Into Nina's flat in Mayfair, one rare August morning, entered Lord Kneedrock, unannounced. He found her in her little drawing-room arranging flowers in a vase—flowers not a whit more lovely than herself.
"Whose?" he asked, nodding toward them. It was his first and only word, and she had not seen him for two months.
She went him one better—one letter better.
"Mine."
"Who sent them?"
"The florist."
"Who paid for them?"
"Nobody as yet. His bill won't be in until the first of the month."
"Who ordered them?"
"I did. Anything more?" She seemed delighted.
He strode over to an open, awninged window and dropped into an invitingly cushioned chair. He was still bearded, still rather leonine, but he was better groomed than in those days in India.
He employed a tailor that was an artist in his craft, and a hair-dresser that was no less so. After a fashion he was almost attractive.
"I am to infer then that there is no present adoring cavalier."
"No," she answered. "Not since last Friday. He has sailed, I believe, to offer his services to the Mexican revolutionists."
"Ah!" he leaned back and gazed pensively over his interlocked fingers. His eyes rested on a bronze in the opposite corner.
"You've never thanked me for that," he said casually.
Nina followed his gaze. "Thankedyou?" she asked.
"Who else?"
"For the cobra?" For it was the cobra with the history that he continued to regard.
"For the cobra."
"You mean you were the one that sent it to me? There was no card with it—no name."
"I picked it up in Calcutta and fancied it might please you. Eve and the serpent, you know. Rather delicately significant—What?"
She was staring at him, astounded. After all these five years he had unsealed his lips. She noticed his scarred left hand, recalled the part that the bronze had played in that, too—and wondered the more.
"Some day," he said in an undertone that had become habitual, "I'll send you a bronze tigress. That will make the symbolism complete."
"Do—do you so much mind, then?" she asked yieldingly. "I mean about my amusements."
"Youroneamusement?" The sneer, the cynicism was in his tone again. "Good God, no! Why should I?"
"You seemed to resent it. I—I'll be very good, if you wish."
"I don't wish anything about it. To be candid, it interests me, when I happen to think of it. You're a type. And I always did like types. The men you first charm and then devour are types, too—types of the weakling. They could never win my sympathy."
"No one has ever encouraged me to be different," she said, turning back to her flowers.
He waited a long moment, his lips parted. Then he said: "No? I dare say not."
She came to him, a white carnation in her hand, and, bending over, caught his coat-lapel between thumb and finger. But, noting her intention, he drew it away.
"No, no," he cried sharply. "Not for me. I am nopetit maître."
She was about to retreat abashed, but he gripped her wrist and held it, and her cheeks flushed crimson. Then he let it go.
"I was looking at the ring," he said. "I see you still wear it."
"I'm still bearing my cross," she returned, "but I've given up hope of the crown."
"I told you to give it to poor Darling," he reminded her. "It should have been buried with him."
She made no rejoinder, but stuck the carnation among the gold of her hair. Almost at the same moment one of the doors was pushed ajar and an enormous staghound, black to a hair, slipped in and began nuzzling Nina's hand.
"Another present?" inquired Nibbetts, looking the beast over.
"Yes. A loan rather—my Irish soldier of fortune left Tara with me to keep his memory green, I fancy."
She patted his head, and into her eyes he looked unutterable things.
"You've bewitched the creature, that's clear," said her caller. He laid a hand on the hound's back and was answered by a low growl. "Surly brute!" he added.
"He senses in you his master's rival," she suggested roguishly.
"God forbid!" snarled Kneedrock.
"Tell me about the marmalade maid," Nina begged, sitting down and taking Tara's head in her lap. "The maid of Dundee."
"I was visiting a man I knew in Tahiti," Nibbetts answered frankly. "And it happens he has a niece. I ran away from her."
"Why?" Nina asked simply.
"For the best reason in the world," he told her. "I was getting to like her too well. That's why I'm here this morning. You're a perfectly incomparable antidote for that sort of thing."
"She's like her marmalade, perhaps—too cloyingly sweet," said Nina, indifferently.
"Her marmalade?" questioned Nibbetts, his brow knitting.
"Doesn't she make it, then? I can't think of Dundee in any other connection. Don't all the women there peel oranges?"
"She doesn't." He could be very literal at times.
"What does she do? How in the world does she spend her time?"
"She spends most of it, I fancy, talking to her parrot."
"Her parrot! How odd! Hasn't she any one else to talk to?"
"Only one other—her uncle. And he doesn't understand."
"But the parrot does, I infer?"
"Thoroughly. The Tahitian parrots are very wise little birds."
Nina's laugh rippled. "It talks back, of course."
"Most certainly. One must talk back to her—even if it is only a parrot."
"And what does she talk about? What do they talk about, I mean?"
The viscount took his time answering. The pause lent emphasis to his words.
"Of me, mostly, I fancy."
"How dull it must be for them!" Nina observed, and Kneedrock's eyes, twinkled. He was really amused.
"Mustn't it?" he chuckled. "Damnably! Still, you can see the picture. Ideal subject for agenrecanvas. What?"
"Oh, perfect," agreed Nina, but she didn't smile. She patted the hound's head and answered the pathetic look in his appealing eyes.
"I'm afraid you've been unkind to her, Hal," she said presently.
"I'm afraid I have," he admitted. "I—" But he thought again and held his peace.
"Why?" she asked.
"Perforce. As a peer I'm bound to respect the laws of the realm. You didn't, but I must."
"I thought—But you know what I thought."
"Poor Darling," he said cryptically. Still there was nothing cryptic about it to Nina. She quite understood.
"I'm very good now," she asserted. "It's hard, but I do try. You must know how I do try."
"Why don't you keep out of temptation?" he asked, standing up. "Why don't you run as I do?"
"I've already told you. There's that in me which is too strong for my will. And the one man that could help me—won't."
He tossed his great tawny head in signal of annoyance. "Tommyrot! You like it. You've got a cruel streak. That's the whole explanation."
"I haven't," she denied, with rising indignation. "I'm too tender-hearted. That's half my trouble. When I meet a nice man who is hungry for my kisses I can't deny him."
"And after you've given you cut his throat or blow his brains out. You are a national menace. You should be either locked up or banished."
She rose, and the hound beside her pressed against her legs.
"Are you going to Bellingdown?" she inquired, ignoring his outbreak. "Kitty tells me she has asked you."
"I'm not sure. Are you?"
"Yes—on Thursday."
"Then I'll not," he said decisively. "No house is big enough for both of us at the same time."
"I'll promise not to eat you," she smiled.
"I'm not afraid of that. You're too devilish careful of your digestion to undertake it. But you'll be eating some other poor chap; and I don't enjoy the spectacle."
"But if I promise to fast?"
"I don't believe in your promises. You've broken every one you ever made me. No, I sha'n't go down. You'll have an open field."
But when Nina traveled down on the appointed day, accompanied by her maid, the black staghound, and innumerable bags and boxes, Nibbetts was the first man she met.
"One of the chauffeurs is ill and the other drunk," he explained, "so I volunteered to fetch you. They'll send a groom down for your luggage later."
"But I must have a dinner-gown," she complained, "and suppose—"
"We can strap one box on behind, I fancy—if we must."
"We certainly must. I can't pin all my hopes of a presentable first appearance to a stupid groom's ideas of expediency and expedition."
He offered no explanation of his change of plan, and Nina forbore to ask him. It developed later, however, that he had already been at Bellingdown for two days.
The Duke and Duchess of Pemberwell were there, too—as were also Sir George and Lady Charlotte. Lord Bellingdown was at home for the shooting, but Waltheof was expected that evening.
"And that's all?" asked Nina, to whom Nibbetts had conveyed this inclusivepersonnelof the house-party.
"All at present," he answered. "There may be one or two more to-morrow for the week-end."
"You don't know who?"
"I don't know who. I'm sorry we can't offer you better sport. The prospective prey so far is neither numerous nor promising. In decency, you know, you must keep your paws off Wally."
He was a distant cousin of Kitty Bellingdown and understood the situation thoroughly.
"I hate that man," said Nina. "Long, black, sardonic creature!"
"That reminds me," said Nibbetts. "What's become of the hound?"
Mrs. Darling glanced back. "He's following. Would you mind driving a little slower. Tara's out of training."
"You'll be late for tea."
"Bother the tea!" she exclaimed. "I can't have the beast winded. My soldier of fortune would never forgive me."
Then Kneedrock did something to the gear and the car shot ahead faster than ever. So they reached the house in ample time, with Tara nowhere in sight.
"And I'll never be able to replace him," Nina mourned. "The breed's dying out."
"Like that of good women," growled Nibbetts.
Lady Bellingdown, coming forward in the hall to meet them, overheard: "Is he ballyragging you again, dear?" she asked, while Nina lifted her veil for the impending greeting. "He's quite impossible."
"He's ballyragging the sex. We shall have to combine to crush him."
"Women will never combine on anything," was his gruff comment. "They're too jealous of one another. The fight for suffrage is foredoomed."
Nina and Kitty kissed and said sweet things to each other, and the viscount turned away with a sneer and a scowl.
"There's always plenty of seed-cake here," whispered the duke, finding a place beside Nina at tea. "Very good seed-cake, too. Much better than at Puddlewood. Let me help you to some."
He put a piece on her plate and she leaned over to get something quite confidential from the duchess, who sat on the end of the lounge nearest the fire. "Even if I am English I want to be warm," was abon motof her youth, still quoted, and still being lived up to.
"I've the very latest word in the Carleigh affair," she whispered behind her hand, with a stolen glance toward Lady Bellingdown, who was busy over the teacups. "Come to my room before dinner and I'll tell you."
Nina nodded, and then the two chattered commonplace for a moment to throw off suspicion. When Nina sat up again her seed-cake was gone and the duke was chuckling.
"But where is it?" she asked, perplexity in her violet eyes.
His grace pointed to the floor at her farther side. Tara was lying there. "He's yours, I suppose. He took the seed-cake at a gulp. Fine staghound that. I had a pair like him once. I say, Doody, didn't I have a fine pair of black staghounds once?"
"Yes, Pucketts." That was the duke's nickname from the cradle.
"Everything's foxhounds nowadays. But when I was younger," he went on—and on—and on.
Nina, delighted to see the animal once more, was caressing his long ears and mumbling baby-talk to him.
In the privacy of the guest-suite she occupied the duchess smoked one cigarette after another and told Nina Darling that it was Sir Caryll himself who had broken the engagement at the last minute, and not the prospective mother-in-law, as the world had it.
"But why? I thought he was madly in love with the girl."
"Oh, he was. But you see he learned something in a most accidental way, and when he asked Rosamond about it, she confirmed it with perfect candor. It seems her own father—Mrs. Veynol's first husband—is a convict. He is still in prison somewhere in the States.
"The whole story—without names, of course, but going just as far as they dared go—appeared last week inBritish Society. I don't take the scurrilous sheet, of course; but my maid does, and she gave it to me to read. I've been wondering if Kitty saw it."
"Perhaps it isn't true," Nina suggested.
"It must be. That's one thing about those wicked society papers—they're almost always right. Otherwise they wouldn't dare, don't you know. It's that that makes them so objectionable."
Nina left her great-aunt and flew to her own room with barely time to dress. There she found her hostess, already in full dinner regalia, awaiting her.
"I felt I must see you at once, dear," began Lady Bellingdown. "I've such a favor to ask you. You can do something for me now that I shall never forget as long as I live. And I don't know a solitary other woman that could do it."
Nina's suspicions ran at once to Lord Waltheof.
"If it's—" she began—but was checked instantly.
"You could never possibly fancy. It isn't anything you'd think. It's about Caryll Carleigh."
"About Caryll Carleigh?"
"Yes. He's been in Scotland, you know, practically buried, and growing worse—more morose, more heart-sick every day. He's had a fearful knocking down, and I've been worried about him—no end."
"Well?" pressed Nina, groping. She couldn't in the least see what she had—or could have—to do with it all.
"I want you to take him in hand—to make him forget."
"I! But how?"
"Here. He's coming. I've just had a wire. He has already started. He will be here to-morrow for tea."
Nina hesitated for just a second. "I—I'll do my best," she said at length.
"Poor darling!" sighed the duchess.
The hall was forty feet wide, eighty feet long, and fifty feet high. It was banked with palms and chrysanthemums and with Michaelmas daisies in silver pots. Yet the words echoed.
"You mean—" questioned Kneedrock, frowning.
The electricity behind a million prisms up aloft was well shaded, and the six dozen candles amid the pictures and bric-à-brac were half-smothered in pink frills. Moreover, Kneedrock had just come in and was still some distance off. Yet the frown was clearly seen.
"Oh, I didn't mean Darling. I didn't mean Darling at all," the duchess corrected quickly.
"We—we were speaking of Caryll," explained Lady Bellingdown, her hand upon the teapot's handle. "We're all thinking of him, you know. He'll be here now—any minute."
"I don't see why you asked him," growled Kneedrock roughly, as was a cousin's privilege. "He'll get no comfort here."
"Nina, remember," reminded the duchess, very interested in her bread and butter.
Then the noble viscount growled at her grace. "He'll get no comfort out of Nina. She'll chew him up alive and throw back the bones, as a snake does."
"Oh dear!" put in Lady Kitty deprecatingly. "You're always so hard upon her."
"It's Nibbetts's way," soothed the duchess, looking very kindly at him. In spite of a lingering unkemptness, he was indeed a fine object to view—massive and leonine. "He always puts things a bit boldly."
"Boldly?" he echoed. "Ugh! Why, the fellow, you know, is all knocked up. Can't go anywhere. Has been off spearing fish for a month, quite alone. And then you ask him here and throw him to Nina's teeth and claws. Ha!"
A minute before the comparison was ophidian, now it was feline. He was nearly as bad as Dinghal.
The duke, who was sitting in a corner of the huge lounge, very much hunched up and nibbling seed-cake as fast as his little, lean jaws would work, spoke defensively between nibbles.
"Maybe she'll amuse him," he said thickly, his mouth full. "Nina's very amusing when she likes. She's often made me laugh. I like Nina."
"I think she's a very delightful young woman," joined in the duchess, in order that her allegiance to her great-niece might not be open to question. "We shall have her at Puddlewood this autumn. We always have her at Puddlewood."
"And she makes life very interesting. Yes, she does," added the duke before taking a fresh nibble. "I always like her to come. Don't I, Doody?"
The duchess hastened with the required confirmation.
"Yes, Pucketts always has liked—" But there her grace stopped short.
There was a slight noise at the end of the hall, and the attention of every one was at once directed toward the door. It was a fact that the entire party was on the tiptoe of expectancy. Every soul there was speculating on how Carleigh would look and how he would act.
"No," said Lady Bellingdown, speaking in the assured tone of one who knows—and yet she had paused to listen, too—"that will not be he. I heard carriage wheels a minute ago. But we've sent a car for him."
She glanced nervously about. "Really, you know," she added, "you mustn't all stare so when he does come in. You must treat him absolutely as if nothing had happened. He is so frightfully sensitive, you know."
"I should think he would be," observed Nibbetts, lounging suddenly down on a settee and speaking in his usual resonant tone that was distinctly audible far and near. "I should think he would be."
"It was really her mother," said Charlotte Gray, who hadn't readBritish Societyand was not in the duchess's confidence. "It was all her mother. It's a very shocking story. It's Borgian. It's Medicean. It's not a bit our present Georgian. Not in the least."
She was looking at Kneedrock, but she was talking for her own amusement, since every one knew all this, and she must have been aware of it.
"It's better not to talk of it," cautioned Lady Bellingdown, by way of gentle rebuke. "Donty feels that it will be wisest not to speak of it while the poor boy is in the house."
Whereupon Lord Waltheof, from his customary place behind her chair, voicing his somewhat superior knowledge of affairs at Bellingdown, said: "He's going early Monday. It won't be a very long strain."
"Going early Monday, is he?" queried the duke, nibbling faster than ever. "That won't help much. We're all going early Monday, too."
The door at the far end of the hall opened just then to admit Sir George Grey—a handsome, slight boyish fellow, with curling chestnut hair.
"Oh, it's Shucks!" cried Charlotte, setting down her teacup and running forward to meet her husband, of whom, being still a bride, she was extremely fond.
"Those were the carriage wheels," discerned the duke, cutting into another seed-cake while his hostess was over behind the palms for a word with the newcomer. "They were Grey's wheels, Doody," he elucidated to the duchess, who was back toward him at the moment. "They were Grey's wheels."
"I hear," said the duchess.
The footman was bringing fresh tea.
"I'm late," said Sir George, coming around to the fire. "Hello, Nibbetts!"
Then he nodded generally to the others. "I got shot in the back," he went on jovially, "and they had to undress me. And then I had to dress again, of course."
"Who shot you?" asked Lady Bellingdown, with the well-bred interest of a well-bred hostess. "Were you badly shot?"
When gentlemen go shooting, to be shot is so common that no one very much minds. Even Sir George's wife, loving him as she did, managed to preserve a stoical silence. To have appeared upset would have been very bad form.
"I don't know," answered the victim. "I don't know who shot me. I was ahead with Donty Down, and I heard Donty yell, and then—there I was peppered. He vows he saw the shot coming."
"How amusing!" cried the duke, delighted. "It is amusing. Donty's always funny."
"Was he shot, too?" asked Donty's wife.
"No, he—"
The door creaked beyond and the butler came tumbling forward to whisper: "Sir Caryll Carleigh."
Then he was really there before them—the hero of the biggest harvest of talk in recent years.
There had been nothing like it since the memorable day when Nina came back from India under the protection of her cousin, the viscount, and every one had a different version of everything.
He was very pale, a slender, brown-eyed youth with his underlip twitching nervously. To all appearances he was quite scared. Still, he certainly was really there.
Naturally there was a flutter—a perfectly visible flutter—for had it not been repeatedly and authoritatively stated that this love-wreck would never be repaired and float in his own especial "swim" again?
Grenfell and the icy coast of Labrador perhaps, or a government berth in Manchuria—but never home society again. Never, never!
And now he was here. His aunt, Lady Bellingdown, hurried forward, her hands extended.
"My dear Caryll!Soglad to see you again. You know every one here, I'm sure. We're allsoglad to see you.Soglad, you know."
He bent and kissed her hand very prettily. Then he bravely cast his big, dark eyes over the rest of the group, taking them all in, individually as well as collectively.
He knew them, every one. Yes, they were all kinsfolk or friends, whose wedding presents he had returned a month before.
It was a trying pair of seconds, through which the duke's seed-cake cheeped like a canary.
"Did you come straight from town?" Waltheof asked in a carefully careless tone. Then he remembered. Very stupid of him; but now too late to mend.
He was standing back to the fire, and the violent agitation of his coat-tails, beneath which his hands were locked, was to the observant ones sign and symbol of his embarrassment.
"I've been in Scotland for a month," returned Carleigh, coloring deeply and seeking a seat.
Every one felt that it was unpardonable in Waltheof to have said "town" to the man who was the center of its talk.
"Oh, Scotland!" exclaimed the duke, as if the fact that the boy had been there was the very remotest thing from his knowledge. "Very amusing place, Scotland. Lovely place, too, Scotland. We went there on our honeymoon. I say, Doody, that was where we went, wasn't it?"
The duchess looked daggers at her duke. Fancy having a husband so lost to the fitness of things as to mention honeymoons in the presence of one who might have been on his at the moment—but wasn't!
"One goes there for the shooting now," she said, to ease the blow. "You always go there for the shooting."
"Not the last time," denied his grace; "it was the closed season—the last time." Then he took another piece of cake.
The duchess didn't quite know whether mention of the closed season was or was not painfully pertinent. "Scotland's so gray," she said in a confidential aside to Waltheof.
Lady Bellingdown was looking beseechingly here and there, praying for some one to say something. It was Kneedrock who responded.
"I hate Scotland," he growled. "I know a girl up there that—" He broke off, leaving them to think anything, and concluded: "I wish I could keep away from the bally place."
Then Lady Bellingdown wished that he hadn't. It was positively awful! Everybody looked at everybody in furtive consternation. Her hand trembled and she spilled Carleigh's tea all over.
He had risen in expectation of nourishment and was standing beside her. With a frozen smile, as she changed saucers, she gasped:
"Nina is here. You remember her, don't you? She's a widow now, you know. Very sweet, very bright. Extremely good company."
"Was she happily married?" Caryll asked, trying to look unconcerned.
"Why—er-r—I don't know. They went out to India, and he was killed in an accident. Cleaning a gun, you know. It was never very clear how it happened. Nobody ever knew. She's in half-mourning still."
"They werenothappy," contributed Kneedrock in his resounding undertone. Then he lounged close. "I know," he added sharply. "She's a tiger come human, and Darling was her prey—some of her prey."
Lady Bellingdown was trying to laugh, though not very successfully. "What awful things you say, Nibbetts!" she sighed.
Carleigh stared in silence.
"It's true," the viscount pursued. "She's a reincarnated man-eater. She likes to take chaps and tear them and maul them and drive the souls out of them with pats that they're too far gone to feel!"
Every one was listening. Carleigh's pallor had gone white as paper. But it was the whiteness of intense interest rather than of alarm.
"Oh, I say!" exclaimed the duke, swallowing hurriedly. "I say, Kneedrock! What you mean is that she's uncommonly amusing. That's so, and that's all you mean. Only you put it a bit strongly. But that's what you mean."
Nibbetts shrugged his broad, heavy shoulders.
"Have it your own way," he grumbled. "I know what I mean, and I know what I know. You just watch her eyes get narrow, and then you wait a month. They narrow when a new man appears; and in a month she's licking his blood from her paws!"
"Oh, how very rude you are!" Lady Bellingdown chided. "Really, you know, I won't have it. You sha'n't say another word. No, I won't have it!"
Carleigh looked down at his tea. A queer flush had succeeded the pallor—a flush of still livelier interest to which Kneedrock's remarks had stung him.
He wondered what a reincarnated tigress would be like. A pleasant thrill charged through him for the first time in quite five weeks.
And just then the door at the end of the hall opened and Nina Darling trod lightly in. She had been walking and still had on her hat—a hat of yellow felt with cocks' plumes sifting backward.
In her hand she carried a man's walking-stick, and by her side stalked a great black staghound.
Sir Caryll took her all in instantly. And remembering the reference to half-mourning, wondered whether it was expressed in the hound. Certainly there was no other sign, for her frock was a pale tan frieze and her boots were but a shade darker.
"I am very late," she cried, and her clear voice rang across them like a bell. "But I am forgivable. I found the quaintest little church, and I have been praying. Yes, only fancy! I've been down on my knees begging not to do wrong, because—" she looked at them all and laughed—"because I feel just like doing wrong and I don't want to."
"You'll do it," snarled Kneedrock,sotto-voce.
"You know Caryll Carleigh, don't you, dear?" asked Lady Bellingdown.
She turned her big violet eyes his way, and he, watching eagerly, saw them fold to slits, just as Kneedrock had said. And Kneedrock saw them, too.
"And you prayed to be kept from mischief, eh?" he mused. "But of course you didn't mean it."
She crossed to Carleigh's side and sat down there. "And I prayed for others, too," she told him. "For you." With a laugh. "You need it; don't you?"
"I need it," he answered shortly. "Yes, surely."
She pulled off her heavy gloves and gave them, with the stick, to the staghound, which walked gravely away at once.
"Did you walk far?" Lady Bellingdown asked.
"Rather. To the Pine Needles."
"Why, that's twelve miles," said Lord Waltheof.
"Perhaps."
Carleigh stared more frankly at her—at her head of gold, her brow of fairest ivory, set with gems of living amethyst beneath; at her long, sinuous figure, which suggested Lilith and the medieval conception of an angel as well.
When she lifted her eyes to him and smiled, he realized that it was the first really natural smile that he had encountered in a month.
Something cold within him warmed once more. The feminine then still held that which could affect him. His heart, after all, was not utterly dead.
He returned the smile, and the slits grew yet more narrow. And as they had seemed to young Andrews, on a night at Simla, and to Heaven only knows how many other men at Heaven only knows how many other places, so they seemed to him—cleft opals, with the devil splitting the hairs of the lashes that kept them from scorching a mere masculine mortal.
"I remember you as a little girl," he murmured.
"First blood," said Kneedrock, who had been listening, in a half-whisper to the duke.
"Yes, but you know she'll brace him up," returned his grace. "She really will. My word, but she's very bracing, is Nina. I like her. I always have."
"He'll be very glad to creep back, scratched and minus one ear, and marry his fiancée in six months," rejoined the honorable viscount with bitter cynicism.
"Do you really think so?" asked the duke.
"Think so! I know it," yawned Kneedrock. "She doesn't care who rattles the bones, once she's had the meat."
When the men came in after dinner that evening Mrs. Darling sat alone in a huge red satincauseuse; one of those queer, hard, tufted royal things that fashion pitched in among the wigs and powder of one past period.
She wore a gown of gray gauze with bands of beaded and jeweled fringe at corsage and knees. Few women can wear gray. Nina could, and did.
The other women were grouped near, talking, but not with her. They had not shunted her; but she had gone apart and sat so. It was her way when the time for the reappearance of the men drew near. Nobody misconstrued. They all understood.
"And yet, how she does make a party go, you know!" whispered her hostess to the duchess. "She's really quite wonderful at it."
"I like her," confessed the duchess. "She's such nice lines about her waist, too, hasn't she?"
"Y-yes," faltered Lady Bellingdown, "she's quite a picture. I do wish Nibbetts wouldn't pitch into her so. It's very nasty of him."
"But Caryll will never believe what he says," the duchess offered comfortingly. "Men never do."
As she spoke the doors slid apart and the six men straggled in in procession, scattering slowly like a flock of settling birds. Each married man tried to avoid his wife and rather missed the mark.
Caryll Carleigh walked to where Mrs. Darling sat, circled her and took the other end of the red tufted thing that was made for two. She just smiled.
All the rest began to talk at once. The air warmed with: "They made it a point to drive through once a year and preserve the right of way—" "He said: 'Don't hurry!' but she took it and the branch caught her and carried her off—" "Oh, no, it wasn't that winter; it was when I was in Malta—" and so on, and so on.
Sir Caryll lifted his eyes and lowered his voice. "Do you know, I was sure my heart was dead. I was certain of it. But now I begin to doubt."
She smiled still, staring straight before her.
"Do look at me," he pleaded. "Your eyes are so wonderful. Like an elixir. They give me back all that I have lost. Do look at me."
"Do you know," she asked, complying with his request, "that I'm considered a very bad woman?"
"I don't believe it."
"Oh, but I am. You ask Lord Kneedrock. He'll tell you. He has a hash about a reincarnated tiger that he tells every one. He calls my hands claws."
She looked down at her hands then and Caryll's gaze followed hers. They were wonderful hands, every finger a psychic index.
"Some day I'll let you hold one for a little," she said, moving them slightly. "You can judge for yourself what they're like then."
He was conscious of the most curious of thrills. It coursed through him from head to toes. It stimulated him, wonderfully. It redoubled his courage.
"Adieu, ordinary rules!" his heart cried. "To the front and fire!" And his voice said: "Has Kneedrock ever held them?"
"Oh, yes. Ever so many have. I'm making a study of holding hands. Some men keep boring into your palm with their thumb, and some like to grind all your knuckle-bones together, crosswise. They never seem to think how the woman may feel."
"I fancy, under such circumstances, if I were you, I should say something," said Sir Caryll, laughing.
She looked at him, seriously. "What, for instance?"
"'Oh, you hurt! Let go!'"
"I'll try to remember," she said, without a smile. "You think that is better than just bearing it?"
"Yes. Unless you like it."
"Oh, I never like it. I grew weary of it long ago. Men are all so dreadfully alike. Unless you are going to be different, I—Are you going to be different?"
"I'm heart-broken," said Carleigh, not quite seriously. "Perhaps that constitutes a difference."
"I know exactly how it feels to be heart-broken." She nodded wisely. "You feel that it will kill you; but it doesn't. The third day one takes pudding, as usual."
"Tell me," he pleaded suddenly, "did you love your husband?"
"Oh, no," she answered with emphasis. "What a stupid question!"
"What went on before he died?"
She laughed. "Lots," was her laconic answer.
"Were you very lonely?"
"No. I had compensation."
He felt a violent throb through all his veins.
"A lover?" he asked boldly.
Instantly her eyes came to his. "You really do think bad of me, then?" Her tone was reproachful. "You think that when I said people considered me a very bad woman they meant baddest bad, and that they considered right?"
"No," he corrected. "I didn't stop to think. What I said just jumped into my head. I'm curious about you—that's all."
"I'm not going to tell you my story," she declared. "You ask Kneedrock. He'll tell you that I shot my husband to marry another man, and that the other man begged to be excused. Kneedrock's very entertaining when he begins to be confidential about me."
"How can you joke about such things?"
"I joke about everything. It's my way of getting on."
"But such an awful tale!"
"Oh, dreadful!" she said, easily.
He felt a bit uncertain and his laugh showed it. "The other man was an idiot," he told her.
"Quite so," she assented.
There was a movement among the others. They were going to have bridge. All had risen and their backs were turned. Quickly he laid his hand upon hers. Then:
"Oh, how you interest me!" he exclaimed, below his breath. "You've had a bad time, too. I know it. I feel it. You'll tell me, and I'll tell you, and there'll be something in the world I'll care about again. You see, I thought—I really was sure—that all the caring about things had been killed in me forever."
Her hand was quiet beneath the throbbing of his own. He had a singular hand for a man—one of those rare hands that pale and flush, that shiver and burn.
It burned now, but hers had no responding heat or throb. If his quivered with a passionate call for some response, the response came not. He had to recognize that no sleeping ardor stirred to the call of his caress.
But her eyelids drooped lower and lower until her lashes lay close against her cheeks, and then as he looked—and longed—he saw suddenly with an ecstatic thrill of surprise and delight that tears shone among them.
"You feel—something?" he murmured breathlessly. "What?"
"I feel for you," she answered. "You are so young. How old are you? Do you mind telling me?"
Certainly he had not expected that answer. "I am twenty-six," he said. "But why?"
"Twenty-six!" Her eyes were still closed. "I am thirty," she said softly. "That is why."
He felt quite bewildered; in a maze as to her meaning. "I know you've had a bad time, too," he said again. "You'll tell me all about it, won't you? Don't join the bridge crowd. They'll be playing there for hours, and we can sit here and have ourselves to ourselves. Do! Do! I want to know such a lot, and you'll tell me all."
She drew her hand gently away. "Will I?" she whispered. "Will I, truly?"
He seized her hand a second time, "Yes—yes, you will. You're going to be so kind—so good—to me. You're going to let me have your trouble to think of instead of mine. I'm so tired of the ceaseless agony of mine. I didn't do anything, you know. 'Fore God, I didn't do anything. It was all a plot, and now they've ruined her life and mine. Perhaps it was a plot with you, too."
"No," she breathed. "With me it was a plan."
"Never mind the difference," he protested. "They say, you know, that I was in love with the mother. I wasn't. Really, I wasn't. But they told her and the engagement was broken. It was all the most horrible thing imaginable. You'll hear it on all sides.
"Of course no one would believe that story about you, but every one believes the one about me. They haven't ruined you, but they have ruined me. And then people think that Scotland should have helped me." He paused, quite pale, his voice shaking.
His hand had closed harder and harder on hers, and now he drew it nearer. When he had pressed it between both of his own for a long minute, he felt a painful point within his palm, and, freeing her, he looked. On her third finger sparkled a diamond cross.
It was a great, awkward thing to be attached to a ring, although lovely enough in itself. The cross had marked his flesh. He turned her hand and saw that the ring was shaped and carven like a crown—a crown with points.
"The cross and the crown?" he questioned then. "Your own design?"
"His mother's," she said, still with closed eyes. "If I had been his wife it would have been mine. But as I can never be his wife he gave it to me to wear—because I loved him."
"The man who backed out?" Carleigh asked.
"The same man," she made answer.
"Stupid idiot!"
"With all my heart."
With which she opened her eyes and rose abruptly.
"You are very young," she said in the most casual of tones. "Oh, dear, but you are so very young. When you've gone further on in life you'll know that very few of those that really love can ever marry. I almost think that it is the first sign of a great love to be separated. And a good thing too. It leaves one one's dreams."
The tone startled him, but the matter of her speech suited. She moved toward the fire. Kneedrock stood there, facing the chimney-piece.
"What are you doing?" she asked him, gaily. "Have you stopped playing?"
"They don't want me just now," he said.
Carleigh felt annoyed; but he followed close after her.
"We were talking of such interesting things," she went on, still addressing the viscount's back.
"I dare say. What for instance?" he asked, without turning.
"I've told Sir Caryll that you will tell him all of my story," she pursued, ignoring the question. "You will—won't you?"
"The whole of it?"
"Yes."
"I hope that it will interest him more than it does me."
"If it bores you to repeat it, you needn't," said Nina, gently. "But it is rather dramatic, you know. I mean that night, and all that happened."
"Poor Darling!" muttered Kneedrock.
Carleigh felt most uncomfortable.
"Nibbetts was there, you know," she explained tranquilly. "He was always a friend of the family."
"We're first cousins," said the viscount shortly.
"And once—once, in India—he fought for my good name," she continued, easily.
"The good name of the family," the cousin corrected—unnecessarily it seemed to Sir Caryll.
"It came to the same thing," she added.
Carleigh wished that the other man would go back to the game and thus end this bewilderingly frank conversation. And the next instant he did, and they two were alone again.
"Youhavehad a hard time," he said, quickly. "I fancy I ought to know all about the story, Mrs. Darling, but I don't. I haven't any connections in the army. We are all diplomatic people. It's very stupid in us, I suppose."
"Not quite that," she returned. "I've sometimes thought that we are stupid to go in for the army so strongly. But it is all an affair of blood and bigness, I imagine."
He laughed. "Blood and bigness," he repeated. "How cleverly you put it! And with us it is—"
"Brains and littleness," she cut in.
Then he laughed again, outright. So outright that those at the tables heard, threw up their heads, listened, and then bowed their heads again, masking significant smiles.
"There is no one like Nina," Lady Bellingdown commented under her breath.
"Oh, he is saved, if you mean that," Sir George declared lightly.
"I told you so," reminded the duke, proudly. "I said: 'Nina will wake him up.' She always wakes everybody up. She says what you wouldn't think she'd say, and it wakes one up most uncommonly."
And they went forward with their game. For that matter so did Mrs. Darling and Carleigh.
"Are you stopping here for long?" he asked.
"For as long as I can stand it."
"You mean—"
She clasped her hands behind her head and gazed intently into the very soul of the embers. "I mean that I soon choke and stifle in the close air of man. I am happier alone."
Freshly startled, he stared afresh. "It's always bad, then?" he asked sympathetically. "You don't get over it?"
"It's always bad." She paused a second or more, and then turned toward him, her eyes narrowed in that characteristic style which Kneedrock had described so harshly.
"But it is glorious, all the same," she cried with an odd little soft rapture. "You haven't come to that yet. You've not gone on to where one fights for the mere joy of loving love, in life, as one fights for breath in a suffocating pit. Why shouldn't I love to love? I love to do it. I love it all. I'd double the stakes at every loss, if I could. Do you follow me?"
"N-no," stammered Sir Caryll, a trifle stunned by the sudden shock of a boomerang idea. "N-no—I—er—I—"
"But you will to-morrow," she declared, nodding at him. "You will to-morrow. I'll go first and you'll follow."
"Oh, if you mean that—"
"I never give up," she asserted. "I never will—"
"Does it look hopeless?" he broke in, laughing.
"I will tell you that to-morrow."
"When to-morrow?"
"We'll get off an hour before luncheon. I'll be down here waiting for you at a quarter to twelve precisely."
"You'll findmewaiting," said Carleigh, smiling.
The next morning the sun soared radiant. Carleigh, handed his stick by his valet, was conscious, too, of a personal soaring radiance: a condition so unusual and unexpected that it metaphorically struck him in the face.
"Oh, no," he reminded his lovelornity with emphasis, "it cannot possibly be!" Yet he knew joy to be all over him.
Not even the fourteen rare old engravings of early Christian martyrs and their martyrdom, with which the corridor was cheerfully embellished, could dampen his bubbling gaiety.
One cannot, indeed, take much interest in hangings and burnings and other tortures when one is going to have an hour alone in the open with a pretty woman who says things that—as the duke put it—you wouldn't think she would.
In the hall below he found the great black staghound—sole symbol of her mourning—waiting in majestic solitude beside a chair that bore a slender switch of a cane and a rough gray Burberry.
Mrs. Darling, herself, was not there; but the hound, the cane, and the coat—the morning being cold—showed that she had not forgotten her appointment.
Carleigh strolled over to the fire and lighted a cigarette. He felt so delightedly content. Presently his hostess swept quickly in from another room and nodded at him with the good cheer that no one had of late dared exhibit before him.
"You're going out with Nina," she said, evidently well-posted. "We're all driving to lunch with the men in the open. Can't you and she find your way there, too?"
"We'll try, but don't wait for us," he answered, really blithely.
Then it abruptly rushed over him how much he had been eased of his pain in these few hours, and he went up and kissed Lady Bellingdown's cheek impulsively, with: "Oh, Aunt Kitty! When will you have a spare minute for me, alone? I've such a lot to tell you."
In his way he was as uncontrolled as Nina, and quite as given to bursting forth in unwary speech.
"Tell it all to her, dear boy," she advised, looking up into his flushed brightness. "She's such a sweet, sympathetic woman. And she'll help you. She helps every man. She has wonderful ways with her."
"You recommend her as a confidante?"
"Yes, indeed."
"But why, aunt? Why?"
"Oh, she has a way with her that brings men out of themselves. I don't know just what it is, because I'm a woman, and she never has it with women. But I know that she has it. She was always like that. And then she grew more so after her marriage. There was a while when no one knew just what the end would be, but she pulled through quite straight."
"There was a story?"
"When a woman is magnetic, my dear Caryll, there is always a story."
"Who will tell it me?"
"She will, if you ask her, I fancy."
He smiled again. "I am so interested. If you knew the relief—the rest—the absolute joy of feeling an interest in something again!"
"I know, dear boy. It's been bad. But Nina will help you. She helps every one. Ah, here she is now!"
And she was; tall and withy as a willow-wand; more wondrous, it seemed to Caryll, by daylight than nightlight, because more clearly seen.
"Good-morning! Good-morning!" she cried, a hand to each. "What a glorious day! The bang-bang of the guns woke lazy me; but I thanked Heaven that I was a woman and went to sleep again directly."
Lady Bellingdown laughed, and kissing her hand to both, vanished quickly through a curtained archway opposite.
Then Mrs. Darling all at once altered. First she glanced at Carleigh, and then at the floor. "Have you been waiting long?" she queried.
"Hours," he declared, gloating over her confusion. He picked up the coat and offered her the cane. With a quick, fleeting smile, she took both; and then they were off; the funereal Tara at their heels.
Across the Italian garden they went, and then across the Dutch garden, and the French garden to the genuine English park. When their feet clapped gaily on the smooth, sodden mosaic of leaves, he turned to her, exclaiming:
"Life has become suddenly full again for me. I am really happy. And yet this time yesterday I was a misanthrope—a blighted creature. Think of that! It is your witchcraft."
But she shook her head.
"No," she contradicted firmly. "Not my doing at all. Manlike you wish to attribute all good and evil to some cause. But as a matter of fact you were already cured. I am but the 'top-stones of the corner.'"
"No, no, not at all," he denied gravely. "I was blighted, I—"
"Then you are blighted still," she declared. "What has happened is that you are just enough intoxicated to forget for a little. I've benumbed you. That's all."
"I beg to differ."
"Differ to beggary, if you will. Nevertheless, I know. I know I am right."
"I am divinely happy. I—" he began again. But she went on unheeding:
"We shall flirt, you and I, and we shall go pretty far. But we shall not fall in love and we shall not marry, because of two very excellent reasons."
"And they are?"
"A man and a woman."
"What woman? What man?"
She tossed her head in a way that might have signified anything.
"You mean that we love others—you and I?" he hazarded.
She laughed distractingly.
"Perhaps you love," he pursued. "But I am heart-free."
She walked on in silence.
"I don't ask the name of the man, for that's your affair. But no woman lives who can stand in the way of my bolting with you or marrying you if I choose."
"You are very positive," she said at length. "What if I am the woman and you are the man?"
For a second or two he stared blankly. "Oh," he said, crestfallen. "I see. Thanks!"
"Don't let us discuss such serious subjects as ourselves," she proposed. "Look at the sky and the swans—but be careful not to slip—and recollect that forgetfulness was the nectar upon which the gods subsisted."
"Quite so. There!" He squared his shoulders, but he looked at neither the sky nor the swans. He looked directly at her.
"I suppose I have just proposed to you and been refused; but, after all, what does it matter? Already I have forgotten the trifling episode. I've drunk of the gods' nectar. It saves one's reason occasionally. Because I have been able to forget, I have been able to live."
"You deserve the cross for heroism," she said. "I think you are wonderful."
He colored becomingly. "Spare my modesty," he pleaded. Then: "Look here! Now that we're quite alone, tell me your story."
"Tell me yours first."
"Oh, mine's so very hideous. But I don't mind telling you. My fiancée's mother, who had been out of the country for years, came back to find her little girl grown up, so she—well, she managed to break it all off—"
His voice slipped a note, and, turning, she saw that his face was working.
"I can't tell you more," he said, with a choke. "I'm not as brave as I thought. I can't help remembering. You'll find plenty to tell you that I loved the mother. She wasn't very old, you know."
"Why didn't you marry her?"
At her question he stopped short in the path.
"What's the matter?" she asked, turning.
"Why, I never thought of that way out," he answered, going white and red alternately.
"What a funny man you are!" cried Nina, startled. "Perhaps you will marry the mother yet. How old is she?"
"About thirty-seven."
"And rich?"
"Oh, yes. She's an American." As if riches and Americans were synonymous.
"Better marry her."
"I like you better just at present," returned Carleigh.
"Thanks, awfully. But I've told you what woman will stand in the way of your serious views about me. Besides, I'd never dare risk such a man as you. Everything will right itself, some day."
"Nothing can be right ever."
"Never?"
"Never."
"Ah, you've not told me all the story then?"
"Of course not. I never shall. I never can."
For a few steps they walked on in silence.
"Do tell me your—your story," he faltered. "Tell me what you can—what you'd like to."
"My story? My stories, you mean. I'm all stories." And she laughed her merry laugh.
"Butthestory?"
"Oh,thestory!" She paused for the space of a heart-beat, and her eyes were serious. "Even that began with my birth," she continued. "It's rather long, you see, to tell on a short walk. It's a war story. I was born to battle; and not being a man, and medieval, was appointed to eternal combat with myself."
"With victory for the prize," he suggested.
She thought for a second; then dropped her head. "I don't know. No one can tell. Perhaps—perhaps not."
"But you can tell me some of it—me," he insisted.
"But it's so hopeless," she said wearily. "And you're really too young to know what I mean when I talk. Then, too, it's such a horrid story. Just as yours is, you know.
"Mixed love and straight-out killing haven't been respectable since the time when Catherine de' Medici shoved every pleasant way of getting on under a cloud. How I do wish I had lived when you could kill a man by shaking hands! If that were possible now, I know what I'd do to lots of men."
"What?" asked Carleigh, quickly.
"I'd never shake hands any more. I'd kiss them all instead. It would be so humane and blameless—and nice."
He felt all the blood in him bound out of his heart to meet her whimsy.
"You darling!" he cried ecstatically. "What could be nicer? A fig for your tragedies. We'll just flirt—and—and—"
He seized her and was drawing her into a close embrace. His face was scarlet, his pupils distended.
"The guns are just there on the hill," she said, ever so calmly. "Better wait!"
Carleigh released her with reluctance, but his expanded pupils were still devouring her.
"Iama new man," he whispered passionately. "Darling, oh, darling! I'm so glad I came."
Neither of them saw the tall form of Lord Kneedrock, who, at a little distance stood watching them, a bitterly satirical smile upon his lips.
A little beyond, the forty beaters stood huddled together like a pack of hounds.
The head-keeper, that personage of indescribable majesty and humility, was consulting with Bellingdown, who looked very anxious.
The duke was taking a last sip and a nibble, while his hostess begged him not to hurry. All the rest were lighting cigarettes.
"You smoke, of course," Carleigh was asking Mrs. Darling.
"Of course."
"Shall I give you a light?"
"Thanks."
"I stick to a pipe," said Kneedrock, dragging one out of his huge, shapeless pocket.
"It is a nice thing," volunteered the duke. "I often smoke one at home. I say, Doody, don't I often smoke a pipe at home?"
"Yes, he does," the duchess verified. "He smokes one all the time at Puddlewood."
"Shall we join the guns?" Lady Bellingdown asked, rising and addressing the women generally.
"I can't," refused Charlotte Grey. "I can't see things killed. Sometimes they cry out, and it makes me dreadfully ill."
Bellingdown turned about with a worried air. "Here, Greggy, what do you say? Hemmings thinks the spinney there to the left. I'd thought only of Daggs Farm, and so on by the mill."
Sir George, whom they called "Greggy," looked as if the whole of the Far East was hanging on his nod. He silently considered.
"I tell m'lud that the spinney's quite fresh, sir," said Hemmings, touching his cap respectfully. "M'lud saw a fine bag off there last year, sir."
"What doyousay?" pleaded Lord Bellingdown, quite visibly agitated.
The other men gathered about, all obviously perturbed.
"Hand me my field-glasses," commanded Sir George. "My man has them."
Sir George's man, carrying Sir George's two guns, came hurriedly forward with Sir George's field-glasses. Every one pressed close and glanced back and forth between the baronet and the spinney, which was an exceedingly ordinary spinney with some fir-trees beyond.
The owner of the field-glasses raised them, adjusted them, lowered them, readjusted them, raised them again and took a long look.
"I should toss up for it," he decided, without deciding.
"What an old fool he is!" the duchess observed confidentially into the ear of Charlotte Grey, who started visibly.
"Who do you mean?" asked Lady Grey sharply.
Then the duchess started, too.
"I thought you were Nina Darling," she confessed. "I meant the head-keeper, of course. Who else could I mean?"
"Oh!" said Lady Grey coldly.
"But where is dear Nina?" the duchess blandly inquired. "Such a charming person! She always livens one up so. I'm really very fond of Nina. We do so enjoy her whenever she comes to Puddlewood."
"She's just getting out of sight there," replied Lady Grey, still more coldly. "That's Sir Caryll with her. It seems he's given up shooting since his jilting."
"Shall we go on with the guns?" queried Lady Bellingdown. "It's just as you like, duchess."
"Oh, if I can do as I like I'll go home with the china and the butler and the pony-cart," her grace answered. "It would be something new to do."
Kneedrock laughed and hooked his arm through hers.
"I've a nice upholstered car turning up at three," he told her in an undertone. "Be patient and I'll provide for you."
"But there are two cars waiting now," said the duchess. "Oh, I see. You're making a joke. But such a poor joke, Nibbetts, dear."
"Do let us settle on what to do," begged the hostess. "Shall we walk with the guns or go home at once?"
"And is it to be the spinney or Daggs Farm?" cried the host. "Come, now, we can't wait about all day, you know."
"But we often wait about an hour after luncheon at Puddlewood, you know," objected the duke. "I say, Doody, don't we often wait about an hour after luncheon at Puddlewood?"
"Mrs. Darling and Sir Caryll are quite out of sight now," announced Charlotte Grey, slinging her blue scarf around her throat. "I wonder what they're saying."
As a matter of fact, at just that second they were not saying anything. They were stopping and trying to think, and their pulses were interfering rather too much for cool comfort.
They were at the Lower Stream Stile, which was a picture spot in the park. At the moment the picture had the deeper meaning always added by human figures.
Nina sat on the second step of the stile, and Sir Caryll sat on the lowest, cuddled in close by her feet. He had her hand in his and his eyes were raised to her face.
Affairs had moved on very fast—even since luncheon half an hour ago.
"Tell me the truth—your husband is really dead?" the man demanded passionately. "It isn't some horrible spasmodic playfulness of yours to talk loneliness and all that while really—"
"No," answered Nina, nestling her fingers closer and speaking in a warm, low voice. "No, he's really dead. He was cleaning his guns and one was loaded. So careless in his boy, wasn't it? No, it's quite all so. Really, I am marriageable, eligible, and all the rest of it."
Carleigh kissed the nestling fingers. "To think that I ever fancied I knew what love was before!" he murmured. "You dear! You darling! May I call you Nina?"
"But you've called me Nina three times already since luncheon."
"Have I? I didn't know it. Dearest, I do not know what I am doing or saying any more. You have me wound all in and out around these fingers.
"Do you know, I thought I knew a little bit about love and about women, and about what men and women could mean to one another. But I was a baby at the game. I knew the lines, don't you know, but I didn't know their expressiveness. I was a child playing with the letters of the alphabet."
"You saw the symbols, but you didn't know their meaning?"
"Exactly so."
"But now you know."
"Now I know."
Nina hugged herself seductively together. "Isn't it deliciously, delightfully dangerous to sit like this and think that if any one should appear anywhere there would be such an outbreak of talk as would even cause last month to pale with envy?"
He kissed her hand. "I'd love it all," he said. "I can hold no dearer wish than to share a scandal with you. 'There goes the man who made off with Mrs. Darling!' How I should look down with contempt on all less clever men!"
Nina rippled gaily. "You know you do this rather well," she praised. "I'm sure that whoever peeped would fain believe the lie."
"I hope so."
"I'm sure of it. I'll tell you how flirting compares with marriage. It's like the best rouge and the real color. You can manage the rouge; the real color you can't."
"You're so charming!" he exclaimed, rather absorbing the hand. "And, oh, I'm so happy! When we go home, should they guess, what will it matter?"
She laid her free hand on his shoulder. "I'd mind," she said gently. "I don't want them to talk. I'm asked to the house to comfort you; not to catch you or cure you."
"But, Nina, my darling, what can it matter? You will marry me some day soon."
She started so violently that the old stile creaked and bid fair to fall down. The staghound, which had been lying quietly on the grass at their feet, started up, too. Carleigh saw his bared fangs and heard his ugly growl.
"Oh, dear!" he protested, trying to pull her back into her place. "Why, what is it?"
"Don't say it!" she cried, in a tone of violent protest. "Don't! Don't! I'm perfectly willing to play with you at love; but don't speak of marriage.
"When men say that word it always brings me to my senses. I remember, then. The good in me comes back. I get my devil into harness once more. Have I sinned again? Have I fallen into the pit afresh? Does this man really and truly mean what he says? No, no, no! Oh, no!"