It must be remembered that Peter was a rowing man. Always, except when out with the guns, he was with Baby Lennox. They were inseparable from the first day of his visit. Even in the evening they hunted in couples, because she was sick of Bridge, she said, and he gave out that he knew nothing at all about any card games and had no desire to learn. After being frequently pressed to cut in by Courthope, Pulsford, Fountain and the other men who could not bear to see him with an unscathed cheque-book, and tempted again and again by their well-groomed and delightfully friendly wives to try a hand, Peter was left alone. They were annoyed and irritated but they found that when Peter said "No" he didn't mean "Yes," like so many of the other young men whose weakness formed the greater part of these people's income; and so they very quickly gave him up to Baby Lennox, were obliged to be satisfied with his jovial piano-playing and make up for lost time with the inevitable members of the nouveau riches who lived near by and were only too glad to pay for the privilege of dining at Thrapstone-Wynyates in the odour of titles.
The nights being warm and windless, Peter sat out on the moon-bathed terrace with Baby Lennox listening to her girlish prattle and thinking how particularly charming she looked with the soft light on her golden hair and white arms and dainty foot. Sometimes, suddenly, her merry words would give place to sad ones, and Peter's simple, honest heart would be touched by her artistic and mythical glimpses of the unhappy side of her life.
"Oh, Peter, Peter!" she said one night, unconsciously showing almost a yard of leg in a black lace stocking patterned with butterflies. "I wish, oh, how I wish that I'd been born like you, under a lucky star! I've always been in a smart and rather careless set and I've never really had time to see visions and walk in the garden of my soul." She spoke in capital letters. "If I'd met you when I was a little young thing you might have become my gardener to pluck the weeds out of my paths, and train the flowers of my mind. You might have planted seeds so sweet that in my best and most devout hours their blooms would have filled my thoughts with scent. Oh dear me, the might have beens,—how sad they are! But, in one thing at least I can take joy,—I'm all the better for knowing you, dear big Peter."
But these graver interludes never lasted long. Mrs. Lennox was far too clever for that. She would break the monotony of conversation by walking with her little hand on the boy's strong arm, or by dancing with him to the music of a gramophone placed in the open window of the morning room. How close she clung to him then and how sweet she was to hold!
And then, she would say, with a wonderful throb in her voice. "Oh, Peter, Peter! Isn't life wonderful—isn't it just the most wonderful and thrilling thing that is given to us? Listen to the stars—there's love in their song! Listen to the nightingale—love, all love! Listen to the whisper of the breeze! Can't you hear it tell us to love and touch and taste all the sweets that are given us to enjoy? Oh, Peter, Peter! Listen, listen,—and live!"
In her picturesque and slangy way she announced to Kenyon, as soon as three days after the commencement of the house-party, that she "had got Peter well hooked." It was not, however, an accurate statement. It is true that Peter's vanity had been appealed to. Whose wouldn't have been? This attractive young thing was hostess. She was far and away prettier, younger, more alluring and more complex than any other woman in the party. And yet she had made a favorite of Peter at once and showed a frank pleasure in being with him at all possible times. He had hardly spoken for longer than an hour with her before she had said, in the middle of his description of the Henley week, "I must call you Mr. Peter, I must. May I?" She sent him little notes, too, charming, spontaneous little notes, to say "Good-night," and how greatly she had enjoyed the evening, or the swim, or the round of golf, beginning "Dear Big Man" and ending,—at first without a signature, and eventually with "Baby." At the beginning they were brought in by the man, or placed on the dressing-table against a bowl of flowers. Then they were thrust under his door by her after he had gone up to his room, or thrown through his open window from the narrow balcony that ran round the house. Her room was next to his. She had seen to that. In a hundred unexpected and appealing ways she had set out to prove to him that they were indeed, as she had said they were, "very, very close friends."
Now, Peter had never been a woman's man. To him women and their ways were new and wonderful. He suspected nothing. Why should he? He accepted Mrs. Randolph Lennox on her face value, which was priceless, as so many other excellent and unsophisticated young men had done. He believed in her and her stories and was very sorry that she had been unhappy. He believed that she was sincere and good and clean and that she liked him and was his friend.
Kenyon, who watched all this, called Peter an easy mark. He was. What else could he be in the expert and cunning hands of such a woman?
As for Mrs. Lennox, her performance,—it was rather in the nature of a performance,—was all the more brilliant and effective because Peter appealed to her more than any man she had ever met. His height and strength and squareness, his fearless honesty, his unself-conscious pride and boyish love of life,—she liked them all. She liked his clean-cut healthy face and thick hair and amazing laugh. But, above everything, she liked him for being untilled soil, virgin earth. It was this that piqued her seriously and set alight in her a desire which grew and grew, to test her charms upon him, to taste him, to stir him into a first great passion. And this was the real reason that she gave him so much of her time and company. The gratification of this desire was the thing for which she was working, upon which she had set her mind. Hers was not a record of failures. Peter stood a very poor chance of getting out whole.