The excellent entertainment provided for them acted as a palliative to Winnie's irritation and Bob Purnett's acute curiosity. There are no 'intervals' at music halls; they were switched too quickly from diversion to diversion for much opportunity of talk to present itself; and during the 'orchestral interlude,' half-way through the programme, Bob left his place in search of refreshment. When they came out, the subject of 'Mrs. Smith' had not advanced further between them.
Winnie refused her escort's offer of supper. By now she was tired out, and she felt, though reluctant to own it, a childish instinct—since she had to sleep in that desert of a house—to hide her head between the sheets before midnight. This aim a swift motor-cab might just enable her to accomplish.
Nor did the subject advance rapidly when the cab had started. Winnie lay back against the cushions in a languid weariness, not equal to thinking any more about her affairs that night. Bob sat opposite, not beside her, for fear of his cigar smoke troubling her. She often closed her eyes; then he would indulge himself in a cautious scrutiny of her face as the street lamps lit it up in their rapid passage. She looked exceedingly pretty, and would look prettier still—indeed, 'ripping'—with just a little bit of make-up; for she was very pale, and life had already drawn three or four delicate but unmistakable lines about eyes and mouth. Bob allowed himself to consider her with more attention than he had ever accorded to her before, and with a new sort of attention—on his own account as a man, not merely as a respectful critic of Godfrey Ledstone's taste. Because that remark of hers about not being called 'Mrs. Ledstone'—on pain of going mad—made a difference. Perhaps it meant only a tiff—or, as he called it, a 'row.' Perhaps it meant more; perhaps it was 'all off' between her and Godfrey—a final separation.
Whatever the remark meant, the state of affairs it indicated brought Winnie more within her present companion's mental horizon. Tiffs and separations were phenomena quite familiar to his experience. The truth might be put higher; tiffs were the necessary concomitant, and separations the inevitable end, of sentimental friendships. They came more or less frequently, sooner or later; but they came. Growing frequency of tiffs usually heralded separations. But sometimes the 'big row' came all at once—a storm out of a blue sky, a sudden hurricane, in which the consort ships lost touch of one another—or one went under, while the other sailed away. All this was familiar ground to Bob Purnett; he had often seen it, he had experienced it, he had joked and, in his own vein, philosophized about it. The thing he had not understood—though he had punctiliously feigned to accept—was the sanctity and permanence of a tie which was, as everybody really must know, neither sacred nor likely to be permanent. There he was out of his depth; when tiffs and separations came on the scene, Bob felt his feet touch bottom. And he had always been of opinion, in his heart, that, whatever Winnie might believe, Godfrey Ledstone felt just as he did. Of course Godfrey had had to pretend otherwise—well, the face opposite Bob in the cab was worth a bit of pretending.
Winnie spoke briefly, two or three times, of the performance they had seen, but said nothing more about herself. When they arrived at her door, she told him to keep the cab.
"Because I've got nothing for you to eat, and I think you finished even the whisky! Thanks for my evening, Mr. Purnett."
He walked through the little court up to the door with her. "And you look as tired as a dog," he remarked—with a successful suppression of 'Mrs. Ledstone.' "What you want is a good sleep, and—and it'll all look brighter in the morning. May I come and see you soon?"
"If I'm here, of course you may. But I haven't made up my mind. I may go back to the country, to the Aikenheads, my cousins—where I met Godfrey, you know."
He could not resist a question. "I say, is there trouble? You know how I like you both. Has there been a row?"
She smiled at him. "Godfrey avoided any danger of that. I don't want to talk about it, but you may as well know. Godfrey has gone away."
"Oh, but he'll come back, Mrs.——He'll come back, I mean, you know."
"Never. And I don't want him. Don't ask me any more—to-night, anyhow." She gave him her hand with a friendly pressure. "Good-night."
"Good Lord! Well, I'm sorry. I say, you won't cut me now, will you?"
"I haven't so many friends that I need cut a good one. Now, if you drive off at once, you'll be back in time to get some supper somewhere else." She smiled again, and in a longing for comfort owned to him—and to herself—her childish fears. "And I want to be snug in bed before the spooks come out! I feel rather lonely. So, again, good-night." He had a last vision of her small pale face as she slowly, reluctantly it seemed to him, shut the door. A great rattle of bolts followed.
"Well, I'm left outside, anyhow," Bob reflected philosophically, as he walked back to the cab. But his mind was occupied with the picture of the proud forlorn woman, there alone in the empty house, very much alone in the world too, and rather afraid of 'spooks.' All his natural kindliness of heart was aroused in pity and sympathy for her. "I should like to give her a really good time," he thought. In that aspect his impulse was honestly unselfish. But the image of the pale delicate face abode with him also. The two aspects of his impulse mingled; he saw no reason why they should not, if it were really 'all off' between her and Godfrey Ledstone. "I think she likes me well enough—I wonder if she does!" He did not, to do him justice, ask an extravagant degree of devotion in return for any 'good times' which he might find himself able to offer. When it is so easy for two people with good tempers, sound digestions, and plenty of ready cash to enjoy themselves, why spoil it all by asking too much? Surely he and Winnie could enjoy themselves? The idea stuck in his mind. Again, why—to him—should it not? His scrupulous behaviour hitherto had been based on loyalty to Godfrey Ledstone. It appeared that he was released from the obligation by his friend's own act. "He can't say I didn't play the game, while the thing lasted," thought Bob, with justifiable self-satisfaction.
The morrow of a catastrophe is perhaps harder to bear than the hour in which it befalls us. The excitement of battling with fate is gone; but the wounds smart and the bruises ache. Physically refreshed by sleep—a sleep happily unbroken by assaults from without or ghostly visitants within the house—Winnie braced her courage to meet the call on it. Her task, not easy, yet was plain. She would not weep for her Godfrey Ledstone; she would try not to think of him, nor to let her thoughts stray back to the early days with him. She would and must think of the other Godfrey, the one in Woburn Square. What woman would weep for such a man as that—except his mother? On him she would fix her thoughts, until she need think no more of either of them. She had to think of herself—of what she had done and of what she was now to do. On the first head she admitted a blunder, but no disgrace—a mistake not of principle or theory, only a mistake in her man; with regard to the second, she must make a decision.
Just before she had fairly settled down to this task, she had a visitor. At half-past eleven—early hours for her to be out and about—Mrs. Lenoir appeared.
"I was supping at the Carlton grill-room last night," she explained, "with a couple of girls whom I'd taken to the play, and Bob Purnett came in. He drove me back home, and—I don't know if he ought to have—but he told me about some trouble here. So, as I'm an interfering old woman, I came round to see if I could be of any use." Her manner to-day was less stately and more cordial. Also she spoke with a certain frankness. "You see, I know something about this sort of thing, my dear."
Winnie, of course, distinguished her 'sort of thing' very broadly from 'the sort of thing' to which Mrs. Lenoir must be assumed to refer, but she made no secret of the state of the case or of her own attitude towards it. "I accept it absolutely, but I'm bitterly hurt by the way it was done."
"Oh, you can put it that way, my dear; but you're human like the rest of us, and, of course, you hate having him taken away from you. Now shall I try what I can do?"
"Not for the world! Not a word, nor a sign! It's my mistake, and I stand by it. If he came back, it would never be the same thing. It was beautiful; it would be shameful now."
Mrs. Lenoir smiled doubtfully; she had an imperfect understanding of the mode of thought.
"Very well, that's settled. And, for my part, I think you're well rid of him. A weak creature! Let him marry a Bloomsbury girl, and I hope she'll keep him in fine order. But what are you going to do?"
"I don't quite know. Stephen and Tora would let me go back to Shaylor's Patch for as long as I liked."
"Oh, Shaylor's Patch! To talk about it all, over and over again!"
A note of impatience in her friend's voice was amusingly evident to Winnie. "You mean the less I talk about it, the better?" she asked, smiling.
"Well, you haven't made exactly a success of it, have you?" The manner was kinder than the words.
"And I didn't make exactly a success of my marriage either," Winnie reflected, in a puzzled dolefulness. Because, if both orthodoxy and unorthodoxy go wrong, what is a poor human woman to do? "Well, if I mayn't go to Shaylor's Patch—at present, anyhow—I must stay here, Mrs. Lenoir; that's all. The studio's in my name, because I could give better security than Godfrey, and I can stay if I want to."
"Not very cheerful—and only that dirty old Irishwoman to do for you!"
"Oh, please don't abuse Mrs. O'Leary. She's my one consolation."
Mrs. Lenoir looked at her with something less than her usual self-confidence. It was in a decidedly doubtful and tentative tone that she put her question: "I couldn't persuade you to come and put up with me—in both senses—for a bit?"
Winnie was surprised and touched; to her despairing mood any kindness was a great kindness.
"That's really good of you," she said, pressing Mrs. Lenoir's hand for a moment. "It's—merciful."
"I'm an old woman now, my dear, and most of my cronies are getting old too. Still, some young folks look in now and then. We aren't at all gay; but you'll be comfortable, and you can have a rest while you look about you." There was a trace of the explanatory, of the reassuring, about Mrs. Lenoir's sketch of her home life.
"What's good enough for you is good enough for me, you know," Winnie remarked, with a smile.
"Oh, I'm not so sure! Oh, I'm not speaking of creature comforts and so on. But you seem to me to expect so much of—of everybody."
Winnie took the hand she had pressed and held it. "And you?" she asked.
"Never mind me. You're young and attractive. Don't go on expecting too much. They take what they can."
"They? Who?"
"Men," said Mrs. Lenoir. Then out of those distant, thoughtful, no longer very bright eyes flashed for an instant the roguish twinkle for which she had once been famous. "I've given them as good as I got, though," said she. "And now—will you come?"
Winnie laughed. "Well, do you think I should prefer this empty tomb?" she asked. Yes—empty and a tomb—apt words for what the studio now was. "You weren't as nice as this at Shaylor's Patch—though you always said things that made me think."
"They've all got their heads in the air at Shaylor's Patch—dear creatures!"
"I shall enjoy staying with you. Is it really convenient?" Mrs. Lenoir smiled. "Oh, but that's a silly question, because I know you meant it. When may I come?"
"Not a moment later than this afternoon."
"Well, the truth is I didn't fancy sleeping here again. I expect I should have gone to Shaylor's Patch."
Again Mrs. Lenoir smiled. "You're full of pluck, but you're scarcely hard enough, my dear. If I'm a failure, Shaylor's Patch will do later, won't it?"
"I shall disgrace you. I've nothing to wear. We were—I'm very poor, you know."
"I'd give every pound at my bank and every rag off my back for one line of your figure," said Mrs. Lenoir. "I was beautiful once, you know, my dear." Her voice took on a note of generous recognition. "You're very well—in thepetitestyle, Winnie." But by this she evidently meant something different from her 'beautiful.' Well, it was matter of history.
That afternoon, then, witnessed a remarkable change in Winnie's external conditions. Instead of the desolate uncomfortable studio, charged with memories too happy or too unhappy—there seemed nothing between the two, and the extremes met—peopled, also, with 'spooks' potential if not visualized, there was Mrs. Lenoir's luxurious flat in Knightsbridge, replete, as the auctioneers say, with every modern convenience. The difference was more than external. She was no longer a derelict—left stranded at the studio or to drift back to Shaylor's Patch. No doubt it might be said that she was received out of charity. Amply acknowledging the boon, Winnie had yet the wit to perceive that the charity was discriminating. Not for her had she been plain, not for her had she been uninteresting! In a sense she had earned it. And in a sense, too, she felt that she was in process of being avenged on Godfrey Ledstone and on Woburn Square. A parallel might be traced here between her feelings and Cyril Maxon's. They had made her count for nothing; she felt that at Mrs. Lenoir's she might still count. The sorrow and the hurt remained, but at least this was not finality. She had suffered under a dread suspicion that in their different ways both Shaylor's Patch and the solitary studio were. Here she had a renewed sense of life, of a future possible. Yet here too, for the first time since Godfrey left her, she lost her composure, and the tears came—quite soon, within ten minutes after Mrs. Lenoir's greeting.
Mrs. Lenoir understood. "There, you're not so angry any more," she said. "You're beginning to see that it must have happened—with that fellow! Now Emily will make you comfortable, and put you to bed till dinner-time. You needn't get up for that unless you like. There's only the General coming; it's one of his nights."
Oh, the comfort of a good Emily—a maid not too young and not too old, not too flighty and not too crabbed, light of hand, sympathetic, entirely understanding that her lady has a right to be much more comfortable than she has ever thought of being herself! In Maxon days Winnie had possessed a maid. They seemed far off, and never had there been one as good as Mrs. Lenoir's Emily. She had come into Mrs. Lenoir's life about the same time as Mr. Lenoir had, but with an effect that an impartial observer could not but recognize as not only more durable, but also more essentially important—save that Lenoir had left the money which made Emily possible. Mrs. Lenoir had paid for the money—in five years' loyalty and service.
Winnie reposed between deliciously fine sheets—why, it was like Devonshire Street, without Cyril Maxon!—and watched Emily dexterously disposing her wardrobe. It was not ample. Some of the effects of the Maxon days she had left behind in her hurried flight; most of the rest had worn out. But there were relics of her gilded slavery. These Emily tactfully admired; the humbler purchases of 'Mrs. Ledstone' she stowed away without comment. Also without comment, but with extraordinary tact, she laid out the inferior of Winnie's two evening dresses.
"There's nobody coming but the General, miss," said she.
"Now why does she call me 'miss'—and who's the General?" These two problems rose in Winnie's mind, but did not demand instant solution. They were not like the questions of the last few days; they were more like Shaylor's Patch conundrums—interesting, but not urgent, willing to wait for an idle hour or a rainy day, yielding place to a shining sun or a romp with Alice. They yielded place now to Winnie's great physical comfort, to her sense of rescue from the desolate studio, to her respite from the feeling of finality and of failure. With immense surprise she realized, as she lay there—in a quiet hour between Emily's deft and charitable unpacking and Emily's return to get her into the inferior frock (good enough for that unexplained General)—that she was what any reasonably minded being would call happy. Though the great experiment had failed, though Godfrey was at this moment in Woburn Square, though Mabel Thurseley existed! "Oh, well, I was so tired," she apologized to herself shamefacedly.
She got down into the small but pretty drawing-room in good time. Yet Mrs. Lenoir was there before her, clad in a tea-gown, looking, as it occurred to Winnie, rather like Mrs. Siddons—a cheerful Mrs. Siddons, as, indeed, the great woman appears to have been in private life.
"I got my things off early, so as to leave you Emily," said the hostess. She obviously did not consider that she had been getting anything on.
"What a dear she is!" Winnie came to the fire and stood there, a slim-limbed creature, warming herself through garments easily penetrable by the welcome blaze.
"Quite a find! The General sent her to me. Her husband was a sergeant-major in his regiment—killed in South Africa."
The General again! But Winnie postponed that question. Her lips curved in amusement. "She calls me 'miss.'"
"Better than that silly 'Mrs. Smith' you said to Bob Purnett. Only unhappy women try to make epigrams. And for a woman to be unhappy is to be a failure."
"Isn't that one—almost—Mrs. Lenoir?"
"Quite quick, my dear!" her hostess commented. "But if it is, it's old. I told Emily you were a second cousin. I never know exactly what it means, but in my experience it's quite useful. But please yourself, Winnie. Who will you be?"
"Did Emily believe what you told her?"
The twinkle came again. "She's much too good a servant ever to raise that question. What was your name?"
"My maiden name? Wilkins."
"I think names ending in 'kins' are very ugly," said Mrs. Lenoir. "But a modification? What about Wilson? 'Winnie Wilson' is quite pretty."
"'Miss Winnie Wilson'? Isn't it rather—well, rather late in the day for that? But, I don't want to be Ledstone—and it's rather unfair to call myself Maxon still."
"Names," observed Mrs. Lenoir, "are really not worth troubling about, so long as you don't hurt people's pride. I used to have a fetish-like feeling about them—as if, I mean, you couldn't get rid of the one you were born with, or, my dear, take one you had no particular right to. But one night, long ago, somebody—I really forget who—brought an Oxford don to supper. We got on the subject, and he told me that a great philosopher—named Dobbs, if I remember rightly—defined a name as 'a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark.'" She looked across the hearthrug, confidently expecting Winnie's approval. "I liked it, and it stuck in my memory."
"It does make things simpler, Mrs. Lenoir."
"Mind you, I wouldn't take a great name I hadn't a right to. Courtenays and Devereauxes in the chorus are very bad form. But I don't see why you shouldn't be Wilson. And the 'Miss' avoids a lot of questions."
"All right. Miss Winnie Wilson be it! It sounds like a new toy. And now, Mrs. Lenoir, for the other problem that Emily has raised. Who's the General?"
Mrs. Lenoir liked her young friend, but possibly thought that she was becoming a trifle impertinent. Not that she minded that; in her heart she greeted it as a rebound from misery; in the young it often is.
"If you've any taste in men—which, up to now, you've given your friends no reason to think—you'll like the General very much."
"Will he like me?"
"The only advantage of age is that I shan't mind if he does, Winnie."
Winnie darted towards her. "What a dear you've been to me to-day!"
"Hush, I think I hear the General's step."
The parlour-maid—not Emily, but a young woman, smart and a trifle scornful—announced, "Sir Hugh Merriam, ma'am—and dinner's served."
The General was old-fashioned; he liked to be left alone with the port—or let us say port-wine, as he always did—after dinner for a quarter of an hour; then he would rejoin the ladies for coffee and, by their never assumed but always solicited permission, a cigar in the drawing-room. Thus Winnie had a chance of gratifying her lively curiosity about the handsome old man with gentle manners, who had seen and done so much, who talked so much about his sons, and came to dine with Mrs. Lenoir twice a week.
"I've fallen in love with your General. Do tell me about him," she implored her hostess.
"Oh, he's very distinguished. He's done a lot of fighting—India, Egypt, South Africa. He first made his name in the Kala Kin Expedition, in command of the Flying Column. And he invented a great improvement in gun-carriages—he's a gunner, you know—and——"
"I think," interrupted Winnie, with a saucy air of doubt, "that I meant something about him—and you, Mrs. Lenoir."
"There's nothing to tell. We're just friends, and we've never been anything else."
Winnie was sitting on a stool in front of the fire, smoking her Ledstone-learnt cigarette (destined, apparently, to be the only visible legacy of that episode). She looked up at Mrs. Lenoir, still with that air of doubt.
"Well, why shouldn't I tell you?" said the lady. "He wanted something else, and I wouldn't."
"Were you in love with somebody else?"
"No, but he'd brought those boys—they were just schoolboys then—to see me, and it—it seemed a shame. He knew it was a shame too, but—well, you know what happens sometimes. But, quite soon after, his wife fell ill, and died in four or five days—pneumonia. Then he was glad. But he went abroad directly—without seeing me—and was abroad many years. When he came home and retired, I met him by accident, and he asked leave to call. He's very lonely—so am I rather—and he likes a change from the club. I don't wonder! And, as you'll have gathered, we've known all the same people in the old days, and always have lots to talk about. That's the story, Winnie."
"I like it. Do you ever see the sons?"
"They all come to see me when they're home on leave; but that's not often."
"The Major's coming next week, though. The General said so. Let's see if I've got them right. There's the Major—he's the eldest—in Egypt. But the second one is cleverer, and has become a colonel first; he's in Malta now. And then the one in India has only just got his troop; he ought to have had it before, but they thought he gave too much time to polo, and horse-racing, and private theatricals."
"That's Georgie—my favourite," said Mrs. Lenoir.
"I'm for the Major—because I think it's a shame that his younger brother should be made a colonel before him. I'm glad it's the Major that's coming home on leave next month."
Mrs. Lenoir looked at Winnie, and patted herself on the back. All this was much better for Winnie than the empty studio. She knew that the animation was in part an effort, the gaiety in some measure assumed—and bravely assumed. But every moment rescued from brooding was, to Mrs. Lenoir's mind, so much to the good. According to some other ways of thinking, of course, a little brooding might have done Winnie good, and would certainly have been no more than she deserved.
Coffee came in, and, quick on its heels, the General. He produced his cigar, and advanced his invariable and invariably apologetic request.
"Please do. We neither of us mind, do we, Winnie?" said Mrs. Lenoir. There was really more reason to ask the General if he minded Winnie's cigarette, which had come from the studio and was not of a very fine aroma.
Winnie stuck to her stool and listened, with her eyes set on the fire. At first the talk ran still on the three sons—evidently the old soldier's life was wrapped up in them—but presently the friends drifted back to old days, to the people they had both known. Winnie's ears caught names that were familiar to her, references to men and stories about men whom she had often heard Cyril Maxon and his legal guests mention. But to-night she obtained a new view of them. It was not their public achievements which occupied and amused the General and Mrs. Lenoir. They had known them as intimates, and delighted now to recall their ways, their foibles, how they had got into scrapes and got out of them in the merry thoughtless days of youth. Between them they seemed to have known almost everybody who was 'in the swim' from thirty years to a quarter of a century before; if the General happened to say, 'So they told me, I never met him myself,' Mrs. Lenoir always said, 'Oh, I did'—andvice versâ.
"It was just before my dear wife died," the General said once, in dating a reminiscence.
There was a moment's silence. Winnie did not look up. Then the General resumed his story. But he cut it rather short, and ended with, "I'm afraid our yarns must be boring this young lady, Clara."
Evidently he accepted Winnie entirely at her face value—as Miss Winnie Wilson. The anecdotes and reminiscences, though intimate, had been rigidly decorous, even improbably so in one or two cases; and now he was afraid that she was bored with what would certainly interest any intelligent woman of the world. Winnie was amused, yet vexed, and inclined to wish she had not become Miss Wilson. But she had made a good impression; that was clear from the General's words when he took his leave.
"Bertie will come and see you directly he gets home, Clara. It'll be in about six weeks, I expect." He turned to Winnie. "I hope you'll be kind to my boy. He doesn't know many ladies in London, and I want him to have a pleasant holiday."
"I will. And I wish they were all three coming, Sir Hugh."
"That might end in a family quarrel," he said, with a courtly little bow and a glance from his eyes, which had not lost their power of seconding a compliment.
"Well, I think you've made a favourable impression, though you didn't say much," Mrs. Lenoir remarked when he was gone.
Winnie was standing, with one foot on her stool now. She frowned a little.
"I wish you'd tell him about me," she said.
There was a pause; Mrs. Lenoir was dispassionately considering the suggestion.
"I don't see much use in taking an assumed name, if you're going to tell everybody you meet."
"He's such a friend of yours."
"That's got nothing to do with it. Now if it were a man who wanted to marry you—well, he'd have to be told, I suppose, because you can't marry. But the General won't want to do that."
"It seems somehow squarer."
"Then am I to say Mrs. Maxon or Mrs. Ledstone?"
There it was! Winnie broke into a vexed laugh. "Oh, I suppose we'd better leave it."
Thus began Winnie's cure, from love and anger, and from Godfrey Ledstone. Change of surroundings, new interests, kindness, and, above all perhaps, appreciation—it was a good treatment. Something must also be credited to Mrs. Lenoir's attitude towards life. She had none of the snarl of the cynic; she thought great things of life. But she recognized frankly certain of its limitations—as that, if you do some things, there are other things that you must give up; that the majority must be expected to demand obedience to its views on pain of penalties; if you do not mind the penalties, you need not mind the views either; above all, perhaps, that, if you have taken a certain line, it is useless folly to repine at its ordained consequences. She was nothing of a reformer—Winnie blamed that—but she was decidedly good at making the best of her world as she found it, or had made it for herself; and this was the gospel she offered for Winnie's acceptance. Devoid of any kind of penitential emotion, it might yet almost be described as a practical form of penitence.
Winnie heard nothing of or from Woburn Square; there was nobody likely to give her news from that quarter except, perhaps, Bob Purnett, and he was away, having accepted an invitation to a fortnight's hunting in Ireland. But an echo of the past came from elsewhere—in a letter addressed to her at Shaylor's Patch, forwarded thence to the studio (she had not yet told the Aikenheads of her move), and, after two or three days' delay, delivered at Knightsbridge by Mrs. O'Leary in person. It was from her husband's solicitors; they informed her of his intention to take proceedings, and suggested that they should be favoured with the name of a firm who would act for her.
Winnie received the intimation with great relief, great surprise, some curiosity, and, it must be added, a touch of malicious amusement. The relief was not only for herself. It was honestly for Cyril Maxon also. Why must he with his own hands adjust a lifelong millstone round his own neck? Now, like a sensible man, he was going to take it off. But it was so unlike him to take off his millstones; he felt such a pride in the cumbrous ornaments. 'What had made him do it?' asked the curiosity; and the malicious amusement suggested that, contrary to all preconceptions of hers, contrary to anything he had displayed to her, he too must have his weaknesses—in what direction it was still uncertain. The step he now took might be merely the result of accumulated rancour against her, or it might be essential to some design or desire of his own. Winnie may be excused for not harbouring the idea that her husband was acting out of consideration for her; she had the best of excuses—that of being quite right.
For the rest—well, it was not exactly pleasant. But she seemed so completely to have ceased to be Mrs. Maxon that at heart it concerned her little what people said of Mrs. Maxon. They—her Maxon circle, the legal profession, the public—would not understand her provocation, her principles, or her motives; they would say hard and scornful things. She was in safe hiding; she would not hear the things. It would be like what they say of a man after he has gone out of the room and (as Sir Peter Teazle so kindly did in the play) left his character behind him. Of that wise people take no notice.
But Godfrey? It must be owned that the thought of him came second; indeed third—after the aspect which concerned her husband and that which touched herself. But when it came, it moved her to vexation, to regret, to a pity which had even an element of the old tenderness in it. Because this development was just what poor Godfrey had always been so afraid of, just what he hated, a thing analogous to the position which in the end he had not been able to bear. And poor Woburn Square! Oh, and poor Mabel Thurseley too, perhaps! What a lot of people were caught in the net! The news of her husband's action did much to soften her heart towards Godfrey and towards Woburn Square. "I really didn't want to make them unhappy or ashamed any more," she sighed; for had not her action in the end produced Cyril's? But, as Mrs. Lenoir would, no doubt, point out, there was no help for it—short of Winnie's suicide, which seemed an extreme remedy, or would have, if it had ever occurred to her: it did not.
Her solicitude was not misplaced. The high moralists sayEsse quam videri—what you are and do matters, not what people think you are or what they may discover you doing. A hard high doctrine! "He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." Mr. Cyril Maxon also had found occasion to consider these words.
For Winnie had been right. Jubilation had reigned in Woburn Square, provisionally when Godfrey fetched his portmanteau away from the studio, finally and securely (as it seemed) when Amy made known the result of her mission. Father read his paper again in peace; mother's spasms abated. There was joy over the sinner; and the sinner himself was not half as unhappy as he had expected—may it be said, hoped?—to be. Mercilessness of comment is out of place. He had been tried above that which he was able. Yet, if sin it had been, it was not of the sin that he repented. It had been, he thought, from the beginning really impossible on the basis she had defined—and extorted. In time he had been bound to recognize that. But he wore a chastened air, and had the grace to seek little of Miss Thurseley's society. He took another studio, in a street off Fitzroy Square, and ate his dinner and slept at his father's house.
Things, then, were settling down in Woburn Square. By dint of being ignored, Winnie and her raid on the family reputation might soon be forgotten. The affair had been kept very quiet; that was the great thing. (Here Woburn Square and the high moralists seem lamentably at odds, but the high moralists also enjoin the speaking and writing of the truth.) It was over. It ranked no more as a defiance; it became merely an indiscretion—a thing young men will do now and then, under the influence of designing women. There was really jubilation—if only Amy would have looked a little less gloomy, and been rather more cordial towards her brother.
"I don't understand the girl," Mr. Ledstone complained. "Our line is to make things pleasant for him."
"It's that woman. She must have some extraordinary power," his wife pleaded. Winnie's extraordinary power made it all the easier to forgive her son Godfrey. Probably few young men would have resisted, and (this deep down in the mother's heart) not so very many had occasion to resist.
Then came the thunderbolt—from which jubilation fled shrieking. Who hurled it? Human nature, Winnie, Lady Rosaline Deering—little as she either had meant to do anything unkind to the household in Woburn Square? Surely even the high moralists—or shall we say the high gods, who certainly cannot make less, and may perhaps make more, allowances?—would have pitied Mr. Ledstone. Beyond all the disappointment and dismay, he felt himself the victim of a gross breach of trust. He fumed up and down the back room on the ground floor which was called his study—the place he read the papers in and where he slept after lunch.
"But he said there were to be no proceedings. He said he didn't believe in it. He said it distinctly more than once."
Mrs. Ledstone had gone to her room. The sinner had fled to his studio, leaving Amy to break the news to Mr. Ledstone; Amy was growing accustomed to this office.
"I suppose he's changed his mind," said Amy, with a weary listlessness.
"But he said it. I remember quite well. 'I am not a believer in divorce.' And you remember I came home and told you there were to be no proceedings? Monstrous! In a man of his position! Well, one ought to be able to depend on his word! Monstrous!" Exclamation followed exclamation like shots from a revolver—but a revolver not working very smoothly.
"It'll have to go through, I suppose, daddy."
"How can you take it like that? What'll your Uncle Martin say? And Aunt Lena—and the Winfreys? It'll be a job to live this down! And my son—a man with my record! He distinctly said there were to be no proceedings. I left him on that understanding. What'll Mrs. Thurseley think? I shall go and see this man Maxon myself." Of all sinners Mr. Maxon was ranking top in Woburn Square to-day—easily above his wife even.
"I don't expect that'll do any good."
"Amy, you really are——Oh, well, child, I'm half off my head. A man has no right to say a thing like that unless he means it. No proceedings, he said!"
"I expect he did mean it. Something's changed him, I suppose."
Something had—and it never occurred to Cyril Maxon that the Ledstone family had any right to a say in the matter. He would have been astonished to hear the interpretation that Mr. Ledstone put on the interview which he remembered only with vivid disgust, with the resentment due to an intrusion entirely unwarrantable. So the poor old gentleman must be left fuming up and down, quite vainly and uselessly clamouring against the unavoidable, an object for compassion, even though he was thinking more of the Thurseleys, of Uncle Martin, Aunt Lena, and the Winfreys than of how his son stood towards divine or social law on the one side, and towards a deserted woman on the other? Respectability is, on the whole, a good servant to morality, but sometimes the servant sits in the master's seat.
The culprit's state was no more enviable than his father's; indeed it appeared to himself so much worse that he was disposed to grudge his family the consternation which they displayed so prodigally and to find in it an unfair aggravation of a burden already far too heavy. Nothing, perhaps, makes a man feel so ill-used as to do a mean thing and then be baulked of the object for whose sake he did it. A mean thing it undoubtedly was, even if it had been the right thing also in the eyes of many people—for to such unfortunate plights can we sometimes be reduced by our own actions that there really is not a thing both right and straight left to do; and it had been done in a mean and cowardly way. Yet it was now no good. Things had just seemed to be settling down quietly; he was being soothed by the consolatory petting of his mother and father. Now this happened—and all was lost. His decent veil of obscurity was rent in twain; he was exposed to the rude stare of the world, to the shocked eyes of Aunt Lena and the rest. He had probably lost the girl towards whom his thoughts had turned as a comfortable and satisfactory solution of all his difficulties; and he had the perception to know that, whether he had lost Mabel or not, he had finally and irretrievably lost Winnie. Everybody would be against him now, both the men of the law and the men of the code; he had been faithful to the standards of neither.
He had not the grace to hate himself; that would have been a promising state of mind. But fuming up and down in his studio off Fitzroy Square (just like his father in the back room in Woburn Square) and lashing himself into impotent fury, he began to feel that he hated everybody else. They had all had a hand in his undoing—Bob Purnett and his lot with their easy-going moralities, Shaylor's Patch and its lot with their silly speculations and vapourings over things they knew nothing about, Cyril Maxon who did not stand by what he said nor by what he believed, Winnie with ridiculous exacting theories, Mabel Thurseley (poor blameless Mabel!) by attracting his errant eyes and leading him on to flirtation, his parents by behaving as if the end of the world had come, his sister because she despised him and had sympathy with the deserted woman. He was in a sad case. Nobody had behaved or was behaving decently towards him, nobody considered the enormous—the impossible—difficulties of his situation from beginning to end. Was there no justice in the world—nor even any charity? What an ending—what an ending—to those pleasant days of dalliance at Shaylor's Patch! What was deep down in his heart was—"And I could have managed it all right my way, if she'd only have let me!"
He did not go home to dinner that evening. He slunk back late at night, hoping that all his family would be in bed. Yet when he found that accusing sister sitting alone in the drawing-room, he grounded a grievance on her solitude. She was sewing—and she went on sewing in a determined manner and in unbroken silence.
"Well, where's everybody? Have you nothing to say? I'm sent to Coventry, I suppose?"
"Mother's in bed. Oh, she's pretty easy now; you needn't worry. Daddy's in his study; he was tired out, and I expect he's gone to sleep. I'm quite ready to talk to you, Godfrey."
Perhaps—but her tone did not forebode a cheerful conversation.
He got up from the chair into which he had plunged himself when he came in.
"Pretty gay here, isn't it? Oh, you do know how to rub it in, all of you! I should think living in this house would drive any man to drink and blue ruin in a fortnight."
Amy sewed on. She had offered to talk, but what he said seemed to call for no comment. He strode to the door and opened it violently. "I'm off to bed."
"Good-night, Godfrey," said Amy; her speech was smothered by the banging of the door.
Poor sinner! Poor creature! Winnie Maxon might indeed plead that her theory had not been fairly tried; she had chosen the wrong man for the experiment.
Here, then—save for the one formality on which Cyril Maxon now insisted—Winnie and the Ledstone family were at the parting of the ways. Their concurrence had been fortuitous—it was odd what people met one another at Shaylor's Patch, Stephen's appetite for humanity being so voracious—fortuitous, and ill-starred for all parties. They would not let her into their life; they would not rest till they had ejected her from her tainted connexion with it. Now they went out of hers. She remembered Godfrey as her great disappointment, her lost illusion, her blunder; Amy as it were with a friendly stretching-out of hands across a gulf impassable; the old folk with understanding and toleration—since they did no other than what they and she herself had been taught to regard as right. How could the old change their ideas of right?
Their memory of her was far harder—naturally, perhaps. She was a raider, a brigand, a sadly disturbing and destructive invader. At last she had been driven out, but a track of desolation spread behind her retreating steps. Indeed there were spots where the herbage never grew again. The old folk forgave their son and lived to be proud of him once more. But Amy Ledstone had gauged her brother with an accuracy destructive of love; and within twelve months Mabel Thurseley married a stockbroker, an excellent fellow with a growing business. She never knew it, but she, at least, had cause for gratitude to Winnie Maxon.
Godfrey returned to the obedience of the code. He was at home there. It was an air that he could breathe. The air of Shaylor's Patch was not—nor that of the Kensington studio.
"By the law came sin——" quoted Stephen Aikenhead.
"He only meant the Jewish law. Man, ye're hopeless." Dennehy tousled his hair.
The February afternoon was mild; Stephen was a fanatic about open air, if about nothing else. The four sat on the lawn at Shaylor's Patch, well wrapped up—Stephen, Tora, and Dennehy in rough country wraps, Winnie in a stately sealskin coat, the gift of Mrs. Lenoir. She had taken to dressing Winnie, in spite of half-hearted remonstrances and with notable results.
"But the deuce is," Stephen continued—this time on his own account and, therefore, less authoritatively—"that when you take away the law, the sin doesn't go too."
Winnie's story was by now known to these three good friends. Already it was being discussed more as a problem than as a tragedy. Some excuse might be found in Winnie's air and manner. She was in fine looks and good spirits, interested and alert, distinctly resilient against the blows of fortune and the miscarriage of theoretical experiments. So much time and change had done for her.
"And it seems just as true of any other laws, even if he did mean the Jewish, Dick," Stephen ended.
"Don't lots of husbands, tied up just as tight as anything or anybody can tie them, cut loose and run away just the same?" asked Tora.
"And wives," added Winnie—who had done it, and had a right to speak.
"It's like the old dispute about the franchise and the agricultural labourer. I remember my father telling me about it somewhere in the eighties—when I was quite a small boy. One side said the labourer oughtn't to have the vote till he was fit for it, the other said he'd never be fit for it till he had it."
"Oh, well, that's to some extent like the woman question," Tora remarked.
"Are we to change the law first or people first? Hope a better law will make better people, or tell the people they can't have a better law till they're better themselves?"
"Stephen, you've a glimmer of sense in you this afternoon."
"Well, Dick, we don't want to end by merely making things easier for brutes and curs—male or female."
"I think you're a little wanting in the broad view to-day, Stephen. You're too much affected by Winnie's particular case. Isn't it better to get rid of brutes and curs anyhow? The quicker and easier, the better." Tora was, as usual, uncompromising.
"Everybody seems to put a good point. That's the puzzle," said Stephen, who was obviously enjoying the puzzle very much.
"Oh, ye're not even logical to-day, Tora," Dennehy complained, "which I will admit you sometimes are, according to your wrong-headed principles. Ye call the man a brute or a cur, and this and that—oh, ye meant Godfrey! What's the man done that he hadn't a right to do on your own showing? His manners were bad, maybe."
"It's our own showing that we're now engaged in examining, if you'll permit us, Dick," Stephen rejoined imperturbably. "When a man's considering whether he's been wrong, it's a pity to scold him; because the practice is both rare and laudable."
"Oh, you mustn't even consider whether I've been wrong, Stephen," Winnie cried. "Wrong in principle, I mean. As to the particular person—but I don't want to abuse him, poor fellow. His environment——"
"That's a damnable word, saving your presence," Dennehy interrupted. "Nowadays whenever a scoundrel does a dirty trick, he lays it to the account of his environment."
"But that's just what I meant, Dick."
"Say the devil, and ye're nearer the mark, Winnie."
"Environment's more hopeful," Stephen suggested. "You see, we may be able to change that. Over yourprotégéwe have no jurisdiction."
"He may have over you, though, some day! Oh, I'll go for a walk, and clear my head of all your nonsense."
"Don't forget you promised to take me to the station after tea," said Winnie.
"Forget it!" exclaimed Dick Dennehy in scorn indescribable. "Now will I forget it—is it likely, Winnie?" He swung off into the house to get his walking-stick.
Tora Aikenhead shook her head in patient reproof. No getting reason into Dick's, no hope of it at all! It was just Dick's opinion of her.
A short silence followed Dennehy's departure. Then Stephen Aikenhead spoke again.
"You've had a rough time, Winnie. Are you sorry you ever went in for it?"
"No, it was the only thing to try; and it has resulted—or is just going to—in my being free. But I did fail in one thing. I was much more angry with Godfrey than I had any right to be. I was angry—yes, angry, not merely grieved—because he left me, as well as because he was afraid to do it in a straightforward way. I didn't live up to my theories there."
"I don't know that I think any theory easy to live up to," said Tora. "Is the ordinary theory of marriage easy to live up to either?"
"It's always interesting to see how few people live up to their theories." Stephen smiled. "It seems to me your husband isn't living up to his."
"No, he isn't, and it's rather consoling. I don't fancy it ever entered his head that he would have to try it in practice himself. Rather your own case, isn't it, Stephen? You've never really found what any—any difficulty could mean to you."
"Oh, I know I'm accused of that. I can't help it; it's absolutely impossible to get up a row with Tora. And even I don't say that you ought to walk out of the house just for the fun of it!"
"We prove our theory best by the fact of the theory making no difference," said Tora.
"I suppose that in the end it's only the failures who want theories at all," Winnie mused.
"Probably—with the happy result of reducing,pro tanto, the practical importance of the subject, without depriving it of its speculative interest," laughed Stephen. "Love, union, parentage, partnership—it's good to have them all, but, as life goes on, a lot of people manage with the last two—or even with only the last. It grows into a pretty strong tie. Well, Winnie, you seem to have come through fairly well, and I hope you won't have much more trouble over the business."
"I shan't have any, to speak of. I've put it all in Hobart Gaynor's hands. I went to see him and told him all he wanted to know. He's taken charge of the whole thing; I really need hear no more about it. He was awfully kind—just his dear old self." She smiled. "Well, short of asking me to his house, you know."
"Oh, that's his wife," said Tora.
"Mrs. Gaynor seems to live up to her theories, at any rate," chuckled Stephen.
"It's not so difficult to live up to your theories about other people. It's about yourself," said Winnie.
"I think your going to Mrs. Lenoir's is such a perfect arrangement." Tora characteristically ignored the large body of opinion which would certainly be against her on the question.
"I'm very happy there—she's so kind. And I seem quite a fixture. I've been there nearly two months, and now she says I'm to go abroad with her in the spring." She paused for a moment. "The General's very kind too. In fact I think he likes me very much."
"Who's the General? I don't know about him."
Winnie explained sufficiently, and added, "Of course he thinks I'm just Miss Wilson. Mrs. Lenoir says it's all right, but I can't feel it's quite straight."
"As he appears to be nearly seventy, and Mrs. Lenoir's friend, if anybody's——" Stephen suggested.
Winnie smiled and blushed a little. "Well, you see, the truth is that it's not only the General. He's got a son. Well, he's got three, but one of them turned up about a fortnight ago."
"Oh, did he? Where from?"
"From abroad—on long leave. It's the eldest—the Major."
"Does he like you very much too, Winnie?"
Winnie looked across the lawn. "It seems just conceivable that he might—complicate matters," she murmured. "I haven't spoken to Mrs. Lenoir about that—aspect of it."
Stephen was swift on the scent of another problem. "Oh, and you mean, if he did—well, show signs—how much ought he to be told about Miss Wilson?"
"Yes. And perhaps even before the signs were what you'd call very noticeable. Wouldn't it be fair? Because he doesn't seem to me at all a—a theoretical kind of person. I should think his ideas are what you might call——"
"Shall we say traditional—so as to be quite impartial towards the Major?"
"Yes. And especially about women, I should think."
Stephen looked across at his wife, smiling. "Well, Tora?"
Without hesitation Tora gave her verdict. "If you'd done things that you yourself knew or thought to be disgraceful, you ought to tell him before he grows fond of you. But you're not bound to tell him what you've done, on the chance of his thinking it disgraceful, when you don't."
"I expect it's more than a chance," Winnie murmured.
"I'm groping after Tora's point. I haven't quite got it. From the Major's point of view, in the hypothetical circumstances we're discussing, what's of importance is not what Winnie thinks, but what he does."
"What's important to the Major," Tora replied, "is that he should fall in love with a good woman. Good women may do what the Major thinks disgraceful, but they don't do what they themselves think disgraceful. Or, if they ever do, they repent and confess honestly."
"Oh, she's got an argument! She always has. Still, could a good woman let herself be fallen in love with under something like false pretences?"
"There will be no false pretences, Stephen. She will be—she practically is—an unmarried woman, and, if she married him, she'd marry him as such. The rest is all over."
"It may be atavistic—relics of my public school and so on—but it doesn't seem to me quite the fair thing," Stephen persisted; "to keep him in the dark about our young friend, Miss Wilson, I mean."
"I think I agree with you, Stephen." Winnie smiled. "If he does show signs, that's to say!"
"Oh, only if he shows signs, of course. Otherwise, it's in no way his business."
"Because, whatever his rights may be, why should I risk making him unhappy? Besides, in a certain event, he might find out, when it was—from his point of view—too late."
Stephen laughed. "At least admit, Tora, that from a merely practical point of view, there's something to be said for telling people things that they may find out for themselves at an uncomfortably late hour."
"Oh, I thought we were trying to get a true view of a man's—or a woman's—rights in such a case," said Tora, with lofty scorn. "But it seems I'm in a minority."
"You wouldn't be happy if you weren't, my dear. It's getting dusk, and here comes Dick back. Let's go in to tea."
Dick Dennehy often grew hot in argument, but his vexation never lasted long. Over tea he was in great spirits, and talked eagerly about a new prospect which had opened before him. The post he held as correspondent was a poor affair, ill-paid and leading to nothing. He had the chance of being appointed a leader-writer on a London daily paper—a post offering a great advance both in pay and in position. The only possible difficulty arose from his religious convictions; they might, on occasion, clash with the policy of the paper, in matters concerning education for instance.
"But they're good enough to say they think so well of me in every other way that the little matter may probably admit of adjustment."
"Now don't you go back on your theories—or really where are we?" said Stephen chaffingly.
"I won't do that; I won't do that. I should be relieved of dealing with those questions. And, Stephen, my boy, I'd have a chance of a decent place to live in and of being able to put by my old age pension."
They all entered eagerly into the discussion of these rosy dreams, and it was carried,nem. con., that Dick must build himself a 'week-end' cottage at Nether End, as near as might be to Shaylor's Patch. Perhaps Winnie could find one to suit her too!
"And we'll all sit and jaw till the curtain falls!" cried Stephen Aikenhead, expressing his idea of a happy life.
"Ye're good friends here, for all your nonsense," said Dennehy. "I'd ask no better."
"Moreover, Dick, you can marry. You can tie yourself up, as Tora puts it, just as tightly as you like. Choose a woman, if possible, with some breadth of view. I want you to have your chance."
"Oh, I'm not likely to be marrying." A cloud seemed to pass over his cheery face. But it was gone in a moment. "Well, who'd look at me, anyhow?"
"I think you'd make an excellent husband, Dick," said Winnie. "I should marry you—yes, even tie you up—with the utmost confidence."
He gave her a queer look, half-humorous, half-resentful. "Don't be saying such things, Winnie, or ye'll turn my head and destroy my peace of mind."
"Oh, last time I flirted with you, you said you liked it!" she reminded him, laughing.
On the way to the station, Winnie walked with her arm through his, for the evening had fallen dark, and the country road was rough. With a little pressure of her hand, she said, "I'm so glad—so glad—of the new prospects, Dick. I believe in you, you know, though we do differ so much."
He was silent for a moment, and then asked abruptly, "And what prospects have you?"
"Oh, I suppose I'm rather like the politician who had his future behind him. But I haven't made up my mind what to do. I'm living rather from hand to mouth just now, and taking a holiday from thinking."
"Oh, I'll mind my own business, if that's what you mean."
"Dick, how can you? Of course it wasn't. Please don't be huffy about nothing."
"I'm worried about you. Don't let those people up at the Patch get at you again, Winnie—for pity's sake, don't! Take care of yourself, my dear. My heart bleeds to see you where you stand to-day, and if you got into any other trouble—you don't understand that you're a woman a man might do bad as well as good things for."
Emotion was strong in his voice; Winnie lightly attributed it to his nationality.
"Don't fret about me. I've got to pay for my blunders, and, if I've any sense at all, I shall be wiser in future."
"If ye're ever inclined to another man, for God's sake try him, test him, prove him. Ye can't afford another mistake, Winnie. It'd kill you, wouldn't it?"
"I shouldn't—like it," she answered slowly. "Yes, I shall be cautious, Dick. And it would take a good deal to make me what you call 'inclined to' any man just yet." She broke into a laugh. "But it's your domestic prospects that we were discussing this afternoon!"
"I have none," he answered shortly, almost sourly.
"Oh, you've only just begun to think of it," she laughed. "Don't despair of finding somebody worthy some day!"
They had just reached the station—nearly a quarter of an hour ahead of their time. Dennehy was going back to sleep at the Aikenheads', but he sat down with her in the waiting-room under a glaring gas lamp, to wait for the train. Seen in the light, Dennehy's face looked sad and troubled. Winnie was struck by his expression.
"Dick," she said gently, "I hope we haven't been chaffing you when—when there's something serious?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "No, no, ye couldn't call it serious."
"I believe it is, because you were in good spirits till we began about that. Then you looked funny and—well, you don't look at all funny now. If there is anything—oh, don't despair! And all good, good wishes, dear Dick! Oh, what a pity this should come, just when everything else is looking so bright for you!"
"I tell ye, Winnie, there's nothing serious."
Winnie nodded an entirely unreal acquiescence. "Very well, my friend," she said.
A long silence fell between them. In direct disobedience to a large notice, Dennehy lit a cigarette and smoked it quickly, still looking sad and moody. Winnie, troubled by his trouble and unconvinced by his denial, was wondering why in the world she had never thought of such a thing happening to Dick Dennehy. Why not? There was no reason; he was a man, like the rest. Only we are in the habit of taking partial and one-sided views of our friends and neighbours. The most salient aspect of them alone catches our eye. To cover the whole ground we have neither time nor, generally, opportunity. They come to stand, to us, for one quality or characteristic—just as the persons in a novel or a play often, perhaps generally, do, however much the writer may have endeavoured to give the whole man on his canvas. Now the quality of lover—of even potential lover—had never seemed to associate itself at all necessarily or insistently with Dick Dennehy, as it did, at once and of necessity, with Godfrey Ledstone. So Winnie had just not thought of it. Yet she knew enough to understand how it is that this very kind of man takes love hard, when it does chance to find him out—takes it hard and keeps it long—long after the susceptible man has got over his latest attack of recurrent fever. Was poor Dick Dennehy really hard hit? "Who'd look at me, anyhow?" he had asked. Well, he certainly was not handsome. But Winnie remembered her two handsome men. "I should like to have a word with that girl!" she thought. Her reference was to Dick's hard-hearted mistress.
But Winnie was not of the women—if indeed they exist—whose innocence merges in denseness and who can successfully maintain for a twelvemonth a total ignorance of the feelings of a man with whom they are thrown into familiar acquaintance. Suddenly, some two minutes before her train was due, her brain got to work—seized on the pieces of the puzzle with its quick perception. Here was a man, naturally ardent, essentially sanguine, in despair—surely about a woman? He did not deny the woman, though he protested that the matter was not 'serious.' Merely to look at him now proved it, for the moment at least, grievous. Well, for 'serious' she read practicable; for 'not serious' she substituted hopeless. Then he had looked at her in that queer way; the words had been all right, conceived in the appropriate vein of jocular flirtation; but the look was out of joint. And then his extreme and emotional concern for her welfare and prudent conduct! Would he, even though a Celt, have felt that anxiety quite so keenly, if another and hopeless affection had been dominating his mind? "Who'd look at me, anyhow?" That protest his modesty made consistent with an aspiration for any lady; it need not be taken too seriously. But his abrupt curt answer about his prospects—"I have none"——?
The pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit pretty well, yet the proof was not conclusive. Say that the evidence was consistent, rather than demonstrative. Somehow, intangibly and beyond definition, there was something in the man's bearing, in his attitude, in the totality of his words and demeanour, which enforced the conviction. There even seemed an atmosphere in the bare, dirty little waiting-room which contained and conveyed it—something coming unseen from him to her, in spite of all his dogged effort to resist the transference. He smoked a second cigarette fiercely. Why, when he had been serene and cheerful all the afternoon, should he be so suddenly overcome by the thought of an absent woman that he could not or would not speak to or look at a friend to whom he was certainly much attached?
The train rumbled into the station. "Here it is!" said Winnie, and rose to her feet.
Dick Dennehy started and jumped up. For a second his eyes met hers.
"Come along and put me into a carriage," she added hastily, and made her way at a quick pace to the train. "Where are the thirds?"
They found the thirds, and she got in. He shut the door, and stood by it, waiting for the train to start.
"You've got a wrong idea. I tell ye it's not serious, Winnie."
He made his protest again, in a hard desperate voice. Then, with an effort, he took a more ordinary tone.
"I'm full of business over this new idea—and with winding up the old connection, if I do it. I mayn't be seeing you for a few weeks. You will take care of yourself?"
"Surely if anybody's had a warning, I have! Good-bye, Dick."
She put her hand out through the window. He took it and pressed it, but he never lifted his eyes to hers. A lurch back, a plunge forward, and the train was started. "Good-bye, Dick!" she cried again. "Cheer up!"
Leaning out of the window, she saw him standing with his hands in his pockets, looking after her. He called out something, which she heard imperfectly, but it embraced the word 'fool,' and also the word 'serious.' She could supply a connexion for the latter, but travelled to town in doubt as to the application of the former. Was it to her or to himself that Dick Dennehy had applied the epithet? "Because it makes a little difference," thought Winnie, snuggling down into the big collar of her sealskin coat—quite out of place, by the way, in a third-class carriage.