PART VIII

AT SANTON

I

"For goodness' sake, Joan, stop chattering just for a few minutes!" Philip broke out testily. "If you don't want to sit, say so and have done with it. This is enough to drive anybody mad!"

I had been wondering how much longer his patience would hold out. When an artist is in difficulties with his canvas, motor-bicycle talk for an hour on end can be extremely wearing.

Joan looked up with aggravating sweetness. "What, Philip?" she inquired.

"I say if you don't want to sit, off you go on the confounded machine and I'll start something else."

"But, Philip darling, you know the sparking-plug's broken, and it will be three or four days before we can get another. Do you think Wellands will stock that make, Chummy?"

Charles Valentine Smith knocked out the new Captanide pipe and proceeded to refill it with the Dunhill Mixture.

"Well, if they don't I think I know a fellow who has a spare. That's the worst of the Beaver," he went on. "Now with an Indian or a Douglas ..."

And off they went again, she as well as he, both talking at once: big-ends, plugs, magnetos: Beaver, Indian, Douglas.... In my younger youth I used to ride a tall ungeared ordinary; except for one hellish five minutes in which I had clung, ardently praying, to Smith's back-carrier, I know nothing about these modern machines; and how Joan managed to keep her sideways seat on that grid of torture over his back wheel passed my comprehension. But ever since the arrival of the hideous thing she had hardly been off it, hair all over the place, ankles stiffly out, skirts rippling like a ribbon on a ventilating-fan, and cauliflowers of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind them. I could only conclude that modern love, besides being blind, is deficient in the tactile nerve-centers as well.

It was ten o'clock in the morning, and Philip had set up his easel on a sheep-nibbled slope of the cliff-tops. Joan, in her old tweed skirt and new canary-colored silk jumper, was stretched luxuriously on the thymy bents. The amber beads about her neck matched the potentilla on which she lay, and I give you your choice which was the bluest--the aimlessly fluttering butterflies, the nodding harebells, or her demure and reprehensible eyes. Philip had deliberately excluded the blue of the sky from his canvas. The picture was simply of Joan herself, the crewel-work of flowers on which she lay, and behind her, red as the habitation of dragons, the midsummer sorrel that massed itself up the slope.

The talk continued, a fitter's romance: clutches, brakes, front-drives: Minervas, Excelsiors, de Dions....

In my day we played croquet and read "Maud." ...

And then Philip exploded again.

"Oh, _do_ dry up! How do you expect me to paint? Pull that book a bit closer, Joan, so it throws the light up on your face, and hold your chin a bit higher----"

As if she spoke to herself I heard Joan's murmur: "Why did the razorbill razorbill?"

As softly Charles Valentine Smith murmured back: "So the sea-urchin could sea-urchin"; and this last flippancy was too much for Philip. He put his palette down on the turf and turned to Smith and myself.

"Look here," he said politely, "will you two fellows oblige me by pushing off? Right away somewhere else, please, and now."

"Oh," Joan wailed, "and I shan't have anybody to talk to!"

"You can read your book."

"But it's such a stupid one--all about an old artist, over thirty, who fell in love with his model and bought her alpaca blouses and thread stockings----"

"You shall have a motor catalogue to-morrow. Now sheer off, you fellows."

Obediently I got on to my feet and turned to Smith.

"Come along. We'll give him till midday. Here's your stick."

And I helped him to his feet and bore him off.

II

Ordinarily I do not find it easy to talk to very young men. I have been as young as they, but they have not been as old as I, and I know this but they do not. Young women--that is another matter, and I will make a very candid confession. I now envy these youngsters their youth. I envied Smith his youth. Despite his limp, I was conscious of his tallness and lissomness as he hobbled by my side. And I will add that it is not an unmixed joy to be asked to do a young goddess's shopping for her because you are "quite the kindest person she knows."

It would hardly be true to say that my acquaintance with young Smith had made no progress at all. I had made quite a number of interesting observations on his idyll of petrol, love and crime. But he for his part was still at the stage of apology for his "neck" in asking Joan to ask me to buy his pipes and tobacco for him, and by way of leveling up the obligation had actually sent for a copy of that dandy book that I as a novelist must on no account miss, _The Crimson Specter of Hangman Hollow_. But I was still "Sir" to him and he hardly "Chummy" to me, and our small-talk was quite small. It was certainly small enough as we left the thymy hollow and slowly made for the cliff-tops.

"Tell me if I walk too quickly for you," I said. His hurt was to his right ankle, and his stick left a trail of little round holes in the turf.

"Oh, that's all right, thanks, sir," he said cheerfully, pegging away; and he added with a chuckle, "I say, between you and I, old Philip was rather in a paddy, wasn't he?"

"Between you and me he was," I said. I corrected him quite deliberately. Now that the failure of the sparking-plug had put this opportunity into my hands I was determined at all costs to know more of him. Hence my--well _grossièreté_. But he noticed nothing. Instead he broke out with a feigned enthusiasm.

"I say, these pipes are turning out jolly well! Lovely bit of straight grain this one! You do know how to choose a pipe, sir! Are they French or Italian briar?"

"French."

"Jolly nice bit of root!"

"I'm very glad."

"Cool as a nut. Joan's quite right about my smoking too many cigarettes. They're all right for the street--I hate to see a fellow smoking a pipe in the street--and gaspers smell a bit sickly to other people sometimes, don't you think?"

I agreed with this too.

"I suppose the _Specter_ hasn't turned up yet?" was his next effort, as he sat down to rest for a minute.

"Not yet."

"I do hope it isn't out of print. How soon does a book go out of print, sir--on an average?"

Weakly I thought of "Why does the razorbill razorbill?" and, I am afraid, found nothing to reply....

Then, as he continued to babble laboriously across the gulf that separated us, I remembered again certain tubular parcels that arrived for him by post, which, when stripped of their wrappings, turned out to contain the _Transactions_ and _Proceedings_ of this Society or that. Seeing these left lying about I had peeped into them, and had been brought up standing against such intimidating fences as the following:--

"_Aerofoil Sections in relation to Speed Range._"

"_Influence of Wave-friction on Aerodynamic Resistances._"

"_Notes on Lateral Stability._"

My simple literary mind faints in regions such as these. His presumably did not. This apparently was his ordinary reading, the _Specter_ his relaxation.

"--amber beads," the words came across the void that separated soul from soul. "Just the shade I meant--neither too yellow nor too brown--I'm afraid it took up an awful lot of your time----"

It was here that I took my plunge.

"What," I said, looking steadily at him, "is the Influence of Wind-friction on Aerodynamic Resistance?"

His jaw dropped, as well it might. I knew that for a moment he was wondering whether I had taken leave of my senses.

"Eh?" he said.

I repeated the question. Of course, I no more wanted information about Aerodynamic Resistance than I did about briar pipes and amber beads. It was information about Charles Valentine Smith that I wanted and intended to have.

I date my possession of him from the moment that that look of consternation came into his face. It broke upon me that I had put him into some position that he felt he must immediately explain. Indeed he half rose, as if, having obtained my acquaintance under false pretenses, he must set himself right or leave me.

"Oh, I say, sir!" he broke anxiously out. "Do you mean those Journals and things?"

"That's what I had in my mind. Especially the blue-covered ones."

"Oh lord! You don't suppose I can make head or tail of _those_!"

"Not make head or tail of them? But I've seen you reading them."

He seemed positively sick to extricate himself from my too flattering opinion of him.

"_Me_ understand all _that_! I could kick myself if you think that! Why, that's all designers' stuff--they've got brains, those chaps--shiploads of them--why, I should never have heard of the things but for----" He checked himself.

"But----" I began, puzzled.

He was blushing--blushing like a young girl.

"I know," he said. "I feel a most awfully ass. The fact is, sir, I just moon over those things, lose myself in 'em, sort of. I don't know the first thing about 'em. Of course, there are bits here and there--engines and practical flying and all that--I know a bit about that--what I mean to say is, a fellow doesn't want to miss anything--it's hard to explain----"

On the contrary: it was not at all hard to explain. Simply, I had caught him day-dreaming. That vivid color still in his cheeks told me that I had stumbled on a privacy. A young girl approaching womanhood knows these soft _oubliances_, these shy yet hardy excursions of the spirit that lead nowhither and die of their own over-sweetness. It is love of which she dreams; and this was his equivalent. He just "mooned." It was not understanding--he "didn't want to miss anything." His was not a technician's, but a poet's nature. And caught unawares he blushed.

"Of course my real job would be one of these Expeditions," he mumbled.

I pursued him relentlessly. "Which Expeditions?"

"Well, between you and I, they've started work on several of them. In Africa and India and places. You see I'm awfully keen on Air-geography. If this dashed ankle of mine ever gives me a chance again, that is. Bobby always said that was my line of country. He was the chap for the technical end. Thought in surds, Bobby did. He put me on to all those Journals and things, and--after--well, I sort-of keep it up. _He_ was your man for that."

"By Bobby do you mean your friend Maxwell?"

"Yes. Bobby," he replied, his eyes far out over the sea.

III

He spoke the name with the most perfect readiness and simplicity; there was neither tremor in his voice nor the faintest sign of pain in his dark and steady eyes. He was not even self-conscious under my (I admit) prolonged and deliberate gaze. By what mystery of self-absolution he had expunged the sinister fact for which Esdaile vouched I could not tell. He repeated Bobby's name.

"Yes, Bobby was your man for all that. Fearfully hot stuff. When Bobby opened his mouth I used to dry up."

Then, still without removing my eyes from him, "I never knew Bobby," I said. "But I know a man who did."

He turned to me swiftly. "Who was that?" he demanded.

"A man called Hanson. An Australian. He says he knew him in Gallipoli."

His brows were knitted. "Hanson? Hanson? What was his other name?"

"Dudley."

"Hanson? Hanson? Did he say he knew me?"

"He wasn't sure. He thinks he ran across you. He knew you by sight, anyway, for he described you to me."

"Hanson? No, I give it up. Don't remember him at all. You met such crowds of chaps, you see--sometimes it's just like a dream----"

I appreciated that; but there still remained one thing that was no dream. This was Philip's explicit declaration, "Oh, he remembers all right--it was the other I didn't tell him--that anybody else knew." Philip might now be resolved to let the whole affair sink into oblivion, but Philip after all had not shot anybody. On that morning when I had had my talk with Mackwith I had been rather pleased with my acumen in pointing out that whether our Case had legal consequences or not its moral consequences were inescapable. Yet here, if I could believe my own eyes, was a man who was escaping them in their entirety. He continued to order Journals that Bobby had "put him on to," and could speak of his victim apparently out of some transcendental state of mind where sorrow was an anomaly and regret beside the mark. It all appeared to be admirable, but I found it quite incomprehensible.

"But," I came out of my reverie presently, "you haven't yet told me what 'it' was that Bobby knew all about."

"Do you mean those books?" he asked.

"No, I don't mean the books at all. I know a good deal about books. You can get so soaked in them that you make a whole artificial world out of them, quite self-contained, logical with itself at every single point, and absolutely out of touch with anything that really matters. Do you see what I mean?"

I wasn't sure that he did, and here was I, who do not talk easily to young men, quite anxious that he should.

"Well, let's put it another way. You say Bobby knew all about these equations and diagrams and things. Did he know what it was all _for_--_really_ for--not just wind-resistance or whatever you call it, but something more--why there should be aeroplanes _at all_, for example?"

I had said it badly, but I saw his brow clear. There was a kindling in the eyes he turned to me.

"It's funny you should say that," he said in a rather low voice, "because that's just what Bobby himself used to say. He used to say that anybody who'd passed his matric. could do what he did, and he always would have it that _I_ was the whole show. I didn't agree with him, of course, but--is that what you mean?"

"It is so far," I said. "What else did he say?"

"Well, he always said it was a jolly good thing I wasn't technical. And I did see what he meant by that. I mean to say things _are_ simple really, the big things I mean. You take the sea----" again his eyes wandered far out over it. "People talk an awful lot of bunk about the sea. They think bases are just harbors and ports and coaling-stations and so on. That a base is something fixed. Why, that's exactly what it isn't. You've got to get your coal and oil and stores, of course, but that's only like going into a shop and coming out again as quick as you can. It's only then that the job really begins. I'm afraid I'm talking an awful lot, sir, but I got it down to this: that a ship's only a ship when she's moving. She's no better than a stupid old breakwater when she isn't. I mean to say her real base is her course. Just an imaginary line to make a dash from and turn up where the trouble is. Focal points I believe they call 'em. At least that's the way I worked it out for myself."

"And do you mean the air's the same, or going to be?"

The look that I have ventured to call discontent came into his eyes.

"Well, nothing's quite the same as anything else, of course. But I do think this. There's Germany. Over there----," he nodded out to sea. "North Sea or German Ocean we used to call that, and that was there she said her future was. Well, it isn't, of course. She hasn't got any coast to speak of, and isn't going to have any. But----"

And this time his eyes went aloft to the immeasurable fields of the air.

"She's got just as much of _that_ as anybody else. Taking a perfectly sound line about it too. And what's the good of our saying she shan't build aircraft as long as the damn dog doesn't know? Of course she'll build aircraft. That's where her future is now, and she can afford to hand over ships. But every Zepp or plane you get out of her you'll have to get with a pair of pincers. Then ... swift? Swift won't be the word.... Oh, don't I wish I could get on one of these Expeditions!"

I made no comment on this, since I know nothing about the air. These were merely the words of Charles Valentine Smith, who did.

IV

He knew very little about himself--hardly seemed aware that there was anything of importance to know. It was all Maxwell--"Bobby was the whole show." And I had a very keen sense of the honor the dead man had done himself in denying this. "Frightfully hot stuff on maths," said Smith; and the world is full of men who are "frightfully hot stuff on maths," in that sense; but it is rarely that you find one of these not too absorbed in the technique and detail of his own activities to be aware of a vision beyond. I know this in my own business. I see men working with an appalling intensity, a new and wild and squandering energy that has long ago passed from me; but for their Muse I look in vain. An altar is set up, not to any god known or unknown, but to itself. I speak diffidently, but I seldom see that any flame from Elsewhere descends upon it. This is hard to say, since I too rub my two sticks together with my fellows, hoping they may kindle. I should not say it except that I was now trying to arrive at some comprehension of Maxwell, the competent and efficient man, exposed to all manner of temptations to narrowness and complacency and inertia, but who could yet see in this unsuspecting youngster something he himself did not and could never possess.

And add to this that quasi-religious bond of the air that makes of two men twins in one womb....

I repeat, Maxwell did himself a quite radiant honor.

"What sort of a fellow was Maxwell to look at?" I asked by and by.

The answer was almost startlingly ready. This lad who had bolted from Malvern, forced his way into an Embassy and demanded to be taken in the service of a foreign Power, unbuckled the watch from his wrist.

"Here he is," he said.

I found myself looking at a young but curiously worn face, with a great width of brow, eyes that seemed to hold I knew not what nameless expression of disillusion and fatality, and a firm and sweet mouth. That face had certainly lost nothing spiritually by its ungrudged and generous homage. Yet he too had probably jazzed and pink-ginned and drummed ragtime on cases of stuffed birds. Strange days! Wisdom and experience under young brilliantined hair, and the bald and reverend dome accepting the result on hearsay! Slang, and an undreamed-of valor; Magalhaens' vision, and a lark at a Grafton Ball! By being "frightfully keen on Air-geography" Smith merely meant what Columbus and Cabot and the Navigator had meant; by wanting to "get on one of these Expeditions" he was willing to dare for discovery's sake some monstrous Baffin's Bay of the air. "Not to miss anything," he fumed and fretted over Maxwell's equations and made them part of the Dream and the Desire. He was brooding over it now as we lay there together, I with his watch in my hand.... And all this, I ought to say, was at the time when the last of the Santon hay was barely stacked, and John Alcock and Whitten Brown had just flown the Atlantic in sixteen hours. It was when the headland was pale cloth-of-gold with the ripening corn, and the R. 34 had crossed to America and returned. It was when the ditches were yellow with hawkweed and the copses pink with campion, and no man living could have told you what the intentions of the Air Ministry were. Smith was lying there brooding, not on the carriage of a few pounds' weight of letters nor on prizes of £10,000, but on the problems of man's unchanged and warring heart. He dreamed of Imperial Defense. He was "keen" on making India and Egypt secure. He was "dead nuts" on the safety of Africa, "all out" for Australia's protection, and "tails up" if any other nation jolly well interfered.

And this was his next remark:--

"I say, sir, I think Joan got that Dunhill number wrong after all--I'll swear there's latakia on this--don't tell Joan though--this is _entrez nous_."

_Entrez nous!_ Between you and I! O modest flower tossed to the welcoming hands of the Entente!

I handed him his watch back.

Strange, strange days!

V

Why did I not say straight out to him, "Look here, my young friend, this is all extremely interesting, but what I don't understand is why you shoot a man and then carry his picture on your wrist. In plain English, now, why did you shoot him--always supposing you did?"

Well, I was trying to put myself in his place--trying to picture a friendship such as he had had with this wistful, self-effacing young fatalist whose picture I had just handed back to him. I have told you how the more poignant of these experiences between man and man have been denied me; a flying-friendship I could never by any possibility have had; but I could reach out to it in my fancy. I could imagine with what fierce jealousy I should have guarded a treasure so rich. Not a word, not a breath from outside would I have suffered with regard to it. It was not a question of mere impertinence. It was rather one of the violation of a sacred place.

And it seemed to me that I now owed him no less than I would have claimed for myself. It made no difference that he was twenty-four and I within hand's-reach of fifty. Less than an hour had swept these conventions aside, and thenceforward he was entitled to the full honors of friendship and respect. He might tell me what he chose. Ply him with questions, however, I could not.

Nay, it even seemed to me now that I should have to drop my point before Philip also. However much I had been put on my mettle by those discoveries I had made on that Sunday afternoon in his studio, to drag them up again now would merely be to attack Chummy at one remove. If I could not have it from himself I could hardly have it at all, and the Case, which had unfolded as a conjuror's pilule unfolds into a flagrant and morbid-hued passion-flower, looked like shutting itself up again and being as if it had never been.

Yet the discoveries of that Sunday had been much on my mind. Especially that gold ring that had once belonged to Audrey Cunningham had been on my mind. That the circumstances in which I had found it were directly connected with the rupture between her and Monty I could hardly doubt, and several times, as a mere man, I had been on the point of confessing my share in the incident to Mollie Esdaile.

If Mollie has a little dropped out of the picture, let me now bring her in again as she brought herself in as Chummy Smith and I lay on the turf that morning.

I forget for what delinquency Alan and Jimmy had spent some hours in disgrace; I think they had been cutting one another's hair. But apparently all was now expiated. With joyous cries they dashed over a low brow, Mollie's head and shoulders rising behind them, and flung themselves upon us with the jubilant announcement that they were good again and that the hens had laid eleven eggs.

"One's a duck's----"

"Two's duck's----"

"I'll bet you----"

"I'll bet you my purple pencil----"

"I'll bet you my Bible an' all my shells----"

"Where's daddy?"

"Hasn't he finished painting Auntie Joan yet?"

Mollie was laughing and telling Chummy not to get up. She "goes to pieces" a little in the country in the matter of dress, and wore her mallow-flower of an old sunbonnet and her gray sandshoes. As Smith reached for his stick and got up on to his feet she caught my eye and laughed again. She had suffered from big-ends and magnetos too.

"Did Philip bundle you both out?" she asked.

"He bundled this man out. I was behaving myself."

"Well," quoth Smith, "we only gave him till twelve o'clock, and it's five to now. You coming, kids?"

They were not merely coming; they were already twenty yards on the way, with Chummy pegging after them. Had Mollie and I followed, Philip would merely have commandeered us for the carrying home of his painting-tackle. Instead we turned along the cliff-tops in the opposite direction, towards the zigzag path that dropped steeply to the beach.

Since that impetuous dash of hers to London she had shown herself from time to time--I will not say brooding (that is too strong a word), but frequently withdrawn, pensive, _rêveuse_. She was as brisk and practical as ever about the house or in the arranging of picnics and excursions, but somehow the routine of her daily life struck me as a series of detached and separate efforts, that for some reason or other never acquired momentum. I admit, however, that it would be easy to make too much of this change in her, if change there was.

"Shall we go down?" she said as we paused at the top of the path. "I haven't seen the sands for two days. 'Man works till set of sun----'"

"Come along," I said, giving her a hand; and we began the descent.

The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide was at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out the wide spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel striations of wet and dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the sky was perfectly reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far under our feet could be distinctly seen, the dry portions the intervening footings from one to the next of which we stepped. Our feet left no prints on the firm surface, so that looking behind the illusion was still the same--the dry stripes, the sudden brilliant chasms in between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue and white and dazzling sun.

"Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet.

"Oh? What about?" she asked.

"About his aims and so on--what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly again?"

"I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I shouldn't think he'd want to."

"He does."

She looked straight before her, as if to rest her eyes from the passing immensities underfoot. There was indeed a fantastic sort of consonance between flight and the phenomenon of the shore that midday. I do not know, however, whether this vague association prompted the huge implication of her very next words--an implication which I now had from her for the first time.

"You know what I mean," she said quietly.

I tried to steal a glance at her face, but saw only the folds of the sunbonnet.

"And that it isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to talk about," she added, leaving me to take the hint.

"No," I agreed mechanically; but for all that I needed a few moments in which to think.

Obviously I was not there to get out of Philip's wife something that Philip himself refused me; but the immensity of her quiet assumption had pulled me up short. I was assumed to know the whole--the whole--of "what she meant." It was left to my good sense to see that it was not a thing to talk about. There was to be no argument; she merely expected an equal simplicity in return, and with a woman like Mollie to expect such a thing is to get it. I watched a cloud of sheldrake that wheeled and broke over their own images a few yards away to our left, and then I turned to her.

"My dear, I'm not sure that I do understand altogether, but we certainly won't talk about it. I should, however, like to mention one little thing that I don't think even Philip knows."

She turned quickly. "What is that?"

"Nor Smith."

"What is it?"

"Nor, I should say, you yourself."

"If only you'll tell me what it is----!"

I looked into her eyes. "Where is Mrs. Cunningham now?" I asked.

VI

Her start could hardly have been more sudden had I asked her where Alan was a few moments after he had been seen playing at the cliff's edge.

"Audrey Cunningham? She was at Harrogate last, I think--or Scarboro--why?"

"Why was her engagement broken off?"

She made an abrupt, impatient gesture. Evidently I had plunged her back into an older mood.

"Oh, I don't know! I'm tired to death of--of everything! Why do you want to remind me of it? I was just beginning to forget a little. Oh, why didn't we leave London a week earlier! We nearly did--Philip was only waiting for Billy to get those pictures back--we should have escaped everything then!"

I soothed her. "Yes; but about the engagement. I could make very little of your letter. You said things were tangled and difficult and so on. What did you mean, Mollie?"

She was silent.

"Do you mean that you won't discuss Mrs. Cunningham with me?"

Still she did not speak.

"Because you have discussed her. I had your letter. You said you'd heard from her. That was since you last saw her. What happened in between?"

She found her voice. "Nothing that I know, except that it seems to have been definitely off."

"By that do you mean that she returned Monty's ring?"

"She didn't say what she did with the ring."

"Well, she neither returned it nor kept it. I have it. I don't want it. Will you take it?"

I fetched it from my pocket and held it out to her.

Her hand found my sleeve, almost as if that brilliance underfoot unsteadied her head. Her eyes had closed and there was a little hard crumple between her brows. I put my other hand on her shoulder.

"Let's get up the beach--this is too dazzling--it's making you dizzy," I said.

Faintly she murmured, "Yes--it does get in your eye----"

VII

On the hot loose sand above the highest seaweed I made her sit down. Presently she had recovered a little. Her manner was now undoubtedly that of a person on whose back a half-withdrawn burden is reimposed. But she shouldered it.

"Where did you get it?" she asked, her eyes on the ring in my palm.

"Do you remember Philip asking me to pack up some sketches for him and sending me his key?"

"He did say something about it. Monty had left."

"I found the ring on the Sunday afternoon I went for the sketches. It was in a hole in the studio floor."

"In a hole.... Ah-h-h-h!"

I looked sharply at her, but continued.

"Stuck quite firmly in: in fact, I had to prise it out with a screwdriver. I didn't know which of them it belonged to--I don't know now--so I slipped it into my pocket. Perhaps you'd better take it."

But she made no movement to do so. She was picking up handfuls of sand and allowing it to slip through her fingers again. She made quite a number of little heaps, which her eyes attentively watched, but her mind was elsewhere--perhaps on that last letter of Audrey Cunningham's, when apparently the engagement had been neither off nor on. She made no sign when I placed the ring in her lap. I had to speak.

"Queer, wasn't it?"

Her murmur was so low that I scarcely heard it. "Of course a thing like that _would_ make it definitely off."

"A thing like what?"

"Losing it like that--after all the other."

"Come, she can hardly have 'lost' it, since I had to get a screwdriver to prise it out!"

"I don't mean 'lost' in that way--be quiet and let me think."

The fingers began to make a fifth sandhill.

I hope I have made it clear that I was confining myself quite strictly to Monty Rooke's affair. If it was simply a misunderstanding I did not think I was going beyond my business in discussing with Mollie whether that misunderstanding might not be removed. But it now seemed to me that I was once more on the verge of far more than this. That deep long-drawn "Ah-h-h-h!" that "A thing like that _would_ make it definitely off" were enough to convince me of this. Evidently my words had meant more to her than to myself who had uttered them. Therefore if Mollie claimed time to think, so did I.

And first of all I recalled my firm persuasion of that Sunday afternoon that Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery. It might have been an accidental one, or she might merely not have rested until she had made it, but a discovery she had made, and it had to do with the hole in the studio floor. I remembered too my own pacings, eye-measurements, judgment of angles, and my slight chagrin that Philip had frustrated my further investigations by his removal of the key from the cellar door. And it seemed to me that again everything seemed to come round to that cellar of Esdaile's--the cellar on which Hubbard had instantly fastened as holding the answer to the riddle, the cellar in which Philip had spent that unaccountable half-hour and over which he had since so jealously watched, yet the self-same cellar into which both Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had since descended and found ... nothing.

Yet instantly all my former objections rose again as vividly as ever--the extreme physical improbability that Philip could have seen anything through that peep-hole, the utter unlikelihood that he should have had his eye at it at that particular moment of time, the virtual impossibility that he should have thought of the hole at all on hearing the crash.

And yet in this hole had been tightly jammed the ring now lying in Mollie's lap.

Suddenly Mollie surprised me by looking up and almost brightly smiling. She smoothed out the sandhills and picked up the ring from her lap.

"Well," she said in a tone of relief, "that makes an immense difference. I'm awfully glad you told me. Shall we be getting back?"

But this, it struck me, was rather rushing matters. I thought I had a right to know just a little more than that. Therefore I did not rise.

"One moment," I said. "I should like to know why you said that 'a thing like that would make it definitely off.'"

She smiled again, with a sort of affectionate raillery.

"Oh ... and you're supposed to understand women!"

This I warmly disclaimed. "In any case I only know Mrs. Cunningham very slightly," I protested.

"And you formed no impression of her?"

"I didn't say that."

"Not even that she would be just the woman to take a--hint--of that kind?"

She was gently but quite plainly laughing at me; but, glad as I was to see the cloud disappear from her brow, she was not going to have everything her own way.

"Then she did make a discovery, and received a hint, as you call it, in doing so?"

"Did she?" she parried.

"_Did_ she?"

At that she laughed outright. She patted my sleeve almost as if I had been a child.

"You men _can't_ know how funny you are sometimes!" she mocked me.

VIII

It struck me even then that the moment Mrs. Cunningham's name was introduced there was introduced also something of that sex-antagonism--perhaps I had better modify that and say sex-difference--for which her personal story had given her such bitter reason. Here now was Mollie, suddenly and in the middle of our _tête-à-tête_, abolishing me as an individual and saddling me with the collective qualities of men in general. And I must remind you once more that as a matter of mere historical sequence I was still unaware of what had passed between her and Philip on that night when she had put Audrey Cunningham to bed, and Monty had spent half the night in wandering through the dark Roehampton lanes.

"Well, let's take it that we're funny," I said rather shortly. "I don't quite see the joke myself, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that if I can do Monty a good turn I want to. Whether patching it up between him and Mrs. Cunningham is a good turn is for you to decide. I only met her once in my life, and hardly exchanged a dozen words with her."

"You shall presently if I can lay my hands on her."

"What do you mean? That you're going to have her down here?"

"Of course I'm going to have her down here if she can come," said Mollie in her most matter-of-fact tones. "How slowly you think! She must come immediately. I shall see about it this afternoon _même_."

"And Rooke too?"

"We'll see about that."

"And Hubbard? And Mackwith?"

"No. What have they got to do with it?"

"Merely to make the party complete. We should be just where we started then."

"Oh, I think we can dispense with that side of it," she answered lightly. "Let me see: was it Harrogate? It was Buxton, and then Matlock, and then either Harrogate or Scarboro...."

I wonder whether the surmise has dawned on you that was now beginning to dawn on me? I admit that I had none but the very slightest grounds for it, and that even these were more exclusions than affirmations; but in the absence of anything more positive they had to serve. Think for a moment how we men, solemnly, ponderously and sure that we were doing the decent thing, had decided that at all costs certain facts of our Case should be kept from the womenfolk. To that end we had evaded, temporized, shuffled. And now suppose--just suppose--that all our care and concealment had been wasted, and that two of the women at any rate knew as much as Philip Esdaile knew and far, far more than any of the rest of us? Mind you, I was only guessing; but I began rather to fancy my guess. If there was little for it, I could see nothing against it. Certain things, moreover, were distinctly in its favor. Why this remarkable brightening in Mollie's manner, this change from her dizzy little stagger over those strips of inverted sky when I had first produced that ring to her air of lightsome raillery now? Why this quick instinctive taking of sex-sides, this sudden practical decision to seek out Audrey Cunningham this very day and to have her down to Santon? It was not the ring at all; it was--could only be--the place in which the ring had been found. Always, always we came back to that hole in the studio floor at which Philip's eye could not possibly have been at the moment of the crash that May morning. Somewhere between the hole and the cellar the elusive explanation lay. I had been thwarted, Mackwith knew nothing about it, and Hubbard could only grunt and mumble about periscopes and sound-ranging and selenium cells; but Mollie, I was persuaded, knew.

And what I had just told her, which she had not hitherto known, was that Audrey Cunningham shared the knowledge with her.