Napier shrugged. "I can only say that it's highly probable if Miss Ellis goes to London that Mr. Grant will find an excuse for going too."
"You'd have to prevent that. What would his father, what would Lady Grant think of...." She stopped there, as having indicated some unsuitableness even greater than might appear.
"All the more, then," said Napier, as though she had given out of those close-shut lips some damning fact, "all the more we ought to keep an eye on them. But if they are in London—there'll be only one of us 'to keep an eye'—" She kept both of hers on Napier. "You'd be here," he added, "and I'd be sweltering in London."
"You, too, in Nan's train!"
"Oh, dear, no!" he laughed. "In Julian's, catching up what Miss Ellis designs to let fall."
"You, too!" she repeated, as though the calamity were greater than she could grasp.
He nodded. "I'd have to. Especially after what you ... didn't say. And to go to London now would be an awful sell for both of us."
"For both of us?" she inquired with a little catch.
"For Julian and me. My holiday begins in ten days, and we were counting on having it in Scotland. You see," he explained, "we've looked forward to these next weeks for over a year. We've spent our summers together ever since Eton days. If Julian goes, I've got to go too. And I should look on such a necessity,"—he gazed upon the lady as he spoke, with eyes well practised in conveying tender regretfulness—"I should look on it as a personal misfortune."
The stricture about her mouth relaxed. The lips even trembled a little.
Napier couldn't imagine himself actually making love to Miss von Schwarzenberg. But he could easily imagine himself kissing that beautiful mouth of hers. So easily, indeed, that with some abruptness he turned away.
It was lucky he had.
"There she is!" Out of a fiery cloud, Madge McIntyre, on tiptoe, looked in at the window. Her schoolboy brother, behind her, was grinning. "Bobby's won his bet!" she called out derisively to the world in general. The wind of her scorn stirred in her flaming hair. Wildfire tossed it back to say to her companion, "She has been able to tear herself away from her American!"
"I've been looking for you," said Miss Greta, calmly. "Come round."
"Looking for me! Oh,my!" A final shake of the flaming mane, and as if Wildfire's fury had shriveled her; had burnt both of them up, she and Bobby vanished.
Napier made for the library, thanking his stars for the interruption. What in the name of common sense had he been about to do? To saddle himself with a flirtation—or a relation of some sort—with this foreign young woman from whom, with considerable expenditure of skill, he had kept clear for over a year!
"Mr. Napier,"—she overtook him on the library threshold—"I can't have you thinking me ungrateful. I appreciate—dobelieve me, how particularly kind and thoughtful—yes, chivalrous, you've shown yourself—"
With genuine amazement Napier faced her again. "What—a—I don't understand...."
"Oh, I can well believe you do these things—these generous, delicate things almost without thinking." Before he knew what she was about, she had found his hand. She was pressing it in both of hers. She held up her face—or, as it seemed, her lips. He backed away. "I shallneverforget," she said in her intense whisper, "your putting me on my guard like this. And I may be able to be of use to you before we've done. Meggie, where are you, child?"
The thing happened with a remarkable regularity. An expedition would be proposed by Julian, vetoed by Greta. Julian would stir Nan's enthusiasm. Greta would dampen it. Yet Napier soon realized that, if Nan were determined to come, Miss Greta was equally determined to come, and have an eye on her.
So it fell out that the von Schwarzenberg's schemes, first to banish and later to sequestrate the American, were set at naught through the agency of Mr. Julian Grant. With a perfectly careless transparency he showed that no plan of a social nature stood the smallest chance of enlisting him unless it included the American. Whatever Miss Greta described in the future, she must have known that at that moment her only chance of seeing more of Napier was to fall in with Julian's program. After all, exceptional as her position at Kirklamont was acknowledged to be, she was far too level-headed an expert to leave her special charge out of any proposed diversion. Since Madge had to be included, Bobby would come too—when he wasn't off with the head keeper, or fishing with the Pforzheims. If "those children" were added to the party, Miss Greta would be left the freer to cultivate her cautiously conducted friendliness with the secretary. For the rest, Miss Greta bothered herself extraordinarily little about the friend who had come so far for her sake.
Lady McIntyre and Sir William were everything that was kind and hospitable. No later than the third morning after the arrival of Miss Ellis, Lady McIntyre made Sir William stop the motor at the inn and invite the young lady to dine with them that evening.
Poor Julian! It's all up with him, Napier decided, between sympathy and malicious satisfaction, as the girl slipped her long satin cloak off her shoulders in the hall.
Sir William eyed the apparition with the appraising glance of the connoisseur in feminine good looks. Plainly she passed muster.
"Well, Miss Ellis, and shall I ask you, as your compatriots do me when I've been only a few hours in the place, 'What do you think of this country?'"
"If you did, I could tell you a-plenty right now. And a great deal more to-morrow!"
"Why to-morrow?"
"Because—" She interrupted herself to go forward upon the flustered entrance of the hostess. Lady McIntyre's manner was that of the person so inured to being late that she got no good out of being on time. But to this manifestation Napier had long been accustomed. What mildly intrigued him was the manner of the girl. She had put on a different grace along with her evening gown. Her slower movements had even a touch of stateliness, as though to match the trailing elegance of embroidered chiffons.
"Come now, Miss Ellis," Sir William repeated, "why could you tell me more about your impressions after to-morrow?"
"Because Mr. Grant is going to show us a castle. And Greta has promised to take pictures of it. I suppose you know how splendid Greta is at taking pictures? You don't? Well, she's every bit as good as a professional."
"What castle?" Lady McIntyre asked. "Glenfallon?"
Miss von Schwarzenberg had come into the hall, with Madge clinging on her arm.
"We have some delightful foreigners at Glenfallon. Germans. We owe them a great debt of gratitude—" Every one there, except Miss Ellis, knew that Lady McIntyre was going on to tell, as she invariably did to each newcomer, the story of Frau Lenz and the providential result of taking her advice. No one knew better than Madge how this repetition bored and annoyed Miss Greta. When her mother had got as far as "debt of gratitude," Madge threw in the information that "the old man wore goggles! And goes scudding about the firth in the dead of night in a motor launch. Simply bogey, I call it!"
"It is bogey enough," said Miss Greta, gently, "to be nearly blind and not able to sleep."
Julian's entry did not disturb the group at the fire.
"If they're so kind, those Pforzheims, I wish," Miss Ellis went on, "they'd take us out in their launch some time."
"Take us out? Not they!" said Madge.
"They won't? How do you know, miss?" Sir William pulled Madge's ear.
"They won't take people out in their boat. Won't even take me. Asked 'em."
"Meggie!" Lady McIntyre's tone was shocked, but the look she cast round said, "There's a spirited young person for you!"
Bobby came in, and Julian joined the others in time to celebrate the superior attractions of a sailboat over a beastly launch. "I'll take you out and you'll see!" The person who was apparently to do the seeing was Miss Ellis.
Greta von Schwarzenberg caught Napier's eye. "These innocents!" she seemed to say. It was the sort of cautious interchange that punctuated the entire evening. It went on across the flowers during dinner. It went on across the bridge table after dinner. The silent interchange advanced immeasurably the sense of understanding between Miss Greta and Sir William's secretary. Perhaps he owed himself this relaxation. Though why Napier felt something owing, wasn't yet clear to him. What was clear was the surprise, not unmixed with ironic amusement, of the man accustomed to be first at the goal of feminine interest, who sees a person commonly quite out of the running pass him with easy stride.
Napier found in the unusual experience of looking on at this kind of scene, instead of playing the chief part in it, something that appealed both to his sense of the ludicrous and, since the person concerned was Julian, to his generosity. So good for Julian!
At dinner Napier had almost pointedly ignored Miss Ellis. She must talk to Julian. But by no canon of friendship could Napier be asked not to have a little fun out of the spectacle. It ministered too temptingly (especially with Miss Greta opposite) to that sense of the ludicrous which other people's emotional adventures are apt to inspire in us. And the more acutely and exquisitely is this pleasure provided if either of the "parties" has hitherto neglected or been deprived of this element in human experience. Not to know the ropes is to provide amusement to the old salt. Napier, in the character of the Old Salt upon the seas of sentiment, sat and smiled.
It was only when the party broke up that he stood a minute beside the girl, while Julian discussed his sailing plans with the others.
"Why do you look at Miss Greta like that?" Napier demanded in an undertone.
She laughed a little consciously. "Am I looking at her like that?"
"Yes. As if you didn't know whether Julian's plan was a good plan till she'd endorsed it."
"It's quite true," she answered in a rush of confidence. "I don't always follow her advice, but I always wish I had. Heavens! the things Greta has saved me from!"
"And what were some of your greatest escapes?"
"Oh, the usual things. Thinking I'd better marry this one, and then that."
"But why did you think you'd better marry them?"
"Because I thought they'd be so awfully hurt if I didn't." She joined in his laughter, and then seriously: "You must understand they werequitenice too. I rather loved them, as you say over here."
"And would you always be ready to give up the idea of marrying anybody Greta disapproved?"
"I—don't—know," she said.
"Are you really going to motor her to Abergarry?" Napier demanded, after Miss Ellis' departure.
"Oh, you heard that!" Julian laughed. "We thought it was a secret."
"A secret? 'Oh, my, I'd love to see your home!'" he mimicked. "'And is it really three hundred years old? Oh, my!'"
"Look here, Gavan," Julian stopped short in the middle of the moonlit road—"don't say you aren't going to like her."
"I don't see my way not to liking her," he said grudgingly, "but I felt to-night, if she said, 'Oh, my,' again, I should probably wring her neck."
"What's wrong with it? Bless my soul! It's harmless enough. Some of our up-to-date young womenswear."
"Oh, ifyoudon't mind, I suppose I must put up with it. But, I say, you aren't going to take her alone to Abergarry, are you?"
"Why not?" Julian was smiling. "Doyouwant to come?"
"I was only thinking," Napier said, "it was rather marked, your not including the von Schwarzenberg."
"Why should we always have to lug that German woman along?" The question came out with uncommon rancor.
"Nan," Julian went on, already with the proprietary air, "is under the most complete illusion about the von Schwarzenberg." Something watchful came into the face he showed to the moonlight—almost suspicious, totally un-Julianesque. "Ithought the reason Nan was going away so meekly to London was that she was dependent on von Schwarzenberg."
Napier said that he, too, had received the impression that Miss Greta was financing her "little friend."
Madge certainly thought so. But Madge has a way of getting to the bottom of things.
She had done it when she came over to say good night to Julian and Nan.
"Miss Greta was very kind to you at school, wasn't she?"
"Very, very kind."
"And she gives you your holidays? Pays your expenses?"
Miss Ellis stared. "Expenses!"—and then broke into a little laugh. "Why, no. You are a funny girl."
Madge threw back her hair. She didn't relish being called a funny girl. She ached to bring this interloper down off her high horse. "Was it a very expensive school Miss von Schwarzenberg sent you to?"
"Sent me—to school? Oh, you haven't understood her. I had my mother to send me. And she sent Greta, too. Mother used to say,"—Miss Ellis was still talking more to Mr. Grant than to the girl—"she considered it a very great privilege to put opportunities in the way of a person like Greta."
Ever since the days of "wet bob" prowess, Julian was at his best, Napier had always thought, on the water. But sailing was the sport he gave his soul to. He forgot his troublesome theories, his quarrel with the world's ordering, and yielded himself with delight to a comradely tussle with the difficulties of navigation, on a rock-bound, "chancy" bit of coast, as he called it.
He looked his best too. The lithe activity of body, the extraordinary quickness of eye, showed the dreaming gone; instead of it, a mastery in alertness. His girlish brown hands, endowed with a steadiness as of steel.
The person who was distinctly not at her best under these conditions was Miss Greta. She had opposed the boating plan as long as she could. The moment she grasped the fact that Nan and Julian, and probably Napier, were going on the water with or without Miss Greta, Miss Greta saw her course with characteristic clarity. She adored sailing! It was only her "sense of responsibility" which had made her hesitate.
Her sense of responsibility, if it was that, went far to spoil her pleasure. She had a curious idea that, though the coast hereabouts was dangerous, the farther out you went the more you tempted fortune. "Those horrchible, rock-bound islands!"
Napier smiled to himself. He did a good deal of covert smiling during those perfect July days, though he didn't pretend to himself that he was specially happy.
The initial reason he gave himself for his state of mind was the breath-taking speed of your inexperienced person, once he is started. While Napier had been giving a secretly humorous welcome to Julian's little distraction, here was that rash youth planning to motor the girl to Abergarry. The only thing, so far as Napier could judge, that prevented Julian from introducing the girl forthwith as his future wife was the trifling circumstance that Sir James and Lady Grant had just telegraphed to say they would be detained a fortnight longer at Bad Nauheim.
There were times when, if Napier had been forced to stand and deliver the reasons for his secret depression, he would have been inclined to say they rose, not out of the fact that Julian was probably going to marry this girl, but out of a growing conviction that she wouldn't "fit in" in the life over here. She was "crude," as Miss Greta had said. And she was too independent; too impulsive; too ... what was it? No repose. You never knew where she'd break out next, either in speech or act. It wasn't so much that what she said was wrong, or that what she did was amiss; only both might be unexpected. She kept you on the jump. No thoroughly nice woman, certainly no wife, should keep you on the jump.
Curiously, to Napier's mind, Julian was fashing himself on the score of the influence which Greta von Schwarzenberg exercised over Nan Ellis. "I tell you," he said one night, "the woman's hold over her is uncanny. Part of the trouble lies in Nan's sense of loyalty. It's a drawbridge and a moat and an army—horse, foot, and dragoons. I can't get past it. It's a thing I haven't so far been able to talk openly to her about. And there's only one other thing of that kind,"—Julian's face was quite beautiful in that moment—"she doesn't know yet—unless she guesses."
"Oh, you haven't said anything yet?"—Napier breathed freer.
He was only waiting, Julian said, to get one thing clear. Not his caring! And not any doubt of her. It was only that he couldn't share his wife with anybody, least of all with von Schwarzenberg. "I've got to know what that woman counts for."
"Why don't you find out?" Napier said. His own impatience, his sense of suppressed irritation at the idea of the Schwarzenberg's uncanny hold, surprised Napier—though he would have said it was a natural expression of sympathy for his friend. "I'dfind out 'what she counts for' ... if it were my affair!"
"I was going to yesterday," Julian said. "I'm thinking I will to-night."
Napier took out his watch. "Ten minutes to eleven," he remarked.
"Hang the Schwarzenberg!" Her inventing to see Nan home in the motor that evening had been a low-down device to cheat Julian Grant of his rights!
But all the same here he was, briskly leading the way along the cross-cut to the inn. "She's often late getting to bed."
"How do you know?" Napier demanded.
"Going over the hill, I've seen the light in her window.... Do you notice," he broke off to say, "how, when we're sailing, Nan always wants to go farther out?" He waited a moment, eager for Napier's tribute to the spirit of the girl. "And not foolhardy either!"
"You are making a very tolerable sailor of her," Napier admitted.
"Steady as any old hand," the other went on eagerly. "And that woman always interfering. 'Be careful, Nanchen; leave it to Mr. Grant.' 'We must turn back now; look how far we've come!'"
There had been, indeed that very afternoon, a spirited argument, in the course of which a number of prickly observations were made, chiefly by Bobby and Miss Greta. With sole exception of the lady, everybody in the boat enthusiastically—Bobby even violently—in favor of going out to the Islands. The project was opposed by the one person with a pertinacity that Julian was sure could mean only one thing. A jealous woman's determination to preserve her ascendancy. To make a test case. She's afraid she's losing hold. She must make a stand somewhere. She makes it at Gull Island. "We aren't to land there if von Schwarzenberg dies for it. I tell you what it is, Gavan. I'll get Nan out to Gull Island to-morrow, or I'll know the reason why!" The face Julian turned to his friend in the starlight was lit with radiances Napier had never thought to see there.
"This way." Julian began to tread his way on in front, among the rocks and underbrush. "I shall go and wait in the gorse by the inn till von Schwarzenberg takes herself off."
A sense of utter joylessness fell on Napier, as for a few minutes longer he kept the pace at Julian's heels. He struggled consciously against the absurd illusion of being left out in the cold. He, with his hosts of friends, his hosts of "affairs," scattered broadcast through the last ten years, the Gavan Napier of enviable worldly lot, had an instant's keen perception of the externality of all these things. He had never lived through an hour like this that was Julian's.
"I'll turn back now," Napier said aloud. The figure in front neither turned nor tarried. On and on.
Napier smiled. His friend was hurrying along under the stars toward a planet mightier for light and leading than any in the heavens—a candle set in the window of a girl.
Before Napier had finished sorting the next morning's letters, the Grants' chauffeur drove up to Kirklamont with a note.
Mustsee you before the others come. Car will wait and bring you to the landing.J. G.
Mustsee you before the others come. Car will wait and bring you to the landing.
J. G.
The slight figure was prancing up and down the strip of sand between encircling rocks. Never a look toward his beloved boat, riding with transfigured sails at the entrance to the cove. As far away as Napier could see his friend, he felt the nervous force that was being expended in that absorbed prowl.
"I nearly routed you out in the middle of the night," was the way Julian began.
"You remember last night, just to prevent me from taking Nan home, that woman took Nan home herself? Well, she stayed at the 'Queen' a mortal hour. As if that wasn't enough in all conscience, Nan was for seeing her home! 'No, darling, no!' I heard the von Schwarzenberg say. And then with that acrid break in her sugariness, 'I don't want to be taken half-way!'
"There was something I lost. Then, 'My dear child,' I heard her say, 'you must allow me here to know what is appropriate, what is expected. What isn't expected, is that an inexperienced girl, strange to the place, should be running about dark roads this time of night. You would be misunderstood. I should be misunderstood if I let you.' Then Nan was, 'Sosorry!' and 'Forgive me, Greta!' They kissed. Nan went slowly back to the inn. Then, instead of turning into the Kirklamont footpath, Schwarzenberg came up the hill. I laughed to myself to think of her surprise when she should come across me. But she turned to the left and cut across the west flank. I thought maybe the woman had got bewildered, going in unaccustomed places at night. But she wasn't walking like a bewildered person at all. Do you know what shewaswalking like? Like a person who has done the same thing before. She was making straight as a die for that old shepherd's hut the bracken cutters use. She went into that hut and stayed there three quarters of an hour."
"No!"
"And when she came out, Ernst Pforzheim was with her. They came along so near me that I began to be sorry for them. They were heading straight for a nasty jar when they should see me. Well, they didn't see me. They went by not five yards away from the stone pile I was leaning against—talking hard in German, till I lost sound and sight of them."
"God bless me!"
"I'm sorry, Gavan." To Napier's amazement, Julian was looking at him with pitying eyes. Evidently, he thought, in spite of his friend's air of humorous detachment, he had been cherishing some genuine feeling for Miss Greta.
The idea, especially in view of the revelation, offended Napier'samour propre. "I hadn't thought it necessary to tell anybody," he said, "but I knew there was—or there had been—a Pforzheim friendship under the rose."
"You didn't think it necessary to tell...."
"I was in the Schwarzenberg's confidence before ... all this. I couldn't give her away, could I?"
"You needn't have given her away. The merest hint would have warned me. You might have thought of Nan!" he burst out passionately.
"Oh, everybody can't be thinking of Nan, to the exclusion of everybody else."
The other man looked into Napier's eyes. And Napier laughed out. It was so patent that old Julian, newly enlightened as to the part love plays, had conceived the idea that his poor friend was the victim of a tenderness for Miss Greta.
Gavan caught in the toils of a woman like that!—the tragedy of it softened Julian. His face cleared. The motor was coming back with the others.
But the only others who were in the car were Madge, distinctly scowling, and Bobby, cheerful as usual. "Miss Greta's got a headache. Not coming!" the boy called out.
Julian was in the car as soon as they were out. "I'll go and get Miss Ellis."
"You can't. She won't leave 'her friend'!" said Madge, jerking her head away.
They didn't sail that day.
Julian haunted Kirklamont all the afternoon and evening. No sign of either lady.
"I shouldn't have thought she would be so obvious!" Julian burst out, as he and Napier sat smoking at the far end of the terrace. "To stick in bed all day just so as to prevent Nan—"
"What's the good? There's always to-morrow."
"She thinks twenty-four hours will block the business pretty completely, and maybe even take the edge off Nan's keenness about the island for good. Anyway,"—his forehead drew up into lines of anxiety—"twenty-four hours will give her time to draw the reins tighter. She's drawing the reins tighter this minute." Julian looked up at the pile of Kirklamont, somewhere in whose innermost Nan Ellis was in attendance on a so-called sick-bed instead of being, where she ought to be, out sailing with Julian. "I'll tell you what it is, Gavan,"—he drove a fist into the palm of his hand. "You may take my word for it I'll get Nan Ellis out to Gull Island to-morrow somehow. You see if I don't."
"You said that last night."
"No. I said last night I'd get her out there or I'd know the reason why. Well, now I know the reason against it." He nodded toward the two windows whose blinds were drawn.
"The reason doesn't seem to mind so much your wandering about the mainland with her 'little friend,'" Napier reflected out loud. "She seems to have a special scunner against islands. Why?"
"Especially against Gull Island," Julian agreed. And he too echoed, "Why?"
To the general surprise, Nan Ellis had risen early and vanished. Miss Greta had fallen asleep and, opening her eyes at eight—no Nan. The disappearance exercised a strikingly curative effect upon Miss Greta. She rose and dressed, and herself conducted a search. "Iknow!" she said at last. "Nan has gone to get fresh clothes. She has a mania for never wearing twice what she calls a 'shirt waist.'"
Sir William had already left the breakfast table, and every one but Napier had finished. Still Miss Greta lingered. "Shemustcome soon—after leaving me like that."
And come she did; across the lawn, in full view of the dining-room windows, walking at Julian Grant's side, looking up into his face; Julian, talking with great earnestness, his right hand, palm upward, now raised, now lowered, with that weighing action Napier knew so well. They parted when they reached the path, and Nan came on alone, "Julian," she announced with no apparent self-consciousness in use of his name—"Julian's coming back to take me for a sail, whether anybody else wants to go or not."
"Oh, really!" Miss Greta exchanged a look with Napier.
"Thank you!" said Madge at her prickly pertest. "Since you are so pressing—"
"We must wait for the letters!" It was so that Miss Greta, coming out into the hall, announced her intention of being one of the party. So, too, she betrayed her cherished hope that Napier might join them.
"Of course Gavan must go." He, Sir William, wasn't going to be a spoil-sport! And he announced the fact with a roguish significance that made Miss Greta cast down her eyes. When she lifted them, there was the bag. It proved a light post. Sir William tore open two or three envelopes while he stood there.
"Anything in the papers?" Miss Greta asked Napier.
A glance at the outsides of her own letters seemed to satisfy her. Did she read other people's with the same facility?
"The papers don't seem to have come," Napier answered.
"Not come! I wonder why!" She listened while he explained, in the easy British fashion, "that now and then the fella at the Junction would forget to throw the papers out."
"And you stand that? Sir William doesn't get the man dismissed?"
"What the devil...!" Sir William broke out. Apparently there were things which Sir William could not stand! One of them was in the letter he held as he went fuming toward the library, with Napier at his heels.
"Shut the door! Look here. The fact of that confidential memorandum being in the hands of the British Government is known. Known in the Hamburg shipping center, of all things! Here, you see what they say." Sir William thrust under the eyes of his secretary the highly disconcerting letter he had just received from the Board of Trade. "Well—? It certainly didn't happen inmydepartment. Damned impudence!" Sir William burst out, "to suppose that any ofourpeople...." He glared at an invisible cross-examiner, "It's never been out of our hands!"
"Except," Napier threw in, "to come into the translator's."
"Translator!" his chief echoed pettishly. Sir William, like many men not at home in foreign languages, quite particularly objected to being reminded of the fact. "Translator! They aren't worrying about the translator. It's what you're here for."
"I wasn't the translator of that particular document. You gave it to Miss von Schwarzenberg to do."
"To be sure! But remembering that doesn't help us."
"I wonder!" said Gavan Napier.
"Come, come!" said Sir William. "It's annoying to have secret information go astray, but it needn't warp our common sense."
Napier's duty, as he saw it, to try to turn his chief's mind toward a possible culprit under his own roof was discounted at the start, as the younger man well knew, by Sir William's chivalrous view of women. That wasn't really what was the matter with his view, but that was the name it went by. Sir William had married his butterfly lady for her painted wings. Finding but little underneath the blue and golden dust, he loyally concluded that the only difference between Lady McIntyre and other men's wives was a difference in the hue and the degree of their gold and blue—or their leaden and dun, as the case might be.
Even if women were told things, they could never distinguish what was important from what was trivial, and they forgot as quickly the precise point as the general bearing. Sir William had lived many happy years in the comfort of these convictions.
"I tell you, Gavan, the use of that document would argue a relationship with affairs quite grotesque to suppose on the part of any woman."
The thought of the Pforzheims flashed across Napier, bringing a kind of relief. Miss Greta might quite innocently have remembered and retailed enough to Mr. Ernst for him to turn to account.
For the first hour and a half of that memorable sail, theKelpieran lightly before a delicate breeze. An eager girl at the prow, a watchful woman at the stern, youth and manhood on board—a cargo of fair hopes borne along under skies of summer to airs of extreme sweetness. It was the very light opera of seafaring and of life. No faintest hint of the weightier merchandise—for which mankind takes risks.
Julian looked back at the receding coast-line. "How gloriously Glenfallon stands!" He quoted, "'A great sea mark outstanding every flaw!'"
Innocent as it was, the comment seemed not to please Miss Greta. She thought the castle was "probably not so great a 'sea mark' as it looks to us."
Julian assured her that you could see Glenfallon tower, "Well, a long way beyond those cruisers."
"What cruisers?" All eyes except Miss Greta's swept the horizon. And all found it featureless, till Bobby picked out a couple of dun-gray shapes.
Nan looked at Julian with frank admiration. "My! what wonderful eyes you must have! I can't see a thing!"
"Pooh! Mr. Grant isn't a patch on Ernst Pforzheim," said Bobby.
"Oh, you and your Pforzheims!" Julian scoffed.
With his Scotch tenacity, Bobby stuck to his guns. "All I'm saying is, Mr. Ernst can do better than see a ship when it's so far away nobody else knows there's a ship there at all.Hecan tell you what she is!"
"Any one with good sight," said Miss Greta, "can be trained." In German schools, she went on, a study of silhouettes was just part of the ordinary discipline of the eye.
Julian was deflecting Madge's course to the left of Gull Island.
"Oh,dolet us go alittlenearer!" the girl implored.
"No!" came from Miss Greta's cushions in the stern; "the ... the channel isn't safe!"
Julian began to tell about bird-nesting over there when he was a boy. And a cave the smugglers had used—
"Oh, my!" came the familiar note. "We simplymustgo and explore!"
"No," said Miss Greta decisively. "No!"
Napier caught Julian's eye. "Why?" they both asked silently.
And now even the devoted Nan was ready with, "Dearest Greta, why not?"
"Because it—it's too dangerous, I tell you!" She had carried a handkerchief to her lips. Over the handkerchief the eyes looked out to the Gull rocks, with an expression not easy to define. But Napier felt as clearly as ever he'd felt anything in his life: she will do something to prevent those two from wandering away together on Gull Island. What would she do? Whatcouldshe do? He lay in the boat and speculated.
Certainly Miss Greta's conception of her responsibility for the safety of her charges had produced a curious agitation in that lady. While the others were arguing, she dashed her handkerchief down from her lips, that were seen to be trembling, and called out roughly, "Madge!I forbid it!"
"Why ... Miss Greta?" said the astonished girl, staring at her altered idol with wide eyes.
"You must turn back," said the lady, her bosom heaving.
Whether Julian didn't hear, or wouldn't hear, Napier didn't know. Nan Ellis had turned to look at the island. She leaned far out over the bow. Motionless as a figure-head, she faced the islands and the outer sea. The wind drowned Greta's protest—it blew the girl's loose hair straight back—it made a booming in the sail.
"Mr. Grant, Irefuseto let them land!"
Julian stared at her. Miss Greta made an effort to speak in a more normal tone. "It's too—toodangerous," she said hoarsely.
"Oh, very well," Julian said. "They can stay in the boat."
"Then why,"—her voice rose again—"why are you going so near? You just want to tantalize them!"
"They won't be half so tantalized, will you, Madge, if somebody goes and brings back the news. I haven't been there for a dozen years—nor anybody else, I should say."
The boat was cutting through the bright water at a great speed. The wind sang in the sail.
Miss von Schwarzenberg half rose. "Stop!" she cried out. "I—I'm dizzy—I'm sick!" She lurched; she flung out her hands. Before anybody had time to catch her, or, indeed, had any conception of the need to, Miss von Schwarzenberg had lost her balance. She was over the side of the boat.
Napier sprang to his feet just a second too late. Greta, in five fathoms of water, was crying for help.
The first Nan knew of what had happened, Madge was screaming with horror and Julian was tearing off his coat. But Napier was nearer. Miss Greta needn't have lifted her arms out of the water as the foolish do, calling frantically, "Mr. Napier! Mr. Nap—!" before, most horribly, she disappeared. Napier was out of the boat and swimming toward a hat. He dived and came up, supporting a dripping yellow head on one arm.
Julian helped to lift Miss Greta in. They covered her with coats. The two girls chafed her hands. Julian, silent with remorse, as fast as he could was bringing theWater Kelpiehome.
As Napier supported Miss Greta down the little gangway, she pressed his arm. Under her breath, "You've saved my life," she murmured. "For all that's left of it, I shall remember."
She wouldn't wait till they could get a motor. In her clinging, soaking clothes she insisted on walking those three quarters of a mile from the landing to Kirklamont.
Oh, Greta von Schwarzenberg was game, for all her pardonable panic at the sudden prospect of death. Napier admitted as much to Miss Ellis, as the heroine of the day hurried on before them, nobly concerned to tone down the story with which Madge and Bobby were so pleasantly occupied in freezing their mother's blood.
Nan lingered a moment at Julian's side in the lobby, but it was to Napier she was talking. "'Peril of death'?" she repeated, under cover of the repercussions of Lady McIntyre's consternation and thankfulness. "Why do you say that?"
"Well, I don't want to make much of the little I did—but suppose I hadn't been there, and suppose Julian couldn't swim!"
"But Greta can."
Both men stared at the girl incredulously.
"It's none the less good of you—what you did. And very horrid for poor Greta, with all her nice clothes on—"
"She canswim?"
"Like a fish."
Upon Miss von Schwarzenberg's reappearance after luncheon, the family welcomed her with affectionate enthusiasm. Lady McIntyre established the rescued one on the sofa. Nan Ellis brought a footstool. Sir William stirred the fire.
Napier was struck by the picture of amenity and cheerfulness presented by the group.
"No, Miss Greta," said Madge, "you needn't be looking round; the papershaven'tcome, I'm glad to say. You've got to rest and be taken care of." She spread the shawl over Miss Greta's knees. Sir William, from the hearth-rug, beamed upon the scene.
"Eh? What? Speaking from London?" he said to the servant, who had come in with a message. "All right." So little was Sir William prepared for any important communication, he didn't even go into the library to receive it. He crossed to the telephone on the opposite side of the hall.
Napier would probably have concerned himself about the message no more than Lady McIntyre or Madge, but for the chance that made him aware of how intently Greta was taking in the swift change that came over the amiable, fussy, little figure with the receiver at his ear.
"What?What?Say that again.When?Six o'clock last night? You don't mean it was official.... God bless my soul! No, not a word. Our papers haven't come." Then a pause. "How long did you say they'd give? NotthisSaturday? Why, that's to-morrow!" A pause of thirty seconds followed, Sir William hanging on to the receiver, listening.
"I'll think it over," he said excitedly. "I'll call you up later. Good-by." When he had hung up the receiver, he still stood there, rooted, looking through the wall at some astonishing happening far off.
"William," Lady McIntyre started up, "it's not about the boys!"
"Boys? No. God bless my soul! nothing whatever to do with the boys."
"Oh, only some government matter." With a clearing brow she settled again in her corner.
Sir William turned about, and went with quick, fussy, little steps into the library.
Napier followed his chief a moment after, only to be told to go and send a couple of messages. "Hall telephone." Sir William spoke shortly. He sat, elbows on table, head in hands, staring straight before him at some staggering vision.
As Napier stood waiting to get his call through, Miss Greta came over to the writing-table and took the address-book out of the stand. Madge hitched herself up on the end of the table nearest the telephone and sat swinging her long legs.
"What's up?" she demanded, with her laughing impudence.
"Is anything up?" Napier asked.
"There, Miss Greta, didn't I tell you? It's boring enough ofFatherto pinch up his lips and go out of the room like that when he gets some news that would be so nice and interesting for us all."
"Sir William is quite right. A member of the Government never talks in private about official business."
"Oh, doesn't he?"—Wildfire tossed back her mane. "You know perfectly well Father's discretion lasts only as long as the first shock of any piece of news. He thinks he's done all he's called on to do when he doesn't tell us that minute. If you wait, you're safe to hear what it's all about."
"My dear Madge!" remonstrated Miss Greta, sweetly. It was taking her a long time to verify that address.
Patience incarnate at the telephone having refused to deal with two underlings in turn, waited now for the station master to be fetched. "Is that the station master? Well, look here. Is the new express running yet? Yes, what time? I'm speaking from Kirklamont for Sir William McIntyre. He must catch that train. Yes, motoring to—Yes. You could hold it a minute or two, I suppose, if—All right." He had no sooner rung off, than he rang on. "Give me the motor-house." And still Miss Greta sat there, till she heard that the new car was to come round in time for Sir William to catch the four o'clock express at the junction.
As Napier rang off again, his chief was back in the hall, giving directions to a servant about packing a traveling bag. Sir William's family appeared not the least excited at the prospect of the sudden journey. They were too well accustomed to his bustling ways. But Sir William himself had the air of being even more wrought up, now that he'd had time to think over his news, than he had been on receiving it. He stood frowning and working his eyebrows as the conversation in the hall died and the company waited for the enlightenment which Madge had foretold was sure to come.
"Madness!" He flung it out to an invisible audience. "Madness!"
"Oh, Ireland!" said Lady McIntyre, certain of the inevitable connection.
"Ireland? Not at all. Austria."
Miss Greta, her envelope in hand, had turned about in her chair and looked over the back of it, her round head slightly on one side in an attitude of polite attention. Very different from the form adopted by the ladies of Sir William's own family, secure as they were in their knowledge that Sir William would unburden himself.
They seemed disposed to look upon the news, when it did come, as something of an anticlimax, for Sir William preceded his launching of the fact with an increased activity of eyebrow and a furious jingling of seals. "Austria," he said, "has sent an ultimatum to Servia."
"Oh, is that all?" Lady McIntyre's last lingering fear was laid to rest.
"Couched in such terms," Sir William went on, "as no self-respecting nation could accept."
Miss Greta's air of elaborate deference suffered no change. She heard that the Austrian Government was plainly composed of a set of Bedlamites, "scratching matches in a powder-magazine."
Sir William seemed to have his excitement, his anxiety, all to himself, till Mr. Grant came in with Nan Ellis. Even then, Sir William had only one person with whom to share the graver implications in the news.
You'd say Julian neither heard nor saw the girl he had been frankly adoring as they came in. Question after question he fired at Sir William, rather as though that gentleman were responsible for theimpasse. "What!Servia is to take it or leave iten blocby to-morrow night? Why, that means there's less than twenty hours between Europe and—" he stopped appalled.
They still called it Servia at this date.
"Europe?" said Miss Greta, gently. "You mean Servia."
The butler came in with the belated papers.
Sir William snatched up the "Times." He glanced quickly at headlines.
"They don't make much of it," Napier said.
"Naturally," Miss Greta excused them. "They are full of their own difficulty."
"What do you call their own difficulty?" Napier asked, as he paused to turn the paper.
"Why, Ireland," she answered promptly.
Napier found himself looking at her.
"There are some sane people even in Ireland," Sir William threw out over the top of his paper. "But this—this Austrian madness. No warning, no parley; a pistol to Servia's head!"
Julian's voice over-topped Sir William's. "It amounts to the abject humiliation of Servia—or war."
"Servia will accept Austria's terms," said Miss Greta, quietly.
"Never!" Julian shouted. "All the chancelleries of Europe will join in protest."
Sir William paused in his trot up and down that end of the hall. "If Russia goes in, Germany can't stay out. This time to-morrow Europe may be ablaze."
The supposition, sounding through those piping times of peace, rang fantastic. Napier remembered, long after, how he had looked round Kirklamont hall and saw that apart from Sir William there wasn't a soul there who believed in the possibility of war, except one. That one—Miss Greta.
"Monstrous as it would be to force Servia into political slavery," Julian admitted gravely, "there would be one thing worse."
Nan at last lifted her voice. "What would the worst thing be?"
"War," answered Julian.
"What, what!" Sir William caught him up. "There are worse things than war, young man."
"There's nothing worse than war. Fortunately, we've reached a place where the mass of the people know that."
As the awful prospect unfolded, people were not appalled, though they said they were. They weren't even unhappy. They were far too excited. And to be excited about matters of world-wide importance is to be lifted out of the petty round and to catch at the crumbs of greatness.
Napier went up to town with Sir William. At close quarters with official minds, the younger man shared those hours of anxious hope, bred by the earlier interchange between Petersburg and Berlin, London and Belgrade.
Still, and without ceasing, though too late, as was seen in the retrospect, England worked for peace.
Not even the formal declaration of war on Servia, made by Austria on the Tuesday following that fateful Friday, arrested the effort of the British Government to avert the catastrophe.
Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall, the German demand was made for British neutrality and the first shots were fired at Belgrade.
Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the Mittel-Europa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."
Napier flung the letters into the waste-paper basket and forgot them. But as he went about his work, transmitting cryptic telephone calls or hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.
Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then the moment when France cried, "Yes," and Germany's silence was louder in the instructed ear than roar of cannon.
Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing more could be hoped for or immediately be done, he found that, for the first time in his life, he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if only for a single round of the clock.
They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged. The fact struck sharply on the strained senses of the two men who drove up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful August. Late Saturday night Germany had declared war on Russia, and France was already invaded.
In the hall at Kirklamont Lady McIntyre sat with her family, her Russian embroidery, and her boarhounds. She came to meet her husband with, "William, dear! And what's the news?"
Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the point of going upstairs, changed his mind.
Sir William met interrogation testily.
Gavan Napier's first impression on entering the hall had been of the still intensity of Miss Greta's gaze; perhaps he was the more struck by it because it wasn't on himself. On Sir William. As she closed the book she'd been reading aloud and rose, the look was gone. Amid the heats of midsummer and of war she stood cool, pearl-powdery, sweet, with a smile for Napier now, and an expression of deferential welcome for Sir William. Miss Greta left to other folk all worrying questions aimed at jaded and travel-worn men.
No, Sir William wasn't going to sleep till after luncheon. But he was hot and dusty, he would go up....
They would have tackled Napier, but he, too, escaped hard upon Sir William's heels.
As Napier followed his chief down three quarters of an hour later, a laugh floated up. Nan Ellis.
She and Bobby sat on the sofa, taking and giving lessons in the tying of sailors' knots. She looked up carelessly enough at Napier's appearance. "How do you do? Do you know any good knots? I thought you wouldn't."
"She is prettier than I remembered," he said to himself.
Sir William, on the hearth-rug, showed a man already refreshed.
"What's this about the papers?" This raised voice commanded the hall.
"Yes, my dear William, for the third time. That was why we had to try to get our news from London. But they were horrid, yesterday, about telling us anything. It's not very pleasant,"—Lady McIntyre revealed her conception of the use of war news—"when neighbors call, expecting us to know the latest, and find we haven't heard a word since Saturday morning."
"Well, then,"—Sir William filled the hiatus with a single sentence—"at seven o'clock on Saturday evening Germany declared war on Russia."
Instantly the hall was full of hubbub. The excitement bred by that tremendous fact reached even Lady McIntyre. "Dear me! I wonder what the Pforzheims will say to that. Theywillbe astonished."
Miss Greta went through the motions of surprise. "Has it really come?"
Napier, observing her narrowly, said to himself. "She knew." And then, "How did she know?"
Julian Grant came hurrying in with excited face. Before he had spoken to anybody else or so much as looked at Nan: "Tell us, Sir William; it's only in the country, isn't it, that people are talking wildly about England being mixed up in this horrible business?"
"People talk everywhere," Sir William said crustily.
After Sir William's rebuff, Julian had gone over and sat down by Nan. It was Miss Greta who did the talking.
Napier saw her leaning across Nan to engage Mr. Grant. Most gentle she was, ingratiating. As he strolled nearer, Napier heard one or two of her leading questions, put with an air of having no idea how straight they went to the heart of the matter.
"Oh, you think that? I shouldsolike to know why."
Sir William, pretending not to listen, pretending to talk to Madge, lost no word; neither Julian's denunciation of the idea of England's interfering, nor Miss Greta's, "Well, it would be quixotic. And whatever her enemies may say, England is not quixotic." It was the kind of little compliment with a sting in its tail that Miss Greta could deliver with an innocence that must, Napier decided, console her for many an enforced piece of self-suppression.
"'Quixotic!'" Julian began to tell how much worse it would be than that.
Fury rose in Sir William. Napier saw it getting into his eyebrows. Miss Greta saw it, too, Napier could have sworn. Oh, she knew perfectly what she was about. "Itisdifficult,"—she supplemented Julian's assurance—"very difficult, to see how England could come in, with civil war ready to break out at any minute. She would be sacrificing herself for what?" Miss Greta inquired in her suave voice.
"The statesman who would advocate it," said Julian, "would be committing suicide."
Sir William swung round. "You're wide enough of the markthistime."
"You don't mean—"
"Our obligations to France—" Sir William began.
"What obligations?" the young man demanded. "The country hasn't endorsed any obligations." He jumped up and faced Sir William on the hearth-rug. "If behind our backs they've gone and committed us—" Julian's dark eyes flashed a threat of dire reprisal. Provisionally he wiped the floor with those (including, all too flagrantly, the Laird of Kirklamont) who might, "in their colossal ineptitude, want to commit this nation to war."
"That'syouropinion," said Sir William, growing bright red under the friction. "You seem to think we have no right to ours."
Julian halted an instant before the problem. "How much righthasa man to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would have maintained, till all was blue, that an intelligent bricklayer had as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically aware, Sir Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, hehadn'tany such valid right to press his views as had a Grant of Abergarry. Between mirth and consternation, Napier realized that this was the key to the renewed outpouring. It was not so much Julian, but a Grant, very properly telling a McIntyre things good for him to know.
In the heat and fury of the discussion which she had so adroitly precipitated, Miss Greta stretched out a hand and took up her knitting. She sat there with bent head.
"Who? The democracy of England!" Julian was crying to Sir William's angry, "Who is going to prevent?"
"If politicians don't know that, they'll learn it to their cost. English participation in this war is impossible."
"So little impossible," Sir William barked back, "that we'll be in it up to the neck."
There was a moment's hush in the hall, before everybody, except Miss Greta, began to talk at once. Miss Greta never lifted her head. She did not so much as lift her eyes. Napier saw that she was following the success of her ruse with an intensity that held her hands immovable, as though the rapid fingers had been caught, tied fast, in those "field-gray" filaments she wove, as though her palms had been skewered through by the shining steel of her long needles. They stuck out at right angles, seeming to transfix the rigid, death-white hands.
"Never! never!" Julian had cried out at the top of his voice.
"And if we weren't in it," Sir William shouted, "we'd be wiped off the map. What's more, we'd deserve to be."
"I tell you," Julian vociferated, "England will never consent to be dragged into this quarrel."
"England won't be dragged in. She will go in because it would be a shame to keep out. Sheisin!"
Napier sat damning himself with uncommon vigor. Idiot! that he hadn't foreseen the Von Schwarzenberg's agile apprehension of this new use to which Nanchen's lover might be put. Too late the realization that her baulked eagerness for official news had made her egg on Julian to engage his fellow Scot at their real "national game"—which isn't golf at all. Debate's the name of it. Those two played it with passion. Nothing could stop them now. Sir William trumpeted at Julian, and Julian skirled wildly back. The hall was in confusion.
"You said England neverwould," Nan cried across to Miss Greta.
"I said she wouldn't be so ill-advised," was the barely audible answer.
The shell-shock of Sir William's bomb had shaken even Greta von Schwarzenberg. From that first impact she recovered her mental poise at a price. Her face was white with the cost of it, or under the tension of some immediate decision. It suddenly came over Napier: she wants more than anything on earth to warn the Pforzheims.
She made a slight movement. It brought the clock within range. Five minutes to luncheon time. "Five minutes," Napier said to himself, "in which to get the news to Glenfallon," if he didn't prevent her.
It suddenly flashed over Napier that he might learn more by letting her communicate with the Pforzheims than by preventing her. A highly important conclusion about Miss Greta herself might thus be reached in the only possible way. And the harm done by the Pforzheims knowing? The die was already cast. The German Government knew that. The whole world would know it in a few hours. The Pforzheims couldn't even gamble on the tip. The stock exchange was closed.
There was yet another consideration very present to Napier's cautious type of mind. Suppose he were mistaken as to the woman's designs. Such a mistake, besides being intensely disagreeable to any one of decent feeling, would "do" for you with the McIntyres. Undoubtedly would "do" for you with Nan.
All the same, an expressionless intensity of the Schwarzenberg's stillness, in the midst of the hubbub all about her, kept the observing mind alert.
She stirred, she half rose. In the midst of his excitement, Napier caught himself smiling faintly. He caught himself, because Miss Greta had caught him.
"Devil take her acuteness! She wouldn't be sitting down calmly at the luncheon-table if she didn't know I had my eye on her," he said to himself. He might as well have said it aloud. She smiled at him across the board. The china-blue eyes were as hard as big alley marbles. She raised her cider-glass to her lips.
Nan turned to her impulsively. "Do you still think—" She stared at the smashed tumbler and the cascade down Miss Greta's pink frock.
"Oh, Nan dear, my new dress!"
"Me? Do you mean—did I do that? Oh, my! I'm most terribly sorry!"
"If I sponge it off instantly—" Greta rose. Nan rose.
Madge rose. "I'll help you," she said.
"Certainly not!" Miss Greta cast back a look not to be mistaken, and hurried off, holding her skirt out in front of her and looking at it with a very passion of concern.
Should he bolt after her? Ridiculous! How could he dog the steps of a woman going upstairs to sponge her frock!
Should he go outside and waylay the messenger? He hadn't even the flimsiest excuse, except one that wasn't producible, unless he could catch her red-handed. To catch her sending a note to Ernst Pforzheim, what would that prove? Wouldn't any of us in her place want to share such tremendous news with our compatriots, let alone with a lover?
She was away less than eleven minutes. Napier timed her. When she came back she had on a different skirt and a subtly different expression. Whatever had been on her mind as well as on her dress, she had got rid of both. The others still argued and speculated. The staggering news was new to them. Curiously, it was already old to Napier, old and grim and implacable. He shoved it wearily aside. While Miss Greta's head was bent and she thought him covertly eyeing her, Napier drank refreshment out of the face at her side. The little girl from over the water, what was it she did to him? The mystery of these things.
Napier took Julian out on the terrace to cool off, though he said it was to smoke. "I say, day and night for over a week I've heard nothing but war. Talk to me about something pleasant," he said. It was a plain lead, but Julian was a mole of a man.
"What do you call pleasant in a world like this?"
"Oh, several things." From where they sat they could see Nan Ellis under the trees at the entrance to the park, and Wildfire flying back and forth through the air—as Nan urged the swing.
Napier remembered that, in all the heady talk before and during luncheon, Julian had hardly looked at the girl. When she spoke he didn't hear. Napier sat now studying his friend. "Don't say I didn't warn you. There's one person who'll be precious tired of all this war-talk if it goes on."
Julian lifted absent eyes. "Nan? Not a bit of it. You don't know Nan. Whenever I stray to personal affairs, it's, 'Come and show me on the map where Luxemburg is,' and, 'Just where have they crossed the French border?'"
"I suppose you're not by any chance so taken up telling her where the Germans are in France that you don't know whereabouts you are with America?"
Hedidn'tknow. He'd been waiting till he could see his way clear to detach the girl from Miss Greta. And then this appalling business—
Napier's silence seemed to convey to Julian some hint of an unspoken arraignment. She had written to her mother, he said, in extenuation. "Yes, about me. She is devoted to her mother. Yes, I've been thinking it over. You see, the Germans—"
"God bless my soul! Let's leave the Germans to stew in their own juice an hour or two!" Gavan got up and walked back and forth in front of the two garden chairs and of the man left sitting there. More than by any previous extravagance of Julian's, some of the things he said at luncheon had angered Napier. They fairly made Sir William choke. They were of a character to make Sir James Grant incline to choke the speaker.Thatwas the knowledge which opened the door to the fear that clutched at Napier—fear of himself. Fear of the temptation revealed in this growing conviction of his, that if he let Julian drift on the new tide that was sweeping in, it would carry him away, far beyond the securities, the privileges of a favored son of the old order. Almost certainly it would carry him away from Nan Ellis. Whether an illusion or not, Napier felt that he had only to sit there in the other chair and do nothing, to see Julian blindly "do for" himself. As he walked up and down, Napier discoursed upon woman.
"You mean," Julian said, with the air of the docile disciple receiving a brand-new doctrine, "you mean that, in spite of feeling sure of her—bless her!—you think I ought to get something definite settled this afternoon?"
"You certainly ought to find out where you stand. Youcan'tlet it drift." He knew that what he really meant was thathecouldn't. He got up and walked away toward the loch.
On his way back, Julian was coming with that nervous step to meet him. Well, he'd spoken to her. She admitted she was fond of him. "But I don't want to marry you," she had said. "I told her," he went on, "that I couldn't believe that. Fortunately for me, for I didn't see how I could bear it. 'You don't want to marryanybody just now?' I suggested. And what on earth do you think she said?"
"How doIknow!" Napier returned irritably.
"She said, 'Well, I'll just see about that! You mustn't go pulling me up by the roots to see how I'm growing,' she said. 'It puts me back.' And then I very nearly took hold of her. But all I did was to sit tight and say: 'Whichwayare you growing, Nan? IfIcan't find out, I'll have to get Gavan to.' 'You'd ask Gavan!' And she looked so startled, I laughed. 'So you don't want Gavan to know how you behave,' I said. I wasn't surprised!"
He brought it out with an incredible lightheartedness. If underneath his surface equability Julian was really agitated, shaken, torn, it was not on the score of his own and Nan's future. It was for the immediate fate of Europe. He swung back to it as they came in sight of the hall. "I was thinking as I came along that our diplomacy for the last twenty years—"
A servant crossed the lawn to meet them with two telegrams for Sir William.
"And the telephone, sir. Sir William left word that you—Yes, London, sir." Napier hurried back to his post.
Tommy Durrant was at the other end—a message for Sir William from the Prime Minister. Napier wrote it down. He'd ring Tommy up before six. Any more news? King Albert's letter, asking for the support of England, had been read in the House with immense effect. "In spite of some labor opposition, they'll vote the credit to-night; you'll see. If the German fleet molests the French, we'll be on hand!" cried Tommy along the wire. "Army? Mobilizing over night. Kitchener's back from Egypt."
Under the renewal of the hammer-strokes, Napier's sense of a world blindly driven to some incredible doom gave to the family group, when he rejoined it, an air of unreality. And this in spite of the fact that Miss Greta did not make the mistake of ignoring the subject which in all minds usurped the foreground.
She made her own little contribution with an air of engaging frankness. "If the war were going to be fought out on sea, the British fleet, of course—But you wouldn't say yourself, would you, that the British were a military people?"
"Not in the sense that Germany is," Napier agreed.
"In no sense at all," said Julian.
"But Germany! Every son of Germany is a soldier!" Miss Greta's tone was just a trifle too superior.
But wasn't she right? Even the Pforzheims. They, too, were soldiers. These friendly, slightly ridiculous neighbors underwent in Napier's mind a sudden and violent transformation. They stripped off their stage tweeds, their check shirts, their superabundant jewelry; they stood in uniform. Severe, infinitelypraktisch, six foot, each, of formidable enemy.
After tea there was a general movement.
"Coming for a stroll?" Julian stood looking down at Nan.
"Yes, but itiscold toward sunset in this Scotland of yours. I must have my jacket."
"Oh, well, where is it?" he demanded, with a touch of his absent-minded impatience.
She looked at him. "Idon't know. In the coat-room, perhaps. You'll find it somewhere."
"Do you think I shall?" he questioned dubiously. "What's it like?"
"Well, of all things!" She sat up very straight. "You mean to say you never noticed? It isn't thevery leastlike anybody else's."
"Oh, I dare say I'll remember it all right when I see it." Julian retired meekly to the coat-room.
Nan brought her eyes down from the florid, gilt molding above the window to the level of Napier's face.
"You look worried," she announced.
"I am worried."
"Just about the war—nothing particular?"
Yes, there was one thing in particular. "One thing I can't honestly say I'm happy about." His speech slowed under the quick shifting of light and shadow in her eyes. What did she think he had been going to say when he began that brought that darkening as he ended, "I can't honestly say I am happy about Julian."
"AboutJulian!"
"Yes. He tells me you and he aren't engaged, and he doesn't know why."
"Is that all you've got to worry you?"
"Doesn't it seem to you enough to justify any friend—"
She was dumb.
Napier took refuge in a rapid survey of Julian's character and advantages.
"Do you know," she broke in, "you're talking to me about Mr. Grant as if you were recommending a chauffeur. He belongs, I gather, to a reputable family; he's steady; he was a long time in his last place; sober, very,verysober! But I really don't need any testimonials to Mr. Grant's character," she wound up under her breath, as that young man emerged gloomily from the room at the bottom of the hall.