"Dear Leslie:
"May I usurp your sex's privilege and change my mind about coming to Freres Lulford for Christmas. I was going to Ponty's, as you know, but somehow, this year, don't feel keyed up to the light-hearted crowd they get together at Capelant. I want somewhere to hide my unrevered head until the Spirit of Christmas is gone out of the land, and I should like a look at Saleratus. The alternative is to go to Scotland and turn myself into a sort of Dana Gibson picture of the sorrows of the rich. You know the sort of thing: 'Where Get-there Lumsden really got to.'
"To tell you the truth, dear Leslie, I should never have refused your invitation if you hadn't frightened me with our mysterious newly discovered relative. Even, now, when I've decided to take the risk, I'll feel nervous. You say 'brilliant.' Suppose it turns out to be some dreadful little artist or writer person who'll want to paint me, or use me as 'a type.'..."
When he had got so far he re-read the letter, tore it up, and wrote out two telegrams. One was addressed to Lady Pontardawe, Capelant, Flintshire, and its contents are no affair of ours. The other said—
"Changed my mind. Motoring down, if fine, Wednesday."
His tickled sense of expectancy supported him through a dull dinner—possessed him, in fact, to the extent of making him rather a distrait companion. Once he laughed out unaccountably. Expectation was as rare with him as regret. He probably regarded them as equivalent weaknesses, but there was no doubt which was the pleasanter to indulge. Not quite a satyr, he was still less a saint. Men who knew him well, contented themselves by saying that Bryan "stayed it well," and the secret of his power to last was probably that, for him, the life that began when he was called in the morning ended when he switched the light off from above his pillow. He was not an imaginative man, but if he had been, his morning bath might justly have been conceived by him as a wide cool river, reflecting a gray morning sky, that flowed between him and all follies and fevers of the night. He took no heed what phantoms waved to him from the other shore, nor what urgency and significance might be in their gestures.
He got back before twelve, changed his coat for a wadded Indian silk smoking-jacket, and finished a long black cigar before he turned in. He felt tranquil, and, for reasons possibly connected with his telegram to Wales, even virtuous. Lulford, with its cloister terrace, its gray walled fruit-gardens beneath the "Prior's oriel," and its lilied carp-wood, girt with bastion and towers of clipped yew, had always been a favorite house with him, far beyond the wind-tortured barrack in Scotland that was the cradle of his own grim race, and which all his money could not make bloom afresh. The glamour of his youth still invested it. He had spent many a long holiday there, the while his mother, widowed but no ways desolate, was seeking her own distractions at Wiesbaden or Lausanne, and to the end of his school days (not particularly pleasant ones, for he had been in an unfashionable house and perpetually short of pocket-money) whatever sentiment of eclogue or pastoral survived the drudgery of construe, always had for its stage and background the remembered pleasantness of Lulford. Wonderful, not how little had survived, but how much!
And to-night something else haunted it, something that was real, that rather appealed to imagination than was evoked by it. Youth, flushed, timorously daring, beckoned and eluded him down those alleys and groves. (Eternal illusion, making your own summer wherever your feet choose to pass!) He was of the age when a man is looking for the heralds of middle life, and his empressement struck him as one rather ominous sign. The growing simplification of life was another. The match-makers were giving Bryan up at last. He remembered a time when it would not have been so easy to sneak away for two weeks in the hunting season.
Dollfus had, after all, not been so far astray in his surmise. There had been an encounter at La Palèze—one of those secrets which the most transparent of women never seem to feel the need of telling. She had not appeared frightened nor very much surprised—had let him walk by her side across the dunes and through the pine woods, even chatted a little, lightly. But then neither had she made any attempt to keep the appointment he had so subtly forced upon her for the morrow. He had never seen her alone again.
Ill at ease among abstractions, his mind turned with relief to the case in point. Condensed slightly, his reflections ran something after this fashion: