiercely again, and beating with clenched fists. I heard a
+crash.
+
+The cab was stopped, and strange faces crowded. I was being held. "She
+has lost her mind," one said.
+
+But no, it wasn't lost! It was serving me with devilish clearness. More
+pictures, and still more.
+
+Well, well--Betty would die soon!
+
+Like cool water--holy water--came the thought of death. Perhaps she was
+already dead. Oh, my God, make it true! Let her be dead!
+
+Here was healing at last. Betty was dead!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+DARKNESS
+
+
+But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead.
+
+They brought me a telegram.
+
+In wrenching the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could
+hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe
+housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected
+back by the night train.
+
+The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes
+Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had
+lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even
+to-day could I go home.
+
+I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the
+end would very quickly come. There was mercy there.
+
+As for me--I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of
+the world. As though to our best, our only friend, I turned to the
+thought of her physical weakness.
+
+But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in
+her arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was ill a long, long while.
+
+Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again,
+what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead--there were the
+others.
+
+The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others.
+
+So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up
+in her little world, to help her to find a mate--that light was pale
+beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.
+
+And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the
+people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in
+London.
+
+Who would help me to find mine?--or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina
+safely dead!
+
+Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face
+alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my
+waking. Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge.
+There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace!
+peace!--and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst
+open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears,
+and then would cease.
+
+Who else?
+
+Not her friend, the Healer--whose way of healing was to look away from
+the wound.
+
+Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his
+love--who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the
+house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'--I'd
+let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret
+home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the
+other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set
+himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world.
+
+Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my
+heart)--_they all knew_.
+
+And they accepted this thing.
+
+That was the thought that again and again tore me out of my bed, and
+brought the great Darkness down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the grey intervals I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more
+and more in the room. I came to look for her.
+
+She spoke sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think
+that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light.
+
+I wondered about the doctor. How had she been brought to have someone
+tending me who did not call himself a Healer, yet who I felt might well
+have cured any malady but mine?
+
+She had forbidden the nurse to talk to me about my sister, so that I was
+the more surprised the day Mrs. Harborough spoke of Betty of her own
+accord. "If you will try to get strong," she said, "I will tell you what
+has been done to find her. And when you are really well I will do all
+that any one woman can to help."
+
+So we talked a little--just a little now and then, about the things I
+thought of endlessly. And not vaguely either. She saw how vagueness
+maddened me. We faced things. How she had misunderstood my mother. That
+could never be made up now. My mother never knew why we were not with
+her, nor even that we were not there. Consciousness had never come back
+to her. I heard of all that Eric had done, and that his was the last
+face she knew. He had stayed with her all that night, to the end.
+
+There were letters for me from him. Soon, now, I should have my letters.
+
+He had been many times to ask about me.
+
+About _me_! What was he doing about.... But no, that was for me alone.
+Up and down the streets I should go, looking into the eyes of outcasts
+under city lamps--looking for the eyes I knew.
+
+Nor could I wait till I was well. Night by night I went upon the quest.
+Catching distant glimpses of Bettina in my dreams, struggling to reach
+her, for ever losing her in the turmoil of streets and the roar of
+stations, till the thought of Bettina was merged in overmastering terror
+of the noise and evil which was London.
+
+The moment I was a little better they tried to get me to sleep without
+an opiate. The doctor made so great a point of this, I did all in my
+power not to disappoint him, and for no reason in the world but that
+something in his voice reminded me of Eric--just a little. Nobody knew
+how much of the time, behind closed eyes, my mind was broad awake....
+
+Oh, the London nights!--airless, endless. And the anguish of those
+haunted hours before dawn. My country ears, so used to silence or the
+note of birds, strained to interpret London sounds before break of day.
+
+Hardly any honest, individual voices, and yet no moment quiet.
+Incessantly the distant rumbling of ... _something_. I could never tell
+what. It was the roar of London streets by day, attenuated, held at bay,
+but never conquered--the bustle and clang muffled in the huge blanket of
+the night.
+
+The strongest impression about it was just of the vague, unverifiable
+thing being _there_--an enemy breathing in the dark. Sometimes it
+started up with a rattle of chains.
+
+"Mail-carts," said the nurse.
+
+And that other sound--like one's idea of battering-rams thundering at
+fortress walls--the nurse would have me believe that to such an
+accompaniment did milk make entry into London! Sometimes the thick air
+was so sharply torn by horn, or pierced by whistle, that I would start
+up in my bed trembling, listening, till the dying clamour sunk once more
+to the level of the giant's breathing.
+
+When I was not delirious, the reason I lay still was sometimes half a
+nightmare reason; a feeling that the muffled night-sounds were like the
+bees at home in the rhododendron, drumming softly so long as we sat
+still. The moment we rose up the bees rose too, with angry commotion,
+ready to fly in our faces and sting. Just so with that muted hum of
+London. If I were not very still, if I were to rise and venture out, all
+the stinging, angry noises would rise, too, and overwhelm me.
+
+And out there in the heart of the swarm, Bettina. Being stung and stung,
+till feeling died.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A STRANGE STEP
+
+
+One day, when my head was clearer, I seemed to have lain a great while
+waiting for someone to come. I asked where Mrs. Harborough was.
+
+She was "engaged for the moment."
+
+Presently I asked what kept her. The nurse rang and sent a message.
+
+Mrs. Harborough came up at once. She had been talking to Mr. Annan, she
+said. And would I like to see him?
+
+No. I shrank under the bedclothes, and turned my face to the wall.
+
+An afternoon, soon after that, brought me the sudden clear sense of
+Eric's being again in the house. I was sure that he timed his visits so
+that he might see the doctor. When the doctor left the room that
+afternoon I asked if Mr. Annan had been again.
+
+Yes; and did I want to see him now?
+
+No.
+
+"He has come to-day with another friend of yours," said Mrs. Harborough,
+lingering.
+
+"One of the Helmstones?" I asked dully.
+
+"No; Mr. Dallas."
+
+Ranny! Ranny was downstairs. The happy, care-free people were going
+still about the world.
+
+"Is he married?" I asked.
+
+"Married?" Mrs. Harborough seemed surprised. Certainly, he seemed free
+to devote a great deal of time to us. Mr. Annan and he between them had
+left no means untried, she said.
+
+"I have been told a thousand times," I interrupted, "that everything has
+been done, but no one ever tells me what." I fell to crying.
+
+Looking more stirred than I had ever thought to see her, she told me
+that young Dallas had offered rewards, and had gone from place to place
+in search....
+
+I seized her hands. I made her sit by the bedside.
+
+Yes, and always he had come back here, making his report and asking
+questions.
+
+Eric brought the doctors and the nurses ... but Ranny had done better.
+Ranny had stirred up Scotland Yard. When Eric told him the nurse had
+said I was for ever raving about barred windows, Ranny had flung out of
+my aunt's drawing-room and was gone a day and a night.
+
+Yes, he came back. He had found the house. He got a warrant, and he went
+with the police when they made their search. He had seen the woman. She
+brazened it out. She had never heard of either Bettina or me.
+
+_My_ story? Oh, very possible, she said, that I and my sister had been
+"seeing life." No uncommon thing for young women to lie about their
+escapades. "Drugged?" the usual excuse.
+
+The next day I asked them to let me see Ranny. They refused.
+
+I did not sleep that night.
+
+The doctor came earlier the next morning and was troubled. "What is it?"
+he said.
+
+I told him. "I will promise to be very quiet," I said. I would promise
+anything if they would only let me see Ranny.
+
+Mrs. Harborough went out and sent a message. Mr. Dallas was staying
+quite near, she said. But I waited for him for a thousand years. And
+then ... a footstep on the stair.
+
+My heart drew quivering back from the two-edged knife of Wanting-to-know
+and Dreading-to-know. Then all that poignancy of feeling fell to
+dulness, for the step was not Ranny's and not Eric's. I had never heard
+this slow, uncertain footfall.
+
+The door opened, and it was Ranny.
+
+He did not look at me.
+
+His eyes went circling low, like swallows before rain. They settled on
+the coverlid till, slowly, he had come and stood beside me.
+
+Then Ranny lifted his eyes....
+
+Oh, poor eyes! Poor soul looking out of them!
+
+"Ranny," I whispered, "speak to me."
+
+"I have failed," he said. He leaned heavily against the chair.
+
+"I have heard," I managed to say, "how hard you have been trying...."
+
+"But I have failed!" he said once more; and I hope I may never again
+hear such an accent.
+
+I pointed to the chair ... we could neither of us speak for a while. And
+then he cleared his throat.
+
+"They took her out of that house and hid her," he said. "And then they
+took her abroad. I traced her to their house in Paris. But she had
+gone. Always I have been too late."
+
+When I could speak I said: "You are a good friend, Ranny...."
+
+He made an impatient gesture. "Nothing is any good!" He stood up. "But I
+wanted you to know that I am trying.... Trying still. Nothing that you
+could do but I am doing it. Will you believe that?"
+
+"But, Ranny," I said, "how can you do all this? Haven't you ... other
+claims?"
+
+"Other claims?" he said, as though he had never heard of them.
+
+"You surely did have other claims?"
+
+"I thought I had. But when this came I saw they were nothing." He
+stopped an instant near the door. "You don't believe I would lie to
+you?"
+
+"No," I said.
+
+"Then get well. _You_ have something to live for. You and Annan. Not
+like me."
+
+He went out with that strange-sounding step.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING
+
+
+They were sorry they had let him come. A new night nurse was sent. Two
+doctors, now. And, either I dreamed it or, at the worse times, Eric was
+there as well. But always when I was myself, and the haunted night had
+given way to day, his face was gone. Yet his care was all about me. The
+doctors were friends of his; the nurses of his choosing.
+
+I cannot explain why, but ferreting out these facts gave me something
+less than the comfort they might be thought to bring. Why was he
+troubling about me? Why was he not spending every thought and every hour
+in trying to find Bettina?
+
+Ranny had meant it well, telling me I had something to live for besides
+Betty, and giving that something a name. But it was an ill turn; a sword
+in my side for many a day and night. It gave me a ceaseless smart of
+anger against Eric. I was jealous, too, that it had been Ranny, and not
+Eric, who had been taking all these journeys. Ranny had been working
+day and night. Ranny was the person we owed most to--Betty and I.
+
+And was I to lie there, suffocated by all this care, and leave a boy
+like Ranny (a boy I had expected so little of) to spend himself, soul
+and substance, for my sister?
+
+How dared Eric think that he and I were going to be happy, while Ranny
+searched the capitals of Europe, and while Bettina....
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+One night, or early morning rather, stands out clear.
+
+Vaguely I remembered a renewed struggle, and a fresh defeat. Now,
+strangely, unaccountably, I had waked out of deep sleep with a feeling
+quite safe and sure, at last, that Betty was free.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+The night-light had burned out. A pearly greyness filled the room.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .
+
+The nurse was sitting by the window, wrapped in a shawl.
+
+Her head, leaning against the window-frame, was thrown back as though to
+look at something.
+
+I don't know whether it was the shawl drawn about drooped shoulders, or
+the association of a lifted face by the window, but I thought of the
+hop-picker. And of the promise I had made. Yes, and kept.
+
+As long as I had been at Duncombe after that haggard woman passed, no
+other with my knowing had gone hungry away.
+
+Not all suffering, then, was utterly vain.
+
+What was the white-capped figure looking at--so steadily, so long?
+
+I raised myself on my elbow, and leaned forward till I, too, could see.
+A tracery of branches, bare, against a clear-coloured sky; and through
+the crossing lines, a little white moon looked through its sky-lattice
+into the open window of my room.
+
+I got up, so weak I had to cling hold of table and chair, till I stood
+by the nurse. She was asleep, poor soul! But I hardly noticed her then.
+I was looking up in a kind of ecstasy, for it seemed to me that a pale
+young face--not like the Bettina I had known, and still Bettina's face,
+was leaning down out of Heaven to bring me comfort.
+
+But as I looked I saw there was high purpose as well as a world of pity
+in the face--as though she would have me know that not in vain her
+innocence had borne the burden of sin.
+
+And I was full of wondering. Till, suddenly, I realised that not to
+comfort me alone, nor mainly, was Betty leaning out of heaven ... _she
+was come to do for others what no one had done for her_.
+
+Then the agony of the sacrifice swept over me afresh. I remembered I had
+gone back into that last Darkness saying, as I had said ten thousand
+times before: "Why had this come to Betty?"
+
+And now again I asked: "Why had it to be you?"
+
+Through the gentle grey of morning Betty seemed to be leading me into
+the Light. For the answer to my question was that the suffering of
+evil-doers had never been fruitful as the suffering of the innocent had
+been.
+
+Was there, then, some life-principle in such pain?
+
+A voice said: "You shall find in mortal ill, the seed of Immortal Good."
+
+I knelt down by the window and thanked my sister.
+
+Others shall thank her, too.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Italics are indicated by _underscores_. Small caps are indicated by ALL
+CAPS. In the original, mid-chapter breaks are indicated by either
+asterisks (retained here) or by double-spaced lines (a row of dots
+here).
+
+Variations in spelling, hyphenation, and use of accents appear as in the
+original. End-of-line hyphenations in the original are rejoined here.
+Obvious typographical errors have been changed.
+
+Contents: "NUMBUS" to "NIMBUS"
+Page 2:  "wheat-ears'" to "wheat-ear's" (a wheat-ear's hidden)
+Page 12: "servants" to "servants'"  (the servants' gossip)
+Page 24: "Fairly" to "Fairy" (the Fairy Tale element)
+Page 49: period added (my mother liked him.)
+Page 52: "Helmstone's" to "Helmstones'" (acquaintance of the Helmstones')
+Page 88: quote added (fragrance to their breath.")
+Page 93: removed hyphen from "live-laborious days"
+Page 175: "seedums" to "sedums" (mosses, sedums and suchlike)
+Page 226: "d'automme" to "d'automne" (feuille d'automne touched)
+Page 227: "Drew" to "Dew" (Dew Pond House)
+Page 259: "then" to "them" (take them to my sister)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Little Sister, by Elizabeth Robins
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #36220 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36220)