CHAPTER III

“WE TRAVEL LIGHT”

Bertram was beginning to tire of Chavvy. Aunt Esther was beginning to tire of Bertram. And Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was quite obviously beginning to tire of Peter and her persistent lack of response to his demands for payment. Peter was just rather tired. She could not pay Mr. Lazarus; and Chavvy had conceived for her an unnecessarily clinging affection: “After all,” she was wont to remark wistfully, “we are girls together.”... Peter were not sure if it were legitimate to girl with one’s stepmother. Furthermore, her father and her aunt made her their headquarters of separate complaint. And withal at any moment might come a summons from Stuart, a letter from Stuart, a challenge from Stuart, demanding that she must be constantly and supremely on the alert. For his siege of her was carried on in the spirit of who would say: “Yield you shall--but yield if you dare!”

At present he was following up a period of furious and feverish need of her, when meeting after meeting failed to quench the thirst that was upon them, by a prolonged outburst of silence. An outburst in that it lacked all of relaxation or flatness; insisted every moment of every day that it was on both sides a silence pregnant of meaning--though whether of self-torment or of defeat or of bomb-manufacture neither could tell; a silence awaiting hourly shatterment. Peter felt once or twice that Stuart was mutely pleading with her to break it, or else allow him to break it, but now it amused her to exact mercilessly from him the quality of superman which himself had thrust her into exacting.

“I want to speak to you, my daughter.” In such ponderous fashion did Bertram one Sunday’s noon, call Peter aside into the trim quadrangle of garden. He was addicted to airing his fatherhood in front of Miss Esther and Chavvy, as though challenging them to go and do likewise if they could,--“and it isn’t easy,” disregarding a few minor facts of co-operation, “it isn’t easy to have had a splendid girl like that, all by oneself, and to have brought her up to be a credit!”

So now he laid emphasis on the appellation ‘my daughter,’ causing Miss Esther to toss her head, as she remarked: “Special afternoon Service at three o’clock, Peter, my dear, should you feel inclined to come,” signifying that she, more than Bertram, was responsible for the girl’s welfare and up-bringing.

“Do you want me too, Pierrot?” pleaded Chavvy, always alarmed at the prospect of a _tête-à-tête_ with her husband’s sister-in-law.

“No,” snapped Pierrot; “stay where you are.”

--“I can’t make out,” he confided in Peter, as they strolled towards the garden-seat, “why those two don’t get on better; there’s a fuss every single time I run up to town.”

“You’ve been up every single day,” she reminded him gently. As, indeed, her pocket had good cause to know.

Bertram, misliking her accents of reproof, remembered his original intention in calling her aside:

“The--ah--young gentleman who seemed to occupy a great deal of your attention, Peter; I’ve been making enquiries, and he appears to be in a fairly sound position. He hasn’t called here lately, I’ve noticed; I hope,” with tender concern, “that he isn’t making a fool of my little girl?”

Peter gazed helplessly at the speaker; then bubbled over with joyous laughter.

“What would you do if that were the case, daddy, dear?”

Bertram ignored both the question and the laughter. “I should like to know,” he persisted, “what his intentions may be?”

“As strictly dishonourable as even you could wish--Pierrot!” mocked his undutiful child.

“Oh, damn!--Sorry, Peter; but do I look like a Pierrot?”

“More like an organ-grinder; you’re disgracefully shabby.”

“I know,” ruefully; “and my dress-suit is much too tight, supposing I wore it in the mornings.”

“I don’t think that Aunt Esther would approve of that.”

“Well, I’ll run in to Lazarus to-morrow, and see if he’ll rig me up a suit on spec.”

“Mr. Lazarus,” murmured Peter, “has just got out a summons against me. I wouldn’t go to Mr. Lazarus, if I were you.”

“Lord!” Bertram exclaimed in genuine sympathy. “I’m awfully sorry, Peter, old girl; I was just going to ask you to lend me a fiver. I wonder if I could borrow a ten-pound-note from anyone, and lend you a fiver to pay Lazarus; then he might make me that suit without pressing for payment, and I’d be five pounds to the good.” He brightened considerably at the prospect of five pounds to the good, and, jingling the imaginary coins in his pocket, evidently considered that he had now solved the financial problem with as much ease as he had previously disposed of his daughter’s love affairs. He turned to his own matrimonial aspects: “Chavvy will be perfectly happy with you and Esther, I suppose. The tour will only be for the rest of the season.”

“What tour?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m booked with the ‘Troubadours’ from the first of July; next Monday. A month at Maidenhead, then a fortnight of Hastings, wind up at Bournemouth. Got it through young Tommy Weekes; he has cancer of the throat, and mayn’t sing in the open,--or anywhere else, I should imagine, poor Tom, except in the heavenly choir--and for that he don’t sing the right kind of song. Being able to strum on the mandoline settled it for me, and jolly thankful I was, too.” He spoke quickly, feeling the impending disapproval.

“You’re leaving Chavvy here?”

“Yes,” defiantly.

“It’s hardly fair, dad; she’ll be miserable. ’Tisn’t her sphere.”

“I’m not going to tour with a wife,” muttered Bertram. “Where’s the fun, Peter? And she hangs round me--oh, you’ve seen!”

True that Chavvy was of an ivy-like disposition. And even a Pierrot will turn if sufficiently Pierretted upon.

“I couldn’t have stood this infernal tidiness a day longer,” continued Bertram gaily, his momentary depression lifted at the prospect of freedom. “’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno how you’ve put up with it all these years. I’d lift you out, if I could; take you along with me. I wonder--perhaps you could hold a tambourine, or something,” doubtfully.

“Thanks,” said Peter, really grateful; “but I don’t think I’ll do that, it’s too difficult. Besides, the tidiness is only surface, and doesn’t worry me much. But it’s a shame to leave Chavvy planted in the midst of it.”

“My dear, to her it’s the height of luxury, after all the hardships she’s undergone; clean towels every week, a bath every night, nice society, what more can she want?” Bertram had not the faintest idea of being illogical. And try as she would, Peter was unable to detach herself from his point of view. It was, after all, merely a repetition of Stuart’s creed, to cease sucking when the orange was dry. But then, spoke justice, one must not marry the orange.

A puff of wind which had been toying with some odd scraps of paper on the lawn, now lifted the largest of these and deposited it at Peter’s feet. She recognized a fragment of the plaintive storyettes which Chavvy was in the habit of scribbling, and afterwards, in the pride of her heart, showing to Peter. So the girl felt no present scruples in reading:

... “Who wear the white-and-black Moon Livery, must sooner or later go forth to look for new loves. So Pierrot went ... and Pierrette was very lonely--oh, very lonely! Harlequin came to passionately woo her, and many other suitors, but she sent them all away from her quaint Little Red House, thinking that Pierrot would return.... Pierrot did not return. The crimson rose that he had dropped at her feet in leaving, withered, but still she found sweetness in its Crushed Perfume.

“Autumn came and Autumn went....

“And Winter....

“Night after night Pierrette crouched in front of the fire, waiting for the footsteps that never came; dreaming into the ruddy hollows of the coals all her sad little memories of the sunshine and carnival that Had Been.

“... One evening when the rain and hail and wind shook the windows, Pierrette saw the petals of her rose drop one by one to the ground, and gathering them into her hand she cried impatiently that she too wouldn’t wait any longer, and ran to cast the faded token of a faded love on to the Rubbish-heap at the end of her little garden of lilies.

“... Hark! a sound of sobbing through the darkness. Across the Rubbish-heap lay a glimmer of white! ... ragged, wet, tired, Pierrot had crept home.... And, forgiving all, she crouched down beside him, drew his head into her lap.... ‘Pierrot,’ she whispered, ‘_I knew you would come back_.’...”

* * * * *

Thus far Peter was able to read. The author’s style was well imbued with the Pierrot-germ just then rampant in the air; yet here was sufficient at least to show that Chavvy did not expect fidelity from her husband, was preparing herself to be forlornly patient through the long days of waiting. Peter chided herself as a brute for the involuntary wish that Chavvy could go and do it all somewhere else.

Suddenly she saw Bertram and his wife as ludicrous caricatures of herself and Stuart; he in his desire to cut free whenever he pleased; and she--no, at all events she would not wait for Stuart to come back to her through wind and rain. Thirteen days now his silence had endured; Peter cast an anxious look towards the rubbish-heap round the corner of the house--and at the same moment the gate clicked, and Stuart sauntered towards them across the lawn; his appearance so eminently matter-of-fact and prosperous as at once to relieve her of alarm.

“Hullo, Peter. Come for a tramp?”

She departed to don thick boots. A ‘tramp’ with Stuart, she knew from previous experience, meant that whatever stood in their direct line of march, must simply and without question be ignored. One did not go backwards or roundabout or half-way. One went through and on. If a mountain blocked the path, one went over it; if a rushing torrent, then into it; if a board with “trespassers will be prosecuted”--well, of course, that was as good as an invitation; one had to consider if it were not mere self-indulgence to follow the call. Time ceased to exist; climatic conditions were just accepted; ultimate destination remained a negligible quantity until one established an ultimate destination by arriving there; and safety of limb was not for an instant weighed in the balance against the possibility of surmounting an eight-foot barrier interlaced with barbed wire, and an enraged bull waiting on the further side. These little country strolls with Stuart gave Peter an insight into his religion of ignoring life itself in favour of life’s lightest moment.

Therefore she donned thick boots and an unquestioning spirit, wondering the while whether the first might not be regarded as rather a contradiction to the second.

Meanwhile, left to entertain Stuart in the garden, Bertram borrowed his ten pounds.

“_Pax?_” said Peter tentatively, as they swung up the road towards the Weald.

“Certainly _pax_, or I shouldn’t have come.”

“You gave in first.”

“I did,” with quiet triumph; “you’d never have given in, Peter; you’re a bit of a coward that way.”

“_I’m_ a coward because I’d never have given in?” cried the girl, who in the thirteen days’ interim had almost forgotten how to tread in looking-glass land.

“Of course. I suddenly had enough of the fray, wanted to see you, chucked over the entire edifice of silence, and came. You’d have stuck to your guns, not dared abandon them. Coward!”

She dashed back: “So you simply abstain from indulgence as long as abstinence itself is the indulgence. I always thought your asceticism was a distorted form of vice.”

He laughed across the broad sun-slashed road, to where she plodded in solitary anger.

“Won’t you join me in my ditch, Peter?” seductively; “it’s a very nice ditch.”

No reply.

“Peter. I did have to come. That’s rather a triumph for you, isn’t it? I couldn’t keep away any longer.”

She stamped her foot: “I won’t have my sword returned to me in that fashion. And you know perfectly well it wasn’t cowardice; that I can’t call you back, ever, in case you might be gone for good.”

“Do you mean to say,” in blank astonishment, “that if it were for good, you’d have let me walk out in that casual fashion?”

“‘According to the letter of the bond,’” she quoted.

He kicked the sodden leaves with his heel; picked up a stick and swished it at the air; burst forth at length: “Hang it, Peter! I showed you the exit-door once, and you’ve kept your eye glued to it ever since. Forget it, can’t you?”

“It was an insult ever to point it out. Because there was no need for it. I wouldn’t have tugged.”

“I know that--now,” his accents were almost humble; “but you see, Peter, there have been other she-encounters, and ... and they didn’t know about the door. So I suppose I grew mistrustful.”

“Worse than that. You grew careful.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Please, Peter, join me in my ditch.”

So she laughed, and crossed the road to his side. And a little further up the hill, they found a tinker in the ditch, and tried to make him talk like the tinkers of J. M. Synge and Jeffrey Farnol and Borrow and Hilaire Belloc, and other welkinistic writers. But this was Just a tinker; a man of no conversation and apparently no philosophy. So in disgust they left him; and, climbing a stile, struck out across the Weald, sweet with the hot sweet smell of trodden fern; before them in the East a threatening pall of cloud hung low and grey over the landscape; and behind them, where they could not see it, the sun flooded the same landscape in slanting gold, which gave a curiously sinister effect to the whole. Then a steep descent plunged them head foremost into a labyrinth of bushes; netted undergrowth, which they were compelled to butt through darkly, with snapping of twigs and branches to mark each outward step; till at last, scratched and torn and out of breath, they stood in the lane on the further side.

Stuart swung himself over a formidable gate which barred the further end of the lane, and waited for Peter to follow. After one or two attempts, she saw it was beyond her accomplishment.

“I give it up, Stuart,--no, I’m hanged if I do!” impetuously, meeting his quizzical look.... Then drew back: “I’m not so afraid of you but that I can own to being beaten,” she said.

He had remounted the gate in order to assist her, and now paused to deliberate, a leg on either side the topmost bar: “I wonder if I ought to make you do it, after that.”

Gravely Peter waited, while he hovered on the verge of a blunder.

“No!” and dropping to her side, he quietly raised the wooden latch, and stood aside for her to pass through.

“If I’d noticed that it opened!” she laughed. “Stuart, I’ve found your tombstone epitaph at last.”

“Which is?”

“‘He took the line of most resistance.’”

Stuart dwelt on her with a slow warm look, more of man in it than he was wont to show. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder:

“Tired?”

She had never yet answered ‘yes’ to this query, and wondered what mood it would arouse in him should she do so. Supposing she _were_ tired? tired of the pilgrimage, of conflict, of the rain beating fresh and cold upon her face....

A few yards ahead stood a little group, consisting of a man, a woman, a perambulator, and two children. The man wore a bowler hat, and the woman a fussy dress of bright blue cloth, obviously reserved for Sunday wear; one child was distinguished from the other by a tippet of dirty imitation ermine. Otherwise they both had sticky mouths, and both were complaining loudly. The man lifted them in turn from the perambulator, and dandled them: “Shall daddy wheel the pram then?” and loud crows of assent.

Seen thus, the man in the bowler had the appearance of one fettered to the texture of a dream, a dream whence all the radiance had been soaked. In the wide spaces of sky and land and rain, the whole turn-out had an inexpressibly dingy look, that caused Stuart and Peter, with an upward rush of spirits, to feel like Hermes and Artemis walking the earth. He dropped his hand from her shoulder, and side by side, untouching, they flashed past the man and the woman and the two children and the perambulator. And Stuart said again: “Tired, Peter?” no longer wishing, as in the first instance, that her answer might be ‘yes.’ “No,” she rang back at him; and they smiled at one another, and swung on.

* * * * *

Towards evening, an unexpected bend of the road brought them home. It was Stuart’s habit to leave Peter at the gate, without jarring by extraneous chatter what they had found of magic in their day. But Miss Esther, anxiously watching for them from beneath a large umbrella, willed otherwise; insisted that Stuart should not depart without his tea, “And you run straight upstairs and get into some dry clothes, Peter, my dear; Mr. Heron will excuse you.”

Rather glumly, Stuart followed his hostess into the dining-room, where tea was informally spread upon the big table. The prevailing atmosphere struck in him the same note of drabness as had the incident of the perambulator. Among these people he was regarded as Peter’s ‘young man,’--well, not quite as bad as that; Peter’s ‘admirer,’ who came to visit her on Sundays, and took her for a walk, and brought her home to tea, and----

“Milk and sugar, Mr. Heron?”

“We used to sometimes squeeze lemon into tea, a Russian boy and I,” volunteered Chavvy, who was bravely hiding a heart that ached, Bertram having that afternoon confessed his plans; “he had such melancholy eyes, and his father was a convict,” attempting by this recital to rouse her Pierrot to some sort of jealousy. “They call it sayonara,” she added, in somewhat incorrect explanation of the tea.

Miss Esther said that she had no patience with heathen habits, and that everybody knew they were only imitations of honest English tea-drinking, which was quite good enough for her, thank you, without squeezing ‘sayonara’ into her cup. “Though I daresay you’ll call me narrow-minded, Mr. Heron,” drawing Stuart into the conversation, that he might not feel shy.

Animated by an Encyclopædic spirit very foreign to his nature, Stuart explained drily the difference between ‘samovar’ and ‘sayonara’--“which happens to be Japanese for ‘farewell.’”

“That’s just as bad,” pronounced Miss Esther. While Chavvy murmured in timid apology for her error: “I was thinking of Port Arthur,” and subsided altogether.

Stuart looked up, relieved, at Peter’s entrance--then bit his lip in annoyance. She had changed into a thin crêpe frock; he felt sure it was her ‘best,’ donned for his benefit. As a matter of fact, Peter’s garments had been soaked through, and this particular dress was quickest and easiest for her to fasten unaided; but, thoroughly jarred by his surroundings, he chose to see her too tainted by Suburbanism.

Miss Esther filled and refilled cups; sent Peter for more hot water; maintained a flow of lofty but gracious chatter, thinking privately the while that not often had she to entertain so leaden a tea-party; why, the Lorrimers’ Saturday tea-and-tennis institution held a hundred times as much of innocent mirth. But, then, Mr. Lorrimer himself was sufficient of a humorist to make any party ‘go.’

Stuart she considered ‘difficult.’ All young men were more or less so, but she had a method of taming their barbarism never known to fail: on their second introduction to Bloemfontein she would say carelessly: “Now please remember that you can smoke all over the house here--no forbidden ground,” and having found the key to their mysterious masculinity, would watch them in grateful enjoyment of their privilege: “They appreciate it, poor fellows; of course at home they’re never allowed it”--and: “You spoil them, Esther,” usually the conclusion of these remarks.

But Stuart failed to respond to treatment. Notwithstanding he had smoked a horrid black pipe up and down the stairs and in Miss Esther’s own sitting-room--yet here he sat morose and glum as any stranger, not a patch in manners on that nice Mr. St. Quentin who sometimes came.

Indeed, it was curious to observe how Miss Worthing’s personality, the least arresting of any present, reduced every other member to a polite and stricken level of uncommunicativeness. Miss Esther, in her own setting, and all her convictions securely buttoned in waterproof, dominated Stuart and Bertram, Peter and Chavvy, to the entire extinction of their own turbulence; so that presently the two men were exchanging decorous views on the political situation, while Peter and Chavvy, like acolytes, supported Miss Esther with seed-cake and bread-and-butter.

“If you have finished, Peter, you can take Mr. Heron into the drawing-room. I told them to light a fire, although this is the end of June, but then I always say be warm when you are cold and never mind the time of year.”

The drawing-room fire was the outcome of a brief skirmish which had once occurred between Peter and her aunt, when the former had carelessly announced her intention of taking Stuart up to her attic for the viewing of some book.

“My dear, with your bed in it!”

“Oh, I’ll lead him very carefully past the bed,” laughed Peter. “After all, it’s my den, as well as bedroom.”

Miss Esther stiffened: “Out of the question, Peter. Even if you placed a screen around it----” doubtfully.

Peter declared that the screen around the bed would add the same suggestion of immorality that Venus acquired by her fan.

So now Miss Esther emphasized warningly the drawing-room fire.

Stuart pushed back his chair, and sauntered from the room in Peter’s wake. He felt Chavvy’s eyes upon them, dark and wistful--“you two will be together when I shall be, oh, so alone,” the unspoken comment; and he believed Bertram to be smiling complacently upon the back of his son-in-law-to-be. And there he wronged Bertram, who muttered: “I don’t like the fellow; too damned superior!” and this in spite of the ten pounds.

Standing with his elbow on the drawing-room mantelpiece, Stuart surveyed Peter moodily; she looked content enough, content with the hideous prim room, with the fire, the cushions at her back, the approval floating up like incense from the dining-room below. And he was seeing her in contact with homely familiar things; had marked her press the bell for the maid to bring hot water; heard her answer Miss Esther’s enquiries about their walk--“Yes, thanks, very nice; where? oh, just roundabout----” Artemis linked to the trivial details of everyday; Artemis at Bloemfontein; she seemed leagues of distance away from him.

“What’s up?” queried Peter, lazily thrusting at the silence between them. She too was secretly irritated: why couldn’t he be restful, after their long wet tramp? why always that atmosphere of tautness? Merle had once said “Stuart has no firelight mood.”... For the first time since their quarrel, Peter regretted Merle; would gladly have had her there in place of Stuart, “Just to volupp,” thinking of the cottage at Carn Trewoofa, the rainfall, that last long dozing talk, broken by the entrance of the two letters....

It was a pity, and rather absurd too, that she should not have been able to keep Stuart and Merle.

--“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m going, that’s all.”

She raised her eyebrows in delicate scorn, but made no further comment. Nor did she move when she heard the door close behind him.

“He needn’t have been afraid,” with a finer appreciation of his mood than he had given her credit for.

Miss Esther looked up sharply from her knitting, at the rush of feet on the stairs outside, a slammed door, a gate swinging wide on its hinges.

“It’s Mr. Heron. And he has gone. How very strange, without saying good-bye. And what is Peter about, not to see him off? Dear me, foolish young people, they must have quarrelled.”

“He will come back,” murmured Chavvy, in concordance with her leitmotif.

* * * * *

Not yet, reflected Stuart rebelliously, as the train bore him from Thatch Lane. Barely six weeks since that night in Cornwall,--surely the shears need not yet be employed. But having started at such extreme tension, it was utterly impossible that their love should be of long endurance. He had felt the first slackening this evening; the first desire to be quit of her presence; the first distaste at any of her actions. He must disengage her from the background of orderly respectability; search in his mind for the scene wherein he would most desire to place her image; could not visualize any sort of setting ... merely a scamper of wind, and a voice--his own voice--saying authoritatively to someone: “Get her out of irons, you ass! you must get a way on before you turn her at the bank....”

That was it--exactly it! they had got their boat into irons, he and Peter; must get a way on before they rushed ahead or--turned at the bank. In either case, get a way on.

He would take her sailing.

And casting about for a means of accomplishing his wish in accordance with the conventions--Stuart was not in favour of that ‘splendid unconventionality’ usually ending in a muddle, whereof Young Bohemia delights to prate--he bethought him of Nigger Strachey. Nigger had a wife, which just now would come in handy, though Stuart had hitherto rather resented her entrapping of his friend. It brought home to him strongly the lurking danger that besets all men. Strachey had been as sturdily opposed to marriage as Stuart himself; and then, queerly, it had befallen him. So Stuart walked warily, mistrustful of the crafty huntress who hid in the dark, and then pounced. His fear of marriage was the most unsubtle of all his qualities; an elementary fear, of the kind that offers food for music-hall comedians, and inspired Bernard Shaw to the writing of “Man and Superman.” Peter knew of his fear, and hated it as she might hate a gaoler, because it checked her from spontaneously revealing all that she felt for him.

The idea of taking Peter sailing utterly possessed Stuart; and he went straight from Euston to Strachey’s rooms in Chelsea.

“Look here, Nigger, have you still got that bungalow at Potter Heigham?”

“The one you gave me for a wedding-present? Yes. Most unpractical gift I had. Looked to you for a nice bit of Dresden, or at least a plated tea-service.”

“I want you and your wife to invite me up for a week’s sailing; day after to-morrow; and bring whom I like.”

“Do,” grunted Nigger; “delighted. Need we be there?”

“Yes.”

“Um!” Strachey removed the pipe from his mouth and expressed his disturbance by a long and doubtful whistle. “My wife----” he began ponderously.

“Oh, that’s all right.... What do you take me for?”

“My mistake,” said Nigger, slowly masticating the new aspect. Oliver Strachey’s mind matched his face, in that it presented a great dark bulk occasionally illuminated by a flash of white. His quick grin was as unexpected as the rare streaks he displayed of wit or humour; and his cumbersome: “I don’t quite follow your meaning, Heron,” a great pleasure to his young comrade, who liked to watch Nigger’s massive and reliable mentality at work upon his own twisted acrobatics. The two men were never confidential; never gave mutual good advice; were ignorant each of the other’s troubles; disagreed on all abstract topics; and had thrice in company faced death by wave and wind. All of which made for entirely satisfactory comradeship. So that now Oliver asked no questions about the proposed visit to Norfolk, and merely commented:

“Got stacks of work on hand. Still, I could do it in Norfolk as well as here. What I’m wondering is if my wife will care to go?”

“Hang your wife,” Stuart was about to say; then recollected in time that men are absurdly prone to touchiness on the subject of their domestic partners. Especially when as doggedly in love as Oliver. It was just as well to have restrained himself, as Aureole Strachey just then came into the room. She walked swayingly up to Stuart, and remarked in a heavy-lidded voice:

“I dreamt that your uncle was dead. Is he?”

As an entrance, quite effective.

“I don’t think so,” said Stuart, surprised. “Which? Baldwin?” hopefully.

Aureole did not know. But she was insistent about the death. So to settle the matter one way or another, Stuart telephoned home:

“Hullo ... that you, Mater?... Any of the uncles dead?... No, you needn’t scream, darling--I haven’t heard anything; just a passing curiosity.... Morbid? well, perhaps!... You saw them at dinner. All quite healthy?... Good!” He rang off, and reassured Aureole: “They’re not dead, any of them.”

Aureole remained unconvinced. The soft full curves of her mouth, resemblance of which she was vainly trying to coax from a Greuze to a Rossetti, drooped sulkily at the corners. She had no acquaintance with Stuart Heron, save from her wedding-day, when she had not much liked him. “He--gives me nothing,” she had complained to her husband; “he--means nothing.” And Nigger had made no reply, save by one of his dazzlingly incongruous smiles, which all Aureole’s provoked questionings could not compel him to explain.

But to-night there seemed a possibility that Stuart would give her more. He scrutinized her intently for a moment, from her copper hair, carelessly caught up with a single jade hairpin, down to her temperamental feet; and, inspired by these, shot out at her a sudden:

“The pavements are stifling you. You should be walking among reeds--always among reeds!”

Nigger had quitted the room in quest of tobacco; so Aureole was able to blossom forth emotions which, inexplicably to herself, she pruned when her husband was by.

“Sand,” she breathed. “Miles and miles of shining sand. Desert sand. I always adored walking on sand at Broadstairs. Stretches of yellow sand as far as the horizon. I’m a Pagan, you know!”

Stuart knew. He had gathered as much from her first entrance. But sand was no good to him. He wanted to arouse an all-consuming interest in reeds.... There were a great many reeds in Norfolk. For the next ten minutes he plied her Paganism with such consummate skill that she met her husband on his return to the room, with the frantic request to be taken the very next day to their bungalow on the Broads, or she would assuredly perish--of paving-stones.

“I--just want to go. I can’t tell you why. Something is calling me--something with a swish in it. I--just want to go.”

So the expedition was definitely arranged for the ensuing Tuesday; suspecting the ‘something with a swish in it’ to have been Stuart, Oliver was yet somewhat amazed that his capricious lady should choose to quit town before the season’s shutters had closed down. However, relations between them had been a little strained during the past few weeks, owing to the effect on her of a belated reading of the “Doll’s House,” in conjunction with an occult acquaintance who had informed her that she was the Empress Faustina reincarnated, and must not be thwarted in aught she did, since she was in this phase working out Karma. Not keen on Karma, Oliver now hoped, manlike, that the fresh air would make all the difference in the world towards restoring marital harmony.

“The ‘Tyke’ in decent repair?”

“Believe so. I haven’t sailed since I’m married.”

Stuart’s grunt was expressive of many things.

“The ‘Tyke’?” cried Aureole. “What a horrid name! It shows how much imagination you men have, left to yourselves,” in languid disdain.

Stuart promised her that she should re-christen the boat. And after fixing the final arrangements, took his leave.

“Even chances on ‘Tiger Queen’ or ‘Serpent o’ the Nile,’ I should imagine.” Thus he speculated on the re-naming of the ‘Tyke,’ as he walked towards Grosvenor Square.

But Aureole decided that night on ‘Faustina,’ in deference to her own pleasingly lurid, though unfortunately forgotten past.

* * * * *

He wrote to Peter: “Meet me Tuesday, Liverpool Street, ten-fourteen. We’re out for a week’s sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Never mind about the moralities; I’ve arranged for those. Throw overboard other people’s objections--and your own. Don’t wonder if you ought to indulge me by giving in; we’ll have no battle here,--you’ve just to come, and leave the rest to me. Bring as little luggage as possible--we travel light.”

She replied briefly.

“All right”; and then in a postscript: “Were you being symbolical about the luggage?”

To which his answer:

“You--dear! No, of course not. Damn symbolism! I was thinking of porters.”