Some ten or twelve people only remained in the drawing-room when Kit returned, for several had taken their departure before the Murchisons, and Toby seemed to be a target at which was being fired some straight, hard chaff. As usual, he was looking serene and pleasant, but it seemed to Kit that his smile at this moment was more the result of habit than of any entertainment that the chaff afforded him.
"Toby has made an impression," explained Alice, "and he's too modest to acknowledge it."
"Dear Toby, you made an excellent impression," said Kit, taking his arm, as he stood rather hot and stiff under the chandelier. "I'm very much pleased with you, and I'll remember you in my will."
"If he'll promise to remember you in his!" said Jack, who had returned from speeding the parting guest. "That should be worth something."
"Answer them back, Toby," said Kit. "Hit out."
"A lovely man," said Tom, "but homely. A happy and amiable disposition."
"More than can be said for you, old chap," remarked Toby. "Tom, how gray you are getting!"
"Yes, I've no chance. But you are in luck, Toby. The girl is charming, and her mother is unique."
"I haven't the slightest idea what you are talkingabout," said Toby, amid loud laughter and a shrill cat-call from Alice. "Well, I'm going, Kit. Good-night; and try to teach Tom manners."
And Toby, still smiling genially, went towards the door. But Kit retained his arm.
"Don't go, Toby," she said. "Stop and play a bit. You like baccarat. And don't mind what Tom says. You're a credit to the family."
"Toby will bring the family more credit," said Tom, in a low, audible voice to his sister.
"Tom, be quiet," said Alice. "When you try to chaff people, it is like an elephant dancing on eggshell china."
"Toby, Alice is calling you eggshell china. Lovely but homely."
"Awfully sorry, Kit," said Toby, "but I must go. I promised to go on to the Keynes'."
Now, it was to the Keynes' that the Murchisons had gone, and Kit knew it. She saw also that Toby had had enough of the subject, and, without any more efforts to detain him, especially since he was rather tiresome at baccarat, and always won. "Well, if you must go, you must," she said. "Let's see you again soon, old boy."
Toby smiled and nodded and left the room.
"Dear Toby!" said Kit, "it was hard luck on him. How could you say such things, Tom? It's serious. The poor boy is head over ears."
"There is a phenomenon in hypnotism called suggestion, Kit," he said, as she took a seat beside him. "If a thing is suggested to the subject, the suggestion is followed. Did you suggest it?"
"Oh, in a sort of way. But Toby isn't hypnotized; he's fascinated. I am delighted he takes it seriously. She is a sweet girl, and I would soonerhave Toby for my husband than anyone. I shall get him to marry me when Jack dies, like the woman in the parable. Oh, they have just put out a little green table. How queer of them! And cards! Well, I suppose, as it is there—— You play baccarat, I think, Mr. Alington?"
Mr. Alington paused, as usual, before replying, and looked benevolently at Kit and Lady Haslemere in turn.
"I shall be delighted to play," he said. "I find it very soothing after a tiring day; one does not have to think at all. I used to play a good deal in Australia, and, dear me, yes! I had the pleasure of playing the other night at your house, Lady Haslemere. Odd games we used to have in Australia. One had to keep both eyes open to see that nobody cheated. Indeed, that was not very soothing work. I have seen five nines on the table before now, which really is an excessive number. Embarrassing almost."
He had the manner of taking everybody into his confidence, and as the others were standing together as he spoke, and he a few steps from them, he had an easy opportunity to look several people in the face. Kit and Alice again received a special share of his kind and intelligent glance, and, as he finished speaking, he laughed in his pleasant voice, as if with considerable inward amusement. So, when they sat down at the card-table, out of the dozen of them there were at least two disconcerted people present, for it was not certain whether Jack had heard.
"I think he scored," said Alice, in a low voice to Kit; and Kit looked impatient, and thought so too.
When they had all taken their seats, Alington was found, as Kit and Alice had wished (and he also, if they had known it), to be opposite them. Therewere a few moments' delay, as the table was lined, and, playing idly with the counters he had purchased, he looked up at them.
"It is so simple to cheat at baccarat, without the clumsy device of five nines," he said. "One need only lay one's stake just on the white line, neither over it nor behind it. Then, if you win, the slightest touch and the counters will go over, and it appears that you have staked; if not, you leave them as they are. A touch of the cards will do it. So!"
He put a couple of cards face upwards on the table, as if showing his hand, and as he did it, drew his stake over the line so gently and imperceptibly that it was impossible to see that the counters moved. Kit laughed, not very pleasantly. Her laughter sounded a trifle cracked.
"Take care, all of you!" she cried. "There is a brilliant sharper present. Mr. Alington, how stupid of you to tell us! You might have won all our money without any of us being the wiser."
Alington laughed, and Alice told Kit in a low voice not to lose her temper. Alington's laugh was a great contrast to Kit's, pleasant and amused.
"I make the company a present of the only safe way to cheat at baccarat," he said. "The bank? Ah, I see Lord Conybeare takes the bank."
Death and baccarat are great levellers, and Kit in her more sententious moments used to call the latter an escape from the trammels of civilization, and a return to the natural savage instincts. Certainly nothing can be simpler; the cave-men, provided they could count as far as nine, might have played at it. And, indeed, unalloyed gambling is not a bad second, considered as a leveller, to death itself. Rich men win, poor men lose; the Countess rubsshoulders (it is not meant that she did at Kit's house) with the cocotte; Jew spoils Jew, and Gentile Gentile. The simple turn of the cards is an affair as haphazard as life. If anyone, it must be the devil who knows where and when the nines will come up, and he is incorruptible on this point. The brute loses; the honest man wins; the honest man is made a pauper; the brute a millionaire. There is certainly something fascinating about what we call Luck. No virtue or vice invented by the asceticism or perverted corruptness of man has yet made a bait that she will take. Mathematicians tell us that she is purely mathematical; yet how emphatic a denial she gives to this shallow description of her if one tries to woo her on a system! One might as well make love on the prescriptions of the "Complete Letter-writer."
On this particular night she showed herself the opposite of all the epithets with which her unintelligent worshippers have plastered her. She is called fickle—she was a pattern of devotion; she is called changeable—she exhibited an immutable face. Wherever Alington sat, whether to the right or to the left of the dealer, or whether he took the bank himself, she favoured him with a fixed, unalterable smile, a smile nailed to her features, as if her photograph was being taken. Like the two-faced Jannet, as Mrs. Murchison had once called that heathen deity, she kept the benignant aspect for him.
Now, it is one of the rules without exception in this world, that nobody likes losing at cards. People have been heard to say that they do not like winning. This statement is certainly incorrect. It is possible to play an interesting set at tennis, an enjoyable round of golf, an entrancing football match, a really memorable game of chess, and lose, but itis not humanly possible to enjoy losing at baccarat. The object of the game is to win the money of your friends in an exciting and diverting manner, but the diversion tends to become something worse than tedium if they consistently win yours. Excuses and justifications may be found for most unprofitable pursuits, and perhaps the only thing to be said in favour of gambling is that there is no nonsense about it, and, as a rule, no nonsense about those who indulge in it. No one as yet has said that it improves the breed of cards, or that he has the prosperity of the card-makers at heart. The card-table is still a place where hypocrites do not win credence from anybody.
The great goddess Luck ignored Lady Haslemere that night (for she is no respecter of persons, and cuts people whenever she chooses), merely letting her lose a few inglorious sovereigns, and devoted her attention to Alington and Kit. The latter she visited with every mark of her peculiar disfavour, and the nest-egg in her jewel-case upstairs had to be heavily unyoked. Kit seldom enjoyed herself less than she did this evening; as a rule, she had distinctly good luck at cards, and it was little short of maddening to sit there hour after hour, just to watch her stake being firmly and regularly taken away. Like most people who are generally lucky at cards, she was considered admirably good form at play; but when she was losing in this unexampled manner, she found it difficult to remain cordial, and more than once she had to force herself with an effort to remember that a hostess had duties. Alington's mild, intelligent face opposite her roused in her a kind of frenzy, and his unassumed quietness and utter absence of any signs of satisfaction at his hugewinnings seemed to her in the worst taste. Both she and Lady Haslemere had seen how completely their scheme of watching him to see whether he cheated had miscarried; indeed, from the moment when he gave his little exhibition of the ease with which it was possible to defraud the table, they had realized that they might play the detective till their eyes dropped out of their heads from weariness without catching him. Lady Haslemere had given it up at once, concluding that Kit and she must have been mistaken before; Kit continued to watch him furtively and angrily, but the little detective game was not nearly so amusing as she had anticipated.
Meantime, as her stakes vanished and revanished, Kit found herself thinking absently of what Alington had shown them. It was so simple, and she almost wished that she was one of the people who cheated at cards. But she was not. Then occurred an incident.
Alington was taking the bank. Nearly opposite him, and belonging to the party on the dealer's right, was Kit. She had just been upstairs to get all that remained of her nest-egg, and in front of her lay several small counters, two of fifty pounds, and two of a hundred. She had just lost once, and counting up what remained to her, she put all her counters in a heap near the line. Again she staked fifty pounds, and on receiving her cards took them up and looked at them. She was rather excited; her hand trembled a little, and the lower edge of her cards twitched forward. Then she laid them on the table.
"Natural," she said, and as she said it, she saw that she had flicked one of her hundred-pound counters over the line, and it was staked. Almost simultaneouslyshe caught Alington's eye; almost simultaneously Tom's voice said:
"One fifty. Well done, Kit! You've had the worst of luck all the evening."
"A fine, bold stroke," said Alington in his precise tones, still looking at her. "Luck must turn, Lady Conybeare."
For one moment Kit paused, and in that pause she was lost. Alington counted out her stake, pushed it over to her, and rose.
"A thrilling end to my bank," he said. "The first big stake this evening. Thank you, Lady Conybeare, for introducing big stakes. The game was getting a little slow."
And he went to the side-table for a cigarette.
Kit had cheated, and she knew it, and she suspected Alington knew it. She had neither meant, intended, contemplated, nor conceived possible such a thing, yet the thing was done. In point of fact, she had done it quite unwittingly. She had never intended to push her counters over the line with the edge of her cards. But then had followed—and she knew this, too—an appreciable moment in which she perceived what had happened before Tom's voice broke in. But she had not been able to sayat once, "I have made a mistake; I only staked fifty." After that each possible division of a single second made speech infinitely more impossible. To hesitate then was to be lost. Thirty seconds later her stake was paid, and to say then what had happened was not only impossible, but inconceivable. Besides, she thought to herself with a sudden relief, it was wholly unnecessary. She would tell Alington about it quite candidly, and return the money. But it was a poor ending to the evening on which sheand Alice were going to watch him to see if he cheated.
That moment when she did not speak was psychologically more important than Kit knew. She had lived in the world some five-and-twenty years, and for five-and-twenty years her instincts had been forming. But during those years she had not formed an instinct of absolute, unwavering, instantaneous honesty. Before now she had been in positions where there was a choice between the perfectly upright course and the course ever so slightly crooked, and had she known the history of her soul, she would have been aware that when she had stuck to the absolutely upright line she had done so after reflection. Then came this moment when there was no time for reflection, and the habit of looking at her decisions as ever so faintly debatable had asserted itself. She had paused to consider what she should do. That, in such circumstances, was quite sufficient.
That she was ashamed was natural; that she was angry was to her more natural still. She felt that the thing had been forced on her, and so in a manner, if we take into consideration all the instincts which were undoubtedly hers at that moment, it was; how far she was to be held responsible for those instincts is a question for psychologists and those who have got to the bottom of the problem of original sin, but not for story-tellers.
She had a great command over herself, and she gathered up her stakes with a laugh. There had been no perceptible pause of any kind.
"I was just going to order the carriage to take me to the workhouse," she said, "but I can still afford to breakfast without the assistance of the poor laws. Must you go, Mr. Alington? Half-past two;is it really? I had no idea. Good-night. I hope Jack is behaving himself on your board. Mind you keep him in order; it is more than I can do."
She looked Mr. Alington full in the face as she spoke, trying, but failing, to detect the least shadow of a change in his impassive and middle-class features. But when he looked benevolently at her through his spectacles and bowed with his accustomed awkwardness, she felt a sudden lightness of heart at the thought that he had not seen. She did not examine too closely into what this lightness of heart exactly implied.
The others soon followed Mr. Alington's example, and took themselves off. Jack had walked to the front-door with Lady Haslemere, and Kit waited a moment in the drawing-room, after sending Lord Comber, who lingered, away, for him to come up again. Whether she intended to tell him what had happened she scarcely knew; that must depend. But he did not return, and before long servants entered to put out the lights. They would have withdrawn when they saw her, but she got up.
"Yes, put the lights out," she said. "Has his lordship gone out?"
"No, my lady; his lordship went upstairs to his room ten minutes ago."
Kit abandoned the idea of telling him that night. If she went to his room, it would imply that she had something to say, and she did not wish to commit herself yet. So she went to her own room, and rang for her maid.
The hair and unlacing processes seemed interminable this evening, and were intolerable even to the accompaniment of an excellent Russian cigarette. She had been given on her birthday, only a fewweeks before, by Lord Comber, a wonderful silver-framed antique mirror, with the old Venetian motto on it, "Sono felice, te videndo," and it had made dressing and undressing a positive pleasure. Jack also had made himself amusing about it; he had come into her room the day after it arrived, and, seeing the motto on it, said, laughing:
"God has given you a good conceit of yourself, Kit. Where did you buy it?"
"I didn't buy it," she replied, never having intended to make a mystery about it. "Ted gave it me."
"Ted Comber? What damned impertinence!"
Kit burst out laughing.
"Jack, you are inimitable as the jealous husband," she had said. "It is a newrôle. Poor Ted! it must have cost a pot of money."
And Jack had permitted himself to leave the room, banging the door behind him.
Ted and she had laughed over the episode together.
"So like a man to ask absurd questions, and then be angry because he is told the truth," Kit had said. "It would have been quite as easy for me to lie."
But to-night not even the mirror, with its amusing associations, nor the reflection of herself, nor the Russian cigarette, could beguile the tedium of the toilet. The comb caught in her hair; her maid's hands were cold, she was clumsy; the evening post was stupid; it was late; Kit was sleepy and discontented. In fact, she was in an abominable temper.
At last it was over, and her maid left her. She got up from the chair in front of her glass, where she had been sitting in her wonderful lace dressing-gown, and took a turn up and down the room. Shefelt like a fractious child, out of sorts, out of gear, out of temper. Then quite suddenly she stopped, threw herself face downwards on the bed, and began to cry from sheer rebellion and impatience of this stupid world.
Mrs. Murchison was sitting on a pile of cushions beneath her crimson parasol. The cushions were in a punt, and the punt was on the Thames, and it was Sunday afternoon, and she and her daughter were spending a Saturday till Monday, the last of the season, with the Conybeares. Toby, in flannels, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, was resting from his labours with the punt pole, and sitting opposite this lady. It was a blazing hot day, but, in spite of the glare of the water, cooler, so Mrs. Murchison has asserted, on the river than elsewhere. In point of fact, she felt positively frizzled with the heat; but she had weaned Toby from his basket-chair under a tree on the lawn to have a private talk with him, ascertain how the land lay, and generally encourage him. This desire to speak to him privately took its birth from two words she had had with Kit the evening before. These two words, again, were the result of a conversation which Toby had had with Kit in the train coming down, and thus the fact that Toby was doomed to punt and swelter under a broiling sun instead of sitting coolly in the shade was indirectly his fault for having said what he had said to Kit.
For the last fortnight Kit had been in a state of chronic exasperation with her tiresome brother-in-law.Toby was gauging his own gait, and Kit's efforts to make him march in time with her had brought no results. He was always to be found at the houses to which Lily went, and at those houses he was always talking to her. But Kit could not bring him to the point. Elsewhere his demeanour was absent and slightly idiotic; he appeared to have something on his mind, and dressed with unusual care. Thus, as they travelled down from London on the Saturday, Kit felt herself called upon to try to put the finishing touch to the work she flattered herself she had begun so well. She had not yet told him that the Murchisons were coming. She had, in fact, only asked them the evening before.
"Who is to be there?" asked Toby, as they left Paddington.
"Oh, the usual lot: Ted and the rest, and—oh yes, Mrs. Murchison and her daughter."
Toby looked fixedly out of the window with the idiotic expression on his face, and the dawnings of a very creditable blush. There was silence a moment, and Kit watched him from behind her paper. Toby turned and caught her eye.
"Oh bother you, Kit!" he exclaimed.
Kit laid down the paper and began to laugh.
"And don't laugh," said Toby rudely; "it's all your fault."
"I should say it was Lily Murchison's," remarked Kit.
"Kit, will you be serious a minute?" said he. "I want to say things; I can't say them, you know, but you are clever—you will understand."
Kit laid her hand on his arm with a sympathetic pressure of her fingers.
"Dear Toby," she said, "I understand perfectly, and I am delighted—delighted! It is charming."
Toby looked very serious.
"Kit, I wish you had never told me to fall in love with her," he said; "it has spoilt it all. Of course, it is not in consequence of what you said that I have, but I wish you hadn't suggested it that evening at the Hungarian dance. That she is rich, and that the world knows it, stands in front of me. It is a vile world; it will say I fell in love with her only because of that. Oh, damn!"
Kit was divided between amusement and impatience.
"It has been reserved for you, Toby, to discover that riches are a bar to matrimony," she observed; "the reverse is usually believed to be the case."
Toby shook his head. Kit appeared to him quite as tiresome as he to her.
"You don't understand," he said.
Kit had a brilliant idea. She saw that Toby wanted to talk about it, so she determined not to talk, but to leave in him a little barbed shaft that might do useful work.
"We'll not talk about it, Toby," she said; "I can see you don't want to. Probably you are not in love at all, just a bit attracted. Get over it as quick as you can, there's a good boy; it makes you unsocial anddistrait. Besides, how often has she seen you? With all your excellent qualities, dear Toby, you are not exactly—well, anything more than quite a poor, pleasant, plain young man. So drop the whole thing; you will neither break your heart nor hers. I have made too much of it, no doubt. I was wrong, I feel sure I was wrong, and I beg your pardon. Oh, there has been a hurricane in Florida!How too terrible!" And she buried herself again behind her paper.
Toby gave a short preoccupied grunt, and subsided into his corner, frowning angrily at the innocent features of the landscape. With all his native modesty and candour, he was not quite of Kit's way of thinking. The lover's devotion, which quite honestly swears that he is not fit to be the doormat to the beloved's boots, sees all the time that there is another possibility, and even in the ecstasy of humiliation aspires to worthier offices. Even while he swears himself a doormat, yet with a magnificent inconsistence he lifts his eyes higher than her boots. Though Toby was all that those tame reptilia, who think that every woman they meet is in love with them, are not, yet he did not at all accept Kit's suggestion that Lily could not conceivably have anything to say to him. With perfect sincerity he would say he was not worthy, but he was not at all content to have it said for him. Even more absurd was her suggestion that he was not in love himself.Distrait!he should just think he was. And he glared savagely at the outside page of Kit's Pall Mall.
Just about as they went screaming and swaying through Slough, Kit laid her paper down and yawned elaborately. Through her half-closed eyes she saw Toby glowering darkly at her from the seat opposite, and waited with amused satisfaction the working of her darts.
"Nothing in the paper," she said.
"I thought there was a famine in Florida," he observed dryly.
Kit regarded him for a moment in irritating silence.
"Florida is a long way off," she said at length."Probably it is only a geographical expression. There are many places and people, Toby, much nearer than Florida."
The second link in the chain of circumstances which led to Toby's going punting in the heat was shorter. It occurred that same evening after dinner. Kit was sitting with Mrs. Murchison in the window of the hall, while the others were out on the lawn, when Lily entered, followed by Toby.
"I'm going to bed, mother," she said. "Good-night, Lady Conybeare; good-night, Lord Evelyn."
"Let me give you a candle," said Toby; and they left the room.
Then said Kit very softly, as if to herself: "Poor Toby! poor dear Toby."
Mrs. Murchison heard (she was meant to hear). Hence, on the following afternoon she wished for a private conversation with Toby, and at this moment they were in the punt together. Mrs. Murchison was, considered as a conversationalist, a little liable to be discursive, and heat and a heavy lunch combined to emphasize this tendency; they melted her brains, and a perfect stream of information concerning all parts of the globe came rioting out. Besides this natural bent, she considered it best to approach the subject, on which she particularly wanted to talk to Toby, by imperceptible degrees, not run at him with it as if she was a charging Dervish fighting for Allah. This accounts for her saying that the Thames reminded her so much of the Nile.
Now, Toby, like many others, snatched a fearful joy from Mrs. Murchison's conversation. He saw that the flood-gates were opening, and, with a sigh of delighted anticipation, he said that he supposed it was very like indeed.
"Quite remarkably like, quite," said Mrs. Murchison, "and the closer you look, the more the simile grows upon you. Dear me, how I enjoyed that winter we spent in Egypt! How often I thought over the psalm, 'When Israel came out of Egypt'! We spent a fortnight in Cairo first, and what between the dances and the bazaars and the tombs of the Marmadukes, and the excursions, we had plenty to do. I remember so well one ride to the Pyramids of Sahara, where we met a very famous archeologist whose name I forget, but he had red whiskers and a very nervous manner, and showed us over them."
"That must have been very pleasant," said Toby.
"Most delicious. Then another day we went to see the tree under which the Virgin Mary sat whenshewent to Egypt, which was really a remarkable coincidence, because my name is Mary, too, and the guide gave us a leaf from it as a Memento Mary. Ah, dear me, how charming and quaint it all was! Then we went up the river in our own private diabetes and stuck on a sandbank for weeks."
Toby's breath caught in his throat for a moment, but he stiffened his risible muscle like a man.
"Didn't you find that rather tedious?" he asked.
"No, not at all; I was quite sorry when we got off, because the air was so fresh, like champagne, and the sunsets so beautiful, and every evening great flocks of ibexes and pelicans used to fly down to the river to drink. But now I come to think of it, we weren't there for weeks, but only for an hour or two, and very tiresome it was, as we wanted to get on, and Mr. Murchison's language—— Then at Luxor such sights, the great Colossus of Mammon, and the temples and the hotel gardens. And while we were there some professor or another—not theone with the red whiskers, you must understand—discovered a cylinder covered with cruciform writing, but it seemed to me quite common. And the donkey-boys were so amusing; we used to throw them piazzas, and see them scramble for them."
"Threw them what?" asked Toby politely.
"Piazzas and half-piazzas. The small silver coin of the country."
"Oh yes. You must have travelled a good deal."
"Indeed we have: Mr. Murchison was so devoted to it; I used to call him the Wandering Jew. Then from Egypt we went on to the Holy Land,La Sainte Terre, you know the French call it—so poetical. And we saw Tyre and Sodom and all those places, and where Cicero was killed at the brook Jabbok, and where Elijah went up to heaven, and Damascus—quite lovely!—and the temples of Baalzac—or was it the temple of Baal?"
"Did you go with one of Cook's tours?"
"Indeed we did not; it would have spoiled all the poetry and romance to me if we had done that. No, Mr. Murchison took his yacht, so we could go where we pleased and when we pleased and how we pleased. Then from there we went to Athens, and on through the Straits of Messina, and saw that volcano—Hecla, is it not?—and got to Rome for Easter."
"Rome is delightful, is it not?" said Toby, still playing the part of Greek-play chorus. "I have hardly travelled at all."
"Most interesting; I quite longed to be one of those poky little professors who spend all their lives hunting for grafficos in the Christian catafalques. I assure you we had quite a Childe Harold-al-Raschid pilgrimage, what with Egypt and all, quite likethe Arabian Knight. It was wonderful. Travelling is so opening to the mind; I am sure I never really understood what 'from Dan even to Beersheba,' meant until I went and did it too."
"Did you go to Naples?" asked Toby, who still wanted more.
"Indeed we did, and saw Vesuvio in an eruction. Vesuvius you call it, but, somehow, when one has been to Italy, the Italianpoint-de-vueseems to strike one more. Dear me, yes! Vesuvio, Napoli—all those names are so much more life-like than Leghorn and Florence. And those queer little dirty picturesque streets in Napoli, where the Gomorrah live! I have often given myself up as murdered."
A spasm of inward laughter shook Toby like an aspen leaf as this incomparable lady gave him this wonderful example of the widening effects of foreign travel. But it passed in a moment.
"So like the Nile—so like the Nile," she murmured, as they slewed slowly through beds of water-lilies. "If you can imagine most of the trees taken away, Lord Evelyn, and the remainder changed into palms, and sand instead of meadows, you literally have the Nile. Indeed, the only other difference would be that the water of the Nile is quite thick and muddy, not clear like this, and, of course, the sky is much bluer. Dear Lily, how she enjoyed it!"
"Was Miss Murchison with you?" asked Toby.
Her mother settled herself comfortably in her cushions. This was more like business, and she congratulated herself on the diplomacy she had shown in leading the conversation round so naturally, via Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy, to this point.
"Yes, indeed she was; I never stir anywherewithout my sweet Lily. Lily of the valley, I call her sometimes. My precious child! You see, Lord Evelyn, she was brought up in England, and for years I never saw her once. And I shall so soon have to part with her again!"
Toby, who had been leaning over the side of the punt, dabbling his blunt fingers in the cool water, sat up suddenly.
"How is that?" he asked.
"Oh, Lord Evelyn, you nearly upset the boat! These punts are so insecure! Only a plank between us and death. You see, I can't expect her to live with me always. She will marry. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and the same applies to a woman. I would not have her remain single all her life in order to be near me," said Mrs. Murchison, with a deep altruistic sigh.
Toby gave a little laugh of relief.
"Oh, I see. For the moment I thought you meant that—that something was already settled."
"No," said Mrs. Murchison; "the dear child is not so easy to please. Half London has been at her feet. But dear Lily has nothing to say to them. She sends them empty away, like theMagnificat."
Mrs. Murchison sighed.
"You are not a mother, Lord Evelyn," she went on, "and you cannot know all that is in a mother's heart, though I am sure you are delightfully sympathetic and understanding. I tell you I hardly sleep a wink at night for dreaming of Lily's future. I want her to marry some Englishman, of course. Some nice pleasant man out of the titled classes. She was born to be titled. I often shut my eyes when I look at her, and say to myself, 'Some day my darling will go into dinner before her own mother.'She has had the opportunity many times, and I have wondered lately whether my dearest has not someone in her eye—I should say her heart."
"I wonder," said Toby, with marked indifference.
"So like the Nile," said Mrs. Murchison diplomatically, giving it to be understood that the conversation was still quite general. "But the mysteries of a maiden's heart, Lord Evelyn!" she sighed. "Lily takes after me; as a child, I was so mysterious that nobody thought I should live."
"Miss Murchison is not delicate?" asked Toby.
"Dear me, no! most indelicate. Her health never gave me a moment's anxiety since she left her cradle. But she is very reticent about some things, and very thoughtful. When I was a child I used to fall in love a hundred times a day; it may have been Vanderbilt or a postman, and I used to put down their initials in a little green morocco pocket-book; but I never used to tell anyone about it, just like Lily. But you can see by her forehead how thoughtful she is, like Marie Antoinette. Doesn't Tennyson speak of the 'bar of Marie Antoinette'? She has it most marked above the eyes."
Toby's ignorance of "In Memoriam" was even less profound than Mrs. Murchison's knowledge of it, and he only murmured that he seemed to remember it, which was not true.
"Thoughtful and pensive," said Mrs. Murchison. "Dear child! how she looked forward to coming down here! And so gay at times. And never, Lord Evelyn," said Mrs. Muchison very earnestly, "has she said an unkind word to me."
By this time Toby had already turned the punt round, and was propelling it deftly back towards the lawn.
"Yes, if I could see her nicely married to some such man," said Mrs. Murchison, growing bolder. "I should be content to lie like some glorious Milton in a country churchyard. Dear me, how lovely the river is, and so like the Nile! Well, I suppose we must be going back; it should be near tea-time. I have so enjoyed my little excursion with you, Lord Toby—I beg your pardon, Lord Evelyn; and what a pleasant chat we have had, to be sure!"
And the good, kind, excellent, worldly woman beamed at Toby's brown face.
Toby never wasted time in making resolutions. Instead, he went and did the thing; and now he walked cheerfully up to the group on the lawn with his coat on his arm, and inquired if anyone had seen Miss Murchison.
"Because perhaps she would like to go for a bit in the punt," he explained.
She was not there; vague people had seen her vaguely, "some time ago"; and the advent of tea made him wait, not because he wanted tea, but because his chance of finding her was better at a well-defined centre.
The rest of the party was spending Sunday afternoon in various orthodox manners: Lord Comber was abstaining from a pile of yellow French novels he had brought out, Kit was sleeping peacefully with her mouth open in a long deck-chair, Jack was throwing sticks into the water for the spaniels, and Lady Haslemere was in her bedroom (a recognised Sunday resort, like a public garden). But tea brought everyone flocking together, like eagles to a carcass, and among them came Lily.
Toby had not seen her come out through the drawing-room window; her step on the velvet of thegrass was noiseless, and it was not till she was close to the table that he looked up. Then their eyes met, black eyes and blue; and so chance a meeting, a thing which had happened a dozen times before in the course of a meal, seemed strangely to disconcert each. The most simple of all changes had come over Toby; Mrs. Murchison's words had fired his inflammable material—it was all ablaze. And that beacon must have shone from his honest open eyes, for Lily saw the change that none other saw, the private signal flying for her; and when, soon afterwards, he lounged up to her, and asked her if she would care to go out in the punt, as it was cooler now, she knew, so she thought afterwards, what was coming.
She assented, and the two went down over the close-shaven lawn to where it was moored.
Kit, like most people who possess that master-key to immense enjoyment of life, namely, a ravenous, insatiable appetite for pleasure, had always a vital instinct to put off as long as possible anything which was unpleasant. She usually found plenty of delightful things to do every day of her life; indeed, with her tremendousjoie de vivre, almost everything she did was delightful, and if there was something not delightful to be done, as a rule she did not do it. In this complicated hurly-burly of life, it is a great thing to be able to simplify, as in the tutor-ridden days one used to simplify the huge vulgar fractions which covered the page, and turned out in the end to be equivalent to zero. Kit's methods of simplification were really notable; she cut out everything which looked as if it would give trouble, and did not care in the slightest degree about the result. And if you do not care about the result, life, like vulgar fractions and the wicked, ceases from troubling.
But occasionally, so cruelly conducted is this world, she was driven to take odiously disagreeable steps, for fear of the speedy and inevitable disaster which would attend their omission. There were also certain prophylactic measures she used habitually to take, just as one goes to the dentist to avoid possibletoothache in the future. Under the latter head came such small affairs as bazaar-openings and tedious "Grundy" dinners; also the yearly visit to Jack's uncle, who was a Bishop—a grim ordeal, but efficacious. They gave one a firmer stand, so to speak. It would have argued a shocking lack of worldly wisdom to neglect such simple little things, and whatever Kit lacked, she had an admirable amount of that. But the avoidance of unpleasantness in the greed for the pleasures of the moment led her constantly to put off distasteful things, in the same way in which one puts off the writing of letters, blindly hoping that if they are left unanswered long enough they will, in a manner of speaking, answer themselves. This charming result is often attained, but sometimes it is not, whereby the children of Eve are disconcerted.
The tiresome baccarat incident had now been unanswered rather more than a fortnight, during which interval Kit had not seen Mr. Alington. She told Jack that the mine-man was rather too much for her. Besides, she had introduced him to a hundred houses; if he could not swim for himself now, he never would. But when on the morning following this Sunday, as Kit, figuratively speaking, looked over her old letters to see what had to be done in the last week in London, she came upon the baccarat letter, and read it through again, hoping that she would feel that it had by now answered itself, for she had given it time. But though she was sedulous in taking a favourable view of this and all other matters concerning herself, she came to the disheartening conclusion that it had not. There was clearly only one of two things to be done—either give it more time and another chance to answer itself unaided,or answer it herself at once. And, as a wise and perhaps a good wife should, she determined to consult her husband about it, wishing that she had done so before.
The confidence between the two was, in a certain well-defined area, of an intimate kind. There were, no doubt, certain things which Kit did not tell Jack, and she on her side felt that there might be developments in the Alington scheme, for instance, into which she would not be permitted to enter. She did not resent this; everyone may have his own private sitting-room, where, if one knocks, one may be refused admittance. It was wiser then not to knock, and certainly there were things in hers which it was not her intention to show Jack. But apart from these few exceptions, Kit always told Jack everything, especially if she was in difficulties.
"It produces such peace of mind," she had said once to Alice, "to know that no one can tell your husband worse things than he already knows about you. How some women can go on letting their husbands remain in ignorance about their bills and other indiscretions, I can't conceive. Why, I should have to ask Jack every evening what he had learned about me during the day. And that sort of revelations come much better from oneself. It wears," said Kit thoughtfully, "the guise of candour, and also possibly of regret."
The two women practised great freedom of speech with each other, and Alice replied frankly:
"Sometimes I think you are a clever woman, Kit; at other times I feel sure I am wrong, and that you are the most abject of fools."
"I suppose you mean that I seem to you an abject fool now," said Kit. "Why, please?"
"Because you tell Jack only the things that don't really matter. The things which if he heard from elsewhere would really make a row, you don't tell him."
"Ah, but those are the things which nobody can tell him," said Kit, with her customary quickness, and more than her usual penetration.
This conversation occurred to her mind to-day, when she determined to ask his advice about the baccarat. The only question was whether it, too, came under the head of what nobody else could tell him. If it had been someone of her own set who had seen, or whom she suspected to have seen, the littlefaux pasof the hundred-pound counter, it would no doubt have come under the head of the things incommunicable. To Tom, Toby, Jack, Lord Comber, it would have been impossible to repeat such a thing. But one could not guess what ideas of honour a wild West Australian miner might have. To repeat such a thing about a woman was contrary to the code in use among her associates, and a good thing, too, thought Kit, strictly confining the question to the particular instance, and not confounding issues by a consideration of honour in general.
Even after the lapse of a fortnight the thought of that evening was a smart and a mortification. Jack was going to entrust the ship of his fortunes to the wild man who sang hymns, and played a harmonium, for aught she knew, and her really laudable desire to have some hold, some handle over him, had ended in thisdébâcle. It was not certain, indeed, that he had seen, but Kit could not but admit that it was highly probable. After all, honesty was the best policy, and she determined to tell Jack.
He had gone up to town by an early train, and Kit, who disliked getting up early almost as much as she disliked going to bed early, followed him later. He was out when she reached Park Lane, and it was close on lunch-time when she heard a cab drive up. Next moment the butler had announced Mr. Alington. The two looked just like brothers.
"Good-morning, Lady Conybeare," he said very smoothly. "Your husband asked me to lunch here, as we have some business to talk over. I was to give you a message, if he was not yet in, asking you not to wait lunch for him. He might"—Mr. Alington appeared to ponder deeply for a moment—"he might be detained."
This meeting was intensely annoying to Kit. She had told Jack that she had had enough of the mine-man, and it was very tiresome to have thistête-à-tête, and quite particularly disagreeable after their last meeting to see him alone. However, she put on the best face she could to the matter, and spoke with familiar geniality.
"Oh, Jack is always late," she said. "But why he should think it necessary to ask me not to wait for him is more than I can say. I suppose you have been imbuing him with business habits. Jack a business man! You have no idea how droll that seems to his wife, Mr. Alington. Let us lunch at once; I am so hungry. Kindly ring that bell just behind you, please."
Mr. Alington sat still a moment, and then rose with deliberation, but did not ring.
"I am lucky to find you alone, Lady Conybeare," he said, "for the truth is, there was a little matter I wanted to talk over with you."
Kit rose swiftly from her seat before he had finishedhis sentence, and rang the bell herself. It was answered immediately, and as the man came into the room, "Indeed; and what is that?" she said. "Is lunch ready, Poole? Let us go in, Mr. Alington. I am always so hungry in London and elsewhere."
Kit could scarcely help smiling as she spoke. She had no intention whatever of talking any little matter over with Mr. Alington, especially if it was the one she had in her mind; and she could not help feeling amused by the simplicity of the means by which she had put the stopper on the possibility of a private talk. She wished to hold no private communications with the man. She had done her part in launching him, for the convenience of Jack; she had given him to understand, or rather given other people to understand, that he was anami de la maison, and she washed her hands of him. He was very kindly going to make Jack's fortune in return for benefits received, but he had distinctly said that the arrangement was one of mutual advantage. It was give and take; he was on the same level as your grocer or bootmaker, except that those tradesmen gave in the hopes of eventually taking, while Mr. Alington took as he went along. At the best he was a sort of cash-down shop, and Kit did not habitually deal with such. She did not consider him dangerous, and she was so well pleased with her own adroitness that she very unwisely determined to drive her advantage home.
So, as he followed her through the folding-doors into the dining-room, "What is the little matter you referred to?" she asked again, feeling perfectly secure in the presence of servants in the room.
Mr. Alington closed his eyes for a moment before he took his seat, and murmured a brief graceto himself. He opened them a moment afterwards with a short sigh, and Kit'sriposteto his thrust did not seem to have ruffled or disconcerted him in the least.
His broad butler-like face was as serene as ever.
"It was a matter which I thought you might have preferred to discuss alone," he said; "but as you seem to wish it, I will tell you here. The other night when I had the pleasure of playing baccarat with you, you won on a natural——"
A flush of anger rose to Kit's face. The man was intolerable, insolent, before the servants, too; but as he spoke she felt a sudden fear of him. He looked her full in the face with mild firmness, breaking his toast with one hand, while with the other he manipulated his macaroni on the end of his fork.
"Stop!" said Kit, quick as the curl of a whiplash.
But Mr. Alington did not wince.
"You will be so kind, then, as to give me the opportunity of speaking to you privately about it," he said. "I am quite of your way of thinking. It is far better discussed so. I quite see."
Kit felt herself trembling. She was not accustomed to such bland brutality at the hands of anyone. She would have been scarcely more surprised if her stationer or butcher had suddenly appeared in the room, and urged the propriety of a private talk. Alington, it is true, had been to her house, had a right to consider himself a guest; but that made it even more intolerable. Apparently he had no idea of the distinction between guests and guests, and it would be a shocking thing if this were overlooked. Meantime he went on eating macaroni with a superbmastery over that elusive provender, in silence, since Kit did not reply.
The dining-room was one of the most charming rooms in London, rather dark, as dining-rooms should be, the walls of a sober, self-tint green, and bare but for some half-dozen small pictures of the Barbizon school, which, if alienable, would long ago have been alienated to supply the chronic scarcity of money in the Conybeare establishment. They were wonderful examples, but Kit hated them, since they could not be sold. "They make me feel like a man on a desert island with millions of gold sovereigns and no food," she had said once. The chairs were all armed, and upholstered in green brocade, and the thick Ispahan carpet made noiseless the feet of those "who stand and wait." Partly this, partly the distraction of her thoughts, brought it about that red mullets were at Kit's elbow a full ten seconds unperceived. She could not make up her mind what to do. She bitterly repented having said "Stop!" just now to Alington, for the vehemence of her interjection gave herself away. She had practically admitted that something had occurred on the night they played baccarat which she earnestly desired not to have discussed in public. A fool could have seen that, and with all her distaste for the man she did not put this label to him. And with odiously familiar deference he had agreed with her; he had assumed the right of discussing things with her in private.
Again, she could not quarrel with him. Conybeare's application to business, his early visits to the City, his frequent conferences with Alington, his unexampled preoccupation, all showed for certain that there were great issues at stake, for he wouldnot give himself such trouble for a few five-pound notes. All this passed through her mind very rapidly, and at the end of ten seconds she leaned back in her chair, saw the red mullets, and took two of them.
"Yes, you are quite right," she said; "we will talk of it afterwards. Ah, here is Jack! Morning, Jack!"
Jack nodded to her and Alington, and took his seat.
"You have heard the news, Kit?" he asked.
"Lots; but which?"
"Toby is engaged to Miss Murchison. The Crœsum told me in the train this morning. She is coming to see you this afternoon."
Kit for the moment forgot her other worries.
"Oh, how delightful!" she cried. "Dear Toby! And Lily is most charming, and so pretty! Do you know her, Mr. Alington?"
"I have met her at your house, I think. And an heiress, is she not?"
"I believe she has a little money," said Kit. "One has heard people say so. But mere gossip, perhaps."
Jack laughed low and noiselessly.
"That will be so pleasant for Toby," he observed, "if it is true."
Kit sighed.
"What a pity that it is not the custom for a bride to settle money on her husband's brother, Jack!" she said.
"Yes, or give it in order to escape death duties. What opportunities for unusual kindness some people have!"
"Well, it is charming, anyhow," said Kit. "I noticed they went for a stroll in the punt yesterdayafternoon, which I thought promising. A punt is so often a matrimonial agency. You aren't afraid of tipping it up like an ordinary boat. You proposed to me in a racing pair, or something skittish—do you remember, Jack?—and I said I'd do anything in the world if you would only row straight to shore. And you kept me to it. Hardly fair, was it, Mr. Alington?"
Mr. Alington smiled like an elderly clergyman at a school feast, and his smile was suggestive of his liking to see young people happy.
"I wonder the Matrimonial News doesn't keep a few punts for the use of clients," went on Kit, in nervous anxiety to get lunch over as quickly as possible. She had made up her mind about Alington in the last half-minute or so, and was desirous of getting a word with him, her intention being to deny his charge point-blank, and in turn accuse him. "Punts and evening hymns do wonders with people who can't quite make up their minds to propose."
Mr. Alington looked mildly interested at this surprising information, and he appeared to be weighing it carefully as he ate his quail before giving it his support.
"They might keep a small choir and a harmonium as well," went on Kit. "I believe all the respectable middle-class go to evening church on Sunday and sing hymns very loud out of one book, and propose to each other afterwards. Dear Toby, how happy he will be! How nice—how exceedingly nice!" she murmured sympathetically.
Alington and Kit had by this time finished lunch, and she rose.
"I can't stop and see you eat, Jack," she said."Come, Mr. Alington; we will go and have coffee, and Jack will join us."
On these hot July days Kit often sat in the inner hall, which was cooler than the drawing-room. It was a charming place of palms and parquetry, with furniture at angles, and a general atmosphere of coolness and sequestered corners. Coffee came immediately with cigarettes, and Kit took one. Mr. Alington, however, explained that except on Sundays he did not allow himself to smoke till after dinner.
"I find a little abstinence very helpful," he gave as his modest excuse.
The servants withdrew, and Kit began playing with her subject.
"I am afraid you thought me very abrupt at lunch," she said, "but I have a great objection to discussing matters, which it is conceivable might be better kept private, before servants, and when you mentioned baccarat I thought it better to stop you, even at the risk of seeming very brusque. You will hardly believe it, Mr. Alington"—here her voice sank to a low confidential murmur—"you will hardly believe it, but only a few weeks ago I saw a man cheat at baccarat at a friend's house. Very distressing, was it not? I talked it over with a friend, and we found it most difficult to decide what to do. That sort of thing might so easily get about; it is so dangerous to speak before servants."
"I think you talked it over with Lady Haslemere?" remarked Mr. Alington.
Kit was stirring her coffee and smiling sweetly. She was getting on beautifully. But at these words and their peculiarly calm delivery her hand stopped stirring, and her smile faded.
"I think also you agreed to ask the suspect toplay again, in order to watch him," went on the impassive butler. "Was it not so, Lady Conybeare? And I think the suspect was none other than myself."
Kit put down her coffee-cup and leaned back in her chair. The thing had gone wrong; she had meant to have got first innings on the subject of baccarat cheating, and she was rather afraid she was clean bowled. Quick as she was, she could not see her answer. Mr. Alington did not, however, look at her, nor did he pause longer than was necessary to sip his coffee.
"Your tactics were a little open, a little obvious, Lady Conybeare, if you will allow me to say so," he went on. "Delicious coffee! You exchanged so many glances with Lady Haslemere, and then looked up at me, that I could not fail to see you were watching for something. No man, I expect, likes to be suspected of so very paltry a crime as cheating at baccarat—a crime so hopelessly void of any grandeur—and no man, I am sure, likes a trap being laid for him by those whom he is entitled to consider his friends. And before I go on to the point I have in my mind I should like to say a word about this."
He cleared his throat and sipped his coffee again.
"What you and Lady Haslemere saw," he went on—"did your husband suspect me too? It does not matter—what you saw was this: I had declared a natural, and you saw me, as you thought, push a fifty-pound counter over the line. Was that not so?"
"There is no question of 'thought,'" said Kit, whom a sense of danger made the more incautious; "we saw you do it."
"Quite true. If you had observed a little more closely, you would have seen something else. Now,I ask you, the few times we have played baccarat together, did you ever see me fail to stake?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Quite so. If you had looked at the table a moment before, you would have seen I had nothing staked. What happened was this: I had staked four ten-pound counters and two fives; then, seeing that I had no more smaller ones, I withdrew them to substitute one fifty for them. At that moment I received my cards, and, taking them up I forgot for the moment to substitute my fifty. I looked at the cards, declared the natural, and you saw me push forward the fifty-pound counter quite openly, and, so you thought, clumsily. It never occurred to me for a moment there was any need of an explanation."
Kit's anger and alarm was growing on her.
"Very clumsily," she said; "we all saw it."
"It was stupid of me, no doubt, not to have explained at the time," he said, "but really I had no idea the company was so suspicious."
He paused for a moment, and his mild temper was roused at the thought of Kit's behaviour.
"But perhaps people are right to be suspicious," he added, with a raised intonation.
The shot went home, and Kit's face grew a shade paler. But she could not conceivably show that she knew what he meant, for that would be to accuse herself. Instead, she put all the insolence her voice would hold into her reply.
"And what proof have I of the truth of what you say?" she asked, fighting desperately on this battle-ground of her adversary's choosing.
"The fact that I say it," said Mr. Alington. "Also, there is corroborative evidence if I choose to adduce it. I showed you the other night, meaningmerely to give you a hint, that, had I wanted, I could have cheated very neatly. Is it credible, then, even supposing that I am one of those people who cheat, that I should have done it so clumsily?"
Kit in her heart believed the man, but her superficial woman's cunning refused to give up the hold she still hoped she might have over him, her only answer to the hold she was afraid he had over her.
"We all make blunders at times," she said, in her most fiendish manner. "Unfortunately, I don't believe what you say."
Mr. Alington sipped his coffee again. His momentary irritation had quite died down; you could not have found a kinder Christian in all England.
"Fortunately, however, that matters very little," he replied.
"It does not make a man popular among us," observed Kit, "if he is known to cheat at baccarat. I understood you the other night to say that sort of thing was common in Australia. I should advise you to remember that we think differently here."
Kit had lost her temper completely, and did not stop to weigh her words. Worse than that, she lost her head, and lashed out insults with foolish defiance.
Mr. Alington crossed one leg over the other, his mouth grew a shade more compressed and precise, and his large pale eyes turned suddenly unluminous and stale like a snake's. Kit grew frightened again, and when a woman is frightened as well as angry she is not likely to score off a perfectly cool man. There was a moment's pause.
"Lady Conybeare," said he at length, "you have chosen to treat me as a knave and as a fool. And I dislike very much being treated as a knave or a fool by you. You accuse me of cheating: that Ihave reason to believe does not seem to you very shocking."
"May I ask why?" interrupted Kit.
Mr. Alington held up his hand, as if to deprecate any reply just now.
"And you accuse me of cheating clumsily, foolishly," he continued. "But can you really think I should be so tragic an ass as to come to you with my mere assertion that I did not cheat? I have given you your chance to believe me of your own free will; you have, I regret to say, refused it. I will now force you to believe me—force you," he repeated thoughtfully. "I have a witness, a person then present, who saw me withdraw those smaller counters and replace the larger."
Kit laughed, but uneasily.
"How very convenient!" she said. "What is his name?"
"Lord Abbotsworthy," remarked Alington. "I even took the precaution of calling his attention to what I had done. It was lucky I did. Ask Lord Abbotsworthy."
"One of your directors," said Kit, almost beside herself with anger, and rising from her chair.
"One of my directors, as you say," he replied, "and your friend. I need hardly remind you that your husband is another of my directors."
On the moment Jack came out of the dining-room. He cast one glance at Kit's face, took a cigarette, and strolled discreetly upstairs. When his wife was on the war-path and had not asked his alliance he did not give it.
"I shall be upstairs when you and my wife have finished your talk," he said over his shoulder to Alington. "Come and see me before you go."
The pause sobered Kit.
"Yes," continued Alington, "he had a moment before asked me to change him some money for small counters, and that left me with only a few small ones. Luckily, he will remember seeing me withdraw and substitute my stake. You and Lady Haslemere would have been wise to consult him before taking this somewhat questionable step of watching me. A fault of judgment—a mere fault of judgment."
Kit, figuratively speaking, threw up her hand. The desperate hope that Alington was lying was no longer tenable.
"And I await your apology," he added.
There was a long silence. Kit was not accustomed to apologize to anybody for anything. Her indifference to this man, except in so far as he could financially serve them, had undergone a startling transformation in the last hour. Indifference had given place first to anger at his insolence, then to fear. His placid, serene face had become to her an image of some infernal Juggernaut, whose car rolled on over bodies of men, yet whose eyelash never quivered. Pride battled with fear in her mind, fury with prudence. And Juggernaut (butler no longer), contrary to his ascetic habit, lit a cigarette.
"Well?" he said, when he judged that the pause was sufficiently prolonged.
Kit had sat down again in her chair, and was conscious only of two things—this inward struggle, and an absorbing hatred of the man seated opposite her.
"Supposing I refuse to apologize?" she asked at length.
"I shall regret it very much," he said; "you probablywill regret it more. Come, Lady Conybeare, by what right do you make an enemy of me?"
Again there was silence. Kit knew very well how everyone would talk if this detestable business became public, which she understood to be the threat contained in Alington's words, and knew also that a rupture between Jack and him, which must inevitably follow, would not be likely to lead to their financial success in this business of the mines.
"I shall require you also to tell Lady Haslemere and your husband, if he also has at any time suspected me, into what a deplorable error you have fallen," continued Alington, dropping out his words as you drop some strong drug into a graduated glass, careful to give neither too much nor too little.
Suddenly Kit made up her mind, and having done that, she determined to act with the best possible grace.
"I apologize, Mr. Alington," she said; "I apologize sincerely. I wronged you abominably. I will do in all points as you suggest."
Mr. Alington did not move a muscle.
"I accept your apology," he said. "And please do me the favour not to treat me like a fool again, for I am far from being a fool."
This speech was not easy swallowing for Kit, but she had to take what he threw her. Alington got up.
"I have to go upstairs to see your husband," he said, "because we have a good deal of business—the shares of the new group will be on the market in a few days."
He paused a moment.
"Do not give another thought to the matter,Lady Conybeare," he said. "It is much better we should be friends. Ah, by the way, regarding that matter on which I meant to speak to you, that unfortunate affair of the hundred-pound counter—you know what I mean. Do not give another thought to that, either. I assure you that it will not be through me that it goes further. I fully believe you never meant it. Only you did not correct your mistake instantaneously, and so correction became impossible. Was it not so?"
His broad face brightened and beamed, like the face of a father speaking lovingly and consolingly to a son about some petty fault, and he held out his hand to her.
Kit wavered. She would have given anything in the world to say, "What affair of the hundred-pound counter? I don't know what you mean." But she could not. She was physically, perhaps morally, incapable of giving the words utterance. Alington had made her afraid; she was beaten, cowed. And the accuracy of his intuition astounded her. Then she gave him her hand; she had no word for him on this subject.
"Good-bye," she said—"au revoir, rather. You will be in and out a good deal, I suppose, while we are in London. There is always lunch at two. My husband is in his room upstairs. You know the way, I think."
Many people have their own pet plan of sending themselves to sleep, such as counting imaginary sheep going through a visionary hedge, or marking out a lawn-tennis court, lifting the machine as seldom as possible. Kit's method, though she usually fell asleep immediately, was to enumerate her dislikes. This was a long and remarkably varied list, beginning"Marie Corelli, parsnips," and she seldom got to the end of it. To-night she admitted Mr. Alington into the charming catalogue, and getting to his name, she did not continue the list, nor did she immediately go to sleep.