In the ensuing days, Alex met that look very often—a look of pleased, speculative approval, pregnant with unspoken meanings.
Noel sought her company incessantly, and every opportunity was given them of spending time in one another's society. For five glowing, heather-surrounded days and five breathless, moonlit evenings, they became the centre of their tiny world.
Then Lady Isabel said one night to her daughter:
"You've enjoyed this visit, haven't you, darlin'? I'm sorry we're movin' on."
"Oh," said Alex faintly, "are we really leaving tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow morning, by the early train," her mother assented cheerfully.
The true instinct of the feeble, to clutch at an unripe prize lest it be taken from them, made Alex wonder desperately if she could not postpone her departure.
But she dared not make any such suggestion, and Lady Isabel, looking at her dismayed face, laughed a little as though at the unreason of a child. Alex blushed with shame as she thought that her mother might have guessed what was in her mind. That evening, however, Lady Isabel came into her room as she was dressing for dinner.
"I thought you'd like to putthisover your shoulders, Alex," she said negligently. "It will improve that cream-coloured frock of yours."
It was a painted scarf that she held out, and she stood gazing critically while the maid laid it across Alex' shoulders.
"You look so nice, darling child. Are you ready?"
"Yes, mother."
They went downstairs together.
Alex was acutely conscious of a certain maternal pride and tenderness, such as she had not experienced from Lady Isabel since the first days of her return from Liège, when she had finally left school. She did not let herself speculate to what such unusual emotion might portend.
But at the sight of Noel Cardew, better-looking than ever in evening clothes, a chaotic excitement surged up within her in anticipation of their last evening together.
Almost as she sat down beside him at the dinner-table, she said piteously, "I wish we weren't going away tomorrow."
"You'renot?"
"Oh, yes. Didn't you know?"
"I hadn't realized it," said Noel, and although she avoided looking at him, she noted with a feeling of triumph the dismay in his voice.
"Oh, I say! What a shame. Must you really go?"
"We're going to pay two more visits and then leave Scotland altogether."
"I shan't stay much longer myself," observed Noel nonchalantly.
Alex was conscious of keeping the words as it were at the back of her mind, with the implication which she attached to them, while the conversation at the small table became general.
As she followed her hostess and Lady Isabel from the room, Noel, holding open the door, said to her in a rapid, anxious tone, very low:
"You'll come out into the garden afterwards, won't you?"
An enigmatic "perhaps" was not in Alex' vocabulary.
She gave him a quick, radiant smile, and nodded emphatically.
It never occurred to her eager prodigality that she ran any risk of cheapening the favours that so few had ever coveted.
In the garden she moved along the gravelled walk beside him, actually breathless from inward excitement.
"There was heaps more I wanted to say to you about the book," Noel remarked disconsolately. "I shan't have any one to exchange ideas with now. They're all so old—and besides, I don't think English people as a rule care much about psychology and that sort of thing. They're so keen on games. So am I, in a way, but I must say it seems to me that the study of human nature is a good deal more worth one's while."
"People are so interesting," said Alex. She was perfectly aware of the futility of her remark as she made it, but in some undercurrent of her consciousness there floated the conviction that one need not put forth any great powers of originality in order to obtain response from Noel Cardew.
"I can be perfectlynaturalwith him—we think alike," She defended herself against her own unformulated accusation with inexplicable anger.
"I think they're frightfully interesting," said Noel with conviction. "Of course, men are far more interesting than women, if you don't mind my saying so, simply from the psychological point of view. I hope you don't think I'm being rude?"
"Oh,no."
"You see, women, as a general rule, are rather shallow, though, of course, there are a great many exceptions. But you know what I mean—as a rule they're rather shallow. That's what I feel about women, they're shallow."
"Perhaps you're right," said Alex, rather discouraged. She would not admit to herself that his sweeping assertion awoke no echo whatever within her.
To her immaturity, the essence of sympathy lay in complete agreement, and abstract questions meant nothing to her when weighed in the balance against her desire to establish, to her own satisfaction at least, the existence of such sympathy between herself and Noel Cardew.
"I've got another mad plan," said Noel slowly. "You'll think I'm always getting insane ideas, and this one rather depends on you."
"Oh, what?"
"I hope you won't mind my suggesting such a thing—" He paused so long that Alex' imagination had time for a hundred foolish, ecstatic promptings, such as her reason knew could not be forthcoming, but for which her whole undisciplined sense of romance was crying.
"Well, look here: what should you think of collaborating with me over the book? I'm sure you could write if you tried, and anyway, you could probably give me sidelights on the feminine part of it. It would be most awfully helpful to me if you would."
"Oh," said Alex uncertainly. She was invaded by unreasoning disappointment. "But how could we do it?"
"Oh, well, notes, you know—just keep notes of anything that struck us particularly, and then put it in together later. We should have to do a good deal of it by correspondence, of course.... I say, are you a conventional person?"
"Not in the least," said Alex hastily.
"I'm glad of that. I'm afraid I'm rather desperately unconventional myself. Of course, in a way it might be rather unconventional, you and me corresponding—but would that matter?"
"Not to me," said Alex resolutely.
"That's splendid. We could do a lot that way, and then I hope, of course, that you'll let me come and see you in London."
"Of course," Alex cried eagerly. "I don't know the exact date when we shall be back, but I could let you know. Have you got the address?"
"Clevedon Square—"
She hastily supplied the number of the house.
"Oh, that's all right. I'm sure to forget it," said Noel easily; "but I shall find you in the books, I suppose."
"Yes," said Alex, feeling suddenly damped.
She herself would have been in no danger of forgetting the number of a house wherein dwelt any one whom she wished to see, but with disastrous and quite unconscious humility, she told herself that it was, of course, not to be expected that any one else should go to lengths equal to her own. In her one-sided experience, Alex had always found herself to be unique.
That Noel Cardew was not in despair at the idea of her departure was evident. But he repeated several times that he wished she were not going so soon, and even asked whether she would stay on if invited to do so.
"I'm sure they'd all love you to," he assured her. "Then Lady Isabel could pay the other visits and call for you on her way back."
"I'm sure I shouldn't be allowed to stay on by myself," said Alex dolefully.
"There you are! Conventionality again.Mydaughters," said Noel instructively, "if I ever have any, shall be brought up quite differently. I've made up my mind to that. I daresay you'll laugh at all these theories of mine, but I've always been keen on ideas, if you remember."
But for once Noel did not receive the habitual ready disclaimer called for by his speech.
His easy allusion to his hypothetical daughters had reduced Alex to utter silence.
Afterwards, alone in the darkness of her own room, she wondered why such a startling sense of protest had revolted within her at his words, but her mind shied away instinctively from the question, and she found herself unable to pursue it.
The next morning, in the unromantic atmosphere induced by an early breakfast, and Sir Francis' anxiety to make sure of catching the connection, politely concealed, but quite evident to the perceptions of his wife and daughter, Noel Cardew and Alex exchanged their brief and entirely public farewell.
"I'll write about the book," was his cheerful parting assurance.
"Don't forget," said Alex.
Lady Isabel was rather humorous on the subject offin de siècleemancipation, amongst the house party in the midst of which she and her daughter found themselves that evening.
"What are boys and girls coming to? I hear young men gaily promisin' to write to Alex on all sorts of subjects, and making private assignations with her," she declared amusedly. "Aren't you and that nice-looking Cardew boy writin' a book in collaboration, or something, darling?"
The slight jest was made popular amongst her seniors, and Alex was kindly rallied about her modern freedom and assumption of privileges undreamed of by the older generation. The inference obviously placed upon her friendship with Noel Cardew was evident, and pleased her starved vanity even more than the agreeable amount of flattery and attention which at last was being bestowed upon her.
It was her first hint of success achieved amid standards which she had been taught to believe were all-prevalent. Brushed lightly by the passing wing of triumph, she became eager and self-confident, even rather over-clamorous in the assertion of her own individuality, as had been the child Alex in the nursery at Clevedon Square.
Lady Isabel did not check her. She made subtle exploitation of Alex' youth and sudden, rather boisterous gaiety, and occasionally laughed a little, and alluded to the collaboration scheme between her and Noel Cardew. "But all the same, darlin' child," she observed to Alex in private, "I can't have you correspondin' with young men all over the country unbeknown to me. Once in a way is all very well, perhaps, but you'll have to let me see the letters, I think."
Alex was only mildly resentful of the injunction. She surmised shrewdly enough that her mother was more anxious to establish the authentic existence of a correspondence between Noel Cardew and herself than to supervise the details of it. She herself waited with frantic, furtive eagerness for his first letter.
It did not reach her until after her return to London. Secretly bitterly disappointed, she read the short, conventional phrases and the subscription:
"I never know how to end up a letter, but hope this will be all right—Yours very sincerely,"NOEL E. CARDEW."
"I never know how to end up a letter, but hope this will be all right—Yours very sincerely,
"NOEL E. CARDEW."
Across the top of the front page was a postscript.
"Next month I shall be in town. Don't forget that I am coming to call upon you. I hope you won't be 'out'!"
"Next month I shall be in town. Don't forget that I am coming to call upon you. I hope you won't be 'out'!"
Alex, to whom nothing was trivial, saw the proposed call looming enormous upon the horizon of her days.
Every afternoon she either sat beside Lady Isabel in the carriage in an agony, with only one thought in her mind—the expectation of finding Noel's card upon the hall table on their return—or else took her part disjointedly and with obvious absent-mindedness in the entertainment of her mother's visitors.
When, during a crowded At Home afternoon, in the course of which she had necessarily ceased to listen for the sound of the front-door bell, "Mr. Cardew" was at length announced, Alex felt almost unable to turn round and face the entering visitor.
Her own imagination, untempered either by humour or by experience, had led her to picture the next encounter between herself and Noel so frequently, and with such a prodigal folly of romantic detail, that it seemed incredible to her that the reality should take place within a few instants, amidst brief, conventional words and gestures.
Noel did not talk about the book that they were to write together, although he remained beside Alex most of the afternoon. Only just as he was leaving, he asked cheerfully:
"You've not forgotten our collaboration, have you, partner? I've heaps of things to discuss with you, only you were so busy this afternoon, looking after all those people."
"We shall be in on Sunday," Alex told him eagerly, "and there won't be such a crowd."
"Oh, good," said Noel. "Perhaps we'll meet in the Park before that, though."
"I hope so," said Alex.
They met in the Park and elsewhere, and Noel, all through the ensuing weeks before Christmas, called often at the house in Clevedon Square.
Lady Isabel twice asked him to dinner, but although he was once placed next her, on neither occasion, to Alex' astonished resentment was he assigned to her as a partner.
Alex, for the first time conscious of being sought after, and receiving with avidity the fragments that fell to her share, forced herself to believe that they would eventually constitute that impossible whole of which she had dreamed wildly and extravagantly all her life.
Into the eager assents which she gave to all Noel's many theories, she read a similarity of outlook, into her almost trembling readiness to fall in with his every suggestion, a community of tastes, and into his interminable expositions of his own views an appeal to her deeper sympathies that surely denoted the consciousness of affinity between them.
She was happy, although principally in a nervous anticipation of happiness to come. She was able, when alone, to imagine that from absolutely impersonal good comradeship, Noel would suddenly plunge into the impassioned declarations of her own fancy, but when she was actually with him, his cool, pleasant, boyish voice dispelled the folly, and her fundamental shyness, that never deserted her save in the realm of her own thoughts, was relieved, with an intense and involuntary relief, that it should be so.
She saw Noel's father and mother again, and was greeted by the latter with a bright and conditional affectionateness that inspected even while it acclaimed.
It was after this that the trend of Noel's thoughts appeared suddenly to change, and he spoke to Alex of the place in Devonshire.
"One's first duty is to the place, of course," he said reflectively, "and I'm not at all sure that I oughtn't to look into the management of an estate, and all that sort of thing, very thoroughly. Some day—a long, long time hence, of course—I shall have to run our own place, and I'm rather keen about the duties of a landlord, and improving the condition of the people. I used to be a Socialist, as you know, but I must say one's ideas alter a bit as one goes on through life, and I've had some talks with the pater lately."
He broke off, and looked rather oddly at Alex for a moment.
"They want me to think of settling down, I believe," he said, almost shyly.
Alex spent that night in feverishly placing possible and impossible interpretations on the words, and on the look he had given her.
The sense of an approaching crisis terrified her so much that she felt she would have given worlds to avoid it.
The following evening it came.
Most conventionally, she met Noel Cardew at an evening reception, and he conducted her rather solemnly to a small conservatory where two chairs were placed, conspicuously enough, beneath a solitary palm.
An orchestra was just audible above the hum and buzz of conversation.
"It's luck getting in here," said Noel. "I wanted to see you very particularly tonight. I must say I never thought I should find myself particularly wanting to seeanygirl—in fact, I'd practically made up my mind never to have anything to do with women—but I see now that two people who had very much the same sort of ideas about life in general could do a tremendous lot for a place, and for the country generally; don't you agree?—and, of course—" He became hopelessly incoherent, "... knowing one another's other's people it all makes such a difference ... I could never understand fellows running after Gaiety girls and marrying them, myself!! After all, one's duty to the estate is ... and then, later on, perhaps, if one thought of Parliament—"
Alex felt that the pounding of her heart was making her physically faint, and she raised her head desperately, in the hope of stopping him. Noel met her eyes courageously.
"I wish you'd let me tell our people that you—that we—we're engaged," he said hoarsely.
His words struck on Alex' ear almost meaninglessly.
Irrationally in love as she was, with Love, she knew only that he was asking something of her—that she had at last an outlet for that which no one had ever yet desired.
Unable to speak, and unconscious of bathos, she vehemently nodded her head.
Noel immediately took both her hands and shook them wildly up and down.
"Thank Heaven, it's over," he cried boyishly. "You can't imagine how I've been funking asking you—I thought you'd say yes, but one feels such an awful fool—and I've never done it before. I say, Alex—I can call you Alex now, can't I—you're like me, aren't you? You don't want sentimentality. If there's one thing I bar," said the newly-accepted lover, "it's sentimentality."
"I am engaged to be married," Alex repeated to herself, in a vain endeavour to realize the height to which she must have now attained. But that realization, by which she meant tangible certainty, for which she craved, continually eluded her.
The preliminary formalities, indeed, duly took place, from her own avowal before a graciously-maternal Lady Isabel, to Noel's formal interview with Sir Francis in the traditional setting of the library.
After that, however, a freakish fate seemed to take control of all the circumstances connected with Alex' engagement.
Noel Cardew's father became ill, and in the uncertainty consequent upon a state of health which his doctor declared might be almost indefinitely prolonged, there could be no question of immediately announcing the engagement.
"Just as well, perhaps. We're all delighted about it, but they're both young enough to wait a little while," Lady Isabel smilingly made the best of it. "Next year will be quite time enough to settle anything."
Her serenity was the obvious outcome of an extreme contentment.
Alex found herself better able to regard herself in the light of one betrothed in her mother's company than in that of Noel. He treated her almost exactly as he had always done, with cheerful good-fellowship, and only at the very outset of the engagement with any tinge of shyness in his bearing.
"Of course, I ought to have got a ring," he said very seriously, "but I don't believe in taking any chances, and so, just in case there was any hitch, I waited. Besides, I don't know what you like best—you'll have to choose."
Alex smiled at the words. There was a glamour about such a choice, even beyond that with which her own sense of the romantic perforce enveloped it.
She wondered whether she would be allowed to go with Noel to a jeweller's, or whether he would, after all, choose his token alone, and bring it to her, and place it on her finger with one of those low, ardently-spoken sentences which she could hear so clearly in her own mind, and which seemed so strangely and utterly impossible in Noel's real presence.
But the arrival of Noel's ring, after all, took her by surprise.
He had been lunching with them in Clevedon Square, when the jeweller's assistant was announced, just as Lady Isabel was rising from the luncheon-table.
She turned enquiringly.
"Noel?"
"I told him to come here. I thought you wouldn't mind. You see, I want Alex to choose her ring."
"Oh, my dear boy! how very exciting! But may we see too?"
Mrs. Cardew was also present.
"Oh, rather," said Noel heartily. "We shall want your advice."
They all trooped hastily into the library, where the man was waiting, with the very large assortment of gleaming rings ordered for inspection by Noel.
"What beauties!" said Lady Isabel. "But, really, I don't know if I ought to let him."
She glanced at Mrs. Cardew, who said in a very audible voice:
"Of course. He's so happy. It's quite delightful to watch them both."
She was looking hard and appraisingly at the rings as she spoke.
Alex looked at them too, quite unseeing of their glittering magnificence, but acutely conscious that every one was waiting for her first word.
"Oh, how lovely!" she exclaimed faintly.
She chid herself violently for the sick disappointment that invaded her, not, indeed, at the matter, but at the manner of the gift.
And yet she realized dimly, that it was impossible that it should have happened in any other way—that any other way, indeed, would have been as utterly uncharacteristic of Noel Cardew as this was typical.
"Which do you like?" he asked her. "I chose all the most original ones I could see. I always like unconventional designs better than conventional ones, I'm afraid. Where's that long one you showed me this morning?"
"The diamond marquise, sir?" The assistant deferentially produced it, glancing the while at Alex.
"That's it," said Noel eagerly. "Try it on, Alex, won't you?"
He used her name quite freely and without any shyness.
Alex felt more of genuine excitement, and less of wistful bewilderment, than at any moment since Noel had first asked her to marry him, as she shyly held out her left hand and the jeweller slipped the heavy, beautiful ring onto her third finger.
She had long, slim hands, the fingers rather too thin and the knuckles, though small, too prominent for beauty. But, thanks to the tyranny of old Nurse, and to Lady Isabel's insistence upon the use of nightly glycerine-and-honey, they were exquisitely soft and white.
The diamonds gleamed and flashed at her as she moved the ring up and down her finger.
"We can easily make it smaller, to fit your finger," said the jeweller's assistant.
"It really is beautiful. Look, Francis," said Lady Isabel.
Alex' father put up his glasses, and after inspection he also exclaimed:
"Beautiful."
"You've such little fingers, dear, it'll have to be made smaller," said Mrs. Cardew graciously.
"Is it to be that one, then?" Lady Isabel asked.
Alex saw that her mother's pretty, youthful-looking flush of pleasurable excitement had mounted to her face. She herself, conscious of an inexplicable oppression, felt tongue-tied, and unable to do more than repeat foolishly and lifelessly:
"Oh, it's lovely, it's perfectly lovely. It'stoobeautiful."
Noel, however, looked gratified at the words of admiration.
"That's the oneIlike," he said with emphasis. "I knew when I saw them this morning that I liked that one much the best. We'll settle on that one, then, shall we?"
"You silly boy," laughed his mother, "that's for Alex to decide. Perhaps she likes something else better. Try the emerald, Alex?"
"Oh, this is lovely," repeated Alex again, shrinking back a little. Furious with herself, she was yet only desirous that the scene should not be prolonged any longer.
"Come and look at it in the light?" The urgent pressure of Lady Isabel's hand on her arm drew her into the embrasure of the window.
"Alex," said her mother low and swiftly, all the time holding up her hand against the light as though studying the ring. "Alex, youmustbe more gracious. Whatisthe matter with you?"
"Nothing," said Alex childishly, feeling inclined to burst into tears.
"Then for Heaven's sake do try and smile and show alittleenthusiasm," said her mother with unwonted sharpness.
Alex, scarlet, and most visibly discomposed, returned to the group round the library table.
Forcing herself to make some attempt at obeying her mother's behest, she picked up the nearest jewel, two pearls in a prettily-twisted setting, and began to examine it.
"I like that design, too. It's original," said Mrs. Cardew.
"Oh, but pearls are unlucky—she couldn't have pearls," protested Lady Isabel.
"They mean tears, don't they?" Alex contributed to the discussion, for the sake of making her mother see that she was willing to do her best.
"Are you superstitious?" Noel asked rather reproachfully. "I can't say I believe in all that sort of thing myself, you know. In fact I make rather a principle of doing things on a 13th, or walking under ladders, and all the rest of it, just to prove there's nothing in it."
Sir Francis fixed the young man benevolently through his monocle.
"I presume, however, that in this instance you prefer not to tempt the gods," he remarked affably, and Noel, always obviously in awe of his betrothed's father, hastily agreed with him.
"Then it's diamonds, is it?—unless Alex prefers the emerald."
"I like the diamond one best," Noel reiterated. "I really pitched on that one the minute I saw it. I like originality."
"Well, it couldn't be lovelier," said Lady Isabel contentedly.
The jeweller was shown out, leaving the diamond marquise ring, in its little white-velvet case, on the table in front of Alex.
Sir Francis opened the door for his wife and Mrs. Cardew.
"Oh," said Noel urgently. "Youmuststay and see her put it on."
Both ladies laughed at the boyish exclamation, and Alex flushed scarlet once more.
Noel opened the case and looked proudly at his gift.
"You must put it on for her," said his mother, "when it's been made smaller."
The hint was unmistakable.
Noel held out the ring.
"Let's see it on now at once, Alex. It can go back to the shop later."
Alex, in a sort of utter desperation, thrust out her hand, and Noel, politely and carefully avoiding touching it with his own, slipped the heavy hoop over her finger.
"Thank you," she stammered.
There was another laugh.
"Poor dears! Let's leave them in peace," cried Mrs. Cardew mockingly, and rustled to the door again.
"Did you ever see anything so young as they both are?" she murmured sweetly to Lady Isabel, audibly enough for Alex to guess at the words, if she did not actually hear them.
She was thankful that they should no longer be watching her, and turned with something like relief to Noel's gratified, uncritical looks.
It became suddenly much easier to speak unconstrainedly.
Perhaps she was subconsciously aware that of all of them, it was Noel himself who would expect the least of her, because his demands upon her were so infinitesimal.
"It's a beautiful ring; thank you very, very much. I—" She stopped and gulped, then said bravely, "Iloveit."
She emphasized the word almost without knowing it, as though to force from him some response.
Although she had never actually realized it, it was a word which, in point of fact, had never yet passed between them. Noel's fair face coloured at last, as his light eyes met her unconsciously tragical gaze.
"Alex a son air bête aujourd'hui."
With horrid inappropriateness, the hated gibe of her schooldays flashed into Alex' thoughts, stiffening her face into the old lines of morbid, self-conscious misery.
Part of her mind, in unwilling detachment, contemplated ruefully the oddly inadequate spectacle which they must present, staring shamefacedly at one another across the glittering token of their troth.
Frenziedly desirous of breaking the silence, heavy with awkwardness, that hung between them, she began to speak hastily and almost at random.
"Thank you so very much—I've never had such a lovely present—it's lovely; thank you so much."
"I thought you'd like it," muttered Noel, more overcome with confusion, if possible, than was Alex.
"Oh, yes, yes. It's lovely."
"I thought you'd like something rather original, you know, not a conventional one."
"Oh, yes!"
"You're sure you wouldn't rather have one of the others—that emerald one that mother liked?"
"Oh, no."
"I dare say they'd let me change it, the man knows us very well."
"Oh, no, no."
"Well, I, I—I'm awfully glad you like it."
"Yes, Idolike it. I—I think it's lovely."
"I—I thought you'd like it."
Alex began to feel as though she was in a nightmare, but she was mysteriously unable to put an end to their sorry dialogue.
"It's perfectly lovely, I think. I don't know how to thank you."
Noel swallowed two or three times, visibly and audibly, and then took a couple of determined steps towards her.
"I think you—you'd better let me kiss you," he said hoarsely. "You haven't yet, you know."
Something deep down within Alex was surging up in angry bewilderment, and she was sufficiently aware of a sense of protest to rebut it indignantly and with lightning-swift determination.
It was the humility of love that had prompted her lover to crave that permission which should never have been asked.
So she told herself in the flash of a moment, while she waited for Noel's kiss to lift her once and for all into some far realm of romance where trivial details of manifestation should no longer obscure the true values of life.
Unconsciously, she had shut her eyes, but at an unaccountable pause in the proceedings, she opened them again.
Noel was carefully removing his pince-nez.
"I say," he stammered, "you're—you're sure you don't mind?"
If Alex had followed the impulse of her own feelings, she must have cried out at this juncture:
"Not if you're quick and get it over!"
But instead, she heard herself murmuring feebly:
"Oh, no, not at all."
She hastily raised her face, turning it sideways to Noel, and felt his lips gingerly touching the middle of her cheek. Then she opened her eyes again, and, scrupulously avoiding Noel's embarrassed gaze, saw him diligently polishing his pince-nez before replacing them.
It was the apotheosis of their anti-climax.
Alex possessed neither the light-heartedness which is—mistakenly—generally ascribed to youth, nor the philosophy, to face facts with any determination.
She continued to cram her unwilling mind with illusions which her innermost self perfectly recognized as such.
It was, on the whole, easier to place her own interpretation upon Noel's every act of commission or omission when the shyness subsequent to their first ill-conducted embrace had left him, which it speedily did. Easier still, when intercourse between them was renewed upon much the same terms of impersonal enthusiasm in discussion as in Scotland, and easiest of all when Alex herself, in retrospect, wrenched a sentimental significance out of words or looks that had been meaningless at the time of their occurrence.
When Noel went to Devonshire, whither his father by slow, invalid degrees had at last been allowed to move, he said to Alex in farewell:
"I shall expect to hear from you very often, mind. I always like getting letters, though I'm afraid I'm not much good at writing them. You know what I mean: I can write simply pages if I'm in the mood—just as though I were talking to some one—and other days I can't put pen to paper."
"I don't think I write very good letters myself," said Alex wistfully, in the hope of eliciting reassurance.
"Oh, never mind," said Noel consolingly. "Just write when you feel like it."
Alex, who had composed a score of imaginary love-letters, both on his behalf and her own, tried to compensate herself the following evening for the vague misery that was encompassing her spirit, by writing.
She was alone in her own room, the fire had fallen into red embers, and her surroundings were sufficiently appropriate to render attainable the state of mind which she desired to achieve.
As she involuntarily rehearsed to herself the elements of her own situation, she lulled herself into a species of happiness.
His ring on her finger, his letter on its way to her—she was going to write to the man who had asked her to become his wife.
There was really some one at last, Alex told herself, to whom she had become the centre of the universe, to whom her letters would matter, to whom everything that she might think or feel would be of importance.
She remembered Maurice Goldstein, his knowledge of Queenie's every movement, his triumphant rapture at being allowed to take her out to luncheon or tea. Even now, Alex had seen him follow his wife with his ardent, glowing gaze, as she moved, serene and graceful, round a crowded room on the arm of some other man—and the look had made her heart throb sympathetically, and perhaps not altogether unenviously.
Almost fiercely she told herself that she had Noel's love. She was to him what Queenie was to young Goldstein.
To every rebellious doubt that rose within her, she opposed the soundless, vehement assertions, that the indelible proof of Noel's love lay in the fact that he had asked her to marry him.
Gradually she persuaded herself that only her own self-consciousness, of which she was never more aware than when with Noel, was responsible for that strange lack, which she dared not attempt to define, lest in so doing she should shatter the feeble structure built out of sentimentality and resolute self-blinding.
Partly because she instinctively craved a relief to her own feelings, and partly because she had really almost made herself believe in the truth of her own imaginings, Alex wrote her first love-letter, the shy, yet passionately-worded self-expression of a young and intensely romantic girl, in love with the thought of Love, too ignorant for reserve, and yet too conscious of the novelty of her own experience for absolute spontaneity.
Alex did not sleep after she had written her letter, but she lay in bed in the warm, soft glow of the firelight, and saw the square, white envelope within which she had sealed her letter, leaning against the silver inkstand on her writing-table.
When the maid came to her in the morning, she brought a letter addressed in Noel's unformed hand.
It was quite short, and began:
"DEAREST ALEX (is that right?)"
It told her of the journey to Devonshire, of an improvement in the invalid's state of health, and of Noel's own projected tour of inspection round the estate, which he thought had been neglected by his agent of late.
"But I shall be able to put all that right, I hope, as I'm rather keen about the housing of the poor, and questions of that sort. You might look out for any decent book on social economy, will you, Alex?"
The letter did not extend beyond the bottom of the second page, but Noel was going to write again in a day or two, when there was more to tell her, and with love to every one, he was hers for ever and a day, Noel.
Alex' reply went to Trevose the same day, but the letter she had written in the firelight, she burnt.
The engagement was not announced, but a good many people knew about it.
Their congratulations pleased Alex, as did her mother's obvious pride and satisfaction.
She liked wearing her diamond ring, although she only did so at home, and she even found pleasure in writing of her new dignities to Barbara at Neuilly.
In such trivial anodynes did Alex seek oblivion for the ever-increasing terror that was gaining upon her.
Noel came back from Devonshire after Christmas—and Lady Isabel sometimes spoke tentatively to Alex of a wedding early in the season.
"Jubilee year would be so charming for your wedding, my darling," she said effusively.
Alex thought of a white satin dress and long train, of orange blossom and a lace veil, of bridesmaids, presents, the exciting music of Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and the glory of a wedding-ring. On any other aspects of the case her mind refused to dwell.
Nevertheless, she made little or no response to her mother's hinted suggestions. Neither Noel nor Alex ever exchanged the slightest reference to their marriage, although Noel often discoursed freely of a Utopian future for the tenantry at Trevose, the basis of which, by implication, was his suzerainty and that of Alex.
"I rather believe in the old-fashioned feudal system, personally. You may say that's just the contrary of my old socialistic ideas, Alex, but then I always think it's a mistake to be absolutely cast-iron in one's convictions. One ought to assimilate new ideas as one goes through life, and, of course, sometimes they're bound to displace preconceived notions. I'm a tremendous believer inexperience; it teaches one better than anything else. Besides, Emerson says, 'Dare to be inconsistent.' I'm keen on Emerson, you know. Are you?"
"Oh, yes," said Alex enthusiastically, wishing to be sympathetic. "But I only read Emerson a long while ago, when I was at school. Noel, were you happy at school?"
"Oh, yes," said Noel unemotionally. "The great thing at school is to be keen, and get on with the other fellows. They were always very decent to me."
"Iwasn't very happy," said Alex. She was passionately desirous of sympathy, and was full of youth's mistaken conviction, that unhappiness is provocative of interest.
Noel cheerfully and unconsciously disabused her of the idea.
"Of course, girls don't have nearly such a good time as boys do at school. But don't let's talk about rotten things like being unhappy. I always believe in taking things as they come, don't you? I never look back, personally. I think it's morbid. One ought always to be looking ahead. I tell you what I'll do, Alex—I'll give you a copy of Emerson'sEssays. You ought to read them."
Noel was very generous, and often made her presents. Alex was disproportionately grateful, but to her extreme, though unavowed relief, he never again claimed such a recognition as that which had followed the bestowal of her engagement-ring.
She drifted on from day to day, scarcely aware of her own unhappiness, but wondering bitterly why this, the supreme initiation, should seem to fail her so utterly, and still hoping against hope that the personal element for which she looked so avidly, might yet enter into her relation with Noel.
One day she told herself, with shock of discovery, that Noel was curiously obtuse. He had taken her with Lady Isabel and his brother Eric to Prince's skating-rink. Alex did not skate, but she enjoyed hearing the band and watching the skaters. Eric Cardew was among the latter, and Alex recognized Queenie Goldstein, in magnificent furs.
"Noel, do you see that very fair girl—the one in blue? She was my great friend at school."
Alex at the same instant saw a look of fleeting, but unmistakable vexation on her mother's face at the description.
"Why, that's Mrs. Goldstein, isn't it?" said Noel, screwing up his eyes in an interested look.
"Yes. I wish I could catch her eye." Alex was reckless of her mother. "I haven't talked to her for such a long while. Do you know her?"
"I've met her once or twice."
"Couldn't you go and speak to her, and bring her over here?" asked Alex wistfully.
Noel looked at her, surprised.
"I don't think I can do that. She wants to skate."
"Of course not," broke in Lady Isabel. "Don't be a little goose, Alex. What do you want her for?"
"Oh, nothing," Alex replied dejectedly, and also very crossly.
She was in the frame of mind that seeks a grievance, and her nerves were far more overstrained than she realized.
She felt a sudden, absolute anger when Noel said didactically:
"I don't think it would be very good manners for me to go and force myself on Mrs. Goldstein's notice. I don't know her at all well, and there are heaps of people who want to talk to her—just look at all those fellows!"
"You might do it just to please me," muttered Alex, less from coquettery than from injured pride.
Noel became rather red, and after a minute he remarked in a severe voice:
"I must say, Alex, I think that's rather a ridiculous thing to say."
Alex was silent, but from that day the spirit of resentment had at last awakened within her.
She became irritable, and although she still strove to persuade herself that her engagement meant the ultimate realization of happiness, she often spoke impatiently to Noel, and no longer sought to conform herself to the type of womanhood which he obviously desired and expected to find her.
The old sense of "waiting for the next thing" was strong upon her, and she spent her days in desultory idleness, since Lady Isabel made fewer engagements for her, and Noel's calls upon her time were far from excessive.
She made the discovery then, less illuminating at the time than when viewed afterwards in retrospect, that she could not bear to read novels.
All of them, sooner or later, seemed to deal with the relations between a man and a woman in love, and Alex found herself reading of emotions and experiences of which her own seemed so feeble a mockery, that she was conscious of a physical pang of sick disappointment.
Was all fiction utterly untrue to life? or was hers the counterfeit, while the printed pages but reproduced something of a reality which was denied to her?
She dared not face the question, and was further perplexed by the axiom mechanically passed on by successive authorities in rebuke of her childhood's passion for reading:
"You can't learn anything about Real Life from story-books."
At all events, Alex found the story-books of no solace to her mental sickness, and turned away from their perusal with a sinking heart.
She seldom quarrelled with Noel because, although he was sometimes unmistakably offended at her petulance, he never lost his temper. On the contrary, he argued with her at such length that Alex, although the arguments left her quite unconvinced of the Tightness of his point of view, often gave in from sheer weariness and the sense of hopeless, exhausting muddle.
She could visualize no possible eventual solution of the intangible problem that somewhere lay heavy, undefined and undefinable, at the back of all her thoughts.
It seemed to her that such a state of affairs had endured for a lifetime, and must extend into eternity, when her relations with Noel entered into the inevitable crisis to which a fortnight's mutual fret and dissatisfaction had been only the prelude.
Sir Francis, graciously benevolent, invited Noel Cardew to make one of an annual gathering that, for the Clare children, amounted to an institution—to view the Christmas pantomime at Drury Lane. For more years than any of them, except Alex, could remember, a box at the pantomime had been the yearly almost the solitary, expression of Sir Francis Clare's recognition of his younger children's existence as beings other than merely ornamental adjuncts to their mother.
Lady Isabel, who detested pantomimes, never joined the party, and Alex could remember still—had, indeed, never altogether lost—the feeling of extreme awe that rendered unnecessary old Nurse's severe injunctions to the children as to the behaviour suitable to so great an occasion.
This year, Barbara was at Neuilly, and it was considered inadvisable to "unsettle" her by a return to London for the Christmas holidays. But Cedric was at home, and Archie and Pamela, as clamorous as they dared to be for their father's treat.
Sir Francis did not sacrifice himself to the extent of foregoing late dinner altogether, but he dined at seven o'clock, and issued what more nearly approached to a royal mandate than an invitation, to Alex, Cedric and Noel to bear him company.
The big cuckoo clock in the hall still showed the hour as short of eight o'clock when Pamela and Archie, the former muffled in a large pink shawl, and both of them prancing with ill-restrained impatience, were at last permitted to dispatch the footman in search of a cab.
The carriage, in the opinion of Sir Francis, would be amply filled by himself, his two daughters and Noel Cardew, and it was part of the procedure that the boys should be allowed to journey to the theatre by themselves in a hansom-cab.
The streets were snowy, and as shafts of light from the street-lamps fell across the crowded pavements and brilliant shop windows, still displaying the Christmas decorations put up a month ago, something of the old childish glamour surrounding the yearly festival came upon Alex.
Pamela, already a modern child in the lack of that self-conscious awe of their father that had kept Alex and Barbara tongue-tied in his presence, nevertheless, had none of the modern child'sblasésatiety of parties and entertainments of all kinds.
The Drury Lane pantomime was her solitary annual experience of the theatre, and she was proportionately prepared to enjoy herself to the full. When Sir Francis, with kind, unhumorous smile, made time-honoured pretence of having forgotten the tickets, Pamela gave Alex a shock by her cheerful and unhesitating refusal to carry on the dutiful tradition of her elder sisters and conform tacitly to the jest by a display of pretended consternation.
"Oh, no, I know you haven't forgotten them," Pamela cried shrilly. "I saw you look at them just before we started. Besides, you said last year you'd forgotten them, and you had them in your pocket all the time. I remember quite well."
She began to bounce up and down on the seat of the carriage, the accordion-pleated skirts of her new pink frock billowing round her.
"Sit still," said Alex repressively. She reflected that she herself as a little girl, and even Barbara, had been very much nicer than was Pamela.
She wondered what Noel had been like as a little boy, and looked at him almost involuntarily.
His glance met hers, and he smiled slightly. The response touched Alex suddenly and acutely, and she felt a pang of remorse for the intense irritation that his presence had often caused her lately.
When the carriage stopped and he sprang out to offer her his hand in descending, she gave hers to him with a tiny thrill, and her fingers lingered for an instant in his, as though awaiting, almost in spite of herself, an all-but-imperceptible pressure that was not forthcoming.
"It's begun," gasped Pamela in an agony of impatience in thefoyer.
Sir Francis, always punctilious, placed Alex in the right-hand corner of the box, the two children in the centre, and then, with a slight smile, offered Noel his choice of the remaining chairs.
Alex was conscious of a throb of gratification, perhaps more attributable to vanity than to anything else, when the young man placed himself just behind her own chair.
Sir Francis, the comparative isolation of the engaged couple sufficiently sanctioned by the family party surrounding them, immediately disposed himself behind Cedric at the extreme left of the box.
The curtain went down to the sound of applause almost as they took their places, and the lights were turned up. Alex looked round her.
The huge house was everywhere sprinkled with groups of children—Eton boys in broad, white collars such as Archie wore, little girls in white frocks with wide pink or blue sashes and hair-ribbons.
When the orchestra began a medley of old-fashioned popular airs,Home, sweet Home, Way down upon the Swanee River, Bluebells of Scotland, and the like, Alex overwrought, fell an easy victim to the cheap appeal to emotionalism.
In the irrational, passionate desire for reassurance that fell upon her, she leant back until her shoulder almost touched Noel's.
"Look at all those children!" she whispered, hardly knowing what she said.
Noel gazed at the stalls through his pince-nez.
"The place is crammed," he said. "They say it's the best show they've ever had. Of course, I haven't seen it yet, but my own idea about these pantomimes is that they don't stick enough to the original story. Take 'Cinderella,' now, or 'The Babes in the Wood.' The whole thing is simply a mass of interpolations—they never really follow the thread of one idea all the way through. I can't help thinking it would be much better if they did, you know. After all, a pantomime is supposed to be for children, isn't it?"
"Yes."
Alex wondered what reply she had expected from him to her sudden ejaculation, that the actuality should bring such a sense of ironical disappointment.
She leant forward again as the curtain went up.
She was still child enough to enjoy a pantomime for its own sake, but the swing of catchy tunes and sentimental ballads brought with them something more than the easy heartache to which youth falls so ready a victim.
As the crash of the orchestra heralded a big scenic effect of dance and colour, Noel leant a little towards her and began to speak.
"Of course, it's a good show in its way. Look, Alex, you can see the man manipulating the coloured lights, up there. If you lean right back into this corner—there, up there."
His voice was full of interest and almost of eagerness. Alex leant back as he suggested and gazed obediently up at the lime-light operator, although she felt no interest, but rather a faint distaste.
"It's the ingenuity of these things I like," Noel's voice in her ear was explaining. "Of course, the dancing's good, and the comic bits, though I don't know that I care tremendously about that. They're always apt to be rather vulgar, even in front of a lot of ladies and children. Pity, that is. But take the songs, now, Alex; wouldn't you think that it would pay some one to write reallygoodlibretto, and get it taken on at a place like this and set to decent music? The tunes are good enough, but it's the words that are so poor, I always think."
Alex listened almost without hearing. The time had gone by when she could tell herself, with vehement attempt at self-deception, that such assertions indicated a fundamental resemblance between her tastes and those of Noel Cardew.
She was now only unreasonably angry and disappointed because of her baffled desire for the introduction, however belated, of a personal element into their intercourse.
She actually felt the tears rising to her throat as the evening wore on, and an intolerable fatigue overcame her.
Sitting upright became more and more of an effort, and the box seemed narrow and over-full.
The instinct of self-pity made her attempt to draw Noel's sympathy indirectly.
"Could you move back a little?" she half whispered. "I am getting rather cramped."
"Are you?" returned Noel with surprise, as he pushed his chair back.
But he did not appear to be in the least concerned about the matter. She looked at him once or twice and he met her glance absently. She knew that her face must show signs of the fatigue that she felt, but she knew also that they would not be perceptible to Noel.
For a moment, one of the rebellious gusts of misery of her stormy childhood shook Alex.
Why—why should there be no one to care, no one to whom it mattered that she be weary or out of spirits, no one to perceive, unprompted, when she was tired? She realized what such instinctive protection and care would mean to her, and the almost passionate gratitude with which she could welcome and return such solicitude.
But with Noel, she need not even exercise it. Had she loved him as she had endeavoured to persuade herself that she did, instead of only the figure of Love called by his name, Alex knew that Noel would have passed by all the smaller manifestations of her love unheeding and uncomprehending.
Her gods were mocking her with counterfeit indeed.
"You look tired, Alex," said her father's courteously-displeased voice.
Alex knew that on the rare occasions when he personally supervised a party of pleasure, Sir Francis liked the occasion to be met with due appreciation. She gave a forced smile and sat rather more upright.
"To be sure," her father said seriously, "it is a prolonged entertainment."
But Alex knew that neither Cedric, Archie nor Pamela would hear of any curtailment of their enjoyment, and Pamela was already urgently whispering that theymuststay for the clown—they always did.
Sir Francis yielded graciously, evidently well-pleased, and they remained in the theatre for the final humours of the harlequinade.
Snow was actually falling when at length Sir Francis Clare's carriage was discovered, and Alex, her always low vitality at its lowest, was shivering with mingled cold and fatigue.
"Get in, children," commanded their father. "Noel, my dear boy, we can give you a lift, but pray get in—we must not keep the horses standing. What a terrible night!"
Crouched into a corner of the carriage, with Pamela half asleep on her lap, Alex was conscious of the relief of the darkness and the swift motion of the wheels.
Noel was next her, and in the sudden sense of almost childish terror and loneliness that possessed her, Alex sought instinctive comfort and reassurance in the unavoidable contact. She leant against his shoulder in the shelter of the dark, closely-packed carriage, and was sorry when Clevedon Square was reached at last, and she found herself obliged to descend.
"Good-night—thanks most awfully," said Noel at the door. "Good-night, Alex. I say, I'm afraid you were frightfully jammed up in the corner there—I'm so sorry, but I simply couldn't move."
On making up her mind that she must break off her engagement, Alex, unaware, took the bravest decision of her life.
She was being true to an instinctive standard, in which she herself only believed with part of her mind, and which was absolutely unknown to any of those who made up her surroundings.
She hardly knew, however, that she had taken any resolution in her many wakeful nights and discontented days, until the moment when she actually put it into execution. She wrote no eloquent letter, entered into no elaborate explanation such as would have seemed to her, after the manner of her generation, theoretically indispensable to the situation.
She blurted out three bald words which struck upon her own hearing with a sense of extreme shock the moment they were uttered.
"It's no use."
Noel looked hard at her for a moment, and then did not pretend to misunderstand her meaning.
"What, us being engaged?"
His intuitive comprehension, of which Alex had received so little proof ever before, might be unflattering, but it struck her with immense relief.
"Yes."
They gazed at each other in silence for a few moments, and Alex was furious with herself for a phrase sprung from nowhere that reiterated itself in her brain as she looked at Noel's handsome, inexpressive face—"Fish-like flaccidity...."
And again and again "Fish-like flaccidity."
They were in the drawing-room at Clevedon Square, and Noel, as though seeking to relieve his obvious embarrassment by moving, got up and walked across the room to the window.
"Of course, I've felt for some time that you weren't very happy about it all, and naturally—if you feel like that...."
All the seething disappointment and wounded vanity and aching loneliness that had tortured her since the very first moments of her engagement to Noel Cardew, rushed back on Alex, but she sought vainly for words in which to convey any part of her feelings to him.
It would be like trying to explain some abstruse principle of science to a little child. The sense of the utter uselessness of any attempt at making clear to him the reasons which were chaotic even to herself, paralysed Alex' utterance.
"I don't think it's any use going on," she repeated feebly.
"You're perfectly free," Noel assured her scrupulously; "and though, of course, I—I—I—you—we—it would be—" He broke off, very red.
Alex wished vaguely that it was possible for them to talk it all out quite frankly and dispassionately with one another, but the hard, crystalline detachment of the generation that was to follow theirs, had as yet no place in the scheme of things known to Noel and Alex.
They made awkward, conventional phrases to one another.
"Naturally," the boy said with an effort, "the whole blame must rest with me."
"Oh, no, I'll tell father and mother that I wanted to—to—break it off."
Alex stopped, conscious that she could not think of anything else to say.
But rather to her surprise, it appeared that Noel had something else to say.
He faced her with hands thrust into his pockets, his hair and little, fair moustache and his brown eyes looking very light indeed contrasted with his flushed face.
"Of course, you're absolutely free, as I said, only I must say, Alex, that you're making rather a mistake. Every one was awfully pleased about it, and we've known each other since we were kids—sinceyouwere a kid, at any rate—and a broken engagement—well, of course, I don't want to say anything, naturally, but itdoesput a girl in a—a—well, in what's called rather an invidious position. Especially when it isn't as though there was any particular reason for it."
"The principal reason—" Alex began faintly, not altogether certain of what it was that she was about to say.
"You see, I always thought we should hit it off together so well. We always did as kids—when you were a kid, I mean," Noel explained. "We always seemed to like the same things, and have a good deal in common."
"I don't think that you liked any of the thingsIcared about especially," Alex said, with a flash of spirit.
"What does that matter?" Noel demanded naïvely, "so long as one of us likes the things that the other does? It would be exactly the same thing."
Alex had never told herself, and was therefore quite unable to tell Noel, that she had never liked anything particularly, except his liking for her, which she had striven almost frenziedly to gain and retain by means of an artificially-stimulated display of sympathetic interest in his enthusiasms.
"There's another thing—I don't know whether I ought to say it to you, quite—but, of course, after one's—well, married—there's a lot more one has in common, naturally."
"Yes," said Alex forlornly. She quite believed it.
There was an awkward silence.
"Are you angry, Noel?"
She did not think he was at all angry, or very violently moved in any way, but she asked the question from an instinctive desire to hear from him any expression of his real feelings.
He replied stiffly, "Not at all. Of course, it's much better that you should say all this in time ... as I say, I've felt for some time that you weren't particularly cheerful. But I must say, Alex, I'm dashed if I know why."
"I don't know why, exactly—except that I—I don't feel as if we—really—cared enough for one another—"
Alex spoke with a pause between each word, blushing scarlet, as though it really cost her a physical effort to break through the barrier of reserve that she had been taught so relentlessly should always be erected between her own soul and the naked truth of her own sensations and intimate convictions.
Noel blushed too and Alex felt that he was shocked, which increased her own self-contempt almost unbearably.
"Naturally, if I hadn't—" he left a blank to supply the words, "I shouldn't have asked you to be engaged to me. I must say, Alex, I think you're rather exacting, you know."
Alex quivered from head to foot, as though he had insulted her most brutally. She, who had shrunk, with a genuine dread that had surprised herself, from Noel's few, shyly-uttered endearments, and had found so entire a lack of response in herself to his occasionally-attempted displays of tenderness, to be accused of having been exacting!
She did not for an instant realize, what even Noel faintly surmised, that she had indeed been exacting, of a romantic fervour which she was as incapable 'of inspiring as he of bestowing; from which, had it existed, the outward expressions of love would have leapt spontaneously, supremely appropriate, and necessary to them both.
In the mental chaos and muddle of their extreme youth, they looked at one another confused and bewildered, almost like two children suddenly conscious of the magnitude of their own naughtiness.
Noel said, rather proudly, as though one of the children suddenly tried to appear grown-up:
"You must allow me to undertake the distressing task of—breaking it to—them."
Alex almost shuddered, so acute was her own apprehension of the disclosure to her father and mother.
"I shall tell mother at once," she said, lacking the courage even to mention Sir Francis.
It was typical of the whole time and circumstances of their brief engagement that both Noel, and, in a lesser degree, Alex, had looked upon the relation into which they had entered as one in which their parents held the stakes and were of primary concern. They themselves were only puppets for whom strings were pulled, so as to cause certain vibrations and reactions over which they had no personal control.
This belief, unformulated by either, and entirely characteristic of a late Victorian generation, was, perhaps, that which they held most in common.
Alex even wondered whether she ought to wait and speak to Lady Isabel before taking the next step which she had in mind, but her desire to try and raise their trivial, shamefaced parting to a higher level by one dramatic touch, was too strong for her.
She slowly pulled the diamond engagement-ring off her finger, and handed it to him.
"Oh, I say," stammered Noel. He looked miserably undecided, and she knew that he was wondering whether he could not ask her to keep it just the same.
But in the end he slipped it into his pocket, after balancing it undecidedly for a moment in the palm of his hand.
She sat on the sofa, her left hand feeling strangely bare, unweighted by the heavy, glittering hoop, and Noel looked out of the window.
"I think I shall go abroad," he announced suddenly, and with mingled relief and mortification, Alex detected the sound of satisfaction latent in his voice. She felt that he thought himself to be doing the proper thing in the circumstances, and the sting inflicted on her pride by his acquiescence in their parting, though she had expected nothing else, gave her the sudden impulse necessary to rise and cross the room until she stood beside him at the window.
"Please forgive me, Noel."
"Oh, there's nothing to forgive," he returned hastily. "Of course, if you feel like that, it's all over."
He looked at her steadily and Alex felt the suspicion rush over her that he was trying obliquely to convey a warning to her that if she dismissed him now, it would be of no use to recall him later.
Alex felt passionately that in the depths of his stubborn vanity lay the truest presentment of himself that Noel would ever show her. If there was another side to his personality—and she was dimly willing to believe it for all her utter ignorance of him—the power to call it forth did not dwell in her.
Her momentary feeling of anger gave way to humiliation, and she half held out her hand.
"Good-bye, Noel," she said humbly.
As though to atone for the lack of feeling in his tone, Noel wrung her hand until it hurt her, as he replied automatically: "Good-bye, Alex."
"I suppose we shall never meet again," thought Alex, with all the finality of youth, and felt dazed as she saw him open the door.
Mechanically, she rang the bell in order that the servants downstairs might know that he was leaving, and come into the hall to find his hat and stick and to open the door for him.
Lady Isabel had instilled into Alex that it was part of her responsibility in grown-up life to ring the bell for departing guests, as unostentatiously as possible, at just the right moment, and every time that she remembered to do it, she always felt rather proud of herself.
This time she thought:
"It's the last time Noel will ever be in this room with me. He is going right out of my life."