Nan, screened from the remainder of the room by the window embrasure, let the sketch she was holding flutter to the ground.

The quiet, drawling voice was Peter's! And he didn't know she was here! It would be horrible—horrible to meet him suddenly like this . . . here . . . in the presence of other people.

She pressed herself closely against the wall of the recess, her breath coming gaspingly between parched lips. The mere tones of his voice, with their lazy, distinctive drawl, set her heart beating in great suffocating leaps. She had never dreamed of the possibility of meeting him—here, of all places, and the knowledge that only a few yards separated them from one another, that if she stepped out from the alcove which screened her she would be face to face with him, drained her of all strength.

She stood there motionless, her back to the wall, her palms pressed rigidly against its surface.

Was he coming towards here? . . . Now? It seemed hours since his voice had first struck upon her ears.

At last, after what appeared an infinity of time, she heard the hum of talk and laughter drift out of the room . . . the sound of footsteps retreating . . . the closing of a door.

Her stiff muscles relaxed and, leaning forward, she peered into the studio. It was empty. They had all gone, and with a sigh of relief she stepped out from her hiding-place.

She wandered aimlessly about for a minute or two, then came to anchor in front of Mrs. T. Van Decken's portrait. With a curious sense of detachment, she fell to criticising it afresh. It had been painted with amazing skill and insight. All the beauty was there, the exquisite tinting of flesh, the beautiful curve of cheek and throat and shoulder. But, behind the lovely physical presentment, Nan felt she could detect the woman's soul—predatory, feline, and unscrupulous. It was rather original of Maryon to have done that, she thought—painted both body and spirit—and it was just like that cynical cleverness of his to have discerned so exactly the soulless type of woman which the beautiful body concealed and to have insolently reproduced it, daring discovery.

She looked up and found him standing beside her. She had not heard the quiet opening and closing of the door.

"An old friend of yours has just come in to see my Van Decken," he said quietly. His eyes were slightly quizzical.

Nan turned her face a little aside.

"I know. Where—where is he?"

"I took him along to have some tea. I've left him with the Fentons; they can prepare him for the . . . shock."

She flushed angrily.

"Maryon! You're outrageous!" she protested.

"I imagined. I was showing great consideration, seeing I've no cause to bear Mallory any overwhelming goodwill."

"I thought you had only met him once or twice?"

Rooke looked down at her with an odd expression.

"True—in the old days, only once. At your flat. But we've knocked up against each other several times since then. And Mrs. Van Decken asked him to come and see her portrait."

"You and he can have very little in common," observed Nan carelessly.

"Nothing"—promptly—"except the links of art. I've always been true in my art—if in nothing else. Besides, all's grist that comes to Mallory's mill. He regards me as a type. Ah!"—as the door opened once more—"here they come."

Her throat contracted with nervousness and she felt that it would be a physical impossibility for her to speak. She turned mechanically as Penelope re-entered the room, followed by her husband and Peter Mallory. Uppermost in Nan's mind was the thought, to which she clung as to a sheet-anchor, that of the three witnesses to this meeting between Peter and herself, the Fentons were ignorant of the fact that she cared for him, and Maryon, whatever he might suspect, had no certain knowledge.

The dreaded ordeal was quickly over. A simple handshake, and in a few moments they were all five chatting together, Mrs. Van Decken's portrait prominent in the conversation.

Mallory had altered in some indefinable way. In the fugitive glances she stole at him Nan could see that he was thinner, his face a trifle worn-looking, and the old whimsical light had died out of his eyes, replaced by a rather bitter sadness.

"You'd better come and dine with us to-night, Mallory," said Fenton, pausing as they were about to leave. "Penelope and I are due at the Albert Hall later on, but we shall be home fairly early and you can entertain Nan in our absence. It's purely a ballad concert, so she doesn't care to go with us—it's not high-brow enough!"—with a twinkle in Nan's direction.

She glanced at Peter swiftly. Would he refuse?

There was the slightest pause. Then—

"Thank you very much," he said quietly. "I shall be delighted."

"We dine at an unearthly hour to-night, of course," volunteered Penelope. "Half-past six."

"As I contrived to miss my lunch to-day, I shan't grumble," replied Peter, smiling. "Till to-night, then."

And the Fentons' motor slid away into the lamplit dusk.

"Wasn't that rather rash of you, Ralph?" asked Penelope later on, when they were both dressing for the evening. "I think—last summer—Peter was getting too fond of Nan for his own peace of mind."

Ralph came to the door of his dressing-room in his shirt-sleeves, shaving-brush in hand.

"Good Lord, no!" he said. "Mallory's married and Nan's engaged—what more do you want? They were just good pals. And anyway, even if you're right, the affair must he dead embers by this time."

"It may be. Still, there's nothing gained by blowing on them," replied Penelope sagely.



CHAPTER XXVI

"THE WIDTH OF A WORLD BETWEEN"

Nan gave a final touch to Penelope's hair, drawing the gold fillet which bound it a little lower down on to the broad brow, then stood back and regarded the effect with critical eyes.

"That'll do," she declared. "You look a duck, Penelope! I hope you'll get a splendid reception. You will if you smile at the audience as prettily as you're smiling now! Won't she, Ralph?"

"I hope so," answered Fenton seriously. "It would be a waste of a perfectly good smile if she doesn't." And amid laughter and good wishes the Fentons departed for the concert, Peter Mallory accompanying them downstairs to speed them on their way.

Meanwhile Nan, left alone for the moment, became suddenly conscious of an overpowering nervousness at the prospect of spending the evening alone with Peter. There was so much—so much that lay behind them that they must either restrict their conversation to the merest trivialities, avoiding all reference to the past, or find themselves plunged into dangerous depths. Dinner had passed without incident. Sustained by the presence of Penelope and Ralph, Nan had carried through her part in it with a brilliance and reckless daring which revealed nothing at all of the turmoil of confused emotions which underlay her apparent gaiety.

She seemed to have become a new being this evening, an enchanting creature of flame and fire. She said the most outrageous things at dinner, talking a lot of clever nonsense but sheering quickly away if any more serious strain of thought crept into the conversation. For an instant she might plumb the depths, the next she would be winging lightly over the surface again, while a spray of sparkling laughter rose and fell around her. With butterfly touch she opened the cupboard of memory, daring Peter the while with her eyes, skimming the thin ice of bygone times with the adroitness of an expert skater.

She was wearing the frock which had called forth Lady Gertrude's ire, and from its filmy folds her head and shoulders emerged like a flower from its sheath, vividly arresting, her scarlet lips and "blue-violet" eyes splashes of live colour against the warm golden ivory of her skin.

It was Nan at her most emotionally distracting, now sparkling with an almost feverish vivacity, now drooping into sudden silence, while the lines of her delicately angled face took on a touching, languorous appeal.

But now, now that the need for playing a part was over, and she stood waiting for Mallory's return, something tragic and desperate looked out of her eyes. She paced the room restlessly. Outside a gale was blowing. She could hear the wind roaring through the street. A sudden gust blew down the chimney and the flames flickered and bent beneath it, while in the distance sounded a low rumble of thunder—the odd, unexpected thunder that comes sometimes in winter.

Presently the lift gates clanged apart. She heard Mallory's step as he crossed the hall. Then the door of the room opened and shut.

She did not speak. For a moment she could not even look up. She was conscious of nothing beyond the one great fact that she and Peter were alone together—alone, yet as much divided as though the whole world lay between them.

At last, with an effort, she raised her eyes and saw him standing beside her. A stifled cry escaped her. Throughout dinner, while the Fentons had been present, he had smiled and talked much as usual, so that the change in the man had been less noticeable. But the mask was off now, and in repose his face showed, so worn and ravaged by grief that Nan cried out involuntarily in pitiful dismay.

Her first impulse was to fold her arms about him, drawing that lined and altered face against her bosom, hiding from sight the stark bitterness of the eyes that met her own, and comforting him as only the woman who loves a man knows how.

Then, like a black, surging flood, the memory of all that kept them apart rushed over her and she drew back her arms, half-raised, falling limply to her sides. He made no effort to approach her. Only his eyes remained fixed on her, hungrily devouring every line of the beloved face.

"Why did you come?" she asked at last. Her voice seemed to herself as though it came from a great distance. It sounded like someone else speaking.

"I couldn't keep away. Life without you has become one long, unbearable hell."

He spoke with a strange, slow vehemence which seemed to hold the aggregated bitterness and pain of all those solitary months.

A shudder ran through her slight frame. Her own agony of separation had been measurable with his.

"But you said . . . at Tintagel . . . that we mustn't meet again. You shouldn't have come—oh, you shouldn't have come!" she cried tremulously.

He drew a step nearer to her.

"I had to come, I'm a man—not a saint!" he answered.

She looked up swiftly, trying to read what lay behind the harsh repression in his tones. She felt as though he were holding something in leash—something that strained and fought against restraint.

"I'm a man—not a saint!" The memory of his renunciation at King Arthur's Castle swept over her.

"Yet I once thought you—almost that, Peter," she said slowly.

But he brushed her words aside.

"Well, I'm not. When I saw you to-day at the studio . . . God! Did you think I'd keep away? . . . Nan, did you want me to?"

The leash was slipping. She trembled, aching to answer him as her whole soul dictated, to tell him the truth—that she wanted him every minute of the day and that life without him stretched before her like a barren waste.

"I—we—oh, you're making it so hard for me!" she said imploringly. "Please go—go, now!"

Instead, he caught her in his arms, holding her crushed against his breast.

"No, I'm not going. Oh, Nan—little Nan that I love! I can't give you up again. Beloved!—Soul of me!" And all the love and longing, against which he had struggled unavailingly throughout those empty months of separation, came pouring from his lips in a torrent of passionate pleading that shook her heart.

With an effort she tore herself free—wrenched herself away from the arms whose clasp about her body thrilled her from head to foot. Somewhere in one of the cells of her brain she was conscious of a perfectly clear understanding of the fact that she must be quite mad to fight for escape from the sole thing in life she craved. Celia Mallory didn't really count—nor Roger and her pledge to him. . . . They were only shadows. What counted was Peter's love for her and hers for him. . . . Yet in a curious numbed way she felt she must still defer to those shadows. They stood like sentinels with drawn swords at the gate of happiness, and she would never be able to get past them. So it was no use Peter's staying here.

"You must go, Peter!" she exclaimed feverishly. "You must go!"

A new look sprang into his eyes—a sudden, terrible doubt and questioning.

"You want me to go?"

"Yes—yes!" She turned away, gesturing blindly in the direction of the door. The room seemed whirling round her. "I—I want you to go!"

Then she felt his hand on her shoulder and, yielding to its insistent pressure, she faced him again.

"Nan, is it because you've ceased to care that you tell me to go?" He spoke very quietly, but there was something in the tense, hard-held tones before which she blenched—a note of intolerable fear.

Her shaking hands went up to her face. It would be better if he thought that of her—better for him, at least. For her, nothing mattered any more.

"Don't ask me, Peter!" she gasped, sobbingly. "Don't ask me!"

Slowly his hand fell away from her shoulder.

"Then it's true? You don't care? Trenby has taken my place?"

A heavy silence dropped between them, broken only by the sullen roll of thunder. Nan shivered a little. Her face was still hidden in her hands. She was struggling with herself—trying to force from her lips the lie which would send the man's reeling faith in her crashing to earth and drive him from her for ever. She knew if he went from her like that, believing she had ceased to care, he would never come back again. He would wipe her out utterly from his thoughts—out of his heart. Henceforward she would be only a dead memory to him—the symbol of a shattered faith.

It was more than she could bear. She could not give up that—Peter's faith in her! It was all she had to cling to—to carry her through life.

She stretched out her arms to him, crying brokenly:

"Oh, Peter—Peter—"

At the sound, of her low, shaken voice, with its infinite appeal for understanding, the iron control he had been forcing on himself snapped asunder, and he caught her in his arms, kissing her with the fierce hunger of a man who has been starved of love.

She leaned against him, physically unable to resist, and deep down in her heart glad that she could not. For the moment everything was swept away in an anguish of happiness—in the ecstasy of burning kisses crushed against her mouth and throat and the strained clasp of arms locked round her.

"My woman!" he muttered unsteadily. "My woman!"

She could feel the hard beating of his heart, and her slender body trembled in his arms with an answering passion that sprang from the depths of her being. Forgetful of everything, save only of each other and their great love, their lips clung together.

Presently he tilted her head back. Her face was white, the shadowed eyes like two dark stains on the ivory bloom of a magnolia.

"Beloved! . . . Nan, say that you love me—let me hear you say it!"

"You know!" Her voice shook uncontrollably. "You don't need to ask me, Peter. It—it hurts to love anyone as I love you."

His hold tightened round her.

"You're mine . . . mine out of all the world . . . my beloved. . . ."

A flare of lightning and again the menacing roll of thunder. Then, sudden as the swoop of a bat, the electric burners quivered and went out, leaving only the glow of the fire to pierce the gloom. In the dim light she could see his face bent over her—the face of her man, the man she loved, and all that was woman and lover within her leaped to answer the call of her mate—the infinite, imperious demand of human love that has waited and hungered through empty days and nights till at last it shall be answered by the loved one.

For a moment she lay unresisting in his arms, helpless in the grip of the passion of love which had engulfed them both. Then the memory of the shadows—the sentinels with drawn swords—came back to her. The swords flashed, cleaving the dividing line afresh before her eyes.

Slowly she leaned away from his breast, her face suddenly drawn and tortured.

"Peter, I must go back—"

"Back? To Trenby?" Then, savagely: "You can't. I want you!"

He stooped his head and she felt his mouth on hers.

A glimmer of pale firelight searched out the two tense faces; the shadowy room seemed listening, waiting—waiting—

"I want you!" he reiterated hoarsely. "I can't live without you any longer. Nan . . . come with me . . ."

A tremulous flicker of lightning shivered across the darkness. The dead electric burners leaped into golden globes of light once more, and in the garish, shattering glare the man and woman sprang apart and stood staring at each other, trembling, with passion-stricken faces. . . .

The long silence was broken at last, broken by a little inarticulate sound—half-sigh, half-sob—from Nan.

Peter raised his head and looked at her. His face was grey.

"God!" he muttered. "Where were we going?"

He stumbled to the chimneypiece, and, leaning his arms on it, buried his face against them.

Presently she spoke to him, timidly.

"Peter?" she said. "Peter?"

At the sound of her voice he turned towards her, and the look in his eyes hurt her like a physical blow.

"Oh, my dear . . . my dear!" she cried, trembling towards him. "Don't look like that . . . Ah! don't look like that!"

And her hands went fluttering out in the mother-yearning that every woman feels for her man in trouble.

"Forgive me, Nan . . . I'm sorry."

She hardly recognised the low, toneless voice.

Her eyes were shining. "Sorry for loving me?" she said.

"No—not for loving you. God knows, I can't help that! But because I would have taken you and made you mine . . . you who are not mine at all."

"I'm all yours, really, Peter."

She came a few steps nearer to him, standing sweet and unafraid before him, her grave eyes shining with a kind of radiance.

"Dear," she went on simply, throwing out her hands in a little defenceless gesture, "if you want me, I'll come to you. . . . Not—not secretly . . . while I'm still pledged to Roger. But openly, before all the world. I'll go with you . . . if you'll take me."

She stood very still, waiting for his answer. Right or wrong, in that moment of utter sacrifice of self, she had risen to the best that was in her. She was willing to lay all on love's altar—body, soul, and spirit, and that honour of the Davenants which she had been so schooled to keep untarnished. Her pledge to Roger, her uncle's faith in her—all these must be tossed into the fire to make her gift complete. But the agony in Peter's face when the mask had fallen from it had temporarily destroyed for her all values except the value of love.

Peter took the fluttering, outstretched fingers and laid his lips against them. Then he relinquished them slowly, lingeringly. Passion had died out of his face. His eyes held only a grave tenderness, and the sternly sweet expression of his mouth recalled to Nan the man as she had first known him, before love, terrible and beautiful, had come into their lives to destroy them.

"I should never take you, dear," he said at last. "A man doesn't hurt the thing he loves—not in his right senses. What he'll do when the madness is on him—only his own soul knows."

She caught his arm impetuously.

"Peter, let me come! I'm not afraid of being hurt—not if we're together. It's only the hurt of being without you that I can't bear. . . . Oh, I know what you're thinking"—as she read the negation in his face—"that I should regret it, that I should mind what people said. Dear, if I can give you happiness, things like that simply wouldn't count. . . . Ah, believe me, Peter!"

He looked down at her with the tenderness one accords a child, ignorantly pleading to have its way. He knew Nan's temperament—knew that, in spite of all her courage, when the moment of exaltation had passed not even love itself could make up for the bitterness of its price, if bought at such a cost. He pictured her exposed to the slights of those whose position was still unassailable, waiting drearily at Continental watering-places till the decree absolute should be pronounced, and finally, restored to respectability in so far as marriage with him could make it possible, but always liable to be unpleasantly reminded, as she went through life, that there had been a time when she had outraged convention. It was unthinkable! It would break her utterly.

"Even if that were all, it still wouldn't be possible," he said gently. "You don't know what you would have to face. And I couldn't let you face it. But it isn't all. . . . There's honour, dear, and duty. . . ."

Her gaze met his in dreary interrogation.

"Then—then, you'll go away?" Her voice faltered, broke.

"Yes, I shall go away . . . out of your life."

He fell silent a moment. Then, with an effort, he went on:

"This is good-bye. We mustn't see each other again—"

"No, no," she broke in a little wildly. "Don't go, Peter, I can't bear it." She clung to him, repeating piteously: "Don't go . . . don't go!"

He stooped and pressed his lips to her hair, holding her in his arms.

"My dear!" he murmured. "My very dear!"

And so they remained for a little space.

Presently she lifted her face, white and strained, to his.

"Must you go, Peter?"

"Heart's beloved, there is no other way. We may not love . . . and we can't be together and not love. . . . So I must go."

She lay very still in his arms for a moment. Then he felt a long, shuddering sigh run through her body.

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes. . . . Peter, go very quickly. . . ."

He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth—not passionately, but with the ineffably sad calmness of farewell.

"God keep you, dear," he said.

The door closed behind him, shutting him from her sight, and she stood for a few moments staring dazedly at its wooden panels. Then, with a sudden desperate impulse, she tore it open again and peered out.

But there was only silence—silence and emptiness. He had gone.



CHAPTER XXVII

THE DARK ANGEL

The following morning Ralph and Penelope breakfasted alone, the latter having given orders that Nan was on no account to be disturbed. It was rather a dreary meal. They were each oppressed by the knowledge which last night had revealed to them—the knowledge of the tragedy of love into which their two friends had been thrust by circumstances.

On their return from the concert at the Albert Hall they had encountered Mallory in the vestibule of the Mansions, and the naked misery stamped upon his face had arrested them at once.

"Peter, what is it?"

The question had sped involuntarily from Penelope's lips as she met his blank, unseeing gaze. The sound of her voice seemed to bring him back to recognition.

"Go to Nan!" he said in queer, clipped tones. "She'll need you. Go at once!"

And from a Nan whose high courage had at last bent beneath the storm, leaving her spent and unresisting, Penelope had learned the whole unhappy truth.

Since breakfast the Fentons had been dejectedly discussing the matter together.

"Why doesn't she break off this miserable engagement with Trenby?" asked Ralph moodily.

"She won't. I think she would have done if—if—for Peter's sake. But not otherwise. She's got some sort of fixed notion that it wouldn't be playing fair." Penelope paused, then added wretchedly: "I feel as if our happiness had been bought at her expense!"

"Ours?" Completely mystified, Ralph looked across at her inquiringly.

"Yes, ours." And she proceeded to fill in the gaps, explaining how, when she had refused to marry him, down at Mallow the previous summer, it was Nan who had brought about his recall from London.

"I asked her if she intended to marry Roger, anyway—whether it affected my marriage or not," she said. "And she told me that she should marry him 'in any case.' But now, I believe it was just a splendid lie to make me happy."

"It's done that, hasn't it?" asked Ralph, smiling a little.

Penelope's eyes shone softly.

"You know," she answered. "But—Nan has paid for it."

The telephone hell buzzed suddenly into the middle of the conversation and Penelope flew to answer it. When she came back her face held a look of mingled apprehension and relief.

"Who rang up?" asked Ralph.

"It was Kitty. She's back in town. I've told her Nan is here, and she's coming round at once. She said she'd got some bad news for her, but I think it'll have to be kept from her. She isn't fit to stand anything more just now."

Ralph pulled out his watch.

"I'm afraid I can't stay to see Kitty," he said. "I've that oratorio rehearsal fixed for half-past ten."

"Then, my dear, you'd better get off at once," answered Penelope with her usual common sense. "You can't do any good here, and it's quite certain you'll upset things there if you're late."

So that when Kitty arrived, a few minutes later, it was Penelope alone who received her. She was looking very blooming after her sojourn in the south of France.

"I've left Barry behind at Cannes," she announced. "The little green tables have such a violent attraction for him, and he's just evolved a new and infallible system which he wants to try. Funnily enough, I had a craving for home. I can't think why—just in the middle of the season there! But I'm glad, now, that I came." Her small, piquant face shadowed suddenly. "I've bad news," she began abruptly, after a pause. Penelope checked her.

"Hear mine first," she said quickly. And launched into an account of the happenings of the last three days—Nan's quarrel with Roger, her sudden rush up to town and unexpected meeting with Peter at Maryon's studio, and finally the distraught condition in which she had discovered her last night after Peter had gone.

"Oh, Penny! How dreadful! How dreadful it all is!" exclaimed Kitty pitifully, when the other had finished. "I knew that Peter cared a long time ago. But not Nan! . . . Though I remember once, at Mallow, wondering the tiniest bit if she were losing her heart to him."

"Well, she's done it. If you'd seen them last night, after they'd parted, you'd have had no doubts. They were both absolutely broken up."

Kitty moved restlessly.

"And I suppose it's really my fault," she said unhappily. "I brought them together in the first instance. Penny, I was a fool. But I was so afraid—so afraid of Nan with Maryon. He might have made her do anything! He could have twisted her round his little finger at the time if he'd wanted to. Thank goodness he'd the decency not to try—that."

Penelope regarded her with an odd expression.

"Maryon's still in love with Nan," she observed quietly, "I saw that at the studio."

Kitty laughed a trifle harshly.

"Nan must be 'Maryon-proof' now, anyway," she asserted.

Penelope remained silent, her eyes brooding and reflective. That odd, magician's charm which Rooke so indubitably possessed might prove difficult for any woman to resist—doubly difficult for a woman whose entire happiness in life had fallen in ruins.

The entrance of the maid with a telegram gave her the chance to evade answering. She tore open the envelope and perused the wire with a puzzled frown on her face. Then she read it aloud for Kitty's benefit, still with the same rather bewildered expression.

"Is Nan with you? Reply Trenby, Century Club, Exeter."

"I don't understand it," she said doubtfully.

"I do!"

She and Kitty both looked up at the sound of the mocking, contemptuous voice, Nan was standing, fully dressed, on the threshold of the room.

"Nan!" Penelope almost gasped. "I thought you were still asleep!"

Nan glanced at her curiously.

"I've not been asleep—all night," she said evenly. "I asked your maid for a cup of tea some time ago. How d'you do, Kitty?"

She kissed the latter perfunctorily, her thoughts evidently preoccupied. She was very pale and heavy violet shadows lay beneath her eyes. To Penelope it seemed as though she had become immensely frailer and more fragile-looking in the passage of a single night. Refraining from comment, however, she held out the telegram.

"What does it mean, Nan?" she asked. "I thought you said you'd left a note telling Roger you were coming here?"

Nan read the wire in silence. Her face turned a shade whiter than before, if that were possible, and there was a smouldering anger in her eyes as she crushed the flimsy sheet in suddenly tense fingers and tossed it into the fire.

"No answer," she said shortly. As soon as the maid had left the room, she burst out furiously:

"How dare he? How dare he think such a thing?"

"What's the matter?" asked Penelope in a perturbed voice.

Nan turned to her passionately.

"Don't you see what he means? Don't you see? . . . It's because I didn't write to him yesterday from here. He doesn't believe the note I left behind—he doesn't believe I'm with you!"

"But, my dear, where else should you be?" protested Penelope. "And why shouldn't he believe it?"

Nan shrugged her shoulders.

"I told you we'd had a row. It—it was rather a big one. He probably thinks I've run away and married—oh, well"—she laughed mirthlessly—"anyone!"

"Nan!"

"That's what's happened"—nodding. "It was really . . . quite a big row." She paused, then continued, indignantly:

"As if I'd have tried to deceive him over it—writing that I was going to you when I wasn't! Roger's a fool! He ought to have known me better. I've never yet been coward enough to lie about anything I wanted to do."

"But, my dear"—Penelope was openly distressed—"we must send him a wire at once. I'd no idea you'd quarrelled—like that! He'll be out of his mind with anxiety."

"He deserves to be"—in a hard voice—"for distrusting me. No, Penny"—as Penelope drew a form towards her preparatory to inditing a reassuring telegram. "I won't have a wire sent to him. D'you hear? I won't have it!" Her foot beat excitedly on the floor.

Penelope signed and laid the telegraph form reluctantly aside.

"You agree with me, Kitten?" Nan whirled round upon Kitty for support.

"I'm not quite sure," came the answer. "You see, I've been away so long I really hardly know how things stand between you and Roger."

"They stand exactly as they were. I've promised to marry him in April. And I'm going to keep my promise."

"Not in April," said Kitty very quietly. "You won't be able to marry him so soon. Nan, dear, I've—I've bad news for you." She hesitated and Nan broke in hastily:

"Bad news? What—who is it? Not—not Uncle David?" Her voice rose a little shrilly.

Kitty nodded, her face very sorrowful. And now Nan noticed that she had evidently been crying before she came to the flat.

"Yes. He died this morning—in his sleep. They sent round to let me know. He had told his man to do this if—whenever it happened. He didn't want you to have the shock of receiving a wire."

"I don't think it would have been a shock," said Nan at last, quietly. "I think I knew it wouldn't be very long before—before he went away. I've known . . . since Christmas."

Her thoughts went back to that evening when she and St. John had sat talking together by the firelight in the West Parlour. Yes, she had known—ever since then—that the Dark Angel was drawing near. And now, now that she realised her old friend had stepped painlessly and peacefully across the border-line which divides this world we know from that other world whose ways are hidden from our sight, it came upon her less as a shock than as the inevitable ending of a long suspense.

"I wish—I wish I'd seen him just once more," she said wistfully. "To—to say good-bye."

Kitty searched the depths of her bag and withdrew a sealed envelope.

"I think he must have known that," she said gently. "He left this to be given to you."

She gave the letter into the girl's hands and, signing to Penelope to follow her, quitted the room, leaving Nan alone with her dead.

In the silence of the empty room Nan read the last words, of her beloved Uncle David that would ever reach her.

"I think this is good-bye, Nan," he had written. "But don't grieve overmuch, my dear. If you knew how long a road to travel it has seemed since Annabel went away, you would be glad for me. Will you try to be? Always remember that the road was brightened by many flowers along the wayside—and one of those flowers has been our good friendship, yours and mine. We've been comrades, Nan, which is a far better thing than most relatives achieve. And if sometimes you feel sad and miss the old friendship—as I know you will—just remember that I'm only in the next room. People are apt to make a great to-do about death. But, after all, it's merely stepping from one of God's rooms into the next.

"I don't want to talk much about money matters, but I must just say this—that all I have will be yours, just as all my heart was yours.

"I hope life will be kind to you, my dear—kinder than you hope or expect."

There were many who would find the world the poorer for lack of the kindly, gallant spirit which had passed into "God's next room," but to Nan the old man's death meant not only the loss of a beloved friend, but the withdrawal from her life of a strong, restraining influence which, unconsciously to herself, had withheld her from many a rash action into which her temperament would otherwise have hurried her.

It seemed a very climax of the perversity of fate that now, at the very moment when the pain and bitterness of things were threatening to submerge her, Death's relentless fingers should snatch away the one man on earth who, with his wise insight and hoarded experience of life, might have found a way to bring peace and healing to her troubled soul.

She spent the rest of the day quietly in her room, and when she reappeared at dinner she was perfectly composed, although her eyes still bore traces of recent tears. Against the black of the simple frock she wore, her face and throat showed pale and clear like some delicate piece of sculpture.

Penelope greeted her with kindly reproach.

"You hardly touched the lunch I sent up for you," she said.

Nan, shook her head, smiling faintly.

"I've been saying good-bye to Uncle David," she answered quietly. "I didn't want anything to eat."

Kitty, who had remained at the flat, regarded her with some concern. The girl had altered immensely since she had last seen her before going abroad. Her face had worn rather fine and bore an indefinable look of strain. Kitty sighed, then spoke briefly.

"Well, you'll certainly eat some dinner," she announced with firmness. "And, Ralph, you'd better unearth a bottle of champagne from somewhere. She wants something to pick her up a bit."

Under Kitty's kindly, lynx-eyed gaze Nan dared not refuse to eat and drink what was put before her, and she was surprised, when dinner was over, to find how much better she felt in consequence. Prosaic though it may appear, the fact remains that the strain and anguish of parting, even from those we love best on earth, can be mitigated by such material things as food and drink. Or is it that these only strengthen the body to sustain the tortured soul within it?

After dinner Ralph deserted to his club, and the three women drew round the fire, talking desultorily, as women will, and avoiding as though by common consent matters that touched them too nearly. Presently the maid, came noiselessly into the firelit room.

"A gentleman has called to see Miss Davenant," she said, addressing her mistress.

Nan's heart missed a beat. It was Peter—she was sure of it—Peter, who had come back to her! In the long watches of the night he had found out that they could not part . . . not like this . . . never to see each other any more! It was madness. And he had come to tell her so. The agony of the interminable night had been his as well as hers.

"Did he give any name?" Her violet eyes were almost black with excitement.

"No, miss. He is in the sitting-room."

Slowly Nan made her way across the hall, one hand pressed against her breast to still the painful throbbing of her heart. Outside the room she hesitated a moment; then, with a quick indrawing of her breath, she opened the door and went in.

"Roger!"

She shrank back and stood gazing at him dumbly, silent with the shock of sudden and undreamed-of disappointment. She had been so sure, so sure that it was Peter! And yet, jerked suddenly back to the reality of things, she almost smiled at her own certainty. Peter was too strong a man to renounce and then retract his renunciation twenty-four hours later.

Trenby, who had been standing staring into the fire, turned at the sound of her entrance. He looked dog-tired, and his eyes were sunken as though sleep had not visited them recently. At the sight of her a momentary expression of what seemed to be unutterable relief flashed across his face, then vanished, leaving him with bent brows and his under-jaw thrust out a little.

"Roger!" repeated Nan in astonishment.

"Yes," he replied gruffly. "Are you surprised to see me?"

"Certainly I am. Why have you come? Why have you followed me here?"

"I've come to take you back," he said arrogantly.

Her spirit rose in instant revolt.

"You might have saved yourself the trouble," she flashed back angrily. "I'm not coming. I'll return when I've finished my visit to Penelope."

"You'll come back with me now—to-night," he replied doggedly. "We can catch the night mail and I've a car waiting below."

"Then it can wait! Good heavens, Roger! D'you think I'll submit to be made a perfect fool of—fetched back like a child?"

He took a step towards her.

"And do you think that I'll submit to be made a fool of?" he asked in a voice of intense anger. "To be made a fool of by your rushing away from my house in my absence—to have the servants gossiping—not to know what has become of you—"

"I left a note for you," she interrupted. "And you didn't believe what I told you in it."

"No," he acknowledged. "I didn't. I was afraid . . . Good God, Nan!" he broke out with sudden passion. "Haven't you any idea of what I've been through this last forty-eight hours? . . . It's been hell!"

She looked at him as though amazed.

"I don't understand," she said impatiently. "Please explain."

"Explain? Can't you understand?" His face darkened. "You said you couldn't marry me—you asked me to release you! And then—after that!—I come home to find you gone—gone with no word of explanation, and the whole household buzzing with the story that you've run away! I waited for a letter from you, and none came. Then I wired—to safeguard you I wired from Exeter. No answer! What was I to think? . . . What could I think but that you'd gone? Gone to some other man!"

"Do you suppose if I'd left you for someone else I should have been afraid to tell you? That I should have written an idiotic note like that? . . . How dared you wire to Penelope? It was abominable of you!"

"Why didn't she reply? I thought they must be away—"

"That clinched matters in your mind, I suppose?" she said contemptuously. "But it's quite simple. Penelope didn't wire because I wouldn't let her."

He was silent. It was quite true that since Nan's disappearance from Trenby Hall he had been through untold agony of mind. The possibility that she might have left him altogether in a wild fit of temper had not seemed to him at all outside the bounds of probability. And it was equally true that when another day had elapsed without bringing further news of her, he had become a prey to the increasing atmosphere of suspicion which, thanks to the gossip that always gathers in the servants' hall, had even spread to the village.

Nor had either his mother or cousin made the least attempt to stem his rising anger. Far from it. Lady Gertrude had expressed her opinion with a conciseness that was entirely characteristic.

"You made an unwise choice, my son. Nan has no sense of her future position as your wife."

Isobel had been less blunt in her methods, but a corrosive acid had underlain her gentle speech.

"I can't understand it, Roger. She—she was fond of you, wasn't she? Oh"—with a quick gesture of her small brown hands—"she must have been!"

"I don't know so much about the 'must have been,'" Roger had admitted ruefully. "She cared—once—for someone else."

"Who was it?"

Isobel's question shot out as swiftly as the tongue of an adder.

"I can't tell you," he answered reluctantly. He wished to God he could! That other unknown man of whom, from the very beginning, he had been unconsciously afraid! He was actively, consciously jealous of him now.

Then Isobel's subdued, shocked tones recalled him from his thoughts.

"Oh, Roger, Nan couldn't—she would never have run away to be—with him?"

She had given words to the very fear which had been lurking at the back of his mind from the moment he had read the briefly-worded note which Nan had left for him.

Throughout the night this belief had grown and deepened within him, and with the dawn he had motored across country to Exeter, driving like a madman, heedless of speed limits. There he had dispatched a telegram to Penelope, and having waited unavailingly for a reply he had come straight on to town by rail. The mark of those long hours of sickening apprehension was heavily imprinted on the white, set face he turned to Nan when she informed him that it was she who had stopped Penelope from sending any answer.

"And I suppose," he said slowly, "it merely struck you as . . . amusing . . . to let me think what I thought?"

"You had no right to think such a thing," she retorted. "I may be anything bad that your mother believes me, but at least I play fair! I left Trenby to stay with Penelope, exactly as I told you in my note. If—if I proposed to break my promise to you, I wouldn't do it on the sly—meanly, like that." Her eyes looked steadily into his. "I'd tell you first."

He snatched her into his arms with a sudden roughness, kissing her passionately.

"You'd drive a man to madness!" he exclaimed thickly. "But I shan't let you escape a second time," he went on with a quiet intensity of purpose. "You'll come back with me now—to-night—to Trenby."

She made a quick gesture of negation.

"No, no, I can't—I couldn't come now!"

His grip of her tightened.

"Now!" he repeated in a voice of steel. "And I'll marry you by special licence within a week. I'll not risk losing you again."

Nan shuddered in his arms. To go straight from that last farewell with Peter into marriage with a man she did not love—it was unthinkable! She shrank from it in every fibre of her being. Some day, perhaps, she could steel herself to make the terrible surrender. But not now, not yet!

"No! No!" she cried strickenly. "I can't marry you! Not so soon! You must give me time—wait a little! Kitty—"

She struggled to break from him, but he held her fast.

"We needn't wait for Kitty to come back," he said.

"No." The door had opened immediately before he spoke and Kitty herself came quickly into the room. "No," she answered him. "You needn't wait for me to come back. I returned yesterday."

"Kitty!"

With a cry like some tortured captive thing Nan wrenched herself free and fled to Kitty's side.

"Kitty! Tell him—tell him I can't marry him now! Not yet—oh, I can't!"

Kitty patted her arm reassuringly.

"Don't worry," she answered. Then she turned to Roger.

"Your wedding will have to be postponed, Roger," she said Quietly. "Nan's uncle died early this morning."

She watched the tense anger and suspicion die swiftly out of his eyes. The death of a relative, necessarily postponing Nan's marriage, appealed to that curious conventional strain in him, inherited from Lady Gertrude.

"Lord St. John dead?" he repeated. "Nan, why didn't you tell me? I should have understood if I'd known that. I wouldn't have worried you." He was full of shocked contrition and remorse.

Kitty felt she had been disingenuous. But she had sheltered Nan from the cave-man that dwelt in Roger—oddly at variance with the streak of conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up. And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had always sought to serve her.

"I want Nan to come and stay with me for a time," pursued Kitty steadily, on the principle of striking while the iron is hot. "Later on I'll bring her down to Mallow, and later still we can talk about the wedding. You'll have to wait some months, Roger."

He assented, and Nan, realising that it was his mother in him, for the moment uppermost, making these concessions to convention, felt conscious of a wild hysterical desire to burst out laughing. She made a desperate effort to control herself.

The room seemed to be growing very dark. Far away in the sky—no, it must be the ceiling—she could see the electric lights burning ever more and more dimly as the waves of darkness surged round her, rising higher and higher.

"But there's honour, dear, and duty. . . ." Peter's words floated up to her on the shadowy billows which swayed towards her.

"Honour! Duty!"

There was a curious singing in her head. It sounded like the throb of a myriad engines, rhythmically repeating again and again:

"Honour! Duty! Honour! Duty!"

The words grew fainter, vaguer, trailing off into a regular pulsation that beat against her ears.

"Honour!" She thought she said it very loudly.

But all that Kitty and Roger heard was a little moan as Nan slipped to the ground in a dead faint.



CHAPTER XXVIII

GOOD-BYE!

A chesterfield couch had been pulled well into the bay window of one of Kitty's big rooms so that Nan, from the nest of cushions amid which she lay, could see all that was passing in the street below. The warm May sunshine poured into the room, revealing with painful clarity the changes which the last three months had wrought in her. Never at any time robust in appearance, she seemed the slenderest, frailest thing as she lay there, the delicate angles of her face sharpened by fever and weakness, her cheeks so hollowed that the violet-blue eyes looked almost amazingly big and wide-open in her small face.

Kitty was sitting near her, a half-knitted jumper lying across her knees, the inevitable cigarette in her hand, while Barry, who had returned from Cannes some weeks ago—entirely unperturbed at finding his new system a complete "wash-out"—leaned, big and debonair, against the window.

"When are we going to Mallow?" asked Nan fretfully. "I'm so tired of staring at those houses across the way."

Barry turned his head and regarded the houses opposite reflectively.

"They're not inspiring, I admit," he answered, "even though many of them are the London habitations of belted earls and marquises."

"We'll go to Mallow as soon as you like," interposed Kitty. "I think you're quite fit to stand the journey now."

"Fit? Of course I'm fit. Only"—Nan's face clouded—"it will mean your leaving town just when the season's in full swing. I shan't like dragging you away."

"Season?" scoffed Kitty. "Season be blowed! The only thing that matters is whether you're strong enough to travel."

She regarded Nan affectionately. The latter had no idea how dangerously ill she had been. She remembered Roger's visit to the flat perfectly clearly. But everything which followed had been more or less a blank, with blurred intervals of doubtful clarity, until one day she found herself lying in a bed with Kitty standing at its foot and Peter sitting beside it. She recollected quite well observing:

"Why, Peter, you've got some grey hairs! I never noticed them before."

Peter had laughed and made some silly reply about old age creeping on, and presently it seemed to her that Kitty, crying blindly, had led him out of the room while she herself was taken charge of by a cheerful, smiling person in a starched frock, whose pretty, curling hair insisted on escaping from beneath the white cap which coifed it.

Unknown to Nan, those were the first rational words she had spoken since the night on which she had fainted, after refusing to return to Trenby Hall with Roger. Moved by some inexplicable premonition of impending illness, Kitty had insisted on driving her, carefully pillowed and swaddled in rugs, to her house in Green Street that same evening.

"If she's going to be ill," she remarked practically, "it will be much easier to nurse her at my place than at the flat."

Results had justified her. During the attack of brain fever which followed, it had required all the skill of doctors and nurses to hold Nan back from the gates of death. The fever burnt up her strength like a fire, and at first it had seemed as though nothing could check the delirium. All the strain and misery of the last few months poured itself out in terrified imaginings. Wildly she besought those who watched beside her to keep Roger away from her, and when the fear of Roger was not present, the whole burden of her speech had been a pitiful, incessant crying out for Peter—Peter!

Nothing would soothe her, and at last, in desperation, Kitty had gone to Mallory and begged him to come. His first impulse had been to refuse, not realising the danger of Nan's illness. Then, when it was made clear to him that her sole chance of life lay in his hands, he had stifled his own feelings and consented at once.

But when he came Nan did not even recognise him. Instead, she gazed at him with dry, feverishly brilliant eyes and plucked at his coat-sleeve with restless fingers.

"Oh, you look kind!" she had exclaimed piteously. "Will you bring Peter back to me? Nobody here"—she indicated Kitty and one of the nurses standing a little apart—"nobody here will let him come to me. . . . I'm sure he'd come if he knew how much I wanted him!"

Mallory had been rather wonderful with her.

"I'm sure he would," he said gently, though his heart was wrung at the sight of her flushed face and bright, unrecognising eyes. "Now will you try to rest a little before I fetch him? See, I'll put my arm round you—so, and if you'll go to sleep I'll send for him. He'll be here when you wake."

He had gathered her into his arms as he spoke, and his very touch seemed to soothe and quiet her.

"You're . . . rather like . . . Peter," she said, staring at him with a troubled frown on her face.

Holding that burningly bright gaze with his own steady one, he answered quietly:

"I am Peter. They said you wanted me, so of course I came. You knew I would."

"Peter? Peter?" she whispered. Then, shaking her head: "No. You can't be Peter. He's dead, I think. . . . I know he went away somewhere—right away from me."

Mallory's arms closed firmly round her and she yielded passively to his embrace. Perhaps behind the distraught and weary mind which could not recognise him, the soul that loved him felt his presence and was vaguely comforted. She lay very still for some time, and presently one of the nurses, leaning over her, signed to Peter that she was asleep.

"Don't move," she urged in a low voice. "This sleep may be the saving of her."

So, hour after hour, Peter had knelt there, hardly daring to change his position in the slightest, with Nan's head lying against his shoulder, and her hand in his. Now and again one of the nurses fed him with milk and brandy, and after a time the intolerable torture of his cramped arms and legs dulled into a deadly numbness.

Once, watching from the foot of the bed, Kitty asked him softly:

"Can you stand it, Peter?"

He looked up at her and smiled.

"Of course," he answered, as though there were no question in the matter.

It was only when the early dawn was peering in at the window that at last Nan stirred in his arms and opened her eyes—eyes which held once more the blessed light of reason. Then in a voice hardly audible for weakness, but from which the wild, delirious note had gone, she had spoken.

"Why, Peter, you've got some grey hairs!"

And Peter, forcing a smile to his drawn lips, had answered with his joking remark about old age creeping on. Then, letting the nurse take her from his arms, he had toppled over on to the floor, lying prone while the second nurse rubbed his limbs and the agony of returning life coursed like a blazing fire through his veins. Afterwards, with the tears running down her face, Kitty had helped him out of the room.

Nan's recovery had been slow, and Peter had been compelled to abandon his intention to see no more of her. She seemed restless and uneasy if he failed to visit her at least once a day, and throughout those long weeks of convalescence he had learned anew the same self-sacrifice and chivalry of spirit which had carried him forward to the utter renunciation he had made that summer night in King Arthur's Castle.

There was little enough in the fragile figure, lying day after day on a couch, to rouse a man's passion. Rather, Nan's utter weakness called forth all the solicitude and ineffable tenderness of which Peter was capable—such tenderness—almost maternal in its selfless, protective quality, as is only found in a strong man—never in a weak one.

At last, with the May warmth and sunshine, she had begun to pick up strength, and now she was actually on the high road to recovery and demanding for the third or fourth time when they might go to Mallow.

Inwardly she was conscious of an intense craving for the sea, with its salt, invigorating breath, for the towering cliffs of the Cornish coast, and the wide expanse of downland that stretched away to landward till it met and mingled with the tender blue of the sky.

"Strong enough to stand the journey?" she exclaimed in answer to Kitty's remark. "I should think I am strong enough! I was outdoors for a couple of hours this morning, and I don't feel the least bit tired. I'm only lying here"—indicating the Chesterfield with a humorous little smile that faintly recalled the Nan of former days—"because I find it so extremely comfortable."

"That may be a slight exaggeration," returned Kitty. "Still, I think you could travel now. And your coming down to Mallow will rather ease things."

"Ease things? What things?"

"Your meeting with Lady Gertrude, for one. You may have forgotten—though you can be sure she hasn't!—that you left Trenby Hall rather unceremoniously! And then your illness immediately afterwards prevented your making your peace with her."

Nan's face changed. The light seemed to die out of her eyes.

"I'd almost forgotten Lady Gertrude," she said painfully.

"I don't think you'll find it difficult to meet her again," replied Kitty. "Roger stopped in town all through the time you were really dangerously ill—"

"Did he?" interrupted Nan. "That was—rather nice of him, considering how I'd treated him."

"Do you still mean to marry the fellow?" asked Barry, bluntly.

"Yes." The monosyllable fell slowly but quite convincingly. "Why hasn't he been to see me lately?" she added after a moment.

"Because I asked him not to," answered Kitty. "He stayed in London till you were out of danger. After that I bustled him off home, and told him I should only bring you down to Mallow if he could induce Lady Gertrude to behave decently to you."

"You seem to have ordered him about pretty considerably," remarked Nan with a faint smile.

"Oh, he was quite meek with me," returned Kitty. "He had to be. I told him his only chance was to keep away from you, to manage Lady Gertrude properly, and not to worry you with letters."

"So that's why he hasn't written? I've wondered, sometimes."

Nan was silent for a time. Then she said quietly:

"You're a good pal, Kitten."

Followed a still longer pause. At last Kitty broke it reluctantly:

"I've something else to tell you."

Nan glanced up quickly, detecting some special significance in her tones.

"What is it?" she asked.

Kitty made a gesture to her husband that he should leave them alone. When he had gone:

"It's about Peter," she said, then paused unhappily.

"Yes. Go on. Peter and I are only friends now. We've—we've worked up quite a presentable sort of friendship since my illness, you know. What is there to tell me?"

"You know that Celia, his wife, has been out in India for some years. Well—"

Nan's frail body stiffened suddenly.

"She's coming home?" she said swiftly.

Kitty nodded.

"Yes. She's been very ill with sunstroke. And she's ordered home as soon as she is able to travel."

Nan made no answer for a moment. Then she said almost under her breath:

"Poor Peter!"

It was late in the afternoon when Peter came to pay his usual daily visit. Kitty brought him into the room and vanished hastily, leaving the two alone together.

"You know?" he said quietly.

Nan bent her head.

"Yes, I know," she answered. "Oh, Peter, I'm so sorry!" Adding, after a pause: "Must you have her with you?"

"I must, dear."

"You'd be happier alone."

"Less unhappy, perhaps." He corrected her gently. "But one can't always consider one's own personal wishes. I've a responsibility towards Celia. She's my wife. And though she's been foolish and treated life rather as though it were a game of battledore and shuttlecock, she's never done anything to unfit herself to be my wife. Even if she had—well, I still shouldn't consider I was absolved from my responsibility towards her. Marriage is 'for better, for worse,' and I can't be coward enough to shirk if it turns out 'for worse.' If I did, anything might happen—anything! Celia's a woman of no will-power—driven like a bit of fluff by every breeze that blows. So you see, beloved, I must be waiting to help her when she comes back."

Nan lifted her eyes to his face.

"I see that you're just the best and bravest man I know—preux chevalier, as I once called you. . . . Oh, Peter! She's the luckiest woman in the world to be your wife! And she doesn't even know it!"

He drew her hands into his.

"Not really lucky to be my wife, Nan," he said quietly, "because I can give her so little. Everything that matters—my love, my utter faith, all my heart and soul—are yours, now and for ever."

Her hands quivered in his clasp. She dared not trust herself to speak, lest she should give way and by her own weakness try his strength too hard.

"Good-bye, dear," he said with infinite tenderness. Then, with a ghost of the old whimsical smile that reminded her sharply, cruelly, of the Peter of happier days: "We seem always to be saying good-bye, don't we? And then Fate steps in and brings us together again. But this time it is really good-bye—good-bye for always. When we meet again—if we do—I shall have Celia to care for, and you will be Roger's wife."

He stooped his head and pressed his lips against first one soft palm and then the other. She heard him cross the room and the door close behind him. With a little cry she covered her face with her hands, crushing the palms where his kiss had lain against her shaking lips.



CHAPTER XXIX

ON THIN ICE

May had slipped away into the ranks of the dead months, and June—a June resplendent with sunshine and roses—had taken her place.

Nan, an open letter in her hand, sat perched on the low wall of the quadrangular court at Mallow, delicately sniffing the delicious salt tang which wafted up from the expanse of blue sea that stretched in front of her. Physically she felt a different being from the girl who had lain on a couch in London and grumbled fretfully at the houses opposite. A month at Mallow had practically restored her health. The good Cornish cream and butter had done much towards rounding the sharpened contours of her face, and to all outward appearance she was the same Nan who had stayed at Mallow almost a year ago.

But within herself she knew that a great gulf lay fixed between those insouciant, long-ago days and this golden, scented morning. The world had not altered. June was still vivid and sweet with the rapture of summer. It was she herself who had changed.

Looking backward, she almost wondered how she had endured the agony of love and suffering and sacrifice which had been compressed into a single year. She wished sometimes that they had let her die when she was so ill—let her slip easily out of the world while the delirium of fever still closed the door on conscious knowledge of all that she had lost. It seemed foolish to make so much effort to hold on to life when everything which had made it lovely and pleasant and desirable had gone out of it. Yet there were still moments, as to-day, when the sheer beauty of the earth so thrilled her that for the time being life was a thousand times worth living.

And behind it all—back of the tears and suffering which seemed so cruelly incomprehensible—there lay always the inscrutable and splendid purposes of God, and the Ultimate Light beyond. Lord St. John had taught her that. It had been his own courageous, unshakable belief. But now he had gone from her she found her faith faltering. It was too difficult—well-nigh impossible—to hold fast to the big uplift of such thought and faith as had been his.

Her marriage loomed ahead in the near future, and in spite of her dogged intention to fulfil her bargain, she dreaded unspeakably the actual day which would make her Roger's wife—compelling her to a physical and spiritual bondage from which she shrank with loathing.

But there could be no escape. None. Throughout her illness, and since then, while she had groped her way slowly back to health here at Mallow, Roger had been thoughtful and considerate to an astonishing degree. Never once, during all the hours they had passed together, had he let that strong passion of his break loose, though once or twice she thought she had heard it leap against the bars which prisoned it—the hot, imperious desire to which one day she must submit unmurmuringly.

Drilled by Kitty, he had been very undemanding up till now. Often he had left her with only a kindly pressure of the hand or a light kiss on her forehead, and she had been grateful to him. Grateful, too, that she had been spared a disagreeable scene with his mother. Lady Gertrude had met her without censure, even with a certain limited cordiality, and accordingly Nan, whose conscience was over-sensitive just now, had reproached herself the more severely for her treatment of her future mother-in-law.

Perhaps she would have felt rather less self-reproachful if she had known the long hours of persuasion and argument by which Roger had at last prevailed upon his mother to refrain from pouring out the vials of her wrath on Nan's devoted head. Only fear lest she might alienate the girl so completely that Roger would lose the wife he wanted had induced her to yield. She had consented at last, but with a mental reservation that when Nan was actually Roger's wife she would tell her precisely what she thought of her whenever occasion offered. Nothing would persuade her to overlook such flagrant faults in any daughter-in-law of hers!

Latterly, however, she had been considerably mollified by the Seymours' tactful agreement to her cherished scheme that Nan's marriage should take place from Mallow Court. Actually, Kitty had consented because she considered that the longer Nan could lead an untrammelled life at Mallow, prior to her marriage, the better, and thanks to her skilful management the date was now fixed for the latter end of July.

Roger had chafed at the delay, but Kitty had been extremely firm on the point, assuring him that she required as long as possible to recuperate from her recent illness. In her own mind she felt that, since Nan must inevitably go through with the marriage, every day's grace she could procure for her would help to restore her poise and strengthen nerves which had already been tried to the uttermost.

Between them, Barry and Kitty and the two Fentons—who had joined the Mallow party for a short holiday—did their utmost to make the time that must still elapse before the wedding a little space of restfulness and peace, shielding Nan from every possible worry and annoyance. Even the question of trousseau was swept aside by Kitty of the high hand.

"Leave it to me. I'll see to it all," she proclaimed. "Good gracious, there's a post in the country, isn't there? Patterns can be sent and everything got under way, and finally Madame Veronique shall come down here for the fittings. So that's that!"

But in spite of Kitty's good offices, Nan was beginning to find the thorns in her path. Now that her health was more or less restored, Roger no longer exercised the same self-control. The postponing of the wedding-day to a date six weeks ahead roused him to an impatience he made no effort to conceal.

"But for your uncle's death and Kitty's prolonging your convalescence so absurdly, we should have been married by now," he told her one day with a thwarted note in his voice.

Nan shivered a little.

"Yes," she said. "We should have been married."

"Well"—his keen, grey eyes swept her face—"there'll be no further postponement. I shall marry you if the whole of your family chooses to die at the same moment. Even if you yourself were dying you should be my wife—my wife—first."

Roger's nature seemed to have undergone a curious change—an intensifying of his natural instincts, as it were. Those long hours of apprehension during which he had really believed that Nan had left him, followed by her illness, when death so nearly snatched her from him, had strengthened his desire for possession, rousing his love to fever heat and setting loose within him a corresponding jealousy.

Nan could not understand his attitude towards her in the very least. In the first instance he had yielded with a fairly good grace to Kitty's advice regarding the date of the wedding, but within a few days he had suddenly become restive and dissatisfied. Had Nan known it, an apparently careless remark of Isobel Carson's had sown the seed.

"It's curious that your marriage with Nan still seems to hang on the horizon, Roger," she had remarked reflectively. "It's always 'jam to-morrow,' isn't it? You'd better take care she doesn't give you the slip altogether!"—smilingly.

Very often, since then, he would sit watching Nan with a sullen, brooding look in his eyes, and on occasion he seemed a prey to morose suspicion, when he would question her dictatorially as to what she had been doing since they had last met. At times he was roughly tender with her, abruptly passionate and demanding, and she grew to dread these moods even more than his outbreaks of temper.

It was now more than ever impossible for her to respond, and only yesterday, when he had suddenly caught her in his arms, kissing her fiercely yet feeling her lips lie stiff and unresponsive beneath his own, he had almost flung her from him. Then, gripping her by the arm until the delicate flesh showed red and bruised beneath the pressure, he had said savagely:

"By God, Nan! I'll make you love me—or break you!"

Nan turned back her sleeve and looked at the red weals now darkening into a bruise which his grasp had made on the white skin of her arm. Then she re-read the letter in her hand. It bore yesterday's date and was very brief.

"I'm hoping to get out of town very soon now, and I propose to come down and inspect my new property with a view to re-decorating the house. I could never live with dear godfather's Early Victorian chairs and tables! So you may expect to see me almost any day now on the doorstep of Mallow Court.

"Yours as always.

"MARYON."

Nan's first impulse was to beg him not to come. She had screwed up her courage to fulfil her pledge to marry Roger, and she felt that the presence in the neighbourhood of Maryon—Maryon with his familiar charm and attraction, and his former love for her intensified by losing her—might be a somewhat disturbing factor.

Looking out over the sea, she smiled to think how futile Maryon's charm would be to touch her if she were going to marry Peter Mallory. She would have no wish even to see him. But yesterday's scene with Roger had increased her fear and dread of her coming marriage, and she was conscious of a captive's longing for one more taste of freedom, for one more meeting with the man who had played a big part in the old Bohemian life she had loved so well.

For long she hesitated how to answer Maryon's letter, sitting there on the seaward wall, her chin cupped in her hand. Should she write and ask him to postpone his visit? Or reply just as though she were expecting him? At last her decision was taken. She tore up his letter and, strolling to the edge of the cliff, tossed the pieces into the sea. She would send no answer at all, leaving it to the shuttle of fate to weave the next strand in her life.

And a week later Maryon Rooke came down to take possession of his new domain.

"I can take six clear weeks now," he told Nan. "That's better than my first plan of week-ending down here. I have been working hard since you blew into my studio one good day, and now for six weeks I toil not, neither do I spin. Unless." he added suddenly, "I paint a portrait of you while I'm here!"

Nan glanced at him delightedly.

"I should love it. Only you won't paint my soul, will you, Maryon, as you did Mrs. T. Van Decken's?"

His eyes narrowed a little.

"I don't know, Nan. I think I should rather like to paint it. Your soul would be an intricate piece of work."

"I'm sure it wouldn't make nearly as nice a picture as my face. I think it's rather a plain soul."

"The answer to that is obvious," he replied lightly. "Well, I shall talk to Trenby about the portrait. I suppose permission from headquarters would be advisable?"

Nan made a small grimace.

"Of the first importance, my friend."

Rather to Nan's surprise, Roger quite readily gave permission for Rooke to paint her portrait. In fact, he appeared openly delighted with the idea that her charming face should be permanently transferred to canvas. In his own mind he had promptly decided to buy the portrait when completed and add it to the picture gallery at the Hall, where many a lovely Trenby of bygone generations looked down, smiling or sad, from the walls.

The sittings were begun out of doors in the tranquil seclusion of the rose garden, Rooke motoring across to Mallow almost daily, and Nan posed in a dozen different attitudes while he made sketches of her both in line and colour, none of which, however, satisfied him in the least.

"My dear Nan," he exclaimed one day, as he tore up a rough charcoal sketch in disgust, "you're the worst subject I've ever encountered—-or else my hand has lost its cunning! I can't get you—you—in the very least!"

"Oh, Maryon"—breaking her pose to look across at him with a provoking smile—"can't you find my soul, after all?"

"I don't believe you've got one. Anyway, it's too elusive to pin down on canvas. Even your face seems out of my reach. You won't look as I want you to. Any other time of the day I see just the expression on your face want to catch—the expression"—his voice dropped a shade—"which means Nan to me. But the moment you come out here and pose, it's just a pretty, meaningless mask which isn't you at all."

He surveyed her frowningly.

"After all, it is your soul I want!" he said vehemently.

He took a couple of quick strides across the grass to her side.

"Give it me, Nan—the heart and soul that looks out of your eyes sometimes. This picture will never be sold. It's for me . . . me! Surely"—with a little uneven laugh—"as I've lost the substance, you won't grudge me the shadow?"

A faint colour ran up under her clear skin.

"Oh, I know it was my own fault," he went on. "There was a time, Nan, when I had my chance, wasn't there?"

She hesitated. Then:

"Perhaps there was—once," she acknowledged slowly.

"And I lost it! Well, I've paid for it every day of my life," he said shortly. "And twice a day since your engagement," he added, with one of those odd touches of whimsicality which were liable to cross even his moments of deep feeling, giving a sense of unreality to them—a something insincere.

"To get back to the picture—" suggested Nan.

He laughed.

"We can't get back—seeing we've never got there at all yet. These"—with a gesture to the various sketches littering the lawn—"are merely preliminary. When I begin the portrait itself, we'll retire indoors. I think the music-room here will answer the purpose of a studio very well."

"Two whole weeks!" observed Nan meditatively. "I fancy Roger will be somewhat surprised that progress is so slow."

"Trenby? Pooh! It's not his picture. I shall have to explain to him"—smiling—"that art is long."

"He'll get fidgety about it. You see, already we've stayed at home several times when the others have arranged a picnic expedition."

"Choosing the better part," he retorted. "I should like to make one more attempt this afternoon, if you're not too tired. See, your arms . . . so! And I want your face the least bit tilted."

He put his hand very gently beneath her chin, posing her head as he wished it. For a moment he held her so, her face cupped in his hand, while his hazel eyes stared down at her with a smouldering fire in their depths.

Slowly the hot colour crept into her face beneath his scrutiny.

"Maryon!" Her lips moved protestingly.

"I think you've got the shortest upper lip of any woman I know," he said, calmly releasing her and going back to his easel. "And women with short upper lips are the very devil."

He sketched rapidly for a time.

Her pose at the moment was practically perfect—the small head tilted a little on the long round throat, while the slanting rays of the sun turned the dusky hair into a shadowy, gold-flecked nimbus.

Rooke worked on in silence, though once as he looked across at her he caught his underlip suddenly betwixt his teeth. She was so utterly desirable—the curve of her cheek, the grace of her lissom body, the faint blue veins that showed beneath the warm, ivory skin. And she was going to be Trenby's wife!

"There!" he said abruptly. "That's the idea at last. Tomorrow we'll begin the portrait itself."

Nan rose, stretching her arms above her head.

"I'm sure I shall die of fatigue, Maryon," she observed, coming round to his side to inspect the sketch.

"Nonsense! I shall allow due intervals for rest and—mental refreshment. What do you think of it?"

"I look rather—attractive"—impertinently.

"You do. Only I could suggest a substitute for the word 'rather.'"

Her eyes defied him.

"Could you? . . . What would it be?"

Before he could make any answer, there came a sound of voices close at hand, and a minute later Trenby and Isobel Carson appeared from round the corner of a high box hedge.

"We've been farming," announced Isobel. "I've been looking at Roger's prize sheep and cattle. I mean"—with a laughing, upward glance at her companion—"at the ones that are going to be his prize sheep and cattle as soon as they come under the judged eye. Then we thought we'd motor across and inspect the portrait. How's it going, Mr. Rooke?"

"The portrait isn't yet begun, Miss Carson," he replied blandly.

"It seems to take a long time to get under way," she retorted. "Is it so difficult to make a start? Surely not—for the great Mr. Rooke!"—with delicate mockery.

There was a perpetual warfare between herself and Rooke. She was the kind of woman he cordially detested—the pseudo sporting, outdoor type, with a strong tendency towards the feline—"Neither male nor female created He them," as he had once said. And when Rooke disliked man or woman he took small pains to conceal the fact. Isobel had winced, more than once, under the lash of his caustic tongue.

"I've made a start, Miss Carson, as these sketches testify"—waving his arm towards them. "But some subjects require very much more delicate handling than—others would do." And his half-closed eyes swept her insolently from head to foot.

Isobel reddened and her mouth took on a somewhat disagreeable expression.

"Then Nan must be an unusually difficult subject, mustn't she, Roger? Why, you've been at it two weeks and have literally nothing to show for it! You want speeding up."

Meanwhile Roger had been regarding the sketches in silence, an uneasy feeling of dissatisfaction stirring in his mind.

"Yes," he said slowly. "You don't seem to have made much progress." And his eyes travelled rather sombrely from Nan's face to that of the artist.

"You must have a little patience, Trenby," replied Rooke pleasantly. "The start is the difficult part. Tell me"—placing a couple of sketches on the easel as he spoke—"which of those two poses do you like the better?"

For the moment Roger's thoughts, slowly moving towards a vague suspicion, were directed into another channel, precisely as Rooke had intended they should be, and he examined the sketches carefully. Finally he gave his opinion with surprisingly good judgment.

"That's Nan," he said, indicating one of them—the last of the afternoon's efforts.

"Yes," agreed Rooke. "That's my choice." Then, turning laughingly to Nan, he went on: "The die is cast. To-morrow we'll begin work in good earnest."

"To-morrow?" broke in Isobel. "Oh, Roger, you mustn't let him take possession of Nan to-morrow! We're all motoring over to Denleigh Abbey for lunch, and the Peabodys will think it most odd if Nan doesn't come."

"The Peabodys?" queried Rooke. "Are those the 'new rich' people who've bought the Abbey?"

"Yes. And they want us all to go—Mrs. Peabody made a special point of it the other day. She asked everyone from Mallow as well as ourselves."

"What extensive hospitality!" murmured Rooke.

"They're quite nice people," asserted Isobel defiantly.

"Dear lady, they must indeed be overflowing with the milk of human kindness—and Treasury notes."

Isobel's bird-like eyes gleamed maliciously.

"They want to hear Nan play," she persisted.

"And to see me paint?" he suggested ironically.

She ignored his retort and, turning to Nan, appealed to her directly.

"Shan't you come?" she asked bluntly.

"Well, if Maryon wants me to sit for him—" Nan began hesitatingly.

"The sooner the portrait's begun, the sooner it will be finished," interposed Rooke. "Can't you dispense with your fiancee to-morrow, Trenby? . . . But just as you like, of course," he added courteously.

Roger hesitated. The frank appeal was disarming, shaking the suspicion he was harbouring.

"Let's leave it like this," continued Rooke, following up his advantage. "If the light's good, you'll let me have Nan, but if it's a dull day she shall be swept into the gilded portals of the Peabodys."

"Very well," agreed Roger, rather reluctantly.

"I think you'll find," said Isobel, as she and Roger strolled back to the car, "that the light will be quite good enough for painting."

And that seemingly harmless remark lodged in Roger's mind and rankled there throughout the whole of the following day when the Peabody lunch took place as arranged—but lacking the presence of Maryon Rooke and Nan.



CHAPTER XXX

SEEKING TO FORGET

"And this is my holiday!" exclaimed Maryon, standing back from his easel the better to view the effect of his work. "Nan, you've a lot to answer for."

Another fortnight had gone by, and the long hours passed is the music-room, which had been temporarily converted into a studio, were beginning to show fruit in the shape of a nearly completed portrait.

Nan slipped down from the makeshift "throne."

"May I come and look?"

Rooke moved aside.

"Yes, if you like. I've been working at the face to-day."

She regarded the picture for some time in silence, Rooke watching her intently the while.

"Well?" he said at last, interrogatively.

"Maryon"—she spoke slowly—"do I really look like—that?"

He nodded.

"Yes," he replied quietly. "When you let yourself go—when you take off the meaningless mask I complained of."

With that uncanny discernment of his—that faculty for painting people's souls, as Nan described it—he had sensed the passionate, wistful, unhappy spirit which looked out from her eyes, and the face on the canvas gave back a dumb appeal that was almost painfully arresting.

Nan frowned.

"You'd no right to do it," she exclaimed a little breathlessly.

"I painted what I saw."

She was silent, tremulously disturbed. He could see the quick rise and fall of her breast beneath the filmy white of her gown.

"Nan," he went on in low, tense tones. "Did you think I could be with you, day after day like this, and not—find out? Could I have painted your face, loving each line of it, and not learned the truth?" She stretched out her hand as though to check him, but he paid no heed. "The truth that Roger is nothing to you—never will be!"

"He's the man I'm going to marry," she said unevenly.

"And I'm only the man who loves you! . . . But because I failed once, putting love second, must I be punished eternally? I'm ready to put it first now—to lay all I have and all I've done on its altar."

"What—what do you mean?" she stammered.

He put his hands lightly on her shoulders and drew her nearer to him.

"Is it hard to guess, Nan? . . . I want you to leave this life you hate and come with me. Let me take you away—right away from it all—and, somewhere we'll find happiness together."

She stared at him with wide, horrified eyes.

"Oh, you're mad—you're mad!"

With a struggle she freed herself from his grasp and stood away from him.

"Listen," she said. "Listen to me and then you'll understand what you're asking. I'm not happy—that's true. But it's my own fault, not Roger's. I ought never to have given him my promise. There was someone else—"

"Mallory!" broke in Rooke.

"Yes—Peter. It's quite simple. We met too late. But I learned then what love means. Once I asked him—I begged him—to take me away with him. And he wouldn't. I'd have gone to the ends of the earth with him. I'd go to-morrow if he'd take me! But he won't. And he never will." She paused, panting a little. "And now," she went on, with a hard laugh, "I don't think you'll ask me again to go away with you!"

"Yes, I shall. Mallory may be able to live at such high altitudes that he can throw over his life's happiness—and yours, too—for a scruple. I can't—and I don't want to. I love you, and I'm selfish enough to be ready to take you any minute that you'll come."

Throwing one arm about her shoulders, he turned her face up to his.

"Don't you understand?" he went on hoarsely. "I'm flesh and blood man, and you're the woman I love."

The hazel eyes blazed with a curious light, like flame, and she shivered a little, fighting the man's personality—battling against that strange kinship of temperament by which he always drew her.

"I can wait," he said, quietly releasing her. "You can't go on long as you're living now; the tension's too high. And when you're through with it—come to me, Nan! I'd at least make you happier than Trenby ever will."

Without reply she moved towards the door and he stood aside, allowing her to pass out of the room in silence.

In the hall she encountered Roger, who had ridden over, accompanied by a trio of dogs, and the sight of his big, tweed-clad figure, so solidly suggestive of normal, everyday things, filled her with an unexpected sense of relief. He might not be the man she loved, but he was, at any rate, a sheet-anchor in the midst of the emotional storms that were blowing up around her.

To-day, however, his face wore a clouded, sullen expression when he greeted her.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked, his eyes fastening suspiciously on her flushed cheeks.

She answered him with a poor attempt at her usual nonchalance.

"Oh, Maryon came over this morning, so I've been sitting to him."

"All day? I don't like it too well." The look of displeasure deepened on his face. "People will talk. You know what country folks are like."

Nan's eyes flashed.

"Let them talk! I'm not going to regulate my conduct according to the villagers' standard of propriety," she replied indignantly.

"It isn't merely the villagers," pursued Roger. "Isobel said, only yesterday, she thought it was rather indiscreet."

"Isobel!" interrupted Nan scornfully. "It would be better if she kept her thoughts for home consumption. The neighbourhood might conceivably comment on the number of times you and she go 'farming' together."

Roger looked quickly at her, a half-smile on his lips.

"Why, Nan!" he said, a note of surprise, almost of satisfaction, in his voice. "I believe you're growing jealous?"

She laughed contemptuously. She was intensely angry that he should have quoted Isobel's opinion to her, and she struck back as hard as she could.

"My dear Roger, surely by this time it must be clear to you that I'm not very likely to be afflicted by—jealousy!"

The shaft went home, and in an instant the dawning smile on his face was replaced by an expression of bitter resentment.

"No, I suppose not," he returned sullenly.

He stared down at her, and something in the indifferent pose of her slim figure made him realise afresh for how little—how pitifully little—he counted in this woman's life.

He gripped her shoulder in sudden anger.

"But I am jealous!"—vehemently. "Do you hear, Nan? Jealous of your reputation and your time—the time you give to Rooke."

She shrank away from him, and the movement seemed to rouse him to a white heat of fury. Instead of releasing her, he pulled her closer to him.

"Don't shrink like that!" he exclaimed savagely. "By God! Do you think I'll stand being treated as though I were a leper? You avoid me all you can—detest the sight of me, I suppose! But remember one thing—you're going to be my wife. Nothing can alter that, and you belong—to—me"—emphasising each word separately. "You mayn't give me your smiles—but I'm damned if you shall give them to any other man."

He thrust his face, distorted with anger, close to hers.

"Now do you understand?"

She struggled in his grasp like a frightened bird, her eyes dilating with terror. She knew, only too well, what this big primitive-souled man could be like when the devil in him was roused, and his white, furious face and blazing eyes filled her with panic.

"Roger! Let me go!" she cried, her voice quick with fear. "Let me go! You're hurting me!"

"Hurting you?" With an effort he mastered himself, slackening his grasp a little, but still holding her. "Hurting you? I wonder if you realise what a woman like you can do to a man? When I first met you I was just an ordinary decent man, and I loved and trusted you implicitly. But now, sometimes, I almost feel that I could kill you—to make sure of you!"

"But why should you distrust me? It's Isobel—Isobel Carson who's put these ideas into your head."

"Perhaps she's opened my eyes," he said grimly. "They've been shut too long."

"You've no right to distrust me—"

"Haven't I, Nan, haven't I?" He held her a little away from him and searched her face. "Answer me! Have I no right to doubt you?"

His big chest heaved under the soft fabric of his shirt as he stood looking down at her, waiting for her answer.

She would have given the world to be able to answer him with a simple "No." But her lips refused to shape the word. There was so much that lay between them, so much that was complicated and difficult to interpret.

Slowly her eyes fell before his.

"I utterly decline to answer such a question," she replied at last. "It's an insult."

His hands fell from her shoulders.

"I think I'm answered," he said curtly, and, turning on his heel, he strode away, leaving Nan shaken and dismayed.

As far as Maryon was concerned, he refrained from making any allusion to what had taken place that day in the music-room, and gradually the sense of shocked dismay with which his proposal had filled Nan at the time, grew blurred and faded, skilfully obliterated by his unfailing tact. But the remembrance of it lingered, tucked away in a corner of her mind, offering a terrible solution of her difficulties.

He still demanded from her a large part of each day, on the plea that much yet remained to be done to the portrait, while Roger, into whose ears Isobel continued to drop small poisoned hints, became correspondingly more difficult and moody. The tension of the situation was only relieved by the comings and goings of Sandy McBain and the enforced cheerfulness assumed by the members of the Mallow household.

Neither Penelope nor Kitty sensed the imminence of any real danger. But Sandy, in whose memory the recollection of the winter's happenings was still alive and vivid, felt disturbed and not a little anxious. Nan's moods were an open book to him, and just now they were not very pleasant reading.

"What about the concerto?" he asked her one day. "Aren't you going to do anything with it?"

"Do anything with it?" she repeated vaguely.

"Yes, of course. Get it published—push it! You didn't write it just for fun, I suppose?"

A faintly mocking smile upturned the corners of her mouth.

"I think Roger considers I wrote it expressly to annoy him," she submitted.

"Rot!" he replied succinctly. "Just because he's not a trained musician you appear to imagine he's devoid of ordinary appreciation."

"He is," she returned. "He hates my music. Yes, he does"—as Sandy seemed about to protest. "He hates it!"

"Look here, Nan"—he became suddenly serious—"you're not playing fair with Trenby. He's quite a good sort, but because he isn't a scatter-brained artist like yourself, you're giving him a rotten time."

From the days when they had first known each other Sandy had taken it upon himself at appropriate seasons to lecture Nan upon the error of her ways, and it never occurred to her, even now, to resent it. Instead, she answered him with unwonted meekness.

"I can't help it. Roger and I never see things in the same light, and—and oh, Sandy, you might try to understand!" she ended appealingly.

"I think I do," he returned. "But it isn't cricket, Nan. You can kick me out of the house if you like for saying it, but I don't think you ought to have Maryon Rooke around so much."

She flushed hotly.

"He's painting my portrait," she protested.

"Taking a jolly long time over it, too—and making love to you in the intervals, I suppose."

"Sandy!"

"Well, isn't he?" Sandy's green eyes met hers unflinchingly.

"Anyway, I'm not in love with him."

"I should hope not," he observed drily, "seeing that you're going to be Mrs. Trenby."

She gave an odd little laugh.