"I say, there aremillionsof coats here."
"Oh, very well, I'll come."
Hehadbeen an ass! The sole gain, as Napier saw it, out of a rather ridiculous encounter was to establish the fact of the girl's sensitiveness for Julian's dignity.
For Sir William, the Kirklamont charm worked well. Again the next morning he slept late. There was in consequence rather more bustle than usual attendant on his departure. Nan Ellis had rushed over early to say good-by. It struck Napier that she was both grave and excited. She joined him for an instant at the table, where he stood putting some papers into the despatch box.
"Doyouwant me to?" she asked in a low voice, as though continuing a conversation.
"To—"
"Yes, to marry Julian." Then, quick as the darting of a dragon-fly, she pounced on his possible answer. "I sha'n't do it—not even for you. But if that's what youwant, I'd just like to know." She waited. Napier, too, for once in his life tongue-tied.
"Well, good-by everybody. Isn't that lazy dog Bobby down yet?" Sir William demanded.
"He's where he always is these days," answered Madge; "gone off to Glenfallon."
"Wrong!" Bobby was striding into the hall by the side door. He looked rather glum for Bobby.
"Find your friends out of sorts?" Sir William inquired, with his shrewd look. "Nasty jar for Carl and Ernst, opening their newspapers this morning." Sir William was not forgetting to keep an eye on the private case and the summer mackintosh on their way into the car. "Well, what do they think about the warnow? Eh, what?"
"I don't suppose I shall ever know what they think," his son answered.
"I can't think why you say that, dear," his mother remonstrated. "I don't find them at all reserved. They talk with perfect freedom tome."
"Well, they won't any more. They're gone," said Bobby.
"Gone where?"
"I don't know. And, what's more, the caretaker doesn't know."
"You don't mean to say they've gone for good?" Madge sounded a sharp regret.
Bobby nodded. "Glenfallon's shut up."
"But theycan'tbe gone for good.Canthey?" Lady McIntyre turned to Miss Greta.
"How should I know?" The answer came a trifle too quickly.
Sir William got into the car. Napier followed him. He leaned over the slammed door. "When do you say they went?" he asked Bobby.
"Late last night. Bag and baggage."
Those were the days when all thoughts turned to the fleet. The expected leave of Jim McIntyre, and of many a sailor son, had been cancelled. Terrible and glorious things were happening in the element ruled by Britannia. Only the stern discretion of the Admiralty prevented detailed knowledge. Maintenance of this self-denying ordinance on the part of the authorities could not prevent the rumors, which ran about, of a decisive naval engagement. Lady McIntyre, lying awake at night, distinctly heard the boom of guns off the Dogger Bank. Her beloved Jim (God keep him!) was crumpling up the Germans in the North Sea.
It was something to have Colin home from Aldershot and Neil from Shorncliffe. The fact that the two young soldiers were granted leave because they were going off on active service was hidden from their mother.
The knowledge brought Sir William post-haste from London. His proud eyes went from the natty-looking Neil, to the taller, elder soldier with the ugly, honest face. The father's gaze rested longest there. "If you knew the trouble I had—I sha'n't try it again. This place is too far away at such a time."
Lady McIntyre inquired anxiously for admiralty news.
"Well, the Turks have got theBreslauand theGoeben." Sir William glanced at his sons. They said nothing.
"Oh,that," said his wife. "I mean about the great North Sea engagements."
"The movements of the fleet aren't published."
"Published! Ofcoursenot," retorted Lady McIntyre. "But that's no reason they shouldn't tell you."
"Well, I'm afraid they haven't."
"Nonsense! It's just because you've grown so secretive all of a sudden. You're nearly as bad as Colin. Idowish Jim would write!" A rush of tears blurred the blueness of her eyes. Evidently the presence of the other sons only emphasized for the mother the absence of her sailor. "Surely, William, you know about the naval battle. Why, I hear the guns all night long!"
"In your head, my dear," said Sir William, gently.
There was a moment's poignant silence. In truth, the reverberation of those guns of rumor shook all hearts.
"Well, Neil, go on,"—Madge returned to her low chair at Miss Greta's other side. "You were telling us about the new army regulations. Go on."
Miss Greta had fixed her eyes on Napier with that "savior of my life," expression that he was coming to know. He made an ungrateful return. "And how is your 'little friend'?"
"Oh, Nan is well, thank you."
"She ought to be back by now." Lady McIntyre was making a brave effort to put away fears for her sailor. "Nan," she explained to Napier, "very kindly agreed to take the car and do an errand or two which Miss Greta's slight headache—"
The thought flashed across Napier's mind of the far worse pang it would have cost Miss Greta to be away when official news was arriving hot and hot. She listened now to Sir William's reasons why Liège could hold out indefinitely.
Over the shrubberies the winged hat of the girl messenger rose against the landscape, and again, hardly had the car swerved round to the door, before, with that same blackbird-over-the-hedge action, she was out of the car and coming into the hall. "Yes, I did all the commissions, and in about half the time you said. Oh, Sir William!" She went up and shook hands. "You see, I am here still." She stood childishly in front of him, as if waiting for a further extension of playtime.
"That's right, and you look as if it agreed with you."
"Oh, itdoes!" She gave her hand to Napier. And then, turning with one of her quick movements, she found a singular thing to say to a captain of the Black Watch and a young gentleman who held a commission in the Seaforths. "I've seen soldiers, Scotch soldiers! Theydidlook funny!"
"Funny!" said Sir William. The two elder sons turned away their eyes. Bobby grinned and contorted his legs....
"Yes, soldiers wearing aprons."
"I suppose you mean kilts," said Sir William. "Did you never see—"
"Oh, yes, of course, on the stage, and in pictures. But these soldiers had on the funniest little brown apronsovertheir kilts."
"Temporary measure," said Colin, slowly. "They'll soon be all in khaki."
"And it was awfully difficult to get your check cashed." She turned toward Lady McIntyre. "They say now there isn't any silver left in Scotland. And inyourtown there isn't even copper. I hope you don't mind; I had to take stamps in change. There,"—she produced a roll of postal-orders—"are what we'll have to use for money now, they say."
Lady McIntyre protested, but Sir William indorsed the news. Like the khaki aprons, a "temporary measure." Miss Nan made her accounting.
"All these horrid little scraps of paper!" Lady McIntyre complained.
"You can always change them for gold," Neil said.
"If you do, you must keep it circulating," warned Sir William. "No hoarding of gold!"
"But we can't get any more—that's just the trouble."
"You ought to have asked Miss Nan," said Madge.
"But I did, and Nan hadn't any."
"Why, I sawpilesof gold on your table when I went up to the inn with Miss Greta's note yesterday!"
"Yes; I'd got it out for her—all I had."
Miss von Schwarzenberg was leaning against the back of the settle. "What a pity!" she said quietly. "I wish I'd known you wanted gold."
"But,dearGreta, Isaid—"
"Did you? I couldn't have taken it in. It's gone now. To a poor person in desperate straits—A stranded American. That was why I borrowed it."
"Bor-ch-rowed it," she said, with the vanishing "ch" like a ghost of the final sound in the Scots word "loch."
Captain Colin was looking at her from under his thick, whitey-yellow eyebrows—in spite of the fact that his father was talking to him very earnestly about the tactics of the German Army. Beyond a doubt, consciousness of Miss Greta's foreignness was growing. Her slight burring of the "r" had never sounded so marked as it did to-day. For all her long residence in the States, Miss Greta was far more German than anybody in the Kirklamont circle had quite realized until the war. And now very plainly this "Germanism" was taking its place as a bar to conversation, a something still not productive of hostility so much as ofgêne.
"I'd be so grateful, my dear," Lady McIntyre said half aside to Nan, "if you'd make Greta bathe her temples and lie down."
"Yes, let us go. All this—" Nan looked round the hall through a sudden bewilderment of compunction which fell like a veil over her brightness—"all this is dreadful for you."
"For me! Oh, no!"—Miss Greta held her head higher than ever—"it's not dreadful forme." She smiled a little fiercely,—to Napier's sense—as she left the hall, Madge on one side and Nan on the other.
When Sir William went off with his three sons for a stroll, Lady McIntyre accompanied them as far as the gate.
She brought back into the hall a face more agitated than Napier had ever seen it. Irresolute, miserable, she paused on her way to the sofa where Napier sat, trying to read. "Colin," she jerked out in a guarded voice, "has thestrangestnotions!" The pale eyes looked round more helpless than ever. "He says Greta tried to pump him about army matters, and he's sorry he didn't warn Neil! He's going to. Colin said,—oh, in the unkindest way! 'That woman ought to go home!' 'Home?' I said, 'why, this is Greta's home!' 'No, it isn't,' he said; 'Germany's her home, and she ought to go there!' Oh, Colin can be very hard when he likes!" She choked back her tears, as Miss Ellis came running down the stairs. "What is it?" Lady McIntyre started to her feet. "Is Greta worse?"
"Oh, no. It's only Ju—Mr. Grant has got back. We saw him coming across the—"
He stood in the doorway. Nan went forward, hand out, welcome in every lineament, a kind of all-enfolding affection in the forward inclination of the whole, lightly poised figure.
Napier looked on dully.
Though Julian was smiling as he took the girl's hand, she said, with quick intuition of his mood, "What's happened?" And after he'd come in and greeted the others, "Aren't they well, your father and mother?" she persisted gently. "They haven't come? Iamsorry! I knew something was wrong." She folded her sympathy round him like a cloak.
"It isn't their not coming." He dropped into a chair. "It's the stuff I've had to listen to in town. And in the railway carriages too. The colossal tomfoolery—the—the indecent way people were jubilating over the greatest disaster in history. This is the kind of fierce test that people go down under. They'd be ashamed to be unfair, lying, and greedy for themselves. They think it's a merit to be unfair, lying, and greedy for England."
Lady McIntyre cast her eye up the staircase, whither her thoughts had already gone. She was in the act of getting up, when Julian broke out moodily, "And the way people already are beginning to talk and behave about the Germans in England!" He had his instances.
Napier pointed out that, regrettable as these manifestations were, they were fewer and of a much milder character with us than in other countries. He spoke of ill-treatment in Germany and Austria of retiring ambassadors and even of neutrals. He turned to Nan Ellis. "Yourcountrymen could tell you a tale of these last days that would make you open your eyes. Ask your ambassador."
"If the Germans really did," Julian began; but Napier picked him up smartly, "You forget, weknow."
"Well, well, it's one proof the more, if we needed the more, that war brutalizes noncombatants as well as combatants."
Lady McIntyre shook her ear-rings desparingly. "Aromatic vinegar," she murmured, as she went upstairs.
While Julian exposed diplomacy and denounced governments, Nan sat, chin in hand, drinking it in, as if she recognized in these doctrines that true faith for which all her life she had been thirsting. Under the subtle flattery, Julian, in spite of weariness, waxed yet more eloquent. Napier pulled out his watch and made a low exclamation, intended to indicate some pressing business overdue. He went up the stairs two steps at a time. And yet the pace wasn't quick enough to please him. Away, he must get away. Julian had been pitying Colin and Neil, "pawns in the great game." Napier knew now that he envied them. Oh, that he too might go and fight! He walked to and fro in his room in the first access of that fever that was to beset him sore until he should be standing in the trenches of the Somme. With Julian's denunciation of war nagging at his ears, Napier hailed war as the Great Simplification. Not only of international troubles, but of private ones. Instead of ten thousand struggles, one.
Well, at all events, he couldn't, as he now realized (and happily, by reason of the great crisis, he wasn't going to be asked to) stay here in Scotland and look on at this love-making! War had its uses, even to the civilian.
An hour later he was still sitting there, back to the window, smoking innumerable cigarettes and trying to read his novel. A light, rattling sound made him turn round. A fine hail on the window-panes this cloudless August evening. He looked out.
Julian was down below with a handful of coarse sand. A sign: Come down.
What now?
The hall was empty, except of the footmen beginning to lay tea. Outside Julian waited.
"You're off to London to-morrow, too," he began. "Is that the idea?"
"Yes, that was the idea."
"Well, then there's precious little time." He was threading a way through the shrubberies to a half-concealed garden bench.
"I've been wanting your advice, Gavan. The fact is,"—he smiled as he made the confession—"I don't know quite where I am."
"I should have thought you must be in a happier place than most mortals." Napier sat down on a half-concealed wooden seat.
Julian joined him with an eager, "What makes you say that?"
"Well, it must be plain to the blindest she is very fond of you."
"You think she is?" He sat wondering. Then he presented the grievance closest to hand. "She wouldn't let me kiss her just now, and I've been away three whole days."
"She has let you before?"
"Yes."
"As if she was in love with you?"
"Shemustbe, or else she wouldn't, would she, now? A girl like that?"
Napier tried to ask if these scenes were of frequent occurrence, whether they were courted or evaded. The question stuck in his throat. And then, exactly as if he had spoken, Julian answered.
"She's a little capricious about that kind of thing. But,"—he turned trustfully to his friend—"girls oftenare, aren't they?"
Napier sat there without speaking. "I wondered," Julian went on, "if it could possibly mean the sort of disapproval that's putting me into other people's black books—about this devil's mess of a war. But you saw she took quite a rational view about that."
"I saw she tookyourview. As to its being rational—"
"Oh, well, we won't say any more about thatnow. I've talked war till I'm sick. I thought I was coming back here to—something I don't find."
Into Napier's silence Julian dropped the suggestion. "It may only be that I don't understand women." In his quandary Napier wondered aloud whether you ever did understand a person brought up in a different country.
"Or in your own," Julian said moodily. "People I've known since I was a baby I begin to realize I've never known at all!"
"Oh, come, it isn't as bad as that, though we're all of us having our eyes opened these days. Those Pforzheims now; I'm persuaded they got hold of the Kirklamont newspapers and kept them back with the express idea of giving Greta an excuse for getting the official news they wanted."
Julian stared, and then he turned his head wearily away. "What rot!"
The tone nettled Napier. "You seem to have forgotten your own suspicions of that woman."
"They were never ofthatsort, thank God!" Julian flung out. "I didn't like the idea of Nan's friend carrying on a doubtful love affair—But that's all pettiness. The awful actualities of war have brought fine things to the surface in Greta von Schwarzenberg's character."
Napier told himself that he knew what had been brought to the surface, and what effect that bringing had had on Julian.
The spectacle of injustice, or even the danger of injustice, would at any time make Julian Grant forget his own interests and yours and anybody's who wasn't being actively oppressed.
"Have you been to Gull Island since?"
"I've had no time for picnicking," Julian answered shortly.
"Well, since you're championing Schwarzenberg, it's your business to see she isn't made a tool of. You heard how the Pforzheims vanished. I've wondered,"—Napier found it curiously difficult to go on. There was a quality—he had noticed it before—a something in Julian's frankness which put astuteness out of countenance, something that made suspicion seem not only vulgar but melodramatic. Napier felt obliged to throw a dash of whimsicality, of confessed extravagance, into the speculation, "Whether the reason we weren't allowed to land on Gull Island was those Pforzheims. They may have made an emergency camp out of your Smugglers' Cave."
Julian's weary disgust lightened a little. "I had no notion you were so romantic, Gavan."
"Very well, then. If you won't look into the matter, I must get some one else. And set afoot a new crop of rumors. Risk involving Sir William in responsibility for—"
"Oh, see here! I'll go, and hold an inquisition on the gulls and cormorants."
Napier thanked him a little sheepishly. "Of course I don't expect you to find anything. I only feel we've got to make sure."
Sir William and Napier returned to London to face those days of intolerable suspense, when men carried about like a waking nightmare the new proof that an impregnable fortress was a thing of the past. The defenses of Liège had failed. A vast system of forts had been pounded into ruin. Through breach after breach, the German hosts were pouring. People far away from the scenes of carnage and chaos woke in the night under a clutch of dread. What is it? What's the matter with life?The Germans!On and on they were coming, and nothing, it seemed, could stop them.
Then came the Mons retreat and the Battle of the Marne. Belgium was in ruins, but the German flood had been stayed. Sir William, worn and aged after a second heart attack, carefully concealed from every one except the doctor, and Gavan came down from London to spend Saturday night and Sunday at the place he had taken on the Essex coast. Apart from public anxieties, Sir William had been subject to the annoyance of questions in the House, about his chauffeur—a member of his Majesty's Government couldn't be driven about by an unnaturalized German. A new chauffeur had brought Sir William from town.
"Do say you are going to like the house, William, dear!" his wife implored on the familiar note, before he had time to see anything beyond the entrance and the drawing-room. "Remember how little time we had to find anything near enough for you. But talk about it's being afurnishedhouse!"
"Great luck to find such a place," Napier reassured her. "How did you hear of it?"
Lady McIntyre shook her head, as with an effort to shake some clear recollection out of the inner disorder. "We heard of so many! But this—I think Greta saw an advertisement somewhere about this one. I had to come and do the inspecting because of that silliness about getting a permit for Greta."
"Seems all right," said Sir William, rattling his seals as he joined Napier in the bay-window.
"Well, you wouldn't have said that if you'd seen it as those people left it. When I went back to Kirklamont, I told Greta, the hideous bareness—oh, it would never do! But she simply insisted on my going to bed." Lady McIntyre smiled at confession of that helplessness which for long years had, after her beauty, been her strongest card. "Greta said everything would be all right. You had arranged about the silly permit, and the very next day she came down, all by herself, and just took hold."
Sir William glanced at Napier, as he asked his wife where Miss Greta was now.
"She's closing up Kirklamont. That is, shehasclosed it up. They're coming at five forty-five, Greta and the children and Miss Ellis. I've come to like that Ellis girl. And I believe Madge has, too, though she won't say so."
Sir William had been walking about, opening doors, looking out of windows. "Seems the very thing. Capital view, too! I congratulate you, my dear."
She beamed, "Don't congratulate me. It's Greta."
"Even the chairs are just right!" Sir William sank down in one by the open French window.
Lady McIntyre laughed, delighted. "It's your own chair! out of the library at Kirklamont."
"Never!" said Sir William, staring down at the arms, first on one side and then on the other.
"Gretasaidyou'd be glad of your own special chair when you came home tired!"
"Well, she's right." He abandoned himself a moment to the embrace of his old friend.
"Iknewyou'd be surprised!" Lady McIntyre pattered on. "Iwas. I should have thought of chairs and things myself, if it hadn't been called 'a furnished house.' Andchargedfor as a furnished house! But I should never have thought of furnishing a furnished—And even if Ihad, I should have been appalled at the idea of packing up heavy furniture and moving it about this way. Linen and silver, of course, and a few vases, and my china cats, just to give a feeling of home, but a thing like a great hulking arm-chairwith a reading desk—!"
"Yes," Sir William indulged her, "I should as soon have thought of hoicking up my bed."
"Your bed has been hoicked up," she triumphed. "Greta didn't forget you were very particular about your bed."
"You don't say so."
"Oh, yes. You said once the reason you'd never been back to Germany was because of the beds. I was afraid at the time she'd feel that. But you see howbeautifullyshe's taken it. And what about the war, William?" she said, in exactly the same tone.
Sir William was feeling absently for his cigar-case. "Are they still slaughtering those poor Belgians? Matches? I'm sure there must be matches somewhere." She got up and looked vaguely about the big room, as though she expected the matches to come running like a dog that hears its name called. "Anybody but Greta might forget a little thing like that. There! I told you so!" she exclaimed, as Napier produced a box from the far side of the clock. "What doyousay, Mr. Napier? Will it be over by Christmas? Greta is sure it will."
"H'm! H'm! About Miss Greta,"—Sir William struck in with that same exchange of glances the name had called forth at the beginning. "Gavan and I met the inspector of police as we came through the station. New broom. In a great taking. He'd been hauled over the coals, it seems, by an old retired colonel hereabouts—fella called McManus. Has a place a little way down the coast. These retired men are the devil. They don't know they're retired. This fella McManus got wind of a German lady who was here for a week and who, he said, went about poking her nose everywhere."
"Shehadto poke her nose to get housemaids and an odd man. But McManus!Hemust be an old horror."
"Well, that's what he said, 'Poking her nose everywhere,' when he lodged his complaint with the inspector. Very decent fella, the inspector."
"Lodged a complaint!" Lady McIntyre echoed. "Against a member of our household."
"Yes, yes. It's all right. I told the inspector we knew all about Miss von Schwarzenberg, and could absolutely vouch for her."
"Here she is," said Napier from the window.
In another minute Madge and Bobby were bursting in, followed by the other two. Miss von Schwarzenberg, wearing a new look of subdued triumph. The American, eager, stirred, smiling in Napier's direction, and yet far from seeming as happy as the girl adored by Julian should be.
Madge and Bobby filled the room with their accounts of the queer journey, the long stoppages, the waiting for government trains to pass, and the way the troops seemed to be moving about the country.
"Miss Greta thought it wasn't soldiers," Bobby threw in. "Shesays, coal for the fleet."
"That was only at first," Madge defended Miss Greta, "before we found out that we were held up for another—a perfectlythrillingreason! But it's a dead secret, isn't it, Miss Greta?"
"The deadest kind," she answered, as she bent her head for Nan to unpin her veil.
"Russians!" said Madge in a loud stage whisper. "They're sendingarmiesof 'em."
"Russians?" Lady McIntyre blinked rapidly and looked at the door in a perturbed way.
"Yes, to fight the—" Bobby turned tactfully to his father. "I'll be boundyouknow all about it."
"Not a syllable."
Madge laughed. "Dear old Daddy!" she said patronizingly. "Well,weknow, so you needn't keep it up. And it's an awfully good dodge. Think of the surprise it'll be."
"It would be a surprise, right enough," her father admitted.
"You see," Bobby continued, to enlighten his mama, "the North Sea's full of mines, so they've shipped the Russian troops from Archangel, landed 'em in Scotland, and they're rushing 'em through England to the front."
Whether Sir William had any knowledge of this spirited proceeding or not, Bobby had plenty. He'd collected impressions on the journey.
Sir William was occupied in paying facetious tribute to Miss Greta for her manipulation of beds and arm-chairs. "Eh? what?" he interrupted himself to say to a footman whom he discovered unexpectedly behind the barrier of the reading-desk. "Didn't you hear? Tea for these ladies."
"Beg pardon, Sir William, but there's an inspector of police—"
"Inspector! What's he wantnow?"
"He—a—well, sir, he'd like to speak to you for a moment, sir."
Sir William rose rather testily and went out. He took the precaution to turn back and shut the door, after the footman had followed him across the threshold.
"Well," said Miss Greta brightly to Madge, "I am wondering whether you will like your room. You'll find it next mine. You remember the plan I drew?"
"Oh, yes. I'll go up after tea. Simply ravenous!"
Miss Greta bent toward the girl. "We aren't fit to sit down to tea."
Wildfire turned to protest. She seemed to read in the soft face a resolution no stranger would have detected either there, or in the words, "I'm going up too, in a minute. I'll come for you." Madge went quietly out.
Through the open window only the voices from the next room were audible, not the words. Lady McIntyre was all too aware of them.
Miss Greta joined Napier at the window. "Pretty view, don't you think?" She, too, listened to those accents in the next room.
As the door opened, her eyelids fluttered, but she never looked round. The footman was back again with an excuse instead of tea.
"It's the range, m'lady. Itseems,"—hurriedly he appeared to apologize for a stove suspected of an untimely desire for taking a stroll—"itseemsto 'ave gone hout. But the tea won't be long. And Sir William says will Miss von Sworsenburg kindly step into the next room."
Miss Von "Sworsenburg" had obliged with a cloudless face. It was Lady McIntyre who looked disturbed, even guilty. She took refuge in a work-bag, which she unhooked from the back of her chair. She jerked it open hurriedly on her knees and bent her head to rummage in the depths. Conversation between Napier and Nan languished. Both were listening to those voices in the next room.
The door opened abruptly and in bustled Sir William, ruffling up the little hair he had left and looking the very picture of discomfort.
"Perfect dolt, that fella!" he threw over his shoulder to Miss Greta.
She followed Sir William with an air of calmness, not to say detachment, that even she, past mistress in the art of conveying the finer shades of superiority, had never excelled. "I left my gloves, I think," she said.
Sir William had gone to the bell and rung twice. "That fella says she ought to go and register. Makes out he'll get into trouble if she doesn't go at once."
"Register, William? What nonsense! Why on earth shouldshe?"
"Why? Oh, the permit was informal, and only for a given time. Silly idiots!"
"Well, well," his wife soothed him, "tell the creatures, if they're in such a ridiculous hurry—she'll motor over to-morrow."
"To-morrow won't do. He's had orders. It's got to be to-night." Sir William spoke in his most testy tone.
Nan had sprung up and gone to her friend. Napier, too, had come forward. He picked up the missing gloves.
"Oh, thank you," said Miss Greta, with her smile. But it was the look on Nan's face that struck Napier—a look that haunted him afterwards. If it hadn't been absurd, he would have thought she was thanking him with all her soul; wasgivinghim something. Something of unbelievable sweetness, "just because I stooped to pick up that woman's gloves!"
It was all in a flash. The next moment Nan stood buttoning up the coat she had so lately unbuttoned, and saying, "If you really must, I'm coming too!"—her eyes angry, her face ashamed. Miss von Schwarzenberg made no answer. Lady McIntyre was jerking out a succession of nervous questions which nobody took the trouble to notice.
"What we're coming to,Idon't know." Sir William fumed and strutted up and down.
"Yes, Sir William." The servant stood there.
"Where's thetea?" Lady McIntyre in a sinking ship would have cried, "Where's the lifeboat?" with much the same accent and look of desperation.
"It's coming, m'lady. It's on the way up."
"Didn't I tell you five minutes ago"—the footman was catching it on the other side now—"you were to telephone for the car?"
"Yes, Sir William. It's coming round now, Sir William."
"Come, then," Miss Greta said, as though Nan were the person desired by the police. "I'm afraid I must carry you off."
"Oh, my dear!" Lady McIntyre rose with precipitation. Her work-bag rolled to the ground, but she didn't notice. Her blue eyes were on Greta's face a second, and then turned beseechingly on her husband.
"William!" She hurried over to him. "Surely, William,you—"
"Mere red-tape—mere red-tape, my dear," he said to his wife. "Though, if Lord Dacre wasn't coming over at half-past six on official business—I'd go with you," he said handsomely to Miss von Schwarzenberg. Miss von Schwarzenberg murmured politely in her veil that she wouldn't on any account have Sir William take so much trouble.
Lady McIntyre had jerked her head at Napier. But Napier seemed not to know his part in this scene. He stood silent, looking at the indignant face of Miss Greta's "little friend."
"It's too dreadful to let you go without one of us!" Lady McIntyre wailed. "ShallIcome, Greta dear?" And then, a good deal unstrung at the possibility of having her offer accepted: "N-not that I'd be much good, I'm afraid. I was never in a police station in my life."
"I don't imagine," said Miss Greta, with her fine mixture of tolerance and delicate contempt, "that any of us have been much in police stations."
Recollections of Lord Dacre had not brought entire repose to Sir William. He twisted round in the comfortable chair:
"What do you say, Gavan? You won't mind representing me in this little—" he paused as the butler passed between them with a tray. A footman at his heels announced the car.
"Oh, shecan'tgo without tea!" Lady McIntyre cried. Then with extreme felicity she added, "Why, before they hang people they give them tea!" Nan bit her lip.
The incomparable Greta smiled. "It doesn't the least matter about tea, dear Lady McIntyre. And I'd rather get to Newton Hackett before the po—the place shuts." The fraction of an instant her eyes rested on the servants, and then, as she went toward the door, "Sogood of you, sokindto let me have the motor!"
Miss Greta contrived, with economy of means beyond all praise, to give the expedition an air of being devised for her special convenience.
Sir William was plainly ruffled at Napier's obvious reluctance to accompany Miss Greta to Newton Hackett. Sir William was sorry it was such a bore.... If Colin or Neil had been at home, he wouldn't have had to ask anything so admittedly outside the range of a private secretary's functions. Presented like that, there was nothing for it but that Napier should, in Sir William's phrase, represent him in this little matter.
As the three were getting into the car, Madge leaned out of an upper window. "Well, Idothink; sending me up here to wait for you! Where are you going?"
"Newton Hackett, dearest. Back soon." Miss Greta waved her handkerchief.
In a long bare room, a figure in uniform confronted them, on the other side of a table like a counter.
"Are you Inspector Adler?" Napier began.
Yes, the big fair man with a high color and heavy jowl was Inspector Adler.
"You were telephoned to, I believe?"
Yes, Inspector Smith had telephoned from Lamborough.
"Then you know all about this lady's errand." Napier stood aside for Miss Greta.
The interrogation went forward.
"Your surname is Sworsenberg?"
"No; von Schwarzenberg."
He seemed not greatly to like having his pronunciation corrected.
"Will you spell it?"
She spelt it.
"Your Christian name?"
"Johanna Marguerite."
"Please spell them."
She obliged.
"Where were you born?"
"At Ehrenheim."
"Will you spell it?" And when she had done so, he looked at the word with suspicion. "Where is it?"
"In Hanover."
"In Germany, you mean."
"In Hanover, Germany."
"In Germany." He put down the word about which already such a host of new connotations had begun to cling.
Nan lifted her eyes from the register to the man's face. He was taking this business too seriously, with his "Germany, you mean," as if Greta had tried to pretend that Hanover was somewhere else.
"I'm not English, either," said Miss Ellis in an explanatory tone.
"No?" The Inspector fixed her with his serious, blue eyes. "What are you?"
"American."
"Oh," he said, and lost interest.
"Now, Miss—a—Sworsenburger, what is the date of your birth?"
If Miss Greta hesitated a second, it seemed to be from a natural disgust at hearing her name murdered.
"Born 1886—and the name is von Schwarzenberg." She must have been aware of the touch of hauteur in the tone of her correction, for instantly she changed it. "You, too,"—she smiled at the burly inspector—"you have a German name."
"Me?"
"Adler is one of the most com—usual names in Germany."
"My name's notAhdler. It's Adler."
"That's only a corruption," she said, less cautiously than was her wont.
"No corruption about it," he spoke roughly.
"She only means—" Napier began.
"Never 'eard in me life of a corrupt Adler. What's your business over 'ere?"
"This lady," Napier intervened, "came into the family of Sir William and Lady McIntyre as a governess."
"She has become a valued personal friend," Miss Ellis put in stiffly. "Haven't you heard that by telephone? You have only to ring up Sir William himself—"
"We are not supposed to take our information by telephone. How long do you want to stay in this country?"
"She lives here, as I've told you," said Napier, "in the family of—"
The interrogatory went on, Nan more and more furious, appealing silently to Napier from time to time; Miss Greta taking it all with a dignity that made even Napier feel that he had never yet seen her to such advantage. The inspector, too, must in his way have felt that this foreigner who had accused him of being a German (him, James Adler, for the love of God!) and had accused the Adlers of being corrupted, was somehow getting the best of the interview. He was already accustomed (and the war was as yet counted by weeks) to seeing the few Germans who had presented themselves to be registered adopt an attitude either humorous (accompanied by offers of cigars), or uneasy, or tending toward the apologetic. Napier was sure that Adler lorded it a little even over people who knew how to treat an inspector proper.
"I don't see how you can stay here at all now they've made this into a proscribed area," he said with a touch of pride at being inspector of a place so distinguished.
"Oh, so they have!" Miss Greta smiled. "Ioughtto have remembered, when Sir William took the trouble to see about a special permit." She opened a bag and took out a paper.
Inspector Adler looked at it with suspicion. Just this kind of case evidently hadn't come his way before.
"Maybe it's regular," he said cautiously as he handed the paper back. "Better take care of it. You'll need it if you do stay and ever want permission to go outside the five-mile radius."
Miss Greta maintained a lofty silence.
"How does she get such a further permission?" said Napier.
"By applying to the proper authority," said Mr. Adler; "in this case to me." The inspector was dabbing some purple ink on a pad. "Now your finger-print, if you please."
Miss Greta drew back, scarlet. "A German is what I am, not a criminal."
"'Ere's where you go." He pointed downwards with a large, blunt thumb.
Napier in his embarrassment looked away from Miss Greta. His glance fell upon Nan. The girl's eyes had filled. "It's an outrage," she said in a choked voice. "Thatkind of identification is meant for rogues and murderers."
But Miss Greta had recovered herself. "Andthatsort of person," she said, "of course must object very much. But, after all, whyshould—people like us?"
Nan pressed close to Greta's side. "Yes, you must finger-print me, too!" she said between pleading and command. "I'm every bit as much an alien as this lady."
"Not if you're an American.She'san enemy alien."
"She'snotan enemy. You oughtn't to say such things."
"Maybe you know what I ought to say better than the Gover'ment."
When the ordeal at the police station came to an end, every person there was extremely on edge—except, you'd say, Miss von Schwarzenberg. Her dignity under the ordeal would forever, Napier told himself, count in his mind to Miss Greta's credit. Going home, she soothed the ruffled spirits of Miss Nan; she was tender, reassuring; she smiled.
Before the party had left the dinner table that night, Julian Grant walked in. He had arrived late and put up at the Essex Arms.
"I shall complain to his mother about him when I see her," Lady McIntyre threatened. They all fell to congratulating Julian upon his parents' arrival in London. The fact of their belated and difficult return from Germany had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, together with hints of the unsuitable treatment to which Sir James and Lady Nicholson Grant had been subjected. But if, as was plainly the case, some of the Lamborough party waited eagerly to hear the horrid details, Julian seemed to have no mind to make the most of his opportunities.
"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.
"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the ill-treatment of EnglishKurgästfrom the Foreign Office.
Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was aKurgäst. It was a speech that did him no good in that company—being far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.
Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim.Theywould never cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.
So little did Julian recognize this, he was asking if anybody seriously thought inconvenience was avoidable in the vast upheaval of war? He only wished that inconvenience was the worst that any of them might have to complain of. A second time he tripped up those "Foreign Office facts" of Gavan's. Julian knew about those "facts." "And I know certain others.Theyrelate to ill-treatment too. Facts more easily examined. No trouble about subjecting those facts to every sort of test! Why? Because they were nearer home. Yet I doubt if the Foreign Office makes any note of them.Ihave—in haphazard way. But enough to sober any man." He produced two or three. Instances of harsh dismissal at a time when fresh employment was known to be impossible. Instances of boycott, of petty persecution, all because of a foreign name. It was the kind of attempt at sober balancing still possible even under the roof of a British official. A willingness as yet unshackled to see and to criticize these spots on the national sun, was accounted an attitude of mind peculiarly, proudly, British. If this particular circle was readier than most to admit these minor blames, it was largely because of sympathy with the particular German who was in their midst. A form of hospitality.
To Nan Ellis, Julian's espousal of the cause of the stranger within the gate was as music in the ear and as honey in the mouth. Good! good! She applauded him with hands and lips and eyes.
On leaving the dining-room, everybody began to put on hats and wraps.
"Oh, yes, hadn't you heard, Mr. Julian? Fearful excitement! A mine has been washed up on the coast. And you, Madge," urged her father, who needed no urging whatever, "you've got to come and look at it, too."
They all went down to the beach, and walked in the moonlight, by the incoming tide, a quarter of a mile north of the pier.
Miss Greta carried her coat on her arm at first.WouldMr. Napier be so kind? He stopped to help her into the voluminous white canvas ulster. "It isn't true, is it," she said in a low, earnest voice, "that you've joined an O. T. C. and go drilling in the park after working hours?"
"Plenty of men do that," he said, struggling to enable Miss Greta to find the armhole.
"Not men like you!" she whispered. "And when you aren't working with Sir William, you go route marching, or trench digging for a holiday!"
Napier had been one of the first of his world who refused to accept the fact of not being bred a soldier as an excuse for not becoming one. But that Miss Greta should be one of the few to know the fact did not please him. "Oh, the sleeve's wrong side out," he said; "that's why."
The ulster had to come off again. "Surely,"—she turned the sleeve with deliberation—"surely you know that before you are nearly ready for a commission, peace will be declared."
"You think peace will come soon, then?"
"Well, of course, when the Germans have taken Paris. There now—" she stopped short again, making of her compunction an excuse to widen the distance between themselves and the rest of the party. "I've gone in my bungling way and said something I oughtn't to. I, who would rather offend anybody on earth than you."
"I don't know why you should say that." He began to walk on.
"You don't know why?"
There was something unnerving in the appealing sorrow of the question. Why, in the name of all the gods, hadn't he kept up with the others?
"I think you do know," she said, a pace or two behind his hurrying figure.
Napier didn't look round, but he was sure that the tears in her voice had risen to her eyes.
"Do you mind if I go on? I promised Julian—"
"Ah, you've already gone on."
"Gone—" he paused an instant.
"Yes, gone back inside that British arctic circle that you came out of once—to save my life." She gained on him; she was panting at his elbow. "I shall never forget that, Mr. Gavan; never as long as I live."
"Oh, you make too much of—"
"Too much of saving such a life as mine! That may be true."
"You know!"—he swung back a step—"that wasn't in the least what I meant. I—you see—I say!Julian!"
When Napier had caught up with the two in front, Miss Greta wasn't far behind.
Nan turned an excited face. "Does Gavan know?" she asked Julian.
Just as though Greta weren't now at his elbow, Julian jerked out, "He can easily satisfy himself. Two hundred people on the Fourth of August simply vanished from our common life. No public charge, no trial thatwasa trial according to English ideas—"
"Would you leave known spies free to do their work?" Napier asked sharply.
"Do you know what happened to them?" Nan intervened.
"We can tell what happened to some of them. Set blindfolded against a wall and shot."
"How perfectly awful!" breathed Nan.
"Miss Greta isn't as horrified as you are. She knows what Germany would do with men—yes, and women—arrested on even slighter evidence."
"They'd never do that towomen!" said Nan, aghast.
"Oh, wouldn't they!"
"Set awomanagainst a wall and shoot her!"
"It's logical," was Miss Greta's comment.
"Logical!" echoed Nan. "It's—it's devilish."
"Risky but well paid," observed Napier, with his eyes on the rippled sand.
"It should be well paid," pronounced the quiet voice of Greta von Schwarzenberg. They had come up with Lady McIntyre, abandoned by the advance-guard. Nan offered her arm. She and Greta adapted their pace to the older woman's.
As the two men walked on, Julian spoke of the beauty of ships seen in that transfiguring light. "Only two or three little fishing-smacks, and yet the grace, the mystery—"
Napier's eyes had gone farther seaward. What were those other, vaguer shapes? Was there a mystery more urgent there? The night was unseasonably warm, but a chill invaded him as he asked, "Are they English?"
Julian, with his hands clasped behind him, strolled on without troubling to reply.
It was Napier who again broke silence.
"It's all very well to scoff at amateur detectives. Have you thought whyweare on the coast?"
"Good air."
"And we breathe it just where we could so easily, if we were as accomplished as some, make signals and receive them."
Julian uttered the audible sigh of much-tried patience.
"Well, think a moment. Little as there is of proscribed area as yet, why are we in it? Because the McIntyres chose this place?"
"Certainly. Lady McIntyre told me herself about coming down to inspect—"
"Exactly!—a house selected for her. We are in the proscribed area because the enemy alien in the McIntyre family chose this place for them."
"I tell you, Gavan, I'm not going to listen—"
"Yes, you are. I've listened to you often enough. You can listen to me for once." He told him about the leakage of the shipping secret. The loss it had been to us. The gain it had been to the enemy. "Old Colonel McManus is right. She has poked her nose everywhere."
"All this makes me anxious," said Julian, gravely.
His friend breathed a free half-minute.
"Very anxious aboutyou, Gavan."
"See here—" Napier stopped short—"because I was wrong about Gull Island is no reason—"
"So you're satisfied you were wrong, are you?" Julian said lightly.
"Naturally, since you found nothing to report." Then it came out that Julian had had "more serious things" to think about. He hadn't been near the Island. It was the first serious quarrel of their lives.
Napier left his friend and caught up with Sir William. The pressure on his mind did not suffer him to wait till he got his chief alone. When he had asked and obtained Sir William's reluctant consent "to a few days off," Napier broke through the little hail of questions, and commented with, "Isn't that the mine?"
"It is! It is!"
Madge flew on ahead, deaf to Lady McIntyre's, "Wait for your father, darling,"—as though Sir William's presence might be trusted to exercise a mollifying effect upon the mine, a theory which, however, she wasn't long in publicly abandoning.
Fifty yards or so this side of a rock-strewn indentation in the low coast-line there it lay, that strange, new creature of the deep, with nothing in its aspect to account for the instantaneous aversion it inspired in Lady McIntyre. Gray-white, shaped like a great egg or a pear, according to your angle of vision, seen at closer quarters it might be taken for a well-stuffed laundry-bag, except for the something odd protruding from its mouth. Lady McIntyre made no secret of her intention to give it a wide berth. As the others went toward the Thing, Lady McIntyre, left alone some yards away, called out, "Iwishyou wouldn't, William!"
"Wouldn't what?" he said good-humoredly over his shoulder. "I thought we had come for the express purpose of examining it."
"Yes, but I—I didn't know it would be like that."
"You can hardly have expected it to look more harmless," Sir William said as he went closer.
"That's just it." Her wail said she wouldn't have minded it half so much had it been more frankly infernal. "Anyway, Madge mustn't—" Then, with a rising terror in her voice, Lady McIntyre betrayed the degree to which she had lost her bearings at sight of that mysterious messenger of death. "William," she cried, "makeMadge come away."
"It's all right, my dear, as long as they aren't touched. This is the part, you see—"
As he appeared to be in the act of doing the very thing he himself had said was likely to have dire results, Lady McIntyre raised her voice still higher. "Greta, do,dobring Madge here!"
Greta, enveloped in a canvas coat and gray-white motor-veil, was squatting by the enemy. She seemed to hear nothing, as she crouched there on the sand. The others listened to Sir William, and they, too, looked at the Thing, all except Napier. He looked at the huddled figure staring with that curious expression at the mine. It was canvas-covered like herself. Like herself, of rounded contour and of incalculable capacity for harm. It struck Napier rather horribly that there was kinship between the two, that she hung over the infernal thing like a mother might over her child.
"Mr. Napier,"—Lady McIntyre's voice shrilled sharply behind him—"willyou get Madge to come away?"
It was Nan who achieved the impossible. "Brr! I'm cold," she announced. "If you weren't too grand, Mr. Napier, Madge and I would race you to those rocks."
Mr. Napier wasn't too grand, and Miss Madge was elated by her victory. "I'll race you back again," she cried, again off like the wind.
They sat down on the rocks where Madge left them. For several moments there was no sound but the swish and rattle of pebbles as they swept up shore in the advance, and then, deserted by the force behind, fell back a little, clinging for a moment to the skirts of the retreating wave.
Nan, with her white veil cloud-like round her face, looked at the track of light across the water. The moon wore a cloud round her face, too, but she looked in and out. The girl was very still.
"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Napier's heart cried so loud that in a kind of terror he fell upon audible speech. "It is the most wonderful night I ever—" and he stopped. His voice sounded strange. As she turned from the moon-path on the water to meet Napier's look fastened on her, he saw that her eyes had brought away some of the restlessness as well as some of the glitter of the sea. The adorable gentleness in them had given place to a critical, sharp, little glance that affected Napier like a breath from a glacier.
"Sir William seems immensely devoted to you—" To his over-sensitive ear she seemed to imply that being devoted to Gavan Napier implied a singular stretch of charity. Nor would she accept his silence. As though he must himself share this view of his scant deserts. "Don't you think it very nice of Sir William to let you go off on a holiday at such a time as this?"
"Very nice indeed."
She sat with her chin in her hand, her face upturned again. But the soft rapture was gone, gone utterly. "Julian is looking very tired, don't you think?" she said.
"I thought he did look tired."
"He is going to help Mr. Wilkins.
"Who is Mr. Wilkins?"
"Oh, Mr. Wilkins is a splendid person who is organizing stop-the-war meetings."
"Well," said Napier, shortly, "that's a good way to give Mr. Wilkins a taste of it."
"You mean a taste of war?" She dropped her hand. "Oh, Iwishyou wouldn't say things like that!"
"How I am making her hate me!" he said to himself. "Well, since she won't love me, what does it matter?"
But it did matter. It mattered to the very core of him. It mattered to the waking and the sleeping. It mattered for all of life—he knew that now. It would add a bitterness to the bitterness of death. To die never having had this—
She sat with hands lying slack in her lap. "I think I'd like to go home," she said. "I don't like England as much as I did."
"Why is that?"
She looked at him oddly and then away. After another little silence, "Well, for one thing, I think it's abominable the way they are talking and writing about the men who didn't approve of the war and were brave enough to say so, and say it publicly." She turned her eyes from the curling, crisping foam as if to plead for some little sympathy for these views. There was no sign on Napier's face. She thrust her iron-pointed stick into the sand. "What they've given up, some of those men, for the sake of—oh, it's the most splendid thing I ever came near to! Ilovethose men."
"All of them?" Napier asked drily.
She sprang up. "I won't have you mocking at me. Or at Julian!"
"I don't mock at Julian."
"Oh, only at me?" She laughed a little uncertainly and then became grave again, but not, Napier felt, unfriendly. "You know, his father has gone home to Scotland. His mother, too. And Julian is here." They were silent a moment. "And I just wish they'd stayed in Germany," she burst out. "They are horrid to Julian. They've as good as told him they're ashamed of him. But they don't deserve to have a son like Julian. If he wasmyson...."
Napier smiled. "Well, if he were your son?"
"I'd know how to treat him. I'd know rather better than I do now," she wound up, with her astonishing candor.
Hardly two yards away the inrushing surf foamed as white as boiling milk among the boulders.
"How long," she asked, with something breathless in her manner, "before the tide reaches as far as where we are?"
"Not long." Even as he spoke, one of those waves that will sometimes outrace its fellows rushed up the beach and flung itself in thunder against the outward barrier. In spume and froth it ran whitely in and out nearly to the upper rocks, filling all the place with motion and a dazzle of moonlit foam.
"It seems to set the rocks moving. And the noise! Doesn't it make you dizzy?" she said. "It does me."
"Then come higher up."
She shook her head. He showed a place at his side. "Sit here if you feel—"
"Oh, but Iliketo feel dizzy. That's the great difference between you and me." Her laugh was gone in a second. With her eye on the receding wave she asked hurriedly, "Where are you going for your holiday?"
His plans were dependent on other people, he said.
"You make me wonder what 'other people' you've got. How little I know about you." She tumbled the sentences out.
"Well, come to that, how little I know about you."
"There isn't anything I'm not willing to tell you—if—if you cared to know." She spoke more gently, even with a touch of wistfulness. "You British are so reticent!" He didn't deny the charge. He felt her eyes on his face, as she said, "I have an idea you wouldn't be—if you once got started."
He laughed out again at that shot. "The only safe way then," he said, "is not to get started."
"Oh,doget started!" She said it with a touch of roguery lightening her new seriousness. "I should so like to see you indiscreet for once."
Deliberately Napier didn't look at her again, till the danger-point was safely rounded by her saying, "Greta thinks you're going to Scotland."
"Oh,doesshe?" He looked at her straight enough now. "And does she tell you why?"
"No; but you'll tell me that."
"Maybe I will," he answered a trifle grimly, "when I come back."
She studied him. "You are very serious." She leaned a trifle nearer. "You are more serious, I think, than I ever saw you."
Napier smiled. In his heart he was thinking: "Before she is up in the morning, I shall be gone. On the errand that will end even her surface kindness to Greta's enemy. This is the last time. She will never again stand so near and look at me with those eyes of faith."
"Aren't you rather serious, too?" he asked.
She spoke through his question, impulsively, lifting her voice a little above the nearing thunder. "Lady McIntyre thinks you are going to see a lady."
He made his small effort at jocularity. "I must speak to Lady McIntyre."
"Areyou such a fickle person?"
"Is that what they say?"
"They think you are fickle about women."
"Well," he said, achieving an effect of jauntiness, "and what's your opinion, Miss Nan?"
"They don't understand you," she said gravely.
"And doyouunderstand me?" he laughed.
"Yes. Because I'm like that myself. They call me fickle, too. But it's only that we haven't—hadn't"—she amended with that sudden summer lightning in her eyes—"hadn't met The One." If she came closer still, it seemed not to be by her own volition, but in the same way as she had spoken—at the bidding of some influence outside them both. Napier half turned from the too-disturbing nearness and instinctively put out a hand to the boulder, shoulder-high, just in front of him. But his hand moved short of its goal, unguided by a mind that was awhirl in a maelstrom where duties, inclinations, friendships, loves, all churned in an eddy of such surpassing swiftness that the brain reeled and the heart forgot its rhythm.
"Always thinking—but why does your hand shake so?"—the girl's voice was so low, that he hardly heard it above the surf, as she hurried on. "Maybe it's this one. No? Then perhaps it's that. And always wrong—till one day—in the hall—" a very passion of triumph thrilled through her question, "Wasn't it in the hall at Kirklamont?"
"Nan!" he cried out.
And she, on a note that the surf took up and carried out to sea, cried, "Gavan!" On whose initiative neither knew, they were clinging together. They cared as little for sea water as did the rocks. The two stood there like one—as if through all the moons to come they would bide as steadfast in their rapture as the rocks in foam.
When she drew her face away from his, and they looked at each other, it was with the knowledge that the wash of a greater sea than this they stood beside had flung them, companion castaways, on the shore of a new world.
She had thrown back her head. The scarf fell down over her shoulder to her feet, a tiny cascade to join the whiteness of sea water. All veils had been stripped off for that moment of uttermost joy, before the man cried sharply, "Julian!" and his arms fell down to his sides.
"Julian!" the girl echoed, aghast. She stumbled back a step. He didn't try to save her. She fell against the rock. Her hand, that tried to break the fall, was wrenched at the wrist. She hardly knew it at the time.
"Come, let us go back." He was leading her through swirling foam.
"How can we go back?" she whispered. But she followed him. They found the others waiting for them by the pier.