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Title: A reversion to type

Author: E. M. Delafield

Release date: August 1, 2024 [eBook #74166]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: The MacMillan Company, 1923

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74166

Credits: Hannah Wilson, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A REVERSION TO TYPE ***

A REVERSION TO TYPE

BY E. M. DELAFIELD

TENSION

HUMBUG

THE OPTIMIST

THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

A REVERSION TO TYPE

BY

E. M. DELAFIELD

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1923

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COPYRIGHT, 1923,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and printed. Published September, 1923.

Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York, U. S. A.

PART I

A REVERSION TO TYPE

I

If the interior of Squires was revealing, it was quite unconsciously so. Lady Aviolet, one felt sure, was serenely unaware of the need of self-expression that in 1905 was called “modern,” and had she been aware of it, the necessity would not have translated itself through the medium of artistic surroundings.

The original Squires had been burnt to the ground during the Chartist riots, rebuilt, and added to until the square grey mass of flint showed odd, irregular excrescences on every side.

Lower than the house, and surrounded by red brick walls that were older, lay the square stable-yard, surmounted by a clock tower. There had always been hunters in the Aviolet stables, and hounds had been domiciled there two generations earlier.

The gardens lay behind the house. In the front were smooth slopes of grass, a croquet lawn, trim gravelled paths and groups of ornamental shrubs. A square, open space of gravel beneath twin flights of stone steps topped by an openwork stone balustrade wound away between the ornamental shrubs, and eventually became the avenue that ran down the mile length of the park.

The high road lay outside the park gates, white with thick, chalky dust. Wayfarers could see the chimneys through the screening mass of elms, beech trees, and occasional yews.

The windows were better guarded, and could neither be overlooked, nor overlook.

Dr. Lucian, waiting in the hall, did not look out of the windows, but gazed round him, the familiar interior taking a new value as he gave it an attention that he had not given it for years.

The furniture was of heavy Spanish mahogany, the large armchairs upholstered in a blue-grey tapestry that was repeated in the long curtains dividing the hall from the approach to the smoking-room, library, and gun-room. The high, narrow black oak mantelshelf bore five admirable specimens of famille verte.

On the panelled walls hung portraits, all of them rather bad, of Aviolets, in heavy gilt frames. A large writing-table gleamed with silver and dark-green leather with gilt lettering on it, and a smaller table held newspapers and periodicals in orderly array. China stood in glass-fronted cabinets against the walls, and pot plants were grouped on either side of the oak staircase. There were no books, except the four that were all bound alike in loose green leather covers: “Postal Guide,” “Whittaker’s Almanac,” “Bradshaw,” and “A.B.C.,” standing together in a little green stand.

Besides the tapestry curtains, a further door opened out of the hall and Lucian amused himself by conjecturing what lay behind it. He knew that it was Lady Aviolet’s morning-room, but he had never been inside it.

He guessed at pink chintz, rather shabby now, and a writing-table fitted with innumerable pigeon-holes, laden with papers, leaflets, silver photograph frames, and little scarlet woolly garments stabbed together by wooden knitting-needles. A feeble water-colour painting of two young boys probably hung above the table—Ford and Jim Aviolet.

He felt sure that a great many smaller water-colours covered the walls, and that a draped easel set across a corner supported a representation of some such picture as Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World” or Watts’ “Love and Death.” There would be three or four little tables crowded with silver, and silver-gilt trifles, photographs of relatives, and a number of silver vases filled with flowers. A looking-glass would hang over the fireplace, and on the marble mantelshelf would be an ornamental clock, out of order, and a number of other photographs in silver or mosaic-work frames. A revolving bookcase might possibly stand in the middle of the room, containing books on gardening, one or two volumes of Kipling, a work of Whyte Melville’s, and some standard poetry.

No animal, he thought, would be allowed inside the morning-room, although Lady Aviolet was fond of Pug, and he lay in the hall now, panting and snorting. No one was fond of the black Persian cat, except Ford, to whom she belonged, but the black Persian cat, with scrupulous fairness, was also allowed to lie in the hall, like Pug.

Lady Aviolet, when she hurried in at last, even said, “Well, Puss,” as she went past, but she said it without conviction.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Dr. Lucian. I wanted to find some old illustrated papers to amuse my little grandson ... you know what children are like, in bed. You’ve not seen little Cecil yet?”

“No.”

“Not a bit like poor Jim.”

She sighed—a tribute which the doctor supposed to be extorted by convention, since no one aware of the peculiarities that had characterized the mauvais sujet of the Aviolet family could reasonably wish to see his memory perpetuated in his boy. Perhaps, however, the Aviolets did not wish little Cecil to resemble his mother, either. Dr. Lucian had not seen Mrs. Jim Aviolet, but he knew that Jim’s marriage abroad had been looked upon at the time as the crowning folly of a career that had been thickly peppered with follies throughout. Nor had Jim’s death redeemed Jim’s life, although it had the effect—to the doctor’s mind wholly desirable—of causing Sir Thomas Aviolet to offer a home to his daughter-in-law and only grandchild.

They had arrived from Ceylon a month earlier, and, so far as Dr. Lucian was aware, he was the first person in the neighbourhood whose curiosity was to be gratified by an introduction.

He followed Lady Aviolet’s squat, heavy-footed figure up the stairs and along passages so thickly carpeted that their footfalls were inaudible.

Passing through a green baize-covered door, they passed into a chillier region of stairs covered with oil-cloth and pitch-pine cupboards redolent of polish. A pink-sprigged paper covered the walls instead of oak panelling.

“You’ve not seen the nurseries for many years; I think not since Ford and Jim were up here?”

“Not since they both had measles. Jim was only ten years old.”

The doctor remembered that earlier occasion, and his own preference for the scapegrace Jim who had flatly refused to take his medicine while his elder brother Ford, far less ill, had lain with exemplary patience working out chess-problems in bed, and obediently swallowing nauseous draughts.

Lady Aviolet knocked at the door of the room that had been the night nursery, and went in.

“Here is Dr. Lucian, Rose—my daughter-in-law.”

Mrs. Aviolet did not look more than four or five and twenty, built on a large scale, and with something of the slouching awkwardness of an overgrown schoolgirl. Her hair, which was untidy, was a very light brown in front and yellow where it was turned up at the back, and her eyes, big and brown, had beautifully upturned black lashes. Deep dimples showed at the corners of her pretty mouth, and her teeth were white and even. Her worst point might have been her skin, but it was glaringly evident, even to the doctor’s masculine perceptions, that she made lavish and unskilful use of cosmetics.

They looked, at Squires, as much out of place as did her clothes—frilled where Lady Aviolet’s were plain, papery, in spite of their blackness, where the other’s were heavy and substantial.

She gave Dr. Lucian a large and very capable-looking white hand, heavily laden with rings.

“How d’you do? This is my little boy—he’s got a chill.”

The little boy sitting up in bed was very like her, with the same brown eyes, fair hair, and deep dimples, but with a look of fragility. There was nothing in his appearance to recall any of the Aviolets. He was not shy, but eager to talk and to answer questions.

“We hope to get some colour into his face presently,” Lady Aviolet observed. “You know what these Eastern children are.”

She looked at the little boy with dissatisfaction.

“He’s quite healthy,” said Mrs. Aviolet shortly.

She began to give an account of his health, speaking rather defiantly.

“Yes. Yes. I’ll just take his temperature. Put this under your tongue and don’t talk until I take it away again.”

Little Cecil opened his mouth and received the thermometer and then began to laugh, looking round him with big, mischievous eyes.

The doctor held up a warning finger.

“Be quiet, Cecil,” said his grandmother sharply. “Didn’t you hear what Dr. Lucian said?”

“Just you be quiet, Ces,” coaxed his mother. She looked down at him, stroking his forehead.

Lady Aviolet moved to the window. “He’s spoilt,” she said to the doctor, in what she evidently supposed to be an inaudible aside. “We’re looking for a good nursery governess. Just think—seven years old and can’t read yet!”

“When does your son get back?”

“He is back, I am glad to say. It’s difficult to know what to do——” she broke off. “I’d like you to examine Cecil, and see if you think he’s really delicate. I believe they were in some healthy part, up in the hills, but of course it isn’t the same thing as being properly brought up in England.”

The doctor went back to the bedside, made friends with the little boy, and accomplished a very fairly general examination.

“We shall have you up and about again in a couple of days. How do you like England?”

“Very much indeed, thank you. I like the garden, only I’m not allowed to pick the flowers, and there are no monkeys.”

“I’ve got a monkey. Would you like to come and see it?”

“Yes, please.”

The little boy looked delighted.

“A dear little fellow,” said the doctor, as Lady Aviolet took him downstairs again. “I don’t think there’s any need to be uneasy about him at all.”

He repeated the assurance to Cecil’s mother, who had followed them out of the room.

“I knew he was all right. There’s never been anything wrong with him; and this is simply a passing chill—and no wonder, after the heat in the Red Sea.”

“No wonder at all,” the doctor agreed. “He’ll be all right in a day or two.”

Rose Aviolet thanked him, but it struck him that her mother-in-law was still dissatisfied. When they were once more in the hall, and Rose had returned to the nursery, she spoke.

“What do you think of the general health of the child?”

“Excellent, I should think. Heart, lungs, all the rest of it, in very sound order I should say.” He felt faintly surprised at her anxiety. In all the years that he had known her, Lady Aviolet had never struck him as the sort of woman to indulge in foolish, maternal terrors.

“Of course, a tropical child’s first visit to England is always liable to cause a few alarms,” he said tentatively.

“Oh, I’m not nervous. His mother has some idea of his not being fit for school, but as Sir Thomas says, that’s all nonsense. Anyway there’s more than a year before we need think about that.”

“He seems intelligent, but I suppose he’s not had the usual chances of education, if he’s always been in the East.”

“He can’t read or write, but perhaps one couldn’t expect it. But he never seems to have played any games, poor little chap, which is a much more serious disadvantage. As Sir Thomas says, boys can never begin games too young.”

The doctor was not sufficiently in sympathy with Sir Thomas’s dictum to make any reply.

“I am afraid,” said Lady Aviolet in a hesitating way, rather as though the words were forced from her under the compulsion of some unusually strong feeling. “I am afraid that the little boy is going to be a disappointment to Sir Thomas. He is so utterly unlike the Aviolets.”

Dr. Lucian wondered whether she did not rather mean he was so exactly like his mother. The few moments that he had spent in the night nursery had served strongly to confirm the popular verdict that the Aviolets were not pleased with their newly seen daughter-in-law.

“You remember poor Jim, of course. Cecil isn’t in the least like him.”

The doctor inwardly congratulated Cecil on so desirable an escape.

“You were so very kind at the time of all our trouble with poor Jim that I really do want your opinion about the boy. Of course, one hopes that Ford may marry, but meanwhile, this little boy is the only Aviolet of the younger generation, and it does seem so very unfortunate that he should have had the dreadful disadvantage of being brought up abroad.”

The doctor knew that Lady Aviolet would never say what she really meant, which was “the dreadful disadvantage of being brought up abroad by a mother who cannot possibly be described as a lady”; but her grey, prominent eyes, that rather resembled those of a sheep, begged him to take into consideration the whole of the facts that perturbed her, without requiring what she would have regarded as the impropriety of describing them.

“If he may be allowed to come and see us, my sister will be delighted, and it will give me an opportunity of seeing rather more of him and judging as to his fitness for school.”

“Oh, there’s no question about that,” said Lady Aviolet rather quickly. “I’m sure Rose will quite see reason about that, and of course Cecil must go to school. The fact is, there’s a tendency that makes me anxious—it’s so dreadfully un-English. The poor little fellow doesn’t always speak the truth.”

Lucian looked at Lady Aviolet, gravely considering her troubled, stupid, high-bred face. He could gauge accurately the weight that she attached to the accusation by the mere fact that she had brought herself to put it into words.

“Whatever poor Jim’s faults, he was truthful. And you can imagine what it means to Sir Thomas—the soul of truth and honour—to find that this unfortunate little Cecil doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word.”

“Has he been frightened—punished too severely, or anything like that?”

“No, it’s not that sort of thing. Sad though that might be, one could understand it. No, the fact is that he—romances. I don’t know what else to call it. And he doesn’t seem to know when he’s doing it—that’s the dreadful part of it.”

“He is highly imaginative, I suppose?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lady Aviolet in a resentful voice. “I was an imaginative child myself. My next sister and I were always playing with dolls, and making them go through imaginary adventures—shipwrecks and fires, and all sorts of things—but I never remember being unable to distinguish between reality and pretence. If either of us had told a story, we should have been whipped, but I never remember such a thing happening.”

“I am not sure that whipping is the best method of treating a child that doesn’t speak the truth. It may only frighten——”

“I know those are the modern ideas,” said Lady Aviolet, seeming rather piteously eager to demonstrate her readiness to accept views that were new to her, and which the doctor knew that she therefore distrusted instinctively.

“It was Ford’s idea that we might consult you about it. It’s not the way we were brought up, if you’ll forgive me saying so—a naughty child was a naughty child, and a sick one was a sick one—but Ford says that everyone now has this idea that the mind and the body are very closely concerned, and react on one another. I daresay there may be something in it.”

“Everything, I should say.”

“And Rose—my daughter-in-law—speaks of this trouble as a kink. She says it’s always been there—that little Cecil’s word has never been reliable. I don’t really know whether she quite realizes what a sad and shocking thing it is. Of course, her own upbringing—— However, that’s neither here nor there. Of course, she spoils him dreadfully.”

“A risk that all only children must run,” the doctor reminded her.

“I don’t know. Ford was an only child for nearly five years, and he wasn’t spoilt.”

There was a sort of obtuse naïveté about Lady Aviolet’s habit of referring any question to her own individual experience that somehow detracted from the glaring certainty that her experience was of a singularly limited kind.

“It was my maid who first spoke to me about Cecil—poor Dawson. You know how devoted she is to us all, and always has been, and I always thought that Jim, if anything, was her favourite of the two boys. So you can imagine that she wouldn’t be very likely to look for faults in Jim’s boy. But she’s been looking after him till we’ve found a governess, and almost from the very first evening he started telling her the most wonderful stories. About things he’d done—or rather hadn’t done—in Ceylon. He told her he always rode on an elephant, and had little native children to pick up his toys, and I don’t know what else—all pure invention, of course.”

“That might have been in the spirit of boasting!”

“But how dreadful! Why should he boast?”

Dr. Lucian shrugged his shoulders.

“Besides, he stuck to it afterwards. Nothing would make him own that it wasn’t true. Dawson tried to make him say he’d just been inventing, and I asked him about it myself. But he kept on saying: ‘It is true, it is true.’ It really seemed as though the child had made himself believe in his own invention.”

“Very imaginative children may sometimes be really incapable of distinguishing fancy from fact.”

“Then all I can say is, they’re not normal,” said Lady Aviolet with decision.

She looked very unhappy, and it was evident that by “normal” she really meant sane.

“Is there anything else—besides the boasting, I mean?”

“Anything else? I don’t know what more you want,” said poor Lady Aviolet, with a certain tartness in her manner. “He is always telling us about things that never happened, and it’s perfectly impossible to depend on his account of anything. And if there’s one thing Sir Thomas finds it hard to forgive, it’s any least little want of openness. He is dreadfully disturbed about it.”

“And your son?”

“Ford hasn’t seen as much of him as we have, besides he’s been away on business since they came. But of course Ford will take him in hand. It’s my one hope. But mercifully, poor Jim left the guardianship of his boy to Ford—jointly with Rose, of course.”

“She is very young?”

“Only twenty-five. She wasn’t nineteen when this child was born. It was the most foolish marriage poor Jim could have made, but one knows what these sea-voyages are. She was going out to the East, and they were engaged before they reached Colombo. Naturally, we were told nothing about it until it was all over. Poor Jim!”

Dr. Lucian felt quite as much inclined to say, “Poor Rose!” Jim Aviolet had been drinking hard long before he was sent out to a tea-plantation in Ceylon, and the doctor saw no reason to suppose that the East had improved him.

“Of course,” said Lady Aviolet, “Jim had his failings. You, of all people, know what we went through with him. But he was never, never anything but straight—I—I can’t imagine any Aviolet being anything else.”

The range of Lady Aviolet’s powers of imagination had never seemed to the doctor to be anything but restricted in the extreme, but his own would not have included anything so unthinkable as the coupling of any Aviolet with an absence of blatant, matter-of-fact, unsparing and uninspired truthfulness of the most literal description. Nevertheless, he made an exception mentally of Ford, whom he had always judged to be capable of un-Aviolet-like subtleties. The thought made him say again:

“Is your son at home now?”

“Yes, I’m glad to say he is. Of course, being little Cecil’s guardian, he has every right to make the child’s upbringing his own affair, and we quite count on him for advising Rose, who is naturally inexperienced. She is by way of being rather clever, don’t you know, and of course Ford has always been clever, so I quite hope she’ll listen to him.”

She spoke rather as though that which she termed cleverness were some peculiarity which set its victims in a class apart from the rest of mankind.

“In what sort of way is Mrs. Aviolet clever?” the doctor asked, mechanically adopting Lady Aviolet’s vocabulary.

“I don’t quite know, but she tells me that she plays the piano, and she seems fond of reading. I often see her with a book, quite early in the day—a thing which was unheard of a few years ago, except in the case of a regular blue-stocking, as we used to call them. If my dear mother had seen any one of her ten children reading a book before six o’clock at the very earliest, she would have asked if we couldn’t find anything to do. But none of us would have thought of doing such a thing. No Amberly has ever been clever, that I know of. In fact, Sir Thomas and I have often wondered how Ford turned out clever, because the Aviolets have none of them ever been in the least odd, either.”

The doctor had so often wondered exactly the same thing, that he could not resist pursuing the subject.

“I am very much interested in problems of heredity,” he admitted, quite aware that Lady Aviolet would see no eccentricity in such preoccupation on the part of a member of the professional classes. “Didn’t an Aviolet marry a Spaniard a good many generations ago?”

“Yes, indeed, not so very long after the Armada. Sir Basil Aviolet. I believe he was in Cornwall, seeing some property the family had there in those days, near Launceston, and he found this girl on the coast somewhere, and fell in love with her. Of course, she must have been English on her mother’s side, and her father a Spanish sailor. I forget her name, but we have a painting of her.”

She indicated the portrait amongst those hanging against the wall.

“It’s difficult to see what the attraction was, but it must have been very strong, or he could never have been so foolish as to marry her,” said Lady Aviolet simply.

The Spanish ancestress had not been beautiful. If the presentation was a faithful one, her long, narrow, wedge-like face had been of a uniformly brown complexion, her dark eyes set too close together, and her upper lip of an inordinate length.

“Some of her descendants would seem to have taken after her,” said Dr. Lucian.

“Yes. Ford is very like this picture. But her own two sons were regular Aviolets, as it happened. Their portraits are in the dining-room. But I suppose foreigners are always rather apt to be clever, so perhaps Ford is a throwback, in that sort of way.”

Widely apart though their respective standpoints for viewing this phenomenon might be, the doctor had long ago reached the same conclusion as had Lady Aviolet.

“A Latin mentality allied to a Saxon physique is a combination which presents some rather interesting contradictions.”

She looked at him quite blankly, and then said with a certain dignity: “I thoroughly believe in heredity myself. Look at the Amberly nose.”

The doctor did not take the injunction literally. He knew the long, straight feature, slightly flattened, with small, insensitive nostrils. He had seen it on Lady Aviolet’s own face, on those of both her sons, and on the faces of almost all the Grierson-Amberlys living on the other side of the county.

“Poor little Cecil isn’t in the least like the Aviolets; though,” she added, with an obvious desire to be just, “he is a good-looking child, I must say.”

“Very,” said the doctor emphatically.

He had taken a curious fancy to the intelligent, mischievous-looking little boy, and he was already keenly interested in the perverseness of imagination that so greatly distressed Cecil’s grandmother. Abnormalities in psychology were, to the doctor’s way of thinking, better worth studying than the majority of the books regarded with so unsympathetic an eye by Lady Aviolet.

Sir Thomas passed through the hall, a tall, broadly-built, elderly man, with a heavy jowl and expressionless eyes.

“Good-morning, doctor. East wind again to-day.”

“Good-morning. Yes, spring’s late in coming this year. Well, I must be off.”

The doctor made his farewells, aware that the presence of her husband would put an immediate end to the inarticulate confidences of Lady Aviolet.

Driving down the avenue, however, he was overtaken by a slim, tweed-clad figure advancing through the beech-glades.

“Hullo, Lucian! Which way are you going?”

“Whitebourne.”

“The very thing, if you’ll give me a lift.”

The doctor watched Ford Aviolet spring with great activity on to the seat of the high dog-cart and adjust himself and his pince-nez with a series of unconscious, accustomed little gestures.

Ford Aviolet had for the past four or five years expressed at intervals a fear that his views were daringly democratic, and the doctor, during a corresponding period, had strongly suspected that he himself was in use as a practical demonstration of Mr. Aviolet’s socialistic tendencies.

The idea had never served to add any charm to their intercourse.

“I suppose you’ve been to see the hope of the house?” Ford’s tone was pensively ironical, as who should hint at inverted commas for the descriptive phrase of which he had made use.

“Your brother’s little boy? Yes. There’s nothing much wrong there—he’ll be running about again in a couple of days.”

“You saw his mother?”

“I did.”

“The likeness between them is rather remarkable. The boy hasn’t anything about him that recalls poor Jim, has he?”

“No, there’s no likeness.”

“Of course, one would have liked the boy to look like an Aviolet, at least. It’s a disappointment to my father, especially as Cecil will no doubt inherit Squires one of these days. At least, so poor Jim appears to have thought.”

There was gentle scorn in Ford Aviolet’s low voice and rather distinct enunciation.

“If he thought such a thing I wonder he didn’t send his wife and boy home long ago,” said Dr. Lucian curtly.

“My dear Lucian, you have been in the family councils ever since you saved Jim’s face over that horrible business of the blacksmith’s girl. You can hardly suppose that Jim imagined my dear father and mother, to say nothing of my humble self, would welcome a bouncing young woman who was barely eighteen on her wedding day, rejoicing in the good old English name of Smith. My charming sister-in-law has already informed us with great candour that she has never set foot in a country house before. The fact, I may add, was almost glaringly obvious.”

The doctor glanced sharply round at Ford. He knew of old that peculiar lucidity of utterance which he had long ago qualified as a curious and elaborate emanation of bitterness. It was as uncharacteristic of the Aviolets as Ford himself was uncharacteristic of his caste.

Physically, he resembled his mother, but his eyes, neither grey nor obtuse, were long and narrow, very dark-brown, and set close together under superciliously curved eyebrows. He was clean-shaven, which added to the youthful appearance of his slight person, standing nearly six foot high, but narrow-shouldered, and with unusually small and delicate hands and feet.

“I gather that Rose’s avocations in Ceylon were dancing, making her own clothes and the child’s, and trying to wheedle money out of Jim for their preposterous bills whenever he was sufficiently drunk to listen to her.”

The doctor, as sincerely disgusted by these confidences as any one of Ford’s own family might have been, continued to maintain silence.

“A man of your profession, Lucian, should be less squeamish at the sight of other people’s dirty linen,” said Ford mockingly. Then his tone changed.

“Of course, it’s in abominable taste to discuss my sister-in-law at all—you’re perfectly right. You must forgive me. The fact is, the whole business has got on my nerves, and you know the utter impossibility of discussing any unpleasant situation with my beloved parents. That generation has such a miraculous capacity for evading the unpleasant. As a matter of fact, I’m really in hopes of your giving me some advice about the boy.”

“Your mother told me. Well, get them to allow Cecil to come and have tea with my sister, and play with the live stock, and see the monkey, and that’ll give me a chance of having him under observation for a bit. It’s probably a case of a lively imagination and the company of native servants.”

“No doubt,” agreed Ford politely; “but it’s an unpleasant peculiarity, and one would like to eradicate it before the wretched child goes to school, if only for his own sake. Could you drop me here, Lucian? I want to speak to the farrier fellow.”

The doctor drove off alone with a distinct sensation of relief.

He had known Ford and Jim Aviolet since their babyhood. His relations with both had been more than merely professional, for he had covered the graceless Jim’s tracks on more than one occasion, and Ford, of later years, had taken pains to demonstrate that he was willing to accept Dr. Lucian as intellectual affinity rather than as family physician.

Nevertheless, the doctor, although he had not liked Jim, liked Ford even less.

II

Rose Aviolet came down to breakfast late, and entered the dining-room awkwardly. Even at her utmost self-confidence she did not possess the art of coming into a room, and at Squires she was not self-confident at all.

The dining-room was large and high, with heavy furniture of Spanish mahogany, crimson curtains across the embrasures of the bow-windows and wide, crimson-cushioned sills, and a crimson flock paper against which hung enormous oil-portraits in gilt frames. On the sideboard stood massive silver dishes, engraved with the Aviolet crest, each dish with a little blue flame burning beneath it, and on other, lesser sideboards were respectively placed the apparatus of tea and coffee, and a selection of fruit arranged on a dessert service of intrinsically hideous Crown Derby. A log fire burnt on the open hearth.

Lady Aviolet, squat, grey-haired, dressed in a silk shirt with a high-boned collar, and a black tweed skirt that showed clumping boots below it, was opening a pile of letters with deliberation.

She had her back to the windows, and faced Sir Thomas at the other end of the square table.

“Good-morning, Rose. How is Cecil?”

“He’s much better, thank you. He can get up to-day.”

Rose moved uneasily between her own place at the table and the sideboard. The procedure at breakfast always embarrassed her.

Was it bad manners to help oneself? They all did so, but then, they were at home, and Rose, most emphatically, was not. It seemed quite wrong to let an old gentleman like Sir Thomas get up and wait upon one....

She placed herself awkwardly in his way, apologised nervously and with unnecessary laughter, and finally stumbled into her chair, full of inchoate resentment and confusion.

Sir Thomas said to his wife, as Rose had heard him say every morning since her own arrival:

“What are the plans for to-day, my dear?”

Lady Aviolet immediately took up a little note-book with silver corners and a silver pencil attached, and began to flutter the leaves.

“The Marchmonts are coming to tea. Very pleasant neighbours of ours, Rose; you will like to meet them. General Marchmont, he is, and there are two unmarried daughters. Poor Mrs. Marchmont is dead, I’m sorry to say. She was a Mallinson.”

Lady Aviolet paused, as though expecting Rose to say something, but Rose had nothing to say. Neither the word “Marchmont” nor the word “Mallinson” conveyed anything to her beyond the mere sound of the syllables, and she hardly even realised that they could be expected to convey anything more.

“The Marchmonts will be interested in the new bulbs,” said Lady Aviolet.

“Anything for the station?” Sir Thomas inquired. “The carriage must meet the two-thirty. Ford is expecting the person from London who wants to see the house.”

“What person? I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

“Some man who is publishing a book, I believe. He wrote a very civil letter, and asked if he might see the place and take some photographs and Ford sees no objection. Surely he asked you about it?”

“I’d forgotten.”

“So long as he looks after the fellow himself, I don’t mind. And he’ll have to show us what he writes. You can’t trust these liter’y fellows a yard, I’m told.”

“Why, what could he do?” Rose inquired.

“Oh, you never know. Might put in all sorts of impertinent details about the family, if he wasn’t watched. But I daresay he’s all right. Ford’ll look after him.”

“Well, then, the carriage to meet the two-thirty,” said Lady Aviolet. “There’s a box from the Stores, too, to be fetched. And the Mudie box. What about sending in the luggage-cart?”

“Yes. That will be all right.”

“Luggage-cart to go this morning, then.” Lady Aviolet wrote again.

“Rose, have you any plans?”

Rose shook her head.

“Thomas, you’re not doing anything?”

“Why, yes, my dear. The bench is sitting to-day. I must go into Cheriton this morning.”

“Oh, dear!”

Lady Aviolet looked quite confounded.

“That means that Tucker won’t have time to get the carriage cleaned before this afternoon. He won’t like that.”

“No, no, that would never do.”

“I might drive you in the pony-cart, Thomas.”

“You’d have to wait and I can’t tell how long I might be kept. No, the lad must drive over, and he can put up the pony at the ‘Angel’ until I’m ready.”

“Will Tucker be able to spare the boy?”

“He must,” said Sir Thomas firmly.

“Then the pony-cart, and the boy, to be round at ten-thirty sharp.”

“Quarter to eleven is quite time enough.”

“Quarter to eleven, then.”

Lady Aviolet read out from the little book:

“The pony-cart to take you to Cheriton at 10.45, with the boy—and lunch had better be half an hour later, in case you can get back for it—the luggage-cart to fetch the Mudie box and the box from the Stores this morning, and the carriage to meet the 2.30 this afternoon. And I suppose this person will take the seven o’clock train back to town. I must find out from Ford. Oh, and the Marchmonts to tea. That’s all, I think.”

No one contributed any further item to the day’s programme.

Ford made an unobtrusive appearance and uttered his casual morning greetings with a detached coolness to which Rose, sharply observant, felt that she herself could never attain.

She could not remember feeling utterly at a loss ever before, except perhaps on her first day at school, when she was nine years old. But then she had never before found herself in any atmosphere in the least like that of Squires. The conversation at meals—there was no conversation at any other time—was unlike any that she had heard before.

In Ceylon, Jim had grumbled about the native labour on the plantation, had told stories circulated on the previous night at the Club, and had listened readily enough to any items of gossip, generally scandalous, that his wife might have assimilated from her neighbours.

At Squires, Rose had heard the plans of the coming day discussed, with minor variations, exactly as they had been discussed that morning, every day since her arrival.

At lunch, Sir Thomas sometimes reported indignantly that the keeper had again complained of poachers, and sometimes, also indignantly, that his agent had suggested that more money should be spent on repairs to farms or cottages on the estate.

To these observations Lady Aviolet might return a trite ejaculation, to which no one made any rejoinder.

At tea, the talk was generally of the garden, of gardens belonging to other people, and of Pug’s taste in cakes and saucers full of milk.

Sometimes people called, but even then the subjects of conversation did not vary. If Sir Thomas had read the Times before dinner, as sometimes happened, he would then speak disparagingly of the Government, although in general terms rather than from the standpoint of any specific grievance. Ford sometimes made a reply, but more often he raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

All the evening Lady Aviolet knitted, glancing from time to time at the clock, and at half-past ten she always said to Rose:

“Well, I daresay you’re ready for bed, my dear. I’m sure I am.”

Then they took silver candlesticks and went upstairs, Rose climbing the additional flight that led to the night nursery in order that she might look at the sleeping Cecil before she went to her own large bedroom on the first floor.

She felt as though she had been for months at Squires, and her heart sank with a feeling of dismay that was almost physical, as she thought of remaining here for years.

As usual, she drifted into the hall after breakfast, knowing that she was not expected to return to the night nursery until the second housemaid had completed her duties there.

She stood beside one of the smaller inlaid tables, disconsolately turning over papers and periodicals.

“There is a new number of the Graphic, I believe,” said Ford’s voice behind her.

“Oh, thanks.”

On a sudden impulse she looked up at him, intensifying the liquid appeal of her big brown eyes almost unconsciously because he was a man, and young.

“I wish I had more to do, here.”

“Do you? I’m sure my mother would be glad of your help in many ways.”

“She just wouldn’t, then. How could I help her? I don’t know anything about her sort of things. I can’t even knit.”

“My dear mother’s interests are not solely confined to her worsted work, I believe,” Ford answered blandly. “She is, for instance, a very keen gardener.”

“As I happen to have lived in North London till I was seventeen, and after that in Ceylon, with a couple of trips to Australia, I’m not awfully likely to be of use in an English garden,” said Rose with angry sarcasm.

“Perhaps not. May I ask in what direction your tastes happen to lie?”

“I haven’t had much chance of finding out, have I? You can guess what life was like with poor old Jim. Every time he got on the drink, Ces and I went in fear of our lives, and——”

“Please!” Ford held up one hand.

She stared at him, abashed and yet still angry.

“I won’t say it, if you don’t want me to. I had to put up with it, though. Look here, I want to talk to you about what we’re going to do.”

“Certainly.”

He pushed forward one of the armchairs, but she remained on her feet. Although Ford Aviolet was tall, their eyes met on a level, and Rose’s square shoulders were broader than his sloping ones.

“It was very kind to pay our passage home, and all that, and of course it was more than time Ces came to England. Jim was always talking about sending him, only we hadn’t the money—but what happens next?”

“We hope you will pay us a long visit,” said Ford in accents that were singularly lacking in spontaneity.

“Thanks,” she said ungraciously. “But you know I’ve got Ceylon friends we could go and stay with—awfully nice people; they live at Bexhill, retired. And I’ve an uncle in London, too.”

Ford visibly repressed a shudder.

“He’s got a big business there—pawnbroking—and his name is Smith,” said Rose very loudly.

Ford’s voice immediately dropped even below its usual subdued pitch.

“Please let us discuss it quietly, if you have no objection. Won’t you sit down?”

With a flouncing movement, she flung herself into the armchair.

“Let us understand one another, Rose. You and I are joint guardians of Jim’s son. As things stand at present, he will in all probability, one of these days, be the owner of this place.”

“I never thought of such a thing! I don’t believe it! Why, surely you’re going to get married and have kids yourself, one of these days?”

“Oh, please, please!”

Ford’s hand went up again, and this time the expression on his face was that of one excruciated.

“There can be no need to enter into questions of that sort. Cecil is my father’s only grandchild at present, and we should naturally wish him to be brought up according to the family traditions. If you wish to pay some visits—and nothing could be more natural, after your long spell abroad—you may feel perfectly certain that Cecil will be as well looked after here as he could possibly be anywhere.”

Ford was looking at the tips of his fingers as he spoke and missed the lowering gaze, rather like that of an angry animal, which she turned upon him.

“How d’you mean, if I want to pay visits? I’m not going anywhere without Ces. He’s never been away from me for a day since he was born.”

“I am sure you would be the last person to let the boy go on being dependent upon you to such an extent, my dear Rose, when you realize how very much harder it will make the inevitable separation between you when it does come. Cecil will be going to school.”

She opened her mouth as though about to speak, checked herself, and then said slowly:

“He’s only seven years old.”

“Oh, certainly, there’s time before us.” Ford smiled. “It was only a word of warning. Cecil’s education is entirely in your department for the time being. I shall not consider that my responsibility really begins until he is of school age.”

“No,” said Rose slowly.

“You will find my mother a little bit—prejudiced, shall we say?—along certain lines of her own, but otherwise you will have no difficulty in making your own arrangements regarding Cecil. I take it you are in favour of a good nursery governess?”

“Oh, I suppose so. It all sounds rather rot to me, you know,” she said ungraciously. “It seems so silly to pay another woman to take care of him, when his own mother has nothing else on earth to do. I could teach him myself, really.”

“I doubt your finding it satisfactory. Not that I should venture to question your attainments for a moment, but teaching is an art which requires peculiar qualifications, I believe.”

“I don’t know any Latin or Greek, if that’s what you mean, but I went to a decent school in North London up to the time I was sixteen, and some of the things I learnt there have stuck. Besides, Life teaches one.”

Ford smiled again. “How true! ‘Life teaches one.’ It has been said before, I believe, but, of course, it’s none the less true on that account.”

Rose flushed scarlet and looked straight at him. “You can sneer if you want to. I don’t suppose you’ve learnt much from Life yourself. You’ve sat here comfortably and eaten your meals and strolled about round your father’s property, and all the time Jim was sweating on the plantation, and drinking worse every day, and me not knowing which way to turn for money to pay the monthly books.”

Her voice had risen to virago pitch.

“There’s no need to raise your voice,” said Ford. His colour came and went in patches, and his breathing was uneven.

“I might remind you that I went through the South African War, and was severely wounded at Spion Kop. I might also point out to you that a man of my age is likely to have had a number of experiences that would scarcely come within the range of your understanding. But on the other hand, I have no taste for scenes. Indeed, for your own sake, I strongly advise you to bear in mind that at Squires people don’t make scenes. It isn’t done, my dear Rose, it really isn’t done.”

He picked up a newspaper and opened it leisurely.

Rose understood that the conversation was over, and that the onus of a retreat had, skilfully enough, been relegated to her.

She turned her back and went upstairs, conscious that her withdrawal lacked dignity. She hated her brother-in-law with the simple, undisciplined intensity that characterised all her emotions.

Her not very long life had, indeed, run altogether upon emotional lines. Her earliest remembrance was of her widowed mother crying piteously because they were being “sold up,” and she had insisted upon attending the sale, only to break down ignominiously. The six-year-old Rose had roared sympathetically, and Uncle Alfred Smith, very angry, had taken them both away.

They had lived with him in London after that, and Rose’s mother had helped in the business, and Rose had gone to school, enjoying violent and ephemeral friendships with other girls, giggling and idling and whispering just as they did, and working by fits and starts when Uncle Alfred wrote her a severe letter or her mother came to see her. The keenest happiness she knew—and it was so intense as to be almost pain—was connected with those occasional visits, when her mother’s big, blowsy person, always dressed in some vivid colour with a fluttering accompaniment of scarf-ends, veil, ribbons, and feathers, would be inducted into the dingy school-parlour to which Rose would rush—hurling herself rapturously against that substantial form, in a mutually enthusiastic exchange of hugs and kisses.

“Shall I take you out, lovey?”

“Oh, do, Mother.”

They had gone out together, very often hand-in-hand, even after Rose was quite a big girl, and looked into the drapers’ shop windows, for which both had exactly the same passion, and planned all the fine things that they would buy when Rose was grown up and married to a millionaire.

“Only mind, you’ll have to love him, ducky. He must be awfully rich, but you must be awfully in love with him, too, or you won’t get any of the best out of life.”

“All right. I’d like to be in love with him, too.”

The afternoon generally finished with tea in a tea-shop.

“Eat up all the cakes you want, my precious. I expect you get enough bread-and-scrape at that school of yours. Can’t you manage another? That little pink one isn’t very large.”

“Well, I’ll try.”

Parting, at the end of the afternoon, was a choky affair on both sides.

“Not so long now till the holidays, pet. Be a good girl and get a prize, to please Uncle Alfred.”

“I really will try, Mother darling. Is he making much fuss about the school-bills?”

“Not a lot. He wants you to be well educated. See here, Rose, he gave me some money the other day. I can give you this.”

“Oh, Mother! It’s too much.”

“Not a bit of it, lovey. Get some chocs, or something good. By-bye.”

Rose would stand on the doorstep and wave, receiving vigorous waves in return, till her mother, still walking backwards, either collided with a passer-by or disappeared round the corner of the street.

The holidays, when they came, had always been blissful, owing to the companionship of that adored mother. They had both of them enjoyed their cramped quarters in one small bedroom over the shop, both disregarded Uncle Alfred’s severe commands as to the consumption of gas with cheerful impunity, turning up the flame as high as it would go, so that both could judge of the effect upon Rose’s mother’s complexion of the new creams and powders with which she was always trying experiments, sometimes with disastrous results.

“I don’t like that brunette powder, one bit. It makes you look sort of green.”

“It’ll match my hair, then,” had been the substance of Mrs. Smith’s reply to her daughter’s criticism, given with a certain grim humour. “However that girl in the hair-dresser’s could have recommended it the way she did, beats me. To hear her, you’d have thought there wasn’t a thing to touch it in heaven or earth. Not a dye, she said, but just a tonic to brighten the colour and clean the scalp. And look at me!”

The effect achieved by the tonic had indeed been remarkable.

“Don’t you ever have a thing to do with hair-dyes, dearie. You’ve got lovely hair, just exactly the colour mine was before I started monkeying with it.”

But Rose’s mother had shown no objection to her daughter’s semi-surreptitious use of the stick of lip-salve that lay in a drawer of the dressing-chest, amid a tangle of veils, hair-nets, twists of paper containing sweets, biscuit-crumbs, hair-pins, belts, stockings, old envelopes, gloves, powder-boxes, and a dozen other accumulated futilities.

Rose could never remember that her mother had given her more than two pieces of advice, besides that which related to her use of hair-dyes.

“Put on clean under-things when you’re going on a journey. You never know if there mayn’t be an accident, nor who’ll pick you up and save you. You don’t want to be taken unawares, is what I say.”

And the other:

“Know your own mind, Rose, and when you’ve found out what you want, you go for it. There’s nothing like Life, when all’s said and done, and if Life isn’t wanting, then I don’t know what it is. And your Mammy’ll help you to get what you want, if she can do it, my pretty.”

But Rose’s mother had been killed in a street accident, two days before Rose was to leave school for good.

For many years afterwards she had been unable to bear the thought of the months that followed. Her grief had been a kind of frenzy, coming upon her in gusts of overwhelming misery when she could barely force down rising screams for Mother, Mother, Mother, crouched upon the floor, biting at the bed-clothes, with clenched hands and streaming eyes.

For months she had dreaded going to sleep in anticipation of the frightful, sick pang that waking, with its renewal of realization, brought her.

Uncle Alfred had been extraordinarily and unexpectedly kind.

He had given her pocket-money, and occasional presents, and had said nothing about the innumerable novels from the circulating library with which she had sought to drug her misery, although he had long ago denounced all fiction as “trash inspired by the Devil.” (Uncle Alfred had “found religion” some years earlier but had never succeeded in imparting the discovery either to his sister-in-law or to his niece.)

It had been, however, without any such altruistic design at all that Uncle Alfred had accidentally provided Rose with the first real distraction from her sorrow.

He had engaged an assistant.

The youth, who helped in the shop all day and slept under the counter at night, and had meals with them in the living-room, fell in love with Rose.

Immediately, and with no false modesty as to showing it, Rose had fallen in love with Artie Millar in return.

It had been a very young, rapid and essentially physical affair, but it had served, to a certain extent, to reveal to Rose the possibilities in herself. She had been partly frightened, and partly exultant. At school she had acquired a garbled knowledge of sex, supplemented by her mother’s crudely worded reassurance.

“Don’t you worry your pretty head, my poppet. It stands to reason you’ve got a body as well as a heart, doesn’t it? And if you ask me, the one wouldn’t be much fun without the other. You’ll find the whole thing sort of works in together, when you fall in love, and nothing to be ashamed of either. It’s all Nature.”

It had been with this comfortable justification at the back of her mind that Rose had let herself go whole-heartedly to the violent mutual attraction that had overtaken herself and the good-looking assistant—a lad of nineteen, with blue eyes and very white teeth flashing from a singularly brown face. He had been at sea for two years before drifting into the pawnbroker’s shop, and the fact held a fascination for the London-bred Rose.

At first they had given one another long, semi-surreptitious looks, then they had tentatively begun an exchange of jokes and personalities, until the day when Artie had suddenly failed in repartee and, when derided by Rose, had replied, flushing deeply:

“You can say anything you jolly well please to me. I—I like it.”

For days after that she had avoided him, while a new delicious consciousness was awakened between them, enhanced by the necessity of behaving as usual in front of Uncle Alfred.

At last one evening, just as Artie was putting up the shutters for the night, Rose, having watched Uncle Alfred leave the house by the side-door, had slipped into the shop and pretended to be very much surprised at Artie’s presence.

“Hallo! Haven’t you finished yet?”

“Just. I say——”

“Well?”

“I say, are you offended with me about anything?”

“What makes you ask?”

“You’ve seemed different, somehow, lately. More stand-off, like.”

These, and other such time-worn phrases, had passed between them, and in the end Rose had simulated anger, strangely curious all the time to see what Artie, provoked, would do.

What he had done, as both had subconsciously intended from the first, had been to catch hold of her and kiss her roughly and suddenly.

It had been Rose’s first kiss, and had been followed by others, given and exchanged in the semi-obscurity of the shop at closing-time and later on, as they grew bolder, in the public parks to which they had repaired secretly on the rare afternoons when Artie was free.

Perhaps a fortnight had elapsed before the discovery by Uncle Alfred of the idyll so rapidly progressing beneath his roof.

Another crisis of the emotions had followed, for Uncle Alfred had denounced Rose to her face, in his strangely passionless, old-fashioned invective, as a “lewd hussy.” But his wrath had not blinded him to the relative value to himself and his business of an intelligent assistant and an idle niece.

It was Rose for whom he had found a post that would take her away from home, that would, in fact, take her out of England, since she was to look after two children travelling with their parents to Ceylon, remain there for a year, and return to England with them.

“A most wonderful opportunity for any young woman,” Uncle Alfred had pointed out.

It had certainly provided wonderful opportunities for Rose.

In spite of a tearful parting and promise of weekly letters, she had forgotten Artie Millar within twenty-four hours of leaving him. The new excitements had been so many and so varied!

Her employers had been kind to her—Mr. Jones-Pryce had attempted to kiss her, but had left off when she protested—and the children had played on deck and given her no trouble.

Rose, enchanted with her new life, had found aboard ship to afford the most delightful opportunities for flirtation, and several young men, Jim Aviolet amongst them, had been ready to flirt.

The emotional climaxes had then come thick and fast, one upon another. There had been Mrs. Jones-Pryce’s rather tardy awakening to her duties of chaperonage, and her crudely worded rebuke to Rose, the ready tears and loud protests of Rose in return, and Jim Aviolet’s eager and indiscreet consolations.

“Give the old hag notice. You’ll easily find another job of the same kind at Colombo, to get you home again.”

“But I don’t want to go home! Uncle Alfred doesn’t want me—and besides, he’d be so angry.”

“You poor little girl! I say, don’t cry, Rose. I may call you Rose, mayn’t I?”

Oh, yes, he might do anything he liked.

She had not been exactly in love with Jim, but pleased and flattered because he was a “real” gentleman (not like Mr. Jones-Pryce) and full of romantic compassion when he had confided to her that he was the “bad hat” of his family.

“It’s drink, mostly. I suppose you think that awful?”

Rose had not thought it nearly so “awful” as a girl of Jim Aviolet’s own class would have thought it. Drink was a not uncommon misfortune amongst her mother’s friends, and amongst Uncle Alfred’s clientèle. She had been fired with enthusiasm at the idea of reforming him, taking care of him.

“I know I could keep straight with a girl like you, Rose,” had been Jim Aviolet’s declaration.

The end of it had been a precipitated parting at Colombo between Rose and her employers, and her marriage to Jim Aviolet.

It was there that romance had ended, and although the emotional climaxes had still come at intervals, they had almost all been painful ones.

Jim had been violently in love with his young wife for a short while, but from the first week of their marriage they had quarrelled, loudly and angrily. Neither had known the meaning of restraint.

Cecil had been a small bone of contention between them almost from the day of his birth.

If there had been emotion over Jim’s death—and Rose was incapable of viewing any personal equation from any but the emotional standpoint—it had been strangely mixed. There had been grief and shame and anger and remorse, but there had also been untold relief.

III

“I am very glad that Rose should form any friendship,” said Lady Aviolet, in a tone which savoured rather of resentment than of gladness.

The friendship in question had risen, with un-Aviolet-like rapidity, between Rose and the Lucians.

She had taken Cecil to tea there, and had been asked again.

“Please have the carriage at whatever time suits you, my dear,” said Lady Aviolet, who had frequently met the doctor’s sister, but had never called upon her, and would never have contemplated the possibility of doing so.

Rose and Cecil departed joyfully.

“Mummie, when are we going back to Ceylon?”

“I don’t suppose we shall go back at all, darling. I told you we were coming to live in England.”

“But I don’t think I like it much,” said Cecil, opening his brown eyes with a piteous look.

“That fine maid Dawson is kind to you all right, isn’t she?” his mother asked sharply.

The corners of Cecil’s mouth turned down. “She says I tell stories.”

“Well, so you do sometimes, as you very well know. Not that you aren’t going to break yourself of it, because of course you are. Aren’t you, my precious?”

Rose looked at him rather anxiously, and squeezed his little hand tightly in hers.

“Yes, Mummie,” said Cecil confidingly.

He leant against her, playing with her rings. He was an affectionate little boy.

“Here we are. Don’t you want to see the monkey again?”

“Yes. And Miss Lucian,” said Cecil politely.

Miss Lucian had been very kind to him on their first visit, and had thereby won Rose’s confidence as well as Cecil’s.

“He’s been longing to come again,” she cried, as she shook hands with her hostess.

Dr. Lucian’s sister was a small, slight person, not young, but looking so because of the rapidity of her movements and the mobility of her small face.

“Would you like to look at pictures in the drawing-room or go and play in the garden?” she asked Cecil.

“The garden, please.”

“Then we’ll call you when it’s tea-time.”

Rose looked at her gratefully.

“That’s just what he enjoys—being let alone to play out of doors. It’s all new to him, you see.”

“There’s a lovely garden for him at Squires.”

“Oh, yes—and a lady’s maid turned on to trot behind him so as to see that he doesn’t do any damage!” Rose interjected scornfully.

“Why, he seems such a good little boy.”

“So he is.”

“I never heard such nonsense,” exclaimed Miss Lucian, with a warmth equal to Rose’s own.

It needed nothing more to inflame Rose’s ardour, never greatly tempered by discretion.

“The whole thing seems nonsense to me,” she remarked vehemently. “Him being put into a nursery and having his breakfast and supper upstairs and that ridiculous old maid Dawson putting him to bed, and not so much as knowing if his little pyjamas fastened in front or behind—honestly, she didn’t, silly old ass! In Ceylon, I had him with me all the time.”

“And can’t you do that at Squires?”

“Oh, Lord, no. They’re always at me about not spoiling him, and making him manly. It’s quite right, I daresay.”

She threw a sudden odd glance round, as though afraid of being overheard, and then said in a lowered voice:

“I’m going to let them have their own way about all the things that don’t matter much. When it comes to something that does, it’ll be time enough to make a fuss. I think it’s rather good of them, really, to put up with me, considering they think Jim was a fool to marry me, and they don’t like me much, either. But they want Cecil to be brought up just like all the Aviolets.”

“That’s natural.”

“I daresay it is. They seem very stupid people, though,” said Rose reflectively. “I say, will you tell me something?”

“Certainly, if I can.”

“Is living in the country, in England, always like this? I mean, do you always potter about all day without doing anything, and look at the papers while you’re waiting for the next meal, and take the dogs for exercise, and never—never—never talk about anything but the rotten old garden, and whether it rained in the night and if the carriage can go to meet the four-thirty train? Don’t you ever, any of you, do anything?”

“You mustn’t ask me, you know. My brother and I are not like the Aviolets—not like county people. He’s a doctor, and works harder than most people, and I run his house, and we’ve only one servant, so that I’m busy, too.”

“Oh——” said Rose Aviolet.

Relief was detectable in her voice.

“Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought you were just like them,” she said naïvely.

“But don’t you like it at all, being at that big house, and never having to think about expenses or anything of that sort?” asked the doctor’s sister.

“I do like it in a way,” Rose admitted grudgingly. “It feels so safe, after the scrambling way that poor Jim and I lived. I like to see Ces having roast chicken, and rice puddings, and all that good milk to drink—as much as ever he wants it. And, of course, I like the comforts and luxuries for myself. Why, I’d never even seen a room like the room I’ve got there—not even at big hotels. But I think the life’s awful, all the same—and the people.”

“Don’t they ever have any one to stay?”

“Not with me and them being in such deep mourning. I think later on they will—Ford said something about it. A man came the other day to take some photographs of the house for a book he’s writing, and I talked to him, but I could see they didn’t like it. Snobs, I call them.”

Rose’s candour was checked only by the doctor’s entrance into the room with Cecil.

“Can we have some tea, Henrietta?”

They had tea in the dining-room, and afterwards Miss Lucian earned Rose’s warm, effusively expressed gratitude for her kindly display of treasures and curiosities on Cecil’s behalf.

The little boy, intelligent and enthusiastic, was delighted with everything, and especially with a little snuff-box of carved cornelian that played a tiny tinkling tune when the lid was opened.

“That belonged to my great-grandfather, Cecil.”

“I do like it,” said Cecil longingly.

His mother interposed hastily, circumventing his evident intention of suggesting that the ownership of the red cornelian box should be transferred.

“It’s awfully pretty. I’ve never seen one quite like it before. It’s worth ten pounds any day.”

Miss Lucian laughed.

“We should put a much higher value than that upon it, I’m afraid.”

“People always do, but you wouldn’t get more than ten from a dealer,” said Rose simply. “My uncle that I used to live with is Alfred Smith the pawnbroker, so I know. Why, I daresay I could price everything in the room for you.”

Miss Lucian appeared to be more diverted than gratified by her guest’s surprising faculty, but the doctor laughed outright.

“Have you offered to do that at Squires?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “They wouldn’t say thank you. Besides, the stuff there isn’t the sort you ever get hold of. I shouldn’t know about any of it, much, except perhaps the china. The bits on the mantelpiece in the hall are good—famille verte.” Her accent was atrocious.

“Lady Aviolet’s particularly fond of them, I believe.”

“Yes. She dusts them herself, and the servants aren’t supposed to touch them. One day I offered to do them for her, but she wouldn’t let me. I only did it to see what she’d say.”

Rose laughed rather drearily, as though the exercise of experimenting with her mother-in-law’s susceptibilities were lacking in charm.

Indeed, as she was leaving the house she remarked with her almost alarming frankness:

“I must say I loathe going back there. It’s been much more fun here. Thank you so much for having us.”

“Like a nice child remembering her good manners,” said the doctor pityingly, after he had put her into the carriage.

“God help her in-laws, is what I say,” Miss Lucian returned crisply.

“Now why, Henrietta? Don’t you like her?”

“Yes, I do, but they don’t, and never will. However, she’ll certainly marry again and then it’ll be all right.”

The doctor was silenced, somehow not enchanted by the proposed solution for the difficulties of the Aviolet establishment.

“Maurice! Where’s the little musical snuff-box?”

“You must have put it down somewhere.”

They looked at one another doubtfully, and then, with silent thoroughness, searched.

The cornelian snuff-box was gone.

It was the outspoken Miss Lucian who finally voiced the thought that had been in both their minds from the beginning.

“Little Cecil was so much taken with it—you don’t think he could have kept it, do you?”

“Surely not. If he’s got it, poor little chap, it must be by mistake.”

“He’d be welcome to anything else, but not to great-grandpapa’s snuff-box,” said Miss Lucian with decision.

“Certainly not. But he’ll probably be brought in tears to-morrow to apologize for taking it away with him.”

“I ought to have put it away at the time,” said Miss Lucian remorsefully. “It was all my fault.”

“Whatever happens, Henrietta, don’t let him be frightened of us and think we’re going to despise him, even if he took it out of naughtiness pure and simple.”

“Do you take me for a fool?” said his sister indignantly.

The doctor was so far from taking her for anything of the sort, that he was inclined to accept the view which she obviously held, that Cecil had purposely, in a fit of baby covetousness, taken the little cornelian box.

It caused him to make his way to Squires next morning, on the pretext of an ailing servant, in the vague hope of seeing Rose Aviolet and avoiding the problem of direct inquiry such as he feared that his sister meditated.

His first sight of Lady Aviolet put the suspicion in his mind beyond question at once.

“I’m so glad to see you. My naughty little grandson seems to have taken advantage of Miss Lucian’s kindness to him yesterday. He picked up a most charming little box, and I’m sorry to say, brought it home with him. One of the housemaids found it under his little pillow, when she made his bed, and took it to my maid, who of course told me.”

“Children are like magpies—they pick things up and hide them.”

“Of course he knew nothing of its value, but it does seem very odd that a child of that age shouldn’t have been better taught. However, I believe he told the truth when his mother taxed him with it, which I was most thankful for. I’m bound to say that she generally gets the truth out of him eventually, though why he couldn’t have been brought up to speak it in the first place, as a matter of course, I can’t imagine. However, Rose tells me he owned at once that he took the little box, meaning to play with it at home, and then take it back. I’m so sorry, Dr. Lucian.”

The doctor laughed.

“Not at all. It was very natural. If I may take the thing away with me, no one will think any more about it.”

“Oh, but that wouldn’t do at all,” said Lady Aviolet, unsmiling. “I don’t mean to punish him, as he spoke the truth, but he must certainly be made to remember that he has done a very wrong thing. He must give you back the box himself, and say that he is sorry.”

The doctor, profoundly averse as he felt himself to be to the proposed scene of restitution, knew that it would be useless to protest against it.

He waited, unresignedly, while Lady Aviolet rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Aviolet and Master Cecil.

Rose Aviolet came downstairs, leading the little boy by the hand.

“Cecil, come here,” said his grandmother directly.

“Good-morning, Grandmama.”

“Good-morning, my dear. Now listen to me. You know that Dr. Lucian and his sister, who were so kind to you yesterday, have lost something?”

“No,” said Cecil guilelessly.

“Ces!” his mother exclaimed sharply.

He stared up at her with big, innocent brown eyes.

“Rose, I thought you told me——”

“So I did. Ces, you know you were a naughty boy, and took——”

“Leave him to me, if you please, Rose. I should like to get to the bottom of this. If the child confessed his naughtiness to you this morning, there’s no reason he shouldn’t own to it again now, in front of Dr. Lucian. Now, Cecil, did you take away anything that didn’t belong to you, when you went to this gentleman’s house yesterday?”

“No, Grandmama.”

Rose Aviolet shrugged her shoulders and made as though to speak.

“One minute, please, Rose. Grandmama won’t be angry, Cecil, if you speak the truth. You know you’ve already told your mother that you were sorry for doing such a naughty thing.”

“Mayn’t we leave it at that?” said the doctor, low.

“I don’t understand it,” Lady Aviolet said, with obvious truth. “He knows that we know already. It’s only saying what he’s already said once. He did own up to you, didn’t he, Rose?”

“Yes, he did. Come on, darling, tell Dr. Lucian you’re sorry you took what wasn’t yours.”

“And that you will never be so wicked as to steal again,” Lady Aviolet supplemented impressively.

“I didn’t,” said Cecil, looking frightened.

His grandmother looked utterly confounded. “Cecil!”

“Don’t!” cried Rose sharply. “Don’t frighten him!”

The doctor leaned forward and took the little boy’s hand, speaking very gently.

“Never mind, little fellow. You know we all do wrong and foolish things sometimes, and then the only way out is to tell the truth and try and undo the mischief. I think I understand how it happened. You thought it would be nice to have the box to play tunes whenever you wanted to, and so you slipped it out of sight and afterwards you were afraid of being seen putting it back. Wasn’t it something like that?”

Rose’s ardent eyes flashed gratitude at him; but her mother-in-law seemed to be more distressed than ever.

“It’s very kind of you—but please don’t make excuses for him. He ought to be made to understand how naughty he’s been. Cecil, are you, or are you not, sorry for having deliberately acted like a thief?”

“I didn’t, Grandmama.”

“Didn’t what?” Her voice had risen slightly.

“Didn’t take the little music-box.”

The little boy’s face was so innocent, his voice so assured, that Lucian glanced at him sharply. He had been staring straight up at Lady Aviolet with his great brown eyes whilst he spoke, but immediately afterwards he dropped them.

The doctor, trained to observation, sighed involuntarily.

A sound like a gasp echoed him, from Lady Aviolet.

“Now, Ces, what’s the good of saying that,” Rose broke out, “when we know already that you did do it? Why, this morning you told me so yourself.”

“No one is going to punish you, Cecil, if you tell the truth. It’s little boys who tell lies that are punished. You shall have one more chance, the last one. Will you tell Dr. Lucian how sorry you are that you took his musical box?”

He gazed at her dumbly, with suddenly scared eyes.

“You are an obstinate and untruthful little boy, Cecil,” said Lady Aviolet in great agitation.

“He’s not,” Rose cried passionately. “For goodness’ sake, Ces, tell the truth. They shan’t do anything to you.”

“I didn’t take it,” said Cecil.

“A flat lie,” said Lady Aviolet, her face grey with consternation.

Rose stamped her foot. Her arm shot out round the child’s shoulders, gripping him tightly to her.

“Rose, don’t attempt to coax and spoil him. He has told two absolutely direct lies at least, and nothing can alter it.”

Little Cecil’s eyes dilated, and his mouth shut.

“I’m dreadfully, dreadfully shocked and sorry, Cecil. This isn’t the first time you’ve said what isn’t true, you know, and now we can none of us ever trust you again.”

Rose Aviolet shot a look of fury at the elder woman.

“Please don’t tell him that. Ces darling, Mummie trusts you. I know you want to tell the truth really, and you can if you only will. Now out with it, and it’ll be all over.”

“How can it be over, when he has lied? There is nothing more terrible than a liar, and Cecil has proved himself one over and over again. If he did tell the truth now, it would only be because he knows he’s been found out.”

At her indictment, Cecil at last burst into tears.

“I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,” he sobbed abjectly.

Rose put her hand over his mouth.

“You’ve told him that you’ll never trust him again and that he’s a liar even if he does own up,” she said bitterly. “That’s enough.”

“How can you defend him?”

“I don’t defend him. Of course he took the box.”

“That is not the point. Taking the box was mischievous and ill-bred, even dishonest, if he has been taught the commandments, as I suppose he has,” said Lady Aviolet, rather as though supposing the reverse. “But to own to you that he’d taken it, and then deny it flatly to us, is simply pointless falsehood for the sake of falsehood. I told him no one would be angry if he told the truth.”

“Well, he won’t now,” said Rose Aviolet, and she took the little boy away.

He was still crying, and they could hear him, as Rose pulled him up the stairs, repeating like an automaton: “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!”

Lady Aviolet looked terribly distressed, but she turned with a rather pathetic politeness to her visitor. “I’m sorry to have inflicted a nursery court-martial upon you. I never dreamt of this. The boy had confessed to his mother. His lies just now were not only wicked, but utterly pointless. I couldn’t have believed it.”

“The child is vain and sensitive. I can imagine that when he saw what he had done looked upon as a—an act of dishonesty, it may have become extraordinarily difficult to him to own to it in front of other people. His denials struck me as being instinctive, rather than based on any idea of deceiving.”

Lady Aviolet looked utterly at a loss.

“But how terrible, if he is to tell lies by instinct,” she said helplessly. “It seems like some frightful taint. Heaven knows, he never got it from the Aviolets.”

She caught herself up, almost upon the words, with the implication they carried.

“I will fetch your little box, Dr. Lucian.” She went away, leaving the doctor thoughtful and strangely saddened.

“I hope they won’t tell Ford,” was the outcome of his reflections.

His sister said the same thing that evening.

“The fuss must have frightened the poor little thing until he didn’t know what he was saying. I hope they’ll leave it alone now, and not drag the high-and-mighty Mr. Ford into it. If they frighten the child, they’ll never teach him to speak the truth. I should have thought Lady Aviolet would have known that much.”

“I tried to tell her so.”

“What did Rose do?”

In common with everybody else, the doctor’s sister made a liberal use of Christian names in the absence of their owners.

“She seems sensible—though I think she spoils him, in a way. But she’s hopeless with her mother-in-law, and doesn’t seem to know the meaning of tact. I should imagine that they get upon one another’s nerves the whole time. She’s a different creature, at Squires, to what she was down here.”

“Poor thing! I hope she’ll come here again.”

“She’ll come fast enough if she can bring the boy. He’s her one thought in life, I can see that.”

“Of course she can bring him,” Miss Lucian declared vigorously. “What do I care how many fibs he tells, poor little chap!”

The doctor was too well used to his sister’s trenchant methods of expressing herself to protest at such singularly perverted tolerance of spirit.

Rose Aviolet came to see them again, but this time she did not bring Cecil with her. She arrived on foot and with something of the aspect of one who has embarked upon an illicit expedition and is anxious to forestall comment on the proceedings.

“I can’t stay, but I wanted a walk, and so I—I came this way. I wanted to tell you how awfully sorry I was about my little boy having taken your musical box—but indeed he didn’t understand what he was doing.”

“My dear, of course he didn’t. Don’t let’s say any more about it.”

“You are good!” Rose informed her hostess with ardent thankfulness in her voice. “And your brother was awfully kind that morning he came up to Squires, too. I wanted to thank him.”

She turned her liquid brown eyes upon Maurice Lucian.

“You know, he’d have owned up, I think, if it had only been you and me there. He didn’t make any fuss at all about telling me, when they first found out about it.”

“You think he’s afraid of Lady Aviolet, then?”

She hesitated.

“He is, and he isn’t. She doesn’t ever punish him, you know. I shouldn’t let any one but me punish him—but she and that Ford have such a way of making one feel as if they despised one for doing anything wrong.”

Lucian nodded.

“Is little Cecil afraid of being despised?”

“Well, of course he is. Who isn’t, I should like to know?”

The doctor answered her indignant inquiry as though she had meant it literally.

“The very obtuse are not, nor the essentially self-satisfied. Neither, I think, are the absolutely sincere—but then, they are seldom the very young. It is the weak, and the sensitive, and those who are unsure of themselves, who are afraid of the contempt of their mental inferiors. And so they degrade themselves by lying.”

He spoke so simply and earnestly that the protest died away on Rose’s lips.

“Mrs. Aviolet, I’m intensely interested in your boy. May I ask you something?”

She nodded, her eyes full of tears.

“Can you analyse this weakness of his? I mean, what do his untruths spring from?”

“I don’t know.” She looked puzzled. “He invents things that never happened, sometimes—that never could have happened—and then when I try to make him say that it’s all pretending, he won’t. Sometimes I think he doesn’t know whether he’s inventing or speaking the truth.”

The doctor nodded, reflective.

“Is he generally the hero of his own stories?”

“I suppose he is. He tells me about things that he says happened to him, and he really and truly describes it all just as if he’d seen it.”

“I daresay. Has the tendency always been there?”

“Pretty well always. He used to hear Jim boasting very often, and I know I exaggerate myself, when I talk, and always did, though God knows I’m trying all I know to get out of it now. But Jim used to make Ces worse by frightening him. He’d ask him questions, just as if he was laying a trap for him, and then Ces would fib, and his father would whip him. So next time he’d be scared, and not know what he was saying, and contradict himself because he’d see Jim didn’t believe him.”

“Poor little fellow!”

She threw him a very expressive look of gratitude.

“That’s awfully decent of you. Everybody up there is shocked at him, poor little boy. They haven’t the imagination to be sorry for him. I wish I could get him right away with me somewhere.”

“Can’t you?” said Miss Lucian.

“Well, I haven’t got a penny. Jim left nothing but debts, and his father gives me an allowance. I’d rather earn my own living, but of course they wouldn’t hear of that, because of Cecil—besides, I’m sure I don’t know what I could do that would bring in anything worth having. Their plan is to keep us hanging on at Squires till Ces goes to school, and then I suppose they’d let me go off on my own, and bring him there just for the holidays. But that’s exactly where me and them will come to loggerheads, one of these days.”

The doctor looked at her attentively. He was extremely interested in Rose Aviolet.

Underneath the paint and the white powder, he could see that she had flushed deeply.

“About sending my Ces to school. That’s what they want to do, of course. Well, I wouldn’t say a word if he was like other boys, but he isn’t. You’ve seen that for yourself—and besides they talk enough about it, goodness knows. You know what’s wrong with Cecil. Well, I think school will make that worse. He’s not fit for school.”

She spoke with extraordinary vehemence, and both her hearers were silent. Presently Henrietta Lucian said:

“There’s never been an Aviolet yet, I suppose, who hasn’t been a public-school boy?”

“Never, and there’s never been an Aviolet like Ces is, either. But he can be put right, I know he can. Why, I always get the truth out of him in the end. But if he goes to school, and gets told he’s a liar and finds nobody trusts him—why, he’ll lie himself black in the face to try and make himself seem what he isn’t. I’m his mother, and I know. But he isn’t going to school.”

“Isn’t his uncle his guardian?”

“Yes. A bit of poor Jim’s tomfoolery that was, too. Of course I never knew about it. I suppose he thought it’d make them take more interest. But even Ford won’t make me give in about this school business.”

“Are you quite sure it mightn’t be a good thing for your boy?” the doctor asked.

“Quite,” she said fiercely. “I’ve seen what a public-school education made of Jim, and though I don’t say I wouldn’t have let Cecil go if he’d been an ordinary child, I won’t, as things are. A thing may be all right for ninety-nine people and wrong for the hundredth. Ces is the hundredth.”

“You’ve got a fight before you,” Lucian told her plainly.

“I don’t care,” said Rose Aviolet, and laughed defiantly. “I’m rather good at a row.”

The doctor quite believed her. But he did not believe that at Squires there ever would be, any more than there ever had been, a “row.”

IV

Maurice Lucian was entirely right in supposing that there were no such things as “rows” at Squires, but the absence of them was not accepted as a matter of course by Rose Aviolet.

A great deal of her intercourse with her dead mother had consisted in descriptions—perhaps vehement rather than accurate—on Mrs. Smith’s part of “a real old hullabaloo between her and me, and I gave it her straight, I can tell you, with her silly old letter about putting it into the hands of her solicitors if I didn’t pay up then and there,” and on Rose’s part of “Well, Mother, I wasn’t going to stand that from a girl like Esther Moses, needless to say, and I said, Mother, I just said, ‘Yes, you may be very good at arithmetic,’ I said, ‘and good reason why,’ I said, ‘Jewess!’”

Rose and her mother, however indignant, had always rather enjoyed their scenes at the moment of occurrence, and still more in the retrospect.

Scenes with Jim, later on, Rose had enjoyed less, but she had entirely accepted them as part of everyday life, although her pride had not allowed her the satisfaction of retailing them afterwards. At Squires, for the first time in her life, she was in an atmosphere in which scenes could not exist.

To her perceptions, nothing vital could exist at Squires at all, except her own vehement emotions, and these were deprived of the only outlet that she knew—unrestrained speech.

The weeks and even the months slid by in a deadly monotony.

“I’m afraid it’s dull for you, Rose,” said her mother-in-law, after the first anniversary of Rose’s widowhood had passed, and she had discarded as much as she dared of her conventional mourning.

“Well, it is, in a way. Of course there was always a lot going on in Ceylon.”

“I believe these Indian hill-stations are very gay,” Lady Aviolet assented. Nothing had ever succeeded in making her remember that “India” could not cover the whole of the East.

“Ceylon isn’t India,” said Rose bluntly.

She thought Lady Aviolet a fool, and her tone said as much.

“Gaieties are naturally out of the question, but we thought of asking one or two people here for the shooting. I don’t think you’ve met Diana Grierson-Amberly, a young cousin of mine. Her father has a nice old place on the far side of the county. She generally pays us a visit in the autumn.”

Rose, utterly inexperienced in the catch-words used in polite society, could think of no reply, and therefore said blankly: “Oh!”

Lady Aviolet sighed, and went on knitting. Rose’s hands lay idle in her lap. She knew how to make her own underclothes, and how to darn stockings, but considered the practice of either art unfitted to the Squires’ drawing-room. She did not knit, because she did not know what to make, and had often speculated as to the destination of Lady Aviolet’s innumerable woolly garments.

“Diana is wonderfully musical, and plays the violin a great deal.”

“Oh, does she?”

“She was always a great friend of the boys, although she is a good many years younger. She is so good at games.”

“Oh, is she?”

“She has been brought up with her brothers, and has even been allowed to go out with the guns. I believe she is an excellent shot.”

“What does she shoot?” Rose enquired with the first spark of interest that Miss Grierson-Amberly had succeeded in rousing within her.

Lady Aviolet looked rather astonished. “Just what they all do, my dear—rabbits, or partridges, or pheasants, as the case may be. No big-game shooting, or anything like that, of course. She is only about your own age.”

“Oh,” said Rose.

“Is there any one whom you would care to ask here for a day or two’s shooting, perhaps?”

Lady Aviolet’s tone held not the slightest hint that she had debated the propriety of this rather rash invitation for several days before giving it, and had finally done so against the advice of her husband.

Rose was astonished and grateful.

“Thank you very much. It’s very kind of you. But there isn’t anybody. I don’t know anybody, you see. My uncle couldn’t leave his business, and besides, I don’t suppose he can shoot. Besides, him and me had rather a row before I left England, and I haven’t seen him since, although we’ve sort of made it up by letter.”

“Perhaps he will come another time, when the guns are not busy,” said Lady Aviolet impassively.

She was completely unaware that Rose was surprised, and rather disappointed, at not being asked for details of the “row.”

“We are hoping to secure a friend of Ford’s, Lord Charlesbury, and one or two other men. Lord Charlesbury is a widower, poor fellow, and has a boy rather older than Cecil. He lost his wife when the boy was born, and has never married since.”

“Poor little boy, without a mother!” said Rose. “What do they do with him?”

“Oh, of course, he’s at school now, very happy indeed. In fact, Ford thought you and he might talk about a good preparatory school for little Cecil with Lord Charlesbury, who has been into it all so recently.”

“I see,” said Rose.

The question of school had been in abeyance lately.

A nursery governess was installed at Squires, and Rose, to the surprise of her mother-in-law, had submitted to having Cecil less with her, and had refrained from interference on the few occasions when he fell into disgrace, and was punished, very mildly, by little Miss Wade.

“We thought of asking him for the First,” Lady Aviolet said.

“The first what?”

“The First of September, my dear.”

And Rose, no wiser than before, for the fifth time could think of no more brilliant rejoinder than “Oh!”

She was, however, pleased at the thought of a party, and went to London and bought two new dresses and a new hat, wishing regretfully that she dared buy coloured things instead of black ones.

On the last day of August Diana Grierson-Amberly arrived. Rose, at first sight of her, sweepingly decided that she was neither smart nor pretty, and, even more rashly, that in the absence of either of these attributes, she could not be very interesting. She willingly conceded, however, that Diana was “nice” when she heard her speak pleasantly to little Cecil, who was allowed to have tea in the hall with his governess.

The attraction that Miss Grierson-Amberly possessed for a small proportion of her fellow-countrymen, although unappreciated by Rose Aviolet, was very far from being non-existent.

Tall and fair, with a typically English face and figure, she looked exactly what Lady Aviolet had said that she was—very good at games. Her chest was as flat as her back, her feet and hands rather large, her face pleasantly vacant, with a beautiful fresh complexion, blue eyes, and a soft mouth that was always slightly open. Rose envied her the perfect self-possession with which she answered Lady Aviolet’s questions, patting and fondling Pug—but not feeding him from the table, a practice that invariably annoyed Sir Thomas when surreptitiously attempted by Cecil’s governess—and returning Ford’s greeting with pleasant, cousinly calm.

“How d’ye do, Diana.”

“How are you, Ford.”

They shook hands, with a momentary exchange of smiles.

“Are you coming out with us to-morrow?”

“Oh, no. I’m not allowed to go out with a gun, really, except with father and the boys.”

“I hear you do great execution, Diana,” said Sir Thomas. “What do you shoot with?”

“A twenty-bore. I couldn’t carry a twelve-bore all day long, I’m sure.”

She turned good-naturedly to Rose, who was staring at her with enormous brown eyes.

“Do you shoot, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Gracious, no.”

The expletive, savouring rather of Rose’s early surroundings than of her present ones, fell strangely across the atmosphere of the hall at Squires.

“You didn’t get any big-game shooting in the East, then. That’s what made me ask——” Diana said, as though feeling that an apology was perhaps required for the suggestion that had called forth so energetic a declaimer.

“Oh, Lord, no,” said Rose.

Ford coughed very gently.

“You’ve brought your fiddle, Diana, I hope,” said Lady Aviolet.

“I have. I’m afraid I’m dreadfully out of practice, though. One gets so little time.”

“We must have some music after dinner to-night. I know Rose is fond of music, though we do not often hear her play.” Lady Aviolet glanced amiably at her daughter-in-law.

“I can play to-night, if you like,” said Rose abruptly, impelled by an unrecognized instinct of self-assertion, born of her own consciousness that she was out of place amongst these people.

“I can play her accompaniments.” She nodded at Diana, not knowing whether or not she was expected to use the girl’s Christian name.

“How nice of you,” said Diana lightly. “I’ve heaps of music and we’re sure to find something you know.”

The conversation drifted on easily enough. Cecil and Miss Wade went away into the garden, and Rose looked after them with longing eyes, wishing that she could go and play with the little boy, and yet staunch to her resolution that “they” should have their own way in all the things that didn’t matter.

She thought that politeness required her to remain at the tea-table, leaning back in an uncomfortable upright chair, but it did not occur to her to simulate any interest in a conversation which bored her profoundly, and she was as nearly as possible unconscious that every now and then she stifled a half-checked yawn with the back of her hand.

“I hear you have some new neighbours at Bolestone, Diana.”

“Yes, Cousin Catherine. The Frederick Ollertons—such nice people.”

“Let me see, who was she?”

“Wasn’t she a Trevor?” said Ford.

“No, no. You’re thinking of the Arthur Ollertons, in Surrey. He married a Trevor.”

“Ah, that’s it,” Sir Thomas agreed.

“Then who was Mrs. Fred Ollerton? A Bannister?”

“No, that wasn’t it.” Diana’s open brow was corrugated. “No, not a Bannister, though there’s some connection—I think the present Lord Bannister is her uncle.”

“Then she must have been a Saunderson,” Lady Aviolet decided.

“Yes, she was.” Diana’s face relaxed as she agreed almost with enthusiasm. “She was, Cousin Catherine. How stupid of me to forget! Her sister was with them last Christmas—Miss Saunderson.”

“That must have been Connie Saunderson, then—she’s the only unmarried one. The eldest one married Lord Everleach, Connie is unmarried, and Mrs. Frederick Ollerton must be the youngest of them. So disappointing for the Saundersons that there should have been no son in that family.”

“It all goes to a nephew, I believe,” Sir Thomas said.

“Young Verulam, yes. Have you met him, Diana?” Ford enquired.

“I’ve danced with him. He was at the Hunt Ball this year.” She turned amiably to Rose. “Do you know him?”

Rose, startled from the vacancy of thought into which she had drifted in her complete inattention to a conversation that she considered futile, replied brusquely “No,” and there was a sudden silence.

Then Diana, with the super-evident tact of the kind-hearted, remarked rather lamely, “Oh, of course, you’ve been abroad, haven’t you? I forgot that.”

Ford rose, smiling gently after his wont, his mouth curving slightly, his narrow eyes opaque and sombre.

“I hear the carriage, Mother. I hope that’s Charlesbury.”

Diana said, “Oh, good,” in a placid way and Rose straightened herself in her chair, and from long habit, fluffed up a straight end of hair on her temple between her first and second fingers.

Lord Charlesbury was tall, with a kind, thin, sunburnt face, rather good-looking in spite of approaching baldness, and wearing an eyeglass to which Rose, inwardly, after her usual trenchant fashion, immediately applied the epithet of “la-di-dah.”

He greeted Diana Grierson-Amberly by her Christian name, and appeared to be on intimate terms with his hosts.

“How’s the boy, Laurence?”

“Going strong, thanks. He’s as happy as the day is long at Hurst, and they tell me he’s going to be a cricketer.”

“Oh, good,” said Diana again, this time with rather more enthusiasm in her tone.

“He can bowl a very good overarm ball already, and funnily enough he’s a natural left-hand bowler. Don’t know where he gets it from.”

“Very disconcerting thing, to stand up to a left-hand bowler, I always think,” said Sir Thomas.

“Has your boy begun cricket yet?” Lord Charlesbury asked Rose, to her surprise.

She was astonished, but gratified and pleased at any friendly allusion to Cecil.

“How did you know I’d got a little boy?” she asked naïvely.

Lady Aviolet looked disturbed, but Charlesbury laughed low and pleasantly.

“Of course I knew. He and my little fellow must be much about the same age. We must arrange a meeting these holidays.”

“He would like another boy to play with. He’s never had anybody.”

“Ah, well, school will put that right. Hugh is an only child, too. But he’s found his level all right. Hurst is a good place.”

“Is that his school?”

“Preparatory school—yes. I’ve got his name down for Eton and Winchester, at present.”

Rose wondered why any one’s name should be down for two different places, but the subject was not one that she wanted to pursue.

“Cecil’s not quite eight, yet, and he’s backward too, from being brought up in Ceylon.”

“You’ve not been back from the East so very long, have you?”

“It seems ages.”

Charlesbury was looking at her with such evident interest and admiration that Rose rapidly felt at her ease with him, and began to talk in the manner—and also at the pitch—natural to her.

“Heaps of people at home seem to think that Ceylon is the same as India, but it isn’t, in the least,” she told him. “Ceylon is an island that has nothing to do with India, really. It’s not half a bad place, especially up in the hills. We were in a place called Newara Eliya most of the time, and it was as cool as anything. Colombo is sweltering, of course, and as damp as can be. It’s on the sea, you know.”

“Rose,” said Ford’s very quiet and distinct voice at her elbow, “as Lord Charlesbury happens to be a distinguished member of the Geographical Society and the author of several books about the East may I suggest that you are, in the vulgar phrase, importing coals to Newcastle?”

Rose flushed scarlet, rather from anger than from confusion, but before she could speak Charlesbury had interposed quickly and courteously:

“Indeed, I cannot claim anything like Mrs. Aviolet’s acquaintance with Ceylon. I have never had a stay of more than twenty-four hours there, much as I should have liked it. Like the wretched traveller of the song ‘From place to place they hurry me—and think that I forget,’ which is only too true. It takes years in a place to retain any real impression of it. Now you, Mrs. Aviolet, are young, and I am sure have a most excellent memory. Your description of life in the East would have the true, authentic ring about it, whereas mine could only be an imperfect hash of muddled recollections.”

His speech gave Rose time to collect herself. But it was her vivid recognition of the kindliness that had prompted it, which made her conscious of an ardent rush of intense gratitude at the restoration of her self-esteem.

With candid rudeness, she deliberately moved her chair round so that her back was turned to Ford.

No flicker of expression betrayed whether or not Lord Charlesbury took note of this unusual form of social repartee.

He continued to talk in his low, cultivated tones, every now and then appealing to Rose’s judgment and always listening, interested and deferential, to her replies.

She found him delightful, and was entirely undisturbed by any realization of the fact that she was monopolizing the principal guest present.

Her inexperience did not even perceive that it was he who presently contrived to include their hostess in the conversation.

She went up to her room to dress for dinner with the pleasant consciousness, strange to her since she had come to Squires, of having been a success.

“It’s only Ford that always tries to make a fool of me,” was her self-consolatory résumé of the unfortunate moment when she had been abruptly arrested in her description of Ceylon.

As soon as she was dressed, Rose went upstairs, two steps at a time as she always did, to wish Cecil good-night.

“Mummie, Miss Wade says there’s a gentleman staying here who has a little boy the same age as me, and he’s at school and can play cricket.”

“He’s not the same age as you, he’s older,” said Rose sharply.

“When am I going to school?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you like doing lessons with Miss Wade?”

“No. I want to go to school and play cricket. Grandpapa says all boys play cricket.”

“Well, you can play cricket here.”

“Who with?” Cecil not unnaturally demanded.

“We’ll see. Now say your prayers.”

Cecil knelt up in bed, folding his hands and closing his eyes, and repeated rapidly:

“Pray God bless Mummie, an’ Grandpapa an’ Grandmama an’ everybody an’ make me a good boy for Chrissakeamen. An’ let me go to school and play cricket best of all the boys.”

At the last unexpected petition he slyly peeped through his long lashes at Rose, as though to see how the innovation would strike her. She said nothing, but inwardly she was both frightened and angered.

“Good-night, precious. Sleep well.”

“Good-night, Mummie.”

She kissed him and went away.

At the door of the nursery she paused.

“Miss Wade.”

“Yes, Mrs. Aviolet?”

The little governess was meek and inoffensive. She generally wore a conciliatory smile and coloured up to her spectacles with nervousness when she was spoken to unexpectedly.

“Has Ces been having ideas put into his head about going to school?”

Miss Wade looked very much astonished.

“I don’t think I quite understand what you mean, Mrs. Aviolet.”

She looked so frightened that Rose burst out laughing.

“He said something about it just now, that’s all, and you know, nothing’s settled yet, and he’s very backward about lessons.”

“I am doing my best to get him on as fast as possible,” replied Miss Wade, now obviously rather offended, “but of course if you’re not satisfied with his progress, Mrs. Aviolet, I’d much rather be told so. I quite understand——”

“Oh, my Lord!” was the exasperated exclamation of Rose Aviolet. “I don’t mean that at all. He’s getting on like a house on fire. I only mean that it isn’t any good, him or anybody else, thinking that he’s going dashing off to school as a matter of course, just because it’s supposed to be the proper thing to do.”

Rose’s explanation did not appear to afford any illumination to little Miss Wade.

“Lady Aviolet distinctly informed me that I was preparing Cecil for school,” she said. “If he were not so behindhand in English—though I’m sure it’s very natural that he should be so, after India—I should have started him in Latin by this time.”

“Ceylon isn’t India,” said Rose, infuriated, and walked out of the nursery.

Half-way downstairs again, remorse suddenly overtook her.

“What a pig I am! Worse than the Pryce-Jones woman was to me, and, after all, it might just as well be me sitting stuffed up in that old nursery mending Cecil’s clothes and her prancing down to dinner in a low frock. I’d better——”

She turned round and dashed upstairs once more, and burst open the nursery door.

“I’m sorry I seemed cross. It wasn’t anything to do with you, really, and I think Ces is getting on first-rate, truly I do. ’Night-night.”

Late for dinner and stumbling over her long dress as she hastened downstairs, Rose felt better satisfied with herself.

Miss Wade, who had perceived from the first moment of her arrival that Mrs. Aviolet was no lady, felt her opinion to have received confirmation good and strong, and from that moment she despised Cecil’s mother from the bottom of her little soul.

Dinner that evening was the most amusing gathering at which Rose had assisted since coming to Squires, although she was disappointed not to find herself placed next to Lord Charlesbury.

She sat between Sir Thomas and a young fox-hunting squire, the only other guest staying in the house, whom everyone excepting herself seemed to call Toby. As soon as she had discovered that he liked playing cards, they discussed whisky-poker, made very familiar to Rose both in Ceylon and on board ship.

On the other side of the table, Lord Charlesbury listened to Miss Grierson-Amberly’s flat, pleasant tones with exactly the same appearance of intense interest that he had accorded to Rose’s monologue earlier in the day. But every now and then he adjusted his single eyeglass and glanced across the glittering expanse of white cloth, crystal, and silver.

The conversation only became general when Rose’s neighbour spoke animatedly upon the subject of billiards.

“We might have a game after dinner,” said Sir Thomas. “Though I’m afraid we don’t muster very strong here.”

He paused a moment.

Jim Aviolet had played billiards.

“I’m a very poor performer,” said Ford. “Toby could give me fifty in a hundred and a beating, easily. Are you an expert, Diana?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know one end of a cue from the other,” she confessed, and then discounted the admission by adding: “but I can mark for you.”

“I can play,” said Rose, “but I’m awfully bad.”

“I’m afraid that Toby is ‘awfully’ good,” Ford told her, stressing the slang qualification. “If you want a foe worthy of your steel, Toby, we might ask Dr. Lucian up one evening. He’s a local worthy—and a very fine player at that.”

Something in the patronizing inflection of the words, no less than the implied rebuke to herself, roused Rose’s never very deeply dormant pugnacity.

“Dr. Lucian is most awfully nice,” she proclaimed very loudly. “I like him and his sister. They’re—they’re awfully nice.”

She coloured and unconsciously tossed her head as she bore her haltingly worded testimony. There was a moment’s silence.

“I remember Lucian,” said Lord Charlesbury. “A clever fellow, too. I should like to meet him again.”

“Perhaps he could dine here one night, and you might have some good billiards,” said Lady Aviolet.

She looked at Diana Grierson-Amberly and they both rose.

In the drawing-room, Lady Aviolet turned to Diana.

“I hope your violin is down here, Di.”

“It’s upstairs, but I’ll fetch it.”

“Your coffee, my dear....”

“Mother doesn’t let me have it, Cousin Catherine, because of my complexion.”

“Ah, well, you can’t be too careful,” the elder lady acquiesced.

When the girl had gone upstairs, she said to her daughter-in-law:

“I should like to ask Dr. Lucian to dinner, Rose, since he is a friend of yours. But I am afraid that I have never called upon his sister.”

Rose could think of no reply to the last half of the announcement, and therefore ignored it.

“I hope he’ll come,” she said. “He’s very nice and he’s awf—very interested in Cecil.”

“He knew Cecil’s father many years ago, and in fact he has known all of us for many years—ever since he first came down here from London. I believe he’s very highly thought of in his profession. A clever man, Ford calls him.”

She was complacently secure that Ford’s judgment must be infallible, but in this instance Rose felt no desire to dispute it.

“Won’t you look through my pieces, Mrs. Aviolet?” Diana’s voice inquired behind her.

The girl had returned with her violin-case and a neat pile of music.

She opened the grand piano that Rose had never dared to touch, as she spoke. Her pieces, as she had called them, were thoroughly deserving of the name. There was Thomé’s “Simple Aveu” and somebody’s “Variations in F,” and some Operatic Selections, and a good deal of French music.

Already Rose was regretting the rash impulse that had moved her to volunteer the accompaniments.

“I’m more used to songs than to violin pieces,” she answered nervously.

“We’ll have a practice together to-morrow morning, before we perform in public,” Diana good-naturedly suggested.

But when the men came into the drawing-room, the youth Toby was clamorous for some music, and Sir Thomas politely seconded his urgent requests.

“Try this,” Diana said to Rose again and again. “It’s so very easy, really.”

And Rose, giggling nervously, repeated loudly: “No, I couldn’t—really, I couldn’t,” a great many times.

At last she agreed to attempt the “Variations” and sat down at the piano, endeavouring to give herself confidence by the preliminary sketchy “run” that had been the orthodox prelude to all piano solos at school.

Her fingers, stiff from absence of practice, bungled it badly, but she regained courage at the first bars of the very simple music.

“One, two and three, four,” murmured Rose under her breath, violently stressing the first beat in every bar, regardless of phrasing, and vaguely hopeful that the application of the loud pedal would drown any false notes.

If Diana’s playing was mediocre, that of Rose was definitely vulgar, although she possessed a real ability to read at sight, and considerable muscular power and agility.

“Oh, thanks awfully!” cried Toby, when it was over. “Have you got that ripping waltz out of ‘The Strawberry Girl’?”

“Well played, well played,” muttered Sir Thomas, not looking up from his Times.

Charlesbury said nothing at all, and Ford, going over to the piano, silently assisted Rose to close it, with an air which plainly implied that there remained nothing else to be done.

“I suppose I made a fool of myself,” she observed with an angry laugh.

He made no reply.

“She—your cousin—doesn’t play awfully well herself, does she? On her fiddle, I mean.”

“She has had some very good teaching, I believe.”

“Of course, she was miles better than I was,” Rose added with belated generosity. “Not that that’s saying much. I’m awfully out of practice.”

Ford made no reply at all, and Rose, in her desire for reassurance, found temerity to cross the length of the room and sit down beside Charlesbury.

He stood up, as she dropped into her armchair with the flouncing movement of a schoolgirl, but to her relief sat down again almost at once and looked at her with his kind, interested smile.

“I am sure you love music,” he said to her.

“Yes, I do. Not that you’d have thought so, from the row I made just now. I don’t know why I ever said I’d play her accompaniments. I’ve never accompanied a violin before, only songs.”

“You husband didn’t care for music, did he?” said Charlesbury, rather as though stating a fact.

“Not a bit. Did you know Jim?”

“I knew him a little. I’ve known them all for years. But Ford is the one I’ve seen the most of, although he is younger than I am by several years.”

“They told me you were his friend, and I was so surprised, after I’d seen you.”

Charlesbury smiled a little.

“Why were you surprised?”

“Well, you know, I think he’s odious,” said Rose.

Even Lord Charlesbury’s calm wavered slightly before the singular candour of this unvarnished revelation.

“H’sh—his mother may hear you ...” he indicated Lady Aviolet, knitting placidly.

“I daresay she knows quite well what I think,” said Rose gloomily, her voice obediently lowered.

“I hope not.”

He looked down at the monocle, idle between his fingers.

“I’m so sorry you feel like that, Mrs. Aviolet. It must make it so extraordinarily lonely for you here.”

She felt a rush of warm gratitude for the sympathy in his voice.

“Oh, it does. I’m a—a fish out of water, altogether, and I’d go away to-morrow if it wasn’t for little Ces. It isn’t only Ford—though I hate him the worst—it’s the whole life—everything.”

“I’m so sorry for you,” he repeated gently.

“Thank you,” said Rose Aviolet, her honest, child-like brown eyes gazing at him, and her rouged mouth trembling a little with the sincerity of her feelings.

V

“What do they want to start off so early for?” said Rose disconsolately, when the men of the party went away the next morning with their guns as soon as breakfast was over.

She envisaged without enthusiasm the prospect of a morning spent tête-à-tête with Miss Grierson-Amberly.

“Where’s Cecil?” Diana asked. “Couldn’t we take him out?”

Rose’s face lightened immediately.

“That’d be lovely, and it’s simply sweet of you to think of it. He has lessons in the morning, but I should think he could come with us at lunch time.”

They were to meet the guns for luncheon.

“He’d enjoy that, wouldn’t he, and it would be great fun to have him,” Diana said in her placid voice.

Rose wondered whether she ever spoke vehemently or with passion. It did not seem likely.

Lady Aviolet was in her own room, and Rose felt, uneasily, that upon her devolved the entertainment of the visitor.

“What would you like to do?” she demanded abruptly, far too unsure of her ground to make any suggestion, and completely convinced that Diana would be at no loss.

“Please don’t let me be a bother, I’m sure you’re very busy. I’d love to go round the garden, if I may.”

The garden, of course!

Rose never could remember that a garden was interesting.

“I’ll come with you,” she volunteered.

She did not like to ask Miss Grierson-Amberly to wait while she went upstairs and changed her shoes, so she went out in her thin house-slippers and inappropriate openwork stockings. The girl, she noticed, had come down to breakfast wearing thick, heavy shoes with fringed tongues and woollen stockings.

“How’s the rock-garden?” Diana inquired.

“Oh, it’s all right.”

“Lady Aviolet always has such nice things. Are you keen on gardening too?”

“I don’t really know anything about it.”

“Neither do I,” Diana assured her, but Rose felt that their disclaimers were based upon the radically differing foundations of modesty and truthfulness respectively.

Their progress round the garden was punctuated by interested exclamations and inquiries from Diana, to which Rose made but inadequate rejoinders.

“What is that? I know I ought to know, we’ve got some at home, but I can’t remember.”

“It’s a lily,” said Rose, surprised.

“Yes. I meant what sort,” Diana explained gently.

They went into the hothouses.

“It reminds me of Colombo,” Rose said, of the moist, hot atmosphere.

An odd wave of nostalgia came over her, less for the East than for the sense of something familiar, well known to her, and holding none of the pitfalls that she felt to be everywhere in the strange surroundings of her new life.

“Why, I’ve only this minute thought of it, but of course you must have known the Powerfields in Colombo!” Diana’s tone of pleased discovery interrupted her thoughts.

“The Powerfields?”

“Betty Powerfield was a friend of mine before she married. I haven’t seen her since she married Sir William.”

“We were up-country most of the time, we didn’t know any of the Government House people; of course I’ve seen them at the Races, and places like that, but that’s all.”

“How stupid of me! I forgot you were up-country. Of course, one forgets the distances out there.”

Rose swallowed audibly.

“We were in Colombo quite a lot, as well as up-country but we didn’t know the Government House people anyway. Jim didn’t even put our names down in the book, so of course we didn’t get asked to even the official parties. It wouldn’t have been any use.”

Diana did not try to elucidate this cryptic remark.

She talked about gardening again.

“Are you very fond of the country?” Rose said to her at last.

“I like it better than London, I think, really.”

It seemed as though superlatives were for ever outside the range of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s vocabulary.

“London is great fun, of course, though I always think it’s rather a pity to go there just when the country is nicest—May and June, you know. But, of course, in the winter, there’s the hunting. Do you hunt, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Oh, Lord, no!”

“I suppose your little boy will want to start. All the Aviolets ride so well.”

“Ces can ride,” said Rose proudly. “He took to it quite naturally and wasn’t a bit afraid.”

“Oh, good. Shall you let him hunt this winter?”

“Yes, if they want him to.”

Rose was quite steady and resolved upon that point. She herself was afraid of horses, knowing nothing about them. Her stock comment, at the Sunday after-church progress of inspection round the stables, was always: “That horse is a pretty colour, isn’t it?” But she was eager that Cecil should be less ignorant than she was herself, and proud that he should have learnt to ride. She began to tell Miss Grierson-Amberly of his prowess, boasting freely, and almost unheeding of the civil sounds of interest and attention that her companion from time to time emitted. Indeed, as they returned to the house, Rose was inwardly congratulating herself naïvely on having found a congenial topic that had caused the time to pass so quickly.

In the hall she stopped dead, and jerked her head in the direction of Lady Aviolet’s morning-room, of which the door stood ajar, revealing a glimpse of the grey-headed, square-shouldered figure at the table.

“I say—you ask her, won’t you?”

“Ask her—who? What?”

“If Ces may come out to lunch with us,” whispered Rose, like a schoolgirl. “I don’t like to, and besides she’ll be more likely to say Yes if you ask.”

Diana laughed rather uncertainly, as though slightly disconcerted by the manner of the request, but she obligingly made her suggestion to Lady Aviolet.

“A very good idea, if Rose will allow it, and there is no objection on the score of lessons. Rose, will you arrange it with Miss Wade, my dear?”

Lady Aviolet always deferred to Cecil’s mother in all such minor questions, and yet Rose never doubted for a moment that the older woman deplored her upbringing of little Cecil, and looked forward to his schooldays as to a time of regeneration.

As she thought of it, Rose’s young face assumed slowly a look of almost mule-like stubbornness. It was as though, like an animal, she was unable to formulate the terms of her problem rationally, and sought refuge in blind, unassailable instinct.

“Ces isn’t going to school,” she muttered. “They’ll make him worse there.”

She often thought of Cecil’s boyish untruthfulness as a disease, just as Lady Aviolet viewed it as the result of a lack of education, Sir Thomas as a vulgar form of childish naughtiness, and Ford——?

It was not so easy to penetrate to Ford’s convictions, but he had hinted that a mixed heredity led to strange results, and Rose knew that his family pride was outraged by the infusion of Smith blood in Cecil’s veins. She even had a certain tolerant understanding of his feelings, though none for his unpleasing manifestations of them.

It annoyed her, secretly, to see that little Cecil admired his uncle, even although he sometimes seemed to be afraid of him.

Cecil was joyful and excited at the prospect of lunch out of doors. In the pony-cart, he chattered incessantly, and Lady Aviolet responded with great patience, until he suddenly said:

“I can carry the partridges for them. I always carry the rabbits when Uncle Ford shoots. Sometimes they’re all bleeding, but I don’t mind a bit. I always carry them.”

“Cecil,” said his grandmother sharply, “don’t boast! How many times have you carried the shot rabbits for Uncle Ford?”

There was just that suggestion of a trap for inaccuracy in her tone that always scared Cecil, and Rose hastily answered for him.

“Only once, wasn’t it, Cecil?”

“Then why does he say ‘always’?” said Lady Aviolet.

She had long ago told Rose that they must be very particular never to let any mis-statement from Cecil pass unchallenged. It was their one hope, she explained, of inculcating the habit of truthfulness. Cecil now looked confused and alarmed, and as his grandmother fixed her eyes upon him severely he said: “I meant once, Grandmama.”

“Try and always say what you mean, my dear,” she told him.

Cecil was silent for the rest of the drive, but when they reached the keeper’s lodge in the wood he pulled Rose into a corner:

“Are you angry, Mummie?”

“No, of course not.” She kissed him resoundingly.

“I did, really and truly, carry the rabbits for Uncle Ford.”

“But not lots of times, Ces.”

“Three times,” he said, nodding his head. “That first time of all, when Dr. Lucian was there too, and once the day that Miss Wade came, and the day before yesterday. That makes three.”

Rose suddenly remembered. It was true that Cecil had performed the office three times for Ford.

“But then—you told Grandmama just now that you meant only once!”

“I thought that was what she wanted me to say,” explained Cecil piteously.

“Oh, good Lord!” said Rose.

A sort of blank terror invaded her spirit, as the total lack of any apprehension of truth now and then betrayed by Cecil confronted her again.

For a moment she could not speak.

“Come and unwrap the potatoes, Cecil,” called Diana gaily, arriving on foot with Miss Wade, and he ran off quite happily.

The men came in soon afterwards, and Diana asked suitable questions, and made suitable comments on their replies.

Rose remained silent until they were all seated at the long table that had been put up in the patch of ground surrounding the cottage. Even in the perturbation of her spirit, she had noticed with relief and pleasure that Charlesbury had chosen the seat next to hers. Cecil was on her other side, interested in his Irish stew.

“I hope you are coming out with us presently,” said Lord Charlesbury. “We’re shooting over the home farm.”

“It’s all on our way back. I’d like to walk there. But I won’t watch the poor things being killed—I think it’s cruel.”

“It does seem a barbaric form of amusement, doesn’t it?” He smiled at her gently, and changed the subject, on which Rose had been prepared to uphold her views vehemently. She talked to him freely throughout the meal and looked forward as a matter of course to walking with him after it was over.

Deliberately, she slackened her pace until they were well behind the others.

“Lord Charlesbury, I want to ask you something.”

She was looking full at him as she spoke, and for an instant caught a fleeting glimpse of something like apprehension in his face. Even as her perceptions registered the look, it vanished, so that she was not even sure if it had really been there.

“I’m sure you have influence with my brother-in-law, with Ford. Will you try and make him leave Cecil to me?”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“You see it’s like this,” she spoke breathlessly. “Ford is Cecil’s guardian. Poor Jim arranged that—he was always doing tiresome things. And, of course, the Aviolets have got the money. I’ve nothing at all, and Jim—naturally—only left debts. So here we are on charity.”

“You can’t call it that—your boy’s own people.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a bit.” Rose assured him hastily. “At least hardly at all. I wouldn’t mind anything, if it were good for Ces, and of course he’s having splendid advantages here. Isn’t he?”

She looked at him wistfully, as though in sudden needed of reassurance.

“Yes, certainly. He looks such a jolly, happy little chap, too.”

“Well, I think he is. But I—Lord Charlesbury, I don’t want him sent to school.”

He gave a low whistle.

Rose watched him anxiously.

“It would be a dreadful wrench for you—I understand absolutely. It isn’t so very long since I sent my Hugh off, looking such a little fellow too—and, of course, for a mother——”

“Oh, it’s not that!” cried Rose. “You don’t suppose that I’d stand in his way for one moment, if I thought school was going to be the best thing for him! But you see, I don’t.”

“But why not?”

“He’s not like other children. He—he’s got a fault. Poor darling! He doesn’t speak the truth.”

“That is a great pity,” said Charlesbury gravely. “But unfortunately it’s not a very uncommon failing. Children outgrow it.”

Rose suddenly felt that she and this kind, well-bred man, whom she liked so much, were not really talking the same language. He did not despise or condemn, as did the Aviolets, but neither did he understand.

“I don’t think Cecil knows what truth is,” she faltered despondently. “It’s something lacking in him—I don’t even believe that it’s his fault. But it’s dreadful!”

“Poor little fellow! But indeed, if I may say so, I’m quite sure that you’re taking it a great deal too seriously, Mrs. Aviolet. How old is he?”

“Not quite eight.”

“Why, he’s only a baby. You know they say that the age of reason is seven years old, not before. You’ll have broken him of his bad habit long before he has to go to school.”

“If I thought it was only a bad habit—I can’t explain properly, but it seems to me more than that. I can’t get anybody to understand what I mean,” she said confusedly. “It’s like a sort of kink in his mind. And while that’s there, I don’t think he’s fit for school—not any more than if he was physically deformed. They won’t understand him there—I know they won’t.”

“Masters are necessarily men with a wide experience, you know. They are accustomed to deal with every type of boy, after all. Perhaps they may be more understanding than you imagine.”

“Then you think Cecil ought to go to school? You won’t speak to Ford about it?”

There was a sound of pitiful disappointment in her voice. Charlesbury, loyal to the traditions of his caste, yet spoke with quick and sincere compassion.

“Don’t—don’t think that I can’t sympathize with you. I can and do, intensely. Only forgive me if I ask whether you quite realize what a frightful handicap it is for any boy, any English boy, to miss that magnificent public-school training of ours? It’s like nothing else, you know—I mean, there’s no substitute.”

“I suppose not. Most of the men I’ve known haven’t been public-school boys, except, of course, my husband.”

The silence that fell between them made rather too clear their mutual conviction that Jim Aviolet, at least, had been a singularly unfavourable advertisement for the system of education that had produced him.

“What did Jim want, himself, for the boy?”

“I don’t know. He talked about Sir Thomas perhaps offering to pay for his education, but I don’t think he really expected it. In fact I don’t suppose they’d have done it, if Jim had lived. They were pretty well fed up with him,” said Mrs. Aviolet, with her usual inexorable determination that spades should be spades. “Tell me, did Ford hate poor old Jim?”

“They were on very unfriendly terms,” said Lord Charlesbury. “I am afraid there was much jealousy between them. It was never a happy relation.”

“I daresay that’s one reason why Ford is so beastly to me. He always is, you know. He sneers at me, and if I make mistakes—well, when I made mistakes, I suppose I ought to say—he always tries to make it out worse than it is. Oh, he’s hateful!”

“Ford Aviolet always strikes me as a disappointed man,” Lord Charlesbury said reflectively. “He has always just missed things. Although he was not brought up in an intellectual milieu, by any means, he has only just missed being a very clever man. And he has missed a certain popularity that Jim, if I may say so, always obtained whenever he chose to ask for it—especially amongst women. I sometimes think that Ford has resented that. He did well in South Africa, too, but somehow he was passed over, when it came to promotion or decorations. One affects not to care about these things, but I don’t know—I don’t know.”

“I can’t feel a bit sorry for him,” Rose declared. “He’s somehow too contemptuous to seem like a person who has, as you say, just failed. Why doesn’t he marry, and have a son, and then they wouldn’t bother so much about my Cecil.”

Charlesbury turned upon her a gaze that, for all its kindliness, was exceedingly penetrating.

“Do you really wish that?”

She stared back at him.

“Of course. Oh, I see what you mean! But I should hate to think that Cecil would ever have Squires, and be obliged to live there, and do just what the other Aviolets have done before him. I’d rather he made a life for himself.”

“Well done!” He laughed softly.

“Are you laughing at me?” said Rose, offended.

“Indeed I’m not—or only in the way one is allowed to laugh, between friends. I hope you and I are to be friends?”

“Yes,” Rose said directly. “I’d like to be. I haven’t found anybody, in England, that I wanted to be friends with—except Dr. Lucian and his sister. They’ve been very kind to me. As for that Diana creature, that they all talk of as if she was so wonderful, I think she’s too deadly for words. Quite nice, you know, but dull, and extraordinarily stupid.”

Lord Charlesbury carefully displaced his eyeglass before speaking, polished it with a silk handkerchief, and then replaced it.

“As I am to have the pleasure of your friendship, will you allow me to say something very frankly?”

“Yes,” said Rose, wide-eyed.

“I want you to let me have the honour of being the only person to whom you express yourself so very outspokenly about people whom you don’t like. It would be—well, at least unwise, to give your opinion of Diana Grierson-Amberly in quite those words, to someone who might very possibly resent them. You see, English society is quite a small clan, really, isn’t it? And perhaps especially so in the country. It’s a pity to make enemies, after all.”

“Oh!”

“You forgive me for talking like a prig? I’m so much older than you are, and, if you’ll let me say it, so much interested—and so sorry for you.”

“You may well be that,” said Rose Aviolet, with tears in her eyes. “I seem to be always making a fool of myself—if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. But I don’t mind being told by you, because you’re so kind. I’ll try and remember what you said about talking about people.”

“That will be very nice of you. Perhaps you’ll take me for another walk, some day. I should like it very much if you would.”

“I’d like it, too,” said Rose. “You aren’t going away for a few days, are you?”

“I’m afraid I must be off to-morrow. My boy will be home, and I don’t want to miss too much of his holidays. He and I are very great friends, I’m glad to say.”

“Is he like you?”

“No, I don’t think so. One of these days I hope you’ll see him, Mrs. Aviolet. I should like you to bring Cecil over to Charlesbury, and let the two little lads make friends.”

“Thank you very much. I often wish Ces had more to do with other children. I think it would be good for him.”

“One does feel that, with an only child. Hugh has improved in every possible way since he’s been with other boys.”

“At school, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Rose received the reply in silence. She was far too grateful for Charlesbury’s evident liking and sympathy for herself to retort with her habitual assertion that generalities which might apply to other children did not apply to Cecil. Moreover, her shrewdness had quite well perceived that Lord Charlesbury had avoided committing himself to any promise of interference between herself and Ford. After all, he was Ford’s friend, Rose reflected, liking him none the less on that account, although still marvelling somewhat that it should be so.

She was sorry when they came into the home farm and her walk with Charlesbury was over.

The men, spread out in a thin line, began to walk up the steep slope of the first field, Diana Grierson-Amberly walking beside Ford, looking very trim and efficient in her short, brown tweed coat and skirt and close-fitting hat.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to walk with them, Rose?” her mother-in-law asked her, from the pony-carriage in the lane.

“Quite sure, thank you,” Rose said, shuddering, and as a bird rose suddenly and the first shot went off, she uttered a loud and startling scream.

Ford’s head was turned, for a searing moment, in her direction.

“Get in quickly,” said Lady Aviolet.

Her tone was one of forbearance.

“Where’s Ces?”

“He is walking home with Miss Wade. I hope you don’t think it will be too far for him?”

“Oh, no, it won’t hurt him.”

They often deferred thus, politely, to one another’s judgment in matters concerning Cecil, Lady Aviolet from a conscientious desire to respect the rights of motherhood, and Rose from some strange, elementary idea of diplomacy.

“Laurence Charlesbury is a particularly charming person, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do.” Rose’s reply was emphatic, after her fashion.

“We have known him for many years, and I am particularly fond of him.”

“What was his wife like?”

“She had a good deal of foreign blood in her, I believe, but otherwise she was delightful. She was only twenty-four when she died. Such a pretty creature, too.”

“What was her name?” Rose asked abruptly. She was conscious of an impelling curiosity.

“Mona le Breton. Her father was the well-known polo-player, you know.”

Rose, of course, did not know, and was a good deal more interested in trying to obtain some glimpse of the personality that had lain behind the romantic name.

Lady Aviolet, however, possessed no talent for transmitting such impressions.

“They were only married two years. She died when her baby was born, poor thing!”

“Were they very happy together?”

“I believe it was a very happy marriage. He was devoted to her, poor man. Everyone thought he was sure to marry again, if only for the poor little boy’s sake, but he has never shown any signs of doing so.”

“It must have been dreadful for him, losing her. What was she like?”

“She was very pretty,” repeated Lady Aviolet, a little helplessly. “Tall and slim, with brown, curly hair and very dark blue eyes. Quite an unusual type, in fact.”

“What else?”

“How do you mean, my dear? She wasn’t clever, or anything like that, so far as I know. Lady Cowderham was her aunt, and used to take her about before she married. She was the same age as Lady Cowderham’s own girl, who afterwards married one of the Troyles of Lawley—the second son, I think it was.”

They had got back to names and categories again. Rose ceased to feel any interest in what her companion was saying, and therefore, after her wont, ceased to pay any attention to it. Lady Aviolet, naturally, was not thereby encouraged to proceed with her observations and they drove on for a time in silence.

Rose felt pleased and excited by the idea of her friendship with Laurence Charlesbury. She found him attractive, and she had been long enough removed from admiration to welcome it with passionate eagerness.

She heartily wished that Lord Charlesbury were not going away on the morrow, to leave Squires once more intolerable to her.

“Is Lord Charlesbury obliged to go away to-morrow?” she suddenly demanded with great abruptness.

“I suppose so. It’s certainly a pity, but I hope we shall see him again one of these days. He generally comes over once or twice every year.”

“It’s been a very short visit,” said Rose disconsolately.

“It’s not been like a regular shooting-party at all, I’m afraid, my dear. Another year we shall do rather more entertaining, I hope, but, naturally, it was out of the question for us all, just now. However, Diana is staying on for a day or two, I’m glad to say. She’s always so bright.”

“Is she?” said Rose, and then remembered her conversation with Charlesbury, and added in a determined sort of way: “She’s nice and willing, isn’t she? Does she enjoy herself a lot in London?”

“Her mother is very strict about only allowing her a certain number of late nights in the week. But she has a good deal of going out, on the whole, and I’m told that she is a great success everywhere. Men always like her so much.”

Rose felt very much surprised to hear it, but hoped that her silence might be taken as a tribute to the indisputability of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s charms.

“I hope you and she will make friends, my dear. I feel that you have very little companionship of your own age, amongst us all.”

Rose was acutely touched, as she always was by any kindness.

“It is very good of you. I’m afraid you think I’m an ungrateful pig, sometimes——”

Alarm was latent in Lady Aviolet’s grey, obtuse eyes. It crept there, slowly, because all her reactions were slow, but always quite unmistakably, at the introduction of a personal note in conversation. Emotional outbursts, such as Rose was addicted to, she very evidently viewed as indiscretions that only too surely classified their perpetrators.

“My dear—please.... Hark! Can you hear the guns? They must be doing very well.”

“Damn the guns,” said Rose without malice, only resenting her rebuff.

Lady Aviolet slightly drew down her already lengthy upper lip and said nothing whatever.

“I didn’t mean it! It was frightfully rude of me—please forgive me!”

“Don’t, my dear, don’t upset yourself, please. That expression doesn’t sound nice on any one’s lips, but especially not on those of a woman. The use of it is a bad habit, and I’m told it’s very much on the increase—a pity, I think. One knows that no irreverence is intended, but one dislikes hearing such a word at all.”

The fastidious distaste in the elder lady’s voice was quite impersonal, and caused Rose to feel herself relegated to some more than ever remote distance from the world in which the Aviolet standards prevailed.

Her mother-in-law, with deliberate obviousness, changed the subject.

“Ford has probably told you that he is going to talk to Laurence Charlesbury about Hurst, Hugh’s preparatory school. He thinks it might do very well for Cecil, and it would be nice to feel that the little chap would find a friend there. Hugh is a particularly nice boy.”

“And where do I come in?”

Lady Aviolet looked her interrogation at the truculence that had suddenly sprung into Rose’s voice.

“Ford this, and Ford that. Ces is my kid, and I think I ought to be consulted, if there’s going to be talk about where he’s going to, and all the rest of it.”

“I don’t know what you mean, my dear. Ford will talk it all over with you before anything is settled, naturally. Here we are! Now do go and rest quietly in your own room till tea-time. I’m sure you’re tired.”

Rose understood only too well that this forbearing epithet was applied to what she herself ruefully stigmatized as her own crossness. She felt herself, indeed, to be in a strangely restless mood, and disinclined in the extreme to follow Lady Aviolet’s advice and rest.

Instead, she threw off her hat, with its detested little black veil, the moment she reached her room, and stared earnestly at herself in the glass.

Even to her own perceptions, it was an innocent, almost child-like face that gazed back at her, in spite of her big frame and the very patent artificial colour on her full lips.

“I certainly don’t look twenty-five,” she reflected with satisfaction.

Her yellow hair fell in loose strands across her forehead and temples, and she pushed it back impatiently. That unusual corn-colour was an asset, especially with brown eyes and dark lashes, but she had always longed for curly hair. To-day, she thought that she would like to have had brown curly hair, and dark blue eyes, and to have been slim, as well as tall.

“I bet I weigh all of eleven stone,” she murmured disgustedly, her eyes travelling across the square breadth of her fine shoulders and the deep, full curves of her breast.

“And my weight’ll go up every day in this place, with the meals they have and never anything to do worth doing!”

She revolved in her own mind, as often before, foolish and unpractical plans for maintaining herself and Cecil independently of Aviolet assistance. But she knew too much of poverty to take her own flights of fancy seriously. Cecil should have all that the Aviolets could give him.

She held, however, the gifts of their bestowal to be confined within the limits of the material. For the things of the spirit, she was convinced that Cecil had only herself to look to, and the thought added weight to her blind determination of trusting to her own instinct rather than to Ford’s specious logic.

“Perhaps, after all, Lord Charlesbury will say something to Ford,” she thought. “I believe he’d help me if he could.”

The dimple deepened at the corner of her mouth and she smiled, with a curious pleasure at the thought.

Lord Charlesbury did not tell her whether he had spoken to Ford, but he talked to her most of the evening, and the exhilarating conviction of his liking increased in her. She even became rather exuberant in her triumphant consciousness of success, and her manner to Diana Grierson-Amberly took on an unconstraint that hitherto she had been unable to afford.

But at the foot of the stairs, when Charlesbury handed her a lighted candle, he said: “Good-night, and good-bye, I’m afraid. I shall be off early to-morrow morning.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

He smiled at her.

“So am I. You won’t forget that you’re coming to visit Charlesbury and bringing the boy?”

“Oh, no, I shan’t forget,” she assured him seriously.

Shaking hands, he detained hers in his for a moment before releasing it.

VI

Maurice Lucian could only remember having dined at Squires once or twice before, although he had sometimes played billiards with the young men there. It was, he imagined, in order to afford another game of billiards, that he had been invited there now.

It interested him to see the drawing-room at Squires, when he entered it at a quarter past eight that evening.

The pictures on the walls, nearly all of them rather old-fashioned water-colour copies “from the flat,” were carefully lit up by candles in sconces grouped amongst them.

Very beautiful hot-house plants were arranged here and there in stiff groups.

Also arranged in stiff groups, and very much less beautiful than the hot-house plants, were the inmates.

He saw Rose Aviolet, of whom he was thinking most, directly.

Whereas the square neck of Lady Aviolet’s black velvet gown was carefully filled in with equally black net, and Miss Grierson-Amberly’s plain white satin displayed only a tiny triangular patch of fair, sunburnt red neck, Rose Aviolet’s evening dress was cut low, showing her fine neck and shoulders to great advantage. There was a great deal of jet about it, that jingled when she moved, and the doctor noticed that she wore a ring on her middle finger, and that the other women did not, and that instead of a pearl necklace, she had on a string of carved black wooden beads.

Her lips were not more heavily rouged than he had previously seen them, and the powder on her face was, on the whole, less conspicuous than that which lay in rather ineffectual patches on the red splotches of sunburn on Diana Grierson-Amberly’s delicate, mottled skin.

But Miss Grierson-Amberly sat erect on her chair, and her clear blue eyes looked out politely and interestedly from the smooth vacuity of her young face, and her voice was very low, and distinct, and well-bred.

Perhaps Rose Aviolet’s voice——?

It certainly rang out above any other voice in the room.

“I always think it’s an awfully difficult name to pronounce if you’ve only seen it written,” came over audibly from Rose. “Someone in Colombo once read out a letter from me, and she said the signature as if it was Rosa-Violet!”

Diana Grierson-Amberly smiled, looking at Sir Thomas. He remained entirely grave, and Lucian surmised that he saw no cause to be anything but pained at the idea that people should exist who did not know how his name should be pronounced. Moreover, the personal note, never long absent from Rose’s conversation, had sounded oddly out of place.

The others, collectively, were saying:

“There was certainly a touch of frost the other night—not a doubt of it.”

And: “You must take a cutting next time you’re in the garden.”

And from Sir Thomas: “What do you think of the chances of this bye-election?”

Very much the same topics, so far as Lucian could hear, seemed to prevail at the dinner table. He sat next to Lady Aviolet, and she talked about the housing of the poor.

“They want more fresh air. I hardly ever see an open window when I go into a cottage,” she said impressively.

The doctor had often heard her say the same thing before, and he replied mechanically, having long since outgrown the delusion that to reiterate words of pain and indignation at a regrettable state of affairs, is a step towards redressing it.

The sound of Rose Aviolet’s voice reached him very often, and he detected in it presently a new note that caused him to bestow at least half of his attention upon her, instead of the whole of it upon his hostess.

Already she had turned most of the contents of a glassful of sherry into her soup plate, and she was now freely drinking glass after glass of Sir Thomas’s admirable hock.

Lucian could see that her colour had deepened, and could hear that her voice and her laughter were rising steadily. She exchanged loud and rather elementary pleasantries with her partner, the youth Toby. By the time that Lady Aviolet rose from the table, Lucian felt tolerably certain that although Rose Aviolet was not intoxicated, neither was she entirely sober.

Except for his attentive, and far from unkindly, interest in watching her, Lucian would have found his evening very dull.

The four men sat round the dinner table for some time, and their slow talk was confined almost entirely to matters of agriculture.

When they adjourned to the billiard-room, Rose and Lady Aviolet had already taken places on the raised red leather-cushioned seats against the wall. The elder lady, knitting, sat upright. Rose lounged back, her knees crossed, and polished the nails of one hand against the palm of the other.

Diana offered to mark for the players.

Ford stood beside her, ostensibly watching the game, but every now and then, as though by stealth, he turned his eyes and fixed them upon her smooth fair hair and pleasantly serious face, with its slightly open mouth.

From against the wall, Rose’s voice and her laughter cut across the room all too frequently, with an effect of stridency.

Lucian saw that Sir Thomas glanced at her once or twice, frowningly.

“You’re too good for me, doctor,” said Toby good-humouredly.

It was undeniably true.

“Shall we come back into the drawing-room?”

Lady Aviolet led the way, talking to her guest.

“Curiously enough, Lord Charlesbury, who does everything else so well, is not a billiard-player. He left us this morning, I’m sorry to say. Such a delightful man.”

“A short visit,” said Ford curtly, “and I saw less of him than I should have liked. However, he and I had some instructive conversation on the subject of preparatory schools.”

He laughed softly as though at some amusing thought.

Something in the doctor’s mind seemed to leap to attention. As he held open the drawing-room door, he glanced sharply at Rose.

“We’re all interested in the subject of schools just now,” said Lady Aviolet very placidly, “on little Cecil’s account, you know.”

Rose stared rather stupidly at her mother-in-law out of her big brown eyes, and after an instant Diana Grierson-Amberly broke the awkward little silence.

“But of course——”

The inane little civility seemed to rouse Rose Aviolet.

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” she remarked, still in that over-loud voice. “I told Lord Charlesbury that Cecil wasn’t going to be sent to school at all, and what’s more, I’ll tell all of you the same. You needn’t trouble to talk to any more people about it, Ford. It won’t be any use.”

As soon as they had rallied their perceptions—and none of them, the doctor saw, except Ford Aviolet, did so within the first second or two of amazement—the atmosphere became electric as though charged with the force that lay behind Rose’s trenchant syllables.

The boy Toby, with the instincts of his kind, stifled a whistle as it left his lips, and swiftly retreated from the threshold of the room where emotion threatened. Lucian, acutely interested, unconsciously took two steps forward and shut the door.

He saw that Rose Aviolet, taken unawares, was about to force an issue.

Was there to be a scene at Squires after all? His quick glance took in the setting of the odd little drama.

Lady Aviolet, elderly, squat, and ugly, yet strangely dignified, sat back in an armchair, her dress, in weighty folds, falling about her feet on the parquet floor. Behind her stood Sir Thomas, frowning heavily. His shirt-front bulged a little, and his heavy shoulders were bowed.

Ford stood upon the hearthrug, one arm resting on the marble carving of the mantel. His eyebrows were moving slightly up and down, but otherwise his finely chiselled face, like and yet so unlike his mother’s, was expressionless. One hand held his eyeglasses.

Opposite to Lady Aviolet sat the girl Diana. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked perplexed, but not at all perturbed. Her lax mouth, with its narrow formation of palate, and two prominent, white front teeth, looked quite ready either to smile, or to droop slightly in dismay.

Rose Aviolet was standing. She looked big and heavy, with her square shoulders almost bare, her large proportions contrasting with Lady Aviolet’s shortness, Ford’s narrowness of shoulder, and Diana Grierson-Amberly’s flat-chested figure and slender neck and arms.

One strand of hair lay loose across her forehead, and she kept on pushing it back into place again angrily. Her whole appearance was untidy, lacking entirely the repose that kept Lady Aviolet unmoved, and the girl Diana trim and well-groomed-looking at the end of the evening. Her condition, that barely verged upon insobriety, was perfectly evident to Lucian and, he felt sure, to Sir Thomas also. Lady Aviolet and Diana, he was equally convinced, had noticed nothing. Whether or not Ford had a suspicion, Lucian could not tell. But at least it seemed certain that they must all realize that Rose Aviolet was on the brink of making the “row” that she had threatened. Her high voice, pitched higher than usual, broke upon the big, echoing room once more.

“I may just as well say this now, mayn’t I? Ces isn’t going to be sent to any school.”

The challenge was flung at her brother-in-law, but it was Lady Aviolet who replied in a quiet, unruffled voice:

“We can talk about it later, my dear. There’s no hurry.”

“Yes, there is.” Rose contradicted the elder lady flatly, making Ford wince at the crudity.

“There’s this amount of hurry, that I’m not going to stand being badgered about it any longer. Cecil’s my child, and I won’t have him sent to school.”

“We can think about it when the time comes. He won’t be ready for another five or six months, perhaps not even then.”

Lady Aviolet spoke with the same perfect placidity.

“I’ll never consent.”

“Indeed, my dear? We must talk it over and see if we can persuade you to alter your views. Meanwhile, I think we’d better go to bed.”

The anti-climax seemed to madden Rose.

“I’ll discuss it now, while you’re all here. I’m not going on day after day with this hanging over me. We’ll have it out now, and have done with it.”

Whether by accident or design, she was standing in a direct line with the big double-doors that Lucian had closed, so that no one could easily go out.

“I don’t think there’s anything to discuss,” said Lady Aviolet. “But if you propose to keep us all out of our beds, Rose, perhaps someone will be good enough to reach me my knitting. It’s on the little table. Thank you, Diana.”

The girl was hesitating, as though wondering whether to leave the room, but the elder woman invited her, with an amiable gesture, to remain beside her.

She took up the scarlet mass of wool and began unhurriedly to ply the wooden needles. From time to time she counted stitches, half under her breath.

Then Sir Thomas spoke, also unhurried, but with his coarse grey eyebrows drawn close together and coming down well over his wrinkled lids.

“What’s all this nonsense about? Of course the boy goes to school—all boys go to school.”

“It’ll ruin Ces,” said Rose, panting. “Look here, I’d not say a word if he was like other boys. But he isn’t, and he’ll get worse and worse if he’s put with people who don’t understand him. There’s a kink in him somewhere, and he’s not fit for the sort of treatment that runs all boys into a mould and turns them out to pattern.”

“Your opinions of the English public-school system are extremely interesting, Rose,” said Ford with great suavity, “but perhaps you’ll allow me to ask what experience you have had on the subject. Your father was not a public-school man, I believe?”

“He was a bankrupt North London tradesman, and you know it.”

“Quite so. Your other relations?”

“We needn’t go into all that, my boy. Rose has a very natural objection to parting from her only child, but I hope we can make her realize that it’s all for the boy’s own good in the end.”

Sir Thomas’s intention was obviously conciliatory, but Lucian realized, and saw that Ford realized, that his implication of amiable maternal weakness was infuriating to Rose Aviolet’s vanity.

“I’m not a fool,” she cried out. “I’ve told you before that if Ces was an ordinary child, I’d be the first person to say he should go to school.”

Ford’s low, slight laugh jarred on the doctor with a sudden intensity that surprised himself.

“It’s extremely easy to say ‘if,’ isn’t it?”

“Thirty-four—thirty-five—” came softly from his mother. Then she raised her eyes.

“Children never seem ordinary to their parents,” she remarked comfortably. “I had to part with both my boys, Rose, my dear, and you’ll find that poor little Cecil will be much easier to manage after he’s seen something of other boys.”

Rose clenched both hands, as though the sense of being at cross-purposes might drive her to physical violence.

It was evident enough to Lucian that her fierce arguments had conveyed no slightest sense of her meaning to any one in the room save to himself and to Ford Aviolet.

It was again to Ford that she addressed herself, although the light in her eyes as she faced him held something very like hatred.

“You know what I mean. You know perfectly well. I’m not just a fool of a mother saying that she won’t let her little darling go and rough it. I’d let Ces go to school to-morrow, if he wasn’t what he is. You all know what’s wrong with him. He can’t tell the truth. How do you suppose they’ll deal with that at a big school?”

“Successfully, I hope,” said Ford, with an emphasis on the first word. “On your own showing, a home education hasn’t cured the boy of an extremely unpleasant trick. It’s a very good argument for trying a new system.” He looked round, very quietly triumphant, and as his eye caught that of Diana Grierson-Amberly, he smiled slightly.

Then the girl spoke, suddenly and rather breathlessly, turning with a little air of pleading, to Rose Aviolet.

“You know, my brothers are awfully happy at school. Tony’s at Eton still, and he simply loves it. The games and things, you know.”

Now that she, who was, though not in the same sense of the word as himself, an outsider, had made her small, inefficient contribution of words, Lucian felt that he, also, might speak. He, like Rose, chose to address Ford Aviolet, as the only possible interpreter between Rose’s vehemence and the unimaginative, unruffled obtuseness of the old people.

“As I understand it, Mrs. Aviolet’s contention is that her boy, individually, is unsuited for the system of education that the average English boy profits by. Is there no possible alternative?”

His glance involuntarily shifted, almost pleadingly, to Lady Aviolet.

“Do you think little Cecil delicate?” she said in a surprised way. “Some boys are too delicate for school-life, but it always seems such a pity.”

The doctor was silent.

“Pray let us know, Lucian, if the boy looks to you physically unfit?” said Ford. The irony in his tone was most delicate.

The doctor understood perfectly that his interference was being punished. He knew, and Ford Aviolet knew that he knew, that Cecil was a strong and a healthy child.

“Physically, he seems perfectly sound as far as I can tell.”

Rose Aviolet snatched at the cue he had given her.

“His little body’s all right. It’s his mind, or his soul—whatever you like to call it.”

Sir Thomas abruptly emitted a sound which appeared to imply that his grandson had no business to possess anything but a body.

“If he were a hunchback, you wouldn’t send him to school. Why should a mental deformity receive less consideration than a physical one?”

“What’s the use of talking like that, Rose?” said her mother-in-law. “(Fifty—fifty-one—fifty-two) Cecil isn’t a hunchback, or anything in the least like it, thank Heaven!”

Ford Aviolet smiled again.

“Tell them what I mean!” Rose hurled at him, with an intensity that made the girl Diana shrink back, looking bewildered.

Ford’s eyeglasses swung gently to and fro. His eyebrows were raised.

“Plead your own cause, my dear Rose,” he said easily. “You know I don’t see with you. In my humble opinion, school is exactly what Cecil requires.”

“All boys go to school,” Sir Thomas again reiterated. “It’s the greatest disadvantage in the world to a boy to be brought up in any other way. I used to know an unfortunate Roman Catholic fellow who’d been brought up by monks—put him at the greatest disadvantage with other fellows all his life. Of course, a delicate lad may have to be educated at home, but it’s a great disadvantage. I couldn’t allow it for my grandson.”

“You heard Dr. Lucian say Cecil wasn’t delicate, Rose,” said Lady Aviolet.

They were imperturbable in their lack of comprehension.

Rose Aviolet’s breast was rising and falling as though she breathed with difficulty.

“Why don’t you sit down, my dear?” inquired Lady Aviolet.

Rose turned to Lucian as though she had not heard.

“You say Cecil’s bodily health is good, as far as you know. Can you say the same of his soul?”

Her eyes challenged him.

“Rose, Rose—(sixty-eight—nine—and seventy)——Please!——”

The doctor made his voice expressionless as he replied: “You must remember that I’ve only hearsay—except for one instance that might happen with any child—on which to form an opinion. But if the boy, as you say, seems incapable of speaking the truth, then, certainly, morally, he’s unsound!”

“But oh!——” The gasp came from Diana Grierson-Amberly. “Wouldn’t—wouldn’t school be the very thing to cure him of that?”

“I can’t tell.”

“No,” said Rose Aviolet swiftly, “you can’t tell. You’ve studied the subject, and you’re an expert, but you can’t tell off-hand. It’s only people who think in a rut and never get out of it, that don’t know there are two sides to every question. I’m Cecil’s mother, and I’m not a fool about things that really matter, but my opinion goes for nothing!”

“There’s no need to raise your voice, my dear,” said Lady Aviolet. “Of course you’re Cecil’s mother, and we shouldn’t think of doing anything inconsiderate by you, I hope, but you know, poor Jim did leave his boy to Ford’s guardianship. That shows that he wanted him brought up as he’d been brought up himself; now, doesn’t it?”

Jim Aviolet, however brought up, had, the doctor well knew, barely escaped expulsion from school on at least two occasions. He thought Rose Aviolet capable of voicing the fact then and there, and spoke before she could do so.

“Given time, isn’t there the possibility that this tendency may be eradicated?”

Rose looked at him eagerly.

“The study of psychology is taking immense strides, especially on the Continent. Have you ever heard of treatment by auto-suggestion?”

Lady Aviolet made a low sound, something between a cluck and an inarticulate ejaculation.

“I could never approve of that,” she said firmly.

They stared at her, Ford and Sir Thomas no less than the others.

“Anything to do with spiritualism,” said Rose Aviolet’s mother-in-law, shaking her head. “Quite against the teachings of religion, and great nonsense besides.”

Ford Aviolet looked at the doctor.

“Is it necessary to make such a mountain out of a molehill?” he inquired. “My little nephew tells lies. Excuse me, Rose, for saying so, but I think we have your word for it. It is quite a common failing amongst children. His contemporaries will teach him the disadvantages attached to fibbing in a very much more practical manner than we can. Need we discuss it any longer? Lucian, a whisky-and-soda? Mother, you must be tired.”

“Yes.” The old lady rolled up her knitting. “Think it over quietly, Rose. There’s no hurry.”

Rose’s dilated eyes were fixed upon her brother-in-law, and Lucian made one movement forward.

He felt a rush of relief when the tension snapped with a torrent of words, hurled straight at Ford Aviolet.

“You snob—you prig! You could help me—and you won’t. You only care that your nephew should do what every other boy does—so that he shall turn out a little gentleman, able to play games, and talk the right slang, and get the rotten public-school point of view. You don’t care what he’s like, so long as he never gets found out. That’s what your public-school education will teach him: that he may go on telling lies, so long as nobody catches him at it—that sex is just a dirty sort of joke—that religion is going to church in a top hat—that the only thing that matters is to conform—conform—conform to type, all along the line.”

Rose Aviolet had made her scene.

She had hurled her fury, her passionate invective, like a wave against the rock of their immoveable good breeding.

Lucian, the sharpness of his perceptions seeming doubly intensified, could view the wreckage. It was Rose that was spent and broken.

Lady Aviolet, he guessed, had been offended and alienated by Rose’s mention of sex. It was a word that she had hitherto probably only met, and then with reluctance, in literature. She had changed countenance.

The girl Diana, her mouth fallen wide open, had sidled furtively along the floor until she stood beside Ford.

Sir Thomas emitted a sharp sound of disgust.

“You’re not yourself, Rose. Be quiet,” he commanded her.

His arm swept her aside as he opened the door.

Ford moved slowly from his place at the marble mantelpiece.

As he passed Rose he said pleasantly: “You’ll feel upset about this, I’m afraid, when you come to yourself again. But pray let us have no apologies. Personally, I’ll take them as said, if you’ll spare us another dramatic display. These things, you know, really aren’t done.”

That was it: these things weren’t done.

Lucian realized it very thoroughly, as he saw the contemptuous distaste evident on the habitually inexpressive face of Sir Thomas when the women had passed out of the room.

Rose had flung down her gage with all the violence of the strong, undisciplined feeling that governed her. These people had been too well-bred to pick it up. To them, there was never anything to be angry, or noisy, or emotional, about. They were self-controlled by instinct. Their spirits knew no revolt at all. Nothing mattered to them, as almost everything mattered to Rose, the vulgar, the vehemently alive.

He made no doubt that they would not talk very much about her outburst, even amongst themselves. He, the outsider, would never hear any more of it from them. He had no right to have been present.

Prompted by the thought, he began his farewell, taking it as the measure of Lady Aviolet’s perturbation that she had only bowed a mechanical good-night to him as she left the room, forgetting that he was not a guest in the house.

“No hurry,” growled Sir Thomas. “I’m going to get a drink in the smoking-room. Come along.”

A gesture from Ford detained the doctor.

“One moment. I really should like to consult you on this absurdly magnified subject now that it has been raised.”

The doctor’s experience, both of Ford and of humanity, was too large to allow of his being greatly surprised when the consultation took the form of a very lucid résumé of Ford Aviolet’s own impressions.

“In a sense, the boy is certainly abnormal. He has never been taught the value of truth. He romances. But I refuse to regard it seriously.” Ford made his characteristic gesture, a small, elegant waving of his pince-nez.

“My dear mother is hyper-sensitive on the subject. She imagines that it denotes an ineradicable tendency to criminal deceit. That was the old idea, I suppose. What he needs is to me perfectly obvious.”

So few things were, in the doctor’s opinion, perfectly obvious, that he waited with some curiosity to be enlightened.

“School,” said Ford. “School. A thoroughly healthy English atmosphere, where he’ll get plenty of wholesome knocking about, and be called a little liar when he deserves it.”

“A bloody little liar,” Lucian corrected, and Ford, as the doctor had expected, winced slightly.

“Boys are very brutal, no doubt. But brutality of that kind is exactly what Cecil needs. And, my dear fellow, between ourselves, it’ll be half the battle to get him away from his mother.”

“You think she spoils him?”

“No,” said Ford, in a reasonable voice. “No. In the vulgar sense of over-indulgence, she does not spoil him. But her ideas are quite horribly crude, and she is, as you must have perceived, a—an uneducated—how shall I put it? Let us say that hers is a third-rate mind. Look,” cried Ford with a slight shudder, “at her taste in literature.”

“Tout les goûts sont respectables. What is her taste in literature?”

“What, indeed!”

Lucian waited, a flippant desire crossing his mind to inquire whether Ford Aviolet was feeling sick.

“She weeps over the early death of a mawkish infant in a work of fiction that I believe is called ‘Misunderstood.’”

“I’ve read the book.”

The tone of the doctor’s reply implied, as indeed he meant it to imply, that he considered “Misunderstood” to be a highly respectable subject for emotion.

“Then I will say no more.”

“What are you going to do if Mrs. Aviolet still refuses to let the boy go to school?”

“She can’t refuse. Fortunately she hasn’t a penny. One hates to emphasize it, but my father gives her an allowance, and is, of course, undertaking the whole expense of Cecil’s education. Personally, I advise sending him to his preparatory school at once. It’s the very best chance of breaking him of this silly, vulgar habit of telling lies.”

“You think so?”

The eyeglasses described their graceful little curve once more.

“The only hope, I may say. He’ll get kicked out of it.”

“Unless he’s kicked further into it. What’s the alternative to school?”

“There isn’t one.”

“But what does his mother suggest?”

“Oh, a home education. A tutor. No doubt she visualizes him as Little Lord Fauntleroy on a pony riding about amongst the tenants. Very typical of her ideals, poor thing.”

Ford’s tone was tolerant in the extreme.

“So you are very much in favour of the public-school system of education, are you?” inquired the doctor.

To himself, he added:

“And yet, my fine fellow, I’m very much mistaken if your own life at school was anything but a misery and a degradation.”

“Don’t you agree with me?”

“I’m not a public-school man.”

Lucian was conscious of having evaded the question, but he did not think that Ford would remark it. Nor did he.

“It will make a gentleman of the boy, as the odious expression is. My dear man, I’m not one of those people who can see nothing admirable in the institutions of their own country. To my mind, a fine Englishman is the finest man in the world.”

As he spoke, he threw back his slender shoulders in a gesture that was evidently an unconscious one. It struck Lucian rather strangely, as though it were the almost automatic expression of a desire for reassurance.

It was as if Ford was trying to impress Ford with his own claim to be a “fine Englishman.”

“I’m sorry if I sound—er—disgustingly snobbish, but the fact remains that Rose is entirely unfitted, by birth and education, to bring up my father’s grandson. You’ve seen for yourself what she’s like.”

“Very devoted to the boy.”

“Oh, very. I’ve not a word to say against that. The maternal instinct in women and animals is generally in inverse ratio to the intellectual development. But we’re having this difficulty with her on that very account. She raves, as she did to-night, about his temperament requiring a home education and special supervision—but in reality it’s simply class-prejudice. She dreads sending him to acquire a veneer that she knows she doesn’t possess herself—it will separate them. It’s instinctive, of course.”

He shrugged his shoulders, as though dismissing a competently analyzed problem.

“That be damned for a tale,” said the doctor curtly. “You won’t make me believe that—and, what’s more, you won’t make yourself believe it. She was in dead earnest to-night, and whether her view is right or wrong, she’s sincere. She does believe that child to be unfitted for school-life, and there’s a considerable chance that her view may be the right one. I tell you professionally that you’ll be taking a big risk if you disregard it.”

The doctor, under lowered brows, looked full at Ford, but Ford, as usual, was looking down.

Presently he made a low sound like a laugh, that was nevertheless singularly devoid of amusement.

“A storm in a tea-cup, isn’t it? Children have been known to tell fibs before now. Rose may, as you say, be in earnest, but surely that is only one proof the more of her utter lack of balance. If Cecil’s life were at stake, her tragedy-queen airs might be justifiable—but then Cecil’s life is not at stake.”

“I wonder,” said the doctor.

VII

Of the forces arrayed against Rose—and she found them many—the most potent was the strong desire for school that they had implanted in little Cecil himself.

He was always begging to go to Hurst.

“Don’t you want me to be friends with Lord Charlesbury’s little boy, Mummie?”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Well, he’s at Hurst. He’s in the Eleven there.”

“I know.”

“Shouldn’t I be in the Eleven, too?”

“No. You don’t play nearly well enough yet, darling.”

Cecil flushed and then said defiantly: “Diana thinks I would be, and she knows more about cricket than you do, Mummie—you said yourself that she does. She said—she said——”

“What did she say?”

Diana Grierson-Amberly was surely not prone to the paying of unmerited compliments, and Rose felt curious.

“She said I ought to be at Hurst and that I bowled better than that other little boy, Hugh. She did, Mummie.”

“Ces!” said Rose warningly.

“Yes, she did. That was because I bowled her out first ball, just as easy as anything. And the bails stayed on, Mummie, and only the middle stump went down, really and truly.”

She knew, necessarily, that he must be boasting, and the circumstantial details with which he amplified his story made her, from previous experience, forlornly certain that he knew himself to be inventing.

“When did this happen?”

“Last night, when we played on the lawn after tea.”

“Well, I know you did play on the lawn with Uncle Ford and Diana and Miss Wade. But she didn’t really say you bowled better than Hugh Charlesbury, now did she, Ces? You only said that for fun, didn’t you?”

Her coaxing voice pleaded with him for the admission.

“I can’t help it if you won’t believe me, Mummie,” said Cecil with dignity, “but it’s perfectly true all the same.”

Miss Wade descended upon them with her usual air of timorous determination.

“Come along, Cecil dear, it’s time to go out. You’d like me to bowl to you, wouldn’t you? Remember what Miss Grierson-Amberly said to us last night!”

“What?” Rose asked almost involuntarily.

“She said Cecil would never get into the Hurst Cricket Eleven unless he practised really hard. And she told us about Lord Charlesbury’s little boy—didn’t she, Cecil?—who bowled some other boy out first ball, and the middle stump actually went flying, although the bails stopped on.”

“I see,” said Rose dully.

Not for the world would she have exposed Cecil in Miss Wade’s presence. She would not even look at him.

“Come along,” said Miss Wade, in her voice of manufactured brightness.

Cecil had rapidly turned from white to scarlet, but when he saw that his mother had no intention of humiliating him by any spoken comment, his face cleared. He ran up to her and kissed her, and said “Good-bye, Mummie,” quite cheerfully before he went away with Miss Wade.

She felt that he would easily succeed in putting the whole incident quite out of his thoughts.

“But why—why does he do it?” reflected Rose miserably.

She was incapable of searching out the basic foundations for Cecil’s perversion of the truth. The crux of the matter, to her, lay in the bald fact that he told lies; not at all in the existence of a fundamental self-distrust and craving for the reassurance of praise and approval that provided a motive for the lies.

“I can’t make him good,” said Rose to herself desperately.

She was too unsure of the orthodoxy of her own beliefs to have made out of religion an instrument for the chastisement of Cecil’s spirit, and when he had informed her that Miss Wade said all story-tellers went to hell, she had heatedly replied: “Bosh! don’t think about hell. Think about heaven instead.”

Lady Aviolet, she knew, had suggested once or twice to Cecil, with characteristic reticence of expression, that his besetting sin should be made the subject of nightly intercession in his prayers. But Rose herself, and, she felt certain, Cecil with her, had looked upon the mechanical petitions, “Help me always to speak the truth, for Christ’s sake, Amen,” as the merest shelving of responsibility. Religious susceptibilities were no more apparent in Cecil than in herself, and Rose instinctively mistrusted resolutions rooted rather in a supine faith in Divine omnipotence than in a personal will to achieve.

A sense of utter frustration assailed her after the expenditure of nervous energy that she had flung into her “scene” on the previous evening. It had been of no use. The old people had not understood; their stupidity was as impenetrable as their good breeding. Ford, who might have interpreted her ill-chosen words to them, had chosen, malignantly, to play a little comedy of obtuseness that was never meant to deceive Rose, but only to make her angrier and more incoherent.

Thinking it all over, the tears burned in her eyes and she clenched her teeth. It seemed incredible to her that so much vehemence should have proved so completely impotent.

The conviction of defeat was ready to invade her, but her indomitable sense of the issue at stake refused to let her be overwhelmed.

“He shan’t go—he shan’t go——” she repeated to herself, half sobbing. “I know he isn’t fit for school.”

She slowly prepared to put in action a plan that she had evolved in the course of a sleepless hour of the night.

She wrote a letter.

This was to Rose a laborious undertaking at all times, since she disliked letter-writing and had had very little occasion to practise it. Her handwriting, that had an inappropriate appearance on the stamped blue notepaper of Squires, was large and painstaking, and very legible.

My dear Uncle Alfred,

It seems a long time since I wrote to you after poor Jim’s death, and I daresay you will be interested to hear that Cecil and myself are now with Jim’s people at the above address. Well, Uncle, this is to say that things are not going as I should wish with regards to Cecil, and they want very much to send him to a Preparatory School and then to a Public School. This I do not want, because it would be bad for Cecil, and I know what I am talking about. Well, Uncle, I cannot make them see this here, and so I write to you. Will you have Ces and me up at your place for a bit if this is not too inconvenient? I could help in the business like Mother used to, and have a talk with you about Cecil. He’s a lovely little boy, really, and I do want to do the best possible for him.

I must stop now, Uncle, hoping to hear from you before long.

Your affectionate niece,

ROSE.

She sealed her letter very carefully before putting it herself into the oaken box on the hall-table. The late Mrs. Smith had imparted pessimistic views to Rose on the subject of private correspondence if left unprotected.

“It isn’t in nature not to read what isn’t meant for you, if it’s lying about,” had said Mrs. Smith, in simple explanation of her own well-informedness upon various affairs that might strictly have been regarded as the concern of her neighbours rather than her own.

Rose, not sufficiently endowed with curiosity herself to indulge in the reading of other people’s correspondence, was quite tolerantly prepared to believe that this was nevertheless the general practice.

When she had finished her letter, she felt happier. No one had said anything to her about her outburst of the preceding evening. She had come down to breakfast heavy-eyed and apprehensive, although no whit less resolved to maintain her own cause, but there had been no sign that any one remembered the existence either of a cause or of a champion.

The conversation had circled placidly round the customary subject of “plans for the day” and the necessity of sending the young man Toby to the station for the 10.39 train.

Rose had been partly relieved, partly disappointed, and wholly perplexed.

She found the Aviolets, their standards, their aims and avoidances, alike incomprehensible. She felt as though it would be an untold relief to return to Uncle Alfred and his shop, where all the pitfalls were of an obvious kind and where approval and disapproval were alike manifested on equally established and well-defined lines.

“Would you care for a walk?” said Diana Grierson-Amberly, coming upon her in the hall.

“Always walks!” thought Rose with uncomprehending resignation, but Diana’s voice had sounded friendly, and she was grateful, although she could never understand the satisfaction to be derived from walking for half an hour along a country lane, with no shop windows to look into and no given objective, and then turning round and walking along the same road for another half hour back again.

“It isn’t even as though we had anything to say to one another,” she reflected.

But it appeared that Miss Grierson-Amberly had something to say on this occasion.

She sang the praises of the Aviolet family.

“I’ve always been so awfully fond of them all, here. Cousin Catherine is such a dear.”

“Oh, yes,” said Rose, with more of uncertain interrogation than of assent in her tone.

“I used to play with the boys a lot when I was younger, and they were always so nice to me, though they were so much older. Ford and I have always been great pals.”

There was a silence.

“He did so splendidly in South Africa. You know he was wounded at Spion Kop?”

“Yes, I know.”

“They say that he went on encouraging his men and calling out to them long after he was hit.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. We never could quite understand why he didn’t get recommended for promotion, or something like that.”

Another silence.

“Of course, very likely his Colonel did recommend him for decoration, and nothing came of it. I’m afraid there’s a certain amount of wire-pulling that one doesn’t know about,” said Diana solemnly.

Once more Rose made no answer, and once more Diana persevered.

“This world is such a queer place, isn’t it? I mean, there’s so much jealousy and pettiness to be found.”

“I suppose so.”

“Perhaps,” Diana laboriously amended, “I ought to say it’s not so much the world that’s queer, as the people in it.”

On this last subtle commentary of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s upon mankind, the silence that ensued was of so abysmal a character that it remained unbroken for nearly ten minutes. Rose, although her vocabulary hardly comprised the word platitude, was ruthlessly recognizing and condemning the quality of her companion’s conversation as “utter bunkum,” and Diana Grierson-Amberly, not without good cause, was discouraged.

Presently she tried again.

“Cousin Catherine is so fond of children, I expect she loves having Cecil here. I always think it’s such an ideal place for a child, too.”

“Do you? Why?” said Rose, interested for the first time.

Unfortunately, Miss Grierson-Amberly’s observation had been rhetorically, rather than literally, intended.

“Well, the garden, you know, and—and the house—and then Ford can teach him to shoot, later on, and he can have a jolly time in the holidays. Miss Wade is nice, too, isn’t she? I think it must be much more fun to have a young governess.”

“She’s all right, but rather an ass, don’t you think?”

“I thought she seemed a nice little thing. You know, Mrs. Aviolet, I do really think there’s heaps of good in everyone if you only look for it,” said the girl, quite earnestly.

“Well, I don’t. I don’t see one single atom of good in that precious Ford of yours, for instance,” Rose declared with sudden recklessness.

Diana’s face grew very grave and very pink. She turned and looked at Rose, with the corners of her mouth rather turned down, and when she spoke her voice was full of distress.

“Of course, to me, it sounds so dreadful to hear you say a thing like that. I simply can’t understand it. Why, Ford is really a perfect dear, when you know him.”

“What about last night?”

“Well, you know, he can’t help what he thinks, now can he, Mrs. Aviolet?” said the girl pleadingly. “You see, what I always feel, is that there are two sides to every question. I think you ought to remember that, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

The effect of reasonableness with which Diana uttered what Rose regarded as futilities was remarkable.

It even impelled Rose to reply to them as though she felt them to be worth a reply.

“I’m not angry with Ford for thinking that Ces should go to school. It’s quite natural he should think so, I suppose. He’s only mixed with two kinds of people all his life—those who go to public schools and those who go to the national schools. He evidently doesn’t know anything about the in-between people. That’s not his fault. But what puts my monkey up, is him pretending to think that I’m a fool; that I want to keep Cecil a molly-coddle, just for the sake of having him tied to my apron-strings. He’s playing up to old Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet, that’s all, because they’re so stupid. They really do think it’s only that. Why Ford hates me is more than I can tell you—but he does. He’s made things difficult for me ever since I came here.”

“May I say what I think?”

“Of course.”

Rose could not imagine why any one should ever want to do anything else.

“Well, then—I do hope you won’t think it rude of me to say this, but you’ve given me leave to—it seems to me that you take a simply terribly exaggerated view of things. Not only about Ford. (Of course, what you say about his hating you is perfectly absurd. Why, he’s your relation!) But it isn’t only about him. It struck me that you did last night, when you were talking about your little boy. You say that he—well, that he doesn’t always tell the truth. Of course I know it’s a great pity, and the thing of all others that one minds most—it seems so awfully un-English, doesn’t it?—but, after all, Mrs. Aviolet, he’s only a baby, isn’t he? He’ll begin to understand, in a very little while, that he mustn’t tell stories, surely.”

“He knows that now,” said Rose wearily. “You don’t understand. Sometimes I don’t think it’s his own fault, poor darling! He can’t help it.”

“Well, that’s just what I say,” the girl argued perseveringly. “He’ll know better later on. And really and truly, it’s perfectly wonderful what school does for them. My young brother Tony was very delicate as a baby, and I’m afraid we spoilt him dreadfully, but he improved in the most marvellous way after his first term at a preparatory school. It seems to make them so much more manly and sensible, you know.”

“Ces is manly already,” cried Rose, going off at a tangent. “I don’t know what you’d say if you could see what ordinary children are like, after being born and brought up in the tropics. They haven’t got a kick left in them by the time they get home, as a rule, nor for months afterwards.”

“I didn’t mean——”

“That’s all right. I know you didn’t. I suppose the whole thing’s got on my nerves, rather. It’s always Cecil this, and Cecil that, it seems to me.”

“Only because they’re so—so interested in him.”

“I daresay, but it’s a funny way of showing it. You’d think they’d have the sense to see, old people like them, that of course I know more about him than they do.”

“But you know, he wants to go to school himself—really he does. He says so.”

“I know,” said Rose briefly and bitterly.

“Well, then——?”

“Oh, of course, they’ve made him keen, telling him about the games and all the rest of it. He didn’t want to go to school till it was put into his head. You can make a child think it wants anything, even castor oil, if you bluff it enough.”

“But school isn’t a nasty thing, like castor oil,” said Diana, with a sort of ingenious stupidity.

“Chuck it,” Rose advised briefly. “You and me aren’t talking the same language. We shouldn’t understand one another if we went on jawring till we turned black in the face.”

No such disastrous consummation was achieved, but Miss Grierson-Amberly seemed quite unable to abandon the discussion.

“But I do understand you, really and truly I do. Only it seems to me, if you’ll forgive me for saying such a thing, that it would be more unselfish of you to let Cecil do what he wants, and what everybody else thinks best for him, than just to try and make him do what you like. I’m afraid I’m expressing it stupidly, but I daresay you’ll understand. After all, if one loves any one, one wants the best thing for them, doesn’t one? And you know, boys learn heaps of things at school that one simply can’t give them at home—playing the game generally, and esprit de corps, and all that sort of thing.”

“I’ve heard every bit of this before, and I daresay it’s all quite true. But as long as Ces remains what he is, he’ll go to no school. I’d as soon send an epileptic child to school as him.”

“Oh, how can you!” The distress in Diana’s voice was most unmistakably genuine. “Indeed, indeed, I’m certain you’re exaggerating the whole thing most dreadfully. And even if he is as naughty as you think, surely school would be the very——”

“Naughty!” Rose, like an explosion, repeated. “Who said he was naughty? I’ll thank you to keep your advice about my boy till you’ve got one of your own. You’ll know a bit more about it by that time, perhaps.”

For the second time, Diana coloured deeply; but after a moment she said unresentfully:

“I’m afraid I’ve vexed you, and I’m so awfully sorry. I really only said it because I’ve known the Aviolets all my life, and Cecil is such a dear little boy.”

The last words mollified Rose instantly.

“It’s all right. I’m sorry, too, if I was rude. Don’t let’s talk about it any more.”

They made spasmodic conversation upon indifferent subjects until Squires was reached. Rose, tired and out of spirits, trailing slowly upstairs, heard Diana’s voice incautiously raised in Lady Aviolet’s morning-room.

“I hope I’ve done some good, Cousin Catherine. I’ve been reading the Riot Act, but of course——”

The door was closed, and Rose proceeded on her way, muttering sub-audibly, “Damn her impudence!”

Her perceptions, acute, if inarticulate, sensed in Diana Grierson-Amberly all the blind, limitless cruelty of the obtuse. She felt strangely weak and frightened at the thought of it, as though knowing that from that cruelty of the unimaginative there is no appeal.

In the nursery, she found Cecil strutting about, reciting a sort of saga, with the intensely disapproving eyes of Miss Wade fixed upon him in a horrified stare.

“An’ there was elephants there, and a tiger, and—and horses as big as lions; and they all lay down in front of me until I said, ‘Up!’ Like that I said it, very loud and grand—‘UP!’ I said. That was in Colombo, once.”

“Hallo, Ces,” Rose said rather wearily. She guessed, from the expression of the governess, what was coming.

“I’m glad you’ve just happened to come in, Mrs. Aviolet. There’s a little boy here who hardly seems to know the difference between pretence and reality, I’m afraid.”

“What’s the matter?” Rose demanded ungraciously. She would not even look at Miss Wade, and she kept one hand on Cecil’s forehead, stroking back his thick, soft hair.

“Oh, I hope nothing’s the matter,” Miss Wade declared with sudden, spurious brightness. “I’m sure Cecil will tell you himself that he’s only been talking nonsense.”

“I’m not talking nonsense——”

“If you mean that rubbish I heard as I came in, about elephants and tigers, it was nonsense, Ces, and you know it. You weren’t trying to make Miss Wade believe it was true, were you? You wouldn’t be so silly, a big boy like you.”

The appeal to Cecil’s vanity seemed to make him hesitate. At last he gave an uncertain little laugh, and said: “No, Mummie. I only said it for fun. It was just something I was inventing.”

Rose kissed him in sudden, passionate thankfulness.

“My precious! That’s a good boy!”

“It’s a pity, isn’t it, that Cecil should think it amusing to invent things that never happened,” said Miss Wade mildly, “especially as we know that he isn’t always quite as brave as he ought to be about telling the exact truth. But I’m glad he’s been straightforward this time.”

Rose did not think that she looked glad.

“If Cecil may go into the garden for a while, Mrs. Aviolet, I should be glad to speak to you.”

“All right.”

Rose made no attempt at all at displaying an amiability which she was far from feeling.

“As we’re on the subject,” said the little governess nervously, “I thought I’d really better speak to you. Cecil is a dear little boy and I’m very fond of him, but I really don’t know what to do about his want of truth. I’m sorry to have to say it, Mrs. Aviolet, but he’s untruthful—downright untruthful.”

“Have you just found it out or did his grandmother tell you so?” Rose asked truculently.

“Lady Aviolet never mentioned such a thing to me, nor did any one else. I am in the habit of forming my own opinions as to the character of my pupils. I am a student of child-psychology,” said Miss Wade with dignity. “It is a most serious fault, and one that cannot be corrected too young.”

“If you’re thinking of his nonsense just now, Miss Wade——”

The governess interrupted her firmly. “No, that has nothing to do with it. I have been meaning to speak to you for some little while. I should have thought little or nothing of his wild inventions of imaginary adventures, if I had not, more than once, found him out in a direct untruth.”

Rose groaned almost involuntarily.

“You knew of this fault already?”

“Yes, of course I did.”

“He is so young, and such a dear little boy, and so good otherwise that I feel sure he can be corrected. But I must ask you, Mrs. Aviolet, to let me have a free hand in dealing with this.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“I said, ‘No.’”

Miss Wade looked quite confounded.

“Now do you suppose,” Rose impatiently inquired, “that I should give anybody a free hand, as you call it, in punishing my own child? What am I his mother for, if I’m to go giving free hands to other people all over the place? But you can tell me what your idea is—unless it’s school, which, I may tell you, I’ve heard enough about—and a bit over.”

“Cecil is hardly fit for school until he has learnt to speak the truth.”

“That’s the first word of sense I’ve heard spoken about it yet. Well, fire ahead.”

“Mrs. Aviolet, I do not wish you to take it upon my word alone, and therefore I will refer you to my authority. Monroe on the ‘Moral Education of Children.’”

“And what has Monroe got to say about it?”

“‘There are two faults, and two only, for which corporal punishment should be inflicted: deliberate cruelty, and deliberate untruth. We need not add that it should be made perfectly clear to the child that the punishment is not given in anger, still less in revenge.’” Miss Wade relinquished the head voice by which she had denoted that she was quoting, and resumed her natural rather nasal accents.

“I am deeply distressed at having to say it, but Cecil will never realize the full gravity of this dreadful fault unless he is punished in such a way that he will remember it. I have tried reasoning with him, and coaxing him, and scolding him, and he is always sorry, but it produces no real effect at all. Indeed, Mrs. Aviolet, I dislike the idea more than I can tell you, and I have never in my life had to punish a pupil in such a manner before, but I should be failing in my duty if—if——”

Miss Wade faltered and produced her handkerchief, choked by what Rose instantly recognized as a perfectly real emotion.

“Oh, don’t cry! Anyway, you know, it wouldn’t be you who’d have to do it. You’re not nearly strong enough. Besides, you’d never go through with it. I shouldn’t myself. I should sob and howl—roar, in fact. But it’s a man’s job.”

Miss Wade looked at her with an air of rather resentful astonishment.

“Then you have contemplated the idea of corporal punishment already?”

“Spare the rod and spoil the child. Of course I have, Miss Wade.”

“In general, I am thoroughly opposed to the system of corporal punishment,” said Miss Wade gloomily. “I follow Dr. Monroe’s teaching, and he is quite averse to it. But, as he says himself, persistent lying and persistent cruelty are in a class apart and must be dealt with accordingly.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I hope that the occasion may not present itself, but if it does, Mrs. Aviolet, if Cecil tells a direct lie again, then I must ask you either to deal with him on the lines that I have indicated, or else to let his uncle do so.”

“Ask for something you’re a bit more likely to get, I should,” Rose advised the outraged little governess. “If Cecil tells a direct lie, as you call it, again, he shall be whipped. We’ve tried everything else, and it may as well be that. But it’ll be me who’ll settle when it’s done, and how, and who by. And another thing—I’m going to give Ces fair warning about it. Perhaps it’ll help him to be careful, poor lamb.”

She turned to go.

“One moment, Mrs. Aviolet, if you please. Has Cecil ever been—castigated—before?”

“He’s been hit by his father,” said Rose briefly. “He’s never had exactly what you might call a state whipping, so perhaps the disgrace might make an impression on him. But I hope to goodness we shan’t have to do it.”

She let the door slam on Miss Wade’s solemn reiteration of the hope, already feeling that exasperation had committed her to a course of action that her inner self disapproved.

Yet the thought of punishing little Cecil by beating him did not horrify her. Her own mother had administered hearty and impetuous slaps throughout Rose’s childhood, in moments of impatience, and afterwards, as heartily and as impetuously, had smothered her with kisses and given her slices of new bread thickly covered with jam. Rose had borne no malice for the slaps, although they had always caused her to roar lustily, for Mrs. Smith’s heavy-handed blows had never been half-hearted affairs, and she had enjoyed the kisses and the bread-and-jam.

“No bunkum from Dr. Monroe’s little books on Moral Education about Mother!” Rose reminded herself, and smiled in a loving retrospective appreciation of her parent’s thoroughness.

VIII

Two days later, Diana Grierson-Amberly left Squires, and Rose received an answer to her letter.

298 Ovington Street,

London, S. W.

My dear Niece,

Yours of the 6th to hand, for which I thank you. I am willing to receive you and the boy as you suggest, at any date convenient to yourself, on a short visit. There will be no need for you to help in the shop, as the time will be so limited.

I have given much anxious thought and prayer to yourself and to your child, my dear Rose, left alone in worldly surroundings as I fear you are. If you have discovered the hollowness and falseness of mere earthly grandeur, turn your thoughts to that which never fails, if sought in true humbleness of spirit. I will gladly advise you to the best of my poor powers, but there is but One true Counsellor for us all.

Kindly advise later as to date and hour of arrival.

Yours, etc.,

ALFRED SMITH.

A certain lack of enthusiasm as to the projected visit, apparent in Uncle Alfred’s letter, no less than the careful underlining of his pietistic sentiments, recalled him with singular vividness to the mind of his niece as she read.

“It’ll be something, to get away from here,” she consoled herself.

After all, Uncle Alfred had nearly always been kind, in his own strange way. She and her mother had laughed at him, but Mrs. Smith had always steadily upheld Uncle Alfred’s claim to affection and gratitude, because for many years he had given them a home. And he had been nicer to Rose after her mother’s death, she remembered.

“And, anyway, he won’t talk about ‘plans for the day’ at breakfast every blessed morning, and I shall have Ces to sleep in my room again.” She laughed out loud for very joy at the thought. There was a foolish and inexplicable hope in her heart that if she and Cecil once got away from Squires, they need never go back there. To herself, Rose added in all honesty a modification of her ardent wish to cut adrift from everything that the Aviolets stood for:

“After all, I daresay Lord Charlesbury would look us up in London. And it would be much nicer to see him away from all of them.”

In spite of herself, she was nervous at the thought of making her new plan known to Lady Aviolet, and she therefore did so in a casual and blustering manner that gave the announcement an air of unreality.

“Oh—did I tell you I’d heard from my uncle? He’s Mr. Alfred Smith, who has a business in Ovington Street. (Well, it’s a pawnbroking business, really.) I haven’t seen him since I married—and thought of going up to him.”

“Did you, my dear? The train service is very good, so you have only to let me know which day suits you and the carriage can take you to the station for the early train, and meet you again at the six o’clock, or the half-past eight, if you prefer it.”

“Oh, well, thank you very much, but I meant to stay there,” Rose said awkwardly.

“Would that be necessary?”

“I should like it,” Rose replied defiantly.

Her mother-in-law was unmoved. “As you prefer, my dear.”

“I should want to take Cecil, of course.”

“Indeed? Do you think it any real kindness to disturb him? He seems very happy, and looks so well. Besides, he is getting on nicely at his lessons, and it seems hard on Miss Wade that they should be interrupted.”

“She could have a holiday for a bit.”

“She has hardly been with us long enough to expect that. Irregularity is so unsettling to a child, too. I hope you will be unselfish enough to leave Cecil here, Rose, while you pay your visit.”

Lady Aviolet fixed her pale eyes upon Rose as she spoke, and they expressed melancholy, in the very slight degree in which their flaccid shallows ever expressed anything.

“I am Cecil’s grandmother, my dear, and so I am going to take upon myself to tell you that you are a very selfish mother to the boy. I see that you’re very fond of him—I quite see that—but you seem to have so little idea of the tremendous sacrifices that motherhood demands. Take this question of going away: you may say that you want Cecil with you, because you can’t bear to be away from him, but don’t you see that you’re only thinking of yourself? If you thought more of Cecil, and less of yourself, you’d see the folly and unkindness of disturbing and upsetting him by a change just when he is settling down to a regular routine for the first time in his little life. And London isn’t healthy for children like the country is. It won’t do him any good.”

Lady Aviolet’s implacable, unselfconscious certainty of the complete rightness of her own point of view daunted Rose curiously. Through her mind there floated, incoherently, words and phrases that should express her resentment. Difficulties—they always made difficulties—nothing was ever allowed to happen without these complications of argument, disapproval, condemnation ... things that ought to be simple, made difficult. It was tiring ... and it made one angry too. And how could any one decide that someone else was selfish, in that arbitrary way? But she was unable to formulate her thoughts in words, and stood shifting her weight from one foot to the other, like a schoolgirl that is being scolded.

At last she said in a sulky tone that might, equally, have emanated from the schoolgirl:

“I don’t see that at all. I’ve looked after Ces ever since he was born, and I suppose I know what’s best for him.”

She was angrily aware, as she spoke, of the futility of the assertion.

So, apparently, was Lady Aviolet.

“That is as it may be, my dear. And of course you will do as you think best. I can only advise you. But I should have thought that for little Cecil’s own sake, you might be willing to forget yourself. I hope I don’t expect to find old heads on young shoulders, but I should have thought you had seen enough of life to realize that we mothers have to sacrifice a great deal for our children. And they very often disappoint us at the end of it all. But at least there is the comfort of having done all one can.”

Rose, by an unwonted effort, repressed the retort that she longed to utter. If the self-sacrifice of their mother had been responsible for the ultimate evolution of the personalities of Ford and Jim Aviolet, her most ardent wish would be never to emulate such disastrous abnegation for the benefit of Cecil.

“Well, I’m sorry you don’t like the idea, but I’m afraid I’ve made up my mind,” she said, abruptly and ungraciously.

“Then there is no more to be said, my dear. Perhaps you will be able to explain matters to Miss Wade so that she does not resign her situation, but you are acting with great unfairness towards her. If Cecil is to be taken out of her hands like this, and his whole time upset, you cannot expect her to have any real authority over the child. I was beginning to hope that he was improving in every respect under her management.”

Lady Aviolet’s intonation made it clear that her “every” meant “one.”

“Her latest idea is that he ought to be whipped for telling a story.”

“Painful though that would be, it might be the truest kindness to the poor little fellow himself in the end. But I hope we need not consider the question at all. I really do hope and believe that, under Miss Wade’s management, Cecil is losing his weakness.”

Lady Aviolet’s hope—a plant of frail and ill-supported growth—was not destined to fulfilment.

Rose appeared in the Lucians’ drawing-room one afternoon with swollen eyelids, and said miserably to Henrietta:

“They’ve made me punish Cecil. At least, I suppose it wasn’t them that made me, but I’ve had to do it. And yet I don’t really believe in whipping a child—I was going dead against my own instinct, and I knew it in a sort of way, but it seemed the only thing I hadn’t tried.”

“What happened?”

“Ces—poor darling—told a perfectly flat lie to Ford, of all people, and that beast wanted to punish him himself, but, of course, I said I wouldn’t allow that, and that I was the proper person to do it. But in the end Sir Thomas did. I said he might, because I knew it would impress Ces far more—and, besides, I knew I should howl and cry if I had to hit his darling little body.”

Rose laughed tremulously, and openly put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“Poor lamb, how did he take it?” Henrietta Lucian asked.

“He didn’t cry,” Rose said proudly. “He’s a plucky little fellow, and he’s proud, too. I knew he wouldn’t make a sound, and he didn’t. Even his grandfather said he’d been brave over it. Sir Thomas was fairly decent about the whole thing, I will say. He gave Ces a talking to about truth and all that, but it was very short, and then he gave him six cuts with a little cane and left him. And I didn’t go to him.”

“Very brave of you, and I should think quite right.”

“It was hard,” Rose admitted.

“I’m so sorry for you, about the whole thing. Maurice and I often talk about it. He’s interested, you know. I’m pretty sure he thinks it isn’t little Cecil’s fault, in a way, but more like a congenital misfortune.”

“He’s so brave about other things, it’s difficult to understand. I suppose he’s had a rotten bringing up, poor darling, and that’s my fault as much as any one’s. Don’t you think a marriage like mine is a great mistake?”

“In what way?” Henrietta temporized.

“Marrying into a different class.”

“It’s apt to create difficult situations, I suppose.”

“You may say so!” Mrs. Aviolet remarked in heartfelt accents. “But it isn’t only that—though to my dying day I don’t suppose I shall ever see what they’re driving at, half the time—it’s the children. Inheriting two lots of instincts, so to speak, poor little things. I know quite well that my mother-in-law thinks poor little Cecil’s trouble is all owing to his belonging what-you-may-call to the people, one side of him. In a way, I suppose I agree. The high-and-mighty Aviolets were never anything but honourable, were they?”

“In the conventional sense of the word, perhaps not,” said Miss Lucian.

“The conventional sense of the word is all they want,” said Rose simply, quite without irony.

She was very glad when the time came for her to take Cecil to London. He had been wildly and defiantly naughty since his punishment, but he had not again been untruthful.

“Wilful naughtiness is one thing, and underhand ways are another,” Miss Wade primly observed. “I can understand a child—a boy especially—being spoilt and disobedient from time to time, but there is something terrible about a child that is habitually untruthful. It seems so unnatural.”

“I think little Cecil’s disgrace the other day has shown him what a frightful thing untruth is,” Lady Aviolet said. “I hope we may never have to repeat such a thing.”

“It was evidently what the boy needed,” Sir Thomas said curtly.

It struck Rose that all of them unconsciously relied upon their own powers of observation to tell them what effect the experiment in discipline had had upon Cecil.

Hardly aware of the elementary psychological instinct that prompted her, Rose trusted neither to their perceptions nor to her own. She tried to find out from the little boy, himself, what their punishment had meant to him.

“You won’t let them say ever again that you tell stories, will you, darling? If one does slip out, come and tell Mother, and I promise no one shall be angry or punish you. Only tell me about it.”

“Yes, Mummie.”

He was not looking at her.

“I had to ask Grandpa to whip you the other day, Ces, but it made me very unhappy.”

“I’m so sorry, Mummie.” He had put his arms round her neck and was kissing her eagerly. She hugged him.

“Sweetheart! You know we had to do something to make you remember, and you will remember now, won’t you?”

“Yes. I didn’t cry when Grandpa hit me with his cane.”

“I know you didn’t, my own brave little man.”

“I wanted to scream out loud—it hurt so.”

She involuntarily tightened her hold round him.

“I was brave, wasn’t I, Mummie?” he asked her wistfully.

“Very brave, my darling.”

She could not deny him the acknowledgment, and it was only afterwards that she realized herself to have been dimly puzzled by his insistence.

Rose told Miss Wade that she was to have a holiday, and the governess was quite as much offended as Lady Aviolet had predicted that she would be, and offered to resign her situation. Rose only wished that she possessed the courage to accept the offer.

The night before they went to London, she spoke to Ford, who had detained her, with his air of suave autocracy, as she was following Lady Aviolet upstairs.

“One moment, Rose. I want to know how soon you are likely to bring Cecil back from town?”

Rose opened her brown eyes very widely, and spoke with a purposely exaggerated astonishment.

“Why?”

“Because Cecil’s movements concern me, as his guardian,” said Ford calmly.

“I’m his mother, thank you.”

Ford smiled very pleasantly.

“Oh, yes, you have equal rights of guardianship, of course. I had no intention of implying anything else.”

“Equal!” Her voice held unbounded scorn.

“Quite equal.”

She swung round and faced him, her hands on her hips in an attitude that had been frequently characteristic of her mother, her head a little thrust forward.

“What utter nonsense you talk, Ford! You may call yourself Cecil’s guardian till the cows come home, but a child belongs to its mother, I’d have you know.”

“Ladies know so little about the English law,” Ford murmured. “Are you really not aware, Rose, that in law a child has only one parent—its father? If Jim were alive, he would have, strictly speaking, the right to take Cecil away from you altogether, if he pleased. I’m not for an instant suggesting that he would have thought of such a thing—naturally—but I see you altogether fail to realize your position. It has been ruled, very wisely, I think, that the father of a child can appoint a guardian to act with the surviving parent, after his own death. Now a mother has no such power. She can only appoint a guardian after the death of both herself and the father. So you see that your ownership of Cecil is very limited.”

Rose had turned white.

“If that’s the law of the land, it’s enough to make one sick. But I don’t believe it.”

She did believe it, however. Ford was invariably accurate, and his manner had carried conviction with it.

“Then I strongly advise you to inform yourself on the matter. It has really seemed quite necessary for me to mention these facts that you find so unpleasant, owing to your very persistently hostile attitude to me, Rose. You appear to imagine that my attempts at directing matters in which Cecil is concerned, rank as interference pure and simple. So it seems to me better that I should state my case frankly, and make you understand that I have quite a substantial claim behind me.”

“Cecil’s grandparents——” Her voice shook so much from anger and dismay that she could not go on.

“Have nothing to do with it, strictly speaking. The issue lies between you and me, whilst Cecil is under sixteen, and I feel sure that we shall work together more amicably after my little explanation. All I ask you to remember is that our rights of guardianship”—his pause stressed the words—“are equal. Yours and mine.”

“Damn Jim!” said Rose passionately. “And damn the laws of this country, too, if they’re as unjust as all that.”

“H’sh—h’sh—h’sh——” He raised a slim hand authoritatively. “Forgive me if I say that you yourself have done, and are doing, more than any one to convince me of poor Jim’s wisdom in having appointed me joint guardian with you to his son. No woman is fit to bring up a boy entirely unaided, in my humble opinion.”

“She can bring him into the world unaided, though,” said Rose bitterly. “It looks to me like all kicks and no halfpence, for the woman, according to you.”

“Spare me a discussion on Woman’s Rights, Rose, I beg of you. The subject holds not the least interest for me, and, moreover, I feel convinced that we should differ widely in our views. All I ask you to do is to let me know when Cecil is to return to his usual routine.”

“When I please, and not a day or a minute sooner,” said Mrs. Aviolet with unconcealed temper blazing in her eyes and heightening the pitch of her always high-pitched voice.

Ford shrugged his shoulders at the ill-breeding and turned away.

They exchanged no farewells on the following day.

In Rose’s mind was an unspecified determination that she and her child would not return to Squires on the same terms as before, and vague dreams of independence and freedom possessed her as the train carried them towards London.

Cecil was openly delighted at the prospect of holidays and new surroundings. He had only once before been taken by her to London from Squires, for the purpose of visiting the dentist, and his reminiscences of the occasion, his continual questions and exclamations, pleased Rose as much as they did himself, in her sudden exhilaration of spirits.

At the terminus, they engaged a hansom cab, symbolical to Rose of “treats” that her mother had given her during her schooldays. In spite of the excited little boy beside her, she could almost have believed herself a schoolgirl again, her married life, Ceylon, and the months spent at Squires, had all become equally misty and unreal.

She wondered if Uncle Alfred would have changed, and could hardly realize that it was years since she had seen him.

“Mummie,” said Cecil, “will Uncle Alfred be nice? Will he like me?”

“If you’re good,” Rose made the traditional reply.

“Has he got a nice house?”

A faint misgiving assailed her. “It won’t be like Squires, you know, darling. Not a big house.”

“But there’ll be a garden?”

“Well—no. But I’ll take you to the park sometimes.”

“Shall I be able to play cricket there?”

“Perhaps. Look, Ces, this is the Brompton Road.”

He looked eagerly out at the lighted thoroughfare. “Isn’t it noisy, Mummie?”

“I suppose it is. I don’t know. One gets used to it pretty quickly. But Uncle Alfred lives in a smaller street than this, and it’ll be quieter there.”

The cab turned into a side street, then entered a narrower road again, and finally drew up before a corner house at the furthest end of the street.

“Goodness! Here we are!” said Rose. She fumbled excitedly for her purse. “Get out, Ces. No, wait—let me get out first, and I’ll help you. Hold the umbrella, like a good boy.”

“It’s raining, Mummie.”

“Never mind, we’ll be indoors in a minute. I’ll ring the area bell, Cabby, and someone’ll give you a hand with the trunk.”

Rose pulled vigorously at the bell handle on the iron railings that surmounted the area, but before the jangling reverberations had ceased, a man had hurried out on to the pavement, now glistening with wet.

“Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Hullo—why, it’s never Artie Millar! How are you?”

“I’m quite well, thank you, Mrs. Aviolet.”

They shook hands, and Rose said, “This is my kid—Cecil. Makes you feel time’s gone on a bit, doesn’t it?”

“I should never have guessed it but for this young gentleman,” Mr. Millar declared gallantly. “You haven’t altered in the very least.”

“Gammon!” said Mrs. Aviolet with a jovial heartiness that she had seldom permitted herself at Squires. “Give the cabby a hand with the box, will you? Is Uncle A. in the shop?”

“Upstairs. There’s a sitting-room on the first floor, now-a-days. Here’s the girl, she’ll show you the way.”

“A girl too! Whatever next?” murmured Rose.

She paid the cabman, took Cecil’s hand, and followed the small maid into the house. Cecil’s eyes widened as they went through the shop, with a counter down one side of it, glass show-cases on the other, an iron safe beyond the counter, and a match-board partition across one half of the room. Beyond this, again, was a dark and steep staircase, which they ascended.

“Why is it so dark, Mummie?”

“Hush! There’s Uncle Alfred.”

A short, stout figure loomed at the top of the stairs, and a small white imperial scrubbed Rose’s face. With Cecil, Uncle Alfred only shook hands.

“Come in, come in!”

His plump, curiously white hand, with a very large signet ring gleaming on the little finger, waved them into the room. It was not at all like any room at Squires. It was hung with a blue paper powdered all over by large silver stars, and there was a round table bearing an aspidistra in a pot on a ruffled lace mat, several books, and an enormous Bible.

A lighted gas-jet hung from the middle of the ceiling and illuminated the only two pictures, one above the mantelpiece, and the other one at the far end of the room.

Both were coloured lithographs, framed alike in black-and-gilt wood, one representing a fleshly Jewish woman drawing water at a well, the other one depicting the prophet Daniel, erect and haughty, amongst a crouching company of innocuous-looking lions.

“You haven’t changed, Uncle Alfred, not one bit.”

“Unless it’s to put on flesh, I daresay not. Well, I can’t say as much for you, Rose. You look fully your age,” said Uncle Alfred cheerfully.

“Well, I’ve been through a lot, one way and another. And my age is only twenty-five, so I don’t mind if I do look it.”

Mrs. Smith had early impressed upon Rose the advisability of “standing up to” Uncle Alfred, and her exhortation had fallen upon receptive ears. Quite instinctively, the old habit of years ago resumed its sway.

Uncle Alfred turned his attentive, shrewd eyes, light green, like a cat’s, upon little Cecil. His teeth were so prominent that the front ones jutted out far beyond his lower lip. Even when he was serious, as he usually was, and when, as now, he smiled—a rather slow, wary smile—almost the whole row was exposed.

“How old are you, young sir?”

“I’m nearly eight.” Cecil always preferred this form to the more direct declaration that he was seven years old.

“And do you know your catechism?”

“Some of it.”

“Very good. I shall examine you one of these days.”

Cecil looked rather alarmed. Miss Wade had taught him the meaning of “examination.”

“No, not now. We are going to have supper now.”

“Do you still have supper in the old basement, Uncle A.?”

“No, Rose,” said Uncle Alfred with dignity. “My servant inhabits the basement, and meals are served to me and my assistants in the dining-room.”

“Assistants?”

“I have two assistants—Artie Millar, who has served me very well indeed, and is now my salesman, and a young lad, who does the work that Artie used to do when he first came here.”

“You must have done well with the business,” said Rose, impressed.

“The Lord has prospered me—to a certain extent,” Uncle Alfred admitted. “If you will go upstairs to the room next to the store-room you will find it ready for yourself and your child. What is his name?”

“Cecil, Uncle.”

“Neither Scriptural nor historical,” said Uncle Alfred sweepingly. “Take him upstairs and wash his hands, and then we can sit at table together.”

Rose obeyed, feeling fifteen years old again.

“Oh, Ces, it’s the very room mother and I had. There’s the old picture of ‘The Soul’s Awakening’—look, Ces, isn’t it pretty?—but he’s got new furniture. I wonder who’s been in here since I slept here last.”

“Where’s the nursery, Mummie?”

“Where—oh, well, darling, you’re going to sleep in here with Mummie, you know. Won’t that be fun?”

“Yes,” said Cecil rather doubtfully. “And where shall I play, and do my lessons?”

“You’ll see to-morrow. Now wash your hands quickly—never mind a sponge; I’ll unpack afterwards, and there’s a towel here.”

“It’s a very thick towel,” said Cecil, examining the coarse cotton fibre, “and there’s no hot water.”

“Cold will do,” said Rose curtly.

For the first time it occurred to her that the months Cecil had spent at Squires were as a lifetime to his childishness. He had come to take the material comforts, to which Rose was naturally indifferent, for granted. And it appeared that to him they were not indifferent.

He was very good during supper, but the cold mutton and salad did not attract him, and the cheese that concluded the meal, Rose would not let him eat. She remembered with a pang of remorse his mug of fresh milk and his plate of biscuits, brought on a tray to the nursery at Squires every evening.

“But I’ll be able to fix it all up with Uncle A. to-morrow,” she thought.

For her own part, she felt herself to have come home again. There had hardly been a moment at Squires when she had not known constraint of spirit, and her dependence upon entertainers whom she whole-heartedly disliked had galled her incessantly.

Both Millar and the young assistant, a pale-faced youth introduced to her as Felix Menebees, had supper with them.

As soon as the meal was over, Rose took Cecil upstairs and put him to bed.

He was quiet, and seemed rather inclined to cry, but Rose effectually checked this by a promise of the Zoo, and by undertaking to come to bed herself in a very short time.

He had become accustomed to a night-light and she was obliged to leave the gas lighted—the electric light was confined to the shop downstairs—after making him promise that he would not touch it.

“I hope Uncle A. won’t find out,” Rose thought, with the old, apprehensive feeling of half-amused guilt.

In the sitting-room, Uncle Alfred was reading The Pawnbrokers’ Gazette. The boy Felix had already gone downstairs, presumably to Artie Millar’s old sleeping quarters in the shop beside the safe, and Millar himself, the pawnbroker informed his niece, now lived in lodgings at Wimbledon and only came in to business daily.

“Is he married?” Rose inquired. Certain old recollections, that did not amount to emotions, had stirred within her at the sight of her first fancy.

“He is a very God-fearing youth,” said Uncle Alfred, and after a pause sufficient to mark the significance of the word, he added solemnly, “now-a-days. He is not married.”

They exchanged hardly any other conversation, but Rose felt, with a relief as profound as it was inexplicit, that she and her strange, undemonstrative relative were mutually gratified at resuming a tie that, however severely strained by incongruities of temperament, was yet securely founded upon some essential similarity of outlook.

“Whatever else Uncle Alfred is, he’s alive,” Rose reflected. “And those Aviolets at Squires are as dead as mutton—every blessed one of them.”

IX

It appeared paradoxical that, whereas Rose had resented Squires largely on Cecil’s account, she found the familiar life in Ovington Street, agreeable to herself, resented by her little boy.

After the novelty of the first two days, he fretted and was discontented. Rose took him for walks, but when it rained he was obliged to remain in the sitting-room, with no amusement beyond a small musical box that played “Rousseau’s Dream” over and over again, and some old bound numbers of The Quiver.

He missed the garden at Squires, the animals, the rides and drives to which he had become accustomed. As his mother ruefully perceived, he even missed his governess, little Miss Wade. He was not exactly naughty, but lifeless and fretful, and Rose began to see, at first dimly and unwillingly, that her fanciful plan of resuming existence over the pawnbroker’s shop was not destined to mature.

The routine of that life was little changed from the days when she remembered it first.

Breakfast was at eight, and by nine o’clock, Millar had arrived and Felix Menebees had taken the steel door of the shop off its hinges, pushed up the steel blinds, and taken away their grooved supports to the yard at the back of the house. Every day Felix cleaned the windows, threw sawdust on the floor, and swept it up again. The endless task of cleaning and polishing the plate and silver in stock was also his, and Rose gave him the assistance that she had sometimes, in the past, given to Artie Millar. Dinner was at mid-day, and the afternoon work was almost a repetition of the morning’s. At seven the pledge-office shut, and at eight the shop.

It seemed to Rose that even Uncle Alfred’s clients were identical with those she had known years ago. The same shabby women seemed to come in, with the same small pieces of jewellery, faithfully put into pawn every Thursday morning and redeemed every Saturday afternoon. The same depressed and earnest-looking Jews brought in praying-shawls, brass candlesticks, and small brass mortars and pestles, the latter to be redeemed only in time for the Passover. Even the self-same arguments, that had once taken place between Uncle Alfred and various of his clientèle, now took place between them and Artie Millar.

“How much?”

“Thirty bob.”

“Just a moment.”

The moment was the one, or frequently the four or five, during which Millar would examine the gold ring brought by the customer, and find it, in the majority of cases, just below the market weight required for the sum asked.

“Is twenty-five shillings any good to you?”

“No. I want thirty shillings badly. The fact is, the lady friend I’m lodging with is laid up, and I’ve had to get in one or two little things, and there’s been a trouble, like, with the landlord....”

The assistant always ruthlessly cut short these interpolations that as invariably awoke in Rose an eager thrill of interested curiosity.

“Sorry, can’t let you have more than twenty-five shillings; it’s not heavy enough.”

“Could you make it twenty-seven and six?”

Impossible, to Rose, to disappoint that last humble attempt at a compromise. But Artie Millar never seemed to find any difficulty in disassociating sentiment from business.

“Can’t be done. Twenty-five is all I can manage.”

“Very well, let’s have it.”

The client always succumbed, and Artie Millar always concluded by calling out impassively:

“Felix, make out this ticket.”

He seldom asked whether or no the penny for the ticket were forthcoming. His experienced eye told him, apparently, whether it would be produced, or, without words, must be deducted from the money handed over the counter in exchange for the trinket.

Rose felt a little surprised sometimes, recalling her early affair with Millar. Her view of him was now singularly devoid of glamour, and she wondered at the complete absence of the magnetic attraction that each had once had for the other.

“It was youth, I suppose,” she told herself rather wistfully.

It had been youth, also, that had caused her to fall in love with graceless Jim Aviolet, and give herself to him in marriage.

“As bad a day’s work as ever I did in my life,” Rose now summed up that episode to herself with a sigh, adding always with remorseful loyalty, “except for Ces.”

She had Cecil with her all day now, and at night he slept in a cot drawn across the foot of her bed. She felt him to be hers again, as she had never felt him so at Squires, and rejoiced fiercely.

Nevertheless it dawned upon her slowly, but certainly, that Cecil was neither as well nor as happy as he had been at Squires.

Healthy he had always been, but he was not a robust child, and in rather less than a week the difference in diet, the cramped accommodation, and, perhaps, most of all, the absence of country air and exercise, had taken some of the colour from his face and drawn dark lines beneath his eyes.

“Grandmama would say I was selfish, fast enough, if she saw him now, and I’m not sure she’d be so far out as she generally is, either,” Rose reflected desperately.

She consulted Uncle Alfred.

“About how I’m to live, Uncle,” she began abruptly. “What would you say would be a good way for me making money?”

“I thought your husband’s family were providing for you?”

“I mean, supposing I didn’t want them to go on providing for me.”

“Why should I suppose you wishful of casting aside that which the Lord has raised up for the widow and the orphan? Be thankful for their assistance, and do nothing to forfeit it, is my advice to you.”

The Scriptural turns of phrase employed by Mr. Smith rarely interfered with the eminent practicalness of his point of view.

“You don’t know what the life is like, at that place. I’d go mad if I had to go on there year after year. They never do anything but go for walks in the mud and talk about their beastly gardens and their horrid animals.”

“Fashionable folk are very godless, I understand,” said Uncle Alfred.

“I wouldn’t so much mind their being godless—and they aren’t, all—my mother-in-law is as ‘pi’ as can be—but they all seem to me to be half alive. There’s a girl there that they all seem dotty about—I daresay she’ll marry Ford one of these days. Well, I give you my word, Uncle, she’s a perfect fool. She can mess about with dogs and things, and shoot, and they all think she’s clever, just because of that. It shows you what they’re like, doesn’t it?”

“You need not adapt yourself to their standards,” Uncle Alfred said, uncompromising rather than tactful. “But I presume that when your boy once goes to school you will make your home elsewhere.”

“I haven’t made up my mind about Cecil going to school.”

“It is your duty to ensure the advantages of a good education for him, Rose. Did I understand that there is a governess engaged especially for him?”

“Yes. The best of everything is their motto, I will say that for them.”

“H’m. Are they interested in antiques—china and the like?”

“They’ve got more antiques in the house, and have had for about a thousand years, than goes through the shop in a twelvemonth,” returned Rose with candour.

“You can take some catalogues with you when you go back,” said her uncle, unmoved.

“All right. If I do go back.”

“If?”

“Uncle, I do want to bring up Cecil my own way, and I’ve been wondering if him and me need go back to Squires at all.”

“My dear niece, listen to me. You are flying in the face of Providence when you suggest quarrelling with those who are prepared to give your child all the advantages to which he is entitled, but which you yourself are not in a position to bestow upon him. Wealth is dross compared to the riches of the Spirit, and the highest in the land are but as the beasts of the field that perish, if they know not Christ,” said Uncle Alfred with great rapidity, “but you should look upon all these things as being means to an end. You can do a great deal for others with riches at your command.”

His eyes glistened covetously, and Rose remembered her mother’s tolerant verdict that Uncle Alfred was always on the near side, unless it was for a Foreign Mission.

“Haven’t they offered to send Cecil to a good school?”

“Not so much offered, as taken it for granted that I’d want him to go.”

“It is most handsome—most handsome. I consider you a very fortunate woman, Rose. And if, when the boy has gone to school, you wish to return to your old quarters here, I am perfectly prepared to come to an arrangement with you.”

“I’m sure it’s very kind of you, Uncle Alfred, but the fact is, I’m not keen on Ces going to any of their precious schools. What I’m wondering is if him and me couldn’t get off somewhere on our own, and if the Aviolets get their monkey up and cut off my allowance, what I can do to earn enough money for us both.”

“Nothing,” said Uncle Alfred crisply. “Nothing. Untrained young women with no especial aptitude can only earn their living in one profession, and that is not one which I could pollute your ears by mentioning.”

“Goodness, Uncle A., you do pass the most far-fetched remarks,” his niece exclaimed, stifling a laugh.

“Let me hear no more nonsense as to your husband’s relations. God is not mocked, and it would be neither more nor less than deliberate mockery to reject the provision that He has obviously made for you and your child. You must bow to His decrees, and let me tell you that the task, in your case, should be a particularly easy one.”

There was a tone of finality about Uncle Alfred’s delivery of his exordium that Rose knew of old.

His verdict, once given, would never be recalled.

“However, thank goodness, I know Uncle A.,” his niece reflected. “His bark’s worse than his bite, and he’d keep us here, worst come to the worst, if I could scrape up money for our board. Only what can I do with Cecil?”

When she had been away for nearly a fortnight, a letter came from Squires. The sight of the thick blue-grey notepaper, with the stamped address on the corner, brought the atmosphere of the place for an instant into the crowded, untidy bedroom, full of cheap and ugly furniture, where Rose stood and read it.

My dear Rose,

I had hoped to hear from you before this. Could you let me know what day you and Cecil are returning, as I must write to Miss Wade?

I hope the boy is well, and not giving you too much trouble, with no one to relieve you of him. We quite miss him here, and I do not like to think of him in London fogs, which I see by the papers are beginning now. Quite fine weather here since you left, though not much sun, and the poor garden is beginning to look dull.

Yours affectionately,

CATHERINE AVIOLET.

P. S. Ford has been down to Hurst, the preparatory school we thought of for Cecil, and was very favourably impressed. He is anxious to talk it all over with you.

Rose was roused to one of her sudden, vehement furies.

“That settles it! I won’t go back there, nor let Cecil either.”

She dashed into the shop, where Felix Menebees had just put up the shutters.

“Is Mr. Millar there?”

“Here, Mrs. Aviolet.”

“I say, I want to ask you something. Is it true that a person—a child’s guardian—has equal rights with the child’s mother?”

“In what respect, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Any respect,” said Rose impatiently. “If he’s appointed by the child’s father’s will, I mean.”

“Felix, bring me Whittaker’s Almanac,” commanded Millar.

“Oh, will it be there? I never thought of that. It might tell me a lot of things. May I have it?”

“Certainly. If I can be of any assistance——?”

“No, no, I know you’re busy.”

Rose snatched the volume from the hands of Felix Menebees and took it away.

That night she asked Cecil, who was awake and restless when she came to bed:

“Wouldn’t you like to come right away with Mummie somewhere?”

“Away from here?” Cecil asked eagerly. “I’d like to, Mummie. It’s dull here, isn’t it?”

“Poor darling! But you did enjoy the Zoo, and going on the tops of the ’buses, you know.”

“Those were treats,” Cecil observed shrewdly. “Treats are always fun, but when it isn’t a treat day, I don’t like London, Mummie. I’d rather be at home again.”

She realized that by “home” he meant Squires, and that Squires, though she felt it hostile, herself, had been home to his forbears for many generations. She stifled within herself a lurking remorsefulness.

“Wouldn’t it be fun if you and I went in a ship together, to a very nice country place—real country—and stayed there for a bit?”

“Ceylon?” inquired Cecil in a puzzled voice.

“No, no, not as far as that. Perhaps France, or somewhere like that.”

“But aren’t we going back to Squires?”

“I don’t know, lovey.”

“But I want to ride again, and to play cricket. And I want to go to school, where that little boy is who bowls so well.”

Rose realized with dismay the odd tenacity of a child’s memory.

Cecil had begun to cry.

“I don’t like London any more.”

“I’m going to take you away from London, my precious ducky, truly I am.”

“Back to Squires?” sobbed Cecil.

“I don’t know. Don’t cry, lovey. Don’t you feel well?”

She kissed and petted him with vehement affection and secret anxiety at his unwonted fretfulness.

Long after he had fallen asleep, Rose lay wide awake, revolving in her own mind Family Herald schemes for taking Cecil abroad and living there with him under her maiden name, while she earned money for them both by some unspecified means that refused persistently to materialize into a concrete probability.

She could not make up her mind to answer Lady Aviolet’s letter next day, and instead of doing so, took Cecil to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works.

The little boy was wildly excited, and Rose, herself childishly delighted at his pleasure, let him remain there until it was almost closing time.

“We shall be late for supper, Ces. I hope we get a ’bus quickly.”

Mrs. Smith’s training had not led Rose to look lightly upon the taking of cabs.

They came out into Baker Street to find that a thick London fog had enveloped everything.

“Lord! Catch hold of my hand, Ces,” said his mother, dismayed. “This is the pea-soup variety and no mistake. You could cut it with a knife.”

“Why are there no lights? Oh, doesn’t it smell funny! What’s that bell?” chattered Cecil.

Rose paid scant attention to his excitement, beyond gripping him more firmly by the hand.

“I know there’s a policeman at the crossing,” she muttered.

It took them ten minutes to reach the policeman, and a very great deal longer to obey his injunctions and return to Ovington Street by Underground Railway.

Cecil was coughing before they arrived, and that night, for the first time, had a mild attack of croup.

Rose was terrified.

She had never seen croup before, had not the least idea of what to do, and frantically tore downstairs in her dressing-gown in search of Uncle Alfred’s old-fashioned volume of “The Doctor in the Home.”

It was Felix Menebees who turned up the page for her, as soon as he understood why Mrs. Aviolet was in the shop in the middle of the night.

“I’ll find it, and I’ll get what’s wanted. You go back to him,” said the boy, vigorously licking his thumb in order to turn the pages faster.

He heated water for her, and carried it upstairs, and together they plunged little, gasping Cecil into the bath, and watched his terrified face slowly lose its blueish tinge and his laboured breathing gradually become natural.

“He’s better now, Mrs. Aviolet,” said Felix consolingly. “I’ll run out and get the doctor for you, though, if you like.”

“You are a brick. I’ll never forget it, never! Look, he’ll be asleep directly. I don’t think we need have the doctor now, though I’ll have to send for him to-morrow. Go back and get some sleep, Felix. You’ve been so kind and such a help.”

“Don’t mention it, Mrs. Aviolet,” said Felix politely.

He went back to his mattress beside the safe.

Rose sat by the side of the cot where Cecil, still rolled in his dressing-gown under the sheet and blankets, lay asleep against his pillow.

Her yellow hair, thick and straight, kept on falling across her forehead, and she pushed it back, absently, again and again.

Her eyes were fixed upon the child, her thoughts, in her inexperience, full of the terror of losing him.

“He wasn’t ever ill at Squires ... and if he had been, there’d have been Dr. Lucian, and no difficulty about hot water, either, whatever time of night.... Felix was good! The idea of a lad like him getting the mustard for the bath, and helping me, and everything. But if he hadn’t been there, I’d have been properly done—I bet Uncle A. wouldn’t be any more use than a poke in the eye with a dirty stick, and I suppose the girl sleeps like the dead, the same as all servants. That old Dawson would have come, though, at Squires ... and they’d have had ipecacuanha in the house, for certain, and anything one wanted. A fire in his room, most likely, on a night like this. And Cecil was happier there than he is here!”

Tears filled her eyes.

“If I go back, they’ll send him to one of their schools, and he isn’t fit for it—he isn’t fit for it.”

That impassioned conviction was still there, as vehemently as on the night when she had confronted the Aviolets in the drawing-room after dinner, and had made her scene. But Cecil’s illness, and his wistful and unconscious resignation to the lack of those material comforts of which Squires was so prodigal, caused Rose to suffer a new misery of uncertainty.

In the morning, she asked Felix to go for the doctor.

“I’ll stop on my way to fetch the milk, Mrs. Aviolet. How is he?”

“All right, thank goodness. Only just a little bit hoarse, and coughing the tiniest bit. It was all that rotten fog; he isn’t a bit delicate really, and he’s never had croup in his life before.”

She repeated this to the doctor when he came, a common, overworked little man, who barely listened to her.

“All right, all right. He may get another attack about the same time to-night—or he may not. If he does, make him sick—that’ll cut it short. Croup isn’t dangerous, so you needn’t be frightened. Keep him indoors while this weather lasts.”

“In bed?”

“What for? He’s all right, you know. These attacks are nasty while they last, but there’s nothing to make a fuss about. Good-morning, Mrs.—er—H’m.”

The doctor hurried away, leaving Rose to assimilate the difference between Mrs. Jim Aviolet sending for the doctor to come to Squires, and Mrs.—er—H’m summoning medical assistance to the bedroom over the pawnbroker’s shop in Ovington Street.

“I’ve told the girl that she may light the gas-fire in the sitting-room,” Uncle Alfred announced to her later, “so the little chap can go down there; and I’ve put out Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ to amuse him.”

“Thank you very much, Uncle,” said Rose, sincerely grateful.

It was Wednesday, when the shop closed early, and Felix Menebees came upstairs after dinner and said that he would play Halma with Cecil. He blushed all over his pale, spectacled face when Rose thanked him ardently.

“It’s nothing, Mrs. Aviolet. Pleased to do it, I’m sure,” he murmured.

“Well, I’ll go out for a bit. I want some things from the chemist. That doctor seemed to think the croup might come on again to-night, and I’m not going to be taken unawares again, if I know it.”

She went out into the damp, foggy afternoon, very raw and cold.

Her mind misgave her more and more as she thought of writing to Lady Aviolet, announcing that she and Cecil would not return to Squires. How could she cope with the economic problem that might ensue?

The streets seemed to be crowded with shoppers, hurrying, as she herself was hurrying, many of the women holding muffs against their cold faces, as though to protect themselves from the foulness of the atmosphere.

“Mrs. Aviolet!”

Rose turned her head sharply and confronted Lord Charlesbury.

“Oh, I am surprised to see you!” she cried, loudly and naïvely. “I didn’t know you were in London.”

“Then I had the advantage of you, for I saw your brother-in-law yesterday, and he told me you were here. Which way are you going?”

“Only as far as the chemist at the corner there, and then straight back home.”

“It’s beastly weather, isn’t it?” he agreed. “May I come with you?”

“Oh, do,” said Rose.

She was rather surprised at the extent of her own pleasure in the meeting. But he, also, had looked pleased.

Besides, it was nice to walk beside a man again, and have the swing-door of the chemist’s shop pushed open for one, and one’s parcel taken charge of as a matter of course.

“Won’t you let me take you somewhere for some tea? It’s such a dismal afternoon, do take pity on me and cheer me up.”

“Aren’t you busy?”

“My business is done, and I have an hour or more before I need think of catching my train. If you’ve no other engagement yourself——”

“Oh, no. I want to get back to Cecil, but he’ll be all right for a little while. I’d like to come.”

“I’m so glad.” His voice really did sound glad. “Now, where would you like to go?”

“There’s an A.B.C. shop not far from here,” Rose suggested.

“That would be very nice. Or suppose we go to that place in Bond Street—Verreys? Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Then do let me take you there. It’s really quite a nice place.”

He raised his stick for an instant, and a hansom drew up beside the kerb. Rose involuntarily recollected the impassioned gesticulations and shrill whistling with which cabs, when rendered inevitable on account of luggage, were summoned to the door by Uncle Alfred.

“Have you heard from Squires lately?”

“I had a letter from my mother-in-law a few days ago, asking when me and Ces were going back there. And I haven’t answered it yet, either.”

A sigh lifted her breast as she remembered the necessity for answering that letter.

Lord Charlesbury’s kind, grave eyes looked at her with their interested gaze. She suddenly felt that it would be a relief to tell him of her perplexity.

When they were seated at the small table in the warm, lighted restaurant, she did so.

“Look here, I want to tell you something. I’ve practically made up my mind—at least I had till yesterday—not to go back to Squires at all.”

Charlesbury put up his eyeglass with a quick gesture that seemed to indicate that he was startled, but made no reply.

“You’ve seen me there, me and Ces—you know very well we don’t fit in there,” she said defiantly.

“Forgive me if I say that I think that could be put right easily enough, if you were willing to try,” he said gently. “And I’m sure your boy is happy there.”

Rose winced. “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” she curtly admitted. “That’s just what’s threatening to upset my apple-cart. Ces was happy there, in spite of that silly ass of a Wade, and he was well and strong there. He’s been ill since I’ve had him up here. Not really ill, you know, but he had croup last night and he doesn’t look like the same kid.”

“Poor little chap! I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he’s getting better.”

“The croup is better—at least, unless he gets it again to-night. But I don’t think London suits him like the country.”

“Probably not. The country is the place for kiddies, isn’t it, and London is no great catch for any one at this time of year.”

Their tea was brought to them, and Rose poured it out, carefully putting milk into the bottom of each cup first.

“Sugar?”

“No, thanks.”

She dropped two lumps into her own cup and stirred them round and round with her teaspoon, absently, while she went on talking.

“I did think of perhaps taking Ces abroad with me somewhere. One can live awfully cheaply at some of those French places, I believe.”

Lord Charlesbury reflectively answered, “I see,” but it was obvious enough that he was puzzled. At last he said:

“D’you know, I can’t help feeling that there’s something at the back of your mind that I haven’t quite grasped. I’m a stupid fellow, Mrs. Aviolet, and you must help me. What’s the idea of leaving England?”

“I didn’t mean to give any one my address. I don’t want Ford to have anything to do with Cecil’s bringing up.”

“But isn’t he his guardian?”

“Yes,” said Rose viciously. “Thanks to Jim’s absurd will, he is. But isn’t there something called the Law of Extradition—I found it in Whittaker’s Almanac—that would prevent him doing anything in a foreign country? I didn’t understand it all, but it gave me the idea of going abroad.”

“I see,” said Charlesbury again, and passed his hand across his mouth.

“No, I don’t think the Laws of Extradition would really help you very much. For one thing, the legal guardian of a minor has a certain right to determine the minor’s place of residence, and I don’t think Ford Aviolet would care about having your little boy brought up in France. In fact, if you think it over I’m almost sure you won’t really care about the idea yourself, you know. Cecil is English, after all. Don’t you really think it would be better for him to grow up in his own country?”

“Of course I do!” she cried. “But I’ve told you before—and I’ve told them, too—that Cecil isn’t fit for the ordinary English public-school education.”

“I remember.”

Charlesbury remained silent, his face reflective.

Rose stared at him hopefully, half expecting that he would present some hitherto undreamed-of solution to her problem.

“Is there any reason to decide that question of the public school at all, at present? You told me at Squires that it wasn’t the general principles of the public-school system that you disliked, but its application in Cecil’s particular case. Isn’t that so?”

She nodded vehemently.

“Why not wait and see how the boy gets on? Why, it’s at least four years and a half before he could enter any public school. Let Ford put his name down for half a dozen places if he likes, and reserve to yourself the right of re-opening the whole question by the time the boy is old enough for it to be thought of seriously. He may have altered in all sorts of respects by that time.”

“And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile,” said Charlesbury, smiling at her, “let him go back to Squires and get thoroughly strong and healthy. A sound mind in a sound body, you know.... I know you’ll put up with a possibly uncongenial atmosphere for yourself, if it’s for his sake.”

“But that Wade woman won’t stay on for ever. She thinks she’s getting him ready for school, as it is.”

“I hope she is.”

Rose made a quick, protesting movement.

“Don’t be vexed with me,” he said, smiling. “I know you won’t think me impertinent, if I say that I do so want you to go and have a look at Hurst for yourself, one day. Where my boy Hugh is, you know. I think you’d like the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. Lambert. A visit won’t commit you to anything at all, and I think you’d be struck by the amount of individual attention that each boy gets. They’re only little fellows, there, after all, and not more than fifty of them, all told. Mr. Lambert makes a point of their manners and morals, as well as their health. His own boy is in the school, too.”

“I might perhaps go and see the place,” said Rose slowly. “But don’t think for a minute that I’m likely to change about my Cecil. I’m not. As long as he’s what he is, I’m certain he isn’t fit for school.”

“He’s such a little fellow, and they alter so quickly. The faults that trouble you so much now will probably disappear as he grows older and wiser. And do, please, realize that they do really want to do the best thing for him at Squires. Even if they are rather slow, and very conservative.”

“Perhaps the old people do. It isn’t their fault if they’re stupid. But Ford—oh, he’s different!”

Charlesbury smiled at her.

“I don’t think you’ll find Ford nearly so difficult when you get back to Squires.”

She noticed that he was taking her return for granted, but it did not vex her.

“The fact is, I heard a piece of news from him yesterday. They’re probably waiting to tell you till they see you—but I’m going to forestall them, as I’m an old friend, and they must forgive me. Ford Aviolet is going to be married.”

X

Rose opened her brown eyes very wide. “The great Ford! I can guess who it is, can’t I?”

“I expect so,” said Charlesbury, smiling.

“The Grierson-Amberly girl? I thought so. Aren’t the Aviolets delighted about it?”

“I think they are. She’s a distant cousin, you know, and it’s very suitable in every way. I know Lady Aviolet has been hoping for something of the kind; I believe they’ve been rather afraid that Ford would never marry.”

“I suppose they thought no one would ever be good enough for him. I’m certain he thought so himself.”

Lord Charlesbury shook his head. “I wish I knew why you’re so hard on my friend Ford. I grant you that he’s been spoilt, and he has some irritating mannerisms, but he’s all right if you take him the right way. And he has brains, too, which ought to appeal to you.”

Rose smiled frankly at the implied compliment to herself.

“I’m not sure, though, that that isn’t the most sickening thing of all, about Ford. He has got brains. Time and again he could have explained what I really meant about Cecil, for instance, to the old people—and he just didn’t. He could have made them understand things—he’s educated, and I know very well I’m not,” said Rose calmly, “but he never helped me out—not once. The night after you left Squires, them and me had a bit of a flare-up. At least, I was frantic. They were as calm as could be, just thinking what a pity it was I should be so common. I was trying to tell them why I wouldn’t let Ces go to school, but they hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was driving at. They couldn’t understand that a thing which had always been a success in a general way might fail in a particular case. When I tried to explain, they just thought it was because I didn’t know anything about public schools, or because I spoilt Ces, and thought him delicate. Talking to them was like trying to describe a colour to people who’ve been born blind. But not Ford. He understood. He could have made the others see what I meant, even if they hadn’t agreed with me. But he didn’t. Ford hates me.”

“Why should he hate you?”

“I think,” said Rose Aviolet slowly, “that it’s because I’m alive, and Ford isn’t. He can’t get away from traditions. I think he tried to, especially when he went out to South Africa to fight, but he just couldn’t.”

Charlesbury looked keenly at her. “Do you know that you’re something of a psychologist, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“I don’t think I know what a psychologist is, exactly. But that’s what I think about Ford. He just doesn’t fit in. He is a tiny bit different, if you come to think of it—he’s clever, and he likes books, and china, and he reads. And doesn’t he say he’s a Socialist? He breaks away from the Aviolet tradition in those sort of ways, doesn’t he? But what I feel is, that he’s holding on to it with the other hand all the time too. He wants to be alive, but he wants to belong to Squires as well.”

“And the two don’t square. I see,” said Charlesbury reflectively.

“Some people could make them square. You could,” she returned crudely. “But it wants somebody stronger than Ford to do it, and I think he knows it. He’s sort of afraid, isn’t he?”

“That’s, as you say, tradition—holding him back all the time. Perhaps you’re right, and he hasn’t the courage of his emotions.”

“That’s just what I meant,” Rose assented admiringly, “only I couldn’t have described it like that. He hasn’t got the courage of his emotions. And I think, myself, that he’s jealous, downright jealous, because he knows that I have.”

“The things that matter, to you, do matter so very much?”

She nodded. “Ford knows that he doesn’t care about anything in the world one quarter as much as I care about Cecil’s little finger. And I think he wants to care—he wants to come alive.”

“Won’t Diana Grierson-Amberly help him to come alive, now?”

Rose looked at him, as though to see if he were really in earnest, and then uttered a derisive laugh.

“He’ll go down among the dead men for ever and ever now,” she asserted sweepingly. “But they’ll have Aviolet babies, and one of them will cut out my Cecil, thank goodness, and carry on the Squires traditions.”

“You don’t want Squires for your boy?”

“Part of me does, perhaps,” she confessed. “When I see how safe and solid it all is, you know, and when I think of what it means to be poor, and always hard up, and more or less in debt. But I know all the time, really, that Ces would never belong. Not altogether. After all, he’s half Smith. And if you don’t belong, well, it’s like Ford. You’re shamming and struggling and captive, all at the same time. And that’s awful.”

“You are very wise,” said Charlesbury slowly.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Indeed, I’m not. But I do want you, very much, to be wiser still. Won’t you, for Cecil’s sake, compromise, and come back to Squires for a little while?”

“And have them badger me about school again?”

“I don’t think they will. Besides, you know,” he smiled at her, “I’m still secretly hoping that Hurst and Mrs. Lambert will make a difference to your views. You see, supposing Cecil went there for a term or two, it would be simply experiment. It need not commit you to sending him to a public school later on. It may, even, prove to the Aviolets that your idea is correct, and Cecil is unsuited to school-life altogether. Hurst would be the test.”

“It sounds to me like the thin end of the wedge,” said Rose bluntly. “But, at least, you do see my point of view, and don’t talk as if I were a fool that just couldn’t face parting with her darling.”

“I know very well that you only want what will be best for the boy in the long run,” said Charlesbury gravely.

“That’s all. And it isn’t only the long run. It’s now, too. He isn’t well and happy like he was there. I never realized the difference that fresh air, and plenty of room, and the best of everything can make to a kid.”

“It does make a difference,” Charlesbury said levelly. “And moral fitness depends a great deal on physical fitness, doesn’t it, so that one wants to keep them up to the mark, from every point of view.”

Rose gazed at him, her honest, startled eyes full of a new apprehension.

“You mean that it mayn’t even be the best thing for his—his character, to take him away from Squires? Oh, I never thought of that.”

Charlesbury let her assimilate it in silence, her strong, capable hand twisting the wedding-ring on her big, straight-cut finger.

At last she lifted her head. “Perhaps you’re right. And, anyway, I don’t know how I can stand him being ill, and not comfortable. Though mind you,” she added with sudden warmth, “my Uncle Alfred that I’m with, he’s as kind as ever he can be, and had a fire lit on purpose for Ces—and he’s on the near side, is Uncle A., so it means something, coming from him. But, of course, his house isn’t run like Squires is, not by long chalks, and there’s no use pretending it is.”

“Very few houses are as comfortable as Squires. And I know Lady Aviolet looks forward to having Cecil there again. She told me so.”

“They think I’m coming back all right?”

“Certainly they do. I don’t think it’s ever entered their minds that you should do anything else.”

Rose laughed in a rather shame-faced manner. “Perhaps that’s as well. No one likes eating humble pie, now, do they? I’d just as soon they didn’t know I thought of not coming back at all—if I do go back, that is.”

“I think you mean ‘When I do go back,’ don’t you?” said Charlesbury with his friendly smile. “Why not let me send off a telegram for you, saying you’ll be back by the three o’clock train to-morrow? I don’t mind betting you’ll find sunshine in the country.”

“Wouldn’t that be good for Ces!” she murmured aloud wistfully. “Well, I suppose I’ll do it. One thing is, they’ll be too busy about Ford to think much about me.”

“Of course they will. A wedding is always an excitement.”

“I shouldn’t think my in-laws could ever get excited about anything, any more than a couple of old cod-fish,” said Mrs. Aviolet nonchalantly. “But it’ll be something to talk about, besides Cecil’s going to school and that everlasting old garden. I must get back now to Cecil,” she added abruptly.

Lord Charlesbury asked for his bill, and paid it, in spite of an ungracefully worded attempt from Rose to make herself responsible for her own share.

He took her to Ovington Street in a hansom, and they sent a telegram, on the way, to Lady Aviolet, to announce Rose’s return.

“Good-bye,” said Rose, at the door of the pawnshop. “It’s early closing to-day. I’m going in by the area. Thank you for the tea.”

“I’m so glad to have seen you. Thank you for giving me one of the pleasantest afternoons that I’ve spent for a long while.”

“I haven’t made you late for your train, have I?” she cried in sudden alarm.

“No, there’s plenty of time. I shall keep this fellow on and go straight to the station. I hope the little chap will be all right to-night, and I shall think of you both in the country to-morrow. Good-bye.”

Rose ran upstairs, astonished at finding herself committed to an immediate return to Squires, and yet surprisingly unperturbed at the prospect.

She found Cecil entertaining Felix Menebees with stories of his life in Ceylon, to which she did not allow herself to pay conscious attention. The little boy was not coughing, but he looked pale and languid, and her heart contracted strangely at his sudden flush of joy when she told him that they would go back to the country next day.

“Oh, Mrs. Aviolet!” said Felix Menebees, and looked at her in dismay through his spectacles.

“It’ll be the best thing to put him right, won’t it?” Rose said. “And we’re really only supposed to be here on a visit, you know. But we shall be back again one of these days, I expect.”

She had only the vaguest of projects in her mind, besides the desire to cheer the disconsolate Felix, but Cecil, with one of the sudden, uncanny intuitions of childhood, put the idea into words for her.

“Mummie’ll come here when I’ve been sent to school, Felix. And perhaps I’ll spend some of my holidays here, and tell you all about my school.”

“You know nothing about it,” cried his mother abruptly. “Come on, lovey, say good-night to Felix and thank him for being so kind to you.”

She hurried him upstairs to bed.

At supper, Uncle Alfred learned that his guests were proposing to leave him on the morrow.

“You are very impetuous, Rose,” he remarked with displeasure. “Why not have warned me of your intentions earlier? The girl, by my instructions, has ordered butcher’s meat for to-morrow, entirely on your child’s account.”

Rose entered whole-heartedly into this practical objection to her scheme.

“If it hasn’t been delivered yet, couldn’t we stop it?”

“I will speak to the girl.”

“It isn’t that we haven’t been happy, as you very well know, Uncle Alfred. But I daresay the country will get rid of Cecil’s cough before it’s got a hold on him, so to speak, and they’re expecting us back at Squires.”

“If you’ve told them you’re coming to-morrow, you must abide by it,” Uncle Alfred declared gloomily. “It’s worse than useless to have extra food ordered in twice over. Are they expecting you?”

“Yes, they are.”

Rose dared not admit to the telegram. The sight of a telegram was not infrequent at Squires, but in Ovington Street, a telegram signified a first cause of considerable magnitude. She knew that Uncle Alfred would have considered that a post-card could sufficiently announce the date and hour of her arrival, and in her heart, Rose agreed with him. The telegram had been Lord Charlesbury’s doing, like so much else.

Cecil had no return of croup, and the next day they left the rooms over the pawnshop.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Aviolet,” said Felix Menebees wistfully. “I hope the country will do Cecil a great deal of good.”

“Good-bye, Felix. Thank you for what you did that night he was ill. I’ll never forget it. I expect you’ll see us here one of these days again.”

Rose heartily shook the pale youth’s hand.

Her farewell to Artie Millar, in whom she had long ceased to be interested, was tepid by comparison. Uncle Alfred addressed his parting speech to his guests from the top of the stairs, where he had received them a fortnight earlier.

“Good-bye to you, Rose, good-bye to you, my little fellow. You are extremely fortunate in having one of the stately homes of England, as the poet calls them, thus thrown open to you. I feel sure,” said Uncle Alfred, with a doubting eye fixed upon his niece, “I feel certain that you appreciate your good fortune to the full. And I am equally sure, my dear niece, if you will allow an old man to speak a word in season, that you will remember from Whom all blessings flow. Take no credit unto yourself for those things which are Cæsar’s. And remember that I am prepared to enter into an arrangement with you, Rose, at any time, should you wish to return here when your boy has gone to school.”

Rose quite understood that this was the nearest approach to a cordial invitation that Uncle Alfred would permit himself, and enough of his blood ran in her own veins for her to take the suggested “arrangement” in the matter-of-course spirit in which he proposed it.

She said, “Thanks very much indeed, Uncle,” in an affectionate way, kissed him resoundingly, and ran downstairs.

Cecil was in high spirits. “Shall I ride the pony again, Mummie, and will Uncle Ford let me carry the rabbits for him when he’s been shooting?”

“I daresay, darling.”

“Will Miss Wade be there?”

“Yes. Are you glad?”

“I’ll be able to tell her all about London,” said Cecil reflectively. “I don’t think she knows much about London, Mummie.”

As the train took them further away from the city, the air lightened, and they presently ran into clear autumn sunshine.

At the end of the journey, the carriage from Squires was awaiting them.

Their return, which Rose looked upon as a milestone, roused no excitement at Squires.

“How are you, my dear?” said Lady Aviolet placidly, and gently bumped Rose’s face with her own. She kissed her grandson with more cordiality, remarked that he was looking pale, and told him that Miss Wade was returning from her holiday the next day.

“And you’ll have to work hard at your lessons, Cecil, to make up for your time away.”

“I went to Madam Tussawds in London,” Cecil announced.

“Mme. Tussaud,” said Lady Aviolet.

“Mummie says Tussawd.”

“Don’t answer back, Cecil, it’s a bad habit. Ring the bell for the hot water, and we’ll have tea.”

The silver kettle and the hot scones, the cut bread-and-butter and the various cakes, seemed oddly elaborate after Ovington Street.

“What a good tea!” said little Cecil.

Neither Ford nor Sir Thomas was present.

“We have a piece of news for you, Rose,” her mother-in-law presently said, when Cecil had been sent away in Dawson’s charge to the nursery.

“I think I know already.”

“Indeed?”

“I met Lord Charlesbury yesterday, and he told me—about Ford, isn’t it?”

“Did you meet Laurence Charlesbury?”

“Yes. I had tea with him.”

To her own disgust, Rose suddenly heard her voice becoming loud and defiant.

“Oh, yes—how nice! Where did you meet?”

“In the Brompton Road, and we went to a place in Bond Street. He told me that Ford is engaged to be married.”

“Yes, my dear, to Diana. Sir Thomas and I are very pleased about it. Let me give you another cup of tea?”

“No, thanks. Do tell me how it all happened.”

Rose, however much she might dislike Ford, and however cheaply she might hold Diana, was quite incapable of being anything but thrilled and excited over every detail concerning an engagement.

“How it happened?” Lady Aviolet repeated with a certain blankness.

“When did he propose to her and where, and has he given her a ring yet?” Rose earnestly inquired.

Lady Aviolet laughed gently. “How very nice of you to be so much interested in them!”

Her voice held the intonation that generally accompanies the words, “How very foolish of you ...” but she looked at Rose with her usual bleakly kind obtuseness of gaze.

“I believe, since you want so much to hear details, that they settled it in the train, last Saturday. Ford had been to see a man on business, and on his way back he met Diana at the Junction. She was travelling home—with her maid, of course—from some visit or other, and they got into the same train.”

“Is she—are they—does she—are they very much in love?” Rose blurted out, intensely curious.

“They’ve known one another all their lives, you know. Ford has always been very devoted to her, and I’m sure she is to him. Diana is such a thoroughly nice girl.”

“Has he been in love with her long?”

“I really couldn’t tell you, my dear. One always felt that if Ford did ask any girl to marry him, it would probably be Diana. But two or three men have very much wanted to marry her, and I’ve sometimes been afraid that Ford might delay too long.”

“Have they really?”

Rose’s voice held all the astonishment that she invariably experienced at each allusion to the attractions of Miss Grierson-Amberly.

“She could have made a most excellent marriage the year she came out. But her mother, of course, would never have dreamt of persuading her in any way, though I believe she was disappointed at the time. But they’re delighted about this, now, and so all is very well.”

“When are they going to be married?”

“Well, that’s hardly settled yet. Diana is coming to stay here for a little while, we hope, next month, and no doubt they’ll arrange it then. I hope it may be some time in the spring or early summer.”

“I do love weddings,” said Rose emphatically.

“Do you, my dear?” Lady Aviolet’s voice, though amiable, displayed not the least interest in Rose’s gushing enthusiasms.

“There will be a good deal of business to be settled before their wedding takes place, quite apart from Diana’s preparations, and her trousseau and things. Of course, in a sense, this alters your little Cecil’s prospects, but I think you can trust Ford to see that his interests are considered in every possible way.”

“I only hope to goodness,” said Rose fervently, “that Ford and Diana will have half a dozen kids of their own.”

A certain quality of taken-abackness in the silence that ensued conveyed to Rose that her aspirations might be open to the accusation of a lack of delicacy.

With unwonted discretion, she did not endeavour to rectify the mistake by volubly explaining it.

She found, to her surprise, that her stay in London had the effect of rendering Squires more bearable to her. She appreciated anew the material comfort of the big, luxurious house, and was happy when she saw Cecil regaining his colour and his appetite.

Ford was very often away, sometimes in London on business connected with his marriage, and sometimes at Diana’s home on the other side of the county.

He received Rose’s congratulations, which were curt, with his habitual equanimity, and added, after thanking her:

“You need not be afraid that Cecil’s interests will be allowed to suffer by this, Rose.”

“I wasn’t.”

“His welfare still remains one of my first responsibilities,” said her brother-in-law suavely.

She made no answer.

A little later on, Diana Grierson-Amberly came to stay at Squires.

She was friendly to Rose, very kind to Cecil, deferentially affectionate to Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet—but then she had been all of these things before. Equally, her manner towards Ford was almost unaltered.

Her nearest approach to an endearment was “My dear old boy,” and she displayed neither blush nor tremor at the mild, stereotyped jokes about engaged couples in which her future father-in-law occasionally indulged.

To Diana, it was evidently all relegated to the same class as that which she cheerfully and pleasantly hailed as “chaff.”

She seemed amused, if also faintly gratified, by Rose’s schoolgirl excitement.

“What’s your ring? Oh, it’s lovely! What an enormous diamond! Are diamonds your favourite stones?”

“Yes, I think they are. Ford had several down from Hunt’s for me to choose from. He’s given me a beautiful pendant too, but I shan’t wear that till I’m married.”

She uttered the words most matter-of-factly, and Rose remembered her own brief, delirious engagement to Jim, and the glamour of romance that had surrounded every token of their hastily plighted troth.

“But then,” she reflected, “I was much younger than Diana, and I’d never had a proposal before, and apparently she’s had dozens—God knows why, or what any one can see in her. And she’s known Ford all her life, and I’d only known Jim three weeks, and come to that, I’d have done better never to have set eyes on him—except for my Ces.”

But although her habit of facing facts refused to allow Rose the sentimental luxury of a slurred retrospect, she felt very certain that her short-lived and exceedingly ill-starred love-affair had given her such moments of bliss as Diana, in her decorous betrothal, had never known, and never would know. Diana, however, in place of these, had a number of very substantial satisfactions.

She was much absorbed in her trousseau, a great part of which was being made for her at one of the many charitable institutions in which Lady Aviolet was interested, and she received an enormous number of wedding presents, testifying to her own popularity as well as to the good-will of her friends and relations.

There was also, to occupy her, the question of her new home.

“Naturally, we want to live in the country and to stick to these parts,” said Diana.

“I suppose so.” Rose’s acquiescence was dubious.

“I don’t really think it would be a good plan to start at Squires, do you?”

“Rotten.”

“I’m very fond of Cousin Catherine, and all of them, and they’ve been perfectly sweet to me, always, but Mother says, and I must say I agree with her—that those arrangements are always rather a risk.”

“I should think so.”

“I’ve got heaps of ideas for furnishing. You must help me choose the chintzes and things, won’t you?”

“I’d love to,” said Rose, gratified.

She was ready to take an eager interest in their selection, and in fact did so, but the violent blues and purples that she admired accorded ill with the blended art-shades preferred by Diana. They agreed better over the furniture, for Rose had imbibed from Uncle Alfred a genuine respect for what she termed “the antiques line” and Diana shared Ford’s fondness for picking up possible bargains in second-hand shops.

Once or twice Rose accompanied the bride-elect on such expeditions when Ford was not available. She felt herself to have done Diana a service by arguing so violently with the old proprietor of the curiosity-shop they visited that he at last parted with the Empire gilt mirror selected by Diana for a price that was very little above its intrinsic value.

Diana, however, seemed more embarrassed than obliged, and did not again invite Rose to shop with her.

It was finally arranged that the wedding should take place early in June, and Diana lost herself in a maze of letter-writing, consulting of catalogues, and trying-on of clothes.

She paid another visit to Squires three weeks before the date of her wedding, and declared her intention of having a thorough rest.

Rose thought her indeed looking tired and with something less than her usual well-bred security of manner.

“Isn’t all this preliminary fuss rather awful?” she one day abruptly inquired.

“How do you mean, Rose?”

Rose had no aptitude for definitions. “I know I should hate it, that’s all,” she said vaguely. “But I was only engaged a week.”

“But why?” Diana inquired, politely puzzled.

“Oh, it all happened on board ship, and I had a row with the woman I was travelling with, and I didn’t know anybody out there, so Jim just had to fix things up as quickly as he possibly could, and we were married two days after we landed. A woman who’d been on the boat was kind to me, and had me to stay with her till the wedding——”

“But how dreadful for you—and you must have been so very young, too!”

“Seventeen, I was.”

“I’m very glad I wasn’t married at seventeen,” said Diana, with an unaccustomed wistfulness that robbed the words of any offensive intention. “I think one’s so romantic at seventeen, don’t you? I mean, one expects so much.”

“So one ought to, in marriage,” Rose declared stoutly. “I daresay you know that I made rather a hash of things myself, but I do believe one can be most frightfully happy in this world, whatever any one says. It can be more glorious than one’s maddest dreams——”

She stopped short. Diana had attempted her usual rather meaningless little laugh, but had broken down half-way.

“What’s the matter?” said Rose. She put out her hand rather timidly, but Diana did not repulse it—rather did she appear to cling to the big, warm, enveloping grasp.

“Are you frightened?” asked Rose wonderingly.

“I’m tired and—and silly, I daresay. You see, it’s such a tremendous step in one’s life, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Rose energetically. “And it lasts for ever, too. At least, unless they die, like mine did, but you can’t marry on the off-chance of that, after all.”

“Oh, don’t!”

“I didn’t mean that I thought you meant that,” Rose explained, with habitual lucidity. “I suppose you wouldn’t be marrying him, unless you felt sure?”

“No,” said Diana faintly.

Rose looked at her. “You know, it’s still not too late, if you don’t feel perfectly certain. I know how awful it would be, after all those good, expensive presents, and all the money that’s been spent on furnishing the house, too—but, if I were you, I’d chuck it all up now, sooner than do it when you don’t really feel like it. I don’t suppose I’d have married Jim, you know, if I’d been a bit older, but I did have a certain amount of run for my money, because I was in love with him—at first. Just enough to show me that if one really cared, and the man did too—it would simply be heaven.”

“That’s what they say in books.”

“Well, I suppose that the people who write the books know,” said Rose simply.

Diana began to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“I don’t know why I’m so silly and unlike myself. Of course, I’ve known him all my life, and we’ve always been fond of one another. It’s only that being married to a man is—is rather frightening, in a way, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t be, if you loved him.” Rose was staunch to her creed. “When I was a schoolgirl my mother used to tell me that when one really cared about a man, one cared with one’s body as well as one’s soul. And nothing to be ashamed of, either, she used to say.”

That Diana did not share Mrs. Smith’s opinion was evident. Her fair face and neck crimsoned.

“Oh, please——” she said hurriedly, and burst into tears.

“You poor kid! I’m awfully sorry—I didn’t mean to upset you!”

“It’s all right—I’ll go to my room. I don’t think I can be very well. Do forgive me for being so stupid.”

She hastened to the door, but Rose caught her hand again and said very earnestly:

“Look here, just half a minute. Listen: if you do really feel that you can’t carry on with this Ford business, will you tell me, and I swear I’ll stand all the racket for you—tell him myself, even if it’s only five minutes before he starts for the wedding—and—and——”

Diana wrenched her hand away. “I know you mean to be kind, but you mustn’t talk like that. I’m tired, and silly, and I’ve made you think all sorts of nonsense. Please, please forget it—and don’t let’s ever speak about it again.”

Her voice broke once more, and she hurried upstairs, leaving Rose staring blankly after her.

XI

The wedding duly took place in June.

Ford and Diana went to the Channel Islands, and Lady Aviolet, in a quiet, relentless manner, began to urge upon Rose once more the question of school for Cecil.

“He’s improving very much in every way, under Miss Wade, but it’s time he saw something of other boys. It is such a handicap to be an only child. I don’t say it’s urgent—but I do say, go and look at various places. There’s Hurst, now——”

It was not Lady Aviolet’s arguments that prevailed upon Rose at last, but the recollection of her conversation in London with Charlesbury, and—still more—a renewal of nursery tragedy.

Rose, persisting in a habit that was silently, but intensely, disapproved of by Miss Wade, and entering the nursery unexpectedly, discovered the governess in fits of spasmodic laughter before a paper that she held in her hand.

Cecil, his back turned to her, appeared to be absorbed in gazing out of the window. He did not turn round at his mother’s entrance. Rose’s intuition, far more developed than her reasoning powers, warned her of tension in the atmosphere.

“What’s up?”

“I think this will amuse you, Mrs. Aviolet,” tittered the governess.

She handed to Rose the paper, that bore a strange, pencilled outline, resembling a depressed fox rather than anything else, with the words, “This is Puge,” printed underneath in Cecil’s straggling round-hand.

“That is Cecil’s idea of poor Pug,” Miss Wade remarked, in a tone that exploited the comical inadequacy of the conception. “I tell him that he must learn the rules of drawing before he tries anything quite so ambitious as a portrait again.”

Rose gazed at the drawing. It was very poor, indeed, even for eight years old, but she experienced no particular amusement at the sight of it.

“Cecil’s like me—can’t draw a straight line,” she said. “Come here, lovey.”

She had felt dimly afraid that Cecil was resentful of Miss Wade’s tactless ridicule, but she was not prepared for the furious little face that he turned upon her.

“You’re not to look at my drawing—Miss Wade isn’t to look at my drawing!” he cried angrily. “I didn’t say she might look at it!”

The little boy made an ineffectual dash at the paper held above his grasp by the governess.

“Cecil! That’s not at all the way to speak. Just because you can’t stand a little chaff.”

“Don’t, Ces—stop that!” Rose caught hold of him.

“You’re not to laugh at my drawing!” he shrieked.

“I’m not laughing at it. Be quiet this instant.” Rose gave him a hearty shaking, and Cecil burst into tears.

“Good gracious me, what a fuss about nothing! Miss Wade didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Rose rashly asserted.

“Cecil must learn to take a little friendly chaff good-humouredly,” said Miss Wade in a rather vicious-sounding voice. “I’ve noticed before that he’s very touchy—absurdly touchy. What will you do at school, I should like to know, Cecil? To fly out like that just because one doesn’t think everything that you do is perfect. Silly little boy!”

Cecil, who had been sobbing comparatively calmly after his mother’s brief and vigorous ministrations, was screaming, quivering, and stamping with renewed passion by the end of Miss Wade’s speech.

“I never said you might look at my picture! It isn’t fair—you’ve no right to—pig, pig—I hate you.... It isn’t badly drawn; I drew it like that on purpose. I spelt ‘Pug’ wrong on purpose.... I——”

“Cecil, you know that’s not true——”

“Oh, shut up,” cried Rose with sudden anger, turning on the governess.

“Mrs. Aviolet!”

“Well, can’t you see he doesn’t know what he’s saying?”

But this was as disastrous as any inspiration of Miss Wade’s.

“I do know what I’m saying.... It is true.... I drew it badly for fun.... I can draw much better than any one.... I can——”

The nursery door opened again and Lady Aviolet came in.

“What’s this disgraceful noise? I heard you from the garden, Cecil.”

“He’s a very naughty boy indeed, I’m sorry to say.”

Rose picked up the struggling, sobbing Cecil in her strong arms and carried him bodily into the next room, where she threw him on the bed.

“Don’t you stir from there, now,” she panted.

She stood for a moment by the door, and saw him rolling round, his head buried in the pillow, before she left him, closing the door behind her.

“I’ve never seen him like that before,” she helplessly declared.

“Neither have I,” Miss Wade admitted. “I’ve never thought him a passionate child. And all about nothing, as you might say!”

“Is this ridiculous drawing business the only thing that’s gone wrong? Was there really nothing else?” Rose demanded.

“Nothing.”

They looked at one another in a common dismay.

“I should like to hear the whole story,” said Lady Aviolet, determination evident in her deliberate selection of a chair for herself.

Miss Wade repeated the trivial episode, and its totally disproportionate climax.

“He was just angry because you laughed at him?”

“I suppose so. Not that I should think so much of that, Lady Aviolet, in a child that isn’t used to other children and has never learnt to give and take, or to tease and be teased—but the temper! The rage!! The expressions he used!!! And worst of all, the readiness to say what isn’t true. It’s the old, old failing, you know. Declaring that he’d done it badly on purpose, you know—his mother heard him.”

“He didn’t know what he was saying,” Rose repeated roughly.

“That makes it so much the worse, my dear,” her mother-in-law unexpectedly remarked. “It’s almost as though the poor child lied by instinct, not caring what nonsense he may be talking.”

“I thought him nearly cured, too,” said Miss Wade mournfully. “I’m afraid—I really am afraid, Lady Aviolet—that I’ve failed with Cecil. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to say such a thing of a pupil, but I do certainly feel that, except as regards mere book-learning, he’s made little or no progress since I’ve had him. The truth is, there have been too many interruptions—a divided authority—” she glanced resentfully at Cecil’s mother.

Rose, with her arms akimbo, stood staring back at her with brooding, lowering gaze.

“I’m sure it’s very honest of you, Miss Wade, to tell us what you feel, like that,” said Lady Aviolet. “It’s not your fault, I feel sure. It’s just what I’ve always said: Cecil is a spoilt little boy—yes, my dear Rose, he is—and school is what he requires. He doesn’t know how to stand being laughed at, he doesn’t speak the truth, and now he’s flying into these naughty rages. It’s more than time that he left home.”

“Sorry though I am to say it, I quite agree with you, Lady Aviolet. I should like to look out for another situation at the end of the month, if you please.”

Thus Miss Wade, very red, and with compressed lips.

“Well, well”—Lady Aviolet rose—“we’re in no hurry to settle that, Miss Wade, if you’re not. But I certainly do think, after this, that there can be no question about delaying school any longer. We shall see what Ford says.”

“Seeing what Ford said” was with Lady Aviolet the inevitable concomitant to any suggestion. Before he came home again, however, Rose took the law into her own hands.

She announced abruptly that she was going down to Hurst.

“But, my dear, Ford has already been there. He can tell you all about it.”

Why on earth couldn’t one be allowed to take any step without this eternal, relentless, and yet bloodless, opposition, Rose thought angrily.

“Well, I’m going just the same. I want to see it for myself.”

“Very well, my dear. I suppose you will make an appointment with the headmaster—I think his name is Lambert. I believe he has a particularly charming wife, who does a great deal for the boys.”

“Yes.”

“I will come with you, if you like. I should like to see the place.”

Rose looked at her mother-in-law with candid disapproval. “I’d rather not, thank you. I hope you won’t think me a pig,” she added with an effort.

Lady Aviolet did not say that she thought Rose a pig. She made an unsmiling gesture of submission.

“Just as you prefer. I shall get plenty of opportunities later on, I hope, when the little chap is settled there.”

“I thought Henrietta Lucian could come with me,” said Rose.

“The doctor’s sister? If you wish it, my dear, no doubt she will be quite ready to do so.”

“I like her very much,” said Mrs. Aviolet aggressively.

“Do you, my dear? Let me know when you want to go, so as not to clash with any plans. The Marchmonts are coming over to lunch one day next week, I hope.”

Rose gloomily undertook not to interfere with the visit of the Marchmonts, inexpressibly dull as she had always felt them to be. She made an appointment with the headmaster at Hurst, and obtained the companionship of Miss Lucian on her expedition. She was fond of Henrietta Lucian, both for a certain terse humour that was entirely lacking in the society of Squires, and for her matter-of-fact acceptance of little Cecil’s foible, and robust affection for him. Rose found it a relief to have her intention of visiting Hurst taken for granted, without reference to its entailing any future decision. She felt able to put into words a fact that had hitherto vexed her spirit almost too deeply for utterance.

“You know they’ve managed to make Ces perfectly wild to come to this place.”

Rose’s “they” was always unmistakable.

“It’s natural.”

“Of him? I know it is. But it makes it much harder for me to stick to what I’ve said about his not going.”

“Do you mean to stick to it, then?”

“Well, honestly, I don’t know. I’ll see what this blooming place is like. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d ever even think of school for him, after all I’ve said against it, I’d have called you no better than a liar. But I’ve had to own that I don’t seem to be making a great hand of keeping him away. I thought at first that if I had him to myself, it’d be better, but when we were in London, him and me, it wasn’t really a great success. He wasn’t well, for one thing, and he was always talking about the games and animals and things at Squires, poor lamb. And that governess, that Miss Wade, hasn’t done him any good, for all her rotten little books on education. She hasn’t cured him of telling fibs.”

“Poor little man!”

“Nothing seems to do him any good, that way. I know they’ve told him a whole lot about God, and how He hates lies, and always knows when people aren’t speaking the truth, and so on and so forth. I never could stuff him up with all that, myself, not knowing much about it, or caring either.”

“It might be an incentive to Cecil to speak the truth. I shouldn’t discourage any motive that might help him.”

“I wouldn’t for the world,” said Rose. “Only it doesn’t, you see. Make any difference, I mean. I can’t see that he cares a hang whether God minds his telling lies or not. I don’t believe he knows when he’s telling them.”

“It’s probably a bad habit, like any other. He’ll either grow out of it, or leave it off when he finds out for himself that the game isn’t worth the candle. School might teach him that, you know.”

Miss Lucian’s arguments might not be original, but Rose received them thankfully enough in her new perplexity.

The pleasant, spacious building called Hurst made a favourable impression on her, and she met Mr. Lambert without any of the repressed hostility that the mere mention of his name had always roused in her at Squires.

He was a tall, curly-haired man with an agreeable manner, much younger than Rose had expected him to be. She was naïvely pleased and flattered because he spoke to her almost at once of “Cecil,” as though he felt an interest in the boy sufficiently great to have remembered his name.

They were shown the class-rooms, dining-room, dormitories, gymnasium, the Chapel, and the playing-fields, and finally taken through a red baize door beyond which Mrs. Lambert had her drawing-room.

“Let me introduce my wife, Mrs. Aviolet and Miss Lucian.”

Mrs. Lambert also looked younger than Rose had expected her to look, and her round, freckled face was pretty and good-humoured, with big blue eyes glowing like dark jewels under an open forehead and curling brown hair.

She talked very freely and enthusiastically about the school, and her warmth of manner drew Rose towards her very strongly. She listened eagerly to Mrs. Lambert’s practical assurances.

“They really do get enough to eat, you know. I can so well understand any mother feeling dreadful about letting her boy go all by himself to a strange place—but truly, Mrs. Aviolet, I promise you they’re well looked after. My own little boy is in the school, you know. You shall see him, and then you can tell whether he’s a good advertisement.” Her gay, jolly laugh was justified by the appearance of the boy, a healthy, happy-looking specimen, who ran into the room, shook hands, and then burst out with some eager petition to his father.

“Stuff for marking the tennis-court? Of course you can, old chap. Come along and we’ll find it—if Mrs. Aviolet will excuse us? But I daresay you’d like a talk with my wife.”

Mrs. Lambert nodded. “Please do let’s, Mrs. Aviolet. I find it’s such a help with the boys if I can say that I know their mummies a little bit. And from the other point of view, too, of course it helps one to understand a boy if one has a talk with the parents.”

“May I come and see the tennis-court?” said Miss Lucian, and she rose and went out with Mr. Lambert and his son.

Mrs. Lambert sat silent for a moment, looking expectantly at Rose.

At last she said gently: “If you do settle to trust us with your boy, I do want you to feel happy about him. I’ll write to you myself every few days, just at first, and tell you how he’s settling down. It’s wonderful how quickly they get accustomed to it all. Is Cecil fond of games?”

“Yes, but he’s not good at them, yet.”

“That’s sure to come later. He’s an only child, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So’s mine. I do feel it’s a drawback to them, poor darlings, but at least it’s better for a boy than for a girl. They do get to school.”

Rose, preoccupied with a newly born impulse, according to her usual policy, made no effort to disguise her wandering attention.

Mrs. Lambert looked slightly perplexed.

“Won’t you ask me anything you like?” she said at last. “Please don’t think I shan’t understand. I shall, really. It always seems to me so hard for the mothers.”

Rose roused herself suddenly, her decision taken at the same moment.

“You are kind. I never imagined you’d be in the least like this. The fact is I’ve always been dead against school for Cecil, at all. He’s not like other children, in a way. I don’t mean that he’s wanting, you know,” she added hastily.

“I never supposed you did! But what is it, exactly?”

“He doesn’t speak the truth,” said Rose curtly.

There was a pause.

Then Mrs. Lambert nodded her head. Her expression, though graver, still remained sympathetic and full of optimistic cheerfulness.

“Well, that’s a bad fault, of course, and one’s always sorry to see it. But, of course, we’ve had boys like that before. It’s quite a common thing, in fact.”

“You won’t tell your husband, will you? It doesn’t seem fair to Cecil, somehow.”

“Very well. But I can’t help being glad you’ve told me, Mrs. Aviolet. It makes it so much easier to help the poor little fellow if one knows where the weak spot is. My husband will find it out, of course, but I promise not to tell him a word beforehand, though—honestly—I think it would be much the best thing if you’d tell him yourself.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I’ve been worried to death about the whole thing,” said Rose with violence. “Everybody talking as though Ces was the worst and most wicked child in England, just because his father married me.”

Mrs. Lambert ignored the embarrassing personality. “But heaps of children tell fibs—some of them go on till they’re quite big. I’ve known cases, myself——”

“Yes,” Rose said doubtfully. “It isn’t absolutely an unheard of thing, after all. And they do get cured, don’t they?”

“Oh, but of course. It’s just a fault, like any other. I’m sure it can be overcome, if one’s patient and hopeful. And especially in the case of such a young child as your Cecil.”

“And what do you think about school for him? Have you had boys like that before?”

“Yes,” declared Mrs. Lambert stoutly. “Lots of little boys tell stories, if they’re constitutionally timid, or if they’ve been left to servants too much. And Will—my husband—would never be hard on a boy, you know. He thoroughly disbelieves, and so do I, in frightening children.”

“What would he do, then, with a boy who didn’t speak the truth?”

“Well, I don’t ever interfere in matters of school discipline, you know, but I’m pretty sure he’d do every single thing to try and make it easy for the boy to own up. And if he’d actually told a lie, and Will had to punish him, he’d talk to him and tell him why it was. Even quite untruthful children cure themselves in a very short time if they’re put on their honour, and trusted, we’ve always found. It’s a horrid fault, but they outgrow it fairly young, as a rule.”

There was an almost casual assurance about Mrs. Lambert’s point of view that brought a sense of relief, a conviction of having monstrously exaggerated her problem, to Rose.

“They always do outgrow it, in the end?”

Mrs. Lambert laughed a little, gently. “Oh, I think so, don’t you? The moral sense develops, later on ... and, besides, to put it on the lowest ground, they soon find that fibbing isn’t worth while. They always get found out, bless their hearts, most of them do it so badly!”

“Cecil’s stories are often very silly ones—things that no one could be taken in by, seriously.”

“That’s just it!” the schoolmaster’s wife declared briskly. “It shows they aren’t really deceitful, doesn’t it? And I do honestly think the school atmosphere is a thoroughly healthy one, you know. They spend a tremendous amount of time in the open air and they get keen about the games, and they really haven’t much time for naughtiness!”

In a vague way, that she did not seek to analyze, it comforted Rose to hear the reiteration of that trivial adjective, “naughty.”

In Mrs. Lambert’s smiling mouth, it seemed to denude Cecil’s characteristic of some sinister significance that Rose was not able to specify.

“I’ve been worried to death about him,” she again admitted. “Have you truly known boys like that before?”

“My dear Mrs. Aviolet—but of course! I think, between ourselves, that an exaggerated view is taken of that sort of thing. I don’t mean for a minute that truth isn’t the most important thing in the world—of course it is—but quite a lot of children really don’t seem to understand the value of truth while they’re quite little. It all comes later, and I do think boys are so good for one another in that way—the code of honour being so strict, you know, and so much esprit de corps amongst themselves. We had a boy here once—quite a little fellow—with exactly your Cecil’s failing. As a matter of fact, he was half Portuguese, and we don’t take any foreigners at all now—this was before my husband had the school—so perhaps you couldn’t expect quite the same training.... But he was much worse than your little boy can possibly be, I’m sure. He was deceitful, poor little chap—what one could only describe as an artful child.”

“Cecil isn’t that,” Rose interjected. “Go on.”

“Well, he came very near to being expelled in disgrace. Two or three of the boys had been up to some mischief or other—something rather worse than usual—but they’d all have got off lightly if it hadn’t been that this little chap told lie upon lie, trying to cover up his own traces, you know, and incriminating others right and left. We only got at the truth after endless difficulty, when he’d betrayed himself by half a dozen contradictions. (After all, he was only eleven years old.) Well, to cut a long story short, he’d have been sent away if it hadn’t been for my husband. Will was his form-master, and he begged the Head to give him another chance, and said he’d be personally responsible for the boy’s future good behaviour. You understand, it was the lies he’d told that made one so anxious—not the mischief, which was nothing very bad in itself. His parents were in Brazil, and he was in charge of an uncle who was very strict, and altogether one felt dreadfully sorry for the boy. So he was allowed to stay on.”

“And it answered?” said Rose breathlessly.

“It answered. Of course, he went through a very rough time, poor little lad. You see, the other boys necessarily knew what had happened, more or less, and boys aren’t very merciful to that sort of thing, I’m afraid. They practically sent him to Coventry for the rest of the term—one couldn’t wonder, altogether. But it was the turning point in that boy’s life, I do honestly believe. Will kept an eye on him, and he told me it was piteous to see the poor child trying to redeem his character, and prove himself trustworthy. You see, it was a practical demonstration of the fact that a liar is something hateful to his fellow beings. It might not have been the very highest grounds for reformation, but, honestly, it succeeded where pretty nearly everything else had failed.”

“What happened to him afterwards?”

“He got a scholarship, went to Eton, and did extremely well. And I can answer for it, out of my personal knowledge, that even before he left Hurst, he’d overcome that tendency absolutely. He was as truthful as any other boy. Will talked the whole thing out with him in the end, and traced it to his father having frightened him with punishments and threats as a mere baby, till the poor child had absolutely got into the habit of fibbing whenever he thought any one was going to be angry with him. I’ve made a long story of it, I’m afraid, but that was far and away the worst case I’ve ever known, and I’m quite sure Cecil’s mere bad habit isn’t anything like that now, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s more like a—a sort of trick, with Ces. Quite meaningless, sometimes—and silly. He isn’t what I’d call deceitful, a bit. I can’t explain——”

“But, Mrs. Aviolet, I don’t think you need explain any further. I understand—truly I do. I’ve had heaps of experience with boys, after all, and I know the kind of thing you mean quite well. Just silly story-telling—in fact, a bad habit, as I said. I know it must be worrying for you—dreadfully—but, really and truly, it isn’t very uncommon. He’ll get out of it. They all do.”

She spoke with breezy certainty.

“You’ve bucked me up,” said Rose simply. “Thank you very much. I daresay I’ve exaggerated the whole thing in my mind, a bit. Somehow I hadn’t realized that there was any one else with exactly the same trouble.”

“Why, of course there is! It’s a thing we’ve had to contend with again and again. And it always comes right in the end, Mrs. Aviolet.”

The obviously sincere assertion, delivered with Mrs. Lambert’s honest, friendly blue eyes fixed candidly upon Rose’s, brought a sudden warmth to her heart.

“Oh, you are kind! I am glad I’ve seen you,” she cried suddenly. “I’ve been so wretched about the whole thing, and not known what to do. They—my husband’s people—are determined that Ces ought to go through the usual mill—preparatory school, public school, university, and the rest of it. And I’m dead against it. At least I was. But I’m not so sure now about the preparatory school.”

Mrs. Lambert smiled. “Why not try it, as an experiment, and see how it answers before you decide about the rest?”

“That’s just what a great friend of mine said—Lord Charlesbury. You’ve got his boy here, and you know him, don’t you?”

“Yes, he’s charming, isn’t he? So is the boy.”

Easily enough, the schoolmaster’s wife shifted the conversation to less personal topics, Rose obediently following her lead.

They said not another word in direct relation to little Cecil until the moment when Rose and Miss Lucian went away.

Then Mrs. Aviolet squeezed the hand of her hostess in her strong, enveloping grasp and murmured haltingly:

“If he does go anywhere, it’ll be here. I simply can’t tell you what a relief it’s been, seeing you. I hadn’t any idea that you’d be so—human!”

Rose laughed slightly as she said it, with an apologetic note in her laughter, but her brown eyes were oddly misted over. Afterwards she said to Henrietta Lucian:

“I liked that woman—awfully. You don’t know how encouraging she was about Ces. So different to that fool of a Ford, talking about Ces being bullied into telling the truth and kicked into line. I tell you, Ford makes me sick.”

It was not the first time that Mrs. Aviolet had thus heartily apostrophized her absent brother-in-law, and it did not embarrass her to be left without a reply. Her invective, entirely without malice as it was, was always uttered in a tone that assumed complete acquiescence on the part of her hearer.

Henrietta Lucian showed no signs of anything else but acquiescence.

“Have you made up your mind?”

“I suppose I have, really. I don’t know that I shall let on to them, right away. They’re quite aggravating enough without me giving them the chance of saying ‘I told you so.’ But Ces isn’t getting any better with me, and that seems to dish the idea of my taking him away somewhere, and he’s wild to go to school—and I do believe Mrs. Lambert really would do him good.”

She paused for a moment, then spoke with an effort:

“I say, I don’t believe I ought to have said that about them saying ‘I told you so.’ God knows they’re trying enough, but I don’t believe they would mock at me for changing. The old people really do want what they think is best for Cecil, and that’s all they think of. Besides, they never have said ‘I told you so’—although goodness knows I’ve given them every opportunity, the number of times I’ve had to eat humble pie.”

“I see. No, I’m sure they wouldn’t say anything like ‘I told you so.’ For one thing,” Miss Lucian observed drily, “they might think it rather bad form.”

They both laughed.

The Aviolets did not say “I told you so” when Rose at last, in tones truculent rather than submissive, informed them that she approved of Hurst as a preparatory school for Cecil. They calmly and agreeably accepted the announcement as a matter of course.

“And what about yourself, my dear? Have you any plans?” amiably inquired Lady Aviolet. “Can you put up with the dullness of the country, while Cecil is away?”

“It isn’t so much the dullness——” began Rose, and then checked herself.

Lady Aviolet overlooked the obvious implication. “We hope, Sir Thomas and I, that you’ll still look upon this as your headquarters, and of course spend the holidays here with dear little Cecil.”

“Thank you,” said Rose gloomily.

To herself, she thought that the Aviolets could well afford to be gracious. She, the boy’s mother, had failed, and they were to be allowed their own way in the bringing up of Cecil.

XII

A few weeks after Cecil had been taken to Hurst by Ford Aviolet, who quietly appropriated the duty, Rose came to see Miss Lucian.

She had announced it to be a farewell visit before her return to Ovington Street.

“I couldn’t possibly go on slacking about at Squires, the way they all do,” she declared. “It was bad enough, even with Ces there, but it’s been perfectly awful since he went. Nothing but Pug and the garden, and the garden and Pug, till I’m sick of the sound of them both!”

“So you’re going to London?”

“Yes. I can help Uncle Alfred, I daresay, and I’m going to try and find some work. Of course, I shall come back to Squires in the holidays, so as to be with Ces. They’ve been very decent about that, I must say.”

“And don’t they mind your going away?”

“Not a bit, I shouldn’t think. I’m no asset to them,” Mrs. Aviolet declared frankly. “And they’ll get quite enough of me in the holidays.”

“Couldn’t you come here for a few days before you go?” said Miss Lucian.

Rose was like a joyfully surprised child, in her acceptance. “Oh, I’d love to! How kind of you to want me. You’ll hardly believe it, but I haven’t once been to stay with any one, except relations, since we got to England. I have some friends, people we’d known in Ceylon, retired, with a house at Bexhill, and they always used to say I must go and stay with them when I came home, but they never asked me, after all. I wrote to Mrs. Judd, too, from Squires, but she only wrote back and said how nice it must be for me to be with Jim’s people, and wasn’t Squires quite a show place, or some rot of that kind. Not a word about me going to them.”

“Then there was Lord Charlesbury. We were supposed to go and stay with him, last year, but his boy got measles, so we didn’t go. I was frightfully disappointed, but they didn’t seem to care a bit. They never do, about anything.”

Henrietta Lucian shrugged her shoulders. “People are as they’re made, I suppose,” she said philosophically. “Our sort gets much more fun out of life than their sort—though it cuts both ways, too.”

“I’d rather Cecil was like me than like them,” said Rose with decision.

“I quite agree with you. Well, tell me about Cecil. How’s he getting on?”

Miss Lucian’s hearty interest in Cecil always roused in his mother all the passionate gratitude that the entirely unenthusiastic bestowal of material benefits from the Aviolets failed to evoke.

“I’ve had such nice letters from that kind Mrs. Lambert. She’s been so good about writing, and she says he’s getting on very well, and seems thoroughly well and happy. And his own letters say he’s happy, too.”

“I’m so glad!” Miss Lucian ejaculated, with the utmost sincerity.

“I suppose it’s much more fun for him to be with other boys. Only I wish he was better at games.”

“Isn’t he good at them?”

“No, not a bit, and the odd thing is that he really wants to be, dreadfully—and yet it’s the work of the world to get him to try.”

“He’s so active—I can’t imagine Cecil not good at games.”

Rose shook her head. “He won’t try,” she repeated. “He can’t throw a ball properly, and when we were first at Squires, his grandfather tried to show him how, but Ces just wouldn’t learn. I think he didn’t like to be seen doing it the wrong way, and so he wouldn’t ever do it at all. But to hear him talk, you’d think he was mad about cricket or anything like that, and ready to practise his bowling all day.”

“Perhaps he’ll be good at football.”

“Perhaps,” said Rose doubtfully. “Jim was good at games.”

“Yes, I remember. Far better than Ford ever was, but then Ford has always cared more for other things. He isn’t really very strong, physically, is he?”

“He looks weedy enough,” said Mrs. Aviolet contemptuously. “He never offered to teach Ces anything about games, and he never plays any himself, except tennis, and he always looks superior when people go on about golf and things—and yet he sneers at poor little Ces for being no good. It was partly him, I think, that made Ces so tiresome about not trying to learn.”

“That’ll be different, at school. He’ll do as the others do, and there are sure to be plenty of beginners. He won’t be afraid of being laughed at, when he isn’t the only one. Maurice thinks, you know, that it’s that fear of being laughed at that’s at the bottom of all Cecil’s troubles.”

“I know what you mean,” said Rose rather gloomily. “His story-telling. There hasn’t been a word about that, in any of Mrs. Lambert’s letters. I’m sure I hope there’ll never have to be.”

Mrs. Lambert, indeed, writing intimately of Cecil’s physical welfare, touched very little upon other subjects.

Rose had left Squires, and gone to pay her promised visit to the Lucians, before she received confirmation of the fear that had all the time been lurking at her heart.

At Squires, her farewells had been complicated by a slight tinge of remorse that she could make them no more cordial.

“Well, good-bye, my dear. We shall expect you for the holidays, remember. I don’t want to hurry you, but Tucker is at the door, and you must allow for the hill.”

Rose had heard that information bestowed, identically worded, upon every departing guest that she had ever seen at Squires.

“Good-bye. Thanks awfully for having had me for such ages—and Ces, too. I hope I haven’t seemed cross and beastly, very often, but——”

“My dear, please! (Les domestiques!) Ah, here’s Ford.”

“Good-bye, Ford.”

Rose’s tone had involuntarily altered, and her smile, not involuntarily, had vanished.

“Good-bye, Rose. If you want any help about Cecil, don’t hesitate to apply to me.”

Had there been deliberate mockery in his manner, as he made the suggestion? Rose, at least, had felt no doubt upon the point.

Her ejaculatory reply, a sound rather than a distinct syllable, had been the “Tchah!” habitual to Mrs. Smith, as a contemptuous retort, on the rare occasions when words had failed her.

She had shaken hands with Sir Thomas, presented the side of her face for a slight and meaningless contact with that of her mother-in-law, and had thankfully been driven away from the door.

With the Lucians she was at her ease, and very happy until a letter arrived from Mrs. Lambert.

Rose read it with a deepening flush upon her face, and then went straight to Maurice Lucian.

“Look here, you’ve always known about Ces, and you’ve always said, like I do, that there’s a sort of kink in him somewhere that makes him like he is. I’m going to consult you.”

The doctor, seated before his writing-table, swung round in his revolving chair and faced her without speaking. His kind face and profound, intelligent eyes seldom showed either surprise or apprehension. Nevertheless, his expression habitually altered slightly when he spoke to Rose Aviolet. She had come by unperceived degrees to count upon that all-but-imperceptible softening of glance, that greater gentleness in the manner of his speech.

“I want you to read this. It’s from Mrs. Lambert, the schoolmaster’s wife. I told her about Ces before he ever went there.”

The letter was dated from Hurst.

My dear Mrs. Aviolet,

Your boy is very well, and has quite escaped the prevailing cold, which so many of them have had. I am still keeping him on the Extract of Malt, but only as a precaution.

I promised you to write quite fully and frankly, so I will tell you that Cecil hasn’t been quite so bright lately, and we are a little bit afraid, my husband and I, that he has been in some trouble with the other boys. There was some little want of openness over a game that, I’m afraid, almost amounted to cheating, and as it isn’t quite the first time it’s happened with poor little Cecil, he caught it “hot and strong” from the other lads. It didn’t really come to my ears, or to Will’s, in any official way, and he has thought it best not to notice it, but he said that I might write to you.

After the talk we had about Cecil the first time you came down here, I felt I’d much better write frankly, especially as it really hasn’t been what you told me about. As far as I know, he has been quite truthful, but I’m afraid he’s been caught out cheating over games more than once, and you know how dreadfully “down” English boys always are on anything of that kind. It seems such a pity, because Cecil is a dear little boy and gets on well at his lessons.

My own feeling is that, now there’s been an explosion, so to speak, poor little Cecil will have learnt his lesson, and such a thing will never happen again. But I should so much like to hear what you feel about it, and if there is anything you would advise.

Forgive me for worrying you with such a long letter.

Very sincerely yours,

ANNE LAMBERT.

“Have you heard from Cecil?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t say a word about anything of that kind. He writes just as usual, not telling me anything, poor darling—boy’s letters never do—but nice and affectionate, and sounding quite happy.”

“Probably by this time he is quite happy again. Have you any idea what kind of thing she—Mrs. Lambert—means, about cheating at games?”

Rose coloured, but faced the doctor unflinchingly as ever.

“Oh, yes. Ces got into trouble about it at Squires once or twice. He isn’t always straight about games, round games, or anything like that, you know, with counters—I’ve seen him shove his counter along with his hand when he thought no one was looking, and the worst of it is that he doesn’t own up when he’s taxed with it. And the same at card games. That wretched little Miss Wade played Beggar-my-Neighbour, or something, with him, and swore he used to peep at the cards. I think she was probably right.”

“When you say that he doesn’t own up,” said Lucian, in his most impersonal and judicial manner, “do you mean that he flatly denies any accusation of cheating?”

“That’s it.”

“When did you first notice anything of that kind?”

“A long time ago, when he was very small, in Ceylon. But I thought then that it was his native ayah’s fault, and it didn’t seem to matter so much. Jim never found it out. He’d have been very angry if he had.”

“I daresay. Was Cecil frightened of his father?”

“Sometimes, but he’s not a cowardly child, you know. When Jim had been drinking, he used to get angry sometimes, but not often with Ces.”

“Was it fear of Jim that made Cecil say what wasn’t true?”

“I don’t think so. He did tell extra untruths, if you know what I mean, when Jim bullied him and tried to catch him out, but as a general rule, it was just the kind of stories that he told at Squires—things he invented, you know.”

“I know.”

Lucian’s voice was rather sorrowful.

“I daresay it sounds like nonsense,” Rose said, “but often and often I’ve thought that Ces couldn’t really help himself. Aren’t some people born colour-blind, so that they can’t distinguish between colours?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes it seems to me that Ces was born without any—any sense of honour at all.”

Lucian nodded, his grave, pitying eyes fixed upon her, and his implied acceptance of her view filled Rose with terror.

“What am I to do for him?” she cried despairingly.

“I wish I could tell you,” said Maurice Lucian very earnestly. “These tendencies can be pathologically treated, and more is being learnt about the right treatment of them every day, but even so, it’s still working in the dark——”

He broke off, as Rose made a violent gesture of impatience.

“I don’t even know what you mean, when you use words like patho—what’s-its-name. I wish to the Lord that I’d ever been properly educated. It’s no wonder that I’m so little use to poor Ces.”

“You’ll be of less use than ever, if you work yourself up like that,” said Lucian suddenly and sharply.

Rose stared at him, arrested mid-way in the flouncing movement that denoted the perturbation of her mind. For a moment she looked angry, and then the fundamental breadth of generosity that lay beneath all her petulance and her lack of control asserted itself.

“I expect you’re right,” she said, suddenly quiet, and smiled at him as though in remorseful atonement for her temper.

The doctor rose abruptly to his feet, and stood with his hands in his pockets, his back against the door. He was as tall a man as Ford Aviolet, but with a broad, bony frame, and the hair on his temples was already grizzled.

He looked down at Rose, who remained in her chair, gazing up at him rather surprised. Although it would not have occurred to her to make use of the words, she was singularly sensitive to atmosphere, and beneath the artificial colour upon her cheeks, there presently surged a warm blush.

Lucian immediately looked away from her. “Has it ever occurred to you that you might marry again?”

“Of course it has,” said Mrs. Aviolet defiantly. “I thought we were talking about Cecil.”

“There was nothing irrelevant in my question,” the doctor retorted caustically, “although perhaps you may reasonably look upon it as an impertinent one. Rose, I know very well that you don’t care for me at present, but isn’t there any chance for me at all?”

“I did hope you wouldn’t ask me,” said Rose piteously.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m not such a fool as to have thought you would listen to me, for a moment. But it’s more than I’d reckoned on, having you in the house like this, and—and caring for you in the way I do.”

“Do you, really?”

“Yes, dear. Almost since that very first day I saw you at Squires.”

He drew a long breath.

“Couldn’t you, Rose?”

Rose Aviolet shook her head, and he saw tears in her brown eyes.

“I shan’t ever marry again. You don’t know what my married life was like. I suppose it’s a most awful thing to own up to, but after I’d been married to Jim six months, I used to think I’d rather be a widow than anything else in the world. He was in love with me, at first anyway, but do you think I was ever anything but a convenience to him? It was what he wanted, when he wanted it, how he wanted it, first and last. Some women may like it, if they’re the door-mat kind, but I’m not. And it wasn’t only that I was very young and self-willed and spoilt, and Jim more or less of a bad lot—which he was. I know what other marriages are like, too. There isn’t any freedom for the woman, only for the man. Why, Ford told me that it’s only the father that has any legal rights over his children at all.”

“It’s true,” said Lucian. “To the shame of those who tolerate it, the law of the land only acknowledges one parent for children born in wedlock, and that is the father. But can’t you trust me, Rose? I can promise you that it wouldn’t be a case of Jim Aviolet over again,” said the doctor rather grimly.

She shook her head again. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you. I even think you’d do better than any one for Ces. But I don’t hold with second marriages.”

The doctor ignored that pronouncement, which Rose had frequently heard employed by her mother.

“I am very much interested in Cecil, altogether apart from his relationship to you, and personally I believe that I could help him. But, in any case, I want to do that. I’ve wanted to ever since I first knew the boy.”

“I know that.”

“It isn’t Cecil that’s the obstacle, then?”

“No.”

“But you don’t like me enough? I’m not asking for anything more to begin with.”

“I like you much better than most other people,” said Rose candidly. “But I don’t want to marry. I didn’t like it before, and I made a great hash of it.”

“I’d risk that.”

“But I wouldn’t,” said Rose.

They looked at one another rather helplessly.

“If I loved you,” she said at last, “it would be different. I do trust you, and I think you’d be good to my Ces. But it wouldn’t be worth doing, unless I really did care.”

“Mayn’t I try to make you care?”

“I don’t think so,” said Rose slowly.

“Is there somebody else? No, don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”

But his face had altered.

“It’s like this. I don’t hold with second marriages, like I said before, and I had a rotten time the first time, and if any one had told me, when Jim died, that I’d ever run the risk of putting my head through the same noose a second time, I’d have called them a liar. Neither more nor less. But there’s a—person that I’m sort of attracted by, in a way, though I don’t know that there’s much sense in it, because he’s never said a syllable of that sort to me, and so,” said Rose, very much flushed and implacably straightforward, “if I ever did do anything in that line, I suppose I should want it to be him. But, mind you, I haven’t got any reason to think it ever will be, and I should have to be a long sight surer of myself than I am now.”

“I see,” said the doctor slowly.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Rose.

“Don’t let it make any difference, my dear. I don’t give up hope, but I shan’t worry you. Honestly, I think you and I could find happiness together, but these things aren’t lightly come by. Will you go on just as before and let me see you very often, even if you do leave Squires? And, above all, let me be of use to you whenever I can?”

“You’ve been the best friend I’ve had, ever since I came to England.” Rose stood up and gave him both her hands in an impetuous gesture. “I like you much too much ever to let it be anything but the real thing—Maurice.”

She had never called him so before.

“Thank you,” said Dr. Lucian.

She stood for a moment, hesitating, and then said with a sort of rush: “And for goodness’ sake, don’t think too much about what I said. It seemed fairer to tell you, but I don’t suppose there’s anything in it, for a moment, and it would take a lot to make me marry again, especially out of my own class. Once bit twice shy,” concluded Mrs. Aviolet.

Neither she nor Maurice Lucian referred again to their conversation during the remaining days of Rose’s visit.

If there were a certain consciousness latent between them, Rose forgot it speedily enough, in her preoccupation with the question of Cecil.

“I think I shall go down to Hurst,” she said.

The Lucians, unlike the Aviolets, never proffered advice.

Consequently, Rose felt desirous of it.

“Don’t you think I’d better?”

“For your own sake, or for Cecil’s?”

“Both, I suppose. I can’t bear to think of him unhappy.”

“He wrote you quite a happy letter; and I don’t really think you could help him by going there and bringing the whole thing up again,” said Lucian.

“It’s so very hard to do nothing.”

“The hardest thing there is,” agreed the doctor gravely.

She looked at him anxiously.

“Poor little Cecil,” said Henrietta. “Don’t you think he’s probably learnt his lesson, Rose, if the other boys have found him out in some trick or other, and have been horrid to him? If you go down there, it’ll make it all assume enormous proportions to him, and, after all, even Mr. and Mrs. Lambert aren’t supposed to know about it officially, as she said in her letter.”

“Then I’d better not go?” Rose repeated slowly, as though she could hardly believe in the necessity for the discipline, so alien to her, of inaction.

“I should think, better not.”

Rose, from indignation at the suggestion, passed to unwilling consideration of it, and still more unwilling conversion to it.

But she made up her mind, at last, that Cecil should be allowed to weather the storm alone.

It was perhaps the first time that she had deliberately denied herself the luxury of acting upon impulse.

The next day she went to London.

“We shall see you in the holidays,” Henrietta Lucian said to her affectionately, “and Maurice says he’s going to be in London a good deal now—research-work, he calls it—and he wants to go and see you.”

“Oh, yes. He can come to Ovington Street whenever he likes. I’m going to stay with my uncle there—for a bit—he’s a pawnbroker.”

Rose had come to add that piece of information, which was by no means new to Miss Lucian, almost automatically, in her determination not to risk gratifying Ford Aviolet by suppressing it.

She was very much pleased when she found herself in London again.

“I declare, I like the good old smell of the gas upstairs,” she emphatically announced to Felix Menebees, who carried her box up to her bedroom.

The gaunt youth, panting, and paler than ever from the ascent, smiled at her rapturously.

“Yes, Mrs. Aviolet, I’m sure we’re all delighted that you’ve come back again, if I may be allowed to say so.”

It was very evident, indeed, that Felix spoke truth at least as regarded himself, and Rose, with characteristic catholicity of outlook, welcomed his obvious admiration with exactly the same indiscriminate gratification that she had accorded to Charlesbury’s. But for all her transparent vanity, the daughter of the late Mrs. Smith did not lack shrewdness. She was perfectly aware that she might very well find herself falling in love with Lord Charlesbury, and she knew equally well that, although he had admired her at Squires, it was scarcely probable that he would ask her to marry him.

“And I don’t know that I’d accept him if he did,” Rose told herself stoutly. “It would be biting off a good deal more than I could chew, it seems to me. A place bigger than Squires, and a title, and another boy as well as Cecil, and perhaps babies of my own as well! There’d be more sense in taking Maurice Lucian than that!”

She thought very little of the advantages to be derived from marriage with a man in Charlesbury’s position. Her experience of “a gentleman” in the person of Jim Aviolet had been calculated to destroy conventional illusions on that score, and the once magic words, “my lady,” had lost romantic value in her ears, since hearing them habitually applied to her mother-in-law.

She resumed her old life over the pawnshop very easily.

In the phraseology of Mr. Smith, an arrangement had been come to between himself and his niece with no display of false delicacy upon either side.

“They do give me an allowance,” Rose admitted, “but I can’t say I enjoy taking it, though well I know they can spare it. However, that’s neither here nor there. I don’t want you to be out of pocket, Uncle A., I’m sure, by having me here.”

“That’s common honesty, Rose,” her relative answered simply.

“At the same time, I suppose you don’t want to make out of me?” Rose suggested, not altogether without a hint of doubtfulness.

“I wish to do what is fair and proper by all parties, myself included,” said Uncle Alfred with dignity. “The room that you occupy could very well let at seven-and-sixpence a week, exclusive of light and heating.”

“There is no heating, Uncle A., as you very well know. I’m not likely to ask for a fire, and the girl wouldn’t carry the coals up all those stairs if I did, most likely. As for the light, I can buy my own candles, and I’ll pay one-fourth of the gas-bill. That’s fair enough, I should hope.”

“Very well,” her uncle agreed without enthusiasm.

“And if you’ll let me manage the housekeeping, I’ll undertake to bring the weekly books down and feed myself into the bargain. It doesn’t cost more to feed five than to feed four.”

“Yes, it does,” said Uncle Alfred.

It was such a long while since Rose had heard any one, herself excepted, utter a flat contradiction, that she felt quite surprised, and she admitted to herself in that moment that such a form of intercourse was, after all, lacking in charm.

“Call it ten shillings a week, Uncle Alfred, and let’s be done with it.”

“Half a guinea, Rose.”

“Oh, well, half a guinea then.”

“And I shall be very glad of your company, my dear niece,” said the old man, suddenly affable. “The Lord loveth a cheerful giver, and I trust that you will never find me anything else. Of course, you’ll be ready to lend Felix a hand with the silver cleaning in the mornings?”

“Yes—well—all right. But one of these days, quite soon, Dr. Lucian, that I told you about, is going to try and find me some work during the term-time, that I can do.”

“Charity begins at home,” said Uncle Alfred.

Rose laughed, her ready, easy laughter. She was quite willing to help Felix in cleaning the silver from the shop, and although she sincerely intended to undertake any work which Lucian might suggest to her, there was at the back of her mind an unformulated idea that circumstances might arise which would render such a course unnecessary.

When she had paid a visit to Hurst, at Mrs. Lambert’s cordial suggestion, and found Cecil stronger-looking and more animated than she had ever seen him, Rose realized herself to be happier than she had been for many years.

The deepest anxiety in her heart was momentarily quelled, when Mrs. Lambert had told her that there had been no further signs of a lack of truthfulness in Cecil.

He seemed to be happy, and although he told Rose that he did not like games, she could see no mental reservations behind the ingenuous, uplifted gaze of his brown eyes.

Maurice Lucian was frequently in London, and always came to see her. She received him in the sitting-room above the shop, introduced him to the old pawnbroker and to Felix Menebees, and was pleased when Uncle Alfred chose to annex him as a player of backgammon.

“A sensible, likeable fellow, and I have no doubt that he will be brought to a knowledge of the Word in due season,” pronounced Uncle Alfred, who never took for granted the status of any fellow-creature as a Christian.

Cecil and Rose spent his short Christmas holidays at Squires, and she received the placid congratulations of his grandparents on the great improvement which they alleged to have taken place in the little boy.

Ford and Diana were at their own house, and Rose did not see them at all.

She took Cecil back to Hurst herself, and returned to Ovington Street.

There, two days later, she received a letter from Lord Charlesbury, to tell her that he was just returned from Paris and to ask whether he might call upon her.

His letter was dated from a London club.

XIII

“Uncle A., there’s a friend of mine wants to come and see me. Can I ask him to look in, one evening?”

“Say about nine o’clock—after supper.” Uncle Alfred did not stress the point, but Rose perfectly understood his reservation. “Yes, if you want to. Who is the young man?”

“It’s not a young man. It’s Lord Charlesbury. He’s a friend of the Aviolets.”

“You needn’t tell me that. You didn’t pick up a lord off your own bat, my girl, and it wouldn’t speak any the better for you if you had. What are his intentions?”

“Uncle! You don’t understand. It isn’t that sort of thing at all. I never heard any one so old-fashioned as you are. He just wants to call on me.”

“Rose, you know what the Apostle Paul says as to the conduct of widows. At the same time, I should be the first person to rejoice if you were to find a good husband, and a man who would be a father—and a better father—to your boy. And the aristocracy of this country are such——”

“Don’t fly off like that, Uncle,” Rose besought him. She was not embarrassed, only mildly anxious to restrain the pawnbroker’s imaginative flights.

“I’m not thinking of marrying anybody—if you remember, poor Jim wasn’t the sort of husband that would make me want another of the same kind in a hurry—and I don’t believe Lord Charlesbury is, either.”

“Has he been married?”

“Yes. He’s a widower.”

“So much the more suitable,” said the indomitable Mr. Smith decisively.

Rose shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m going downstairs, Uncle, to give Felix Menebees a hand with the silver. He does work, that boy.”

“No boy who didn’t work would remain in my service,” said Uncle Alfred simply, and, as Rose knew, quite truly.

They went downstairs, the old man to confer with Artie Millar in the private pledge-office at the back of the shop, and Rose to put on an apron, an old pair of gloves, and join Felix at his apparently endless task of cleaning the stock of silver, plate, and brass.

She reflected joyously, as she took her place on a cane-bottomed chair and smiled at the pallid Felix, astride a wooden stool:

“This is better than hanging about the hall at Squires, hearing Pug snorting, and waiting for the next meal.”

“Chuck me over some of that stuff, Felix, will you? My, what a lot you’ve done! I was late down, this morning.”

“I could always manage, Mrs. Aviolet,” the boy said shyly. “It’s very good of you to do this, but there isn’t any need. The windows take a lot of time, of course, but if I allow two hours for them and the supports, it’s as much as I want. And then there’s practically all the rest of the day for cleaning the stuff.”

“You do lots of other things as well, Felix—fetching the milk, for one.”

“Oh, I enjoy that. It makes a break. Mrs. Aviolet, have you ever wanted adventures?”

“Heaps of times,” said Rose heartily.

“So have I,” said Felix wistfully. “I often think what it’d be like, if I went out as a cowboy, or something, to the Wild West, or even if I went in for seeing life a bit in London, the way Mr. Millar does.”

He looked at Rose with a strange gleam in his pallid eyes.

“Have you ever read ‘Frank Belloment, the Gentleman Crook’? I don’t suppose you have. I know ladies don’t care for that kind of reading, but it’s great, really it is.”

“I’m fond of a good murder, myself,” Rose admitted. She had shared with her mother, from a very early age, an impassioned interest in the more sensational items of police-court news as reported in the illustrated press.

“Belloment doesn’t go in for murders, only big jewel hauls, or financial coups. As a matter of fact, the book makes out that this Belloment, that I’m telling you about, he never took things from poor people, but only from the rich, that have more than they want. That’s why they call him the Gentleman Crook. And he goes into Society, too, and that’s where he finds out about people’s jewellery.”

“Where is this book?” Rose demanded.

Felix produced from his pocket a paper volume. “There’s one comes out every week. And sometimes they have a story about fellows going out gold-digging, or convicts escaping from prison, and once there was a boy ran away from a shop and went to sea, and I couldn’t help thinking it might very well all be true. Didn’t Mr. Millar go to sea once?”

“Yes, but I bet he doesn’t like talking about it,” said Rose shrewdly. “He’s done well for himself, since those days.”

“I suppose so,” said Felix, but the lust for romance still lingered in his pale face and whole attenuated person.

“Do you want to go abroad, Felix?”

“It’s the dream of my life,” Felix said earnestly.

“Where were you, before you came into the shop?”

“In an orphanage. I was brought up there. At one time, I had hopes of making some interesting discovery regarding my birth, which was irregular, if you’ll excuse me mentioning such a thing. But it appeared that it was only too well known whose son I was, and there was never any question of its being a foreign nobleman who was responsible, or any one like that.”

Rose was breathless with entirely unfeigned interest.

“Then who was it?”

“A travelling salesman, who lodged at the house where my mother was a servant-girl. He travelled in tombstones, I believe. It was suitable, in a way, because she died, when I was born, at the Union. She was only sixteen, and I believe he was turned out of the town and never dared show his face there again.”

“Served him right! Then was Menebees your mother’s name?”

“That’s right, Mrs. Aviolet. And they had me christened Felix because they’d come to the letter F, and Frank and Frederick, and the common names like that, had already been given. I think I was in luck there,” said the youth complacently.

“And how did you get out of the Union?”

“The people of the house where Mother’d been were very kind, and the story got round in the town, and her having been so young and all, and a good girl till this fellow came along, made people sorry, and a subscription was got up. So I was sent to St. Olave’s Orphanage, and brought up well. That’s where the old governor found me, him being a director, and he wanted a boy to work in the shop, and applied there, and I got sent. I always say I’m lucky,” repeated Felix.

“I think it was Uncle Alfred who was lucky, if you ask me.”

Felix blushed with gratification. “I’m sure it’s very kind of you to say so. And when I talk about going out to look for adventures, and travelling, and the like, it’s only in the way of a day-dream, like, Mrs. Aviolet, because I needn’t say I wouldn’t think of leaving the governor, without he wanted me to go. But it’s a kind of diversion, to pretend to myself that I’m off on the Long Trail, with nothing but my gun and my right arm between me and death.”

“I know, Felix, fast enough. I’ve played that sort of game myself,” Rose acknowledged.

“But everything you wanted, like that, would come true, I should think!” Felix cried, looking at her with all his naïve admiration in his face. “And you’ve seen the world and been to the East. I suppose you often ‘hear the East a-calling’?”

“Not I,” said Mrs. Aviolet with emphasis. “Or if I did, I shouldn’t listen. I’m glad I went, in a way, because it opens one’s eyes a bit, but I don’t ever want to go back. Give me old London, and the smell of the gas, every time.”

If Felix were slightly disillusioned by this candid admission, his loyalty did not betray the fact.

He and Rose exchanged their views indefatigably over the silver cleaning, and Rose frequently reflected that, for all the outrageous extravagances of fancy so innocently laid bare by Felix, he was a very much more interesting companion than her amiable, unimaginative, standard-bound sister-in-law, Diana.

“The fact is,” she told herself, with her usual unsparing determination that spades should be spades, “the fact is, this is the kind of place where I fit in. Not beautiful houses in the country, with everybody half asleep, and only waking up to drivel about the bulbs, or the horses, or who so-and-so was before she married somebody else’s first cousin’s sister’s uncle. The shop’s the place for me, right enough, only I must say, I’d like to see a few more people.”

The company of Uncle Alfred’s frequenters was not, indeed, exhilarating.

Artie Millar, whom Rose had once found attractive, now failed to satisfy her taste, unconsciously trained to other standards. He had grown fat, and was inclined to arrive in the mornings with a slightly yellow appearance, and a muttered complaint aside to Felix Menebees as to the “head” brought on by the avocations of the previous night.

It did not add to Rose’s admiration that she intuitively knew Artie Millar to be a thoroughly steady-going young man, of sober and respectable tendencies, whose wildest excesses never led to his arriving later than nine o’clock in the morning at the Ovington Street shop.

The pastiness of his complexion, from which the youthful tan that had captivated her fancy had long ago faded, she matter-of-factly attributed to his dislike of exercise and to the lack of fresh air in the shop.

Representatives of Foreign Missions occasionally called upon Uncle Alfred, and after short and earnest conversations with him in the upstairs sitting-room, usually departed, with subdued elation discernible in the tones of their farewells. They generally left on the table, or sometimes on the counter of the front shop, sodden-looking leaflets that bore, beneath a title that Rose described to herself generically as “The-Good-Work-in-Far-Timbuctoo,” an illustration of a black-coated missionary affectionately embracing the shoulders of a sable African, who was always suitably decked in a little vest and a pair of shorts. These pamphlets, and The Pawnbrokers’ Gazette, formed Uncle Alfred’s evening literature. From time to time, he received a visit from some contemporary of his own, but no one was ever asked to supper, although Mr. Smith permitted Rose to institute the appearance of a tea-tray, with cups and saucers, and a brew of very black, strong tea, at half-past nine every evening. When there was a caller, Rose added a plate of biscuits of the variety called “Fancy” by Uncle Alfred and “Squashed-fly” by his niece.

Further than this, Mr. Smith’s ideas of hospitality did not go.

Rose was not without doubts of her own wisdom in suggesting a visit from Lord Charlesbury. It never occurred to her to feel ashamed of the shop, but she did experience much vicarious wrath and disgust at the absence of hospitality that she considered her uncle displayed in his entertainment of a guest.

“I should have thought, Uncle A., I must say, that we could rise to a decent set-out of coffee, and I could quite well show the girl how to bring it in.”

“How to bring it in!” ejaculated Mr. Smith. “There’s only one way of carrying a tray, as far as I know, unless you want her to balance it on her head like a heathen. I can see plainly that the pomps and vanities of this wicked world are taking a hold on your mind, Rose. ‘Better a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and discontent withal.’”

His cat-like eyes gleamed upon her, and he shook his finger.

“There is something particularly displeasing to the Lord about display, Rose,” said Uncle Alfred, with his habitual assumption of being his Creator’s mouthpiece.

“I wonder what He thinks of the shop-window, then!” retorted Rose, with her tolerant, unmalicious tartness of repartee. “Well, Uncle A., if you won’t have coffee—and I suppose you won’t have whisky——”

(“I am ashamed of you,” said Uncle Alfred parenthetically.)

“—we shall have to do the best we can with tea, but I’m going to get some decent tea myself, and not that beastly black stuff that’s all twigs, and strangers-coming-from-overseas, and goodness knows what all.”

“If you choose to waste your money on tea, I cannot prevent it,” complacently said Mr. Smith.

“I suppose the Lord’ll look the other way, if it’s me and not you, that’s doing the display,” Rose observed, giggling.

It delighted her that Uncle Alfred should be obliged to pretend not to have heard her, in order to avoid the necessity of finding a reply.

“There’s one thing, it’s a lovely room,” said Rose to herself. “Of course the furniture isn’t like Squires, and never will be, but it’s good of its kind—that I will say. The upholstery is good, and I like crimson myself. That plant would do with a scrubbing, though.”

She pounced upon the aspidistra, and sent the little maid for soap and water and an old tooth-brush.

“I’d like it to look nice, Gladys, because a friend of mine is coming round this evening,” she explained.

They worked together cheerfully, and Gladys told Mrs. Aviolet all about the baker’s young man, who was becoming ever so attentive. Rose listened and ejaculated with an absorbed and impassioned interest, which Gladys, though pleased and flattered, obviously regarded as entirely natural. And Rose told herself that this was a good deal better than trying to pump interesting details about the engagement of Ford and Diana out of her mother-in-law.

“Shall you wear your white silk blouse with the ruffle, ’m, this evening?” Gladys inquired shyly.

“Do you think it’s pretty? Prettier than my blue?”

“It’s more stylish, ’m, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it is,” said Rose thoughtfully.

She went upstairs that evening, tried on both the blouses, gazed at herself critically for a long while, rubbed some additional rouge into her face, and smeared her mouth with lip-salve, and finally went down to supper wearing the white blouse with the ruffle and her best navy-blue skirt.

Uncle Alfred gazed at her sharply, but Millar and Felix Menebees were both in the room and he said nothing.

As soon as supper was over Artie Millar went away and Felix retired to the performance of some one of the innumerable menial tasks that he always accepted as being part of his duty.

When the bell rang, Rose went half-way downstairs.

It was Felix who opened the door, Gladys having stipulated that she should not be required to announce Lord Charlesbury by name, as “titles upset her,” and Rose having indignantly retorted that a Lordship couldn’t be introduced with the customary formula of “a gentleman to see you.”

She had finally compromised with an undertaking from Felix Menebees to open the door himself, and usher Lord Charlesbury as far as the staircase, where Rose was to come and meet him.

She heard his deep, pleasant voice speaking to Felix, and a tremulous monosyllable from Felix in return, and then she ran down to meet him.

“I’m very glad to see you again,” said Lord Charlesbury, although Rose was only too well aware that he could hardly see her at all, in the absence of all but absolutely necessary illumination insisted upon by Uncle Alfred. “How are you?”

“I’m quite well, thank you,” Rose replied, in the literal formula taught her long ago by her mother. “Won’t you come up?”

Uncle Alfred was not in the sitting-room, to the relief of his niece, and she and her visitor sat down each in a plush-covered armchair upon either side of the small gas-fire. A beaded footstool, with curly legs, and a fire-screen, its dingy white-wood panel bearing a sprawled painting of yellow and pink roses, stood between them.

Rose looked at Charlesbury.

She had not seen him very often, but she had thought about him a great deal, and felt that strange fear, which is common to all those who have outgrown very early youth, lest the reality of a remembered presence should prove disappointing. He smiled at her, his grave, attractive smile.

“How’s your boy, and how are they all at Squires?”

“Ces is very well, and he likes Hurst all right. I saw your Hugh, when I was down there last.”

“Did you? I’m hoping to go and see him myself, to-morrow. They tell me he’s a born cricketer. Is Cecil keen on that?”

“No,” said Rose baldly, unable to think of any form of phraseology that should soften the unpleasant admission. She felt instinctively that Charlesbury would think Cecil’s lack a regrettable one.

“I daresay it’ll come later, or more probably football absorbs all his energies, unless he hasn’t any to spare for lessons. Hugh is far too one-idea’d. I hope the lads have made friends?”

It struck Rose, as she heard the question, that Cecil had no particular friends amongst his school-fellows, and the thought roused again the never deeply dormant anxiety that lay always in her mind.

She made no answer, because she could not think of anything to say, but before the silence had become embarrassing to her, Lord Charlesbury said:

“What about yourself, Mrs. Aviolet? I’m delighted to hear from Ford that there’s every chance of meeting you at Squires in the holidays.”

“Oh, yes, they always want Ces, and I shall be there part of the time, anyway. But I’m really by way of looking out for some sort of a job myself up here.”

“A job?”

“I haven’t got any money, except what Jim’s people allow me, and I’ve had to come to an arrangement with my uncle here, but I’d like to do something besides cleaning the silver in the shop,” said Rose.

“You are, actually, living here?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I see,” said Charlesbury reflectively.

He put up his single eyeglass and gazed round the room.

“Of course, it isn’t exactly like Squires, but I’ve never been keen on the country, myself, and I like this much better.”

“You’re not lonely?”

“Dear me, no,” said Rose, surprised. “My Uncle Alfred is very good company in his own way, provided you don’t pay too much attention to him when he gets on the religious tack, and that boy that opened the door to you in the shop, Felix Menebees, he’s as nice as can be, and a great friend of mine. The other assistant is all right—Millar—but not exciting. And I see Dr. Lucian, too, pretty often. You remember him, at Squires?”

“The doctor at Squires? Oh, yes, I remember him quite well.”

There was nothing at all derogatory in Charlesbury’s tone, but neither was there any enthusiasm.

Why, indeed, should there be, Rose inquired of herself, in resentment at a slight feeling of disappointment.

“But do forgive me,” Charlesbury smiled at her frankly, “if I ask whether you don’t sometimes long to find yourself in a—a more congenial setting? For instance, we know that at Squires Lady Aviolet is really rather lonely since Ford’s marriage, and would simply love to have you.”

“Oh, no, she wouldn’t,” said Rose.

“Are you quite sure of that?”

“Quite. But, anyway, I don’t want to go back there, except when I can’t help it, for the sake of being with Ces. I was bored stiff at Squires. Surely you remember that,” said Rose naïvely.

“Yes?—well, I’m sorry. After all, that was some little while ago, and perhaps I’d hoped that time—and distance—might have softened your prejudice.”

Rose was beginning a vigorous protest at this description of her own attitude towards Squires when Mr. Smith came into the room.

“Uncle A., this is Lord Charlesbury—my uncle, Mr. Smith,” said Rose, stammering a little.

Uncle Alfred bowed, Lord Charlesbury stood up and held out his hand, and they exchanged greetings.

“How d’you do,” said Lord Charlesbury.

“Good evening, my lord. I am very well, I thank you,” said Uncle Alfred. “Sit down again, if you please. Am I intruding?”

“In your own house, Uncle A.? Whatever next, I wonder?” muttered his niece. She pushed forward the old man’s chair and they all three sat down. The three-cornered conversation that ensued was remarkable neither for smoothness nor for spontaneity.

Charlesbury alone spoke with an effect of being at his ease, and Rose uneasily suspected that this was rather the result of the habit of good breeding, than from any natural affinity with his present audience. Uncle Alfred said “my lord” a great many times, but kept a wary and distrustful eye upon his guest, and from time to time transferred his glance to Rose, as though reviewing the two in conjunction.

They talked about politics, and Rose was silent, from ignorance of the subject and from a complete lack of interest in it. They tried to talk about Squires, and Uncle Alfred became Scriptural, and alluded to the pomps and vanities of this world, whereat Lord Charlesbury became strangely unresponsive.

It was a relief to Mrs. Aviolet when a prolonged clatter of china and a timid knock outside the door heralded the entrance of the little maid Gladys.

“Tea,” said Rose, and was shocked at the blatancy of her own extreme relief at the interruption.

She poured out the tea, glad of an occupation, and with her eyes dared Uncle Alfred to comment upon the unusual elegance of the white fringed tea-cloth thrown over the tray, the best cups and saucers, and a display of Osborne biscuits in place of the “Squashed-flies.”

“Tea is less harmful to the nerves than coffee,” said Uncle Alfred sententiously, “but women are far too much addicted to both.”

“You’re fond of a cup of tea yourself, Uncle. We always have it after supper,” said Rose to Lord Charlesbury.

“It used to be usual everywhere. I can’t remember those days myself, but I can quite well remember my grandfather telling about the times when dinner was at five or six o’clock, and tea was brought into the drawing-room afterwards.”

“Can you?” said Rose, inwardly furious at her own inanity.

“Rose, my dear, call Felix Menebees. A cup of tea will do him good,” said Uncle Alfred blandly.

His niece turned startled eyes upon him. The suggestion was not quite unprecedented, but it was very nearly so, and she had certainly never contemplated its being made on the evening of Lord Charlesbury’s visit.

A sense of reluctance was followed by angry remorse. Why on earth shouldn’t she want Felix?

Rose got up, flung open the door and called down the stairs for Felix in tones that lacked none of her habitual vigour.

Then she went back and poured out a fresh cup of tea, adding carefully the three lumps of sugar that Felix liked, with her usual precautions against allowing Uncle Alfred to perceive the extravagance.

The conversation was actually a little easier when Felix, self-conscious but not embarrassed, had joined them, seating himself upon the extreme edge of a chair, and balancing his cup and saucer between his knees.

Lord Charlesbury talked about America, and Felix at least asked questions, whereas Uncle Alfred confined himself to ejaculating comments, mostly of a disparaging nature.

“Uncle A.’s taken against him, that’s clear enough,” reflected Rose. She held a high opinion of Uncle A.’s shrewdness, and the thought depressed her.

She looked at Charlesbury, wondering whether he reciprocated the pawnbroker’s lack of sympathy, and was forced to the conclusion that he did. His manner was admirable, and his courtesy quite unforced, but there was a certain bewilderment apparent beneath his kindly suavity, and Rose felt sure that he would be profoundly relieved when the evening came to an end.

“Well, we all bite off more than we can chew sometimes, I suppose,” she thought to herself with gloomy philosophy, but it was not until she was actually preceding Charlesbury down the stairs to the front door that it occurred to her to apply to him, as well as to herself, her favourite descriptive idiom.

Had Charlesbury, likewise, bitten off more than he could chew? It was a great deal more likely that he was now, perhaps for the first time, cautiously eyeing the size of the projected bite before attempting it.

“Won’t you let me come and take you out to dinner one night?” he asked as they parted.

“I don’t know,” said Rose in a worried way. She was quite incapable of coquetry, and her reply was prompted by sheerest indecision.

“Why not?” asked Charlesbury, smiling.

“Oh, lots of reasons. I haven’t got a frock, for one thing. Good-night,” said Rose abruptly.

He did not pursue the question of his invitation, but said good-night to her gently and cordially.

Rose went upstairs again, strangely inclined to burst into tears, and very angry with herself for the inclination.

She bounced into the sitting-room, with a movement habitual to the late Mrs. Smith.

Uncle Alfred was reading The Pawnbrokers’ Gazette and Felix was tidily replacing the cups upon the tea-tray.

Rose helped him in silence, glancing out of the corners of her eyes at the imperturbable Mr. Smith, and affecting unconcern by humming a little tune.

When Felix had departed downstairs with the tray, Rose observed in a detached tone of voice, with her head rather upon one side:

“Well, not one of our successes, on the whole, was it? Of course, Uncle A., I shouldn’t think of saying a word to you, but at the same time——”

“That will do, Rose. Say nothing in a hurry. Remember what James has written on the subject of bridling that unruly member, the tongue, and hold your peace. I have only one piece of advice for you, my girl: Ask yourself whether you want to spend the rest of your life in your natural element, or out of it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rose declared, knowing only too well.

“I shan’t bear you a grudge, if you take the chance of bettering yourself, and it might be a very good thing for your boy. But it’ll be the parting of the ways for you and me, and for you and any other friends you may have in your own walk of life; so if you go into it, you must go into it with your eyes open, that’s all. That titled friend of yours is all very well—I haven’t a word to say against him—but you mark my words, Rose, he’s not a mixer, and he never will be. Now if it was that doctor friend of yours, it would be another thing altogether——”

“Oh,” Rose became suddenly reflective.

“Is Dr. Lucian what you’d call a good mixer, Uncle?”

“Certainly. Both by nature and in consequence of his profession. And though I’m not saying you’d not be doing very well for yourself in marrying him, it wouldn’t be the same thing as taking upon yourself the responsibilities of joining up with titled folk, Rose.”

“Jim was Lord Charlesbury’s class, you know.”

“I do know, indeed. And a deplorable business you and he made of your marriage, from all accounts. His death was a merciful release for you.”

“Well, he was a bad lot,” Rose pointed out, without acrimony.

“And this Lord Charlesbury is not. But you have many times complained to me of your inability to feel at home with the Aviolets and their friends, and your disinclination for their mode of life. Ask yourself, therefore, whether you would find it any easier to do yourself credit as the wife of Lord Charlesbury, or any other lord?”

Rose did indeed ask herself this question in the days that ensued.

She saw Lord Charlesbury again, a few days later, when he asked her to lunch with him at a very quiet little restaurant, of which Rose had never heard before, in a quarter of London which she had always supposed to be an unfashionable one. On that occasion he made no reference whatever to his visit to Ovington Street, but again suggested indirectly that Mrs. Aviolet should seek more congenial surroundings for herself.

“But you don’t understand,” said Rose at last. “It’s at Squires, and places like that, that I’m such a fish out of water. The shop, and all that, is my home.”

She looked at him as she spoke, and a horrible sense of finality came over her, although not a muscle of his face had altered.

“I’ve got a headache,” said Rose abruptly. “I’m going home.”

He took her back to Ovington Street.

Rose had neither the training nor the temperament conducive to self-command. In the taxi, to her own unutterable dismay, she began to cry.

“It is my headache,” she lied desperately, the tears streaming down her face. “I often get like this—the pain is dreadful!”

“I’m so sorry,” said Charlesbury. His face and his voice alike showed a deep concern.

At the door he looked at her rather wistfully, holding her hand in farewell. “Are you quite, quite certain that you don’t need a change—that you’re all right here?”

Rose nodded.

Her gaze took in the mean little street and the door leading into the dark shop, and the angle of the wall which discreetly hid the three golden balls that protruded behind.

Rose Aviolet mopped at her wet eyes with a screwed-up handkerchief and then spoke, clearly enough in spite of the choke in her voice.

“I’m quite, quite certain that this is the right place for me, except just when I’ve got to be at Squires for the sake of Ces. Uncle Alfred is my relation, and him and me understand one another all right. It was me and the Aviolets that didn’t. And it would always be the same, with anybody of their sort, and anybody of mine.”

Felix Menebees opened the door.

“Good-bye,” said Rose, and went into the shop.

Rose Aviolet shed no more tears over her abortive romance. “No use crying over spilt milk” had been a favourite aphorism of Mrs. Smith’s, and it was one which had always recommended itself to Rose.

She did not allow Uncle Alfred any opportunity of remarking that his advice had been taken, but wrote to Dr. Lucian with a request for work.

“And it seems fair to tell you that what I once hinted about myself won’t ever come off now. And I’m not going to marry anybody ever. I’ve got enough to do thinking about Ces, and if there’s any spare time, I can put it in over the job you’re going to get me.”

He found her a job, in connection with a large children’s hospital, and after a few weeks, Rose was invited to occupy a room there.

“I’ll do it,” she decided; “it’s better than Squires, and I’ve got to make some sort of a life for myself. And it’s not long till the holidays anyway.”

At the thought of Cecil her heart lightened again.

“Hurst does seem to be doing him good,” she thought. “It was worth meeting Lord Charlesbury, after all, if only because he told me about Hurst for Cecil.”

PART II

FIVE YEARS LATER

I

“What have they done to him, Maurice?”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor, very thoughtfully indeed. “I don’t know.”

“There’s something.”

“Yes.”

“It’s horrible—and one can never know.”

“The Aviolets won’t think that there’s anything to know.”

“She will.”

“Yes,” said the doctor again, as deliberately as before, but with the slightest possible narrowing of his eyes as he spoke. “Yes, she’ll know, all right.”

Miss Lucian put her work down and clasped one hand over the other with a curious effect of earnestness.

“I never saw anything quite like the look in that boy’s eyes when she brought him here this afternoon. And yet I—I can’t place it. What in God’s name was it?”

“I don’t know.”

A sound of impatience broke from her.

“I tell you I don’t know, Henrietta. I’m not even certain that we’re not exaggerating.”

“Maurice!”

“I don’t mean the fact, but its significance.”

“What fact?”

“The fact that something or someone, at that public school, has altered Cecil Aviolet radically, in some way that’s indefinable. It’s not the normal evolution of a type, Henrietta, nor the development of an individuality—it’s something apart from those. And I don’t know what it is.”

“Has he been—frightened?” she half whispered.

“I don’t think it’s that. He may have been frightened—but I don’t think it’s that now.”

“He wasn’t ever a coward,” Henrietta declared vehemently. “I don’t care what any one says, he was a plucky little boy enough.”

“I have never thought him a coward,” said the doctor quietly. “But for all that, he may have been frightened.”

“Bullying?”

“He’s not the sort that gets bullied, much. And I don’t think—mind you, this is only conjecture—but I don’t think he’d mind being bullied, if it only meant being knocked about.”

Henrietta looked at him without speaking. She was aware that the doctor was rather stating aloud the terms of a problem that absorbed him than addressing his sister consciously.

“Do you remember his grandfather whipping him once as a little boy, and his mother saying that he’d been so brave? And even Sir Thomas was pleased with him for that.... You see, the physical isn’t the weak link in the chain for Cecil at all. It’s other things that he minds. He’s most vulnerable where the average Englishman is most impervious.”

The doctor smiled a little, gravely. “His sensibilities—in the French sense of the word.”

“Do you mean his vanity?”

“It’s more than that, with him. It’s his self-respect that’s at stake, always and all the time. At least, that’s how I see it.”

“You mean he’s lost it at that place. Horrible!”

The doctor made a gesture of negation with both hands. “How can I say I know? I don’t know. He’s lost something—and I think he’s acquired something, too. There’s a sort of power of withdrawal about him now.”

“Withdrawal....” She pondered for a moment on the word, knowing his habit of phraseology and the value that a trained mind attaches to the exact word.

“Withdrawal—then you don’t mean a line of defence?”

“No. Or at least only in the negative sense. As far as I can see, and that, Henrietta, is a very little way indeed—the boy hasn’t put up a defence at all—or if he has it’s gone down. He reminds me of that description in one of Newbolt’s things:

‘All night long, in a dream untroubled of hope

He brooded, clasping his knees.’

‘Untroubled of hope.’ Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes. Oh, poor little Cecil—at his age!”

“I may be wrong.”

But Henrietta did not think that her brother was wrong.

They saw Cecil Aviolet several times during his holidays. He seemed to like coming to them, and Dr. Lucian encouraged his visits.

One day he said to him casually: “Most youngsters get bullied during their first term. Between ourselves, didn’t you find that?”

“No,” said Cecil, and added, a shade too promptly, “no—I think the fellows like me, rather. I’ve got heaps of friends already.”

He looked up with his disarming, ingenuous smile, and immediately afterwards looked down. The doctor had seen Cecil Aviolet do just exactly that, once before. He had been a little boy then, taxed by his grandmother with the theft of a toy. And he had denied it, with that same look.

“How do you like the games?” the doctor asked abruptly.

“Awfully. I didn’t know if I should or not, you know, but I do, most awfully.”

“That’s good.”

“Some fellows funk things, you know, their first term—House-runs especially. There was one boy who tried to get a medical exemption after his first run. He tried to pretend he had a heart, you know. But of course it was no go, and some of the fellows found out.”

“H’m. I wouldn’t give much for your friend’s popularity after that.”

“Well, it was a rotten sort of thing to do, wasn’t it?” said Cecil seriously. “I can understand it in a way, because it was my first term, too, of course, and one does find it a most awful sweat, just at first. But I just stuck it out, like other fellows. I must say I can’t understand trying to get out of anything in that sort of way.” He eyed the doctor thoughtfully.

“It seems extraordinary, somehow, to have thought of doing a thing like that,” he said. “It would never have occurred to me, anyway.”

Into the doctor’s kind, watchful eyes there came a sudden gleam, as of enlightenment. He looked at Cecil without speaking.

“Of course, I don’t set up for being braver than other people—far from it—but I do think it’s stupid to try and fake illness so as to get out of things. It only means that they don’t believe one another time, and one gets a reputation for slackness besides—and then they work one all the harder. That’s how I felt about the whole thing—it was such a stupid thing to have done.”

“To tell a lie is almost always a stupid thing to do,” said the doctor gently.

“I suppose so. Do you remember I used to tell crackers when I was a kid, doctor?”

The doctor, continuing to look at Cecil, remained silent.

The test of silence is one which singularly few people can stand. Dr. Lucian was not surprised that Cecil should break forth volubly after one uneasy second.

“School cured me of that, practically—Hurst, I mean. But still, I suppose, having been like that makes it easier for me to understand another fellow not being absolutely straight. I wasn’t so tremendously down on him as some of them were.”

“Was it the funking or the lie that they objected to most?”

“Oh, the funking, of course. But I was rather sorry for him, personally. I couldn’t ever have done what he did myself, but I was sorry for him,” repeated Cecil.

“I see,” said Dr. Lucian, and felt that he did indeed see.

“Absolutely typical,” he reflected, when Cecil had gone. “The pitiful attempt at bluff—telling me about ‘another fellow’—himself, of course, poor lad—and thinking he’s disarmed suspicion forevermore because he’s alluded to his own past habit of lying. They all argue the same way, God help them: ‘They’ll think: “He’d never have gone out of his way to tell us about that, if it had had anything to do with him.”’ What can one do for him? Nothing. Whatever’s wrong with him was dormant while he was at Hurst, but this place has played him some devil’s trick. He’s done for, unless something or someone gets hold of him and shoves some self-respect into him. Half his time he doesn’t really know what he’s saying—he’s in a fog—only that blind instinct left, to hide what he thinks his real self for fear of being despised. And he would be despised—that’s the devil of it—ninety-nine per cent of that wretched lad’s fellow-creatures would actually dare to despise and condemn him for a congenital misfortune that’s about as much within his own control as an inheritance of tuberculosis!”

The doctor groaned aloud at the thought.

As he had surmised, the Aviolets were perfectly well satisfied with Cecil on his return from that first term spent at his public school. They spoke of him now with a certain complacence, excepting always Ford, who seldom mentioned the boy save with semi-contempt.

“Sour grapes, my fine fellow, I daresay,” the doctor muttered to himself. He by no means forgave Ford Aviolet his old hostility towards Cecil’s mother, and it was nothing at all to him that now-a-days Rose, and Rose’s ineradicable characteristics, were accepted at Squires with matter-of-course amiability by the old people.

She came to them as usual during Cecil’s holidays, and Dr. Lucian wondered whether her quick intuition had told her everything that her bewildered reasoning powers would be least able to explain.

But she said nothing to him, and the doctor could easily divine reasons for her silence.

Lucian, however, already uneasy, was sharply awakened to a new perception of possible vexation of spirit for Rose in the always uncongenial atmosphere at Squires.

Ford and Diana, paying to the Aviolets one of their interminable visits, tendered to him a casual invitation, and the doctor one day went with them to the house.

It was the first time that he had seen Rose for months, and he noticed with a pang that for the only time since he had known her, her glorious physique had suffered some slight deterioration. She was thinner, and her face struck him as indefinably altered.

Suddenly he understood. “Good God, she’s left off using rouge!” thought the doctor.

Luncheon was as elaborate a function as it was unlively conversationally; but the doctor became gradually aware of undercurrents.

Ford, before the angry bewilderment of Rose, and innocently seconded by the bland obtuseness of his wife’s life-long habit of “chaff,” and the entire unconsciousness of the two old people, Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet, was baiting the boy Cecil.

“No invitations to stay away these holidays, Cecil?”

“No, Uncle Ford.”

“Ah, well, of course that’s very fortunate for us. We shall have the benefit of your society all the time, I take it.”

“You must come and stay with us, Cecil, for a bit,” said Diana kindly. “I daresay Grandmama will be able to spare you.”

“Ah, but can Cecil bear to leave home?” Ford pretended to deliberate. “But no doubt a public-school boy can do these things; they’re a strange race, public-school boys. Have you found that, Cecil?”

The boy stared at his uncle with absolutely lustreless eyes and made no answer. Ford emitted a very slight laugh.

There was an odd sense of isolation for Lucian in finding himself thus alone to estimate the strange, hidden value of their surface intercourse. Rose, as he well knew, had no inner metre for the gauging of complexities. More and more, she reminded him of some magnificent dumb animal, quick to sense enmity, turning this way and that, unable to escape the goad, and incapable of retaliation in kind, but with inarticulate, pent-up forces gathering for some long-deferred onrush that might yet send down all before it.

She spoke now from the other side of the table. “What are you laughing at, Ford?”

The aggression in her manner was quite unmistakeable, and Lucian saw Diana open astonished eyes, and Sir Thomas draw his heavy brows more closely together.

The least flicker passed across Cecil’s young face, with its new, strangely shuttered look, and without turning his head he shot a glance at his mother from the corners of his eyes.

“What are you laughing at, Ford?” said Rose contemptuously.

“At my nephew,” Ford answered very gently. “He amuses me, that’s all. His manners are so refreshing.”

“Take your elbows off the table, Cecil,” said Lady Aviolet quickly.

“Do you still make your own cheeses here, Lady Aviolet?” said the doctor. “That’s a fine one you have there.”

The old lady, gratified, began to speak of her dairy. She was very proud of it. Ford glanced at the doctor.

The doctor gave him a grim little nod. “Quite right,” he silently assured Ford, “I’m up to your game, and I’m out to stop it. And I don’t mind your knowing it, either.”

Nobody else knew it.

Diana Aviolet was listening, her lips ajar, to her mother-in-law, Sir Thomas was signing imperatively to a servant, Rose was looking at her boy, Cecil, the doctor thought, seemed impervious to everything except to some inner preoccupation that had become part of his being.

Quite suddenly, a very horrible recollection came to Dr. Lucian.

He had once seen a trapped animal that was being devoured alive by vermin.

For an instant, he sought in vain for the association with his present surroundings. The next moment the analogy had flashed upon him, sickening him momentarily.

“That boy—his soul is being slowly devoured alive——”

“And so,” said Lady Aviolet, “we always send one cheese to the show every year. It encourages the dairymaid so much.”

“Splendid!” said the doctor.

“Are you interested in cheese, Lucian?” Ford Aviolet inquired politely.

“In everything,” the doctor retorted curtly.

“How delightful! A lesson to the youth of the present day, who are interested in nothing.”

“I don’t agree.”

It was Rose, of course, who hurled the contradiction, with ill-judged weightiness, into the carefully trivial key in which Ford had set his remark.

“Nor I.” The doctor, doing his best with her ineptitude, essayed a generality. “One generation is always more or less mysterious to the other.”

“You think so? Take my young nephew now——”

“Why be personal?” the doctor inquired crisply.

“Why not?”

“I’m sure Cecil doesn’t mind,” said Diana. Her little laugh struck the doctor as singularly inane.

“Cecil will have learnt to stand a little friendly teasing by now, no doubt,” Ford observed.

The doctor did not fail to perceive the implication, and he saw that Rose also had not missed it. Cecil remained listless and indifferent.

“Cecil has his life before him, we will hope, in which to learn more interesting things than elementary accomplishments, which, so far as I am aware, he acquired in the nursery. Now you and I,” the doctor addressed himself very directly to Ford Aviolet, “you and I, my dear fellow, have left our adventurous days behind us. Achievement, romance, success—it’s all behind us, not ahead of us. The future doesn’t belong to us at all. We shall only have the privilege of watching the present generation, to which you so casually alluded just now. Our mark, if it was ever made at all, was made in the past.”

The doctor’s gaze travelled cheerfully and deliberately round the safe, solid interior that had constituted Ford’s environment for so many years, and came to rest, still cheerful, still deliberate, and wholly implacable, on Ford’s face.

“They say that history always repeats itself,” said Lady Aviolet, boredom in her voice.

Ford, returning the doctor’s look, ignored his mother’s irrelevance. “Very interesting, although I fancy you and I are not exactly contemporaries to a day, doctor. But the point? May I confess that I don’t quite understand——?”

“Oh, I think you do. I fancy you and I understand one another in all essentials.” The significance in Dr. Lucian’s tone was entirely undisguised.

Ford made a graceful little gesture of acquiescence. “You have said it.”

“Said what?” his wife inquired, laughing. “Really, you two are quite mysterious. Are you going to play billiards this afternoon?”

“No, Di,” said her husband. “Dr. Lucian is too strong for me—at billiards.”

“I am sure you play a very good game, Ford. Then what are the plans for this afternoon, I wonder?”

The inquiry came from Lady Aviolet, and her subsequent engineering of entirely unimportant projects and half-hearted suggestions continued until lunch was over.

Afterwards the doctor approached Rose.

“Henrietta hopes that you are coming to see her very soon. Her sciatica is so bad now that she gets about very little.”

“I’m so sorry.”

There was never anything perfunctory about Rose’s emotions, and her face was eloquent.

“It was very nice of Cecil to come and see us so soon. We both appreciated that,” said the doctor tentatively.

“He wanted to come. Look here, you’re not going away immediately, are you?”

“It depends on whether you can let me stay and talk to you for a little while,” the doctor answered frankly. “That’s what I came for.”

Rose looked at him with a strange mingling of pleasure and wistfulness in her brown eyes. Then she sat down and invited him by a gesture to do the same.

The odious word “coquettish” was of all others, Lucian reflected, the least applicable to her simplicity.

“What do you think of Ces?” she abruptly began.

“Not satisfactory, altogether. What was his report like?”

“Not bad. There was something about a want of keenness—but you couldn’t expect him to be very keen, his first term. His lessons are just ordinary—history, good.”

“What does he say himself?”

“He says he’s all right.”

She hesitated for a moment, then said very low: “But I don’t believe him.”

“No?”

“You don’t either?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But why? What is it?”

“I don’t know. My dear—don’t look so frightened. It may be nothing—almost nothing. Remember, he’s only been back with you for a few days—he’s permeated with the atmosphere of the place he’s left. You’ve got his trust, in the ultimate issue, even if it’s overlaid now by God knows what. He’ll tell you what’s wrong—if anything is wrong—himself.”

Rose leant back in her armchair and he saw that she was trembling.

They were silent for a little while.

At last, as though he had silently made her aware of his anguish of sympathy for her pain, Rose turned towards him again.

“I’m glad you don’t try to pretend that it’s all right, and I’m only imagining things. But, of course, I knew you wouldn’t do that. You always understand,” she said gratefully.

“I think so, where you’re concerned,” he gravely agreed. “Tell me, have you found any other—understanding, on this particular point?”

“Oh, no! I’m sure they haven’t noticed anything at all. You know how stupid they are!”

Lucian smiled, at the very familiarity of the words and of Rose’s contemptuous tone.

“I didn’t mean here, so much as at school. Has Cecil made any friends?”

“I haven’t heard of any. There’s a master he likes, I think—a clergyman called Mr. Perriman. He’s quite young.”

“I wonder if Cecil will ‘get religion’?”

“Oh, I hope not!” cried Cecil’s mother with candid alarm. “I’ve seen enough of that with Uncle A. He’s the limit, him and his texts.”

“Cecil’s needn’t take that form. In fact I should say nothing would be less likely.”

“Well, what did you mean, then?”

“Only the sort of sudden awakening of religious susceptibilities that very often attacks young people. It’s an instinctive emotional outlet, really. They outgrow it, generally, or else it falls into its rightful place.”

“It seems to me more like a girl than a boy,” said Rose distrustfully.

“Perhaps. It was only an idea, and I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be a very good thing for Cecil. Don’t you think he wants an incentive?”

She nodded. “D’you know, I found something in a book the other day that made me think of Ces? I want to show it to you. I don’t like good poetry as a rule, you know, like Browning and all that. I never can understand it. But this came home to me, somehow, like something I’d always known but hadn’t ever thought about properly. A sort of recognizing.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to fetch it.” She paused for a moment and then said pleadingly: “Perhaps you’ll be able to say that it’s not true. I hope you will. I daresay I didn’t really understand half of it.”

But as he read the page that she put before him, Lucian marvelled only at her having understood so well.

NEURASTHENIA.[1]

Curs’d from the cradle and awry they come,

Masking their torment from a world at ease;

On eyes of dark entreaty, vague and dumb,

They bear the stigma of their souls’ disease.

Bewildered by the shadowy ban of birth

They learn that they are not as others are,

Till some go mad, and some sink prone to earth,

And some push stumbling on without a star.

“It made me think of Ces, you know,” she repeated.

He closed the book.

“He’s been different, from the time he was a tiny child. I’ve always known it, really, though he was the loveliest little boy and good, too. You do remember what a dear little boy he was when he first came here?” she entreated.

“Yes, I do,” said the doctor stoutly. “And we’ve that foundation to work upon, and the fact that the boy loves you. Your son is not going to ‘push on without a star,’ Rose.”

“That’s the very phrase that haunts me,” she half whispered.

“We’ll exorcise it, between us. Let him come down to us often, won’t you?”

“Indeed, I will. He’ll be only too glad. He doesn’t much like being here, this time. You saw how Ford behaved to him?”

“I did.”

“I could wring his beastly neck,” said Mrs. Aviolet violently.

“Will you forgive me if I tell you that you make that desire a great deal too evident? I’ve known Ford Aviolet for years, and I know him for a bully. Every time he sees that he’s hurt you, and angered you, it gives him a sense of power. And so he’ll go on doing it.”

“He can only touch me through Cecil.”

“He knows that well enough.”

“Why on earth haven’t he and Diana got any children? It’s absurd of them,” declared Rose with vehemence.

“I suppose it’s a disappointment to everyone.”

“Of course it is! They don’t want Cecil to have Squires, and I’m sure I don’t want him to have it. But he’ll have to, if Diana can’t pull herself together.”

Rose had spoken with her usual energy, and Mrs. Ford Aviolet, entering at the moment, said pleasantly:

“What’s that about me?”

“That I must say good-bye to you,” the doctor declared promptly. “I ought to go and see quite a number of patients. Thank you for a very pleasant respite.”

“Oh, must you go? Rose, Cousin Catherine sent me to find you. It’s about plans for to-morrow. She wants to know something, I’m not sure what.”

“All right,” said Rose. She picked up her book, and gave her hand to Dr. Lucian.

Almost involuntarily, he wrung it hard in his—that big, broad hand of hers, that was yet always soft and warm—but she did not wince.

“Good-bye. Give my love to Henrietta.”

She went away, and Lucian was preparing to go when Diana said suddenly:

“There was just one thing—if you can spare a moment.”

“Certainly,” said the doctor, much surprised.

Diana’s perennial smile seemed a little uncertain, wavering as though she were nervous, but she courageously kept it on her lips.

“It’s about my sister-in-law, Rose. I know Miss Lucian is a friend of hers—and you, too, of course. And I wondered if perhaps she’d been talking to you about Cecil.”

She paused, but Lucian felt no inclination to help her out. He remained unsympathetically silent.

“I do so wish that we could get her to take it more lightly.”

“It?”

“Cecil—everything to do with Cecil. I’m really awfully fond of Rose, Dr. Lucian, and it quite worries me to see her upsetting herself like this. Of course I know she is upset, any one could see it. The very way she looks at Cecil—it’s enough to make the boy hopelessly self-conscious. I daresay you noticed at lunch. Ford chaffs him the least little bit in the world, and Rose either loses her temper, or looks as though she were going to cry. It’s really wonderful that Cecil isn’t a great deal more of a spoilt child than he is.”

“Do you think that you understand Cecil, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Is there much to understand in a boy of that age?”

“You think there isn’t?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Diana was obviously uneasy at the turn taken by the conversation. “I suppose a boy of Cecil’s age can’t be very interesting, except to his mother, but at the same time——”

“I can assure you that I find Cecil very interesting indeed, quite apart from his connection with Squires. From a psychological point of view, you know, Cecil is rather—unique.”

“Oh, medically! Do you mean that sort of thing?”

Lucian smiled at the clumsy idiom.

“Cecil can hardly be described as the normal schoolboy, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t you think so?” She seemed vaguely surprised. “I must say I’ve always thought him fairly ordinary. Quite a nice boy, of course, and school has improved him a great deal. Ford always said it would.”

“Yes. It’s supposed to improve all boys, isn’t it?”

She looked more surprised than ever.

“Don’t you think it does?”

“Oh, I daresay. I’ve uttered platitudes on the subject, like everyone else. But I think Cecil’s mother was in the right of it, years ago, when she said that a thing might be good for ninety-nine people and all wrong for the hundredth.”

“That old nonsense! I beg your pardon, Dr. Lucian, but I thought even Rose had forgotten the fuss about Cecil going to school by this time. Why, Hurst made a different child of him.”

“I daresay.”

“Even his mother saw that.”

“It cured him of telling lies?”

Diana looked rather shocked. “Oh, poor little fellow! One would rather forget that he ever did such a thing.”

“The soul never forgets,” said the doctor brusquely.

“These things can be transmuted, or they can be suppressed—but they don’t vanish into nothingness because we all agree that it’s more charitable, or more polite, to forget about them. However, please forgive me. It’s a hobby-horse of mine, and I can’t resist a canter every now and then.”

Diana’s little civil laugh assured him, if he had needed any such assurance, that his energetic diatribe had conveyed to her the minimum of significance possible.

“I mustn’t keep you any longer. But do, if possible, try and get Rose to take the whole question of Cecil less seriously. He’s really quite all right in every possible way, if she’d only believe it, poor dear!”

The doctor shook hands with Mrs. Aviolet. “But I’m afraid,” he observed in valediction, “that I can’t do as you ask. You see, I agree with your sister-in-law. The question of Cecil, to my mind, demands just exactly that.”

“What?”

“To be taken seriously,” said the doctor, his voice very grave.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Edmund Gosse.

II

There was another person, besides Rose Aviolet, who shared Dr. Lucian’s view that the question of Cecil was one to be taken seriously.

Perriman, the young master who had only recently taken Holy Orders, full of zeal and of a naturally kind heart, felt oddly sorry for the boy. He had reason to believe him unpopular in the House, and he knew that he had been mildly bullied throughout his first term.

In his second term, Cecil Aviolet was no longer bullied, so far as Perriman knew, but he seemed to be singularly isolated, and there was a dazed and hunted look about his colourless young face.

Perriman hardly knew whether the boy was cowed or sullen, but he went out of his way to show him good-will and fellowship, and Cecil’s quick response was pathetic in its eagerness.

In his second year, Cecil came up with others to Perriman’s Confirmation class. The young clergyman, of the muscular Christian type, was as robust in his religion as he was at football.

One day, after the class was over, he stopped Cecil. “If you’d like a chat, Aviolet, you can come to my study this evening. I could see you were interested in our reading.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

The boy gave his wistful, ingenuous smile.

The curate scarcely knew whether to expect him or not, and could indeed hardly have told the reason of his own unpremeditated suggestion.

He was a simple, kind-hearted fellow, ardently and naïvely convinced that the only way to God lay through Anglo-Catholicism.

“Come in!” he gladly exclaimed, when the half-expected knock came at his door. “Come in, Aviolet! Delighted to see you—sit down, do. You look cold.”

“It is cold,” said the boy, shivering.

“Are you one of those unhappy people who suffer from bad circulation? I’m one of the lucky ones myself, but I’ve been told that some poor fellows spend half the year feeling as though a jug of ice-cold water had been poured down their spines. I hope you’re not as bad as that.”

“I was born in Ceylon. I think that’s why I feel the cold so much.”

“Ah, yes, I daresay. And can you remember much about the East?”

“A good deal,” said Cecil more eagerly. “I know it was very jolly out there, and I liked it all very much. I was only a little chap when we came home, of course, but I can remember our bungalow, and a sort of Public Gardens place, with red flowers, where the ayahs used to take the children after tea every day. I think I must have had a very good time out there.”

“Ah, you know it’s an axiom that Eastern children are always spoilt. But at least you’ve made up for lost time, Aviolet. Your form-work is quite up to the average, I think.”

Cecil flushed like a girl. “Is it, sir?”

“Quite,” repeated the young clergyman. “And you were interested in what I read to the Confirmation class to-day, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause, which Perriman took care not to break. He saw that the boy was desperately nerving himself to speak.

At last Cecil said haltingly: “Is there—does—does Confirmation do anything to one, sir?”

“How do you mean, my dear boy? Confirmation is the conscious and voluntary renewal of the vow that was made for us at the time of our baptism, you know.”

“Yes, I know. But I mean, does it have any effect on one—make one any better?”

“Certainly, it’s a step in the spiritual life—it confirms us as soldiers of Christ.”

The clergyman, puzzled, felt himself to be answering almost at random.

“Look here, what’s in your mind, Aviolet? Better have it out, whatever it is.”

He felt vaguely uneasy as he saw that the boy’s hands were shaking.

“I wondered if perhaps it might—might cure one of a fault, sir.”

“Cure you of a fault!” echoed the astonished master. “What fault?”

“Any fault,” said Cecil, turning scarlet, and then white. “In the reading to-day, it said about our secret sins, and how they might go on all the time, and only—only God knows about them. And you said that He knew the strength of the temptations, and—and didn’t despise one.”

“I should think not!” ejaculated the clergyman parenthetically.

He thought that he was beginning to understand.

“How old are you, Aviolet?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“Perhaps,” said the clergyman very kindly, and avoiding looking at the boy, “perhaps you’ve come to an age when what I may call the problems of the flesh are particularly vexatious. If that’s what’s worrying you, don’t mind saying so, quite frankly. By far the best and soundest way to tackle these things is to have them out, and you’ve done very wisely in coming to me. Don’t think of me as a master, for the time being, but just as a fellow older than yourself who’s probably been through very much what you’re going through now. Out with it, Aviolet.”

There was no response. Twice Cecil opened his mouth and then shut it again.

“Have you just been turning things over in your mind until you’ve got the whole business of sex on your nerves,” said Perriman bluntly, “or have you been getting into mischief? I’m not going to ask you to incriminate anybody else, if that’s the case, so don’t worry about that.”

“It isn’t anything like that,” said Cecil almost inaudibly.

“It isn’t? Well, so far, so good. Now supposing you tell me what it is, then?”

“When I was a little chap, I—I wasn’t taught to speak the truth.”

“That’s a pity—but you certainly came here with the intention of speaking the truth to me this evening, so I’m sure you’re going to carry out your resolution,” said the clergyman tranquilly.

“When I was at my preparatory school, I thought I’d outgrown it, like any other kid.”

“Outgrown what, Aviolet?”

“Exaggerating.”

Mr. Perriman stared at Cecil. “Tell me what you mean, my dear boy,” he said finally.

Little by little, he patiently extracted a more or less definite self-accusation from Cecil, of which almost every admission was qualified by exculpatory clauses.

At last the clergyman said to him: “You think yourself a liar, Aviolet. That’s really what it amounts to. You say that boasting of imaginary achievements has become a habit with you, and that you make perfectly false statements almost without premeditation. Now, my dear fellow, if you were really a hardened liar, you wouldn’t have come to me to-night, you may be perfectly sure of that. You were not bound to tell any one of this fault. What made you do so?”

Cecil looked dumbly at him.

“It was the wish to be rid of it, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I solemnly assure you that you will be rid of it. Don’t you suppose that Our Lord and Saviour appreciates even the most feeble desire to amend? You’ve shown great courage in coming to me to-night,” said the young man excitedly. “And I want you to listen to me, and to believe what I’m going to tell you.”

He collected himself, and then spoke more quietly.

“To begin with, I want you to realize that you can’t do anything at all by yourself. This habit of untruth makes you miserable, is sapping away your energies, causes you to view everything in a distorted light. You see it all, you know it’s playing the mischief with you, and no doubt you make a hundred resolutions a day to break yourself of the beastly habit. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you can’t. Your resolution is broken as often as it’s made and you’re in despair. And isn’t it a very odd thing that very often it’s not until people are in despair that they think of turning to our blessed Lord for help?”

Mr. Perriman smiled at Cecil.

“They look upon Him as a sort of forlorn hope, you know.”

“The Confirmation—” muttered Cecil.

“Yes, that turned your thoughts in His direction, didn’t it? But I don’t want you to attach a sort of superstitious value to the mere fact of being Confirmed, you know. An effort has got to be made, and you’ve got to make it, but this time it’s not going to be in your own strength.”

The clergyman’s voice was strong and hopeful. Cecil gazed at him with dawning hope and comfort in his pale face.

“Can I really start fresh, sir?”

“Of course you can,” Perriman vigorously assured him. “Why, my dear boy, you’re at the very beginning of life, you’re determined to overcome this weakness, and you’ve God on your side. What more can you want?”

His frank, whole-hearted laugh rang out.

“A year from now, Aviolet, probably less—you’ll be able to look the whole world in the face, and thank God that you don’t know how to be anything but straight in word and in deed. Lying is an ugly, low-down sort of habit, you know, and there’s something in the old saying that Satan is the father of lies. If people only realized the harm that’s done in the nursery by letting children muddle up reality and pretence! A wretched kid is taught to believe in Santa Claus, and fairies, and all the rest of the pretty nonsense, then finds out that none of it’s true, and it was all ‘pretence’—and then people are surprised when their children grow up without realizing the value of truth. Tell me, what’s the attitude of your own people towards this failing of yours?”

“They think I’m all right,” said Cecil quickly. “When I was a little chap, of course they knew—I was punished for telling fibs, as a matter of fact—but after I went to Hurst, it all seemed to be over.”

The clergyman looked at him keenly. “Was it over, or did you have the same trouble at Hurst?”

“No—no—not so bad,” Cecil stammered. “I didn’t think about it, then, in a way. It’s these two terms here that have been frightful.”

“And you’ve brooded over it till you’ve persuaded yourself that it’s something born with you, like a deformed hand or foot, that can’t be got rid of. Well, Aviolet, I tell you that you’ve taken to-day an enormous stride in the right direction, and I honour you for your pluck in doing so. Now then,” said the clergyman in a business-like tone, “what about the next step?”

“What shall I do, sir?”

“If you were a little older, I should say make a regular practice of Confession. But that’s hardly practicable at present. What you can do is this: make a most scrupulous daily examination of conscience and keep note of every failure in strict truth and accuracy. Keep before your mind the certainty that our Lord can and will help you to get the better of this weakness of yours. Tell yourself every day that you’re going to be absolutely straight, and open, and above-board in all your dealings. And above all, my dear boy, pray about it. Don’t wait till you’re in Chapel, on your knees, or till you’ve time to make a long prayer. It’s the fervour you put into it, not the number of words, that counts. I’m not going to give you any books to read, or anything of that kind, but if you want me, you can simply come here and find me.”

“You don’t think I’m utterly rotten, then, sir?”

“No!” roared Perriman. “Get that idea out of your head once for all. Haven’t you read your New Testament? Whose part did Christ always take? That of the sinner—the woman taken in adultery, the Magdalen, the thief on the cross. We’re here to try and imitate our Master, not to fly in the face of everything He ever taught by despising other people. I tell you, sinners were His specialty.”

He suddenly grew calm again.

“If you came to me to-morrow, Aviolet, and said you’d told a lie as big as the house, I should only trust you the more because you’d told me, and hope you’d do better next day. Well, multiply that attitude by a thousandfold, and you’ll get some faint shadow of a reflection of God’s attitude towards sinners.”

Cecil drew a long breath. “I’ll try, sir. Thanks most awfully. You’ve made everything look quite different. I—I think I was in despair pretty nearly.”

“That’s all over now,” Perriman said firmly. “Don’t think about the past any more. Now, is there anything else you want to ask me? Take your time.”

“There’s nothing else, sir. What I wanted to know was whether there was any hope of my being—put right—after so many years?”

Perriman suppressed a smile. “Every hope, Aviolet. Tell me, you’ve not found your own people any help in this business of yours?”

“No, sir. My father died when I was very young, and my mother and I have lived a good deal with my grandparents. They never seemed to look at it like you, as something serious. I can’t explain exactly.... Of course, they thought it was very wrong, but either they seemed to think it was a kind of bad habit, or just a—a sort of ill-bred thing to do. I don’t think any one has realized how it’s been—like you said just now—mucking up my whole life.”

“I can quite believe it. It’s come to loom as the over-shadowing fact in everything, I imagine, and as long as that’s so you’ll never get the best out of life, or out of yourself either. We’ve got to get this thing into proportion, Aviolet, and by George we’ll do it!”

The young clergyman struck his penitent heartily between the shoulders.

“Cut along now, or you’ll be late for call-over. Oh—just one thing more. If you think it’s a sound idea—only if, mind you—you might find it a help to tell me when habit has been too much for you, and you’ve fallen again. (You’re bound to, you know, so don’t let it discourage you.) But that must be exactly as you like. Think it over. Of course, I shan’t want details—just the fact, if you think it would help you to keep a check on yourself.”

“I think it would, sir.”

“Don’t decide in a hurry—but I expect you’re right. An effort of that sort is bound to strengthen the will, and that’s what you want. By the way, you understand that anything you say to me on those lines is under seal of Confession, so to speak? That’s right. Good-night, Aviolet.”

Perriman drew a long breath when the boy had left the room.

“Poor little chap! What a rotten time he must have been having with the other boys. That accounts for his unpopularity. All due to defective upbringing and a naturally weak character, of course. Though no doubt he’s exaggerated the whole thing in his own mind, till he thinks he’s a confirmed liar.... But what an opportunity to bring him nearer to a realization of God’s goodness!”

The young man’s simple face beamed, and presently he drew out of his pocket a little note-book, into which he carefully entered Cecil Aviolet’s initials, and the date.

The boy did not voluntarily seek him again at first, and Perriman said nothing to him, but rejoiced whole-heartedly in a certain lightening of Cecil’s whole aspect that had become evident.

One evening, however, meeting him, the clergyman invited him again into his room. “How are things going with you, eh?”

“Much better, thank you, sir.”

The boy’s face was radiant, and Perriman felt a glow of satisfaction, not unmixed with a little honest self-congratulation.

But two days later came the first check.

“I—I’ve done it again, sir.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Aviolet. But, of course, these things are not overcome in a minute, one knows. Tell me what happened.”

Cecil unfolded a long and piteous story: the flat denial of a piece of folly perpetrated in school.

Perriman encouraged him, exhorted him, and assured him of his own unshaken trust.

Two days later again, the whole thing was repeated.

“But it’s so trivial!” the young clergyman exclaimed, bewildered. “That’s what I can’t understand. Why should you tell trivial, childish fibs like that? There’s no object in it, that I can see.”

But in a little while, good Mr. Perriman became aware in himself of an uneasy suspicion. He began to cut Cecil’s confessions short.

“There, there, my dear boy, that’ll do. Leave it at that. I told you I didn’t want details. You must pull yourself together. There is something almost—abject—in owning freely to this lack of moral backbone, and never summing up resolution to defeat it. And although I’m always ready to give you any help in my power, I don’t want you to get into the way of looking upon your admissions to me as a sort of automatic salve to your conscience, you know.”

The light died out of Cecil’s eyes, and he went quietly away.

The young master felt thoroughly uneasy.

Against his own will, and in defiance of what he innocently thought of to himself as the laws of Nature, he was beginning to feel, rather than to know, that Cecil’s later confessions were not quite genuine ones.

“It’s—it’s almost as though he were trying to keep it up,” Perriman reflected, bewildered and almost disgusted.

At last he told Cecil that he thought the confessions had better cease. “If you would feel it useful to you to give me a general account of your progress, well and good. But I—I really think it would be better not to dwell on your own folly and weakness by giving me a long account of each lapse from the truth, Aviolet. Do try and be more robust about it all, won’t you?”

Cecil winced as though he had been struck, and Perriman felt that he was being brutal.

On the night before the Confirmation, Cecil once more presented himself. “I came to tell you, sir——”

“Not if it’s anything in detail, Aviolet,” the clergyman said almost pleadingly. “To-morrow is to be a new beginning for you, isn’t it? Let the dead past bury its dead. Of course,” he added unwillingly, “if you’ve anything serious on your mind, I don’t want to prevent your unburdening yourself. But if it’s some quibble of conscience, I think you’d better suppress it.”

“It’s serious,” said Cecil, his face pale and his eyes shining.

The clergyman reluctantly resigned himself.

“I—I came to tell you, sir, that I deliberately cheated over the History papers at the end of last term. I saw the questions, before we got our papers.”

“How?” rapped out the master.

“On your desk, sir, when you sent me in here to wait for you one day.”

The boy spoke more boldly and confidently than he had done yet, and there was nothing of the shrinking and stumbling manner that had been evident in his first conversation with Perriman. He faced the master steadily, looking straight up at him.

Perriman remembered that Cecil Aviolet had done well in History.

“What did you do when you saw the questions on my desk?”

“I took down the headings on my cuff.”

“Why do you tell me this now?” Perriman asked slowly.

“Because it was on my mind, and I wanted to start fresh from my Confirmation, sir. It—it seemed my one chance.”

The boy caught his breath, and his tone left no room for doubt as to his earnestness. Then he dropped his eyes and stood waiting.

Perriman spoke at last, and at the first sound of his voice, Cecil started violently, looked once at him, and then seemed almost physically to shrink into himself.

“Cecil Aviolet, if I did my duty, I believe that I should advise the Head to disqualify you altogether as a candidate for Confirmation to-morrow. Either you are mentally unsound, or, for heaven knows what reason, you wish to make me think you so. You did not cheat over the terminal examinations. You did not obtain any sight of the questions set for the History paper. It so happens that no questions for that particular paper were set beforehand. Owing to a press of other matters, the History paper was overlooked, and I myself set the questions, at the eleventh hour, just before the examination began. Nobody on this earth can have seen them, except the Head and myself, for the simple reason that they never left my hand from the moment they were written to the moment I brought them into the class-room and laid them on the desk.”

There was dead silence, while master and boy confronted one another.

“You have made a fool of me, Aviolet, if that was your object,” said Perriman slowly. “Heaven knows, that when I first spoke to you, I did so in all sincerity. I saw that you hadn’t many friends, and cared little for games, and seemed rather out of your element. I saw—or thought I saw—that you were interested in the Confirmation class, and seemed anxious to enter into the right spirit of it all. What you hoped to gain by your bogus confessions and self-accusations, I don’t pretend to know.”

“It wasn’t—it wasn’t—I didn’t——” The boy’s eyes were dilated as though with terror, and his lips white.

“Have you any explanation to offer?” said Perriman incredulously.

His mortification was extreme, and it made him feel sick to see Cecil Aviolet, almost gibbering, mouthing incoherent excuses and meaningless explanations.

“I didn’t—never meant to mock ... you were the only person ... kind to me.... I can’t help it ... it seems to come.... Oh, and I thought the Confirmation——”

He broke down, crying.

“Stop that,” said Perriman contemptuously. “You—you girl—you! Take your hysterics out of here! I’ve had enough of them.”

With hard eyes, he saw the boy creep to the door.

Then the kindly instincts, the old habit of faithful adherence to the precepts of his religion, that were the essential part of the young man’s being, asserted themselves.

“Half a second—look here—come back! I can’t let you go away like that. Aviolet, what on earth made you tell me that senseless lie, accusing yourself of something you’d never done? Was it a—a rotten kind of joke?”

“No—no, sir.... I don’t know ... I can’t help it.... I’m made like that. I told you I was——”

“I don’t know what to believe as to the things you’ve told me,” sighed Perriman. “But I don’t want to be hard on you. I set out to help you, Aviolet, but I’ve bungled badly, somehow. That’s very evident. I—I’m sorry I saw red just now. It was senseless, as well as unkind, to speak as I did. But, you see, I can’t understand you. I don’t think I can help you. I’ve been on a wrong tack altogether, I’m afraid.”

Cecil sobbed on drearily.

“Look here,” said the clergyman gently. “I’m not going to interfere with your going up for Confirmation to-morrow. If you were in earnest, Aviolet, about meaning it to be a new beginning—and I can’t, even now, believe that you weren’t—you’ve got your chance, and you can take it. I’m not going to say anything more to you. Good-night.”

He opened the door quietly and glanced outside.

“All clear—you can cut along.”

Cecil looked up at him as he went out, and the misery in his eyes sent a pang through the master’s heart.

He turned back into the empty room again and sat for a long while with his hands over his face.

“O God, I make Thee a solemn vow, on this day of my Confirmation, that I will never again tell a single wilful lie, so long as I live. And this I sacredly vow and promise, so help me God, for Christ’s sake, Amen.”

Cecil Aviolet, trembling in deadly earnestness, was on his knees in the school chapel. His whole being was strung up momentarily to the pitch of intensity necessary to his belief in his own vow.

When he had repeated this formula, he involuntarily relaxed the tension of mind and body in the exhalation of a long, quivering breath.

Now he knew that if he could break that oath made to God, he was damned indeed. He could never break it. He must be safe, now.

In the midst of a turmoil of shame and remorse and misery, he clung to that conviction. He had no other hope to cling to.

The thought of his own self-exposure to Perriman left him utterly dazed. He felt that he did not even understand how it had happened.

Cecil’s first conversation with Perriman had brought to him the most exquisite sense of relief, proportionate to the wretchedness of a long previous spell of helpless, hopeless self-contempt. He had believed that his Confirmation would indeed prove a new beginning of life, in which the old conditions would no longer prevail any more.

Perriman knew of his degrading weakness, his perpetual breaking of a law of God and man, and yet Perriman had not despised him, had assured him again and again that he was ready to help him, that he believed in him. It had seemed, to Cecil, a very long while since any one in the world of school had been ready to believe in him. He knew that the other boys put him down as a boaster, and sometimes, more crudely, as a young liar. He knew that these things were true of him. Perriman’s interest had begun to revive his self-respect.

After the first difficult statement of fact, it had no longer cost him a great deal to make his avowals to the young clergyman. He had almost felt that they were expected of him, that they enhanced Perriman’s interest in him.

After a little while, he had diligently searched out in himself matter for self-accusation, twisting and distorting tiny incidents until they could be made to acquire some significance, exaggerating facts, sometimes misrepresenting them altogether, sometimes inventing.

And then the master’s hopefulness had seemed to flag, his friendly certainty of the boy’s ultimate conquest to slacken.

He had flicked Cecil upon the raw with that one sentence: “Do try and be more robust about it all, won’t you?”

It had been the stinging, humiliating recollection of those words that had led to the perpetration of the sorry farce that had ended it all.

Ages ago, as it seemed, Cecil Aviolet had indeed seen a pile of papers on Perriman’s own desk that he had perfectly well known to be the question-lists of the coming terminal examinations. There had even flashed across his mind the thought, “A chance for somebody to get a look at the questions now!” But no serious temptation had assailed him. For one thing, the risk of detection would have been too great. At any instant the door might have opened and Perriman have returned. Nor had he been possessed of sufficient presence of mind to think of noting the headings to the questions.

No, those details had occurred to him long afterwards, appropriate accessories to the act, as it might have taken place and as it had not, ever, been in the most remote danger of taking place.

And yet he had scarcely known—had certainly not felt—himself to be lying, when he had made that dramatic statement to Perriman. Cecil was neither very clever, nor profoundly analytical. He did not tell himself, but he dimly knew, that if Perriman had believed in his last lie, he would have come to believe in it himself. He would have worked himself up to something like a genuine remorse for the offence that he had not committed. There would have been flashes of realization—but such searing illuminations Cecil had long been accustomed to relegate into that nocturnal limbo that opens only at the rarest unescapable intervals, in the hour between darkness and the first faint glimmer of dawn: the hour when even youth cannot always seek and find oblivion in sleep.

But Perriman had not believed him. Perriman had thought that Cecil was making a mock of his kindness, of the helping hand that he had extended, the simple, earnest counsels that he had given.

Cecil writhed.

Perriman might forgive him, but he would never respect him, never believe in him any more.

And Cecil did not believe in himself, nor even, very profoundly, in the power of the frenzied vow that he repeated again and again, trying to hypnotize himself into attaching a supernatural potency, like that of a spell, to the form of words that he had chosen.

But when, less than a week later, he found that he had broken his vow again and again, Cecil was not surprised.

At fifteen, he had become definitely incapable of surprise at the extent of his own moral degradation.

III

To Rose Aviolet’s way of thinking, Cecil’s public-school days slid past as might a dream. They had, to her, much of the intangible quality of dream things. She went down to see him many times, in those years, but she never received, either from her visits or from Cecil, any impression of the place other than superficial ones.

There was something withdrawn, strangely colourless about the boy’s personality, that seemed to nullify any possibility of the assimilation of an atmosphere.

He and Rose for the most part spent the holidays at Squires. There Cecil was more eager and more natural, except when Ford was present.

His old, childish admiration for his uncle had entirely disappeared, but in its place was a silent hostility that rather frightened Rose, betraying as it did a depth of bitterness entirely foreign to her own outspoken, abusive dislike.

She once said to Cecil, “You don’t like Ford, do you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he’s rather a beast, I think,” said Cecil slowly. “He sneers at me.”

“I know. He’s always been like that.”

“He’s a beast to you, too, Mummie. Sometimes I want to knock him down when he looks at you with that smile of his, turning down the corners of his mouth.”

“Darling!” cried Rose impulsively.

She was acutely touched by his championship of her.

But when one day Cecil boasted to her that he “had given Uncle Ford a piece of his mind” on the same subject, Rose knew well enough that none of the story was true, and her heart sank within her.

“I simply said to him, ‘Look here, Uncle Ford, I think you forget that I’m practically a man now. You can’t speak like that to my mother in front of me, you know——’”

“Shut up, Ces,” she said wearily.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you think I ought to have said it?”

“You never did say it, Ces, and you know that as well as I do.”

“Mother, if you’re not going to believe what I say, you’ll put an absolute end to all confidence between us. I thought I could always depend on you, at least.”

“So you can, as you very well know,” cried Rose indignantly. “But not to swallow stories that I know perfectly well haven’t got a word of truth in them from start to finish. What’s the sense of it, Cecil?”

“What I told you was perfectly true,” he said coldly.

“That you said that to your uncle? When?”

“It was yesterday, after tea. No—let me see—it was before tea, to be absolutely accurate. In the garden.”

She knew perfectly well that he was lying, but she asked herself whether Cecil knew it.

Before he went back to school for his last term there, Diana Aviolet came to stay at Squires without her husband. She looked pale and drawn, and the slim lines of her figure were sharpening into a middle-aged angularity.

“Cecil has improved a lot,” she said to Rose, soon after her arrival. “He takes so much more interest in things—seems so much keener, somehow.”

“I think he’s very well,” said Rose coolly. “Last year he was growing too fast.”

“I daresay he was. You’re lucky, Rose, to have a son.”

Rose softened in an instant. “Poor Di! It’s rotten bad luck. Have you been to a doctor to see if anything can be done?”

“Oh, my dear!” Diana coloured faintly and prudishly.

“Well, it might be worth while. They have all sorts of dodges now-a-days, I believe. There was a woman I knew—at least I only saw her about once, but she’s a friend of Uncle A.’s—well, she’d been married sixteen years and never a sign of a baby, and she wanted one most dreadfully. And at last she went to a doctor, and made her husband go as well, and he told them——”

Diana broke in hurriedly, “Please, Rose, I’d really rather you didn’t.”

“All right. But she had twin girls, the very next year, perfect ducks, and as healthy as you please, both of them.”

“It’s a boy that Ford wants, of course,” sighed Diana.

Rose, trying to imagine Ford in a paternal role, found herself obliged to maintain a careful silence upon the resultant picture.

“I think it’s very disappointing for a man, if his wife doesn’t have children, don’t you?” Diana asked wistfully.

“It’s just as disappointing for her—in fact more, very likely.”

“Of course, nearly every woman wants a baby, I suppose, but men do seem to feel they’d like someone to live on after them, to carry on the name. At least, that’s what Ford says.”

“Does he say it often?” Rose inquired drily, and felt ashamed when her sister-in-law replied simply and unresentfully:

“Yes, he does.”

“I wish you had got a child,” she said helplessly. “It’s awfully hard on you, especially if Ford——”

Rose stopped abruptly.

“Oh, Ford’s all right. He and I understand one another,” said Ford’s wife rather drearily. “Only of course children are always such a tremendous bond between married people, aren’t they? One misses that.”

“Poor Di,” said Rose gently.

She very often forgot altogether her old animosity towards Diana. In these days, for all Diana’s position as Ford’s wife, her security of moderate wealth and position, her unimpeachable ancestry, it sometimes seemed as though the maturity that had come late to Rose held a deeper significance, a greater stability of poise, than the surface serenity of breeding that had always characterized Diana. Beneath the serenity was an unacknowledged disappointment, a growing boredom, that threatened slow, but very complete, devitalization.

It was quite true that Cecil, as Diana said, had improved.

When he came home from school for the last time, it seemed as though a weight had been removed from his shoulders. He had suddenly acquired an assurance of demeanour that was in odd contrast to his previous morose habit of silence, and self-confidence was no longer lacking in his manner.

In discussing the boy’s future, old Sir Thomas Aviolet expressed himself as being better satisfied with him than he had dared to hope.

“There was a sort of hang-dog look about the lad that I didn’t like, not so very long ago. But he’s taken a turn for the better, I’m glad to see—eh, Rose? He’ll do us credit yet.”

Sir Thomas, like Uncle Alfred, was seldom enthusiastic as Rose understood the word. But she met his very modified praises half-way.

“I always said he’d buck up in time,” she triumphantly declared.

“He seems quite keen on the idea of going to the ’Varsity. I think it’s a good scheme. Completes a fellow’s education, don’t you know? And he might travel for a bit, after that. We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“Travelling is a good thing,” said Rose. “Opens one’s eyes a bit, I mean. But it costs money.”

“That’s my affair,” said Sir Thomas very curtly indeed.

His wife added more gently: “We should like our grandson to see something of the world, my dear, before he settles down to the estate. It seems fairly certain now, humanly speaking, that Cecil will come after Ford at Squires.”

She sighed gently.

“Cecil is growing into a very dear boy, but still—one can’t help feeling for poor Ford’s disappointment at not having a son of his own. I must say, I should never have thought it of Diana.”

“Well, she can’t help it, can she?”

“Give me that ball of wool, my dear, if you can reach it without disturbing yourself. Thank you.”

Rose understood that the subject of Mrs. Ford Aviolet’s ability or inability to continue the direct line of succession to Squires was not one to be pursued.

She had become very much more amenable to such hints with the passing of time.

Cecil himself was pleased and eager at the prospect of going to Cambridge. His new-born enthusiasm reminded Rose of his childish days, and she thought thankfully that the original Cecil had returned to her.

“You see, Mother, I shall make a lot of new friends there, I expect, as well as meeting fellows from school. But I like meeting new people.”

She had noticed that he did, and also, strange development of his one-time timidity, that Cecil now talked more freely and with more animation, when he was in the company of people other than his own immediate circle.

The Marchmonts were invited to lunch at Squires in the course of Diana’s stay, and Rose, at first with gratification, heard Cecil volubly replying to the General’s friendly questionings about his schooldays.

A faint anxiety was beginning to displace the gratification by the time they had entered the dining-room and she had found herself seated next to General Marchmont. Cecil was at the further end of the table.

“Your boy’s growing up very fast. A fine young fellow,” said the old man kindly.

Rose flushed deeply with pleasure and surprise. “I was afraid I heard him laying down the law, just now,” she admitted bluntly.

“No more than is natural and proper at his time of life, I assure you. He seems a clever fellow, too. What’s that he was telling me about a scholarship?”

Rose felt the happy flush ebbing from her face, and bit her lip sharply. “What?”

“Something about his having passed out of school with a fine scholarship to his credit. That’ll stand him in very good stead, you’ll find, whatever line he takes up later on. We want a few brains in the country just now, and the coming generation is where we look for ’em. There isn’t a man in the Government to-day——”

He was launched on a favourite topic, and Rose, not attempting to listen, gave herself up for a moment to her sense of utter dismay.

How could Cecil be such a fool, she asked herself furiously. The silly, boastful lie was predestined to certain contradiction. Only her own passionate instinct of safe-guarding her boy from the contempt and condemnation of others had saved her from an instant denial of the preposterous figment of the scholarship. Not one of the others—Sir Thomas, Lady Aviolet, Diana, any of them—would have either the wit or the charity to leave the old General under his deception, should it occur to him to mention it to them.

She could see, in furious imagination, the blank glance and open-mouthed repudiation with which any one of them would receive such an allusion.

Was it possible that Cecil could not see that too? Rose momentarily lacked the moral courage to face the issue involved in that question. But as time went on, she was forced to consider it.

Cecil, now-a-days voluble and ready to please and be pleased, was attractive to older people by reason of his good looks and his youthfulness. Contemporaries of his grandparents, and even of his mother, liked the boy at first sight, and showed him kindly attention, as had old General Marchmont. He always responded readily, with an evident eagerness to be liked and thought well of that seemed mysteriously to have sprung from the ashes of his schoolboy apathy and dejection. Rose knew that the Aviolets, Lady Aviolet especially, were pleased at this development. She felt sure that they did not perceive that of which she herself was becoming sharply and painfully aware, that sooner or later these kindly people seemed to lose touch with Cecil. They became indifferent, or faintly puzzled, and they no longer sought him out.

Cecil himself appeared to be oddly inured to such shifting relationships. He seemed to pass on, equally eager and hopeful, in search of other friends to whom he might present a more appealing aspect.

For he was acutely preoccupied with his own presentment of himself. Of that Rose, forced into psychological analysis as unfamiliar to her as it was difficult of achievement, had at last become conscious. He recounted imaginary achievements for his own glorification, and related unlikely experiences or future projects obviously intended to render himself interesting to his hearers.

“But everybody does that more or less,” Rose angrily assured herself.

At the back of her mind, unformulated, hung uneasily the sense that Cecil did not pose merely in the foolish, superficial manner habitual to youth. He invented—but he did not delude himself. And he appeared strangely unawakened to the probability that neither did he, at any rate for long, succeed in deluding others.

As in the case of his imaginary scholarship, exploited to General Marchmont, Rose often found that he was incredibly reckless to the certainty of detection.

“Either he doesn’t care—or he doesn’t realize,” she thought, bewildered and wretched.

It seemed to her that, of the two alternatives, one must imply moral, the other mental, deficiency.

She was glad when he went up to Cambridge, hoping against her own innermost certainties that the new environment might produce a miracle. But it produced instead a new perplexity. Cecil began to ask her for money.

He had never been extravagant before, and he received a very adequate allowance from his grandfather.

“What’s the matter? Is it bills?”

“Well, it is, and it isn’t. There are expenses at college that a lady can’t understand, quite, but——”

“Rubbish, Ces! Don’t try and come that gammon over me,” said Mrs. Aviolet forcibly. “Tell me right out what you want money for, like a good boy.”

“I’ve told you that you wouldn’t understand,” said Cecil in an offended voice.

“Then you’d better go to somebody that will,” retorted his mother.

“Mother, I didn’t mean to vex you. The fact is, I got a lot of books and prints for my room when I first went up, and—and the tradesmen are beginning to bother me a bit. They’re threatening—some of them—to write to grandfather.”

Rose had not sufficient experience of the ways of tradesmen in a university town to reject the explanation, although she instinctively doubted it.

“Give me the bills, and I’ll write a cheque—if it’s not more than I’ve got at the bank, which it very well may be.”

“I haven’t got the bills here. You’d better make the cheque out to me.”

“Cecil, do you take me for a fool?” said Rose, looking straight at him.

“If I pay in cash, there’s a considerable discount,” said Cecil with dignity. “That’s the only reason why I suggested it. But if you won’t help me, Mother, then I suppose I shall have to have it out with grandfather.”

“Yes, and I know what that means! The whole thing put into Ford’s hands, and him making a bad matter worse with his sarcasms.... I know. Ces, I’ll help you this once. How much is it?”

“Oh, Mummie darling! Twenty-five pounds. I’ll never be such an ass again....”

He kissed her.

Cecil was always affectionate.

“I wish to goodness you’d tell me, Ces, if there’s anything at the back of this. You ought to know by this time that I shouldn’t let you down, whatever it was.”

“I’ve told you all it is, Mother—on my word of honour I have,” said Cecil, lifting his eyes to hers.

She would not allow herself to disbelieve it. He did not ask her for money again, but some months later, when she had returned to London, and Cecil, at his own desire, was still at work, although the Long Vacation had already begun, she was sent for one evening by the old pawnbroker.

“What mischief has this boy of yours been getting into?” Uncle Alfred demanded, without preamble.

“What’s the matter?”

“The matter is that the lad has written to me for money. I should have thought he knew me better, but he seemed fairly desperate. I can only suppose that some lewd woman has enticed him.”

“Good gracious, Uncle A., what a way you do put things!” Rose protested in vigorous counter-attack.

“The language of Scripture is good enough for me, Rose. Let the squeamish stop up their ears like the adder that is deaf, it will not alter facts. Your son has written and asked me for what he is pleased to call a loan. Needless to say, he offers no security.”

“Well, you’ve got his word, poor child. I’m sure he means to repay it, whatever it is.”

Rose was temporizing, trying to gain command of herself in the new dismay that had come upon her.

“I have not built up a successful business to the glory of God and to the satisfaction of my old age by giving loans to ‘poor children’ on the strength of their intentions of repaying them,” observed Uncle Alfred witheringly. “I have here Cecil’s letter. Do you wish to see it?”

“Yes—no. I daresay he’d much rather I didn’t. I can guess what he says, well enough.”

“I doubt if you can,” said her uncle drily. “It may even surprise you, as much as it did me, to learn that Cecil is entirely disinterested in his request. He merely requires thirty or forty pounds to help a friend out of his difficulties.”

“What friend?”

“Precisely.” Uncle Alfred’s tone was bland. “What friend? I ask myself the same question, Rose. And the answer that occurs to me is to the effect that your son’s friend is of the same family as the friends on whose behalf so many genteel souls, who never—dear me, no, never—contemplate entering a pawnbroker’s establishment on their own account, try to dispose of worthless trinkets in exchange for solid cash. Any one in my way of business gets to know those friends very well indeed. I’ve known ladies bargain quite violently on behalf of the friend. They seem to find it easier than if it was for themselves, somehow. I’m not deceived, and they know I’m not deceived, and yet they go on doing it. The human heart is deceitful, and, above all things, desperately wicked, Rose.”

Uncle Alfred seemed inclined to lose himself in the contemplation of depraved humanity. A knock at the door came to rouse him.

“May I come in?” said Dr. Lucian.

The old pawnbroker welcomed him cordially. He enjoyed the doctor’s games of backgammon, a regular institution now whenever Lucian was in London, and found him excellent company.

He was even prepared to dismiss Rose upon the instant, in the security that a masculine tête-à-tête would be as welcome to his visitor as to himself.

“Don’t let me detain you any further, Rose. Backgammon is not the recreation to you that it is to me—and, moreover, you make a very poor hand at it,” he remarked candidly.

The doctor cast a glance at Rose, but he said nothing. She looked tired, and it might very well be that she was glad of any excuse that should free her from the not always easy task of entertaining Uncle A.

“I’ll go by-and-bye. I’d rather finish this business first, and Dr. Lucian can help, very likely. He knows all about Cecil.”

“What is it?” said the doctor.

“Ces has been playing the fool. I don’t know why, or how. And he’s written to Uncle Alfred to lend him money.”

“He means give, of course,” interjected Uncle Alfred.

“Does he give any reason for wanting money?”

Rose looked at her uncle.

“He writes that he wishes to help a friend who is in great difficulties. Presumably he supposes that I shall believe it.”

Uncle Alfred’s tone left little doubt as to the inaccuracy of the conjecture.

“Yes, I think we might discount that,” said Lucian thoughtfully. “Is this the first time he’s been hard up for money?”

There was a moment’s silence and then Rose said shortly, “No.”

“Do you know—can you guess—what he wants it for?”

“I can’t, indeed.”

“Some Jezebel, no doubt,” was Mr. Smith’s verdict.

“I was wondering about that. Will you let me speak with—er—professional plainness?”

“Of course,” said Rose, opening her brown eyes.

The doctor smiled at her. It was for the sake of Uncle Alfred’s possible susceptibilities that he thus prepared the way. Between Rose and himself, he knew well enough that no artificial barriers to fullness and sincerity of speech could exist.

“About women. Has Cecil had any experiences of that sort at all, so far as you know?”

“None,” said Rose instantly.

Uncle Alfred made a slightly derisive sound, and she turned upon him.

“Oh, I know he wouldn’t tell me about it, if he had. But there are a few things that a boy’s mother knows by instinct, and that’s one of them. And I know that Ces, so far, is as inexperienced in that particular way as any baby.”

“I think you’re probably quite right,” said Dr. Lucian.

But there was no elation in his tone, rather was there something which made Rose cry out anxiously and incoherently:

“Why—what is it?”

“It’s only that I’d rather hear anything, however discreditable, about Cecil, so long as it was normal, than something which, when all’s said and done, is slightly abnormal.”

“You take a low view of human nature, doctor,” remarked Uncle Alfred.

“A low view and a practical one are often synonymous, I find; if by low, you mean natural as opposed to idealistic,” said the doctor drily.

“The human heart is——”

“For goodness gracious’ sake, Uncle A., don’t say that again!” his niece cried.

The pawnbroker looked at her and then nodded significantly to the doctor.

“Very much overwrought,” he observed sententiously.

“And I’ll thank you to let me speak for myself,” said Mrs. Aviolet, tossing her head.

“Your mother over again, Rose. You never got this independent temper from the Smiths, let me tell you. Irreligious my poor brother may have been, and was, in consequence of which he failed in business, and went through the Bankruptcy Court—for unless the Lord buildeth the house, how shall it stand?—but there was no temper about him. And no vice either.”

“Ah, that’s interesting. You understand,” said the doctor, “that these things have a very direct bearing upon Cecil’s case.”

“Do you mean heredity?” Rose asked.

“Certainly I do.”

“The Spirit bloweth where it listeth,” Uncle Alfred automatically quoted, and at once proceeded, in his usual business-like fashion, to the point at issue. “No, my poor brother was a very quiet, well-disposed fellow. Weak, that was his only trouble. Couldn’t say ‘No.’”

“He wasn’t an imaginative, highly-strung person?”

“Nothing of the kind,” Uncle Alfred declared, with a rather offended intonation.

“Cecil is both, you know,” the doctor gently pointed out.

Rose leaned forward, looking earnestly at Dr. Lucian. “I want you to tell me something. Is Ces morally responsible for the things he does?”

Lucian hesitated for a long while before he replied. At last he said: “Honestly, I don’t think he is. Wait——” as she moved, as though uncontrollably. “I don’t mean that he’s of unsound mind. Remember that there’s a great difference between someone who doesn’t know right from wrong and someone who may know it, but has not the strength of mind to control the desire which prompts him towards wrong. The first state implies a deficiency in perception; the second, a deficiency in control. To a certain extent we all, at one time or another, unless we definitely belong to the first group, come under the second. But there are always resistances within ourselves—urgings towards the good. We can call them the promptings of conscience, or the risk of detection, or the fear of consequences. One or other of these motives will serve to deter us, quite frequently, from doing wrong. But I believe, personally, that there are certain individuals in whom those resistances are either non-existent, or else of so feeble a nature that they have no chance of acting as deterrents. Such a deficiency is congenital, for the most part.”

Rose was silent.

The old pawnbroker was gazing into the fire, his shrewd, lined face as expressionless as ever.

Rose Aviolet looked deadly tired.

“Won’t you let me take you home? You look so tired,” said Dr. Lucian gently.

“I’d rather get this settled first. What are you going to say to Cecil’s letter, Uncle?”

“I shall remind him that though his sins be as scarlet, they can be washed white as snow in the Blood of the Lamb. Also I shall point out to him that a man of my business experience is not the person to be approached with foolish and unbusiness-like suggestions of a loan, when what is really meant is a gift.”

“And you won’t send him any money?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, you’re right,” said Rose, drawing a deep breath. “I can’t say anything else. You’re right.”

“Rose,” said the doctor, “would you like me to go to Cambridge and see the boy? I’ll try and find out what’s wrong, and I’ll come and report to you as soon as I get back.”

“That’s exactly like you! How good you are,” cried Rose, her whole face lightening.

“That’s settled, then. Come along, now, and let me see you home. I’ll come back for our game, Mr. Smith.”

“By all means. The Underground Railway will be your best way to travel.”

It was perfectly understood that by the best way Uncle Alfred invariably intended to denote the cheapest way.

Lucian took Rose downstairs.

“Good-night, Mrs. Aviolet,” said a timid voice.

“Oh, good-night, Felix.”

“Will you wait a moment, while I get a taxi?” said the doctor.

“But we can go by Underground.”

“No. You’re much too tired.”

Felix volunteered to fetch a taxi, was thanked and was heartily shaken hands with by Rose through the window, when he had shut the door of the cab upon them.

They left him gazing from the doorstep as they drove away, his eternal feuilleton in his hands.

“That boy worships you, Rose.”

“Poor Felix!” she said leniently. “I shall never forget what a brick he was, years ago, when Ces was ill with croup in the middle of the night.”

“Yes,” said the doctor, rather bitterly, “that’s the way you remember all of us, by what we did, or didn’t do, for Cecil.”

It was very seldom that he allowed himself such an allusion, and the next moment he was ashamed of it.

“I’m sorry—dear.”

“I suppose it’s quite true,” said Rose simply.

When next he spoke, it was in reference to his visit to Cambridge.

“I’ll leave it to you to do whatever seems best,” Rose said. “Poor little Ces! It was a mistake, his going to a public school and university, and all that. He ought to have been put to work young, like the people he comes from.”

He noticed often that now-a-days she was no longer violent in her denunciations of those who had helped to arbitrate in Cecil’s destiny. Time was teaching Rose Aviolet to conform.

Just before they parted, she reverted to what Lucian had said earlier in the evening, as though it had been in her thoughts ever since.

“What you said about motives for not doing wrong having practically no weight at all with some people: well, a thing that’s always puzzled me with Ces is that he never seems to jib at telling a lie even when it’s absolutely certain to be found out. You’d think most people told lies for the sake of deceiving, wouldn’t you? Well—he doesn’t. He tells them when anybody in the world would know that they couldn’t deceive a cat. So it seems,” she turned to face him, and he saw that she was crying, “it seems that what you said is right: the ordinary deterrents don’t exist for Ces. But I do think it isn’t him that ought to go to hell for his sins, but those who brought him into the world what he is.”

IV

Squires, at any rate at the very beginning of the war, maintained its equilibrium. Rose was in London, but Diana and Ford Aviolet drove over from the other side of the county.

“Good Lord, it’s Armageddon!” growled Sir Thomas Aviolet. He was entirely unaware that many hundreds of other people had seized upon the phrase already, and that as many hundreds more would do so within the next few days.

“The whole of the map will have to be re-made,” remarked Lady Aviolet, and sometimes she said instead: “But it can’t last long, that’s one thing. It’s on such a terrific scale that it must be over quickly. It can’t last.”

“They say Kitchener is preparing for a three years’ war.”

“I daresay he has to be on the safe side, Thomas, but it couldn’t possibly last that length of time. Not with all the Russian millions to help us. Why, they say the Russians will be in Berlin before Christmas.”

“I must say, I was frightened that first week-end,” said Diana. “There was a panic in the town, and everyone tried to get food in, for fear of a shortage, you know. And then people were so dreadful about money—one heard of them cashing simply enormous cheques, and taking the gold home with them! Of course, it was the one thing the Government said we mustn’t do—hoard gold. And I’m afraid getting the extra supplies of food wasn’t right, though I did do that myself. I made our grocer give me exactly three times the quantity of everything, and I got a number of tinned things, and a good deal of flour as well. There was actually a queue outside his door, but I’d gone myself, in the car, so, of course, I got in first. After all, it was fair enough in a way, wasn’t it? First come first served, as they say.”

Her husband sneered. “First car first served, Di. You hadn’t come there before they had; but they’d only come on foot.”

“Poor people,” said Diana placidly, although she had coloured faintly at his tone of voice. “Well, I’m sure I hope they got what they wanted, for there was plenty for everybody, as it turned out. And we know, now, that there isn’t going to be any difficulty about supplies, and that people are particularly asked not to hoard.”

“I’m sure we wouldn’t think of such a thing,” said Lady Aviolet. “Though, naturally, nobody wants to go short. That wouldn’t help to end the war. But I’m afraid there’s a dreadful time ahead while it lasts. I wonder we haven’t heard from Cecil about getting a commission.”

“Boys of that age,” said Ford curtly, “won’t be wanted in a show of this kind. They haven’t the stamina, or the experience, or the physique. It’s men that are wanted, not children from school.”

“I expect he’ll want to go, Ford, and one does hear of younger boys——”

“Not of Cecil’s type, Mother. A silly, emotional lad of that kind gives more trouble than he’s worth. Besides, I doubt if he’d be able to stand fire, frankly.”

Lady Aviolet drew herself up. “My dear Ford, you don’t think what you’re saying. Cecil isn’t a coward. You sometimes almost talk as though he weren’t our own flesh and blood.”

“You always are down on poor Cecil, I’ve noticed it myself,” suddenly added Diana.

“I’m sure I don’t know why Ford should give that impression. He’s always been very good to poor Jim’s boy—naturally,” said Lady Aviolet.

She never allowed any one, least of all Ford’s wife, to imply any shadow of criticism of him.

“Cecil isn’t only ‘poor Jim’s’ son.”

“I know, my dear. It was a most unfortunate marriage, of course. But it was all many years ago, and she’s improved wonderfully, poor thing. One may not have very much in common with her, but, at least, she’s a genuinely devoted mother, and she hasn’t stood in the boy’s way.”

“She did her best, when she made difficulties over his going to school.”

“Well, yes,” Lady Aviolet conceded. “She was certainly very tiresome about that, I remember. She had some very odd ideas about his being different to other boys. As though all mothers didn’t think their own children quite different to all other children!”

“But Cecil really was a little bit different, Cousin Catherine,” said Diana. “It seems a shame to say so, but it really was rather dreadful when he was quite little, and wouldn’t speak the truth, or play games without cheating.”

“Little bounder,” muttered Ford between his teeth.

“It’s certainly a very horrid fault,” Diana admitted gravely.

“The streak of bad blood is bound to come out sooner or later. It’s all very well to talk of his being one of ourselves, Mother, but you must admit that there have been times when young Master Cecil showed very decided signs of his Smith ancestry.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t say such things, Ford,” returned Lady Aviolet very placidly.

Her son smiled slightly, raised his eyebrows, and went out of the room.

Diana Aviolet, her face still grave as it had been when she was discussing Cecil, and with a slight additional tinge of colour in it, said to her mother-in-law with an effect of considerable effort:

“You know, I’m afraid that one reason why Ford speaks so bitterly about poor Cecil, is because he feels it so, that he hasn’t got a son himself.”

Lady Aviolet’s own face lengthened—her nearest approach to a change of expression. “Yes, that’s a great disappointment for you both, my dear, and, in fact, for all of us. However, these things are not in our hands, and one can only suppose that Providence has its own inscrutable reasons.”

Diana did not seem to be in any way consoled by the contemplation of such ambiguous wisdom. “Farmers’ wives, and people who really don’t matter a bit, always seem to me to have large families,” she said resentfully. “I don’t know why I can’t have even one child, when it’s so important. I mean, of course, that Ford would like it, and one couldn’t help feeling——”

She broke off, but Lady Aviolet appeared to have understood her meaning.

“Of course, my dear, one had hoped that Ford’s child—and yours—might come after us at Squires, one of these days. After all, he is our eldest son and he’s always been such a good son, too. Poor Jim was very different. Wild, you know. We never say very much about it, but it was his own fault that we were obliged to send him out to the East. And even then, I always think he would have steadied down if only it hadn’t been for that senseless marriage.”

“Of course, it was a pity to marry her, but I quite see—I can understand—I’ve often thought,” said Diana courageously, “that Rose is rather nice, in her own way. What I mean to say is, that in her own way, Rose really is rather nice. Sometimes, anyway.”

“She has improved a great deal,” repeated Lady Aviolet, in very modified approval.

“And she’s good-looking.”

“Men think so, certainly. Laurence Charlesbury admired her. I used sometimes to wonder—however, it would have been very unsuitable, and I imagine he quite realized that. Poor Rose, she was a great deal more impossible in those days than she is now, or else it was that people were so much more particular then. I remember how very much it used to distress me to see her with paint on her face.”

“Bad form,” said Diana judicially.

“Oh, very. And she had a very vehement and emphatic way of talking, that one rather disliked. However, as I say, she has improved very much since then.”

“I wonder what she’ll do now?”

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t train as a Red Cross nurse, I suppose,” said Lady Aviolet rather doubtfully. “I believe the most unlikely people succeed in passing the examinations, and get their certificates, so I suppose it isn’t very difficult.”

“I’m getting up some ambulance classes at home, of course. If Ford gets a commission, I shall try and arrange to go abroad.”

“Ford, my dear! He’s over the age limit.”

“I know, but, of course, he’s going to move heaven and earth. But I don’t really think he’d ever pass, medically.”

“Does his heart still trouble him?”

“Only sometimes.”

“That was the South African war, poor Ford! Well, he need never feel that he hasn’t done something for his country.”

Lady Aviolet rested in this comfortable conviction.

Diana was less at ease, feeling daily the deepening nervous strain beneath which Ford lived.

When a letter came from Cecil, announcing his intention of at once applying for a commission, Sir Thomas loudly proclaimed the fact, looking Ford in the face fairly and squarely as he spoke. Sir Thomas was much more capable than was Lady Aviolet, of thinking Ford and his criticisms something less than infallible.

“Shall I write to Cecil, Father?”

“No thank ’ee. I’ll write myself. He’s shown a very proper spirit,” said Sir Thomas, “and he’s wanted out there. I shall be proud to let him go.”

Sir Thomas had never before spoken with so much cordiality of his grandson.

“Ford may say what he pleases,” he remarked later to his wife, “but that was a very good letter young Cecil wrote me. He may have his faults, but I must say I like a boy of his age to show the right spirit.”

“He’s very young, Thomas.”

“He’ll mend of that in a month or two, as I said to Ford.”

“Oh, I hope it may be all over before then. It can’t last long.”

“Of course, I know very well what’s upsetting Ford,” pursued Sir Thomas with an air of perspicacity. “He can’t get out himself, and he’s got no son to send.”

“His son would be far too young to go, even if he’d got one,” said Lady Aviolet literally. “Why, he’d be still in the nursery.”

“I daresay, I daresay—but that’s what’s upsettin’ him all the same.”

Lady Aviolet did not deny it.

In the course of the next few days, however, it was Sir Thomas who betrayed vexation of spirit, and Ford who was quietly triumphant.

Cecil wrote another letter to his grandfather, in which he did not mention a commission at all, and earnestly asked for money.

“What’s he want money for? He has a very good allowance, and this is no time for lashin’ out. You can write and tell him so, Ford.”

This time Sir Thomas showed no objection to letting Ford act as his secretary. He also bade his wife write to Rose, in London.

“Ask her if she knows what the young ass is up to, and if she doesn’t, she’d better go and see him. Or Ford. Ford would be the best person. Write to her to-night, Catherine.”

Lady Aviolet obediently did so.

My dear Rose,

I wonder if you get more war news in London than we do here. Of course, the papers can only tell what they are allowed to tell, and I am sure that a great deal is being kept from us. What a dreadful time it all is! Like a nightmare, as I say.

I should like to hear if you know how Cecil’s plans stand. Of course, it was very natural he should be eager to join the Army at once, and Sir Thomas was pleased with his letter. But we should like to hear what steps he has taken. We have felt a little bit anxious at his asking for money, especially as he doesn’t say what he wants it for. His allowance is a very good one, more than either Ford or poor Jim ever had at his age. Sir Thomas suggests that Ford should go up and see him, and perhaps he had better, unless you have anything else to suggest.

I daresay it is all very unsettling for him just now, and perhaps he would like to come straight to us, in which case I hope we shall see you as well.

Diana sends her love. She goes home to-morrow to resume Red Cross classes, etc.

Yours affecly.,

CATHERINE AVIOLET.

Rose’s reply, when it came, was not a source of gratification.

Dear Lady Aviolet,

Thanks for yours of last Thursday. I knew Ces would want to go to the war, and of course he’ll have to go.

I’ve been worried, too, about him asking for money, but I can’t get any sense out of him by letter, though I expect I shall when I see him. I shouldn’t think Ford had better go to see him. In fact, I’d already got Dr. Lucian to say that he’d go, only since the war began he’s been head over ears. I’ve now asked him again, and he’ll be off in a couple of days.

I’ll write again when I hear.

Please give Diana my love.

Yours affly.,

ROSE AVIOLET.

“It really is very unsatisfactory,” said Rose Aviolet’s mother-in-law.

“What’s all this about Lucian?” Sir Thomas demanded with corrugated brows. “I don’t want Lucian interfering with my family affairs. What the devil have they got to do with Lucian?”

“You’d better ask Rose. She’s always had some fancy that Dr. Lucian understands Cecil better than the rest of us.”

“Understands him?”

Sir Thomas was scornful of any such necessity. “Lucian is the family doctor, that’s all he is. He ain’t my man of business. What does Rose want him poking about with Cecil’s bills for, eh? I suppose bills are at the bottom of it, young fool. Tell Ford he can go up to Cambridge to-morrow, and write to Rose and tell her I don’t want any meddling from Lucian.”

Thus did Sir Thomas command: prepared to overrule any protests. But he was not destined to settle matters with so high a hand.

“I really can’t write to Rose again, dear,” said Lady Aviolet. “I’m sure you don’t realize how much I’ve got to do just now, with the war and everything. Dr. Lucian is quite a sensible man, and if he was going to presume in any way, he’d have done so long ago when we had to take him so completely into our confidence over poor Jim’s affairs. After all, he is a gentleman. I can’t imagine why we don’t hear from Cecil to say what he’s doing about his commission, but very likely he’s made some silly muddle of things through sheer ignorance, and he doesn’t like to say so. Dr. Lucian can see about that quite as well as anybody else.”

“But there’s evidently some trouble about money, the boy writing and asking for it like that. And Rose’s letter reads a bit as though he’d been worrying her in the same way.”

“I hope he isn’t in debt,” said Lady Aviolet vaguely. “But isn’t there this moratorium, or whatever they call it, of the Government, that wipes out all that kind of thing?”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Sir Thomas curtly. “Women don’t understand, my dear. Better leave it alone.”

Lady Aviolet was only too ready to do so, and to return to her knitting, which now took up more of her time than ever.

Ford, to his father’s peremptory injunctions to proceed immediately to Cambridge, politely and coldly presented a refusal.

“I’m not in the least in sympathy with young Cecil, and never have been. I told you at the time that I thought his first letter a piece of emotional bravado. If he seriously intended to join up at once, he only had to ask you, or myself, how to set about it. There wasn’t a single practical suggestion on the subject in the whole letter—mere rodomontade copied from The Daily Mail patriotic flourishes. I daresay he thought himself quite sincere at the time he wrote, but he’s a boaster, and always has been.”

The heavy face of Sir Thomas was gradually becoming suffused, and his dull eyes looked angrier and angrier.

“I don’t believe it,” he said obstinately. “He can’t be playing the fool now, Ford. I don’t know what all this nonsense is about wanting money, but we’d better get to the bottom of it, that’s all I can say. His fool of a mother wants Lucian to go and see to him. Much more sense if the boy came down here, or you went up there.”

“I’m sorry, it’s quite out of the question. I have a good deal to see to on my own account, at present. If Cecil descends from heroics to practical details, I am quite at his disposal. Otherwise, I think he’d better be left to his mother, who plays up to him, and to Lucian—who plays up to her.”

The next day Ford and Diana left Squires.

“I can’t think why Cecil doesn’t come. Of course, I thought he’d come to London. I knew he’d want to join the Army—not like those people at Squires, who write as if they were quite astonished at his suggesting such a thing,” said Rose scornfully.

“But he hasn’t written any more to me, and I’m terribly afraid he’s written to them for money, like he did to Uncle Alfred, only that was before the war had started, so it seems like years and years ago.”

She caught her breath in a deep sigh.

“I’d go to him myself, only I swore when he first went to school that I wouldn’t be for ever trailing after him in the maddening way that widowed mothers always do. I expect he’d much rather see you, Maurice.”

“I can get up there to-morrow, if you really want me to go.”

“You’re a brick,” said Rose simply. “Maurice, you’re the only person I know who doesn’t think he knows what one wants better than one does oneself. Most people would have said, ‘Hadn’t you better telegraph to Cecil to come here?’ or ‘Hadn’t you better go yourself?’ or other rot of that kind. They always make everything as difficult as they can, it seems to me.”

“I suppose that by ‘they’ you mean, as usual, Cecil’s relatives.”

“I suppose I do.”

They both laughed.

“Mind you, Rose, I think the Army would be a very good thing for Cecil, at least in some respects.”

Her eyes widened. “Why?”

“Because it would give him a chance of feeling that he was really doing a fine thing. I think Cecil has been very much absorbed in imaginary achievements.”

“I know he has.”

“Well, I’ve an idea that he wouldn’t depend on his—fancies—nearly so much if his need of cutting a figure, so to speak, could be gratified in real flesh and blood terms. You see, he’s not good at games, he’s never been particularly clever, he hasn’t even got the personality that would enable him to stand out from the crowd. But that’s what he wants, all the time. That’s what he’s looking for—a chance to distinguish himself.”

“Aren’t we all looking for that, more or less?” Her tone was rather defiant, and she had coloured deeply.

“I suppose we are. Only with Cecil, the instinct has always been out of all proportion.”

“He’s much better than he used to be.”

“I’m glad.”

“You don’t believe it!” she cried swiftly.

“My dear, how do I know?” he protested. “I’ve only had glimpses of him in the last year or two, as you know.”

“He’s much better than he used to be,” she repeated wistfully. Then her essential capacity for facing facts asserted itself.

“But it’s never really possible to know the whole truth about what goes on inside other people’s minds, is it, unless they choose to tell one?”

“Not always then,” said the doctor.

Inwardly, he wondered whether Cecil had impulsively enlisted already, but he saw that the possibility had not occurred to Rose.

“I’ll go to-morrow,” he promised her, “and if Cecil takes my advice, he’ll tell Sir Thomas exactly why he wants money, and how much. He’ll probably get it, and his commission into the bargain. You are prepared for that, Rose?”

“Of course I am.”

She spoke proudly, and Lucian’s heart ached for her.

“What are you going to do yourself, Rose?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve been waiting to hear from Cecil. As soon as it’s settled about him, I can find something to do. It won’t be sitting about at Squires, knitting, anyway. I suppose that’s what poor Diana will end by doing, though Lady Aviolet did write something about Red Cross classes.”

Lucian was rather surprised.

“On the contrary, I should have thought she’d be the very person to go abroad. She has no children, and plenty of money, and let me tell you that she’s an extremely energetic person, and very fairly capable.”

“I know all that,” said Rose calmly, “but you’ll see, Ford won’t let her go. He won’t be able to go himself, because he’s over the age and he’s got a heart or something, and nothing will induce him to let Di go, if he can’t.”

Lucian looked at her reflectively for an instant before he said: “How very much you do dislike Ford!”

“Yes.”

There was a finality in her tone that admitted of no rejoinder.

The doctor, not for the first time, reflected upon the singular un-complexity of Rose Aviolet’s emotions. Her dislikes, to use no more violent term in describing them, were as whole-hearted as were her affections, once given. Either paled to insignificance before the steady, unswerving flame of her passion for her son.

“I’ll go and see Cecil to-morrow,” the doctor repeated, when he said good-bye to her. “Though I don’t suppose the Aviolets will thank me for interfering with their grandson’s affairs, you know.”

“Oh, them,” said Mrs. Aviolet negligently. “Don’t worry about them—they don’t matter.”

V

The doctor, at Cambridge, found Cecil Aviolet under arrest.

Sir Thomas, summoned by telegram, received him.

“Have you come up about this abominable business?”

“I’m here by chance, come up to give the boy a message from his mother. What’s happened?”

The doctor, consternation at his heart, rapped out his questions as one who had the right to information. But Sir Thomas resented nothing, observed nothing. He was nearly beside himself with fury.

“This—this boy, this young blackguard, has been had up—arrested for theft. By God, if I saw him now I believe I’d kill him. A rotter through and through, that’s what he is. My grandson! He’s a dirty, common thief, the young swine! He’s stolen—stolen!”

The old man’s voice was hoarse with passion, and the veins on his face and neck swelled dangerously.

“Stolen what? Money?”

“The same thing—silver. Silver cups and trophies, from other fellows. The young brute——”

Sir Thomas bellowed invectives and curses aloud.

“It’s impossible. There’s a mistake somewhere.”

“That’s what I said, at first. But it’s true. He owned to it.”

Lucian, utterly sick with dismay, could speak no word.

“You’ll have to tell his mother,” said Sir Thomas brutally. “She’ll be here any minute. She’s always spoilt the lad, from the time he was a little boy, and you couldn’t get a straight answer out of him at any price. I could have told her how it would be. You’ll have to tell her, Lucian,” he repeated inexorably. “You’re used to telling women bad news, and she’ll take it better from you. My wife would have come, but it’s knocked her up utterly. By bad luck, she opened the telegram while I was out. We’ve sent for Diana to be with her, and I shall go back as soon as Ford can get here.”

“Is he coming?”

“Of course he’s coming. We’ve got to do the best we can to save the lad from prison, for the sake of the name. My God, to think this young blackguard of Jim’s ’ll be my only grandchild!” raved Sir Thomas.

Lucian paid small attention to the old man’s violence. In earlier years he had seen Sir Thomas Aviolet moved to a like frenzy of savage and irrational fury over the more scandalous episodes in the ill-starred existence of Cecil’s father. He knew that the very violence of the old man’s display of wrath was shortening its duration and exhausting his never very profound capabilities of emotion.

He was thinking, clearly and swiftly.

“Where’s Cecil now?”

“At the police station, I tell you—in a cell at the police station. They searched his rooms this morning—the police did—and they found these blasted cups and things all over the place. They arrested him then and there. They said he was green with funk—he would be, the little cad—and whimpered out at once that he’d stolen the things. God knows what he’s been doing. Got into a mess, I suppose, and thought he’d turn the stuff into cash somehow. I’d sooner he’d taken money, upon my soul I would, than gone and sneaked the pots and things that other decent fellows had won for straight riding and rowing and the rest of it. I’ll pay up—of course I will—I’d pay up ten times over for the sake of the name—but it’ll come out—it’s bound to.”

“Who is going to prosecute?”

“One of the shops—some silversmith’s. It seems there was a big silver thing that hadn’t even been paid for—one of the men had it up to look at it and order the inscription. And the young thief took it out of his room. That’s what put them on the track. Someone saw him, or suspected him, or something. Anyhow, the police came with a search warrant. They’d taken him away by the time I got here, and I tell you, Lucian, I’m glad of it. I couldn’t answer for myself.”

“Then you haven’t been to him yet?”

“Not I. That’s his poor mother’s job. You know what women are. She’ll go to him fast enough, and believe all the lies he may choose to tell her, just as she always has done.”

“How much does she know?”

“Nothing, practically. I telegraphed to her ‘Come at once to Cecil, very urgent.’ She’ll know the rest soon enough.”

The doctor inwardly cursed the cruelty of the unimaginative. He dared not think of the interpretations that Rose would have had time to put upon that summons during her journey.

“I could meet her at the station and tell her.”

“We don’t know what train she’s coming by,” said Sir Thomas helplessly.

“She’ll come by whatever train left London soonest after your telegram reached her,” said the doctor grimly.

“I’ve got a time-table here.” Sir Thomas fumbled interminably, pulled out a little paper book at last, and began to flutter the leaves.

The doctor took it out of his hands, consulted it, shut it to again, and took his hat.

“I’ve just time. I’ll meet the train, take her straight to see the boy, and then meet you here again.”

He reached the station as the train drew up at the platform.

He saw her at once, her tall figure swinging itself from the carriage before the train had stopped moving.

Staring at him, she gripped his arm in both hands and said in a voice, toneless, as though she had rehearsed the sentence over and over again:

“Is he dead? Don’t break it to me, but tell me at once.”

“He’s alive and well. But he’s got into trouble and they’ve arrested him for theft.”

“Nothing else? You swear you’re not keeping anything back—there isn’t anything else to tell me?”

“I swear it, Rose. There’s nothing else.”

Her grasp on his arm relaxed, and the set lines of her white face broke.

“Thank God you’re here,” said Rose Aviolet. “I wouldn’t have believed anybody else. Can you take me to Ces?”

“I’ve a taxi waiting.”

She listened to him in unbroken silence while he told her the little that he had learnt from Sir Thomas. He could see from the strained attitude in which she leant forward on the seat, her hands gripping the sides of it, that unconsciously her every muscle was tightened in an instinctive, desperate desire to speed their progress.

“Could they make it out as kleptomania?” she asked once.

“I doubt it. You see, they’d want medical evidence for that, and it would be very difficult to furnish.”

“Will he go to prison?”

“I don’t think so. Not if we can help it, I promise you. Sir Thomas will offer to make full restitution, of course, and we haven’t heard what Cecil’s got to say yet. There may be mitigating circumstances that we don’t yet know of.”

“Are they bound to—to try him?”

“I don’t know, but I’m afraid so. He’ll probably go before the magistrates, and they’ll remand him for a week. They’re sure to accept bail for him, all right, and he’ll be with you till—till his trial. We’ll get the very best legal advice, Rose, directly you’ve seen the boy. Don’t lose heart.”

He purposely kept the immediate practical issue before them both. Both knew that a darker abyss of thought lay in wait, but neither could envisage it yet.

At the police station, Lucian obtained leave from the Inspector-in-Charge for Mrs. Aviolet to see her son.

They were conducted along whitewashed passages, Rose, looking neither to right nor left of her, but walking with her head well up, gazing straight in front of her.

The doctor let her enter the cell alone, and followed the Inspector to the end of the passage, where the man paused.

“Are you going in, sir?”

“I don’t think so. Not unless they call me. What do you make of this business, Inspector?”

“Very sad for the young gentleman’s people, I’m afraid, sir,” said the official, non-committally.

“I’ve known the boy all his life, and his people before him. You know who they are, of course. He could have applied to them for money, if he’d been in difficulties.”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Has he got any excuse—any reason, for what he did?”

The man hesitated, looked at Lucian, and then spoke less guardedly. “It’s my opinion, sir, that young gentlemen in this sort of position don’t have any valid excuse to offer, unless it’s unsound mind. It isn’t the want of money makes them do it. When it’s money they’re after, we get a forgery or an embezzlement, something like that—not just theft. And there’s some very peculiar features about this case, too. Most peculiar.”

“What’s that?” asked Lucian sharply.

“Sir Thomas Aviolet hasn’t been told this. It’ll come out before the magistrates, of course, but we didn’t tell him this morning. In fact, the man who saw him didn’t rightly know about it. But it’s like this: some of those cups that was found in young Mr. Aviolet’s rooms had got inscriptions on them.”

The Inspector paused, as though expecting a comment, but the doctor, professionally impersonal, did not move a muscle.

“Inscriptions to say that they’d been won by C. J. Aviolet, racing, or the like, or presented to Cecil Aviolet, Esq. The big one, that came from the shop—the one valued at thirty pounds, sir—that one had nothing engraved on it. But there was a document found—a rather remarkable document.”

The Inspector drew out a note-book and read from it:

“To Cecil Aviolet, Esq., in most grateful recognition of his daring achievements, splendid leadership, and indomitable courage and devotion to duty, this cup is presented in grateful admiration by the members of the School Cadet Corps.”

“There you are, sir. That was found in the handwriting of the accused, and no doubt it was meant to be engraved on the cup at his own expense, just as the other smaller cups had been engraved. There were some flowery inscriptions on the other ones, too, all about his prowess at games, and his pluck as a horseman, sir. He’d had them all engraved himself. Some of the cups he’d bought himself, and some of them he’d just taken from other people. In my opinion, the poor young gentleman’s insane.”

The man’s voice was unemotional, giving no hint of any but the most perfunctory compassion.

“No doubt his defence will take that line, sir.”

Lucian nodded. He dared not trust himself to speak.

“The lady’s signing to you, sir,” said the Inspector, and Lucian, in obedience to a gesture from Rose, standing at the door, went in.

Cecil, flushed, his eyes brilliant, leant against one of the whitewashed walls. His hands were in his pockets and he did not remove them at the doctor’s entrance.

Lucian, in an instant, took in the boy’s pose, the tense, hysterical excitement in his bearing, the fictitious defiance that was momentarily nerving him.

He turned to Rose.

“He denies the whole thing,” said Rose, her face ravaged.

“I can explain it all,” Cecil asseverated, wide eyes fixed upon his mother. “The whole thing was a put-up job, a sort of joke. I never thought of its ending like this, and frightening you, Mother. It’s a shame.”

Lucian took two steps forward. “Stop that, Cecil, it’s no good. Remember that you owned up when you were arrested.”

The boy winced at the word, as Lucian had expected.

“I didn’t know—I was frightened then,” he stammered. “Any one would have been frightened. I said the first thing that came into my head. Mother, you believe me, don’t you?”

Rose whitened pitifully at the appeal.

“Stop it, Cecil,” said the doctor again. “If you want to be helped out of this mess, you’ve got to be absolutely open. Be a man. You’ve made a bad mistake, but you can retrieve it, I hope and believe, if you’ll speak the whole truth. Would you rather have it out with me, or with your mother?”

“I’ve told my mother the truth,” said Cecil quietly. “I didn’t do what they think. I’m not a thief.”

“Ces!” wailed Rose. For the first time, tearing sobs shook her.

Dr. Lucian caught his breath. “You don’t understand, Cecil. They know you took the cups, and they know that you had them engraved, at your own expense, with laudatory inscriptions that you had done nothing whatever to deserve, and with imaginary accounts of exploits that you never performed.”

His intentional brutality had its effect.

The boy’s flimsy defence broke down, he turned white and hid his face against his arm.

“Oh, no, no!” said Rose under her breath, her imploring eyes on the doctor.

“My dear, I’m afraid it’s true,” he said steadily. “Ah——”

The boy had suddenly thrown himself on the ground, writhing and sobbing.

Rose was beside him in an instant, her arms round him, her own tears driven back.

“It’ll be all right, Ces. Don’t—don’t. I understand, truly I do. Don’t tell me any more.”

Cecil was screaming under his breath, horribly.

Rose, still kneeling on the stone floor, looked up at Lucian.

“Let him have it out,” the doctor said gently. “Call me, if you want me for anything.”

He stepped outside into the passage once more, closing the door behind him.

He was conscious of a veritable sickness of dismay. It seemed to him, momentarily, that it was himself that was invaded by overwhelming humiliation, that he was openly convicted of that ignoble attempted imposture.

The distant whirr of a telephone struck upon his hearing without penetrating to his consciousness, but in a few moments he was approached by a uniformed figure.

“Dr. Lucian?”

“Yes.”

“Sir Thomas Aviolet has rung up on the telephone, sir. He wishes to speak to you or to Mrs. Aviolet.”

“I’ll go.”

He was taken to a small waiting-room, where yet another uniformed official sat at a table writing, and where a telephone, with receiver unfastened, hung against the wall.

“Dr. Lucian speaking, Sir Thomas.”

The answering voice uttered painstaking shouts.

“I can’t hear. Could you speak lower?”

“... hate these instruments ... what? ... think where you’d got to ... What? Rose come yet...? at once ... solicitor ... best man in ... what?”

“Mrs. Aviolet is with the boy. Do you want me to take any message?”

“... can’t hear a word ... What? ... buzzing going on all the time ... tell Rose ... come here as quickly as possible ... solicitor ... no time to lose.”

“Tell Mrs. Aviolet to come and meet the solicitor who is advising you on the case? Is that right?”

“No time to lose ... hours finding you ...” shouted the angry, inarticulate voice.

“She shall come,” said the doctor, ringing off.

He did not, however, summon Rose, but waited until she came to find him.

“Sir Thomas has telephoned,” he told her. “He’s found a solicitor, the best man available probably. He wants you to come as soon as possible.”

“I’m ready now. They’ll let me come to Ces again.”

As they walked along the street, the doctor eyeing every taxi that passed, Rose said in a choked voice:

“It’s like a nightmare. I keep on thinking I shall wake up out of it all. At first, when you told me what it was, it seemed less awful than all the things I’d been imagining. You see, the telegram only said ‘come at once,’ so I didn’t know.... But prison—oh, it’s awful! Is Sir Thomas frightfully angry?”

“He was very angry when I saw him first, but he’ll have had time to cool down. There’s nothing to be gained by being angry, and I think by-and-bye he’ll see that. He’s sent for Ford.”

“Oh, Ford! What can he do, except jeer and sneer? He won’t even be angry. I believe Ces will go clean off his head, if Ford’s allowed near him.”

“Can you tell me anything about Cecil? Did he give you any sort of explanation at all?”

“He doesn’t deny it any more. That was the worst of all, almost, before you came in, when he kept on saying it was all a mistake, and he hadn’t done it, and wouldn’t I believe him. It was like when he was a little boy, and used to cheat at games, and look up at me with his great soft eyes, with his little hand actually on the counter that he’d moved, and say, ‘But I didn’t, Mummie. I didn’t touch it, truly.’”

She put her handkerchief to her mouth, stifling a sob.

“He can’t help it, you know. It isn’t the same for him as it is for other people—I know it isn’t. I can’t explain it, but I know he’s different, somehow. Jim was bad, and then I suppose marrying someone like me, who wasn’t the same class—Oh, stop that cab quickly!”

She had already signed to the driver.

“Listen, Rose. I want to ask you something. I don’t know, but I imagine, that this solicitor fellow will want to put up a defence of instability of mind. I don’t see what other line he can take. The theft is proved up to the hilt, and the boy will have to plead guilty. If they want medical testimony, are you prepared to hear me take up the line that Cecil is more or less mentally unbalanced?”

“But he’s not mad!”

“I know he isn’t. But the alternative, in the eyes of a jury, will be that he’s a criminal. That would mean—imprisonment.”

“Ces in prison!”

“I know. It would break him, utterly. We’ve got to keep him out of that, somehow.”

“Yes,” she said tonelessly.

“Did Cecil tell you anything? Could he say why he did it?”

“I asked him if it had anything to do with his writing to Uncle A. for money, and he said he wanted the money to pay for the—the silver trophies. He’s had some of them for weeks. I couldn’t ask him about the inscriptions—I couldn’t——”

“No, I see. You know, I think that was part of the same thing as the way he used to talk about imaginary adventures when he was a little fellow. I don’t think he wanted to deceive other people—only himself. He must have had those inscriptions done to try and convince himself that he was something that he wasn’t, and never could be.”

“What were they?” said Rose. “No—don’t tell me. I couldn’t bear it.”

Her voice was choked.

Presently she said: “I suppose, even if we—get him out of this—it’s the end of Cambridge and all that stuff, for Ces?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“We’d better go to the Colonies, he and I. There’s one thing, we can be together. He’s always happy with me, and he’s always loved me best,” she said proudly. “No thanks to them at Squires, either.”

“There’s a pretty considerable chance, Rose, of a job for him when he’s a very little older.”

“You mean the war?”

He nodded.

“I haven’t been able to realize about the war, yet,” she said thoughtfully, and by-and-bye added, with her curious directness: “I suppose a good many people might say that it would be the best thing for Cecil to be killed in the war, before he’d had time to make a worse hash of things.”

The drive appeared to have steadied her, and when the taxi stopped she got out at once, only saying earnestly to Lucian:

“Promise not to go. You won’t leave me?”

“I promise.”

They found Sir Thomas alone. Lucian noted with relief that he seemed to be calmer, as though his fury had spent itself in shouts and denunciations.

“How d’ye do, Rose. This is a dreadful business. I’ve had Calvert on the telephone—first-class man, very clever fellow, I’m told. We’ve got an appointment with him at his office in an hour’s time. Did you keep your cab?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “It’ll wait. We’ve come from the police station, Sir Thomas.”

The old man groaned. “Sit down, Rose, you look done up,” he said not unkindly. “No wonder, either. What d’you make of this affair?”

Rose sank heavily into a chair. “Ces is broken up,” she said piteously.

“The young——” Sir Thomas caught himself up. “It’s a hard thing to say, perhaps, but I’m afraid he’s a hardened young scamp. Either that or he’s off his head. Upon my soul, I don’t know which is worst.”

The doctor thought rapidly.

Beyond the sweeping alternatives that he had just suggested, Sir Thomas was incapable of seeing. The insidious mergings of the psychical into the physical, the encroaching of the nervous system into the domain of moral control, would for ever remain utterly unapprehended by him. He would not only fail to understand; he would never, even dimly, perceive.

Lucian took his decision. Sir Thomas must be approached upon his own plane of reasonings. But he did not look at Rose as he spoke.

“Better face it, Sir Thomas. The boy has never been wholly normal. We shall have to tell this lawyer so.”

Sir Thomas emitted a sort of bark.

“What d’ye mean?”

“I know what he means,” said Rose, her face rigid. “I don’t suppose we’ve any of us forgotten all the trouble there’s been with Ces, one time and another, because he couldn’t speak the truth.”

Lucian inwardly paid passionate homage to her courage and her directness.

“But that’s nothing to do with his being wrong in the head,” said Sir Thomas, bewildered; “if he is.”

“It’s not far off it,” the doctor assured him grimly. “It would go a very long way towards proving that the boy has never possessed the average stability of mind.”

“I suppose you medical men understand your own jargon,” Sir Thomas ungraciously conceded. “But to a plain man of ordinary horse-sense, which is all I’ve ever pretended to be, a liar is a liar and a thief is a thief.”

“Even a so-called criminal may not be morally responsible for his own acts.”

“Then he’s a lunatic.”

Sir Thomas made his assertion with all the positiveness of essential ignorance and stupidity combined.

“It amounts to this,” Rose said suddenly, “either Ces will be proved a thief and sent to prison, or they’ll say he’s mad.”

“Good God!” Sir Thomas groaned. “I only hope he is mad. In fact, I’m inclined to think he must be.”

The doctor glanced swiftly at Rose, seeking to convey to her that Sir Thomas, under the obsession of Cecil’s insanity, would be rather less impracticable than when infuriated by the conviction of Cecil’s depravity. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Call me when it’s time to start. I’m going to telephone for a room at the hotel.”

The doctor let her go. He had something else to say to Sir Thomas Aviolet.

“I learnt an additional fact at the police station—rather a painful one, I’m afraid.”

“Everything about the whole damned business is painful. What was it?”

“One or two of the cups had been inscribed as having been won by poor Cecil for his successes at various games——”

“Never won a cup in his life. The boy’s a perfect fool at any kind of sport. Always has been.”

“Yes. And he hadn’t really won them. But he’d had them inscribed himself.”

“But they couldn’t have been,” Sir Thomas repeated obtusely. “He wasn’t any good at games.”

“It was he who’d had them engraved at his own expense, Sir Thomas. He—he invented the inscriptions.”

“But what for?”

The old man’s utter lack of comprehension was baffling in its completeness.

The doctor told him of the document that the Inspector had read to him, and which they had thought to be the draft for an inscription on the big thirty-pound cup. Sir Thomas listened, his heavy face more and more deeply discoloured, his mouth half opened, his eyes startled and incredulous-looking.

At last he appeared to take in the meaning of the doctor’s carefully chosen words.

“But then—the feller’s mad. He paid for having his own name engraved on cups and things that he’d stolen—he went and bought cups, and then had them engraved? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“Then that settles it,” said Sir Thomas simply. “He’s mad. It’s a ghastly thing but I suppose one ought to be thankful that he can’t be held responsible. God knows where he gets it from! Not the Aviolets, nor yet the Amberlys. I’ll go bail on that. The wretched feller’s mad.”

He was now as deeply convinced of Cecil’s madness as he had previously been convinced of his deliberate wickedness.

“We must get the lawyer man on to that,” he repeated, with an almost child-like pride in his own astuteness. “That’s the line for him to take, d’you see, Lucian? He must tell them the wretched boy’s mad. I—I’m even willing to undertake that he shall be placed under proper restraint. But, for God’s sake, don’t let his mother know that. You know what women are.”

The doctor could have groaned aloud.

Just before they were due to start for the solicitor’s office, Ford arrived.

His sallow face was a shade sallower than usual, his breathing very slightly hurried. He shook hands with his father, and said, “Ha, Lucian?” to the doctor with an interrogative inflexion and raised eyebrows.

“You’ve been quick,” grunted Sir Thomas. “How’s your mother?”

“Di telephoned me that she’s all right, only a bit shaken. Very anxious for news, of course.”

“There’s only one piece of news they can get, can’t they see that? The boy’ll be tried for theft. He’s in custody now.”

“What steps have you taken?” said Ford coolly.

“I’ve got an appointment now with a man called Calvert. I’m told he’s the best feller to go to.”

Sir Thomas seemed eager to convince his son that he had taken prompt and efficient action.

“We’d better go to him at once, then,” said Ford.

“There’s Rose——”

“Rose—is she here? What for?”

“Damn it, Ford, she’s the boy’s mother.”

“All the more reason she should keep out of it. She can’t do the slightest good, and we don’t want melodramatic scenes.”

Sir Thomas looked troubled and angry.

“Well, she’s here now, and behaved perfectly well, poor thing. She’s been to see him.”

“She has also got a full confession out of him,” Dr. Lucian interposed. “Until she’d been with him for a bit, the poor boy was persisting in senseless denials of the whole thing. He owned up, when he was with her.”

“I imagine that the hysterical confessions or denials of a person of Cecil’s mental calibre will hardly affect the point at issue,” said Ford drily.

Sir Thomas fastened upon the wording, rather than the meaning, of the speech.

“Mental, yes. That’s it, Ford. He’s deficient, you know. Not responsible. I saw directly that was the line to take.”

Rose came in.

There was an interchange of looks between her and Ford Aviolet. No more.

“Come along,” said Sir Thomas.

Ford, opening the door for his sister-in-law, nodded at Lucian.

“We’ll let you know if there’s anything to be done. Very much obliged to you, Lucian, and all that.”

Rose looked over her shoulder, her wide, scornful eyes passing over Ford and seeking Lucian only.

Walking past the stiff, narrow-chested figure at the door, he answered the wordless summons, and came.

VI

Rose, her hands tightly locked together, heard her son, a prisoner in the dock, plead Guilty on three counts to stealing goods to the total value of £60 from various college rooms.

She heard Maurice Lucian, his voice and his bearing alike schooled to professional impassivity, give testimony as to the boy’s instability of mind.

She heard Ford Aviolet, far less unmoved than the doctor, his slightly nasal voice low and indistinct, undertake on his father’s behalf that full restitution should be made, and the culprit “placed under proper restraint.”

At that Rose started forward, her hands clenched, but she made no sound.

She heard a clear, monotonous voice from the Bench:

“Have you anything to say, Aviolet?”

Cecil’s reply was inaudible.

There was a moment’s pause, and then the clear, monotonous voice was raised again.

“Your crime has been great, Aviolet, and of a very determined character. You have brought shame on to the old and honoured name of your family, and you cannot possibly plead either ignorance or poverty to excuse your actions. Every advantage of education and upbringing has been yours, and yet you have committed a dastardly theft for which in ordinary circumstances I should probably sentence you to three months’ imprisonment in the Second Division. Not content with theft, you have also had the almost incredible baseness and folly to try and pass yourself off as a subject for admiration on account of your skill and strength at games, your popularity with your fellows, and the like, by means of entirely fictitious inscriptions, composed by yourself, and engraved at your own expense on your stolen trophies. A more senseless, pointless, and idiotic fraud was never perpetrated, and I can only hope that your present humiliation and shame may cure you for ever of what seems to be a form of megalomania.

“For the sake of your unhappy relatives, Aviolet, who have undertaken to make the fullest restitution possible on your behalf, and because of the plea so earnestly put forward, that you are not wholly responsible for your actions, I am prepared to deal with you very leniently.

“You are young, and you have friends to help you. This is a moment when every man in England has a chance of proving his worth. My advice to you is to enlist at once. Are you prepared to do so, if I allow you to leave this Court a free man?”

Cecil raised his head for the first time.

Ford made a movement as though to intervene and Rose saw the doctor lean forward and grip him by the arm. In the lightning interval during which the eyes of the two men met, Cecil spoke:

“Yes, sir.”

The tears rushed to Rose’s eyes, blinding her.

“Very well. Try and redeem your character in the Army. You have been dealt with very mercifully, as I hope you fully realize, but you have also got to realize that you are now, to a certain extent, a marked man. If you fail to make good, if your name comes before the authorities again in the same capacity—then you need not hope for anything but the very strictest justice. And that, let me tell you, will be neither more nor less than prison.

“Now go, and I hope that your future record may wipe out your past.”

Cecil turned away, and at the same moment the doctor was beside Rose.

“This way——” He guided her.

“Ces?”

“Coming at once. You’ll want to go back to your rooms.”

“And pack up and leave the place for ever,” said Rose, recovering her wonted energy.

“It’s largely thanks to you, Lucian, that the boy is free to come with us,” said Ford’s cool tones behind them. “Frankly, I thought this morning that we should leave this place without him.”

“I suppose it would have been possible, in all good faith, to condemn Cecil to prison, but if actions were to be judged by results—which, mercifully, they are not—then it would be a poor look-out for human justice. Prison would be just about the surest way in the world to break the boy for good and all. Thank the Lord, that fellow had the sense to see it.”

“Better luck than the boy deserved,” muttered Ford between his teeth. “Will you look after my sister-in-law, while I go and send a telegram to them at home? I’ll join you at the hotel.”

“Don’t bother,” said Rose, suddenly facing round. “We can manage, Ces and I. There’s nothing to be done, after all, except pack up and go away, and I did most of the packing last night.”

“I’m afraid the situation can hardly be dealt with so off-handedly, Rose,” said her brother-in-law. “The present relief is enormous, I grant you, but we still have to consider the future. I’ve no doubt my father will wish to meet us in London and discuss what is to be done next.”

Rose was neither hearing nor heeding. Her eyes were fixed on Cecil, advancing towards them.

The boy’s face was white and blind, horrible to see.

Lucian took his hand and wrung it.

“It’s over now, Cecil. There’s a car waiting. Take your mother to the hotel, and I order you, as your medical adviser, to have a stiff drink directly you arrive there. Rose, you’ll see he carries that out. We’ll meet at the station in time for the two o’clock train to town.”

Rose nodded.

She and Cecil went away together.

Ford Aviolet, who had viewed Maurice Lucian’s initiative with his habitual faint air of supercilious detachment, seemed nevertheless to be waiting, indifferently rather than of conscious volition, for the doctor’s next move.

“Are you going to find a telegraph office?” said Lucian abruptly.

“I suppose so. If you’ve nothing else to do, perhaps you’ll come my way. Between us, we may think of some pretty way of wording the pleasing intelligence that my nephew has escaped the three months’ imprisonment that he so richly deserves, and is to be hustled into the uniform of a private soldier. No doubt the news will be extremely gratifying to the local postal authorities at home.”

“Nobody is thinking of anything but this war, here or anywhere else.”

“Are you going abroad?”

“No,” said the doctor baldly.

He felt no inclination whatever to put before Ford Aviolet his reasons for the decision.

“I should have thought that a knight-errant like yourself would be——”

Lucian stopped dead. “Look here, I make all allowance for the strain you’ve been under over this wretched business, and the rest of it. But one word more of this, and I swear I’ll kick you into the gutter.”

“You may try,” said Ford Aviolet contemptuously.

The doctor looked at him, and laughed shortly, regaining his temper.

“That was an uncivilized speech of mine, I’ll admit. It’s the Jingo atmosphere we’re living in, now-a-days.”

“You know I’m supposed to have an unsound heart? Half a dozen damned doctors have refused me already,” said Ford bitterly.

The doctor understood why he had been asked whether he meant to go abroad.

“Bad luck!”

“A friend of mine has sworn to get me a job in the War Office, but that isn’t what one wants. The whole thing is a farce—boys like this young rotter of a nephew of mine sent out, and men with experience—fellows who went through the Boer war, like myself—left at home.”

“H’m!”

The sound emitted by the doctor was intended to convey a certain sympathy, but for the life of him he could have found no genial words. Nothing surprised him more than the unexplained tendency that Ford Aviolet had at intervals evinced for years, to expose his soul in short, embittered glimpses to a man by whom he certainly knew himself to be disliked. It threw light, the doctor cynically reflected, on the limitations of Ford Aviolet’s habitual surroundings.

At the post-office, Ford savagely chewed at the end of his silver pencil. Finally he scribbled a message, and handed it silently to the doctor. It was addressed to Lady Aviolet.

“Cecil with us; joining father in London to-day; probably return home to-morrow.”

“I should add two words to that: ‘All well.’”

“I object to clichés,” coldly said Ford. “Nor do I consider that such an expression would be in any way justified by the circumstances.”

Lucian shrugged his shoulders.

Forded handed in his telegram, together with a still more laconically worded one to his father, and the doctor solaced himself with a small retaliation.

He wrote out a lengthy telegram, pushed it across the counter without showing it to Ford, and only remarked, as they left the office:

“I know my sister will want to know what’s happened, and I have not your scruples in regard to clichés in the present case.”

Lucian never forgot that afternoon’s journey to London. Cecil, dazed and white and speechless, sat in a corner seat of the railway carriage, his hands hanging loosely between his knees, his eyes, with the look in them that the doctor had most dreaded to see there, fixed vacantly on space.

Rose, who looked utterly tired out, seemed unable to sit still and moved restlessly in her seat, first opening the window and then shutting it, shifting her dressing-bag from one place to another, and occasionally pulling articles down from the rack apparently for the mere purpose of replacing them.

No one spoke, but the atmosphere was charged with misery until the very air seemed to rock with it, and beneath all, the doctor, at least, was acutely conscious of the steady, relentless undercurrent of cold, passionless hostility and contempt that was soundlessly sent forth by Ford Aviolet. He thought that Rose, too, was aware of it.

At the terminus it was raining, and very cold. Cecil’s teeth were chattering. It seemed the crowning touch to the utter forlornness encompassing him.

“A bag is missing,” said Ford. “Mine, of course. It’s of no account, but I shall have to make the usual fuss. Curse these fellows.”

His face was livid, and he looked angrier than Lucian had ever seen him.

“We’d better go on,” said Rose drearily.

Ford turned round upon her and very nearly snarled: “No! Wait where you are. I shall be back presently.”

Hardly had he turned his back before the doctor felt Rose’s clutch upon his arm.

“Get a taxi,” she urged breathlessly. “Never mind him. He can go to Sir Thomas. I shall take Ces home to Ovington Street. He can’t see his grandfather now, he isn’t fit for it. You can see he isn’t fit for it.”

Her eyes pleaded with him and commanded him.

“Wait a minute. Hadn’t he better get it over, Rose, my dear? He’ll have to see his grandfather sooner or later, and it’s due to the old man, too. Ask the boy what he thinks, Rose.”

She stamped her foot with impatience, her great eyes blazing.

“Can’t you see for yourself that he’s stunned? He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, hardly.”

“I know,” said the doctor gently. “And that’s one reason why it would be better for him to go to Sir Thomas now. There’s bound to be a reaction, later on. Let him get it over.”

She flung herself round, but when she spoke to Cecil her voice was full and soft and gentle.

“Shall we go to the Langham now, to meet Grandpapa, Ces, or would you rather come to Uncle A.’s? You needn’t see any one there unless you want to.”

The boy’s bewildered eyes stared piteously, first at his mother and then at Lucian.

“I’m so cold,” he stammered. “Can’t we go where there’s a fire?”

“I told you so,” Rose flashed at the doctor.

“Cecil,” said the doctor, “will you come and meet your grandfather at once? It’ll be over then, and I don’t fancy it will be very bad. He wants to settle with you what had better be done next.”

Very unexpectedly, Cecil suddenly rallied.

“I’m going to the recruiting office to-morrow,” he suddenly said.

Rose whitened.

At the same moment they saw Ford’s tall figure making its way towards them through the groups of people and the hurrying porters on the platform. His lean, brown face was pinched with cold and drawn with vexation. He was speaking in short, clipped sentences to an argumentative station official at his side.

It was almost incredible that the tiny incident of the mislaid portmanteau should so immensely add to the wretchedness of them all.

To Ford, it was quite evidently the last and culminating exasperation, destroying his habitual control of manner and temper.

The official resented his satirical comments, and was baffling in meaningless and unhelpful replies.

Cecil shivered and shivered.

“Get a cab, for the Lord’s sake, and put us into it,” scolded Rose.

The doctor silently complied.

“Are you coming with us?” she demanded fiercely.

“Do you want me to come or not?” he retorted with equal abruptness.

Cecil looked out from the gloomy depths of the closed taxi.

“Come,” he said.

Ford, with a last, cutting observation to the contemptuous-looking official, directed the driver to the Langham Hotel, and took his place beside Cecil.

They drove in absolute silence through streets that seemed singularly cheerless, with rain beating wildly against the windows, so that they were obliged to close them both.

The warmth and artificial lighting in the big hotel came as a sudden, intense relief.

“Sir Thomas Aviolet?”

“Yes, sir, in a private sitting-room. This way, if you please.”

“Don’t leave me,” Rose whispered to Lucian. “I’m sorry I was so cross at the station.”

Sir Thomas, waiting for them in the ugly, airless room, was not alone. Lady Aviolet sat by the fireless grate, her knitting in her hands.

“Was your train late?” said Sir Thomas, seeming to find an outlet for nervousness in partly-simulated anger.

“How do you do, Rose my dear?” said Lady Aviolet.

She very gently bumped her face against her daughter-in-law’s, in bestowal of her usual perfunctory greeting.

Then she shook Cecil’s hand, without looking at him.

“Ford, my dear boy, how cold you look! Shall I have the fire lit?”

Lady Aviolet rang the bell, ordered the lighting of the fire, and asked that tea should be brought.

Lucian noticed the heavy lines beneath her eyes, the sodden pallor of her face, and the weary, aged look that told of sleepless nights and corroding grief. It was astonishing to him to feel the tense apprehension, the seething emotions of the others, steadied by the mere weight of her composure.

Even Sir Thomas’s bluster died away into a muttered inquiry as to the delay in arrival.

“My luggage has been lost—a gross piece of carelessness. It was properly labelled, and I saw it put in myself. Either it was deliberately taken out again—stolen, in fact—or someone was allowed to walk away with it on arrival. In any case, I shall hold the railway company responsible, as I told them.”

“Scandalous mismanagement,” said Sir Thomas, making use of a phrase which Lucian had very often heard him apply to the minor inconveniences of life.

“Tea,” said Lady Aviolet.

She sat at the round table in the middle of the small room and poured out the tea, and they all, almost automatically, drew chairs to the table and sat down also.

It was Lady Aviolet who held emotion at bay. She made inquiries regarding milk and sugar, and complained gently of the blackness of hotel tea, and desired Ford to ring the bell for more hot water.

“They never bring a proper supply in these places—never.”

She asked about the journey, carefully addressing herself to the doctor.

“It’s turned so very chilly, all of a sudden. You must have found it quite cold.”

“Yes.”

The doctor glanced at Cecil, who still looked chilled through and through.

“Drink some hot tea, Cecil,” said his grandmother.

Her voice was always so utterly inexpressive that it was impossible to say whether or not it denoted constraint, but again she avoided looking at the boy.

“Look here, Ford, I want to know——” began Sir Thomas.

“Just one moment, dear. I want a piece of plain bread and butter. This sort of cake is always poisonous. Dear me, how glad I shall be to get home again!”

Lucian seconded her evident desire to gain time.

“When did you come up from Squires?”

“Yesterday.” She lowered her voice. “Sir Thomas’s letters made me rather uneasy about him, and I thought I should prefer to be with him. He has felt the—the anxiety most terribly.”

“The worst of it may be safely called over, now.”

“I suppose so,” said Lady Aviolet, her face in no way relaxing.

The voice of Sir Thomas, stubborn and inflexible, broke out loudly from the other side of the table.

“Now look here, Catherine, it’s no good shirking the point; we’ve got to settle what’s to be done next. Cecil, I don’t want to say more to you than I need. I daresay—and I may say I—I hope—you’ve gone through something already, in the way of shame and sorrow, for the disgrace you’ve brought upon yourself and upon us all.”

“He was leniently dealt with,” said Ford. “We owe a good deal to Lucian’s evidence, in one sense. I can go into that with you some other time, Father, if you prefer it.” He glanced at Rose.

“But the gist of the matter is this. Cecil, not to put too fine a point upon it, ought to have got six months in prison. Instead of that he was told to go to the nearest recruiting office and enlist. The advice was seasoned with some very pungent observations which I will spare you.”

“Good Lord,” groaned Sir Thomas.

“I presume you haven’t got my telegram, Mother,” said Ford. “I sent one to Squires, having no idea you were up here.”

“Diana will have opened it. She’s there, you know. She waited on, most kindly, to see what the plans would be.”

“You’ll be able to go home to-morrow.”

“Yes,” said Lady Aviolet doubtfully. “If no one will have any more tea, shall we ring and have the things taken away?”

With each postponement of the inevitable crisis, Lucian saw that all of them, except perhaps Cecil, were regaining a measure of poise. Lady Aviolet, indeed, had never lost hers. The avoidance of display had, with her, become an instinct.

The table was cleared, and the formal circle of chairs broken up. Cecil was next to his mother, staring into the fire, and the tragic, fatigued gaze of Rose never left him.

“Now, Cecil, you’ve got out of this—this mess, a good deal more easily than you had any right to expect. But I don’t want you to think that the whole thing ends here. We’ve a right to some sort of explanation, and if you’ve anything to say, now’s your time,” said Sir Thomas.

Cecil, for the first time, looked up, and his white lips moved, but he said nothing at all.

“What made you do it?” asked Ford. His tone was one of utter detachment.

Cecil shook his head.

“Speak up!” ordered his grandfather, with sudden wrath.

“It isn’t fair,” cried Rose passionately. “Why do you torment him with questions now? It can’t undo what’s happened, to talk about it.”

“It can be of very material assistance in preventing its ever happening again, however,” retorted Ford swiftly.

Cecil winced as though he had been struck.

“You know the Ten Commandments, Cecil,” said his grandmother in her slow fashion. “You have heard them often enough in church, I’m sure, and you were taught them as a little boy. ‘Have mercy upon us, O Lord, and incline our hearts to keep this law.’ I’m sure you’ve said those words many a time, with all the rest of us. And if there’s one Commandment more plainly worded than another, surely it is: ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ I could understand it, if you’d never been taught right from wrong. But you have.”

She stressed her inconclusive conclusion with mournful perplexity.

“Well, well, I suppose we none of us think much about church unless we’re inside one,” said Sir Thomas simply. “We don’t want to bring religion into the thing, you can talk about that with your grandmother or your mother later on. But there are certain things that a decent feller doesn’t do, you know—things that put him beyond the pale. Cheating at cards, and that sort of thing, for instance. There have been fellers who’ve blown their brains out for less than what you’ve done, I can tell you.”

The doctor made an irrepressible movement.

“A coward’s form of reparation,” said he. His detestation of generalities was as intense as is that of most precisians in thought, but he was intent only upon Cecil Aviolet, and his possible reactions to the peculiar form of penalization that he was being made to undergo.

“I hope,” said Cecil in a low voice, “that someone else will blow my brains out for me, when I’m sent to fight.”

A sound, just short of open scoffing, came from Ford.

“Heroics are terribly easy, my dear boy. You’ve not gone yet, and, in any case, it’s a pretty nearly certain thing that the fighting will be all over long before you’ve been taught how to hold yourself on parade. You lads are all the same—prating of Death and Glory before you’ve learnt how to hold a rifle.”

Cecil turned his head and glanced at Ford. There was neither resentment nor surprise in his look, but cowed, bewildered misery, like that of a tortured animal.

Lucian set his teeth.

“There’s no question of glory,” said Sir Thomas heavily. “If you do enlist, the circumstances are not such that we need boast about it.”

“If!” cried Rose. “He’d have gone anyway. I know that.”

“That’s neither here nor there, my dear, is it?” said Lady Aviolet mildly.

“If I may make a suggestion,” said Lucian, “it would be that Cecil should find out the nearest recruiting office to-morrow morning, and enlist in a London regiment. That will avoid local gossip best.”

“You might have had a commission in our own Yeomanry, Cecil. All the young men in the county have joined up, practically,” said Lady Aviolet.

“There aren’t nearly enough commissions to go round,” said Rose rather wildly. “Some of them have got to be private soldiers, and everyone knows it’s much harder than just being an officer. And I agree with Dr. Lucian about a London regiment being the best for Ces, as things are.”

Sir Thomas growled assent.

“It’s a most shameful, unhappy business, and we must do the best we can with it. I suppose some of those damned Press fellows were in court?”

“They were,” said Ford. “We shall have the pleasure of seeing the whole thing reported in the evening papers, I’ve no doubt.”

Sir Thomas rang the bell violently.

“Bring me the evening papers,” he demanded.

“Oh, my dear Thomas, please——” Lady Aviolet’s remonstrance was almost emphatic.

“I’d rather know,” said her husband gruffly.

The others sat silent while he scanned the printed sheets. Two he threw aside with a sort of mutter that might have denoted relief. The third one was in Ford’s hands.

“Here you are,” he said quietly, and adjusted his pince-nez.

“‘Undergraduate’s Thefts.... Baronet’s heir pleads guilty.... False inscriptions on stolen goods....’ Oh, Lord, have they got hold of that?”

“What?” said his mother, distressed and obtuse.

Ford read aloud in a rapid undertone:

Some extraordinary inscriptions had been engraved upon the stolen trophies, setting forth the prisoner’s wonderful prowess at games and sport. These were totally untrue and had been engraved at the accused’s own expense. It was stated that a document, in the prisoner’s own handwriting, was found, purporting to represent an inscription: “To Cecil Aviolet, Esq., in most grateful recognition of his daring achievements, splendid leadership, and indomitable courage and devotion to duty, this cup is presented in grateful admiration by the members of the School Cadet Corps.” This was entirely false, and was no doubt destined to take place eventually amongst the other fictitious engravings devised and paid for by the accused.

Sir Thomas violently banged the table with his open hand, making his wife start.

“That’s what you’ve got to explain, you boy, you. That senseless, idiotic game of pretence ... making a fool of yourself——”

“Hush, Thomas,” pleaded Lady Aviolet, as his voice rose almost to a shout.

Ford’s was in marked contrast, as he interposed. “You were always a braggart, Cecil, even as a small boy. I remember the imaginary stories about yourself that you used to tell, by way of boasting. It’s a common failing, of course, but most people outgrow it after seven or eight years old.”

“Stop it,” said Rose suddenly. “If you’ve any more to say, any of you, say it to me. I’m Cecil’s mother, I brought him up, and if he’s got this failing, as Ford says he has, that other boys outgrow, then it’s because I’ve not dealt rightly with him.”

Dr. Lucian, never taking his eyes off Cecil, saw that his lips formed the word “No.” Searching desperately for whatever should break through the boy’s utter despair, he recollected the child at Squires, many years ago, who had been punished by his grandfather’s heavy hand, and had made no sound. The doctor had long gauged the depths of the vanity that had made that endurance not only possible, but almost inevitable, to Cecil. Bending forward, he eagerly sought to appeal to that vanity now.

“Cecil, be a man! You’ve plenty of pluck. Don’t let your mother face the music for you. Any one may make a false step. The fellow who’s respected is the one who fights his way up again.”

Cecil turned and looked at him, with frightened, lack-lustre eyes.

The atmosphere vibrated oddly to Maurice Lucian’s tense, impassioned earnestness. “Tell them you’re going to live it down. You’ve got a splendid chance before you. Every man-jack will be wanted before this war’s over, it’s my belief, and you’re going to be one of the very first to go. No one ever had a better chance of wiping out old scores. Tell them you’re going to make the most of it.”

“Yes, I am,” said Cecil, his voice shaking. His face had suddenly begun to work.

Rose was on her feet, standing between her son and the others. “There isn’t anything more to talk about. He’ll go to the recruiting office to-morrow.”

“Then, my dear, you must come down to Squires with us. We are willing enough to give Cecil another chance, and it’s most important he should spend any leave he may get with us. People will know, then, that there’s no question of casting him off or anything dreadful of that kind. I am sure Sir Thomas agrees with me.”

The doctor saw Rose turn to her son, with a question in her face.

“Please go to Squires, Mummie,” he said to her, still in that uncontrollably quavering voice.

On his last word, the childish name that he did not now very often pronounce, Cecil Aviolet’s stunned apathy suddenly gave way, and he began to cry, in loud, gulping sobs.

“Oh!” cried Lady Aviolet, shocked and disturbed. Instinctively she moved to the door, as though to escape proximity with all that most contravened her every instinct.

Sir Thomas’s exclamation held more of disgust, and less of distress. He, too, moved to the door, and after a second of hesitation, opened it for his wife. The two old people passed out together.

Ford stood stock-still, gazing at his nephew.

His lips parted, as though to speak.

Dr. Lucian laid a most unfaltering grip upon his either shoulder, pushed Ford Aviolet out of the room, and turned the key in the lock.

VII

He could do nothing more to help her.

In the restless preoccupation that filled him, forty-eight hours later, Lucian went round to see the old pawnbroker in Ovington Street.

Felix Menebees opened the door, his face paler than ever and his hair all standing up on end. “How is she, doctor?” he inquired hoarsely.

“Very brave, Felix,” said the doctor kindly. “She’s gone to the country—to Squires, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Please to come in, doctor. The old man—Mr. Smith, I mean—he’s in a terrible way. It seems to have all broken him up, like. This and the war, coming together, like. Mr. Millar’s gone, doctor. He’s enlisted.”

“That’s fine. What about you?”

“They wouldn’t pass me,” said Felix, his face suffused by a strange, yellowish blush.

The doctor, looking at the slender, narrow-shouldered youth with his prominent eyes and pallid face, was not surprised to hear it.

“You tried, did you?”

“Oh, yes, doctor. I tried a good many places, but they all turned me down. One gentleman was very kind and said they’d very likely be glad of me later on, if the war lasts.”

“Meanwhile,” said Lucian, “they’re very glad of you here, no doubt. Shall I go up to Mr. Smith?”

“I’ll ask the servant-girl to tell him you’ve come,” said Felix.

He disappeared into the basement and then came back to say that “the servant-girl” had gone to see if Mr. Smith was able to receive him.

“It’ll buck him up like, I daresay, if you can give him the latest news. He seems to have taken a norror of the idea of—prison.”

“I’ll tell him it’s all right. There’s no danger of that now, thanks to this war.”

“There didn’t ever ought to have been,” said Felix warmly. “I remember Mr. Cecil from when he was a little boy, and he never was bad. He was a—a nice little boy, doctor. I remember him like it was yesterday, and how he’d play Halma, and I’d let him win, most times, just to please him, like. And he always said, ‘That was a good game, Felix. Thank you for playing with me.’ His mother taught him that, you know. And to think of sending her boy to prison—why, it’s just wicked, doctor.”

“I think it is,” said the doctor sadly.

“You’re sure he’s safe now?”

“Quite safe from that, Felix.”

The young man drew a long breath. “I’m glad and thankful to hear it, I’m sure. There was all sorts of notions going through my mind, like, at one time, though I expect you’d think it was all moonshine and madness on my part.”

“I don’t suppose I should think it anything of the sort. What were the notions?”

“I thought perhaps there’d be some way I might offer myself to serve the sentence instead of him,” said Felix, with such simplicity that Lucian scarcely saw the strange appearance that he made as protagonist of Sydney Carton. “It’s a situation that I’ve read of, and I thought there might be something in it—that it might be worked. It would have been nothing to me, doctor, to serve three months’ imprisonment for Mr. Cecil, if I could have done it for her. I daresay you’d laugh, if I told you the number of times I’ve planned out similar situations, as you might say, ever since I was quite a lad. The saving her from a runaway horse, or carrying her out of the building when it caught fire, or giving my life to save Mr. Cecil’s and never letting her know.

“Sometimes, though, I’ve planned out the situation so that she did know, just before the end, and was with me at the last, like.

“It’s all been nonsense, I daresay, but if the opportunity had ever really come, I’d have taken it, doctor.”

“I know you would.”

“It seems funny, in a way, that when you’d always planned dying for someone, or—or being persecuted on their account, or imprisoned, like in a revolution, you shouldn’t ever really do anything better than call cabs for them or take their letters to the post. But I let myself fancy those things, doctor, although I know it was silly like, because the way I’ve argued it is this: that if the thought’s always there, some day the opportunity may come, unexpected like, and then it’ll be a sort of second nature to act promptly, if you take my meaning.”

Felix looked wistfully at the doctor, his hair erect and his bony frame seeming to collapse upon itself from very weakness. His proportions, more especially by comparison with those of Rose Aviolet herself, added indeed an element of the grotesque to his outlined programme of action.

But Lucian felt no inclination to smile. “You’re a good fellow, Felix,” he said. “The picturesque opportunities don’t often come along in real life, as you say, but it’s the other things that really count.”

“Thank you, doctor,” said Felix, blinking his pale eyelashes rapidly. “I should never have said all this, I don’t suppose, only that I’m wrought-up like. Don’t mention it to any one else, please!”

The doctor gave his promise as a breathless young woman in cap and apron came to summon him upstairs.

“Good-night, Felix.”

“I shall be here when you come down, doctor.”

Felix, characteristically, would always be there, the doctor reflected. In all the years during which the doctor had come to Ovington Street, the many times that he had brought Rose there, or taken her away, Felix had always been there, unbolting the door for her, fetching the cab for her, breathlessly echoing her greeting or her farewell, gazing upon her with faithful adoration, and going back to his dark corner of the shop to dream his wild, cinematographic day-dreams of unlikely prowess on her behalf.

“Where is the line of demarcation?” Lucian wondered sadly to himself. “This lad’s fancies may be foolish enough, but it’s a rather sublime sort of folly, and unspeakably pathetic; and that other poor boy, who dragged his day-dreams into everyday life—it’s only a step further, after all.... And yet one’s something of a hero, and the other——”

He would not supply the word, even to himself.

On the way upstairs, a very odd sound, familiar in an elusive sort of way, perplexed him for an instant. He opened the door of the sitting-room.

The frail, fatuous, tinkling sound was intensified. It was an air, the air called “Rousseau’s Dream,” played by an old-fashioned musical box.

It stood on the round table in the middle of the room, where a space had been cleared for it beside the aspidistra and the big Bible. Over the gas-fire, Alfred Smith was sitting, looking strangely chilled and old.

“Rousseau’s Dream” died away in a little blur of sound as the mechanism ran down, and old Smith looked up.

“So you’ve come to see me. It’s kind of you. Sit down by the fire, doctor, and warm yourself.”

Lucian complied with the invitation silently.

“Well, she’s gone down to the country, has she?”

“Yes. You know Cecil has enlisted?”

“I know. They’ll—they’ll send him out there, I suppose?”

“I believe so. He’ll have to go through his training first, of course. Perhaps the whole thing will be over before he gets out there.”

“I hope not,” said the old man sombrely, “I hope not, doctor.”

The old pawnbroker seemed disinclined for conversation, and they sat in silence on either side of the hearth.

At last the old man made a gesture. “You heard that old musical box of mine, as you came in? He—the boy—used to be very fond of it, when he was little. That time when he and his mother first stayed here after they came back from abroad, he was ill once. And when he first came downstairs I let him have the musical box for a treat, and Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ to amuse him. The reason I started it playing just now, was that my heart might be softened towards him. I thought if I could think of him again as a little fellow, I might be better able to forgive him. We are all of us conceived in iniquity, but there is something about a child——”

He broke off.

“Do you remember Cecil Aviolet as a child?”

“Yes, very well indeed.”

“That it should have come to this!” said the old man.

His tone was one of amazement, rather than grief.

“A common thief.”

“No!” said Lucian.

“Yes, that’s all he was. A thief. How can you say he was anything else? That cup was valued at thirty pounds, and he tried to steal the honour and glory of it, too. The Aviolets tried to make out that he was mad, didn’t they? But he wasn’t. I know that very well. He’s a thief and a rogue.”

The doctor was silenced before the sheer weight of the old man’s implacable conviction. Nothing would shake him. Where the Aviolets had seen stark, incomprehensible insanity, where the law had seen wilful depravity, where he himself saw a hundred thousand subtleties of pathology, Uncle Alfred saw the crude fact of a theft.

He would never see anything else.

“It’s my duty to forgive as I hope to be forgiven,” he presently said, very earnestly and loudly. “And I will forgive. I will not let the sun go down upon my wrath. But it’s very hard: Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

“Amen,” said Dr. Lucian.

Uncle Alfred nodded his head slowly. “I hope that may be taken as it was meant,” he cryptically remarked. “How’s Rose?”

“She’s wonderful.”

“Rose is a good girl. She has her faults, but she’s a good girl. I’ve been sorry for Rose, over this business. It wasn’t her fault, the boy turning out like this. Don’t you let any one persuade her that it was, either.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You can help it, all right. She thinks a lot of you, doctor.”

The doctor gazed into the fire.

“I wish,” said Uncle Alfred with sudden fretfulness, “that you’d take and marry her. I’ve never held with Paul on the subject of marriage. No doubt you remember his epistle on the subject? It reads to me like the writing of a disappointed man, you mark my words. People don’t lash out in that way for nothing. Marriage was ordained by God, Paul or no Paul.”

“You haven’t married yourself, Mr. Smith.”

“My loss was another man’s gain,” said Mr. Smith austerely. “And so you’ll find yours will be, my fine sir, if you don’t strike while the iron’s hot. Do you want Rose?”

“Yes.”

“Then, in my opinion, it’s now or never. You’re the person she’s turned to in all this—though I could wish she’d known better than to lean upon an arm of flesh in the day of tribulation—and it’s my belief that if you went to her now, she’d take you.”

“I wish to God I thought so too.”

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” said Uncle Alfred.

He seemed cheered by his own admonitions, and presently Dr. Lucian rose to leave him.

“Are you going to follow my advice?” the old man demanded inquisitively.

“Perhaps I shall. Anyway, I’m very grateful to you for the advice, because I hope it means that you wish me success.”

“I’ve already told you that I wish you success,” Uncle Alfred remarked testily, “but God helps those that help themselves.”

Dr. Lucian went away with the conviction strong upon him that civil speeches were wasted on Mr. Smith.

Within the next two days came the letters that he had known would come.

He opened one from Rose, in her sprawling handwriting that yet held character, and smiled a little, as he always did, at the strange stilted phraseology that he knew her to evolve with so much difficulty whenever she imposed upon herself the uncongenial task of letter-writing.

My dear Maurice,

Ces has been sent off to the barracks and he’ll be in uniform by this time.

They mean to be kind, here, but of course they don’t understand. Sir Thomas says Cecil must come here for the leave they all get before being sent off to fight. I think Ces wants to, really, because he’s always been fond of Squires, and he asked me to stay on here for a bit, till he goes out. I’ve told the hospital I’m not going back for the present. They’ll understand, knowing what’s happened.

I haven’t seen Henrietta yet, but I’ll go soon, and I’ll write and tell you how she is. I had a very nice letter from her.

It wouldn’t be any good me trying to thank you, dear Maurice, for all you did. I can’t say what I feel about it, and never can. There never was any one like you, and I’ll never forget it to my dying day. But I can’t write things, as you know.

It isn’t too bad here. Ford and Diana aren’t here, thank goodness, and I don’t mind anything except Ces, now.

Please go and see Uncle A. if not too busy. I expect he’s down on his luck, and he likes you. Give him my love, and Felix Menebees too.

Yours ever,

ROSE AVIOLET.

The doctor carefully folded up the sheet of paper and put it into his pocket-book before he opened the other letter.

It was from Cecil, dated from the barracks.

My dear Dr. Lucian,

You will have heard from my mother, and she will thank you better than I can for all you’ve done for us both. Of course, I know that what you did for me was for her sake.

I was sent here this morning. It’s all very strange at present, but I’m thankful to be here, and all the men say we shall be sent to the trenches almost at once. I hope we will be, and I hope that I shan’t ever come back from there. This isn’t just swank, but true.

Very, very gratefully

CECIL AVIOLET.

And after he had read that letter, the doctor very deliberately sat down, took out his fountain pen and unscrewed it, and then and there wrote his reply:

My dear Cecil,

Thanks for writing; it was very good of you to find time. I will do everything I can for your mother, for her sake and for yours too, while you’re away, and send you a line with news of her from time to time.

I expect you’ve been through hell, in these last few weeks, and I wish there was anything one could do to help, but it’s the isolation of these things that makes them what they are. I’d like to add, if you won’t think me impertinent, that from a purely professional point of view I should say you’ve turned the corner. But it takes a good deal of pluck to go on, after that, as you’re finding.

My sister asked me in her last letter to give you her love—a message she’s chary with, as a rule, but you’re an old favourite of hers.

The doctor hesitated for some time over the subscription to his letter, and finally, he wrote:

Your old friend,

MAURICE LUCIAN.

A week later he was sent for to Ovington Street.

The small maid-servant who came for him was breathless. “Felix Menebees, ’im as is the assistant, sent me,” she explained, obedient to the fate which decreed that Felix should invariably be denied any ceremonious prefix to his peculiar name. “The old gentleman, he don’t know nothing about you being sent for.”

“Is he ill?”

“M’m,” she nodded hard.

“Do you know what’s the matter with him?”

“The influenza,” she glibly asserted.

“How long has he been bad?”

“About a week, but ’e didn’t let on.”

That Dr. Lucian could believe. He went to the familiar building over the shop at once.

Felix Menebees was at the door, watching for him, and mysteriously beckoned him inside.

“Thank you very much, Gladys. You can go downstairs,” he said to the small servant, who obediently disappeared.

“Doctor, it’s like as if it had to be,” said Felix impressively, when she was no longer within earshot.

“What?”

“More trouble for poor Mrs. Aviolet. You’d have thought she’d had enough to bear without any more being put upon her. But I’m afraid the governor is very ill.”

“Shall I go up?”

“As a friend, yes. As a physician, not on any account,” said Felix earnestly.

“So that’s it, is it? I suppose he doesn’t know you’ve sent for me?”

“I wouldn’t have him know for the world.”

“Very well.”

Dr. Lucian went upstairs.

The pawnbroker was sitting at the round table in the middle of the room, and he was reading in the very large Bible that had always lain there.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he observed to Dr. Lucian without preamble. “I was going to send you a message.”

“I’m afraid you’re a sick man, Mr. Smith.”

“Maybe, maybe. But it’s your signature I want. I’ve made my will. I’ll tell you what’s in it, if you like.”

“That’s not necessary, unless you wish it. Do you want me to sign it now?”

“‘Work while it is day for the night cometh when no man can work.’ Unless I am greatly mistaken—and let me tell you that I am scarcely ever mistaken—that night is not very far away now. Call the lad Felix, and tell him to send the girl here. She can witness with you.”

The doctor obediently went to the head of the stairs, and after delivering his message, delayed his return into the room until all sounds resembling the careful extraction of papers from a secret place by an aged and determined person had ceased.

An immense length of foolscap lay on the table, all but a strip of which was covered with pink blotting paper.

“Here,” said Uncle Alfred to Gladys, who wrote a large, round-hand signature, and went away again looking awed.

“Now you can order me to bed if you like,” said the old man indifferently. “I doubt I shall ever rise from it again, but that boy of poor Rose’s, and this war, between them, have done for me.”

After a very brief examination, Dr. Lucian spoke: “You’re quite right, I’m going to order you into bed. And I want you to let me send round a nurse, who’ll take all trouble off your hands and do just what you tell her.”

“She’ll be the first one of her calling who ever did any such thing, then,” Uncle Alfred disbelievingly remarked. “No, no, I don’t want strange hussies at my bedside; I’ve got no money to throw away on that sort of rubbish.”

“Then send for your niece.” The doctor neatly made the point at which he had been aiming.

“That would be less expensive, by a great deal. Only her keep, though Rose always did have a very hearty appetite. But she’s a good girl—I’m fond of Rose. She can come if she likes. It’ll give her something to think about, now the boy’s gone.”

The doctor wrote that night to Rose. When he came the following evening to see his patient, she met him on the threshold of Uncle Alfred’s room. He took her hand in silence, looking at the tiny lines round her mouth that the last few weeks had traced there.

“Is he very bad?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Going to die?” Rose whispered. “He says himself that he won’t get well again.”

“I’m afraid he won’t, my dear. Shall you be able to stay?”

“Oh, yes. Cecil and I can’t be together now, and I’d rather be here than at Squires, though they’re kind enough in their way. If Ces is sent abroad, he’ll get leave first, and I should have to be free for that, but it won’t be yet.”

Lucian thought, although he did not say so, that she would be free before that.

The old pawnbroker sank very gradually.

The day before his death he remarked to his niece: “Flowers are a very foolish and extravagant custom. You will be so good as to put ‘No flowers, by request.’”

Rose knew better than to protest at the implication. “Very well, Uncle A.”

Presently he said: “You may tell your son that I am not the man to allow the sun to go down upon my wrath. I know my duty as a Christian, and I forgive him. But if you had brought him up in the fear of the Lord, this would never have come to pass.”

That night a change came over him that even to Rose’s eyes was unmistakable, and she sent a message to Lucian early in the following day.

Alfred Smith, his face very grey, lay propped up against his pillows, his fingers plucking at the sheet, his mouth oddly fallen in, and only his shrewd, indomitable old eyes seeming strangely alive still.

“It’s getting very dark,” he said.

The clear light of morning filled the room.

“Now don’t go lighting the gas, Rose,” said Uncle Alfred sharply. “That’s you all over, that is: always in a hurry. There’ll be no need of the light yet awhile. Where’s Felix?”

“In the shop. Do you want him?”

“Certainly not. He’s there to look after the business, not to come upstairs. But mind, there’s to be no philandering with young Millar, my girl. I know you.”

Rose looked pitifully down at the shrunken form. Her strong white fingers closed over his restless ones. Uncle Alfred looked down at their joined hands with a faint, detached air of surprise.

“Is Lucian there?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, low and clearly.

“I am obliged to you for all the attention that you have shown me. Human skill can avail little against ... against the Lord. The Lord——”

His voice wandered into a maze of garbled texts and devotional phrases. But the last words that were wholly intelligible Uncle Alfred spoke with his unfaltering gaze fixed upon Rose.

“You’ll find I’ve remembered you. But you can’t touch the capital.” His tone was triumphant. “I’ve done well, with the Lord’s help, and a good business training. There’s nothing like sound investments to build upon—and unless the Lord build the house, how shall it stand?”

Then he shut his eyes, and, late in the day, passed imperceptibly from sleep into the greater repose.

“He was always kind to Mother and me, in his way, and it meant more coming from him, having always been on the near side, poor Uncle A.,” said Rose, child-like, effortless tears running down her face.

But she wept no more when Felix Menebees, having taken his last leave of his old employer, broke down pitifully, after a night and two days spent upon his feet. Instead, she put a kettle on to the gas-ring and boiled water and made tea and then prosaically said to the doctor and to Felix:

“Let’s have tea. I’m sure it’s much the best thing we can do.”

“Let me....” said Felix incoherently. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Aviolet——”

“Why? I’m sure if any one is entitled to cry, Felix, it’s you, after being on the go a whole night and all you’ve done in the day-time as well. I cry myself, when I’m tired—I roar. I’m sure it does one good sometimes,” said Mrs. Aviolet reflectively.

The funeral was a large one, with few relatives and personal friends present, but many representatives of minor public bodies, and charities. Young Millar had obtained leave for attendance, and afterwards came back to Ovington Street with Rose and Felix.

It was found that Uncle Alfred’s will, a lengthy and elaborately worded document, appointed Artie Millar as his successor in the pawnbroking business, which was left to him outright, together with a capital sum of three thousand pounds. Innumerable small legacies went to as many mission societies, one thousand pounds to Felix Menebees, and Uncle A.’s savings, amounting to nearly five thousand pounds, and invested in gilt-edged securities, was charged with a life-interest for Rose’s benefit, to revert eventually to the business.

“He’s cut Cecil out,” was Rose’s first thought.

Her next, inevitably, was that of the new freedom conferred upon her.

Both she and Lucian congratulated Felix Menebees.

“Thank you very much,” said the youth, in a dazed way. “It was a great surprise to me. It was very good of him.”

Long afterwards he said to the doctor: “I wish Mr. Cecil had had it, doctor—I do indeed.”

“I know what you mean, Felix, but you know Cecil Aviolet will be a rich man one of these days. He’ll be glad that you’ve got some recognition of your loyal service to the old man.”

“It’s a fortune, you know,” Felix said simply. “I’ve no parents, and I’m not clever. I should never have had any money at all, except I earned it, and I’m not clever or strong or educated, to be fit for much.”

“It’s not too late, with this money behind you, to do something in the way of training. What do you fancy?”

Felix gave a curious, shy smile. “I’m going to learn to drive a car, first thing. I’ve arranged about the lessons already.”

“Why, Felix?”

“So as to get to the war. I want to drive a field ambulance.”

The doctor was silent from sheer astonishment.

“Me and Mr. Millar have talked it over. He was most kind. He might have put on airs, in a manner of speaking, seeing as he’s the boss now, but he didn’t at all. He has a relative who’s going to keep the business going for him while he’s at the war, and he offered to make me acting manager at once. It was most gratifying, doctor. But I said that, much as I appreciated the compliment, I must beg to decline owing to other calls. And then I told him what I’d planned. And he’s going to keep the offer open against the time I come back again. Though, of course, as I pointed out, I may never come back again at all, but die fighting my country’s foe, the same as another.”

“Of course you must come back,” said Dr. Lucian vigorously. “We can’t spare your sort, Felix. Good luck to you. Come and see me before you go.”

When Felix Menebees eventually took advantage of the invitation he was in blue uniform, with a Red Cross brassard. His face was radiant.

“We’re off on Monday, doctor. I can’t hardly believe in my own good luck. Me that thought I should never have any adventures at all as long as I lived, but only stand behind a counter all my days! Not that I wouldn’t have done it gladly, for the old gentleman’s sake, and of course for Mrs. Aviolet’s.”

“Have you seen her?”

The pallid face of Felix became even more suffused and transfigured. “Doctor, if you’ll believe me, I wrote and told her how it was my great wish to be allowed to say good-bye to her before I went, and she asked me to take her out to luncheon! She did, indeed. Of course I know, it’s all different when a chap’s in uniform, but I looked upon it, and I always shall, as the very proudest moment of my life. And she’s going to write to me. And I had a note from Mr. Cecil, doctor, to wish me good luck—ever such a nice note. I wish I could have seen him again.”

“You may meet out there.”

“You’d laugh if you knew how often I’d planned getting some chance of saving Mr. Cecil’s life under fire,” said Felix wistfully. “I’d like to do something for her, you know. But the way I look at it, doctor, is that I can be doing my job as though it was for her, like. I daresay you’ve guessed, doctor, knowing both her and me as you do—I daresay you’ve guessed,” said Felix Menebees with a naïveté almost superb, “that I think the whole world, and more, of Mrs. Aviolet.”

VIII

Both Lady Aviolet and Sir Thomas were insistent that Cecil should spend his twenty-four hours’ leave before going to France, at Squires.

“People had better know that he’s coming here as—as usual,” Sir Thomas said. “The lad’s going out to fight and there’s no need to remember anything else.”

The violence of his wrath had subsided by degrees, with the passing months.

“Certainly not,” his wife assented. “And we want to see him, too, Rose my dear, and bid him Godspeed.”

With a generosity that extended far beyond the circumscribed limits of their understanding, they tried to show that they had forgiven him—were willing to give him another chance.

Cecil came to Squires.

He looked strong and sunburnt, and only his eyes betrayed the sickness of the spirit within the young, healthy body.

His grandparents and Diana Aviolet treated him as usual, but he avoided them as much as possible and spent all his moments with Rose. Ford and he exchanged hardly a word—until seven o’clock on the last evening, an hour before Cecil was due to drive to the junction and board his train.

They were in the large hall, and Rose, unwilling to waste an instant of the few precious ones remaining now, was rapidly unpinning her hat behind the heavy tapestry curtains, prepared to fling it out of sight in the adjacent garden-room dear to Diana, sooner than spend time in going upstairs.

As she stood with upraised arms, pushing her yellow hair away from her forehead before the looking-glass on the wall, she heard Ford’s voice.

“So you’re off, and of course you come back with a commission—that’s understood. But not too many decorations, my boy, not too many laudatory inscriptions, I do beg, and—if you must have them, do manage something more artistically authenticated than your college trophies, won’t you?”

In that second, a scarlet mist swam before Rose Aviolet’s eyes.

Through it, she saw the tapestry curtains torn apart by her own hand, and Ford, in his most characteristic attitude, leaning against the high mantelshelf on which stood the pieces of famille verte.

Almost simultaneously with the vision, she was driving her clenched hand, with all her maddened strength behind it, into the middle of his brown, elongated face, from which the sneer had not yet faded.

“God damn you—and damn you—and damn you!” whispered Rose Aviolet, her voice strangled in her throat.

There was a crash of splintering china as Ford reeled backwards and as his shoulder swept the pieces of green china into the tiles of the hearth.

“Mother!” screamed Cecil’s voice behind her.

The next moment Ford had recovered his balance and with one hand gripped Rose’s elbow. With the other hand he pulled wildly at the cord of his smashed pince-nez. Blood sprang where the glass had cut him and his furious gestures smeared it all over his face.

Rose’s free arm swung back again and she raised it for another blow.

Ford gripped her wrist, and in an instant she was powerless.

His face, with amazed, furious eyes, was glaring into hers. “She’s mad—mad—I could have her certified for this....”

“Mother!” cried Cecil’s voice again, on a high, sobbing note.

“She’s mad!” Ford repeated, between his teeth. “Hush—the servants. Get her upstairs.... Ah-h—no, you don’t——”

Rose had wrenched furiously against his grasp.

“Get her upstairs, Cecil. Help me, you fool! She’s as strong as a horse.... Take her feet!”

Rose, suddenly stock-still in his grasp, shuddered from head to foot. She began to tremble violently.

“Take her feet!” Ford commanded.

A flicker passed across Rose’s face.

“By God, no!” shouted Cecil suddenly. “Let go of her arms. She’ll come with me.”

Still in Ford’s grasp, Rose turned her head, her eyes, human and seeing again, seeking Cecil’s.

With that sudden relaxation of tension she found herself, strangely, able to smile at him; and quite suddenly, with the constricted gesture that alone was possible to her with Ford’s hold still upon either arm, she put out her hand to her son.

Half an hour later, incredibly, they had dinner as though nothing had happened.

Ford had disappeared.

Servants of perfectly incurious aspect had swept up the broken china and glass in the hall.

Diana and Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet sat in the dining-room where Rose and Cecil were waited upon with all the simplification of ritual that the war had imposed upon the process of dining at Squires.

Diana and Lady Aviolet knitted.

They made spasmodic conversation.

“They say no one is allowed to write and say where they are, over there. I daresay we shall be able to guess, though.”

“Don’t forget your letters will all have to go through the Censor’s office, Cecil.”

“Great nonsense!” from Sir Thomas. “That’ll all stop directly you get your commission, of course.”

“You ought to have a smooth crossing, I should say.”

“Like a mill-pond on a night like this.”

“Is your flask filled, Cecil?”

“Yes, grandmama.”

“If you find you’ve forgotten anything, or there’s any little thing you want, we can send it, of course.”

“Thanks, Aunt Di.”

“Rose, my dear, you must really eat something. You’ve had nothing. There’s no use in making yourself ill, you know. That won’t help any of us.”

Lady Aviolet anxiously pressed food upon her daughter-in-law.

“A glass of port, then?”

Rose shook her head.

“Wait a minute,” said Sir Thomas. He pulled himself up from his chair, gouty and corpulent, and going to the sideboard, grasped one of the decanters there with his big, shaking old hand, where the blue veins stood out in knots.

“We’re going to drink the boy’s health before he goes, and—and to a speedy and victorious return. From Berlin, eh, Cecil?”

He poured out the wine himself, grasping the backs of the chairs as he went heavily and laboriously round the great mahogany table.

Then, regaining his own place, the old man drew himself up with difficulty to his full height, and raised a brimming glass.

“Here’s to your very good health, Cecil, and a safe and speedy return.”

Lady Aviolet sipped at her glass, but the next moment she had raised her handkerchief to her eyes.

“A safe and speedy return, Cecil,” echoed Diana, very white.

But Rose Aviolet lifted her glass with a steady hand and looked full at Cecil, her brown eyes shining: “Here’s luck, Ces!”

Then she turned to Sir Thomas and said softly: “Thank you.”

The old man had spilt half the port from his glass on to the front of his shirt, and he was gazing down at the spreading stain, grumbling and muttering.

“Hand so infernally unsteady, now-a-days; no doing anything.”

“The carriage is at the door, m’Lady.”

“Oh, dear, where’s Ford?” cried Diana. “You must say good-bye to Uncle Ford, Cecil.”

She pushed back her chair from the table, and Lady Aviolet rose too, replacing the handkerchief somewhere in the rustling folds of her dress.

“Good-byes are always trying,” she said. Her choked voice, pathetic in its striving after a dignified composure, gave utterance to the excusatory cliché almost automatically.

She moved into the hall.

“Plenty of time, but one must allow for the hill.”

Lady Aviolet had always, from the days of her first carriage and pair, allowed for the hill.

It was part of the Squires tradition.

“I must find Ford,” said Diana. She hurried upstairs.

Sir Thomas put out his hand to his grandson. “Good-bye, my boy. Good luck to you. I—I wish I was going with you.”

Cecil wrung his grandfather’s hand. His big brown eyes, with their look of dumb, helpless torment, sought the old man’s as though to convey a message that could never be spoken.

“There, there,” said Sir Thomas. “Good lad, aren’t you? Do your best and we’ll be proud of you yet.”

From an immense distance, across an impassable gulf, it was the answer to the message.

“Good-bye,” said Cecil, in a half-whisper. He turned to his grandmother.

“God bless you,” said Lady Aviolet, crying.

She kissed him, and hurried back into the familiar, unemotional shelter of the morning-room.

But Sir Thomas stood sturdily at the door while Cecil shook hands with the two old servants and he remained there, looking after them as they drove away. His chin dropped heavily on to his breast when at last he turned indoors.

“They were decent, weren’t they?” said Cecil.

“Yes, very.”

“They don’t know about—about what happened in the hall, with Uncle Ford?”

“No, not yet. And I shan’t be there when they do know, Ces. I’m going to the Lucians. They won’t want me at Squires, with him and Diana there—besides, I couldn’t.”

Cecil was silent.

Presently he put his hand into hers, as he had so often done as a little boy, and they sat there, without speaking, until the junction was reached.

“Mummie, I’m so glad you’re going to the Lucians. May I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Has Dr. Lucian asked you to marry him?”

“Yes, heaps of times,” said Rose, without elation as without embarrassment.

“Couldn’t you?”

“Would you like me to?” she asked, surprised.

“Yes, I think I should, especially if it would make you happier. I wouldn’t feel then—I wouldn’t feel so much as if it all depended on a rotter like me—all your happiness.”

“Ces!”

Sobs tore at her throat.

The clear, prolonged whistle of the engine came to them shrilly. He put his arms round her and laid his wet face against hers.

“I love you. I’ll try.”

He was gone.

Rose clung to the wooden barrier of the little station until long after the last red spark from the vanishing train had died in the air.

“Home, Madam?”

The voice of the old man-servant was very patient and pitying, as though he had spoken to her before, and understood why she had neither heard, nor answered.

“I am going to Dr. Lucian’s house,” said Rose Aviolet.

A blinding fatigue possessed her. She discovered that her arms, where Ford had gripped and held her, earlier in the evening, were aching and bruised.

On the threshold of Henrietta Lucian’s room, she stumbled and nearly fell.

“Rose, dear! Come in.”

Henrietta, hobbling stiffly to meet her, pushed her gently into a deep chair, beside the low table where the friendly, homely lamplight shone.

“Don’t say anything—I know. He’s gone. Will you stay here to-night?”

“Yes,” said Rose.

Presently she murmured, “I’m not ever going back to Squires.”

Miss Lucian accepted it quietly.

She left Rose alone whilst a room was prepared for her, and then took her upstairs, pulling herself up each step by the aid of the balusters.

“Oh, your poor knees! I forgot. Don’t climb the stairs,” Rose cried suddenly.

“That’s all right,” said Miss Lucian stoically.

But it had broken the spell.

Rose smiled, thanked her, and broke into a flood of tears.

“That’s better,” said Henrietta, the tears in her own eyes. “Just let me see you in bed, Rose, and then I’ll leave you alone in the dark. It’s all one can do, I suppose.”

When she came downstairs again, she wrote a letter to her brother in London.

“I don’t think Rose will go back to the Aviolets, though I don’t know what happened, exactly. Probably something to do with Cecil. But when this bad bit is over, she’ll want something to do, and I daresay you can help her about it. Anyway, come, if you can.”

Dr. Lucian came.

It was characteristic of the fine and delicate relationship between the brother and sister, that his first inquiry was for Henrietta’s own increasingly frail health. Afterwards, he asked her about Rose.

“She’s heard from Cecil—one of those field post-cards. And she’s talking about work, just as I said she would. She’ll ask you about it.”

“I’ve a suggestion to make to her.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Henrietta significantly.

If any number of implications lay between them in the silence that ensued, neither chose to stress the knowledge of them by word or look.

“You’re wanting to go out there yourself, of course.”

“Blunt is going. He’s a younger man than I am, and wild to go. As a matter of fact, we tossed for it. There’ll be work enough here, before it’s over. And it’s in my own special line—neurology—that I think the Government is going to make use of me.”

“In London, I suppose?”

“Principally.”

“Can you find work for Rose?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her soon. She’s so terribly sad, though she’s so brave.”

That Rose’s sadness was not to impair Rose’s bravery, Lucian felt more certain than ever when she came to him downstairs. The valorous spirit that he had always loved in her was undimmed by her many tears; only the defiance of her early days was gone.

She told him what had happened in the hall at Squires before Cecil went away.

“So you see, I shall never go back there. That’s the end, between them and me, isn’t it? I can’t ever be sorry I did it, you know. Except because of the famille verte. It was such glorious china, and I don’t suppose they’ll ever replace it. Uncle A. said it was very hard to get genuine pieces now-a-days. But one curious thing has happened.”

She paused.

“What is it?”

“I’ve had a letter from Diana. Ford must have told her what I did—his face looked as though he’d been fighting with the cat——” Rose interpolated, with her habitual graceless colloquialism. “But I’ll show you what she says.”

He took the letter, in the square, thick, blue-grey envelope. Diana’s handwriting was as well-bred, unindividual, and unformed as was her mentality.

My dear Rose,

Your things are all packed, and will be sent by the carrier to-morrow.

I hope you will let me know later on what your plans are. It has been a dreadful time for you, I know, and I have felt so awfully sorry for you, only it is so difficult to put things into words, and after all, there isn’t really anything that one can say, is there? Only I do want to say that I’ll do anything I can for you, any time, and I wish we could have seen more of one another.

I was very sorry not to have said good-bye properly to Cecil, you must please give him my love and best wishes when you write. This awful war!

Don’t worry about anything, as you’ve left Squires now and whatever things have happened, this dreadful war makes everything else look tiny. I hope you’ll sometimes write to me, though this letter doesn’t need any answer.

If I get through my Red Cross exams all right, I shall try and go abroad. I’ll let you know.

Yours affectionately,

DIANA AVIOLET.

“She must know what happened,” Rose repeated thoughtfully.

“Yes. Poor thing!”

Rose shuddered. “Poor thing, married to Ford! It’s nice of her to have written, and to say that about Ces. I daresay,” said Rose gently, “that she’s unhappier than I am.”

“She hasn’t your courage, my dear.” The doctor dismissed Diana Aviolet.

Rose’s brown eyes, that looked as though she had cried and cried, sought his, and even now they were vivid and lambent, the eyes of a woman who still lived her life, for joy or grief, with ardour.

“What am I going to do?” she asked him. “Henrietta said you would have some work for me. Is it at the new place you’re going to start?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you about it, all there is to tell, later. But meanwhile, Rose, there’s just this: that work is going to touch the side of life that caught and broke Cecil. I want you to help me to help people who, in one way or another, are like Cecil.”

“Thank you,” said Rose.

They were silent for a while, and then Rose said:

“Of course, you knew that was exactly what I should want most. You always understand. You see, the worst part of it all to me, almost, is to feel that I am partly responsible for Ces being what he is.”

Lucian frowned. “What, exactly, do you mean?”

Rose, cupping her face, now-a-days so innocent of rouge, in her hands, looked earnestly at him from where she sat on the low window-seat.

“Of course, I wasn’t educated, and I was much too young when I married Jim to know about eugenics and heredity and things,” she told him, “but that doesn’t really make me less responsible, does it? The Aviolets have always been all right—you’d expect them to be, of course—but Lord only knows what the Smith blood may have done for my poor Ces. You see, there wasn’t any tradition behind us, was there? Even Uncle A. did things in business that I expect you’d think pretty fishy, from an Aviolet point of view. And, somehow, Ces got born with just that Aviolet instinct left out of him.”

Lucian, walking up and down the long room, came to a sudden standstill before her. “Have they really made you believe that?”

“What?” She looked at him with wide eyes, as he resumed his pacing.

“Have they really made you believe that it’s the strain of your blood in Cecil’s veins that’s made him as he is? My dear, don’t you understand? It’s the Aviolet blood, not yours, that’s responsible. They’re decadent—rotten ... look at Ford. It’s the way, with these old, old families. They intermarry, always with other old, old families, reproducing the same type again and again. You’ve seen the picture of the Spanish ancestress, that Ford is so like? She was probably the saving of them, in her day. They must have died out, or become hopelessly degenerate, but for that one lapse of Sir Basil Aviolet that brought a fresh stock. You can tell that it was a vigorous strain—the physical type that’s persisted to this very day in Ford. But she couldn’t do more than give him her physical characteristics, and a twist to his mentality that’s Latin—nearly the lowest type of Latin, mind you—a middle-class Spaniard. She couldn’t save him, or any of them, altogether. Look at those two boys—Ford and Jim. Poor Jim drank, and did other things as well—I needn’t tell you. But Ford—Ford’s rotten all through. Decadent. Don’t you understand why Ford’s hated you all along? It’s the hatred of the sick for the whole, of the neurotic for the sane.

“Whatever they thought you, Rose, however short you fell of their little, inherited standards, you were alive, all the time, and they knew it. And the Aviolets, they’re dead. Dead limbs on a diseased tree. Ford, poor devil, has the Spanish woman’s brain, such as it is, and so he understands—he can see the difference between you and them. The vital spark. You’ve got it, and they haven’t. They’ll never have it any more. That girl that Ford married is healthy enough, a normal woman, if she is a bit of a fool. But he hasn’t been able to give her a child.”

“She may thank God for it, then,” Rose interposed swiftly, “if it’s as bad as you say.”

“You’re right. She may thank God for it, poor thing. She couldn’t have saved her child from the Aviolet taint, as you’re going to save yours, Rose. It’s what he’s got from you that’s all along held Cecil back from being what Ford is.”

A sound escaped her.

“Don’t you understand?” he asked again, very gently. “Ford understood. In a way, Cecil was Ford. It was the same for both of them. Fundamentally, each of them was aware of that paralysis, that ghastly moral decay, in himself. You and I, my dear, can hardly guess at the meaning of that—the utter, deadly lack, not only of self-confidence, but of self-respect, that it must have engendered. Do you remember that line that you quoted to me once, a long time ago?

‘And some push stumbling on, without a star.’

Don’t cry, Rose, my beautiful, don’t cry any more.”

He knelt beside her, and she wiped away the tears that blinded her and, with the old familiar gesture, pushed the strands of yellow hair away from her brow.

“Is that why Ford hated Cecil?” she asked.

“I think so. Ford saw himself in Cecil all the time. Cecil used to say what wasn’t true so as to make himself believe in himself, so as to see himself as a fine fellow. It wasn’t any one else he wanted to deceive, really. But he had nothing to fall back upon, no inner security, and so he tried to find the courage we all of us need to meet life with, by an imaginary picture of himself as he longed to be. Oh, my God, Rose, which of us hasn’t done it? Only that poor boy got lost, between the two worlds of reality and pretence.”

The doctor paused, and then resumed very gently:

“Ford Aviolet knew exactly the same panic that poor Cecil knows, I’m certain of it. He lacked the inner security, too. But he didn’t take refuge in illusion—couldn’t perhaps. He had other methods of reassuring himself. When he could sneer at, or bully, or hurt something weaker than himself, it gave him a sense of power. He could see himself as a fine fellow, then—the little self that grovelled within him from very weakness. And in both of them, both Ford and Cecil, it was the same taint of corruption, the decadence that came from the Aviolets. Not from you, my dear. You must never think that any more. You’re alive, as the Aviolet stock can never be alive again, and it’s what you’ve given to your boy that’s going to pull him through.”

She was crying again, passionately, and he gripped both her hands and held them tightly in his.

“Never give up hope, Rose. Whatever happens, I believe his soul will come through. You saved that in the earliest days of all, when he was little, once and for ever.”

“We did it together,” said Rose. “You’ve always been there, backing me, ever since we first came to Squires, Ces and I, and they were so angry because he took your little musical snuff-box. Do you remember?”

He nodded.

“How many years ago?”

“Nearly twelve years ago, Rose. And it’s over ten since I first asked you to marry me.”

She gave him a long look, and the ghost of a smile, the shy, mirthful smile that was also Cecil’s. “Well,” said Rose Aviolet, “I think you need only ask me one more time.”

“Really, Rose?”

“Really.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” said Rose, drawing a long breath.

Still kneeling beside her, still holding both her hands in his, Lucian looked her squarely in the eyes.

“Remember, you and I agreed long ago not to take any chances over this thing. It’s going to mean too much to both of us. You’re—you’re not acting on impulse, Rose?”

Into her face there flooded a colour that reminded him of the old days, when Mrs. Jim Aviolet had horrified Squires by her liberal use of rouge.

But as there had been no reality of artifice about her then, so there was no reservation now, in the candour of Rose’s surrender. Both had risen to their feet, and their eyes met on a level.

“Rose.”

He took her into his arms, and it was with all the ardour of her generous temperament that Rose Aviolet, giving herself at last, frankly raised her mouth to his.

“Will you marry me at once, Rose?” he asked her presently. “And we’ll start our work together.”

“Yes. Do you know, Ces wanted this to happen. He told me so, the night he went away.”

“I’m glad,” said Dr. Lucian gently.

Her face thanked him. “Uncle A. would have been glad, too.”

“I think he would,” said the doctor. “He told me some time ago to go in and win, only he didn’t put it that way.”

“I suppose he made it sound as if it had come bang out of the middle of the Bible. He always did. He was very good to me, really, and I was very fond of him. Besides, he gave mother a home.”

The doctor was silent, realizing the inevitable memories that would always throng the faithful heart of Rose, and in which he could never share. As though she had guessed at the faint pang that the thought brought with it, her next words allayed it.

“I wish you’d known her. It’s so difficult to realize that there was ever a time when you weren’t there. Ceylon, and my life with Jim, is the only part that doesn’t seem real to me—not counting Ces, of course. But sometimes, sitting sewing, or anything like that, I’ve thought myself back into those old days over the shop, with mother, when we shared the top bedroom. Sometimes I can hardly believe we’re not there still. It’s funny.”

He listened, as she spoke her thoughts aloud, as Rose had always done.

“I’m glad you’ve got some work for me, and that it’s what you said—helping you to help people who are like him.”

“You see, you’ll understand,” he said. “It’s not only that you won’t condemn, as so many do. You’ll understand. And because you understand, you’ll hope, and you’ll make them hope, too, believe that somehow, somewhere, there’s light ahead. So that there’ll be some, my Rose, who’ll no more ‘push stumbling on without a star.’ Will you make that your work, till Cecil comes home again?”

“Till....” Rose Aviolet paused, and into her brown eyes came the sweetest, strangest look that Lucian had ever seen there; a deep, divided look, that told of inextinguishable love, of enduring grief, of eternal, illimitable hope.

“If Cecil comes home again,” she said, courageous.

Transcriber’s Notes

Fixed minor punctuation errors. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Page 45: changed ‘coveteousness’ to ‘covetousness’.

Page 207: changed ‘so sure’ to ‘not so sure’.

Page 323: changed ‘episode’ to ‘episodes’.

Page 353: changed ‘her’ to ‘him’.

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