"I don't think Mr. Waddington knows that your solicitors advanced the money. There is no reference to them in the correspondence."

"I think, if you'll look through your files, or if Mr. Waddington will look through his, you'll find you are mistaken."

"I can tell Mr. Waddington what you've told me and let you know what he says. If you don't mind waiting a minute I can let you know now."

She sought out Mr. Waddington in his office—luckily it was situated in the kitchen wing, the one farthest from the library. She found him alone in it (the agent had gone), sitting in a hard Windsor chair. He knew that Elise couldn't pursue him into his office; it was even doubtful whether she knew where it was. He had retreated into it as into some impregnable position.

Not that he looked safe. His face sagged more than ever, as though the Postlethwaite nose had withdrawn its support from that pale flesh of funk. If it had any clear meaning at all it expressed a terrified expectation of blackmail. His very moustache and hair drooped lamentably.

"Are you disengaged?" she said.

"Yes. But for God's sake don't tell her that."

"It's all right. She knows she isn't going to see you."

"Well?"

She felt the queer, pathetic clinging of his mind to her as if it realized that she held his honour and Fanny's happiness in her hands.

"She's not going to give up that five hundred without a struggle."

"The deuce she isn't. On what grounds does she claim it?"

"She says you advised her to make a certain investment, and that you promised to lend her half the sum she wanted."

"I made no promise. I said, 'Perhaps that sum might be forthcoming.' I made it very clear that it would depend on circumstances."

"On circumstances that she understood—knew about?"

"Er—on circumstances that—No. She didn't know about them."

"Still, you made conditions?"

"No. I made—a mental reservation."

"She seems to be aware of the circumstances that influenced you. She thinks you've gone back on your word."

"I have gone back on nothing. My word's sacred. The woman lies."

"She sticks to it that the promise was made, that on the strength of it she invested a certain sum of money through her solicitors, that they advanced the money on that security and you advised the investment."

"I did not advise it. I advised her to give it up. I wrote to her. You took down the letter.... No, you didn't. I copied that one myself."

"Have you got it? I'd better show it her."

"Yes. It's—it's—confound it, it's in my private drawer."

"Can't I find it?"

He hesitated. He didn't like the idea of anybody, even little Barbara, rummaging in his private drawer, but he had to choose the lesser of two evils, and that letter would put the matter beyond a doubt.

"Here's the key," he said, and gave it her. "It's dated October the thirtieth or thirty-first. But it's all humbug. I've reason to believe that money was never invested at all. It's all debts. She hasn't a leg to stand on. Not a leg."

"Not a stump," said Barbara. "Leave her to me."

She went back to the library. Mrs. Levitt's face lifted itself in excited questioning.

"One moment, Mrs. Levitt."

After a slightly prolonged search in Mr. Waddington's private drawer she found the letter of October tie thirty-first, and returned with it to the office. It was very short and clear:

"MY DEAR ELISE:

"I cannot promise anything—it depends on circumstances. But if you sent me the name and address of your solicitors it might help."

"Take it," he said, "and show it her."

3

Barbara went back again to the library and her final battle with Elise.

This time she had armed herself with the cheque books.

Mrs. Levitt began, "Well—?"

"Mr. Waddington says he is very sorry if there's any misunderstanding. I don't know whether you remember getting this letter from him?"

Mrs. Levitt blinked hard as she read the letter.

"Of course I remember."

"You see that he could hardly have stated his position more clearly."

"But—this letter is dated October the thirty-first. The promise I refer to was made long after that."

"It doesn't appear so from his letters—all that I've taken down. If you can show me anything in writing—"

"Writing? Mr. Waddington is a gentleman and he was my friend. I never dreamed of pinning him down to promises in writing. I thought his word was enough. I never dreamed of his going back on it. And after compromising me the way he's done."

Barbara's eyebrows lifted delicately, innocently. "Has he compromised you?"

"He has."

"How?"

"Never mind how. Quite enough to start all sorts of unpleasant stories."

"You shouldn't listen to them. People will tell stories without anything to start them."

"That doesn't make them any less unpleasant. I should have thought the very least Mr. Waddington could do—"

"Would be to pay you compensation?"

"There can be no compensation in a case of this sort, Miss Madden. I'm not talking about compensation. Mr. Waddington must realize that he cannot compromise me without compromising himself."

"I should think he would realize it, you know."

"Then he ought to realize that he is not exactly in a position to repudiate his engagements."

"Do you consider that you are in a position—exactly—to hold him to engagements he never entered into?"

"I've told you already that he has let me in for engagements that I cannot meet if he goes back on his word."

"I see. And you want to make it unpleasant for him. As unpleasant as you possibly can?"

"I can make it even more unpleasant for him, Miss Madden, than it is for me."

"What, after all the compromising?"

"I think so. If, for instance, I chose to tell somebody what happened the other day, what you saw yourself."

"Did I see anything?"

"You can't deny that you saw something you were not meant to see."

"You mean Wednesday afternoon? Well, if Mr. Waddington chose to say that I saw you in a bad fit of hysterics I shouldn't deny that."

"I see. You're well posted, Miss Madden."

"I am, rather. But supposing you told everybody in the place he was caught making love to you, what good would it do you?"

"Excuse me, we're not talking about the good it would do me, but the harm it would do him."

"Same thing," said Barbara. "Supposing you told everybody and nobody believed you?"

"Everybody will believe me. You forget that those stories have been going about long before Wednesday."

"All the better for Mr. Waddington and all the worse for you. You were compromised before Wednesday. Then why, if you didn't like being compromised, did you consent to come to tea alone with him when his wife was away?"

"I came on business, as you know."

"You came to borrow money from a man who had compromised you? If you're so careful of your reputation I should have thought that would have been the last thing you'd have done."

"You're forgetting my friendship with Mr. Waddington."

"You said business just now. Friendship or business, or business and friendship, I don't think you're making out a very good case for yourself, Mrs. Levitt. But supposing you did make it out, and supposing Mr. Waddington did lose his head and was making love to you on Wednesday, do you imagine people here are going to take your part against him?"

"He's not so popular in Wyck as all that."

"He mayn't be, but his caste is. Immensely popular with the county, which I suppose is all you care about. You must remember, Mrs. Levitt, that he's Mr. Waddington of Wyck; you're not fighting one Mr. Waddington, but three hundred years of Waddingtons. You're up against all his ancestors."

"I don't care that for his ancestors," said Mrs. Levitt with a gesture of the thumb.

"You may not. I certainly don't. But other people do. Major Markham, the Hawtreys, the Thurstons, even the Corbetts, do you suppose they're all going to turn against him because he lost his head for a minute on a Wednesday? Ten to one they'll all think, and say, you made him do it."

"I made him? Preposterous!"

"Not so preposterous as you imagine. You must make allowances for people's prejudices. If you wanted to stand clear you shouldn't have taken all that money from him."

"All that money indeed! A loan, a mere temporary loan, for an investment he recommended."

"Not only that loan, but—" Barbara produced the cheque books with their damning counterfoils. "Look here—twenty-five pounds on the thirty-first of January. And here—October last year, and July, and January before that—More than a hundred and fifty altogether. How are you going to account for that?

"And who's going to believe that Mr. Waddington paid all that for nothing, if some particularly nasty person gets up and says he didn't? You see what a horrible position you'd be in, don't you?"

Mrs. Levitt didn't answer. Her face thickened slightly with a dreadful flush. Her nerve was going.

Barbara watched it go. She followed up her advantage. "And supposing I were to tell everybody—his friend, Major Markham, say—that you were pressing him for that five hundred, immediately after the affair of Wednesday, on threats of exposure, wouldn't that look very like blackmail?"

"Blackmail? Really, Miss Madden—"

"I don't suppose you mean it for blackmail; I'm only pointing out what it'll look like. It won't look well.... Much better face the facts. You can't do Mr. Waddington any real harm, short of forcing his wife to get a separation."

There was a black gleam in Mrs. Levitt's eyes. "Precisely. And supposing—since we are supposing—I told Mrs. Waddington of his behaviour?"

"Too late. Mr. Waddington has told her himself."

"His own version."

"Certainly, his own version."

"And supposing I gave mine?"

"Do. Whatever you say it'll be your word against ours and she won't believe you. If she did she'd think it was all your fault.... And remember, I have the evidence for your attempts at blackmail.

"I don't think," said Barbara, going to the door and opening it, "there's anything more to be said."

Mrs. Levitt walked out with her agitated waddle. Barbara followed her amicably to the front door. There Elise made her last stand.

"Good afternoon, Miss Madden. I congratulate Mr. Waddington—on the partnership."

Barbara rushed to the relief of the besieged in his office redoubt.

"It's all over!" she shouted at him joyously.

Mr. Waddington did not answer all at once. He was still sitting in his uneasy Windsor chair, absorbed in meditation. He had brought out a little note from his inmost pocket and as he looked at it he smiled.

It began thus, and its date was the Saturday following that dreadful Wednesday:

"MY DEAR MR. WADDINGTON:

"After the way you have stood by me and helped me in the past, I cannot believe that it is all over, and that I can come to you, my generous friend, and be repulsed—"

He looked up. "How did she behave, Barbara?" "Oh—she wanted to bite—to bite badly; but I drew all her teeth, very gently, one by one." Teeth. Elise's teeth—drawn by Barbara.

He tore the note into little bits, and, as he watched them flutter into the waste-paper basket, he sighed. He rose heavily.

"Let's go and tell Fanny all about it," said Barbara.



XIII

1

"I hope you realize, Horatio, that it was Barbara who got you out of that mess?"

"Barbara showed a great deal of intelligence; but you must give me credit for some tact and discretion of my own," Mr. Waddington said as he left the drawing-room.

"Was he tactful and discreet?"

"His first letters," said Barbara, "were masterpieces of tact and discretion. Before he saw the danger. Afterwards I think his nerve may have gone a bit. Whose wouldn't?"

"It was clever of you, Barbara. All the same, it must have been rather awful, going for her like that."

"Yes."

Now that it was all over Barbara saw that it had been awful; rather like a dog-fight. She had been going round and round, rolling with Mrs. Levitt in the mud; so much mud that for purposes of sheer cleanliness it hardly seemed to matter which of them was top dog at the finish. All she could see was that it had to be done and there wasn't anybody else to do it.

"You see," Fanny went on, "she had a sort of case. He was making love to her and she didn't like it. It doesn't seem quite fair to turn on her after that."

"She did all the turning. I wouldn't have said a thing if she hadn't tried to put the screw on. Somebody had got to stop it."

"Yes," Fanny said. "Yes. Still, I wish we could have let her go in peace."

"There wasn't any peace for her to go in; and she wouldn't have gone. She'd have been here now, with his poor thumb in her screw. After all, Fanny, I only pointed out how beastly it would be for her if she didn't go. And I only did that because he was your husband, and it was your thumb, really."

"Yes, darling, yes; I know what you did it for. ... Oh, I wish she wasn't so horribly badly off."

"So do I, then it wouldn't have happened. But how can you be such an angel to her, Fanny?"

"I'm not. I'm only decent. I hate using our position to break her poor back. Telling her we're Waddingtons of Wyck and she's only Mrs. Levitt."

"It was the handiest weapon. And you didn't use it. I'm not a Waddington of Wyck. Besides, it's true; she can't blackmail him in his own county. You don't seem to realize how horrid she was, and how jolly dangerous."

"No," Fanny said, "I don't realize people's horridness. As for danger, I don't want to disparage your performance, Barbara, but she seems to me to have been an easy prey."

"You are disparaging me," said Barbara.

"I'm not. I only don't like to think of you enjoying that nasty scrap."

"I only enjoyed it on your account."

"And I oughtn't to grudge you your enjoyment when we reap the benefit. I don't know what Horatio would have done without you. I shudder to think of the mess he'd have made of it himself."

"He was making rather a mess of it," Barbara said, "when I took it on."

"Well," said Fanny, "I daresay I'm a goose. Perhaps I ought to be grateful to Mrs. Levitt. If he was on the look-out for adventures, it's just as well he hit on one that'll keep him off it for the future. She'd have been far more deadly if she'd been a nice woman. If he must make love."

"Only then he couldn't very well have done it," Barbara said.

"Oh, couldn't he! You never can tell what a man'll do, once he's begun," said Fanny.

2

Meanwhile Mrs. Levitt stayed on, having failed to let her house for the winter. She seemed to be acting on Barbara's advice and refraining from any malignant activity; for no report of the Waddington affair had as yet penetrated into the tea-parties and little dinners at Wyck-on-the-Hill. Punctually every Friday evening Mr. Thurston of the Elms, and either Mr. Hawtrey or young Hawtrey of Medlicott, turned up at the White House for their bridge. If Mrs. Dick Benham chose to write venomous letters about Elise Levitt to old Mrs. Markham, that was no reason why they should throw over an agreeable woman whose hospitality had made Wyck-on-the-Hill a place to live in, so long as she behaved decently in the place. They kept it up till past midnight now that Mrs. Levitt had had the happy idea of serving a delicious supper at eleven. (She had paid her debts of honour with Mr. Waddington's five pounds; the fifty she reserved, in fancy, for the cost of the chickens and the trifles and the Sauterne.) In Mr. Thurston and the Hawtreys the bridge habit and the supper habit, and what Billy Hawtrey called the Levitty habit, was so strong that it overrode their sense of loyalty to Major Markham. The impression created by Mrs. Dick Benham only heightened their enjoyment in doing every Friday what Mrs. Thurston and Mrs. Hawtrey persisted in regarding as a risky thing. "There was no harm in Elise Levitt," they said.

So every Friday, after midnight, respectable householders, sleeping on either side of the White House, were wakened by the sudden opening of her door, by shrill "Good nights" called out from the threshold and answered by bass voices up the street, by the shutting of the door and the shriek of the bolt as it slid to.

And the Rector went about saying, in his genial way, that he liked Mrs. Levitt, that she was well connected, and that there was no harm in her. So long as any parishioner was a frequent attendant at church, and a regular subscriber to the coal and blanket club, and a reliable source of soup and puddings for the poor, it was hard to persuade him that there was any harm in them. Fanny Waddington said of him that if Beelzebub subscribed to his coal and blanket club he'd ask him to tea. He had a stiff face for uncharitable people; Elise was received almost ostentatiously at the rectory as a protest against scandal-mongering; and he made a point of stopping to talk to her when he met her in the street.

This might have meant the complete rehabilitation of Elise, but that the Rector's geniality was too indiscriminate, too perfunctory, too Christian, as Fanny put it, to afford any sound social protection; and, ultimately, the approval of the rectory was disastrous to Elise, letting her in, as she afterwards complained bitterly, for Miss Gregg. Meanwhile it helped her with people like Mrs. Bostock and Mrs. Cleaver and Mrs. Jackson, who wanted to be charitable and to stand well with the Rector.

Then, in the December following the Waddington affair, Wyck was astonished by the friendship that sprang up, suddenly, between Mrs. Levitt and Miss Gregg, the governess at the rectory.

There was a reason for it—there always is a reason for these things—and Mrs. Bostock named it when she named young Billy Hawtrey. Friendship with Mrs. Levitt provided Miss Gregg with, unlimited facilities for meeting Billy, who was always running over from Medlicott to the White House. Miss Gregg's passion for young Billy hung by so slender, so nervous, and so insecure a thread that it required the continual support of conversation with an experienced and sympathetic friend. Miss Gregg had never known anybody so sympathetic and so experienced as Mrs. Levitt. The first time they were alone together she had seen by Elise's face that she had some secret like her own (Miss Gregg meant Major Markham), and that she would understand. And one strict confidence leading to another, before very long Miss Gregg had captured that part of Elise's secret that related to Mr. Waddington.

It was through Miss Gregg's subsequent activities that it first became known in Wyck that Mrs. Levitt had referred to Mr. Waddington as "that horrible old man." This might have been very damaging to Mr. Waddington but that Annie Trinder, at the Manor, had told her aunt, Mrs. Trinder, that Mr. Waddington spoke of Mrs. Levitt as "that horrible woman," and had given orders that she was not to be admitted if she called. It was then felt that there might possibly be more than one side to the question.

Then, bit by bit, through the repeated indiscretions of Miss Gregg, the whole affair of Mrs. Levitt and Mr. Waddington came out. It travelled direct from Miss Gregg to the younger Miss Hawtrey of Medlicott, and finally reached Sir John Corbett by way of old Hawtrey, who had it from his wife, who didn't believe a word of it.

Sir John didn't believe a word of it, either. At any rate, that was what he said to Lady Corbett. To himself he wondered whether there wasn't "something in it." He would give a good deal to know, and he made up his mind that the next time he saw Waddington he'd get it out of him.

He saw him the very next day.

Ever since that dreadful Wednesday an uneasy mind had kept Mr. Waddington for ever calling on his neighbours. He wanted to find out from their behaviour and their faces whether they knew anything and how much they knew. He lived in perpetual fear of what that horrible woman might say or do. The memory of what he had said and done that Wednesday no longer disturbed his complete satisfaction with himself. He couldn't think of Elise as horrible without at the same time thinking of himself as the pure and chivalrous spirit that had resisted her. Automatically he thought of himself as pure and chivalrous. And in the rare but beastly moments when he did remember what he had done and said to Elise and what Elise had done and said to him, when he felt again her hand beating him off and heard her voice crying out: "You old imbecile!" automatically he thought of her as cold. Some women were like that—cold. Deficient in natural feeling. Only an abnormal coldness could have made her repulse him as she did. She had told him to his face, in her indecent way, that love was the most ridiculous thing. He couldn't, for the life of him, understand how a thing that was so delightful to other women could he ridiculous to Elise; but there it was.

Absolutely abnormal, that. His vanity received immense consolation in thinking of Elise as abnormal.

His mind passed without a jolt or a jar from one consideration to its opposite. Elise was cold and he was normally and nobly passionate Elise was horrible and he was chivalrously pure. Whichever way he had it he was consoled.

But you couldn't tell in what awful light the thing might present itself to other people.

It was this doubt that drove him to Underwoods one afternoon early in January, ostensibly to deliver his greetings for the New Year.

After tea Sir John lured him into his library for a smoke. The peculiar smile and twinkle at play on his fat face should have warned Mr. Waddington of what was imminent.

They puffed in an amicable silence for about two minutes before he began.

"Ever see anything of Mrs. Levitt now?"

Mr. Waddington raised his eyebrows as if surprised at this impertinence. He seemed to be debating with himself whether he would condescend to answer it or not.

"No," he said presently, "I don't."

"Taken my advice and dropped it, have you?"

"I should say, rather, it dropped itself."

"I'm glad to hear that, Waddington; I'm very glad to hear it. I always said, you know, you'd get landed if you didn't look out."

"My dear Corbett, I did look out. You don't imagine I was going to be let in more than I could help."

"Wise after the event, what?"

Mr. Waddington thought: "He's trying to pump me." He was determined not to be pumped. Corbett should not get anything out of him.

"After what event? Fanny's called several times, but she doesn't care to keep it up. Neither, to tell the honest truth, do I.... Why?"

Sir John was twinkling at him in his exasperating way.

"Why? Because, my dear fellow, the woman's going about everywhere saying she's given you up."

"I don't care," said Mr. Waddington, "what she says. Quite immaterial to me."

"You mayn't care, but your friends do, Waddington."

"It's very good of them. But they can save themselves the trouble."

He thought: "He isn't going to get anything out of me."

"Oh, come, you don't suppose we believe a word of it."

They looked at each other. Sir John thought: "I'll get it out of him." And Mr. Waddington thought: "I'll get it out of him."

"You might as well tell me what you're talking about," he said.

"My dear chap, it's what Mrs. Levitt's talking about. That's the point."

"Mrs. Levitt!"

"Yes. She's a dangerous woman, Waddington. I told you you were doing a risky thing taking up with her like that.... And there's Hawtrey doing the same thing, the very same thing.... But he's a middle-aged man, so I suppose he thinks he's safe. ... But if he was ten years younger— Hang it all, Waddington, if I was a younger man I shouldn't feel safe. I shouldn't, really. I can't think what there is about her. There's something."

"Yes," said Mr. Waddington, "there's something."

Something. He wasn't going to let Corbett think him so middle-aged that he was impervious to its charm.

"What is it?" said Sir John. "She isn't handsome, yet she gets all the young fellows running after her. There was Markham, and Thurston, and there's young Hawtrey. It's only sober old chaps like me who don't get landed.... Upon my word, Waddington, I shouldn't blame you if you had lost your head."

Mr. Waddington felt shaken in his determination not to let Corbett get it out of him. It was also clear that, if he did admit to having for one wild moment lost his head, Corbett would think none the worse of him. He would then be classed with Markham and young Billy, whereas if he denied it, he would only rank himself with old fossils like Corbett. And he couldn't bear it. There was such a thing as doing yourself an unnecessary injustice.

Sir John watched him hovering round the trap he had laid for him.

"Absolutely between ourselves," he said. "Did you?"

Under Mr. Waddington's iron-grey moustache you could see the Rabelaisian smile answering the Rabelaisian twinkle. For the life of him he couldn't resist it.

"Well—between ourselves, Corbett, absolutely—to be perfectly honest, I did. There is something about her.... Just for a second, you know. It didn't come to anything."

"Didn't it? She says you made violent love to her."

"I won't swear what I wouldn't have done if I hadn't pulled myself up in time."

At this point it occurred to him that if Elise had betrayed the secret of his love-making she would also have told her own tale of its repulse. That had to be accounted for.

"I can tell you one queer thing about that woman, Corbett. She's cold—cold."

"Oh, come, Waddington—"

"You wouldn't think it—"

"I don't," said Sir John, with a loud guffaw.

"But I assure you, my dear Corbett, she's simply wooden. Talk of making love, you might as well make love to—to a chair or a cabinet. I can tell you Markham's had a lucky escape."

"I don't imagine that's what put him off," said Sir John. "He knew something."

"What do you suppose he knew?"

"Something the Benhams told them, I fancy. They'd some queer story. Rather think she ran after Dicky, and Mrs. Benham didn't like it."

"Don't know what she wanted with him. Couldn't have been in love with him, I will say that for her."

"Well, she seems to have preferred their bungalow to her own. Anyhow, they couldn't get her out of it."

"I don't believe that story. We must be fair to the woman, Corbett."

He thought he had really done it very well. Not only had he accounted honourably for his repulse, but he had cleared Elise. And he had cleared himself from the ghastly imputation of middle-age. Repulse or no repulse, he was proud of his spurt of youthful passion.

And in another minute he had persuaded himself that his main motive had been the desire to be fair to Elise.

"H'm! I don't know about being fair," said Sir John. "Anyhow, I congratulate you on your lucky escape."

Mr. Waddington rose to go. "Of course—about what I told you—you won't let it go any further?"

Sir John laughed out loud. "Of course I won't. Only wanted to know how far you went. Might have gone farther and fared worse, what?"

He rose, too, laughing. "If anybody tries to pump me I shall say you behaved very well. So you did, my dear fellow, so you did. Considering the provocation."

He could afford to laugh. He had got it out of poor old Waddington, as he said he would. But to the eternal honour of Sir John Corbett, it did not go any further. When people tried to get it out of him he simply said that there was nothing in it, and that to his certain knowledge Waddington had behaved very well. As Barbara had prophesied, nobody believed that he had behaved otherwise. It was not for nothing that he was Mr. Waddington of Wyck.

And in consequence of the revelations she had made to her friend, Miss Gregg, very early in the New Year Elise found other doors closed to her besides the Markhams' and the Waddingtons'. And behind the doors on each side of the White House respectable householders could sleep in their beds on Friday nights without fear of being wakened by the opening and shutting of Mrs. Levitt's door and by the shrill "Good nights" called out from its threshold and answered up the street The merry bridge parties and the little suppers were no more.

Even the Rector's geniality grew more and more Christian and perfunctory, till he too left off stopping to talk to Mrs. Levitt when he met her in the street.

3

Mr. Waddington's confession to Sir John was about the only statement relating to the Waddington affair which did not go any further. Thus a very curious and interesting report of it reached Ralph Bevan through Colonel Grainger, when he heard for the first time of the part Barbara had played in it.

In the story Elise had told in strict confidence to Miss Gregg, Mr. Waddington had been deadly afraid of her and had beaten a cowardly retreat behind Barbara's big guns. Not that either Elise or Miss Gregg would have admitted for one moment that her guns were big; Colonel Grainger had merely inferred the deadliness of her fire from the demoralization of the enemy.

"Your little lady, Bevan," he said, "seems to have come off best in that encounter."

"We needn't worry any more about the compact, Barbara, now I know about it," Ralph said, as they walked together. Snow had fallen. The Cotswolds were all white, netted with the purplish brown filigree-work of the trees. Their feet went crunching through the furry crystals of the snow.

"No. That's one good thing she's done."

"Was it very funny, your scrap?"

"It seemed funnier at the time than it did afterwards. It was really rather beastly. Fanny didn't like it."

"You could hardly expect her to. There's a limit to Fanny's sense of humour."

"There's a limit to mine. Fanny was right. I had to fight her with the filthiest weapons. I had to tell her she couldn't do anything because he was Waddington of Wyck, and she was up against all his ancestors. I had to drag in his ancestors."

"That was bad."

"I know it was. It's what Fanny hated. And no wonder. She made me feel such a miserable little snob, Ralph."

"Fanny did?"

"Yes. She couldn't have done it. She'd have let her do her damnedest."

"That's because Fanny's an incurable little aristocrat. She's got more Waddington of Wyckedness in her little finger than Horatio has in all his ego; and she despises Mrs. Levitt. She wouldn't have condescended to scrap with her."

"The horrible thing is, it's true. He can do what he likes and nothing happens to him. He can turn the Ballingers out of their house and nothing happens. He can make love to a woman who doesn't want to be made love to and nothing happens. Because he's Waddington of Wyck."

"He's Waddington of Wyck, but he isn't such a bad old thing, really. People laugh at him, but they like him because he's so funny. And they've taken Mrs. Levitt's measure pretty accurately."

"You don't think, then, I was too big a beast to her?"

Ralph laughed.

"Somebody had to save him, Ralph. After all, he's Fanny's husband."

"Yes, after all, he's Fanny's husband."

"So you don't—do you?"

"Of course I don't.... What's he doing now?"

"Oh, just pottering about with his book. It's nearly finished."

"You've kept it up?"

"Rather. There isn't a sentence he mightn't have written himself. I think I'm going to let him go back to Lower Wyck on the last page and end there. In his Manor. I thought of putting something in about holly-decked halls and Yule logs on the Christmas hearth. He was photographed the other day. In the snow."

"Gorgeous."

"I wonder if he'll really settle down now. Or if he'll do it all over again some day with somebody else."

"You can't tell. You can't possibly tell. He may do anything."

"That's what we feel about him," Barbara said.

"Endless possibilities. Yet you'd think he couldn't go one better than Mrs. Levitt."

For the next half-mile they disputed whether in the scene with Mrs. Levitt he was or was not really funny. Ralph was inclined to think that he might have been purely disgusting.

"You didn't see him, Ralph. You've no right to say he wasn't funny."

"No. No. I didn't see him. You needn't rub it in, Barbara."

"We've got to wait and see what he does next. It may be your turn any day."

"We can't expect him to do very much for a little while. He must be a bit exhausted with this last stunt."

"Yes. And the funny thing is he has moments when you don't laugh at him. Moments of calm, beautiful peace.... You come on him walking in his garden looking for snowdrops in the snow. Or he's sitting in his library, reading Buchan's 'History of the Great War.' Happy. Not thinking about himself at all. Then you're sorry you ever laughed at him."

"I'm not," Ralph said. "He owes it us. He does nothing else to justify his existence."

"Yes. But he exists. He exists. And somehow, it's pretty mysterious when you think of it. You wonder whether you mayn't have seen him all wrong. Whether all the time he isn't just, a simple old thing. When you get that feeling—of his mysteriousness, Ralph—somehow you're done."

"I haven't had it yet."

"Oh, it's there. You'll get it some day."

"You see, Barbara, how right I was? We can't keep off him."



XIV

1

It was Sunday, the last week of Horry's holidays. All through supper he had been talking about cycling to Cirencester if the frost held, to skate on the canal.

The frost did hold, and in the morning he strapped a cushion on the carrier of his bicycle and called up the stairs to Barbara.

"Come along, Barbara, let's go to Cirencester."

Barbara appeared, ready, carrying her skates. Mr. Waddington had let her off the Ramblings, yet, all of a sudden, she looked depressed.

"Oh, Horry," she said, "I was going with Ralph."

"You are not," said Horry. "You're always going with Ralph. You're jolly well coming with me this time."

"But I promised him."

"You'd no business to promise him, when it's the last week of my holidays. 'Tisn't fair."

Fanny came out into the hall.

"Horry," she said, "don't worry Barbara. Can't you see she wants to go with Ralph?"

"That's exactly," he said, "what I complain of."

She shook her head at him. "You're your father all over again," she said.

"I'll swear I'm not," said Horry.

"If you were half as polite as your father it wouldn't be a bad thing."

There was a sound of explosions in the drive. "There's Ralph come to settle it himself," said Fanny. And at that point, Mr. Waddington came out on them, suddenly, from the cloak-room.

"What's all this?" he said. He looked with disgust at the skates dangling from Barbara's hand. He went out into the porch and looked with disgust at Ralph and at the motor-bicycles. He thought with bitterness of the Cirencester canal. He couldn't skate. Even when he was Horry's age he hadn't skated. He couldn't ride a motor-bicycle. When he looked at the beastly things and thought of their complicated machinery and their evil fascination for Barbara, he hated them. He hated Horry and Ralph standing up before Barbara, handsome, vibrating with youth and health and energy.

"I won't have Barbara riding on that thing. It isn't safe. If he skids on the snow he'll break her neck."

"Much more likely to break his own neck," said Horry.

In his savage interior Mr. Waddington wished he would, and Horry too.

"He won't skid," said Barbara; "if he does I'll hop off."

"We'll come back," said Ralph, "if we don't get on all right."

They started in a duet of explosions, the motor-bicycles hissing and crunching through the light snow. Barbara, swinging on Ralph's carrier, waved her hand light-heartedly to Mr. Waddington. He hated Barbara; but far more than Barbara he hated Horry, and far more than Horry he hated Ralph.

"He'd no business to take her," he said. "She'd no business to go."

"You can't stop them, my dear," said Fanny; "they're too young."

"Well, if they come back with their necks broken they'll have only themselves to thank."

He took a ferocious pleasure in thinking of Horry and Ralph and Barbara with their necks broken.

Fanny stared at him. "I wonder what's made him so cross," she thought. "He looks as if he'd got a chill on the liver.".... "Horatio, have you got a chill on the liver?"

"Now, what on earth put that into your head?"

"Your face. You look just a little off colour, darling."

At that moment Mr. Waddington began to sneeze.

"There, I knew you'd caught cold. You oughtn't to go standing about in draughts."

"I haven't caught cold," said Mr. Waddington.

But he shut himself up in his library and stayed there, huddled in his armchair. From time to time he leaned forward and stooped over the hearth, holding his chest and stomach as near as possible to the fire. Shivers like thin icicles kept on slipping down his spine.

At lunch-time he complained that there was nothing he could eat, and before the meal was over he went back to his library and his fire. Fanny sat with him there.

"I wish you wouldn't go standing out in the cold," she said. She knew that on Saturday he had stood for more than ten minutes in the fallen snow of the park to be photographed. And he wouldn't wear his overcoat because he thought he looked younger without it, and slenderer.

"No wonder you've got a chill," she said.

"I didn't get it then. I got it yesterday in the garden."

She remembered. He had been wandering about the garden, after church, looking for snowdrops in the snow. Barbara had worn the snowdrops in the breast of her gown last night.

He nourished his resentment on that memory and on the thought that he had got his chill picking snowdrops for Barbara.

At tea-time he drank a little tea, but he couldn't eat anything. He felt sick and his head ached. At dinner-time, on Fanny's advice, he went to bed and Fanny took his temperature.

A hundred and one. He turned the thermometer in his hand, gazing earnestly at the slender silver thread. He was gratified to know that his temperature was a hundred and one and that Fanny was frightened and had sent for the doctor. He had a queer, satisfied, exalted feeling, now that he was in for it. When Barbara came back she would know what he was in for and be frightened, too. He would have been still more gratified if he had known that without him dinner was a miserable affair. Fanny showed that she was frightened, and her fear flattened down the high spirits of Ralph and Barbara and Horry, returned from their skating.

"You see, Barbara," said Ralph, when they had left Fanny and Horry with the doctor, "we can't live without him."

They listened at the smoke-room door for the sound of Dr. Ransome's departure, and Ralph waited while Barbara went back and brought him the verdict.

"It's flu, and a touch of congestion of the lungs."

They looked at each other sorrowfully, so sorrowfully that they smiled.

"Yet we can smile," he said.

"You know," said Barbara, "he got it standing in the snow, while Pyecraft photographed him."

"It's the way," Ralph said, "he would get it."

And Barbara laughed. But, all the same, she felt a distinct pang at her heart every time she went into her bedroom and saw, in its glass on her dressing-table, the bunch of snowdrops that Mr. Waddington had picked for her in the snow. They made a pattern on her mind; white cones hanging down; sharp green blades piercing; green stalks held in the crystal of the water.

2

"Nobody but a fool," said Horry, "would have stood out in the snow to be photographed ... at his age."

"Don't, Horry."

Barbara was in the morning-room, stirring some black, sticky stuff in a saucepan over the fire. The black, sticky stuff was to go on Mr. Waddington's chest. Horry looked on, standing beside her in an attitude of impatience. A pair of boots with skates clipped on hung from his shoulders by their laces. He felt that his irritation was justifiable, for Barbara had refused to go out skating with him.

"Why 'don't'?" said Horry. "It's obvious."

"Very. But he's ill."

"There can't be much the matter with him or the mater wouldn't look so chirpy."

"She likes nursing him."

"Well," Horry said, "you can't nurse him."

"No. But I can stir this stuff," said Barbara.

"I suppose," Horry said, "you'd think me an awful brute if I went?"

"I wish you would go. You're a much more awful brute standing there saying things about him and getting in my way."

"All right. I'll get out of it. That's jolly easy."

And he went. But he felt sick and sore. He had tried to persuade himself that his father wasn't ill because he couldn't bear to think how ill he was; it interfered with his enjoyment of his skating. "If," he said to himself, "if he'd only put it off till the ice gave. But it was just like him to choose a hard frost."

His anger gave him relief from the sickening anxiety he felt when he thought of his father and his father's temperature. It had gone down, but not to normal.

Mr. Waddington lay in his bed in Fanny's room. Barbara, standing at the open door with her saucepan, caught a sight of him.

He was propped up by his pillows. On his shoulders, over one of those striped pyjama suits that Barbara had once ordered from the Stores, he wore, like a shawl, a woolly, fawn-coloured motor-scarf of Fanny's. His arms were laid before him on the counterpane in a gesture of complete surrender to his illness. Fanny was always tucking them away under the blankets, but if anybody came in he would have them so. He was sitting up, waiting in an adorable patience for something to be done for him. His face had the calm, happy look of expectation utterly appeased and resigned. It was that look that frightened Barbara; it made her think that Mr. Waddington was going to die. Supposing his congestion turned to pneumonia? There was so much of him to be ill, and those big men always did die when they got pneumonia.

Mr. Waddington could hear Barbara's quiet voice saying something to Fanny; he could see her unhappy, anxious face. He enjoyed Barbara's anxiety. He enjoyed the cause of it, his illness. So long as he was actually alive he even enjoyed the thought that, if his congestion turned to pneumonia, he might actually die. There was a dignity, a prestige about being dead that appealed to him. Even his high temperature and his headache and his shooting pains and his difficulty in breathing could not altogether spoil his pleasure in the delicious concern of everybody about him, and in his exquisite certainty that, at any minute, a moan would bring Fanny to his side. He was the one person in the house that counted. He had always known it, but he had never felt it with the same intensity as now. The mind of every person in the house was concentrated on him now as it had not been concentrated before. He was holding them all in a tension of worry and anxiety. He would apologize very sweetly for the trouble he was giving everybody, declaring that it made him very uncomfortable; but even Fanny could see that he was gratified.

And as he got worse—before he became too ill to think about it at all—he had a muzzy yet pleasurable sense that everybody in Wyck-on-the-Hill and in the county for miles round was thinking of him. He knew that Corbett and Lady Corbett and Markham and Thurston and the Hawtreys, and the Rector and the Rector's wife and Colonel Grainger had called repeatedly to inquire for him. He was particularly gratified by Grainger's calling. He knew that Hitchin had stopped Horry in the street to ask after him, and he was particularly gratified by that. Old Susan-Nanna had come up from Medlicott to see him. And Ralph Bevan called every day. That gratified him, too.

The only person who was not allowed to know anything about his illness was his mother, for Mr. Waddington was certain it would kill her. Every evening at medicine time he would ask the same questions: "My mother doesn't know yet?" And: "Anybody called to-day?" And Fanny would give him the messages, and he would receive them with a gentle, solemn sweetness. You wouldn't have believed, Barbara said to herself, that complacency could take so heartrending a form.

And under it all, a deeper bliss in bliss, was the thought that Barbara was thinking about him, worrying about him, and being, probably, ten times more unhappy about him than Fanny. After working so long by his side, her separation from him would be intolerable to Barbara; intolerable, very likely, the thought that it was Fanny's turn, now, to be by his side. Every day she brought him a bunch of snowdrops, and every day, as the door closed on her little anxious face, he was sorry for Barbara shut out from his room. Poor little Barbara. Sometimes, when he was feeling well enough, he would call to her: "Come in, Barbara." And she would come in and look at him and put her flowers into his hand and say she hoped he was better. And he would answer: "Not much better, Barbara. I'm very ill."

He even allowed Ralph to come and look at him. He would hold his hand in a clasp that he made as limp as possible, on purpose, and would say in a voice artificially weakened: "I'm very ill, Ralph."

Dr. Ransome said he wasn't; but Mr. Waddington knew better. It was true that from time to time he rallied sufficiently to comb his own hair before Barbara was let in with her snowdrops, and that he could give orders to Partridge in a loud, firm tone; but he was too ill to do more than whisper huskily to Barbara and Fanny.

Then when he felt a little better the trained nurse came, and with the sheer excitement of her coming Mr. Waddington's temperature leapt up again, and the doctor owned that he didn't like that.

And Barbara found Fanny in the library, crying. She had been tidying up his writing-table, going over all his papers with a feather brush, and she had come on the manuscript of the Ramblings unfinished.

"Fanny—"

"Barbara, I know I'm an idiot, but I simply cannot bear it. It was all very well as long as I could nurse him, but now that woman's come there's nothing I can do for him.... I've—I've never done anything all my life for him. He's always done everything for me. And I've been a brute. Always laughing at him.... Think, Barbara, think; for eighteen years never to have taken him seriously. Never since I married him.... I believe he's going to die. Just—just to punish me."

"He isn't," said Barbara indignantly, as if she had never believed it herself. "The doctor says he isn't really very ill. The congestion isn't spreading. It was better yesterday."

"It'll be worse to-night, you may depend on it. The doctor doesn't like his temperature flying up and down like that."

"It'll go down again," said Barbara.

"You don't know what it'll do," said Fanny darkly. "Did you ever see such a lamb, such a lamb as he is when he's ill?"

"No," said Barbara; "he's an angel."

"That's just," said Fanny, "what makes me feel he's going to die.... I wish I were you, Barbara."

"Me?"

"Yes. You've really helped him. He could never have written his book without you. His poor book."

She sat stroking it. And suddenly a horrible memory overcame her, and she cried out:

"Oh, my God! And I've laughed at that, too!"

Barbara put her arm round her. "You didn't, darling. Well, if you did—it is a little funny, you know. I'm afraid I've laughed a bit."

"Oh, you—that doesn't matter. You helped to write it."

Then Barbara broke out. "Oh, don't, Fanny, don't, don't talk about his poor book. I can't bear it."

"We're both idiots," said Fanny. "Imbeciles."

She paused, drying her eyes.

"He liked the snowdrops you brought him," she said.

Barbara thought: "And the snowdrops he brought me." He had caught cold that day, picking them. They had withered in the glass in her bedroom.

She left Fanny, only to come upon Horry in his agony. Horry stood in the window of the dining-room, staring out and scowling at the snow.

"Damn the snow!" he said. "It's killed him."

"It hasn't, Horry," she said; "he'll get better."

"He won't get better. If this beastly frost holds he hasn't got a chance."

"Horry dear, the doctor says he's better."

"He doesn't. He says his temperature's got no business to go up."

"All the same—"

"Supposing he does think him better. Supposing he doesn't know. Supposing he's a bleating idiot.... I expect the dear old pater knows how he is a jolly sight better than anybody can tell him.... And you know you're worrying about him yourself. So's the mater. She's been crying."

"She's jealous of the nurse. That's what's the matter with her."

"Jealous? Tosh! That nurse is an idiot. She's sent his temperature up first thing."

"Horry, old thing, you must buck up. You mustn't let your nerve go like this."

"Nerve? Your nerve would go if you were me. I tell you, Barbara, I wouldn't care a hang about his being ill—I mean I shouldn't care so infernally if I'd been decent to him. ... But you were right I was a cad, a swine. Laughing at him."

"So was I, Horry. I laughed at him. I'd give anything not to have."

"You didn't matter...."

He was silent a moment. Then he swung round, full to her. His face burned, his eyes flashed tears; he held his head up to stop them falling.

"Barbara—if he dies, I'll kill myself."

That evening Mr. Waddington's temperature went up another point. Ralph, calling about nine o'clock, found Barbara alone in the library, huddled in a corner of the sofa, with her pocket-handkerchief beside her, rolled in a tight, damp ball. She started as he came in.

"Oh," she said, "I thought you were the doctor."

"Do you want him?"

"Yes. Fanny does. She's frightened."

"Shall I go and get him?"

"No. No. They've sent Kimber. Oh, Ralph, I'm frightened, too."

"But he's getting on all right. He is really. Ransome says so."

"I know. I've told them that. But they won't believe it. And I don't now. He'll die: you'll see he'll die. Just because we've been such pigs to him."

"Nonsense; that wouldn't make him—"

"I'm not so sure. It's awful to see him lying there, like a lamb—so good—when you think how we've hunted and hounded him."

"He didn't know, Barbara. We never let him know."

"You don't know what he knew. He must have seen it."

"He never sees anything."

"I tell you, you don't know what he sees.... I'd give anything, anything not to have done it."

"So would I."

"It's a lesson to me," she said, "as long as I live, never to laugh at anybody again. Never to say cruel things."

"We didn't say cruel things."

"Unkind things."

"Not very unkind."

"We did. I did. I said all the really beastly ones."

"No. No, you didn't. Not half as beastly as I and Horry did."

"That's what Horry's thinking now. He's nearly off his head about it."

"Look here, Barbara; you're simply sentimentalizing because he's ill and you're sorry for him.... You needn't be. I tell you, he's enjoying his illness. ... I don't suppose," said Ralph thoughtfully, "he's enjoyed anything so much since the war."

"Doesn't that show what brutes we've been, that he has to be ill in order to enjoy himself?"

"Oh, no. He enjoys himself—himself, Barbara—all the time. He can't help enjoying his illness. He likes to have everybody fussing round him and thinking about him."

"That's what I mean. We never did think of him. Not seriously. We've done nothing—nothing but laugh. Why, you're laughing now. ... It's horrible of you, Ralph, when he may be dying. ... It would serve us all jolly well right if he did die."

To her surprise and indignation, Barbara began to cry. The hard, damp lump of pocket-handkerchief was not a bit of good, and before she could reach out for it Ralph's arms were round her and he was kissing the tears off one by one.

"Darling, I didn't think you really minded—"

"What d-did you th-think, then?" she sobbed.

"I thought you were playing. A sort of variation of the game."

"I told you it was a cruel game."

"Never mind. It's all over. We'll never play it again. And he'll be well in another week. ... Look here, Barbara, can't you leave off thinking about him for a minute? You know I love you, most awfully, don't you?"

"Yes. I know now all right."

"And I know."

"How do you know?"

"Because, old thing, you've never ceased to hang on to my collar since I grabbed you. You can't go back on that."

"I don't want to go back on it.... I say, we always said he brought us together, and he has, this time."

When later that night Ralph told Fanny of their engagement the first thing she said was, "You mustn't tell him. Not till he's well again. In fact, I'd rather you didn't tell him till just before you're married."

"Why ever not?"

"It might upset him. You see," she said, "he's very fond of Barbara."

The next day Mr. Waddington's temperature went down to normal; and the next, when Ralph called, Barbara fairly rushed at him with the news.

"He's sitting up," she shouted, "eating a piece of sole."

"Hooray! Now we can be happy."

The sound of Fanny's humming came through the drawing-room door.



XV

1

Mr. Waddington was sitting up in his armchair before the bedroom fire. By turning his head a little to the right he could command a perfect view of himself in the long glass by the window. To get up and look at himself in that glass had been the first act of his convalescence. He had hardly dared to think what alterations his illness might have made in him. He remembered the horrible sight that Corbett had presented after his influenza last year.

Looking earnestly at himself in the glass, he had found that his appearance was, if anything, improved. Outlines that he had missed for the last ten years were showing up again. The Postlethwaite nose was cleaner cut. He was almost slender, and not half so weak as Fanny said he ought to have been. Immobility in bed, his spiritual attitude of complacent acquiescence, and the release of his whole organism from the strain of a restless intellect had set him up more than his influenza had pulled him down; and it was a distinctly more refined and youthful Waddington that Barbara found sitting in the armchair, wearing a royal blue wadded silk dressing-gown and Fanny's motor-scarf, with a grey mohair shawl over his knees.

Mr. Waddington's convalescence was altogether delightful to him, admitting, as it did, of sustained companionship with Barbara. As soon as it reached the armchair stage she sat with him for hours together. She had finished the Ramblings, and at his request she read them aloud to him all over again from beginning to end. Mr. Waddington was much gratified by the impression they made recited in Barbara's charming voice; the voice that trembled a little now and then with an emotion that did her credit.

"'Come with me into the little sheltered valley of the Speed. Let us follow the brown trout stream that goes purling through the lush green grass of the meadows—'"

"I'd no idea," said Mr. Waddington, "it was anything like so good as it is. We may congratulate ourselves on having got rid of Ralph Bevan."

And in February, when the frost broke and the spring weather came, and the green and pink and purple fields showed up again through the mist on the hillsides, he went out driving with Barbara in his car. He wanted to look again at the places of his Ramblings, and he wanted Barbara to look at them with him. It was the reward he had promised her for what he called her dreary, mechanical job of copying and copying.

Barbara noticed the curious, exalted expression of his face as he sat up beside her in the car, looking noble. She put it down partly to that everlasting self-satisfaction that made his inward happiness, and partly to sheer physical exhilaration induced by speed. She felt something like it herself as they tore switchbacking up and down the hills: an excitement whipped up on the top of the deep happiness that came from thinking about Ralph. And there was hardly a moment when she didn't think about him. It made her eyes shine and her mouth quiver with a peculiarly blissful smile.

And Mr. Waddington looked at Barbara where she sat tucked up beside him. He noticed the shining and the quivering, and he thought—what he always had thought of Barbara. Only now he was certain.

The child loved him. She had been fascinated and frightened, frightened and fascinated by him from the first hour that she had known him. But she was not afraid of him any more. She had left off struggling. She was giving herself up like a child to this feeling, the nature of which, in her child's innocence, she did not yet know. But he knew. He had always known it.

So much one half of Mr. Waddington's mind admitted, while the other half denied that he had known it with any certainty. It went on saying to itself: "Blind. Blind. Yet I might have known it," as if he hadn't.

He had, of course, kept it before him as a possibility (no part of him denied that). And he had used tact. He had handled a delicate situation with a consummate delicacy. He had done everything an honourable man could do. But there it was. There it had been from the day that he had come into the house and found her there. And the thing was too strong for Barbara. Poor child, he might have known it would be. And it was too strong for Mr. Waddington. It wasn't his fault. It was Fanny's fault, having the girl there and forcing them to that dangerous intimacy.

Before his illness Mr. Waddington had resisted successfully any little inclination he might have had to take advantage of the situation. He conceived his inner life for the last nine months as consisting of a series of resistances. He conceived the episode of Elise as a safety valve, natural but unpleasant, for the emotions caused by Barbara: the substitution of a permissible for an impermissible lapse. It had been incredible to him that he should make love to Barbara.

But one effect of his influenza was apparent. It had lowered his resistance, and, lowering it, had altered his whole moral perspective and his scale of values, till one morning in April, walking with Barbara in the garden that smelt of wallflowers and violets, he became aware that Barbara was as necessary to him as he was to Barbara.

Her easel stood in a corner of the lawn with an unfinished water-colour drawing of the house on it. He paused before it, smiling his tender, sentimental smile.

"There's one thing I regret, Barbara—that I didn't have your drawings for my Cotswold book."

The Ramblings, thanks to unproclaimed activities of Ralph Bevan, were at that moment in the press.

"Why should you," she said, "if you didn't care about them?"

"It's inconceivable that I shouldn't have cared. ... I was blind. Blind. ... Well, some day, if we ever have an edition de luxe, they shall appear in that."

"Some day!"

She hadn't the heart to tell him that the drawings had another destination, for as yet the existence of Ralph's took was a secret. They had agreed that nothing should disturb Mr. Waddington's pleasure in the publication of his Ramblings—his poor Ramblings.

"One has to pay for blindness in this world," he said.

"A lot of people'll be let in at that rate. I don't suppose five will care a rap about my drawings."

"I wasn't thinking only of your drawings, my dear." He pondered. ... "Fanny tells me you're going to have a birthday. You're quite a little April girl, aren't you?"

2

It was Barbara's twenty-fourth birthday, and the day of her adoption. It had begun, unpropitiously, with something very like a dispute between Horatio and Fanny.

Mr. Waddington had gone up to London the day before, and had returned with a pearl pendant for Fanny, and a green jade necklace for Barbara (not yet presented) and a canary yellow waistcoat for himself.

And not only the waistcoat—

On the birthday morning Fanny had called out to Barbara as she passed her bedroom door:

"Barbara, come here."

Fanny was staring, fascinated, at four pairs of silk pyjamas spread out before her on the bed. Remarkable pyjamas, of a fierce magenta with forked lightning in orange running about all over them.

"Good God, Fanny!"

"You may well say 'Good God.' What would you say if you'd got to...? I'm not a nervous woman, but—"

"It's a mercy he didn't get them eighteen years ago," said Barbara, "or Horry might have been born an idiot."

"Yellow waistcoats are all very well," said Fanny. "But what can he have been thinking of?"

"I don't know," said Barbara. Somehow the pattern called up, irresistibly, the image of Mrs. Levitt.

"Perhaps," she said, "he thinks he's Jupiter."

"Well, I'm not What's-her-name, and I don't want to be blasted. So I'll put them somewhere where he can't find them."

At that moment they had heard Mr. Waddington coming through his dressing-room and Barbara had run away by the door into the corridor.

"Who took those things out of my wardrobe?" he said. He was gazing, dreamily, affectionately almost, at the pyjamas.

"I did."

"And what for?"

"To look at them. Can you wonder? Horatio, if you wear them I'll apply for a separation."

"You needn't worry."

There was a queer look in his face, significant and furtive. And Fanny's mind, with one of its rapid flights, darted off from the pyjamas.

"What are you going to do about Barbara?" she said.

"Do about her?"

"Yes. You know we were going to adopt her if we liked her enough. And we do like her enough, don't we?"

"I have no paternal feeling for Barbara," said Mr. Waddington. "The parental relation does not appeal to me as desirable or suitable."

"I should have thought, considering her age and your age, it was very suitable indeed."

"Not if it entails obligations that I might regret."

"You're going to provide for her, aren't you? That isn't an obligation, surely, you'll regret?"

"I can provide for her without adopting her."

"How? It's no good just leaving her something in your will."

"I shall continue half her salary," said Mr. Waddington, "as an allowance."

"Yes. But will you give her a marriage portion if she marries?"

He was silent. His mind reeled with the blow.

"If she marries," he said, "with my consent and my approval—yes."

"If that isn't a parental attitude! And supposing she doesn't?"

"She isn't thinking of marrying."

"You don't know what she's thinking of."

"Neither, I venture to say, do you."

"Well—I don't see how I can adopt her, if you don't."

"I didn't say I wouldn't adopt her."

"Then you will?"

He snapped back at her with an incredible ferocity.

"I suppose I shall have to. Don't worry me!"

He then lifted up the pyjamas from the bed and carried them into his dressing-room. Through the open door she saw him, mounted on a chair, laying them out, tenderly, on the top shelf of the wardrobe: as if he were storing them for some mysterious and romantic purpose in which Fanny was not included.

"Perhaps, after all," she thought, "he only bought them because they make him feel young."

All the morning, that morning of Barbara's birthday and adoption Mr. Waddington's thoughtful gloom continued. And in the afternoon he shut himself up in his library and gave orders that he was not to be disturbed.

3

Barbara was in the morning-room.

They had given her the morning-room for a study, and she was alone in it, amusing herself with her pocket sketch-book.

The sketch-book was Barbara's and Ralph's secret. Sometimes it lived for days with Ralph at the White Hart. Sometimes it lived with Barbara, in her coat pocket, or in her bureau under lock and key. She was obsessed with the fear that some day she would leave it about and Fanny would find it, or Mr. Waddington. Or any minute Mr. Waddington might come on her and catch her with it. It would be awful if she were caught. For that remarkable collection contained several pen-and-ink drawings of Mr. Waddington, and Barbara added to their number daily.

But at the moment, the long interval between an unusually early birthday tea and an unusually late birthday dinner, she was safe. Fanny had gone over to Medlicott in the car. Mr. Waddington was tucked away in his library, reading in perfect innocence and simplicity and peace. It wasn't even likely that Ralph would turn up, for he had gone over to Oxford, and it was on his account that the birthday dinner was put off till half-past eight. There would be hours and hours.

She had just finished the last of three drawings of Mr. Waddington: Mr. Waddington standing up before the long looking-glass in his new pyjamas; Mr. Waddington appearing in the doorway of Fanny's bedroom as Jupiter, with forked lightning zig-zagging out of him into every corner; Mr. Waddington stooping to climb into his bed, a broad back view with lightnings blazing out of it.

And it was that moment that Mr. Waddington chose to come in to present the green jade necklace. He was wearing his canary yellow waistcoat.

Barbara closed her sketch-book hurriedly and laid it on the table. She kept one arm over it while she received and opened the leather case where the green necklace lay on its white cushion.

"For me? Oh, it's too heavenly. How awfully sweet of you."

"Do you like it, Barbara?"

"I love it."

Compunction stung her when she thought of her drawings, especially the one where he was getting into bed. She said to herself: "I'll never do it again. Never again.... And I won't show it to Ralph."

"Put it on," he commanded, "and let me see you in it."

She lifted it from the case. She raised her arms and clasped it round her neck; she went to the looking-glass. And, after the first rapt moment of admiration, Mr. Waddington possessed himself of the uncovered sketch-book. Barbara saw him in the looking-glass. She turned, with a cry:

"You mustn't! You mustn't look at it."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't let anybody see my sketches."

"You'll let me."

"I won't!" She dashed at him, clutching his arm and hanging her weight on it. He shook himself free and raised the sketch-book high above her head. She jumped up, tearing at it, but his grip held.

He delighted in his power. He laughed.

"Give it me this instant," she said.

"Aha! She's got her little secrets, has she?"

"Yes. Yes. They're all there. You've no business to look at them."

He caracoled heavily, dodging her attack, enjoying the youthful violence of the struggle.

"Come," he said, "ask me nicely."

"Please, then. Please give it me."

He gave it, bowing profoundly over her hand as she took it.

"I wouldn't look into your dear little secrets for the world," he said.

They sat down amicably.

"You'll let me stay with you a little while?"

"Please do. Won't you have one of my cigarettes?"

He took one, turning it in his fingers and smiling at it—a lingering, sentimental smile.

"I think I know your secret," he said presently.

"Do you?" Her mind rushed to Ralph.

"I think so. And I think you know mine."

"Yours?"

"Yes. Mine. We can't go on living like this, so close to each other, without knowing. We may try to keep things from each other, but we can't. I feel as if you'd seen everything."

She said to herself: "He's thinking of Mrs. Levitt."

"I don't suppose I've seen anything that matters," she said.

"You've seen what my life is here. You can't have helped seeing that Fanny and I don't hit it off very well together."

"Fanny's an angel."

"You dear little loyal thing.... Yes, she's an angel. Too much of an angel for a mere man. I made my grand mistake, Barbara, when I married her."

"She doesn't think so, anyhow."

"I'm not so sure. Fanny knows she's got hold of something that's too—too big for her. What's wrong with Fanny is that she can't grasp things. She's afraid of them. And she can't take serious things seriously. It's no use expecting her to. I've left off expecting."

"You don't understand Fanny one bit."

"My dear child, I've been married to her more than seventeen years, and I'm not a fool. You've seen for yourself how she takes things. How she belittles everything with her everlasting laugh, laugh, laugh. In time it gets on your nerves."

"It would," said Barbara, "if you don't see the fun of it."

"You can't expect me to see the fun of my own funeral."

"Funeral? Is it as bad as all that?"

"It has been as bad as all that—Barbara."

He brooded.

"And then you came, with your sweetness. And your little serious face—"

"Is my face serious?"

"Very. To me. Other people may think you frivolous and amusing. I daresay you are amusing—to them."

"I hope so."

"You hope so because you want to hide your real self from them. But you can't hide it from me. I've seen it all the time, Barbara."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite, quite sure."

"I wish I knew what it looked like."

"That's the beauty and charm of you, my dear, that you don't know."

"What a nice waistcoat you've got on," said Barbara.

He looked gratified. "I'm glad you like it I put it on for your birthday."

"You mean," she said, "my adoption day."

He winced.

"It is good," she said, "of you and Fanny to adopt me. But it won't be for very long. And I want to earn my own living all the same."

"I can't think of letting you do that."

"I must. It won't make any difference to my adoption."

He scowled. So repugnant to him was this subject that he judged it would be equally distasteful to Barbara.

"It was Fanny's idea," he said.

"I thought it would be."

"You didn't expect me to have paternal feelings for you, Barbara?"

"I didn't expect you to have any feelings at all."

The wound made him start. "My poor child, what a terrible thing for you to say."

"Why terrible?"

"Because it shows—it shows—And it isn't true. Do you suppose I don't know what's been going on inside you? I was blind to myself, my dear, but I saw through you."

"Saw through me?" She thought again of Ralph.

"Through and through."

"I didn't know I was so transparent. But I don't see that it matters much if you did."

He smiled at her delicious naivete.

"No. Nothing matters. Nothing matters, Barbara, except our caring. At least we're wise enough to know that."

"I shouldn't have thought," she said, "it would take much wisdom."

"More than you think, my child; more than you think. You've only got to be wise for yourself. I've got to be wise for both of us."

She thought: "Heavy parent. That comes of being adopted."

"When it comes to the point," she said, "one can only be wise for oneself."

"I'm glad you see that. It makes it much easier for me."

"It does. You mustn't think you're responsible for me just because you've adopted me."

"Don't talk to me about adoption! When you know perfectly well what I did it for."

"Why—what did you do it for?"

"To make things safe for us. To keep Fanny from knowing. To keep myself from knowing, Barbara. To keep you.... But it's too late to camouflage it. We know where we stand now."

"I don't think I do."

"You do. You do."

Mr. Waddington tossed his cigarette into the fire with a passionate gesture of abandonment. He came to her. She saw his coming. She saw it chiefly as the approach of a canary yellow waistcoat. She fixed her attention on the waistcoat as if it were the centre of her own mental equilibrium.

There was a bend in the waistcoat. Mr. Waddington was stooping over her with his face peering into hers. She sat motionless, held under his face by curiosity and fear. The whole phenomenon seemed to her incredible. Too incredible as yet to call for protest. It was as if it were not happening; as if she were merely waiting to see it happen before she cried out. Yet she was frightened.

This state lasted for one instant. The next she was in his arms. His mouth, thrust out under the big, rough moustache, was running over her face, like—like—while she pressed her hands hard against the canary yellow waistcoat, pushing him off, her mind disengaged itself from the struggle and reported—like a vacuum cleaner. That was it. Vacuum cleaner.

He gave back. There was no evil violence in him, and she got on her feet.

"How could you?" she cried. "How could you be such a perfect pig?"

"Don't say that to me, Barbara. Even in fun.... You know you love me."

"I don't. I don't."

"You do. You know you do. You know you want me to take you in my arms. Why be so cruel to yourself?"

"To myself? I'd kill myself before I let you.... Why, I'd kill you."

"No. No. No. You only think you would, you little spitfire."

He had given back altogether and now leaned against the chimneypiece, not beaten, not abashed, but smiling at her in a triumphant certitude. For so long the glamour of his illusion held him.

"Nothing you can say, Barbara, will persuade me that you don't care for me."

"Then you must be mad. Mad as a hatter."

"All men go mad at times. You must make allowances. Listen—"

"I won't listen. I don't want to hear another word."

She was going.

He saw her intention; but he was nearer to the door than she was, and by a quick though ponderous movement he got there first. He stood before her with his back to the door. (He had the wild thought of locking it, but chivalry forbade him.)

"You can go in a minute," he said. "But you've got to listen to me first. You've got to be fair to me. I may be mad; but if I didn't care for you—madly—I wouldn't have supposed for an instant that you cared for me. I wouldn't have thought of such a thing."

"But I don't, I tell you."

"And I tell you, you do. Do you suppose after all you've done for me—"

"I haven't done anything."

"Done? Look at the way you've worked for me. I've never known anything like your devotion, Barbara."

"Oh, that! It was only my job."

"Was it your job to save me from that horrible woman?"

"Oh, yes; it was all in the day's work."

"My dear Barbara, no woman ever does a day's work like that for a man unless she cares for him. And unless she wants him to care for her."

"As it happens, it was Fanny I cared for. I was thinking of Fanny all the time.... If you'd think about Fanny more and about Mrs. Levitt and people less, it would be a good thing."

"It's too late to think about Fanny now. That's only your sweetness and goodness."

"Please don't lie. If you really thought me sweet and good you wouldn't expect me to be a substitute for Mrs. Levitt."

"Don't talk about Mrs. Levitt. Do you suppose I think of you in the same sentence? That was a different thing altogether."

"Was it? Was it so very different?"

He saw that she remembered. "It was. A man may lose his head ten times over without losing his heart once. If it's Mrs. Levitt you're thinking about, you can put that out of your mind for ever."

"It isn't only Mrs. Levitt. There's Ralph Bevan. You've forgotten Ralph Bevan."

"What has Ralph Bevan got to do with it?"

"Simply this, that I'm engaged to be married to him."

"To be married? To be married to Ralph Bevan? Oh, Barbara, why didn't you tell me?"

"Ralph didn't want me to, till nearer the time."

"The time.... Did it come to that?"

"It did," said Barbara.

He moved from the doorway and began walking up and down the room. She might now have gone out, but she didn't go. She had to see what he would make of it.

At his last turn he faced her and stood still.

"Poor child," he said, "so that's what I've driven you to?"

Amazement kept her silent.

"Sit down," he said, "we must go through this together."

Amazement made her sit down. Certainly they must go through it, to see what he would look like at the end. He was unsurpassable. She mustn't miss him.

"Look here, Barbara." He spoke in a tone of forced, unnatural calm. "I don't think you quite understand the situation. I'm sure you don't realize for one moment how serious it is."

"I don't. You mustn't expect me to take it seriously."

"That's because you don't take yourself seriously enough, dear. In some ways you're singularly humble. I don't believe you really know how deep this thing has gone with me, or you wouldn't have talked about Mrs. Levitt....

"... It's life and death, Barbara. Life and death.... I'll make a confession. It wasn't serious at first. It wasn't love at first sight. But it's gone all the deeper for that. I didn't know how deep it was till the other day. And I had so much to think of. So many claims. Fanny—"

"Yes. Don't forget Fanny."

"I am not forgetting her. Fanny isn't going to mind as you think she minds. As you would mind yourself if you were in her place. Things don't go so deep with Fanny as all that.... And she isn't going to hold me against my will. She's not that sort.... Listen, now. Please listen."

Barbara sat still, listening. She would let him go to the end of his tether.

"I'll confess. In the beginning I hadn't thought of a divorce. I couldn't bear the idea of going through all that unpleasantness. But I'd go through it ten times over rather than that you should marry Ralph Bevan.... Wait now.... Before I spoke to you to-day I'd made up my mind to ask Fanny to divorce me. I know she'll do it. Your name shan't be allowed to appear. The moment I get her consent we'll go off together somewhere. Italy or the Riviera. I've got everything planned, everything ready. I saw to that when I was in London. I've bought everything—"

She saw forked lightnings on a magenta Waddington.

"What are you laughing at, Barbara?"

He stood over her, distressed. Was Barbara going to treat him to a fit of hysterics?

"Don't laugh. Don't be silly, child."

But Barbara went on laughing, with her face in the cushions, abandoned to her vision. From far up the park they heard the sound of Kimber's hooter, then the grinding of the car, with Fanny in it, on the gravel outside. Barbara sat up suddenly and dried her eyes.

They stared at each other, the stare of accomplices.

"Come, child," he said, "pull yourself together."

Barbara got up and looked in the glass and saw the green jade necklace hanging on her still. She took it off and laid it on the table beside the forgotten sketch-book.

"I think," she said, "you must have meant this for Mrs. Levitt. But you may thank your stars it's only me, this time."

He pretended not to hear her, not to see the necklace, not to know that she was going from him. She stood a moment with her back to the door, facing him. It was her turn to stand there and be listened to.

"Mr. Waddington," she said, "some people might think you wicked. I only think you funny."

He drew himself up and looked noble.

"Funny? If that's your idea of me, you had better marry Ralph Bevan."

"I almost think I had."

And she laughed again. Not Mrs. Levitt's laughter, gross with experience. He had borne that without much pain. Girl's laughter it was, young and innocent and pure, and ten times more cruel.

"You don't know," she said, "you don't know how funny you are," and left him.

Mr. Waddington took up the necklace and kissed it. He rubbed it against his cheek and kissed it. A slip of paper had fallen from the table to the floor. He knew what was written on it: "From Horatio Bysshe Waddington to his Little April Girl." He took it up and put it in his pocket. He took up the sketch-book.

"The little thing," he thought. "Now, if it hadn't been for her ridiculous jealousy of Elise—if it hadn't been for Fanny—if it hadn't been for the little thing's sweetness and goodness—" Her goodness. She was a saint. A saint. It was Barbara's virtue, not Barbara, that had repulsed him.

This was the only credible explanation of her behaviour, the only one he could bear to live with.

He opened the sketch-book.

It was Fanny, coming in that instant, who saved him from the worst.

When she had restored the sketch-book to its refuge in the bureau and locked it in, she turned to him.

"Horatio," she said, "as Ralph's coming to dinner to-night I'd better tell you that he and Barbara are engaged to be married."

"She has told me herself.... That child, Fanny, is a saint. A little saint."

"How did you find that out? Do you think it takes a saint to marry Ralph?"

"I think it takes a saint to—to marry Ralph, since you put it that way."

4

"Dearest Fanny:

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Waddington and I have had a scrap. It's made things impossible, and I'm going to Ralph. He'll turn out for me, so there won't be any scandal.

"You know how awfully I love you, that's why you'll forgive me if I don't come back.

"Always your loving

"Barbara."

"P.S.—I'm frightfully sorry about my birthday dinner. But I don't feel birthdayish or dinnerish, either. I want Ralph. Nothing but Ralph."

That would make Fanny think it was Ralph they had quarrelled about. Barbara put this note on Fanny's dressing-table. Then she went up to the White Hart, to Ralph Bevan. She waited in his sitting-room till he came back from Oxford.

"Hallo, old thing, what are you doing here?"

"Ralph—do you awfully mind if we don't dine at the Manor?"

"If we don't—why?"

"Because I've left them. And I don't want to go back. Do you think I could get a room here?"

"What's up?"

"I've had a simply awful scrap with Waddy, and I can't stick it there. Between us we've made it impossible."

"What's he been up to?"

"Oh, never mind."

"He's been making love to you."

"If you call it making love."

"The old swine!"

As he said it, he felt the words and his own fury fall short of the fantastic quality of Waddington.

"No. He isn't." (Barbara felt it.) "He was simply more funny than you can imagine.... He had on a canary yellow waistcoat."

In spite of his fury he smiled.

"I think he'd bought it for that."

"Oh, Barbara, what he must have looked like!"

"Yes. If only you could have seen him. But that's the worst of all his best things. They only happen when you're alone with him."

"You remember—we wondered whether he'd do it again, whether he'd go one better?"

"Yes, Ralph. We little thought it would be me."

"How he does surpass himself!"

"The funniest thing was he thought I was in love with him."

"He didn't!"

"He did. Because of the way I'd worked for him. He thought that proved it."

"Yes. Yes. I suppose he would think it.... Look here—he didn't do anything, did he?"

"He kissed me. That wasn't funny."

"The putrid old sinner. If he wasn't so old I'd wring his neck for him."

"No, no. That's all wrong. It's not the way we agreed to take him. We'd think it funny enough if he'd done it to somebody else. It's pure accident that it's me."

"No doubt that's the proper philosophic view. I wonder whether Mrs. Levitt takes it."

"Ralph—it wasn't a bit like his Mrs. Levitt stunt. The awful thing was he really meant it. He'd planned it all out. We were to go off together to the Riviera, and he was to wear his canary waistcoat."

"Did he say that?"

"No. But you could see he thought it. And he was going to get Fanny to divorce him."

"Good God! He went as far as that?"

"As far as that. He was so cocksure, you see. I'm afraid it's been a bit of a shock to him."

"Well, it's a thundering good thing I've got a job at last."

"Have you?"

"Yes. We can get married the day after tomorrow if we like. Blackadder's given me the editorship of the New Review."

"No? Oh, Ralph, how topping."

"That's what I ran up to Oxford for, to see him and settle everything. It's a fairly decent screw. The thing's got no end of hacking, and it's up to me to make it last."

"I say—Fanny'll he pleased."

As they were talking about it, the landlady of the White Hart came in to tell them that Mrs. Waddington was downstairs and wanted to speak to Miss Madden.

"All right," Ralph said. "Show Mrs. Waddington up. I'll clear out."

"Oh, Ralph, what am I to say to her?"

"Tell her the truth, if she wants it. She won't mind."

"She will—frightfully."

"Not so frightfully as you think."

"That's what he said."

"Well, he's right there, the old beast."

5

"Barbara dear," said Fanny when they were alone together, "what on earth has happened?"

"Oh, nothing. We just had a bit of a tiff, that's all."

"About Ralph? He told me it was Ralph."

"You might say it was Ralph. He came into it."

"Into what?"

"Oh, the general situation."

"Nonsense. Horatio was making love to you. I could see by his face.... You needn't mind telling me straight out I've seen it coming."

"Since when?"

"I don't know. It must have begun long before I saw it."

"How long do you think?"

"Oh, before Mrs. Levitt."

"Mrs. Levitt?"

"She may have been only a safety valve. That's why I made him adopt you. I thought it would stop it. In common decency. But it seems it only brought it to a head."

"No. It was his canary waistcoat did that, Fanny."

The ghost of dead mirth rose up in Fanny's eyes.

"You're muddling cause and effect, my dear. He wasn't in love because he bought the waistcoat. He bought the waistcoat because he was in love. And those other things—the romantic pyjamas—because he thought they'd make him look younger."

"Well then," said Barbara, "it was a vicious circle. The waistcoat put it into his head that afternoon."

"It doesn't much matter how it happened."

"I'm awfully sorry, Fanny. I wouldn't have let it happen for the world, if I'd known it was going to. But who could have known?"

"My dear, it wasn't your fault."

"Do you mind frightfully?"

Fanny looked away.

"It depends," she said. "What did you say to him?"

"I said a lot of things, but they weren't a bit of good. Then I'm afraid I laughed."

"You laughed at him?"

"I couldn't help it, Fanny. He was so funny."

"Oh!" Fanny caught her breath back on a sob. "That's what I can't bear, Barbara—his being laughed at."

"I know," said Barbara.

"By the way, when you're dying dear, if you should be dying at any time, it'll be a consolation to you to know that he didn't see your drawings—"

"Did you see them?"

"Only the one he was looking at when I came in."

"Was it—was it the one where he was getting into bed?"

"No. He was only hunting."

"God has been kinder to me than I deserve then."

"He's been kinder to him, too, I fancy."

She went on. "I want you to see this thing straight. Understand. I don't mind his being in love with you. I knew he was. Head over ears in love. And I didn't mind a bit."

"I think he was reckoning on that. He knew you'd forgive him."

"Forgive him? It wasn't even a question of forgiveness. I was glad. I thought: If only he could have one real feeling. If only he could care for something or somebody that wasn't himself.... I think he cared for you, Barbara. It wasn't just himself. And I loved him for it."

"You darling! And you don't hate me?"

"You know I don't But I'd love you even more if you'd loved him."

"If I'd loved him?"

"Yes. If you'd gone away with him and made him happy. If you hadn't laughed at him, Barbara."

"I know. It was awful of me. But what could I do?"

"What could you do? We all do it. I do it. Mrs. Levitt did it."

"I didn't do it like Mrs. Levitt."

"No. But you were just one more. Think of it. All his life to be laughed at. And when he was making love, too; the most serious thing, Barbara, that anybody can do. I tell you I can't bear it. I'd have given him to you ten times first."

"Then," said Barbara, "you have got to forgive me."

"If I don't, it's because it's my own sin and I can't forgive myself....

"... Besides, I let it happen. Because I thought it would cure him."

"Of falling in love?"

"Of trying to be young when he didn't feel it. I thought he'd see how impossible it was. But that's the sad part of it. He would have felt young, Barbara, if you'd loved him. If I'd loved him I could have kept him young. I told you," she said, "it was all my fault."

"You told me Ralph and I would never be old. Is that what you meant?"

"Yes."

They sat silent a moment, looking down through Ralph's window into the Market Square.

And presently they saw Mr. Waddington pass the corner of the Town Hall and cross the wide, open space to the Dower House.

"You must come back with me, Barbara. If you don't everybody'll know what's happened."

"I can't, Fanny."

"He won't be there. You won't see him till your wedding day. He's going to stay with Granny. He says she isn't very well."

"I'm sorry she isn't well."

"She's perfectly well. That isn't what he's going for."

Across the Square they could see the door of the Dower House open and receive him. Fanny smiled.

"He's going back to his mother to be made young again," she said.

THE END