'A delusion of your trade, Mrs. John. For my part I hope I have something better to do than go about foreseeing people's marriages.'
'Something different, old fellow,' Arty suggested, with an air of being anxious to guard the niceties of the language.
'I wonder if I could write a story about her,' mused Mrs. John, unusually talkative.
'I have so often told Mrs. John in print—anonymously, of course, because of our friendship—that she can't write a story about anything, that I sha'n't discuss the particular case. As a general principle, I object to books about failures. Manson, do you take an interest in humble tragedies?'
'Only in a brief marked two and one,' said Manson Smith.
'Exactly! Or in a par at seven-and-six.'
'Or perhaps in a little set of verses—thrown off,' murmured Arty Kane.
'Who's talking about tragedies?' called Peggy from the other end. 'Elfreda and Horace are splendidly happy. So will Trix and Airey be.'
'And—I am sorry to mention it,' smiled Tommy Trent, 'but the latter couple will also be uncommonly well off.'
'The only touch of poetry the thing ever had, gone out of it!' grumbled Arty resentfully.
'Listen to the voice of the Philistine!' advised Miles, pointing at Tommy. 'For the humiliating reason that he's generally right.'
'No!' ejaculated Mrs. John firmly.
'That is, we shall all come to think him right. Time will corrupt us. We shall sink into marriage, merit, middle age, and, conceivably, money. In a few years we sha'n't beable to make out for the lives of us what the dickens the young fools do want.'
'Is this aséance?' demanded Arty Kane indignantly. 'If the veil of the future is going to be lifted, I'm off home.'
'Fancy bothering about what we shall be in ten years!' cried Peggy scornfully, 'when such a lot of fine things are sure to happen in between! Besides, I don't believe that anything of the sort need happen at all.'
The idea rather scandalised Mrs. John. It seemed to cut at the root of a scientific view of life—a thing that she flattered herself might with due diligence be discovered in her published, and was certainly to be developed in her projected, works.
'Experience, dear Peggy——' she began, with a gently authoritative air.
Miles laid a firm hand on her wrist and poured her out some more champagne; this action might be construed as an apology for his interruption. At any rate he offered no other: after all, Mrs. John was accustomed to that.
'Experience, dear Peggy—to adopt the form of expression used by my honourable friend, which commends itself to all sections of the House—(you mustn't laugh when you're complimented, Peggy!) experience, dear Peggy, enjoys two significations—first, the things that happen; secondly, what you or I may be pleased to think they mean. I have no remedy ready on the spot for the first; the cure for the second is very simple, as many great men have pointed out.'
'What is it?' asked Mrs. John rebelliously.
'Don't think so, Mrs. John.'
'What, reconstruct all your theories——?'
'Now did I say anything of the kind?' he demanded despairingly.
Peggy leant forward with eager eyes.
'Stop!' interposed Arty Kane imperiously. 'I will not be told any more that the world is full of happiness. It'snothing to me one way or the other if it is, and there's an end of it.'
Peggy leant back again, smiling at Tommy Trent.
'Any other point of view would be ungracious to our friends to-night,' said Tommy with a laugh. It appeared rather as though it would be unsuited to his own mood also.
'One thing at least we may be sure of,' said Miles, summing up the discussion with a friendly smile. 'We shall none of us do, or be, or feel, at all approximately what we think we shall. You may say what you like, but there's plenty of excitement in it. Unless you're dull yourself, there's no dulness in it.'
'No, there's no dulness in it,' said Peggy Ryle. 'That is the one thing to be said.'
Would Lady Blixworth have echoed that from Barslett? She would have denied it vigorously in words; but could anything be dull so long as one had brains to see the dulness—and a Sarah Bonfill to describe it to?
Peggy walked off home with Tommy. Nobody questioned, or seemed inclined to question, that arrangement now. Even Miles Childwick looked on with a smile, faintly regretful perhaps, yet considerably amused. He linked his arm in Arty Kane's and the two walked along the Strand, discussing the permutations of human feeling. There seems no need to follow their disquisition on such a well-worn subject. It is enough to catch a fragment from Miles. 'The essence being reciprocity——' was all a news-vendor got for his offer of the late edition.
'It's far too fine to drive,' Peggy declared, picking her way round a small puddle or two, left by a goodly summer shower. 'Have you plenty of time?'
'Time enough to walk with you.'
She put her arm in his. 'So that's all over!' she said regretfully. 'At least, I don't see how Trix is going to do anything else that's at all sensational.'
'I should think she doesn't want to,' said Tommy soberly.
'No, but——' She turned her laughing face to him. 'When is something else going to begin, Tommy? I'm all ready for adventures. I've spent all my money——'
'You've spent——?'
'Now don't pretend to be surprised—it's all gone in frocks, and presents, and things. But—— Why, you never asked me where I got my necklace!'
'If you wore the Koh-i-Noor should I ask you where you got it?'
'Airey sent it to me to-day. I refused it from him before, but to-day I'm going to keep it. Because of what it means to him, you know.' She pushed her cloak a little aside and fingered the pearls. 'Yes, the money's all gone,' she went on, rather pleased apparently; 'and there's no more from poor dear uncle, and—and Airey Newton won't live in Danes Inn any longer!'
Tommy was silent; he was not silent altogether without an effort, but silent he was. She pressed his arm for a moment.
'Will you be promoted to Airey Newton's place?' she asked.
'But why only tea?' said Tommy.
She waited a little before she answered.
'What should you say,' she asked at last, 'if I ever changed?' She did not tell him from what: in words she had never told him, and in words he had never asked.
'I should wait for you to change back again,' said he. Was he the man that in Lady Blixworth's opinion the situation needed?
Peggy was eager in her explanation, but she seemed a little puzzled too.
'I know how much it is to ask,' she said, 'and there's no bond, no promise from you. But somehow it seems to me that I must see some more. Oh, there it all is, Tommy—waiting, waiting! Trix has made me feel that more and more. Was she all wrong? I don't know. Airey was there in the end, you see. And now there are all sortsof things behind her, making—making a background to it. I don't want all she's had; but, Tommy, I want some more.'
He heard her with a sober smile; if there were a touch of sadness in it, there was understanding too. They had come to her door in Harriet Street, and she stopped on the threshold.
'I sha'n't starve. You'll be there at tea-time,' said she with an appealing smile.
His man's feeling was against her. It was, perhaps, too much to ask of him that he should sympathise fully with her idea; he saw its meaning, but its meaning could not be his ideal. He would have taken her now at once, when, as his thoughts put it, the bloom was fresh and she had rubbed so little against the world. The instinct in her and the longings which bore her the other way were strange to him.
She knew it; the timidity of her beseeching eyes told that she asked a great thing—a thing that must be taken on faith, and must try his faith. Yet she could not but ask. The life of to-day was not yet done. Coming now, the life of to-morrow would come too soon. Very anxiously she watched his struggle, perhaps with an undefined yet not uncertain apprehension that its issue would answer the question whether he were in truth the man to whom she must come back, whether they two would in the end make terms and live as one. What her heart asked was, Could freedom and love be reconciled? Else, which must go to the wall? She feared that she might be forced to answer that question. Or would he spare it her?
Another moment wore away. His brows were knit into a frown; he did not look at her. Her eyes were on his, full of contending feelings—of trust and love for him, of hope for herself, it may be of a little shame that she must put him to such a trial. At last he turned to her and met her gaze with a friendly cheerful smile.
'Go out into the world and have your fling, Peggy. Takeyour heart and mine with you; but try to bring them both back to me.'
She caught his hand in hers, delighted that she could go, enraptured that his face told her that he trusted her to go.
'Yes,' she whispered, 'I shall come back with both, because, Tommy, you have such great, great faith in me. I shall come back. But'—her voice rose again in untrammelled gaiety—'But go I must for a little while. There's so much to see!'
THE END
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