The patrol had been relieved by another, an older man, and sober. He merely reproved them for disobeying orders, glanced sympathetically at the presumed invalid, and directed them to one of the temporary hospitals some blocks farther west.
Gora, like all imaginative people, had a horror of the corpse, and averted her eyes from the head of the dead girl outlined under the veil she had thrown over it, Gathbroke was obliged to walk backward, and as both were extremely uncomfortable, there was no attempt at conversation until they reached the gates of the old cemetery the great pioneers had called Lone Mountain and their more commonplace descendants rechristened Laurel Hill.
The glare of the distant fire illuminated the silent city where a thousand refugees slept as heavily as the dead, and as they ascended the steep path they examined anxiously the vaults on either side. Finally Gora exclaimed:
"There! On the right."
The iron doors of a once eminent resident's last dwelling had been half twisted from their rusty hinges. Gathbroke threw his weight on them and they fell at his feet. He and Gora carried in the body and lifted it to an empty shelf.
"Good!" Gora gave a long sigh of relief. "Nothing can happen to her now. Even the entrance faces away from the fire and there is nothing but grass in the cemetery to burn, anyhow." She held her electric torch to the inscription above the entrance. "Better write down the name—Randolph. There's one of the tragedies of the sixties for you! An Englishman the hero, by the way. Nina Randolph is a handful of dust in there somewhere. Heigho! What's the difference, anyway? Even if she'd been happy she'd be dead by this time—or too old to have a past."
Gathbroke replaced the gates, for he feared prowling dogs, and they walked down to the street and sat on the grass, leaning against the wall of the cemetery, as dissociated as possible from the rows of uneasy sleepers.
They slept a little between blasts of dynamite, the snoring of men and women and cries of children; finally at Gora's suggestion climbed to the steep bare summit of Calvary to observe the progress of the fire.
The unlighted portion of the city beneath them looked like a dead planet. Beyond was a tossing sea of flame whose far-reaching violent glare seemed to project it illimitably.
"Nothing can stop it!" gasped Gora; and that terrific red mass of energy and momentum did look as if its only curb would be the Pacific Ocean.
They talked until morning. He was very frank about himself, finding no doubt a profound comfort in human companionship after those long hours of ghastly communion down in that flaming jungle.
He was a younger son and in the army, not badly off, as his mother made him a goodish allowance. She had come of a large manufacturing family in the North and had brought a fortune to the empty treasury of the young peer she had—happily for both—fallen in love with.
He had wanted to go into business—politics later perhaps—after he left Eton, feeling that he had inherited some of the energy of his maternal grandfather, but his mother had insisted upon the army and as he really didn't care so very much, he had succumbed.
"But I'm not sure I shan't regret it. It isn't as if there were any prospect of a real war. I'd like a fighting career well enough, but not picayune affairs out in India or Africa. I can't help thinking I have a talent for business. Sounds beastly conceited," he added hastily. It was evident that he was a modest youth. "But after all one of us should inherit something of the sort. Perhaps, later, who knows? At least I can thank heaven that I wasn't born in my brother's place. He likes politics, and his fate is the House of Lords. A man might as well go and embalm himself at once. Do you know Gwynne? Elton Gwynne? John Gwynne he calls himself out here."
"I've heard of him. He's been written up a good deal. I don't know any one of that sort."
"Really? Well, don't you see? he inherited a peerage; grandfather died and his cousin shot himself to cover up a scandal. Gwynne was in the full tide of his career in the House of Commons and simply couldn't stand for it. He cut the whole business and came out here where he and his mother had a large estate—Lady Victoria's mother or grandmother was a Spanish-Californian. Of course he chucked the title. He's a sort of cousin of mine and I looked him up, and dined with him the other night. He was born in the United States, by a fluke as it were, and has made up his mind to be an American for the rest of his life and carve out a political career in this country. I'd have done the same thing, by Jove! First-class solution … although it's a pretty hard wrench to give up your own country. But when a man is too active to stagnate—there you are…. I wish I had known where to find him to-day, but he lives on his ranch and I've only seen him once since. Lady Victoria took me to a ball night before last—Good God! Was it only that? … and we were to have met again for lunch to-day."
"It is very easy and picturesque to renounce when you possess just about everything in life! If I attempted to renounce any of my privileges, for instance. I should simply move down and out."
He turned his head and regarded her squarely for the first time. Heretofore she had been simply a friend in need, a jolly good sport, incidentally a female. If she had been beautiful he should have noted that fact at once, for he could not imagine the circumstances in which beauty would not exert an immediate and powerful influence, however transitory.
Miss Dwight was not beautiful, but he concluded during that frank stare that her face was interesting; disturbingly so, although he was unable at the moment to find the reason. It was possible that in favorable conditions she would be handsome.
She had a mass of dark brown hair that seemed to sink heavily over her low forehead until it almost met the heavy black eyebrows. She had removed her hat and the thick loose coils made her look topheavy; for the face, if wide across the high cheek-bones and sharply accentuated with a salient jaw, was not large. The eyes were a light cold gray, oval and far apart. Her nose was short and strong and had the same cohibitive expression as the straight sharply-cut mouth—when not ironic or smiling. Her teeth were beautiful.
She had put on her best tailored suit and he saw that her "figger" was good although too short and full for his taste. He liked the long and stately slenderness that his own centuries had bred. But her hands and well-shod feet were narrow if not small, and he decided that she just escaped possessing what modern slang so aptly expressed as "class," Possibly it was the defiance in her square chin, the almost angry poise of her head, that betrayed her as an unwilling outsider.
"Bad luck!" he asked sympathetically.
She gave him a brief outline of her family history, overemphasizing as Americans will—those that lay any claim to descent—the previous importance of the Dwights and the Mortimers in Utica, N.Y. Incidentally, she gave him a flashlight picture of the social conditions in San Francisco.
He was intensely interested. "Really! I should have said there would be the complete democracy in California if anywhere. Of course no Englishman of my generation expects to find San Franciscans in cowboy costume; but I must say I was astonished at the luxury and fashion not only at those Southern California hotels, where, to be sure, most of the guests are from your older Eastern states, but at that ball Lady Victoria took me to. It was magnificent in all its details, originality combined with the most perfect taste. Of course there were not as many jewels as one would see at a great London function, but the toilettes could not have been surpassed. And as for the women—stunning! Such beauty and style and breeding. I confess I didn't expect quite all that. Miss Bascom, Miss Thorndyke, and an exquisite young thing, Miss Groome—"
"Oh, those are the haute noblesse." Gora's tipper lip curled satirically. "No doubt they lay claim that their roots mingle with your own."
"Well, we'd be proud of 'em."
"That was the Hofer ball, wasn't it! Do you mean to say that Alexina Groome was there? Mrs. Groome, who is the most imposing relic of the immortal eighties, is supposed to know no one of twentieth-century vintage."
"I am sure of it. I danced with her twice and would have jolly well liked to monopolize her, but she was too plainly bowled over by a fellow—your name, by Jove—Dwight. Good-looking chap, clean-cut, fine shoulders, danced like a god—if gods do dance. I'm an awful duffer at it, by the way."
"Mortimer? Is it possible? And he—was he bowled over?"
"Ra—ther! A case, I should say."
"How unfortunate. Of course he hasn't the ghost of a chance. Mrs. Groome won't have a young man inside her doors whose family doesn't belong root and branch to her old set. Fine prospect for a poor clerk!"
"Jove! I've a mind to stay and try my luck. Oh!" He dropped his face in his hands. "I'm forgetting!"
"Well, forget again." Gora's voice expressed more sympathy than she felt. She deeply resented his immediate acceptance of her social alienage, even relegating her personal appearance to another class than that of the delicate flora he had seen blooming for the night against the most artful background of the season.
However … he was the first man she had ever met in her limited experience who seemed to combine the three magnetisms…. Who could tell….
"I should be delighted if you would cut my brother out before it goes any further," she said untruthfully. "It will save him a heartache…. Where could you meet her now? Society is disrupted here. But of course Mr. Gwynne visits down the peninsula. He could take you to any one of those exclusive abodes where you would be likely to meet the little Alexina. She is only eighteen, by the way."
"That is rather young," he said dubiously. "I don't fancy her conversation would be very interesting, and, after all, that is what it comes down to, isn't it? I've been disappointed so often." He sighed and looked quite thirty-five. "Still, she has personality. Five or six years hence she may be a wonder…. I don't think I'd care about educating and developing a girl—I like a pal right away…. What an ass I am, rotting like this. Tour brother has as much chance as I have. Younger sons with no prospect of succession are of exactly no account with the American mamma. I've met a few of them."
"Oh, I fancy birth would be enough for Mrs. Groome. She's quite dotty on the subject, and the people out here are simpler than Easterners, anyhow. Simpler and more ingenuous."
"How is it you know so much about it, all, if you are not, as you say—pardon me—a part of it?"
"I wonder!" She gave a short hard little laugh. "I don't know that I could explain, except that it all has seemed to me from birth a part of my blood and bones and gristle. An accident, a lucky strike on my father's part when he first came out here, and they would know me as well to-day as I know them. And then … of course … it is a small community. We live on the doorsteps of the rich and important, as it were. It would be hard for us not to know. It just comes to us. We are magnets. I suppose all this seems to you—born on the inside—quite ignominious."
"Well, my mother would have remained on the outside—that is to say a quiet little provincial—if her father hadn't happened to make a fortune with his iron works. I can understand well enough, but, if you don't mind my saying so, I think it rather a pity."
"Pity?"
"I mean thinking so much about it, don't you know? I fancy it's the result of living in a small city where there are only a few hundred people between you and the top instead of a few hundred thousand. I express, myself so badly, but what I mean is—as I make it out—it is, with you, a case of so near and yet so far. In a great city like London now (great in generations—centuries—as well as in numbers) you'd just accept the bare fact and go about your business. Not a ghost of a show, don't you see? Here you've just missed it, and, the middle class always flowing into the upper class, you feel that you should get your chance any minute. Ought to have had it long ago…. I can't imagine, for instance, that if my mother had married the son of my grandfather's partner that I should have wasted much time wondering why I wasn't asked to the Elizabethan Hail on the hill. Of course I don't mean there isn't envy enough in the old countries, but it's more passive … without hope…."
He felt awkward and officious but he was sorry for her and would have liked to discharge his debt by helping her toward a new point of view, if possible.
She replied: "That's easy to say, and besides you are a man. My brother, who is only a clerk in a wholesale house, has been taken up and goes everywhere. They don't know that I even exist."
"Well, that's their loss," he said gallantly. "Can't you make 'em sit tip, some way? Women make fortunes sometimes, these days, And they're in about everything except the Army and Navy. Business? Or haven't you a talent of some sort? You have—pardon me again, but we have been uncommonly personal to-night—a strong and individual face … and personality; no doubt of that."
Gora would far rather he had told her she was pretty and irresistible, but she thrilled to his praise, nevertheless. It was the first compliment she had ever received from any man but the commonplace and unimportant friends her brother had brought home occasionally before he had been introduced to society; he took good care to bring home none of his new friends.
Her heart leapt toward this exalted young Englishman, who might have stepped direct from one of the novels of his land and class … even the stern and anxious moderns who had made England's middle-class the fashion, occasionally drew a well-bred and attractive man from life…. She turned to him with a smile that banished the somber ironic expression of her face, illuminating it as if the drooping spirit within had suddenly lit a torch and held it behind those strange pale eyes.
"I'll tell you what I've never told any one—but my teacher; I've taken lessons with him for a year. He is an instructor in the technique of the short story, and has turned out quite a few successful magazine writers. He believes that I have talent. I have been studying over at the University to the same end—English, biology, psychology, sociology. I'm determined not to start as a raw amateur. Oh! Perhaps I have made a mistake in telling you. You may be one of those men that are repelled by intellectual women!"
"Not a bit of it. Don't belong to that class of duffers anyway. I don't like masculine women, or hard women—run from a lot of our girls that are so hard a diamond wouldn't cut 'em. But I've got an elder sister—she's thirty now—who's the cleverest woman I ever met, although she doesn't pretend to do anything. She won't bother with any but clever and exceptional people—has something of a salon. My parents hate it—she lives alone in a flat in London—but they can't help it. My grandfather Doubleton liked her a lot and left her two thousand a year. I wish you knew her. She is charming and feminine, as much so as any of those I met at the ball; and so are many of the women that go to her flat—"
"Don't you think I am feminine?" asked Gora irrisistibly. He had a way of making her feel, quite abruptly, as if she had run a needle under her fingernail.
Once more he turned to her his detached but keen young eyes.
"Well … not exactly in the sense I mean. You look too much the fighter … but that may be purely the result of circumstances," he added hastily: the strange eyes under their heavy down-drawn browns were lowering at him. "You are not masculine, no, not a bit."
Once more Miss Dwight curled her upper lip. "I wonder if you would have said the first part of that if you had met me at the Hofer ball and I had worn a gown of flame-colored chiffon and satin, and my hair marcelled like every other woman present—except those embalmed relics of the seventies, who, I have heard, rise from the grave whenever a great ball is given, and appear in a built-up red-brown wig…. And a string of pearls round my throat? My neck and arms are quite good; although I've never possessed an evening gown, I know I'd look quite well in one … my best."
He laughed. "It does make a difference. I wish you had been there. I am sure you are as good a dancer as you are a pal. But still … I think I should have recognized the fighter, even if you had been born in the California equivalent for the purple. I fancy you would have found some cause or other to get your teeth into once in a while. Tell me, don't you rather like the idea of taking Life by the throat and forcing it to deliver?"
"I wonder? … perhaps … but that does not mitigate my resentment that I am on the outside of everything when I belong on the in. I should never have been forced to strive after what is mine by natural right."
"Well, don't let it make a socialist of you. That is such a cheap revenge on society…. Confession of failure; and nothing in it."
He looked at his watch: "Eight o'clock. I'll be getting on to thePresidio. Why don't you come with me?"
Gora's feminine instincts arose from a less perverted source than her social. She shook her head with a smile.
"I don't want to go any farther from my house. I shall slip down my first chance; and I have plenty to eat. Perhaps you will come to see me before you go if my house is spared."
"Rather. What is the number? And if the house goes I'll find you somehow."
He took her hand in both his and shook it warmly. "You are the best pal in the world—"
"Now don't make me a nice little speech. I'm only too glad. Go out to the Presidio and get a hot breakfast and attend—to—to your affairs. I am sure everything will be all right, although you may not be able to get away as soon as you hope."
"I don't like leaving you alone here—"
"Alone?" She waved her hand at the hundreds of recumbent forms in the cemeteries and on the lower slopes of Calvary. "I probably shall never be so well protected again. Please go."
He shook her hand once more, ran down the hill, turned and waved his cap, and trudged off in the direction of the Presidio.
She slept in her own house that night, for dynamiting by miners summoned from Grass Valley by General Funston, and a change of wind, had saved the western portion of the city. For the first time in her life Gora experienced a sense of profound gratitude, almost of happiness. She felt that only a little more would make her quite happy. Her lodgers, even her absorbed brother, noticed that her manner, her expression, had perceptibly softened. She herself noticed it most of all.
Gathbroke met Alexina Groome again a week later.
On Saturday, when the fire was over, and she could retreat decently and in good order, Mrs. Groome, to her young daughter's secret anguish, had consented to rest her nerves for a fortnight at Rincona, Mrs. Abbott's home in Alta.
As Gora had predicted, Gathbroke found that it would have been hardly more difficult to move his sister's body, now at an undertaker's in Fillmore Street, out of the state in war-time than in the wake of a city's disaster, which was scattering its population to every point of the railroad compass. He had refused the space in the baggage car offered to him by the company; it should: be a private car or nothing; and for that, in spite of all the influence Gwynne and his powerful friends could bring to bear, he must wait.
Meanwhile Gwynne had asked him to stay with himself and his mother, Lady Victoria Gwynne, at the house of his fiancée, Isabel Otis, on Russian Hill; a massive cliff rising above one of the highest of the city's northern hills, whose old houses, clinging to its steep sides had escaped the fire that roared about its base. To-day it was a green and lofty oasis in the midst of miles of smoking ruins.
Gathbroke was as nervous as only a young Englishman within his immemorial armor can be. Gwynne, who had gone through the same nerve-racking crisis, although from different causes, understood what he suffered and pressed him into service in the distribution of government rations, and garments to the different refugee camps. But Gathbroke had the active imagination of intelligent youth, and he never forgot to blame himself for lingering in New York with some interesting chaps he had met on theMajestic, and afterward in Southern California, seduced by its soft climate and violent color. Unquestionably, if he had stayed on his job, as these expressive Americans put it, his sister would have been in New York, possibly on the Atlantic Ocean when San Francisco shook herself to ruin.
"But not necessarily alive," said Lady Victoria callously, removing her cigar, her heavy eyes that looked like empty volcanos, staring down over the smoldering waste. "People with heart disease don't invariably wait for an earthquake to jolt them out of life. Assume that her time had come and think of something else or you'll become a silly ass of a neurotic."
Gwynne, more sympathetic, continued to find him what distraction he could, and one day drove him down the Peninsula with a message from the Committee of Fifty to Tom Abbott; who had caught a heavy cold during those three days when he had driven a car filled with dynamite and had had scarcely an hour for rest. He was now at home in bed.
The Abbott's place, Rincona, stood on a foothill behind the other estates of Alta and surrounded by a park of two hundred acres set thick with magnificent oaks. Gathbroke had never seen finer ones in England or France. Gwynne before entering the avenue drove to an elevation above the house and stopped the car for a moment.
The great San Mateo valley looked like a close forest of ancient oaks broken inartistically by the roofs of houses shorn of their chimneys. Beyond, on the eastern side of a shallow southern arm of the Bay of San Francisco, was the long range of the Contra Costa mountains, its waving indented slopes incredibly graceful in outline and lovely in color. Gwynne had pointed out their ever changing tints and shades as they drove through the valley; at the moment they were heliotrope deepening to purple in the hollows.
Behind the foothills above Rincona rose the lofty mountains which in Maria Abbott's youth had seemed to tower above the valley a solid wall of redwoods; but long since plundered and defaced for the passing needs of man.
"Great country—what?" said Gwynne, starting the car. "You couldn't pry me away from it—that is, unless I have the luck to represent it in Washington half the year. You'll be coming back yourself some day."
"I? Never. I hate the sight of its grinning blue sky after the red horror of those three days. I haven't seen a cloud as big as my hand, and in common decency it should howl and stream for months."
"Well, forget it for a day. Perhaps you will be placed next the fairAlexina at luncheon—"
"Alexina…?"
"Groome. You must have met her at the Hofer ball."
"She—what—possible—"
Gwynne looked at his stuttering and flushed young cousin and burst into laughter.
"As bad as that, was it? Well, she's not bespoken as far as I know.Wade in and win. You have my blessing. She is almost as beautiful asIsabel—"
"She's quite as beautiful as Miss Otis."
"Oh, very well. No doubt I'd think so myself if I hadn't happened to meet Isabel first, and if I were not too old for her anyway."
Gwynne could think of no better remedy for demoralized nerves than a flirtation with a resourceful California girl, and if Dick annexed a living companion for his trying journey to England so much the better.
Gathbroke's excitement subsided quickly. He was in no condition for sustained enthusiasm. He felt as if quite ten years had passed since he had half fallen in love with Alexina Groome in a ball room that was now a charred heap in the sodden wreck of a city he barely could conjure in memory.
Besides, he had half fallen in love so often. And she was too young. He had really been more drawn to that strange Miss Dwight; upon whom, however, he had not yet called.
He felt thankful that the girlwastoo young for his critical taste.He wanted nothing more at present in the way of emotions.
Rincona had been named in honor of Rincon Hill, where Tom Abbott's grandmother had reigned in the sixties; a day, when in order to call on her amiable rival, Mrs. Ballinger, her stout carriage horses were obliged to plow through miles of sand hills, and to make innumerable détours to avoid the steep masses of rock, over which in her grandson's day cable car and trolley glided so lightly until that morning of April eighteen, nineteen hundred and six.
When her husband, in common with other distinguished citizens, bought an estate in the San Mateo Valley, she named it Rincona, to the secret wrath of other eminent ladies who had not thought of it in time.
The house had as little pretensions to architectural beauty as others of its era, but it was a large compact structure of some thirty rooms, exclusive of the servants' quarters, and with as many outbuildings as a Danish, farm. Long French windows opened upon a wide piazza, whose pillars had disappeared long since under a luxuriant growth of rose vines and wistaria. At its base was a bed of Parma violets, whose fragrance a westerly breeze wafted to the end of the avenue a quarter of a mile away. All about the house, breaking the smooth lawns, were beds and trees of flowers, at this time of the year a glowing exotic mass of color; but in the park that made up the greater part of the estate exclusive of the farms, the grass under the superb oaks was merely clipped, the weeds and undergrowth removed. The oaks had been evenly shorn of their lower branches, which gave them a formal and somewhat arrogant expression, as of cardinals and kings lifting their skirts.
Alexina hated the enormous rooms with their high frescoed ceilings and heavy Victorian furniture; but Maria Abbott loved and revered the old house, emblem that it was of a secure proud family that had defied that detestable (and disturbing) old phrase: "Three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves." The Abbotts, like the Ballingers and Groomes and Gearys and many others of that ilk, had not come to California in the fifties and sixties as adventurers, but with all that was needed to give them immediate prestige in the new community; and, among those that still retained their estates in the San Mateo Valley, at least, there was as little prospect of their reversion to shirt sleeves as of their conversion to the red shirt of socialism. Their wealth might be moderate but it was solid and steadfast.
The entertaining of the Abbotts, Yorbas, Hathaways, Montgomerys, Brannans, Trennahans, and others of what Alexina irreverently called the A.A., had always been ostentatiously simple, albeit a butler and a staff of maids had contributed to their excessive comfort. In the eighties, evening toilettes during the summer were considered immoral; but by degrees, as time tooled in its irresistible modernities, they gradually fell into the habit of wearing out their winter party gowns at the evening diversions of the country season. Burlingame, that borough of concentrated opulence founded in the early nineties as a fashionable colony, began its career with a certain amount of simplicity; but its millions increased to tens of millions; and what in heaven's name, as Mrs. Clement Hunter, a leader and an individual, once remarked, is the use of having money if you don't dress and entertain as you would dream of dressing and entertaining if you didn't have a cent?
Mrs. Hunter, who had formed an incongruous and somewhat hostile alliance with Mrs. Abbott, knew that her valuable friend, like others of that "small and early" band, resented the fact that their standards no longer counted outside of their own set. Mrs. Abbott had turned a haughty shoulder to Mrs. Hunter for a time, for she remembered her as, in their school days, the socially obscure Lidie McKann; now, however, her husband turning all he touched to gold, she had, incredibly, become one of the most important women in San Francisco and Burlingame.
When Maria Abbott finally succumbed she assured herself that curiosity to see the more ambushed glitter of that meretricious faubourg had nothing to do with it; it was easy to persuade herself that she hoped, being an indisputably smart woman herself, gradually to impose her simpler and more appropriate standards upon these people who sorely threatened the continued dominance of the old régime.
Mrs. Hunter soon disabused her of any such notion, and during the early days of their acquaintance, after Mrs. Abbott came to one of her luncheons attired in a pique skirt and severe shirtwaist, impeccably cut and worn, but entirely out of place in an Italian palace, where forty fashionable women, some of whom had motored sixty miles to attend the function, were dressed as they would be at a Newport luncheon, Mrs. Hunter attended the next solemn affair at Rincona so overdressed and made up that the outraged Altarinos (as Alexina irreverently called them) were reduced to a horrified silence that was almost hysterical.
But one morning Mrs. Abbott caught Mrs. Hunter digging in her private vegetable garden behind the palace, and wearing a garment that her second gardener's wife would have scorned, her unblemished face beaming under a battered straw hat. Both women had the humor to laugh, and their intimacy dated from that moment, Mrs. Hunter confessing that stuff on her face made her sick; but adding that she adored dress and thought that any rich woman was a fool who didn't.
After that there was a compromise on both sides. Mrs. Hunter lunched or dined at Rincona in her simplest frocks and Mrs. Abbott wore her best when honoring Mrs. Hunter and others at Burlingame. She even went so far as to have some extremely smart silk voiles (the fashionable material of the moment) and linens made, and when asked to a wedding, a garden party, or a great function given to some visitor of distinction, complimented the occasion to the limit of her resources.
Mrs. Hunter, in white duck, a sailor hat perched above her angular somewhat masculine face, was sitting on the Abbott verandah as the two Englishmen drove up. She waved her cigarette and cried gayly in her hearty resonant voice:
"Two men! What luck! And in time for lunch. I've hardly seen a man since the first day of the fire. Leave your car anywhere and come in out of the sun. I'll call Maria, and, incidentally, mention whiskey and soda."
"The whiskey and soda is all right," said Gwynne mopping his brow; Nature, having wreaked her worst on California, seemed determined to atone by unseasonably brilliant weather, and the day under the blazing blue vault was very hot.
Mrs. Abbott appeared in a few moments, smiling, cool, in immaculate white, the collar of her shirtwaist high and unwilted. Her weather-beaten face looked years older than Mrs. Hunter's, who, although plain by comparison with the once beautiful Maria Groome, had treated her clean healthy skin with marked respect.
But as the butler had preceded her with whiskey and soda and ice, Mrs. Abbott might already have achieved the mahogany tints of her mother and she would have been regarded as enthusiastically by two hot and dusty men.
"Of course you will stay to luncheon," she said as naturally as she had said it these many years, and as two hospitable generations had said it on that verandah before her. She turned to young Gathbroke with a smile, for Mrs. Hunter, who was in her confidence, had detained her for a moment with a few sharp incisive words. "I have a very bored little sister, who will be glad to sit next to a young man once more."
And although Gathbroke almost frowned at this fresh reminder of the callow years of the girl whose sheer loveliness had haunted his imagination, he went off with a not disagreeable titillation of the nerves, at Mrs. Abbott's suggestion, to find her in the park and bring her back to luncheon in half an hour.
He was light of step and made no sound on the heavy turf; he saw her several minutes before she was aware of his presence and stood staring at her, feeling much as he had done during the progress of the earthquake.
She was standing under one of the great oaks whose lower limbs had been trimmed so evenly some seven feet above the ground that they made a compact symmetrical roof above the dark head of the girl, who, being alone, had abandoned the limp curve of fashion and was standing very erect, drawn up to her full five feet seven. Alexina had no intention of being afflicted with rounded shoulders when the present mode had passed.
But her face expressed no guile as she stood there in her simple white frock with a bunch of periwinkles in her belt, her delicate profile turned to Gathbroke as she gazed at the irregular majesty of the Coast Range, dark blue under a pale blue haze. He had retained the impression of starry eyes and vivid coloring and eager happy youth, a body of perfect slenderness and grace, whose magnetism was not that of youth alone but personal and individual.
Now he saw that although her fine little profile was not too regular, and as individual as her magnetism, the shape of her head was classic. It was probable that she was not unaware of the fact, for its perfect lines and curves were fully revealed by the severe flatness of the dusky thickly planted hair, which was brushed back to the nape of her neck and then drawn up a few inches and flared outward. The little head was held high on the long white stem of the throat; and the pose, with the dropping eyelids, gave her, in that deep shade, the illusion of maturity. Gathbroke realized that he saw her for the moment as she would look ten years hence. Even the full curved red lips were closed firmly and once the nostrils quivered slightly.
The narrow black eyebrows following the subtle curve of her eyelids, the low full brow with its waving line of soft black hair, seemed to brood over the lower part of the face with its still indeterminate curves, over the wholly immature figure of a very young girl.
Gathbroke surrendered then and there. This radiation of mystery, of complexity, this secret subtle visit of maturity to youth, the hovering spirit of the future woman, was unique in his experience and went straight to his head. He forgot his sister, dismissed the thought of Dwight with a gesture of contempt. He might be modest and rather diffident in manner, owing to racial shyness, but he had a fine sustaining substructure of sheer masculine arrogance.
As he walked forward swiftly Alexina turned; and immediately was the young thing of eighteen and of the early twentieth century. Her spine drooped into an indolent curve, her soft red lips fell apart, her black-gray eyes opened wide as she held out her hand to the young Englishman.
"How nice! I never really expected to see you again. I understood LadyVictoria to say you were merely passing through."
Alexina had not cast him a thought since the night of the ball but she was hospitable and feminine.
"I was detained."
She noted with intense curiosity that his bright color paled and his sparkling hazel eyes darkened with a sudden look of horror; but the spasm of memory passed quickly, and once more he was staring at her with frank capitulation.
Alexina's head went up a trifle. She was still new to conquest, and although she had met more than one pair of admiring eyes in the course of the past season, and received as many compliments as the vainest girl could wish, few men had had the courage to storm the stern fortress on Ballinger Hill, or to sit more than once in a drawing-room so darkly reminiscent of funeral ceremonies that a fellow's nerves began to jump all over him.
Nor had her fancy been even lightly captured until Mortimer Dwight, that perfect hero of maiden dreams, had swept her off her dancing feet on the most memorable night of her life.
She had quite made up her mind to marry him. The indignant silent hostility of the family (even Mrs. Ballinger, her moment of weakness passed, having been swung to the horrified Maria's point of view) had been all that was necessary to convince the young Alexina that fate had sent her the complete romance. She hoped the opposition would drive her to an elopement; little dreaming of the horror with which Mr. Dwight would greet the heterodox alternative.
Mrs. Abbott had had a valid excuse for not asking him down: provisions were scarce, and, so Tom said, he was doing useful work in town. But Olive Bascom, whose country home was in San Mateo, had invited him for the next week end, and he had accepted. Alexina was to be one of the small house party, and there were many romantic walks behind San Mateo. A moon was also due.
Still Gathbroke might have entered the race with an even chance, for maidens of eighteen are merely the blind tools of Nature, had not the family made the mistake of displaying too warm an approval of the eligible young Englishman. Mrs. Groome, Mrs. Abbott, Aunt Clara, reënforced even by the more worldly Mrs. Hunter, who, however, had no children of her own, treated him throughout the luncheon with an almost intimate cordiality and a lively personal interest; whereas, if Mrs. Abbott had been driven to keep her word and invite Mortimer Dwight to her historic board she would have depressed him with the cool pleasant detachment she reserved for those whom she knew slightly and cared for not at all; Mrs. Groome, automatically gracious, would have retired within the formidable fortress of an exterior built in the still more exclusive eighties; Aunt Clara would have sat petrified with horror at the desecration; and Mrs. Hunter, free from the obligations of hospitality, would have been brusque, frankly supercilious, made him as uncomfortable as possible.
All this Alexina angrily resented, not knowing that their amiability was in part inspired by sympathy, Gwynne having told them the story of his cousin's tragic experience; although they did in truth regard him as a possibly heaven-sent solution of a problem that was causing them all, even Mrs. Hunter, acute anxiety.
Young Gathbroke was handsomer than Dwight. He was younger, and his circumstances were far more romantic, if romance Alexina must have. It was plain that he was fascinated by the dear silly child, who, in her turn, would no doubt promptly forget the ineligible Dwight if the Englishman proved to be serious and paid her persistent court.
Nevertheless Gathbroke, before the luncheon was half over, felt that he was making no progress with Alexina. Subtly it was conveyed to him on one of those unseen currents that travel directly to the sensitive mind, that these amiable people knew his story; and, no doubt, in all its harrowing details. Simultaneously those details flashed into his own consciousness with a horrible distinctness, depressing his spirits and extinguishing a natural gayety and light chaff that had come back for a moment.
Moreover, to use his own expression, he was besottedly in love, and knew that he betrayed himself every time his eyes met those of the girl, who, he felt with bitterness and alarm, long before the salad, was making a desperate attempt to entertain a very dull young man.
Once or twice a mocking glance flashed through those starry ingenuous orbs, but was banished by the simple art of elevating the wicked iris and revealing a line of saintly white. Alexina was quite determined to add a British scalp to her small collection, and for the young man's possible torment she cared not at all. With young arrogance she rather despised him for his surrender before battle, or at all events for hauling down his flag publicly; and her mind traveled with feminine satisfaction to the calm smiling dominance, combined with utter devotion, of the man who had won her as easily as she had conquered Richard Gathbroke. That the young Englishman's nature was hot and tempestuous, with depths that even he had not sounded, and her ideal knight's more effective mien but the expression of a possibly meager and somewhat puritanical nature; that Dwight's heart was a well-trained organ which would never commit an indiscretion, and that young Gathbroke would have sold the world for her if she had been a flower girl, or the downfall of her fortunes had sent her clerking, she was far too inexperienced to guess; and it is doubtful if the knowledge would have affected her had she possessed it. She was in the obstinate phase of first youth, common enough in girls of her sheltered class, where the opportunities to study men and their behavior are few. Having persuaded herself that she was far more romantic than she really was, and that there would be no possible happiness or indeed interest in life after youth, she had conceived as her ideal mate the dominant male, the complete master, and easily persuaded herself that she had found him in Mortimer Dwight…. If she married Gathbroke he would be her slave (so little did she know him.). Dwight would be her master. (So little did she know him, or herself.)
After luncheon, grinning amiably when Mrs. Abbott hinted that Englishmen liked to be out of doors, she led Gathbroke to the confines of the park, where they sat down under one of the oaks that reminded him of England; for which he was in truth desperately homesick, and never more so than at this moment.
Everything combined to make him realize uneasily his youth. In England a man of twenty-three was a man-of-the-world if he had had the proper opportunities; but this girl who had infatuated him, and even the far more sympathetic Miss Dwight, made him feel that he was a mere boy; and so had this entire family, however unwittingly.
He spoke of Miss Dwight suddenly, for Alexina, who had been duly enlightened while the men were smoking with Tom, had tactfully conveyed her sympathy, her eyes almost round with fascinated horror and curiosity.
He set his teeth and gave a rapid but graphic account of the whole dreadful episode, willing to interest her at any price; and Alexina, sitting opposite on the ground, her long spine curved, her long arms embracing her knees, listened with a breathless interest, spurring him to potent words, even to stressing of detail.
"My goodness gracious me!" she ejaculated when he paused. "I should have gone raving mad. You are a perfect wonder. I never heard of anything so gor—perfectly thrilling. And that girl, what did you say her name was?"
Gathbroke, who had purposely withheld it, said explosively:
"Dwight."
"Dwight?"
"I think she is a sister of a friend of yours." And he was made as miserable as he could wish by a crimson tide that swept straight from her heart pump up to her widow's peak.
"Dwight? Sister? I didn't know he had one. I saw him several times during the fire and he didn't mention her."
"I suspect he was too absorbed." Gathbroke muttered the words, but man's instinct of loyalty to his own sex is strong. "A city doesn't burn every day, you know."
"Still … what is she like? Like him?"
"I do not remember him at all … She? Oh, she has a tremendous amount of dark hair that looks as if falling off the top of her head and down her face. Uncommonly heavy eyebrows, and very light gray—Ah, I have it! I have been groping for the word ever since—sinister eyes…. That is the effect in that dark face. She has a curious character, I should think. Not very frank. She—well, she rather struck me as having been born for drama; tragic drama, I am afraid."
"Not a bit like her brother. How old is she?"
"Twenty-two, she told me."
"What—what does she do? They are not a bit well off."
He hesitated a moment. "Well—as I recall it, she is studying something or other at the University of California."
"And of course she boards down there with her brother, who takes care of her while she is studying to be a teacher or something." Alexina having arranged it to her satisfaction dismissed the subject. She had no mind to betray herself to this good-looking young Englishman who had been sent to her providentially on a very dull day. He would, no doubt, have been frantically interesting if he had not been so idiotic as to fall head over ears the first shot.
Still … Alexina examined him covertly as he transferred his gaze for a moment to the mountains across the distant bay, swimming now in a pale blue mist with a wide banner of pale pink above them…. If she had met him first, or had never met the other at all … who knew?
Alexina, for all her passion for romance, had a remarkably level head. She was quite aware that there had been a certain amount of deliberation in her own headlong plunge, convinced as she was that high romance belonged to youth alone, and fearful lest it pass her by; aware also that a part of Dwight's halo, aside from his looks and manners and chivalrous charm, consisted in his being a martyr to an unjust fate, and, as such, under the ban of her august family. It was all quite too perfect…. But if Gathbroke had come first his qualifications might have proved quite as puissant, and no doubt Tom Abbott, who retained his school-history hatred of the entire English race, would have provided the opposition and perhaps influenced the family.
She swept her intoxicating lashes along the faint bloom high on her olive cheeks and then raised her eyes suddenly to the tormented ones opposite. She also smiled softly, alluringly, as little fascinating wretches will who know nothing of the passions of men.
"I think you should follow Mr. Gwynne's example and stay here with us."He thought of silver chimes and contrasted her voice with Gora Dwight'sangry contralto: he always thought of Gora in phrases. "So manyEnglishmen live out here and adore it."
"I'm perfectly satisfied with my own country, thank you."
Alexina, who was feeling intensely American at the moment, curled her lip. "Oh, of course. We have had plenty of those, too. Scarcely any of them becomes naturalized. Just use and enjoy the country and give as little in return as possible."
"Really? I fancy they must give rather a lot in return or they would hardly be tolerated. No native has worked harder than Elton these last days. I understand most of them are in business or ranching and have married California girls."
"Oh, they have redeeming points." And then having satisfied her curiosity as to how hazel eyes looked when angry she gave him a dazzling smile. "We love them like brothers, and that is a proof that we are not snobbish, for most of them are not of your or Mr. Gwynne's class—just middle-class business people at home."
"Well, you are a business nation, so why not? I have met hardly any but business men out here and I feel quite at home with them. My mother's family are in trade and I enjoy myself immensely when I visit them."
"Oh!" His halo slipped…. Still, what did it matter? "I suppose you told me that to let me know you didn't need to come out here in search of an heiress. But many of our most charming girls are not. Just now it seems to me that more young men in California have money than girls … but they are so uninteresting."
She looked pathetic, her mouth drooped; then she smiled at him confidingly.
He knew quite as well as if he had not been hard hit that she was flirting with him, but as long as she gave him his chance to win her she might do her transparent little best to make a fool of him.
"Have you ever been in love?" asked Alexina softly.
"Oh, about half-way several times, but always drew back in time … knew it wasn't the real thing … Youth fools itself, you know, for the sake of the sensation—or the race. Have you?"
"Oh—" Alexina lifted her thin flexible shoulders airily and this time her color did not flow. "How is one to tell … a girl in her first season … when all men look so much alike? It is fun to flirt with them, when you have been shut up in boarding-school and hardly had a glimpse of life even in vacation. My New York relatives are terribly old-fashioned. It's great fun to give one man all the dances and watch the dado of dowagers look disapproving." And once more she gave him the quick smile of understanding that springs so spontaneously between youth and youth.
"Well … you might have given all those dances to me the other night, instead of to that fellow Dwight."
"Oh, but you see, I had already promised them to him. Lady Victoria always comes so late."
"That's true enough." His spirits rose a trifle.
"When do you go—back to England, I mean? Not for a good long time, I hope. We have awfully good times down here. Janet Maynard and Olive Bascom live at San Mateo in the summer, and Aileen Lawton at Burlingame. They are my chums and we'd give you a ripping time. We'd like to have you take away the pleasantest possible memory of California instead of such a terrible one. I don't mean anything very gay of course. You mustn't think I'm heartless." And she showed the lower pearl of her eyes and looked like a madonna.
"I'm afraid I must go soon. I've had an extension of leave already, and Hofer told me just before we left to-day that he thought he could let me have his private car inside of a week. They've been using it."
There was not a dwelling in sight. The quiet of that old park with its brooding oaks was primeval. Behind her was the pink and blue glory of sky and mountain. Her eyes were like stars.
He burst out boyishly: "If I only had more time! If only I could have met you even when I first came to San Francisco … before … before … I'd—I'd like to marry you. It's fearfully soon to say such a thing. I feel like a fool. But I'm not the first man to fall madly in love at first sight … and you … you … If I tell you now instead of waiting it's because there's so little time. Would you … do you think you could marry me?"
"Oh! Ah!" (She almost said Ow.) After all it was her first proposal. She was thrilled in spite of the fact that she was in love with another man, for she felt close to something elemental, hazily understood … something in her own unsounded depths rushed to meet it.
But he was too young, and too "easy," and she didn't like his gray flannel shirt; which, laundry being out of the question, he had bought in Fillmore Street almost opposite the undertaker's.
"Suppose we correspond for a year? That is, if you must really go so soon."
"I must. I want you to go with me."
His eyes had turned almost black and he had set his jaw in a way she didn't like at all. In nerving himself to go through the ordeal he had worked up his fermenting mind into a positively brutal mood.
"Oh—mercy! I couldn't do that. My people are the most conventional in the world."
The situation was getting beyond her. She had not intended to make him propose for at least a week and then he would have been abject and she majestic. She sprang to her feet with a swift sidewise movement that made her limp young body melt into a series of curves; and, standing at bay as it were, looked at him with a little frown.
He rose as quickly and she liked the set of his jaw bones less and less.
"Are you refusing me outright?" he demanded. "That would be only fair, you know, if I have no chance."
"Well…. I think so. That is—"
"Do you love another man?"
Coquetry flashed back. Nevertheless, she told the exact truth little as she suspected it.
"I love myself, and youth, and life, and liberty. What is a man in comparison with all that?"
"This." And before she could make another leap he had her in his arms; and under the fire of his lips and eyes she lay inert, intoxicated, her first flash of young passion completely responsive to his.
But only for a moment.
She wrenched herself away, her face livid, her eyes black with fury.She beat his chest with her fists.
"You! You! How I hate you! To think I should have given that to you … to think that another man should have been the first to kiss me … I'm in love with another man, I tell you. Why don't you go? I hate myself and I never want to lay eyes on you again. Go! Go! Go!"
During the retreat from Mons and again in those black days of March, nineteen-eighteen, Gathbroke's tormented mind snapped from the present and flashed on its screen so startling a resurrection of himself during those last dreadful days in San Francisco that for the moment he was unconscious of the world crashing about him.
He saw himself in long days and nights of anguish and despair, of embittered love and baffled passion: youth enjoying one of its divine prerogatives and the fullness thereof!
Pacing the floor of his room on Russian Hill, tramping over the mountains across the Bay, doggedly awaiting that sole alleviation of mental suffering in its early stages, a change of scene.
Finally the Hofer car was placed at his disposal and he started on his four days' journey to New York; and this brief chapter, that his friends thought so gruesome, was the least of his afflictions. The memory of his twenty-four hours or more of close physical association with his sister's corpse made any subsequent adventure with the dead seem tame. And at least he was leaving behind him a State which seemed to have magnetized him across six thousand miles to experience the horror and misery she had in pickle for him. He reveled in the audible rush of the train that was carrying him farther every moment from the girl who had cut down into the core of his heart and left her indelible image on a remarkably good memory.
He had asked himself one day—it was his last in California and he had taken his courage in his teeth and was on his way to call on Gora Dwight at last, picking his steps through, the still smoking ruins down to Van Ness Avenue—whether it would be possible for any man to suffer twice in a lifetime as he had suffered since that hideous moment at Rincona, coming as it did on top of an uncommon and terrible experience that had racked his nerves and soul as it might not have done had he been seasoned by war or even a few years older. At all events it had left him with no reserves even in his pride to fight his failure and his loss.
In that shrieking hell of August twenty-sixth, or again when lying abandoned and gassed in a way-side hut during that ominous retreat of the Fifth Army, when he had a sudden close vision of himself, trousers tucked into a pair of Gwynne's hunting boots, swearing now and again as he stepped on a hot brick; and heard his groping ego whisper the question through his prostrate mind, he was tempted to answer aloud, to shout "No" above the shrieking of shells and the groans of men fallen about him.
He might no longer love Alexina Groome after twelve or even eight years of complete severance; and, indeed, save in flashing moments like these he had seldom thought of her after the first two or three years; but at least she had taken the edge from his power to suffer.
He had lost his mother soon after his return with the body of her youngest child, his father had died three years later, and he had accepted these griefs with the composure of maturity. Although he had had some agreeable adventures (not that he had had much time for either women or society) he had taken devilish good care not to get in too deep—even if he still possessed the power to love at all, which he doubted.
He remembered also, what he had almost forgotten, that during that walk it had come to him with the sharpness of surprise that the image of the girl who clung to his mind with the tentacles of a devil-fish, was as he had seen her standing under the oak tree while unaware of his presence: older, a more dignified and thoughtful figure, a woman old enough to be his mate in something more than youthful passion, the ideal woman of vague sweet dreams; not as the thoughtless little coquette who had tempted him to ruin his chances by acting like a cave brute.
Given a fortnight longer, during which he remained master of himself instead of a young fool with a smashed temperament, and the unfledged woman in her, whose subtle projection he had witnessed during that moment of his capitulation, would have recognized him as her mate; as for the moment she had in his arms.
Not the least of his ordeals during those last days was the inevitable call on Gora Dwight. He felt like a cad, after what she had been to him at the end of an appalling experience, to have let, nearly three weeks go by with no apparent recognition of her existence. But he had been unable to find a messenger, there was no post; and then, after his ill-starred visit to Rincona, he had forgotten her until his final visit to the undertaker; when she had seemed to stand, an indignant and reproachful figure, at the head of the casket.
He had a note in his pocket and hoped she would be out. But she opened the door herself, and her dark face, thinner than he recalled it, flushed and then turned pale. But she said calmly as she extended her hand: "Come in. I wondered what had become of you." "I'm sorry. But—perhaps—you can understand—it was not easy for me to come here!"
"Of course. Come up to my diggings."
He followed her up to the attic studio, where as before he took the easy chair and accepted one of her cigarettes; which he professed to be grateful for as his were exhausted and every decent brand in town had gone up in smoke.
Gora was deeply disappointed that she had received no warning of his call, for she possessed an extremely becoming and richly embroidered silk Chinese costume, as red as the flames that had devoured Chinatown a few days after she had bought it at a bankrupt sale. She had put it on every afternoon for a week, hoping and expecting that he would call; and now that she had on her second-best tailored suit, and a darned if immaculate shirtwaist, he had chosen to turn, up! … But at least the lapels of the jacket had recently been faced with red, and it curved closely over her beautiful bust. Moreover, she had just finished rearranging the masses of her rich brown hair when the bell rang.
And she had him for a time, perhaps for an hour! She set out the tea things as an intimation of the refreshment he would get at the proper time….
She too had suffered during this past interminable fortnight, but Gora was far more mature than the young Englishman, upon whom life until the last few weeks had smiled so persistently. She was too complex, she had suffered in too many ways, from too many causes, not all of them elevating, to be capable upon so short a notice, even after a night of unique companionship, of such whole-souled agony and despair. In her imagination, her sense of drama, her vanity, in the fading of vague dazzling hopes of a future to which he held the key, and perhaps a little in her stormy heart, she had felt a degree of harsh disappointment, but she had already half-recovered; and as she sat looking at his ravaged face she wondered that the death of a sister, no matter how harrowing the conditions, could make such a wreck of any man.
He told her of his difficulties in finding some one to remove the body from the vault to the undertaker's, of the delay in obtaining a private car, gave her some idea of his disorganized life since they had parted, but made no mention of Alexina Groome or Rincona. Then he politely asked her if she had any new plans for the future. Nobody seemed to look forward to the same old life.
Gora shrugged her shoulders with a movement expressive of irritation. "My brother, who is engaged to Alexina Groome, insists that I give up this lodging house."
"Oh, so they are engaged?" Gathbroke lit another cigarette, and his hand did not tremble; he felt as if his nerves had been immersed in ice water and frozen.
"Yes—marvelously. The family, as might be expected, is furious. But the girl is mad about him and of age. She is just a foolish child and should be locked up. My brother is not in the least what she imagines him. She wrote me a letter. Good heaven! One would think she had captured the prince of a fairy tale, or the hero of an old romantic novel. There should be a law prohibiting girls from marrying before they are twenty-two at least…. However, the thing is done. And my brother is terribly afraid they'll find out that I keep a lodging house. He's given them to understand we both board here. They are prime snobs and so is he. I never dreamed it was in him until he began to go about in society, but then you never know what is in anybody. Otherwise, he is harmless enough, and a good industrious boy, but he'll never make the money to keep up with that set, and she won't have much. It's a stupid affair all round…."
"I've refused to budge until he finds me a job. He certainly cannot support me, even if I were willing to be supported by any one. As far as I am concerned they could know I kept a lodging house and welcome. It is honest and it gives me a good living; and, what I value more, many hours of freedom. But Mortimer is not only positively terrified they'll find it out, but he is as obstinate over it as—well, as that kind of man always is. He's looking about, and I fancy my fate is stenography or bookkeeping: I took a course at a business college shortly before my mother died. I don't know that he'd like that much better; he hinted that I might be a librarian in a small town. But I'll be hanged if I fall for that."
Gathbroke smiled. "Not that. You don't belong to the country town. But I fancy you'll have to give up the lodging house. Elton Gwynne took me down the Peninsula one day, and—well—I don't fancy they would stand for it. Aristocracies are aristocracies the world over. They may talk democracy, and really modify themselves a bit, but there are certain things they'd choke on if they tried to swallow them, and they won't even try. Better give it up before they find it out and tackle you. I don't fancy you'd stand for that. It would be devilish disagreeable. You've got to know and be more or less intimate with them all—"
"I'll not be patronized by them. I don't know that I'll go near them. For years I've resented that I was not one of them, but I don't fancy tagging in after my brother, treated with pleasant courteous resignation, invited once a year to a family dinner, and quite forgotten on smart occasions."
"Quite so. I like your spunk. Have you thought of being a nurse? All work is hard and I should think that would be interesting. Must meet a jolly lot of people. You should see the becoming uniforms the London nurses wear. Prettiest women on the street, by Jove."
Her heart sank but she replied evenly: "Not a bad idea. I've quite enough saved to take the course comfortably—"
He had a flash of memory. "And that would give you time to win your reputation as a writer. Then the nursing would be merely one more resource."
"It was nice of you to remember that. I'll consider the nursing proposition, and when you have your next war I'll go over and nurse you. That part of it—a war nurse—would be mighty interesting."
The words were spoken idly, merely to avert a pause, and forgotten as soon as uttered. But as a matter of fact the next time they met was when he looked up from his cot in the hospital after he had been retrieved from the hut by two of his devoted Tommies, and saw the odd pale eyes of Gora Dwight close above his own.