Sir Richard, for all his years, was hale and hearty and loved a game of tennis; so that when once Iris' wrist was healed there were many keenly contested games during the long, light evenings—games in which Iris, partnered either by Cheniston or Anstice, darted about the court like a young Diana in her short white skirt and blouse open at the neck to display the firm, round throat which was one of her greatest charms.
The antagonism between Anstice and Bruce Cheniston deepened steadily during these golden summer days. Had they met in different circumstances, had there been no question, however vague and undefined, of rivalry between them, it is possible there would have been no positive hostility in their mutual attitude. Any genuine friendship was naturally debarred, seeing the nature of the memory they shared in common; but it would have been conceivably possible for them to have met and recognized one another's existence with a neutrality which would have covered a real but harmless distaste for each other's society.
Having been forced, by an unkind Fate, into a position in which each saw in the other a possible rival, any neutrality was out of the question. It had not taken Anstice long to discover that Cheniston had so far recovered from the loss of Hilda Ryder as to consider the possibility of making another woman his wife; nor had Cheniston's eyes been less keen.
He had very quickly discovered that Anstice was in love with pretty Iris; and instantly a fire of opposition sprang into fierce flame in his heart; and to himself he said that this man, having once deprived him of his chosen woman, should not again be permitted to come between him and his desire.
True, he did not profess to love Iris Wayne as he had loved Hilda Ryder; for no other woman in the world could ever fill the place in his life left vacant by that untimely shot in the dawn of an Indian day.
Until the hour in which he learned of Miss Ryder's tragic death Bruce Cheniston had been an ordinary easy-going youth, cleverer in some ways than the average man, on a level with most as regarded his outlook on life and its possibilities. He had never been very deeply moved over anything. Things had always gone smoothly with him, and he had passed through school and college with quite passable success and complete satisfaction in himself and his surroundings. His love for Hilda Ryder was the best and highest thing in his whole life; and in his attempt to become what she believed him to be he rose to a higher mental and moral stature than he had ever before attained.
And then had come the tragedy which had deprived him at once of the girl he had loved and the incentive to a better, worthier manhood which her love had supplied. For her sake he could have done much, could have vanquished all the petty failings, the selfish weaknesses which marred his not otherwise unattractive character; but when Hilda Ryder vanished from his life he lost something which he never regained.
He grew older, harder, more cynical. His sunny boyishness, which had effectually masked the cold determination beneath, dropped from him as a discarded garment; and the real man, the man whose possibilities Hilda Ryder had dimly presaged and had resolved to conquer, came to the surface.
He felt, perhaps naturally, that he had a grudge against Fate; and the immediate result was to eliminate all softness from his character, and replace such amiable weakness by a harsh determination to shape his life henceforth to his own design, if indeed strength of purpose and a relentless lack of consideration for any other living being could compass such an end.
Fate had beaten him once. He was determined such victory should be final; and during the last few years Bruce Cheniston had been known as a man who invariably achieved his object in whatever direction such achievement lay—a man of whom his friends prophesied that he would surely go far; while his enemies, a small number, certainly, for on the whole he was popular, labelled him ruthless in the pursuit of his particular aims.