He strode forward, almost upsetting the tea-table beside which she stood. "Look here, Drusilla. You may as well understand me once for all. I wouldn't marry a girl who took me because of what I'd done for her, not if she was the last woman in the world."

"But you would if she was the first, Peter. And I'm convinced that for you she is the first—"

"Now, now!" he warned her, "that'll do! I've been generous enough not to say anything as to who's first with you, though you don't take much pains to hide it. Why not—?"

"You're all first with me," she protested. "I don't know which of you I'm the most sorry for."

"Don't waste your pity on me. I'm perfectly happy. There's only one of the lot who needs any consideration whatever. And, by God! if he's not true to her, I'll—"

"Your intervention won't be called for, Peter," she assured him, making her way toward the door. "You're greatly mistaken if you think I've asked for it."

"Then for Heaven's sake what have you asked for? I don't see."

She was in the hall, but she turned and spoke through the doorway. "I've only asked you not to be an idiot. I merely beg, for all our sakes, that if something precious is flung down at your feet you'll have the common sense to stoop and pick it up."

"I'll consider that," he called after her, as she sped up the stairs, "when I see it lying there."



XII

It may be admitted at once that, on arriving at Tory Hill and hearing from Olivia's lips the tale of her father's downfall, Colonel Rupert Ashley received the first perceptible check in a very distinguished career. Up to this point the sobriquet of "Lucky Ashley," by which he was often spoken of in the Rangers, had been justified by more than one spectacular success. He had fulfilled so many special missions to uncivilized and half-civilized and queerly civilized tribes that he had come to feel as if he habitually went on his way with the might of the British Empire to back him. It was he who in South Africa brought the M'popos to order without shedding a drop of blood; it was he who in the eastern Soudan induced the followers of the Black Prophet to throw in their lot with the English, securing by this move the safety of Upper Egypt; it was he who in the Malay Peninsula intimidated the Sultan of Surak into accepting the British protectorate, thus removing a menace to the peace of the Straits Settlements. Even if he had had no other exploits to his credit, these alone would have assured his favor with the home authorities. It had become something like a habit, at the Colonial Office or the War Officer or the Foreign Office, as the case might be, whenever there was trouble on one of the Empire's vague outer frontiers, to ask, "Where's Ashley?" Wherever he was, at Gibraltar or Simla or Cairo or at the Rangers' depot in Sussex, he was sent for and consulted. Once having gained a reputation for skill in handling barbaric potentates, he knew how to make the most of it, both abroad and in Whitehall. On rejoining his regiment, too, after some of his triumphant expeditions, he was careful to bear himself with a modesty that took the point from detraction, assuring, as it did, his brother-officers that they would have done as well as he, had they enjoyed the same chances.

He was not without a policy in this, since from the day of receiving his commission he had combined a genuine love of his profession with a quite laudable intention to "get on." He cherished this ambition more naturally, perhaps, than most of his comrades, who took the profession of arms lightly, for the reason that the instinct for it might be said to be in his blood. The Ashleys were not an old county family. Indeed, it was only a generation or so since they had achieved county rank. It was a fact not generally remembered at the present day that the grandfather of the colonel of the Sussex Rangers had been a successful and estimable manufacturer of brushes. In the early days of Queen Victoria he owned a much-frequented emporium in Regent Street, at which you could get anything in the line from a tooth-brush to a currycomb. Retiring from business in the fifties, with a considerable fortune for the time, this Mr. Ashley had purchased Heneage from the impoverished representatives of the Umfravilles. As luck would have it, the new owners found a not unattractive Miss Umfraville almost going with the place, since she lived in select but inexpensive lodgings in the village. Her manners being as gentle as her blood, and her face even gentler than either, if such a thing could be, it was in keeping with the spirit that had borne the Ashleys along to look upon her as an opportunity. Young Mr. Ashley, to whom his father had been able to give the advantages of Oxford, knew at a glance that with this lady at his side recognition by the county would be assured. Being indifferent to recognition by the county except in so far as it expressed a phase of advancement, and superior to calculation as a motive for the matrimonial state, young Ashley proceeded with all due formality to fall in love; and it was from the passion incidental to this episode that Lucky Ashley was born.

All this had happened so long ago, according to modern methods of reckoning, that the county had already forgotten what it was the original Ashley had manufactured, or that he had manufactured anything at all. By the younger generation it was assumed that Heneage had passed to the Ashley family through intermarriage with the Umfravilles. Certain it was that the Ashleys maintained the Umfraville tradition and used the Umfraville arms. What chiefly survived of the spirit that had made the manufacture of brushes so lucrative a trade was the intention young Rupert Ashley took with him into the army—to get on.

He had got on. Every one spoke of him nowadays as a coming man. It was conceded that when generals like Lord Englemere or Lord Bannockburn passed away, it would be to such men as Rupert Ashley—the number of them could be counted on the fingers of your two hands!—that the country would look for its defenders. They were young men, comparatively, as yet; but they were waiting and in training. It was a national asset to know that they were there.

It was natural, then, that Ashley's eyes should be turning in the direction of the great appointments. He had won so much distinction in the Jakh War and the Dargal War that there was nothing to which, with time, he could not aspire. True, he had rivals; true, there were men who could supplant him without putting any great strain upon their powers; true, there were others with more family influence, especially of that petticoat influence which had been known to carry so much weight in high and authoritative quarters; but he had confidence in himself, in his ability, his star—the last named of which had the merit of always seeming to move forward.

Everything began to point, therefore, to his marrying. In a measure it was part of his qualification for high command. He had reached that stage in his development, both private and professional, at which the co-operation of a good and graceful wife would double his capacity for public service, besides giving him that domestic consolation of which he began to feel the need. There were posts he could think of—posts that would naturally be vacant before many years were past—in which the fact of his being unmarried would be a serious drawback if his name were to come up. Better to be unmarried than to be saddled with a wife who from any deficiency of birth or manner was below the level of her station! Of course! He had seen more than one man, splendidly qualified otherwise, passed over because of that mischance. But with a wife who in her way was equal to him in his they would both go far. Who could venture to say how far?

In this respect he was fortunate in knowing exactly what he wanted. That is, he had seen enough of the duties of high position to be critical of the ladies who performed them. Experience enabled him to create his ideal by a process of elimination. Many a time, as he watched some great general's wife—Lady Englemere, let us say, or Lady Bannockburn—receive her guests, he said to himself, "That is exactly what my wife shall not be." She should not be a military intrigante like the one, nor a female martinet like the other, nor a gambler like a third, nor a snob like a fourth, nor a fool about young men like several he could think of. By dint of fastidious observation and careful rejection of the qualities of which he disapproved, a vision rose before him of the woman who would be the complement of himself. He saw her clever, spirited, high-bred—a woman of the world, familiar with literature and arts, and speaking at least one language besides her mother-tongue. In dress she should be exquisite, in conversation tactful, in manner sympathetic. As mistress of the house she should be thorough; as a hostess, full of charm; as a mother—but his imagination hardly went into that. That she should be a perfect mother he took for granted, just as he took it for granted that she should be beautiful. A woman who had the qualifications he desired could not be less than beautiful from the sheer operation of the soul.

Considering how definite his ideas were—and moderate, on the whole—it surprised him to find no one to embody them. It sometimes seemed to him that the traditional race of Englishwomen had become extinct. Those he met were either brilliant and hard, or handsome and horsey, or athletic and weedy, or smart and selfish, or pretty and silly, or sweet and provincial, or good and grotesque. With the best will in the world to fall in love, he found little or no temptation. Indeed, he had begun to think that the type of woman on whom he had set his heart was, like some article of an antiquated fashion, no longer produced when unexpectedly he saw her.

He saw her unexpectedly, because it was at church; and whatever his motives on that bright Sunday morning in May in attending the old garrison chapel in Southsea, the hope of seeing his vision realized was not one. If, apart from the reasons for which people are supposed to go to church, he had any special thought, it was that of meeting Mrs. Fane. It had happened two or three times already that, having perceived her at the service, he had joined her on the Common afterward, and she had asked him home to lunch. They had been pleasant little luncheons—so pleasant that he almost regretted the fact that she was an American. He had nothing against Americans in themselves. He knew a number of their women who had married into one arm or another of the Service with conspicuous advantage to their husbands. That, in fact, was part of the trouble. There were so many of them nowadays that he had begun to feel vaguely that where there was question of high position—and he hoped modestly that in his case there was distinctly question of that—it was time the principle was being established of England for the English. Nevertheless, he had got so far in his consideration of Drusilla Fane as to ask himself whether she was not, as the widow of a British officer, an Englishwoman to all intents and purposes as well as in the strict letter of the law. He could not say that he was in love with her; but neither could he say that one of these days he might not be. If he ever were it would certainly be on the principle of faute de mieux; but many a man has chosen his wife on no better ground than that.

Such criticism as he had to make to her disadvantage he could form there and then in the chapel while they were reading the lessons or chanting the psalms. She sat two or three rows in front of him, on the other side of the aisle. There was something about Drusilla in church that suggested a fish out of water. He had noticed it before. She was restless, inattentive; she kept turning her head to see who was behind her or at the other end of the pew; she rarely found the places in the prayer-book or knew just when to kneel down; when she did kneel down she sank into an awkward little bunch; every now and then she stifled, or did not stifle, a yawn.

Ashley had a theory that manner in church is the supreme test of the proprieties. He knew plenty of women who could charm at a dinner or dazzle at a dance, but who displayed their weaknesses at prayer. All unwitting to herself, poor Drusilla was inviting his final—or almost final—judgment on her future, so far at least as he was concerned, for the simple reason that she twitched and sighed and forgot to say the Amens.

And just then his eyes traveled to her neighbor—a tall young lady, dressed in white, with no color in her costume but a sash of hues trembling between sea-green and lilac. She was slender and graceful, with that air at once exquisite and unassuming that he had seen in the Englishwoman of his dreams. Though he could get no more than a side glimpse of her face, he divined that it was pure and that it must be thrown into relief by the heavy coil of coppery-brown hair. But what he noticed in her first was that which he thought of concerning other women last—a something holy and withdrawn, a quality of devotion without which he had no conception of real womanhood. It seemed to be a matter of high courtesy with her not to perceive that the choir-boys sang out of tune or that the sermon was prosy. In the matter of kneeling he had seen only one woman in his life—and she the highest in the land—who did it with this marvelous grace at once dignified and humble. "It takes old England," he said to himself, gloatingly, "to make 'em like that—simple and—stunning."

But on the Common after service, and at luncheon after that, and during the three or four weeks that ensued, he had much to do in reforming his opinions. There were several facts about Olivia Guion that disorientated his points of view and set him looking for new ones. Though he was not wholly successful in finding them, he managed, nevertheless, to justify himself for falling in love in violation of his principles. He admitted that he would have preferred to marry a compatriot of his own, and some one above the rank of a solicitor's daughter; but, since he had discovered the loveliest and noblest creature in the world, it was idle to cavil because one land or one situation in life rather than another had produced her. As well complain of the rubies and pearls that deck the English crown because some were found in Tibetan mountains and others in Indian seas. There are treasures, he argued, so precious as to transcend all merely national limitations, making them petty and irrelevant. The one thing to the point was that in Olivia Guion he had won the human counterpart of himself, who could reflect his qualities and complete them.

* * * * *

He had been so proud that the blow on receiving Olivia's letter in New York was a cruel one. Though it told him nothing but that her father had lost all his money and that the invitations to the wedding had been withdrawn, this in itself was immeasurably distressing to a man with a taste for calling public attention to his movements and who liked to see what concerned him march with a certain pomp. His marriage being an event worthy to take place in sight of the world, he had not only found ways of making it a topic of interest before leaving England, but he had summoned to it such friends of distinction as he possessed on the American side of the water. Though he had not succeeded in getting the British Ambassador, Benyon, the military attache at Washington, was to come with his wife, and Lord Woolwich, who was aide-de-camp at Ottawa, had promised to act as best man. His humiliation on speculating as to what they must have said when they received Olivia's card announcing that the marriage was not to take place on the 28th was such that he fell to wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to bluff the loss of money. They might have carried out their plans in spite of it. Indeed he felt the feasibility of this course the more strongly after he had actually seen Olivia and she had given him the outlines of her tale.

Watching his countenance closely, she saw that he blanched. Otherwise he betrayed no sign of flinching. His manner of sitting rigid and upright in his corner of the rustic seat was a perfectly natural way of listening to a story that affected him so closely. What distressed her chiefly was the incongruity between his personality and the sordid drama in which she was inviting him to take part. He was even more distinguished-looking than he appeared in the photographs she cherished or in the vision she had retained in her memory. Without being above the medium male height, he was admirably shaped by war, sport, and exercise. His neat head, with its thick, crispy hair, in which there was already a streak of gray, was set on his shoulders at just the right poise for command. The high-bridged nose, inherited from the Umfravilles, was of the kind commonly considered to show "race." The eyes had the sharpness, and the thin-lipped mouth the inflexibility, that go with a capacity for quick decisions. While he was not so imposing in mufti as in his uniform, the trim traveling-suit of russet brown went well with the bronze tint of the complexion. It was so healthy a bronze, as a usual thing, that his present pallor was the more ashen from contrast.

Knowing from his telegram the hour at which to expect him, she had gone down the driveway to meet him when she saw him dismiss his taxicab at the gate. She chose to do this in order that their first encounter might take place out-of-doors. With the windows of the neighboring houses open and people sitting on verandas or passing up and down the road, they could exchange no more than some conventional greeting. She would assume nothing on the ground of their past standing toward each other. He seemed to acquiesce in this, since he showed no impatience at being restricted to the formality of shaking hands.

Happily for both, commonplace words were given them—questions and answers as to his voyage, his landing, his hotel. He came to her relief, too, as they sauntered toward the house, by commenting on its dignity and Georgian air, as well as by turning once or twice to look at the view. Nearing the steps she swerved from the graveled driveway and began to cross the lawn.

"We won't go in just yet," she explained. "Papa is there. He felt he ought to dress and come downstairs to receive you. He's very far from well. I hope you'll do your best not to—to think of him too harshly."

"I shouldn't think harshly of any one simply because he'd had business bad luck."

"He has had business bad luck—but that isn't all. We'll sit here."

Taking one corner of a long garden-seat that stood in the shade of an elm, she signed to him to take the other. On the left they had the Corinthian-columned portico of the garden front of the house; in the distance, the multicolored slopes of the town. Olivia, at least, felt the stimulating effect of the, golden forenoon sunshine.

As for Ashley, in spite of his outward self-possession, he was too bewildered to feel anything at all. Having rushed on from New York by night, he was now getting his first daylight glimpse of America; and, though, owing to more urgent subjects for, thought, he was not consciously giving his attention to things outward, he had an oppressive sense of immensity and strangeness. The arch of the sky was so sweeping, the prospect before them so gorgeous, the sunlight so hard, and the distances so clear! For the first time in his life a new continent aroused in him an odd sense of antagonism. He had never had it in Africa or Asia or in the isles of the Southern Sea. There he had always gone with a sense of power, with the instinct of the conqueror; while here.... But Olivia was speaking, saying things too appalling for immediate comprehension.

Her voice was gentle and even; she spoke with a certain kind of ease. She appeared to rehearse something already learned by heart.

"So, you see, he didn't merely lose his own money; he lost theirs—the money of his clients—which was in his trust. I hadn't heard of it when I wrote you in New York, otherwise I should have told you. But now that you know it—"

He looked mystified. "He's jolly lucky not to be in England," he said, trying not to seem as stunned as he felt. "There that sort of thing is a very serious—"

"Offence," she hastened to say. "Oh, so it is here. I must tell you quite plainly that if the money hadn't come papa would have had to go to—"

"But the money did come?"

She made a point of finishing her sentence. "If the money hadn't come papa would have had to go to prison. Yes, the money did come. A friend of—of papa's—and Drusilla's—advanced it. It's been paid over to the people who were going to law."

"So that part of it is settled?"

"That part of it is settled to the extent that no action will be taken against papa."

She continued to talk on gently, evenly, giving him the facts unsparingly. It was the only way. Her very statements, so it seemed to her, implied that as marriage between them was no longer possible their engagement was at an end.

She was not surprised that he scarcely noticed when, having said all she had to say, she ceased speaking. Taking it for granted that he was thinking out the most merciful way of putting his verdict into words, she, too, remained silent. She was not impatient, nor uneasy, nor alarmed. The fact that the business of telling him was no longer ahead of her, that she had got it over, brought so much relief that she felt able to await his pleasure.

She mistook, however, the nature of his thoughts. Once he had grasped the gist of her information, he paid little attention to its details. The important thing was his own conduct. Amid circumstances overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival, relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.

He used the words "precisely the right thing" because they formed a ruling phrase in his career. For twenty-odd years they had been written on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows. They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager countess now deceased. She had said to his mother, apropos of some forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, "You can always be sure that Rupert will do precisely the right thing." Though he was but a lad at Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with all a dowager countess's authority, that from the moment it was repeated to him by his mother he made it a device. It had kept him out of more scrapes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the Victoria Cross.

He had long been persuaded that had the dowager countess not thus given the note to his character his record would never have been written on that roll of heroes. "I should have funked it," was his way of putting it, by which he meant that he would have funked it through sheer ignorance of himself and of his aptitude for the high and noble. It was an aptitude that flourished best under an appreciative eye—of the dowager countess looking down from heaven—or of the discerning here on earth—as an actor is encouraged by a sympathetic public to his highest histrionic efforts. If there was anything histrionic in Ashley himself, it was only in the sense that he was at his finest when, actually or potentially, there was some one there to see. He had powers then of doing precisely the right thing which in solitude might have been dormant from lack of motive.

It was undoubtedly because he felt the long-sighted eyes of England on him that he had done precisely the right thing in winning the Victoria Cross. He confessed this—to himself. He confessed it often—every time, in fact, when he came to a difficult passage in his life. It was his strength, his inspiration. He confessed it now. If he sat silent while Olivia Guion waited till it seemed good to him to speak, it was only that he might remind himself of the advantages of doing the right thing, however hard. He had tested those advantages time and time again. The very memories they raised were a rebuke to weakness and hesitation. If he ever had duties he was inclined to shirk, he thought of that half-hour which had forever set the seal upon his reputation as a British soldier.

He thought of it now. He saw himself again looking up at the bristling cliffs that were to be rushed, whence the Afridis were pouring their deadly fire. He saw himself measuring with his eye the saddle of precipitous slope that had to be crossed, devoid of cover and strewn with the bodies of dead Ghurkas. Of the actual crossing, with sixty Rangers behind him, he had little or no recollection. He had passed under the hail of bullets as through perils in a dream. As in a dream, too, he remembered seeing his men, when he turned to cheer them on, go down like nine-pins—throwing up their arms and staggering, or twisting themselves up like convulsive cats. It was grotesque rather than horrible; he felt himself grinning inwardly, as at something hellishly comic, when he reached the group of Ghurkas huddled under the cavernous shelter of the cliff. Then, just as he threw himself on the ground, panting like a spent dog and feeling his body all over to know whether or not he had been wounded, he saw poor Private Vickerson out in the open, thirty yards from the protection of the wall of rock. While the other Rangers to a man were lying still, on the back with the knees drawn up, or face downward, with the arms outstretched, or rolled on the side as though they were in bed, Vickerson was rising on his hands and dragging himself forward. It was one of Ashley's most vivid recollections that Vickerson's movements were like a seal's. They had the drollery of a bit of infernal mimicry. It was also a vivid recollection that when he ran out to the soldier's aid he had his first sensation of fear. The bullets whizzed so thick about him that he ran back again. It was an involuntary running back, as involuntary as snatching his fingers out of a fire. He could remember standing under the rock, and, as Vickerson did not move, half hoping he were dead. That would put an end to any further attempts to save him. But the soldier stirred again, propping himself with both hands and pulling his body onward for a few inches more. Again Ashley ran out into a tempest of iron and fire and over ground slippery with blood. He could still feel himself hopping back, as a barefooted boy who has ventured into a snow-storm hops back into the house. A third time he ran out, and a fourth. At the fourth he distinctly worded the thought which had been at the back of his mind from the beginning, "I shall get the V.C. for this." He tried to banish the unworthy suggestion, but it was too strong for him. Over the cliffs, and out of the clouds, and from beyond the horizon, he felt the unseen eyes of England upon him, inciting him to such a valor that at the fifth attempt he dragged in his man.

He came out of this reverie, which, after all, was brief, to find the gentle tones in which Olivia had made her astounding revelations still in his ears; while she herself sat expectant, and resigned. He knew she was expectant and resigned and that she had braced her courage for the worst. With many men, with most men, to do so would have been needful. In the confusion of his rapid summaries and calculations it was a pleasurable thought that she should learn from him, and through him and in him, that it was not so with all. The silence which at first was inadvertent now became deliberate as—while he noted with satisfaction that he had not overstated to himself the exquisite, restrained beauty of her features, her eyes, her hair, her hands, and of the very texture and fashion of her clothing—he prolonged the suspense which was to be the prelude to his justifying once again the dowager countess's good opinion. It was to his credit as a brave man that he could nerve himself for this with his eyes wide open—wider open than even Mrs. Fane's—to to the consequences that might be in store for him.



XIII

Ashley had the tact, sprung of his English instinct for moderation, not to express his good intentions too directly. He preferred to let them filter out through a seemingly casual manner of taking them for granted. Neither did he attempt to disguise the fact that the strangeness incidental to meeting again, in trying conditions and under another sky, created between himself and Olivia a kind of moral distance across which they could draw together only by degrees. It was a comfort to her that he did not try to bridge it by anything in the way of forced tenderness. He was willing to talk over the situation simply and quietly until, in the course of an hour or two, the sense of separation began to wear away.

The necessity on her part of presenting Ashley to her father and offering him lunch brought into play those social resources that were as second nature to all three. It was difficult to think the bottom could be out of life while going through a carefully chosen menu and drinking an excellent vin de Graves at a table meticulously well appointed. To escape the irony of this situation they took refuge in the topics that came readiest, the novelty to Ashley of the outward aspect of American things keeping them on safe ground till the meal was done. It was a relief to both men that Guion could make his indisposition an excuse for retiring again to his room.

It was a relief to Olivia, too. For the first time in her life she had to recognize her father as insupportable to any one but herself and Peter Davenant. Ashley did his best to conceal his repulsion; she was sure of that; he only betrayed it negatively in a tendency to ignore him. He neither spoke nor listened to him any more than he could help. By keeping his eyes on Olivia he avoided looking toward him. The fact that Guion took this aversion humbly, his head hanging and his attention given to his plate, did not make it the less poignant.

All the same, as soon as they were alone in the dining-room the old sense of intimacy, of belonging to each other, suddenly returned. It returned apropos of nothing and with the exchange of a glance. There was a flash in his eyes, a look of wonder in hers—and he had taken her, or she had slipped, into his arms.

And yet when a little later he reverted to the topic of the morning and said, "As things are now, I really don't see why we shouldn't be married on the 28th—privately, you know," her answer was, "What did you think of papa?"

Though he raised his eyebrows in surprise that she should introduce the subject, he managed to say, "He seems pretty game."

"He does; but I dare say he isn't as game as he looks. There's a good deal before him still."

"If we're married on the 28th he'd have one care the less."

"Because I should be taken off his hands. I'm afraid that's not the way to look at it. The real fact is that he'd have nobody to help him."

"I've two months' leave. You could do a lot for him in that time."

She bent over her piece of work. It was the sofa-cushion she had laid aside on the day when she learned from Davenant that her father's troubles were like Jack Berrington's. They had come back for coffee to the rustic seat on the lawn. For the cups and coffee service a small table had been brought out beside which she sat. Ashley had so far recovered his sang-froid as to be able to enjoy a cigar.

"Would you be very much hurt," she asked, without raising her head, "if I begged you to go back to England without our being married at all?"

"Oh, but I say!"

The protest was not over-strong. He was neither shocked nor surprised. A well-bred woman, finding herself in such trouble as hers, would naturally offer him some way of escape from it.

"You see," she went on, "things are so complicated already that if we got married we should complicate them more. There's so much to be done—as to papa—and this house—and the future—of the kind of thing you don't know anything about. They're sordid things, too, that you'd be wasted on if you tried to learn them."

He smiled indulgently. "And so you're asking me—a soldier!—to run away."

"No, to let me do it. It's so—so impossible that I can't face it."

"Oh, nonsense!" He spoke with kindly impatience. "Don't you love me? You said just now—in the dining-room—when—"

"Yes, I know; I did say that. But, you see—we must consider it—love can't be the most important thing in the world for either you or me."

"I understand. You mean to say it's duty. Very good. In that case, my duty is as plain as a pikestaff."

"Your duty to stand by me?"

"I should be a hound if I didn't do it."

"And I should feel myself a common adventuress if I were to let you."

"Oh—I say!"

His protest this time was more emphatic. There was even a pleading note in it. In the course of two or three hours he had got back much of the feeling he had had in England that she was more than an exquisite lady, that she was the other part of himself. It seemed superfluous on her part to fling open the way of retreat for him too wide.

She smiled at his exclamation. "Yes, I dare say that's how it strikes you. But it's very serious to me. Isn't it serious to you, too, to feel that you must be true to me—and marry me—after all that's come to pass?"

"One doesn't think that way—or speak that way—of marrying the woman one—adores."

"Men have been known to marry the women they adored, and still regret the consequences they had to meet."

"She's right," he said to himself. "It is serious."

There could be no question as to her wisdom in asking him to pause. At his age and in his position, and with his merely normal capacity for passion, it would be absurd to call the world well lost for love. Notwithstanding his zeal to do the right thing, there was something due to himself, and it was imperative that he should consider it. Dropping the stump of his cigar into his empty coffee-cup, he got up and strode away. The emotion of the minute, far in excess of the restrained phrases convention taught them to use, offered an excuse for his unceremoniousness.

He walked to the other side of the lawn, then down to the gate, then round to the front of the house. To a chance passer-by he was merely inspecting the premises. What he saw, however, was not the spectacular foliage, nor the mellow Georgian dwelling, but himself going on his familiar victorious way, freed from a clogging scandal that would make the wheels of his triumphal car drive heavily. He saw himself advancing, as he had advanced hitherto, from promotion to promotion, from command to command. He saw himself first alone, and then with a wife—a wife who was not Olivia Guion. Then suddenly the vision changed into something misty and undefined; the road became dark, the triumphal car jolted and fell to pieces; there was reproach in the air and discomfort in his sensations. He recognized the familiar warnings that he was not doing precisely the right thing. He saw Olivia Guion sitting as he had left her four or five minutes before, her head bent over her stitching. He saw her there, deserted, alone. He saw the eyes of England on him, as he drove away in his triumphal car, leaving her to her fate. His compunction was intense, his pity overwhelming. Merely at turning his back on her to stroll around the lawn he felt guilty of a cowardly abandonment. And he felt something else—he felt the clinging of her arms around his neck; he felt the throb of her bosom against his own as she let herself break down just for a second—just for a sob. It seemed to him that he should feel that throb forever.

He hurried back to where he had left her. "It's no use," he said to himself; "I'm in for it, by Jove. I simply can't leave her in the lurch."

There was no formal correctness about Ashley's habitual speech. He kept, as a rule, to the idiom of the mess, giving it distinction by his crisp, agreeable enunciation.

Olivia had let the bit of embroidery rest idly in her lap. She looked up at his approach. He stood before her.

"Do I understand," he asked, with a roughness assumed to conceal his agitation, "that you're offering me my liberty?"

"No; that I'm asking you for mine."

"On what grounds?"

She arched her eyebrows, looking round about her comprehensively. "I should think that was clear. On the grounds of—of everything."

"That's not enough. So long as you can't say that you don't—don't care about me any more—"

There was that possibility. It was very faint, but if she made use of it he should consider it decisive. Doing precisely the right thing would become quite another course of action if her heart rejected him. But she spoke promptly.

"I can't say that; but I can say something more important."

He nodded firmly. "That settles it, by Jove. I sha'n't give you up. There's no reason for it. So long as we love each other—"

"Our loving each other wouldn't make your refusal any the less hard for me. As your wife I should be trying to fill a position for which I'm no longer qualified and in which I should be a failure."

"As my wife," he said, slowly, with significant deliberation, "we could make the position anything you felt able to fill."

She considered this. "That is, you could send in your papers and retire into private life."

"If we liked."

"So that you'd be choosing between your career—and me."

"I object to the way of putting it. If my career, as you call it, didn't make you happy, you should have whatever would do the trick."

"I'm afraid you'll think me captious if I say that nothing could do it. If you weren't happy, I couldn't be; and you'd never be happy except as a soldier."

"That trade would be open to me whatever happened."

"In theory, yes; but in practice, if you had a wife who was under a cloud you'd have to go under it, too. That's what it would come to in the working-out."

She stood up from sheer inability to continue sitting still. The piece of embroidery fell on the grass. Ashley smiled at her—a smile that was not wholly forced, because of the thoughts with which she inspired him. Her poise, her courage, the something in her that would have been pride if it had not been nearer to meekness and which he had scarcely called meekness before he felt it to be fortitude, gave him confidence in the future. "She's stunning—by Jove!" It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time. For the first time since he had known her he was less the ambitious military officer seeking a wife who would grace a high position than he was a man in love with a woman. Separating these two elements within himself, he was able to value her qualities, not as adornments to some Home or Colonial Headquarters House, but as of supreme worth for their own sake. "People have only got to see her," he said, inwardly, to which he added aloud:

"I dare say the cloud may not be so threatening, after all; and even if it is, I should go under it with the pluckiest woman in the world."

She acknowledged this with a scarcely visible smile and a slight inclination of the head. "Thank you; I'm foolish enough to like to hear you say it. I think I am plucky—alone. But I shouldn't be if I involved anybody else."

"But if it was some one who could help you?"

"That might be different, but I don't know of any one who could. You couldn't. If you tried you'd only injure yourself without doing me any good."

"At the least, I could take you away from—from all this."

"No, because it's the sort of thing one can never leave behind. It's gone ahead of us. It will meet us at every turn. You and I—and papa—are probably by to-day a subject for gossip in half the clubs in New York. To-morrow it will be the same thing in London—at the club you call the Rag—and the Naval and Military—and your different Service clubs—"

To hide the renewal of his dismay he pooh-poohed this possibility. "As a mere nine days' wonder."

"Which isn't forgotten when the nine days are past. Long after they've ceased speaking of it they'll remember—"

"They'll remember," he interrupted, fiercely, "that I jilted you."

She colored hotly. "That you—what?"

He colored, too. The words were as much a surprise to him as to her. He had never thought of this view of the case till she herself summoned up the vision of his friends and enemies discussing the affair in big leather arm-chairs in big, ponderous rooms in Piccadilly or St. James's Square. It was what they would say, of course. It was what he himself would have said of any one else. He had a renewed feeling that retreat was cut off.

"If we're not married—if I go home without you—it's what'll be on everybody's lips."

"But it won't be true," she said, with a little gasp.

He laughed. "That won't matter. It's how it'll look."

"Oh, looks!"

"It's what we're talking about, isn't it? It's what makes the difference. I shall figure as a cad."

He spoke as one who makes an astounding discovery. She was inexpressibly shocked.

"Oh, but you couldn't," was all she could find to say, but she said it with conviction.



He laughed again. "You'll see. There's no one—not my best friends—not my mother—not my sisters—who won't believe—whatever you and I may say to the contrary—who won't believe but that I—threw you over."

A toss of his hand, a snap of his fingers, suited the action to the word.

Her color came and went in little shifting flashes. She moved a pace or two aimlessly, restively. Her head went high, her chin tilted. When she spoke her voice trembled with indignation, but she only said:

"They couldn't believe it long."

"Oh, couldn't they! The story would follow me to my grave. Things like that are never forgotten among fellows so intimate as soldiers. There was a chap in our regiment who jilted a nice girl at the Cape—sailed for home secretly only a week before the wedding." He paused to let her take in the dastardly nature of the flight. "Well, he rejoined at the depot. He stayed—but he didn't stay long. The Rangers got too hot for him—or too cold. The last I ever heard of him he was giving English lessons at Boulogne."

The flagrancy of the case gave her an advantage. "It's idle to think that that kind of fate could overtake you."

"The fate that can overtake me easily enough is that as long as I live they'll say I chucked a girl because she'd had bad luck."

She was about to reply when the click of the latch of the gate diverted her attention. Drusilla Fane, attended by Davenant, was coming up the hill. Seeing Olivia and Ashley at the end of the lawn, Drusilla deflected her course across the grass, Davenant in her wake. Her wide, frank smile was visible from a long way off.

"This is not indiscretion," she laughed, as she advanced; "neither is it vulgar curiosity to see the lion. I shouldn't have come at all if mother hadn't sent me with a message."

Wearing a large hat a la Princesse de Lamballe and carrying a long-handled sunshade which she held daintily, like a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook, Drusilla had an air of refined, eighteenth-century dash. Knowing the probability that she disturbed some poignant bit of conversation, she proceeded to take command, stepping up to Olivia with a hasty kiss. "Hello, you dear thing!" Turning to Ashley, she surveyed him an instant before offering her hand. "So you've got here! How fit you look! What sort of trip did you have, and how did you leave your people? And, oh, by the way, this is Mr. Davenant."

Davenant, who had been paying his respects to Miss Guion, charged forward, with hand outstretched and hearty: "Happy to meet you, Colonel. Glad to welcome you to our country."

"Oh!"

Ashley snapped out the monosyllable in a dry, metallic voice pitched higher than his usual key. The English softening of the vowel sound, so droll to the American ear, was also more pronounced than was customary in his speech, so that the exclamation became a sharp "A-ow!"

Feeling his greeting to have been insufficient, Davenant continued, pumping up a forced rough-and-ready cordiality. "Heard so much about you, Colonel, that you seem like an old friend. Hope you'll like us. Hope you'll enjoy your stay."

"Oh, indeed? I don't know, I'm sure."

Ashley's glance shifted from Drusilla to Olivia as though asking in some alarm who was this exuberant bumpkin in his Sunday clothes who had dropped from nowhere. Davenant drew back; his face fell. He looked like a big, sensitive dog hurt by a rebuff. It was Mrs. Fane who came to the rescue.

"Peter's come to see Cousin Henry. They've got business to talk over. And mother wants to know if you and Colonel Ashley won't come to dinner to-morrow evening. That's my errand. Just ourselves, you know. It'll be very quiet."

Olivia recovered somewhat from the agitation of the previous half-hour as well as from the movement of sudden, inexplicable anger which Ashley's reception of Davenant had produced in her. Even so she could speak but coldly, and, as it were, from a long way off.

"You'll go," she said, turning to Ashley, "and I'll come if I can leave papa. I'll run up flow and see how he is and take Mr. Davenant with me."



XIV

There was dignity in the way in which Davenant both withdrew and stood his ground. He was near the Corinthian portico of the house as Olivia approached him. Leaning on his stick, he looked loweringly back at Ashley, who talked to Drusilla without noticing him further. Olivia guessed that in Davenant's heart there was envy tinged with resentment, antipathy, not tempered by a certain unwilling admiration. She wondered what it was that made the difference between the two men, that gave Ashley his very patent air of superiority. It was a superiority not in looks, since Davenant was the taller and the handsomer; nor in clothes, since Davenant was the better dressed; nor in the moral make-up, since Davenant had given proofs of unlimited generosity. But there it was, a tradition of self-assurance, a habit of command which in any company that knew nothing about either would have made the Englishman easily stand first.

Her flash of anger against the one in defense of the other passed away, its place being taken by a feeling that astonished her quite as much. She tried to think it no more than a pang of jealousy at seeing her own countryman snubbed by a foreigner. She was familiar with the sensation from her European, and especially her English, experiences. At an unfriendly criticism it could be roused on behalf of a chance stranger from Colorado or California, and was generally quite impersonal. She told herself that it was impersonal now, that she would have had the same impulse of protection, of championship, for any one.

Nevertheless, there was a tone in her voice as she joined him that struck a new note in their acquaintanceship.

"I'm glad you came when you did. I wanted you to meet Colonel Ashley. You'll like him when you know him better. Just at first he was a little embarrassed. We'd been talking of things—"

"I didn't notice anything—that is, anything different from any other Englishman."

"Yes; that's it, isn't it? Meeting an Englishman is often like the first plunge into a cold bath—chilling at first, but delightful afterward."

He stopped under the portico, to say with a laugh that was not quite spontaneous: "Yes; I dare say. But my experience is limited. I've never got to the—afterward."

"Oh, well, you will," she said, encouragingly, "now that you know Colonel Ashley."

"I've heard of men plunging into a cold bath and finding it so icy that they've popped out again."

"Yes; thin-blooded men, who are sensitive to chills. Not men like you."

They entered the house, lingering in the oval sitting-room through which they had to pass.

"Fortunately," he tried to say, lightly, "it doesn't matter in this case whether I'm sensitive to chills or not."

"Oh, but it does. I want you two to be friends."

"What for?" The question was so point-blank as to be a little scornful, but she ignored that.

"On Colonel Ashley's side, for what he'll gain in knowing you; on yours—for something more."

He stopped again, at the foot of the staircase in the hall. "May I ask—just what you mean by that?"

She hesitated. "It's something that a tactful person wouldn't tell. If I do, it's only because I want you to consider me as—your friend. I know you haven't hitherto," she hurried on, as he flushed and tried to speak. "I haven't deserved it. But after what's happened—and after all you've done for us—"

"I could consider you my friend without asking Colonel Ashley to think of me as his."

"Hardly—if I marry him; and besides—when you know him—You see," she began again, "what I have in mind depends upon your knowing him—rather well."

"Then, Miss Guion," he laughed, "you can drop it. I've sized him up with a look. I've seen others like him—at Gibraltar and Malta and Aden and Hongkong and Cairo, and wherever their old flag floats. They're a fine lot. He's all right for you—all right in his place. Only, the place isn't—mine."

"Still," she persisted, "if I marry him you'd be sometimes in England; and you'd come to visit us, wouldn't you?"

"Come and—what?" His astonishment made him speak slowly.

She took a step or two up the stairway, leaning on the banister in a way to prevent his advancing. She was now looking down at him, instead of looking up.

"Isn't it true—?" she said, with hesitation—"at least I've rather guessed it—and I've gathered it from things Drusilla has said about you—You see," she began once more, "if we're to be friends you mustn't mind my speaking frankly and saying things that other people couldn't say. You've intervened so much in my life that I feel you've given me a right to—intervene—in yours."

"Oh, intervene as much as you like, Miss Guion," he said, honestly.

"Well, then, isn't it true that there are things you've wanted—wanted very much—and never had? If so—and I marry Colonel Ashley—"

"Hold on! Let's see what you mean by—things. If it's visiting round in high society—"

He tried to render as scorn his dismay at this touching on his weakness.

"I don't mean anything so crude. Visiting round in high society, as you call it, would at best be only the outward and visible sign of an inward—and, perhaps, spiritual—experience of the world. Isn't that what you've wanted? You see, if I do marry Colonel Ashley, I could—don't be offended!—I could open a door to you that you've never been able to force for yourself."

"You mean get me into society."

"You needn't be so disdainful. I didn't mean that—exactly. But there are people in the world different from those you meet in business—and in their way more interesting—certainly more picturesque. They'd like you if they knew you—and I had an idea that you—rather craved—After all, it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's only making the world bigger for oneself, and—"

Backing away from the stairway, he stood on a rug in the middle of the hall, his head hung like a young bull about to charge.

"What made you think of it?"

"Isn't that obvious? After you've done so much for me—"

"I haven't done anything for you, Miss Guion. I've said so a good many times. It wouldn't be right for me to take payment for what you don't owe me. Besides, there's nothing I want."

"That is to say," she returned, coldly, "you prefer the role of benefactor. You refuse to accept the little I might be able to do. I admit that it isn't much—but it's something—something within my power, and which I thought you might like. But since you don't—"

"It's no question of liking; it's one of admitting a principle. If you offer me a penny it's in part payment for a pound, while I say, and say again, that you don't owe me anything. If there's a debt at all it's your father's—and it's not transferable."

"Whether it's transferable or not is a matter that rests between my father and me—and, of course, Colonel Ashley, if I marry him."

He looked at her with sudden curiosity. "Why do you always say that with—an 'if'?"

She reflected an instant. "Because," she said, slowly, "I can't say it in any other way."

He straightened himself; he advanced again to the foot of the stairway.

"Is that because of any reason of—his?"

"It's because of a number of reasons, one of which is mine. It's this—that I find it difficult to go away with one man—when I have to turn my back upon the overwhelming debt I owe another. I do owe it—I do. The more I try to ignore it, the more it comes in between me and—"

He pressed forward, raising himself on the first step of the stairs, till his face was on a level with hers. He grew red and stammered:

"But, Miss Guion, you're—you're—in love with him?—the man you'd be going away with?"

She nodded. "Yes; but that wouldn't help me to feel justified with regard to the—the duty—I was leaving behind."

He dropped again to the level of the hall. "I don't understand. Do you mean to say that what I've done for Mr. Guion would keep you from getting married?"

"I'm not prepared to say that. Colonel Ashley is so—so splendid in the way he takes everything that—But I'll say this much," she began again, "that you've made it hard for me to be married."

"How so? I thought it would be all the other way."

"If you'll put yourself in my place—or in Colonel Ashley's place—you'll see. Try to think what it means for two people like us to go away—and be happy—and live in a great, fashionable world—and be people of some importance—knowing that some one else—who was nothing to us, as we were nothing to him—had to deprive himself of practically everything he had in the world to enable us to do it."

"But if it was a satisfaction to him—"

"That wouldn't make any difference to us. The facts would be the same."

"Then, as far as I see, I've done more harm than good."

"You've helped papa."

"But I haven't helped you."

"As I understand it, you didn't want to."

"I didn't want to—to do the reverse."

"Perhaps it wouldn't be the reverse if you could condescend to let me do something for you. It would be the fair exchange which is no robbery. That's why I suggest that if I'm to have that—that life over there—you should profit by its advantages."

He shook his head violently. "No, Miss Guion. Please don't think of it. It's out of the question. I wish you'd let me say once for all that you owe me nothing. I shall never accept anything from you—never!"

"Oh!" It was the protest of one who has been hurt.

"I'll take that back," he said, instantly. "There is something you can do for me and that I should like. Marry your Englishman, Miss Guion, and do what you said just now—go away and be happy. If you want to give me a reward, I'll take that."

She surveyed him a minute in astonishment. "You're perfectly extraordinary," she said at last, in a tone of exasperation, "and"—she threw at him a second later—"and impossible!"

Before he could reply she went grandly up the stairway, so that he was obliged to follow her. In the hall above she turned on him again. Had he not known that he had given her no cause for offence he would have said that her eyes filled with tears.

"Things are very hard as it is," she said, reproachfully. "You needn't go out of your way to make them gratuitously cruel."

"But, Miss Guion—" he began to protest.

"Please go in," she commanded, throwing open, as she spoke, the door of her father's room.



XV

Meanwhile, down on the lawn, Drusilla and Ashley were talking things over from their own points of view. There had been a second of embarrassment when they were first left alone, which Drusilla got over by pointing with her parasol to an indistinguishable spot in the stretch of tree-tops, spires, and gables sloping from the gate, saying:

"That's our house—the one with the little white cupola."

He made no pretense to listen or to look. "She says she doesn't want to marry me."

He made the statement dispassionately, as though laying down a subject for academic discussion.

It was some little time before she could think what to say.

"Well, that doesn't surprise me," she risked at last.

"Doesn't surprise you?"

She shook her head. "On the contrary, I should be very much astonished if she did—now. I should be astonished at any woman in her position wanting to marry a man in yours."

"I don't care a hang for my position."

"Oh yes, you do. And even if you didn't, it wouldn't matter. It's naturally a case in which you and she have to see from different angles. With you it's a point of honor to stand by her; with her it's the same thing not to let you."

"In honor it's the positive, not the negative, that takes precedence, and the positive happens to be mine."

"I don't think you can argue that way, you know. What takes precedence of everything else is—common sense."

"And do you mean to say that common sense requires that she shall give me up?"

"I shouldn't go so far as to assert that. But I shouldn't mind saying that if she did give you up there'd be a lot of common sense in her doing it."

"On whose account? Mine?"

"Yes; and hers. Perhaps chiefly on hers. You can hardly realize the number of things she has to take care of—and you'd be one more."

"I confess I don't seize your drift."

"It's not very abstruse, however. Just think. It isn't as if Cousin Henry had fallen ill, or had died, or had gone to pieces in any of the ordinary ways. Except for his own discomfort, he might just as well have been tried and sentenced and sent to prison. He's been as good as there. Every one knows it's only a special providence that he didn't go. But if he's escaped that by the skin of his teeth, he hasn't escaped a lot of other things. He hasn't escaped being without a penny in the world. He hasn't escaped having his house sold over his head and being turned out into the streets. He hasn't escaped reaching a perfectly impotent old age, with not a soul on this earth to turn to but Olivia."

"What about me?"

"Would you take him?"

"I shouldn't take him exactly. If he was my father-in-law"—he made a little grimace—"I suppose I could pension him off somewhere, or board him out, like an old horse. One couldn't have him round."

"H'm! I dare say that would do—but I doubt it. If you'd ever been a daughter you might feel that you couldn't dispose of a poor, old, broken-down father quite so easily. After all, he's not a horse. You might more or less forsake him when all was going well, and yet want to stick to him through thick and thin if he came a cropper. Look at me! I go off and leave my poor old dad for a year and more at a time—because he's a saint; but if he wasn't—especially if he'd got into any such scrape as Cousin Henry's—which isn't thinkable—but if he did—I'd never leave him again. That's my temperament. It's every girl's temperament. It's Olivia's. But all that is neither here nor there. If she married you, her whole life would be given up to trying to make you blend with a set of circumstances you couldn't possibly blend with. It would be worse than singing one tune to an orchestra playing another. She'd go mad with the attempt."

"Possibly; except for one factor which you've overlooked."

"Oh, love! Yes, yes. I thought you'd say that." Drusilla tossed her hands impatiently. "Love will do a lot, but it won't do everything. You can't count on it to work miracles in a sophisticated company like the Sussex Rangers. They've passed the age of faith for that sort of thing."

"I don't see," he said, speaking very slowly, "that the Rangers need be altogether taken into consideration."

She looked at him fixedly. "Do you mean that you'd—send in your papers?"

"Only in the sense that if my wife wasn't happy in the Service we could get out of it."

"Then you're really so much in love that you'd be willing to throw up everything on account of it?" There was some incredulity in her tone, to which, however, he offered no objection.

"Willing or unwilling isn't to the point. Surely you see that as far as public opinion goes I'm dished either way. The more I think of it the plainer it becomes. If I marry Olivia I let myself in for connection with a low-down scandal; if I don't, then they'll say I left her in the lurch. As for the effect on any possible promotion there might be in store for me, it would be six of one and half a dozen of the other. If I married her, and there was something good to be had, and old Bannockburn, let us say, was at the Horse Guards, then Lady Ban wouldn't have Olivia; and if I didn't marry her, and there was the same situation with old Englemere in command, then he wouldn't have me. There it is in a nutshell—simply nothing to choose."

They proceeded to stroll aimlessly up and down the lawn.

"I can quite see how it looks from your point of view—" she began.

"No, you can't," he interrupted, sharply, "because you leave out the fact that I am—I don't mind saying it—that is, to you—you've been such a good pal to me!—I shall never forget it!—but I am—head over heels—desperately—in love."

Having already heard this confession in what now seemed the far-off days in Southsea, she could hear it again with no more than a sense of oppression about the heart.

"Yes," she smiled, bravely. "I know you are. And between two ills you choose the one that has some compensation attached to it."

"Between two ills," he corrected, "I'm choosing the only course open to a man of honor. Isn't that it?"

There was a wistful inflection on the query. It put forth at one and the same time a request for corroboration and a challenge to a contrary opinion. If there could be no contrary opinion, he would have been glad of some sign of approval or applause. He wanted to be modest; and yet it was a stimulus to doing precisely the right thing to get a little praise for it, especially from a woman like Drusilla.

In this for once she disappointed him. "Of course you are," she assented, even too promptly.

"And yet you're advising me," he said, returning to the charge, "to make a bolt for it—and leave Olivia to shift for herself."

"If I remember rightly, the question you raised was not about you, but about her. It wasn't as to whether you should marry her, but as to whether she should marry you. I'm not disputing your point of view; I'm only defending Olivia's. I can see three good reasons why you should keep your word to her—"

"Indeed? And what are they?"

She told them off on her fingers. "First, as you can't do anything else. Second—"

"Your first reason," he interrupted, hastily, as though he feared she suspected him of not being convinced of it, "covers the whole ground. We don't need the rest."

"Still," she insisted, "we might as well have them. Second, it's the more prudent of two rather disadvantageous courses. Third—to quote your own words—you're head over heels in love with her. It's easy to see that now, and now another of these reasons is uppermost in your mind; but it's also easy to see that none of them makes a conclusive appeal to Olivia Guion. That's the point."

"The point is that I'm in love with her, and—if it's not claiming too much—she with me. We've nothing else to consider."

"You haven't. She has. She has all the things I've just hinted at—and ever so many more; besides which," she added, taking a detached, casual tone, "I suppose she has to make up her mind one way or another as to what she's going to do about Peter Davenant."

The crow's-foot wrinkles about his eyes deepened to a frown of inquiry. "About Peter—who?"

Drusilla still affected a casual tone. "Oh? Hasn't she told you about him?"

"Not a word. Who is he?"

She nodded in the direction of the house. "He's up-stairs with Cousin Henry."

"The big fellow who was here just now? That—lumpkin?"

"Yes," she said, dryly, "that—lumpkin. It was he who gave Cousin Henry the money to meet his liabilities."

"So he's the Fairy Prince? He certainly doesn't look it."

"No; he doesn't look it; but he's as much of a problem to Olivia as if he did."

"Why? What has he to do with her?"

"Nothing, except that I suppose she must feel very grateful."

They reached the edge of the lawn where a hedge of dahlias separated them from the neighboring garden.

"When you say that," he asked, "do you mean anything in particular?"

"I suppose I mean everything in particular. The situation is one in which all the details count."

"And the bearing of this special detail—"

"Oh, don't try to make me explain that. In the first place, I don't know; and in the second, I shouldn't tell you if I did. I'm merely giving you the facts. I think you're entitled to know them."

"So I should have said. Are there many more? I've had a lot since I landed. I thought I must have heard pretty well all there was—"

"Probably you had, except just that. I imagine Olivia found it difficult to speak of, and so I'm doing it for her."

"Why should she find it difficult to speak of? It's a mere matter of business, I suppose."

"If it's business to give Cousin Henry what would be nearly a hundred thousand pounds in English money, with no prospect that any one can see of his ever getting it back—that is, not unless old Madame de Melcourt—"

"Oh, I say! Then he's one of your beastly millionaires, by Jove!—grind the noses off the poor, and that sort of thing, to play Haroun-al-Raschid with the cash."

"Not in the least. He never ground the nose off any one; and as for being a millionaire, father says that what he's done for Cousin Henry will pretty well clean him out."

"All the same, he's probably done it with a jolly sharp eye to the main chance."

"Oh, I dare say his motives weren't altogether altruistic. Only it's a little difficult to see where the main chance comes in."

"Then what the deuce is he up to?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that. I repeat that I'm only giving you the facts. You must interpret them for yourself."

He looked thoughtful. Drusilla plucked a scarlet dahlia and fastened it in her dress, after which they strolled back slowly to the middle of the lawn. Here Ashley said:

"Has all this got anything to do with Olivia? I wish you wouldn't make mysteries."

"I'm not making mysteries. I'm telling you what's happened just as it occurred. He advanced the money to Cousin Henry, and that's all I know about it. If I draw any inferences—"

"Well?"

"I'm just as likely to be wrong as right."

"Then you have drawn inferences?"

"Who wouldn't? I should think you'd be drawing them yourself."

They wandered on a few yards, when he stopped again. "Look here," he said, with a sort of appealing roughness, "you're quite straight with me, aren't you?"

The rich, surging color came swiftly into her face, as wine seen through something dark and transparent. Her black eyes shone like jet. She would have looked tragic had it not been for her fixed, steady smile.

"Have I ever been anything else with you?"

"No. You've been straight as a die. I'll say that for you. You've been a good pal—a devilish good pal! But over here—in America—everything seems to go by enigmas—and puzzles—and surprises—"

"I'll explain what I can to you," she said, with a heightened color, "but it won't be so very easy. There are lots of people who, feeling as I do—toward Olivia—and—and toward you—would want to beat about the bush. But when all these things began to happen—and you were already on the way—I turned everything over in my mind and decided to speak exactly as I think."

"Good!"

"But it isn't so very easy," she repeated, pretending to rearrange the dahlia in her laces, so as to find a pretext for not looking him in the eyes. "It isn't so very easy; and if—later on—in after years perhaps—when everything is long over—it ever strikes you that I didn't play fair—it'll be because I played so fair that I laid myself open to that imputation. One can, you know. I only ask you to remember it. That's all."

Ashley was bewildered. He could follow little more than half of what she said. "More mysteries," he was sighing to himself as she spoke. "And such a color! That's her strong point. Pity it only comes by fits and flashes. But, good Lord, what a country! Always something queer and new."

"Good-by," she said, offering her hand before he had time to emerge from his meditations. "We shall see you to-morrow evening. And, by the way, we dine at half-past seven. We're country people here, and primitive. No; don't come to the gate. Olivia must be wondering where you are."

He looked after her as she tripped over the lawn toward the roadway, still holding her long-handled, beribboned, eighteenth-century sunshade with the daintiness of a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook.

"She's a good 'un," he said to himself. "Straight as a die, she is—and true as steel."

None the less he was glad when she left him.



XVI

Ashley wanted to be alone. He needed solitude in order to face the stupendous bit of information Mrs. Fane had given him. Everything else he had heard during the past twenty-four hours he had felt himself more or less competent to meet. True, his meeting it would be at a sacrifice and the probable loss of some of the best things he had hoped and worked for; but he should have the satisfaction that comes to every man of honor when he has done a brave thing well. There would be something, too, in giving the lie to people who accused him of having no thought but for his own advancement. He had been sensitive to that charge, because of the strain of truth in it, and yet had seen no means of counteracting it. Very well; he should counteract it now.

Since there was no way out of the situation he had found in America—that is, no way consistent with self-respect—it was characteristic of him, both as diplomatist and master of tactics, to review what was still in his favor. He called himself to witness that he had wasted no time in repining. He had risen to the circumstances as fast as nature would permit, and adapted himself right on the spur of the moment to an entirely new outlook on the future. Moreover, he had been able to detach Olivia herself from the degrading facts surrounding her, seeing her, as he had seen her from the first, holy and stainless, untouched by conditions through which few women could pass without some personal deterioration. In his admiration and loyalty he had not wavered for a second. On the contrary, he was sure that he should love her the more intensely, in spite of, and perhaps because of, her misfortunes.

He felt free, therefore, to resent this new revelation so fantastically out of proportion to the harmony of life. It was the most staggering thing he had ever heard of. An act such as that with which Drusilla credited Davenant brought into daily existence a feature too prodigious to find room there. Or, rather, having found the room through sheer force of its own bulk, it dwarfed everything else into insignificance. It hid all objects and blocked all ways. You could get neither round it nor over it nor through it. You could not even turn back and ignore it. You could only stand and stare at it helplessly, giving it the full tribute of awe.

Ashley gave it. He gave it while lighting mechanically a cigar which he did not smoke and standing motionless in the middle of the lawn, heedless of the glances—furtive, discreet, sympathetic, admiring—cast at him from the windows and balconies of the surrounding houses. His quick eye, trained to notice everything within its ken, saw them plainly enough. The houses were not so distant nor the foliage so dense but that kindly, neighborly interest could follow the whole drama taking place at Tory Hill. Ashley could guess with tolerable accuracy that the ladies whom he saw ostensibly reading or sewing on verandas had been invited to the wedding, and were consequently now in the position of spectators at a play. The mere detail of this American way of living, with unwalled properties merging into one another, and doors and windows flung wide to every passing glance, gave him an odd sense of conducting his affairs in the market-place or on the stage. If he did not object to it, it was because of the incitement to keep up to the level of his best which he always drew from the knowledge that other people's eyes were upon him.

He felt this stimulus when Olivia came out to the Corinthian portico, seating herself in a wicker chair, with an obvious invitation to him to join her. "Drusilla Fane has been telling me about your—your friend."

She knew he meant the last two words to be provocative. She knew it by slight signs of nervousness in his way of standing before her, one foot on the grass and the other on the first step of the portico. He betrayed himself, too, in an unsuccessful attempt to make his intonation casual, as well as by puffing at his cigar without noticing that it had gone out. An instant's reflection decided her to accept his challenge. As the subject had to be met, the sooner it came up the better.

She looked at him mildly. "What did she say about him?"

"Only that he was the man who put up the money."

"Yes; he was."

"Why didn't you tell me that this morning?"

"I suppose because there was so much else to say. We should have come round to it in time. I did tell you everything but his name."

"And the circumstances."

"How do you mean—the circumstances?"

"I got the impression from you this morning that it was some millionaire Johnny who'd come to your father's aid by advancing the sum in the ordinary way of business. I didn't understand that it was a comparatively poor chap who was cleaning himself out to come to yours."

In wording his phrase he purposely went beyond the warrant, in order to rouse her to denial, or perhaps to indignation. But she said only:

"Did Drusilla say it was to come to my aid?"

"She didn't say it—exactly. I gathered that it was what she thought."

She astonished him by saying, simply: "I think so, too."

"Extraordinary! Do you mean to say he dropped out of a clear sky?"

"I must answer that by both a yes and a no. He did drop out of a clear sky just lately; but I'd known him before."

"Ah!" His tone was that of a cross-examiner dragging the truth from an unwilling witness. He put his questions rapidly and sharply, as though at a Court-martial. "So you'd known him before! Did you know him well?"

"I didn't think it was well; but apparently he did, because he asked me to marry him."

Ashley bounded. "Who? That—that cowboy!"

"Yes; if he is a cowboy."

"And you took money from him?"

Her elbows rested on the arm of her chair; the tip of her chin on the back of her bent fingers. Without taking her eyes from his she inclined her head slowly in assent.

"That is," he hastened to say, in some compunction, "your father took it. We must keep the distinction—"

"No; I took it. Papa was all ready to decline it. He had made up his mind—"

"Do you mean that the decision to accept it rested with you?"

"Practically."

"You didn't—" He hesitated, stammered, and grew red. "You didn't—" he began again. "You'll have to excuse the question.... I simply must know, by Jove!... You didn't ask him for it?"

She rose with dignity. "If you'll come in I'll tell you about it. We can't talk out here."

He came up the portico steps to the level on which she was standing. "Tell me that first," he begged.

"You didn't ask him for it? Did you?"

In the French window, as she was about to enter the room, she half turned round. "I don't think it would bear that construction; but it might. I'd rather you judged for yourself. I declined it at first—and then I said I'd take it. I don't know whether you'd call that asking. But please come in."

He followed her into the oval room, where they were screened from neighborly observation, while, with the French window open, they had the advantage of the air and the rich, westering sunshine. Birds hopped about in the trees, and now and then a gray squirrel darted across the grass.

"I should think," he said, nervously, before she had time to begin her explanation, "that a fellow who had done that for you would occupy your mind to the exclusion of everybody else."

Guessing that he hoped for a disclaimer on her part, she was sorry to be unable to make it.

"Not to their exclusion—but perhaps—a little to their subordination."

He pretended to laugh. "What a pretty distinction!"

"You see, I haven't been able to help it. He's loomed up so tremendously above everything—"

"And every one."

"Yes," she admitted, with apologetic frankness, "and every one—that is, in the past few days—that it's as if I couldn't see anything but him."

"Oh, I'm not jealous," he exclaimed, pacing up and down the length of the room.

"Of course not," she agreed, seating herself in one of the straight-backed chairs. Her clasped hands rested on the small round table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.

Ashley, who had flung his panama on a sofa, continued to pace up and down the room, his head bent and his fingers clasped tightly under his jacket behind his back. He moved jerkily, like a man preserving outward self-control in spite of extreme nervous tension.

He listened almost without interruption while she gave him a precise account of Davenant's intervention in her father's troubles. She spared no detail of her own opposition and eventual capitulation. She spoke simply and easily, as though repeating something learned by heart, just as she had narrated the story of Guion's defaulting in the morning. Apart from the fact that she toyed with a paper-knife lying on the table, she sat rigidly still, her eyes never wandering from the line of autumn flowers on the far side of the lawn.

"So you see," she concluded, in her quiet voice, "I came to understand that it was a choice between taking it from him and taking it from the poor women papa had ruined; and I thought that as he was young—and strong—and a man—he'd be better able to bear it. That was the reason."

He came to a standstill on the other side of the table, where he could see her in profile.

"You're extraordinary, by Jove!" he muttered. "You're not a bit like what you look. You look so fragile and tender; and yet you could have let that old man—"

"I could only have done it if it was right. Nothing that's right is very hard, you know."

"And what about the suffering?"

She half smiled, faintly shrugging her shoulders. "Don't you think we make more of suffering than there's any need for? Suffering is nothing much—except, I suppose, the suffering that comes from want. That's tragic. But physical pain—and the things we call trials—are nothing so terrible if you know the right way to bear them."

The abstract question didn't interest him. He resumed his restless pacing.

"So," he began again, in his tone of conducting a court-martial—"so you refused the money in the first place, because you thought the fellow was trying to get you into his power. Have you had any reason to change your opinion since?"

"None, except that he makes no effort to do it."

He stopped again beside the table. "And do you suppose he would? When you've prepared your ambush cleverly enough you don't have to go out and drag your victim into it. You've only to lie still and he'll walk in of his own accord."

"Of course I see that."

"Well, what then?"

She threw him a glance over her shoulder. To do so it was necessary for her to turn her head both sidewise and upward, so that he got the exquisite lines of the neck and profile, the mysterious gray-green tint of the eyes, and the coppery gleam of her hair. The appeal to his senses and to something beyond his senses made him gasp. It made him tremble. "My God, what a wife for me!" he was saying to himself. "She's got the pluck of a Jeanne d'Arc and the nerve of a Christian martyr."

"Well, then," she said, in answer to his words—"then I don't have to walk into the ambush—unless I want to."

"Does that mean that there are conceivable conditions in which you might want to?"

She turned completely round in her chair. Both hands, with fingers interlaced, rested on the table as she looked up at him.

"I shall have to let you find your own reply to that."

"But you know he's in love with you."

"I know he was in love with me once. I've no absolute reason to think that he is so still."

"But supposing he was? Would it make any difference to you?"

"Would it make any difference to you?"

"It would make the difference—"

He stopped in confusion. While he was not clear as to what he was going to say, he was startled by the possibilities before him. The one thing plain was that her question, simple as it seemed, gave an entirely new turn to the conversation. It called on him to take the lead, and put him, neatly and skilfully, in the one place of all others which—had he descried it in advance—he would have been eager to avoid. Would it make any difference to him? What difference could it make? What difference must it make?

It was one of those moments which occur from time to time when a man of honor must speak first and reflect afterward—just as at the heights of Dargal he had had to risk his life for Private Vickerson's, without debating as to which of them, in the general economy of lives, could the more easily be spared.

"It would make the difference—"

He stopped again. It was a great deal to say. Once he had said it there could be no reconsideration. Reconsideration would be worse than not saying it at all, on the principle that not to stand by one's guns might be a greater cowardice than not to mount them. Fear, destruction, and the pit might come upon him; the service, the country, Heneage, home, honors, ambitions, promotions, high posts of command, all might be swept into the abyss, and yet one imperative duty would survive the wreck, the duty to be Rupert Ashley at his finest. The eyes of England were on him. There was always that conviction, that incentive. Let his heroism be never so secret, sooner or later those eyes would find him out.

He was silent so long that she asked, not impatiently: "It would make what difference, Rupert?"

It was clear that she had no idea as to what was passing in his mind. There had been an instant—just an instant—no more—when he had almost doubted her, when her strategy in putting him where he was had seemed too deft to be the result of chance. But, with her pure face turned upward and her honest eyes on his, that suspicion couldn't last.

"It would make the difference—"

If he paused again, it was only because his throat swelled with a choking sensation that made it difficult to speak; he felt, too, that his face was congested. Nevertheless the space, which was not longer than a few seconds by the clock, gave him time to remember that as his mother's and his sisters' incomes were inalienable he was by so much the more free. He was by so much the more free to do the mad, romantic, quixotic thing, which might seem to be a contradiction of his past, but was not so much a contradiction of himself as people who knew him imperfectly might suppose. He was taken to be ambitious, calculating, shrewd; when all the while he knew himself to be—as most Englishmen are at heart—quixotic, romantic, and even a little mad, when madness can be sublime.

He was able at last to get his sentence out.

"It would make the difference that ... before we are married ... or after ... probably after ... I should have to square him."

"Square him?" She echoed the words as though she had no idea what they meant.

"I'm worth ... I must be worth ... a hundred thousand pounds ... perhaps more."

"Oh, you mean, square him in that way."

"I must be a man of honor before everything, by Jove!"

"You couldn't be anything else. You don't need to go to extremes like that to prove it."

Her lack of emotion, of glad enthusiasm, chilled him. She even ceased to look at him, turning her profile toward him and gazing again abstractedly across the lawn. A sudden fear took hold of him, the fear that his hesitations, his evident difficulty in getting the thing out, had enabled her to follow the processes by which he whipped himself up to an act that should have been spontaneous. He had a suspicion, too, that in this respect he had fallen short of the American—the cowboy, as he had called him. "I must do better than him," he said, in his English idiom. The thought that he might not have done as well was rather sickening. If he had so failed it was through inadvertence, but the effect on Olivia would be as great as if it was from fear. To counteract it he felt the need of being more emphatic. His emphasis took the form of simple common sense.

"It isn't going to extremes to take up one's own responsibilities. I can't let a fellow like that do things for your father any more than for mine, by Jove! It's not only doing things for my father, but for—my wife."

Drawing up a small chair, he sat down on the other side of the table. He sat down with the air of a man who means to stay and take possession.

"Oh, but I'm not your wife, Rupert."

"You're my wife already," he declared, "to all intents and purposes. We've published our intention to become man and wife to the world. Neither of us can go back on that. The mere fact that certain words haven't been mumbled over us is secondary. For everything that constitutes duty I'm your husband now."

"Oh no, you're not. You're the noblest man in the world, Rupert. I never dreamed that there could be any one like you. But I couldn't let you—I couldn't—"

He crushed her hands in both of his own, leaning toward her across the table. "Oh, my darling, if you only knew how easy it is—"

"No, it isn't easy. It can't be easy. I couldn't let you do it for me—"

"But what about him? You let—him!"

"Oh, but that's different."

"How is it different?"

"I don't know, Rupert; but it is. Or rather," she went on, rapidly, "I do know, but I can't explain. If you were an American you'd understand it."

"Oh, American—be blowed!" The accent was all tenderness, the protest all beseeching.

"I can't explain it," she hurried on, "because you don't understand us. It's one of the ways in which an Englishman never can understand us. But the truth is that money doesn't mean as much to us as it does to you. I know you think the contrary, but that's where you make your primary mistake. It's light come and light go with most of us, for the simple reason that money is outside our real life; whereas with you English it's the warp and woof of it."

"Oh, bosh, darling!"

"No, it isn't bosh. In your civilization it's as the blood; in ours it's only as the clothing. That's something like the difference. In accepting it from Peter Davenant—which is hard enough!—I take only what he can do without; whereas—"

"I can do without it, too."

"Whereas," she persisted, "if I were to let you do this I should be robbing you of the essence of what you are."

He drew back slightly. "You mean that your Yankee is a strong man, while I'm—"

"I don't mean anything invidious or unkind. But isn't it self-evident, or nearly, that we're individuals, while you're parts of an intricate social system? The minute you fall out of your place in the system you come to grief; but vicissitudes don't affect us much more than a change of coats."

"I don't care a button for my place in the system."

"But I do. I care for it for you. I should have married you and shared it if I could. But I'd rather not marry you than that you should lose it."

"That is," he said, coldly, "you'd rather use his money than—"

She withdrew her hands, her brows contracting and her eyes clouding in her effort to make him understand the position from her point of view. "You see, it's this way. For one thing, we've taken the money already. That's past. We may have taken it temporarily, or for good and all, as things turn out; but in any case it's done. And yet even if it weren't done it would be easier for us to draw on him rather than on you, because he's one of ourselves."

"One of yourselves? I thought that's just what he wasn't. I thought he was a jolly outsider."

"You mean socially. But that again hasn't much significance in a country where socially we're all of one class. Where there's only one class there can't be any outsiders."

"Oh, that's all very fine. But look at you with your extremes of rich and poor!"

"That's the most superficial difference among us. It's the easiest possible thing to transcend. I'm transcending it now in feeling that I've a right—yes, a kind of right—to take Peter Davenant's money, because as Americans we've a claim on each other."

He threw himself against the straight back of the chair, his arms flung out with a gesture that brought his hands nearly to the floor. "You're the last people in the world to feel anything of the kind. Every one knows that you're a set of ruthless, predatory—"

"I know that's the way it seems; and I'm not defending anything that may be wrong. And yet, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we have a sense of brotherhood—I don't know any other name for it—among ourselves which isn't to be found anywhere else in the world. You English haven't got it. That's why the thing I'm saying seems mere sentiment to you, and even mawkish. You're so afraid of sentiment. But it's true. It may be only a rudimentary sense of brotherhood; and it's certainly not universal, as it ought to be, because we feel it only among ourselves. We don't really include the foreigner—not at least till he becomes one of us. I'm an instance of that limitation myself, because I can't feel it toward you, and I do—"

"You do feel it toward the big chap," he said, scornfully.

She made a renewed effort to explain herself. "You see, it's something like this. If my aunt de Melcourt, who's very well off, were to come forward and help us, I'd let her do it without scruple. Not that there's any particular reason why she should! But if she did—well, you can see for yourself that it wouldn't be as if she were a stranger."

"Of course! She's one of your own people—and all that."

"Well, he's one of our own people—Mr. Davenant. Not to the degree that she is—but the same sort of thing—even if more distant. It's very distant, I admit—"

His lip curled. "So distant as to be out of sight."

"No; not for him—or for me."

He sprang to his feet. "Look here, Olivia," he cried, nervously, holding his chair by the back, "what does it all mean? What are you leading up to?"

"I'm telling you as plainly as I can."

"What you aren't telling me as plainly as you can is which of us you're in love with."

She colored. It was one of those blushes that spread up the temples and over the brows and along the line of the hair with the splendor of a stormy dawn.

"I didn't know the question had been raised," she said, "but since apparently it has—"

It might have been contrition for a foolish speech, or fear of what she was going to say, that prompted him to interrupt her hurriedly:

"I beg your pardon. It was idiotic of me to say that. I didn't mean it. As a matter of fact, I'm jumpy. I'm not master of myself. So much has been happening—"

He came round the table, and, snatching one of her hands, he kissed it again and again. He even sank on one knee beside her, holding her close to him. With the hand that remained free she stroked his crisp, wavy, iron-gray hair as a sign of pardon.

"You're quite wrong about me," he persisted.

"Even if you're right about other Englishmen—which I don't admit—you're wrong about me, by Jove! If I had to give up everything I had in the world I should have all the compensation a man could desire if I got you."

She leaned over him, pressing his head against her breast, as she whispered:

"You couldn't get me that way. You must understand—I must make it as plain to you as I can—that I couldn't go to you except as an equal. I couldn't go to any man—"

He sprang to his feet. "But you came to me as an equal," he cried, in tones of exasperation. "That's all over and done with. It's too late to reconsider the step we've taken—too late for me—much too late!—and equally too late for you."

"I can't admit that, Rupert. I've still the right to draw back."

"The legal right—yes; whether or not you've the moral right would depend on your sense of honor."

"Of honor?"

"Certainly. There's an honor for you as well as for me. When I'm so true to you it wouldn't be the square thing to play me false."

She rose without haste. "Do you call that a fair way of putting it—to say that I play you false because I refuse to involve you in our family disasters? I don't think any one could blame me for that."

"What they could blame you for is this—for backing out of what is practically a marriage, and for deserting me in a way that will make it seem as if I had deserted you. Quite apart from the fact that life won't be worth anything to me without you, it will mean ruin as a man of honor if I go home alone. Every one will say—every one—that I funked the thing because your father—"

She hastened to speak. "That's a very urgent reason. I admit its force—"

She paused because there was a sound of voices overhead. Footsteps came along the upper hall and began to descend the stairs. Presently Davenant could be heard saying:

"Then I shall tell Harrington that they may as well foreclose at one time as another."

"Just as well." Guion's reply came from the direction of his bedroom door. "I see nothing to be gained by waiting. The sooner it's over the sooner to sleep, what?"

"They're talking about the mortgage on the property," she explained, as Davenant continued to descend. "This house is to be sold—and everything in it—"

"Which is one more reason why we should be married without delay. I say," he added, in another tone, "let's have him in."

"Oh no! What for?"

Before she could object further, Ashley had slipped out into the hall.

"I say! Come along in."

His attitude as he stood with hands thrust into his jacket pockets and shoulders squared bespoke conscious superiority to the man whom he was addressing. Though Davenant was not in her line of vision she could divine his astonishment at this easy, English unceremoniousness, as well as his resentment to the tone of command. She heard him muttering an excuse which Ashley interrupted with his offhand "Oh, come in. Miss Guion would like to see you."

She felt it her duty to go forward and second this invitation. Davenant, who was standing at the foot of the staircase, murmured something about town and business.

"It's too late for town and business at this hour," Ashley objected. "Come in."

He withdrew toward the room where Olivia was standing between the portieres of the doorway. Davenant yielded, partly because of his ignorance of the small arts of graceful refusal, but more because of his curiosity concerning the man Olivia Guion was to marry. He had some interest, too, in observing one who was chosen where he himself had been rejected. It would afford an answer to the question, "What lack I yet?" with which he was tormented at all times. That it could not be a flattering answer was plain to him from the careless, indefinable graces of Ashley's style. It was a style that Davenant would have scorned to imitate, but which nevertheless he envied. In contrast with its unstudied ease he could feel his own social methods to be labored and apologetic. Where he was watchful to do the right thing, what Ashley said or did became the right thing because he said or did it. With the echo of soft English vowels and clear, crisp consonants in his ears, his own pronunciations, too, were rough with the harshness transmitted from an ancestry to whom the melody of speech had been of no more practical concern than the music of the spheres.