This time she did not withdraw her hand.
But he was very slow, she thought, in kissing her. He had never kissed her yet. What was the good of being caught at—nothing?
Well, statues (she reflected), especially young ones, are slow——
Even as she was thinking it he did that very thing. Perhaps it was to summon up resolution to do so that he had lain awake the previous night. He kissed her cheek.
The result was curious. It was the law of her physique that most moments of perturbation only turned her paler; but at this particular form of perturbation she turned suddenly pink.
In a few moments she was as before. The first sign that she was Louie again was that she forbade him to repeat the offence. He sulked again.
"All right," he said resentfully; "then we may as well go and see the yacht."
"I don't want to see the yacht."
"Well, you needn't be stuffy about it——"
Statuesweredistractingly slow!
Then she looked at him with a faintly mocking smile.
"Aren't you going to say you're sorry?" she challenged him (but she had for a moment a faint return of the unhabitual colour for all that).
He seemed to suspect that he was being mocked; nevertheless it was with a rather tremulous boldness that he answered "No."
"Oh!"
"You see," he explained, "you did let me hold your hand."
She caught her breath. Good gracious! Why, he would be saying presently that she had asked him to kiss her! "You see, you did let me hold your hand!" What next?
"You know you did," he argued simply.
Even so it is written, "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings——"
Suddenly she laughed. O admirable innocence, that alone can defeat guile! After all, it was too unpardonable not to be pardoned. She turned her face away again.
"Youarestupid!" she murmured, her face, even her neck, pink once more.
At that quite a new gleam seemed to irradiate his good-looking clay.
"I say," he said slowly, as he struggled with the newness of the idea, "you mean—do you mean?—about my not kissing you—properly?"
Oh, the heaviness! But he should kiss her "properly," as he called it, now!
"Oh," she said briskly, "it's too late now. You can't very well after that, can you?"
But he beamed. "Of course I can!"
"No, Roy!"
"I will——"
This was outrageous. She made as if to rise.
"No, Roy—no—you know very well you don't think I'm pretty——"
"Well, you aren't ugly," said he.
(Great heavens! She "wasn't ugly"!)
"Very well, Mr. Statue," she thought, compressing those irregular lips whose degree of prettiness he estimated so nicely. "I'm going to be pretty in a very few minutes, and you're going to tell me so."
"No, Roy," she said aloud; "just let's sit and talk—sensibly—I don't know what made you behave like this all of a sudden——"
And there was none to say "Provoking hussy!"
An hour later they rose. It was too late to go to the yacht now. They walked together back to the stile. Their shoulders overlapped. The kisses came easily now.
"Then we'll go aboard her to-morrow?" he said.
"Very well."
"'Once aboard the lugger'—ha, ha—but of course she's a cutter, not a lugger. That's just a saying, 'Once aboard the lugger.'"
"Really?"
"Yes, hadn't you heard it? 'Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine,' it is. And I say, you'd better put some old clothes on if I'm to show you how the centre-board works."
"All right."
"What about Lovey?" he asked once more.
"Oh, we write down on a slate where we're going."
He held her a little away. "I—say!... You wouldn't tell her where, would you?"
"Why not?"
"What—cheek!"
"She put me 'on my honour'—impudence!" quoth Louie.
"But I say—what frightful cheek!"
"Good-bye——"
"Just a minute——"
"Well——"
Then, "'Bye——"
"Good-bye——"
He called her name after her. "Louie!"
"What?"
"Good-bye——"
"Good-bye, boy——" She waved her hand.
Anyway, she thought with satisfaction, she had made him say—swear—that she was pretty.
The next afternoon, as good as her word, Louie wrote on the hall-slate: "Gone to Mazzicombe: L. Causton." Then she walked, whistling, out of the house and up the hill.
VI
This time she fully expected to catch it, and did catch it. No time was lost. A note from Mrs. Lovenant-Smith just before supper ordered her to report herself immediately after that meal. At a quarter past nine she presented herself.
The French window stood wide open, but night was fastfalling over the front lawn, and a clipped peacock of box showed against a brownish-green sky. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith stood by the window. It moved as she turned, and there swung slowly across the pane the reflection of the tall, yellow-shaded standard-lamp in one corner. Miss Harriet Chesson had followed Louie in. In her hand was a piece of paper—Louie's "conduct-report."
The beginning of the encounter was no skirmish; its end was positive slaughter. This is no place for a report of it, round by round; it must be summarised, even as the "Life and Battles" summarises the combat between Buck and the terrible Piker. Louie "led," so to speak, by asking whether she might sit down, giving as her reason that she had had a long walk that afternoon; permission was only refused her after she had put her hand on the back of a wheatear chair and said again: "I think you said Yes?" She then placed the chair for Miss Harriet to sit on, as near as possible to that of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. She herself stood in the middle of the room.
Miss Harriet, evidently wishing she was somewhere else, read aloud the conduct-report. It was longish and detailed. It also, as Louie well knew, did not contain one of the real points at issue. She looked from one to the other of the two women. The Lady-in-Charge wore a discreetly-necked evening frock, with a fichu secured by a mourning brooch; and her fingers kept touching this brooch, and also kept leaving it again, as if Louie's eyes had been capable of a physical plucking of them away. She had had Miss Harriet in, Louie knew, for moral support. The principal's dress, too, was a give-and-take between her gardening costume and conventional evening attire. Her indictment read, she seemed more than ever anxious to depart. Louie,for her part, was rather glad that she had been called in. Buck had always fought better for the eyes upon him.
Mrs. Lovenant-Smith began correctly; her first trace of acerbity showed only when Louie, having listened to her arraignment with downcast eyes, lifted them for a moment to make a modest and quite immaterial correction.
"Have the goodness to cease this exaggerated deference, Miss Causton. It doesn't deceive me. It's only a form of veiled insolence."
Louie heard her indictment out in silence.
First blood was drawn when Louie mentioned the name of Roy Lovenant-Smith. She called him, with aggravating naturalness, "Roy." Mrs. Lovenant-Smith rose nearly an inch in height.
"'Roy!'" she echoed. "'Roy,' indeed!"
"I quite expected Priddy would tell you that first time. Of course he would. The gardeners here don't like outsiders intruding," said Louie.
The point told. There was no need to mention the name of Miss Hastings. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face deepened its ochre.
"Go on, Miss Causton," she said; while Miss Harriet timidly interposed: "I think that's all you wanted me for?"
Louie went on. "And anyway, you gave your nephew permission to come on the premises, which seems to me quite as much against the Rules as anything there." She pointed to the charge-sheet.
"Pray go on, Miss Causton," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, swallowing her wrath. Piker Betteridge, counting the moral advantage to be more than the pain endured, had formerly been wont to thrust out his undefended jaw inorder to prove its invulnerability to attack; Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was doing something of the same kind now.
"Pray go on——" she said.
"And of course that's all bunkum," said Louie, warming, and pointing once more to the paper in Miss Harriet's hand. "That isn't in the least what you mean. What you really hate is my having told the girls what you've had in your mind ever since I came—I mean about my father."
"Pray go on!" The jaw was thrust out once more.
("Perhaps I'd better go?" Miss Harriet still fidgeted. Seedsmen's daughters are not at their ease at these Olympian conflicts.)
"All right, I will go on," said Louie, warming still more. "You would have preferred me to hold my tongue about it, and if you're thinking of asking me to resign I should like to say now that probably at least half-a-dozen others will go with me."
Here, however, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith scored a point.
"That may have been true a little while ago," she said, "but—go on." And Louie remembered certain little incidents and unbendings that had caused it to be indulgently rumoured that "Lovey wasn't such a bad old sort once you got to know her." Louie conceded the point.
"Anyway, that's what she does mean," she said, turning to Miss Harriet—"that she didn't want me to tell them that my father was a prizefighter and kept a public-house!"
"Address yourself to me, if you please," ordered Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.
"Certainly! You've been set against me from the first, for that very reason; and as for your nephew, I've knownhim for years and years, and you've no business at all to have him here, and it would sound rather well, wouldn't it, if the tale got about that you allowed——"
But at this Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's hardly held composure gave way with a snap. Well-born but necessitous Ladies-in-Charge of horticultural colleges do not submit to being told their duty by the daughters of pugilists. She stamped on the floor.
"Silence!" she cried, shaking. "I was a fool ever to have had you here! You make discipline impossible. You corrupt your fellow-students—you make a boast of your unfortunate parentage—you show no respect for the Rules—you think yourself at liberty to come and go as you please—you carry on a vulgar intrigue——"
"—not with a gardener——"
("Oh, Ireallymust go my rounds!" murmured Miss Harriet; but she lingered; the spectacle of Olympians forgetting themselves does not occur every day.)
"—disgracing yourself among younger and more innocent girls——"
"—with a Lovenant-Smith, anyway——"
Again the stamp. "I forbid you to mention his name!"
"Roy——"
"Leave the room!"
("Please, please!" besought Miss Harriet.)
"You will pack your boxes at once!"
"I shall consult Lord Moone's lawyer first. You accepted my fees—your college is an imposition from beginning to end, and I'll see that's known. That will be another scandal——"
"Ah!" choked Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, perhaps with some hazy recollection of the law of slander in her head."You hear that, Miss Chesson? You hear that? You heard those words?"
"No, I didn't quite catch—ladies—please!"
"If you didn't catch it, I said the whole place was a shameless fraud," said Louie calmly.
"Very good. Ring the bell, Miss Chesson!"
But the servant appeared only in time to see Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's complete collapse. She sank, shaking, into a chair, and gazed unseeingly into a pigeon-hole of her desk, as if she might find some help against this devilish girl there. As she clung (as it were) to the ropes, Louie let her have it (so to speak) on the beezer.
"You oughtn't to be here at all, really, you know," she said. "You ought to be in one of those places—you know—in the Queen's gift, at Kensington or Hampton Court, with the dowagers and maids-of-honour. If you like I'll ask my uncle whether he can't do anything."
And without waiting for an answer she swept out, not by the door, but by the French window. The reflection of the yellow-shaded standard-lamp swung again as she did so.
She entered the courtyard by the side door, passed under the dark yew and the arch beneath the box-room, and made her way through the orchard. She had reached her pitch at the foot of the hill before she remembered that she had forgotten her mattress and blankets. She returned in search of them. Twenty minutes later she was in bed, her knees up, her hands clasped behind her head.
She was white with triumph. That woman! Well, Louie thought she had held her own. She had had the last word, at all events, and an optic-bunging one too. Now should she leave, or stay? It was entirely a question of balance between her desire to see the last of the place andher resolve to go at nobody's pleasure but her own. It might be that she would have to stay another week in order to avoid the suspicion that she was turning tail. The fraud of a place!
She lay, pale and victorious, thinking the matter over.
One thing was certain; she would not return to Trant. She supposed she was vindictive by nature, but that would merely mean at the most a week's gradually increasing strain on her temper and then another series of embroilings with her mother. A philosophic elf somewhere deep within her—it was hardly affection—bade her spare her mother what she had not spared Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. Why seek a known trouble at Trant? If she must take trouble with her wherever she went, she might as well take it to a fresh place.
Before she was aware they had done so, her thoughts had flown to the vouched-for but incredible things Richenda Earle had said about life and London.
Lord Moone had a house, and Captain Chaffinger chambers, in London, and she knew both. For the rest, her knowledge of the place was pretty much what Richenda had guessed it to be—shops, restaurants, theatres. Of her five visits two had been spent at Lord Moone's, two at Cynthia's friends, the Kayes, and one at an hotel—this not counting the night on which, having run away from the convent, she had occupied Chaff's room and had wondered at his large pincushion, his pictures, and ribboned haircurlers that he doubtless kept in memory of his departed youth.
Her father, too, lived in London, or thereby——
She fell to wondering about her father.
There was a full but late-rising moon that night; it hadnot yet cleared the tree-tops of the eastern end of the orchard below. She watched its silver through the topmost boughs. Already it filled the heavens with a mist of light, dimming the stars; the glister on near leaves was brighter than the Plough over her head. Scents of the distant gardens stole undispersed through the night; that of the night-flowering tobacco-plant was for some minutes almost sicklily oppressive; and behind her she heard the scurrying of the rabbits at play.
It was odd that she thought of her father rather than of Roy. Somehow only Roy's actual presence had the power to colour those now pale cheeks of hers. Certainly it had done so that afternoon. For an hour, aboard the yacht, the rose-peonies in the garden had been paler than she. But her father had her thoughts now, and the sum of them was that she would have given much to be able to think of him as not cruel, not faithless, not a man who had had to be thrust back into the ditch whence he had come. She might have sought him out then.
For she was going to London; that was settled. She had her allowance, more by a half than the income Richenda and her Mr. Weston would gladly have married on, and not one penny more of it would she waste at Chesson's. The next day or two would almost certainly provide her with a "good exit." Then nobody would be able to say she had slunk out.
Oh, if her father had but not been a brute!
The moon cleared the trees, and another too-sweet tract of the night-flowering tobacco enveloped her. A bird or two stirred. Some time before she had thought she had heard the sound of a curlew's whistle, low and not very near, but she had disregarded it. Now it came again. Allthe effect it had was to turn her thoughts, tardily and almost unnoticed by herself, to Roy.
She knew little about yachts; yachting was no pastime of Lord Moone's; but even her vaunting mood relaxed to a momentary smile as she remembered the yacht down under the hill there. Those two boys must be crazy to risk their lives like that. They had rounded Land's End in her, and in quite good faith evidently expected the miracle to be repeated. The only wonder was that the centre-board had gone before the rest of the crazy fabric. "I told you to put some old clothes on," Roy had apologised for his vessel, "—and I say—I don't think I'd sit on the table if I were you—I'm notquitesure about it, you see—may have to send it to Mazzicombe after all—come on the locker." So they had sat on the locker——
She had felt safer when, half-an-hour later, she had clambered down into the little dinghy again. It would be Davy Jones's locker for Master Roy and his friend Mr. Izzard unless some fatherly fisherman took them and their boat in hand.
Then came the thoughts of her unknown father again.
"Ee-oooo-eee!"
She sat up. The whistle came from the stile up the hill. And suddenly she knew it was no curlew. It was Roy.
She listened.
"Ee-oooo-eee!"
It was Roy.
She knew he would not seek her farther than the stile. Had there not been other sleepers just below the orchard, it would still have been the extreme of his boldness that he had got so far. But—she remembered how from the firstshe had been the prime mover in their entirely wanton flirtation—was it necessarily the extreme of hers?
Then, as the devil would have it, something brought Mrs. Lovenant-Smith into her head again.
That woman!
All the blood left her cheeks and thronged to her heart again.
Roy would certainly not pass the stile——
She hesitated for a moment longer, and then suddenly got up from her bed.
Her clothes were wrapped in her waterproof; she took the waterproof and put it on. She thrust her feet into a pair of slippers. The waterproof was not so long as the garment beneath it; the moon was now well above the trees; it showed the hurrying white about her heels as she walked quickly up the hill. She drew the under-garment up a little. The waterproof was almost the colour of the scorched grass. The small shadow that preceded her was now the thing most plainly to be seen.
Over the stile she saw the shoulder of his white sweater. Again her caution awoke.
"You might have put a coat on," she said, a little out of breath. "You can be seen half-a-mile away on a night like this."
"I thought you were never going to hear me!" he said.
"Oh! You seem to have been sure I'd come if I did."
"Well, you have come, haven't you?" he answered. "I say, isn't your hair different?"
"Well, it isn't done for a call, if that's what you mean; I always do it like that at night, stupid. But I'm not going to stand here with you as white as a cottage wall."
Thereupon he paid her the only compliment he ever did pay her—and that was unintentional.
"It isn't any whiter than your feet, anyway," he said.
"Well, I'm not going to stop a minute."
"Oh, dash it all!" he protested. She did think him cool!
"Good gracious, how long do you think Iamgoing to stay?"
"Hardly worth coming for, I call it," he grumbled.
"Thankyou!"
"For you, I mean, of course—as if you didn't know I'd walk miles—how you take a fellow up!"
"Well, two minutes."
Two minutes can be a very short time; five minutes had passed when, making a movement to free herself, she said: "Let me go now, Roy—I think we're both as mad as we can be."
"There isn't anybody about," he muttered.
More minutes passed; then:
"Do you really think my feet are white?" she whispered. A slipper had come off.
Then, close against his breast, she made an inconsequential, halting little appeal. "Oh, Roy—don't go in that dreadful boat again! You'll be drowned—I know you will——"
"Should you care?" he whispered.
"Silly boy!"
"No, but should you care?"...
"Roy, let me go!" she ordered suddenly. The minutes were passing fatally quickly.
"No—no——"
"Oh—yes——"
"I won't let you go."
"Roy, let me go, I say!"
But it was not a command now. It was a supplication—perhaps not even that.
She did not love him; in her heart she knew she did not love him. He loved her—years afterwards; only years afterwards. The thought of her left him—but it returned to him, never to leave him again. The moon made the crest of the hill like day, but the shadows of the gorse-bushes lay dark on the short grass and stunted bents and the patches of wild thyme. The moon southed, then rode less high. In the short night a lamb called; and then the birds, reaching the shallows of their sleep, gave a drowsy twittering and went to sleep again. It was the false dawn. The stars grew a little brighter as a deeper darkness possessed the earth; then in the darkness a cock crowed.
They met again on the next night. On the night after that they met once more.
Only after that did she sit down, alone in the box-room, in the twilight, to think.
Her boxes were packed and strapped, and the cart was coming for them from Rainham Magna in the morning.
She wished Burnett Minor had been there. She would have liked to say good-bye to the child. There was nobody else it would break her heart to leave.
Yet Roy was still down there under the hill. The centre-board had gone wrong again. She was to see him at the stile, in the morning, before leaving. It seemed, somehow, superfluous.
But she did meet him. His face was set, and he had forgotten to shave.
"Don't look like that; it wasn't your fault," she said composedly.
"It was—it was——" he muttered, hands clenched.
"Rubbish!" She gave a short laugh. "You've nothing at all to blame yourself for."
"Oh, I have—I have."
Then he turned to her. "Louie, you've got to promise me one thing——"
But she stopped him. She knew what he was going to say.
"That's quite out of the question," she said.
"But look here!" He used the words he had used the second time they had met. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and then leave her in the lurch. You must marry me, Louie, if—if——"
At that she had found a touch of her old irony.
"Not unless, of course?"
"Oh yes—yes."
But she turned away. "No. Good-bye."
"Won't you even kiss me?"
"No."
But there was a gentleness in her refusal such as he had never had from her before. Kisses came hardly now.
I
Richenda Earle could have told Louie Causton that an allowance of three hundred pounds a year, paid in quarterly instalments, only permits of a sunny little bedroom and a charming sitting-room in Lancaster Gate on certain terms, of which terms a dipping sooner or later into reserves of capital is certainly one. It is true that Louie still had capital of which she knew nothing. She did not yet, for example, count her wardrobe as capital, nor reflect that if its present standard was to be maintained money must be set apart for the purpose of maintaining it. She did not yet count her time as capital, nor write off the days she classed as days of "looking about her" as so many obligations against the time when looking about her would no longer serve her turn. She did not count her health as capital, nor her wild, resilient spirits, nor her "placeableness" at a glance among those whose possession of some capital may be assumed. All she reckoned as capital was the hundred odd pounds she had placed in a small but sound bank of her stepfather's recommendation, and (she had vaguely heard of such things) such additional credit as the Captain's name might command. But perhaps it is enough to say that she had this conception of the potency of the Captain's name.
Nevertheless, her second week's bill at Lancaster Gate was enough to cause her to send for her landlady, and to ask that person whether she had not a single room anywhere empty that might combine the prettiness of her present quarters with the convenience of having all her belongingswithin a single door. She was conscious of reasonableness, almost of magnanimity, when she remarked that she didn't mind going up another flight of stairs. The landlady had such a room, but pointed out its lack of cupboard-space and the number of Louie's dresses. That, Louie replied, did not matter; she intended to sell a number of the older dresses; and her things were carried upstairs.
Her idea in selling the older dresses was that thereby she might add another thirty pounds or so to her balance; the half-dozen she thought she could spare had cost thrice that amount. The wardrobe dealer who waited upon her offered her five pounds for them. Louie thanked her, told her that she had thoughts of going into a business so lucrative herself, and bade her good-afternoon.
She had come to London at the beginning of September; before that month was out she had decided to leave Lancaster Gate. For some reason or other her quarter's allowance had not arrived, and she wrote to Chaff about it. Chaff promised to look to the matter. She wrote also to Richenda Earle, stating the kind of lodging she required, and asking whether Richenda knew of such an one. To this last letter she had a reply by return of post. Richenda proposed the house of her married sister, which was in Sutherland Place, Bayswater. Without prejudice to her choice, Louie took a walk along Sutherland Place, and received an impression of a quiet street with milk-carts drawn up by the kerb and virginia creeper covering the houses with crimson. As she passed the door Richenda had specified, the door opened, and a squarer and older Richenda came out with a string bag in her hand. That, Louie thought, would be Mrs. Leggat, the wife of the estate-agent's clerk.
A week later Louie moved into Mrs. Leggat's first floor-front-bed-sitting-room. That night she counted her money. The result of her calculations caused her to jump up, as if she had thoughts of seeking some occupation or other that very night. Her quarter's allowance had still not come. Then Mr. Leggat, a lumpy-headed man with rabbit teeth and a Duke of Wellington nose, came in to fix a gas-burner for her, and she fell into talk with him. He wiped his hands ceaselessly on an old rag as he talked. He told her it was a pity that Rich had not stuck to her book-keeping; he himself would have been head clerk by this time had he had her thorough practical grounding instead of having had to knock about the world and fend for himself; and he asked her what sort of a villa-building-site Rainham Parva would, in her opinion, make. He added that it was nice to have "the rooms" (he used the plural) let to somebody they knew something about, and then, having omitted to shake hands with her on coming in, did so before going out, and evidently accounted their introduction complete. He came back presently for a pair of pincers he had forgotten, left her a Carter Paterson card for her window in case she should have need of one, said that one of these Sundays they must all go round to the Earles in Westbourne Grove to tea, made a pun on the words Earle and Lord, and went out again. An hour later Louie heard him tiptoeing discreetly past her door on his way upstairs to bed.
Louie was resolved, however, to put a stop to the "Earle and Lord" business once for all. She was a Causton, not a Scarisbrick, in Sutherland Place.
She felt herself to be already on the verge of a new life that was—let us say amusing—precisely in proportion as it was different from any life she had ever known. Shemust be—if the word may pass—amused; she told herself so, clinching the argument by adding that it was far better to laugh than to cry. She had promised Richenda that she would call and see her Mr. Weston at his Business School in Holborn; and this might be—well, amusing. She went without loss of time. She took the Oxford Street bus one morning and alighted at the door of the School.
She mounted three floors of narrow, old-fashioned stairs, asked a fair, perky boy, who somehow managed to make a good suit of clothes look cheap, where she should find Mr. Weston, and presently found herself introducing herself to a thin and melancholy-looking man with a sparse and colourless beard, a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, and a gentle and hopeless voice. This was "the Secretary Bird," then. He shook hands slackly with her, placed a chair for her in one of the bays of a sort ofEthat was lined with books of reference, and she listened to his soft, dispirited voice and to the clicking of typewriters in an adjoining room. He thanked her for "all her kindnesses" to Richenda, whatever these might have been, and presently a skimpy little woman in green plaid, with eyes that peered quizzically behind spectacles and "destined spinster" written all over her, tiptoed for a moment at the end of the bay of books, uncertain whether to approach. Then the fair, perky boy who made good clothes look cheap also came up. Mr. Weston said: "Excuse me—yes, Miss Windus?" Louie saw that she was interrupting the morning's work. She rose.
"I daresay we shall see one another again," she said. "Good-bye."
And, outside on the Holborn pavement again, she said toherself with decision: "Thanks—but no Business Schools for me!—Poor Richenda!"
Three weeks later she became a student at that very school.
There is no puzzle about it. Some things come no less unexpectedly that they are more than reasonably to be expected. To put this as briefly as it can be put, she had merely discovered that an affair of atmosphere had become an affair of fact. That was all—nothing more, nothing less. But that was no reason why she should not be amused.
The natural thing for young women in such circumstances to do is to seek their mothers. If Louie did this natural thing a little unnaturally—well, she did it unnaturally, that was all. The row, scene, or whatever it was going to be, had better be got over; then she could proceed to amuse herself. She had wired that she was coming; the Captain had met her at Trant station; but she had had nothing to say to the Captain.
The Captain, however, had had something to say to her. At first his mumbling into his moustache had not penetrated to her intelligence; she had only heard broken repetitions of "Dear old Mops—only for a week or two—knew you weren't without—meant to write, but dashed awkward thing to explain by letter, and was coming up in a week in any case—if she stuck fast he'd see what could be done——"
"Eh?" Louie had said at last. "What's that, Chaff?"
Chaff had repeated his mumblings. At the end of them she had gathered that the needy Captain had borrowed the quarter's allowance that had been entrusted to him for despatch.Louie had merely given a little preoccupied laugh and patted his hand.
"All right, old boy; don't worry," she had said.
A sample or two of her conversation with her mother must answer for the rest. For quite twenty minutes the Honourable Emily's head had been buried in the sofa-cushions, and the Trant coal-and-blanket charitable account had lain where it had fallen from her hand—across her cheek.
"That's all," Louie had ended with hard composure.
"Oh—oh——" the mother had moaned.
"And as I say, I won't marry him."
"Oh—you must—you must!"
"Why? Because Uncle Augustus will say I must?"
"Oh—you must!"
"I'll go and see Uncle Augustus."
"Oh, you mustn't—you mustn't!"
Then, in an interlude, the reasons why everything must at all costs be kept from Lord Moone had been brokenly explained. In another interlude a few minutes later Louie had invented a fictitious name.
"That conveys nothing to me," Mrs. Chaffinger had moaned. "What is he?"
Louie had invented a station in life to fit the name. Her mother's face had disappeared behind the coal-and-blanket account again.
"And this—this!—is your study of horticulture!" she had half faintingly wailed.
"Yes. Yours was art, wasn't it?"
Then Mrs. Chaffinger's querulous despair had shown a weak, vindictive gleam. Both pronouns had been a little emphasised as she had retorted:
"I married your father!"
It was only a flicker. Her head had gone into the cushions again.
"That didn't last very long," the devilish girl had commented.
"I married your father, I say—for your sake," had come from the cushions.
"That's one of the differences. There are others. If you're thinking of wiring to Uncle Augustus I'll wait; if you're not, I'll go."
Lord Moone had been wired for. He had wired back: "Impossible"; but a second wire had brought him over post-haste the next morning. The situation had been explained to him; the peer had walked away for a few moments; Louie had thought she had heard something about "our damnable women"; then, coming back, Lord Moone had abruptly convened a Committee of Ways and Means. Words like "Impossible ... once in a lifetime quite enough ... secrecy ... the Continent for a few months ... institution," had been used; and at one other alternative Louie's eyes had become hard and chill as ice.
"Thank you," she had come harshly in. "As you say, all these things may be possible. I decline them all."
Then Lord Moone, whose habit of ordering masses of men probably misled him into thinking that the ordering of one young woman who says "I won't" was a comparatively simple matter, had made his pronouncement.
"Very well," he had said. "Then as head of the family I order that your allowance shall be stopped till you come to your senses. You hear that, Emily?"
"You mean you'll starve me out?" Louie had said, with dancing eyes. Like her father, she came up to time as long as she could stand.
"I mean what I've said."
"Then ring the bell, please—and don't light that cigar till I've gone. I shall be ill if you do."
And Lord Moone himself had ordered the carriage in which she had turned her back on Trant.
Burnett Minor, when Mrs. Lovenant-Smith had surprised the rebellion in the box-room, had not made herself more inconspicuous than had Captain Chaffinger during this scene. Indeed, probably considering that Lord Moone, his sister and Louie herself formed a quorum, he had presently been discovered to be not there. But it seemed to be the Captain's lot to receive and despatch Louie in her comings and goings, and before the carriage had reached the lodge he had stopped it and climbed in. Ordinarily, the whites of the Captain's eyes had yellowish marblings; the yellow had now deepened to the hue of cayenne. He had blown his nose repeatedly and violently, and Louie, glancing covertly at him, had suddenly had a pang. All at once he had shown his age. Somehow Louie resented his doing so. People and things you have never taken quite seriously have no right to come near the tragic. It was as if some puppet strutting within a proscenium should suddenly bleed.
"Mops," he had said by-and-by, blowing his nose again, "that was a lie you told them, wasn't it?"
Louie had tried to shut her eyes to Chaff's bleeding. Her hand had sought his.
"The name I told them? Of course it was, you clever old Chaff, to see that."
"You don't tell me that, do you, Mops?"
"You?! No, poor old boy, it isn't worth while telling lies to you."
"I'm glad of that, Mops——"
So, for his private comfort, she had invented for Chaff quite a new lie, name, station in life and all.
Then: "Oh, Mops, Mops, Mops!——" he had murmured sorrowfully.
Little parties were one thing, but his Mops quite another.
But her anger had stirred again. She had remembered her uncle's proposals.
"Did you hear what he said—Moone? No; you'd gone out. Listen——"
He had tugged unhappily at his moustache as she had told him, bringing out the words with vehemence and hate.
"Well, but, Mops——" he had demurred wistfully.
"What, are you going to tell meyouthink so too?"
"All right, Mops, all right, all right, old girl——"
"Much I care for him and his family name! He could bully mother into marrying people, but he can't bully me.... Sorry, Chaff, that was clumsy; we're pals at any rate. Uncle Gus and his Scarisbricks!"
Her exclamations of contempt had occupied the rest of the time to the station. Chaff had put her into her carriage.
"You'll let me know where you are and what you're doing, won't you, dear?" he had pleaded. "I can't let you go like this!"
"I hardly know where I shall be myself yet. Very likely I shall go to a Business School; I shall have to do something, and that's all I know anything about. Anyway, the bank will find me—no, you poor old thing, ofcourse I don't mean the money! Of course I'll ask you for that when I want it. I've quite a lot yet. Good-bye, old thing."
"Good-bye, dear."
And this time he had not warned her not to run away with a student of book-keeping.
She went to the Business School partly (bien entendu) for amusement, and partly because there would be very little sense in sitting all day long in Mrs. Leggat's first-floor bed-sitter in Sutherland Place, Bayswater. Perhaps, too, Lord Moone helped to drive her there. Her very skin crept when she remembered the lengths to which he would have gone—he, the corner-stone of orthodoxy when such subjects came up for (very) full-dress debate—to save that precious thing, the family name of the Scarisbricks. Louie had had vanities of person, scores of them; but she had also the sense of the holiness of the body, and she had had enough of Trants and Mallard Boises and their masters for a time. The Business School would be as amusing as anywhere else; indeed, she knew of nowhere else. Here she was at last in a London that was not the London of shops and dinners and theatres and drives in the Park. She would have the fun—always the fun—of it. She would go with the Leggats to see Richenda's sisters and that father of hers who had apologised to her for having brought her into the world. She would learn these unfamiliar accents that met her ear, breathe this invigorating if dusty air. She would know what life meant to that skimpy woman in the green plaid, would inspect that new specimen, the jaunty boy who made his good clothes look like an ordinary "reach-me-down." And she knew, withoutknowing how she knew, that before long she would be seeing her father. Sit in Sutherland Place? Oh no, that wasn't amusing. Besides, she would presently have her living to earn. She had thought, when Richenda had told her those dismal tales, that there must be something wrong with Richenda and that she herself would be able to do better. Well, she would very soon know.
II
At Chesson's she had taken her proper place among her fellow-students at once; it was not her fault if here, at the Business School, she did not at first so much make friends as watch a number of amusing phenomena. She watched them with wonder; all was so very, very different. The building itself seemed once to have been some sort of a dwelling-house, for there were cabbagey wall-papers of a bygone fashion on the walls, broken ends of bell-wire stuck out from the mantel-sides and the cornices, and the gas-brackets were old and ornate and grimy. Louie was conscious of something like a shock the first time she approached one of the third-floor bay windows and, looking across the street, saw in the windows opposite men packing things in brown paper, waitresses carrying trays, and gas-jets burning in the dark interiors beyond. They seemed so near. The width of Holborn lay between, but they seemed to crowd on her much more closely than the yew at Rainham Parva had ever crowded on the inner windows of the courtyard. The yew, moreover, was thinned at intervals, but there was no cutting and lopping the forward-thrusting, amusing humanity across the way. They seemed to be caged there expressly for her observation.Well, she was there to observe—to observe, and, of course, to be amused.
Her new companions, too, were unlike anybody she had ever known; they no more resembled them than the sweet heavy airs of Chesson's resembled these diverting smells of dust and damp and bad ventilation and the whiff of the Holborn pavement below. Their accents (amusing, however) struck her sharply; their faces—alert, sophisticated, highly entertaining but without candour—no less sharply. They too, like the buildings across the way, seemed to ignore intervening space and to press intrusively forward to look at her. She was glad that the first thing she had done had been to stop Mr. Weston's mouth on the subject of the Scarisbricks and Lord Moone; half the drollery of her experience would have gone had these people known who she really was. And the things these slovenly voices said had no candour. They struck her as a series of (merry) "scorings-off," a succession of (cheery) "chippings" of one another. If their reticences seemed all in the wrong places, and hand in hand with their defensiveness went an eager volubility about the things Louie would have kept to herself, why, so much the more laughable the whole joke.
She had been only just in time in extorting her promise from Mr. Weston. She was sure of this from his manner of speaking to herself. It was extremely, syllabically distinct. To words that he had been pronouncing correctly and without thought all his life he gave (as if he must find something superior for her, and knowing better all the time) pronunciations marvellously new. He found new words, too; must look 'em up, Louie thought, in the dictionary. Richenda, who had begun by being his sweetheart, became his "intended," and once even his "inamorata."But he was to be trusted. Louie saw that. If he gave away her identity at all it would be only by the portentousness of his secrecy. As a matter of fact he never did so.
It was the skimpy woman in the green plaid, Miss Windus, who answered most of Louie's questions about her new companions. She too was a delightful novelty to Louie. As if to make her own position quite clear at the outset, she had confided to Louie at once that she herself was "partly independent." Seeing Louie's slightly puzzled look, she had gone on to explain that by this she meant that she enjoyed an income of perhaps a pound a week "on her own." With this title to consideration thoroughly understood, she went ahead. When Louie asked a question about the high-heeled little Cockney Jewess, Miss Levey, Miss Windus answered it in terms of her own pound a week. "Miss Levey?" she said. Oh, she'd nothing; she lived at home and had her fees paid for her, of course, and wouldn't stick fast, being a Jewess, not she; but Kitty didn't suppose Miriam Levey had one shilling to rub against another; not, that was, "on her own." Louie, finding other questions answered from this same standpoint, took her cue and framed her questions accordingly. Had the other female student (there were only four women), Miss Soames, anything? Well, Kitty didn't know; she fancied her aunt must have a tidy bit coming in; they lived together in a boarding-house in Woburn Place, and as the aunt did nothing all day perhaps she too was partly independent, or even wholly so. Had Mr. Merridew, the swaggering boy who cheapened his clothes so curiously, a tidy bit coming in? Here Kitty evidently had a tale to tell. Had Archie Merridew a bit coming in, indeed! Why, his father was Mr. Merridew of Merridew and Fry's,the fancy stationers with branches everywhere, so Louie could judge for herself whether that meant a bit or not! Archie a bit? Why, Mr. Merridew Senior had retired, and lived at a big place near Guildford, with a tennis-lawn, if you please. Archie Merridew a bit!—Then what about Mr. Mackie? (Louie might have been estimating people by what money they had all her life.)—Mr. Mackie? No, Kitty shouldn't think Mr. Mackie had very much, but he had a splendid "permanency" offered him when he had passed his examinations, as an auctioneer's clerk, four pounds a week to start with—to start with, mind you—and a "rise" every year. Yes; Mr. Mackie was all right, and, oh dear!wasn'tMr. Mackie funny?
Louie thought this Mr. Mackie more than funny; in her inexperience of the type she could never believe he was quite true. For Mr. Mackie sang songs, imitated music-hall artistes, could "gag" for a whole day on end, and never forget for a moment the immense success he was. He fascinated Louie. "Ladies and bipeds in trousers!" he would begin, with rapid gestures and still more rapid speech, "before the applause I am waiting for has had time to subside—good word, subside—(thank you, Cuthbert, you can take the bouquet round to the stage-door)—as I was saying when Fitzclarence interrupted me, ladies and tripeheads in blouses, whoa, backpedal, never mind—as I was saying, I will now endeavour to give you my celebrated imitation of Roderigo the gasfitter at one o'clock on a Saturday with the thirty bob in his pocket and Hildegarde Ann his wife licking the paint of the lamp-post at the corner to squench her thirst—heu, her thirst!... Chord on, please, titillate the catgut, Professor, and take firm hold of his hand, girls——"
Then, while the eyes of Lord Moone's niece would grow bigger and bigger, would follow the performance.
"Isn'the funny!" Kitty would giggle, faint with laughing; "oh, give us some more, Mr. Mackie!"
And Kitty, like Saint Paul, died daily at yet another trick of Mr. Mackie's—the putting of his handkerchief to his nose, and the drawing of it slowly downwards to the accompaniment of a piercing whistle.
But Louie was only moderately amused by young Merridew. Mr. Mackie had his own perfection; but vulgaritywitha tennis-lawn! "Good gracious, no," said Louie.
She had entered the School as a day student; but within a week she had put her name down for the evening classes also. Even then she had the evenings of Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and the whole of Sunday quite unamusingly on her hands. She did not want time on her hands. As much Mr. Mackie as you pleased, but no time on her hands. So she joined the classes that met on the evenings of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
On her very first evening she saw a student whom she had not seen before.
She had taken a text-book on Elementary Book-keeping from one of the shelves of theEof books in which she had had her first talk with Mr. Weston (who, by the way, had said that he would like to see her for a few minutes before she left that evening), and finding a chair within the recess, had sat down where she was to read it. She had not looked up when somebody had passed the mouth of her little compartment and entered the next one. She had heard a book taken down from a shelf behind her, and, after some minutes, put back again; and had she not chanced to straighten her back at that moment she would probably not have seenthe man repass. She had no time to notice more than that he was very big and not very well dressed. She went on with her reading, wondering, in the intervals of her slack attention to her book, what Mr. Weston wanted with her.
She saw the big man again at the close of the class. This time he was standing at the head of the stairs, waiting for young Merridew. He really was immensely big, so big that a too prolonged first look at him seemed unpleasantly like impertinent curiosity. Indeed, he seemed already to feel her eyes upon him, for he moved as if to look back at her in turn; but young Merridew came up at that moment and they went out together. The big man's head and shoulders were to be seen beyond the handrail for quite an appreciable moment of time after young Merridew's had disappeared. But she had been wrong in thinking that he wore a shabby suit. His suit might be shabby also, but it could not be seen. He wore, and had apparently worn in class also, a tawny old ulster of yellow and black check. In spite of its age it seemed somehow a better garment than did the more expensive clothes of his companion. He did not, however, strike her as very amusing.
She turned away to seek the Secretary Bird—Mr. Weston.
For the moment Mr. Weston was engaged. He was standing near the lecture-room blackboard, talking to the girl who lived with her partly independent aunt at the boarding-house in Woburn Place. Louie had already remarked the likeness of this girl, who might have been twenty but looked younger, to Polly Ross, the pretty daughter of the tipsy veterinary surgeon at Trant. Polly too had sported that running of pale blue ribbon beneath the openwork of what Kitty Windus called her "pneumoniablouse," and the clumps of dark hair on her nape too was like Polly's, and she had Polly's dark and sidelong glance, and highly conscious air of unconsciousness when that glance had attracted what it had probably been meant to attract, attention to herself. She had a copy of the Pansy Library in her hand, and Louie smiled as she remembered Burnett Minor and her spoutings. She waited until Weston should be at liberty.
As she waited, Kitty Windus, wearing an Inverness cape and a boat-shaped hat, came up. Miss Windus lived in a street off Tottenham Court Road, and already once or twice Louie had walked with her as far as the Oxford corner. She was waiting for the Polly Ross girl now, whose direction was the same. She asked Louie whether she intended to walk or to "hop on a bus." She always spoke in these rather sprightly terms, just as she always stiffened the line of her back a little the moment a man, any man, entered the room; and she referred, brightly and hopefully, to proposals of marriage as "chances." Louie was already learning when she might expect any given one of Kitty's innumerableclichés, and had several times (humorously) given them back to Kitty again with complete success. As they waited for the Polly Ross girl (whose name was Evie Soames) Louie asked Kitty who the big man who had gone out with Mr. Merridew was.
"Oh, the Mandrill!" said Kitty, laughing even before Louie had got out the word "big." "That's Mr. Jeffries. Isn't he a caution? But he only comes in the evenings."
She meant that Mr. Jeffries had not a pound a week on his own. Students who only came in the evenings were of a slightly inferior order to those who came during the day.
"I suppose he had his brown paper parcel with him?" Kitty said, with more mirth in her peering little eyes.
Louie remembered that Mr. Jeffries had carried a brown paper parcel. Kitty twittered.
"Bet you can't guess what was in it—that is, if you haven't heard it?"
She said "it" as if it had been a riddle or some sort of a joke. Louie admitted that she could not guess what had been in Mr. Jeffries' parcel.
"Good old brown paper parcel!" Kitty chuckled. "You'll get to know it by-and-by! You see," she explained, "he goes to Archie's for a bath. Isn't it killing?"
"I—I don't quite see what you mean," said Louie. She honestly did not.
"Why, for a bath—you know, a common or garden bath, with hot water. I peeped into it once (the parcel, I mean; for shame, you dreadful girl!) and it had a clean shirt and a pair of socks in it. I suppose he wraps those he takes off up when he's done."
Louie's eyes had opened very wide indeed. A man to have to ask another man for a bath! Well, that was something learned about London! A bath—a thing so necessary that its existence was assumed—how extremely amusing! She knew that entertaining word, "poor," but what was this other, this new and side-splitting word that meant that a man had to ask another man for a bath? She had never heard of anything so—so—there was no adjective that quite fitted the humour of it.
The next moment she had wasted an irony on Kitty.
"Hasn't he—a tidy bit?" she asked.
But it took far more than this to get through Kitty's hide. She gave another little laugh and drew her gloves more smoothly over her thin hands.
"Him? The Mandrill? (I always call him the Mandrill, my dear.) Not a penny to bless himself with; look at him!"
"Nor a permanency?" Louie asked.
"What, with those clothes? I ask you, now: it isn't a cold night to-night, is it? Well, why does he keep that heavy old coat on all the evening? Enough said, my dear. He works somewhere in the City, I believe—'something in the City'—sounds most prosperous, doesn't it? And Archie's awful kind to him, I think, but of course he is frightfully clever, and does help Archie with his work sometimes, so Archie gives him a bath (I don't mean what you mean, I mean lets him have one). Here's Evie. Are you coming along?"
But Louie, besides being tickled, smarted a little too. To have to beg for a bath—and then to have the gift made a matter of common knowledge and a joke!—
Well, if these people were different, differences, after all, were what she was here to see.
She turned to Mr. Weston.
What Mr. Weston wanted to say to her she could not guess; but he had hardly spoken twenty words before she was smiling at herself for not guessing. The examinations were to be held just before Christmas, and unless Louie could be ready for her Elementary by that time she would have a good many months to wait before she could enter for the examination again. What Mr. Weston had to propose was, in a word, that he should coach her privately.
She knew what that meant. It meant that he wouldcome to Sutherland Place on Sundays and talk about Richenda.
Well, even talk about Richenda would make shorter thatdies non.
"It really would be a great furtherance of your aims, Miss Causton," Weston said wistfully.
Louie smiled at the periphrasis, and then considered.
"It might be the best thing to do," she said; "but of course I should accept it only on one condition."
"May I venture to inquire what that condition is?" Weston inquired deferentially.
"That you let me pay you for it," said Louie promptly.
But Weston put up a peremptory hand. "Oh no—no, no, no—I should be ashamed after all your kindnesses——"
Louie laughed again. "Good gracious, what kindnesses?"
"Ah, you once shielded an individual very dear to me and took the blame upon yourself, Miss Causton——" His tone was reverential, his eyes did her homage. Louie had forgotten all about the box-room rebellion and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. She laughed once more.
"Well, just as you like. But no pay, no coaching, that's all."
Weston sighed. No doubt his acquiescence cost him a pang. If he took money for giving lessons, lessons he must give, and the talk about Richenda must go.
"Do you dwell on the point with insistence?" he asked.
"Very much."
"I am far from denying that it would be of some assistance in the furnishing of our future nest, if I may use the expression——"
"Of course it would. So that's agreed?"
"So be it," said Weston.
Louie half expected him to add: "Amen."
She was in the habit of dispensing money a little largely, and for the present she could quite well afford to do this. For Chaff had done more than pay his debt. That very day she had had a letter from him, forwarded by the bank. He had paid one hundred pounds into her account, asking her to regard the extra twenty-five pounds as interest on his unceremonious borrowing. But she did not for a moment believe his cheerful tale that "things were all right again now"; poor old boy, ten to one he had borrowed pretty ruinously elsewhere in order to pay her. At all events, Weston should not give up his Sundays for nothing, and she might, after all, allow him an outpouring about Richenda and the future nest once in a while. It was only half-a-crown a week.
But as she left Weston she was thinking of something else that half-a-crown a week had power to buy. Half-a-crown a week would have bought this big shabby student a bath almost every day.
To have to carry a change of underclothing in a brown paper parcel to another man's place——
And to have that parcel peeped into——
How damnable—no, how funny, she meant!
In the light of her knowledge of this extraordinary economy Mr. Jeffries had to practise she felt—she didn't know why—almost shy in his presence the next time she saw him. She felt that she possessed something of his—namely, this knowledge—which she ought not to have possessed. She wondered whether he knew how he had been given away. Something about him almost suggested that he might.
Perhaps it was his mouth. It looked, except when he deliberately opened it, as if it might very well not have opened during the whole of the twenty-eight or twenty-nine years Louie guessed him to have had a mouth at all. The rest of his face, which would have been too large for any man less huge, was an unrelenting slab. It was in the mouth if anywhere that sensitiveness must be looked for. Certainly there was none in the eyes. These Louie found (it was on a Wednesday night that she noticed these things; she had seen him first on a Monday) remarkable. They were the eyes of a lion—clear amber, sherry-coloured. They were made more than ever to resemble the eyes of a lion by that tawny ulster he never removed, and she remembered Kitty's sinister and mirthful suggestion. Did his keeping on of that ulster mean something hardly less stark and laughable than the circumstance of the bath itself? (Louie felt that she was learning.) Then she noticed his hands. She always noticed hands. He stopped in passing to pick up a pen for her. The hand that returned it was not only a magnificent engine of sinew and bone and muscle, powerful and heroic; it was also (this was not so funny) exquisitely kept. Her own hand, pale and slender as the leaf of a willow by contrast with his, was not in its different way more perfect. He might cadge for a bath, but his hands he could look after himself for nothing. And that was true of his hair also. It was tawny, close-cut, and took the light as cleanly as a new silk-hat; hair-brushing was evidently cheap also. The man did what he could. She would have liked to hear his voice, but he handed her the pen in silence and passed on.
"Well, he looks forbidding," was her comment on him as the great church-door of his back disappeared into thetypewriting-room, "and he has got too big a face and a rather frightening jaw; but he does shave it properly, and I don't see where the 'Mandrill' comes in—wretched little creature with her pound a week! And he is like a lion, with those eyes and that ulster——"
And merely because he seemed to be a person to be scored off and given meanly away, she was already prepared, had she been challenged, to vow that he was handsome—in his heavy and unhumorous way. As a matter of fact, if Roy Lovenant-Smith resembled the little terra-cotta head in the Tanagra Gallery of the Museum, this Mr. Jeffries suggested something from the Assyrian Gallery downstairs—something in black basalt, that might carry the doorway of a temple on its head. In any case, with the ulster, the eyes, and the silky tawny hair, he was as like a lion as needs be.
When she had seen him twice only she took it upon herself to snub young Merridew on his behalf.
She and Kitty were leaving the School at four o'clock on the Thursday afternoon when the son of the fancy stationer joined them, and, taking it quite for granted that his tidy bit and his tennis-lawn made him as desirable to Louie as they evidently exalted him in Kitty's eyes, walked westwards along Holborn with them. He wore a new red waistcoat with brass buttons, and perhaps it was in order to live up to his splendour that he made Louie an offer which she curtly declined. They were passing a confectioner's shop; perhaps he noticed—for he seemed a sharp enough little bounder—Louie's glance at the window; he turned to her.
"Like some chocs?" he said.
Had Louie not already detested him, this would havebeen quite enough. Priddy would have had less appalling manners. As it happened, she would have liked some chocolates; lately she had craved for chocolates as much as she had hated the smell of tobacco; but she wanted no chocolates of this young man's buying.
"No, thank you," she replied; and presently she contrived to put Kitty (the straight-backed Kitty whom a man accompanied) between Mr. Merridew and herself.
She had the outside berth of the pavement, and she was wondering whether she would not cross the road and hop on a bus, leaving Kitty and the heir to the tennis-lawn together, when something Kitty said detained her. It was something about Mr. Jeffries. Hitherto Louie had hardly been listening.
"—oh, Jeff!" Merridew was saying. "He'll have to go till we come back. Anyway I shall save half-a-cake of soap."
"There's such a lotofhim," Kitty giggled. "How big's your bath?"
"Well, he's an awfully useful coach for the Method exam., I will say that for him; so we'll call it a fair swap. You know Evie's aunt, don't you?"
"No."
"Thought you did. Good old Aunt Angela! (She always gets ratty when I call her that.) I didn't know she was an old friend of the pater's till we saw 'em at the Zoo that Sunday. So that's why they're coming."
"Oh, perhaps, perhaps not," said Kitty archly. "Perhaps it isn't the aunt they want to see——"
A passer-by elbowed Louie off the pavement; all she caught of what followed was Kitty's laugh.
"So that accounts for the new blouse! You never thinkof askingmedown to Guildford, Archie!" she said reproachfully.
"You must get a chaperon," Archie replied gallantly; "can't be did without, Kitt-oh. The mater don't allow running after yours truly."
Then of another light passage Louie heard only the concluding laugh.
"Well, what of it?" Archie was saying knowingly; and Louie heard something else about apron-strings. "Pale blue baby ribbon ones, eh what?" Archie added, with a grin.
"Archie!" Kitty reproved him.
"Oh, come off it!" replied the fancy stationer's son. "As if a fellow hadn't eyes! If you girlswillwear pneumonia blouses——"
"Archie, you're dreadful!" said Kitty, deliciously shocked.
"Well, it's a tannersworth at the Holborn Public Baths for Jeff next week-end——"
Here Louie interposed. Even amusement can be too rich. "Good-bye," she said, "there's my bus."
She heard Kitty call after her something about the penny stage, but by that time she was half-way across the road.
Brass-buttoned little beast!
She got on her bus.
But a quarter of a mile farther on she descended from it again. She wanted to buy chocolates for herself. She bought them, walked to the Marble Arch, and there turned into the Park. She ate the chocolates as she walked.
Little animal! He appeared to keep the whole School posted about Mr. Jeffries' personal habits. He could not go down to his home for the week-end, taking the Polly Rossgirl and her aunt with him apparently, but Mr. Jeffries and half-a-cake of soap must be dragged in. And that pathetic, pathetic care the man took of his hair and hands! For all that, as she strode along, crunching her chocolates, she became almost angry with him too. Was soap so frightfully dear, and was there no water anywhere but at Mr. Merridew's rooms? She could not understand a man who had any sensitiveness at all suffering his mind to be turned over and inspected and thumb-marked by these people in this way.