CHAPTER IVTHE SHAPE OF THREE

After-supper hours, bringing with them the usual flushed dishevelment, actual and spiritual. Blooms beginning to droop in the heat; prevailing carelessness as to the hieroglyphics actually scrawled on the programme; bold voices, mingling with the bandsmen’s deeper notes, as they chorus to the popular encore, imperiously demanded. Lingerings on the stairs, and where softly-lit seclusion is provided for those who care to linger. Departure of the suave and elderly diplomats; Madame des Essarts must perforce wait, royalty unattended, till romping insatiable youth shall have drunk its fill. Her reflections on modern dancing, its antics and exaggerations, are such as to preclude description. She is pleased to note, however, that hergranddaughter’s burnished dark head is still unruffled, her complexion unheated. “Elle est vraie des Essarts!”

Number twenty-one. Merle and Peter, skilfully guided where the throng is thickest, smile at one another in passing, eager, in the midst of enjoyment, for the mutual retrospection of the morrow. Comes the interval between twenty-two and twenty-three. Armand Drélincourt, for the third time in four hours, discourses with immense relish upon his fatal temperament. Peter listens attentively, but springs to her feet, interrupting the narrative at its most thrilling point, when the far-off tinkle of a bell reaches her ear: “Hadn’t we better go down?” Having settled on Logan Thane as a piratical playmate, she is frankly excited at the prospect of number twenty-three.

He is not waiting near the door of the ballroom. Neither is he in the stream descending the stairs. Peter waits impatiently till he shall choose to end his flirtation behind some drapedportière. Already the dancers are in full swing. Rose-Marie approaches: “Shall we go home now, Peter? Most people have left; it looks so bad to be among the last.” And behold St. Quentin standing faithful as the painted sentinel of Herculaneum: “May I have the pleasure, Miss Kyndersley?”

“I’m booked already,—whereisLogan Thane?”

“But your partner seems to have deserted you. Silly fellow; he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

Peter privately agrees. It takes still three minutes to convince her that Logan Thane has undoubtedly cut his dances and gone home early; and then she lets St. Quentin reap the reward of his tireless vigil: “I shall be leaving after this one, so we may as well finish it instead of the next.” She has flushed richly and her eyes are dark with annoyance. Childishly, she wants Logan Thane to have a sense of all that might have been his, had he not succumbed to weariness.

“Peter,” Rose-Marie’s voice, plaintive now; “thecar has been waiting over an hour already, and mothersaid——”

“All right.” Peter disengages herself from the infatuated St. Quentin, murmurs her thanks to her hostess, looks around in vain for Merle, and suffers herself to be led by Rose-Marie to the cloak-room.

Downstairs, a few stray couples, clinging still to the fringes of pleasure, boston stormily to the strains of “Gipsy Love.” The massed flowers on the walls hang heavier and heavier yet. Madame has yawned twice, daintily, behind her Pompadour fan. As the last notes die away, Merle dashes for the doorway, dragging her partner in her wake.

“Peter!—she hasn’t gone yet, has she, grandmaman?” She succeeds in waylaying Peter, cloaked and reluctant, on her passage down the main staircase.

“You mustn’t go. I want you to dance the next with Stuart.” Merle’s tone conveys all she dares put into it of meaning and entreaty. Peter shakes her head, indicating Rose-Marie, inclined to be fractious.

“Leave her to me.Dogo on, Peter.”

Peter wavers; the ballroom, after good-byes have been spoken and wraps adjusted, becomes doubly a place of enchantment, if only because etiquette debars from re-entering.

She looks at Stuart Heron.

And he, for his part, tries to trace the connection between a tall girl in a bronze evening-cloak, and a picture which has forced itself irrelevantly upon his mental vision: picture of a Cavalier emerging from some dark doorway; backward-floating plume, and mantle carelessly flung; swagger and smile expressive of all that lurked in his quest of love and hazard, and peradventure of hazardous love....

“Go on, Peter,” urges Merle. “You’ll like him.”

Peter hesitates no longer; tosses aside her cloak; and permits Stuart to escort her back to the regions oflight whence she had thought to be self-banished. The band is crashing out in true Bacchanalian frenzy the last waltz of all, the waltz of their release. Twenty years before, and it would have been: “After the ball is over,” with its cloying suggestions of regret and sentiment; but modern youth requires something at once more abandoned and more discordant.

Stuart speaks: “She said I was going to like you.”

“And she said I was going to like you.”

Then in earnest duet: “How we’re bound to hate each other!”

He is a little above medium height; their eyes are almost on a level. He cannot rid himself of the impression that whatever he says now, is likely to matter later on. And the entire contents of his brain have wandered round the corner, and sitting there, mock his futility.

“No,” contradicting his own statement. “I don’t think we shall hate each other; at least, not more than is necessary to preserve mutual interest.” Why are they hurrying the time, those fool musicians? How long can one decently sit out with a girl, after the last candle is extinguished, and a lackey is holding her cloak in readiness? Seven minutes, perhaps? He will have to give her in that seven minutes lightning indications of all that is in him worth her knowing; whet her curiosity, and at the same time satisfy his own. The undertaking is a breathless one.

“Who are you?” Peter queries, having in vain tried to fit him with some attributes of Merle’s catalogue. “I can’t place you at all,and——”

“And what?” he leaps in, for she has paused, and there is no time to pause; two more couples have ceased to dance, and are busy encircling Madame des Essarts with an aura of thanksgiving and farewell. “And what?”

“And Merle introduced you as if you mattered.”

“Merle was quite right. I do matter.”

“Merle?”

“Why not? I’m a relic of her childhood.”

“It makes you sound like Stonehenge.”

“You strive rather after effect, don’t you?” He slings this at her, himself striving after effect.

“Of course. Would you have me display at once all the domestic virtues?”

“You haven’t any,” tauntingly. “Not one. Other girls can cook nothing but an omelette. You, I’m sure, can cook nothing at all. It must be a proud boast. I hate talking while I dance, don’t you?”

In silence they finish the waltz. Then Stuart sweeps her through a pair of velvet hangings, down two rooms, and to a sofa at the far end of a third, before she is well aware of his intentions. She takes a sidelong survey of his outward marks: features that vie for room with his monocle and quickly-changing expression, giving an effect to his face of overcrowding; a mouth corner-tilted and impish, such as is sometimes perceived in a small street-arab, but mostly in a leprechaun, who can only be met hammering shoes on moor and crag by moonlight. She notes further that his jaw is lean, with the forward bent of a runner; and his head, which by dint of hard brushing and grooming gives at first an effect of conventional sleekness, is in reality a most rebellious and intricate affair, no hair growing in precisely the same direction as its fellow, but each insisting it will beat out like Bret Harte’s pioneer, “a way of his own, a way of his own!”

From the distant ballroom, snatches of “God save the King” drift and die and are re-born, with an effect of inexpressible melancholy. And, sighing, Stuart relinquishes desire to show the girl all his sides before dawn—philosophical, tender, childish, manly, sporting, whimsical, or political,—resigns himself to proving merely that he is original.

“You can never get away from your likeness to a Reynolds’ Angel,” à propos of nothing; “because there are five of them, so that if the expression should miss one, it will hit the next; I’m sorry for you, of course, but there is nothing to be done about it. Do you live anywhere? Forgive me for these astounding acrobatics, but I’m so afraid you will be fetched by your nurse Rose-Marie; I heard you remark she was growing fractious.”

“I live in Thatch Lane with an aunt. My mother is dead, and my father unmentionable, to save you from the agonies of a tactless question.”

... The bandsmen are dimly visible, packing away their mute instruments. A voice from the long-ago is calling faintly “Peter” ... hastily she covers the sound: “Whatare you? A stockbroker?”

“No,” he too has heard, and speaks rather breathlessly; “do I make love like a stockbroker?”

“You haven’t.”

“I have, in my own subtle fashion. But Ican’toverleap the first stages in this Post-impressionist preliminary scamper of ours.”

... “Pet-er! Pe-ter!” clearer now—and nearer.

“A stockbroker has but seven stages of love-making, and by these shall ye know him,” laughs Peter.

“And I have a hundred and seven, and seven more after that, and by none of these shall ye know me.”

“Do you always talk about yourself?”

“No,” desperately; “I can talk about ever so many things: Cathedrals, and good form, and machinery, and how to make pins. Oh, and metaphysics. Particularly metaphysics. I took a double first at Oxford. I’ve no right to tell you, but I want you to know,” with the first touch of boyishness that has as yet escaped the hard polished surface of his manner.

... “I can’t think where she is,” Merle replies courteously, two rooms off.

... “Pee-ee-eee-ter!”

—“Confound it! How can I be eloquent with that phantom female forever squawking like the poor cat i’ the adage.”

Peter remarks, caring not a whit for Rose-Marie: “I’m sure that an adage is a medieval Scotch pantry, and that the cat was stealing the cream.”

“The ‘Cat and Adage’ wouldn’t be a bad public-house,” Stuart reflects; “in case I shouldeverwanttobuilda—damn!” in an outburst of frenzied and polysyllabic fury, as a little procession, consisting of Merle, Rose-Marie, the two brothers of Rose-Marie, and Mark St. Quentin, advance with triumphant shoutings towards the truants’ retreat.

His curses are overtopped by St. Quentin’s pæans of victory:

“I told you I’d seen them come this way. You’ve given us a rare hunt, Miss Kyndersley.” And the eldest and most pimply of the Lester twins shakes a playful finger:

“Bedtime, you know, Miss Peter. No good running away and hiding.”

“Good night,” Stuart turns abruptly away, not caring to form part of the returning procession across three rooms. Nor does he express any audible hopes of renewing an acquaintance so delightfully begun.

“Well?” Merle threw a world of mischievous expectancy into the interrogation, when Peter paid her promised visit at tea-time the following day.

Merle was lying on the couch, her back supported by many cushions, a silken wrap thrown lightly over her feet. For Madame des Essarts cherished the notion that constitutions of delicate birth were necessarily also of delicate health, to attain which desirable consummation, she kept a venerable and witty doctor in daily attendance, and reduced Merle on the slightest provocation from the vertical to the horizontal.

Peter tossed down her hat, and sank into a curly-legged arm-chair.

“I wish this weren’t such an impossible room,” she grumbled; “what with gilt and tapestries and priceless china and painted ladies on the ceiling, I can hardly hear myself speak. It’s the sort of room you can’t take up and wrap round you. What we ought to do, Merle, is with the aid of a ladder, a big apron, and a bottle of gum, cover the walls ourselves in brown paper, like those brave bright Bohemian bachelor girls in books.”

“Well?” quoth Merle again, disregarding the Bohemian girls.

“And then the supreme insult of a central heating system, when every fibre of me yearns for firelight. How would it be to light a fire of sticks on the carpet? Would your grandmother mind?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” murmured Merle. “It’s only Aubusson, and she’s a reasonable woman, and you could always explain to her that you were being the Swiss Family Robinson.”

“Or Robinson Crusoe. Why, do you suppose, are shipwrecked islanders always called Robinson? Is it something wild and primitive that lies in the name?”

“You know,” Merle suggested gently, “it’s not necessary to be quite so garrulous, to convince me that you want to hear about Stuart Heron.”

Peter gave in: “Who is he?”

“A millionaire.”

“That’s a nuisance. Is he sensitive about it? No, he doesn’t give me the impression of being sensitive about anything. He’s hard and polished and invulnerable; Achilles without the heel.”

“Three months’ treatment, and you’ll be crying aloud that he’s all heel and no Achilles.”

Nicole entered with the tea equipage, containingmuch of chased silver; and conversation was for a moment suspended.

“Mademoiselle Peter should not have risen from bed to-day,” severely. “She must surely be fatigued after so late an evening.”

“I was one of those who left early,” Peter mendaciously assured the old woman, of whom she stood in distinct awe.

“Nicole, you’ve forgotten the cream, and Mdlle. Peter is here. You know her love of cream is only equalled by her hatred of cows.”

Nicole looked respectfully incredulous: “Surely not, Mademoiselle. But if it were not for the good kind cows, what would Mademoiselle put in her tea?”

“Idon’tput cows in my tea,” Peter protested unhappily. And as Nicole, with many chucklings, withdrew, “Merle, why do you hold me up to scorn before your staff? And I want more about Stuart—Heron, did you say?”

“Awfully Heron. They all are. And quite indecently rich. He has a mother, and three uncles, and a married sister, and some cousins—pretty girls. Family existing for the worship of Stuart, sole son of the house of Heron. And all things bright and beautiful, all things great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Herons have them all. I don’t know much more about them, except presents; they’re for ever giving each other presents; costly trifles, such as a villa on the Riviera, or a Rolls-Royce motor, or a new hothouse, or a sackful of pink diamonds. Whenever you go there, Mrs. Heron is sure to say: ‘Oh, let me show you the chocolate-coloured page-boy that Stuart gave me because he scored a goal at football’; or ‘do help me think of a present for my brother-in-law, it’s the anniversary of his wife’s death. Last time I gave him twenty-four pairs of silk pyjamas sewn with seed-pearls; do you suppose he would like the Only OrinocoOrchid? I hear you can get it for five hundred guineas.’”

“Don’t be ridiculous, and pass the cake,” laughed Peter. “Besides, all this doesn’t explain Stuart.”

“I don’t know much about Stuart; of course I was taken there as a child, but then——” Merle’s eyes grew large and wistful, “I wasn’t a child; I was a French doll, in beautiful, expensive clothes, and not allowed to romp with the other children. So I suppose Stuart despised me. In fact, he told me as much last night; that since we’ve been grown-up he has avoided me for fear I should break. He’s only three years down from Oxford.”

“So young? I took him for about thirty.”

“Twenty-five, I believe.”

“He mentioned Oxford—isn’t Nicole going to bring that cream?—but I doggedly refused to take notice. ’Varsity is the one subject I will not discuss with the initiated; I pronounce Magdalen as God meant it to be pronounced, mix up dons with proctors, and earn for myself undying contempt. So it’s better left alone.”

Nicole entered with the cream, and the intimation that Monsieur Heron desired to speak with Mademoiselle des Essarts on the telephone.

“The game commences in earnest,” laughed Merle. “But I don’t want to get up. You answer it, Peter.”

Peter, nothing loath, ran downstairs to the boudoir, and replaced Madame des Essarts at the mouthpiece: “Hello!”

“Hello—look here,” came Stuart’s unmistakable tones from the other end; tones veiling with the typical Oxford accent a curious eagerness as of a dog forever worrying and shaking a bone. “Look here, how’s my mother?”

“I’m not good at arithmetic.”

“Your grandmother has asked me three times, and Ifeel I ought to have known. I said ‘quite well, thanks,’ but now I come to think of it, she isn’t. Would it be the right thing to ring off, and ring up again to contradict the statement.”

“It would be easier on the whole to cure your mother, and get it right that way.”

“I say, it isn’t Merle. It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me. Merle’s lying down.”

A pause. Then a chuckle from the other end.

“I trust you have recovered from the fatigues of the dance, Peter. I recollect that you were among the last to go.”

She assured him politely that she was suffering from no ill-effects, and trusted he was the same. And she passed over the use of her Christian name.

“What are you talking about, you two girls? Irish-stew of the night before? Have I come in yet?”

“Perhaps you don’t come in.”

“Iamcoming in,” something very like a threat in the assurance. “I’m in already. Well in. Merle told me about the projected Triumvirate.”

Peter sped an indignant glance towards the absent Merle, for not informing her of this breach of faith; and a look of defiance at Stuart, who could not see it, for daring to laugh, which he wasn’t.

“I’m afraid I had a purpose in ’phoning,” he continued; “though it would be splendid to say I’d rung up for no reason whatever. Will you ask Merle if she’ll come with me to a dance at the Cecil, next Tuesday evening, and bring her little friend.”

Peter refused to rise to such a palpable throw. “Tickets?”

“I’ve got them. Four. Can you provide another male of some sort?”

“I’ll ask Merle. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

She returned to find Merle being cherished by hergrandmother, so that a careful version of the foregoing invitation needed to be given:

“Mr. Heron is making up a party, and hopes we will join him; and at the same time benefit a charity in which he is interested.”

Madame des Essarts gave the scheme her gracious acquiescence. “He doubtless wishes to revenge himself for last night,” she mused approvingly; “but it is a somewhat hurried courtesy.” For there existed nothing in which she was so punctilious as in these social accounts of give and take; accounts which Merle insisted were as carefully noted and balanced as any butcher’s or baker’s. So much debit, so much credit; a nice perception of how many teas given went to cancel one luncheon taken. So now:

“If you are to invite another gentleman,mon enfant, it must be Mr. St. Quentin; you remember he motored us to Ranelagh.” Madame touched Peter’s cheek lightly with her hand, besought her not to tire Merle or herself with too much conversation, and rustled away, leaving in her train a faint swish and perfume. Whereupon Peter re-edited truthfully the duologue.

—“Merle, why did you tell him about the trio, and—and all that rot?”

“Rot?”

“He thinks so. He probably thinks it—oh, girlish!”

“He’s going to count,” said Merle. “And ...Peter——”

“What?”

“Three is a funny shape,” the younger girl admitted slowly. “I think it might mean two and one. And I think, Peter, we shall have to settle, you and I, to be square with each other, in the triangle.”

“What a ghastly geometrical figure: If the square ABCD standing on the base of the triangleXYZ——”

But Merle was not laughing. “We must agree totalk things out, and always get them clear, even if it should mean disloyalty to Stuart. Because I believe he’s the strongest.”

Peter considered this a moment, while she emptied the cream-jug into her cup. “Yes,” she decided at length. “But we’ll tell him that you and I are going to keep the path unblocked between us. It will be fairer; and save him from blundering.”

“He won’t blunder,” Merle prophesied. “And I think, too, that he’s capable of calling a taxi.”

Peter laughed:

“I’d forgotten the taxis; of course, they were the original means of bringing him in. But I rather wonder what he hopes to find.”

The shape began to assert itself already on the way to the Cecil. Merle, Peter and Stuart discovered that their three-cornered talk flashed forth with uncommon swiftness and brilliancy, as if drawing inspiration one from the other; that a spirit and being came alive that belonged not to any two of them, nor yet to any one, but could only be borne of just that conjunction of three. So that they were palpitating with eagerness to continue exploration in the kingdom which their magical number had thrown open to them, when Mark St. Quentin, symbol of a world without meanings, met them, as arranged, in the ballroom.

As far as St. Quentin was concerned, the evening proved a failure, strongly reminding him of a phase in his rather lonely childhood, when elder brothers and sisters used to glory in the flaunting of their “secrets.” Though of just what these miraculous “secrets” consisted he could never discover. Nor could he discover now what was the curious excitement that seemed to quiver in his alternate partners; and he was certainly baffled by the bewildering fashion of their talk. As well he might be; for Peter and Merle, dizzied by the constant change and interchange of male involved by quartette, occasionally allowed their separate manners to overlap, with merely amusing results when Stuart received the St. Quentin dregs, but absolutely fatal when St. Quentin was by mistake driven to cope withsome startling turn of phrase that should have been Stuart’s portion.

They were being shockingly ill-bred, the three; not a doubt of it. But a hardness of heart and an oblivion of manners descends upon those who, on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, are picking up gold and silver, towards those incapable of perceiving the alluring glitter; and St. Quentin was finally reduced to concentrate his hopes upon supper, which meal he fondly anticipated might “draw them all together a bit.” Also, a man of little imagination, he ascribed the dreary void within him on contemplating the Tiddlerites, as due to hunger. So that when Stuart announced carelessly after the eighth dance: “Had about enough now, haven’t we?” he so far forgot himself as to expostulate with some fervour:

“Oh, I say. But I thought we were stopping on for supper, anyway.”

“So did I,” replied Stuart. “But my partners seem rather anxious to get home.”—Merle looked astonished, but understood that she was expected to play up to some dark sub-current of intention.

“Grandmaman did beg me not to be late,” demurely. Which happened to be true.

“But Miss Kyndersley,” St. Quentin turned with dying hopes to Peter; “won’t you stay and have supper?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, if Merle doesn’t.” Peter, not in the mood as yet to renounce gaiety, was inclined to be indignant with Stuart for his ill-disguised anxiety to quit.

“A jolly little supper,” wailed the odd man out, seeingpâtéand lobster slipping irrevocably through his fingers.

On the threshold of the hotel rose another slight discussion: “I’ll see the ladies home; it’s on my way,” from Stuart.

“Oh,but——”

“It’s on my way,” firmly. And he had hailed a taxi, for which vehicles he certainly possessed magnetic attractions, had helped in Merle and Peter, and had given the address at Lancaster Gate, before St. Quentin was allowed a chance to proffer services. As the latter stood beneath the awninged steps, watching the swift departure, every line of face and figure seemed to quiver forth in resentful unison: “A jolly little supper....”

The car shot round the corner. Stuart let down the window and leant out: “Drive to the Billet-doux,” he commanded curtly, giving the name of a celebrated little French restaurant on the border-line between fashion and Bohemia.

Peter laughed, understanding; and because his methods amused her. But Merle gasped in some disturbance.

“Sorry,” said Stuart. “But it was essential to get rid of him, wasn’t it? I don’t mean him personally, but any other existent fourth.”

“But he was of our party,” Merle rebuked him gravely, conscious of being alone in her defence of good manners.

“I think not,” laughed Stuart; “merely a stage property.”

They drew up before the quaint white hostelry in Soho; set off by its dark and murky surroundings, and proclaiming aloud its aloofness from these, by the ostentatious guardianship of two commissionaires.

Passing through the swing doors, Merle was caught up by the tumult of voices and ring of glass within; forgot to be prim and censorious; gave herself over entirely to the joy of this unexpected, and—as far as Madame des Essarts was concerned—forbidden truancy.

So they came for the first time to the Billet-doux, destined to prove one of the permanent backgrounds to their triangular career. And the austere and melancholySpanish waiter who assisted them to uncloak, did not for a moment guess how he was to be puzzled by the alternate qualities and quantities of their future comings; merely noticed that the party seemed in excellent spirits, and that the gentleman spent commendably little time and breath in his selection of the supper. And here again the girls silently approved.

Peter leant forward across the table: “There’s something to be settled without further delay,” she announced, half in mockery, and withal letting a tinge of earnest invade her tones. “It’s tactless to mention it, but—you’re a millionaire, aren’t you?”

Stuart assented, very ashamed.

“We’ve agreed to forgive,” Peter went on, “on the condition that you let us forget. No chucking about of gold purses to the populace, mark you. As long as you never permit us to see more than two sovereigns at a time, our three-ship shall endure. But the rest of your vast fortune, and all your motor-cars and boot-trees, you must hide in mattresses and banks. Is that understood?”

“Can’t you make it guineas,” he pleaded unhappily. And in consideration of his quenched demeanour, they agreed to expand the limits by a florin.

“I suppose you had better know the worst,” he continued gloomily, helping them to varieties of sardines that, like Diogenes, dwelt mainly in tubs. “I’m a diamond-merchant.”

Merle burst out laughing. “Oh, Stuart, how comical! Do you wear a silk hat?”

“Anda face to match. You must invade the offices one day, and see me in the act.”

“You take it seriously, then?”

“Desperately. Notice the absorbed face of a small boy playing at grown-ups; if he were laughing all the time, he wouldn’t be enjoying the game.”

“But if we really do bear down upon you, will yougive us a sign that it’s all right? Because otherwise I’m terrified of the ‘business face.’”

“One sign ye shall have, and no more. After that I’ll expect you to play also, and take proper interest in diamonds, and listen prettily to the Khalif,—it doesn’t matter about the One-eyed Calendar.”

And here Merle demanded explanations, which were midway interrupted by a wail of despair from Peter; she had somehow contrived to mix her implements so that whichever way she worked it, the fish-knife would be left for dessert. Stuart looked for enlightenment at Merle:

“Doesn’t she know? Has no one told her? Are we to pretend not to see?”

“She springs from the people,” Merle answered his aside. “The kind that wear curl-papers and barrows. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re alone.”

... Stuart and Merle, if only in jest; and Peter the outsider. Not for one moment could the flexible triangle retain its form.

“Let it be clearly understood,” broke in Peter, defiantly holding out the wrong glass, that wine might be poured into it, “that except for the benefit of Fernand, I refuse to be: ‘and your little friend also.’”

“Who is Fernand?” from Stuart.

Merle owned to an elder brother who dwelt in Paris. “Peter and I were once upon a time allowed to travel alone from England to the South of France, to join Grandmaman in Nice.En route, I gave Peter a party consisting of Fernand, and a first-classwagon-lit.”

“In juxtaposition?” murmured Stuart. Peter, for fear of Merle’s little reserves, flashed him a glance of warning. The shape had altered again.... Obviously it was impossible to keep intimacy of speech and spirit moving between more than two points; the idea was to spin it so swiftly from one to another and then on, asto give the appearance of all three simultaneously involved.

Peter took up the narrative:

“Fernand Alfonso des Essarts, the essence of decorum and propriety, met us at the Gare du Nord, and escorted us across Paris. He carried a big box of chocolates for Merle, and a smaller one for her little friend also. He conveyed to Merle the compliments of all her unknown relatives in Paris; and she cast down her eyes, transformed to an embodiment of the virginaljeune fille, convent-fresh and dewy, and conveyed to him the compliments of all his unknown relatives in London. And they thanked each other separately for each one. In this wise did they continue to converse. He asked her if she were thirsty—‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you are thirsty?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I am thirsty,’ sez I, likewise convent-fresh and dewy. He displayed polite interest in her progress at the piano—‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you play the piano?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I play the piano.’—I don’t, by the way, Stuart; it’s quite all right. And Fernand surveyed his beautiful boots, and probably thought of his beautiful grisette, neglected that evening for the sake of theseembêtantesyoung English misses. And with an inspiration he asked Merle if she hadmal-de-merin crossing—‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you hadmal-de-merin crossing?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I hadmal-de-merin crossing. Very!’ The word too much did it, and Fernand addressed me no more.”

“I hope thewagon-litproved a compensation for your temporary effacement,” laughed Stuart.

He sat opposite them, as it were one pitted against two. And the girls marvelled anew that aught with the looks and costume and bearing of conventional man-about-town, eye-glass and knowledge of the wine-list, should yet have caught the melody of their pipes, and revealed in response his own nimble goat-legs. Theproximity of the mirror which enlarged their number to six, lent a grotesque flavour to the scene, allowing each of the players the illusion of being at the same time spectator; placing the table, with its shining napery and silver, tumbled shimmer of whitebait, and dull red Burgundy in the glasses, outside and apart from reality. Stuart, catching at one moment the reflected eyes of his companions, toasted them silently in phantom wine ... and it needed a curious effort, a tug of the will, before they could recall their glances from the three puppets in looking-glass-land, to meet, each of them, their two companions in the flesh. The light and stir of the restaurant, the drifting brilliant figures from one crowded room to another, the gay groups, talking, laughing, were all, as it were, subordinated, like supers in a stage set. So the solicitous waiter, hovering, might have been stolen from some sinister Spanish masque of passion and hatred. From an outer chamber, drifted wailing snatches of violin-play. The ghost of Mark St. Quentin glided into the vacant seat to Peter’s right. “A jolly little supper,” he murmured reproachfully....

“Three coffees, black,” Stuart ordered of the waiter; “And—green Chartreuse, both of you? I think so; three green Chartreuses.” He did not consult their tastes, hoping to gauge them accurately by intuition, or else luck. He held a match to their cigarettes; and, reverting to the topic of their journey, suggested that awagon-litmight be rather a nice domestic animal: “A tame redwagon-litwith trustful brown eyes. I wonder if my wife would let me keep one in the back-garden, among the washing.”

Merle was overcome by a vision of the future wife of the diamond-merchant hanging up the diamond-merchant’s pants on a clothes-line, every Monday morning.

“Just fancy,” Stuart burst forth, “the indignity of having to ask permission before one could keep a fox-terrieror awagon-lit. I cannotunderstand the state of mind which leads a man to marriage: the eternal sucking of the same orange, when there are thousands for his plucking.”

His tone was of the lightest, but Peter understood that it veiled a warning. And she was conscious of a sudden rage that he should deem a warning necessary.

“Prince of Orange,” she mocked him; “you probably waste your kingdom.”

But he boasted: “Not so. For I am aware of the exact instant just before the juice is all spent and the skin will taste bitter in my mouth. And then I cast away my orange and gather another. There are so many in the grove that sometimes indeed I am tempted to leave one half-sucked, to try the flavour of the next. But I don’t ... I don’t.”

Merle put in: “You are speaking symbolically.”

“I am,” smiling at her—his leprechaun smile.

“And what of the pips? do you swallow them in the process?”

“Rather than spit them, yes. I likewise suck silently, and with great haste, greediness and appreciation.”

“I wonder,” mused Peter, into her curling smoke-wreaths, “if the orange has any views on the subject....”

Stuart heard: “That depends on the thickness of its skin.”

“Their rejected skins shall go to make your pathway to Hell. And the whole way ye shall slip ignominiously.”

“Rather say I shall slide gloriously.”

“And bump at the bottom?”

“There are great virtues, even in a bump at the bottom, to those who understand the art of swift recovery.”

Peter mused on this, while remarking idly that thepale glint of Chartreuse held much more of evil than the frank winking serpent-green ofcrême-de-menthe.

“Are you never natural?” she queried suddenly, recalling the man to joyous sparring, from his tender admiration of Merle’s side-face, which, one among a thousand, really merited the higher appellation of profile.

“No, I don’t think so. What am I, natural? or you, or anyone else? something that sleeps and eats and walks, and never enquires. Not of such stuff are born the Orange-Suckers, the Hairpin-Visionists.”

“Hairpin-Visionists?” chorus of attracted femininity.

He explained: “If, whatever you are doing, you are able to project yourself into the future, and from that point look back again to the present, you can get your outlines clear, see where each step is leading you, obtain a sense of proportion and values on the incident. And that mental process follows the curves of an ordinary hairpin, starting at one of the points—then forward—and back again. D’you see?” he traced the diagram with his fingers on the table-cloth.

“Then you always live your life backwards, from some imaginary spot seven or eight months hence? What a grotesque looking-glass existence!”

“The Billet-doux is lowering its lights,” remarked Stuart. And called for the bill. They had supped luxuriously, and drunken of wine that lay cradled in straw, a white muffler about its slender neck. So that the reckoning amounted to two pounds three and twopence. Stuart was about to fling down three pieces of gold—when he remembered....

Here was a quandary indeed.

Leaning across to Merle, he murmured in confidential and embarrassed tones: “I say, I’m rather short of cash; forgive the awful cheek—could you lend me half a crown?”

Very gravely she produced the coin: “It’s quite all right; please don’t bother about returning it.” The notion of a Heron short of cash was truly delightful.

“Peter,” snuggling her head sleepily against the older girl’s shoulder, when they had taken their seats in the home-bound taxi. “Peter, are we going to like him? I believe we are.”

Peter looked at Stuart—and surprised a rather lorn and out-of-it expression on his face. There had been unconscious cruelty, perhaps even coquetry, in Merle’s gesture and appeal; emphasizing his position on the opposite seat; their snug drowsy security in the fortress he was attempting to storm from without.

“You realize that, don’t you?” said Peter, hammering upon the nail; “that Merle and I talk to each other; really talk. And that we’ll allow you no quarter.”

“Thank you for the danger-signal.” Stuart smiled, and ceased to resemble the lonely millionaire of fiction. The triangle for the moment was clearly isosceles: a short line connecting points X and Z at the base, while Y lay infinitely remote at the apex.

“It is going to be difficult,” thought Y exultantly.

For Stuart was nauseated by the rose-path.

And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair. Pride of youth and good looks and active limb. Pride in their need of one another, and their power to stand alone withal. Most of all, pride of brain, that could leap from point to point, nor ever lose a foothold; propound subtlety upon subtlety, each of the three eager to give the corkscrew its final twist, till towards the seventh evolution they would laughingly give up, and slowly unwind again. Brains that could be adapted to any circumstances and any company; wring enjoyment from the most unpromising material; brainsthat forgot not, so that reference became a language, incomprehensible save to those who had invented the cipher. Brains responsive, electric, in perfect working order. Pride of brain, surely as splendid a thing as the more usual pride of body that waits on youth.

The trio, definitely established, possessed a spirit of its own; its actions were wilful and indeterminate, and none could know its soul save by inspiration. It was built of cross-moods, cross-stimulations; and it owned no leader nor follower, but changed its several parts from moment to moment. A thing of fine complexity, the trio, that could adjust itself to the shock of any outside problem or weariness,—in fact, take unto and into itself these same problems and wearinesses, and make of them part of the whole, subjugated to its domination. And its god was the unknown, and its fear the Inevitable, and retrospect its recreation, and in the Hairpin Vision lay its safety, and in sex its slumbering danger.

The Spanish waiter, of a romantic disposition, took interest in the Señor and two Señoritas who came so frequently to the Billet-doux; and wondered when the former would begin to evince a preference. The Spanish waiter, only human, went so far as to rejoice in the sight of Peter and Stuart supping alone; since himself had begun to regard Merle with a more than waiterly eye. He was both puzzled and furious, two nights later, at the entrance of Stuart and Merle. And his bewilderment knew no bounds, when, having at last decided the Señoritas were at deadly enmity for their love of the capricious Señor, Peter and Merle shattered this most plausible theory by lunching together in perfect harmony of spirit. The Spanish waiter might stand as the first of a collection of persons convinced of the madness of the trio: collection of incidentals to their daily progress, such as railway-porters, policemen, telephone operators, grocers, boatmen, parents, rustics andBaldwin. Collection which Stuart proposed leaving to the Nation on his death: “each individual to be labelled with date and circumstance concurrent with his or her initiation to the belief of our complete insanity.”

Peter found an instance: “Specimen 41: Respectable Old Gentleman. March 2nd, 1913. On accidentally catching sight of Trio solemnly smashing egg at the end of Euston.”

“You know,” said Merle, “I don’t think he would have been so bewildered if Stuart hadn’t explained to him that we always smash eggs at supreme moments of our career; that we regard it as a religious ceremony; and that our accompanying chant is taken from Scene I of Macbeth: “When shall we three meet again?”—ending:

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