"You 'll meet some one you like better than me on the voyage, perhaps."
"Never, never," she said almost viciously, and her eyes seemed to look down a long passage which had some one at the end of it.
"At last I 've got some one away from her!" she murmured to herself.
Westenra, even though in the past few weeks he had grown used to her extraordinary childish innocence and ignorance of life, mixed with a leaning for outlawry, an amazing respect for étiquette, and an anxiety to keep up a conventional appearance, found this new phase incomprehensible. He could not understand the gloating triumph of her manner. She behaved as if he were a hunting trophy which she had long yearned to bag. A dozen times she would jump up from her seat, examine him proudly, hug him, and sit down again murmuring:
"I've got you--I've got you, haven't I, Garry? No one can get you away again, can they?"
"Of course not, Silly Billy," came to be his standard reply.
————
Times are when a traveller arriving at Cannes railway station needs the physique and temper of a thoroughly-aroused buffalo to make any impression on the crowd that surges and sways and laughs and greets and grumbles there. But on the early June morning when Westenra and Haidee Halston descended from the P.M.L. Express there was no one in sight expect a few somnolent porters and a tall woman holding a small arrow-straight boy by the hand. The woman was beautifully dressed in white linen and a hat smothered with red and yellow poppies. The arrowy boy had a waving topknot of shiny, ruddy-gold hair, with bare legs and sandalled feet to make a sculptor rave.
Haidee having seen them last recognised them first. But even she had to give a second glance to make sure that it really was Val and Bran. They both looked so well and charming and beautiful to behold. Bran had never had clothes so truly magnifique before. And Val had roses in her cheeks and lips--a strange thing in so hot a climate! Somehow the triumph Haidee had been exulting over and vengefully trumpeting in her heart died down and faded away when she saw Val coming towards her, hands out in the usual eager fashion, a kiss forming on her lips. Both she and Bran at the back of their welcoming smiles seemed to be wearing their wistful lion-cub expression, and Haidee had to grip hard on to her vengeance not to lose it altogether and just fall upon them both and hug them. Westenra, too, was aware of a sensation that surprised him, at the sight of this woman who had once been so much to his life and now was nothing, standing there with frank outstretched hands smiling a welcome from under her cool flowery hat. The fact was that she did not sufficiently look the part of a shrine-smasher. If he had not happened to know her guilty it might have been quite difficult for him to believe that this was the woman who had destroyed his life-dreams--and ruined his home. As it was he could only marvel at the strangeness of women who could do such things and yet retain a look of honesty and inward peace. He marvelled, too, that as he took her hand and looked into the eyes he knew so well his heart stirred like a live thing. He was more amazed by that strange stirring in his breast than if a body he had certified dead and seen put away into the place of dead things suddenly quickened in its shroud and returned to life. For he had in the last few years deliberately fought down and crushed out his feeling for Val as a man might crush and kill a useless, hopeless thing. It was useless that madness he had felt for her--as useless as she was and always would be to a sane, practical man. There was no use or sense in letting the pain of his longing for her get the upper hand of him and he had not let it, but wrestled with it until he got it under. Had she not shown him in Jersey that she did not care enough for him to change? Shown him, and told him, and proved her words with deeds. And it was all old grief and pain now. Even if he had still retained any feeling for her she had gone back to Valdana. That ended it all as definitely as if she lay before him in her coffin. He would never have risked seeing her again if it had not been for his son.
Ah! his son! That was different. It was natural and justifiable that his veins should thrill at the sight of such a brave stripling. Bran, for all his elfin faun-like grace of body, had a big face, with the promise of big things lurking behind its plastic contours and deep-set eyes. He sprang into his father's arms and kissed him ardently.