He had to take up arms in her defense on this, the first night of his arrival. Mrs. Loring had gone up to her room for some photographs of her house in America, and as she flitted through the door her scarf caught on the knob, and he had been obliged to extricate it. He had known her exactly four hours, and although he was unconscious of it, his heart was being pulled along the passage and up the stairway at the tail-end of that wisp of chiffon, while he listened to her retreating footsteps. Closing the door he came back to Mrs. de Tracy's side.

"Her dress is indecorous for a widow," said that lady severely.

"Oh, I don't see that," replied Lavendar. "She is in reality only a girl, and her widowhood has already lasted two years, you say."

"Once a widow always a widow," returned Mrs. de Tracy sententiously, with a self-respecting glance at her own cap and the half-dozen dull jet ornaments she affected. Lavendar laughed outright, but she rather liked his laughter: it made her think herself witty. Once he had told her she was "delicious," and she had never forgotten it.

"That's going pretty far, my dear lady," he replied. "Not all women are so faithful to a memory as you. I understand Americans don't wear weeds, and to me her blue cape is a delightful note in the landscape. Her dresses are conventional and proper, and I fancy she cannot express herself without a bit of colour."

"The object of clothing, Mark, is to cover and to protect yourself, not to express yourself," said Mrs. de Tracy bitingly.

"The thought of wearing anything bright always makes me shrink," remarked Miss Smeardon, who had never apparently observed the tip of her own nose, "but some persons are less sensitive on these points than others."

Mrs. de Tracy bowed an approving assent to this. "A widow's only concern should be to refrain from attracting notice," she said, as though quoting from a private book of proverbial philosophy soon to be published.

"Then Mrs. Loring might as well have burned herself on her husband's funeral pyre, Hindoo fashion!" argued Lavendar. "A woman's life hasn't ended at two and twenty. It's hardly begun, and I fear the lady in question will arouse attention whatever she wears."

"Would she be called attractive?" asked Mrs. de Tracy with surprise.

"Oh, yes, without a doubt!"

"In gentlemen's eyes, I suppose you mean?" said Miss Smeardon.

"Yes, in gentlemen's eyes," answered Lavendar, firmly. "Those of women are apparently furnished with different lenses. But here comes the fair object of our discussion, so we must decide it later on."

The question of ancestors, a favourite one at Stoke Revel, came up in the course of the next evening's conversation, and Lavendar found Robinette a trifle flushed but smiling under a double fire of questions from Mrs. de Tracy and her companion. Mrs. de Tracy was in her usual chair, knitting; Miss Smeardon sat by the table with a piece of fancy-work; Robinette had pulled a foot-stool to the hearthrug and sat as near the flames as she conveniently could. She shielded her face with the last copy of Punch, and let her shoulders bask in the warmth of the fire, which made flickering shadows on her creamy neck. Her white skirts swept softly round her feet, and her favourite turquoise scarf made a note of colour in her lap. She was one of those women who, without positive beauty, always make pictures of themselves.

Lavendar analyzed her looks as he joined the circle, pretending to read. "She isn't posing," he thought, "but she ought to be painted. She ought always to be painted, each time one sees her, for everything about her suggests a portrait. That blue ribbon in her hair is fairly distracting! What the dickens is the reason one wants to look at her all the time! I've seen far handsomer women!"

"Do you use Burke and Debrett in your country, Mrs. Loring?" Miss Smeardon was enquiring politely, as she laid down one red volume after the other, having ascertained the complete family tree of a lady who had called that afternoon.

Robinette smiled. "I'm afraid we've nothing but telephone or business directories, social registers, and 'Who's Who,' in America," she said.

"You are not interested in questions of genealogy, I suppose?" asked Mrs. de Tracy pityingly.

"I can hardly say that. But I think perhaps that we are more occupied with the future than with the past."

"That is natural," assented the lady of the Manor, "since you have so much more of it, haven't you? But the mixture of races in your country," she continued condescendingly, "must have made you indifferent to purity of strain."

"I hope we are not wholly indifferent," said Robinette, as though she were stopping to consider. "I think every serious-minded person must be proud to inherit fine qualities and to pass them on. Surely it isn't enough to give old blood to the next generation—it must be good blood. Yes! the right stock certainly means something to an American."

"But if you've nothing that answers to Burke and Debrett, I don't see how you can find out anybody's pedigree," objected Miss Smeardon. Then with an air of innocent curiosity and a glance supposed to be arch, "Are the Red Indians, the Negroes, and the Chinese in your so-called directories?"

"As many of them as are in business, or have won their way to any position among men no doubt are there, I suppose," answered Robinette straightforwardly. "I think we just guess at people's ancestry by the way they look, act, and speak," she continued musingly. "You can 'guess' quite well if you are clever at it. No Indians or Chinese ever dine with me, Miss Smeardon, though I'd rather like a peaceful Indian at dinner for a change; but I expect he'd find me very dull and uneventful!"

"Dull!—that's a word I very often hear on American lips," broke in Lavendar as he looked over the top of Henry Newbolt's poems. "I believe being dull is thought a criminal offence in your country. Now, isn't there some danger involved in this fear of dullness?"

"I shouldn't wonder," Robinette answered thoughtfully, looking into the fire. "Yes; I dare say there is, but I'm afraid there are social and mental dangers involved in not being afraid of it, too!" Her mischievous eyes swept the room, with Mrs. de Tracy's solemn figure and Miss Smeardon's for its bright ornaments. "The moment a person or a nation allows itself to be too dull, it ceases to be quite alive, doesn't it? But as to us Americans, Mr. Lavendar, bear with us for a few years, we are so ridiculously young! It is our growing time, and what you want in a young plant is growth, isn't it?"

"Y-yes," Lavendar replied: then with a twinkle in his blue eyes he added: "Only somehow we don't like to hear a plant grow! It should manage to perform the operation quite silently, showing not processes but results. That's a counsel of perfection, perhaps, but don't slay me for plain-speaking, Mrs. Loring!"

Robinette laughed. "I'll never slay you for saying anything so wise and true as that!" she said, and Lavendar, flushing under her praise, was charmed with her good humour.

"America's a very large country, is it not?" enquired Miss Smeardon with her usual brilliancy. "What is its area?"

"Bigger than England, but not as big as the British Empire!" suggested Carnaby, feeling the conversation was drifting into his ken.

"It's just the size of the moon, I've heard!" said Robinette teasingly. "Does that throw any light on the question?"

"Moonlight!" laughed Carnaby, much pleased with his own wit. "Ha! ha! That's the first joke I've made this holidays. Moonlight! Jolly good!"

"If you'd take a joke a little more in your stride, my son," said Lavendar, "we should be more impressed by your mental sparkles."

"Straighten the sofa-cushions, Carnaby," said his grandmother, "and don't lounge. I missed the point of your so-called joke entirely. As to the size of a country or anything else, I have never understood that it affected its quality. In fruit or vegetables, for instance, it generally means coarseness and indifferent flavour." Miss Smeardon beamed at this palpable hit, but Mrs. Loring deprived the situation of its point by backing up Mrs. de Tracy heartily. She had no opinion of mere size, either, she declared.

"You don't stand up for your country half enough," objected Carnaby to his cousin. ("Why don't you give the old cat beans?" was his supplement, sotto voce.)

"Just attack some of my pet theories and convictions, Middy dear, if you wish to see me in a rage," said Robinette lightly, "but my motto will never be 'My country right or wrong.'"

"Nor mine," agreed Lavendar. "I'm heartily with you there."

"It's a great venture we're trying in America. I wish every one would try to look at it in that light," said Robinette with a slight flush of earnestness.

"What do you mean by a venture?" asked Mrs. de Tracy.

"The experiment we're making in democracy," answered Robinette. "It's fallen to us to try it, for of course it simply had to be tried. It is thrillingly interesting, whatever it may turn out, and I wish I might live to see the end of it. We are creating a race, Aunt de Tracy; think of that!"

"It's as difficult for nations as for individuals to hit the happy medium," said Lavendar, stirring the fire. "Enterprise carried too far becomes vulgar hustling, while stability and conservatism often pass the coveted point of repose and degenerate into torpor."

"This part of England seems to me singularly free from faults," interposed Mrs. de Tracy in didactic tones. "We have a wonderful climate; more sunshine than in any part of the island, I believe. Our local society is singularly free from scandal. The clergy, if not quite as eloquent or profound as in London (and in my opinion it is the better for being neither) is strictly conscientious. We have no burglars or locusts or gnats or even midges, as I'm told they unfortunately have in Scotland, and our dinner-parties, though quiet and dignified, are never dull.... What is the matter, Robinetta?"

"A sudden catch in my throat," said Robinette, struggling with some sort of vocal difficulty and avoiding Lavendar's eye. "Thank you," as he offered her a glass of water from the punctual and strictly temperate evening tray. "Don't look at me," she added under her voice.

"Not for a million of money!" he whispered. Then he said aloud: "If I ever stand for Parliament, Mrs. Loring, I should like you to help me with my constituency!"

The unruffled temper and sweet reasonableness of Robinette's answers to questions by no means always devoid of malice, had struck the young man very much, as he listened.

"She is good!" he thought to himself. "Good and sweet and generous. Her loveliness is not only in her face; it is in her heart." And some favorite lines began to run in his head that night, with new conviction:—

He that loves a rosy cheek, Or a coral lip admires, Or from star-like eyes doth seek Fuel to maintain his fires,— As old Time makes these decay, So his flames will waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts and calm desires, Hearts with equal love combined—

but here Lavendar broke off with a laugh.

"It's not come to that yet!" he thought. "I wonder if it ever will?"



X

A NEW KINSMAN

Young Mrs. Loring was making her way slowly at Stoke Revel Manor, and Mrs. de Tracy, though never affectionate, treated her with a little less indifference as the days went on. "The Admiral's niece is a lady," she admitted to herself privately; "not perhaps the highest type of English lady; that, considering her mixed ancestry and American education, would be too much to expect; but in the broad, general meaning of the word, unmistakably a lady!"

Mrs. Benson, though not melting outwardly as yet, held more lenient views still with regard to the American guest. Bates, the butler, was elderly, and severely Church of England; his knowledge of widows was confined to the type ably represented by his mistress and he regarded young Mrs. Loring as inclined to be "flighty." The footman, who was entirely under the butler's thumb in mundane matters, had fallen into the habit of sharing his opinions, and while agreeing in the general feeling of flightiness, declared boldly that the lady in question gave a certain "style" to the dinner-table that it had lacked before her advent.

For a helpless victim, however, a slave bound in fetters of steel, one would have to know Cummins, the under housemaid, who lighted Mrs. Loring's fire night and morning. She was young, shy, country bred, and new to service. When Mrs. Benson sent her to the guest's room at eight o'clock on the morning after her arrival she stopped outside the door in a panic of fear.

"Come in!" called a cheerful voice. "Come in!"

Cummins entered, bearing her box with brush and cloth and kindlings. To her further embarrassment Mrs. Loring was sitting up in bed with an ermine coat on, over which her bright hair fell in picturesque disorder. She had brought the coat for theatre and opera, but as these attractions were lacking at Stoke Revel and as life there was, to her, one prolonged Polar expedition, with dashes farthest north morning and evening, she had diverted it to practical uses.

"Make me a quick fire please, a big fire, a hot fire," she begged, "or I shall be late for breakfast; I never can step into that tin tub till the ice is melted."

"There's no ice in it, ma'am," expostulated Cummins gently, with the voice of a wood dove.

"You can't see it because you're English," said the strange lady, "but I can see it and feel it. Oh, you make such a good fire! What is your name, please?"

"Cummins, ma'am."

"There's another Cummins downstairs, but she is tall and large. You shall be 'Little Cummins.'"

Now every morning the shy maid palpitated outside the bedroom door, having given her modest knock; palpitated for fear it should be all a dream. But no, it was not! there would be a clear-voiced "Come in!" and then, as she entered; "Good morning, Little Cummins. I've been longing for you since daybreak!" A trifle later on it was, "Good Little Cummins bearing coals of comfort! Kind Little Cummins," and other strange and wonderful terms of praise, until Little Cummins felt herself consumed by a passion to which Mrs. de Tracy's coals became as less than naught unless they could be heaped on the altar of the beloved.

So life went on at Stoke Revel, outwardly even and often dull, while in reality many subtle changes were taking place below the surface; changes slight in themselves but not without meaning.

Robinette ran up to her room directly after breakfast one morning and pinned on her hat as she came downstairs. Mark Lavendar had gone to London for a few days, but even the dullness of breakfast-table conversation had not robbed her of her joy in the early sunshine, made more cheery by the prospect of a walk with Carnaby, with whom she was now fast friends.

Carnaby looked at her beamingly as they stood together on the steps. "You're the best turned-out woman of my acquaintance," he said approvingly, with a laughable struggle for the tone of a middle-aged man of the world.

"How many ladies of fashion do you know, my child?" enquired Robinetta, pulling on her gloves.

"I see a lot of 'em off and on," Carnaby answered somewhat huffily, "and they don't call me a child either!"

"Don't they? Then that's because they're timid and don't dare address a future Admiral as Infant-in-Arms! Come on, Middy dear, let's walk."

Robinette wore a white serge dress and jacket, and her hat was a rough straw turned up saucily in two places with black owls' heads. Mrs. Benson and Little Cummins had looked at it curiously while Robinette was at breakfast.

"'Tis black underneath and white on top, Mrs. Benson. 'Ow can that be? It looks as if one 'at 'ad been clapped on another!"

"That's what it is, Cummins. It's a double hat; but they'll do anything in America. It's a double hat with two black owls' heads, and I'll wager they charged double price for it!"

"She's a lovely beauty in anythink and everythink she wears," said Little Cummins loyally.

"May I call you 'Cousin Robin'?" Carnaby asked as they walked along. "Robinette is such a long name."

"Cousin Robin is very nice, I think," she answered. "As a matter of fact I ought to be your Aunt Robin; it would be much more appropriate."

"Aunt be blowed!" ejaculated Carnaby.

"You're very fond of making yourself out old, but it's no go! When I first heard you were a widow I thought you would be grandmother's age,—I say—do you think you will marry another time, Cousin Robin?"

"That's a very leading question for a gentleman to put to a lady! Were you intending to ask me to wait for you, Middy dear?" asked Robinette, putting her arm in the boy's laughingly, quite unconscious of his mood.

"I'd wait quick enough if you'd let me! I'd wait a lifetime! There never was anybody like you in the world!"

The words were said half under the boy's breath and the emotion in his tone was a complete and disagreeable surprise. Here was something that must be nipped in the bud, instantly and courageously. Robinette dropped Carnaby's arm and said: "We'll talk that over at once, Middy dear, but first you shall race me to the top of the twisting path, down past the tulip beds, to the seat under the big ash tree.—Come on!"

The two reached the tree in a moment, Carnaby sufficiently in advance to preserve his self-respect and with a colour heightened by something other than the exercise of running.

"Sit down, first cousin once removed!" said Robinette. "Do you know the story of Sydney Smith, who wrote apologizing to somebody for not being able to come to dinner? 'The house is full of cousins,' he said; 'would they were "once removed"!'"

"It's no good telling me literary anecdotes!—You're not treating me fairly," said Carnaby sulkily.

"I'm treating you exactly as you should be treated, Infant-in-Arms," Robinette answered firmly. "Give me your two paws, and look me straight in the eye."

Carnaby was no coward. His steel-grey eyes blazed as he met his cousin's look. "Carnaby dear, do you know what you are to me? You are my kinsman; my only male relation. I'm so fond of you already, don't spoil it! Think what you can be to me if you will. I am all alone in the world and when you grow a little older how I should like to depend upon you! I need affection; so do you, dear boy; can't I see how you are just starving for it? There is no reason in the world why we shouldn't be fond of each other! Oh! how grateful I should be to think of a strong young middy growing up to advise me and take me about! It was that kind of care and thought of me that was in your mind just now!"

"You'll be marrying somebody one of these days," blurted Carnaby, wholly moved, but only half convinced. "Then you'll forget all about your 'kinsman.'"

"I have no intention in that direction," said Robinette, "but if I change my mind I'll consult you first; how will that do?"

"It wouldn't do any good," sighed the boy, "so I'd rather you wouldn't! You'd have your own way spite of everything a fellow could say against it!"

There was a moment of embarrassment; then the silence was promptly broken by Robinette.

"Well, Middy dear, are we the best of friends?" she asked, rising from the bench and putting out her hand.

The lad took it and said all in a glow of chivalry, "You're the dearest, the best, and the prettiest cousin in the world! You don't mind my thinking you're the prettiest?"

"Mind it? I delight in it! I shall come to your ship and pour out tea for you in my most fetching frock. Your friends will say: 'Who is that particularly agreeable lady, Carnaby?' And you, with swelling chest, will respond, 'That's my American cousin, Mrs. Loring. She's a nice creature; I'm glad you like her!'"

Robinette's imitation of Carnaby's possible pomposity was so amusing and so clever that it drew a laugh from the boy in spite of himself.

"Just let anyone try to call you a 'creature'!" he exclaimed. "He'd have me to reckon with! Oh! I am so tired of being a boy! The inside of me is all grown up and everybody keeps on looking at the outside and thinking I'm just the same as I always was!"

"Dear old Middy, you're quite old enough to be my protector and that is what you shall be! Now shall we go in? I want you to stand near by while I ask your grandmother a favor."

"She won't do it if she can help it," was Carnaby's succinct reply.

"Oh, I am not sure! Where shall we find her,—in the library?"

"Yes; come along! Get up your circulation; you'll need it!"

"Aunt de Tracy, there is something at Stoke Revel I am very anxious to have if you will give it to me," said Robinette, as she came into the library a few minutes later.

Mrs. de Tracy looked up from her knitting solemnly. "If it belongs to me, I shall no doubt be willing, as I know you would not ask for anything out of the common; but I own little here; nearly all is Carnaby's."

"This was my mother's," said Robinette. "It is a picture hanging in the smoking room; one that was a great favorite of hers, called 'Robinetta.' Her drawing-master found an Italian artist in London who went to the National Gallery and made a copy of the Sir Joshua picture, and I was named after it."

"I wish your mother could have been a little less romantic," sighed Mrs. de Tracy. "There were such fine old family names she might have used: Marcia and Elspeth, and Rosamond and Winifred!"

"I am sorry, Aunt de Tracy. If I had been consulted I believe I should have agreed with you. Perhaps when my mother was in America the family ties were not drawn as tightly as in the former years?"

"If it was so, it was only natural," said the old lady. "However, if you ask Carnaby, and if the picture has no great value, I am sure he will wish you to have it, especially if you know it to have been your mother's property." Here Carnaby sauntered into the room. "That's all right, grandmother," he said, "I heard what you were saying; only I wish it was a real Sir Joshua we were giving Cousin Robin instead of a copy!"

"Thank you, Carnaby dear, and thank you, too, Aunt de Tracy. You can't think how much it is to me to have this; it is a precious link between mother's girlhood, and mother, and me." So saying, she dropped a timid kiss upon Mrs. de Tracy's iron-grey hair, and left the room.

"If she could live in England long enough to get over that excessive freedom of manner, your cousin would be quite a pleasing person, but I am afraid it goes too deep to be cured," Mrs. de Tracy remarked as she smoothed the hairs that might have been ruffled by Robinette's kiss.

Carnaby made no reply. He was looking out into the garden and feeling half a boy, half a man, but wholly, though not very contentedly, a kinsman.



XI

THE SANDS AT WESTON

"Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I must run up to London on Saturday," said Lavendar to himself as he finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes, there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees; in another, years might have passed since the moment when he first saw Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman's plum tree.

"Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that time when we first crossed in the boat, I've never been more than half an hour alone with her," he thought. "There are only three other people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they're not wanted) so that we're eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly! I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his presence isn't always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her," he sighed. "After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much as she does me?"

No one could have told from Lavendar's face, when he appeared fresh and smiling at the breakfast table half an hour later, that he was hatching any deep-laid schemes.

Robinette entered the dining room five minutes late, as usual, pretty as a pink, breathless with hurrying. She wore a white dress again, with one rose stuck at her waistband, "A little tribute from the gardener," she said, as she noticed Lavendar glance at it. She went rapidly around the table shaking hands, and gave Carnaby's red cheeks a pinch in passing that made Lavendar long to tweak the boy's ear.

"Good morning, all!" she said cheerily, "and how is my first cousin once removed? Is he going to Weston with me this morning to buy hairpins?"

"He is!" Carnaby answered joyfully, between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs. "He has been out of hairpins for a week."

"Does he need tapes and buttons also?" asked Robinette, taking the piece of muffin from his hand and buttering it for herself; an act highly disapproved of by Mrs. de Tracy, who hurriedly requested Bates to pass the bread.

"He needs everything you need," Carnaby said with heightened colour.

"My hair is giving me a good deal of trouble, lately," remarked Lavendar, passing his hand over a thickly thatched head.

"I have an excellent American tonic that I will give you after breakfast," said Robinette roguishly. "You need to apply it with a brush at ten, eleven, and twelve o'clock, sitting in the sun continuously between those hours so that the scalp may be well invigorated. Carnaby, will you buy me butter scotch and lemonade and oranges in Weston?"

"I will, if Grandmother'll increase my allowance," said Carnaby malevolently, "for I need every penny I've got in hand for the hairpins."

"I hope you are not hungry, Robinetta," said Mrs. de Tracy, "that you have to buy food in Weston."

"No, indeed," said Robinette, "I was only longing to test Carnaby's generosity and educate him in buying trifles for pretty ladies."

"He can probably be relied on to educate himself in that line when the time comes," Mrs. de Tracy remarked; "and now if you have all finished talking about hair, I will take up my breakfast again."

"Oh, Aunt de Tracy, I am so sorry if it wasn't a nice subject, but I never thought. Anyway I only talked about hairpins; it was Mr. Lavendar who introduced hair into the conversation; wasn't it, Middy dear?"

Lavendar thought he could have annihilated them both for their open comradeship, their obvious delight in each other's society. Was he to be put on the shelf like a dry old bachelor? Not he! He would circumvent them in some way or another, although the role of gooseberry was new to him.

The two young people set off in high spirits, and Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon watched them as they walked down the avenue on their way to the station, their clasped hands swinging in a merry rhythm as they hummed a bit of the last popular song.

"I hope Robinetta will not Americanize Carnaby," said Mrs. de Tracy. "He seems so foolishly elated, so feverishly gay all at once. Her manner is too informal; Carnaby requires constant repression."

"Perhaps his temperature has not returned to normal since his attack of quinsy," Miss Smeardon observed, reassuringly.

Meanwhile Lavendar sat in Admiral de Tracy's old smoking room for half an hour writing letters. Every time that he glanced up from his work, and he did so pretty often, his eyes fell on a picture that hung upon the opposite wall. It was the copy of Sir Joshua's "Robinetta" made long ago and just presented to its namesake.

In the portrait the girl's hair was a still brighter gold; yet certainly there was a likeness somewhere about it, he thought; partly in the expression, partly in the broad low forehead, and the eyes that looked as if they were seeing fairies.

Of course to his mind Mrs. Loring was a hundred times more lovely than Sir Joshua's famous girl with a robin. He felt very ill-used because Robinette and Carnaby had deliberately gone for an excursion without him and had left him toiling over business papers when they had gone off to enjoy themselves.

How bright it was out there in the sunshine, to be sure! And why should it be Carnaby, not he, who was by this time walking along the sea front of Weston, and watching the breeze flutter Robinette's scarf and bring a brighter colour to her lips?

There! the last words were written, and taking up his bunch of letters, watch in hand, he sought Mrs. de Tracy, and explained that he would bicycle to Weston and catch the London post himself.

"I'll send William"—she began; but Lavendar hastily assured her that he should enjoy the ride, and hurried off in triumph. Miss Smeardon smiled an acid smile as she watched him go. "He has forgotten all about poor Miss Meredith, I suppose," she murmured. "Yet it was not so long ago that they were supposed to be all in all to each other!"

"It was a foolish engagement, Miss Smeardon," said Mrs. de Tracy in a cold voice. "I never thought the girl was suited to Mark, and I understand that old Mr. Lavendar was relieved when the whole thing came to an end."

"Quite so; certainly; no doubt Miss Meredith would never have made him happy," said Miss Smeardon at once, "though it is always more agreeable when the lady discovers the fact first. In this case she confessed openly that Mr. Lavendar broke her heart with his indifference."

"She was an ill-bred young woman," said Mrs. de Tracy, as if the subject were now closed. "However, I hope that the son of my family solicitor would think it only proper to pay a certain amount of attention to the Admiral's niece, were she ever so obnoxious to him."

Miss Smeardon made no audible reply, but her thoughts were to the effect that never was an obnoxious duty performed by any man with a better grace.

The sea front at Weston was the most prosaic scene in the world, a long esplanade with an asphalt path running its full length, and ugly jerrybuilt houses glaring out upon it, a gimcrack pier with a gingerbread sort of band-stand and glass house at the end;—all that could have been done to ruin nature had been determinedly done there. But you cannot ruin a spring day, nor youth, nor the colour of the sea. Along the level shore, the placid waves swept and broke, and then gathered up their white skirts, and retreated to return with the same musical laugh. Children and dogs played about on the wet sands. The wind blew freshly and the sea stretched all one pure blue, till it met on the horizon with the bluer skies.

Weston seemed to Lavendar a very fresh and delightful spot at that moment, although had he been in a different mood its sordidness only would have struck him. Yes, there they were in the distance; he knew Robinette's white dress and the figure of the boy beside her. Hang that boy! Were they really going to buy hairpins? If so, then a hair-dresser's he must find. Lavendar turned up the little street that led from the sea-front, scanning all the signs—Boots—Dairies—Vegetable shops—Heavens! were there nothing but vegetable and boot shops in Weston? Boots again. At last a Hairdresser; Lavendar stood in the doorway until he made sure that Robinette and the middy had turned in that direction, and then he boldly entered the shop.

To his horror he found himself confronted by a smiling young woman, whose own very marvellous erection of hair made him think she must be used as an advertisement for the goods she supplied.

In another moment Robinette and the boy would be upon him, and he must be found deep in fictitious business. He cast one agonized glance at the mysteries of the toilet that surrounded him on every side, then clearing his throat, he said modestly but firmly, that he wanted to buy a pair of curling tongs for a lady.

"These are the thing if you wish a Marcel wave," was the reply, "but just for an ordinary crimp we sell a good many of the plain ones."

"Yes, thank you. They will do; the lady—my sister, also wished—"

"A little 'addition,' was it, sir?" she moved smilingly to a drawer. "A few pin curls are very easily adjusted, or would our guinea switch—"

At this moment the boy and Robinette entered the shop. Lavendar was paying for the curling tongs, and not a muscle of his face relaxed. "Oh, here you are. I have just finished my business," he said, turning round, "I thought we might encounter one another somewhere!"

Robinette and Carnaby exchanged knowing glances of which Lavendar was perfectly conscious, but he stood by while Mrs. Loring bought her hairpins, and Carnaby endeavoured to persuade her to invest in a few "pin curls." "Not an hour before it is absolutely necessary, Middy dear," she said; "then I shall bear it as bravely as I can. Come now, carry the hairpins for me, and let me take Mr. Lavendar out of this shop, or he will be tempted to buy more than he needs."

"Oh, no!" Lavendar remarked pointedly. "I have what I came for!"

"Don't forget your parcel," Carnaby exclaimed, darting after Lavendar as they went into the street. "You've left it on the counter."

"How careless!" said Mark. "It was for my sister."

"You never told me you had a sister," said Robinette, as they walked together, Lavendar wheeling his bicycle and Carnaby sulking behind them.

"I am blessed with two; one married now; the other, my sister Amy, lives at home."

"Well, you see, in spite of all our questions the first time we met, we really know very little about each other," she went on lightly. "It takes such a long time to get thoroughly acquainted in this country. Do they ever count you a friend if you do not know all their aunts and second cousins?"

Lavendar laughed. "Willingly would I introduce you to my aunts and my uttermost cousins, and lay the map of my life before you, uneventful as it has been, if that would further our acquaintance."

Even as he spoke a hateful memory darted into his thoughts, and he reddened to his temples, until Mrs. Loring wondered if she had said anything to annoy him.

Some fortunate accident at this point ordered that Carnaby should meet a friend, another middy about his own age, and they set off together in quest of a third boy who was supposed to be in the near neighbourhood.

As soon as the lads were out of sight Lavendar found the jests they had been bandying together die on his lips. "I'm going down deeper; I shall be out of my depth very soon," he thought to himself, as he walked in silence by Robinette's side.

"Let us come down to the beach again; we can't go to the station for half an hour yet," she said. "I like to look out to sea, and realize that if I sailed long enough I could step off that pier, and arrive in America."

They stood by the sea-wall together with the fresh wind playing on their faces. "Isn't it curious," said Robinette, "how instinctively one always turns to look at the sea; inland may be ever so lovely, but if the sea is there we generally look in that direction."

"Because it is unbounded, like the future," said Lavendar. He was looking as he spoke at some children playing on the sands just beside them. There was a gallant little boy among them with a bare curly head, who refused help from older sisters and was toiling away at his sand castle, his whole soul in his work; throwing up spadefuls—tremendous ones for four years old—upon its ramparts, as if certain they could resist the advancing tide.

"What a noble little fellow!" exclaimed Robinette, catching the direction of Lavendar's glance. "Isn't he splendid? toiling like that; stumping about on those fat brown legs!"

"How beautiful to have a child like that, of one's own!" thought Lavendar as he looked. On the sands around them, there were numbers of such children playing there in the sun. It seemed a happy world to him at the moment.

Suddenly he saw his companion turn quickly aside; a nurse in uniform came towards them pushing, not a happy crooning baby this time, but a little emaciated wisp of a child lying back wearily in a wheel chair. Something in Robinette's face, or perhaps the bit of fluttering lace she wore upon her white dress, had attracted its notice, and it stretched out two tiny skeleton hands towards her as it passed. With a quick gesture, brushing tears away that in a moment had rushed to her eyes, young Mrs. Loring stepped forward, and put her fingers into the wasted hands that were held out to her. She hung above the child for a moment, a radiant figure, her face shining with sympathy and a sort of heavenly kindness; her eyes the sweeter for their tears.

"What is it, darling?" she asked. "Oh, it's the bright rose!" Then she hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to Lavendar. "Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the little thorns," she asked.

"The rose looked very charming where it was," he remarked, half regretfully, as he did what she commanded.

"It will look better still, presently," she answered.

The child's hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard," she thought. "All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!"

Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. "Sweet woman!" he was saying to himself. "It is more than a merry heart that is able to give such sympathy; it's a sad old world after all where such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of evil."

Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. "A rose and a smile! that's all we could give it," she said; "and we would either of us share some of that burden if we only could." She watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added, "After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of things, or we shouldn't be a living world at all."

"Amen," said Lavendar, "but the sight of suffering innocents like that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead."

"Dead!" she echoed. "Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with."

"Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I've known, was like that," Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other's past.

"She was a fine woman," he went on, "with a certain comfortable breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens."

Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in retrospective silence, looking at the blue sea before them.

Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.

"I wonder if it's a matter of size," she said after a moment. "I wonder! Let's be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father's success came to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be accepted, so I was my mother's helper. We had but one servant, and I learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee, and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy's sister had to work, Admiral de Tracy's niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my father's illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed his pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her health failed. I wasn't enough for her; she needed father and her face was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they held my mother's when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle, but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the tasks my head and heart suggest."

Lavendar had a strong desire to take those same hands in his and kiss them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on the edge of the wall, a man's hands, fine and supple, but meant to work.

"I seem to have done nothing," he exclaimed. "You look so young, so irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine have never done a real day's work, Mrs. Loring, for they've been the servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man, and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I could avoid." He paused, and went on slowly, "I've thought sometimes, of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real life, and not mere existence, one must put one's whole heart into it, and that two people—" He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment, conscious of having said too much.

"Can help each other. Indeed they can," Mrs. Loring went on serenely, "if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don't they help?"

"Not a great deal," Lavendar confessed. "One would, but she's married and in India, worse luck! The other is—well, she's a candid sister." He laughed, and looked up. "If my best friend could hear my sister Amy's view of me, just have a little sketch of me by Amy without fear or favour, he, or she, would never have a very high opinion of me again, and I am not sure but that I should agree with her."

"Nonsense! my dear friend," exclaimed Robinette in a maternal tone she sometimes affected,—a tone fairly agonizing to Mark Lavendar; "we should never belittle the stuff that's been put into us! My equipment isn't particularly large, but I am going to squeeze every ounce of power from it before I die."

"Life is extraordinarily interesting to you, isn't it?"

"Interesting? It is thrilling! So will it be to you when you make up your mind to squeeze it," said Robinette, jumping off the wall. "There is Carnaby signalling; it is time we went to the station."

"Life would thrill me considerably more if Carnaby were not eternally in evidence," said Lavendar, but Robinette pretended not to hear.



XII

LOVE IN THE MUD

The next day Robinette was once more sitting in the boat opposite to Lavendar as he rowed. They were going down the river this time, not across it. Somehow they had managed that afternoon to get out by themselves, which sounds very simple, but is a wonderfully difficult thing to accomplish when there is no special reason for it, and when there are several other people in the house.

Fortunately Mrs. de Tracy did not like to be alone, so that wherever she went Miss Smeardon had to go too, and there happened to be a sale of work at a neighbouring vicarage that afternoon where she considered her presence a necessity. Robinette had vanished soon after luncheon and the middy had been dull, so after loitering around for a while, he too had disappeared upon some errand of his own. Lavendar walked very slowly toward the avenue gateway, then he turned and came back. He could scarcely believe his good fortune when he saw Mrs. Loring come out of the house, and pause at the door as if uncertain of her next movements. She looked uncommonly lovely in a white frock with touches of blue, while the ribbon in her hair brought out all its gold. She wore a flowery garden hat, and a pair of dainty most un-English shoes peeped from beneath her short skirt.

"Are you going out, or can I take you on the river?" Lavendar asked, trying without much success to conceal the eagerness that showed in his voice and eyes.

Robinette stood for a moment looking at him (it seemed as if she read him like a book) and then she said frankly, "Why yes, there is nothing I should like so much, but where is Carnaby?"

"Hang Carnaby! I mean I don't know, or care. I've had too much of his society to-day to be pining for it now."

"Well, he does chatter like a magpie, but I feel he must have such a dull time here with no one anywhere near his own age. Elderly as I am, I seem a bit nearer than Aunt de Tracy or Miss Smeardon. Aunt de Tracy, all the same, will never understand my relations with that boy, or with anyone else for that matter. I did try so hard," she went on, "when I first arrived, just to strike the right note with her, and I've missed it all the time, by that very fact, no doubt. I'm so unused to trying—at home."

"You mean in America?"

"Yes, of course; I don't try there at all, and yet my friends seem to understand me."

"Does it seem to you that you could ever call England 'home'?"

"I could not have believed that England would so sink into my heart," she said, sitting down in the doorway and arranging the flowers on her hat. "During those first dull wet days when I was still a stranger, and when I looked out all the time at the dripping cedars, and felt whenever I opened my lips that I said the wrong thing, it seemed to me I should never be gay for an hour in this country; but the last enchanting sunny days have changed all that. I remember it's my mother's country, and if only I could have found a little affection waiting for me, all would have been perfect."

"You may find it yet." Lavendar could not for the life of him help saying the words, but there was nothing in the tone in which he said them to make Robinette conscious of his meaning.

"I'm afraid not," she sighed, thinking of Mrs. de Tracy's indifference. "I'm much more American than English, much more my father's daughter than the Admiral's niece; perhaps my aunt feels that instinctively. Now I must slip upstairs and change if we are going boating."

"Never!" cried Lavendar. "If I don't snatch you this moment from the devouring crowd I shall lose you! I will keep you safe and dry, never fear, and we shall be back well before dark."

They went down the river after leaving the little pier, passing the orchards heaped on the hillsides above Wittisham, and Lavendar wanted to row out to sea, but Robinette preferred the river; so he rowed nearer to the shore, where the current was less swift, and the boat rocked and drifted with scarcely a touch of the oars. They had talked for some time, and then a silence had fallen, which Robinette broke by saying, "I half wish you'd forsake the law and follow lines of lesser resistance, Mr. Lavendar. Do you know, you seem to me to be drifting, not rowing! I've been thinking ever since of what you said to me on the sands at Weston."

"Ungrateful woman!" he exclaimed, trying to evade the subject, "when these two faithful arms have been at your service every day since we first met! Think of the pennies you would have taken from that tiny gold purse of yours for the public ferry! However, I know what you mean; I never met anyone so plain-spoken as you, Mrs. Robin; I haven't forgotten, I assure you!"

"How about the candid sister? Isn't she plain-spoken?"

"Oh, she attacks the outside of the cup and platter; you question motive power and ideals. Well, I confess I have less of the former than I ought, and more of the latter than I've ever used." Lavendar had rested on his oars now and was looking down, so that the twinkle of his eyes was lost. "I suppose I shall go on as I have done hitherto, doing my work in a sort of a way, and getting a certain amount of pleasure out of things,—unless—"

"Oh, but that's not living!" she exclaimed; "that's only existing. Don't you remember:—

It is not growing like a tree In bulk doth make man better be.

It's really living I mean, forgetting the things that are behind, and going on and on to something ahead, whatever one's aim may be."

"What are you going to do with yourself, if I may ask?" said Lavendar. "Don't be too philanthropic, will you? You're so delightfully symmetrical now!"

"I shall have plenty to do," cried Robinette ardently. "I've told you before, I have so much motive power that I don't know how to use it."

"How about sharing a little of it with a friend!"

Lavendar's voice was full of meaning, but Robinette refused to hear it. She had succumbed as quickly to his charm as he to hers, but while she still had command over her heart she did not intend parting with it unless she could give it wholly. She knew enough of her own nature to recognize that she longed for a rowing, not a drifting mate, and that nothing else would content her; but her instinct urged that Lavendar's indecisions and his uncertainties of aim were accidents rather than temperamental weaknesses. She suspected that his introspective moods and his occasional lack of spirits had a definite cause unknown to her.

"I haven't a large income," she said, after a moment's silence, changing the subject arbitrarily, and thereby reducing her companion to a temporary state of silent rage.

"Yet no one would expect a woman like this to fall like a ripe plum into a man's mouth," he thought presently; "she will drop only when she has quite made up her mind, and the bough will need a good deal of shaking!"

"I haven't a large income," repeated Robinette, while Lavendar was silent, "only five thousand dollars a year, which is of course microscopic from the American standpoint and cost of living; so I can't build free libraries and swimming baths and playgrounds, or do any big splendid things; but I can do dear little nice ones, left undone by city governments and by the millionaires. I can sing, and read, and study; I can travel; and there are always people needing something wherever you are, if you have eyes to see them; one needn't live a useless life even if one hasn't any responsibilities. But"—she paused—"I've been talking all this time about my own plans and ambitions, and I began by asking yours! Isn't it strange that the moment one feels conscious of friendship, one begins to want to know things?"

"My sister Amy would tell you I had no ambitions, except to buy as many books as I wish, and not to have to work too hard," said Mark smiling, "but I think that would not be quite true. I have some, of a dull inferior kind, not beautiful ones like yours."

"Do tell me what they are."

He shook his head. "I couldn't; they're not for show; shabby things like unsuccessful poor relations, who would rather not have too much notice taken of them. In a few weeks I am going to drag them out of their retreat, brighten them up, inject some poetry into their veins, and then display them to your critical judgment."

They were almost at a standstill now and neither of them was noticing it at all. As Mrs. Loring moved her seat the boat lurched somewhat to one side. Mark, to steady her, placed his hand over hers as it rested on the rail, and she did not withdraw it. Then he found the other hand that lay upon her knee, and took it in his own, scarcely knowing what he did. He looked into her face and found no anger there. "I wish to tell you more about myself," he stammered, "something not altogether creditable to me; but perhaps you will understand. Perhaps even if you don't understand you will forgive."

She drew her hands gently away from his grasp. "I shall try to understand, you may rely on that!" she said.

"I'm not going to trouble you with any very dreadful confessions," he said, "only it's better to hear things directly from the people concerned, and you are sure to hear a wrong version sooner or later."—Then stopping suddenly he exclaimed, "Hullo! we're stuck, I declare! look at that!"

Robinette turned and saw that their boat was now scarcely surrounded with water at all. On every side, as if the flanks of some great whale were upheaving from below, there appeared stretches of glistening mud. Just in front of them, where there still was a channel of water, was an upstanding rock. "Shall we row quickly there?" she cried. "Then perhaps we can get out and pull the boat to the other side, where there is more water. What has happened?"

"Oh, something not unusual," said Lavendar grimly, "that I'm a fool, and the sea-tide has ebbed, as tides have been known to do before. I'm afraid a man doesn't watch tides when he has a companion like you! Now we're left high, but not at all dry, as you see, till the tide turns."

By a swift stroke or two he managed to propel their craft as far as the rock. They scrambled up on it, and then he tried to haul the boat around the miniature islet; but the more he hauled, the quicker the water seemed to run away, and the deeper the wretched thing stuck in the mud. He jumped in again, and made an effort to push her off with an oar; meanwhile Robinette nearly fell off the rock in her efforts to get the head of the boat around towards the current again, and making a frantic plunge into the ooze, sank above her ankles in an instant. Lavendar caught hold of her and helped her to scramble back into the boat. "It's all right; only my skirt wet, and one shoe gone!" she panted. "Now, what are we to do?" She spread out her hands in dismay, and looked down at her draggled mud-stained skirt, her little feet, one shoeless and both covered with mud and slime. "What an object I shall be to meet Aunt de Tracy's eye, when, if ever, it does light on me again! Meanwhile it seems as if we might be here for some hours. The boat is just settling herself into the mud bank, like a rather tired fat old woman into an armchair, and pray, Mr. Lavendar, what do you propose to do? as Talleyrand said to the lady who told him she couldn't bear it."

Lavendar looked about them; the main bed of the river was fifty yards away; between it and them was now only an expanse of mud.

"It's perfectly hopeless," he said, "the best thing we can do is to beget some philosophy."

"Which at any moment we would exchange for a foot of water," she interpolated.

"We must just sit here and wait for the tide. Shall it be in the boat or on the rock?"

"I don't see much difference, do you? Except that the passing boats, if there are any, might think it was a matter of choice to sit on a damp rock for two hours, but no one could think we wanted to sit in a boat in the mud."

They landed on the rock for the second time. "For my part it's no great punishment," said Lavendar, when they settled themselves, "since the place is big enough for two and you're one of them!"

"Wouldn't this be as good a stool of repentance from which to confess your faults as any?" asked Robinette, as she tucked her shoeless foot beneath her mud-stained skirt and made herself as comfortable as possible. "I'll even offer a return of confidence upon my own weaknesses, if I can find them, but at present only miles of virtue stretch behind me. Ugh! How the mud smells; quite penitential! Now:—

"What have you sought you should have shunned, And into what new follies run?"

"Oh, what a bad rhyme!" said Lavendar.

"It's Pythagoras, any way," she explained.

Then suddenly changing his tone, Lavendar went on. "This is not merely a jest, Mrs. Loring. Before you admit me really amongst the number of your friends I should like you to know that—to put it plainly—my own little world would tell you at the moment that I am a heartless jilt."

"That is a very ugly expression, Mr. Lavendar, and I shall choose not to believe it, until you give me your own version of the story."

"In one way I can give you no other; except that I was just fool enough to drift into an engagement with a woman whom I did not really love, and just not enough of a fool to make both of us miserable for life when I, all too late, found out my mistake."

There passed before him at that moment other foolish blithe little loves, like faded flowers with the sweetness gone out of them. They had been so innocent, so fragile, so free from blame; all but the last; and this last it was that threatened to rise like a shadow perhaps, and defeat his winning the only woman he could ever love.

Robinette stared at the stretches of ooze, and then stole a look at Mark Lavendar. "The idea of calling that man a jilt," she thought. "Look at his eyes; look at his mouth; listen to his voice; there is truth in them all. Oh for a sight of the girl he jilted! How much it would explain! No, not altogether, because the careless making of his engagement would have to be accounted for, as well as the breaking of it. Unless he did it merely to oblige her—and men are such idiots sometimes,—then he must have fancied he was in love with her. Perhaps he is continually troubled with those fancies. Nonsense! you believe in him, and you know you do." Then aloud she said, sympathetically, "I'm afraid we are apt to make these little experimental journeys in youth, when the heart is full of wanderlust. We start out on them so lightly, then they lead nowhere, and the walking back alone is wearisome and depressing."

"My return journey was depressing enough at first," said Lavendar, "because the particular She was unkinder to me than I deserved even; but better counsels have prevailed and I shall soon be able to meet the reproachful gaze of stout matrons and sour spinsters more easily than I have for a year past; you see the two families were friends and each family had a large and interested connection!"

"If the opinion of a comparative stranger is of any use to you," said Robinette, standing on the rock and scraping her stockinged foot free of mud, "I believe in you, personally! You don't seem a bit 'jilty' to me! I'd let you marry my sister to-morrow and no questions asked!"

"I didn't know you had a sister," cried Lavendar.

"I haven't; that's only a figure of speech; just a phrase to show my confidence."

"And isn't it ungrateful to be obliged to say I can't marry your sister, after you have given me permission to ask her!"

"Not only ungrateful but unreasonable," said Robinette saucily, turning her head to look up the river and discovering from her point of vantage a moving object around the curve that led her to make hazardous remarks, knowing rescue was not far away. "What have you against my sister, pray?"

"Very little!" he said daringly, knowing well that she held him in her hand, and could make him dumb or let him speak at any moment she desired. "Almost nothing! only that she is not offering me her sister as a balm to my woes."

"She has no sister; she is an only child!—There! there!" cried Robinette, "the tide is coming up again, and the mud banks off in that direction are all covered with water! I see somebody in a boat, rowing towards us with superhuman energy. Oh! if I hadn't worn a white dress! It will not come smooth; and my lovely French hat is ruined by the dampness! My one shoe shows how inappropriately I was shod, and whoever is coming will say it is because I am an American. He will never know you wouldn't let me go upstairs and dress properly."

"It doesn't matter anyway," rejoined Mark, "because it is only Carnaby coming. You might know he would find us even if we were at the bottom of the river."



XIII

CARNABY TO THE RESCUE

At Stoke Revel, in the meantime, the solemn rites of dinner had been inaugurated as usual by the sounding of the gong at seven o'clock. Mrs. de Tracy, Miss Smeardon, and Bates waited five minutes in silent resignation, then Carnaby came down and was scolded for being late, but there was no Robinette and no Lavendar.

"Carnaby," said his grandmother, "do you know where Mark intended going this afternoon?"

"No, I don't," said Carnaby, sulkily.

"Your cousin Robinetta,"—with meaning,—"perhaps you know her whereabouts?"

"Not I!" replied Carnaby with affected nonchalance. "I was ferreting with Wilson." He had ferreted perhaps for fifteen minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon in solitary discontent, but he would not have owned it for the world.

"Call Bates," commanded Mrs. de Tracy. Bates entered. "Do you know if Mr. Lavendar intended going any distance to-day? Did he leave any message?"

"Mr. Lavendar, ma'am," said Bates, "Mr. Lavendar and Mrs. Loring they went out in the boat after tea. Mr. Lavendar asked William for the key, and William he went down and got out the oars and rudder, ma'am."

"Does William know where they went?" asked Mrs. de Tracy in high displeasure. "Was it to Wittisham?"

"No, ma'am, William says they went down stream. He thinks perhaps they were going to the Flag Rock, and he says the gentleman wouldn't have a hard pull, as the tide was going out. But Mr. Lavendar knows the river well, ma'am, as well as Mr. Carnaby here."

"Then I conclude there is no immediate cause for anxiety," said Mrs. de Tracy with satire. "You can serve dinner, Bates; there seems no reason why we should fast as yet! However, Carnaby," she continued, "as the men cannot be spared at this hour, you had better go at once and see what has happened to our guests."

"Right you are," cried Carnaby with the utmost alacrity. He was hungry, but the prospect of escape was better than food. He rushed away, and his boat was in mid-river before Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon had finished their tepid soup.

A very slim young moon was just rising above the woods, but her tender light cast no shadows as yet, and there were no stars in the sky, for it was daylight still. The evening air was very fresh and cool; there was no wind, and the edges of the river were motionless and smooth, although in mid-stream the now in-coming tide clucked and swirled as it met the rush. Over at Wittisham one or two lights were beginning to twinkle, and there came drifting across the water a smell of wood smoke that suggested evening fires. Carnaby handled a boat well, for he had been born a sailor, as it were, and his long, powerful strokes took him along at a fine pace. But although he was going to look for Robinette and Mark, he was rather angry with both of them, and in no hurry. He rested on his oars indifferently and let the tide carry him up as it liked, while, with infinite zest, he unearthed a cigarette case from the recesses of his person, lit a cigarette, and smoked it coolly. Under Carnaby's apparent boyishness, there was a certain somewhat dangerous quality of precocity, which was stimulated rather than checked by his grandmother's repressive system. His smoking now was less the monkey-trick of a boy, than an act of slightly cynical defiance. He was no novice in the art, and smoked slowly and daintily, throwing back his head and blowing the smoke sometimes through his lips and sometimes through his nose. He looked for the moment older than his years, and a difficult young customer at that. His present sulky expression disappeared, however, under the influence of tobacco and adventure.

"Where the dickens are they?" he began to wonder, pulling harder.

A bend in the river presently solved the mystery. On a wide stretch of mud-bank, which the tide had left bare in going out, but was now beginning to cover again, a solitary boat was stranded.

With this clue to guide him, Carnaby's bright eyes soon discovered the two dim forms in the distance.

"Ahoy!" he shouted, and received a joyous answer. Robinette and Mark were the two derelicts, and their rescuer skimmed towards them with all his strength.

He could get only within a few yards of the rock to which their boat was tied, and from that distance he surveyed them, expecting to find a dismal, ship-wrecked pair, very much ashamed of themselves and getting quite weary of each other. On the contrary the faces he could just distinguish in the uncertain light, were radiant, and Robinette's voice was as gay as ever he had heard it. He leaned upon his oars and looked at them with wonder.

"Angel cousin!" cried Robinette. "Have you a little roast mutton about you somewhere, we are so hungry!"

"You are a pretty pair!" he remarked. "What have you been and done?"

"We just went for a row after tea, Middy dear," said Robinette, "and look at the result."

"You're not rowing now," observed Carnaby pointedly.

"No," said Mark, "we gave up rowing when the water left us, Carnaby. Conversation is more interesting in the mud."

"But how did you get here? I thought you were going to the Flag Rock?" demanded Carnaby.

"Is there a Flag Rock, Middy dear? I didn't know," said Robinette innocently. "It shows we shouldn't go anywhere without our first cousin once removed. We just began to talk, here in the boat, and the water went away and left us." Then she laughed, and Mark laughed too, and Carnaby's look of unutterable scorn seemed to have no effect upon them. They might almost have been laughing at him, their mirth was so senseless, viewed in any other light.

"It's nearly eight o'clock," he said solemnly. "Perhaps you can form some idea as to what grandmother's saying, and Bates."

"Well, you're going to be our rescuer, Middy darling, so it doesn't matter," said Robinette. "Look! the water's coming up."

But Carnaby seemed in no mood for waiting. He had taken off his boots, and rolled up his trousers above his knees.

"I'd let Lavendar wade ashore the best way he could!" he said, "but I s'pose I've got to save you or there'd be a howl."

"No one would howl any louder than you, dear, and you know it. Don't step in!" shrieked Robinette, "I've confided a shoe already to the river-mud! I just put my foot in a bit, to test it, and down the poor foot went and came up without its shoe. Oh, Middy dear, if your young life—"

"Blow my young life!" retorted Carnaby. He was performing gymnastics on the edge of his boat, letting himself down and heaving himself up, by the strength of his arms. His legs were covered with mud.

"No go!" he said. "It's as deep as the pit here; sometimes you can find a rock or a hard bit. We must just wait."

They had not long to wait after all, for presently a rush of the tide sent the water swirling round the stranded boat, and carried Carnaby's craft to it.

"Now it'll be all right," said he. "You push with the boat-hook, Mark, and I'll pull"; but it took a quarter of an hour's pushing and pulling to get the boat free of the mud.

Except for the moon it would have been quite dark when the party reached the pier. They mounted the hill in some silence. It was difficult for Robinette to get along with her shoeless foot; Lavendar wanted to help her, but she demanded Carnaby's arm. He was sulking still. There was something he felt, but could not understand, in the subtle atmosphere of happiness by which the truant couple seemed to be surrounded; a something through which he could not reach; that seemed to put Robinette at a distance from him, although her shoulder touched his and her hand was on his arm. Growing pangs of his manhood assailed him, the male's jealousy of the other male. For the moment he hated Mark; Mark talking joyous nonsense in a way rather unlike himself, as if the night air had gone to his head.

"I am glad you had the ferrets to amuse you this afternoon," said Robinette, in a propitiatory tone. "Ferrets are such darlings, aren't they, with their pink eyes?"

"O! darlings," assented Carnaby derisively. "One of the darlings bit my finger to the bone, not that that's anything to you."

"Oh! Middy dear, I am sorry!" cried Robinette. "I'd kiss the place to make it well, if we weren't in such a hurry!"

Carnaby began to find that a dignified reserve of manner was very difficult to keep up. His grandmother could manage it, he reflected, but he would need some practice. When they came to a place where there were sharp stones strewn on the road, he became a mere boy again quite suddenly, and proposed a "queen's chair" for Robinette. And so he and Lavendar crossed hands, and one arm of Robinette encircled the boy's head, while the other just touched Lavendar's neck enough to be steadied by it. Their laughter frightened the sleepy birds that night. The demoralized remnant of a Bank Holiday party would have been, Lavendar observed, respectability itself in comparison with them; and certainly no such group had ever approached Stoke Revel before. They were to enter by a back door, and Carnaby was to introduce them to the housekeeper's room, where he undertook that Bates would feed them. Lavendar alone was to be ambassador to the drawing room.

"The only one of us with a boot on each foot, of course we appoint him by a unanimous vote," said Robinette.

But the chief thing that Carnaby remembered, after all, of that evening's adventure, was Robinette's sudden impulsive kiss as she bade him good-night, Lavendar standing by. She had never kissed him before, for all her cousinliness, but she just brushed his cool, round cheek to-night as if with a swan's-down puff.

"That's a shabby thing to call a kiss!" said the embarrassed but exhilarated youth.

"Stop growling, you young cub, and be grateful; half a loaf is better than no bread," was Lavendar's comment as he watched the draggled and muddy but still charming Robinette up the stairway.



XIV

THE EMPTY SHRINE

Lavendar had discovered, much to his dismay, that he must return to London upon important business; it was even a matter of uncertainty whether his father could spare him again or would consent to his returning to Stoke Revel to conclude Mrs. de Tracy's arrangements about the sale of the land.

Affairs of the heart are like thunderstorms; the atmosphere may sometimes seem charged with electricity, and yet circumstances, like a sudden wind that sweeps the clouds away before they break, may cause the lovers to drift apart. Or all in a moment may come thunder, lightning, and rain from a clear sky, and there is nothing that is apt to precipitate matters like an unexpected parting.

When Lavendar announced that he had to leave Stoke Revel, two pairs of eyes, Miss Smeardon's and Carnaby's, instantly looked at Robinette to see how she received the news, but she only smiled at the moment. She was just beginning her breakfast, and like the famous Charlotte, "went on cutting bread and butter," without any sign of emotion.

"Hurrah!" thought the boy. "Now we can have some fun, and I'll perhaps make her see that old Lavendar isn't the only companion in the world."

"She minds," thought Miss Smeardon, "for she buttered that piece of bread on the one side a minute ago, and now she's just done it on the other—and eaten it too."

"She doesn't care a bit," thought Lavendar. "She's not even changed colour; my going or staying is nothing to her; I needn't come back."

He had made up his mind to return just the same, if it were at all possible, and he told Mrs. de Tracy so. She remarked graciously that he was a welcome guest at any time, and Carnaby, hearing this, pinched Lord Roberts till he howled like a fiend, and fled for comfort to his mistress's lap.

"You little coward," said Carnaby, "you should be ashamed to bear the name of a hero."

"I've mentioned to you before, Carnaby, I think, that I dislike that jest," said his grandmother, and Carnaby advancing to the injured beast said, "Yes, ma'am, and so does Bobs, doesn't he, Bobs?" reducing the lap-dog to paroxysms of fury. "Would it be any better if I called him Kitchener?" hissing the word into the animal's face. "Jealous, Bobs? Eh? Kitchener." This last word had a rasping sound that irritated the little creature more than ever; his teeth jibbered with anger, and Miss Smeardon had to offer him a saucer of cream before he could be calmed down enough for the rest of the party to hear themselves speak.

"Had you nice letters this morning? Mine were very uninteresting," Robinette remarked to Lavendar as they stood together at the doorway in the sunshine, while Carnaby chased the lap-dog round and round the lawn.

"I had only two letters; one was from my sister Amy, the candid one! her letters are not generally exhilarating."

"Oh, I know, home letters are usually enough to send one straight to bed with a headache! They never sound a note of hope from first to last; although if you had no home, but only a house, like me, with no one but a caretaker in it, you'd be very thankful to get them, doleful or not."

"I doubt it," Mark answered, for Amy's letter seemed to be burning a hole in his pocket at that moment. He had skimmed it hurriedly through, but parts of it were already only too plain.

When the others had gone into the house, he went off by himself, and jumping the low fence that divided the lawn from the fields beyond, he flung himself down under a tree to read it over again. Carnaby, spying him there, came rushing from the house, and was soon pouring out a tale of something that had happened somewhere, and throwing stones as he talked, at the birds circling about the ivied tower of the little church.

The field was full of buttercups up to the very churchyard walls. "I must get away by myself for a bit," Lavendar thought. "That boy's chatter will drive me mad." At this point Carnaby's volatile attention was diverted by the sight of a gardener mounting a ladder to clear the sparrows' nests from the water chutes, and he jumped up in a twinkling to take his part in this new joy. Lavendar rose, and strolled off with his hands in his pockets and his bare head bent. The grass he walked in was a very Field of the Cloth of Gold. His shoes were gilded by the pollen from the buttercups, his eyes dazzled by their colour; it was a relief to pass through the stone archway that led into the little churchyard. To his spirit at that moment the chill was refreshing. He loitered about for a few minutes, and then seeing that the door was open, he entered the church, closing the door gently behind him.

It was very quiet in there and even the chirping of the sparrows was softened into a faint twitter. Here at last was a place set apart, a moment of stillness when he might think things out by himself.

He took out Amy's letter, smoothing it flat on the prayer books before him, and forced himself to read it through. The early paragraphs dealt with some small item of family news which in his present state of mind mattered to Lavendar no more than the distant chirruping of the birds, out there in the sunshine. "You seem determined to stay for some time at Stoke Revel," his sister wrote. "No doubt the pretty American is the attraction. She sounds charming from your description, but my dear man, that's all froth! How many times have I heard this sort of thing from you before! Remember I know everything about your former loves."

"You don't, then," said Lavendar to himself. Down, down, down at the bottom of the well of the heart where truth lies, there is always some remembrance, generally a very little one, that can never be told to any confidant.

"You will find out faults in Mrs. Loring presently, just like the rest of them," continued the pitiless writer. (Amy's handwriting was painfully distinct.) "I must tell you that at the Cowleys' the other day, I suddenly came face to face with Gertrude Meredith and Dolly! Dolly looks a good deal older already and fatter, I thought. I fear she is losing her looks, for her colour has become fixed, and she will wear no collars still, although on a rather thick neck, it's not at all becoming. I spoke to her for about three minutes, as it was less awkward, when we met suddenly face to face like that. She laughed a good deal, and asked for you rather audaciously, I thought. They live near Winchester now, and since the Colonel's death are pretty badly off, Gertrude says. Dolly is going to Devonshire to stay with the Cowleys; you may meet her there any day, remember. It does seem incredible to me that a man of your discrimination could have been won by the obvious devotion of a girl like Dolly; but having given your word I almost think you would better have kept it, rather than suffer all this criticism from a host of mutual friends."

Lavendar groaned aloud. He had a good memory, and with all too great distinctness did he now remember Dolly Meredith's laugh. How wretched it had all been; not a word had ever passed between them that had any value now. If he could have washed the thought of her forever from his memory, how greatly he would have rejoiced at that moment.

Well, it was over; written down against him, that he had been what the world called a jilt and a fool; yes, certainly a fool, but not so great a one as to follow his folly to its ultimate conclusion, and tie himself for life to a woman he did not love.

Lavendar was extraordinarily sensitive about the breaking of his engagement; partly because Miss Meredith herself, in her first rage, had avowed his responsibility for her blighted future, giving him no chance for chivalrous behaviour; partly because in all his transient love affairs he had easily tired of the women who inspired them. He seemed thirsty for love, but weary of it almost as soon as the draught reached his lips.

And now had he a chance again?—or was it all to end in disappointment once more, in that cold disappointment of the heart that has received stones for bread? It was not entirely his own fault; he had expected much from life, and hitherto had received very little. But Robinette!

"Let me find all her faults now," he said to himself, "or evermore keep silent; meantime I hope I am not concealing too many of my own."

He tried to force himself into criticism; to look at her as a cold observer from the outside would have done; for that curious Border country of Love which he had entered has not an equable climate at all. It is fire and frost alternate; and criticism is either roused almost to a morbid pitch, or else the faculty is drugged, and nothing, not even the enumeration of a hundred foibles will awaken it for a time.

When the cold fit had been upon him the evening before, Lavendar had said to himself that her manner was too free—that she had led him on too quickly; no, that expression was dishonourable and unjust; he repented it instantly; she had been too unself-conscious, too girlish, too unthinking, in what she said and did. "But she's a widow after all, though she's only two and twenty," he went on to himself. "Hang it! I wish she were not! If her heart were in her husband's grave I should be moaning at that; and because I see that it is not, I become critical. There's nothing quite perfect in life!"

He had begun by noticing some little defects in her personal appearance, but he was long past that now; what did such trifles matter, here or there? Then he remembered all that he had heard said about American women. Did those pretty clothes of hers mean that she would be extravagant and selfish to obtain them? Could a young man with no great fortune offer her the luxury that was necessary to her? and even so, what changes come with time! He had a full realization of what the boredom of family life can be, when passion has grown stale.

"At seventy, say, when I am palsied and she is old and fat, will romance be alive then? Will such feeling leave anything real behind it when it falls away, as the white blossoms on Mrs. Prettyman's plum tree will shrink and fall a fortnight hence?"

He looked about him. On the walls of the little church were tablets with the de Tracy names; the names of her forefathers amongst them. Under his feet were other flags with names upon them too; and out there in the sunshine were the grave-stones of a hundred dead. How many of them had been happy in their loves?

Not so many, he thought, if all were told, and why should he hope to be different? Yet surely this was a new feeling, a worthy one, at last. It was not for her charming person that he loved her; not because of her beauty and her gaiety only; but because he had seen in her something that gave a promise of completion to his own nature, the something that would satisfy not only his senses but his empty heart.

He clenched his hands on the carved top of the old pew in front of him, which was fashioned into a laughing gnome with the body of a duck. "And if this should be all a dream," he asked himself again, "if this should all be false too! Good Lord!" he cried half aloud, "I want to be honest now! I want to find the truth. My whole life is on the throw this time!"

There was a moment's silence after he had uttered the words. He got up and moved slowly down the aisle, opening the door, seeing again the meadow of buttercups, yellow as gold, and listening again to the sparrows chirruping in the sunshine outside.

"I have been in that church a quarter of an hour," he said to himself, "and in trying to dive to the depths of myself and find out whether I was giving a woman all I had to give, I did not get time to consider that woman's probable answer, should I place my uninteresting life and liberty at her disposal."



XV

"NOW LUBIN IS AWAY"

Lavendar made his adieux after luncheon and went off to London. "Good-bye for the present, Mrs. de Tracy; I shall be back on Wednesday probably, if I can arrange it," he said. "Good-bye, Mrs. Loring," and here he altered the phrase to "Shall I come back on Wednesday?" for his hostess had left the open door.

There was no hesitation, but all too little sentiment, about Robinette's reply.

"Wednesday, at the latest, are my orders," she answered merrily, and with the words ringing in his ears Lavendar took his departure.

"Do you remember that this is the afternoon of the garden party at Revelsmere?" Mrs. de Tracy enquired, coming into the drawing room a few minutes later, where Mrs. Loring stood by the open window. She had allowed herself just five minutes of depression, staring out at the buttercup meadow. How black the rooks looked as they flew about it and how dreary everything was, now that Lavendar had gone! She was woman enough to be able to feel inwardly amused at her own absurdity, when she recognized that the ensuing three days seemed to stretch out into a limitless expanse of dullness. "The village seemed asleep or dead now Lubin was away!" Still, after all, it was an occasion for wearing a pretty frock, and she knew herself well enough to feel sure that the sight of a few of her fellow-creatures even pretending to enjoy themselves, would make her volatile spirits rise like the mercury in a thermometer on a hot day.

Miss Smeardon was to be her companion, as Mrs. de Tracy had a headache that afternoon and was afraid of the heat, she said. "What heat?" Robinette had asked innocently, for in spite of the brilliant sunlight the wind blew from the east, keen as a knife. "I shall take a good wrap in the carriage in spite of this tropical temperature," she thought. Carnaby refused point blank to drive with them; he would bicycle to the party or else not go at all, so it was alone with Miss Smeardon that Robinette started in the heavy old landau behind the palsied horse.

Miss Smeardon gave one glance at Mrs. Loring's dress, and Robinette gave one glance at Miss Smeardon's, each making her own comments.

"That white cloth will go to the cleaner, I suppose, after one wearing, and as for that thing on her head with lilac wistaria drooping over the brim, it can't be meant as a covering, or a protection, either from sun or wind; it's nothing but an ornament!" Miss Smeardon commented; while to herself Robinette ejaculated,—

"A penwiper, an old, much-used penwiper, is all that Miss Smeardon resembles in that black rag!"

Carnaby, watching the start at the door, whistled in open admiration as Robinette came down the steps.

"Well, well! we are got up to kill this afternoon; pity old Mark has just gone; but cheer up, Cousin Robin, there's always a curate on hand!"

For once Robinette's ready tongue played her false, and a sense of loneliness overcame her at the sound of Lavendar's name. She gathered up her long white skirts and got into the carriage with as much dignity as she could muster, while Carnaby, his eyes twinkling with mischief, stood ready to shut the door after Miss Smeardon.