MY LITTLE SISTER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

———

GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND
THE NEW MOON
THE OPEN QUESTION
BELOW THE SALT
THE MAGNETIC NORTH
THE DARK LANTERN
COME AND FIND ME
(Published by William Heinemann)
THE CONVERT (Methuen)
VOTES FOR WOMEN: A Play in Three Acts
(Mills & Boon)
THE FLORENTINE FRAME
(John Murray)
WOMEN'S SECRET
(Woman's Press, Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway)
WHY?
(Woman's Press, Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway)
UNDER HIS ROOF
(Woman Writer's League, 12 Henrietta St.)

MY LITTLE SISTER
BY ELIZABETH ROBINS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1913

CHAPTERPAGE

[First Impressions]1
[Lessons]6
[A Thunder-storm]13
[Nimbus]16
[The Mother's Vow] 24
[Martha's Going—Yet Remaining]33
[A Shock]45
[Annan]51
[Eric]59
[The Bungalow]68
[Awakening] 83
[Our First Ball]94
[The Cloud Again]108
["Where is Bettina?"]120
[My Secret]137
[The Yachting Party]150
[The Emerald Pendant] 161
[Ranny]169
[Another Girl]178
[Two Invitations and a Crisis]186
[Aunt Josephine's Letter]198
[Planting Thyme ]209
[Eric's Secret]215
[Madame Aurore]224
[Going to London]244
[Aunt Josephine]253
[The Dinner Party]266
[The Grey Hawk]287
[Where?]303
[The Blunt Lead-Pencil]310
[The Man with the Sword]322
[Darkness]329
[A Strange Step]336
[The End Which Was the Beginning]341

MY LITTLE SISTER

CHAPTER I
FIRST IMPRESSIONS

She is very fair, my little sister.

I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went.

I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without touching the quick.

I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written "was" or "seems."

And that, in sum, is my story.

We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot clearly remember what life was like before.

Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen, I cannot tell. I do not think I imagined the confused picture of dark faces and a ship.

My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is wide and green.

As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse; always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with the infinite possibilities of existence—from the discovery of a wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing, leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.

We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and kicked their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at Bettina.

To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina.

And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill.

Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at large in our green dominions was an enemy.

So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate. My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm. And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock blew across her face.

Mélanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Mélanie could not even understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been there with my mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby. Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy.

Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond.

I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away. Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange woman kissed Bettina?

The new nurse lied.

And I said no word.

But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at Duncombe was ever to kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me—which I remember thinking a pity.

Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare confess it.

For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge of the lie.

CHAPTER II
LESSONS

There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our mother as fledglings in a nest.

Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness.

In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in our lessons—so much so that we were a long time in finding out the dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made stimulating, and the easy things she made delight.

No; there was an exception to this.

Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister.

Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my "Étude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy—a gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle."

"Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge."

I began again—allegro, as I thought.

But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands.

"How can I? You expect me to be as quick as God!"

I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always the hand of a very young child—so soft and pliant that you wondered if there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord.

Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections of old English song:

"Where are you going to, my pretty maid?"

We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the first thing she sang in English.

I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the mythology stories were in French.

And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium.

We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green—brave little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had been taken from the people.

Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been only a superior sort of farmhouse.

Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did.

We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds. The proper thing to do, on catching sight of any stranger, was to start with an aversion suggested by our mother's, but improved upon—more pictorial. We would all three stare at the intruder, and then allow our eyes to travel to the nearer of the signs, "Trespassers," etc. If this pantomime did not convince the creature of the impropriety of his presence, we would look at one another with wide eyes, as though inquiring: "Can such things be? Are these, then, deliberate criminals? If so"—our looks agreed—"the company of outlaws is not for us." We turned our backs and went home. I was twelve before I realised that we ourselves were trespassers.

The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone.

That was a blow.

Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit less to those broad acres rolling away—with foam of gorse and broom on the crests of their green waves—rolling northward towards London and the future.

Two miles to the south was our village—source of such supplies as did not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus, the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a children's school-treat?

And she never did any of these things.

Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had beguiled Bettina with chocolate.

I was furious and miserable.

I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream.... But the servants' gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I thought about little else in our walks.

Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I persist."

Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of my mother's character.

I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in.

But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of—I knew not what. But I knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our walks were different, because we were always thinking we might meet him.

I prayed God to give my mother strength—for Christ's sake not to let it happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer.

Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken the matter in hand.

CHAPTER III
A THUNDER-STORM

Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite suddenly the croisée of the casement showed as ink-black lines crossing a square of blue-white fire.

The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain. Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight.

Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her paleness ghostlike.

She drew back from the window. Before the lightning died I had seen that she was frightened. I had been frightened, too, till I saw that she was. In the impulse to reassure her, my own fear left me. I went to her in that second blackness and put my hand in hers. When I could see again I looked through the streaming window-pane, as we stood there, and I saw a man sheltering under the chestnut-tree at our gate. He lifted his umbrella, and seemed to make a sign: "May I come in?"

"Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue. My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen.

I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging together.

"That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and daylight struggled back. We went on with our playing. I noticed, as my mother went downstairs, that she kept her head turned away from the window.

Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother, with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the drawing-room door for the bearers to pass.

Their feet left muddy marks in the hall....

We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had been taken away.

People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric current.

I knew God had heard my prayer.

But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was riven from foot to crotch.

That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You expect me to be as quick as God."

CHAPTER IV
NIMBUS

I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No. He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon.

Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of fear.

I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones.

We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships.

My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade.

More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."

I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows—a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.

I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew themselves pursued.

Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears. Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains.

"Now we are safe and sound!" she would say.

I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger.

In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had barred him out.

That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy, craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch at your bare feet as you jumped in.

I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was there.

Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless.

As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing—I mean children—every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the organ's playing."

Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we—a something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and often seemed upon the verge of understanding.

There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that look, listening, foreboding.

There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively, to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look when the fringe of shadow lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to the light.

There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or moods. She was merely gentle and aloof.

She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times when she must have been unhappy, too.

She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs to do lessons in the morning-room—which was our schoolroom under the cheerfuller name.

Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that?

I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons, listening to that music she never made for us.

And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast.

Then I would shut the window.

Bettina ought never to hear such music.

For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it "between the lights."

As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper still.

As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy places.

Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and consolatory suggestions of supper.

Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our mother—when she would break off and come to find us—help us to hurry through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our father's order and his watch. We had turned over the pretty things he had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two brass buttons we might never touch.

We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them wonderfully—as though they were alive.

And we, too—we were always happier after we had seen them.

We knew that she felt, somehow, safer.

So did we.

CHAPTER V
THE MOTHER'S VOW

We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own. But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent distance, but with a closeness of devotion.

In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family.

The reason for the first is clear.

As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort.

Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour, partly as symbols of our national greatness.

From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter, or to her sailor-son, the Prince of Wales. His wife, that Princess of Wales, who even before her marriage had been the idol of England was our idol too—apart from her high destiny as mother of the future King, (the little Prince born in the same year as Bettina)—and mother of that fascinating figure in the story, the solitary Princess of her house, three years younger than the youngest of our family. Our interest in them all received a fresh accession at the birth of Prince Henry; we hailed the advent of Prince George; we felt the succession trebly sure in the fortunate arrival of Prince John. We saw them safely christened; we consulted the bulletins in the Standard and the Queen about their health; we followed their august comings and goings with an enthusiasm undampened by hearing how well they were all being brought up on the incomparable "White Lodge" system, which had been so successfully applied to the little royalties' mamma.

Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath.

It was let to different people, from time to time, for the hunting. If the people had children, they were of palpitating interest to us, even though we never saw much of the children.

Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother.

If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would stop to ask how my mother was.

The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother ought to have a nurse. She said she had me.

That was the proudest moment of my childhood.

I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her.

Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick room.

In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape, and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching Bettina play at church-choir with all our dolls in a row, and tiny home-made hymn-books in their laps.

When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously: "Someone must go down and bring Bettina back."

I could not bear to see Loring, or Mélanie, doing anything for my mother. I think they humoured me, and that Mélanie performed her service chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid was able to come downstairs.

She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different.

Not only thin. Different.

Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people who "called to inquire."

We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon "indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her malady.

We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought.

When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children.

In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look. I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?"

One day Dora shook her head.

"Why not?"

She was going back to school. "Aren't you going back to school?" she asked.

"Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school."

Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us.

"You like having to go to school!" I said.

She loved it. "So would you."

"I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction.

She couldn't think why.

Neither could I—beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of pity—"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at home."

Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified to hear we had never had one.

Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a strange woman those hours she spent with us.

We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so hopeless. Or she would sit under the wild broom in Cæsar's Camp watching the birds; or lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors or out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure," our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all.

Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in all things else.

I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I recognised her accomplishments as among our best family assets—reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger, soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the paths appointed.

Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected against colds, against fatigue.

There is, in almost every house, one main concern.

When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable.

But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable.

I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or away from our mother, until—but that is to come later.

I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car—the first we had encountered at close quarters—a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded her dreadful errand—to invite us children to come and stay at her house in Brighton from Friday to Monday!

We stood there, blank, speechless.

Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse.

Relief and pride rushed together. I could have kissed my mother's feet. My own could hardly keep from dancing.

"Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor.

The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs.

Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will not let anyone take you away—no, never. Very well, you shall not pay visits."

And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not never?"

"Not never."

Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word!

CHAPTER VI
MARTHA'S GOING—YET REMAINING

When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had been with us since she was fifteen—at first a little scullery-maid. Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of her youth and her love of fun.

We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring us our presents at the same time—perhaps out of fear of the cook, who held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was elderly, and very easily annoyed.

She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if ever we spoke of these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any more. So we were most careful.

So was Peter.

So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to go down the garden and wait for them—wait so long, sometimes, that we fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning.

Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye—though she wasn't ever coming back, the cook said.

Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room.

In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom what had become of Martha.

Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone under.

"Under? Under what?"

Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!"

I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person.

I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She chased me out with a hot frying-pan.

We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter.

As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon she went away.

We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.

Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid us back.

I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died. And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they had four little children left. And one or other of the children was always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a fearful lot of poultices.

Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too, and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called "Household Medicine." I read it a great deal—especially when one of the little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their sufferings.

One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs. Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr. Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had been like this for two days.

"Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper; and the thing for me to do was to send him some proper food—all of which was done in collusion with Martha.

I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages. Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.

I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to. That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common clay, Martha Loring.

The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two years or more after she "went under."

Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well again—so well that she insisted on going for a walk.

My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings and overshoes.

But, after all, we only stayed out about ten minutes. My mother said the air was raw, and "not safe."

At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be obvious later—I remember we had delicious things to eat that day. Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being urged to eat more than she wanted.

My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take.

When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic, because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire. We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there had been this trouble to make Bettina eat—specially breakfast. My mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow cold. So a punishment had to be invented. Bettina, who dearly loved society, must be left alone to finish breakfast—a plan that seemed to work, for when one of us went back in a few minutes, Bettina's plate would be bare. Then the awful discovery one day, in cleaning out a seldom-opened part of the side-board—a great collection of toast and bits of mouldy bacon, pushed quite to the back of the capacious drawer.

While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now and superior, a face looked in at the window—a pinched, unhappy face, with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down—heavy leaden drops out of a leaden sky.

I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily. The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the hop-fields.

At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What are you doing? Shut the window instantly!" And as I was not quick about it, she came behind me and shut the window sharply. What was I thinking of? Had I no regard for my little sister, sitting there in the current of raw air? Really, she had thought me old enough by now to be trusted!

Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head. "Go away!"

"Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story. My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases.

"Go away!" she said. And again that gesture.

I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered.

My mother measured out the tonic.

My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other, lesser instances, came back to me—strange lapses into hardness on the part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm, she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words. If Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's sensitiveness shared. And yet....

The woman with her burden had moved away—a draggled figure in the rain.

A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart—an impulse of actual hatred towards my mother—as the hop-picker disappeared.

Hatred of Bettina, too.

I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright above the greyness of that wretched time.

Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered, something of her spirit still survived.

Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with the misery of having to admit the sentence just.

I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink.

It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina.

Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions dawning—wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal?

The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course, Bettina must not tease the cat."

With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety.

But that haggard hop-picker—no, I couldn't understand it.

The hop-picker haunted me.

Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow, to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others."

The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back.

In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I didn't know about had made her like that.

In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind.

Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures, and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick world's infection through our windows.

To-morrow?

CHAPTER VII
A SHOCK

When to-morrow came we knew.

We had been using up our capital.

Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of us?

Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked.

Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone.

But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of three.

For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow.

And should we always have the pension?

Yes, as long as she lived.

Not "always" then.

A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world and of our littleness, came down upon me.

We seemed to have almost no relations.

We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all.

My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs. Harborough.

"Aunt Josephine?"

"Well, your father's step-sister."

All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly.

"She couldn't have known you," Bettina said.

"That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with unwonted bitterness.

Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial condition was to harass and depress my mother. The condition was bad. Therefore it was best covered up.

"We shall manage," she said.

I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts. Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed to be out of mind. Out of my mother's mind.

I thought constantly about these things.

One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die together. My mother was horrified.

"But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live—Bettina and I, without the pension?"

"You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you."

I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence.

My mother went alone into the garden.

She came in looking tired and white.

Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went upstairs "quite goodly," as we used to say. She looked back and smiled. She was still the most beautiful person we knew. But it was a very waxen beauty now. I must learn not to weary her with insoluble riddles. I went into the dining-room to make her tray ready—I liked doing it myself. Bettina's voice came floating in. She had grown tired of playing proper music. She was singing the nursery rhyme which my mother had set to variations of the tinkling old-world tune:

"Where are you going to, my pretty maid?"

I thought how strange and wonderful was the simplest, most ordinary little life. There must always be that question: what is going to become of me? I had long known what was the proper thing to happen. I ought to marry Lord Helmstone's heir. And Bettina should marry a prince.

But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest Hall—since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently came my lady. Very smart, with amazing clothes; and some married daughters with babies. There were two daughters unmarried, who seemed to be always abroad or in London. We liked Lord Helmstone; even my mother liked him. But she criticised his "noisy friends." These were the golfers who motored down from London. Broad-shouldered men, in tweeds that made them seem broader still. They would pass by our garden-wall and look at Bettina. Often when they had passed they looked back. Secretly, I wondered if any of them were those "husbands" who were going to take care of us. Some lodged in the village. The noisiest stayed at the Hall.

Bettina's singing had broken off abruptly. I heard her running upstairs.

And then a cry.

"Come—oh, quickly, quickly!"

Bettina had heard the fall overhead.

Our mother lay on the floor, Bettina standing over her, agonised, helpless.

We lifted her on to the bed. We loosened her clothing, and brought water, and bathed her temples.

She opened her eyes and smiled—then the lids went down. Still that look, the look that made her a stranger.

Was this death?...

Bettina shrank from it. But I told her not to leave the room a second. I would bring the doctor quickly.

Bettina's face.... "I cannot stay alone," she whispered.

"I will send up one of the servants."

She held my arm. "Suppose ... while you are gone—— Oh, I am afraid."

"I will run all the way," I said.

CHAPTER VIII
ANNAN

I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water.

I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for other people, we said. "Other people must take their chance." I remembered that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the postmaster wrote out a telegram. We were "taking the chance" now. Such a little thing—my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my mother her life.

The postmaster rang up Brighton.

The doctor was out.

What could be done but leave a message!

I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not thought of that before?

Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. He recommended the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the driver to Littlecombe.

"Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too, waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted mind.

That new acquaintance of the Helmstones'! Was he not a sort of a doctor? "The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch arrogance—"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We had not seen him—at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from other golfers.

I ran most of the way to the farm.

As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the pathway with a sort of rigidity of gait, I received an impression of something so restrained and chilling that I hoped he was not the man I had come for. In any case this was not a person before whom one would care to show emotion. I asked if he were Mr. Annan. Yes, his name was Annan. His tone asked: and what business was it of mine? But he halted there, below me, as I stood on the step explaining very briefly my errand.

He did not want to come; I could see that.

He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner.

I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given him no idea of the urgency of our need. I had to explain that all we asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our regular doctor would be with us very soon.

He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish-brown.

"We mustn't lose time," I said.

As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf clubs thrown down in a stone passage.

He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for a warning.

The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed, at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.

What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered young golfers in Norfolk jackets—far too like them, to help in so dire a need as ours.

I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps, why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan would go far." He had gone too far in the direction of overwork. He had been urged to come down here and play golf. Still, he worked long hours....

And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help."

We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my younger sister was not to know if my mother——

"Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster—almost at a run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me without an effort.

Mother, mother!——

Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing. "Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning."

Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children.

Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles?

"I am taking you the short cut," I said.

"Of course."

We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All that gentleness and beauty——

What a richness had been lavished on our lives!

I had never begun to understand it before this evening—never once had thanked her.

Mother, mother!——

The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was nearly over now. And her time—— Was that nearly over too? Where would she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet ... and that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that evening.

"Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once who was always made faint by it."

He did not look at me again.

But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind.

Now we could see the red tile roof.

Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my running.

As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of Duncombe garden.

Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever.

Before I entered the house a strange thing happened.

A great peace fell on me.

I knew, without asking, that all was well.

Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic light was this, then, that was shining on the world?

He saw my mother, and told us what to do.

Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his verdict.

As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me—eyes suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh.

"You don't think she is going to die?"

"Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always hope——"

"Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My mother!..."

He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning.

I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's life—and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and soul.

Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald and red-gold and azure—a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was like the quickness of God.

CHAPTER IX
ERIC

For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some direction.

There seemed no need to talk.

Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it.

Then it would come again.

He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a great misery behind him.

No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give.

The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I hadn't the heart to worry her with questions.

We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an air.

She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs.

There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as engaged, she said, to Guy Whitby-Dawson. He was in the Guards.

We were all agog. When was she going to be married?

She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards.

Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance.

I wished we three had a pittance.

For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would die. Then he would have plenty.

Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged, Hermione flirted a good deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought over some of his photographs for us to look at. We did not admire him at all.

But we never told Hermione.

As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing.

If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses were up—all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would find I had been gone for hours.

The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old devotions paled.

Mercifully, nobody knew.

I looked for him all the next spring. In the summer I said to myself, I shall never see him again.

Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my mother.

I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.

No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.

I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.

I had not dreamed him. He was true.

The next day brought him.

I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The others seemed gladder to see him than I.

He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe, instead of tramping all that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse even than the Club House brew.

The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.

Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made him confess he could not tell Indian from China.

"Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no one noticed.

It was wonderful to see him again—to verify all those things I had been thinking about him for the year and four months since he went away.

But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without embarrassment.

I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him, too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird. Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any sisters."

He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.

But the confession seemed to have brought him nearer, to make him more human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh, happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like?

"Oh——" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were "all right."

The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.

My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was "like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling still to keep up the property—a losing battle. And a second brother, not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was "trying to grow tea in Ceylon."

Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.

I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing out the word research with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.

That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve—a forefinger sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper lip—and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner of the Hidden Field—that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.

CHAPTER X
THE BUNGALOW

My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the dévot, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint.

I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.

Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing Schwärmerei, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics.

The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor.

Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.

But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.

She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"—a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put.

"Three weeks."

"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."

He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays—thank God!—in a laboratory.

Which was scarcely polite.

"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."

He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.

"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance—oh, naturally, not her kind.

What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.

Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton—Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss of the most expensive brand."

They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."

"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper.

Hermione was not a bit dashed. "You may look for romance in bottles if you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.

"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"

"Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain."

He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said, would be waiting for his foursome.

A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of "story-telling."

"You said you were only going to stay three weeks."

To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."

"——and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."

I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.

"What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.

"Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in the country?"

"Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.

As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara seemed to speak for him. "——just to live in for a while," she said quite gently.

"Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.

"What do you want a bungalow for, then?" Hermione's teasing voice followed after him.

"——mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.

Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have some place to keep one's traps," he called back.

Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face almost beautiful.

I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.

A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron, painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard.

The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.

Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.

As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on. And those noises—which he was, strangely, still more sensitive to—produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at "country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us—Eric rather out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit:

"——wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At four, this kind of thing——" In a quiet, meditative way he would begin clucking. Then quacking, almost sleepily at first; then with more and more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy of a loud, exuberant crow. All this not the least in the sketchy, impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble noises, but with a precision and vigour that first startled you, and then made you feel that you were being given, not only an absolutely faithful reproduction of the sound those creatures make, but in the oddest way given their point of view as well. We laughed the more, I think, because the comedy seemed to come out of the revelation of the immense seriousness of the animals. Eric's commentary seemed so fair. It seemed to admit that the importance to ducks and cocks and hens of their goings on was at least as great as the importance of peace and quiet to him. With an air of doing it against the grain, he gave you (with a rueful kind of honesty) the duck's sentiments in a series of depressed little quacks that hardly needed the translation: "'Been all over this repulsive pond; turned myself and all my family upside down for hours. Nothing!'" Then indignant quacks, and: "'Silly new servant can't tell time. Past five o'clock, and no sharps!'" Then a single jubilant "'Quack! There she is——'" and a rising chorus, till anyone not in the room would be ready to swear we kept as many ducks as Big Klaus. A moment's silence, and in his own person Eric would say with a sigh: "Now, perhaps, I can tackle that German review." "'Buck! Buck! Buck!'"—or rather a series of sounds that defies the alphabet. Then the interruption: "'My-wife's-laid-an-egg!'" and the shrill rapture of a loud crow of great authority.

The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him.

And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked.

I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable.

She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in at first one window and then another. She said there was nothing but a stove and packing-cases in the room she could see into. And she brought back a bewildering account of what had been done to the windows of the other room. There were no curtains and no blinds, but thick brown paper had been pasted over the glass of each lower sash. You could no more see in than you could see through the wall.

The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after all, she said.

Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?"

"Oh, quite well, thank you."

"Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read the whole day and half the night."

No, he didn't read all the time.

"What do you do then?"

Ah, there was no telling.

And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he didn't want to.

Hermione announced that she had been to call.

"Yes," he said, "I heard you call."

She stared.

"You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?"

"Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at his ease.

Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my life I ever saw Hermione blush.

"What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!"

"Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I always am busy when I'm at the Bungalow."

She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.)

"Yes, I heard you try the door."

"Well, you are an extraordinary being—shutting yourself up with brown paper pasted over the windows——"

"——only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."

"Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"

He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."

"I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."

"Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."

She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he makes bombs."

"Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.

"No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make counterfeit money."

"If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be counterfeit."

One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of creatures—poor little darling guinea-pigs.

She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.

"No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"

He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.

But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You know perfectly well the Chows are pets."

"Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never heard of keeping guinea-pigs."

"'Keeping them'—I used to have them to play with; but you know quite well you don't mean to 'keep' them."

"Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."

Of course she hadn't been able to keep them beyond their natural span. "But I never did anything horrible to them."

Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed.

Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only a child."

But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said, that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the dogs such whippings as you do."

Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now and then, they'd get out of hand.

"Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For your pleasure. And profit. Not theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to keep them?

In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.

Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said. "I shall just notice how long you keep them."

"Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."

Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air, she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them for?"

"Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect, after all, to make my fortune."

Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well, here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My idea is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a day——"

"But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they run away? Ours did."

While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."

CHAPTER XI
AWAKENING

There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go into the Bungalow.

This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said, according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle eyes and very long arms and legs.

Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.

"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.

"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione—not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it."

I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back—the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person.

We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came.

That pleased me more than anything.

He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient, and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I, too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.

Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they "proved the spirit."

A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was worse—long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse; they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes—— Then he died.

Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It was a fine way to die."

He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the governing class, out of touch with the real work of the world—no wonder they still groped after the military idea.

They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other, wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with those other "preachers"—in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of merely living off the sheep of his pasture.

But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of talking.

We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were shown the Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed up his moustache and began to heckle him. What had he done—except to use his great position as a rostrum? What had been done by all the members of the Lords and Commons put together comparable to the achievements of—for instance, Sanitary Science? Ha, Science! No phrase-making. No flourish of fine feelings. Just Sanitation—the force that had done more in fifty years to improve the condition of the poor than all the philanthropy since the birth of Christ. And what had the Government done even for Science?

Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of wisdom.

"When I ope my mouth let no dog bark."

No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his work—humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact—these kept him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away from the limelight. He was unwritten about—unknown. Even when, after years of toil, your man of science came out of obscurity with some great gift for the world in his hand, no one except other men of science was the least excited. The Daily Mail was quite unmoved. The service done mankind by science left the general public in the state of Pet Majorie's turkey:

"——she was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single damn."

He was not complaining.

All this was wholesome.

"Science!"

"No high-piled monuments are theirs who chose
Her great inglorious toil—no flaming death.
To them was sweet the poetry of prose,
And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath.

"Who wrote that?" my mother asked.

With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of the human race."

And he told us about him.

I asked to have the verse written down.

Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; but still, a splendour only to dazzle me—not to light and lead.

When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then to steal a look.

When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon that background.

My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption—the long, blessed hours while other people slept.

To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric, had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint, this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving.

All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since she was born—till that afternoon when I began to think furiously about her again.

Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Monmouth and carried Eric off. I thought they had all three gone to the links.

I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said, rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the more delicate fruits on the wall.

All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started, and stood as still as the apple-tree.

Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other bending down. He kissed her—Eddie Monmouth.

I turned and fled back to the house.

The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of my dreaming.

Bettina!—old enough to be kissed by a man!

So she was the first to be engaged ... my little sister, who had only just had her sixteenth birthday.

I tried that night to lead up to a confidence.

But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to tell me her great secret just at first.

So I waited.

Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding.

Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for India. The bride a girl they had never heard of.

I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up courage to steal a glance—not a cloud on Betty's face.

Here was courage!

But what the poor child must be going through.—I could not leave her to bear this awful thing alone....

When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew.

She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little. Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mind like that!" she said. "He was very nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas."

At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering alone.

But I was wrong.

Bettina did like Ranny Dallas best!

He liked Bettina, and flirted with her.

I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly.

But I saw more than that.

I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or with waking now and then to thrill at stories about other people's courage, insight, indomitable patience. Why should I not rouse myself and nerve myself? Why should not I, too, scorn delight and live laborious days?

It was then the Great Idea came to me.

CHAPTER XII
OUR FIRST BALL

Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away without a word about the radical change that had come over a life outwardly the same.

That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my mother—French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me.

I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall.

I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "liked him best"—liked him more than the man she had allowed to kiss her, and who had not cared for her at all.

I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny.

All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was "chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants."

I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of being so—chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean. And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he looked.

I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn. Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say that he wouldn't be seen riding such a bicycle—"no, not on a dark night!" Ranny, as we knew, had two motor-cars of his own, and was very particular about their every detail. But he said all that the much-abused "bike" needed was a brake. Even without a brake it was "a lot better," he said, "than having to think about the shover-chap."

After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them—and, for all I could do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina.

I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there Ranny got the chaffing.

"What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what he'd come for.

"Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship."

"Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would say to us: "Here's a fella usen't to care a doit for golf—and now this passion!"

When Lord Helmstone said that—which, in the way of facetious persons secure from criticism, he did a great many times—a colour like a girl's would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh——?"

"In this weather?"

"Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep down superfluous tissue. Eh—what?"

People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly.

When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well, but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone, she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way.

I said that was quite different, and we very nearly had a serious quarrel. When I saw that Betty really couldn't see the vast difference between making fun of that boy and making fun of a man like Eric Annan, I began to feel more anxious than ever about Betty.

This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South.

They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step."

Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two. There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers, and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behave rather badly to Ranny. When she had danced three times with the oldest sailor—Captain Gerald Boyne—Ranny took her into a corner and remonstrated. I saw he looked pretty serious, but I didn't know till she and I were undressing in our own room that night, or rather morning—I didn't know how strongly he had spoken.

We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us.

My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in the morning."

So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked different to me—this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of the dimity curtains. Yes, the moon was brighter than ever! Betty threw open the window and leaned out. Oh, what a pity to go to bed when the world was looking like this!

We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold; but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air of justification—"such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss, just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so divinely!"

I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said.

"Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had promised him——" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent her dancing at all with Captain Boyne.

"But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded her.

"Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she forgot to keep her voice down.

My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called.

We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he say?"

I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in particular—he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he danced badly.

"Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me."

"Yes," I admitted, "he does dance best with you."

Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione, and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on. Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up.

And he began badly: "'You've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'"

Betty said "No."

"'Why not? Why haven't you told him?'"

"He would ask for a reason."

"'Very well, give it'"

"'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said.

"'The reason is....' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and—we waltzed that time too."

"Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that."

No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the cotillion."

"Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous."

She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there."

"I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that horrid waltz after he had said he 'made a point of it'—I wasn't to dance again with 'that fellow.' And then, what do you think I said?" Bettina took hold of my arm, so I couldn't go on braiding my hair. "I said he was jealous of Captain Boyne, or why should he call him 'that fellow'? Even at the moment I felt how horrid that was of me; for it's not a bit like Ranny to be jealous in a horrid way, calling people 'fellows.' So I said: 'If the Boynes aren't nice, why are they here?' And Ranny said: 'Oh, Gerald Boyne's people are all right. His brother is all right. But I shouldn't want you to dance with Gerald if you were my sister. And if you were my wife, I should forbid it.'"

"'But,' I said, 'I'm not your sister!'—Betty tossed her head, laughing softly—'and I'm not your wife——'"

I asked her if she had said it like that?

Yes, she had. "And I said, too—I said it was 'fortunate.'" Then without the least warning, poor Betty sat down on the foot of her bed and began to cry.

I put my arm round her. And she pulled her bare shoulders away. "You needn't think I'm crying about Ranny," she said. "I suppose it's being so angry makes me cry."

"You are crying because you are over-tired," I said, and I began to take off her shoes and stockings.

"I'm not crying because I'm tired, but because"—she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown—"it's a disappointment to see anyone so silly ... making 'points' of such things as waltzes."

When she was ready for bed, she stood meditating a moment. And then: "Ranny has never struck me as one of the horrid, unforgiving sort of people. Has he you?"

"Oh, no," I said, and I made her get into bed. I covered her up. But it was no use; she threw back the eiderdown, and sat bolt upright.

"——asking me like that, at a ball, if I liked Captain Boyne best—a man I'd never seen before—don't you call it very rude?"

"No; only a little foolish——"

Another knock on the communicating door. "If you children keep on talking I shall have to come in."

We promised we wouldn't say another word. But more than once Betty began: "Ranny——"

"Sh!" I said.

The quarrel about the window had ended in our leaving it a couple of inches open, and the curtains looped back. As we lay there, the room grew brighter; so bright that every little treasure on the long, narrow shelf above each bed could be plainly seen. All the small vases and pictures and china animals—all the odds and ends we had cherished most since we were babies.

When Bettina had come in that night, the first thing she did was to clear a space for her cotillion favours. The moonlight showed the brilliant huddle of fan and bonbon-basket tied with rose-colour, and, most conspicuous of all, the silver horn hung with parti-coloured ribbons.

When we had lain quiet in our beds for ten minutes or so, Bettina pulled out a pillow from under her head, and propped it so that the moon couldn't shine any longer on the be-ribboned horn. And neither could Betty's eyes rest on it any more. She lay still for some time, and I was falling asleep, when I heard her bed creak. She had pulled herself half out of the covers, and was leaning over the pillow-barrier. She took the horn and the other favours, one by one, and with much gravity thrust them under the bed.

A sigh of satisfaction and a settling down again.

I turned and smiled into my pillow. It was so exactly the sort of thing Bettina used to do when she was in the nursery—punishing her toys when things went wrong.

What a blessing, I said to myself, that I was coming to like Ranny Dallas. For, quite certainly, he was going to be my brother-in-law.

CHAPTER XIII
THE CLOUD AGAIN

The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the North.

Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was.

"Perhaps he will write," I said.

"He isn't the sort that writes—not even when he's friends with a person." Then, with a rather miserable laugh, Betty added: "He says he can't spell."

So I gathered that she had asked him to try.

And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two, and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne.

We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely what would happen—all, that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter.

It was a somewhat subdued Bettina who began that year; but I don't think it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long.

(Oh, Bettina! how is it now?)

I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being actively unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father was very ill. Ranny's place was at home.

Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in common. And she spoke as though any week-end that found his father better, Ranny might motor down.

So we waited.

Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends.

As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced prematurely.

I, too.

I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love me for finding—all alone like this.

I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I had been "good" and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the Great Secret.

My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm.

My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to Betty?

"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"

"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and dogs."

"Oh, as for dogs!—--" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they discuss?"

"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."

She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."

When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as though she might be feeling "out of things."

Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."

"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."

At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, I have been away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is the one they chiefly want."

She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."

As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of the difficulty of confidence on our part—of how our very devotion and craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her know about Ranny."

"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"

I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did she feel so?

Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could tell her about myself.

"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."

"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."

And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved with me too.

I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics" to tell. The very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of girls!—girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate. I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens, have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet....

"Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her own.

I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions but those at Duncombe. Feeling myself incredibly bold, I reminded her of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said (unconscious at the moment of the lie)—"you know all that happens to us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big."

I could not have approached her in any way more telling than to make confidence on her part seem a corollary to confidence on ours. She cast about with an indulgent air for something new. And then I heard for the first time of the "sort of cousin" who had come to keep house for my grandfather, and to bring up the little girl of four. I wondered the more at so important a figure having been left out of all previous pictures, when I heard that my grandfather had cared more for this "sort of cousin" than he had cared for his only child. The cousin must have been a horrible woman, though my mother told me so little about her, I cannot think how I knew. The most definite thing that was said was: "She brought out all that was least good in your grandfather." And when he ceased to care for the cousin in one way, she made him care for her in another. "She ministered to all his whims and perversities." My mother dismissed the first sixteen years of her life with: "I had seen a great deal of evil before I was grown; mercifully, I met your father when I was still very young."

He was the one man, I gathered, whom she had ever found worthy of all trust, all love; and she had been so glad to leave home—to leave England!

But out there in India she must have seen plenty of nice army people.

Oh, plenty of army people.

She seemed not to want to dwell much even on the happy time. She had her two children in three years. The babies kept her at home, and she had loved being at home with the babies—and above all with my father in his spare hours. Then, as we knew, he had been killed out tiger-hunting. And she broke off, "Now go on about the Boynes."

I asked her, mischievously, why she took such an interest in the Boynes, as though I had not tried to bring that very thing about. Her ideal of "the confidence that should exist" broke down even here; the navy, she said evasively, was "the finest of the services."

"Not finer than the army," I protested.

"Yes, finer than the army. Peace was the real 'enemy' to soldiers; but peace did not demoralise sailors, for there was always the sea for them to conquer. Was Hermione expecting to see the Boynes soon again?"

I smiled inwardly. She might as well have confessed that she thought the older Boyne might "do" for me, and the younger Boyne for Betty.

But what had become of the ideal of confidence?

Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or—mercifully—more than a pale reflection of past Despair.

There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately behind. They may put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed.

The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue, stand appalled.

The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I felt about—— No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look like this.

I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how, when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me—days which our mother must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the key to—there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the beauty of life to those two lovers in the gorgeous East; and out of starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended.

The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour.

Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the sadness of life to older people.

Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of older women—that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed.

She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness—and a fear.

Not even my secret could console me at such moments.

Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother—where was Betty?

She was late.

She was very late.

Unaccountably, alarmingly late.

CHAPTER XIV
WHERE IS BETTINA?

She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina waited—nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case."

She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked nor stirred.

We went out in the hall and held a whispered conference. "She won't mind a bit," Bettina was sure. "It isn't as if it would do another time"—for the Helmstones were off again to-morrow. To clinch the argument, Betty told me that Hermione was expecting a letter, by the last post, from a friend of Ranny's; the one chance of hearing anything for Heaven knew how long.

So I let Bettina go.

My mother never woke till nearly nine, and of course the first thing she asked was, "Where is Betty?"

I said the maid had taken her, and Lady Helmstone had promised to send her home.

My mother was extremely ill-pleased that Bettina had gone. I had hoped that after that profound sleep she would wake up feeling better, as I have noticed the books nearly always say is what will happen. But I have noticed, since, that people who have been sleeping heavily at some unseasonable hour will often waken not refreshed and calmed, but out of sorts, and easily fretted by quite small things. They seem to require time before they can collect themselves and see the waking world in true proportion.

"We thought you wouldn't mind," I said.

And why should we? Why, above all, should I, who was so much older...?

"To go anywhere else ... I should have been against it," I said, "but to the Helmstones—where you let her go so constantly."

Saying that was a mistake.

Did not Betty know, above all, did not I know, the feeling of all the proper sort of mothers about young girls being away from home at night? Day-visiting—a totally different matter.

It was "the last evening for weeks," I reminded her. The Helmstones were going back to town....

"I am not sorry," said my mother.

To my surprise the circumstance that seemed to annoy her most was that I had not gone with Bettina. She spoke to me in such a way I felt the tears come into my eyes. "I stayed on your account," I said.

"I have told you before"—and she told me again.

The supper tray came up, and went down scarcely touched. I asked if I should read to her.

No. There had been reading enough for that day.

So I mended the fire and brought some sewing.

She lay with the candle alight on the night table, waiting, listening.

"Who is to be there?"

"Oh, just the family, I suppose."

"Did you ask?"

"No—but Betty would have said, if...."

"——never even asked!"

We sat in silence.

"What time is it?"

"A quarter to ten."

"It is not like Bettina," she said presently. Bettina had never in her life done such a thing before.

I agreed she never had. If Bettina transgressed (and I admit that this was seldom), she never did so outright. And she was not sly. She did not so much evade as avoid an inconvenient rule.

My mother remembered, no doubt, that any sin of deliberate disobedience was far more likely to be mine. "I suppose the child, not able to ask my permission, came to you."

Yes, she had consulted me.

"And you took it upon yourself——"

I sat there, in disgrace.

Presently: "Perhaps the Boynes have motored down. Or one of them."

I said I had no reason to think so. All the same, I couldn't help welcoming the suggestion. For the idea that the Boynes, "or one of them," might be there, seemed, oddly enough, to excuse Bettina in my mother's eyes. And she was moved to make me understand why I had been reproached. We had to be far more careful than most girls. I heard about the heavy responsibility of bringing up "girls without a father."

I wondered in what way our father's being here would have altered the events of this particular evening. And since he had been quoted to justify anxiety, I made bold to go to him for cheer. At times of stress before, I had invoked my father. Not often, and all-cautiously. And never yet in vain. That night I wondered aloud what were the kind of things our father would have done.

"His mere being here would make all the difference."

His mere name certainly did much. Once again I had cause to bless him for taking the chill out of the domestic atmosphere.

She talked more about him and, by implication, more about herself that night than ever before or after. She told me of the mistakes he had saved her from. The things he had warned her against. Though he was brave as a lion, she would have me believe that he was afraid of trusting people. He had said to her after a certain occurrence——

"What occurrence?" I interrupted.

"No need to go into that," she said hurriedly. The point lay in his comment: "The safe course is not to trust anyone."

"That is very uncomfortable," I said.

It was better, she answered, to be less comfortable and safe, than to be more comfortable and——

"And what?"

She had stopped suddenly, and felt for her watch on the night table. "Ten minutes past. They will surely see that she starts for home by ten o'clock."

We sat for five minutes without speaking. I thinking of my father.

Then we heard the maids making the nightly round, shutting and locking up the house.

"Look out of the window," my mother said.

I could see nothing. The night was dark and still.

"She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk."

She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the door."

Oh, the times we had been told that!

Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that?

If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened.

Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my narrower range.

I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke—until I, unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on the familiar Magic—my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred. She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a different key.

"The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of nice equilibrium."

"I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said.

"The fall?"

"Yes—when father was killed—and all the happiness fell down."

Then she said something wholly incomprehensible at the time, but which I understand better now. "Perhaps," she said, "I would have borne what you call 'the fall' less well if I hadn't known ... there are worse than tigers in the world's jungle."

I felt I was on the track of some truer understanding, and a secret excitement took hold of me. "How was it you came to know that?" I asked.

"It is a thing," she said, "that even happy women learn." Then, hurriedly, she went on: "And it ended—my happiness—before any stain or tarnish dimmed it. All bright and shining one moment, the next all vanished."

I watched the face I knew so well. Covertly, I watched it. Saw the delicate lineaments a little pinched with anxiety. The eyes veiled one moment, the next lifting wide as at a sudden call.

"What was that?" she said.

I heard nothing.

Oftenest that quick lift of heavy eyelids, and the flash of bright fixity, would come without any following of speech. And the eloquence of that silence, tense, glittering, wrought more upon my nerves than any words. All my body strung to attention, I listened with my soul.

No sound.

No sound at all. Then, inwardly, I rebelled against the tyranny and waste of this emotion.

Why was she like this?

"Have they put on the chain?" she asked.

"Yes."

"And bolted the door?"

"Yes."

"How do you know they have bolted it?"

"I heard them."

"Heard them?"

"Heard the bolt."

"One may easily think a stiff bolt has gone home, and all the while——"

"But I am sure."

My easy certainty seemed to anger her. "I thought so, too, once." She said it with a vehemence that startled me.

After a moment: "Was that here?" I asked.

"No, no, no"—she shook it off.

I went and knelt down by the bed. "Tell me about it, mother."

"No, no. It is not the kind of thing you need ever know."

"How can you be sure? You weren't expecting anything to happen." I felt my way by the shrinking in her face. "Yet someone came to the unbolted door——?"

"What makes you think that!" she exclaimed, and I was hot and cold under her look.

"It—it only came into my head"; and then, with fresh courage, or renewed curiosity, "But I am right!" I said, with sudden firmness. "Isn't it so? You were horribly frightened, weren't you?" I touched her hand, expecting she would draw it away from me, but the fingers had locked on the silk frill of the quilt. They were cold; they made me think of death.

"Yes," she said, very low, "I was horribly frightened." I felt the shuddering that ran along her wrist, and the chill of that old fear of hers crept into my blood, too. She looked through me, as though I were vapour, as though the bodyless Dread her eyes were fixed on once again for that instant—as though that were the most real presence in the room.

"Tell me," I whispered, "tell me what it was."

"——impossible to talk about such things." She drew away her hand. "All you need to know is ... the need of taking care. Of never running risks. What time is it?"

"Five minutes past eleven."

"Did Lady Helmstone say she and Hermione would walk back with Bettina?"

"No, she didn't say that."

"What did she say?"

"Just that she would send Betty home."

After some time she said quite suddenly: "That might mean alone in the motor."

I was going to say "Why not?" But as I looked up from my work at the face under the candle light, a most foolish and indefinable fear flashed across my mind—a feeling too ridiculous to own—sudden, indefinable dread of that inoffensive man, the Helmstones' head chauffeur. I had no sooner cast out the childish thought than I remembered the two under men. One only a sort of motor-house "odd man." To that hangdog creature might fall the task of driving Betty home! I had thought of this man vaguely enough before, yet with some dash of human sympathy, for it was common talk that he was "put upon" by the other men. He was a weakling, and unhappy; now I suddenly felt him to be evil—desperate.

Oh, why had I let Bettina go!

Even if the chauffeurs, all three, were decent enough ordinarily, what if just to-night they had been drinking?

Betty coming across the deserted heath with a drunken driver——

Oh, God, I prayed, don't let anything happen to Bettina....

A quarter past eleven.

I put on a bold face. "They wouldn't, I think, have a motor-car out for Betty at this hour, and the reason she is late is because she has told them she would like the walk."

"They will hardly send a woman with her at this time of night."

We both started violently, and all because a coal had fallen out of the grate on the metal fender.

My mother was the first to speak: "They are haphazard people, I sometimes think.... You don't suppose they would send her back with a groom...?"

I said I was sure they would not, though an hour before I would have asked, Why not?

"Lord Helmstone couldn't be expected to put himself out. I wish I had not let the servants go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you think of it? Of course, they should have gone and brought Bettina home."

I saw now how right and proper this would have been.

Half past eleven.

"It is very strange," I said.

"Go and look out again, you may see a lantern, or the motor-lamps."

I leaned out into the fresh-smelling darkness, and I saw nothing, I heard nothing.

I hung there, unwilling to draw in my head and admit the world without was empty of Bettina. She had been thrown out of the car. She was lying by the roadside somewhere, dead, that was why she didn't come home.

Suddenly I thought of Gerald Boyne. What if, after all, he had been dining there. He would be sure to want to bring Bettina home. Yes, and those casual Helmstones would turn Bettina over to him without a thought. A man Ranny wouldn't let his sister dance with in a room full of her friends.... Bettina, setting out with Gerald Boyne to cross the lonely heath—and never reaching home.

I knew all this was wild and foolish ... then why did these imaginings make me feel I could not bear the suspense another moment? I shut the window and turned round. "You must let me go for her," I said.

The same suggestion must have been that moment on her lips. "Go, wake the servants," she said, "tell them to dress quickly. Get your cloak and light the lantern." She gave her short sharp directions. The young servant was to go with me. The old one was to lock the door behind us, and wait up with my mother. I went with a candle through silent passages, and knocked on doors.

I left the lantern burning down in the hall, and in my cloak went back to my mother's room.

She was leaning out, over the side of the bed listening.

"Aren't they ready?"

"They are only just roused."

"Servants take ten times as long to dress as——Hark. Look out!"

I went back to the window and peered between the close-drawn curtains, with hands at my temples on either side of my eyes.

Nothing.

Except.... Yes, I could hear the heavy step of the older woman down in the hall unlocking, unbolting, unchaining the door ... that the housemaid and I might lose no time when she was ready.

The old woman must be waiting for us there below, with the lantern in her hand. A faint light was lying on the path. Not a sound now in all the world except my mother's voice behind me:

"You will take the short cut."

"Oh yes."

"And as you go don't talk—listen."

"Listen!" I echoed, with mounting horror. "What should I hear?"

"How do we know?"

A chill went down my back.

The bedroom-door opened, and Bettina walked in.

"Such a nice evening! They've been teaching me bridge. Why have you put on your cloak? Why are you looking—oh! what has happened to you?"

Not very much was said to Bettina that night. She and two of the Helmstones' maids had come round by the orchard-gate, walking softly on the grass, "so as not to waken mother."

Only a little crestfallen, she was sent away to bed. My mother had motioned me to wait. As I watched Bettina making her apologies and her good-night, I thought how worse than useless had been all that anxiety and strain. "I shall remember to-night," I said to myself, "whenever I am frightened again."

But this, I could see before she spoke, was not the moral my mother was drawing. "Shut the door," she signed. And when I had come back to her, she drew herself up in bed and laid her hand on mine. "I want you to make me a promise," she said. "It is not fair to girls not to let them know that terrible things can happen. Promise me that you will take better care of Bettina. Never let anyone make you forget——"

I promised—oh, I promised that!

CHAPTER XV
MY SECRET

Eric, like the violets and primroses, came earlier that third spring.

He seemed an old friend now, with an established footing in the house. Yet I had never been alone with him for more than five minutes before the day I told him my secret.

I had imagined it all so different from the way it fell out. I said to myself that I would meet him on his way home some evening, after he had played the last round. He would never know that I had been waiting for him in the copse; but that would be where I should tell him, standing by the nearer stile, where I had first seen kindness in his eyes.

My mother's health was worse again that spring, and when I wasn't studying I was much with her. After Eric came I stayed with her even more, for he said she had lost ground.

He discouraged her from coming downstairs. I believe he prevailed on her to keep her room chiefly by coming constantly to see her, bringing books and papers. My mother's sick-room was not like any other I have seen. It was full of light and air, and hope and pleasantness. She would lie on the sofa in one of the loose gowns she looked so lovely in, and we would have tea up there.

Nearly always I managed to go down to the door with Eric.

One day, that very first week, he came a good hour before we expected him. Bettina had shut herself up to write to Hermione, "——and I am afraid my mother is asleep," I said.

"Well, you are not," he answered. I saw his eyes fall on the books and papers that littered the morning-room sofa, and I felt myself grow red. The books would betray me!

The strange thing was that he pushed them away without ever looking at them! And he sat down beside me.

He had never been so close to me before. I think I was outwardly quite unmoved. But I could not see him, even at a distance, without inward commotion. When he sat down so near me, a great many pulses I had not known before were in my body began to beat and hammer. I felt my heart grow many sizes too big, and my breast-bone ache under the pressure. I said to myself the one essential was that he should not suspect—for him to guess the state he had thrown me into would be the supreme disaster. He might despise me. Almost certainly he would think I was hysterical. I knew the contempt he felt for hysterical women. Never, never should he think me one! I would rather die, sitting rigidly in my corner without a sign, than let him think I had any taint of the hysterical in me!

Above all, for my Great Secret's sake, I must show self-command. Upon that I saw, in a flash, this was the ideal moment for telling him about The Plan.

He asked how had my mother slept. I don't know what I said. But I remember that he spoke very gently of her. And he said I must husband my strength. I stayed too much indoors, he said. Hereafter I was to take an hour's brisk walk every day of my life.

I told him I couldn't always do that in these days.

"You must," he said.

I thought of my books, and shook my head.

"Won't you do it if I ask you to?" he said.

He leaned a little towards me. I dared not look up.

"I understand your not wanting to leave your mother," he said. "But couldn't your sister——" Then, before I could answer, "No," he said, smiling a little, "I suppose she couldn't."

There was something in his tone that did not please me. "You mean Betty is too young?"

No; he didn't mean that, he said.

What did he mean?

"Well, she has other preoccupations, hasn't she?" he said lightly.

"You mean Hermione? Hermione and all the family are in London."

No; he didn't mean Hermione. I was in too much inner turmoil to disentangle his meaning then. For he went on quickly to say: "Suppose I sit with your mother for that hour, while you go out and get some exercise?"

I was to lose an hour of him—tramping about alone! The very thought gave me an immense self-pity. My eyes grew moist.... "Come, come!" I said to myself, "keep a tight rein!"

Just as I was getting myself under control again, he undid it all by laying his hand over mine.

"Let me help you," he said.

"Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being kind; don't think it is more—don't dare think it is more!"

Though I couldn't help thinking it was more, I turned to the thought of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming to be faced.

And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something about: "If you really do want to help me——"

But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand. The words I had rehearsed and meant to say—they flew away. I felt my thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water.

With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those few seconds' contact we two seemed to have grown into one. I found I had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time—questions that made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said I imagined it would be like that.

"Well, it was like that."

"And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one of your family."

He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented.

"I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people."

What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me.

"Why, that you have the most interesting profession in the world," I said.

"You don't mean the practice of medicine!—mere bread-and-butter."

"You don't love your profession!"

He smiled, and that time the smile was less ungenial. But I had not liked the tone of patronage about his work.

"They were all wasted on you, then—those splendid opportunities—the clinic in Hamburg, the years in Paris——"

"Oh, well"—he looked taken aback at my arraignment—"I mayn't be a thundering success, but I won't say I'm a waster."

"If you don't love and adore the finest profession in the world——! Yes, somebody else ought to have had your chances. Me, for instance."

"You! Oh, I dare say," his smile was humorous and humouring.

"You think I'm not in earnest. But I am." I went to the cupboard where Bettina and I each had a shelf, and brought out an old wooden workbox. I opened it with the little key on my chain. I took out papers and letters. "These are from the Women's Medical School in Hunter Street"—I laid the letters open before him—"answers to my inquiries about terms and conditions."

He glanced through one or two. "What put this into your head?" he said, astonished, and not the least pleased so far as one could see. "How did you know of the existence of these people?"

"You left a copy of the Lancet here once." Something in his face made me add: "But I should have found a way without that."

"What way—way to what?" He spoke irritably in a raised voice. I looked anxiously at the door. "We won't say anything just yet to my mother," I begged. "My mother wouldn't—understand."

"What wouldn't she understand?" All his kindness had gone. He was once more the cold inaccessible creature I had seen that first day stalking up to Big Klaus's door.

"What I mean is," I explained, quite miserably crestfallen, "my mother wouldn't understand what I feel about studying medicine. But you"—and I had a struggle to keep the tears back—"I've looked forward so to telling you——"

He turned the papers over with an odd misliking expression.

"For one thing, you could never pass the entrance examination," he said. I asked why he thought that.

"Do you see yourself going to classes in London, cramming yourself with all this?"—his hand swept the qualifications list.

"Not classes in London," I said. "But people do the London Matriculation without that. I am taking the University Tutorial Correspondence Course," I said.

I was swallowing tears as I boasted myself already rather good at Botany and French. My mother thought even my German tolerable.

I picked up the little pamphlet issued by the University of London on the subject of Matriculation Regulations, and I pointed out Section III., "Provincial Examinations." The January and June Matriculation Examinations were held at the Brighton Municipal Technical College. He could see that made it all quite convenient and easy.

"I can see it is all quite mad," he answered. "Suppose by some miracle you were to pass the entrance exams.—have you any idea how long they keep you grinding away afterwards?"

"Five to seven years," I said.

"Well! Can't you see what a wild idea it is?"

I said to myself: he knows about our straitened means. "You mean it costs such a great deal."

"It costs a great deal more than you think," he said, shifting about discontentedly in his chair.

Then I told him that my mother had some jewels. "I am sure that when she sees I am in earnest, when I have got my B. A., she will be willing I should use the jewels——"

"It's a dog's life," he said, "for a woman."

I gathered my precious papers together. "You think I shall mind the hard work. But I shan't."

"It isn't the hard work," he said, "though it's not easy for a man. For a woman——" he left the woman medical-student hanging over the abyss.

For all my questions I could not bring him to the point of saying what these bugbears were.

He was plainly tired of the subject.

My first disappointment had yielded to a spiritless catechism of how this and how that.

My persistent canvass of the matter brought him nearer a manifestation of ill-temper than I had ever seen in him.

There was a great deal, he said, that he couldn't talk about to a girl of eighteen. But had I or anybody else ever heard of a man who was a doctor himself wanting his sister, or his daughter to study medicine? He had never known one. Not one.

I confessed I couldn't think why that was, except that nobody belonging to a girl ever wanted her to do anything, except—I stopped short and then hurried on.... "But after all, you know that women do go through the medical schools and come out all right."

He shook his head. "They've lost something. Though I admit most of the women you mean, never had the thing I mean."

I said I didn't understand.

"Well, you ought to. You've got it." He looked at me with an odd expression and asked how long I'd had this notion in my head. I said a year. "All this time! You've been full of this ever since I was here last!"

I lied. I said I had thought of absolutely nothing else all that time. He stood up ... but I still sat there wondering what had made me tell him that lie.

"You won't go," I said, "without seeing my mother."

To-day—he hadn't time.

I went down with him as usual to the front door, weeping inwardly, yet hoping, praying, that before the door closed he would say something that would help—something kind.

He often said the best things of all just as he was going—as though he had not dared to be half so interesting, or a tenth so kind, but in the very act of making his escape.

To-day he put on his covert coat in a moody silence. Still silent, he took his hat.

I stood with the door-knob in my hand. "You think, then, even if Aunt Josephine helped——"

"Who is Aunt Josephine?"

"My father's step-sister. She is well off."

Aunt Josephine's riches made no impression upon him. He was going away a different man from the one who had come in and pushed away my papers, to sit beside me and to take my hand. He pulled his stick out of the umbrella-stand.

"You feel sure I couldn't?" I pleaded at the door.

"I feel sure you could do something better."

He was out on the step. "Good-bye," he said, with the look that hurt me, so tired—disappointed.

He had come for peace—for my mother's tranquil spirit to bring rest to his tired mind. And all he had found here was my mother's daughter fretting to be out in the fray! I had not even listened. I had interrupted and pulled away my hand.

After I shut the door, I opened it again, and called out: "Oh, what was it you were going to tell me?"

"It wouldn't interest you," he said, without even turning round.

CHAPTER XVI
THE YACHTING PARTY

I had to make use of Eric's old plea, "pressure of work," to account for his going away without seeing my mother.

I watched the clock that next afternoon in a state of fever. Would he come again at three, so that we might talk alone? No. The torturing minute-hand felt its way slowly round the clock-face, its finger, like a surgeon's on my heart, pressing steadily, for all my flinching, to verify the seat and the extent of pain.

Four o'clock. Five. Half-past. No hope now of his coming, I told myself, as those do who cannot give up hope.

My mother questioned me. What had Mr. Annan said the day before? Had he, then, come so early for "nothing in particular"? I said that I supposed he had come early because he found he could not come late.

About six o'clock, as I was counting out some drops for my mother, a ring at the front door made me start and spill the liquid on the table. He had relented! He was coming to say the things I had been so mad as to prevent his saying yesterday. We listened. My heart fell down as a woman's voice came up. Lady Helmstone! Wanting to see my mother "very particularly." We wondered, while the maid went down to bring her, what the errand might be which could not be entrusted to Bettina. For, wonderful to say, Bettina was to be allowed to go to a real dinner-party that night at the Hall. Hermione had written from London, begging that Betty might come and hear all about the yachting party.

This was not the first we had heard of the project. It had been introduced in a way never to be forgotten. We had counted on hearing from the Helmstones all the thrilling details about the Coronation which was fixed for the coming June. We felt ourselves sensibly closer to the august event through our acquaintance with the Helmstones. Lesser folk than they might hope to see the great Procession going to the Abbey—King and Queen in the golden Coach of State, our particular friends the little Princes and the young Princess in yet another shining chariot, followed by the foreign Potentates, the State officials, and by our Peer of the Realm with all his brother Lords and Barons in scarlet and ermine; and the flower of the British Army, a glancing, flaming glory in the rear.

The highly fortunate might see this Greatest Pageant of the Age on its return from the Abbey, when the Sovereigns would be wearing their crowns and their Coronation robes.

But the Helmstones! They would actually see the anointing and the crowning from their High Seats in the Abbey. Even a girl like Hermione would be asked to the State Ball.

Never before had we realised so clearly the advantages of being a Peer.

We thought the Helmstones very modest not to be talking continually about the Coronation. While we waited, impatient to hear more on the great theme, they had introduced the subject of the yachting trip. I remembered this while Lady Helmstone was coming up the stair—I remembered our bewilderment at learning that they hoped to sail "about Easter," and to be cruising in the Ægean at the end of June.

They had forgotten the Coronation!

Then the shock of hearing Lord Helmstone thank God that he would "be well out of it." London, he said, would be intolerable this season. He had let the house in Grosvenor Square "at a good round Coronation figure" to a new-made law-lord—"sort of chap who'll revel in it all." Many of the greatest houses in London were to be let to strangers.

The yachting trip was one of many arranged that people might escape "the Coronation fuss."

According to my mother, Lord Helmstone and his like showed a kind of treason to the country in not doing their share to make the symbolic act of Coronation a public testimony to English devotion to the Monarchy. What would become of the significance of the occasion if the aristocracy (upholders of that order typified by the King) deserted the King on a day when the eyes of the world would be upon the English throne.

Oh, it was pitiable! this leaving the great inherited task to the upstart rich. Lord Helmstone's act showed blacker in the light of remembered honour done him both by the present King and by his father. We knew Lord Helmstone had liked the late King best. Yet even of him we had heard this unworthy subject speak with something less than reverence. With bated breath Bettina and I had reported these lapses, as well as the late ironic reference to "the bourgeois standards of the present Court." Our mother said that only meant that the life of the King and Queen was a model for their people. "But Lord Helmstone laughed," we persisted—"they all laughed."

We saw we were wrong to dwell upon so grave a lapse. Lord Helmstone's taste was questionable, we heard. "He does not scorn the distinctions His Majesty confers." There were people—my mother was sorry if Lord Helmstone was one—who thought it superior to smile at the Fount of Honour.

Smiling at Founts was one thing. But to go a-yachting when you might help to crown the King of England, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith...!

Bettina and I had agreed privately that the reason she was allowed the unheard-of licence of dining out alone was that she might embrace this final opportunity of probing the mystery before the Helmstones vanished. They had come down from London for their last week-end before going to Marseilles to join the Nautch Girl.

And now Lady Helmstone was passing our bedroom, where Bettina on the other side of the closed door sat working feverishly to finish putting some fresh lace on the gown she was to wear at dinner.

Lady Helmstone came into my mother's room, very smart and smiling, and without preamble proposed to take Bettina along as one of her party. Equally without hesitation my mother said the idea was quite impracticable.

Lady Helmstone was a person accustomed to having her own way. "You cannot expect," she said, "you cannot want to keep your girls at home for ever."

"N-no," my mother agreed, with that old look of shrinking. But Bettina was far too young——

A niece of Lord Helmstone's, just Bettina's age, was to be of the party.

Ah, well, Bettina was different. Bettina was the sort of child who had never been able to face the idea of a single night away from home. And this was a question of a cruise of—how many weeks?

"Six months," said Lady Helmstone cheerfully.

My mother stared. Lady Helmstone could not have meant the proposal seriously—"Bettina would die of home-sickness."

Lady Helmstone ventured to think not. As I have said, she was ill-accustomed to seeing her invitations set aside. She spoke of Hermione's disappointment ... they were all so fond of Bettina. She should have every care.

My mother made her acknowledgments—the suggestion was most kind; most hospitably meant. But Lady Helmstone had only to put it to Bettina. She would soon see.

Lady Helmstone smiled. "I think you will find Bettina would like to come with us."

I was annoyed at her way of saying that, as if she knew Bettina better than we. I went into the next room, and got out my school-books. I left the door open in case my mother should need me, and I heard them talking about "daughters."

There was much to be said, Lady Helmstone thought, for the way they did things in France. My mother preferred the English way.

"And yet you will not take it," said the other, with that suavity that allowed her to be impertinent without seeming so. "I don't think—living as you do—you quite realise the trouble mothers take to give their girls the sort of opportunity you are refusing." There were changes—"great and radical changes," she said—changes which my mother, leading this life of the religieuse, was possibly not aware of.

My mother deprecated as much as she had heard of these changes.

"Ah, but, necessary—a question of supply and demand. You can afford to disregard them only if you do not expect your daughters to marry."

My mother said stiffly that she saw no reason to suppose her daughters would not marry—"all in good time." They were very young, Bettina a child——

"She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best "opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty—I may say of patriotism—have to think seriously about these things." She herself, having married off three daughters and two nieces, might be considered something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls about London.... Three! Conceive the indiscretion!—only the young one really caring about balls—the other two going stolidly through with it, season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard—I changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'and never more than two at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's position to do—I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in London."

There was a pause.

"Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a tone of perfunctory politeness.

"All the other women leave," said Lady Helmstone, with a rusé significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June. August is the time. I made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden, cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef—cordon bleu. 'You must give better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did."

There was another significant pause.

"The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those girls would be manœuvring for partners at balls still, and their mother would be in her grave, but for...."

The interview ended stiffly.

The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know there had been any question of her going. "The child is already disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione."

When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and said: "If Betty never went anywhere, I should not want her to go away in the care of a woman like that."

CHAPTER XVII
THE EMERALD PENDANT

I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.

While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.

"I look dreadfully missish," she said.

When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a school-treat!"

We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard Hermione behind Betty's voice.

She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant." That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too, begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.

"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"

Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?

My mother wouldn't say....

After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.

My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600.

She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.

I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the jewels be sold?

My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a shield before the other.

She spoke my name and I started—the voice sounded odd. I went back to the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me to sit down.

Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.

The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.

We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.

I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high companionship ... marching to the world's relief.

In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!

MY LITTLE SISTER

MY LITTLE SISTERBY ELIZABETH ROBINS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IFIRST IMPRESSIONS

CHAPTER IILESSONS

CHAPTER IIIA THUNDER-STORM

CHAPTER IVNIMBUS

CHAPTER VTHE MOTHER'S VOW

CHAPTER VIMARTHA'S GOING—YET REMAINING

CHAPTER VIIA SHOCK

CHAPTER VIIIANNAN

CHAPTER IXERIC

CHAPTER XTHE BUNGALOW

CHAPTER XIAWAKENING

CHAPTER XIIOUR FIRST BALL

CHAPTER XIIITHE CLOUD AGAIN

CHAPTER XIVWHERE IS BETTINA?

CHAPTER XVMY SECRET

CHAPTER XVITHE YACHTING PARTY

CHAPTER XVIITHE EMERALD PENDANT