Part 7

When they played tennis at the Hardinges' house, Lily was generally assigned to Colin for a partner, as it was necessary to equalize the sets by coupling the weakest player, as Lily indubitably was, with the strongest.

At first she thought that he must resent her inferiority, but it was soon evident that he did not even acknowledge it to exist. When she played well, he praised her rapturously, and when she played badly he put aside her apologies with assurances that the sun, or the wind, or some mistaken movement of his own had been against her.

Under the stimulus of his admiration, Lily suddenly blossomed into a self-confidence hitherto unknown to her, and actually learnt to like tennis, and to play passably well.

Occasionally Colin was her adversary, and then he served his balls to her as gently as possible, and she knew it, and was thrilled by his chivalry, although she never made acknowledgment of it to him in any spoken words.

Such tiny little things seemed to count. The way one looked, or didn't look--the seat one chose in the garden at tea-time. The allusions that proved how carefully certain predilections or desires had been noted. And there were the photographs.

All of them had cameras, and groups were taken. Colin always placed himself next to Lily, or sitting at her feet, or standing just behind her, for these.

Colin took photographs of Lily, because that was such a very pretty hat, if she didn't think it rude of him to make a personal remark. And might he take one of her without a hat on at all, for a change?

Lily would just take one snapshot of Colin, because he had put her camera to rights, and they must see if it had been a successful operation.

Colin manœuvred the unsuspecting Sylvia into making use of his Kodak, which was much superior to her own Brownie, so that the photograph which she took of Colin and Lily, alone together on the tennis court, appeared to be a sudden inspiration of her own.

But Lily knew that the whole was a deeply thought-out plot of Colin's, although he never said so. When the films were developed and printed, however, though Colin exhibited them freely, he let Lily know, casually, that only she and he were to have copies of that particular photograph.

The glamour of perfect summer weather lay over it all, and the scent and colour of the innumerable roses with which the Hardinges' garden seemed to be eternally decked. It was the beginning of August, when the halcyon days drew to a close, and on the last evening, they all, under a red harvest moon, went out to the favourite scene of their many excursions--a stretch of common land whereon the heather had just burst into purple bloom.

The undergraduate challenged Dorothy to a race through the thick, impeding clumps, and they sped far ahead, the youth gaining upon her every moment, in spite of a long start and the silk skirt that she had daringly wound round her waist, exposing her frilled petticoats and a shapely length of leg.

Sylvia and two contemporaries, encountered upon the way, linked arms and could be heard singing fragmentarily as they went. Kenneth, excited by the unwonted lateness of the hour, ran with the Hardinges' dog, and alternately teased and chattered to Janet, always left odd-man-out, and now relegated to the society of her father, who told her instructive things about the moon. Lily and Colin lingered far behind them all.

They were not articulate, even now, in spite of the soft allurement of the melancholy that possessed them both.

In Lily's mind, there floated a fragment once read somewhere:

... _De cet adieu, si douce est la tristesse._

She said tremulously:

"I'm sorry you're both going away to-morrow."

She had not wanted to say _both_, but the word mysteriously forced itself from her.

"I'm sorry, too," Colin answered fervently. "I shall never forget this time. It's been the happiest of my whole life."

"I think it's been the happiest of mine, too."

Shyness overwhelmed and silenced them both.

"You don't want to catch up with the others, do you?" spoke Colin entreatingly.

"No--oh no. They're too far ahead," said Lily hurriedly.

The hillside became steeper, and the gorse-bushes that stood up amidst the tough springing heather became more numerous.

"I think I'd better go first and--and help you, if I may."

He thrust the stiff, green spires aside, and held out his hand.

Lily tremulously placed hers within his grasp.

They climbed slowly, without speaking.

"Shall we sit down for a minute?" Colin suggested, when the end of the steep path was reached, and Lily had softly, but definitely, withdrawn her hand from his.

They leant against a boulder, and Colin detected a tiny tuft of white heather.

"Let's each pick a piece of it, and not tell anyone where we found it."

Then they exchanged their pieces, rather solemnly and without speaking much. Colin's fingers lingered round Lily's as she tendered her little spray towards him, and they looked long at one another in the moonlight.

"I shall always keep mine," he murmured.

"As a remembrance," whispered Lily.

"I shan't need anything to make me remember," said the boy reproachfully. "Will you keep yours?" he added beseechingly.

"Yes."

Colin kissed his piece of heather and put it into a little pocketbook.

Lily tucked hers tenderly into the front of her gown. Then it was all over and the others joined them, and they went down the hill again all together, singing "For Auld Lang Syne," and Lily and Kenneth were left at their own lodge-gates.

And for the next few days, Lily found the picnics dull, and the tennis parties no longer events to be looked forward to, and the taking of photographs not worth while.

Once Dorothy Hardinge said to her, quite calmly: "I believe Colin Eastwood was awfully in love with you, Lily."

"Father says Colin is frightfully susceptible," said Janet quickly. "I heard Father and Mother laughing about him."

Lily did not mind the laughter of good-natured Cousin Charlie and his wife.

She wondered with shy, delicious tremors whether Colin really was in love with her, and whether some day he would come back again and ask her to marry him, and take her away to some nebulous dream world in which all true lovers had their being.

Her dreams and fancies were nearly as unsubstantial as those that she had woven round imaginary adventures, and told herself from day to day, at school. She was still only pretending to be like other people. Really Lily knew that it was all pretence to say that she was now grown up.

Philip said it from time to time, even while himself still treating her as a child, with no slightest claim to either judgment or individuality of her own.

But when he one day found her, more or less surreptitiously, childishly devouring toffee in the garden, he reminded her seriously and with displeasure, of her years.

"You don't want to eat unwholesome sweetstuff, between meals, like a little schoolboy. That's all very well for the nursery," said Philip, disregarding the fact, resentfully remembered by Lily, that no such practice had ever been allowed prevalence in the Stellenthorpe nursery.

"I don't like to see you behaving so babyishly, Lily. It's--it's undignified, and unsuitable. I don't like to see it."

He saw it no more.

Lily, although regarding detection as shameful, was either not sufficiently convinced of the heinousness of eating toffee at nineteen years old, or else lacked sufficient self-control to refrain from surreptitiously indulging her desire for sweet things.

She made inconspicuous expeditions to the village sweet-shop, and returned with her purchases in her pocket, thoroughly despising herself the while.

Guilt, and a ludicrously disproportionate terror showed plainly in her face when she once met her father, on her return by the least frequented entrance to the house.

"What have you been doing, my little pet?" Philip enquired with a suspiciousness foreign to his nature, but which must have been engendered in the most trusting of parents by Lily's confused and disconcerted expression.

"I just went up to the village," she stammered, and felt herself flushing.

Philip stared at her in a puzzled manner. "What for?" he said at last.

"Nothing, Father. Just a--a walk."

Lily hastened away from further questions with the sense of her own degradation strong upon her. She hated herself for having told a lie, and supposed that she had done so from a natural and ingrained tendency to deceive in the first place, and an uncontrollable and dishonouring passion for sweets in the second. She had become incapable of analyzing impartially the true grounds of her own moral cowardice.

Had her natural honesty of mind been less systematically and thoroughly warped, she might have received illumination from the sequel of the affair.

Philip, during the afternoon that followed their encounter, was silent with that peculiar silence which Lily knew, too well, denoted in him both grief and perplexity.

Then, at the end of the evening, he said to her suddenly:

"My little child would never do anything foolish without telling me, eh, Lily?"

"No, Father," automatically said Lily, neither of them awake to the absurd and improbable inconsistency of prefacing an act of folly by announcing it in a quarter where it would certainly receive scant encouragement.

"You must never play little, underhand tricks," said Philip nervously.

It was quite evident that he intensely disliked saying whatever he had set himself to say, and Lily's heart sank with the familiar feelings of shame and dismay as she realized that he was obliquely referring to her morning's walk.

"It's--it's not quite ladylike, not to be open and above-board. And little people have to be specially careful when they're rather older. There must never be anything like--well, like setting up a correspondence, for instance, with some youth or other, without saying anything about it."

For a moment Lily felt utterly bewildered.

"We don't want to put anything at all unpleasant into words," her father said hastily, "but sometimes a little hint.... You see, my little pet, very young people can be rather thoughtless sometimes, and then it may lead to things that are perhaps a little bit undesirable--you'll understand better when you're older. But clandestine expeditions to post letters, or to call for them, are quite out of the question, and might lead to a great deal of talk and unpleasantness."

Philip stopped to shudder at the distasteful vista of possibilities thus opened up, and the perception suddenly flashed upon Lily of his ingenious misinterpretation of the object of her morning expedition.

It afforded her the most unaffected relief.

There was no humiliation, and but little inconvenience, in being suspected of misdemeanours on a scale to which she had never aspired. It was even, mysteriously, rather gratifying.

"You understand what I mean, my darling?"

"Yes," said Lily, trying to keep extreme thankfulness out of her voice.

"Then we needn't say anything more about it." But Philip still fidgetted uneasily with his newspaper and it was evident that he had more to say, and that he much disliked the prospect of saying it.

"Of course, one likes you to have plenty of innocent and ladylike amusement," he said at last, in reluctant and distrustful tones. "Certainly one does. And Cousin Charlie's daughters and--and their friends--are everything that is nice and proper, no doubt. But I shouldn't like to think that you ever get at all--excited, or unguarded, so that people might find you a little bit--undignified."

Lily's relief was now merged in acute discomfort.

Her father must be thinking of Colin Eastwood. Had she really been undignified?

To Lily's thinking it was an unendurable word, denoting indefinable forms of unrestraint, of an underbred lack of self-respect.

"One of these days," said Philip, carefully looking away from his daughter's discomfited face and perhaps scarcely less embarrassed than was she, "one of these days I hope to see my little girl happily engaged and married to some good, suitable man. But not for a long, long while yet, and in the meantime my little Lily mustn't cheapen herself by foolish boy-and-girl nonsense."

"I haven't----" stammered Lily, scarlet.

"Hush, hush, now. You know you mustn't contradict Father like that."

The form of Philip's serious and unvehement rebukes had not varied since the days of Lily's babyhood.

"You'll be a good child, my pet, I know. If only your mother had been spared to us, there would never have been any little difficulties. You must talk to Cousin Ethel, if there's anything she can help you about----"

"But there isn't anything----" Lily was frenziedly repudiating she knew not what.

"Well, well, we needn't talk of sad, uncomfortable things, my child. Only no little hole-and-corner affairs with letter-writing, remember."

But Lily had ceased to derive relief from the evident immunity from detection of the toffee scandal that was thus implied.

Her idle dreaming about that impalpable summer romance was over, and she strove with shame to forget the very name of Colin Eastwood.

VII

"You must have a talk with Ethel, have a talk with Ethel," said Charlie Hardinge. "My dear fellow, you must have a talk with Ethel."

Philip looked gloomy and distrustful.

He did not tell himself that Ethel Hardinge always roused in him a feeling of irritation that temporarily embraced the whole family of Hardinge, nor did he realize that she had a precisely similar effect upon most of those people who, with reluctant admiration, spoke of her as being such a good mother.

He told himself instead that Ethel was the mother of three daughters, and that therefore she understood everything about all young girls.

Without enthusiasm, he embarked upon a talk with Ethel.

"My motherless little child," said Philip, thereby involving himself in misunderstanding at the very outset, since Ethel supposed him to be alluding to little Kenneth.

"No, no," said Philip, pained. "Kenneth is at school. Besides, he is a boy. It's my poor little Lily that troubles me."

"Oh, but she's not a _child_," said Ethel brightly. "I assure you, you mustn't think of her as a child. A girl of nineteen is grown up, or she ought to be. My Dorothy is a year younger than Lily, but I should never dream of saying she wasn't grown up. Besides, she'd resent it so much if I did!"

"I think Lily is content to let me judge for her----" said Philip stiffly.

Nothing in Lily's conduct justified the assertion--rather the reverse--but while Philip's necessity constrained him to ask for assistance, his dignity constantly impelled him to deny any need of it. This naturally increased the delicacy of his adviser's position, but Ethel Hardinge was cheerfully impervious to atmospheric conditions.

"There's a stage when they get discontented and out of hand," she remarked thoughtfully. "I went through it with Dorothy, and I'm going through it with Janet now. Girls thinking they can't get on at home, you know."

Philip was sincerely horrified.

"That is very sad and shocking," said he gravely. "Home is a young girl's natural sphere above all others, I should have thought. But I hope little Lily has no terrible ideas of that kind in her head."

"Oh, they all go through it," Ethel repeated comfortably. "It'll be my Sylvia next."

"Indeed?" said Philip, who felt no interest in Ethel's Sylvia, but would have thought it unsympathetic not to simulate one.

His conscientious observance of this self-imposed law retarded the course of the consultation a good deal, since everything that either of them said invariably served to remind Ethel of its applicability to one or more of her own children.

"It goes off, once they get other things to think about," Mrs. Hardinge observed optimistically. "Dorothy was quite all right again when we had those nice boys staying here. They had plenty of fun all together, and it quite took her mind off her grievances."

"But why should little chil--should young girls, living at home, have grievances at all?" demanded Philip piteously. "They ought to be as happy as the day is long."

"Of course, our kiddies have everything to make them jolly--and really, I think they know it, at the bottom of their hearts. Dorothy and Sylvia are cheery enough, now, and Janet is only going through a phase. But your Lily--of course it's lonelier for her. And then, she's very affectionate and sensitive, after all--my girls always say she wants bracing--perhaps it rather reacts on her spirits to know that you--that you----"

Ethel called up a fit of coughing to her aid. It was never easy to make a personal remark to Philip Stellenthorpe.

He grew more rigid than ever as the sense of this one was borne in upon him.

"You mean that my own happiness is, naturally, no longer to be found in this life? But my little Lily can know nothing of that," said he in all good faith. "I should never dream of speaking about my grief to her, or allowing it to cloud her spirits."

"I don't see how you can help it," said Ethel bluntly.

Philip sat in astonished silence.

He had never thought of his children save as beings of quite undeveloped perceptions, and it was to him an incredible and unwelcome suggestion that Lily might possibly be aware of anything that had not expressly been put into words for her information.

"We always imagined, Charlie and I, that you'd give Lily a regular season in London as soon as she grew up. I only wish we could afford it for our kiddies--but it's out of the question, with three of them."

"If Lily's dear mother had been spared to us, no doubt there would have been something of that sort," said Philip dejectedly. "But in the circumstances, it hardly occurred to me that I should actually spend three or four months in town, and take her to balls and parties and all the rest of it, myself. And I am really quite out of touch with London society nowadays. But if my duty to the child requires a sacrifice----"

"No--no," said Ethel hastily.

She rightly conjectured that the spirit in which Philip would approach the proposed immolation might safely be counted upon to victimize Lily quite as thoroughly as himself.

"Isn't there anyone to whom you could send her? It's so easy to make arrangements of that sort, as a rule. Most people are only too pleased to take a pretty girl about--by arrangement, of course."

"I could only entrust the charge of Lily to near relations, naturally," said Philip.

If Mrs. Hardinge failed to appreciate the force of the axiom, she made no sign of it.

"Surely there are aunts and people?"

"My wife was an only daughter, as of course you know, and her brothers are not married. I have only one sister, and she is unmarried and lives abroad."

Philip's manner suggested strongly that "abroad" in this connection might cover a multitude of sins. But Ethel knew all about Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe.

"Oh, but wouldn't she be the very person? I remember her quite well. Last time I was in town taking Sylvia to the dentist I met your sister in the waiting-room. We had quite a long talk."

"My sister has a small villa in Italy, outside Rome. She lives there almost altogether, and I fancy she would dislike London."

Ethel entirely disbelieved that any woman would dislike London for a sojourn of which the expenses of herself and a young and pretty companion would be liberally met. But she felt unable to put this into words which should leave Philip's susceptibilities unwounded.

So she said instead, with an air of bright inspiration:

"Then why not send Lily to Italy? It would be a splendid education. I've often thought how much I should like Janet to get a trip abroad! She's the clever one, you know--it would be rather wasted on Dorothy, I'm afraid. From what your sister told me she has a most interesting circle of friends amongst the English colony in Rome, and knows all the Embassy people."

"Yes, that is so."

Philip appeared to be much more favourably struck with this scheme than with Ethel's previous suggestion.

He put from him the painful recollection of certain heartless words, spoken nearly ten years ago, and tried only to remember that poor Clo was his nearest relation, and Lily's aunt.

After all, she had loved the children in her own way, and Philip had long ago euphemized her terrible speech about Vonnie into "poor Clo's rather unsympathetic way of speaking about things that should be held sacred."

Whenever Philip Stellenthorpe came to within measurable distance of a decision, however, it was his invariable instinct to make earnest search for difficulties or disadvantages that might stand in the way of its execution.

"There are several drawbacks to the plan, of course," he began at once. "My sister may have other arrangements of her own, or the idea may not appeal to Lily."

"I shouldn't dream of consulting her, if I were you," said Ethel in a surprised voice. "Just tell her it's all settled, as a tremendous surprise for her, and she'll be delighted. Girls are like that."

"I'm sure my little girl would never be ungrateful for anything I had arranged on her behalf," said Philip sadly. "But I don't know whether this is the right time of year for Italy. I should have to find out about that."

"You would hardly send her for less than six months, surely," urged the practical Mrs. Hardinge. "_Some_ of that would be sure to be the right time of year."

"And what about the journey?"

Philip pounced upon a further debatable point with gloomy triumph.

Ethel misunderstood him.

"That would be one point in favour of letting her go this autumn. She wouldn't have that long journey in the heat."

"I was wondering who should take her."

"Take her? Isn't she old enough to take herself?"

"It is one of my rules," said Philip sublimely, "that Lily should not go about alone. I have never allowed her to travel by herself, and I shouldn't dream of letting her begin by a journey to Italy."

"Of course, if she's never travelled by herself, she can't begin by going all that way. Our kiddies always go about together--but perhaps one by herself may be different. Only it seems a pity she should be so helpless at her age."

Philip looked offended as he always did at any form of criticism.

"You could send a maid with her."

"My sister's establishment would probably not admit of an additional servant."

"She could see Lily into the train in Paris, and then come back. Come, you wouldn't mind her going straight through in a ladies' carriage by herself, would you?" said Ethel persuasively.

Philip reluctantly conceded that this might be permitted, less because the idea appeared to him satisfactory, than because he had just thought of a fresh objection to the whole scheme, and was desirous of bringing it forward immediately.

"I should be sorry if Lily made her friends amongst Roman Catholics, I must admit."

"I daresay most of Miss Stellenthorpe's friends are English. I believe there's quite a colony there. In any case, she wouldn't be likely to be attracted by a foreigner, would she?"

Ethel's abrupt descent from the general to the particular slightly scandalized her hearer.

"No--no. I don't know that I was thinking of anything very specific," he said untruthfully. "Only on general grounds."

"Oh well, of course, she's very pretty. There are sure to be plenty of people who'll admire her. That boy we had here, Colin Eastwood, was a good deal smitten."

Ethel laughed comfortably, but Philip remained quite unsmiling.

"Boy-and-girl nonsense is all very well," he remarked in tones which implied the contrary, "but of course it can't lead to anything, and only puts foolish ideas into the heads of little people. I naturally hope to see my poor little Lily happily and suitably settled some day, but there's plenty of time before her."

"I approve of early marriages," Ethel declared stoutly. "I hope if our girls are to marry, that they'll all marry young."