"I might spare you two days," he answered, as he passed on to his box.
At the end of the first Arden's curiosity was satisfied. Lady Barbara was a study in crude contrasts. While she pained her family by sceptical indifference to religion, there seemed nothing that she would not believe, provided only that it did not come to her from the lips of a priest. As they drove from one clairvoyant to another, she revealed a curious knowledge of necromancy; she had read every book that she could find on Satanism and the Black Mass and would talk of astrology and the significance of dreams with grave conviction. But the cult of the fortune-tellers was inspired primarily by a desire to discuss herself and to be discussed. A single morning exhausted the possibilities of amusement from such a source, and her companions were less diverting than herself; Sonia Dainton dropped out when she found herself accorded second place, Summertown played a thin stream of monotonous jocosity over the survivors, and Webster fell asleep with an air of duty well done when he had provided luncheon for every one, discovered a new clairvoyant and driven the party to her at breakneck speed in the latest of the racing cars whose purchase constituted the overt business of his life.
They were to have met again with Lady Knightrider at the end of the season; but, when Arden and Jack Waring entered the train for Raglan, Loring awaited them with a grave face and pointed to a column notice in his paper, headed "Serious Flying Accident."
"Thank Heaven, it happened when she was with her people and not with me," he began. "That's my silly little fool of a cousin again! She got that fellow Gaymer down to Crawleigh Abbey; and, when her parents' backs were turned, they went off for a jaunt to Salisbury Plain. The manœuvres were on, so they brightened them up by flying so low that the inspecting general bolted and the troops scattered in panic. There'll be the deuce to pay for that alone. Then, on the way back, they came down in the New Forest and got hung up on a tree. Gaymer's broken a collar-bone and two ribs; and Barbara's badly shaken and bruised. Here's an opportunity for your literary genius, Valentine; help me to draft a telegram of sympathy which will shew at the same time that I think she richly deserved all she got."
The accident was Lady Barbara's formal introduction to England. Throughout 1909 there was an official pretence that she was not yet out; she would still be no more than seventeen when her parents returned, and both Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider refused to present her before that. The baptism of blood in the New Forest made her name and face known to every reader of every illustrated paper. "The ideal début for her," exclaimed Loring in disgust. "I can see her spending the rest of her life trying to live up to it."
Four days later he came into Arden's room with a letter which he threw onto the bed with a grim smile.
"Dearest Jim,
"It was sweet of you to send me that wire. I've strained my back and covered myself with bruises, but it was worth it. Fear is a wonderful sensation; I believe it's the strongest of all the emotions. I certainly feel that I shall never again get that sublimated degree of fear. I got Death. (D'you spell Death with a capital D? I always do—from respect; Death will outlast God.) You heard I had concussion? I knew I was dying and that one step would carry me over the dividing-line. There was a black curtain, like a drop-scene; and I knew that, as soon as that lifted, I should be dead and on the other side. I said to myself I wouldn't die. When I came to, the doctor was frowning terribly, and I heard him mutter, 'Just about time, too, young lady.' I wonder whether you'd be sorry, if I died, Jim. When I had appendicitis at Simla, you couldn't get through the streets for the people who were waiting to hear how the operation had gone off. The wires were blocked for three days with enquiries.
"I'm to be allowed out at the end of the week and hope to be well enough to come to you at House of Steynes with father and mother.