Charles Eager pondered the matter deeply, and was ready for the boys when they tackled him the next morning.
He knew, as soon as he saw them, that they had been discussing matters during the night and were intent on information.
"Mr. Eager," said Jack, "Will you tell us about our father? Why is he in the French army?"
Eager told them briefly that part of the story.
"And do you consider he did right to go away like that?" was the next question.
"Under the circumstances I should say he did. At all events it was Sir Denzil's wish that he should go, and he could judge better then than we can now."
"And we two were born after he'd left?"
"So I am told."
"Well now, even in twins isn't one generally the older of the two. Which of us is the elder?"
"That I don't know. I believe there is some doubt about it, and so we look upon you both as on exactly the same level."
"Suppose Sir Denzil should die, and our father should die--we don't want them to, you understand, but one can't help wondering--which of us would be Sir Denzil?"
"That is a matter that has exercised your grandfather's mind since ever you were born, my boy, and I'm afraid we can arrive no nearer to the answer. We can only wait."
"It'll be jolly awkward," protested Jim.
"Very awkward. Some arrangement will have to be come to, of course; but exactly what, is not for me to say. Your grandfather can divide his estate between you, and as to the title----"
"We could take it turn about," suggested Jim.
"Or you may both win such new honours for yourselves that it will be of small account."
"Yes, that's an idea," said Jack thoughtfully. And after a pause, "And you can tell us nothing about our mother, Mr. Eager?"
"No. You were ten years old, you know, when we met for the first time and you stole all my clothes. What a couple of absolute little savages you were!"
"We had jolly good times----"
"We've had better since," said Jack. "If you hadn't come to live here we might have been savages all our lives."
"You must do me all the credit you can. At one time I had hoped to become a soldier myself."
"Jolly good thing for us you didn't," said Jim. "But haven't you been sorry for it ever since, Mr. Eager?"
"There are higher things even than soldiering," smiled Eager. "If I can help to make two good soldiers instead of one, then England is the gainer."
"We'll jolly well do our best," said Jim.
And so they had arrived at a portion of the problem of their house, and bore it lightly.
And as to the grim remainder--"It would only uselessly darken both their lives," said Eager to himself. "We must leave it to time, and that is only another name for God's providence."
Jack had set his heart on Woolwich. In due course he took the entrance examinations without difficulty, and passed into the Royal Military School with flying colours. Woolwich, however, was quite beyond Jim, and, besides, his heart was set on horses. He would be a cavalryman or nothing. But even for Sandhurst there was an examination to pass--an examination of a kind, but quite enough to give him the tremors, and sink his heart into his boots whenever he thought of it. Examinations always had been abomination to Jim and always got the better of him.
He argued eloquently that pluck, and a firm seat, and a long reach would make a better cavalryman than all the decimal fractions and French and Latin that could be rammed into him. But the authorities had their own ideas on the subject. So to an army-tutor he went in due course, a notable crammer in the Midlands, who knew every likely twist and turn of the ordinary run of examiners, and had got more incapables into the service than any man of his time, and charged accordingly.
And there, for six solid months, Jim was fed up like a prize turkey, on the absolutely necessary minimum of knowledge required for a pass, and grew mentally dyspeptic with the indigestible chunks of learning which he got off by heart, till his brain reeled and went on rolling them ponderously over and over even in his sleep.
Fortunately he started with a good constitution, and there was hunting three days a week, or such a surfeit of knowledge might have proved too much for him.
There were half a dozen more in the same condition; and the sight of those seven gallant hard-riders, poring with woebegone faces and tangled brains over tasks which in these days any fifth-form secondary-schoolboy would laugh at, tickled the soul of their tutor, Mr. Dodsley, almost out of its usual expression of benign and earnest sympathy at times. They represented, however, a very handsome living with comparatively easy work, and he did his whole duty by them according to his lights.
The shadow of the coming death-struggle cast a gloom over the little community for weeks before the fatal day, and all seven decided, in case of the failure they anticipated, to enlist in the ranks, where their brains could have well-merited rest.
Jim never said very much about that exam., but he did disclose the facts to Mr. Eager, and chuckled himself almost into convulsions; whenever he thought over it and the awful months of preparation that had preceded it.
"There was a jolly decent-looking old cock of a colonel at the table when I went in," he said. "And my throat was dry, and my knees were knocking together so that I was afraid he'd see 'em. He looked at my name on the paper and then at me.
"'James Denzil Carron?' he said. 'Any relation of my old friend Denzil Carron of--what-the-deuce-and-all was it now?'
"'Carne," I chittered.
"'That's it! Carron of Carne, of course. What are you to him, boy?'
"'Son, sir.'
"Denzil Carron's son! God bless my soul, you don't say so! And is your father alive still?'
"'Yes, sir.'
"'You don't say so! God bless my soul! Denzil Carrell alive! Why, it must be twenty years since I set eyes on him! Will you tell him, when you see him, that his old friend, Jack Pole, was asking after him?' And then," said Jim, "I suppose he saw me going white at prospect of the exam., for he just said, 'Oh, hang the exam.! You can ride?'
"'Anything, sir.'
"'And fence?'
"'Yes, sir. And box and swim, and I can run the mile in four minutes and fifteen seconds.'
"'God God bless my soul, I wish I could! You'll do, my boy! Pass on, and prove yourself as brave a man as your father!' And I just wished I'd known it was going to be like that. It would have saved me a good few headaches and a mighty lot of trouble. However, perhaps it'll all come in useful, some day--that is, if I remember any of it."
Jack did well at Woolwich. He passed out third of his batch, and in due course received his commission as second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers.
Jim made but a poor show in head-work, but showed himself such an excellent comrade, and such a master of all the brawnier parts of the profession, that it would have needed harder hearts than the ruling powers possessed to set any undue stumbling-blocks in his way. To his mighty satisfaction, he was gazetted cornet to the 8th Regiment of Hussars, just a year after Jack got through.
None of them ever forgot the last holiday they all spent together before the great dispersal. Some of them looked back upon it in the after-days with most poignant feelings--of longing and regret. For nothing was ever to be again as it had been--and not with them only, but throughout the land.
It was as though all the circumstances and forces of life had been quietly working up to a point through all these years--as though all that had gone before had been but preparation for what was to come--as though the time had come for the Higher Powers to say, as sensible parents sooner or later say to their children, "We have done our best for you--we have fitted you for the fight; now you are become men and women, work out your own destinies!"
It was amazing to Charles Eager--feeling himself as young as ever--to find all his youngsters suddenly grown up, suddenly become, if not capable of managing their own affairs, at all events filled with that conviction, and fully intent on doing so.
And, so far, the strange story of their actual relationship had not been made known to the boys. Eager had discussed the matter with Sir Denzil many times, but the old man, not unreasonably, maintained the position that, unless and until events forced the disclosure, there was no need to trouble their minds with it. And Eager, knowing them so well, could not but agree that it would be a mighty upsetting for them.
While they were working hard, in their various degrees, for their examinations, It was, of course, out of the question. And when the matter was mooted again, Sir Denzil said quietly:
"Let it lie, Eager. If it has to come out, it will come out; but if anything should deprive us of one of them before it does come out, there is no need for the other to carry a millstone round his neck all his life."
The old man had mellowed somewhat with the years. The problem as to which was his legitimate heir, and the possibility of unconsciously perpetuating the line through the bar sinister, still troubled him at times; but the boys themselves, in their ripening and development, had done more than anything else to alter his feelings towards them.
Well-born or ill-born, they were fine bits of humanity. He had come to tolerate them with a degree of appreciation, to regard them with something almost akin to a form of affection, atrophied, indeed, by long disuse, and disguised still behind a certain cynicism of speech and manner and the very elegant handling of his jewelled snuff-box, whenever they met.
When they were at Carne for holidays, they had their own apartments, and, for a sitting-room, the long, oak-panelled parlour, looking north and west over the flats and the sea; and here they were at last enabled to entertain their friends, and repay some of the hospitalities of the earlier years.
At times Sir Denzil would send for them to his own rooms, and they came almost to enjoy his acid questionings and pungent comments on life as they saw it. Behind his cynical aloofness they were not slow to perceive a keen interest in the newer order of things, and they talked freely of all and sundry--their friends, and their friends' friends, and all the doings of the day. It was very many years since the old man had been in London. He felt himself completely out of things, and had no desire to return; but still he liked to hear about them.
And at times, by way of return, when the boys had their friends in, he would, with the punctilious courtesy of his day, send Mr. Kennet to request their permission to join them, and then march in, almost on Kennet's heels, looking, in his wig and long-skirted coat and ruffles and snuff-box, a veritable relic of past days.
Jack, in the plenitude of his present-day knowledge, and the power it gave him of affording interesting information to the recluse, discoursed with him almost on terms of equality.
Jim, on the other hand, though he could rattle along in the jolliest and most amusing way imaginable with his chosen ones, still found the old gentleman's rapier-like little speeches and veiled allusions somewhat beyond him, and so, as a rule, left most of the talking to him and Jack.
But the first time the boys both came down in their uniforms, modestly veiling their pride under a large assumption of nonchalance, but in reality swelling internally like a pair of young peacocks, they carried all before them. They looked so big, so grand, so masterful, that it took some time even for the Little Lady to fit them into their proper places in their own estimation and in hers.
And as for their grandfather, it took an immense amount both of time and snuff and sapient head-nodding before he could get accustomed to them, and then he was quite as proud of them as they were of themselves.
"By gad, sir!" he said to Eager, in an unusual outburst of suppressed vehemence, "you were right and I was wrong. We can't afford to lose either of them, though what you're going to do about it all, when the time comes, is beyond me. Jack, there, talks like a book, like all the books that ever were, and knows everything there is to know in the world"--Jack had been delivering himself of some of his newest ideas on fortification--"but what can you make of that? It may only be the higher product of a coarser strain. I'm not sure that the other isn't more in the line. I'm inclined to think he'll make his mark if he gets the chance that suits him."
"They both will, sir. Take my word for it. We shall all, I hope, live to be proud of them both. And as to the other matter, maybe they'll cut so deep, and go so far, that after all it will become of secondary importance."
"That," said Sir Denzil, with a steady look at him over an elegantly delayed pinch of snuff, "is quite impossible. They can attain to no position comparable with the succession to Carne."
And Gracie? With what feelings did she regard these brilliantly-arrayed young warriors?
She had for them a most wholesome, whole-hearted, and comprehensive affection, and she bestowed it in absolutely equal measure upon them both.
She had grown up in closest companionship with them. She could not imagine life without them or either of them: it would have been life without its core and colour. And, so far, they stood together in her heart, and no occasion had arisen for discrimination between them.
When, indeed, Jim had disappeared for a time, and seemed lost to them, life had seemed black and blank for lack of him, and Jack could not by any means make up for him. But when Jack in turn disappeared life was equally shadowed for her, and Jim was no comfort whatever.
She, rejoicing in them equally, had no thought or wish but that things should go on just as they were. But in the boys other feelings began unconsciously to push up through the crumbling crust of youth.
They were nearing manhood. The Little Lady was no longer a child. She had grown--tall and wonderfully beautiful in face and figure. They had met other girls, but never had either of them met any one to compare with Grace Eager. And they met her afresh, each time they came home, with new wonder and vague new hopes and wishes.
It was the party which Sir George Herapath gave in the autumn that brought matters to a head.
Neither of the boys had seen Grace in evening dress before. Indeed, it was her first, and the result of much deep consideration and planning on the part of herself and Margaret Herapath.
When it was finished and tried on in full for the first time, old Mrs. Jex, admitted to a private view, clasped her hands and the tears ran down her face as she murmured, "An angel from heaven! Never in all my born days have I set eyes on anything half so pretty!"--though really it was only white muslin with pale-blue ribbons here and there. But it showed a good deal of her soft white arms and neck, and they dazzled even Mrs. Jex. As for the boys--it was as though the most marvellous bud the world had ever seen had suddenly burst its sheath and blossomed into a splendid white flower.
When she came into the big drawing-room at Knoyle that night, with Eager close behind, his intent face all alight with pride in her, and perhaps with anticipation for himself, she created quite a sensation, and found it delightful.
She came in like a lily and a rose and Eve's fairest daughter all in one; and our boys gazed at her spell-bound, startled, electrified as though by a galvanic shock. And deep down in the consciousness of each was a strange, wonderful, peaceful joy, a sudden endowment, and an almost overpowering yearning. In the self-same moment each knew that in all the world there was no other woman for him than Grace Eager. And, vaguely, behind that, was the fear that the other was feeling the same.
And she? She enjoyed to the full the novel sensation of the effect she produced upon them, and was just the same Gracie as of old--almost.
She sailed up to them and dropped a most becoming curtsey, and rose from it all agleam and aglow with merry laughter at their visible undoing.
"Well, boys, what's the matter with you?" she rippled merrily.
"You!" gasped Jim.
"Me? What's the matter with me? I'm all right. Don't you like me like this? Meg and I made it between us."
Didn't they like her like that? Why----!
"You see," said Jack, "we've never seen you like this before, and you've taken us by surprise."
"Oh, well, get over it as quickly as you can, and then you may ask me to dance with you."
"I don't think I'll ever get over it, but I'll ask you now," said Jim. Which was not bad for him.
And Jack felt the first little stab of jealousy he had ever experienced towards Jim, at his having got in first.
"I'd like every dance," laughed Jim happily, "but----"
"Quite right, old Jim Crow! Mustn't be greedy! You first, because you spoke first, then Jack----"
"Then me again," persisted Jim.
"We'll see. Is that Ralph Harben? How he's grown! His whiskers and moustache make him look quite a man." And Jim decided instantly on the speedy cultivation of facial adornments. "Oh, he's coming! And there's Meg." And she flitted away to Margaret, who was talking to Charles Eager, and so for the moment upset Master Harben's plans for her capture.
With no little distaste the boys had suffered instruction in the art of dancing, as a necessary part of the education of a gentleman. Now they fervently thanked God for it. To have to stand with their backs to the wall while every Tom, Dick, or Ralph whirled past in the dance with Gracie, would have been quite past the bearing. They felt new sensations under their waistcoats even when George Herapath had her in charge, though there was not a fellow on earth they liked better, or had more confidence in, than old George, now a dashing lieutenant in the Royal Dragoons, and quite a man of the world. As for Ralph Harben--well, if either of them could have picked a reasonable quarrel with him, and had it out in the garden, unbeknown to any but themselves, Master Ralph would have undergone much tribulation.
They danced with Gracie many times that night, and grew more and more intoxicated with happiness such as neither had ever tasted before or even dreamed of. And yet, below and behind it all, pushed down and hustled into dark corners of the heart and mind, was that other new feeling which, though it was foreign to them, they instinctively strove to keep out of sight.
Over the incidents of that party we need not linger. There were many fair girls and fine boys there, but they do not come into our story. They all enjoyed themselves immensely, and Sir George, beaming genially, enjoyed them all as much as they enjoyed, themselves.
Margaret moved among them like a queen lily, and the boys were somewhat overpowered by her stately beauty. But Charles Eager seemed to find his satisfaction in it, and his eyes followed her with vast enjoyment whenever he was not dancing with her, for he danced as well as he jumped or boxed.
When Mr. Harben--Sir George's active partner in the business, and Ralph's father--chaffed him jovially on the matter, he replied cheerfully that David danced before the ark, and he didn't see why he shouldn't do likewise. And when Harben would have tackled him further as to the ark, he averred that arks were as various as the men who danced before them, and had no limitations whatever in the matter of size, shape, or material--that some men were arks of God and more women--that when he came across such he bowed before them, or, as the case might be, danced with them, and he sped off to claim Margaret for the next round, leaving his adversary submerged under the avalanche of his eloquence.
That night was, for the younger folk, all enjoyment, tinged indeed with those other vague feelings I have named, but quickened and intensified, before they separated, by news from the outer world which strung all their nerves as tight as fiddlestrings and swept them with many emotions.
For, coming upon Sir George and his partner conversing earnestly in a quiet corner one time, Eager, with his eyes on Margaret and Ralph Harben circling round the room, asked--casually, and by way of exhibiting detachment from any special interest in that other particular matter--"Well, Mr. Harben, what's the news from the East?"
And the two older men stopped talking and looked at him. It was Sir George who answered him, soberly:
"Grave news, Mr. Eager. Harben was just telling me that the fleet is to enter the Black Sea, and that at headquarters they entertain no doubt as to the result."
"You mean war?" asked Eager, with a start.
"War without a doubt, Mr. Eager," said Harben, involuntarily rubbing his hands together. For he was a contractor, you must remember; and whatever of misery and loss war entails upon others, for contractors it means business and profit.
"We are to fight Russia on behalf of Turkey?"
"Russian aggression must be checked," said Harben. "Her ambition knows no bounds. We go hand-in-hand with France, of course."
"H'm! My own feeling would be that it is more for the aggrandisement of Louis Napoleon than for the checking of Russia that we are going to fight."
"Who's going to fight?" asked Lieutenant George, catching the word.
And then of course it was out. For, once more, whatever of misery and loss war entails upon others, to the fighting man in embryo it means only glory and the chances of promotion.
It was the following day that the disturbances nearer home began.
Jack lay awake most of the morning after he got to bed, thinking soberly, with rapturous intervals when Gracie's laughing face floated in the smaller darkness of his tired eyes, and envying Jim, who slept at intervals like a sheep-dog after a day on the hills. But at times even Jim's heavy breathing stopped and he lay quite still, and then he too was thinking--which was an unusual thing for him to do in the night--though not perhaps so deeply as Jack.
They both felt like boiled owls in the morning, and lay late. It was close on midday when Jack, after several pipes and a splitting yawn, said, "Let's go up along,"--which always meant north along the flats--"my blood's thickening." And they went off together along the hard-ribbed sand, with the sea and the sky like bars of lead on one side and the stark corpses of the sand-hills, with the wire-grass sticking up out of them like the quills of porcupines, on the other.
They walked a good two miles without a word, both thinking the same things and both fearing to start the ball rolling.
"We've got to talk it out, Jim," said Jack at last.
Jim grunted gloomily.
"What are you thinking of it?"
"Same as you, I s'pose."
"It mustn't part us, old Jim."
Jim snorted. Under extreme urgency he was at times slow of expression in words.
"Gracie has become a woman, the most beautiful woman in all the world"--with rapture, as though the mere proclamation of the fact afforded him mighty joy, which it did.
"And we are men . . . and--and we've got to face it like men."
And Jim grunted again. He was surging with emotions, but he couldn't put them into words like Jack.
"I would give my life for her," said Jack.
"I'd give ten lives if I had 'em."
"She can only have one of us, and only one of us can have her." Which was obvious enough.
"And it all lies with her. We only want what she wants."
"I only want her," groaned Jim.
"Of course. So do I. But we neither of us want her unless she wants us," reasoned Jack.
"I do. She's made me feel sillier than ever I felt in all my life before. All I know is that I want her."
Jack nodded. "I know. I've been thinking of it all night."
"So've I," growled Jim. And Jack refrained from telling him how he had envied him his powers of sleep.
"It seems to me the best thing we can do is to write and tell her what we're feeling."
Jim snorted dissentingly. Letter-writing was not his strong point, and Jack understood.
"Well, you see, we can't very well go together and tell her. But if we write she can have both our letters at the same time, and then she can decide. I'm sure it's the only way to settle it. Can you think of anything better?"
But Jim had no suggestions to offer. All he knew was that his whole nature craved Gracie, and he could not imagine life without her.
In the earlier times, when, as generally happened, they both wanted a thing which only one of them could have, they always fought for it, and to the victor remained the spoils.
But in those days the spoils were of no great account, and the pleasure of the fight was all in all.
This was a very different matter. The prize was life's highest crown and happiness for one of them, and no personal strife could win it. It was a matter beyond the power of either to influence now. It was outside them. They could ask, but they could not take. Forcefulness could do much in the bending and shaping of life, but here force was powerless.
And it was then, as he brooded over the whole matter, that one of life's great lessons was borne in upon Jim Carron--that the dead hand of the past still works in the moulding of the present and the future, that what has gone is still a mighty factor in what is and what is to come.
He groaned in the spirit over his own deficiencies, the lost opportunities, the times wasted, which, turned to fuller account, might now have served him so well. If only he could have known that all the past was making towards this mighty issue, how differently he would have utilised it.
For, submitting himself to most unusual self-examination, and searching into things with eyes sharpened by unusual stress, he could not but acknowledge that, compared with Jack, he made but a poor show.
Jack was clever. He had a head and knew how to use it. He would go far and make a great name for himself. Whereas he himself had nothing to offer but a true heart and a lusty arm, and Jack had these also in addition to his greater qualifications.
How could any girl hesitate for a moment between them? His chances, he feared, were small, and he felt very downcast and broken as he sat, that same afternoon, chewing the end of his pen and thoughtfully spitting out the bits, in an agonising effort after unusual expression such as should be worthy of the occasion.
His window gave on to the northern flats, and, as he savoured the penholder, in his mind's eye he saw again the wonderful little figure of Gracie in her scarlet bathing-gown, with her hair astream, and her face agleam, and her little white feet going like drumsticks, as they had seen her that very first morning long ago. And, since then, how she had become a part of their very lives!
And then his thoughts leaped on to the previous night, and his pulses quickened at the marvel of her beauty: her face--little Gracie's face, and yet so different; her lovely white neck and arms. He had seen them so often before in little Gracie. But this was different, all quite different. She was no longer a child, and he was no longer a boy. She was a woman, a beautiful woman,thewoman, and he was a man, and every good thing in him craved her as its very highest good. God! How could he let any other man take her from him? Even Jack----
He spat out his penholder, and kicked over his chair, as he got up and began to pace the room, with clenched hands and pinched face.
"Dearest Grace,
"We two are in trouble, and you are the unconscious cause of it. We have suddenly discovered that we have all grown up, and things can never be quite the same between us all as they have been. Jim is writing to you also, and you will get both our letters at the same time. We both love you, Gracie, with our whole hearts. If you can care enough for either of us it is for you to say which. For myself I cannot begin to tell you all you are to me. You are everything to me--everything. I cannot, dare not imagine life without you in it, Gracie. Can you care enough for me to make me the happiest man in all the world?
"Ever yours devotedly,
"John Denzil Carron."
"Gracie Dear,
"It is horrid to have to ask if you care for me more than you do for old Jack. But it has come to that, and we cannot help ourselves. I want you more than I ever wanted anything in all my life. You are more to me than life itself or anything it can ever give me. I know I am not half good enough for you, and I wish I had made more of myself now. But I do not think any one could ever care for you as I do.
"God bless you, dear, whatever you decide.
"Please excuse the writing, etc., and believe me,
"Yours ever,
"Jim,"
When Mrs. Jex brought in these two letters, as they lingered lazily over the tea-table, Grace laughed merrily.
"What are those boys up to now? It must be some unusually good joke to set old Jim writing letters."
But her brother's face lacked its usual quick response. He had been very thoughtful all day, sombre almost; and when Grace had chaffed him lightly as to his exertions of the previous night, instead of tackling her in kind, he had said quietly:
"Yes, you see, we old people don't take things so lightly as you youngsters."
"You are thinking of this war?"
"Yes--partly."
"And----?"
"Oh--lots of things."
"Margaret?"--with a twinkle.
"Oh, Margaret of course. I thought I had never seen her look more charming."
"She is always charming. Charlie, I wish----" and she hung fire lest in the mere touching she might damage.
"And what do you wish, child?"
"I wish you'd marry her. She's the sweetest thing that ever was."
"You have a most excellent taste, my child."
"It's in the family. Meg's taste is equally good"--with a meaning glance at him, but he was looking thoughtfully into his teacup.
"And you really think we shall be dragged into war, Charlie?"
"Mr. Harben seemed to think it certain."
"I don't think I like Mr. Harben very much. I caught sight of his face while you were all talking in the corner, and I thought he must have heard some good news."
"He was probably thinking at the moment only of his own particular aspect of the matter. War means business for contractors, you know."
"Sir George didn't look that way."
"He hasn't very much to do with the firm now, I believe. Besides, one would expect him to take wider views than Harben. He is a bigger man in every way."
Then Mrs. Jex came in with the letters, and Gracie wondered merrily what joke the boys were up to. But Eager, who had not failed to notice their unconcealed enthralment the night before, pursed his lips for a moment as though he doubted if the contents of those letters would prove altogether humorous.
"I thought they'd have been round, but I expect they've been in bed all day." And she ripped open Jim's letter, which happened to be uppermost, with an anticipatory smile.
Eager saw the smile fade, as the sunshine fails off the side of a hill on an April day, and give place to a look of perplexity and a slight knitting of the placid brow.
She picked up Jack's letter, and tore it open, and read it quickly. Then, with a catch in her breath and a startled look in her eyes, she jerked:
"Charlie--what do they mean? Are they in fun----"
"Shall I read them, dear?"
She threw the letters over to him, and sat, with parted lips and wondering--and rather scared--face, looking into the fire, with her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
"This is not fun, Grace dear," her brother said gravely at last. It had taken him a terrible long time to read those very short letters, but he read so much more in them than was actually written. "It is sober earnest, and a very grave matter."
"But I don't want---- Oh!--I wish they hadn't"--with passionate fervour. "Why can't they let things go on as they are? We have been so happy----"
"Yes. . . . But time works its changes. They are no longer boys----"
A wriggle of dissent from Grace.
"----Although they may seem so to us. And you are no longer a little girl----"
"Oh! I feel like a speck of dust, Charlie; and I don't, don't, don't want----"
"I know, dear; but it is too late. You may feel a little girl to-day. Last night you were an exquisitely beautiful woman--and this is the result."
Grace put her hands up to her face and began to cry softly. For there, in the dancing flames, she had seen in a flash what it all must mean--severances, heart-aches, trouble generally. And they had all been so happy.
Eager wisely let her have her cry out. When, at last, she mopped up her eyes, and sat looking pensively into the fire again, he said quietly:
"Let us face the matter, dear! They are dear, good lads, and they are doing you the greatest honour in their power. There being two of them, of course"--and it came home to him that here were he and Gracie up against the problem of Carne also--"makes things very trying, both for them and for you. You like them both, I know----"
"I've always liked them both, and I don't like either of them one bit better than the other."
"Is there any one else you like as well as either of them?"
"No, of course not. I've never cared for any one as I have for Jack and Jim--except you, of course. Oh! what am I to do, Charlie?"
"As far as I can see, there is only one thing to be done at present, and that is--wait."
"Can you make them wait? Oh, do! Some time, perhaps----"
"If this war comes, they will have to go into it. They may neither of them come back."
"Oh, Charlie! . . . That is too terrible to think of----"
"War is terrible without a doubt, dear. It cuts the knot of many a life."
"My poor boys! But how can I possibly tell them?"
"I think, perhaps, you had better leave it all to me, dear. I will just explain to each of them quietly how this has taken you by surprise, and that you feel towards the one just as you do towards the other, and that, for the time being, they must let matters rest there."
"Things will never be the same among us again."
"Not quite the same, perhaps; but there is no reason why your friendship should suffer."
"If they will see it that way----"
"They will have to see it that way. They ought, by rights, to have spoken to me first. And if they had I could have saved you all this. I must scold them well for that."
"The dear boys!"
And presently, since he could imagine from their letters the state of the boys' feelings, and such were better got on to reasonable lines as soon as possible, he set off in the chill twilight for Carne. And Gracie sat looking into the fire, her mind ranging freely in these new pastures--troubled not a little at this sudden break in the brotherly-sisterly ties which had hitherto bound them, with quick mental side-glances now and then at the strange new possibilities, and not entirely without a touch of that exaltation with which every girl learns that to one man she is the whole end and aim of life.
The trouble was that here were two men holding her in that supreme estimation, and that, so far, in her very heart of hearts, she found it impossible to say that she loved one better than the other. And at times the white brow knitted perplexedly at the absurdity of it, while the sweet, mobile mouth below twisted to keep from actual smiles as she thought of it all.
But, naturally, the first result of the whole matter was that her mind dwelt incessantly and penetratingly on her boyfriends who had suddenly become her lovers, and she regarded them from quite new points of view. And she knew that she was right, and that they never could be all quite the same to one another as they had been hitherto.
Long before Charles got back she was feeling quite aged and worn with overmuch thinking.