Frank Jervaise, striding on ahead of me, answered at once, with a gloomy shake of his head.

"Isn't she there?" his mother asked. And "Hasn't she been there at all?" she persisted when Frank returned a morose negative.

"Who did you see?" put in young Turnbull.

"Miss Banks," Frank said.

"You are quite sure that Brenda hadn't been there?" Olive Jervaise added by way of rounding up and completing the inquiry.

It was then Frank's turn to begin an unnecessary interrogation by saying "She isn't here, then?" He must have known that she was not, by their solicitude; but if he had not put that superfluous question, I believe I should; though I might not have added as he did, "You're absolutely certain?"

Young Turnbull then exploded that phase of the situation by remarking, "I suppose you know that the car's gone?"

Frank was manifestly shocked by that news.

"Good Lord! no, I didn't. How do you know?" he said.

"I left my own car in the ditch, just outside the Park," Ronnie explained. "Don't know in the least how it happened. Suppose I was thinking of something else. Anyway, I've fairly piled her up, I'm afraid. I was coming back from the vicarage, you know. And then, of course, I walked up here, and Mr. Jervaise was good enough to offer me your car to get home in; and when we went out to the garage, it had gone."

"But was it there when you went to get your own car?" Frank asked.

"I'm bothered if I know," Ronnie confessed. "I've been trying hard to remember."

Mr. Jervaise sighed heavily and took a little stroll across to the other side of the Hall. He seemed to me to be more perturbed and unhappy than any of the others.

Frank stood in a good central position and scowled enormously, while his mother, his sister, and Ronnie waited anxiously for the important decision that he was apparently about to deliver. And they still looked to him to find some expedient when his impending judgment had taken form in the obvious pronouncement, "Looks as if they'd gone off together, somewhere."

"It's very dreadful," Mrs. Jervaise said; and then Olive slightly lifted the awful flatness of the dialogue by saying,—

"We ought to have guessed. It's absurd that we let the thing go on."

"One couldn't be sure," her mother protested.

"If you're going to wait till you're sure, of course..." Frank remarked brutally, with a shrug of his eyebrows that effectively completed his sentence.

"It was so impossible to believe that she would do a thing like that," his mother complained.

"Point is, what's to be done now," Ronnie said. "By gad, if I catch that chap, I'll wring his neck."

Mr. Jervaise, who was taking a lonely promenade up and down the far side of the Hall, looked up more hopefully at this threat.

"Oh! we can catch him," Frank commented. "He has stolen the car, for one thing..." his inflection implied that catching Banks might be only the beginning of the trouble.

"Well, once we've got him," returned Ronnie hopefully.

"Don't be an ass," Frank snubbed him. "We can't advertise it all over the county that he has gone off with Brenda."

"I don't see..." Ronnie began, but Mrs. Jervaise interrupted him.

"It was so unfortunate that the Atkinsons should have been here," she remarked.

"Every one will know, in any case," Olive added.

Those avowals of their real and altogether desperate cause for distress raised the emotional tone of the two Jervaise women, and for the first time since I had come into the Hall, they looked at me with a hint of suspicion. They made me feel that I was an outsider, who might very well take this opportunity to withdraw.

I was on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me into the conclave.

"What do you think, Melhuish?" he asked, and then they all turned to me as if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation. Even old Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.

"There is so little real evidence, at present," I said, feeling their need for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.

"It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have—run away with that man," Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.

"She's under age, too," Frank put in.

"Does that mean they can't get married?" asked Ronnie.

"Not legally," Frank said.

"It's such madness, such utter madness," his mother broke out in a tone between lament and denunciation. But she pulled herself up immediately and came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw that still floated in this drowning world. "But, as Mr. Melhuish says," she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, "we really have very little evidence, as yet."

"It has occurred to me to wonder," I tried, "whether Miss Jervaise might not have been moved by a sudden desire to drive the car by moonlight..." I was going on to defend my suggestion by pleading that such an impulse would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to accommodate all the family—with the one exception of Frank, who, as it were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the effect that the moon had already set, was, however, smothered in the general acclamation.

"Oh! of course! So she may!" Mrs. Jervaise exclaimed.

"Well, we might have thought of that, certainly," Olive echoed. "It would be so like Brenda."

While Ronnie hopefully murmured "That is possible, quite possible," as a kind of running accompaniment.

Then Mr. Jervaise began to draw in to the family group, with what seemed to me quite an absurd air of meaning to find a place on the raft of the big rug by the fireplace. Indeed, they had all moved a little closer together. Only Frank maintained his depressing air of doubt.

"Been an infernally long time," he said. "What's it now? Half-past three?"

"She may have had an accident," Olive suggested cheerfully.

"Or gone a lot farther than she originally meant to," Ronnie substituted; the suggestion of an accident to Brenda obviously appearing less desirable to him than it apparently did to Brenda's sister.

"It seems to me," Mr. Jervaise said, taking the lead for the first time, "that there may very well be half a dozen reasons for her not having returned; but I can't think of one that provides the semblance of an excuse for her going in the first instance. Brenda must be—severely reprimanded. It's intolerable that she should be allowed to go on like this."

"She has always been spoilt," Olive said in what I thought was a slightly vindictive aside.

"She's so impossibly headstrong," deplored Mrs. Jervaise.

Her husband shook his head impatiently. "There is a limit to this kind of thing," he said. "She must be made to understand—I will make her understand that we draw the line at midnight adventures of this kind."

Mrs. Jervaise and Olive agreed warmly with that decision, and the three of them drew a little apart, discussing, I inferred, the means that were to be adopted for the limiting of the runaway, when she returned. But I was puzzled to know whether they were finally convinced of the truth of the theory they had so readily adopted. Were they deceiving, or trying very hard, indeed, to deceive themselves into the belief that the whole affair was nothing but a prank of Brenda's? I saw that my casual suggestion had a general air of likelihood, but if I had been in their place, I should have demanded evidence before I drew much consolation from so unsupported a conclusion.

I joined young Turnbull.

"Good idea of yours, Melhuish," Ronnie said.

Frank grunted.

"I've no sort of grounds for it, you know," I explained. "It was only a casual suggestion."

"Jolly convincing one, though," Turnbull congratulated me. "So exactly the sort of thing she would do, isn't it, Frank?"

"Shouldn't have thought she'd have been gone so long," Jervaise replied. He looked at me as he continued, "And how does it fit with that notion of ours about Miss Banks having expected her?"

"That was only a guess," I argued.

"Better evidence for it than you had for your guess," he returned, and we drifted into an indeterminate wrangle, each of us defending his own theory rather because he had had the glory of originating it than because either of us had, I think, the least faith in our explanations.

It was Ronnie who, picking up the thread of our deductions from the Home Farm interview in the course of our discussion, sought to reconcile us and our theories.

"She might have meant to go up to the Farm," he suggested, "and changed her mind when she got outside. Nothing very unlikely in that."

"But why the devil should she have made an appointment at the Home Farm in the first instance?" Frank replied with some cogency.

"If she ever did," I put in unwisely, thereby provoking a repetition of the evidence afforded by Miss Banks's behaviour, particularly the damning fact that she, alone, had responded to Racquet's demand for our instant annihilation.

And while we went on with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway's return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more uneasy as no sound came. No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and peevish, and the necessity of restraining themselves before Turnbull and myself added still another to their many sources of irritation.

I put the Jervaises apart in this connection, because Ronnie was certainly very wide awake and I had no inclination whatever to sleep. My one longing was to get back, alone, into the night. I was fretting with the fear that the dawn would have broken before I could get away. I had made up my mind to watch the sunrise from "Jervaise Clump."

It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible. I saw the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a sentence—undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious craving that was obsessing her.

"Oh, dear!" she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and then "Dear me!" Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox genteel attitude.

"I don't know when I've been so tired," she apologised.

But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of gentility.

"Oh! Lord, mater, you've started us now," he said, and gave away almost sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively racked us with the longing to imitate him.

"Really, my dear, no necessity for you," began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, "no necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any case, do anything until the morning."

"Even if she comes in, now," supplemented Olive.

"As I'm almost sure she will," affirmed Mrs. Jervaise.

And she must have put something of genuine confidence into her statement, for automatically we all stopped talking for a few seconds and listened again with the ears of faith for the return of the car.

"But as I said," Olive began again, abruptly ending the unhopeful suspense of our pause, "there's nothing more we can do by sitting up. And there's certainly no need for you to overtire yourself, mother."

"No, really not," urged Ronnie politely, "nor for you, either, sir," he added, addressing his host. "What I mean is, Frank and I'll do all that."

"Rather, let's get a drink," Frank agreed.

We wanted passionately to get away from each other and indulge ourselves privately in a very orgie of gapes and stretchings. And yet, we stuck there, idiotically, making excuses and little polite recommendations for the others to retire, until Frank with a drastic quality of determination that he sometimes showed, took command.

"Go on, mater," he said; "you go to bed." And he went up to her, kissed her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint protestations of apology.

Olive followed, and with a last feint of hospitality, her father brought up the tail of the procession.

"Coming for a drink?" Frank asked me with a jerk of his head towards the extemporised buffet.

"Well, no, thanks. I think not," I said, seeking the relief afforded by the women's absence; although, now, that I could indulge my desire without restraint, the longing to gape had surprisingly vanished.

"Going to bed?" Jervaise suggested.

"Yes. Bed's the best place, just now," I lied.

"Right oh! Good-night, old chap," Ronnie said effusively.

I pretended to be going upstairs and they did not wait for me to disappear. As soon as they had left the Hall, I sneaked down again, recovered from the cloak-room the light overcoat I had worn on our expedition to the Farm—I have no idea to whom that overcoat belonged—borrowed a cap, and let myself out stealthily by the front door.

As I quietly shut the door behind me, a delicious whiff of night-stock drifted by me, as if it had waited there for all those long hours seeking entrance to the stale, dry air of the Hall.

* * * * *

And it must have been, I think, that scent of night-stock which gave me the sense of a completed episode, or first act, as I stood alone, at last, on the gravel sweep before the Hall. Already the darkness was lifting. The dawn was coming high up in the sky, a sign of fair weather.

I have always had a sure sense of direction, and I turned instinctively towards the landmark of my promised destination, although it was invisible from that side of the Hall—screened by the avenue of tall forest trees, chiefly elms, that led up from the principal entrance to the Park. I had noticed one side road leading into this avenue as I had driven up from the station the previous afternoon, and I sought that turning now, with a feeling of certainty that it would take me in the right direction. As, indeed, it did; for it actually skirted the base of "Jervaise Clump," which touched the extreme edge of the Park on that side.

As I cautiously felt my way down the avenue—it was still black dark under the dark trees—and later up the tunnel of the side road which I hit upon by an instinct that made me feel for it at the precise moment when I reached the point of its junction with the avenue—I returned with a sense of satisfaction to the memory of the last four hours. I was conscious of some kind of plan in the way the comedy of Brenda's disappearance had been put before us. I realised that, as an art form, the plan was essentially undramatic, but the thought of it gave me, nevertheless, a distinct feeling of pleasure.

I saw the experience as a prelude to this lonely adventure of mine—a prelude full of movement and contrast; but I had no premonition of any equally diverting sequel.

The daylight was coming, and I believed, a trifle regretfully, that that great solvent of all mysteries would display these emotions of the night as the phantasmagoria of our imagination.

Before I had reached the end of the tunnel through the wood and had come out into the open whence I could, now, see the loom of Jervaise Clump swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.

As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me, whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.

It isn't one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.



V

DAYBREAK

He was whistling Schubert's setting of "Who is Sylvia?" and as I climbed slowly and as silently as I could towards him, I fitted the music to the words of the second verse:—

Is she kind as she is fair? For beauty lives with kindness.

Only a man in love, I thought, could be whistling that air with such attention and accuracy. He hit that unusual interval—is it an augmented seventh?—with a delicacy that was quite thrilling.

He had the world to himself, as yet. The birds of the morning had not begun their orisons, while the birds of the night, the owls and the corncrakes had, happily, retired before the promise of that weakening darkness which seemed nevertheless to have reached a moment of suspense—indeed, I fancied that it was darker, now, than when I had come out of the Hall a quarter of an hour before.

The whistler had stopped before I reached the crest of the hill, and after trying vainly to locate his whereabouts in the gloom, I leaned up against one of the outermost trunks of the perky little clump of trees, and facing East awaited developments. A thin, cold wind had sprung up, and was quietly stirring the leaves above me to an uneasy sibilance. I heard, now, too, an occasional sleepy twitter as if a few members of the orchestra had come into their places and were indolently testing the tune of their pipes. It came into my mind that the cold stir of air was the spirit of the dying night, fleeing westward before the sun. Also, I found myself wondering what would be the effect on us all if one morning we waited in vain for the sunrise? I tried to picture my own emotions as the truth was slowly borne in upon me that some unprecedented calamity had silently and without any premonition befallen the whole world of men. Would one crouch in a terror of apprehension? I could not see it that way. I believed that I should be trembling with a furious excitement, stirred to the very depths by so inspiring and adventurous a miracle. I had forsaken my speculation and was indulging in the philosophical reflection that a real and quite unaccountable miracle, the more universal the better, would be the most splendid justification of life I could possibly conceive, when the whistler began again, only a few yards away from me.

I could just see him now, sitting propped against the trunk of another tree, but I waited until he had finished what I chose to believe was the third verse of his lyric before I hailed him. It came to me that I might test his quality by continuing the play in proper form, so when he paused, I went on with the speech of the "host" which immediately follows the song in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona."

"How now?" I said. "Are you sadder than you were before?"

He did not move, not even to turn his head towards me, and I inferred that he was aware of my presence before I spoke.

"You, one of the search party?" he asked.

I went over and sat down by him. I felt that the situation was sufficiently fantastic to permit of free speech. I did not know who he was and I did not care. I only knew that I wanted to deliver myself of the dreams my lack of sleep had robbed from me.

"The only one," I said, "unless you also belong to the very small and select party of searchers."

I fancy that he turned his head a little towards me, but I kept my gaze fixed on the indigo masses of the obscure prospect before us.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked.

"Not so much who as what," I said. "And even then it isn't so easy to define. I've heard men call it beauty and mystery, and things like that; but just now it seemed to me that what I wanted most was a universal miracle—some really inexplicable happening that would upset every law the physicists have ever stated. I was thinking, for instance, how thrilling it would be if the sun did not rise this morning. One would know, then, that all our scientific guesses at laws were just so many baby speculations founded on nothing more substantial than a few thousand years of experience which had, by some chance given always more or less the same results. Like a long run on the red, you know."

"I know," he said. "Well? Go on."

I was greatly stimulated by his encouragement. Here, at last, was the listener I had been waiting for all through the night.

"One gets so infernally sick of everything happening according to fixed rules," I continued. "And the more you learn the nearer you are to the deadly ability of being able to foretell the future. If we ever do reach that point in our intellectual evolution, I only hope that I shan't be there to see it. Imagine the awful ennui of a world where the expected always happened, and next year's happenings were always expected! And yet we go on seeking after knowledge, when we ought surely to avoid it, as the universal kill joy."

"Hm!" commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful agreement.

"You don't agree with that?" I asked.

"Well, I see what you're after, in a way," he acknowledged; "but it doesn't seem to me that it amounts to very much—practically."

I was a trifle disappointed. I had not expected any insistence on the practical from a man who could whistle Schubert and Shakespeare to the dawn.

"Oh, practically! Perhaps not," I replied with a hint of contempt for anything so common.

He gave a little self-conscious laugh. "You can't get away from the practical in this life," he said. "Even in—" He seemed to bite off the beginning of confidence with an effort. "You may dream half the night," he began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement, "but before the night's over you'll come up against the practical, or the practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see what a fool you are. The way this world's run, you can't avoid it, anyhow."

I knew that what he said was true, but I found it damping. It fitted all too well with the coming realism of day. The contours of the landscape were slowly resigning themselves to the formal attitudes imposed upon them by expectation. The blood of colour was beginning to run weakly through the monochrome. The nearer slopes of the hill and the leaves of the trees were already professing a resolute green. Moment by moment the familiar was taking prudent shape, preparing itself for the autocrat whose outriders were multitudinously busy about their warnings of his approach. Presently the scene would take on the natural beauty of our desire, but the actual process of transformation rather depressed me that morning. I had been so deeply in love with the night.

I took up my companion's last sentence—spoken, I fancied, with a suggestion of brooding antagonism.

"You think the world might be 'run,' at least, more interestingly?" I put in.

"More sensibly," he said in a voice that hinted a reserve of violence. "There's no sense in it, the way we look at things. Only we don't look at 'em, most of us, not with any intelligence. We just take everything for granted because we happen to be used to it, that's all."

"But would any form of socialism..." I tried tentatively.

"I don't know that I'm a socialist," he returned. "I don't belong to any union, or anything of that kind." He stopped and looked at me with a defiant stare that was quite visible now. "You know who I am, I suppose?" he challenged me.

"No idea," I said.

"Banks, the chauffeur," he said, as if he were giving himself up as a well-known criminal.

I was not entirely unprepared for that reply, but I had no tactful answer to make. I rejected the spontaneous impulse that arose, as I thought quite fantastically, to say "I believe I have met your sister;" and fell back on an orthodox "Well?" I tried to convey the effect that I still waited to be shocked.

"I suppose you're staying up at the Hall?" he said.

"For the week-end only," I admitted.

"Been a pretty fuss there, I take it?" he said.

"Some," I acknowledged.

He set his resolute-looking mouth and submitted me to cross-examination.

"Been looking for me?" he began.

"In a way. Frank Jervaise and I went up to your father's house."

"What time?"

"Between two and three."

"Not since?"

"No; we left about half-past two."

"Is she back?"

"Who?" I asked. I was thinking of his sister, and could find no application for this question.

"Miss Jervaise."

"Oh—er—Miss Brenda? No. She hadn't come in when I left the house."

"What time was that?"

"About four. I came straight here."

"Not back, eh?" he commented with a soft, low whistle, that mingled, I thought, something of gladness with its surprise.

"You don't know where she is, then?" I ventured.

He turned and looked at me suspiciously. "I don't see why I should help your friends," he said.

I realised that my position was a difficult one. My sympathies were entirely with Banks. I felt that if there was to be any question of making allowances, I wanted to be on the side of Brenda and the Home Farm. But, at the same time, I could not deny that I owed something—loyalty, was it?—to the Jervaises. I pondered that for a few seconds before I spoke again, and by then I had found what I believed to be a tolerable attitude, though I was to learn later that it compromised me no less than if I had frankly thrown in my lot with the Banks faction.

"You are quite right," I said. "And I would sooner you gave me no confidences, now I come to think of it. But I should like you to know, all the same, that I'm not taking sides in this affair. I have no intention, for instance, of telling them at the Hall that I've seen you."

The daylight was flooding up from the North-West, now, in a great stream that had flushed the whole landscape with colour; and I could see the full significance of honest inquiry in my companion's face as he probed me with his stare. But I could meet his gaze without confusion. My purpose was single enough, and if I had had a moment's doubt of him when he failed to respond to my mood of fantasy; I was now fully prepared to accept him without qualification.

He was not like his sister in appearance. He favoured the paternal stock, I inferred. He was blue-eyed and fairer than Anne, and the tan of his face was red where hers was dusky. Nevertheless, I saw a likeness between them deeper than some family trick of expression which, now and again, made me feel their kinship. For Banks, too, gave me the impression of having a soul that came something nearer the surface of life than is common in average humanity—a look of vitality, zest, ardour—I fumbled for a more significant superlative as I returned his stare. And yet behind that ardour there was, in Arthur Banks, at least, a hint of determination and shrewdness that I felt must be inherited from the sound yeoman stock of his father.

Our pause of mutual investigation ended in a smile. He held out his hand with a pleasant frankness that somehow proclaimed the added colonial quality of him.

"That's all right," he said, "but anyway I couldn't give you any confidences, yet. I don't know myself, you see."

"Are you going back to the Hall?" I asked.

"I don't know that, either," he said, and added, "I shan't go back as the chauffeur, anyway."

And, indeed, there was little of the chauffeur in his appearance, just then. He was wearing a light tweed suit and brown brogues, and his clothes sat upon him with just that touch of familiarity, of negligence, that your professional servant's mufti can never accomplish.

There was a new air of restlessness about him since he had put me under cross-examination. He looked round him in the broadening day as if he were in search of something, or some one, hopefully yet half-despairingly expected.

"Look here—if you'd sooner I went..." I began.

He had risen to his feet after his last statement and was looking back towards the Hall, but he faced me again when I spoke.

"Oh, no!" he said with a hint of weariness.

"It isn't likely that..." He broke off and threw himself moodily down on the grass again before he continued, "It's not that I couldn't trust you. But you can see for yourself that it's better I shouldn't. When you get back to the Hall, you might be asked questions and for your own sake it'd look better if you didn't know the answers."

"Oh, quite," I agreed, and added, "I'll stay and see the sun rise."

"You won't see the sun for some time," he remarked. "There'll be a lot of cloud and mist for it to break through. It's going to be a scorcher to-day."

"Good," I replied; and for a few minutes we discussed weather signs like any other conventional Englishmen. A natural comparison led us presently to the subject of Canada. But through it all he bore himself as a man with a preoccupation he could not forget; and I was looking for a good opening to make an excuse of fatigue and go back to the Hall, when something of the thought that was intriguing him broke through the surface of his talk.

"I'm going back there as soon as I can," he said with a sudden impatience. "There's room to turn round in Canada without hitting up against a notice board and trespassing on the preserves of some landed proprietor. I'd never have come home if it hadn't been for the old people. They thought chauffering for Mr. Jervaise would be a chance for me! Anyhow my father did. He's got the feeling of being dependent. It's in his bones like it is with, all of 'em—on the estate. It's a tradition. Lord, the old man would be horrified, if he knew! The Jervaises are a sort of superior creation to him. We've been their tenants for God knows how many hundred years. And serfs before that, I suppose. I get the feeling myself, sometimes. It's infectious. When you see every one kow-towing to old Jervaise as if he were the angel Gabriel, you begin to feel as if there must be something in it."

The full day had come, and the cold draught of air that had preceded the sunrise came now from behind me as if the spirits of the air had discovered that their panic-stricken flight had been a mistake and were tentatively returning to inquire into the new conditions. The birds were fully awake now, and there was a tremendous gossiping and chattering going on, that made me think of massed school-children in a railway station, twittering with the excitement of their coming excursion. In the North-East the gray wall of mist was losing the hardness of its edge, and behind the cloud the sky was bleaching to an ever paler blue.

"And yet," I said, as my companion paused, "the Jervaises aren't anything particular as a family. They haven't done anything, even in the usual way, to earn ennoblement or fame."

"They've squatted," Banks said, "that's what they've done. Set themselves down here in the reign of Henry II., and sat tight ever since—grabbing commons and so on, now and again, in the usual way, of course. The village is called after them, Thorp-Jervaise, and the woods and the hills, and half the labourers in the neighbourhood have got names like Jarvey and Jarvis. What I mean is that the Jervaises mayn't be of any account in London, or even in the county, alongside of families like Lord Garthorne's; but just round here they're the owners and always have been since there have been any private owners. Their word's law. If you don't like it, you can get out, and that's all there is about it." He gazed thoughtfully in front of him and thrust out his lower lip. "I've got to get out," he added, "unless..."

I hesitated to prompt him, fearing the possibly inquisitive sound of the most indirect question, and after what I felt was a very pregnant silence, he continued rather in the manner of one allusively submitting a case.

"But you get to a point where you feel as if no game's worth winning if you can't play it fair and open."

"So long as the other side play fair with you," I commented.

"They can afford to," he returned. "They get every bit of pull there is to have. I told you we've been tenants of the Home Farm ever since there's been a Home Farm, but old Jervaise could turn my father out any time, at six months' notice. Would, too. Probably have to, for the sake of public opinion. Well, would you call that playing fair?"

"I shouldn't," I said with emphasis.

"Most people would," he replied gloomily. I was wondering what his own "pull" might be, the pull he would not use because the use of it conflicted with his ideal of playing the game. I was inclined, with a foolish romanticism to toy with the notion of some old blood relationship between the families of Jervaise and Banks—some carefully hidden scandal that might even throw a doubt on the present owner's right of proprietorship. I was still rebuilding that foolish, familiar story of the lost heir, when my new friend put an end to further speculation by saying,—

"But what's the good of thinking about that—yet? Why, I don't even know..."

I could not resist a direct question this time. "Don't even know what?" I asked.

"I was forgetting," he said. He got to his feet again, looked round for a moment, and then gave a yawn which seemed to spring from a nervous rather than a muscular origin.

"No good my compromising you, just now," he said with a friendly smile. "You've probably guessed more, already, than'll be altogether convenient for you when you see the family at breakfast. Perhaps, we'll meet again some day."

"I'm staying here till Monday," I said.

"But I don't know if I am," he replied with a whimsical twist of his firm mouth. "Well, so long," he went on quickly. "Glad to have met you, anyway." He nodded with a repetition of that frank, engaging smile of his, and turned away.

He did not take the road by which I had found Jervaise Clump, but descended the hill on the opposite side; and, after he had gone for five minutes or so, I got up and took a view of the prospect in that direction. I had no thought of spying upon him. I just wished to see if the Home Farm lay over there, as I guessed it must from my memory of the general lie of the land during our moonlit return to the Hall.

I was right. The farm was clearly visible from the northern slope of the hill—an L-shaped, low, white house with a high, red-tiled roof. It stood on another little tumulus about a mile away, a small replica of Jervaise Clump; and the whole house was visible above the valley wood that lay between us.

At first I could not decide why the effect of the place gave me an impression of being unusual, and finally decided that this apparent air of individuality was due to the choice of site. In that country all the farms were built in the lower lands, crouching under the lee of woods and hills, humbly effacing themselves before the sovereignty of the Hall. The Home Farm alone, as far as I could see, presented a composed and dignified face to its overlord.

"There is a quality about these Bankses," I thought, and then corrected the statement by adding, "about the children, at least." From what Arthur Banks had said, I gathered that his father conformed to the faith of the estate, both in act and spirit.

I stared at the Farm for a few minutes, wondering what that French wife might be like. I found it difficult to picture the ci-devant governess in those surroundings, and more particularly as the mother of these two fascinating children. They, like their home, produced an effect of being different from the common average....

I became aware that the green of woods and grass had leapt to attention, and that sprawling shadows had suddenly come into being and were giving a new solidity to the landscape. Also, I felt a touch of unexpected warmth on my right cheek.

I returned to the place where Banks and I had talked, and sat down again facing the glorious light of the delivered sun. And almost at once I was overcome by an intense desire to sleep. My purpose of walking back to the Hall, undressing and going to bed had become impossible. I stretched myself full length on the turf, and surrendered myself, exquisitely, to the care of the sunlight.



VI

MORNING

I awoke suddenly to the realisation of sound. The world about me was alive with a murmurous humming. It was as if in passing through the silent aisles of sleep, some door had been unexpectedly thrown open and let in the tumultuous roar of life from without—or as if after a brief absence I had returned and with one movement had re-established all the communications of my body.

All sense of tiredness had left me. I opened my eyes and saw that the sun had leapt far up into the sky. The whole population of Jervaise Clump was plunged into the full bustle of its daily business. Industrious bees were methodically visiting the buttercups; their bustling, commercial eagerness in marked contrast to the bluebottles and flies that seemed to choose their point of alighting with a sham intentness which did not disguise their lack of any definite purpose. Now and again a feral, domineering wasp would join the crowd, coming up with the air of a fussy, inquisitive overseer.

I looked at my watch and found that the time was a quarter past eight. I had been asleep for nearly three hours. I had no idea what time the Jervaises had breakfast, but I knew that it was high time I got back to the Hall and changed my clothes.

I unbuttoned my coat and looked down at my shirt front and thought how incongruous and silly that absurd garb of evening dress appeared in those surroundings.

And as I trotted back to the Hall, I found a symbol in my dress for the drama of the night. It was, I thought, all artificial and unreal, now that I looked back upon it in the blaze of a brilliant August morning. Beginning with the foolishness of a dance at that time of year—even a "tennis-dance" as they called it—the subsequent theatrical quality of the night's adventure seemed to me, just then, altogether garish and fantastic. I began to wonder how far I had dramatised and distorted the actual events by the exercise of a romantic imagination? In the sweet freshness of the familiar day, I found myself exceedingly inclined to be rational. Also, I was aware of being quite unusually hungry.

The front door of the Hall was standing wide open, and save for a glimpse of the discreet John very busy in his shirt-sleeves, I saw no one about. I was glad to reach my room unobserved. I knew that my feeling was unreasonable, but entering that sedate house, under the blaze of the morning sun, I was ashamed of my tawdry dress. A sense of dissipation and revelry seemed to hang about me—and of an uncivilised dirtiness.

A cold bath and a change of clothes, however, fully restored my self-respect; and when I was summoned by the welcome sound of a booming gong, the balance of sensation was kicking the other beam. My sleep in the open had left me finally with a feeling of superiority. I was inclined to despise the feeble, stuffy creatures who had been shut up in a house all night.

I knew the topography of the house fairly well after my night's experience of it, and inferred the breakfast-room without any difficulty. But when I reached the door I stood and listened in considerable astonishment. Luckily, I was not tempted to make the jaunty entrance my mood prompted. I had not seen a soul as I had made my way from my room in the north wing down into the Hall. The place seemed to be absolutely deserted. And, now, in the breakfast-room an almost breathless silence was broken only by the slow grumbling of one monotonous voice, undulating about the limited range of a minor third, and proceeding with the steady fluency of a lunatic's muttering. I suppose I ought to have guessed the reasonable origin of those sounds, but I didn't, not even when the muttering fell to a pause and was succeeded by a subdued chorus, that conveyed the effect of a score of people giving a concerted but strongly-repressed groan. After that the first voice began again, but this time it was not allowed to mumble unsupported. A murmured chant followed and caricatured it, repeating as far as I could make out the same sequence of sounds. They began "Ah! Fah! Chah! Hen...." That continued for something like a minute before it came to a ragged close with another groan. Then for a few seconds the original voice continued its grumbling, and was followed by an immense quiet.

I stared through the open door of the Hall at the gay world of colour outside and wondered if I was under the thrall of some queer illusion. But as I moved towards the garden with a vague idea of regaining my sanity in the open air, the silence in the breakfast-room was broken by the sigh of a general movement, the door was opened from within, and there poured out a long procession of servants: a grave woman in black, a bevy of print-gowned maids, and finally John—all of them looking staid and a trifle melancholy, they made their way with a kind of hushed timidity towards the red-baized entrance that led to the freedoms of their proper condition.

Within the breakfast-room a low chatter of voices was slowly rising to the level of ordinary conversation.

My entrance was anything but jaunty. This was the first intimation I had received of the Jervaises' piety; and my recognition of the ceremonial of family worship to which I had so unintuitively listened, had evoked long undisturbed memories of my boyhood. As I entered the breakfast-room, I could not for the life of me avoid a feeling of self-reproach. I had been naughty again. My host, taking the place of my father, would be vexed because I had missed prayers.

My reception did little to disperse my sense of shame. The air of Sunday morning enveloped the whole party. Even Hughes and Frank Jervaise were dressed as for a special occasion in black tail-coats and gray trousers that boasted the rigidity of a week's pressing. Not only had I been guilty of cutting family prayers; I was convicted, also of disrespect on another count. My blue serge and bright tie were almost profane in those surroundings. The thought of how I had spent the night convicted me as a thorough-going Pagan.

"I hope you managed to get a little sleep, Mr. Melhuish," Mrs. Jervaise said tepidly. "We are having breakfast half an hour later than usual, but you were so very late last night."

I began to mumble something, but she went on, right over me, speaking in a voice that she obviously meant to carry "And Brenda isn't down even now," she said. "In fact she's having breakfast in her own room, and I am not at all sure that we shan't keep her there all day. She has the beginning of a nasty cold brought on by her foolishness—and, besides, she has been very, very naughty and will have to be punished." She gave a touch of grim playfulness to her last sentence, but I should not in any case have taken her statement seriously. If I knew anything of our Brenda, it was that she was not the sort of young lady who would submit to being kept in her own room as a punishment.

"I hope the cold won't be serious," was all I could find to say.

I looked at Mr. Jervaise, who was standing despondently by the fireplace, but he did not return my glance. He presented, I thought, the picture of despair, and I suffered a sharp twinge of reaction from my championship of the Banks interest at sunrise. Those two protagonists of the drama, Banks and Brenda, were so young, eager and active. Life held so much promise for them. This ageing man by the fireplace—he must have been nearly sixty—had probably ceased to live for his own interests. His ambitions were now centred in his children. I began to feel an emotional glow of sympathy for him in his distress. Probably this youngest, most brilliant, child of his was also the most tenderly loved. It might well be that his anxiety was for her rather than for himself; that the threat to his pride of family was almost forgotten in his sincere wish for his daughter's happiness. It would appear so certain to him that she could never find happiness in a marriage with Arthur Banks.

And with that thought a suspicion of my late companion of the hill-top leapt into my mind. He had hinted at some influence or "pull" over Brenda's father that might perhaps be used in a last emergency, although the use of it implied the taking of a slightly dishonourable advantage. Was it not probable, I now wondered, that this influence was to be obtained by working on Jervaise's too tender devotion to his daughter? Was she, perhaps, to be urged as a last resource to bear on that gentle weakness by threat or cajolery?

I began to wish that I had not been quite so friendly with Mr. Banks. I had been led away by the scent and glamour of the night. Here, in this Sunday morning breakfast-room, I was able for the first time to appreciate the tragedy in its proper relation to the facts of life. I saw that Brenda's rash impulsiveness might impose a quite horrible punishment on her too-devoted father.

I turned away towards one of the window-seats. Miss Tattersall and Nora Bailey were sitting together there, pretending a conversation while they patiently awaited the coming of breakfast. Mrs. Jervaise was talking now to her elder daughter; Frank was arguing some point with Gordon Hughes, and as I felt unequal to offering comfort to the lonely head of the house, so evidently wrapped in his sorrow, I preferred to range myself with the fourth group. I thought it probable that the sympathies of those two young women might at the moment most nearly correspond to my own.

I was surprised to be greeted by Miss Tattersall with what had all the appearance of a discreetly covert wink, and I raised my eyebrows with that air of half-jocular inquiry which I fancied she would expect from me. She evaded the implied question, however, by asking me what time I "really got to bed, after all."

"The sun was up before I went to sleep," I replied, to avoid the possible embarrassment of her comments should I admit to having slept in the open air; and then John and a female acolyte came in with the long-desired material of breakfast.

"Good!" I commented softly. "I'm simply ravenous."

"Are you?" Miss Tattersall said. "You deserve to go without breakfast for having missed prayers," and added in precisely the same undertone of conventional commonplace, "I don't believe she came back at all last night."

But, having thus piqued my curiosity, she gave me no opportunity to gratify it. She checked the question that my change of expression must have foreshadowed by a frown which warned me that she could not give any reason for her suspicion in that company.

"Later on," she whispered, and got up from her seat in the window, leaving me to puzzle over the still uncertain mystery of Brenda's disappearance. Miss Bailey had not, apparently, overheard the confidence. She did not, in any case, relinquish for an instant that air of simple, attentive innocence which so admirably suited the fresh prettiness of her style.

There was little conversation over the breakfast table. We were all glad to find an excuse for silence either in the pretence or reality of hunger. Old Jervaise's excuse was, quite pathetically, only a pretence; but he tried very hard to appear engrossed in the making of a hearty meal. His manner had begun to fascinate me, and I had constantly to check myself from staring at him. I found it so difficult to account satisfactorily for the effect of dread that he in some way conveyed. It was, I thought, much the effect that might have been produced by a criminal in danger of arrest.

But all of us, in our different ways, were more than a little uncomfortable. The whole air of the breakfast-table was one of dissimulation. Gordon Hughes made occasional efforts in conversation that were too glaringly irrelevant to the real subject of our thoughts. And with each beginning of his, the others, particularly Olive, Mrs. Jervaise, and little Nora Bailey, plunged gallantly into the new topic with spasmodic fervour that expended itself in a couple of minutes, and horribly emphasised the blank of silence that inevitably followed. We talked as people talk who are passing the time while they wait for some great event. But what event we could be awaiting, it was hard to imagine—unless it were the sudden return of Brenda, with or without Banks.

And, even when we had all finished, and were free to separate, we still lingered for unnecessary minutes in the breakfast-room, as if we were compelled to maintain our pretence until the last possible moment.

Old Jervaise was the first to go. He had made less effort to disguise his preoccupation than any of us, and now his exit had something of abruptness, as if he could no longer bear to maintain any further semblance of disguise. One could only infer from the manner of his going that he passionately desired either solitude or the sole companionship of those with whom he could speak plainly of his distress.

We took our cue from him with an evident alacrity. Every one looked as if he or she were saying something that began with a half-apologetic "Well..."; and Mrs. Jervaise interpreted our spirit when she remarked to the company in general, "Well, it's very late, I'm afraid, and I dare say we've all got a lot to do before we start for church. We shall have to leave soon after half-past ten," she explained.

Frank had already left the room when she said that, she herself went out with her elder daughter, and the four of us who remained, all visitors, were left to pair with each other as we chose. It was Miss Tattersall who determined the arrangement. She cleverly avoided the submissive glance of little Nora Bailey, and asked me unequivocally if I would care to take a "stroll" with her in the garden.

I agreed with a touch of eagerness and followed her, wondering if her intriguing sentence before breakfast had been nothing more than a clever piece of chicane, planned to entice me into a tete-a-tete.

(I admit that this may sound like a detestable symptom of vanity on my part, but, indeed, I do not mean to imply that she cared a snap of the fingers for me personally. She was one of those women who must have some man in tow, and it happened that I was the only one available for that week-end. Frank was supposed to be in love with Miss Bailey; Gordon Hughes was engaged to some girl in the north, and used that defence without shame when it suited him.)

I did not, however, permit Miss Tattersall to see my eagerness when we were alone on the terrace together. If she was capable of chicane, so was I; and I knew that if she had anything to tell me, she would not be able to keep it to herself for long. If, on the other hand, I began to ask questions, she would certainly take a pleasure in tantalising me.

"What's this about going to church?" was my opening.

"Didn't you know?" she replied. "We all go in solemn procession. We walk—for piety's sake—it's over a mile across the fields—and we are rounded up in lots of time, because it's a dreadful thing to get there after the bell has stopped."

"Interrupting the service," I put in with the usual inanity that is essential to the maintenance of this kind of conversation.

"It's worse than that," Miss Tattersall explained gaily; "because Mr. Sturton waits for the Jervaises, to begin. When we're late we hold up the devotions of the whole parish."

"Good Lord!" I commented; sincerely, this time; and with a thought of my socialist friend Banks. I could still sympathise with him on that score, even though I was now strongly inclined to side with the Jervaises in the Brenda affair.

"Yes, isn't it?" Miss Tattersall agreed. "Of course, they are the only important people in the place," she added thoughtfully.

"So important that it's slightly presumptuous to worship God without the sanction of their presence in church," I remarked. And then, feeling that this comment was a trifle too strong for my company, I tried to cover it by changing the subject.

"I say, do you think we ought to stay on here over the week-end?" I asked. "Wouldn't it be more tactful of us to invent excuses and leave them to themselves?"

"Certainly it would. Have you only just thought of it?" Miss Tattersall said pertly. "Nora and I agreed about that before we came down to prayers. But there's a difficulty that seems, for the moment, insuperable."

"Which is?" I prompted her.

"No conveyance," she explained. "There aren't any Sunday trains on the loop line, Hurley Junction is fifteen miles away, and the Jervaises' car is Heaven knows where and the only other that is borrowable, Mr. Turnbull's, is derelict just outside the Park gates."

I thought she was rather inclined to make a song of it all, genuinely thankful to have so sound an excuse for staying to witness the dramatic developments that might possibly be in store for us. I do not deny that I appreciated her feeling in that matter.

"And the horses?" I suggested.

"Too far for them, in the omnibus," she said. "And nothing else would be big enough for four people and their luggage. But, as a matter of fact, Nora and I talked it all over with Mrs. Jervaise before prayers, and she said we weren't to think of going—especially as it was all right, now, about Brenda."

"I'm glad it is all right, if only for old Jervaise's sake," I said, craftily.

She looked up at me, trying to guess how far I was honest in that remark.

"But you don't really believe..." she said.

"I don't see why not," I returned.

"That Brenda has come back?"

"Mrs. Jervaise said..."

"Had to, of course," Miss Tattersall replied curtly.

I pursed my mouth and shook my head. "It would be too risky to deceive us as crudely as that," I said. "Make it so much more significant if we discovered that they had been lying about her."

Miss Tattersall looked obstinate, putting on that wooden enduring expression peculiar to fair people with pale eyes.

"I don't believe she has come back," she said.

I continued to argue. I guessed that she had some piece of evidence in reserve; also, that for some reason she was afraid to produce it. And at last, as I had hoped, my foolish, specious arguments and apparent credulity irritated her to a pitch of exasperation.

"Oh! you can talk till all's blue," she broke in with a flash of temper, "but she hasn't come back."

"But..." I began.

"I know she hasn't," Miss Tattersall said, and the pink of her cheeks spread to her forehead and neck like an overflowing stain.

"Of course if you know..." I conceded.

"I do," she affirmed, still blushing.

I realised that the moment had come for conciliation. "This is tremendously interesting," I said.

She looked up at me with a question in her face, but I did not understand until she spoke, that what had been keeping back her confession was not doubt of my trustworthiness but her fear of losing my good opinion.

"I expect you'll think it was horrid of me," she said.

I made inarticulate sounds intended to convey an effect of reassurance.

"You will," she insisted, and gave her protest a value that I felt to be slightly compromising. I could only infer that the loss of my good opinion would be fatal to her future happiness.

"Indeed, I shan't," I protested, although I had to say it in a tone that practically confirmed this talk of ours as a perfectly genuine flirtation.

"Men have such queer ideas of honour in these things," she went on with a recovering confidence.

"Do you mean that you—peeped," I said. "Into Brenda's room?"

She made a moue that I ought to have found fascinating, nodding emphatically.

"The door wasn't locked, then?" I put in.

She shook her head and blushed again; and I guessed in a flash that she had used the keyhole.

"But could you be sure?" I persisted. "Absolutely sure that she wasn't there?"

"I—I only opened the door for a second," she said, "But I saw the bed. It hadn't been slept in."

"And this happened?" I suggested.

"Just before I came down to prayers," she replied.

"Well, where is she?" I asked.

Miss Tattersall laughed. Now that we had left the dangerous topic of her means of obtaining evidence, she was sure of herself again.

"She might be anywhere by this time," she said. "She and her lover obviously went off in the motor together at twelve o'clock. They are probably in London, by now."

I did not give her confidence for confidence. I had practically promised Banks not to say that I had seen him on Jervaise Clump at five o'clock that morning, and I was not the least tempted to reveal that important fact to Miss Tattersall. I diverted the angle of our talk a trifle, at the same time allowing my companion to assume that I agreed with her conclusion.

"Do you know," I said, "that the person I'm most sorry for in this affair is Mr. Jervaise. He seems absolutely broken by it."

Miss Tattersall nodded sympathetically. "Yes, isn't it dreadful?" she said. "At breakfast this morning I was thinking how perfectly detestable it was of Brenda to do a thing like that."

"Or of Banks?" I added.

"Oh! it wasn't his fault," Miss Tattersall said spitefully. "He was just infatuated, poor fool. She could do anything she liked with him."

I reflected that Olive Jervaise and Nora Bailey would probably have expressed a precisely similar opinion.

"I suppose he's a weak sort of chap?" I said.

"No. It isn't that," Miss Tattersall replied. "He doesn't look weak—not at all. No! he is just infatuated—for the time being."

We had been pacing up and down the lawn, parallel to the front of the house and perhaps fifty yards away from it—a safe distance for maintaining the privacy of our conversation. And as we came to the turn of our walk nearest to the drive, I looked back towards the avenue that intervened between us and the swelling contours of Jervaise Clump. I was thinking about my expedition towards the sunrise; and I was taken completely off my guard when I saw a tweed-clad figure emerge from under the elms and make its way with a steady determination up the drive.

"Well, one of them isn't in London, anyway," I said.

"Why? Who?" she returned, staring, and I realised that she was too short-sighted to make out the identity of the advancing figure from that distance.

"Who is it?" she repeated with a hint of testiness.

I had seen by then that I had inadvertently given myself away, and I had not the wit to escape from the dilemma.

"I don't know," I said, hopelessly embarrassed. "It—it just struck me that this might be Banks."

He had come nearer to us now, near enough for Miss Tattersall to recognise him; and her amazement was certainly greater than mine.

"But you're right," she said with a little catch in her breath. "It is Banks, out of uniform."

For a moment I hoped that her surprise might cover my slip, but she was much too acute to pass such a palpable blunder as that.

"It is," she repeated; "but how did you know? I thought you had never seen him."

"Just an intuition," I prevaricated and tried, I knew at the time how uselessly, to boast a pride in my powers of insight.

The effect upon my companion was neither that I hoped to produce, nor that I more confidently expected. Instead of chaffing me, pressing me for an explanation of the double game I had presumably been playing, she looked at me with doubt and an obvious loss of confidence. Just so, I thought, she might have looked at me if I had tried to take some unfair advantage of her.

"Well, I suppose it's time to get ready for church," she remarked coldly. "Are you coming?"

I forget what I replied. She was already slipping into the background of my interest. I was so extraordinarily intrigued by the sight of Arthur Banks, the chauffeur, boldly ringing at the front door of Jervaise Hall.



VII

NOTES AND QUERIES

Miss Tattersall had started for the house and her preparations for church-going, but she paused on the hither side of the drive and pretended an interest in the flower beds, until Banks had been admitted to the Hall.

I could not, at that distance, mark the expression on John's face when he answered the bell, but I noticed that there was a perceptible interval of colloquy on the doorstep before the strange visitor was allowed to enter. I should have liked to hear that conversation, and to know what argument Banks used in overcoming John's reluctance to carry the astounding message that the chauffeur had "called" and wished to see Mr. Jervaise. But, no doubt, John's diplomacy was equal to the occasion. Banks's fine effort in self-assertion was probably wasted. John would not mention the affront to the family's prestige. He would imply that Banks had come in the manner proper to his condition. "Banks wishes to know if he might speak to you a minute, sir," was all the warning poor old Jervaise would get of this frontal attack upon his dignities.

So far I felt a certain faith in my ability to guess the hidden action of the drama that was being played in the Hall; but beyond this point my imagination would not carry me. I could not foresee the attitude of either of the two protagonists. I thought over what I remembered of my conversation with Banks on the hill, but the only essential that stuck in my mind was that suggestion of the "pull," the admittedly unfair advantage that he might possibly use as a last resource. I was conscious of an earnest wish that that reserve would not be called upon. I felt, intuitively, that it would shame both the chauffeur and his master. I had still less material for any imaginative construction of old Jervaise's part in the scene now being played; a scene that I could only regard as being of the greatest moment. Indeed I believed that the conversation then taking place would reach the climax of the whole episode, and I bitterly regretted that I had apparently no possible chance of ever learning the detail of that confrontation of owner and servant. Worse still, I realised that I might have some difficulty in gathering the upshot. Whether Banks were accepted or rejected the Jervaises would not confide the story to their visitors.

I must admit that my curiosity was immensely piqued; though I flatter myself that my interest was quite legitimate, that it contained no element of vulgar inquisitiveness. Nevertheless, I did want to know—the outcome, at least—and I could decide upon no intermediary who would give me just the information I desired.

Miss Tattersall I ruled out at once. She so persistently vulgarised the affair. I felt that in her mind she regarded the elopement as subject for common gossip; also, that she was not free from a form of generalised jealousy. She did not want Arthur Banks for herself, but she evidently thought him a rather admirable masculine figure and deplored his "infatuation" for Brenda. Moreover, I had a notion that I had fallen from Miss Tattersall's favour. There was something in her expression when she discovered my deceit in pretending ignorance of the heroic chauffeur that portrayed a sense of personal injury. No doubt she thought that I had squeezed her confidence, while I treacherously withheld my own; and she would certainly regret that confession of having peeped into Brenda's room, even if she did not guess that I had inferred the final shame of using the keyhole. Subsequent evidence showed that my only mistake in this connection was a fatuous underestimation of the lady's sense of injury.

Of the other members of the house-party, Frank Jervaise was the only one who seemed likely or able to post me in the progress of the affair, and I felt considerable hesitation in approaching him. I could not expect a return of that mood of weakness he had exhibited the night before; and I had no intention of courting a direct snub from him.

There remained Banks, himself, but I could not possibly have questioned him, even if my sympathies had still been engaged on his side.

And I must admit that as I paced the lawn in front of the house my sympathies were very markedly with old Jervaise. It hurt me to remember that look of apprehension he had worn at breakfast. I wanted, almost passionately, to defend him from the possibly heart-breaking consequences that might arise from no fault of his own.

I was still pondering these feelings of compassion for my host, when the church-party emerged from the front door of the Hall. If my watch were right they were very late. Mr. Sturton and his congregation would have to wait ten minutes or so in patient expectation before they could begin their devotions. And I would gladly have effaced myself if only to save the Jervaises the vexation of a still further delay. But I was too near the line of their approach. Any attempt at retreat would have been a positive rudeness.

I was framing an apology for not accompanying them to church as they came up—Mrs. Jervaise and her daughter leading, with their three visitors in a bunch behind. But I was spared the necessity to offer what would certainly have been a transparent and foolish excuse for absenting myself from their religious observances. Mrs. Jervaise pulled herself together as the party approached me. She had had her head down even more than usual as they came out of the Hall, as if she were determined to butt her way through any further obstacles that might intervene between her and her duty as a Christian. At sight of me, however, she obviously stiffened. She almost held herself erect as she faced me; and her hawk nose jerked up like the head of a pick.

"So you're not coming with us, Mr. Melhuish?" she said.

"I hope you will excuse me," I replied with, I hope, a proper air of courtesy.

"Of course," she said stiffly, her nose still balanced, as it were, in preparation to strike. Then she lowered her head with the air of one who carefully replaces a weapon, and mumbling something about being "dreadfully late as it was," continued her interrupted plunging into the resistances that separated her from her goal. The others followed, as if they were being trailed in her wake by invisible hawsers. None of them took any notice of me—particularly Miss Tattersall, whose failure to see me was a marked and positive act of omission.

I realised that I had been disapproved and snubbed, but I was not at all distressed by the fact. I put it all down to my failure in piety, begun with my absence from prayers and now accentuated by my absence from church. Olive, Nora Bailey, and Hughes had, I supposed, followed Mrs. Jervaise's lead in duty bound, and I knew nearly enough why Miss Tattersall had cut me. I had no idea, then, that I had come under suspicion of a far more serious offence than that of a sectarian nonconformity. Indeed, I hardly gave the matter a moment's attention. The composition of the church-party had provided me with material for further speculation concerning the subject that was absorbing all my interest. Why were old Jervaise and his son also absent from the tale of those devoted pilgrims? Was that interview in the Hall developing some crucial situation, and had Frank been called in? One thing was certain: Banks had not, as yet, come out. I had kept my eye on the front door. I could not possibly have missed him.

And it was with the idea of seeing what inferences I could draw from his general demeanour when he did come, rather than with any thought of accosting him, that I maintained my thoughtful pacing up and down the lawn on the garden side of the drive. I was relieved by the knowledge that that party of church-goers were out of the way. I had a feeling of freedom such as I used to have as a boy when I had been permitted to stay at home, on some plea or another, on a Sunday morning. I had a sense of enlargement and opportunity.

* * * * *

I must have been on that lawn for more than an hour, and my thoughts had covered much ground that is not appropriate to this narrative, when I was roused to a recognition of the fact that my brief freedom was passing and that I was taking no advantage of any opportunity it might afford me.

The thing that suddenly stirred me to a new activity was the sound of the stable-clock striking twelve. Its horrible bell still had the same note of intrusive artificiality that had vexed me on the previous night, but it no longer thrilled me with any sense of stage effect. It was merely a mechanical and inappropriate invasion of that lovely Sunday morning.

There was a strange stimulation, however, in the deductions that I drew from that portentous chiming, for my interest was at once called to the fact that this was the first time that clock had struck since I had been on the lawn. I could not conceivably have missed its earlier efforts at the hours of ten and eleven. There was an insistence about the beastly thing that demanded one's attention. Had it, then, run down overnight and been recently re-wound? And if so, by whom?

It may seem absurd that I should have made so much of the inferences that followed my consideration of this problem, but the truth is that my mind was so intensely occupied with one subject that everything seemed to point to the participation of the important Arthur Banks. At any other time I should not have troubled about the clock; now, I looked to it for evidence. And however ridiculous it may appear, I was influenced in my excited search for clues by the fact that the clock had, after it was re-wound, only struck the hour of twelve. The significance of that deduction lay in the observation—my experience is, admittedly, limited—that clocks which have run down must be patiently made to re-toll the hours they have missed, or they will pick up their last neglected reminders of the time at the point at which they stopped. And from that I inferred an esoteric knowledge of mechanics from that rewinder of the stable-clock who had got the horrid contrivance correctly going again without imposing upon us the misery of slowly working through an almost endless series of, as it were, historical chimes. I agree that my premises were faulty, far too lightly supported, but my mind leapt to the deduction that the mechanic in this connection could be none other than Banks. And granting that, the further inferences were, undoubtedly, important. For as I saw them they pointed infallibly to the conclusion that Banks had accepted once more the yoke of servitude; that he had made his exit through the servants' quarters and had meekly taken up his tasks again with the winding of the stable-clock.

(I may add that strangely enough the weak inference was correct, and the well-grounded one fallacious. If you would interpret the riddle of human motives, put no confidence in logic. The principles of logic are founded on the psychology of Anyone. And Anyone is a mechanical waxwork, an intellectual abstraction, a thing without a soul or a sub-consciousness.)

Having taken the side of old Jervaise, I ought to have been comforted by this conclusion, and I tried to persuade myself that it indicated the only satisfactory termination to the brief drama of the night. I attempted to see the affair as a slightly ridiculous episode that had occupied exactly twelve hours and ended with an inevitable bathos. I pictured the return of a disgraced and penitent Brenda, and the temporary re-employment, as an antidote to gossip, of the defeated Banks. They would be parted, of course. She might be taken abroad, or to Scotland, and by the time she returned, he would have been sent back to the country from which he had been injudiciously recalled. Finally, old Jervaise would be able to take up his life again with his old zest. I believed that he was a man who took his pleasures with a certain gusto. He had been quite gay at the dance before the coming of the scandal that had temporarily upset his peace of mind.

All this imaginary restitution was perfectly reasonable. I could "see" things happening just as I had thought them. The only trouble was that I could find no personal satisfaction in the consideration of the Jervaises' restored happiness. I was aware of a feeling of great disappointment for which I could not account; and although I tried to persuade myself that this feeling was due to the evaporation of the emotional interest of the moving drama that had been playing, I found that explanation insufficient. I was conscious of a loss that intimately concerned myself, the loss of something to which I had been unconsciously looking forward.

I came out of my reverie to find that I had wandered half round the house, across the formal pleasance, and that I was now at the door leading into the kitchen garden.

I hesitated a moment with a distinct sense of wrong-doing, before I opened the door with the air of one who defies his own conscience, and passed up the avenue between the gouty espaliers—fine old veterans they were, and as I could see, now, loaded with splendid fruit. The iron gates that led out into the Park were locked, but a gardener—the head gardener, I suppose—came out of one of the greenhouses close at hand, and let me through.

I began to hurry, then. It was already twenty past twelve, and lunch was at half-past one. Just what I proposed to do, or whom I expected to see, at the Home Farm, I had no idea; but I was suddenly determined to get there and back before lunch. The walk would not take me more than a quarter of an hour each way, but, for no reason that I could explain, the balance of half an hour or so that remained to me appeared far too short. I remember that as I walked through the wood, I persuaded myself that I wanted to see Arthur Banks, who, according to my neat and convincing theory, had taken up his work again and was, therefore, probably at the Hall. But, as I have said, our impulses are never guided, and seldom altered, by that form of reasoning known as logic.

* * * * *

But I never reached the farm, and I forgot all about the pretended motive of my excursion. For in two seconds I came to an entirely new judgment on the whole problem of the Jervaise-Banks intrigue, a judgment that had nothing in common with any earlier turns of sympathy from one party to the other.

Such a little thing it was that temporarily turned me into a disgusted misanthrope, nothing more than a sight of two people seen for a moment in an arresting shock of outraged amazement before I turned a disgusted back upon them and retreated moodily to the Hall. But the sight was enough to throw the affair into a new perspective, and beget in me a sense of contempt for all the actors in that midsummer comedy. "A plague on both your houses," I muttered to myself, but I saw them no longer as the antagonists of a romantic drama. I was suddenly influenced to a mood of scorn. Jervaises and Banks alike seemed to me unworthy of any admiration. The members of those families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was an infatuated fool, and the best I could hope for him was that he would realise the fact before it was too late. Frank, confound and confound him, was a coarse-minded sensualist. The thought of him drove me crazy with impatience....

And what on earth could have tempted Anne to let him kiss her, if she had not been a crafty, worldly-minded schemer with an eye on the glories of ruling at the Hall?

It is true that I did not actually see him kiss her. I turned away too quickly. But the grouping left me in no doubt that if he had not kissed her already, he was on the point of doing it. In any case he had had his arm round her, and she had shown no signs of resisting him.



VIII

THE OUTCAST

My first impression of the curious change in demeanour shown towards me by the Jervaises and their friends at lunch was that it had no existence outside my own recently embittered mind. I thought that I was avoiding them, not that they were avoiding me. It was not until I condescended to come down from my pinnacle of conscious superiority that I realised my own disgrace.

My effort at conversation with Mrs. Jervaise was a mere act of politeness.

"I'm afraid you were rather late this morning," I said. It was not, perhaps, a tactful remark, but I could think of nothing else. All the church-party were stiff with the slightly peevish righteousness of those who have fulfilled a duty contrary to their real inclinations.

Mrs. Jervaise lifted her nose savagely. No doubt her head went with it, but only the nose was important.

"Very late, Mr. Melhuish," she said, stared at me as if debating whether she would not instantly give me the coup de grace, and then dipped again to the threat of the imaginary doorway.

"Mr. Sturton give you a good sermon?" I continued, still suffering from the delusion that I was graciously overlooking their obvious inferiority to myself.

"He is a very able man; very able," Mrs. Jervaise said, this time without looking up.

"You are lucky to have such a good man as vicar," I said. "Sometimes there is—well, a lack of sympathy between the Vicarage and the Hall. I remember—the case isn't quite parallel, of course, but the moral is much the same—I remember a curate my father had once..."

Now, my story of that curate is thoroughly sound. It is full of incident and humour and not at all derogatory to the prestige of the church. I have been asked for it, more than once, by hostesses. And though I am rather sick of it myself, I still fall back on it in cases of such urgency as I judged the present one to be. I thought that I had been lucky to get so easy an opening to produce the anecdote with relevance, and I counted on it for a good five minutes relief from the constraint of making polite conversation.

Mrs. Jervaise's response began to open my eyes to the state of the new relations that now existed between myself and the rest of the party. She did not even allow me to begin. She ignored my opening entirely, and looking down the table towards her husband said, "Mr. Sturton preached from the tenth of Hebrews, 'Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering.' Quite a coincidence, wasn't it?"

"Indeed? Yes, quite a coincidence," Mr. Jervaise replied without enthusiasm. He did not look as cheerful as I had anticipated, but he wore the air of a man who has had at least a temporary reprieve.

"Olive and I were quite struck by it; weren't we, dear?" Mrs. Jervaise continued, dragging in her daughter's evidence.

"Yes, it was very odd," Olive agreed tepidly.

I never knew what the coincidence was, but I judge from Mrs. Jervaise's insistence that it was something perfectly futile.

I glanced across at Hughes, and guessed that he was not less bored than I was myself, but when I caught his eye he looked hastily away.

I was beginning to wonder what I had done, but I valiantly tried again.

"Don't you think it possible that many cases of apparent coincidences are probably due to telepathy?" I said genially, addressing the dangerous-looking profile of my hostess.

She gave an impatient movement of her head that reminded me of a parrot viciously digging out the kernel of a nut.

"I really can't say," she said, pointedly turned to Gordon Hughes, who was on her other side, and asked him if he had played much tennis lately.

I looked round the table for help, but none of the party would meet my eyes, avoiding my glance with a determination that could not be mistaken. I might have suffered from some loathsome deformity. Frank, alone, appeared unaware of my innocent appeal for an explanation. He was bending gloomily over his plate, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts—though how any man could be gloomy after his recent experience it was beyond me to imagine.

My astonishment flamed into a feeling of acute annoyance. If any one had spoken to me at that moment, I should have been unforgivably rude. But no one had the least intention of speaking to me, and I had just sense enough to restrain myself from demanding an apology from the company at large. That was my natural inclination. I had been insulted; outraged. I was the Jervaises' guest, and whatever they imagined that I had done, they owed it to me and to themselves to treat me with a reasonable courtesy.

It was a detestable situation, and I was completely floored by it for the moment. We were not half-way through lunch, and I felt that I could not endure to sit there for another twenty minutes, avoided, proscribed, held fast in a pillory, a butt for the sneers of any fool at the table. On the other hand, if I got up and marched out of the room, I should be acknowledging my defeat—and my guilt of whatever crime I was supposed to have committed. If I ever wished to justify my perfect innocence, I should forfeit my chances, at once, by accepting the snub I had received. To do that would be to acknowledge my sense of misbehaviour.

I leaned a little forward and glanced at Miss Tattersall who was sitting just beyond Nora Bailey on my side of the table. And I saw that my late confidante, the user of keyholes, was faintly smiling to herself with an unmistakable air of malicious satisfaction.

I wished, then, that I had not looked. I was no longer quite so conscious of outraged innocence. It is true that I was guiltless of any real offence, but I saw that the charge of complicity with the chauffeur—a charge that had certainly not lost in substance or in its suggestion of perfidy by Miss Tattersall's rendering—was one that I could not wholly refute. I was in the position of a man charged with murder on good circumstantial evidence; and my first furious indignation began to give way to a detestable feeling of embarrassment, momentarily increased by the necessity to sit in silence while the inane chatter of the luncheon table swerved past me. If I had had one friend with whom I could have talked, I might have been able to recover myself, but I defy any one in my situation to maintain an effective part with no active means of expression.

I glanced a trifle desperately at Olive Jervaise. I judged her to be rather a colourless creature who would not have the spirit openly to snub me. She was nearly opposite to me, between her brother and Hughes, and well placed for an open attack if I could once engage her attention. But when I came to consider an opening, every reasonably appropriate topic seemed to have some dangerous relation to the affaire Brenda. Any reference to the dance, to the Sturtons, the place, the weather, suddenly assumed in my mind the appearance of a subtle approach to the subject I most wished to avoid. If I was, indeed, regarded in that house as a spy in league with the enemy, the most innocent remark might be construed into an attempt to obtain evidence.

I fancy, too, that I was subject to an influence other than the heightened self-consciousness due to my awkward situation. I had only just begun to realise that the absence of Brenda must be a horribly insistent fact to her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the nervous respectability of this dull and fearful household like the gleam of unexpected water in the blankness of a desert. Her absence must have seemed to them a positive thing. Probably every one at the table was thinking of her at that moment. And the result of this combined thought was producing a hallucination of Brenda in my mind, strong enough to hypnotise me. In any case, her apparition stood at the end of every avenue of conversation I could devise. I could think of no opening that did not lead straight up to the subject of her absence.