COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY FRIEND

LAURITZ MELCHIOR

AND, THROUGH HIM,
TO ALL MY FRIENDS
IN DENMARK
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED

MOTTO

to me over the past
Decillions.
There is no better than it
And now. What behaves well
In the past or behaves well
To-day is not such a wonder.
The wonder is always and
Always how there can be
A mean man or an infidel."

Walt Whitman.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

TWO DAYS

[CHAPTER I]

THE SCARLET FEATHER

I

Young Henry Trenchard, one fine afternoon in the Spring of 1920, had an amazing adventure.

He was standing at the edge of Piccadilly Circus, just in front of Swan and Edgar's where the omnibuses stopped. They now stop there no longer but take a last frenzied leap around the corner into Regent Street, greatly to the disappointment of many people who still linger at the old spot and have a vague sense all the rest of the day of having been cheated by the omnibus companies.

Henry generally paused there before crossing the Circus partly because he was short-sighted and partly because he never became tired of the spectacle of life and excitement that Piccadilly Circus offered to him. His pince-nez that never properly fitted his nose, always covered one eye more than the other and gave the interested spectator a dramatic sense of suspense because they seemed to be eternally at the crisis of falling to the ground, there to be smashed into a hundred pieces—these pince-nez coloured his whole life. Had he worn spectacles—large, round, moon-shaped ones as he should have done—he would have seen life steadily and seen it whole, but a kind of rather pathetic vanity—although he was not really vain—prevented him from buying spectacles. The ill-balancing of these pince-nez is at the back of all these adventures of his that this book is going to record.

He waited, between the rushing of the omnibuses, for the right moment in which to cross, and while he waited a curious fancy occurred to him. This fancy had often occurred to him before, but he had never confessed it to any one—not even to Millicent—not because he was especially ashamed of it but because he was afraid that his audience would laugh at him, and if there was one thing at this time that Henry disliked it was to be laughed at.

He fancied, as he stood there, that his body swelled, and swelled; he grew, like 'Alice in her Wonderland,' into a gigantic creature, his neck shot up, his arms and his legs extended, his head was as high as the barber's window opposite, then slowly he raised his arm—like Gulliver, the crowds, the traffic, the buildings dwindled beneath him. Everything stopped; even the sun stayed in its course and halted. The flower-women around the central statue sat with their hands folded, the policemen at the crossings waited, looking up to him as though for orders—the world stood still. With a great gesture, with all the sense of a mighty dramatic moment he bade the centre of the Circus open. The Statue vanished and in the place where it had been the stones rolled back, colour flamed into the sky, strange beautiful music was heard and into the midst of that breathless pause there came forth—what?

Alas, Henry did not know. It was here that the vision always stayed. At the instant when the ground opened his size, his command, his force collapsed. He fell, with a bang to the ground, generally to find that some one was hitting him in the ribs, or stepping on his toes or cursing him for being in the way.

Experience had, by this time, taught him that this always would be so, but he never surrendered hope. One day the vision would fulfil itself and then—well he did not exactly know what would happen then.

To-day everything occurred as usual, and just as he came to ground some one struck him violently in the back with an umbrella. The jerk flung his glasses from his nose and he was only just in time to put out his hands and catch them. As he did this some books that he was carrying under his arm fell to the ground. He bent to pick them up and then was at once involved in the strangest medley of books and ankles and trouser-legs and the fringes of skirts. People pushed him and abused him. It was the busiest hour of the day and he was groping at the busiest part of the pavement. He had not had time to replace his pince-nez on his nose—they were reposing in his waistcoat pocket—and he was groping therefore in a darkened and confusing world. A large boot stamped on his fingers and he cried out; some one knocked off his hat, some one else prodded him in the tenderest part of his back.

He was jerked on to his knees.

When he finally recovered himself and was once more standing, a man again amongst men, his pince-nez on his nose, he had his books under his arm, but his hat was gone, gone hopelessly, nowhere to be seen. It was not a very new hat—a dirty grey and shapeless—but Henry, being in the first weeks of his new independence, was poor and a hat was a hat. He was supremely conscious of how foolish a man may look without a hat, and he hated to look foolish. He was also aware, out of the corner of his eye, that there was a smudge on one side of his nose. He could not tell whether it were a big or a little smudge, but from the corner of his eye it seemed gigantic.

Two of the books that he was carrying were books given him for review by the only paper in London—a small and insignificant paper—that showed interest in his literary judgment, and but a moment ago they had been splendid in their glittering and handsome freshness.

Now they were battered and dirty and the corner of one of them was shapeless. One of the sources of his income was the sum that he received from a bookseller for his review copies; he would never now receive a penny for either of these books.

There were tears in his eyes—how he hated the way that tears would come when he did not want them! and he was muddy and hatless and lonely! The loneliness was the worst, he was in a hostile and jeering and violent world and there was no one who loved him.

They did not only not love him, they were also jeering at him and this drove him at once to the determination to escape their company at all costs. No rushing omnibuses could stop him now, and he was about to plunge into the Piccadilly sea, hatless, muddy, bruised as he was, when the wonderful adventure occurred.

All his life after he would remember that moment, the soft blue sky shredded with pale flakes of rosy colour above him, the tall buildings grey and pearl white, the massed colour of the flowers round the statue, violets and daffodils and primroses, the whir of the traffic like an undertone of some symphony played by an unearthly orchestra far below the ground, the moving of the people about him as though they were all hurrying to find their places in some pageant that was just about to begin, the bells of St. James' Church striking five o'clock and the soft echo of Big Ben from the far distance, the warmth of the Spring sun and the fresh chill of the approaching evening, all these common, everyday things were, in retrospect, part of that wonderful moment as though they had been arranged for him by some kindly benignant power who wanted to give the best possible setting to the beginning of the great romance of his life.

He stood on the edge of the pavement, he made a step forward and at that moment there arose, as it were from the very heart of the ground itself, a stout and, to Henry's delicate sense, a repulsive figure.

She was a woman wearing a round black hat and a black sealskin jacket; her dress was of a light vivid green, her hair a peroxide yellow and from her ears hung large glittering diamond earrings.

To a lead of the same bright green as her dress there was attached a small sniffing and supercilious Pomeranian. She was stout and red-faced: there was a general impression that she was very tightly bound about beneath the sealskin jacket. Her green skirt was shorter than her figure requested. Her thick legs showed fairly pink beneath very thin silk black stockings; light brown boots very tightly laced compressed her ankles until they bulged protestingly. All this, however, Henry did not notice until later in the day when, as will soon be shown, he had ample opportunity for undisturbed observation.

His gaze was not upon the stout woman but upon the child who attended her. Child you could not perhaps truthfully call her; she was at any rate not dressed as a child.

In contrast with the woman her clothes were quiet and well made, a dark dress with a little black hat whose only colour was a feather of flaming red. It was this feather that first caught Henry's eye. It was one of his misfortunes at this time that life was always suggesting to him literary illusions.

When he saw the feather he at once thought of Razkolnikov's Sonia. Perhaps not only the feather suggested the comparison. There was something simple and innocent and a little apprehensive that came at once from the girl's attitude, her hesitation as she stood just in front of Henry, the glance that she flung upon the Piccadilly cauldron before she stepped into it.

He saw very little of her face, although in retrospect, it was impossible for him to believe that he had not seen her exactly as she was, soul and body, from the first instant glimpse of her; her face was pale, thin, her eyes large and dark, and even in that first moment very beautiful.

He had not, of course, any time to see these things. He filled in the picture afterwards. What exactly occurred was that the diamond earrings flashed before him, the thick legs stepped into the space between two omnibuses, there was a shout from a driver and for a horrible moment it seemed that both the girl and the supercilious Pomeranian had been run over. Henry dashed forward, himself only narrowly avoided instant death, then, reaching, breathless and confused, an island, saw the trio, all safe and well, moving towards the stoutest of the flower-women. He also saw the stout woman take the girl by the arm, shake her violently, say something to her in obvious anger. He also saw the girl turn for an instant her head, look back as though beseeching some one to help her and then follow her green diamond-flashing dragon.

Was it this mute appeal that moved Henry? Was it Fate and Destiny? Was it a longing that justice should be done? Was it the Romantic Spirit? Was it Youth? Was it the Spirit of the Age? Every reader of this book must make an individual decision.

The recorded fact is simply that Henry, hatless, muddy, battered and dishevelled, his books still clutched beneath his arm, followed. Following was no easy matter. It was, as I have already said, the most crowded moment of the day. Beyond the statue and the flower-woman a stout policeman kept back the Shaftesbury Avenue traffic. Men and women rushed across while there was yet time and the woman, the dog and the girl rushed also. As Henry had often before noticed, it was the little things in life that so continually checked his progress. Did he search for a house that he was visiting for the first time, the numbers in that street invariably ceased just before the number that he required. Was anything floating through the air in the guise of a black smut or a flake of tangible dust, certainly it would settle upon Henry's unconscious nose: was there anything with which a human body might at any moment be entangled, Henry's was the body inevitably caught.

So it was now. At the moment that he was in the middle of the crossing, the stout policeman, most scornfully disregarding him, waved on the expectant traffic. Down it came upon him, cars and taxi-cabs, omnibuses and boys upon bicycles, all shouting and blowing horns and screaming out of whistles. He had the barest moment to skip back into the safe company of the flower-woman. Skip back he did. It seemed to his over-sensitive nature that the policeman sardonically smiled.

When he recovered from his indignant agitation there was of course no sign of the flaming feather. At the next opportunity he crossed and standing by the paper-stall and the Pavilion advertisements gazed all around him. Up the street and down the street. Down the street and up the street. No sign at all. He walked quickly towards the Trocadero restaurant, crossed there to the Lyric Theatre, moved on to the churchyard by the entrance to Wardour Street and then gazed again.

What happened next was so remarkable and so obviously designed by a kindly paternal providence that for the rest of his life he could not quite escape from a conviction that fate was busied with him! a happy conviction that cheered him greatly in lonely hours. Out from the upper Circle entrance to the Apollo Theatre, so close to him that only a narrow unoccupied street separated him, came the desired three, the woman and the dog first, the girl following. They stood for a moment, then the woman once more said something angrily to the girl and they turned into Wardour Street. Now was all the world hushed and still, the graves in the churchyard slept, a woman leaning against a doorway sucked an orange, the sun slipped down behind the crooked chimneys, saffron and gold stole into the pale shadows of the sky and the morning and the evening were the First Day.

Henry followed.

Around Wardour Street they hung all the shabby and tattered traditions of the poor degraded costume romance, but in its actual physical furniture there are not even trappings. There is nothing but Cinema offices, public houses, barber shops, clothes shops and shops with windows so dirty that you cannot tell what their trade may be. It is a romantic street in no sense of the word; it is not a kindly street nor a hospitable, angry words are forever echoing from wall to wall and women scream behind shuttered windows.

Henry had no time to consider whether it were a romantic street or no. The feather waved in front of him and he followed. He had by now forgotten that he was hatless and dirty. A strangely wistful eagerness urged him as though his heart were saying with every beat: "Don't count too much on this. I know you expect a great deal. Don't be taken in."

He did expect a great deal; with every step excitement beat higher. Their sudden reappearance when he had thought that he had lost them seemed to him the most wonderful omen. He believed in omens, always throwing salt over his left shoulder when he spilt it (which he continually did), never walking under ladders and of course never lighting three cigarettes with one match.

Some way up Wardour Street on the left as you go towards Oxford Street there is a public house with the happy country sign of the Intrepid Fox. No one knows how long the Intrepid Fox has charmed the inhabitants of Wardour Street into its dark and intricate recesses—Tom Jones may have known it and Pamela passed by it and Humphrey Clinker laughed in its doorway—no one now dare tell you and no history book records its name. Only Henry will never until he dies forget it and for him it will always be one of the most romantic buildings in the world.

It stood at the corner of Wardour Street and a little thoroughfare called Peter Street. Henry reached the Intrepid Fox just as the Flaming Feather vanished beyond the rows of flower and vegetable stalls that thronged the roadway. Peter Street it seemed was the market of the district; beneath the lovely blue of the evening the things on the stall are picturesque and touching, even old clothes, battered hats, boots with gaping toes and down-trodden heels, and the barrow of all sorts with dirty sheets of music and old paper-covered novels and tin trays and cheap flower-painted vases. In between these booths the feather waved. Henry pursuing stumbled over the wooden stands of the barrows, nearly upset an old watery-eyed woman from her chair—and arrived just in time to see the three pursued vanish through a high faded green door that had the shabby number in dingy red paint of Number Seven.

Number Seven was, as he at once perceived, strangely situated. At its right was the grimy thick-set exterior of "The City of London" public house, on its left there was a yard roofed in by a wooden balcony like the balcony of a country inn, old and rather pathetic with some flower-pots ranged along it and three windows behind it; the yard and the balcony seemed to belong to another and simpler world than the grim ugliness of the "City of London" and her companions. The street was full of business and no one had time to consider Henry. In this neighbourhood the facts that he was without a hat and needed a wash were neither so unusual nor so humorous as to demand comment.

He stood and looked. This was the time for him to go home. His romantic adventure was now logically at an end. Did he ring the bell of Number Seven he had nothing whatever to say if the door were opened.

The neighbourhood was not suited to his romantic soul. The shop opposite to him declaring itself in large white letters to be the "Paris Fish Dinner" and announcing that it could provide at any moment "Fish fried in the best dripping" was the sort of shop that destroyed all Henry's illusions. He should, at this point, have gone home. He did not. He crossed the road. The black yard, smelling of dogs and harness, invited him in. He stumbled in the dusk against a bench and some boxes but no human being seemed to be there. As his eyes grew accustomed to the half light he saw at the back of the yard a wooden staircase that vanished into blackness. Still moving as though ordered by some commanding Providence he walked across to this and started to climb. It turned a corner and his head struck sharply a wooden surface that suddenly, lifting with his pressure a little, revealed itself as a trap-door. Henry pushed upwards and found himself, as Mrs. Radcliffe would say "in a gloomy passage down which the wind blew with gusty vehemence."

In truth the wind was not blowing nor was anything stirring. The trap-door fell back with a heavy swaying motion and a creaking sigh as though some one quite close at hand had suddenly fainted. Henry walked down the passage and found that it led to a dusky thick-paned window that overlooked a square just behind the yard through which he had come. This was a very small and dirty square, grimy houses overlooking it and one thin clothes-line cutting the light evening sky now light topaz with one star and a cherry-coloured baby moon. To the right of this window was another heavily curtained and serving no purpose as it looked out only upon the passage. Beside this window Henry paused. It was formed by two long glass partitions and these were not quite fastened. From the room beyond came voices, feminine voices, one raised in violent anger. A pause—from below in the yard some one called. A step was ascending the stair.

From within voices again and then a sound not to be mistaken. Some one was slapping somebody's face and slapping it with satisfaction. A sharp cry—and Henry pushing back the window, stepped forward, became entangled in curtains of some heavy clinging stuff, flung out his arms to save himself and fell for the second time within an hour and on this occasion into the heart of a company that was most certainly not expecting him.

II

He had fallen on his knees and when he stumbled to his feet his left heel was still entangled with the curtain. He nearly fell again, but saved himself with a kind of staggering, suddenly asserted dignity, a dignity none the easier because he heard the curtain tear behind him as he pulled himself to his feet.

When he was standing once more and able to look about him the scene that he slowly collected for himself was a simple one—a very ugly room dressed entirely it seemed at first sight in bright salmon pink, the walls covered with photographs of ladies and gentlemen for the most part in evening dress. There were two large pink pots with palms, an upright piano swathed in pink silk, a bamboo bookcase, a sofa with pink cushions, a table on which tea was laid, the Pomeranian and—three human beings.

The three human beings were in various attitudes of transfigured astonishment exactly as though they had been lent for this special occasion by Madame Tussaud. There was the lady with the green dress, the girl with the flaming feather and the third figure was a woman, immensely stout and hung with bracelets, pendants, chains and lockets so that when her bosom heaved (it was doing that now quite frantically) the noise that she made resembled those Japanese glass toys that you hang in the window for the wind to make tinkling music with them. The only sounds in the room were this deep breathing and this rattling, twitting, tittering agitation.

Even the Pomeranian was transfixed. Henry felt it his duty to speak and he would have spoken had he not been staring at the girl as though his eyes would never be able to leave her face again. It was plain enough that it was she who had been slapped a moment ago. There was a red mark on her cheek and there were tears in her eyes.

To Henry she was simply the most beautiful creature ever made in heaven and sent down to this sinful earth by a loving and kindly God. He had thought of her as a child when he first saw her, he thought of her as a child again now, a child who had, only last night, put up her hair—under the hat with the flaming feather, that hair of a vivid shining gold was trying to escape into many rebellious directions. The slapping may have had something to do with that. It was obvious at the first glance that she was not English—Scandinavian perhaps with the yellow hair, the bright blue eyes and the clear pink-and-white skin. Her dress of some mole-coloured corduroy, very simple, her little dark hat, set off her vivid colour exquisitely. She shone in that garish vulgar room with the light and purity of some almost ghostly innocence and simplicity. She was looking at Henry and he fancied that in spite of the tears that were still in her eyes a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth.

"Well, sir?" said the lady in green. She was not really angry Henry at once perceived and afterwards he flattered himself because he had from the very first discovered one of the principal features of that lady's "case"—namely, that she would never feel either anger or disapproval—at any member of the masculine gender entering any place whatever, in any manner whatever, where she might happen to be. No, it was not anger she showed, nor even curiosity—rather a determination to turn this incident, bizarre and sudden though it might be, to the very best and most profitable advantage.

"You see," said Henry, "I was in the passage outside and thought I heard some one call out. I did really."

"Well you were mistaken, that's what you were," said the green lady. "I must say——! Of all the things!"

"I'm really very sorry," said Henry. "I've never done such a thing before. It must seem very rude."

"Well it is rude," said the green lady. "If you were to ask me to be as polite as possible and not to hurt anybody's feelings, I couldn't say anything but that. All the same there's no offence taken as I see there was none meant!"

She smiled; the gleam of a distant gold tooth flashed through the air.

"If there's anything I can do to apologize," said Henry, encouraged by the smile, but hating the smile more than ever.

"No apologies necessary," said the green lady. "Tenssen's my name. Danish. This is Mrs. Armstrong—My daughter Christina——"

As she spoke she smiled at Henry more and more affectionately. Had it not been for the girl he would have fled long before; as it was, with a horrible sickening sensation that in another moment she would stretch out a fat arm and draw him towards her, he held his ground.

"What about a cup of tea?" she said. At that word the room seemed to spring to life. Mrs. Armstrong moved heavily to the table and sat down with the contented abandonment of a cow safe at last in its manger. The girl also sat down at the opposite end of the table from her mother.

"It's very good of you," said Henry, hesitating. "The fact is that I'm not very clean. I had an accident in Piccadilly and lost my hat."

"That's nothing," said Mrs. Tenssen, as though falling down in Piccadilly were part of every one's daily programme.

"Come along now and make yourself at home."

He drew towards her, fascinated against his will by the shrill green of her dress, the red of her cheeks and the strangely intimate and confident stare with which her eyes, slightly green, enveloped him. As he had horribly anticipated her fat boneless fingers closed upon his arm.

He sat down.

There was a large green teapot painted with crimson roses. The tea was very strong and had been obviously standing for a long time.

Conversation of a very bright kind began between Mrs. Tenssen and Mrs. Armstrong.

"I'm sure you'll understand," said Mrs. Tenssen, smiling with a rich and expensive glitter, "that Mrs. Armstrong is my oldest friend. My oldest and my best. What I always say is that others may misunderstand me, but Ruby Armstrong never. If there's one alive who knows me through and through it's Mrs. Armstrong."

"Yes," said Henry.

"You mustn't believe all the kind things she says about me. One's partial to a friend of a lifetime, of course, but what I always say is if one isn't partial to a friend, who is one going to be partial to?"

Mrs. Armstrong spoke, and Henry almost jumped from his chair so unexpectedly base and masculine was her voice.

"Ada expresses my feelings exactly," she said.

"I'm sure that some," went on Mrs. Tenssen, "would say that it's strange, if not familiar, asking a man to take tea with one when one doesn't even know his name, and his entrance into one's family was so peculiar; but what I always say is that life's short and there's no time to waste."

"My name's Henry Trenchard," said Henry, blushing.

"I had a friend once" (Mrs. Tenssen always used the word "friend" with a weight and seriousness that gave it a very especial importance), "a Mr. William Trenchard. He came from Beckenham. You remember him, Ruby?"

"I do," said Mrs. Armstrong. "And how good you were to him too! No one will ever know but myself how truly good you were to that man, Ada. Your kind heart led you astray there, as it has done often enough before."

Mrs. Tenssen nodded her head reminiscently. "He wasn't all he should have been," she said. "But there, one can't go on regretting all the actions of the past, or where would one be?"

She regarded Henry appreciatively. "He's a nice boy," she said to Mrs. Armstrong. "I like his face. I'm a terrible woman for first impressions, and deceived though I've been, I still believe in them."

"He's got kind eyes," said Mrs. Armstrong, blowing on her tea to cool it.

"Yes, they're what I'd call thinking eyes. I should say he's clever."

"Yes, he looks clever," said Mrs. Armstrong.

"And I like his smile," said Mrs. Tenssen.

"Good-natured I should say," replied Mrs. Armstrong.

This direct and personal comment floating quite naturally over his self-conscious head embarrassed Henry terribly. He had never been discussed before in his own presence as though he didn't really exist. He didn't like it; it made him extremely uneasy. He longed to interrupt and direct the conversation into a safer channel, but every topic of interest that occurred to him seemed unsuitable. The weather, the theatres, politics, Bolshevism, high prices, food, house decoration, literature and the Arts—all these occurred to him but were dismissed at once as unlikely to succeed. Moreover, he was passionately occupied with his endeavour to catch the glimpses of the girl at the end of the table. He did not wish to look at her deliberately lest that should embarrass her. He would not, for the world bring her into any kind of trouble. The two women whom he hated with increasing vehemence with every moment that passed were watching like vultures waiting for their prey. (This picture and image occurred quite naturally to Henry.) The glimpses that he did catch of the soft cheek, the untidy curls, the bend of the head and the curve of the neck fired his heart to a heroism, a purity of purpose, a Quixotism that was like wine in his head, so that he could scarcely hear or see. He would have liked to have the power to at that very instant jump up, catch her in his arms and vanish through the window. As it was he gulped down his tea and crumbled a little pink cake.

As the meal proceeded the air of the little room became very hot and stuffy. The two ladies soon fell into a very absorbing conversation about a gentleman named Herbert whose salient features were that he had a double chin and was careless about keeping engagements. The conversation passed on then to other gentlemen, all of whom seemed in one way or another to have their faults and drawbacks, and to all of whom Mrs. Tenssen had been, according to Mrs. Armstrong, quite marvellously good and kind.

The fool that Henry felt!

Here was an opportunity that any other man would have seized. He could but stare and gulp and stare again. The girl sat, her plate and cup pushed aside, her hands folded, looking before her as though into some mirror or crystal revealing to her the strangest vision—and as she looked unhappiness crept into her eyes, an unhappiness so genuine that she was quite unconscious of it.

Henry leant across the table to her.

"I say, don't . . . don't!" he whispered huskily.

She turned to him, smiling.

"Don't what?" she asked. There was the merest suggestion of a foreign accent behind her words.

"Don't be miserable. I'll do anything—anything. I followed you here from Piccadilly. I heard her slapping you."

"Oh, I want to get away!" she whispered breathlessly. "Do you think I can?"

"You can if I help you," Henry answered. "How can I see you?"

"She keeps me here . . ."

Their whispers had been low, but the eager conversation at the other end of the table suddenly ceased.

"I'm afraid I must be going now," said Henry rising and facing Mrs. Tenssen. "It was very good of you to give me tea."

"Come again," said Mrs. Tenssen regarding him once more with that curiously fixed stare, a stare like a glass of water in which floated a wink, a threat, a cajoling, and an insult.

"We'll be glad to see you. Just take us as you find us. Come in the right way next time. There's a bell at the bottom of the stairs."

Mrs. Armstrong laughed her deep bass laugh.

He shook hands with the two women, shuddering once more at Mrs. Tenssen's boneless fingers. He turned to the girl. "Good-bye," he said. "I'll come again."

"Yes," she answered, not looking at him but at her mother at the other side of the table. The stairs were dark and smelt of fish and patchouli. He stumbled down them and let himself out into Peter Street. The evening was blue with a lovely stir in it as in running water. The booths were crowded, voices filled the air. He escaped into Shaftesbury Avenue as Hänsel and Gretel escaped from the witch's cottage. He was in love for the first time in his young, self-centred life. . . .

[CHAPTER II]

HENRY HIMSELF

In the fifth chapter of the second part of Henry Galleon's Three Magicians there is this passage (The Three Magicians appeared in 1892):

When he looked at the Drydens, father, daughter, and son, he would wonder, as he had often in earlier days wondered, why writers on English character so resolutely persisted in omitting the Dryden type from their definitions? These analyses were perhaps too sarcastic, too cynical to include anything as artless, as simple as the Dryden character without giving the whole case away . . . and yet it was, he fancied in that very character that the whole strength and splendour of the English spirit persisted. Watching Cynthia and Tony Dryden he was reminded of a picture in a fairy-tale book read and loved by him in his youth, now forgotten to the very name of its author, lingering only with a few faded colours of the original illustration. He fancied that it had been a book of Danish fairy romances. . . . This picture of which he thought was a landscape—Dawn was breaking over a great champigné of country, country that had hills and woods and forests, streams and cottages all laid out in that detailed fancy that, as a child, he had loved so deeply. The sun was rising over the hill; heavy dark clouds were rolling back on to the horizon and everywhere the life of the day, fresh in the sparkling daylight was beginning. The creatures of the night were vanishing; dragons with scaly tails were creeping back reluctantly into their caves, giants were brandishing their iron clubs defiantly for the last time before the rising sun; the Hydras and Gryphons and Five-Headed Tortoises were slinking into the dusky forests, deep into the waters of the green lakes the slimy Three-Pronged Alligators writhed deep down into the filth that was their proper home.

The flowers were thick on the hills, and in the valleys, the birds sang, butterflies and dragon-flies flashed against the blue, the smoke curled up from the cottage chimneys and over all the world was hung a haze of beauty, of new life and the wonder of the coming day.

In the foreground of this picture were two figures, a girl and a boy, and the painter, clumsy and amateurish, though his art may have been, had with the sincerity and fervour of his own belief put into their eyes all their amazement and wonder at the beauty of this new world.

They saw it all; the dragons and the gryphons, the heavy clouds rolling back above the hill were not hidden from them; that they would return they knew. The acceptance of the whole of life was in their eyes. Their joy was in all of it; their youth made them take it all full-handed. . . .

I have thought of them sometimes—I think of the Drydens now—as the Young Enchanted. And it seems to me that England is especially the country of such men and women as these. All the other peoples of the world carry in their souls age and sophistication. They are too old for that sense of enchantment, but in England that wonder that is so far from common sense and yet is the highest kind of common sense in the world has always flourished. It is not imagination; the English have less imagination than any other race, it is not joy of life nor animal spirits, but the child's trust in life before it has grown old enough for life to deceive it. I think Adam and Eve before the Fall were English.

That sense of Enchantment remains with the English long after it dies with the men and women of other nations, perhaps because the English have not the imagination to perceive how subtle, how dangerous, how cynical life can be. Their art comes straight from their Enchantment. The novels of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray and Dickens and Meredith, the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the pictures of Hogarth and Constable and Turner. The music of Purcell, the characters of Nelson and Wellington and Gordon. . . .

And think what that sense of Enchantment might do for them if only their background would change. For generations gone that has not moved. One day when the earthquake comes and the upheaval and all the old landmarks are gone and there is a new world of social disorder and tumbling indecency for their startled gaze to rest upon then you will see what these children of Enchantment will do!

So much, for Galleon who is already now so shortly after his death looked upon as an old sentimental fogy. Sentimental? Why certainly. What in the world could be more absurd than his picture of the English gazing wide-eyed at the wonder of life? They of all peoples!

And yet he was no fool. He was a Cosmopolitan. He had lived as much in Rome, in Paris, in Vicenza, as in London. And why should I apologize for one of the greatest artists England possesses? Other times, other names . . . and you can't catch either Henry Trenchard or Millicent—no, nor Peter either—and I venture to say that you cannot catch that strange, restless, broken, romantic, aspiring, adventurous, disappointing, encouraging, enthralling, Life-is-just-beginning-at-last Period in which they had these adventures simply with the salt of sheer Realism—not salt enough for that Bird's tail.

I should like to find that little picture of Henry Galleon's fairy book and place it as a frontispiece to this story. But Heaven alone knows where that old book has gone to! It was perhaps Galleon's own invention; he was a queer old man and went his own way and had his own fancies, possessions that many writers to-day are chary of keeping because they have been told on so many occasions by so many wise professors that they've got to stick to the Truth. Truth? Who knows what Truth may be? Platitudinous Pilate failed over that question many years ago, and to-day we are certainly as far as ever from an answer. There are a million Truths about Henry and Millicent and the times they lived in. Galleon's is at least one of them, and it's the one I've chosen because it happens to be the way I see them. But of course there are others.

"The whole Truth and nothing but the Truth." What absurdity for any story-teller in the world to think that he can get that—and what arrogance! This book is the truth about these children as near as I can get to it, and the truth about that strange year 1920 in that strange town, London, as faithfully as I can recollect, but it isn't everybody's Truth. Far from it—and a good thing too.

Henry's rooms were at the top of 24 Panton Street. To get to them you placed a Yale key in the lock of an old brown door, brushed your way through a dim passage, climbed a shabby staircase past the doors of the Hon. Nigel Bruce, Captain D'Arcy Sinclair, Claude Bottome, the singer, and old Sir Henry Bristow, who painted his face and wore stays. This was distinguished company for Henry who was at the beginning of his independent life in London, and the knowledge that he was in the very centre of the Metropolis, that the Comedy Theatre was nearly opposite his door and Piccadilly only a minute away gratified him so much that he did not object to paying three guineas a week for a small bed-sitting room without breakfast. It was a very small room, just under the roof, and Henry who was long and bony spent a good deal of his time in a doubled-up position that was neither aesthetic nor healthy. Three guineas a week is twelve pounds twelve shillings a month, and one hundred and fifty-one pounds four shillings a year. He had a hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own, left to him by his old grandfather, and by eager and even optimistic calculation he reckoned that from his literary labours he would earn at least another hundred pounds in his London twelve months. Even then, however, he would not have risked these handsome lodgings had he not only a month ago, through the kind services of his priggish brother-in-law, Philip Mark, obtained a secretaryship with Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., at exactly one hundred and fifty pounds per annum.

With inky fingers and a beating heart he produced this estimate:

And against this he set:

There were certain risks about this estimate. For one thing literature might, conceivably, not contribute her hundred pounds quite so completely as he hoped. On the other hand, she might contribute more. . . .

Again Henry was on trial with Sir Charles, was going into his service the day after to-morrow for the first time, had never been secretary to any one in his life before, and was not by temperament fitted entirely for work that needed those two most Damnable and Soul Destroying of attributes, Accuracy and Method. He had seen Sir Charles only once, and the grim austerity of that gentleman's aristocratic features had not been encouraging.

Never mind. It was all enchanting. What was life for if one did not take risks? Every one was taking risks, from Mr. Lloyd George down to (or possibly up to) Georges Carpentier and Mr. Dempsey—Henry did not wish to be behind the rest.

Mr. King, his landlord, had suggested to him that he might possibly be willing to lay a new wall-paper and a handsome rug or carpet. There was no doubt at all that the room needed these things; the wall-paper had once been green, was now in many places yellow and gave an exact account of the precise spots where the sporting prints of the last tenant (young Nigel Frost Bellingham) had hung. The carpet, red many years ago, resembled nothing so much as a map of Europe with lakes, rivers, hills, and valleys clearly defined in grey and brown outline. Henry explained to Mr. King that he would wish to wait for a month or two to see how his fortunes progressed before he made further purchases, upon which Mr. King, staring just over Henry's shoulder at the green wall-paper, remarked that it was usual for gentlemen to pay a month's rent in advance, upon which Henry, blushing, suggested that an improvement in his fortunes was perfectly certain and that he was private secretary to Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., of whom Mr. King had doubtless heard. Mr. King, bowing his head as of one who would say that there was no Baronet in the United Kingdom of whom he had not heard, nevertheless regretted that the rule concerning the month's rent was constant, unchanging and could, in no circumstances whatever, be altered.

This Mr. King was little in stature, but great in demeanour. His head was bald save for a few black hairs very carefully arranged upon it, as specimens are laid out in the Natural History Museum. His face also was bald, in the strictest sense of the word; that is, not only did no hairs grow upon it but it seemed impossible that any hairs ever had grown upon it. His eyes were sharp, his mouth deprecating and his chin insignificant. He wore, it seemed, the same suit of black, the same black tie, the same stiff white shirt from year's end to year's end. He showed no human emotion whether of anger, regret, disappointment, expectation or sorrow.

He told no jolly stories of other tenants nor of life about town such as Henry would have liked him to tell. He had, Henry was sure, a great contempt for Henry. He was not, from any point of view, a lovable human being.

Henry did what he could for his room, he was proud of it, felt very kindly towards it and wanted to clothe it with beauty. It is difficult, however, to make a room beautiful unless the wall-paper and the carpet contribute something. Henry had a nice writing-table that his Uncle Timothy had given him, a gate-legged table from his sister Katherine and a fine Regency bookcase stolen by him from his Westminster home. He had three pictures, a Japanese print, a copy of Mr. Belcher's drawing of Pat O'Keefe, "The Wild Irishman," and a little water-colour by Lovat Frazer of a king and queen marching into a banquet-hall and attended by their courtiers. This last, splendid in gold and blue, green and red was the joy of Henry's heart and had been given him by his sister Millicent on his last birthday.

In the bookcase there were, on the whole, the books that you would expect—the poems of Swinburne, Dowson, and Baudelaire, some of the 1890 novelists and one or two moderns. But he was also beginning to collect a few rare editions, and he had Clarissa and The Mysteries of Udulpho and The Monk in their original bindings, and an early Pilgrim's Progress, a rather rare Donne and a second Vicar of Wakefield. These were his greatest treasures. He had only two photographs in his room—his sisters and that of his greatest and perhaps his only friend. These stood one on either side of the very plain alarm-clock that took the middle of the mantelpiece.

Henry, as he sat on his bed, looking before him out of the little window across to the corner gables of the Comedy Theatre, appeared very much the same crude and callow youth that he had seemed on going up to Oxford just before the war.

He had not yet caught up to his size which had leapt ahead of his years when he was about sixteen. He was still long, lean, and untidy, his black hair refusing any kind of control, his complexion poor with a suspicion of incipient pimple, his ears too red, his hands never quite clean. The same and yet not at all the same.

The hint of beauty that there had been when he was nineteen in the eyes and mouth and carriage of neck and shoulders was now, when he was twenty-six, more clearly emphasized. At first sight Henry seemed an untidy and rather uncleanly youth; look again and you would see quite clearly that he would be, one day, a distinguished man. His untidiness, the way that his trousers bagged at the knee, that he carried, like some knight with his lady's favour, the inevitable patch of white on his sleeve, that his boots were not rightly laced and his socks not sufficiently "suspended"—these things only indicated that he was in the last division of the intermediate class, between youth and manhood.

The war had very nearly made him a man, and had not the authorities discovered, after his first wound in 1915, that he was quite hopeless in command of other men but not at all a fool at intelligence he would have been a man complete by this time. The war smartened him a little but not very much, and the moment he was free he slipped back into his old ways and his old customs with a sigh of relief.

But there again not entirely. Like his cousin John, who was killed in Galicia in 1915, stretcher-bearing for the Russians, he was awkward in body but clean in soul. The war had only emphasized something in him that was there before it, and the year and a half that he spent with his family in the Westminster house after the Armistice was the most terrible time of his life. No one knew what to do with him. His mother had had a stroke in the spring of 1917 and now lay like a corpse at the top of the old house, watching, listening, suffering an agony of rebellion in her proud and obstinate soul. With her influence gone, his grandfather and his great-aunt Sarah dead, his two aunts Betty and Anne living in the country down at Walton-on-Thames, his father more and more living his own life in his study, his sister Katherine married and involved now entirely in her own affairs, Henry felt the big house a mausoleum of all his hopes and ambitions. Return to Oxford he would not. Strike out and live on his one hundred and fifty pounds he would at the first possible moment, but one thing after another prevented him. He remained in that grim and chilly house mainly because of his sister Millicent, whom he loved with all his heart and soul, and for whom he would do anything in the world.

She also had a little money of her own, but the striking out was a little difficult for her. Her father and mother, all the relations said, needed her, and it wanted all the year and a half to prove to the relations that this was not so. Her father scarcely saw her except at breakfast and, although he regarded her with a kindly patronage, he preferred greatly his books, his club, and his daily newspaper. Her mother did not need her at all, having been angered before the war at the action that Millie took in the great family quarrel of Katherine v. Mrs. Trenchard, and being now completely under the control of a hard and tyrannical woman, Nurse Bennett, whose word now was law in the house, whose slightest look was a command.

Millicent and Henry determined that when they escaped it should be together. Millicent had her own plans, and after some months of mysterious advertising in the newspaper, of interviews and secret correspondences, she secured the post of secretary companion to a certain Miss Victoria Platt who lived at 85 Cromwell Road, Kensington. At the very same time Philip found for Henry the secretaryship of which I have already spoken. They escaped then together—Millicent to rooms at the top of Baker Street that she shared with a girl friend, Mary Cass, and Henry to the hospitality of Mr. King. Their engagements also were to begin together, Millicent going to Miss Platt for the first time on the morning after the day of which I am writing, Henry to go to his Baronet on the day after that.

They were beginning the world together. There was surely a fine omen in that. Apart they would do great things—but, together, was there anything they could not do?

At 7.15 that evening, bathed in the blue dusk that filtered in through the little attic window Henry was sitting on his bed staring, wide-eyed, in front of him.

At 8.15 on that same evening, hidden now by the purple shades of night he was still sitting there, his mouth open, staring in front of him. It is desperately platitudinous—it is also desperately true, that there is no falling in love like the first falling in love. And Henry was fortunate in this—that he had fallen in love for the first time at a comparatively ripe age. To some it is the governess or the music-master, to some even the nurse or the gardener's boy. But Henry had in the absolute truth of the absolute word never been in love before to-night.

He had loved—yes. First his mother, then his sister Katherine, then his sister Millicent, then his friend Westcott. These affections had been loyal and true and profound but they had been of the heart and the brain, and for true love the lust of the flesh must be added to the lust of the mind and the heart.

He had tumbled in then, to-day, head foremost, right in, with all his hero-worship, his adoration, his ignorance, his purity, his trust and confidence, fresh, clean, unsullied to offer as acceptable gifts. He could not, sitting on his bed, think it out clearly at all. He could only see everything in a rosy mist and in the heart of the mist a flaming feather, and Piccadilly boiling and bubbling and Mrs. Tenssen with her bright green dress and the stable-yard and the teapot with the flowers and there—somewhere behind these things—that girl with her fair hair, her unhappy gaze beyond him, far far beyond him, into worlds that were not as yet his but that one day might be. And with all this his heart pounding in a strange suffocating manner, his eyes burning, his throat choking, his brain refusing to bring before him two connected thoughts.

At last, when St. James's Church struck half-past eight a thought did penetrate.

He had promised to go to the Hunters' evening party. Never less did he want to go to a party than to-night. He would wish to continue to sit on his bed and study the rosy mist. "I will sit here," he said, "and perhaps soon the face will come to me just as it was. I can't see it now, but if I wait. . . ." Then he had cramp in his leg and the sudden jerk shot him from the bed and forced him to stand in the middle of the floor in an extraordinary attitude with one leg stiff and the other bent as though he were Nijinsky practising for the "Spectre de la Rose."

The shock of his agony drove him to consider two very good reasons for going to the Hunters' party. One was material—namely, that he had had nothing to eat since Mrs. Tenssen's pink cake, that he was very hungry in spite of his love and that there would be free sandwiches at the Hunters. The other reason was a better one—namely, that it was possible that his friend Westcott would be there and to Westcott, above all human beings, save only Millicent, he wished to confide the history of his adventure.

Concerning his friendship with Westcott a word must be said. About a year ago at the house of a friend of Philip's he had been introduced to a thick-set saturnine man who had been sitting by himself in a corner and appearing entirely bored with the evening's proceedings. His host had thrown Henry at this unattractive guest's head as though he would say: "I dare not offer up any of my more important guests to this Cerberus of a fellow, but here's a young ass who doesn't matter and I don't care whether his feelings are hurt or no." Henry himself was at this time cultivating a supercilious air in public, partly from shyness and partly because he did not wish to reveal how deeply pleased he was at being invited to parties. He liked at once Westcott's broad shoulders, close-cropped hair and nonchalant attitude. The first ten minutes of their conversation was not a success, and then Henry discovered that Westcott had, in the days of his youth, actually known, spoken to, had tea with the God of his, Henry's, idolatry, Henry Galleon. Westcott was perhaps touched by young Henry's ingenuous delight, his eager questions, his complete forgetfulness of himself and his surroundings at this piece of information. He in his turn launched out and talked of the London of fifteen years ago and of the heroes of that time, a time that the war had made historic, curious, picturesque, a time that was already older than crinolines, almost as romantic as the Regency. Their host left them together for the remainder of the evening, feeling that he had most skilfully killed two dull birds with one stone. They departed together, walked from Hyde Park Corner together and by the time that they parted were already friends. That friendship had held firm throughout the succeeding year. As a friendship it was good for both of them. Westcott was very lonely and too proud to go out and draw men in. Henry needed just such an influence as Westcott's, the influence of a man who had known life at its hardest and bitterest, who had come through betrayal, disappointed ambition, poverty and loneliness without losing his courage and belief in life, a man whose heart was still warm towards his fellowmen although he kept it guarded now lest he should too easily be again betrayed.

There was no need to keep it guarded from Henry whose transparent honesty could not be mistaken. Henry restored something of Westcott's lost confidence in himself. Henry believed profoundly in what he insisted on calling Westcott's "genius," and that even the simplest soul on earth should believe in us gives some support to our doubting hopes and wavering ambitions. Henry admitted quite frankly to Westcott that he had not heard of him before he met him. Peter's novels—Reuben Hallard, The Stone House, Mortimer Stant and two others—had been before Henry's time and the little stir that Reuben had made had not penetrated the thick indifference of his school-days. Westcott was not at all sensitive to this ignorance. Before the war he had broken entirely with the literary life and his five years' war service abroad had not encouraged him to renew that intimacy. He had had hard starving days since the Armistice and had been driven back almost against his will to some reviewing and writing of articles.

All men had not forgotten him he discovered with a strange dim pleasure that beat like a regret deep into his soul—the younger men especially because he had been a commercial failure were inclined to believe that he had been an artistic success. Mysterious allusions were made in strange new variegated publications to Reuben Hallard and Mortimer Stant.

He began to review regularly for The Athenæum and The New Statesman, and he did some dramatic criticism for The Nation. He soon found to his own surprise that he was making income enough to live without anxiety in two small rooms in the Marylebone High Street, where he was cared for by a kindly widow, Mrs. Sunning, who found that he resembled her son who was killed in the war and therefore adored him. Even, against his will, all his hopes, there were faint stirrings of a novel in his brain. He did not wish to revive that ambition again, but the thing would come and settle there and stir a little and grow day by day, night by night, in spite of his reluctance and even hostility.

Perhaps in this Henry had some responsibility. Henry was so sure that Peter had only to begin again and the world would be at his feet. One night, the two of them sitting over a small grumbling fire in the Coventry Street attic, Peter spoke a little in detail of his book.

After that Henry never left him alone. The book was born now in Henry's brain as well as in Peter's; it knew its own power and that its time would come.

Peter had by no means confided all his life's history to Henry. The boy only knew that there had been a great tragedy, that Westcott was married but did not know where his wife was or even whether she were still alive. Of all this he spoke to no man.

Gabriel Hunter was a painter of the new and extravagant kind; his wife wore bobbed hair, wrote poetry and cultivated a little Salon in Barton Street, Westminster, where they lived.

The Hunters were poor and their house was very small and quite a small number of people caused it to overflow, but to Henry during the last year the Hunter gatherings had stood to him for everything in life that was worth while. It was one of his real griefs that Millicent wouldn't go to that house, declaring that she hated the new poets and the new painters and the new novelists, that she liked Tennyson and Trollope and John Everett Millais and that as soon as she had a house of her own she was going to collect wax flowers and fruit and horsehair sofas. She said many of these things to irritate Henry and irritate him she did, being able to separate him from his very volcanic temper within the space of two minutes if she tried hard enough.

On every other occasion going to the Hunter's had been synonymous to Henry with going to Paradise. To-night for the first time it seemed to be simply going to Westminster. At last, however, hunger drove him, and at a quarter-past nine he found himself in the Hunters' little hall, all painted green with red stripes and a curtain covered with purple bananas and bright crimson oranges hanging in front of the kitchen stairs.

The noise above was deafening and had that peculiarly shrill sound which the New literature seems to carry with it in its train, just as a new baby enjoys its new rattle. When Henry peered into the little drawing-room he could see very little because of the smoke. The scene outlined from the doorway must have seemed to an unprepared stranger to resemble nothing so much as a little study in the Inferno painted by one of the younger artists. Behind and through the smoke there were visions of a wall of bright orange and curtains of a brilliant purple. On the mantelpiece staring through the room and grinning malevolently was the cast of a negro's head.

A large globe hanging from the ceiling concealed the electric light behind patterns of every conceivable colour. The guests were sitting on the floor, on a crimson sofa, and standing against the wall. Henry soon discovered that to-night's was a very representative gathering.

Standing just inside the door he felt for the first time in the Hunters' house perfectly detached from the whole affair. Always before he had loved the sensation of plunging in, of that sudden immersion in light and colour and noise, of swimming with all the others towards some ideally fantastic island of culture that would be entirely, triumphantly their own. But to-night the intense personal experience that he had just passed through kept him apart, led him to criticize and inspect as though he were a visitor from another planet. Was that in itself a criticism of the whole world of Art and Literature proving to him that that must always crumble before real life, or was it simply a criticism of some of the crudity and newness of this especial gathering? Peering through the smoke and relieved that no one appeared to take the slightest notice of him, he saw that this was indeed a representative gathering because all the Three Graces were here together. Never before had he seen them all at one time in the same place. Whether it were because of the exhaustion that five years' war had entailed upon the men of the country or simply that the complete emancipation of women during the last decade had brought many new positions within women's power it was certain that just at this period, that is at the beginning of 1920, much of the contemporary judgement on art and letters was delivered by women—and in letters by three women especially, Miss Talbot, Miss Jane Ross and Miss Martha Proctor. These three ladies had certain attributes in common—a healthy and invigorating contempt for the abilities of the opposite sex, a sure and certain confidence in their own powers and a love of novelty and originality. Miss Talbot, seated now upon the red sofa, was the reviewer of fiction in The Planet. She was the most feminine of the three, slight in stature, fair-haired and blue-eyed, languid and even timid in appearance. Her timidity was a disguise; week after week did she destroy the novels before her, adroitly, dispassionately and with a fine disregard for the humaner feelings. In her there burnt, however, a truer and finer love of literature than either Jane Ross or Martha Proctor would ever know. She had ever before her young vision her picture of the perfect novel, and week after week she showed her scorn in italicized staccato prose for the poor specimens that so brazenly ventured to interfere between her vision and herself.

Had she her way no novelist alive should remain ungoaded, so vile a sin had he committed in thus with his soiled and clumsy fingers desecrating the power, beauty and wisdom of an impossible ideal.

Meanwhile she made a very good income out of her unending disappointment.

Far other Jane Ross.

Jane Ross was plain, pasty-faced, hook-nosed, squat-figured, beetle-browed, and she was the cleverest journalist at that time alive in England. Originally, ten years ago when she came from the Midlands with a penny in her pocket and a determination to make her way, it may have been that she cared for literature with a passion as pure and undeviating as Grace Talbot's own. But great success, a surprised discovery of men's weakness and sloth, a talent for epigrams unequalled by any of her contemporaries had led her to sacrifice all her permanent standards for temporary brilliance. She was also something of a cat, being possessed suddenly to her own discontent by little personal animosities and grievances that she might have controlled quite easily had not her tongue so brilliantly led her away. She had, deep down in her soul, noble intentions, but the daily pettinesses of life were too strong fer her; she won all her battles so easily that she did not perceive that she was meanwhile losing the only battle that really mattered. As her journalism grew more and more brilliant her real influence grew less and less. When her brain was inactive her heart, suddenly released, could be wonderfully kind. A little more stupidity and she would have been a real power.

For both Grace Talbot and Jane Ross the new thing was the only thing that mattered. When you listened to them, or read them you would suppose that printing had been discovered for the first time somewhere about 1890 and in Manchester. Martha Proctor, less brilliant than the other two, had a wider culture than either of them. The first glance at her told you that she was a journalist, tall, straight-backed, her black hair brushed back from a high forehead, dressed in tweeds, stiff white collars, and cuffs, wearing pince-nez, she seemed to have nothing to do with the prevalent fashion. And she had not. Older than the other two she had come in with the Yellow Book and promised to go out with Universal Suffrage. She had fought her battles; in politics her finest time had been in the years just before the war when she had bitten a policeman's leg in Whitehall and broken a shop-window in Bond Street with her little hammer. In literature her great period had been during the Romantic Tushery of 1895 to 1905. How she had torn and scarified the Kailyard novelists, how the Cloak and Sword Romances had bled beneath her whip. Now none of these remained and the modern Realism had gone far beyond her most confident anticipations. She knew in her heart that her day was over; there was even, deep down within her, a faint alarm at the times that were coming upon the world. She knew that she seemed old-fashioned to Jane Ross and her only comfort was that in ten years' time Jane Ross would undoubtedly in her turn seem old-fashioned to somebody else. Because her horizon was wider than that of her two companions she was able to judge in finer proportion than they. Fashions passed, men died, kingdoms fell. What remained? Not, as she had once fondly imagined, Martha Proctor.

Two children and a cottage in the country might after all be worth more than literary criticism. She was beginning to wonder about many things for the first time in her life. . . .

I have outlined these ladies in some detail because for the past year and a half Henry had worshipped at their shrines. How he had revelled in Grace Talbot's cynical judgments, in Jane Ross's epigrams, in Martha Proctor's measured comparisons! To-night for the first time a new vision was upon him. He could only see them, as he stared at them through the smoke, with physical eyes—Grace Talbot's languid indifference, white hands and faint blue eyes. Jane Ross's sallow complexion and crinkled black hair; Martha Proctor's pince-nez and large brown boots.

Then, as his short-sighted eyes penetrated yet more clearly he saw—— Could it be? Indeed it was. His heart beat quickly. There seated uncomfortably upon an orange chair from Heal's was no less a person than the great K. Wiggs himself. Henry had seen him on two other occasions, had once indeed spoken to him.

That earlier glorious moment was strong with him now, the thrill of it, the almost passionate excitement of touching that small podgy hand, the very hand that had written Mr. Whippet and Old Cain and Abel and The Slumber Family.

What then to-night had happened to Henry? Why was it that with every longing to recover that earlier thrill he could not? Why was it that again, as just now with the Three Graces, he could see only Mr. Wiggs's physical presence and nothing at all of his splendid and aspiring soul? Mr. Wiggs certainly did not look his best on an orange chair with a stiff back.

And then surely he had fattened and coarsened, even since Henry's last vision of him? His squat figure perched on the chair, his little fat legs crossed, his bulging stomach, his two chins, his ragged moustache, his eyes coloured a faint purple, his thin whispy hair—these things did not speak for beauty. Nor did the voice that penetrated through the clamour to Henry's corner, with its shrill piping clamour, give full reassurance.

It was not, no alas, it was not the voice of a just soul; there was, moreover, a snuffle behind the pipe—that spoke of adenoids—it is very hard to reconcile adenoids with greatness.

And yet Wiggs was a great man! You knew that if only by the virulence with which certain sections of the press attacked him whenever he made a public appearance.

He was a great man. He is a great man. Henry repeated the words over to himself with a desperate determination to recover the earlier rapture. He had written great books; he was even then writing them. He was, as Henry knew, a kindly man, a generous man, a man with noble and generous ambitions, a man honest in his resolves and courageous in his utterances. Why then did he look like that and why was Henry so stupidly conscious of his body and of his body only? Could it be that the adventure of the afternoon had filled his young soul with so high and splendid an ideal of beauty that everything else in the world was sordid and ugly? He moved restlessly. He did not want to think life sordid and ugly. But was this life? Or at any rate was it not simply a very, very small part of life? Was he moving at last from a small ante-room into a large and spacious chamber? (I have said before that picturesque images occurred to him with the utmost frequency.)

He caught fragments of conversation. A lady quite close to him was saying—"But there's no Form in the thing—no Form at all. He hadn't thought the thing out—it's all just anyhow. . . ."

Somewhere else he heard a man's deep bass voice—"Oh, he's no good. He'll always be an amateur. Of course it's obvious you miss truth the moment you go outside the narrator's brain. Now Truth . . ."

And Wigg's shrill pipe—"Ow, no. That isn't History. That's fable. What do facts matter?"

There was a little stir by the door. Henry turned and found Peter Westcott standing at his side.

He was instantly delighted to perceive that the change that had crept over him since the afternoon did not include Peter. His feeling for Peter was the same that it had ever been, intensified if possible. He loved Peter as he stood there, strong, apart, independent, resolute. That was the kind of independence that Henry himself must achieve so that he would not be swayed by every little emotional and critical wind that blew.

"Hallo, Peter," he said, "I was looking for you."

"You haven't been looking very hard," said Peter. "I've been here a long time."

"There's so much smoke," said Henry.

"Yes, there is. And I've had enough of it. And I'm going."

"I'm going too," said Henry. "Mrs. Hunter has looked at me twice and I don't believe that she's the least idea who I am."

"You're going?" said Westcott astonished. "Why, you love these parties. I expected you to be here all night."

"I don't love it to-night," said Henry solemnly. "It all seems silly. Let's go."

They went down into the Hall, found their coats and passed into the serenity and peace of Barton Street.

"Do you mind walking a bit?" asked Henry.

"As a matter of fact," said Westcott, "I'm going to walk all the way home. I'll take you up through Coventry Street if you like and drop you at your Palace."

"I only went there to-night to see you," said Henry. "I've got something very important to tell you."

They walked in silence into Whitehall. Henry found it difficult to begin and Westcott never spoke unless he had something that he really wanted to say—a reason sufficient for the reputation of sulkiness that many people gave him. The beauty of the night too kept them silent. After that hot, over-coloured room London was like some vast, gently moving lake upon whose bosom floated towers and lamps and swinging barges—myriads of stars were faint behind a spring mist that veiled, revealed and veiled again an orange moon.

Only the towers of the Houses of Parliament were sharp and distinct and they too seemed to move with the gentle rhythm as though they were the bulwarks of some giant ship sailing towards some certain destination.

So quiet was the world that all life seemed to be hypnotized into wondering expectation.

"Well now, Henry, what is it?" asked Peter at last.

"It's the most extraordinary thing," said Henry. "I suppose you'll laugh at me. Anybody would. But I just couldn't help myself. It didn't seem like myself doing it."

"Doing what?"

"Why, before I knew I was following them. And I hadn't any reason to follow them. That's the funny thing. Only I'd just fallen down."

Peter turned upon him. "For God's sake, Henry, get it straight, whom were you following and where? And where did you fall down?"

"In Piccadilly Circus. I was just staring around and some one pushed me and I fell on to my knees and when I'd picked myself up again they'd got half-way across——"

"They? Who?"

"Why the woman and her daughter. At least of course I didn't know she was her daughter then. It was only afterwards——"

Peter was irritable. "Look here, if you don't straighten everything out and tell me it all quite simply from the beginning with names and dates and everything I leave you instantly and never see you again."

Henry tried again and, staring in front of him so that he stumbled and walked like a man in a dream, he recovered it all, seeing freshly as though he were acting in it once more and giving it to Westcott with such vivid drama that they had arrived outside the door in Panton Street as though they had been carried there on a magic carpet. "And after that," finished Henry, "I just came home and I've been thinking about her ever since."

The street was very quiet. Within the theatre rows and rows of human beings were at that moment sitting, their mouths open and their knees pressed together while "The Ruined Lady" went through incredible antics for their benefit. Outside the theatre a few cars were standing, a man or two lounged against the wall, and the stars and the orange moon released now from their entangling mist, shone like lights through a tattered awning down upon the glassy surface of the street. Peter put his hand upon Henry's shoulder; the boy was trembling.

"Take my advice," he said, "and drop it."

"What do you mean?" asked Henry fiercely.

"Of course you won't follow my advice, but I'm older than you are. You asked me to advise you and I'm going to. Don't you see what those two women are? If you don't you're even more of an ass than I know you to be."

"What do you mean?" said Henry again.

"Well, just ask yourself, what kind of a woman is it who when a strange man bursts in through her window smiles and asks him to tea?"

"If she's like that," said Henry angrily, "then all the more I've got to get the girl out of it."

Peter shrugged his shoulders, "I bet the girl knows what she's about," he said.

Henry laughed scornfully. "That's the worst of you, Peter," he said. "You're a cynic. You don't believe in anybody or in anything. You always see things at their worst."

Peter smiled. "That's as may be," he said. "I believe in you anyway. You know quite well that if you get in a mess I've got to pull you out of it. I'm only warning you. If you like, I'll go with you next time and see the girl."

Henry looked up at the moon. "I know I'm an ass about some things," he said. "But I'm not an ass about this. I'll save her if I die for it."

Peter was touched.

"You're bewitched," he said, "I was once. I don't want to wake you up. The only trouble with these things is that the enchantment doesn't last but the things we do under the enchantment do.

"However, it's better to have been enchanted, whatever comes of it, than never to have been enchanted at all. Will you promise me one thing?"

"What's that?" asked Henry.

"To tell me everything, exactly, truthfully."

"Yes, if you don't laugh at me."

"No, I won't—unless you can laugh as well. But you're going to get into a mess over this as sure as you're Henry Trenchard, and if I don't know all about it, I shan't be able to help you when the time comes that you need me."

"I'll tell you everything," said Henry fervently.

"When do you go to your old Baronet?"

"The day after to-morrow."

"Well, I'll come in and see you here that afternoon about five and get your news. Is that all right?"

"Yes," said Henry. "Isn't it a wonderful night? I think I'll walk about a bit."

"You're going to look up at her window?"

Henry blushed, a thing he did very easily. "You can't see her window from the street," he said. "It's quite true I might go round that way."

Westcott went off laughing. The moon and Henry were left alone together.

[CHAPTER III]

MILLIE

Millicent Trenchard was at this time twenty-five years of age.

She had been pretty at eighteen, she was beautiful now, beautiful in the real sense of that terribly abused word, because she aroused interest as well as admiration in the beholder. The questions asked about her would be always different ones, depending for their impulse on the private instincts and desires of the individual.

Her eyes were large, dark, her figure slender, her colouring fair, her hair (she had a mass of it) dark brown with some shadow of dull gold in its threads, her neck and shoulders lovely with a pure healthy whiteness of colour and form that only youth could give her, her chin strong and determined but not exaggerated—all this catalogue is useless. Her beauty did not lie in these things, but in the vitality, the freedom, the humour, the wildness of her spirit. Her eyes, the dimple in her cheek, the high, clear forehead spoke of kindness, generosity, love of her fellowmen, but it was the quality behind those things, the quality of a soul absolutely free and independent but not selfish, open-minded and honest but neither dogmatic nor impertinent, young and ignorant perhaps but ready for any discovery, fearless and excited but tender and soft-hearted, unsentimental but loyal-hearted, that finally told. Although her means were so slender she dressed admirably, liking bright colours, crimson and purple and orange, but never looking so well as when she was in the simplest black.

She knew everything about dress by natural instinct, could make clothes out of nothing at all (not so difficult in 1920), was able to buy things in the cheapest way at the smartest shops, and really spent less time and thought over all these things than most of the clumsily dressed girls of her acquaintance. She was always neat; her gloves and her shoes and her stockings were as fine as those of any lady in the land. She was never extravagant in the fashion of the moment nor was she outside it; when women of sixty wore skirts that belonged more properly to their granddaughters, she who might with pride have been short-skirted was not.

And, just at this time, she was so happy that it made you afraid to watch her. Mary Cass, her friend, was often afraid.

Miss Cass was five years older than Millicent and had seen a great deal of life. She had driven an ambulance in France, and it was afterwards, when nursing in a hospital in Boulogne, that she and Millicent had made friends. She had nursed with the same quiet capacity with which she had driven her ambulance, and now she was studying at the Women's College of Medicine and at the end of her five years' course was going to be one of the most efficient women surgeons in Europe. That was what she set in front of her, and the things that she set in front of her she obtained. She was a little, insignificant, mild-eyed mouse of a woman with a very determined chin; she had none of Millicent's gaiety and wild zest for life. Life seemed to her rather a poor thing at best; she had no great expectations of it, but, on the other hand, bore no one a grudge because she was in the midst of it. So long as she was working at something she was happy; she was fond of Millicent but not extravagant about her.

Her work was more to her than any human being, and she would have liked Millicent to look on work with a deeper seriousness. This was their one deep difference of opinion, that to Mary Cass work was more than human nature and that to Millicent people were everything. "I'd rather live with people I love than write the greatest book in the world," Millicent said. "I believe, Mary, that you only make a friend because you hope one day to be able to cut his or her leg off."

"I'd do it very nicely," said Mary gravely.

There was a further little trouble between them that Mary was rather impatient of Henry. She thought him untidy, careless, inaccurate, clumsy and sentimental; he was undoubtedly all of these things—Millicent, of course, adored Henry and would not hear a word against him from anybody.

"He's only careless because he's a genius," she said.

"When's he going to begin his genius?" asked Mary. "He's twenty-six now."

"He has begun it. He's written ten chapters of a novel."

"What's it about?" asked Mary, with an irritating little sniff that she used on occasions.

"It's about the Eighteenth Century," said Millie, "and a house in a wood——"

"People want something more real nowadays," said Mary.

"He hasn't got to think of what people want," answered Millie hotly. "He's got to write what he feels."

"He's got to make his bread and butter," said Miss Cass grimly.

Nevertheless it may be suspected that she liked Henry more than she allowed; only her fingers itched to be at him, at his collar and his socks and his boots and his tie. But she believed about this, as she did about everything else, that her day would come.

On the morning that Millie was to go to Miss Platt's for the first time she dressed with the greatest care. She put on a plain black dress and designed to wear with it a little round red hat. She also wore a necklace of small pearls that her father had once given her in a sudden swiftly vanishing moment of emotion at her surprising beauty. When she came into the little sitting-room to breakfast she was compelled to confess to herself that she was feeling extremely nervous, and this amazed her because she so seldom felt nervous about anything. But it would be too awful if this Platt affair went wrong! To begin all over again with those advertisements, those absurd letters, that sudden contact with a world that seemed to be entirely incapacitated and desperately to need help without in the least being willing to pay for it!

That was the real point about Miss Platt, that she was willing to pay. The brief interview had shown Millicent a middle-aged, rather stout woman, with a face like a strawberry that is afraid that at any moment it may be eaten, over-dressed, nervous and in some as yet undefined way, a little touching. She had taken, it seemed, to Millicent at once, calling her "my dear" and wanting to pay her anything in reason. "I'm so tired," she said, "and I've seen so many women. They are all so pale. I want some one bright about the house."

Upon this foundation the bargain had been struck, and Millicent, looking back at it, was compelled to admit that it was all rather slender. She had intended to talk to Mary Cass about it at breakfast, to drive her into reassuring her, but discovered, as so many of us have discovered before now, that our nearest and dearest have, and especially at breakfast, their own lives to lead and their own problems to encounter. Mary's brain was intent upon the dissection of a frog, and although her heart belonged to Millie, medical science had for the moment closed it. Millie therefore left the house in a mood of despondency, very rare indeed with her. She travelled on the top of a succession of omnibuses to Cromwell Road. She had time to spare and it was a lovely spring morning; she liked beyond all things to look down over the side of the omnibus and see all the scattered fragmentary life that went on beneath her. This morning every one was clothed in sun, the buildings shone and all the people seemed to be dressed in bright colours. London could look on such a morning so easy and comfortable and happy-go-lucky, like a little provincial town, in the way that butchers stout and rubicund stood in front of their shops, and the furniture shops flung sofas and chairs, coal-scuttles and bookcases right out into the pavement with a casual, homely air, and flower-shops seemed to invite you to smell their flowers without paying for it, and women walked shopping with their hand-bags carefully clutched, and boys dashed about on bicycles with a free, unrestrained ecstasy, as though they were doing it simply for their amusement. Other cities had surely acquired by now a more official air, but London would be casual, untidy and good-natured to the last trump, thank God!

Millie soon recovered her very best spirits, and was not in the least offended when a seedy young man stared at her from an opposite seat and wetted his lips with his tongue as though he were tasting something very good indeed.

She had, however, to summon all her spirits to her aid when Cromwell Road encompassed her. Rows and rows of houses all the same, wearing the air, with their white steps, their polished door-handles and the ferns in the window, of a middle-aged business man dressed for church on a Sunday morning. They were smug and without personality. They were thinking about nothing but themselves. No. 85 was as smug as the others.

She rang the bell, and soon a small boy dressed in a blue uniform and brass buttons stared at her and appeared to be incapable of understanding a word that she said.

He stared at her with such astonishment that she was able to push past him into the hall before he could prevent her.

"You can't see Miss 'Toria," he was heard at last to say in a hoarse voice. "She don't see any one before she's up."

"I think she'll see me," said Millie quietly. "She's expecting me."

He continued to stare, and she suggested that he should go and inquire of somebody else. He was away for so long a time that she was able to observe how full the hall was of furniture, and how strangely confused that furniture was. Near the hall-door was a large Jacobean oak chest carved with initials and an old date 1678, and next to this a rickety bamboo table; there were Chippendale chairs and a large brass gong, and beyond these a glass case with stuffed birds. Millie, whose fingers were always itching to arrange things in her own way, could see at once that this might be made into a very jolly house. From the window at the stair-corner came floods of sunlight, she could hear cheerful voices from the kitchen; the house was alive even though it were in a mess. . . .

A tall dark woman in very stiff cap and apron appeared; she "overlooked" Millie scornfully, and then said in a voice aloof and distant that Miss Platt would see Miss Trenchard upstairs.

Millie followed the woman and, receiving the same impression of light and confusion as she went up, reached the third floor and was led into a room on the right of the stairs.

Here the sun was pouring in, and for a moment it was difficult to see, then through the sunlight certain things declared themselves: item an enormous, four-poster bed hung with bright curtains, item a whole row of long becking and bowing looking-glasses, item many open drawers sprayed with garments of every kind, item Miss Victoria Platt rising, like Venus from the sea, out of the billowy foam of scattered underclothing, resplendent in a Japanese kimono and pins falling out of her hair. The tall woman said sharply, "Miss Trenchard, miss," and withdrew. Miss Platt, red-faced and smiling, her naked arms like crimson rolling-pins, turned towards her.

"Oh, my dear, isn't it too sweet of you to come so punctually? Never did I need anybody more. I always say I'll be down by nine-thirty sharp. Mrs. Brockett, I say, you can come into the morning-room at nine-thirty precisely. I shall be there. But I never am, you know. Never. Well, my dear, I am glad to see you. Come and give me a kiss."

Millie stepped carefully over the underclothing, found herself warmly encircled, two very wet and emphatic kisses implanted on her cheek and then a voice hissing in her ear—

"I do want us to be friends, I do indeed. We shall be, I know."

There was a little pause because Millie did not know quite what to say. Then Miss Platt made some masculine strides towards a rather faded rocking-chair, swept from it a coat and skirt and pointing to it said:

"There, sit down! I'm sure you must be wanting a rest after your journey."

"Journey!" said Millie laughing, "I haven't had a journey! I've only come from Baker Street."

"Why, of course," said Miss Platt, "it was another girl altogether who was coming from Wiltshire. I didn't like her, I remember, because she had a slight moustache, which father always told us implied temper." She stood back and regarded Millie.

"Why, my dear, how pretty you are! Aren't you the loveliest thing ever? And that little hat! How well you dress!" She sighed, struggling with her corsets. (The kimono was now a dejected heap upon the floor.) "Dress is so easy for some people. It seems to come quite naturally to them. Perhaps my figure's difficult. I don't know. It's certainly simpler for slim people."

"Oh, do let me help you," cried Millie, jumping up. She came over to her and in a moment the deed was done.

"Thank you a thousand times," said Miss Platt. "How kind you are. I have a maid, you know, but she's going at the end of the week. I simply couldn't bear her superior manner, and when she went off one Saturday afternoon from my very door in a handsome motor-car that was too much for me. And she wanted to practise on my piano. Servants! You'll have to help there, my dear. Change them as often as you like, but they must be willing and have some kind of friendly feeling for one. I can't bear to have people in the house who look as though they'd poison your soup on the first opportunity. Why can't we all like one another? I'm sure I'm ready enough."

Millie said: "I suppose it doesn't do to spoil them too much."

"You're right, dear, it doesn't. But as soon as I speak severely to them they give notice, and I am so tired of registry offices. I just go in and out of them all day. I do hope you're good with servants."

"I'll do my best," said Millie, smiling bravely, although her heart was already sinking at the sense of her inexperience and ignorance.

"I'm sure you will," said Miss Platt, who was now arrayed in bright blue. "Method is what this house wants. You look methodical. The very way you put your clothes on shows me that. My sister Ellen has method, but household affairs don't interest her. She lives in a world of her own. Clarice, my younger sister, has no method at all. She's the most artistic of us. She paints and sings too delightfully. Are you artistic?"

"No, I'm not," said Millie. "Not a little bit."

Miss Platt seemed for a moment disappointed. "I'm sorry for that. I do love the Arts, although I don't do anything myself. But I do encourage them wherever I can." Then she brightened again. "It's much better you shouldn't be artistic. You're more likely to have method."

"I have a brother who writes," said Millie.

"Now, isn't that wonderful!" Miss Platt was delighted. "You must bring him along. I do think I'd rather be able to write than anything. What kind of thing does he write?"

"Well, he's rather young and of course the war kept him back, but he's in the middle of a novel and he reviews books for the papers."

"Why, how splendid!" Miss Platt was ready now to depart. "How clever he must be to write a novel! All those conversations they put in! I'm sure I don't know where they get it all from. What a gift! Mind you bring him to see me, dear, as soon as ever you can."

"I will," said Millie.

"I do love to have literary and artistic people round me. We do have quite delightful musical parties here sometimes. And dances too. Do you dance?"

"I love it," said Millie.

"That's splendid. Now come along. We'll go downstairs and start the morning's work."

The drawing-room was just such a place as Millie had expected, a perfect menagerie of odds and ends of furniture and the walls covered with pictures ranging from the most sentimental of Victorian to the most symbolic and puzzling of Cubists. But what a nice room this could be did it contain less! Wide, high windows welcomed the sun and a small room off the larger one could have the most charming privacy and cosiness. But the smaller room was at the moment blocked with a huge roller-top desk and a great white statue of a naked woman holding an apple and peering at it as though she were expecting it to turn into something strange like a baby or a wild fowl at the earliest possible moment. This statue curved in such a way that it seemed to hang above the roller-top desk in an inquiring attitude. It was the chilliest-looking statue Millie had ever seen.

"Yes," said Miss Platt, seeing that Millicent's eyes were directed towards this, "that is the work of a very rising young sculptor, an American, Ephraim Block. You'll see him soon; he often comes to luncheon here. I do love to encourage the newer art, and Mr. Block is one of the very newest."

"What is the subject?" asked Millie.

"Eve and the Apple," said Miss Platt. "It was originally intended that there should be a Tree and a Serpent as well, but Mr. Block very wisely saw that very few Art Galleries would be large enough for a tree such as he had designed, so they are to come later when he has some open-air commissions. He is a very agreeable young man; you'll like him I'm sure. Some of my friends think the statue a little bold, but after all in the service of art we must forget our small pruderies, must we not? Others see a resemblance in Eve to myself, and Mr. Block confessed that he had me a little in mind when he made his design. Poor man, he has a wife and children, and life is a great struggle for him, I'm afraid. These Americans will marry so young. Now this," she went on, turning to the roller-top desk, "is where I keep my papers, and one of the very first things I want you to do is to get them into something like order.

"They are in a perfect mess at present and I never can find anything when I want it. I thought you might begin on that at once. I have to go out for an hour or two to see a friend off to America. What she's going to America for I can't imagine. She's such a nice woman with two dear little boys, but she had a sudden passion to see Chicago and nothing could keep her. I shall be back by twelve, and if there's anything you want just ring the bell by the fireplace there and Beppo will attend to you."

"Beppo?" asked Millie.

"Yes, he's the page-boy. After dear father died I had a butler, but he got on so badly with Mrs. Brockett that I thought it wiser to have a boy. My sister, Clarice, suggested that he should be called Beppo. He was a little astonished at first because he's really called Henry, but he's quite used to it now. Well, good-bye, dear, for the moment. I can't tell you what a relief it is to me to have you here. It simply makes the whole difference."

Millie was left alone in her glory.

At first she wandered about the room, looking at the pictures, glancing out of the windows at the bright and flashing colour that flamed on the roofs and turned the chimney-pots into brown and gold and purple, gazed at a huge picture over the marble mantelpiece of three girls, obviously the Miss Platts twenty years ago, modest and giggling under a large green tree, then unrolled the desk. She gave a little gasp of despair at what she saw. The papers were piled mountain-high, and the breeze that come from the rolling back of the desk stirred them like live things and blew many of them on to the floor. How was she ever to do anything with these? Where was she to begin? She gathered them up from the floor, and looking at the first fist-full discovered bills, letters, invitation cards, theatre programmes, advertisements, some of them months old, many of them torn in half, and many more of them, as she quickly discovered, requests for money, food and shelter. She felt an instant's complete despair, then her innate love of order and tidiness came to her rescue. She felt a real sense of pity and affection for Miss Platt. Of reassurance too, because here obviously was a place where she was needed, where she could be of real assistance and value. She piled them all on to the floor and then started to divide them into sections, invitations in one heap, begging letters into another, advertisements into another.

Strange enough, too, this sudden plunging into the intimacies of a woman whom until an hour ago she had not known at all! Many of the letters were signed with Christian names, but through all there ran an implicit and even touching belief that certainly "Victoria," "dearest Viccy," "my darling little Vic," "dear Miss Platt" would find it possible to "grant this humble request," "to loan the money for only a few weeks when it should faithfully be repaid," "to stump up a pound or two—this really the last time of asking."

Half-an-hour's investigation among these papers told Millie a great deal about Miss Platt. Soon she was deep in her task. The heavy marble clock in the big room muttered on like an irritable old man who hopes to get what he wants by asking for it over and over again.

She was soon caught into so complete an absorption in her work that she was unaware of her surroundings, only conscious that above her head Venus leered down upon her and that all the strange, even pathetic furniture of the room was accompanying her on her voyage of discovery, as though it wanted her to share in their own kindly, protective sense of their mistress. The clock ticked, the fire crackled, the sun fell in broad sheets of yellow across the hideous carpet of blue and crimson, quenching the fire's bright flames.

Ghosts rose about her—the ghosts of Victoria Platt's confused, greedy, self-seeking world. Millie soon began to long to catch some of these pirates by their throats and wring their avaricious necks. How they dared! How they could ask as they did, again and again and again! Ask! nay, demand! She who was of too proud a spirit to ask charity of any human being alive—unless possibly it were Henry, who, poor lamb, was singularly ill-fitted to be a benefactor—seemed, as she read on, to be receiving a revelation of a new world undreamt of before in her young philosophy. Her indignation grew, and at last to relieve her feelings she had to spring up from the desk and pace the room.

Suddenly, as she faced the windows to receive for a moment the warmth and friendliness of the sunlight, the door opened behind her and, turning, she saw a woman enter.

This was some one apparently between thirty and forty years of age, dressed in rather shabby black, plain, with a pale face, black hair brushed severely from a high forehead, cross, discontented eyes and an air of scornful severity.

The two women made a strange, contrast as they faced one another, Millicent with her youth, beauty and happiness, the other scowling, partly at the sudden sunlight, partly at the surprise of finding a stranger there.

"I beg your pardon," said Millie smiling. "Do you want any one?"

"Do I want any one?" said the other, in a voice half-snarl, half-irony; "that's good! In one's own house too!"

"Oh, I beg your pardon!" cried Millie again blushing. "I didn't know. I've only been here an hour. I'm Miss Platt's new secretary."

"Oh, you are, are you? Well, I'm Miss Platt's old sister, and when I said it was my house I made of course the greatest possible mistake, because it isn't my house and never will be. You can call me a guest or a companion or even a prisoner if you like. Anything that it pleases you."

This was said with such extreme bitterness that Millie thought that the sooner she returned to her work at the roll-top desk the better.

"You're Miss Ellen Platt?" she asked.

"I am. And what's your name?"

"Millicent Trenchard."

"What on earth have you taken up this kind of work for?"

"Why shouldn't I?" asked Millie with spirit.

"Well, you're pretty and you're young and your clothes don't look exactly as though you're hard up. However if you want to be imprisoned before your time there's no reason why I should prevent you!"

"I want to work!" said Millie, then, laughing, she added: "And there seems to be plenty for me to do here!"

Ellen Platt seemed to be suddenly arrested by her laugh. She stared even more closely than she had done before. "Yes, there's plenty of work," she said. "If Victoria will let you do it. If you last out a month here you'll do well."

"Why, what's the matter with it?" asked Millie.

"You can't be very observant if it isn't enough for you to cast a glance around this room and tell yourself what's the matter. But I'll leave you to make your own discoveries. Six years ago we hadn't a penny to bless ourselves with and thought ourselves ill-used. Now we have more money than we know what to do with—or at least Victoria has—and we're worse off than we were before."

She said those words "Or at least Victoria has" with such concentrated anger and bitterness that Millie turned her head away.

"Yes I expect having a lot of money suddenly is a trouble," she said. "I must be getting on with my work."

She moved into the little room; Ellen Platt followed her as though determined to fire her last shot at close quarters.

"Victoria's had five secretaries in the last month," she said. "And they've none of them been able to stand it a week, and they were older women than you," then she went out, banging the door behind her.

"What an unpleasant woman," thought Millie, then buried herself again in her work.

Her other interruption came half an hour later. The door opened and there came in a man of medium height, bald and with a bushy moustache so striking that it seemed as though he should have either more hair on his head or less over his mouth. He had twinkling eyes and was dressed in grey. He came across the room without seeing Millie, then started with surprise.

"Good heavens!" he said. "A girl!"

"I'm Miss Platt's new secretary," she said.

"And I'm Miss Platt's family physician," he said through his moustache. "My name's Brooker." He added smiling, "You seem in a bit of a mess there."

She must have looked in a mess, the papers lying in tangled heaps on every side of her; to herself she seemed at last to be evoking order.

"I'm not in so much of a mess as I was an hour ago," she said.

"No, I daresay." He nodded his head. "You look more efficient than the last secretary who cried so often that all Miss Platt's correspondence looked as though it had been out in the rain."

"What did she cry about?" asked Millie.

"Homesickness and indigestion and general confusion," he answered. "You don't look as though you'll cry."

"I'm much more likely to smash Eve," said Millie. "Don't you think I might ask Miss Platt to have her moved back a little this afternoon? It's so awful feeling that she's watching everything you do."

"There's nowhere very much to have her moved back to," said the Doctor. "She's back as far as she will go now. You're very young," he added quite irrelevantly.

"I'm not," said Millie. "I'm twenty-five."

"You don't look that. I don't want to be inquisitive, but—did you know anything about these people before you came here?"

"No," said Millie. "No more than one knows from a first impression. Why? You look concerned about me. Have I made a mistake?"

The doctor laughed. "Not if you have a sense of humour and plenty of determination. The last four ladies lacked both those qualities. Mind you, I'm devoted to the family. Their father, poor old Joe, was one of my greatest friends."

"Why do you pity him?" asked Millie quickly.

"Because he was one of those most unfortunate of human beings—a man who had one great ambition in life, worked for it all his days, realized it before he died and found it dust in the mouth. The one thing he wanted from life was money. He was a poor man all his days until the War—then he made a corner in rum and made so much money he didn't know what to do with himself. The confusion and excitement of it all was too much for him and he died of apoplexy.

"Only the day before he died he said to me: 'Tom, I've put my money on the wrong horse. I've been a fool all my life.'"

"And he left his money to his daughters?" asked Millie.

"To Victoria, always his favourite. And he left it to her to do just as she liked with and to behave as she pleased to her sisters."

He had never cared about Clarice and Ellen. He was disappointed because they weren't boys.

"So Victoria's King of the Castle and knows she is, too, for all that she's a good, kind-hearted woman. Are you interested in human beings, Miss——?"

"Trenchard," said Millie. "I am."

"Well if you really are you've come to the right place. You won't find anything more interesting in the whole of London. Here you have right in front of your nose that curious specimen of the human family, the New Rich, and you have it in its most touching and moving aspect—frightened, baffled, confused, bewildered and plundered.

"Plundered! My God! you'll have plenty of opportunity of discovering the Plunderers in the next few weeks if you stay. There are some prime specimens here. If you're a good girl—and you don't look a bad one—you'll have a chance of saving Victoria. Another year like the one she's just gone through and I think she'll be in an asylum!"

"Oh, poor thing!" cried Millie. "Indeed I'm going to do my very best."

"Mind you," he went on, "she's foolish—there never was a more foolish woman. And she can be a tyrant too. Clarice and Ellen have a hard time of it. But they take her the wrong way. They resent it that she should hold the purse and they show her that they resent it. You can do anything you like with her if you make her fond of you. There never was a warmer-hearted woman."

He went over to Millie's desk and stood close to her. "I'm telling you all this, Miss Trenchard," he said, "because I like the look of you. I believe you're just what's needed in this house. You've got all the enchantment of youth and health and beauty if you'll forgive my saying so. The Enchanted Age doesn't last very long, but those who are in it can do so much for those who are outside, and generally they are so taken up with their own excitement that they've no time to think of those others. You'll never regret it all your life if you do something for this household before you leave it."

Millie was deeply touched. "Of course I will," she said, "if I can. And you really think I can? I'm terribly ignorant and inexperienced."

"You're not so inexperienced as they are." He held out his hand. "Come to me if you're disheartened or bewildered. There'll be times when you will be. I've known these women since they were babies so I can help you."

They shook hands on it.

[CHAPTER IV]

HENRY'S FIRST DAY

Meanwhile Henry's plunge into a cold and hostile world was of quite another kind.

One of the deep differences between brother and sister was that while Millie was realistic Henry was romantic. He could not help but see things in a coloured light, and now when he started out for his first morning with his Baronet London was all lit up like a birthday cake. He had fallen during the last year under the spell of the very newest of the Vers Librists, and it had become a passion with him to find fantastic images for everything that he saw. Moreover, the ease of it all fascinated him. He was, God knows, no poet, but quite simply, without any trouble at all, lines came tumbling into his head:

The chimneys, like crimson cockatoos,
Fling their grey feathers
Wildly.

or

The washing
Billowing—
Frozen egg-shells
Crimson pantaloons
Skyline
Flutter.

or

The omnibuses herd together
In the dirty autumn weather
Elephants in jungle town
Monkey-nuts come pattering down.

and so on and so on. . . .

He got deep pleasure from these inspirations; he had sent three to an annual anthology Hoops, and one of them, "Railway-Lines—Bucket-shop," was to appear in the 1920 volume.

But the trouble with Henry was that cheek by jowl with this modern up-to-date impulse ran a streak of real old-fashioned, entirely out-of-date Romance. It was true, as Millie had informed Miss Platt, that he had written ten chapters of a story, The House in the Lonely Wood.

How desperately was he ashamed of his impulse to write this romance and yet how at the same time he loved doing it! Was ever young literary genius in a more shameful plight! A true case of double personality! With the day he pursued the path of all the young 1920 Realists, believing that nothing matters but "the Truth, the calm, cold, unaffected Truth," thrilling to the voices of the Three Graces, loving the company of the somewhat youthful editor of Hoops, reading every word that fell from the pen of the younger realistic critics.

And then at night out came the other personality and Henry, hair on end, the penny bottle of ink in front of him, pursued, alas happily and with the divine shining behind his eyelids, the simple path of unadulterated, unashamed Romance!

What would the Three Graces say, how would the editor of Hoops regard him, did they know what he did night after night in the secrecy of his own chamber, or rather of Mr. King's chamber? Perhaps they would not greatly care—they did not in any case consider him as of any very real importance. Nevertheless he could not but feel that he was treating them to double-dealing.

And then his trouble was suddenly healed by the amazing, overwhelming adventure of Piccadilly Circus. As he had discovered at the Hunters' party, nothing now mattered but the outcome of that adventure. He worked at his Romance with redoubled vigour; it did not seem to him any longer a shameful affair, simply because he had now in his own experience a Romance greater and wilder than any fancy could give him. Also images and similes occurred to him more swiftly than ever, and they were no longer modern, no longer had any connection with Hoops or the new critics, but were simply the attempts that his own soul was making to clothe Her and everything about Her, even Her horrible mother, with all the beauty and colour that his genius could provide. (Henry did not really, at this time, doubt that he had genius—the doubting time was later.)

It will be seen then that he started for Sir Charles Duncombe's house in a very romantic spirit.

The address was No. 13 Hill Street, Berkeley Square, so that Henry had a very little way to go from his Panton Street room. Hill Street is a bright, cheerful place enough with a sense of dignity and age about it and a consciousness that it knows only the very best people. Even the pillar-boxes and the lamp-posts call for decorum and are accustomed, you can see, to butlers, footmen and very superior ladies'-maids. But it cannot be denied that many of the Hill Street houses are dark inside and No. 13 is no exception to that rule. Unlike most of the Hill Street houses which all often change masters, No. 13 had been in the possession of the Duncombe family for a great many years, ever since the days of Queen Anne, in fact, the days of the famous Richard Duncombe who, being both the most desperate gambler and the astutest brain for a bargain in all London, made and lost fortunes with the greatest frequency.

Henry on this first morning knew nothing about the family history of the Duncombes, but if he had known he might have readily believed that so far as the hall and the butler went no change whatever had been made since those elegant polished Queen Anne days. The hall was so dark and the butler so old that Henry dared neither to move, lest he should fall over something, nor to speak lest it should seem irreverent. He stood, therefore, rooted to the stone floor and muttered something so inaudibly that the old man courteously waiting could not hear at all.

"Henry Trenchard," he said at last, looking wildly about him. How the cold seemed to strike up through the stone flags into his very marrow!

"Quite so, sir," said the old man. "Sir Charles is expecting you."

Up an enormous stone staircase they went, Henry's boots making a great clatter, his teeth against his will chattering. Portraits looked down upon him, but so dark it was that you could only catch a glimmer of their old gold frames.

To Henry, modern though he might endeavour to be, there would recur persistently that picture—the most romantic picture perhaps in all his childish picture-gallery—of Alan Fairford, sick and ill, dragged by Nanty Ewart through the dying avenues of Fairladies, having at long last that interview with the imperious Father Bonaventure in the long gallery of the crumbling house—the interview, the secret letter, the mysterious lady "whose step was that of a queen." "Whose neck and bosom were admirably formed, and of a dazzling whiteness"—the words still echoed in Henry's heart calling from that far day when a tiny boy in his attic at Garth he read by the light of a dipping candle the history of Redgauntlet from a yellowing closely-printed page.

Here, in the very heart of London was Fairladies once again and who could tell? . . . Might not the spring in the wall be touched, a bookcase step aside and a lady, "her neck and bosom of a startling whiteness," appear? For shame! He had now his own lady. The time had gone by for dreams. He came to reality with a start, finding himself in a long dusky library so thickly embedded with old books that the air was scented with the crushed aroma of old leather bindings. A long oak table confronted him and behind the table, busily engaged with writing, was his new master.

The old man muttered something and was gone. Sir Charles did not look up and Henry, his heart beating fast, was able to study his surroundings. The library was all that the most romantic soul could have wished it. The ceiling was high and stamped with a gold pattern. A gallery about seven feet from the ground ran round the room, and a little stairway climbed up to this; except for their high diamond-paned windows on one side of the room the bookcases completely covered the walls; thousands upon thousands of old books glimmered behind their gold tooling, the gold running like a thin mist from wall to wall.

Above the wide stone fireplace there was a bust of a sharp-nosed gentleman in whig and stock, very supercilious and a little dusty.

With all this Henry also took surreptitious peeps at Sir Charles, and what he saw did not greatly reassure him. He was a very thin man, dressed in deep black and a high white collar that would in other days have been called Gladstonian, bald, tight-lipped and with the same peaked bird-like nose as the gentleman above the fireplace. He gave an impression of perfect cleanness, neatness and order. Everything on the table, letter-weight, reference-books, paper knife, silver ink-bottle, pens and sealing-wax, was arranged so definitely that these things might have been stuck on to the table with glue. Sir Charles's hands were long, thin and bird-shaped like his nose. Henry, as he snatched glimpses of this awe-inspiring figure, was acutely conscious of his own deficiencies; he felt tumbled, rumpled, and crumpled. Whereas, only a quarter of an hour ago walking down Hill Street, he had felt debonair, smart and fashionable (far of course from what he really was), so unhappily impressionable was he.

Suddenly the hand was raised, the pen laid carefully down, the nose shot out across the table.

"You are Mr. Trenchard?" asked a voice that made Henry feel as though he were a stiff sheet of paper being slowly cut by a very sharp knife.

"Yes, sir," he said.

"Very well. . . . We have only corresponded hitherto. Mr. Mark is your cousin, I think?"

"My brother-in-law, sir."

"Quite. A very able fellow. He should go far."

Henry had never cared for Philip who, in his own private opinion, should have never gone any distance at all, but on the present occasion he could only offer up a very ineffective "Yes."

"Very well. You have never been anybody's secretary before?"

"No, sir."

"And you understand that I am giving you a month's trial entirely on your brother-in-law's recommendation?"

"Yes, sir."

"And what"—here the nose shot out and forward in most alarming fashion—"do you understand a secretary's duties to be?"

Henry smiled rather to give himself confidence than for any other very definite reason. "Well, sir, I should say that you would want to me to write letters to your dictation and keep your papers in order and, perhaps, to interview people whom you don't wish to see yourself and—and,—possibly to entrust me with missions of importance."

"Hum. . . . Quite. . . . I understand that you can typewrite and that you know shorthand?"

"Well, sir"—here Henry smiled again—"I think I had better be frank with you from the beginning. I don't typewrite very well. I told Philip not to lay much emphasis on that. And my shorthand is pretty quick, but I can't generally read it afterwards."

"Indeed! And would you mind telling me why, with these deficiencies, you fancied that you would make me a good secretary?"

Henry's heart sank. He saw himself within the next five minutes politely ushered down the stone staircase, through the front door and so out into Hill Street.

"I don't think," he said, "that I will make you a very good secretary, not in the accepted sense. I know that I shall make mistakes and be clumsy and forgetful, but I will do my very best and you can trust me, and—I am really not such a fool as I often look."

These were the very last words that Henry had intended to say. It was as though some one else had spoken them for him. Now he had ruined his chances. There was nothing for it but to accept his dismissal and go.

However, Sir Charles seemed to take it all as the most natural thing in the world.

"Quite," he said. "Your brother-in-law tells me that you are an author."

"I'm not exactly one yet," said Henry. "I hope to be one soon, but of course the war threw me back."

"And what kind of an author do you intend to be?"

"I mean to be a novelist," said Henry, feeling quite sure that this was the very last thing that Sir Charles would ever consider any one ought to be.

"Exactly. And you will I suppose be doing your own work when you ought to be doing mine?"

"No, I won't," said Henry eagerly. "I can't pretend that I won't sometimes be thinking of it. It's very hard to keep it out of one's head sometimes. But I'll do my best not to."

"Quite. . . . Won't you sit down?" Henry sat down on a stiff-backed chair.

"If you will kindly listen I will explain to you what I shall wish you to do for me. As you have truly suggested I shall need some help with my letters; some typing also will be necessary. But the main work I have in hand for you is another matter. My grandfather, Ronald Duncombe, was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. He was a great letter-writer, and knew all the most interesting personalities of his time. You, doubtless, like all the new generation, despise your parents and laugh at your grandparents." Sir Charles paused here as though he expected an answer to a question.

"Oh no," said Henry hurriedly. "My grandfather's dead—he died a few years ago—but he was a very fine old man indeed. We all thought a great deal of him."

"I'm glad to hear it. That will make you perhaps the more sympathetic to this work that I have for you. There are several black boxes in the cupboard over there filled with letters. Walter Scott was an intimate friend of his—of course, you despise Walter Scott?"

"Oh, no," said Henry fervently, "I don't, I assure you."

"Hum. Quite. When one of you young men writes something better than he did I'll begin to read you. Not before."

"No," said Henry, who nevertheless longed to ask Sir Charles how he knew that the young men of to-day did not write better seeing that he never read them.

"In those boxes there are letters from Byron and Wordsworth and Crabbe and Hogg and many other great men of the time. There are also many letters of no importance. I intend to edit my grandfather's letters and I wish you to prepare them for me."

"Yes," said Henry.

"I wish you to be here punctually at nine every morning. I may say that I consider punctuality of great importance. You will help me with my own correspondence until ten-thirty; from ten-thirty until one you will be engaged on my grandfather's letters. My sister will be very glad that you should have luncheon with us whenever you care to. I shall not generally require you in the afternoon, but sometimes I shall expect you to remain here all day. I shall wish you always to be free to do so when I need you."

"Yes, sir," said Henry.

"Sometimes I shall be at Duncombe Hall in Wiltshire and shall want you to stay with me there at certain periods. I hope that you will not ask more questions than are absolutely necessary as I dislike being disturbed. You are of course at liberty to use any books in this library that you please, but I hope that you will always put them back in their right places. I dislike very much seeing books bent back or laid face downwards."

"Yes," said Henry. "So do I."

"Quite. . . . And now, are there any questions that you will like to ask?"

"No," said Henry. "If there are any questions that I want to ask would you prefer that I asked them when I thought of them or kept them until the end of the morning and asked them all together?"

"That had better depend on your own judgment."

There was a pause.

"That table over there," said Sir Charles, pointing to one near the window, "is a good one for you to work at. I should suggest that you begin this morning with the box labelled 1816-1820. That is the cupboard to your right. It is not locked."

The first movement across the floor to the cupboard was an agonizing one. Henry felt as though everything in the room were listening to him, as though the gentleman with the nose on the mantelpiece was saying to him: "You'll never do here. Look at the noise your boots make. Of course you won't do."

However he got safely across, opened the cupboard which creaked viciously, found the black boxes and the one that he needed. It was very heavy, but he brought it to the table without much noise. Down he sat, carefully opened it and looked inside. Pile upon pile of old yellow letters lay there, packet after packet of them tied with faded red tape. Something within him thrilled to their age, to their pathos, to their humility, to the sense that they carried up to him of the swift passing of time, the touching childishness of human hopes, despair and ambitions. He felt suddenly like an ant crawling laboriously over a gleaming and slippery globe of incredible vastness. The letters seemed to rebuke him as though he had been boasting of his pride and youth and his confidence in his own security. He took out the first bundle, reverently undid the tape and began to read. . . .

Soon he was absorbed even as his sister Millicent, at that same moment in the Cromwell Road, was absorbed in a very different collection of letters, on this her second Platt morning. The library with its thousands of books enfolded Henry as though now it approved of him and might love him did he stay reverently in its midst caring for the old things and the old people—the old things that pass, the old people who seem to die but do not. At first every letter thrilled him. The merest note:

15 Castle St., Edinburgh,
June 4, 1816.

My dear Ronald—What about coming in to see us? All at Hartley well and easy—Mamma has been in Edinburgh after a cook—no joking matter—and to see Benjie who was but indifferent, but has recovered. . . . I will write a long letter soon, but my back and eyes ache with these three pages. . . .

Then a note about a dinner-party, then about a parcel of books, then a letter from Italy full of the glories of Florence; then (how Henry shivered with pleasure as he saw it!) the hand and sign of the Magician himself!

Dear Sir Ronald Duncombe—I am coming to town I trust within the fortnight, but my trees are holding me here for the moment. I have been saddened lately by the death of my poor brother, Major John Scott, who was called home after a long illness. All here wish to be remembered to you.—Most truly yours,

Walter Scott.

A terrible temptation came to Henry—so swift that it seemed to be suggested by some one sitting beside him—to slip the letter into his pocket. This was the first time in all his days that he had had such a letter in his hand, because, although his father had been for many years a writer of books on this very period, his material had been second-hand, even third-hand material. Henry felt a slight contempt for his father as he sat there.

Then, as the minutes swung past, he was aware that he should be doing something more than merely looking at the old letters and complimenting them on their age and pretty pathos. He should be arranging them. Yes, arranging them, but how? He began helplessly to pick them up, look at them and lay them on the table again. Many of them had no dates at all, many were signed only with Christian names, some were not signed at all. And how was he to decide on the important ones? How did he know that he would not pass, through ignorance and inexperience, some signature of world-significance? The letters began to look at him with less approval, even with a certain cynical malevolence. They all looked the same with their faded yellow paper and their confusing handwriting. He had many of them on the table, unbound from their red tape, lying loosely about him and yet the box seemed as full as ever. And there were many more boxes! . . . Suddenly, from the very bowels of the house, a gong sounded.

"You can wash your hands in that little room to the right," said Sir Charles, whose personality suddenly returned as though Henry had pressed a button. "Luncheon will be waiting for us."

And this was the conclusion of Henry's first appearance as a private secretary.

[CHAPTER V]

THE THREE FRIENDS

Upon the afternoon of that same day at five of the clock they were gathered together in Mr. King's friendly attic—Henry, Millicent and Westcott. Because there was so little room Henry and Millie sat on the bed, Peter Westcott having the honour of the cane-bottomed chair, which looked small enough under his large square body.

The attic window was open and the spring afternoon sun came in, bringing with it, so Henry romantically fancied, a whiff from the flower-baskets in Piccadilly and the bursting buds of the St. James's Church trees—also petrol from the garage next door and, as Peter asserted, patchouli and orange-peel from the Comedy Theatre.

At first, as is often the case with tea-parties, there was a little stiffness. It was absurd that on this occasion it should be so; nevertheless the honest fact was that Millie did not care very greatly for Peter and that Henry knew this. She did not care for him, Henry contended, because she did not know him, and this might be because in all their lives they had only met once or twice, Millie generally making some excuse when she knew that Peter would be present.

Was this jealousy? Indignantly she would have denied it. Rather she would have said that it was because she did not think that he made a very good friend for her dear Henry. He was, in her eyes, a rather battered, grumpy, sulky, middle-aged man who was here married and there not married at all, distinctly a failure, immoral probably and certainly a cynic. None of these things would she mind for herself of course, but Henry was so much younger than she, so much more innocent, she happily fancied, about the wicked ways of the world. Westcott would spoil him, take the bloom off him, make him old before his time—that is what she liked to tell him. And perhaps if they had not met on this special afternoon that little barrier would never have been leaped, but to-day they had so much to tell and to hear that restraint was soon impossible, and Henry himself had so romantic a glow in his eyes, and his very hair, that it made at once the whole meeting exceptional. This glow was indeed the very first thing that Millie noticed.

"Why, Henry," she said as soon as she sat down on the bed, "what has happened to you?"

He was swinging on the bed, hugging his knees.

"There's nothing the matter," he said. "I'm awfully happy, that's all."

"Happy because of the Baronet?"

"No, not so much the Baronet although he's all right, and it's awfully interesting if I can only do the work. No, it's something else. I'll tell you all about it when we've had tea. I say, Millie, how stunning you look in that orange jumper. You ought always to wear orange. Oughtn't she, Peter?"

"Yes," said Peter, his eyes fixed gravely upon her.

Millie flushed a little. She didn't want Westcott's approval. A nuisance that he was here at all! It would be so much easier to discuss everything with Henry were he not here.

Mr. King arrived, very solemn, very superior, very dead.

He put down the tray upon the rather rickety little table. They all watched him in silence. When he had gone Henry chuckled.

"He thinks I'm awful," Henry said. "Too awful for anything. I don't suppose he's ever despised any one before as he despises me, and it makes him happy. He loves to have some one who's awful. And now about Miss Platt—every bit about Miss Platt from her top to her toe!"

He went to the tea-table and began to pour out the tea, wishing that Millie and Peter would like one another better and not look so cross.

Millie began. She had come that afternoon burning to tell everything about the Platt household, and then when she saw Westcott there she was closed like an oyster. However, for Henry's sake she must do something, so she began because in her own way she was as truly creative as Henry was in his. She found that she was enjoying herself and it grew under her hand, the Platt house, the Platt rooms, the Platt family, Victoria and Ellen and Clarice, and the little doctor and Beppo and the housekeeper and the statue of Eve and all the letters. . . .

They began to laugh; she was laughing so that she could not speak and Henry was laughing so that the two brazen and unsympathetic muffins which Mr. King had provided fell on to the carpet, and then Peter laughed and laughed more than that, and more again, and any ice that there had ever been was cracked, riven, utterly smashed!

They all fell into the Pond together and found it so warm and comfortable that they decided to stay there for the rest of the afternoon.

"Of course," said Millie, "it entirely remains to be seen whether I'm up to the job. I'm not even sure that I can manage the correspondence, I'm almost certain that I can't manage the servants. The housekeeper hates me already—and then there are the sisters."

"Ellen and Clarice."

Millie nodded her head. "They are queer. But then the situation's queer. Victoria's got all the money and likes the power. They have to do what she says or leave the house and start all alone in a cold and unsympathetic world. They couldn't do that, they couldn't earn their livings for five minutes. Clarice thinks she can sing and act. You should hear her! Ellen does little but sulk. Victoria gives them fine big allowances, but she likes to feel they are her slaves. They'd give anything for their freedom, marry anybody anywhere—but they won't plunge! How can they? They'd starve in a week."

"And would their sister let them?" asked Peter.

"No, I don't think she would," said Millie. "But she'd have them back and they'd be no better off than before. She's a kind-hearted creature, but just loves the power her money gives her—and hasn't the least idea what to do with it! She's as bewildered as though, after being in a dark room all her life, she were suddenly flung into the dancing-hall in Hampstead. . . . Oh, it's a queer time!"

Millie sprang up from the bed.

"Every one's bewildered, the ones that have money and didn't have it, the ones that haven't money and used to have it, the ones with ideas and the ones without, the ones with standards and the ones without, the cliché ones and the old-fashioned ones, the ones that want fun and the ones that want to pray, the ugly ones and the pretty ones, the bold ones and the frightened ones. . . . Everything's breaking up and everything's turning into new shapes and new colours. And I love it! I love it! I love it! I oughtn't to, it's wrong to, I can't help it! . . . . It's enchanting!"

As she stood there, the sun streaming in upon her from the little window and illuminating her gay colours and her youth and health and beauty she seemed to Peter Westcott a sudden flame and fire burning there, in that little attic to show to the world that youth never dies, that life is eternal, that hope and love and beauty are stronger than governments and wars and the changing of forms and boundaries. It was an unforgettable moment to him, and even though it emphasized all the more his own loneliness it seemed to whisper to him that that loneliness would not be for ever.

"Hold on!" said Henry. "Look out, Millie! The table's very shaky and if the plates are broken King will make me pay at least twice what they're worth. You know it's a funny thing, but I'm seeing just the other side of the picture. Your people have just got all their money, my people have just lost all theirs. Before the war, so far as I can make out, Duncombe was quite well off. Most of it came from land, and that's gone down and the Income Tax has come up, and there's hardly anything left. They think they'll have to sell Duncombe Hall which has been in the family for centuries, and that will pretty well break their hearts I fancy."

"They? Who's they?" asked Millie.

"There's a sister," said Henry. "Lady Bell-Hall—Margaret She's the funniest little woman you ever saw. She's a widow. Her husband died in the war—of general shock I should fancy—air-raids and money and impertinence from the lower classes. The widow nearly died from the same thing. She always wears black and a bonnet, and jumps if any one makes the least sound. At the same time she's as proud as Lucifer and good too. She's just bewildered. She can't understand things at all. The word written on her heart when she comes to die will be Bolshevist. She talks all the time and it's from her I know all this!"

"And Duncombe himself? What's he like?" asked Millie.

"Oh, he's queer! I like him but I can't make out what he thinks. He never shows any sign. He will, I suppose, before long. I shall make so many muddles and mistakes that I shall just be shown the door at the end of the month. However, he can't say I didn't warn him. I told him from the beginning just what I was. I know I'm going to have an awful time with those letters. They all look so exactly alike, and many of them haven't got any dates at all, and then I go off dreaming. It's almost impossible not to in that library. It's full of ghosts, and the letters are full of ghosts as well. And I'm sorry for those two. It must be awful, everything that you believe in going, the only world you've ever known coming to an end before your eyes, every one denying all the things you've believed in and laughing at them. He's brave, old Duncombe. He'll go down fighting."

"And what's the other thing?" said Millie, sitting down on the bed again, "that you were going to tell me?"

Henry told his adventure. He did not look at Millie as he told it; he did not want to see whether she approved or disapproved; he was afraid that she would laugh. She laughed at so many things, and most of all he was afraid lest she should say something about the girl. If she did say anything he would have to stand it.

After all Millie had not seen her. . . . So he talked, staring at the little pink clouds that were now forming beyond the window just over the "Comedy" roof—they were like lumps of coral against the sky—three, four, five . . . then they merged into two billowing pillows of colour, slowly fading into a deep crimson, then breaking into long strips of orange lazily forming against a blue that grew paler and paler and at last, as he ended, was white like water under glass.

He stopped.

"How long ago was all this?" Millie asked at last.

"Two days back."

"Have you seen her since?"

"No. I've been round that street several times. I know it by heart. I haven't dared go up—not so soon again."

"I wish I'd seen her," Millie said slowly. Then she added, "Anyway you must go on with it, Henry. You've promised to help her and so of course you must. If she's taking you in it will do you good to be taken in. It will teach you not to be such an ass another time. If she's not taking you in——"

"Of course she's not taking me in," Henry answered hotly. "I know that you and Peter think me a baby and that I haven't any idea of things. You've always thought that, Millie, but I'm sure I don't know what you base it on. I'm hardly ever wrong. Wasn't I right about Philip? Isn't he just the prig I always thought him, and didn't he take Katherine away from us and break us all up just as I said he would?

"And as to girls you both look so learned as though you knew such a lot, but when have I ever been foolish about girls? I've never cared the least bit about them until now. I've been waiting, I think, until she came along. Because I'm not always tidy and break things, you both think I'm an ass. But I'm not an ass, as I'll show you."

Millie went across to him and kissed him on the forehead.

"Of course I don't think you an ass. But you are easily taken in by people—you always believe what they say."

Henry nodded his head. "Perhaps I don't so much as I mean to. But it's the best thing to try to. You get far more that way."

The three sat there in silence. At last Millicent said:

"Isn't it queer? Here's the world on the very edge of every sort of adventure, and here are we on the very edge too? I feel in my bones that we shall go through great things this year—all of us. Unpleasant and pleasant—all sorts. I don't believe that there's ever been in all history such a time for adventure as now."

Henry jumped up from behind the table.

"That's true!" he cried. "And whatever happens we three will stick together. Nothing shall separate us—nothing; and nobody. You and I and Peter. We'll never let anybody come between us. We'll be the three best friends the world has ever seen!"

He caught Millie's hand. She looked up at him, smiling. He came across and caught Peter's also. Suddenly Millicent put out hers and took Peter's free one.

"You're a sentimental donkey, Henry," she said. "But there's something in what you say."

Peter flushed. "I'm older than both of you," he said, "and I'm dull and slow but I'll do what I can."

There was a knock on the door and they sprang apart. It was Mr. King to take away the tea.

[BOOK II]

HIGH SUMMER

[CHAPTER I]

SECOND PHASE OF THE ADVENTURE

Now might young Henry be considered by any observer of average intelligence to be fairly launched into the world—he is in love, he is confidential secretary to a gentleman of importance, he has written ten chapters of a romantic novel and he is living in chambers all on his own. It has been asserted again and again that the Great War of 1914 turned many thousands of boys into old men long before their time. The exact contrary may also be proved to be true—namely that the War caught many boys in their teens, held them in a sort of vise for five years, keeping them from life as it is usually lived, teaching them nothing but war and then suddenly flinging them out into a Peace about which they were as ignorant as blind puppies. Boys of eighteen chronologically supposed to be twenty-four and superficially disguised as men of forty and disillusioned cynical men at that, those were to be found in their thousands in that curious tangled year of 1920. Henry thought he was a man; he was much less a man than he would have been had no war broken out at all.

On the afternoon following the tea party just now described he left Hill Street about four o'clock, his head up and his chest out, a very fine figure indeed had it not been that, unknown to himself, his tie had stepped up to the top of his collar at the back of his neck and there was a small smudge of ink just in the right corner of his nose. He had had a very happy day, very quiet, very peaceful, and he was encouraged to believe that he had been a great success. It was true that Sir Charles had addressed very few words to himself and that Lady Bell-Hall had addressed so many during luncheon that he had felt like a canary peppered with bird-seed, but he did not expect Sir Charles to speak very often, nor did he mind how frequently the funny little woman in the bonnet spoke, so long as she liked him. It had all been very easy, and the letters had been entrancing, so entrancing that Berkeley Square seemed to be Princes Street, and he could see through the open door Sir Walter's hall and Maria Edgeworth announced and the host's cheery welcome and glorious smile, and the laughter of the children, and Maria dragged into the circle and forced to sing the Highland song with the rest of them, and Honest John hurrying down Castle Street wrapped up against the cold, and the high frosty sky and the Castle frowning over all.

He had been there—surely he had been there in an earlier incarnation, and now this. . . . He was pulled up by a taxi ringing at him fiercely, and by the press of carriages at the Piccadilly turning.

He was swung suddenly on to the business of the moment, namely that he was going to make his first serious attempt at breaking through into the mysteries of Peter Street, then definitely to do or die—although as a matter of honest fact he had no intention whatever of dying just yet. He was borne into Shaftesbury Avenue before he knew where he was, borne by the tide of people, men and women happy in the bright purple-hued spring afternoon, happy in spite of the hard times and the uncertain future, borne along, too, by the cries and sounds, the roll of the omnibuses, the screams of the taxis, the shouting of the newsboys, the murmur of countless voices, the restless rhythm of the unceasing life beneath the brick and mortar, the life of the primeval forests, the ghosts of the serpents and the lions waiting with confident patience for the earth to return to them once more.

He slipped into Peter Street as into a country marked off from the rest of the world and known to him by heart. This afternoon the barrows and stalls were away; no one was there, not even the familiar policeman. It was like a back-water hidden from the main river, and its traffic by the thick barrier of the forest trees, gleaming in its own sunlight, happy in its solitude. He found the door-bell, listened to it go tinkling into the depths of the house, and after its cessation heard only the thumping of his own heart and the shattered beat of the unresting town.

He waited, it seemed, an unconscionable time; then slowly the door opened, revealing to his astonished gaze the girl herself. So staggered was he by her appearance that for the moment he could only stare. The passage behind her was dark in spite of the strong afternoon sun.

"Oh!" he said at last. "I came. . . . I came. . . ."

She looked at him.

"Have you come to see my mother?" The tiny slur of the foreign accent excited him as it had done before. It seemed suddenly that he had known her for ever.

"Because if you have," she went on. "Mother's out."

"No," he said boldly, "I've come to see you."

She looked back to the stairs as though she were afraid that some one were lurking there and would overhear them. She dropped her voice a little.

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "Mother." Then hurriedly, "Come up. Come up. I don't like being alone and that's the truth. If mother's angry when she comes in I don't care. Anything's better."

She turned and led the way. He followed her, smelling the stuffiness that was like dirty blankets pressed against the nose. There was no window to the stairs, and at the corner it was so dark that he stumbled. He heard her laugh in the distance, then an opened door threw light down. He was in the room where he had been before, enwrapped still in its heavy curtains, and lit even on this lovely day with electric light heavily clouded under the pink silk shades. She was still laughing, standing at the other side of the table.

He stood awkwardly fingering his hat. He had nothing to say, and they were both silent a long time. Then simply because he was expecting the hated woman's arrival at any moment he began:

"I've been wanting to come all these three days. I've thought of nothing else, of how you said I could help you—and—get you out of this. I will. I will—I'll do anything. You can come now if you like, and I'll take you to my sister's—she's very nice and you'll like her—and they can do anything they like, but they shan't take you away. . . ."

He was quite breathless with excitement. She stared at him gravely as though not understanding what he said. When he saw the puzzle in her eyes his eloquence was suddenly exhausted and he could only stammer out:

"That's—that's what you said the other day—that you wanted to escape."

"To escape?" she repeated.

"You said that."

She moved her hands impatiently, and her voice dropped until it was almost a whisper.

"When you came the other day I was foolish because mother had just been angry. I was excited because she had been angry before that horrid fat woman—you remember? I hate her to be angry when she's there because she likes it. She hates me because I'm young and she's old. . . . Of course I can't get away—and how could I go with you? I don't know you. Why, you're only a boy!" Then she added reflectively, as though she were giving the final conclusive argument, "and you've got ink on your nose."

Henry committed then what is always a foolish seeming act at the very best, he took out a not very clean handkerchief, licked a corner of it with his tongue and rubbed his nose.

"It's on the right side in the corner," she said, regarding him.

"Is it off now?" he asked her.

"Yes."

Henry then pulled himself together and behaved like a man.

"I don't know what you mean now," he said, "about not wanting me to help you, but you did say that the other day and you must take the consequences. I don't want to help you in any way, of course, that you don't want to be helped, but I am sure there is something I can do for you. And in any case I'm going on coming to see you until I'm stopped by physical force—even then I'm going on coming."

"I'll tell you this," she said suddenly. "I don't want you to come because mother wants you to, and every one whom mother wants me to like is horrid. Why does she want you to come?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Henry, surprised. "She can't know anything about me at all."

"She does. She's found out in these two days. She said yesterday afternoon she wondered you hadn't come, and then this morning again."

Henry said: "Won't you take me as I am? Your mother doesn't know me. I want to be your friend. I've wanted to from the first moment I saw you in Piccadilly Circus."

"In Piccadilly Circus?"

"Yes. That's where I first saw you the other afternoon and I followed you here."

That seemed to her of no importance. "Friend?" she said frowning and staring in front of her. "I don't like that word. Two or three have wanted to be friends. I won't have friends. I won't have anybody. I'd rather be alone."

"I can't hurt you," said Henry very simply. "Why every one laughs at me, even my sister who's very fond of me. They won't laugh, one day, of course, but you see how it is. There's always ink on my nose, or I tumble down when I want to do something important. You'd have thought the army would have changed that, but it didn't."

She smiled then. "No, you don't look as though you'd hurt anybody. But I don't want to trust people. It only means you're disappointed again."

"You can't be disappointed in me," Henry said earnestly. "Because I'm just what you see. Please let me come and see you. I want it more than I've ever wanted anything in my life."

They both heard then steps on the stair. They stopped and listened. The room was at once ominous, alarmed.

Henry felt danger approaching, as though he could see beyond the door with his eyes and found on the stair some dark shape, undefined and threatening. The steps came nearer and ceased. Two were there listening on the other side of the door as two were listening within the room.

He felt the girl's fear and that suddenly stiffened his own courage. It was almost ludicrous then when the door opened and revealed the stout Mrs. Tenssen, clothed now in light orange and with her an old man.

Henry saw at once that however eagerly she had hitherto expected him she was not easy at his presence just now. His further glance at the old man showed him at once an enemy for life. In any case he did not like old men. The War had carried him with the rest upon the swing of that popular cry "Every one over seventy to the lethal chamber."

Moreover, he personally knew no old men, which made the cry much simpler. This old man was not over seventy, he might indeed be still under sixty, but his small peak of a white beard, his immaculate clothing and his elegantly pointed patent leather shoes were sufficient for Henry. Immaculate old men! How dared they wear anything but sackcloth and ashes?

Mrs. Tenssen, whose orange garments shone with ill-temper, shook hands with Henry as though she expected him instantly to say: "Well, I must be going now," but he found himself with an admirable pugnacity and defiant resolve.

"I called as I said I would," he observed pleasantly. "And I came in by the door and not by the window," he added, laughing.

She murmured something, but did not attempt to introduce him to her companion.

He meanwhile had advanced with rather mincing steps to the girl, was bowing over her hand and then to Henry's infinite disgust was kissing it. Then Henry forgot all else in his adoration of the girl. He will never forget, to the end of whatever life that may be granted him, the picture that she made at that moment, standing in the garish, overlighted room, like a queen in her aloofness from them all, from everything that life could offer if that room, that old man, that woman were truly typical of its gifts. "It wasn't only," Henry said afterwards to Peter, "that she was beautiful. Millie's beautiful—more beautiful I suppose than Christina. But Millie is flesh and blood. You can believe that she has toothache. But it was like a spell, a witchery. The beastly old man himself felt it. As though he had tried to step on to sacred ground and was thrown back on to common earth again. By gad, Peter, you don't know how stupid he suddenly looked—and how beastly! She's remote, a vision—not perhaps for any one to touch—ever . . .!"

"That," said Peter, "is because you're in love with her—and Millie's your sister."

"No, there's more than that. It may be partly because she's a foreigner—but you'd feel the same if you saw her. Her remoteness, as though the farther towards her you moved the farther away she'd be. Always in the distance and knowing that you can come no nearer. And yet if she knew that really she wouldn't be so frightened as she is. . . ."

"It's all because you're so young, Henry," Peter ended up.

But young or no Henry just then wasn't very happy. The old man with his shrill voice and his ironic, almost cynical determination to be pleased with everything that any one did or said (it came, maybe, from a colossal and patronizing arrogance)—reminded Henry of the old "nicky-nacky" Senator in Otway's Venice Preserved which he had once seen performed by some amateur society. He remained entirely unclouded by Mrs. Tenssen's obvious boredom and ill-temper, moods so blatantly displayed that Henry in spite of himself was crushed.

The girl showed no signs of any further interest in the company.

Mrs. Tenssen sat at the table, picking her teeth with a toothpick and saying, "Indeed!" or "Well I never!" in an abstracted fashion when the old man's pauses seemed to demand something. Her bold eyes moved restlessly round the room, pausing upon things as though she hated them and sometimes upon Henry who was standing, indeterminately, first on one foot and then on another. Something the old man said seemed suddenly to rouse her:

"Well, that's not fair, Mr. Leishman—it's not indeed. That's as good as saying that you think I'm mean—it is indeed. Oh, yes, it is. You can accuse me of many things—I'm not perfect—but meanness! Well you ask my friends. You ask my friend Mrs. Armstrong who's known me as long as any one has—almost from the cradle you might say. Mean! You ask her. Why, only the other day, the day Mr. Prothero was here and that young nephew of his, she said, 'Of all the generous souls on this earth, for real generosity and no half-and-half about it, you give me Katie Tenssen.' Of course, she's a friend as you might say and partial perhaps—but still that's what she said and——"

The old man had been trying again and again to interrupt this flood. At last, because Mrs. Tenssen was forced to take a breath, he broke in:

"No. No. Indeed not. Dear, dear, what a mistake! The last thing I was suggesting."

"Well, I hope so, I'm sure." The outburst over, Mrs. Tenssen relapsed into teeth-picking again.

Henry saw that there was nothing more to be got from the situation just then.

"I must be going," he said. "Important engagement."

Mrs. Tenssen shook him by the hand. She regarded him with a wider amiability now that he was departing.

"Come and see us again," she said. "Any afternoon almost."

By the door he turned, and suddenly the girl, from the far end of the room, smiled. It was a smile of friendship, of reassurance and, best of all, of intimacy.

Under the splendour of it he felt the blood rush to his head, his eyes were dimmed, he stumbled down the stairs, the happiest creature in London.

The smile accompanied him for the rest of that day, through the night, and into the Duncombe library next morning. That morning was not an easy one for Henry. He arrived with the stern determination to work his very hardest and before the luncheon bell sounded to reduce at least some of the letters to discipline and sobriety. Extraordinary the personal life that those letters seemed to possess! You would suppose that they did not wish to be made into a book, or at any rate, if that had to be, that they did not wish the compiler of the work to be Henry. They slipped from under his fingers, hid themselves, deprived him of dates just when he most urgently needed them, gave him Christian names when he must have surnames, and were sometimes so old and faded and yellow that it was impossible to make anything out of them at all.

Sir Charles had as yet shown no sign. Of what he was thinking it was impossible to guess. He had not yet given Henry any private letters to write, and the first experiment on the typewriter was still to be made. One day soon he would spring, and with his long nose hanging over the little tattered, disordered piles on Henry's table would peer and finger and examine: Henry knew that that moment was approaching and that he must have something ready, but this morning he could not concentrate. The plunge into life had been too sudden. The girl was with him in the room, standing just a little way from him smiling at him. . . .

And behind her again there were Millie and the Platts, and Peter and the three Graces, and the Romantic Novel and even Mr. King—and behind these again all London with its banging, clattering, booming excitement, the omnibuses running, the flags flying, the Bolshevists with their plots, and the shops with their jewels and flowers, the actors and actresses rehearsing in the theatres, the messenger boys running with messages, the policemen standing with hands outstretched, the newspapers announcing the births and the deaths and the marriages, D'Annunzio in Fiume, the Poles in Warsaw fighting for their lives, the Americans in New York drinking secretly in little back bedrooms and the sun rising and setting all over the place at an incredible speed.

It was of no use to say that Henry had nothing to do with any of these things. He might have something to do with any one of them at any moment. Stop for an instant to see whether the ground is going to open in Piccadilly Circus and you are lost!—or found!—at any rate, you are taken, neck and crop, and flung into life whether you wish it or no. And Henry did wish it! He loved this nearness and closeness, this sense of being both one of the audience and the actors at one and the same time! Meanwhile the letters, with their gentle slightly scornful evocation of another world, only a little behind this one, and in its own opinion at any rate, infinitely superior to it, were waiting for his concentration.

Then the Duncombe family itself was beginning to absorb him, with its own dramatic possibilities. At luncheon that day he was made forcibly aware of that drama.

Lady Bell-Hall had from the first stirred his eager sympathies. He was so very sorry for the poor little woman. He did so eagerly wish that he could persuade her to be a little less frightened at the changes that were going on around her. After all, if Duncombe Hall had to be sold and if she were forced to live in a little flat and have only one servant, did it matter so terribly? Even though Soviets were set up in London and strange men with red handkerchiefs and long black beards did sit at Westminster there would still be many delightful things left to enjoy! Her health was good, her appetite quite admirable and the Young Women's Christian Association and Society for the Comfort of Domestic Servants and the League of Pity for Aged Widowers (some among many of Lady Bell-Hall's interests) would in all probability survive many Revolutions or, at least, even though they changed their names, would turn into something equally useful and desirous of help. He longed to say some of these things to her.

His opportunity suddenly and rather uncomfortably arrived.

Lady Bell-Hall in appearance resembled a pretty little pig—that is, she had the features of a pig, a very young pig before time has enveloped it in fat. And so soft and pink were her cheeks, so round her little arms, of so delicate a white her little nose, so beseechingly grey her eyes that you realised very forcibly how charming and attractive sucklings might easily be. She sat at the end of the round mahogany table in the long dark dining-room, talked to her unresponsive brother and sometimes to Henry in a soft gentle voice with a little plaint in it, infinitely touching and pathetic, hoping against hope for the best.

To-day there came to the luncheon an old friend of the family, whose name Henry had once or twice heard, a Mr. Light-Johnson.

Mr. Light-Johnson was a long, thin, cadaverous-looking man with black sleek hair and a voice like a murmuring brook. He paid no attention to Henry and very little to Duncombe, but he sat next to Lady Bell-Hall and leaned towards her and stared into her face with large wondering eyes that seemed always to be brimming with unshed tears.

There are pessimists and pessimists, and it seems to be one of the assured rules of life that however the world may turn, whatever unexpected joys may flash upon the horizon, however many terrible disasters may be averted from mankind, pessimists will remain pessimists to the end. And such a pessimist as this Henry had never before seen.

He had an irritating, tantalizing habit of lifting a spoonful of soup to his lips and then putting it down again because of his interest in what he was saying.

"What I feared last Wednesday," he said, "has already come true."

"Oh dear!" said Lady Bell-Hall. "What is that?"

"The Red Flag is flying in East Croydon. The Workers' Industrial Union have commandeered the Y.M.C.A reading-room and have issued a manifesto to the Croydon Parish Council."

"Dear, dear! Dear, dear!" said Lady Bell-Hall.

"It is a melancholy satisfaction," said Mr. Light-Johnson, "to think how right one was last Wednesday. I hardly expected that my words would be justified so quickly."

"And do you think," said Lady Bell-Hall, "that the movement—taking Y.M.C.A. reading-rooms I mean—will spread quickly over London?"

"Dear Lady," said Mr. Light-Johnson, "I can't disguise from you that I fear the worst. It would be foolish to do any other. I have a cousin, Major Merriward—you've heard me speak of him—whose wife is a niece of one of Winston Churchill's secretaries. He told me last night at the Club that Churchill's levity!—well, it's scandalous—Nero fiddling while Rome burns isn't in it at all! I must tell you frankly that I expect complete Bolshevist rule in London within the next three months."

"Oh dear! oh dear!" said Lady Bell-Hall. "Do have a little of that turbot, Mr. Johnson. You're eating nothing. I'm only too afraid you're right. The banks will close and we shall all starve."

"For the upper classes," said Mr. Johnson, "the consequences will be truly terrible. In Petrograd to-day Dukes and Duchesses are acting as scavengers in the streets. What else can we expect? I heard from a man in the Club yesterday, whose son was in the Archangel forces that it is Lenin's intention to move to London and to make it the centre of his world rule. I leave it to you to imagine, Lady Bell-Hall, how safe any of us will be when we are in the power of Chinese and Mongols."

"Chinese!" cried Lady Bell-Hall. "Chinese!"

"Undoubtedly. They will police London or what is left of it, because there will of course be severe fighting first, and nowadays, with aerial warfare what it is, a few days' conflict will reduce London to a heap of ruins."

"And what about the country?" asked Lady Bell-Hall. "I'm sure the villagers at Duncombe are very friendly. And so they ought to be considering the way that Charles has always treated them."

"It's from the peasantry that I fear the worst," said Mr. Light-Johnson. "After all it has always been so. Think of La Vendée, think of the Russian peasantry in this last Revolution. No, there is small comfort there, I'm afraid."

Throughout this little conversation Duncombe had kept silent. Now he broke in with a little ironic chuckle; this was the first time that Henry had heard him laugh.

"Just think, Margaret," he said, "of Spiders. Spiders is our gardener, Light-Johnson, a stout cheery fellow. He will probably be local executioner."

Light-Johnson turned and looked at his host with reproachful eyes.

"Many a true word before now has been spoken in jest, Duncombe," he said. "You will at any rate not deny that this coming winter is going to be an appalling one—what with strikes, unemployment and the price of food for ever going up—all this with the most incompetent Government that any country has ever had in the world's history. I don't think that even you, Duncombe, can call the outlook very cheerful."

"Every Government is the worst that any country's ever had," said Duncombe. "However, I daresay you're right, Light-Johnson. Perhaps this is the end of the world. Who knows? And what does it matter if it is?"

"Really, Charles!" Lady Bell-Hall was eating her cutlet with great rapidity, as though she expected a naked Chinaman to jump in through the window at any moment and snatch it from her. "But seriously, Mr. Light-Johnson, do you see no hope anywhere?"

"Frankly none at all. I don't think any one could call me a pessimist. I simply look at things as they are—the true duty of every man."

"And what do you think one ought to do?"

"For myself," said Light-Johnson, helping himself to another cutlet, "I shall spend the coming winter on the Riviera—Mentone, I think. The Income Tax is so scandalous that I shall probably live in the south of France during the next year or two."

"And so shoulder your responsibilities like a true British citizen," said Duncombe. "I'm sure you're right. You're lucky to be able to get away so easily."

Light-Johnson's sallow cheeks flushed ever so slightly. "Of course, if I felt that I could do any good I would remain," he said. "I'm not the sort of man to desert a sinking ship, I hope. Sinking it is, I fear. The great days of England are over. We must not be sentimentalists nor stick our heads, ostrich-wise, in the sand. We must face facts."

It was here that Henry made his great interruption, an interruption that was, had he only known it, to change the whole of his future career. He had realized thoroughly at first that it was his place to be seen and not heard. Young secretaries were not expected to talk unless they were definitely needed to make a party "go." But as Light-Johnson had continued his own indignation had grown. His eyes, again and again, in spite of himself, sought Lady Bell-Hall's face. He simply could not bear to see the little lady tortured—for tortured she evidently was. Her little features were all puckered with distress. Her eyes had the wide staring expression of a child seeing a witch for the first time. Every word that Light-Johnson uttered seemed to stab her like a knife. To Henry this was awful.

"They are not facts. They are not facts!" he cried. "After every war there are years when people are confused. Of course there are. It can't be otherwise. We shall never have Bolshevism here. Russian conditions are different from everywhere else. They are all ignorant in Russia. Millions of ignorant peasants. While prices are high of course people are discontented and say they're going to do dreadful things. When everybody's working again prices will go down and then you see how much any one thinks about Russia! England isn't going to the dogs, and it never will!"

The effect of this outburst was astonishing. Light-Johnson turned round and stared at Henry as though he were a small Pom that had hitherto reposed peacefully under the table but had suddenly woken up and bitten his leg. He smiled, his first smile of the day.

"Quite so," he said indulgently. "Of course. One can't expect every one to have the same views on these matters."

But Lady Bell-Hall was astonishing. To Henry's amazement she was angry, indignant. She stared at him as though he had offered a deadly insult. Why, she wanted to be made miserable! She liked Mr. Johnson's pessimism! She wished to be tortured! She preferred it! She hugged her wound and begged for another turn on the wheel!

"Really, Mr. Trenchard," she said, "I don't think you can know very much about it. As Mr. Light-Johnson says, we should face facts." She ended her sentence with a hint of indulgence as though she would say: "He's very, very young. We must excuse him on the score of his youth."

The rest of the meal was most uncomfortable. Light-Johnson would speak no more. Henry was miserable and indignant. He had made a fool of himself, but he was glad that he had spoken! Lady Bell-Hall would hate him always now and would prejudice her brother against him—but he was glad that he had spoken! Nevertheless his cheese choked him, and in embarrassed despair he took a pear that he did not want, and because no one else had fruit ate it in an overwhelming silence.

Then in the library he had his reward. Light-Johnson had departed.

"I shan't want you this afternoon, Trenchard," Duncombe said. Then he added: "You spoke up well. That man's an ass."

"I shouldn't," he stammered, "have said anything. I don't know enough. I only——"

"Nonsense. You know more than Light-Johnson. Speak up whenever you have a mind to. It does my sister good."

And this was the beginning of an alliance between the two.

[CHAPTER II]

MILLIE AND PETER

And here are some extracts from a diary that Millicent kept at this time.

April 14.—Just a week since I started with the Platts and I feel as though I'd been there all my life. And yet I haven't got the thing going at all. I'm in nearly the same mess as I was the first morning. I'm not proud of myself, but at the same time it isn't my fault. Look at the Interruptions alone! (I've put a capital because really they are at the heart of all my trouble.) Victoria herself doesn't begin to know what letting any one alone is. I seem at present to have an irresistible fascination for her. She sits and stares at me until I feel as though I were some strange animal expected to change into something stranger.

And she doesn't know what silence means. She says: "I mustn't interrupt your work, my Millie" (I do wish she wouldn't call me "my Millie"), and then begins at once to chatter. All the same one can't help being fond of her—at least at present. I expect I shall get very impatient soon and then I'll be rude and then there'll be a scene and then I shall leave. But she really is so helpless and so full of alarms and terrors. Never again will I envy any one with money! I expect before the War she was quite a happy woman with a small allowance from her father, living in Streatham and giving little tea-parties. Now what with Income Tax, servants, motor-cars, begging friends, begging enemies, New Art and her sisters she doesn't know where to turn. Of course Clarice and Ellen are her principal worries. I've really no patience with Clarice. I hate her silly fat face, pink blanc-mange with its silly fluffy yellow hair. I hate the way she dresses, always too young for her years and always with bits stuck on to her clothes as though she picked pieces of velvet and lace up from the floor and pinned them on just anywhere.

I hate her silly laugh and her vanity and the way that she will recite a poem about a horse (I think it is called something like "Lascar") on the smallest opportunity. I suppose I can't bear seeing any one make a fool of herself or himself and all the people who come to the Platts' house laugh at her. All the same, she's the happiest of the three women; that's because she's more truly conceited than the others. It's funny to see how she prides herself on having learned how to manage Victoria. She's especially sweet to her when she wants anything and you can see it coming on hours beforehand. Victoria is a fool in many things but she isn't such a fool as all that. I call Clarice the Ostrich.

Ellen is quite another matter. By far the most interesting of them. I think she would do something remarkable if she'd only break away from the family and get outside it. Part of her unhappiness comes, I'm sure, from her not being able to make up her mind to do this. She despises herself. And she despises everybody else too. Men especially, she detests men, although she dresses rather like them. Victoria and Clarice are both afraid of her because of the bitter things she says. She glares at the people who come to lunch and tea as though she would like to call fire down and burn them all. It's amusing to see one of the new artists (I beg their pardon—New Artists) trying to approach her, attempting flattery and then falling back aware that he has made one enemy in the house at any rate. The funny thing is that she rather likes me, and that is all the stranger because I understand from Brooker, the little doctor, that she always disliked the secretaries. And I haven't been especially sweet to her. Just my ordinary which Mary says is less than civility. . . .

April 16.—Ephraim Block and his friend Adam P. Quinzey (that isn't his real name but it's something like that) to luncheon. I couldn't help asking him whether he didn't think the "Eve" rather too large. And didn't he despise me for asking! He told me that when he gets a commission for sculpting in an open space, the tree that goes with the "Eve" will be large enough to shelter all the school children of Europe.

Although he's absurd I can't help being sorry for him. He is so terribly hungry and eats Victoria's food as though he were never going to see another meal again. Ellen tells me that he's got a woman who lives with him by whom he's had about eight children. Poor little things! And I think Victoria's beginning to get tired of him. She's irritated because he wants her to pay for the tree and the serpent as well as Eve herself. He says it isn't his fault that Victoria's house isn't large enough and she says that he hasn't even begun the Tree yet and when he's finished it it will be time enough to talk. Then there are the Balaclavas (the nearest I can get to their names). She's a Russian dancer, very thin and tall and covered with chains and beads, and he's very fat with a dead white face and long black hair. They talk the strangest broken English and are very depressed about life in general—as well they may be, poor things. He thinks Pavlowa and Karsavina simply aren't in it with her as artists and I daresay they're not, but one never has a chance of judging because she never gets an engagement anywhere. So meanwhile they eat Victoria's food and try to borrow money off any one in the house who happens to be handy. You can't help liking them, they're so helpless. Of course I know that Block and the Balaclavas and Clarice's friends are all tenth-rate as artists. I've seen enough of Henry's world to see that. They are simply plundering Victoria as Brooker says, but I'm rather glad all the same that for a time at any rate they've found a place with food in it.

I shan't be glad soon. I'm beginning to realize in myself a growing quite insane desire to get this house straight—insane because I don't even see how to begin. And Victoria's very difficult! She loves Power and if you suggest anything and she thinks you're getting too authoritative she at once vetoes it whatever it may be. On the other hand she's truly warm-hearted and kind. If I can keep my temper and stay on perhaps I shall manage it. . . .

April 17.—I've had thorough "glooms" to-day. I'm writing this in bed whither I went as early as nine o'clock, Mary being out at a party and the sitting-room looking grizzly. I feel better already. But a visit to mother always sends me into the depths. It is terrible to me to see her lying there like a dead woman, staring in front of her, unable to speak, unable to move. Extraordinary woman that she is! Even now she won't see Katherine although Katherine tries again and again.

And I think that she hates me too. That nurse (whom I can't abide) has tremendous power over her. I detest the house now. It's so gloomy and still and corpse-like. When you think of all the people it used to have in it—so many that nobody would believe it when we told them. What fun we used to have at Christmas time and on birthdays, and down at Garth too. Philip finished all that—not that he meant to, poor dear.

After seeing mother I had tea with father down in the study. He's jolly when I'm there, but honestly, I think he forgets my very existence when I'm not. He never asked a single question about Henry. Just goes from his study to his club and back again. He says that his book Haslitt and His Contemporaries is coming out in the Autumn. I wonder who cares?

It makes me very lonely if one thinks about it. Of course there's dear Henry—and after him Katherine and Mary. But Henry's got this young woman he picked up in Piccadilly Circus and Katherine's got her babies and Mary her medicine. And I've got the Platts I suppose. . . .

All the same sometimes it isn't much fun being a modern girl. I daresay liberty and going about like a man's a fine thing, but sometimes I'd like to have some one pet me and make a fuss over me and care whether I'm alive or not.

On the impulse of this mood, I've asked Peter Westcott to come and have tea with me. He seems lonely too and was really nice at Henry's the other day. Now I shall go to sleep and dream about Victoria's correspondence.

April 18.—A young man to luncheon to-day very different from the others. Humphrey Baxter by name; none of the aesthete about him! Clean, straight-back, decently dressed, cheerful young man. Item, dark with large brown eyes. At first it puzzled me as to how he got into this crowd at all, then I discovered that he's rehearsing in a play that Clarice is getting up, The Importance of Being Earnest. He plays Bunbury or has something to do with a man called Bunbury—anyway they all call him Bunny. He's vastly amused by the aesthetes and laughs at them all the time, the odd thing is that they don't mind. He also knows exactly how to treat Victoria, taking her troubles seriously, although his eyes twinkle, and being really very courteous to her.

The only one of the family who hates him is Ellen. She can't abide him and told him so to-day, when he challenged her. He asked her why she hated him. She said, "You're useless, vain and empty-headed." He said, "Vain and empty-headed I may be, but useless no. I oil the wheels." She said hers didn't need oiling and he said that if ever they did need it she was to send for him. This little sparring match was very light-hearted on his side, deadly earnest on hers. The only other person who isn't sure of him is Brooker—I don't know why.

Of course I like him—Bunny I mean. What it is to have some one gay and sensible in this household. He likes me too. Ellen says he goes after every girl he sees.

I don't care if he does. I can look after myself. She's a queer one. She's always looking at me as though she wanted to speak to me. And yesterday a strange thing happened. I was going upstairs and she was going down. We met at the corner and she suddenly bent forward and kissed me on the cheek. Then she ran on upstairs as though the police were after her. I don't very much like being kissed by other women I must confess; however, if it gives her pleasure, poor thing, I'm glad. She's so unhappy and so cross with herself and every one else.

April 20.—Bunny comes every day now. He says he wants to tell me about his life—a very interesting one he says. He complains that he never finds me alone. I tell him I have my work to do.

April 21.—Bunny wants me to act in Clarice's play. I said I wouldn't for a million pounds. Clarice is furious with me and says I'm flirting with him.

April 22.—Bunny and I are going to a matinee of Chu Chin Chow. He says he's been forty-four times and I haven't been once. He likes to talk to me about his mother. He wants me to meet her.

April 24.—Clarice won't speak to me. I don't care. Why shouldn't I have a little fun? And Bunny is a good sort. He certainly isn't very clever, but he says his strong line is motor-cars, about which I know nothing. After all, if some one's clever in one thing that's enough. I'm not clever in anything. . . .

April 25.—Sunday, I went over to luncheon to see whether I could do anything for Victoria and had an extraordinary conversation with Ellen. She insisted on my going up to her bedroom with her after luncheon. A miserable looking room, with one large photograph over the bed of a girl, rather pretty. Mary Pickford prettiness—and nothing else at all.

She began at once, a tremendous tirade, striding about the room, her hands behind her back. Words poured forth like bath-water out of a pipe. She said that I hated her and that every one hated her. That she had always been hated and she didn't care, but liked it. That she hoped that more people would hate her; that it was an honour to be hated by most people. But that she didn't want me to hate her and that she couldn't think why I did. Unless of course I'd listened to what other people said of her—that I'd probably done that as every one did it. But she had hoped that I was wiser. And kinder. And more generous. . . . Here she paused for breath and I was able to get in a word saying that I didn't hate her, that nobody had said anything against her, that in fact I liked her—— Oh no, I didn't. Ellen burst in. No, no, I didn't. Any one could see that. I was the only person she'd ever wanted to like her and she wasn't allowed to have even that. I assured her that I did like her and considered her my friend and that we'd always be friends. Upon that she burst into tears, looking too strange, sitting in an old rocking-chair and rocking herself up and down. I can't bear to see any one cry; it doesn't stir my pity as it ought to do. It only makes me irritated. So I just sat on her bed and waited. At last she stopped and sniffing a good deal, got up and came over. She sat down on the bed and suddenly put her arms round me and stroked my hair. I can't bear to have my hair stroked by anybody—or at least by almost anybody. However, I sat there and let her do it, because she seemed so terribly unhappy.

I suppose she felt I wasn't very responsive because suddenly she got up very coldly and with great haughtiness as though she were a queen dismissing an audience. "Well, now you'd better go. I've made a sufficient fool of myself for one day." So I got up too and laughed because it seemed the easiest thing and said that I was her friend and always would be and would help her anyway I could but that I wasn't very sentimental and couldn't help it if I wasn't. And she said still very haughtily that I didn't understand her but that that wasn't very strange because after all no one else did, and would I go because she had a headache and wanted to lie down. So I went.

Wasn't I glad after this to find Bunny downstairs. He suggested a walk and as Victoria was sleeping on the Sunday beef upstairs I agreed and we went along all through the Park and up to the Marble Arch, and the sun was so bright that it made the sheep look blue and the buds were waxy and there were lots of dogs and housemaids being happy with soldiers and babies in prams and all the atheists and Bolsheviks as cheery as anything on their tubs. Bunny really is a darling. He sees all the funny things, just as I do; I don't believe a word that Ellen says about him. He assures me that he's only loved one girl in his life and that he gave her up because she said that she wouldn't have babies. He was quite right I think. He says that he's just falling in love again with some one else now. Of course he may mean me and he certainly looked as though he did. I don't care. I want to be happy and people to like me and every one to love everybody. Why shouldn't they? Not uncomfortably, making scenes like Ellen, but just happily with a sense of humour and not expecting miracles. I said this to Bunny and he agreed.

We had tea in a café in Oxford Street. He wanted to take me to a Cinema after that but I wouldn't. I went home and read Lord Jim until Mary came in. That's the book Henry used to be crazy about. I think Bunny is rather like Jim although, of course, Bunny isn't a coward. . . .

Now Millie was seized with a strange and unaccountable happiness—unaccountable to her because she did not try to account for it. Simply, everything was lovely—the weather, the shops, the people in the streets, Mary, Henry, the Platts (although Clarice pouted at her and Ellen was sulky). Everything was lovely. She danced, she sang, she laughed. Nothing and nobody could offend her. . . .

In the middle of this happiness Peter Westcott came to tea. She had asked him because she was sorry for him and because she felt that she had not been quite fair to him in the past. Nevertheless as she waited for him in her little sitting-room there was a little patronage and contempt for him still in her heart. She had always thought of him as old and gloomy and solemn. He seemed to her to be that to-day as he came in, stayed awkwardly for a moment by the door and then came forward with heavy rather lumbering steps towards her. But his hand was warm and strong—a clean good grip that she liked. He sat down, making her wicker chair creak—then there was an untidy pause. She gave him his tea and something to eat and talked about the weather.

At another time, it might be, the ice would never have been broken and he would have gone away, leaving them no closer than they had been before. But to-day her happiness was too much for her; she could not see him without wanting to make him laugh.

"Have you seen Henry?" she asked. It was so difficult to speak much about Henry without smiling.

"Not for a week," he answered, "he's very busy with his Baronet and his strange young woman." Then he smiled. He looked straight across at her, into her eyes.

"Why did you ask me to come to tea?"

"Why?"

"Yes, because you don't like me. You think me a tiresome middle-aged bore and a bad influence for Henry." His eyes drew her own. Suddenly she liked his face, his clear honest gaze, his strong mouth and something there that spoke unmistakably of loyalty and courage.

"Well, I didn't like you," she said after a moment's pause. "That's quite true. I liked you for the first time at Henry's the other day. You see I've had no chance of knowing you, have I? And I decided that we ought to know one another—because of Henry."

"Do you really want to know me better?" he asked.

"Yes, I really want to," she answered.

"Well, then, I must tell you something—something about myself. I never speak about the past to anybody. Of what importance can it be to anybody but myself? But if we are going to be friends you ought to know something of it—and I'm going to tell you."

She saw that he had, before he came, made up his mind as to exactly the things that he would tell her, that without realizing it he intended it as an honour that he should want to tell her. Then, too, her feminine curiosity stirred in her. Henry had told her a little, a very little, about him; she knew that he had had a bad time, that he was married, but that his wife had been seen by no one for many years, that he had written some books now forgotten, that he had done well in the War—and that was all.

"Tell me everything you like," she said. "I'm proud that you should want to."

"I was born," Peter began, "in a little town called Treliss on the borders of Cornwall and Glebeshire in '84. I had a very rotten childhood. I won't bore you with all that, but my mother was frightened into her grave by my father who hated me and everybody else. He sent me to a bad school, and at last I ran away up to London. I had one friend, a Treliss fisherman, who was the best human being I've ever known, and he came up to London with me. Things went from bad to worse the first years, but looking back on it I can only see everything that happened in the most ridiculously romantic light—absurd things that I'd like to tell you more about in detail some time. They were so absurd; you simply wouldn't believe me if I told you. I was mixed up for instance with melodramatic theatrical anarchists who tried to blow up poor old Victoria when she was out riding. Looking back now I can't be sure that those things ever really happened at all.

"I never seem to meet such people now or to see such things. Was it only my youth perhaps that made me fancy it all like that? You and Henry, may be, are imagining things in just that way now. Stephen, for instance, my fisherman friend. I've never met any one like him since—so good, so simple, so direct, so childlike. I knew magnificent men in the War as direct and simple as Stephen, but they didn't affect me in the way he did—that may have been my youth again.

"Whatever it was we went lower and lower. We couldn't get any work and we were just about starving, when I got ill, so ill that I should have died if the luck hadn't suddenly turned, an old school friend of mine appeared and carried me off to his home. Yes, luck turned with a vengeance then. I had written a story and it was published and it had a little success. One thinks you know that that little success is a very big one the first time it comes—that every one is talking about one and reading one when really it is a few thousand people at the most.

"Anyway that first success put me on my feet. It was during those years after the Boer War when I think literary success was easier to get than it is now—more attention was paid to writing because the world was quieter and had leisure to think about the arts and money to pay for them. I don't mean that genius, real genius, wouldn't find it just as easy now as then to come along and establish itself, but I wasn't a genius, of course, nor anything like one. Well, I had friends and a home and work and everything should have been well, but I always felt that something was working against me, some bad influence, some ill omen—I've felt it all my life, I feel it now, I shall feel it till I die. Lucky, healthy people can laugh at those things, but when you feel them you don't laugh. You know better. Then I married—the daughter of people who lived near by in Chelsea; I was terribly in love; although I felt there was something working against us, yet I couldn't see how now it could touch us. I was sure that she loved me—I knew that I loved her. She was such a child that I thought that I could guide her and form her and make her what I wanted. From the first there was something wrong; I can see that now looking back. She had been spoilt because she was an only child and had a stupid silly mother, and she was afraid of everything—of being ill, of being hurt, of being poor. She was conventional too, and only liked the people from the class she knew, people who did all the same things, spoke the same way, ate the same way, dressed the same way. I remember that some of my Glebeshire friends came to see me one day and frightened her out of her life. Poor Clare! I should understand her now I think, but I don't know. One has things put into one and things left out of one before one's born and you can't alter them, you can only restrain them, keep them in check. I had something fundamentally wild in me, she something tame in her. If we had both been older and wiser we might have compromised as all married people have to, I suppose, but we were both so young that we expected perfection, nay, we demanded it. Perfection! Lord, what youth! . . . Then a baby was born, a boy—I let myself go over that boy!" . . . Peter paused. . . . "I can't talk much about that even now. He died. Then everything went wrong. Clare said she'd never have another child. And she was tired of me and frightened of me too. I can see now that she had much justice there. I must have been a dull dog after the boy died, and when I'm dull I am dull. I get so easily convinced that I'm meant to fail, that I've no right in the world at all. Clare wanted fun and gaiety.

"We hadn't the means for it anyway. I was writing badly. I couldn't keep my work clear of my troubles; I couldn't get right at it as one must if one's going to get it on to paper with any conviction. My books failed one after another and with justice.

"People spoke of me as a failure, and that Clare couldn't endure. She hadn't ever cared very much for my writing, only for the success that it brought. Well, you can see the likely end of it all. She ran off to Paris with my best friend, a man who'd been at school with me, whom I'd worshipped."

"Oh," Millie said, "I'm sorry."

"I only got what I deserved. Another man would have managed Clare all right—made a success out of the whole thing. There's something in me—a kind of blindness or obstinacy or pride—that sends people away from me. You know it yourself. You recognized it in me from the first. Henry didn't, simply because he's so ingenuous and so warm-hearted. He forgets himself entirely; you and I think of ourselves a good deal. I went back to Treliss. I had a friend there, a woman, who showed me a little how things were. I wanted to give everything up and just booze my time away and sink into a worthless loafer as my father had done. She prevented me, and I had, too, a strange revelation one night out on the hills beyond Treliss when I saw things clearly for an hour or two.

"I determined to come back and fight it out. I could show pluck even though I couldn't show anything else. Now I can see that there was something false in that as there was in so many of the crises of my life, because I was thinking only of myself set up against all the world and the devil and all the furies, making a fine figure while the armies of God stood by admiring and whispering one to another, 'He's a fine fighter—there's something in that fellow.'

"It was in just that mood that I came back to London. I went over to Paris and searched for Clare, couldn't hear anything of her, then came back and buried myself.

"I was full of this idea of courage, my back to the wall and fighting the universe. So I just shut myself up, got a little journalism—sporting journalism it was, football matches and boxing and cricket—and grouched along. The other men on the sporting paper thought me too conceited for words and left me alone. I drank a bit too, the worst kind of drinking, alone in one's room.

"Then the War came, thank God. I won't bother you with that, but it kept me occupied until the Armistice, then suddenly I was flung back again with all my old troubles thick upon me once more. I remember one day I had been seeing a rich successful novelist. He talked to me about his successes until I was sick. Then in the evening I went and saw the other end of the business, the young unpopular geniuses who are going to change the world. Both seemed to me equally futile, and once again I was tempted to end it all and just let myself go when I suddenly, standing there in Piccadilly Circus, saw myself just as I had years before at Treliss and my pretentiousness and lack of humour and proportion. And I saw how small we were, and what children, and how short life was, and then and there I swore I'd never take myself so seriously again as to talk about 'going to the dogs,' or 'fighting fate,' or 'being a success,' or 'destiny being against me.' I cheered up a lot after that. That was my second turning-point. You and Henry have made the third."

"Me and Henry?" said Millie, regardless of grammar.

"That's why I've burdened you with this lengthy discourse. I haven't spoken of myself for years to a soul. But I want your friendship. I want it terribly and I'll tell you why.

"You and Henry are young. I see now that it's only the young who matter any more. If you take the present state of the world from the point of view of the middle-aged or old, it's all utterly hopeless. We may as well make a bonfire of London and go up in the sparks. There's nothing to be said. It's as bad as it can be. There simply isn't time for even the young middle-aged to set things right. But for the young, for every one under thirty it's grand. There's a new city to be built, all the pieces of the old one lying around to teach you lessons—the greatest time to be born into in the world's history.

"And what the middle-aged and old have to do is to feed the young, to encourage them, laugh at them, give them health and strength and brains, such as they are, to stiffen them, to be patient with them, and for them, not to lie down and let the young trample, but to work with them, behind them, around them—above all, to love them, to clear the ground for them, to sympathize and understand them, and to tell them, if they shouldn't see it, that they have such a chance, such an opportunity, as has never before been given to the son of man.

"For myself what is there? The world that was mine is gone, is burnt up, destroyed. But for you, for you and Henry and the great company with you. Golly! What a time!"

He mopped his brow. He looked at Millie and laughed.

"Please forgive me," he said. "I haven't let myself go like this for years!"

Millie's sympathy was, for the moment, stronger than her vocabulary, her sympathy, that is, for the earlier part of his declaration. As he recounted to her his own story she had been readily, eagerly carried away, feeling the absolute truth of everything that he said, responding to all his trouble and his loneliness. When he had spoken of his boy she had almost loved him, the maternal in her coming out so that she longed to put her arms round him and comfort him. He seemed, as every man seems to every woman, at such a time, himself a child younger than she, more helpless than any woman. But at the end he had swung her on to another mood. She did not know that she liked being addressed as The Young. She felt in this, as she had always before felt with him, that there was something a little priggish, a little laughable in his earnestness. She did not see herself in any group with thousands of other young men and young women. She was not sure that she felt young at all—and in any case she was simply Millicent Trenchard with Millicent Trenchard's body, ambitions and purposes. She had also instinctively the Trenchard distrust of all naked emotions nakedly displayed. This she was happily to conquer—but not yet.

She felt finally as though she were a specimen in a glass jar, set up on the laboratory table, and that the professor was beginning:

"You will now notice that we have an excellent specimen of The Young. . . ."

Then she looked at him and saw how deeply in earnest he was, and that he himself was feeling true British embarrassment at his unforeseen demonstration. This called forth her maternal emotions again. He was a dear old thing—a little childish, a little old and odd, but he needed her help and her sympathy.

"I'll tell you," she said, "I don't think it's very much good putting us all into lumps like that. For instance, you couldn't place Mary Cass and myself in the same division, however hard you tried. If you are going simply by years, then that's absurd, because Mary is years older than I am in some things and years younger in others. One's just as old as one feels," she added with deep profundity, as though she were stating something quite new and fresh that had never been said before.

He smiled, looking at her with great affection.

"I don't want you to look upon yourself as anything in particular," he said. "Heaven forbid. That would be much too self-conscious. What I said was from my point of view—the point of view of those who were young before the War—really young, with all their lives and their ambitions before them—and can never be young again in quite that way. I only wanted to show you that knowing you and Henry has given me a new reason for living and for enjoying life and a better reason than I've ever had before. I know you distrusted me and I want you to get over that distrust."

"If that's what you want," Millie cried, jumping up and smiling, "you can have it. I feel you're a real friend, both to Henry and me, and we want a friend. Of course we're young and just beginning. We shall make all kinds of mistakes, I expect, and I'd rather you told us about them than any one else."

"Would you really?" He flushed slowly with pleasure. "And will you tell me about mine too? Is that a bargain?"

"Well, I don't know about telling you of yours," she answered. "I've noticed that that's a very dangerous thing. People ask you to tell them and say they can stand anything, and then when the moment comes they are hurt for evermore. Nor do they believe that those are their mistakes—anything else but not those. However, we'll try. Here's my hand on it."

He took her hand. She was so beautiful, with her colour a little heightened by the excitement and amusement of their talk, her slim straight figure, the honesty and nobility of her eyes as they rested on his face, that, in spite of himself, his hand trembled in hers. She felt that and was herself suddenly confused. She withdrew her hand abruptly, and at that moment, to her relief, Mary Cass came in.

She introduced them and they stood talking for a little, talking about anything, hospitals, Ireland, the weather. Then he went away.

"Who's that?" said Mary when he was gone.

"A man called Westcott, a friend of Henry's."

"I like him. What's he do?"

"He's a writer——"

"Oh, Lord!" Mary threw herself into a chair. "What a pity. He looks as though he were better than that."

"He's a dear old thing," said Millie. "Just a hundred and fifty years old."

"Which means," said Mary, "that he's been telling you how young you are."

"Aren't you clever?" said Millie admiringly.

"Whether I'm clever or no," said Mary, "I'm tired. This chemistry——"

And with that we leave them.

[CHAPTER III]

THE LETTERS

Henry was not such a fool as he looked. You, gentle reader, have certainly by now remarked that you cannot believe that all those years in the Army would have failed to make him a trifle smarter and neater and better disciplined than he appears to be. To which I would reply, having learnt the fact through very bitter personal experience, that it is one of the most astonishing facts in life that you do not change with anything like the ease that you ought to.

That is of course only half the truth, but half the truth it is, and if smuts choose your nose to settle on when you're in your cradle, the probability is that they'll still be settling there when you're in your second childhood.

Henry was changing underneath, as will very shortly, I hope, be made plain, but the hard ugly truth that I am now compelled to declare is that by the early days of June he had got his Baronet's letters into such a devil of a mess that he did not know where he was nor how he was ever going to get straight again. Nevertheless, I must repeat once more—he was not such a fool as he looked.

During all these weeks his lord and master had not glanced at them once.

He had indeed paid very little attention to Henry, giving him no typewriting and only occasionally dictating to him very slowly a letter or two. He had been away in the country once for a week and had not taken Henry with him.

He had attempted no further personal advances, had been always kindly but nevertheless aloof. Henry had, on his side, made very few fresh discoveries.

He had met once or twice a brother, Tom Duncombe, a large, fat, red-faced man with a loud laugh, carroty hair, a smell of whisky and a handsome appetite. Friends had come to luncheon and Mr. Light-Johnson had been as constant and pessimistic as ever, but Henry had not trusted himself to a second outburst. Of his own private love-affair there is more to be said, but of that presently.

The salient fact in the situation was that until now Duncombe had not mentioned the letters, had not looked at them, had not apparently considered them. Every morning Henry, with beating heart, expected those dread words: "Well now, let's see what you've done"—and every day passed without those words being said.

Every night in his bed in Panton Street he told himself that to-morrow he would force some order into the horrible things, and every day he was once again defeated by them. He was now quite certain that they led a life of their own, that they deliberately skipped, when he was not looking, out of one pile into another, that they changed the dates on their pages and counterfeited handwritings, and were altogether taunting him and teasing him to the full strength of their yellow crooked little souls. And yet behind the physical exterior of these letters he knew that he was gaining a feeling for and a knowledge of the period with which they dealt that was invaluable. He had burrowed in the library and discovered a host of interesting details—books like Hogg's Reminiscences and Gibson's Recollections, and Washington Irving's Abbotsford and Lang's Lockhart, and the Ballantyne Protests and the Life of Archibald Constable—them and many, many others—he had devoured with the greed of a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island. He could tell you everything now about the Edinburgh of that day—the streets, the fashions, the clothes, the politics. It seemed that he must, in an earlier incarnation, have lived there with them all, possibly, he liked to fancy, as a second-hand bookseller hidden somewhere in the intricacies of the Old Town. He seemed to feel yet beating through his arteries the thrill and happy pride when Sir Walter himself with his cheery laugh, his joke and his kindly grip of the hand stood among the dusky overhanging shelves and gossiped and yarned and climbed the rickety ladder searching for some ballad or romance, while Henry, his eyes aflame with hero-worship, held that same ladder and gazed upwards to that broad-shouldered form.

Yes—but the letters were in the devil of a mess!

And then suddenly the blow fell. One beautiful June morning, when the sun, refusing to be beaten by the thick glare of the windows, was transforming the old books and sending mists of gold and purple from ceiling to floor, Henry, his head bent over files of the recalcitrant letters, heard the very words that for weeks he had been expecting.

"Now then—it's about time I had a look at those letters of yours."

It is no exaggeration at all to say that young Henry's heart stood absolutely still, his feet were suddenly like dead fish in his boots and his hands weak as water. This, then, was The End! Oh, how he wished that it had occurred weeks ago! He had by now become devotedly attached to the library, loved the books like friends, was happier when hidden in the depths of the little gallery nosing after Bage and Maturin and Clara Reeve than he had been in all his life before. Moreover, he realized in this agonizing moment how deeply attached he had grown during these weeks to his angular master. Few though the words between them had been, there seemed to him to have developed mysteriously and subterraneously as it were an unusual sympathy and warmth of feeling. That may have been simply his affectionate nature and innocence of soul. Nevertheless, there it was. He made a last frantic effort towards a last discipline, juggling the letters together and trying to put the more plainly dated next to one another on the top of the little untidy heaps.

He realized that there was nothing to be done. He sat there waiting for sentence to be pronounced.

Duncombe came over to the table and rested one hand on Henry's shoulder.

"Now, let's see," he said. "You've had more than a month—I expect to find great progress. How many boxes have you done?"

"I'm still at the first," said Henry, his voice low and gentle.

"Still at the first? Ah, well, I expect there are more than one knew. What's your system? First in months and then in years, I suppose?"

"The trouble is," said Henry, the words choking in his throat, "that so many of them aren't dated at all."

"Yes—that would be so. Well, here we have April, 1816. What I should do, I think, is to make them into six-monthly packets—otherwise the—Hullo, here's 1818!"

"They move about so," said Henry feebly.

"Move about? Nobody can move them if you don't—March 7, 1818; March 12, 1818; April 3—Why, here we are back in '16 again!"

There followed then the most dreadful pause. It seemed to the agonized Henry to last positively for centuries. He grew an old, old man with a long, white, sweeping beard, he looked back over a vast, misspent lifetime, his hearing was gone, his vision was dulled, he was tired, deadly tired, and longed only for the gentle peace of the kindly grave. Not a word was said. Duncombe's long white fingers moved with a deadly and practised skill from packet to packet, taking up one, looking at it, laying it down again, taking up another, holding it for an eternity in his hand then carefully replacing it. The clock wheezed and gurgled and chattered, the sunlight danced on the bookshelves, Henry was in his grave, dead, buried, a vague pathetic memory to those who once had loved him.

"Why!" a voice came from vast distances; "these letters aren't arranged at all!" The worst was over, the doom had fallen; nothing more terrible could occur.

Henry said nothing.

"They simply aren't arranged at all!" came the voice more sharply.

Still Henry said nothing.

Duncombe moved back into the room. Henry felt his eyes burrowing into a hole, red-hot, in the middle of his back. He did not move.

"Would you mind telling me what you have been doing all these weeks?"

Henry turned round. The terrible thing was that tears were not far away. He was twenty-six years of age, he had fought in the Great War and been wounded, he had written ten chapters of a romantic novel, he was living a life of independent ease as a bachelor gentleman in Panton Street—nevertheless tears were not far away.

"I warned you," he said. "I told you at the very beginning that I was a perfect fool. You can't say I didn't warn you. I've meant to do my very best. I've never before wanted to do my best so badly—I mean so well—I mean——" he broke off. "I've tried," he ended.

"But would you mind telling me what you've tried?" asked Duncombe. "The state the letters were in when they were in this box was beautiful order compared with the state they're in now! Why, you've had six weeks at them! What have you been doing?"

"I think they move in the night," said Henry, tears bubbling in his voice do what he could to prevent them. "I know that must sound silly to you, or to any sensible person, but I swear to you that I've had dozens of them in the right order when I've gone away one day and found them in every kind of mess when I've got back next morning."

Duncombe said nothing.

"Then," Henry went on, gathering a stronger control of himself, "they really are confusing. Any one would find them so. The writing's often so faded and the signatures sometimes so illegible. And at first—when I started—I knew so little about the period. I didn't know who any of the people were. I've been reading a lot lately and although it looks so hopeless, I—" Then he broke off. "But it's no good," he muttered, turning his back. "I haven't got a well-ordered mind. I never could do mathematics at school. I ought to have told you, the second day I tried to tell you, but I've liked it so, I've enjoyed it. I——"

"I daresay you have enjoyed it," said Duncombe. "I can well believe it. You must have had the happiest six weeks of your life. Isn't it aggravating? Here are six weeks entirely wasted."

"Please take back your money and let me go," said Henry. "I can't pay you everything at once because, to tell you the truth, I've spent it, but if you'll wait a little——"

"Money!" cried Duncombe wrathfully. "Who's talking of money? It's the wasted time I mind. We're not an inch further on."

"We are," cried Henry excitedly. "I've been taking notes—lots of them. I've got them in a book here. And whoever goes on with this next can have them. He'll learn a lot from them, he will really."

"Let's see your notes," said Duncombe.

Henry produced a red-bound exercise book. It was nearly filled with his childish and sprawling hand. There were also many blots, and even some farcical drawings in the margin.

Duncombe took the book and went back with it to his desk. There followed a lengthy pause, while Henry stood in front of his table staring at the window.

At last Duncombe said, "You certainly seem to have scribbled a lot here. Yes . . . I take back what I said about your being idle. I'm glad you're not that. And you seem interested; you must be interested to have done all this."

"I am interested," said Henry.

"Well, then, I don't understand it. If you are interested why couldn't you get something more out of the letters? A child of eight could have done them better than you have."

"It's the kind of brain I have," said Henry. "It's always been the same. I never could do examinations. I have an untidy brain. I could always remember things about books but never anything else. It was just the same in the War. I always gave the wrong orders to the men. I never remembered what I ought to say. But when they put me into Intelligence and I could use my imagination a little, I wasn't so bad. I can see Scott and Hogg and the others moving about, and I can see Edinburgh and the way the shops go and everything, but I can't do the mechanical part. I knew I couldn't at the very beginning."

"You'd better go on working for a bit while I think about it," said Duncombe.

Henry went back to the letters, a sick heavy weight of disappointment in his heart. He could have no doubt concerning the final judgment. How could it be otherwise? Well, at the most he had had a beautiful six weeks. He had learnt some very interesting things that he would never forget and that he could not have learnt in any other way. But how disappointing to lose his first job so quickly! How sad Millie would be and how sarcastic his father! And then the girl! How could he now entertain any hopes of doing anything for her when he had no job, no money, no prospects! . . .

A huge fat tear welled into his eye, he tried to gulp it back; he was too late. It plopped down on one of the letters. Another followed it. He sniffed and sniffed again. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He fought for self-control and, after a hard sharp battle, gained the victory. The other tears were defeated and reluctantly went back to the place whence they had come.

The clock struck one; in five minutes' time the gong would sound for luncheon. He heard Duncombe get up, cross the floor; once again he felt his hand on his shoulder.

"You certainly have shown imagination here," he said. "There are some remarkable things in this book. Not all of it authentic, I fancy." The hand pressed into his shoulder with a kindly emphasis. "It's a pity that order isn't your strong point. Never mind. We must make the best of it. We'll get one of those dried-up young clerks at so much an hour to do this part of it. You shall do the rest. I think you'll make rather a remarkable book of it."

"You're going to keep me?" Henry gulped.

"I'm going to keep you." Duncombe moved back to his desk. "Now it's luncheon-time. I suggest that you wash your hands—and your face."

Henry stood for a moment irresolute.

"I don't know what to say—I—to thank——"

"Well, don't," said Duncombe. "I hate being thanked. Besides, there's no call for it."

The gong sounded.

This was an adventurous day for Henry; he discovered in the first place that Duncombe would not himself be in to luncheon, and he descended the cold stone stairs with the anticipatory shiver that he always felt when his master deserted him. Lady Bell-Hall neither liked nor trusted him, and showed her disapproval by showering little glances upon him, with looks of the kind that anxious hostesses bestow upon nervous parlour-maids when the potatoes are going the wrong way round or the sherry has been forgotten. Henry knew what these glances said. They said: "Oh, young man, I cannot conceive why my brother has chosen you for his secretary. You are entirely unsuited for a secretary. You are rash, ignorant, bad-mannered and impetuous. If there is one thing in life that I detest it is having some one near me whose words and actions are for ever uncertain and not to be calculated beforehand. I am never certain of you from one minute to another. I do wish you would go away and take a post elsewhere."

Because Henry knew that Lady Bell-Hall was thinking this of him he was always in her presence twice as awkward as he need have been, spilt his soup, crumbled his bread and made strange sudden noises that were by himself entirely unexpected. To-day, however, he was spared his worst trouble, Mr. Light-Johnson. The only guests were Tom Duncombe and a certain Lady Alicia Penrose, who exercised over Lady Bell-Hall exactly the fascinated influence that a boa-constrictor has for a rabbit. Alicia Penrose certainly resembled a boa-constrictor, being tall, swollen and writhing, bound, moreover, so tightly about with brilliant clothing fitting her like a sheath that it was always a miracle to Henry that she could move at all. She must have been a lady of some fifty summers, but her skirts were very short, coming only just below her knees. She was a jolly and hearty woman, living entirely for Bridge and food, and not pretending to do otherwise. Henry could not understand why she should come so often to luncheon as she did. He supposed that she enjoyed startling Lady Bell-Hall with peeps into her pleasure-loving life, not that in her chatter she ever paused to listen to her hostess's terrified little "Really, Alicia!" or "You can't mean it, Alicia!" or "I never heard such a thing—never!"

After a while Henry arrived nearer the truth when he supposed that she came in order to obtain a free meal, she being in a state of chronic poverty and living in a small series of attics over a mews.

She was, it seemed, related to every person of importance and alluded to them all in a series of little nicknames that fell like meteors about table. "Podgy," "Old Cuddles," "Dusty Parker," "Fifi Bones," "Larry," "Bronx," "Traddles"—these were her familiar friends. When she was alone with Henry, Duncombe and his sister she was comparatively quiet, paying eager attention to her food (which was not very good) and sometimes including Henry in the conversation. But the presence of an outsider excited her terribly. She was, outwardly at any rate, as warmly excited about the domestic and political situation as was Lady Bell-Hall, but it did not seem to Henry that it went very deep. So long as her Bridge was uninterfered with everything else might go. She talked in short staccato sentences like a female Mr. Tingle.

To-day she was stirred by Tom Duncombe, not that she did not know him well enough, he being very much more in her set than were either his brother or sister. Henry had not liked Tom Duncombe from the first and to-day he positively loathed him. This was for a very simple human reason, namely, that he talked as though he, Henry, did not exist, looking over his head, and once, when Henry volunteered a comment on the weather, not answering him at all.

And then when the meal was nearly over Henry most unfortunately fell yet again into Lady Bell-Hall's bad graces.

"Servants," Lady Alicia was saying. "Servants. Been in a Registry Office all the morning. For father. He wants a footman and doesn't want to pay much for him; you know all about father, Tommy." (The Earl of Water-Somerset was notoriously mean). "Offering sixty—sixty for a footman. Did you hear anything like it? Couldn't hear of a soul. All too damned superior. Saw one or two—never saw such men. All covered with tattoo marks and war-ribbons—extraordinary times we live in. Extraordinary. Puffy Clerk told me yesterday—remarkable thing. Down at the Withers on Sunday. Sunday afternoon. Short of a fourth. Found the second footman played. Had him in. Perfect gentleman. Son of a butcher but had been a Colonel in the War. Broke off to fetch in the tea—then sat down again afterwards. Best of the joke won twenty quid off Addy Blake and next morning asked to have his wages raised. Said if he was going to be asked to play bridge with the family must have higher wages. And Addy gave them him."

Tom Duncombe guffawed.

"Dam funny. Dam funny," he said. Lady Bell-Hall shook her head. "A friend of mine, a Mr. Light-Johnson—I think you've met him here, Alicia—told me the other day he's got a man now who plays on the piano beautifully and reads Spanish. He says that we shall all be soon either killed in our beds or working for the Bolsheviks. What the servants are coming——"

As the old butler brought in the coffee at this moment she stopped and began hurriedly to talk about Conan Doyle's séances which seemed to her very peculiar—the pity of it was that we couldn't really tell if it had happened just as he said. "Of course he's been writing stories for years," she said. "He's the author of those detectives stories, Alicia—and writing stories for a long time must make one very regardless of the truth."

Then as the butler had retired they were able to continue. "I don't know what servants are coming to," she said. "They never want to go to church now as they used to."

It was then that Henry made his plunge, as unfortunate in its impetuosity and tactlessness as had been his earlier one, it was perhaps the red supercilious countenance of Tom Duncombe that drove him forward.

"I'm glad servants are going to have a better time now," he said, leaning forward and staring at Alicia Penrose as though fascinated by her bright colours. "I can't think how they endured it in the old days before the War, in those awful attics people used to put them into, the bad food they got and having no time off and——"

"Why, you're a regular young Bolshevik!" Alicia Penrose cried, laughing. "Margaret, Charles got a Bolshevik for a secretary. Who'd have thought it?"

"I'm not a Bolshevik," said Henry very red. "I want everything to be fair for everybody all the way round. The Bolsheviks aren't fair any more than the—than the—other people used to be before the War, but it seems to me——"

"Seen the Bradleys lately, Alicia?" said Tom Duncombe, speaking exactly as though Henry existed less than his sister's dog, Pretty One, a nondescript mongrel asleep in a basket near the window.

"No," said Alicia. "But that reminds me. Benjy Porker owes me five quid off a game a fortnight ago at Addy Blake's. Glad you've reminded me, Thomas. That young man wants watching. Plays badly too—why in that very game he had four hearts——"

Henry's cup was full. Why, again, had he spoken? When would he learn the right words on the right occasion? Why had he painted himself even blacker than before in Lady Bell-Hall's sight?

He went up to the library hating Tom Duncombe, but hating himself even more.

He sat down at his table determining to put in an hour at such slave-driving over the letters as they had never known in all their little lives. At four o'clock punctually he intended to present himself in Mrs. Tenssen's sitting-room.

When he had been stirring the letters about for some ten minutes or so the quiet and peace of the library once again settled beautifully around him. It seemed to enfold him as though it loved him and wished him to know it. Once again the strange hallucination stole into his soul that the past was the present and the present the past, that there was no time nor place and that only thinking made it so, and that the only reality, the only faith, the only purpose in this life or in any other was love—love of beauty, of character, of truth, love above all of one human being for another. He was touched to an almost emotional softness by Duncombe's action that morning. Touched, too, to the very soul by his own love affair, and touched finally to-day by the sense that he had that old books in the library, and the times and the places and the people that they stood for, were stretching out hands to him, trying to make him hear their voices.

"Only love us enough and we shall live. Everything lives by love. Touch us with some of your own enchantment. You are calling us back to life by caring for us. . . ." He stopped, his head up, his pen arrested, listening—as though he did in very truth hear voices coming to him from different parts of the room.

What he did hear, however, was the opening of the library door, and what he beheld was Tom Duncombe's bulky figure standing for a moment hesitating in the doorway. He came forward but did not see Henry immediately. He stood again, listening, one finger to his lip like a schoolboy about to steal jam. Henry bent his head over his letters, but with one eye watched. All thoughts of love and tenderness were gone with that entrance. He hated Tom Duncombe and hated him for reasons more conclusive than personal, wounded vanity. Duncombe took some further steps and then suddenly saw Henry. He stopped dead, staring, then as Henry did not turn, but stayed with head bent forward, he moved on again still cautiously and with the clumsy hesitating, step that was especially his.

He arrived at his brother's table and stopped there. Henry, looking sideways, could see half Duncombe's heavy body, the red cheek, the thick arm and large, ill-shaped fingers. Those same fingers, he perceived, were taking up letters and papers from the table and putting them down again.

Then, like a sudden blow on the heart, certain words of Sir Charles's spoken a week or two before came back to Henry. "By the way, Trenchard," he had said, "if I'm out and you're ever alone in the library here I want you to be especially careful to allow no one to touch the papers on my table, nor to permit any one to open a drawer—any one, mind you, not even my brother, unless I've told you first that he may. I leave you in charge—you or old Moffatt (the ancient butler), and if you are going, and I'm not yet back, lock the library and give the keys to Moffatt."

He had promised that at the time, feeling rather proud that he should have been charged with so confidential an office. Now the time had come for him to keep his word, and the most difficult crisis of his life was suddenly upon him. There had been difficult moments in the War—Henry alone knew how difficult moments of physical challenge, moments of moral challenge too—but then in that desolate-hell-delivered country thousands of others had been challenged at the same time, and some especial courage seemed to have been given one with special occasion. Here he was alone, and alone in an especially arduous way. He did not know how much authority he really had, he did not know whether Sir Charles had in truth meant all that he had said, he did not know whether Tom Duncombe had not after all some right to be there.

Above all he was young, very young, for his age, doubtful of himself, fearing that he always struck a silly figure in any crisis that he had to face. On the other hand, he was helped by his real hatred of the red-flushed man at the table, unlike his brother-in-law Philip in that, namely, that he did not want every one to like him and, indeed, rather preferred to be hated by the people whom he himself disliked.

Tom Duncombe was now pulling at one of the drawers of the table. Henry stood up, feeling that the whole room was singing about his ears.

"I beg your pardon," he said, smiling feebly, and knowing that his voice was a ridiculous one. "But would you mind waiting until Sir Charles comes in? I know he won't be long—he said he'd be back by three."

Duncombe moved away from the drawer and stared.

"Here," he said. "Do you know where my brother keeps the key of this drawer? If so, hand it over."

"Yes, I do know," said Henry. (It was sufficiently obvious, as the key was hanging on a string at the far corner of the table.) "But I'm afraid I can't give it you. Sir Charles told me that no one was to have it while he was away."

Duncombe took in this piece of intelligence very slowly. He stared at Henry as though he were some curious and noxious kind of animal that had just crawled in from under the window. A purple flush suffused his forehead and nose.

"Good God!" he said. "The infernal cheek!"

They stood silently staring at one another for a moment, then Duncombe said:

"None of your lip, young man. I don't know who the devil you think you are—anyway hand over the key."

"No," said Henry paling, "I can't."

"You can't? What the devil do you mean?"

"Simply I can't. I was told not to—I'm your brother's secretary and have to do what he says—not what you say!"

Henry felt himself growing more happily defiant.

"Do you want to get the damnedest hiding you've ever had in your young life?"

"I don't care what you do."

"Don't care what I do? Well, you soon will. Are you going to give me that key?" (All this time he was pulling at the drawers with angry jerks, pausing to stare at Henry, then pulling again.)

"No."

"You're not? You know I can get my brother to kick you out?"

"I don't care. I'm going to do what he said."

"You bloody young fool, he never said you weren't to let me have it."

"I may have misunderstood him. If I did, he'll put it right when he comes back."

"Yes, and a nice story I'll tell him of your damned impertinence. Give me that key."

"Sorry I can't."

"I'll break your bloody neck."

"That won't help you to find the key." Henry was feeling quite cheerful now.

"Christ! . . . You shall get it for that!"

He made two steps to come round the table to get at Henry—and saw the key. At the same instant Henry saw that he saw it. He ran forward to secure it, and in a second they were struggling together like two small boys in a manner unlovely, unscientific, even ludicrous. Ludicrous—had there been an observer, but for the fighters themselves it was one of those uncomfortable struggles when there are no rules of the game and anything may happen at any moment. Duncombe was large but fat and in the worst possible condition, with a large luncheon still unsettled and in a roving state. Moreover he had never been a fighter. Henry was not a fighter either and was handicapped at once because at the first onset his pince-nez were knocked on to the carpet. He fought then blindly in a blind world. He knew that Duncombe was kicking, and struggling to strike at him with his fists. Himself seemed strangely involved in Duncombe's chest, at which he tore with his hands, while he bent his head to avoid the blows. He was breathing desperately, while there was such anger seething in his breast as he had never felt for anything human or inhuman in all his life. He felt Duncombe's waistcoat tear, plunged at the shirt, and at once his fingers felt the bare flesh, the soft fat of Duncombe's well-tended body. He was also conscious that he was muttering "You beast, you beast, you beast!" that his left leg was aching terribly and that Duncombe had his hand now firmly fixed in his hair and was pulling with all his strength.

Henry was going. . . . He was being pushed backwards. He caught a large fold of Duncombe's fat between his fingers and pinched. Then he was conscious that in another moment he would be over; he was falling, the ceiling, far away, beat down toward him, his left arm shot out and his fingers fastened themselves into Duncombe's posterior, which was large and soft, then, with a cry he fell, Duncombe on top of him.

Henry, half-stunned, lay, his leg crushed under him, his eyes closed, and waited for the end. Duncombe now could do what he liked to him, and what he liked would be something horrible. But Duncombe also, it seemed, could not stir, but lay there all over Henry, heaving up and down, the sweat from his cheek and forehead trickling into Henry's eyes, his breath coming in great desperate pants.

Then from a long way off came a voice:

"Tom—Trenchard. What the devil!" That voice seemed to electrify Duncombe. Henry felt the whole body quiver, stiffen for a moment, then slowly, very slowly raise itself.

Henry stumbled up and saw Sir Charles, not regarding him at all, but fixing his eyes only upon his brother, who stood, his hair on end, his shirt torn and exposing a red, hairy chest, wrath in his eyes, his mouth trembling with anger and also with some other emotion.

"What have you been doing, Tom?"

"This damned——" then to Henry's immense surprise he broke off and left the room almost at a run.

Sir Charles went straight to his table, looked at the papers, glanced at the drawers, then finally at the key, which was still on the hook.

His voice, when he spoke, was that of the saddest, loneliest, most miserable of men.

"You'd better go and clean up, Henry," he said, pointing to the farther room.

He had never called him Henry before.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE CAULDRON

But the day had not finished with Henry yet.

When he had washed and tidied himself he discovered to his great relief that his pince-nez were not broken, and that only one button (and that an unimportant one) was torn from his trousers, and he departed. Sir Charles asked him no questions, but only sat there at his table, staring at his paper with a fixed look of melancholy absorption that Henry dared not break. As no questions were asked Henry offered no explanations. He was very glad that he had not to offer any. He simply said, "Good afternoon, sir," and went. He was half expecting that Tom Duncombe would be hiding behind some pillar in the hall, and would spring out upon him as he passed, but there was no sign of anybody. The house was as silent and dead as the Nether Tomb.

He walked through the crowded ways to Peter Street in a fine turmoil of excitement and agitation. The physical side of the struggle was not yet forgotten; his shins, where Tom Duncombe had kicked him, were very sore indeed, and his leg would suddenly tremble for no particular reason.

His chest was sore and his head ached, from his enemy's vigorous hair-pulling. He was very thankful that his face was not marked. That was because he had held his head down. But the physical consequences were lost in consideration of the deeper, more important spiritual and material issues. What had Tom Duncombe really been after? Plainly enough something that he had been after before. One could tell that from his brother's silence. What revenge would Tom now try to take upon Henry? Perhaps he would bribe Mr. King to murder him in his sleep, or would send Henry poison in a box of chocolates, or would distil fly-paper into his coffee as Seddon had done to poor Miss Barrow? Perhaps he would have him assassinated by some Bolshevik agent, in the middle of Piccadilly? No, all these things, delightful though they sounded, were not likely—Tom Duncombe was obviously lacking in imagination.

A beautiful vers libre flew like a coloured dove into Henry's brain just as he crossed the Circus:

Red-chested Minotaur
Thrust
Blow on Blow.
Golden apples showering
From Autumn trees
In wolf-haunted
Forest—

Had he not been sworn at by the driver of a swiftly advancing taxi-cab he might have thought of a second verse equally good.

Arriving at his destination, he found Mrs. Tenssen all alone seated at the table playing Patience, with a pack of very greasy cards. One useful lesson at least Henry was to learn from this eventful year, a lesson that would do him splendid service throughout his life—namely, that there is nothing more difficult than to discover a human being, man or woman, who is really wicked all the way round and the whole way through. People who seem to be thoroughly wicked, whom one passionately desires to be thoroughly wicked, will suddenly betray kindnesses, softnesses, amiabilities, imbecilities that simply do not go with the rest of their terrible character. This is very sad and makes life much more difficult than it ought to be.

It is indeed to be doubted whether a completely wicked human being has ever appeared on this planet.

It had already puzzled Henry on several occasions that Mrs. Tenssen, who as nearly resembled a completely wicked person as he had ever beheld, should care so passionately for the simple game of Patience, and should take flowers, as he discovered that she did, once a week to the Children's Hospital in Cleseden Street.

He would so greatly have preferred that she should not do these things. She did them, it might be, as a blind, a concealment, an alibi, even as Count Fosco had his white mice and Uncle Silas played the flute, but they did not appear to be a disguise; she seemed to enjoy doing them.

She greeted Henry with great affection. She had been very kind to him of late. He did not like her any better than on his first vision of her; he liked her indeed far less. He did not know any one, man or woman, from whom sex so indecently protruded. It was always as though she sat quite naked in front of him and that she liked it to be so.

She had once made what even his innocent mind understood as improper advances to him, and he had not now the very slightest doubt of the reason why the various gentlemen, of all sizes and ages, came and had tea with her.

All this made him very sick and put him into an agony of desire to seize Christina and deliver her from the horrible place, but until now he had not thought of any plan, and one of his principal difficulties was that he could never succeed in being with Christina alone.

He realized that Mrs. Tenssen had not as yet sufficiently made up her wicked mind about him. She was hesitating, he perceived, as to whether he was worth her while or no. He had no doubt but that she had been making inquiries about him and his family. Was she speculating about him as a husband for her daughter? Or had she some other plans in her evil head?

To-day the room was close and stuffy and dingy in spite of the pink silk. There was a smell of cooking that writhed in and out of the furniture, some evil, but savoury mess that was onions and yet not onions at all, here black pudding, and there stewing eels, once ducks' eggs and then again sheeps' brains—just such a savoury mess as any witch would have stewing in her cauldron.

Mrs. Tenssen, on this afternoon, proceeded to deliver herself of some of her thoughts, her large face crimson above her purple dress, her rings flashing over the shabby dog-eared cards. Henry sat there, his eyes on the door, listening, listening for the step that he would give all the world to hear.

"You know," she said, cursing through her teeth at the bad order of the cards, "the matter with me is that I'm too good-natured. I've got a kind heart—that's the matter with me. I'm sorry for it. I'm a fool to let myself go as I do. And what have I ever got for my kindness—damn that club. What but ingratitude and cheating. It's the way of the world. You're young. You just remember that. Don't let your heart go. Use your intelligence."

"What," asked Henry who wished to discover from her something about Christina's earlier life, "kind of a town is Copenhagen? How did you like Denmark?"

"Ugh!" said Mrs. Tenssen. "I'm an Englishwoman, I am—born in Bristol and bred there, thank God. None of your bloody foreign countries for me. Twenty years of my life wasted in that stinking hole. Not that my husband was so bad—not as husbands go that is. He was a sailor and away many a time, and a good thing too. Fine upstanding man he was with yellow curls and a chest broad enough to put a table on. He'd smack my ass and say, 'There's a woman for you!' and so I was and am still for the matter of that."

"Was Christina your only child," asked Henry.

"Yes. What do you take me for? No more children for me after the first one. 'No,' I said to David. 'Behave as you like,' I said, 'but no more children for me.' Wouldn't have had that one if I hadn't been such a blighted young fool. What's life for if you're lying up all the time? But David was all right. Drowned at sea. I always told him he would be."

"Well, then, why weren't you happy?"

"Happy," she echoed. "I tell you Copenhagen's a stinking town. Dirty little place. And his relations! There was a crew for you, especially a damned brother of his with a long beard, like a goat who was always round interfering. Didn't want me to have any gentlemen friends. 'Oh you go to hell,' I said. 'I'll have what friends I damn well please.' Wanted to take my girl away from me. There's a nice thing! When a woman's a widow and all alone in the world and doing all she can for her girl, for a bloody relation to come along and try to take her away."

"What did he want to take her away for?" asked Henry.

"How the hell should I know? That's what I asked him. 'What do you want to take her away for?' I asked him. He called me dirty names, then, so I just called dirty names back. Two can play at that game. I hadn't been educated in Bristol for nothing. Then they went on interfering, so I just brought her over here."

Henry was longing to ask some more questions when the door opened and Christina came in.

"Well, deary," said her mother. "Here's Mr. Trenchard." Christina smiled, then stood there uncertainly.

"There's a man coming upstairs, mother, who said you'd asked him to call. He wouldn't give his name."

Steps were outside. There was a pause, a knock on the door. Mrs. Tenssen looked at them both uncertainly.

"What do you say to taking Christina out to tea, Mr. Trenchard? It won't do her any harm?"

Henry said he would be delighted, as for sure he would.

"Well, then, suppose you do—some nice tea-shop. I know you'll look after her."

The girl moved to the door. Henry opened it for her. On the other side was standing a large heavy man, some country-fellow he seemed, young, brown-faced, in rough blue clothes.

Christina slipped by, her head down. In the street Henry found her crying. He didn't speak to her or ask her any questions. In silence they went down Peter Street.

When they were in Shaftesbury Avenue, Henry said, very gently:

"Where would you like to have tea? I'd want to take you to the grandest place there is if you'd care for that."

She shook her head. "No no, nowhere grand. . . ." She paused, standing still and looking about her as though she were utterly lost. Then he saw her, with a great effort, drag herself together. "There's a little place in Dean Street," she said. "A little Spanish restaurant—opposite the theatre."

He had been there several times to have a Spanish omelette which was cheap and very good. The kind little manager was a friend of his. He took her there wondering that he was not more triumphant on this, the first occasion when he had been alone with her in the outside world—but he could not be triumphant when she was so unhappy.

He found, as he had hoped he would, a little deserted table in the window shut off from the rest of the room by the door. It was very private with the light evening sunlight beyond the glass and people passing to and fro, and a little queue of men and women already beginning to form outside the pit door of the Royalty Theatre. The little manager brought them their tea and smiled and made little chirping noises and left them to themselves.

She was in great distress, not noticing her tea, staring in front of her as Henry had often seen her unconsciously do before, rolling her handkerchief between her hands into a little wet ball.

"I wanted us to come. I'm glad we've had the chance. I've been wanting for weeks to explain something to you." Henry poured her tea out for her and mechanically, still staring beyond him, beyond the shop, beyond London, she drank it.

"You've been very good these months, very very good. I don't know why, because you didn't know me before, nor anything about me. One day I laughed at you and I'm sorry for that. You are not to be laughed at—you have not that character—not at all—anywhere."

She paused, and Henry, looking into her face, said:

"I haven't been good to you. I'm ashamed because these weeks have all gone by and I haven't helped you yet. But you needn't say why do I come and why am I your friend. I love you. I loved you the first moment I saw you in Piccadilly. I've never loved anybody before and I feel now as though I shall never love anybody again. But I will do anything for you, or go anywhere. You only have to say and I will try and do that."

Her gaze came inwards, leaving those wide unscaleable horizons whither she had gone and travelling back to the simple untidy face of Henry whose eyes at any rate were good enough for you to be quite sure that he meant honestly all that he said. "That's it," she said quickly. "That's what I must try to explain to you. I've wanted to say to you before that perhaps I have made you think what isn't true. I like you. You're the only friend I've had since I came to England. But I can't love you, you dear good boy, nor I can't love anybody. I will not forget you if I can once get out of this horrible place, but I have no thoughts of love—not for any one—until I can come home again.

"You saw me crying just now. I should not cry; my father used to say, 'Christina, always be strong and not show them you're weak,' but I cry, not from weakness, but from deep, deep shame at that woman and what you see in her house."

She suddenly took his hand. "You are not angry because I don't love you? You see, I have only one thought—to get home, to get home, to get home!"

Henry choked in his throat and could only stare back at her and try to smile.

"Well, then," she said smiling. "Now I will try to tell you how I am. That woman—that horrible woman—whom they call my mother, and I too, to my shame, call her so—she was the wife of my father. From my birth she was cruel to me, she always hated me. When my father was at home she could not touch me—he would not allow her—but when he was at sea then she could do what she wished. My father was a hero, he was the finest of all Danish men, and when a Dane is fine no one in the world is as fine as he. He loved me and I loved him. Every one must love him, how he sang and danced and played like a child! After a time he hated the woman he'd married, because she was cruel, and he would have taken me away with him on his ship, but of course he could not. And then father was drowned—one night I knew it. I saw him. He came to my bed and smiled at me and he was all dripping with water. Then that woman was terrible to me, and my two uncles, father's brothers, who were almost as fine as he, tried to take me away, but she was too quick for them. And when they quarrelled with her, she ran away in the night and brought me over here."

Henry sighed in sympathy with her.

"Yes, and here it is terrible. I do not think I can endure it very much more. My uncle wrote and said he would come for me, and that is why I have been waiting, because I am sure that he will come.

"But now I think that woman is planning something else. She wants to sell me to some man so that she herself can be free. She is in doubt about several. That old man you saw the other day is one. He is very rich, and has a castle. Then she has been for some while in doubt about whether perhaps you will do. I don't care for it when she beats me, and when she says terrible things to me, but it is the fear of the future, and she may do worse than she has ever done—she threatens . . . and when I am alone at night—often all night—I am so afraid. . . ."

"Alone?" said Henry. "Isn't she there?"

"She has another place—somewhere in Victoria Street. Often she is away all night."

"Then," said Henry eagerly, "it's quite easy. We'll escape one night. I can get enough money together and I will travel with you to Copenhagen and give you to your uncle."

She shook her head. "No. You are a sweet boy, but that is no good. She has the place always watched. The police would stop us at once. She is a very clever woman."

"But then," pursued Henry, "if that house in Peter Street is a bad house, and she is keeping you, that is against the law, and we can have her arrested."

Christina shook her head.

"No. She is a very clever woman indeed. Nothing wrong goes on there. Perhaps in Victoria Street. I don't know. I have never been there. But I am sure if you tried to catch her in Victoria Street you would not be able to. There is nothing to be done that way. But see . . ."

She leant over towards Henry across the table, dropping her voice.

"Next December I shall be twenty-one and shall be free. It is before that that I am afraid. I know she is making some plan in her head. But I feel that you are watching, then I shall be safer. She wants to get a lot of money for me, and I think perhaps that old Mr. Leishman whom you saw is arranging something with her.

"What you want to do is to be friends with her so long as you can, so that you may come to us freely. But one day she will have made up her mind, and then there will be a scene, and she will forbid you the house. After that watch every day in The Times in the personal part. I will let you know when it is serious. I will try to tell you where I have gone. If I do that, it will mean that it is very anxious, and you must help me any way you can. Will you promise me?"

"I promise," said Henry. "Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I will come."

"I have written to my uncle and I know he will come if he can. But he travels very much abroad, and my other uncle is in Japan. If they do not get any letter, I have no one—no one but you."

She took Henry's hand again. "Since father died I can't love any one," she said. "But I can be your friend and never forget you. I have been so long frightened now, and I am so tired and so ashamed, that I think all deeper feeling is dead.

"I only want to get home. Do you understand, and not think me false?"

Henry said, "I'm just as proud as I can be."

Then, saying very little, he took her back to Peter Street.

[CHAPTER V]

MILLIE IN LOVE

Meanwhile, as Henry was having his adventures, so, also was Millie having hers, and having them, even as Henry did, in a sudden climacteric moment after many weeks of ominous pause.

She knew well enough that that pause was ominous. It would have been difficult for her to avoid knowing it. The situation began to develop directly after the amateur performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. That same performance was a terrible and disgracefully public failure. It had been arranged originally with the outward and visible purpose of benefiting a Babies' Crèche that had its home somewhere in Maida Vale, and had never yet apparently been seen by mortal man. Clarice, however, cared little either for babies or the crèches that contain them, but was quite simply and undisguisedly aching to prove to the world in general that she was a better actress than Miss Irene Vanbrugh, the creator of her part.

The charity and kindliness of an audience at an amateur theatrical performance are always called upon to cover a multitude of sins, but, perhaps, never before in the history of amateur acting did quite so many sins need covering as on this occasion—sins of omission, sins of commission, and sins of bad temper and sulkiness. Clarice knew her part only at happy intervals, but young Mr. Baxter knew his not at all, and tried to conceal his ignorance with cheery smiles and impromptu remarks about the weather, and little paradoxes that were in his own opinion every bit as good as Oscar Wilde's, with the additional advantage of novelty. Mr. Baxter was, indeed, at the end of the performance thoroughly pleased with himself and the world in general, and was the only actor in the cast who could boast of that happy condition.

Next morning in the house of the Platts the storm broke, and Millie found, to her bewildered amazement, that she was, in one way and another, considered the villainness of the piece. That morning was never to be forgotten by Millie.

She was not altogether surprised that there should be a storm. For many days past the situation had been extremely difficult; only four days earlier, indeed, she had wondered whether she could possibly endure it any longer, and might have gone straight to Victoria and resigned her post had she not had five minutes' encouraging conversation with little Doctor Brooker, who had persuaded her that she was doing valuable work and must remain. There were troubles with Clarice, troubles with Ellen (very curious ones), troubles with Victoria, troubles with the housekeeper, even troubles with Beppo. All the attendant guests in the house (except the poor Balaclavas) looked upon her with hatred because they knew that she despised them for their sycophancy and that they deserved her scorn. Her troubles with Victoria were the worst, because after all did Victoria support her nothing else very seriously mattered. But Victoria, like all weak characters determined upon power, swayed like a tree in the wind, now hither now thither, according to the emotions of the moment. She told Millie that she loved her devotedly, then suddenly would her mild eyes narrow with suspicion when she heard Millie commanding Beppo to bring up some more coal with what seemed to her a voice of too incisive authority. She said to Millie that the duty of the secretary was to control the servants, and then when the housekeeper came with bitter tales of that same secretary's autocracy she sided with the housekeeper. She thought Clarice a fool, but listened with readiness to everything that Clarice had to say about "upstart impertinence," "a spy in the house," and so on. She had by this time conceived a hatred and a loathing for Mr. Block and longed to transfer him to some very distant continent, but when he came to her with tears in his eyes and said that he would never eat another roll of bread in a house where he was so looked down upon by "the lady secretary," she assured him that Millie was of no importance, and begged him to continue to break bread with her so long as there was bread in the house.

She complained with bitterness of the confusion of her correspondence and admired enthusiastically the order and discipline into which Millie had brought it, and yet, from an apparently wilful perverseness, she created further confusion whenever she could, tumbling letters and bills and invitations together, and playing a kind of drawing-room football with her papers as though Dr. Brooker had told her that this was one of the ways of warding off stoutness.

This question of her stoutness was one of Millie's most permanent troubles. Victoria now had "Stoutness on the Brain," a disease that never afflicted her at all in the old days when she was poor, partly because she had too much work in those days to allow time for idle thinking, and partly because she had no money to spend on cures.

Now one cure followed upon another. She tried various systems of diet but, being a greedy woman and loving sweet and greasy foods, a grilled chop and an "asbestos" biscuit were real agony to her. Then, for a time, she stripped to the skin twice a day and begged Millie to roll her upon the floor, a performance that Millie positively detested. She weighed herself solemnly every morning and evening and her temper was spoilt for the day when she had not lost but had indeed gained.

It must not be supposed, however, that she was always irritable and in evil temper. Far from it; between her gusts of despair, anger and assaulted pride she was very sweet indeed, assuring Millie that she was a wicked woman and deserved no mercy from any one.

"I cannot think how you can endure me, my Millie," she would say. "You sweet creature! Wonderful girl! What I've done without you all these years I cannot imagine. I mean well. I do indeed. I'm sure there isn't a woman in the country who wants every one to be happy as I do. How simple it seems! Happiness! What a lovely word and yet how difficult of attainment! Life isn't nearly as simple as it was in the days when dear Papa was alive. I'm sure when I had nothing at all in the bank and didn't dare to face kind Mr. Miller for days together because I knew that I had had more money out of his bank than I had ever put into it, life was simplicity—but now—what do you think is the matter with me, my Millie? Tell me truthfully, straight from your loyal heart."

Millie longed to tell her that what was the matter could all be found in that one word "Money!" but the time for direct and honest speech, woman to woman, was not quite yet, although it was, most surely, close at hand.

With Ellen the trouble was more mysterious—Millie did not understand that strange woman. After the scene in Ellen's room for many days she held aloof, not speaking to Millie at all. Then gradually she approached again, and one morning came into the room where Millie was working, walked up to her desk, bent over her and kissed her passionately and walked straight out of the room again without uttering a word. A few days later she mysteriously pressed a note into her hand. This was what it said:

Darling Millie—You must forgive any oddness of behaviour that I have shown during these last weeks. I have had one headache after another and have been very miserable too for other reasons with which I need not bother you. I know you think me strange, but indeed you have no more devoted friend than I if only you would believe it. Some may seem friends to you but are not really. Do not take every one at their face value. It is sweet of you to do so but you run great risks. Could we not be a little more together than we are? I should like it so much if we could one day have a walk together. I feel that you do not understand me, and it is true that I am not at my best in this unsympathetic household. I feel that you shrink from me sometimes. If I occasionally appear demonstrative it is because I have so much love in my nature that has no outlet. I am a lonely woman, Millie. You have my heart in your hands. Treat it gently!—Your loving friend,

Ellen Platt.

This letter irritated and annoyed Millie. Her hands were full enough already without having Ellen's heart added to everything else. And why need Ellen be so mysterious, warning her about people? That was underhand. Did she suspect anybody she should speak out. Millie walked about cautiously for the next few days lest she should find herself alone with Ellen, when the woman looked so miserable that her heart was touched, and one morning, meeting her in the hall, she said:

"It was kind of you to write that note, Ellen. Of course we'll have a walk one day."

Ellen stared at her under furious eyebrows. "If that's all you can say," she exclaimed, "thank you for nothing. Catch me giving myself away again," and brushed angrily past her. . . .

So on the morning after the theatricals down came the storm. It began with the housekeeper, Mrs. Martin. Sitting under Eve Millie examined the household books for the last fortnight.

"The butcher's very large," she observed.

"Honk!" Mrs. Martin remarked from some unprobed depths of an outraged woman. She was a little creature with an upturned nose and a grey complexion.

"Well it really is too large this time," said Millie. "Twenty pounds for a fortnight even in these days——"

"Certingly," said Mrs. Martin, speaking very quickly and rising a little on her toes. "Certingly if I'm charged with dishonesty, and it's implied that I'm stealing the butcher's meat and deceiving my mistress, who has always, so far as I know, trusted me and found no fault at all and has indeed commented not once nor twice on my being economical, but if so, well my notice is the thing that's wanted, I suppose, and——"

"Not at all," said Millie, still very gently. "There's no question of any one's dishonesty, Mrs. Martin. As you're housekeeper as well as cook you must know better than any one else whether this is an unusual amount or no. Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps——"

"I may have my faults," Mrs. Martin broke in, "there's few of us who haven't, but dishonesty I've never before been accused of; although the times are difficult and those who don't have to buy the things themselves may imagine that meat costs nothing, and you can have a joint every quarter of an hour without having to pay for it, still that hasn't been my experience, and to be called a dishonest woman after all my troubles and the things I've been through——"

"I never did call you a dishonest woman," said Millie. "Never for a moment. I only want you to examine this book with me and see whether we can't bring it down a little——"

"Dishonesty," pursued Mrs. Martin, rising still higher on her toes and apparently addressing Eve, "is dishonesty and there's no way out of it, either one's dishonest or one isn't and—if one is dishonest the sooner one leaves and finds a place where one isn't the better for all parties and the least said the sooner mended——"

"Would you mind," said Millie with an admirable patience, "just casting your eye over this book and telling me what you think of it? That's all I want really."

"Then I hope, Miss," said Mrs. Martin, "that you'll take back your accusation that I shouldn't like to go back to the kitchen suffering under, because I never have suffered patiently under such an accusation and I never will."

"I made no accusation," said Millie. "If I hurt your feelings I'm sorry, but do please let us get to work and look at this book together. Time's short and there's so much to be done."

But Mrs. Martin was a woman of one idea at a time. "If you doubt my character, Miss, please speak to Miss Platt about it, and if she has a complaint well and good and I'll take her word for it, she having known me a good deal longer than many people and not one to rush to conclusions as some are perhaps with justice and perhaps not."

Upon this particular morning Millie was to lose her temper upon three separate occasions. This was the first occasion.

"That's enough, Mrs. Martin," she said sharply. "I did not call you dishonest. I do not now. But as you seem incapable of looking at this book I will show it to Miss Platt and she shall discuss it with you. That's everything, thank you, good morning."

"Honk!" said Mrs. Martin. "Then if that's the way I'm to be treated the only thing that's left for me to do is hand in my notice which I do with the greatest of pleasure, and until you came, Miss, I should never have dreamt of such a thing, being well suited, but such treatment no human being can stand!"

"Very well then," said Millie, cold with anger. "If you feel you must go, you must. I'm sorry but you must act as you feel."

Mrs. Martin turned round and marched towards the door muttering to herself. Just before she reached it Victoria and Clarice entered. Mrs. Martin looked at them, muttered something and departed banging the door behind her.

Millie could see that Victoria was already upset, her large fat face puckered into the expression of a baby who is not sure whether it will cry or no. Clarice, her yellow hair untidy and her pink gown trembling with unexpected little pieces of lace and flesh, was quite plainly in a very bad temper.

"What's the matter with Mrs. Martin?" said Victoria, coming through into the inner room. "She seems to be upset about something."

"She is," said Millie. "She's just given notice."

"Given notice!" cried Victoria. "Oh dear, oh dear! What shall we do? Millie, how could you let her? She's been with us longer than any servant we've had since father died and she cooks so well considering everything. She knows our ways now and I've always been so careful to give her everything she wanted. Oh Millie, how could you? You really shouldn't have done it!"

"I didn't do it," said Millie. "She did it. I simply asked her to look at the butcher's book for the last fortnight. It was disgracefully large. She chose to be insulted and gave notice."

"Isn't that vexing?" cried Victoria. "I do think you might have managed better, Millie. She isn't a woman who easily takes offence either. She's taken such a real interest in us all and nothing's been too much trouble for her!"

"Meanwhile," Millie said, "she's been robbing you right and left. You know she has, Victoria. You as good as admitted it to me the other day. Of course if you want to go on being plundered, Victoria, it's no affair of mine. Only tell me so, and I shall know where I am."

"I don't think you ought to speak to me like that," said Victoria. "It's not kind of you. I didn't quite expect that of you, Millie. You know the troubles I have and I hoped you were going to help me with them and not give me new ones."

"I'm not giving you new ones," Millie answered. "I'm trying to save you. However——"

It was at this point that Clarice interrupted. "Now I hope at last, Victoria," she said, "that your eyes are opened. It only supports what I was saying downstairs. Miss Trenchard (Clarice had been calling her Miss Trenchard for the last fortnight) may be clever and attractive and certainly young men seem to think her so, but suited to be your secretary she is not."

Millie got up from her seat. "Isn't this beginning to be rather personal?" she said. "Hadn't we all better wait until we are a little cooler?"

"No we had not," said Clarice, trembling with anger. "I'm glad this occasion has come at last. I've been waiting for it for weeks. I'm not one to be underhand and to say things behind people's backs that I would not dare to say to their faces; I say just what I think. I know, Miss Trenchard, that you despise me and look down upon me. Of that I have nothing to say. It may be deserved or it may not. I am here, however, to protect my sister. There are things that she is too warm-hearted and kind-natured to see although they do go on right under her very nose. There have been occasions before when I've had to point circumstances out to her. I've never hesitated at what was I thought my duty. I do not hesitate now. I tell you frankly, Miss Trenchard, that I think your conduct during these last weeks has been quite disgraceful. You have alienated all Victoria's best friends, disturbed the servants and flirted with every young man that has come into the house!"

This was the second occasion on which Millie lost her temper that morning.

"Thank you," she said. "Now I know where I stand. But you'll apologize please for that last insult before you leave this room."

"I will not! I will not!" cried Clarice.

"Oh dear, what shall I do?" interrupted Victoria. "I knew this was going to be a terrible day the moment I got out of bed this morning. Clarice, you really shouldn't say such things."

"I should! I should!" cried Clarice, stamping her foot. "She's ruined everything since she came into the house. No one knows how I worked at that horrible play and Bunny Baxter was beginning to be so good, most amusing and knowing his part perfectly until she came along. And then she turned his head and he fancies he's in love with her and the whole thing goes to pieces. And I always said, right away from the beginning, that we oughtn't to have Cissie Marrow as prompter, she always loses her head and turns over two pages at once—and now I've gone and made myself the laughing-stock of London and shall never be able to act in public again!"

The sight of Clarice's despair touched Millie, and when the poor woman turned from them and stood, facing the window, snuffling into a handkerchief, her anger vanished as swiftly as it had come.

Besides what were they quarrelling about, three grown women? Here was life passing and so much to be done and they could stand and scream at one another like children in the nursery. Millie's subconscious self seemed to be saying to her: "I stand outside you. I obscure you. This is not real, but I am real and something behind life is real. Laugh at this. It vanishes like smoke. This is not life." She suddenly smiled; laughter irradiated all her face, shining in her eyes, colouring her cheek.

"Clarice, I'm sorry. If I've been a pig to you all these weeks I surely didn't mean to be. It hasn't been very easy—not through anybody's fault but simply because I'm so inexperienced. I'm sure that I've been very trying to all of you. But why should we squabble like this? I don't know what's happened to all of us this year. We stood far worse times during the War without losing our tempers, and we all of us put up with one another. But now we all seem to get angry at the slightest thing. I've noticed it everywhere. The little things now are much harder to bear than the big things were in the War. Please be friends, Clarice, and believe me that I didn't mean to hurt you."

At this sudden softening Clarice burst into louder sobbing and nothing was to be heard but "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" proceeding from the middle of the handkerchief.

All might now have been well had not Victoria most unfortunately suddenly bethought herself of Mrs. Martin.

"All the same, Millie," she said. "It wasn't quite kindly of you to speak to Clarice like that when you knew that she must be tired after all the trouble she had with her acting, and I'm sure I thought it went very nicely indeed although there was a little confusion in the middle which I'm certain nobody noticed half as much as Clarice thought they did. And I do wish, Millie, that you hadn't spoken to Mrs. Martin like that. I simply don't know what we shall do without her. We'll never get any one else as good. I'm sure she never spoke to me rudely. She only wants careful handling. I do so detest registry offices and seeing one woman worse than another. I do think you're to blame, Millie!"