"Often, Tootles, my dear."

"And will you see the light in my eyes and feel my hands on your face and my lips on your lips?"

She bent forward and put them there and drew back with a shaking sob and scrambled up and fled.

She had seen the others coming, but that was not why she had torn herself away. One flash of sex was enough that night. The next time he must do the kissing.

Eve and July and the scent of honeysuckle!

Breakfast was on the table. To Irene, who came down in her dressing gown with her hair just bundled up and her face coated with powder, eight o'clock was an unearthly hour at which to begin the day. In New York she slept until eleven, read the paper until twelve, cooked and disposed of a combined breakfast-lunch at one, and if it was a matinee day, rushed round to the theater, and if it wasn't, killed time until her work called her in the evening. A boob's life, as she called it, was a trying business, but the tyranny of the bustling woman with whom she lodged was such that if breakfast was not eaten at eight o'clock it was not there to eat. Like an English undergraduate who scrambles out of bed to attend Chapel simply to avoid a fine, this product of Broadway theaterdom conformed to the rule of Mrs. Burrell's energetic house because the good air of Devon gave her a voracious appetite. Then, too, even if she missed breakfast, she had to pay for it, "so there you are, old dear."

Tootles, up with the lark as usual, was down among the ducks, giving Farmer Burrell a useful hand. She delighted in doing so. From a country grandfather she had inherited a love of animals and of the early freshness of the morning that found eager expression, now that she had the chance of giving it full rein. Then, too, all that was maternal in her nature warmed at the sight and sound of all those new, soft, yellow things that waddled closely behind the wagging tails of their mothers, and it gave her a sort of sweet comfort to go down on her knees and hold one of these frightened babies against her cheek.

Crying out, "Oo-oo, Tootles," from halfway down the cinder path, Irene, stimulated by the aroma of hot coffee and toast, and eggs and bacon, returned to the living room and fell to humming, "You're here and I'm here."

Tootles joined her immediately, a very different looking little person from the tired-eyed, yawning girl of the city rabbit warren. Health was in her eyes and a little smile at the corners of her mouth. Quick work was made of the meal to the intermittent duck talk of Mrs. Burrell who came in and out of the kitchen through a creaking door,—a normal, noisy soul, to whom life was a succession of laborious days spent between the cooking stove and the washtub with a regular Saturday night, in her best clothes, at the motion-picture theater at Sag Harbor to gape at the abnormality of Theda Bara and scream with uncontrolled mirth at the ingenious antics of Charlie Chaplin. An ancient Ford made possible this weekly dip into these intense excitements.

And then the two girls left the living room with its inevitable rocking chairs and framed texts and old heating stove with a funnel through the wall and went out into the sun.

"Well, dearie," said Irene, sitting on the edge of the stoop, within sound of the squeaking of a many-armed clothes drier, teased by a nice sailing wind. "Us for the yawl to-day."

"You for the yawl," said Tootles. "I'm staying here to help old man Burrell. It's his busy day."

Irene looked up quickly. "What's the idea?"

"Just that,—and something else. I don't want to see Martin till this evening. I moved things last night, and I want him to miss me a bit."

"Ah," said Irene. "I guessed it meant something when you made that quick exit when we moved up. Have you got him, dearie?"

Tootles shot out a queer little sigh and nodded.

"That's fine. He's not like the others, is he? But you've played him great. Oh, I've seen it all, never you fear. Subtle, old dear, very subtle. Shouldn't have had the patience myself. Go in and win. He's worth it." Tootles put her hands over her face and a great sob shook her.

In an instant, Irene had her in her arms. "Dear old Tootles," she said, "it means an awful lot to you, don't it? Don't give way, girlie. You've done mighty well so far. Now follow it up, hot and fast. That boy's got a big heart and he's generous and kind, and he won't forget. I brought you here for this, such a chance as it was, and if I can see you properly fixed up and happy, my old uncle's little bit of velvet will have come in mighty useful, eh? Got a plan for to-night?"

Tootles nodded again. "If I don't win to-night," she said, "it's all over. I shall have to own that he cares for me less than the dust. I shall have to throw up my hands and creep away and hide. Oh, my God, am I such a rotten little freak as all that, Irene? Tell me, go on, tell me."

"Freak? You! For Heaven's sake. Don't the two front rows give nobody but you the supper signal whenever the chorus is on?"

"But they're not like Martin. He's,—well, I dunno just what he is. For one thing there's that butterfly he's married to. He's never said as much as half a word about her to me, but the look that came into his eyes when he saw her the night I told you about,—I'd be run over by a train for it any time. He's a man alright and wants love as bad as I do. I know that, but sometimes, when I watch his face, when neither of us is talking, there's a queer smile on it, like a man who's looking up at somebody, and he sets his jaw and squares his shoulders just as if he had heard a voice telling him to play straight. Many times I've seen it, Irene, and after that I have to begin all over again. I respect him for it, and it makes me love him more and more. I've never had the luck to meet a man like him. The world would be a bit less rotten for the likes of you and me if there were more of him about, I tell you. But it hurts me like the devil because it makes me feel no better than a shoe with the buttons off and the heel all worn down, and I ask myself what's the blooming use. But last night I kissed him, and I saw his eyes glint for the first time and to-night,—to-night, Irene, I'm going to play my last card. Yes, that's what I'm going to do, play the last card in the pack."

"How?" asked Irene eagerly, sympathy and curiosity bubbling to the top.

Tootles shook her head. "It isn't lucky to go talking about it." she said, with a most wistful smile. "You'll know whether it's the heights or the depths for me when you see me in the morning."

"In the morning? Shan't you be..."

"Don't ask. Just wish me luck and go and have a good day with the boys. I shall be waiting for you at the cottage. And now I'm off down to the ducks. Say I've got a headache and don't let 'em come round and try to fetch me. So long, Irene; you've been some pal to me through this and I shall never forget."

Whereupon Tootles went off to lend the unloquacious Burrell a helping hand, and Irene ran up to the bedroom to dress.

From the pompous veranda of the Hosack place Gilbert Palgrave, sick with jealousy, watched Joan swimming out to the barrels with that cursed boy in tow. And he, too, had made up his mind to play his last card that night.

Man and woman and love,—the old, inevitable story.



IX

The personnel of the Hosacks' house party had changed.

Mrs. Noel d'Oyly had led her little husband away to Newport to stay with Mrs. Henry Vanderdyke, where were Beatrix and Pelham Franklin, with a bouncing baby boy, the apple of Mr. Vanderdyke's eye. Enid Ouchterlony had left for Gloucester, Massachusetts, where her aunt, Mrs. Horace Pallant, entertained in an almost royal fashion and was eager to set her match-making arts to work on behalf of her only unmarried niece. Enid had gone to the very edge of well-bred lengths to land Courtney Millet, but Scots ancestry and an incurable habit of talking sensibly and rather well had handicapped her efforts. She had confided to Primrose with a sudden burst of uncharacteristic incaution that she seemed doomed to become an old man's darling. Her last words to the sympathetic Primrose were, "Oh, Prim, Prim, pray that you may never become intellectual. It will kill all your chances." Miss Hosack was, however, perfectly safe.

Milwood, fired by a speech at the Harvard Club by Major General Leonard Wood, had scratched all his pleasant engagements for the summer, and was at Plattsburg learning for the first time, at the camp which will some day occupy an inspiring chapter in the history of the United States, the full meaning of the words "duty" and "discipline." Their places had been taken by Major and Mrs. Barnet Thatcher and dog, Regina Waterhouse and Vincent Barclay, a young English officer invalided out of the Royal Flying Corps after bringing down eight German machines. A cork leg provided him with constant amusement. He had a good deal of property in Canada and was making his way to Toronto by easy stages. A cheery fellow, cut off from all his cherished sports but free from even the suggestion of grousing. Of his own individual stunts, as he called them, he gave no details and made no mention of the fact that he carried the D.S.O. and the Croix de Guerre in his bag. He had met the Hosacks at the American Embassy in London in 1913. He was rather sweet on Primrose.

The fact that Joan was still there was easily accounted for. She liked the place, and her other invitations were not interesting. Hosack didn't want her to go either, but of course that had nothing to do with it, and so far as Mrs. Hosack was concerned, let the bedroom be occupied by some one of her set and she was happy enough. Indeed, it saved her the brain fag of inviting some one else, "always difficult with so many large houses to fill and so few people to go round, my dear."

Harry Oldershaw was such a nice boy that he did just as he liked. If it suited him he could keep his room until the end of the season. The case of Gilbert Palgrave was entirely different. A privileged, spoiled person, who made no effort to be generally agreeable and play up, he was rather by way of falling into the same somewhat difficult category as a minor member of the British Royalty. His presence was an honor although his absence would have been a relief. He chose to prolong his visit indefinitely and there was an end of it.

Every day at Easthampton had, however, been a nightmare to Palgrave. Refusing to take him seriously, Joan had played with him as a cat plays with a mouse. Kind to him one minute she had snubbed him the next. The very instant that he had congratulated himself on making headway his hopes had been scattered to the four winds by some scathing remarks and her disappearance for hours with Harry Oldershaw. She had taken a mischievous delight in leading him on with winning smiles and charming and appealing ways only to burst out laughing at his blazing protestations of love and leave him inarticulate with anger and wounded vanity. "If you want me to love you, make me," she had said. "I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best." He had done his best. With a totally uncharacteristic humbleness, forgetting the whole record of his former easy conquests, and with this young slim thing so painfully in his blood that there were times when he had the greatest difficulty to retain his self-control, he had concentrated upon the challenge that she had flung at him and set himself to teach her how to love with all the thirsty eagerness of a man searching for water. People who had watched him in his too wealthy adolescence and afterwards buying his way through life and achieving triumphs on the strength of his, handsome face and unique position would have stared in incredulous amazement at the sight of this love-sick man in his intense pursuit of a girl who was able to twist him around her little finger and make him follow her about as if he were a green and callow youth. Palgrave, the lady-killer; Palgrave, the egoist; Palgrave, the superlative person, who, with nonchalant impertinence, had picked and chosen. Was it possible?

Everything is possible when a man is whirled off his feet by the Great Emotion. History reeks with the stories of men whose natures were changed, whose careers were blasted, whose honor and loyalty and common sense were sacrificed, whose pride and sense of the fitness of things were utterly and absolutely forgotten under the stress of the sex storm that hits us all and renders us fools or heroes, breaking or making as luck will have it and, in either case, bringing us to the common level of primevality for the love of a woman. Nature, however refined and cultivated the man, or rarified his atmosphere, sees to this. Herself feminine, she has no consideration for persons. To her a man is merely a man, a creature with the same heart and the same senses, working to the same end from the same beginning. Let him struggle and cry "Excelsior!" and fix his eyes upon the heights, let him devote himself to prayer or go grimly on his way with averted eyes, let him become cynic or misogynist, what's it matter? Sooner or later she lays hands upon him and claims him as her child. Man, woman and love. It is the oldest and the newest story in the world, and in spite of the sneers of thin-blooded intellectuals who think that it is clever to speak of love as the particular pastime of the Bolsheviki and the literary parasites who regard themselves as critics and dismiss love as "mere sex stuff," it is the everlasting Story of Everyman.

Young and new and careless, obsessed only with the one idea of having a good time,—never mind who paid for it,—Joan knew nothing of the danger of trifling with the feelings of a high-strung man who had never been denied, a man over-civilized to the point of moral decay. If she had paused in her determined pursuit of amusement and distraction to analyze her true state of mind she might have discovered an angry desire to pay Fate out for the way in which he had made things go with Martin by falling really and truly in love with Gilbert. As it was, she recognized his attraction and in the few serious moments that forced themselves upon her when she was alone she realized that he could give her everything that would make life easy and pleasant. She liked his calm sophistication, she was impressed, being young, by his utter disregard of laws and conventions, and she was flattered at the unmistakable proofs of his passionate devotion. But she would have been surprised to find beneath her careless way of treating herself and everybody round her an unsuspected root of loyalty towards Alice and Martin that put up a hedge between herself and Gilbert. There was also something in the fine basic qualities of her undeveloped character that unconsciously made her resent this spoiled man's assumption of the fact that, married or not, she must sooner or later fall in with his wishes. She was in no mood for self-analysis, however, because that meant the renewal of the pain and deep disappointment as to Martin which was her one object to hide and to forget. So she kept Gilbert in tow, and supplied her days with the excitement for which she craved by leading him on and laughing him off. It is true that once or twice she had caught in his eyes a look of madness that caused her immediately to call the nice boy to her support and make a mental note of the fact that it would be wise never to trust herself quite alone with him, but with a shrug of the shoulders she continued alternately to tease and charm, according to her mood.

She did both these things once again when she came up from the sea to finish the remainder of the morning in the sun. Seeing Gilbert pacing the veranda like a bear with a sore ear, she told Harry Oldershaw to leave her to her sun bath and signalled to Gilbert to come down to the edge of the beach. The others were still in the sea. He joined her with a sort of reluctance, with a look of gall and ire in his eyes that was becoming characteristic. There was all about him the air of a man who had been sleeping badly. His face was white and drawn, and his fingers were never still. He twisted a signet ring round and round at one moment and worried at a button on his coat the next. His nerves seemed to be outside his skin. He stood in front of Joan antagonistically and ran his eyes over her slim young form in its wet bathing suit with grudging admiration. He was too desperately in love to be able to apply to himself any of the small sense of humor that was his in normal times and hide his feelings behind it. He was very far from being the Gilbert Palgrave of the early spring,—the cool, satirical, complete man of the world.

"Well?" he asked.

Joan pretended to be surprised. "Well what, Gilbert dear? I wanted to have a nice little talk before lunch, that's all, and so I ventured to disturb you."

"Ventured to disturb me! You're brighter than usual this morning."

"Ah I? Is that possible? How sweet of you to say so. Do sit down and look a little less like an avenging angel. The sand's quite warm and dry."

He kicked a little shower of it into the air. "I don't want to sit down," he said. "You bore me. I'm fed up with this place and sick to tears of you."

"Sick to tears of me? Why, what in the world have I done?"

"Every conceivable and ingenious thing that I might have expected of you. Loyalty was entirely left out of your character, it appears. Young Oldershaw and the doddering Hosack measure up to your standard. I can't compete."

Joan allowed almost a minute to go by in silence. She felt at the very tip-top of health, having ridden for some hours and gone hot into the sea. To be mischievous was natural enough. This man took himself so seriously, too. She would have been made of different stuff or have acquired a greater knowledge of Palgrave's curious temperament to have been able to resist the temptation to tantalize.

"Aren't you, by any chance, a little on the rude side this morning, Gilbert?"

"If you call the truth rude," he said, "yes."

"I do. Very. The rudest thing I know."

He looked down at her. She was leaning against the narrow wooden back of a beach chair. Her hands were clasped round her white knees. She wore little thin black shoes and no stockings. A tight rubber bathing cap which came low down on her forehead gave her a most attractively boyish look. She might have been a young French Pierrot in a picture by Sem or Van Beers. He almost hated her at that moment, sitting there in all the triumph of youth, untouched by his ardor, unaffected by his passion.

"You needn't worry," he said. "You won't get any more of it from me. So that you may continue to amuse yourself undisturbed I withdraw from the baby hunt. I'm off this afternoon."

He had cried "Wolf!" so many times that Joan didn't believe him.

"I daresay a change of air will do you good," she said. "Where are you going?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "What's it matter? Probably to that cottage of mine to play hermit and scourge myself for having allowed you to mortify me and hold me up to the ridicule of your fulsome court of admirers."

"Yes, that cottage of yours. You've forgotten your promise to drive me over to see it, haven't you?"

Palgrave wheeled round. This was too much of a good thing. "Be careful, or my rudeness will become more truthful than even you will be able to swallow. Twice last week you arranged for me to take you over and both times you turned me down and went off with young Oldershaw."

"What IS happening to my memory?" asked Joan.

"It must be the sea air."

He turned on his heel and walked away.

In an instant she was up and after him, with her hand on his arm.

"I'm awfully sorry, Gilbert," she said. "Do forgive me."

"I'd forgive you if you were sorry, but you're not."

"Yes, I am."

He drew his arm away. "No. You're not really anything; in fact you're not real. You're only a sort of mermaid, half fish, half girl. Nothing comes of knowing you. It's a waste of time. You're not for men. You're for lanky youths with whom you can talk nonsense, and laugh at silly jokes. You belong to the type known in England as the flapper—that weird, paradoxical thing with the appearance of flagrant innocence and the mind of an errand boy. Your unholy form of enjoyment is to put men into false positions and play baby when they lay hands on you. Your hourly delight is to stir passion and then run into a nursery and slam the door. You dangle your sex in the eyes of men and as soon as you've got them crazy, claim chastity and make them ashamed. One of these days you'll drive a man into the sort of mad passion that will make him give you a sound thrashing or seduce you. I don't want to be that man. Oldershaw is too young for you to hurt and Hosack too old, and apparently Martin Gray has chucked you and found some human real person. As for me, I've had enough. Good morning."

And once more, having delivered himself coldly and clearly of this brutally frank indictment he went up the steps to the veranda and into the house.

There was not even the tail of a smile on Joan's face as she watched him go.

Lunch was not quite the usual pleasant, happy-go-lucky affair that day. The gallant little Major, recently married to the fluffy-minded Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves and her peevish little dog, sat on the right of the overwhelmingly complacent Cornucopia. With the hope of rendering himself more youthful for this belated adventure with the babbling widow he had been treated by a hair specialist. The result was, as usual, farcically pathetic. His nice white hair which had given him a charming benignity and cleanness had been turned into a dead and musty black which made him look unearthly and unreal. His smart and carefully cherished moustache which once had laid upon his upper lip like cotton wool had been treated with the same ink-colored mixture. His clothes, once so perfectly suitable, were now those built for a man of Harry Oldershaw's youthful lines and gave him the appearance of one who had forced himself into a suit made for his son. It was of a very blue flannel with white lines,—always a trying combination. His tie and socks were en suite and his gouty feet were martyrized to this scheme of camouflage by being pressed into a pair of tight brown and white shoes. Having been deprived of his swim for fear that his youthfulness might come off in the water and with the rather cruel badinage of his old friend Hosack still rankling in his soul, the poor little old gentleman was not in the best of tempers. Also he had spent most of the morning exercising Pinkie-Winkie while his wife had been writing letters, and his nerves were distinctly jaded. The pampered animal which had taken almost as solemn a part of his marriage vows as the bride herself had insisted upon making a series of strategic attacks against Mrs. Hosack's large, yellow-eyed, resentful Persian Tom, and his endeavors to read the morning paper and rescue Pinkie from certain wreckage had made life a bitter and a restless business. He was unable to prevent himself from casting his mind back to those good bachelor days of the previous summer when he had taken his swim with the young people, enjoyed his sunbath at the feet of slim and beautiful girls, and looked forward to a stiff cocktail in his bathhouse like a natural and irresponsible old buck.

Gilbert Palgrave faced him, an almost silent man who, to Cornucopia's great and continually voiced distress, allowed her handsomely paid cook's efforts to go by contemptuously untouched. It rendered her own enthusiastic appetite all the more conspicuous.

For two reasons Hosack was far from happy. One was because Mrs. Barnet Thatcher was seated on his right pelting him with brightness and the other because Joan, on his left, looked clean through his head whenever he tried to engage her in sentimental sotto voce.

Gaiety was left to Prim and the wounded Englishman and to young Oldershaw and the towering Regina who continually threw back her head to emit howls of laughter at Barclay's drolleries while she displayed the large red cavern of her mouth and all her wonderful teeth. After every one of these exhausting paroxysms she said, with her characteristic exuberance of sociability, "Isn't he the best thing?"

"Don't you think he's the most fascinating creature?" to any one whose eye she caught,—a nice, big, beautiful, insincere girl who had been taught at her fashionable school that in order to succeed in Society and help things along she must rave about everything in extravagant language and make as much noise as her lungs would permit.

Joan's unusual lack of spirits was noticed by every one and especially, with grim satisfaction, by Gilbert Palgrave. With a return of optimism he told himself that his rudeness expressed so pungently had had its effect. He congratulated himself upon having, at last, been able to show Joan the sort of foolish figure that she cut in his sight and even went so far as to persuade himself that, after all, she must do something more than like him to be so silent and depressed.

His deductions were, however, as hopelessly wrong as usual. His drastic criticism had been like water on a duck's back. It inspired amusement and nothing else. It was his remark that Martin Gray had chucked her and found some human real person that had stuck, and this, with the efficiency of a surgeon's knife, had cut her sham complacence and opened up the old wound from which she had tried so hard to persuade herself that she had recovered. Martin-Martin-what was he doing? Where was he, and where was that girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle?

The old overwhelming desire to see Martin again had been unconsciously set blazing by this tactless and provoked man. It was so passionate and irresistible that she could hardly remain at the table until the replete Cornucopia rose, rattling with beads. And when, after what seemed to be an interminable time, this happened and the party adjourned to the shaded veranda to smoke and catch the faint breeze from the sea, she instantly beckoned to Harry and made for the drawing-room.

In this furniture be-clogged room all the windows were open, but the blazing sun of the morning had left it hot and stuffy. A hideous squatting Chinese goddess, whose tongue, by a mechanical appliance, lolled from side to side, appeared to be panting for breath, and the cut flowers in numerous pompous vases hung their limp heads. It was a gorgeously hot day.

Young Oldershaw bounded in, the picture of unrealized health. His tan was almost black, and his teeth and the whites of, his eyes positively gleamed. He might have been a Cuban.

"Didn't I hear you tell Prim last night that you'd had a letter from your cousin?"

"Old Howard? Yes." He was sorry that she had.

"Is Martin with him?" It was an inspiration, an uncanny piece of feminine intuition.

Young Oldershaw was honest. "He's staying with Gray," he said reluctantly.

"Where?"

"At Devon."

"Devon? Isn't that the place we drove to the other day—with a little club and a sort of pier and sailboats gliding about?"

"Yes. They've got one."

Ah, that was why she had had a queer feeling of Martinism while she had sat there having tea, watching the white sails against the sky. On one of those boats bending gracefully to the wind Martin must have been.

"Where are they living?"

"In a cottage that belongs to a pal of Gray's, so far as I could gather."

In a cottage, together! Then the girl whom she had called "Fairy,"—the girl who was human and real, according to Gilbert, couldn't be, surely couldn't be, with them.

"Will you drive me over?" she asked.

"When?"

"Now."

"Why, of course, Joan, if I—must," he said. It somehow seemed to him to be wrong and incredible that she had a husband,—this girl, so free and young and at the very beginning of things, like himself, and whom he had grown into the habit of regarding as his special—hardly property, but certainly companion and playmate.

"If you're not keen about it, Harry, I'll ask Mr. Hosack or a chauffeur. Pray don't let me take you an inch out of your way."

In an instant he was off his stilts and on his marrow bones. "Please don't look like that and say those things. You've only got to tell me what you want and I'll get it. You know that."

"Thank you, Harry, the sooner the better, then," she said, with a smile that lit up her face like a sunbeam. She must see Martin, she must, she must! The old longing had come back. It was like a pain. And being with Howard Oldershaw in that cottage he was alone, and being alone he had got back into his armor. SHE had a clean slate.

"Hurry, hurry," she said.

And when Harry hurried, as he did then, though with a curious misgiving, there were immediate results. Before Joan had chosen a hat, and for once it was difficult to make a choice, she heard his whistle and from the window of her bedroom saw him seated, hatless and sunburnt to the roots of his fair hair, in his low-lying two-seater.

It was, at his pace, a short run eastward over sandy roads, lined with stunted oaks and thick undergrowth of poison ivy, scrub and ferns; characteristic Long Island country with here a group of small untidy shacks and there a farm and outhouses with stone walls and scrap heaps, clothes drying on a line, chickens on the ceaseless hunt and a line of geese prowling aimlessly, easily set acackle,—a primitive end-of-everywhere sort of country just there, with sometimes a mile of half burned trees, whether done for a purpose or by accident it would be difficult to say. At any rate, no one seemed to care. It all had the look of No Man's Land,—unreclaimed and unreclaimable.

For a little while nothing was said. Out of a clear sky the sun beat down upon the car and the brown sand of the narrow road. Many times the boy shot sidelong glances at the silent girl beside him, burning to ask questions about this husband who was never mentioned and who appeared to him to be something of a myth and a mystery. He didn't love Joan, because it had been mutually agreed that he shouldn't. But he held her in the sort of devoted affection which, when it exists between a boy and a girl, is very good and rare and even beautiful and puts them close to the angels.

Presently, catching one of these deeply concerned glances, she put her little shoulder against his shoulder in a sisterly way. "Go on, then, Harry," she said. "Ask me about it. I know you want to know."

And he did. Somehow he felt that he ought to know, that he had the right. After all he had stopped himself from loving her at her urgent request, and their friendship was the best thing that he had ever known. And he began with, "When did you do it?"

"Away back in history," she said, "or so it seems. It's really only a few months."

"A few months! But you can hardly have been with him any time."

"I have never really been with him," she said. She wanted him to know everything. Now that the wound was open again and Martin in possession of her once more, she felt that she must talk about it all to some one, and who could be better than Harry, who was so like a brother?

The boy couldn't believe that she meant what she implied but would have bitten off his tongue rather than put a direct question. "Is he such a rotter?" he asked instead.

"He's not a rotter. He's just Martin—generous, sensitive, dead straight and as reliable as a liner. You and he were made in twin molds."

He flushed with pleasure—but it was like meeting a new Joan, a serious, laughterless Joan, with an odd little quiver in her voice and tears behind her eyes. He felt a new sense of responsibility by being confided in. Older, too. It was queer—this sudden switch from thoughtless gaiety to something which was like illness in a house and which made Joan almost unrecognizable.

He began again. "But then—" and stopped.

"I'm the rotter," she said. "It's because of me that he's in Devon and I'm at Easthampton, that he's sailing with your cousin, and I'm playing the fool with Gilbert. I was a kid, Harry, and thought I might go on being a kid for a bit, and everything has gone wrong and all the blame is mine."

"You're only a kid now," said Harry, trying to find excuses for her. He resented her taking all the blame.

She shook her head. "No, I'm not. I'm only pretending to be. I came to Easthampton to pretend to be. All the time you've known me I've been pretending,—pretending to pretend. I ceased to be a kid before the spring was over,—when I came face to face with something I had driven Martin to do and it broke me. I've been bluffing since then,—bluffing myself that I didn't care and that it wasn't my fault. I might have kept it up a bit longer,—even to the end of the summer, but Gilbert said something this morning that took the lynch pin out of the sham and brought it all about my ears."

And there was another short silence,—if it could be called silence with the whirring of the engine and the boy driving with the throttle out.

"You care for him, then?" he asked finally, looking at her.

She nodded and the tears came.

It was a great shock to him, somehow; he couldn't quite say why. This girl had, as she had said, played the fool with Gilbert,—led the man on and teased him into desperation. He loathed the supercilious fellow and didn't give a hang how much he suffered. Anyway, he was married and ought to have known better. But what hit was the fact that all the while she had loved this Martin of hers,—she, by whom he dated things, who had given him a new point of view about girls and who was his own very best pal. That was not up to her form and somehow hurt.

And she saw that it did and was deeply sorry and ashamed. Was she to have a bad effect on every man she met? "I won't make excuses, Harry," she said. "They're so hopeless. But I want you to know that I sprang into marriage before I'd given a thought to what it all meant, and I took it as a lark, a chapter in my adventure, something that I could easily stop and look at after I'd seen and done everything and was a little breathless. I thought that Martin had gone into it in the same spirit and that for the joke of the thing we were just going to play at keeping house, as we might have played at being Indians away in the woods. It was the easiest way out of a hole I was in and made it possible for me not to creep back to my grandmother and take a whipping like a dog. Do you understand?"

The boy nodded. He had seen her do things and heard her say things on the spur of the moment that were almost as unbelievable.

His sympathy and quick perception were like water to her. And it was indescribably good to be believed without incredulous side-looks and suspicions, half-smiles such as Hosack would have given,—and some of the others who had lost their fineness in the world.

"And when Martin,—who was to me then just what you are, Harry dear,—came up to my room in his own particular natural way, I thought it was hard luck to be taken so literally and not be left alone to find my wings for a little. I had just escaped from a long term of subjection, and I wanted to have the joy of being free—quite absolutely free. Still not thinking, I sent him away and like a brick he went, and I didn't suppose it really mattered to him, any more than it did to me, and honestly if it had mattered it wouldn't have made any difference because I had promised myself to hit it up and work off the marks of my shackles and I was full of the 'Who Cares?' feeling. And then Gilbert Palgrave came along and helped to turn my head. Oh, what a perfect little fool I was, what a precocious, shallow, selfish little fool. And while I was having what I imagined was a good time and seeing life, Martin was wandering about alone, suffering from two things that aren't good for boys,—injustice and ingratitude. And then of course I woke up and saw things straight and knew his value, and when I went to get him and begin all over again he wasn't mine. I'd lost him."

The boy's eyebrows contracted sharply. "What a beastly shame," he said, "I mean for both of you." He included Martin because he liked him now, reading between the lines. He must be an awfully decent chap who had had a pretty bad time.

"Yes," said Joan, "it is, for both of us." And she was grateful to him for such complete understanding,—grateful for Martin, too. They might have been brothers, these boys. "But for you, Easthampton would have been impossible," she added. "I don't mean the house or the place or the sea, which is glorious. I mean from what I have forced myself to do. I came down labelled 'Who Cares?' caring all the time, and just to share my hurt with some one I've made Gilbert care too. He's in an ugly mood. I feel that he'll make me pay some day—in full. But I'm not afraid to be alone now and drop my bluff because I believe Martin is waiting for me and is back in armor again with your cousin. And I believe the old look will come into his eyes when he sees me, and he'll hear me ask him to forgive and we'll go back and play at keeping house in earnest. Harry, I believe that. Little as I deserve it I'm going to have another chance given to me,—every mile we go I feel that! After all, I'm awfully young and I've kept my slate clean and I ought to be given another chance, oughtn't I?"

Harry nodded and presently brought the car to a stop under the shadow of the little clubhouse. Half a dozen other cars were parked there, and a colored chauffeur was sitting on the steps of the back entrance, fast asleep with his chin on his chest. The small but vigorous orchestra was playing a fox-trot on the far veranda, and the sound of shuffling feet resembled that of a man cleaning something with sandpaper. There was an army of flies on the screen door of the kitchen and on several galvanized iron bins stuffed with ginger-ale bottles and orange peel.

"We'll leave the car here," said Harry, "and go and have a look for the cottage. It'll be easy to find. There aren't many of 'em, if I remember right."

Joan took his arm. She had begun to tremble. "Let's go this way first," she said, going the right way by instinct.

"If they're in," said Harry, "and I should guess they are.—there's no wind,—I'll draw old Howard off for an hour or so."

"Yes, please do, Harry."

And they went up the sandy incline, over the thick undergrowth, and the sun blazed down on the shining water, and half a dozen canvas-covered catboats near the little pier. Several people were sitting on it in bathing clothes, and some one was teaching a little girl to swim. The echo of her gurgling laughter and little cries came to them clearly. The sound of music and shuffling feet grew fainter and fainter. Gardiner's Island lay up against the horizon like a long inflated sand bag. There were crickets everywhere. Three or four large butterflies gamboled in the shimmering air.

Away out, heading homewards, Martin's yawl, with Irene lying full stretch on the roof of the cabin, and Howard whistling for a wind, crept through the water, inch by inch.

With the tiller under one arm and a pipe in his mouth, long empty, sat Martin, thinking about Joan. Hearing voices, Tootles looked up from a book that she was trying to read. She had been lying in the hammock on the stoop of Martin's cottage for an hour, waiting for Martin. It had taken her a long time to do her hair and immense pains to satisfy herself that she looked nice,—for Martin. Her plan was cut and dried in her mind, and she had been killing time with all the impatience and throbbing of nerves of one who had brought herself up to a crisis which meant either success and joy, or failure and a drab world. She couldn't bear to go through another day without bringing about a decision. She felt that she had to jog Fate's elbow, whatever was to be the insult. She had discovered from a casual remark of Howard's that Martin, those hot nights, had taken to sleeping on the boat. Her plan, deliberately conceived as a follow-up to what had happened out under the stars the night before, was to swim out to it and wait for him in the cabin. She knew, no one so well, that it was in the nature of a forlorn hope, but she was desperate. She loved him intransitively, to the utter extinction of the little light of modesty which her hand-to-mouth existence had left burning. She wanted love or death, and she was going to put up this last fight for love with all the unscrupulousness of a lovesick woman.

She saw two people coming towards the cottage, a tall, fair, sun-tanned youth, hatless and frank-eyed like Martin, and—

She got up. A cold hand seemed suddenly to have been placed on her heart. Joan,—it was Joan, the girl who, once before, at Martin's house, had sent the earth spinning from under her feet and put Martin suddenly behind barbed wire. What hideous trick was this of Fate's? Why was this moment the one chosen for the appearance of this girl,—his wife? This moment,—her moment?

Fight? With tooth and nail, with all the cunning and ingenuity of a member of the female species to protect what she regarded as her own. She and her plan against the world,—that was what it was. Thank God, Martin was not in sight. She had a free hand.

She had not been seen. A thick honeysuckle growing up the pillar had hidden her. She slipped into the house quickly, her heart beating in her throat. "I'll try this," said Harry. "Wait here." He left Joan within a few feet of the stoop, went up the two steps, and not finding a bell, knocked on the screen door. In less than an instant he saw the girl with bobbed hair come forward. "I'm sorry to trouble you," he said, with a little bow, "I thought Mr. Gray might live here," and turned to go. Obviously it was the wrong house.

Very clearly and distinctly Tootles spoke. "Mr. Gray does live here. I'm Mrs. Gray. Will you leave a message?"

Harry wheeled round. He felt that the bullet which had gone through his back had lodged in Joan's heart. He opened his mouth to speak but no word came. And Tootles spoke again, even more clearly and distinctly. She intended that her voice should travel.

"My husband won't be back for several days," she said, "but I shall be very glad to tell him that you called if you will leave your name."

"It—it doesn't matter," said Harry, stammering. After an irresolute, unhappy pause, he turned to go—

He went straight to Joan. She was standing with her eyes shut and both hands on her heart, as white as a white rose. She looked like a young slim tree that had been struck by lightning.

"Joan," he said, "Joan," and touched her arm. There was no answer.

"Joan," he said, "Joany."

And with a little sob she tottered forward.

He caught her, blazing with anger that she had been so hurt, inarticulate with indignation and a huge sympathy, and with the one strong desire to get her away from that place, picked her up in his arms,—a dead delicious weight,—and carried her down the incline of sand and undergrowth to his car, put her in ever so gently, got in himself, backed the machine out, turned it and drove away.

And Tootles, breathing hard and shaking, stood on the edge of the stoop, and with tears streaming down her face, watched the car become a speck and disappear.



XI

The sun had gone down, and the last of its lingering glory had died before the yawl managed to cajole her way back to her mooring.

Dinner was ready by the time the hungry threesome, laughing and talking, arrived at the cottage. Howard, spoiling for a cocktail, made for the small square dining-room, and Irene, waving her hand to Tootles, cried out, "Cheero, dearie, you missed a speedy trip, I don't think," and took her into the house to tidy up in the one bathroom. Martin drew up short on the edge of the stoop, listened and looked about, holding his breath. It was most odd, but—there was something in the still air that had the sense of Joan in it.

After a moment, during which his very soul asked for a sight of her, he stumped into the living room and rang the bell impatiently.

The imperturbable Judson appeared at once, his eyebrows slightly raised.

"Has any one been here while I've been away?" asked Martin.

"No, sir. No one except Miss Capper, who's been reading on the stoop."

"You're quite sure?"

"You never can be quite sure about anything in this life, sir, but I saw no one."

"Oh," said Martin. "All right, then." But when he was alone, he stood again, listening and looking. There was nothing of Joan in the room. A mixture of honeysuckle and tobacco and the aroma of cooking that had slipped through the swing door into the the kitchen. That was all. And Martin sighed deeply and said to himself "Not yet. I must go on waiting," and went upstairs to his bedroom. He could hear Irene's voice above the rush of water in the bathroom and Howard's, outside, raised in song. In the trees outside his window a bird was piping to its mate, and in the damp places here and there the frogs had already begun to try their voices for their community chorus. It was a peaceful earth, thereabouts falsely peaceful. An acute ear could easily have detected an angry roar of guns that came ever nearer and nearer, and caught the whisper of a Voice calling and calling.

When Martin returned to the wood-lined sitting room with its large brick chimney, its undergraduate chairs and plain oak furniture, its round thick blue and white mats and disorderly bookcase, Tootles was there, a Tootles with a high chin, a half defiant smile, and honeysuckle at her belt.

"Tootles."

"Yes?"

"Have you been alone all the afternoon?"

"Yes." (Fight? Tooth and nail.) "Except for the flies.... Why, boy?"

"Oh, nothing. I thought—I mean, I wondered—but it doesn't matter. By gum, you have made the room look smart, haven't you? Good old Tootles. Even a man's room can be made to look like something when a girl takes an interest in it."

If she had been a dog she would have wagged her tail and crinkled up her nose and jumped up to put her nozzle against his hand. As it was she flushed with pleasure and gave a little laugh. She was a thousandfold repaid for all her pains. But, during the first half of a meal made riotous by the invincible Howard and the animated Irene, Tootles sat very quiet and thoughtful and even a little awed. How could Martin have sensed the fact that she had been there?... Could she,—could she possibly, even with the ever-ready help of nature,—hope to win against such a handicap? She would see. She would see. It was her last card. But during all the rest of the meal she saw the picture of a muscular sun-tanned youth carrying that pretty unconscious thing down the incline to a car, and, all against her will, she was sorry. That girl, pampered as she was, outside the big ring of hard daily effort and sordid struggle as she always had had the luck to be, loved, too. Gee, it was a queer world.

The stoop called them when they left the boxlike dining room. It was still hot and airless. But the mosquitoes were out with voracious appetite and discretion held them to the living room.

Irene flung herself on the bumpy sofa with a cigarette between her lips and a box near to her elbow. "This's the life," she said. "I shall never be able to go back to lil' old Broadway and grease paint and a dog kennel in Chorusland."

"Sufficient for the day," said Howard, loosening his belt. "If a miracle man blew in here right now with a million dollars in each hand and said: 'Howard Guthrie Oldershaw,'—he'd be sure to know about the Guthrie,—'this is all yours if you'll come to the city,' I'd..."

Irene leaned forward with her mouth open and her round eyes as big as headlights. "Well?"

"Take it and come right back."

"You disappoint me, Funny-face. Go to the piano and hit the notes. That's all you're fit for."

It was a baby grand, much out of tune, but Howard, bulging over the stool, made it sound like an orchestra,—a cabaret orchestra, and ran from Grieg to Jerome Kern and back to Gounod, syncopating everything with the gusto and the sense of time that is almost peculiar to a colored professional. Then he suddenly burst into song and sang about a baby in the soft round high baritone of all men who run to fat and with the same quite charming sympathy. A useful, excellent fellow, amazingly unself-conscious and gifted.

Martin was infinitely content to listen and lie back in a deep straw chair with a pipe between his teeth, the memories of good evenings at Yale curling up in his smoke. And Tootles, thinking and thinking, sat, Puck-like, at his feet, with her warm shoulders against his knees. Not in her memory could she delve for pleasant things, not yet. Eh, but some day she might be among the lucky ones, if—if her plan went through—

Howard lit another cigarette at the end of the song, but before he could get his hands on the notes again Irene bounded to her feet and went over to the piano. "Say, can you play 'Love's Epitome'?" she pronounced it "Eppy-tomy."

"Can a duck swim?" asked Howard, resisting a temptation to emit a howl of mirth. She was too good a sort to chaff about her frequent maltreatment of the language.

"Go ahead, then, and I'll give you all a treat." He played the sentimental prelude of this characteristic product of the vaudeville stage, every note of which was plagiarized from a thousand plagiarisms and which imagined that eternity rhymed with serenity and mother with weather. With gestures that could belong to no other school than that of the twice-dailies and the shrill nasal voice that inevitably goes with them, Irene, with the utmost solemnity, went solidly through the whole appalling thing, making the frequent yous "yee-ooo" in the true "vawdville" manner.

To Tootles it was very moving, and she was proud of her friend. Martin almost died of it, and Howard was weak from suppressed laughter. It was the first time that Irene had shown the boys what she could do, and she was delighted at their enthusiastic applause. She would have rendered another of the same sort gladly enough,—she knew dozens of them, if Tootles had not given her a quick look and risen to her feet.

"Us for the downey," she said, and put the palm of her hand on Martin's lips. He kissed it.

"Not yet," said Howard. "It's early."

"Late enough for those who get up at dawn, old dear. Come on, Irene."

And Irene, remembering what her friend had said that morning, played the game loyally, although most reluctant to leave that pleasant atmosphere, and said "Good night." And she was in such good voice and Howard played her accompaniment like a streak. Well, well.

Tootles took her hand away gently, gave Martin a little disturbing smile, put her arm round the robust shoulders of her chum, opened the screen door and was gone.

Howard immediately left the piano. He had only played to keep things merry and bright. "Me for a drink," he said. "And I think I've earned it."

Martin's teeth gleamed as he gave one of his silent laughs.

"How well you know me, old son," he said.

"Of course. But—why?"

"I like Tootles awfully. She's one in a million. But somehow it's—oh, I dunno,—mighty difficult to talk to her."

"Poor little devil," said Howard involuntarily.

"But she's having a real good time—isn't she?"

"Is she?" He helped himself to a mild highball in reluctant deference to his weight.

"I've never seen her look so well," said Martin.

Wondering whether to tell the truth about her state of mind, which his quick sophisticated eyes had very quickly mastered, Howard drank, and decided that he wouldn't. It would only make things uncomfortable for Martin and be of no service to Tootles. If she loved him, poor little soul, and he was not made of the stuff to take advantage of it, well, there it was. He, himself, was different, but then he had no Joan as a silent third. No, he would let things alone. Poor old Tootles.

"Great weather," he said, wrenching the conversation into a harmless generality. "Are you sleeping on the yawl to-night?"

"Yes," replied Martin. "It's wonderful on the water. So still. I can hear the stars whisper."

"Most of the stars I know get precious noisy at night," said Howard, characteristically unable to let such a chance go by. Then he grew suddenly grave and sat down. "Martin, I'm getting frightfully fed up with messing about in town. I'm going to turn a mental and physical somersault and get a bit of self-respect."

"Oh? How's that, old man."

"It's this damn war, I think. I've been reading a book in bed by a man called Philip Gibbs. Martin, I'm going to Plattsburg this August to see if they can make something of me."

Martin got up. "I'm with you," he said. "If ever we get into this business I'm going to be among the first bunch to go. So we may as well know something. Well, how about turning in now? There'll be a wind to-morrow. Hear the trees?" He filled his pocket with cigarettes and slung a white sweater over his shoulder.

"All right," said Howard. "I shall read down here a bit. I won't forget to turn out and lock up." He had forgotten one night and Judson had reported him.

"Good night, old son."

"Good night, old man."



XII

He was not given much to reading, but when Martin left the cottage and stood out in the liquid silver of the moon under the vast dome which dazzled with stars, and he caught the flash of fireflies among the undergrowth that were like the lanterns of the fairies a line came into his mind that he liked and repeated several times, rather whimsically pleased with himself for having found it at exactly the right moment. It was "the witching hour of night."

He remained on top of the incline for a little while, moved to that spirit of the realization of God which touches the souls of sensitive men when they are awed by the wonder and the beauty of the earth. He stood quite still, disembodied for the moment, uplifted, stirred, with all the scents and all the whisperings about him, humble, childlike, able, in that brief flight of ecstasy, to understand the language of another world.

And then the stillness was suddenly cut by a scream of vacuous laughter, probably that of an exuberant Irish maid-servant, to whom silences are made to break, carrying on, most likely, a rough flirtation with a chauffeur.

It brought Martin back to earth like the stick of a rocket. But he didn't go down immediately to the water. He sat there and nursed his knees and began to think. Whether it was Howard's unexpected talk of Plattsburg and of being made something of or not he didn't know. What he did know was that he was suddenly filled with a sort of fright.... "Good God," he said to himself, "time's rushing away, and I'm nearly twenty-six. I'm as old as some men who have done things and made things and are planted on their feet. What have I done? What am I fit to do? Nearly twenty-six and I'm still playing games like a schoolboy!... What's my father saying? 'We count it death to falter not to die' ... I've been faltering—and before I know anything about it I shall be thirty—half-time.... This can't go on. This waiting for Joan is faltering. If she's not coming to me I must go to her. If it's not coming right it must end and I must get mended and begin again. I can't stand in father's shoes with all he worked to make in my hands like ripe plums. It isn't fair, or straight. I must push up a rung and carry things on for him. Could I look him in the face having slacked? My God, I wish I'd watched the time rush by! I'm nearly twenty-six ... Joan—to-morrow. That's the thing to do." He got up and strode quickly down to the water. "If she's going to be my wife, that's a good step on. And she can help me like no one but my father. And then I'll make something of myself. If not ... if not,—no faltering, Gray,—then I'll do it alone for both their sakes."

He chucked his sweater into the dingey, shoved it off the beach and sprang in and rowed strongly towards the yawl. Somehow he felt broader of back and harder of muscle for this summing up of things, this audit of his account. He was nearly twenty-six and nothing was done. That was the report he had to make to his conscience, that was what he had to say to the man who smiled down upon him from his place in the New York house.... Good Lord, it was about time that he pulled himself together.

The yawl was lying alone, aloof from the other small craft anchored near the pier. Her mast seemed taller and her lines more graceful silhouetted against the sky, silvered by the moon. It was indeed the witching hour of night.

He got aboard and tied up the dingey, cast a look round to see that everything was shipshape, took in a deep breath and went into the cabin. He was not tired and never felt less like sleep. His brain was clear as though a fog had risen from it, and energy beat in him like a running engine. He would light the lamp, get into his pajamas and think about to-morrow and Joan. He was mighty glad to have come to a decision.

Stooping, he lit the lamp, turned and gave a gasp of surprise.

There, curled up like a water sprite on the unmade bunk lay Tootles in bathing clothes, holding a rubber cap in her hand, her head, with its golden bobbed hair, dented into a cushion.

For a moment she pretended to be asleep, but anxiety to see how Martin was looking was too much for her. Also her clothes were wet and not very comfortable. She opened her eyes and sat up.

"My dear Tootles!" said Martin, "what's the idea? You said you were going home to bed." She would rather that he had been angry than amused. "It was the night," she said, "and something in the air. I just had to bathe and swam out here. I didn't think you'd be coming yet. I suppose you think I'm bug-house."

"No, I don't. If I hadn't taken my bathing suit to the cottage to be mended I'd have a dip myself. Cigarette?" He held one out.

But she shook her head. How frightfully natural and brotherly this boy was, she thought. Was her last desperate card to be as useless as all the rest of the pack? How could it be! They might as well be on a desert island out there on the water and she the only woman on it.

"Feel a bit chilly? You'd better put on this sweater."

She took it from him but laid it aside. "No. The air's too warm," she said. "Oh, ho, I'm so sleepy," and she stretched herself out again with her hands under her head.

"I'm not," said Martin. "I'm tremendously awake. Let's talk if you're not in a hurry to get back."

"I'm very happy here," she answered. "But must we have that lamp? It glares and makes the cabin hot."

"The moon's better than all the lamps," said Martin, and put it out. He sat on his bunk and the gleam of his cigarette came and went. It was like a big firefly in the half dark cabin. "To-morrow," he said to himself, with a tingle running through his blood, "to-morrow—and Joan."

Tootles waited for him to speak. She might as well have been miles away for all that she affected him. He seemed to have forgotten that she was alive.

He had. And there was a long silence.

"To-morrow,—and Joan. That's it. I'll go over to Easthampton and take her away from that house and talk to her. This time I'll break everything down and tell her what she means to me. I've never told her that."

"He doesn't care," thought Tootles. "I'm no more than an old shoe to him."

"If I'd told her it might have made a difference. Even if she had laughed at me she would have had something to catch hold of if she wanted it. By Jove, I wish I'd had the pluck to tell her."

"He even looks at me and doesn't see me," she went on thinking, her hopes withering like cut flowers, her eagerness petering out and a great humiliation creeping over her. "What's the matter with me? Some people think I'm pretty. Irene does ... and last night, when I kissed him there was an answer.... Has that girl come between us again?"

And so they went on, these two, divided by a thousand miles, each absorbed in individual thought, and there was a long queer silence.

But she was there to fight, and having learned one side of men during her sordid pilgrimage and having an ally in Nature, she got up and sat down on the bunk at his side, snuggling close.

"You are cold, Tootles," he said, and put his arm round her.

And hope revived, like a dying fire licked by a sudden breeze, and she put her bobbed head on his broad shoulder.

But he was away again, miles and miles away, thinking back, unfolding all the moments of his first companionship with Joan and looking at them wistfully to try and find some tenderness; thinking forward, with the picture of Joan's face before him and wondering what would come into her eyes when he laid his heart bare for her gaze.

Waiting and waiting, on the steady rise and fall of his chest,—poor little starved Tootles, poor little devil,—tears began to gather, tears as hot as blood, and at last they broke and burst in an awful torrent, and she flung herself face down upon the other bunk, crying incoherently to God to let her die.

And once more the boy's spirit, wandering high in pure air, fell like the stick of a rocket, and he sprang up and bent over the pitiful little form,—not understanding because Joan held his heart and kept it clean.

"Tootles," he cried out. "Dear old Tootles. What is it? What's happened?"

But there was only brotherliness in his kind touch, only the same solicitude that he had shown her all along. Nothing else. Not a thing. And she knew it, at last, definitely. This boy was too different, too much the other girl's—curse her for having all the luck.

For an instant, for one final desperate instant, she was urged to try again, to fling aside control and restraint and with her trembling body pressed close and her eager arms clasped about his neck, pour out her love and make a passionate stammering plea for something,—just something to put into her memory, her empty loveless memory,—but suddenly, like the gleam of a lamp in a tunnel, her pride lit up, the little streak of pride which had taken her unprofaned through all her sordid life, and she sat up, choked back her sobs, and dried her face with the skirt of her bathing dress.

"Don't mind me," she said. "It's the night or something. It got on my nerves, I suppose, like—like the throb of an organ. I dunno. I'm all right now, anyway." And she stood in front of him bravely, with her chin up, but her heart breaking, and her attempt to make a laugh must surely have been entered in the book of human courage.

But before Martin could say anything, she slipped into the cockpit, balanced herself on the ledge of the cabin house, said "Good night, old dear," and waved her hand, dived into the silver water and swam strongly towards the beach.



XIII

It began to dawn upon Hosack that Joan had slipped away with Harry Oldershaw from the fact that Palgrave first became restless and irritable, then had a short sharp spat with Barclay about the length of the line on the Western front that was held by the British and finally got up and went into the house and almost immediately prowled out alone for a sulky walk along the beach.

Chortling as he watched him, although annoyed that he, himself, was not going to have an opportunity of saying soft things to Joan for some hours, Hosack made himself comfortable, lit another cigar and pondered sleepily about what he called "the infatuation of Gilbert the precious."

"I can sympathize with the feller's being gone on the girl," he said to himself, undisturbed by Regina's frequent bursts of loud laughter at young Barclay's quiet but persistent banter, "but dammit, why make a conspicuous ass of himself? Why make the whole blessed house party, including his hostess, pay for his being turned down in favor of young Harry? Bad form, I call it. Any one would imagine that he was engaged to be married to Joan and therefore had some right to a monopoly by the way he goes on, snarling at everybody and showing the whites of his eyes like a jealous collie. Everybody's talking, of course, and making jokes about him, especially as it's perfectly obvious that the harder he hunts her the more she dodges him.... Curious chap, Gilbert. He goes through life like the ewe lamb of an over-indulgent mother and when he takes a fancy to a thing he can't conceive why everybody doesn't rush to give it him, whatever the cost or sacrifice.... If young Harry hadn't been here to keep her amused and on the move I wonder if Joan would have been a bit kinder to our friend G. P.? She's been in a weird mood, as perverse as April. I don't mind her treating me as if I was a doddering old gentleman so long as she keeps Gilbert off.... A charming, pretty, heart-turning thing. I'd give something to know the real reason why that husband of hers lets her run loose this way. And where's her mother, and why don't those old people step in?—such a child as she is. Well, it's a pretty striking commentary on the way our young people are brought up, there's no doubt about it. If she was my daughter, now—but I suppose she'd tell me to go and hang myself if I tried to butt in. Divorce and a general mess-up-the usual end, I take it."

He shook his head, and his ash dropped all over his clothes and he began to nod. He would have given a great deal to put his feet on a chair and a handkerchief over his face and sink into a blissful nap. The young people had gone off somewhere, and there were only his wife, the Major, and the bride on the veranda. And, after all, why shouldn't he? Cornucopia could always be relied upon to play up—her conversational well was inexhaustible, and as for Mrs. Thatcher—nothing natural ever stopped the incessant wagging of her tongue.

But it was not to be. He heard a new voice, the squeak of a cane chair suddenly pushed back, looked up to see the Major in an attitude of false delight and out came Mrs. Cooper Jekyll followed,—as he inwardly exclaimed,—"by the gentle Alice Palgrave, by all that's complicating! Well, I'm jiggered."

"Well," cried Cornucopia, extending her ample hand. "This IS a surprise."

"Yes, I intended it to be," said Mrs. Jekyll, more than ever Southampton in her plague veil and single eyeglass, "just to break the aloofness of your beach life."

"And dear Alice, too,—neater than ever. How very nice to see you, my dear, and how's your poor mother?"

Her little hand disappearing between Mrs. Hosack's two podgy members like the contents of a club sandwich, Alice allowed herself to be kissed on both cheeks, murmured an appropriate response, greeted the Thatchers, waved to Hosack who came forward as quickly as he could with pins and needles in one leg and threw a searching glance about for Gilbert.

Every one caught it and gathered instinctively that Mrs. Jekyll had been making mischief. She had certainly succeeded in her desire to break the aloofness. The presence of Alice at that moment, with Gilbert behaving like a madman, was calculated to set every imagination jumping.

"Um, this won't make G. P. any better tempered," thought Hosack, not without a certain sense of glee.

Mrs. Jekyll disclosed her nose and mouth, which, it seemed, were both there and in perfect condition. "I was in town yesterday interviewing butlers,—that Swiss I told you about refused to be glared at by Edmond and left us on the verge of a dinner party, summing us all up in a burst of pure German,—and there was Alice having a lonely lunch at the Ritz, just back from her mother's convalescent chair. I persuaded her to come to me for a few days and what more natural than that she should want to see what this wonderful air has done for Gilbert—who has evidently become one of the permanent decorative objects of your beautiful house."

"Cat," thought Mrs. Thatcher.

"And also for the pleasure of seeing so many old friends," said Alice. "What a gorgeous stretch of sea!" She bent forward and whispered congratulations to the Major's bride. Her quiet courage in the face of what she knew perfectly well was a universal knowledge of the true state of Gilbert's infatuation was good to watch. With his one brief cold letter in her pocket and Mrs. Jekyll's innuendoes,—"all in the friendliest spirit,"—raking her heart, her self-control deserved all the admiration that it won from the members of the house party. To think that Joan, her friend and schoolfellow in whose loyalty she had had implicit faith should be the one to take Gilbert away from her.

With shrewd eyes, long accustomed to look below the surface of the thin veneer of civilization that lay upon his not very numerous set, Hosack observed and listened for the next half an hour, expecting at any moment to see Joan burst upon the group or Gilbert make his appearance, sour, immaculate and with raised eyebrows. He studied Mrs. Jekyll, with her brilliantly made-up face, her apparent lack of guile, and her ever-watchful eye. He paid tribute to his copious wife for her determined babble of generalities, well-knowing that she was bursting with suppressed excitement under the knowledge that Alice had come to try and patch up a lost cause. He chuckled at the feline manners of the little lady whom they had all known so long as Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves, her purring voice, her frequent over-emphasis of exuberant adjectives, her accidental choice of the sort of verb that had the effect of smashed crockery, her receptiveness to the underlying drama of the situation and the cunning with which she managed to hide her anxiety to be "on" in the scene which must inevitably come. He examined his old friend, Thatcher, under whose perfect drawing-room manners, felicitous quips and ready laughter there was an almost feminine curiosity as to scandal and the inadvertent display of the family wash. And, having a certain amount of humor, he even turned an introspective eye inwards and owned up to more than a little excitement as to what was going to happen when Gilbert realized that Mrs. Jekyll had brought his wife over to rescue him. Conceive Gilbert being rescued! "All of us as near the primeval as most of us are to lunacy," he told himself. "Education, wealth, leisure and all the shibboleths of caste and culture,—how easily they crack and gape before a touch of nature. Brooks Brothers and Lucile do their derndest to disguise us, but we're still Adam and Eve in a Turkish bath.... Somehow I feel,—I can't quite say why,—that this comedy of youth in which the elements of tragedy have been dragged in by Gilbert, is coming to a head, and unless things run off at a sudden tangent I don't see how the curtain can fall on a happy ending for Joan and the husband who never shows himself and the gentle Alice. Spring has its storms and youth its penalties. I'm beginning to believe that safety is only to be found in the dull harbor of middle-age, curse it, and only then with a good stout anchor."

It was at the exact moment that Joan and Harry went together up the incline towards Martin's cottage at Devon, eyed by Tootles through the screen door, that Gilbert came back to the veranda and drew up short at the sight of his wife.



XIV

It was when Gilbert, after a most affectionate greeting and ten minutes of easy small talk, led her away from the disappointed group, that Alice made her first mistake.

"You don't look at all well, Gilbert," she said anxiously.

The very fact that he knew himself to be not at all well made him hate to be told so. An irritable line ran across his forehead. "Oh, yes, I'm well," he said, "never better. Come along to the summer house and let's put a dune between us and those vultures."

He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch of undulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read the morning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux when the moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of the hyena. And there he sat her down and stood in front of her, enigmatically, wondering how much she knew. "If it comes to that," he said, "you look far from well yourself, Alice."

And she turned her pretty, prim face up to him with a sudden trembling of the lips. "What do you expect," she asked, quite simply, "when I've only had one short letter from you all the time I've been away."

"I never write letters," he said. "You know that. How's your mother?"

"But I wrote every day, and if you read them you'd know."

He shifted one shoulder. These gentle creatures could be horribly disconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to open more than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration of a love that had never stirred him. "Yes, I'm glad she's better. I'm afraid you've been rather bored. Illness is always boring."

"I can only have one mother," said Alice.

Palgrave felt the need of a cigarette. Alice, admirable as she was, had a fatal habit, he thought, of uttering bromides.

And she instantly regretted the remark. She knew that way of his of snapping his cigarette case. Was that heavily be-flowered church a dream and that great house in New York only part of a mirage? He seemed to be the husband of some other girl, barely able to tolerate this interruption. She had come determined to get the truth, however terrible it might be. But it was very difficult, and he was obviously not going to help her, and now that she saw him again, curiously worn and nervous and petulant, she dreaded to ask for facts under which her love was to be laid in waste.

"No wonder you like this place," she said, beating about the bush.

"I don't. I loathe it. The everlasting drumming of the sea puts me on edge. It's as bad as living within sound of the elevated railway. And at night the frogs on the land side of the house add to the racket and make a row like a factory in full blast. I'd rather be condemned to a hospital for incurables than live on a dune." He said all this with the sort of hysteria that she had never noticed in him before. He was indeed far from well. Hardly, in fact, recognizable. The suave, imperturbable Gilbert, with the quiet air of patronage and the cool irony of the polished man of the world,—what had become of him? Was it possible that Joan had resisted him? She couldn't believe such a thing.

"Then why have you stayed so long?" she asked, with this new point of view stirring hope.

"There was nowhere else to go to," he answered, refusing to meet her eyes.

This was too absurd to let pass. "But nothing has happened to the house at Newport, and the yacht's been lying in the East River since the first of June and you said in your only letter that the two Japanese servants have been at the cottage near Devon for weeks!"

"I'm sick of Newport with all its tuft-hunting women, and the yacht doesn't call me. As for the cottage, I'm going there to-morrow, possibly to-night."

Alice got up quickly and stood in front of him. There was a spot of color on both her cheeks, and her hands were clasped together. "Gilbert, let's both go there. Let's get away from all these people for a time. I won't ask you any questions or try and pry into what's happened to you. I'll be very quiet and help you to find yourself again."

She had made another mistake. His sensitiveness gave him as many quills as a porcupine. "Find myself," he said, quoting her unfortunate words with sarcasm. "What on earth do you mean by that, my good child?"

She forced back her rising tears. Had she utterly lost her rights as a wife? He was speaking to her in the tone that a man uses to an interfering sister. "What's to become of me?" she asked.

"Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a free hand."

"And will you join me there, Gilbert?"

"No. I'm not in the mood."

He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog took a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. "Don't you think you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off."

But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end she must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All her sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her, perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of a debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady and devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgive inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, when necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look of reproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only her future and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom she prayed. They must be considered.

And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompous summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horrible resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.

"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me help you, dear."

Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing. "Help"—the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow youth crossed in love?

He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in all this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.

"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,—isn't that enough? I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't ask for more than that,—from me."

He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,—more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact remained. "I'll take you back," he added.

But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts."

He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,—a caricature of the once easy-going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.

"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.

"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it, naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?"

"Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.

There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.

"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of twenty-one,"—curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain self-consciousness,—"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked back to the Maurice. It was the first time I'd ever been on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious undergraduate. But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once. And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in life. It contained a woman, of course—a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze of trees. I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine, coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige my mother,—you asked for this,—and imagined that I had settled into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?"

"Please, Gilbert," said Alice.

He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."

But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became more jerky and real. "I respected you, Alice," he went on. "I didn't love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see you in my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrack had ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions, adjust myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a young Gilbert."

Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he was too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.

"And then,—it's always the way,—I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I saw the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and the pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungry youth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up and walked up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back in his face.

"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharp note for once.

"Yes," he said. "Joan.... She's done it," he added, no longer choosing his words. "She's got me. She's in my blood. I'm insane about her. I follow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word, slinking away with my tail between my legs when she orders me to heel. My God, it's hell! I'm as near madness as a poor devil of a dope fiend out of reach of his joy. I wish I'd never seen her. She's made me loathe myself. She's put me through every stage of humiliation. I'd rather be dead than endure this craving that's worse than a disease. You were right when you said that I'm ill. I am ill. I'm horribly ill. I'm ... I'm..."

He stammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with his hands.

And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true womanly love ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms about his neck and drew his head down on her shoulder.

And he left it there, with tears.

A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.

As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed to be coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play her last card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage of "Mrs. Gray" and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipe between his teeth, was thinking about Joan.

Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having an abscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment of affectation, he had never been so much of a man.

There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything either strange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and was not ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in her own life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could understand, even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to Gilbert. She adopted his words in thinking it all over. They appealed to her as being exactly right.

She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with the aid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be drawn back to her and mended. She almost used Hosack's caustic expression "rescued." The word came into her mind but was instantly discarded because it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had played with Gilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know that any girl could see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool she was supremely thankful that the complication was not as tragic as it might have been. So long as Joan held out, the ruin of her marriage was incomplete. Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant light. Gilbert had gone back to youth. It seemed to her that she had better treat him as though he were very young and hurt.

"Dearest," she said, "I'm going to take you away."

"Are you, Alice?"

"Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and get your strength back."

He gave a queer laugh. "You talk like a mother," he said, with a catch in his voice.

She went forward and kissed him passionately.

"I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man," she whispered. "Never forget that."

"You're,—you're a good woman, Alice; I'm not worthy of you, my dear."

It pained her exquisitely to see him so humble.... Wait until she met Joan. She should be made to pay the price for this! "Who cares?" had been her cry. How many others had she made to care?

"I'll go back to Mrs. Jekyll now," she went on, almost afraid that things were running too well to be true, "and stay at Southampton to-night. To-morrow I'll return to New York and have everything packed and ready by the time you join me there. And I'll send a telegram to Captain Stewart to expect us on Friday. Then we'll go to sea and be alone and get refreshment from the wide spaces and the clean air."

"Just as you say," he said, patting her hand. He was terribly like a boy who had slipped and fallen.

Then she got up, nearer to a breakdown than ever before. It was such a queer reversal of their old positions. And in order that he shouldn't rise she put her hands on his shoulders and stood close to him so that his head was against her breast.

"God bless you, dearest boy," she said softly. "Trust in me. Give all your troubles to me. I'm your wife, and I need them. They belong to me. They're mine. I took them all over when you gave me my ring." She lifted his face that was worn as from a consuming fire and kissed his unresponsive lips. "Stay here," she added, "and I'll go back. To-morrow then, in New York."

He echoed her. "To-morrow then, in New York," and held her hand against his forehead.

Just once she looked back, saw him bent double and stopped. A prophetic feeling that she was never to hear his voice again seized her in a cold grip,—but she shook it off and put a smile on her face with which to stand before the scandal-mongers.

And there stood Joan, looking as though she had seen a ghost.



XV

Alice marched up to her, blazing with anger and indignation. She was not, at that moment, the gentle Alice, as everybody called her, Alice-sit-by-the-fire, equable and pacific, believing the best of people. She was the mother-woman eager to revenge the hurt that had been done to one who had all her love.

"Ah," she said, "you're just in time for me to tell you what I think of you."

"Whatever you may think of me," replied Joan, "is nothing to what I think of myself."

But Alice was not to be diverted by that characteristic way of evading hard words, as she thought it. She had seen Joan dodge the issues like that before, many times, at school. They were still screened from the veranda by a scrub-supported dune. She could let herself go.

"You're a thief," she blurted out, trembling and out of all control for once. "Not a full-blown thief because you don't steal to keep. But a kleptomaniac who can't resist laying hands on other women's men. You ought not to be allowed about loose. You're a danger, a trap. You have no respect for yourself and none for friendship. Loyalty? You don't know the meaning of the word. You're not to be trusted out of sight. I despise you and never want to see you again."

Could this be Alice,—this little fury, white and tense, with clenched hands and glinting eyes, animal-like in her fierce protectiveness?

Joan looked at her in amazement. Hadn't she already been hit hard enough? But before she could speak Alice was in breath again. "You can't answer me back,—even you, clever as you are. You've nothing to say. That night at my house, when we had it out before, you said that you were not interested in Gilbert. If that wasn't a cold-blooded lie what was it? Your interest has been so great that you've never let him alone since. You may not have called him deliberately, but when he came you flaunted your sex in his face and teased him just to see him suffer. You were flattered, of course, and your vanity swelled to see him dogging your heels. There's a pretty expressive word for you and your type, and you know it as well as I do. Let me pass, please."