The Unbearable Bassington...............................................................................................................................1

Saki (H.H. Munro)...................................................................................................................................1

FRANCESCA BASSINGTON sat in the drawingroom of her house in Blue Street, W., regaling herself and

her estimable brother Henry with China tea and small cress sandwiches. The meal was of that elegant

proportion which, while ministering sympathetically to the desires of the moment, is happily reminiscent of a

In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful Miss Greech; at forty, although much of the

original beauty remained, she was just dear Francesca Bassington. No one would have dreamed of calling her

sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew her were punctilious about putting in the "dear."

Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that she was svelte and knew how to dress, but

they would have agreed with her friends in asserting that she had no soul. When one's friends and enemies

agree on any particular point they are usually wrong. Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to

describe her soul, would probably have described her drawingroom. Not that she would have considered

that the one had stamped the impress of its character on the other, so that close scrutiny might reveal its

outstanding features, and even suggest its hidden places, but because she might have dimly recognised that

Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have the best intentions and never to carry

them into practice. With the advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to command a more

than average share of feminine happiness. So many of the things that make for fretfulness, disappointment

and discouragement in a woman's life were removed from her path that she might well have been considered

the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she was not of the perverse band of

those who make a rockgarden of their souls by dragging into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed

troubles they can find lying around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways and pleasant places of life; she

liked not merely to look on the bright side of things but to live there and stay there. And the fact that things

had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and cheated her of some of her early illusions made her

cling the closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that she seemed to have reached a calmer period

of her life. To undiscriminating friends she appeared in the guise of a rather selfish woman, but it was merely

the selfishness of one who had seen the happy and unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the utmost

what was left to her of the former. The vicissitudes of fortune had not soured her, but they had perhaps

narrowed her in the sense of making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that immediately

pleased and amused her, or that recalled and perpetuated the pleasing and successful incidents of other days.

And it was her drawingroom in particular that enshrined the memorials or tokens of past and present

Into that comfortable quaintshaped room of angles and bays and alcoves had sailed, as into a harbour, those

precious personal possessions and trophies that had survived the buffetings and storms of a not very tranquil

married life. Wherever her eyes might turn she saw the embodied results of her successes, economies, good

luck, good management or good taste. The battle had more than once gone against her, but she had somehow

always contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent gaze could roam over object after object that

represented the spoils of victory or the salvage of honourable defeat. The delicious bronze Fremiet on the

mantelpiece had been the outcome of a Grand Prix sweepstake of many years ago; a group of Dresden figures

of some considerable value had been bequeathed to her by a discreet admirer, who had added death to his

other kindnesses; another group had been a selfbestowed present, purchased in blessed and unfading

memory of a wonderful ninedays' bridge winnings at a countryhouse party. There were old Persian and

Bokharan rugs and Worcester tea services of glowing colour, and little treasures of antique silver that each

enshrined a history or a memory in addition to its own intrinsic value. It amused her at times to think of the

bygone craftsmen and artificers who had hammered and wrought and woven in far distant countries and ages,

to produce the wonderful and beautiful things that had come, one way and another, into her possession.

Workers in the studios of medieval Italian towns and of later Paris, in the bazaars of Baghdad and of Central

Asia, in oldtime English workshops and German factories, in all manner of queer hidden corners where craft

secrets were jealously guarded, nameless unremembered men and men whose names were worldrenowned

And above all her other treasures, dominating in her estimation every other object that the room contained,

was the great Van der Meulen that had come from her father's home as part of her wedding dowry. It fitted

exactly into the central wall panel above the narrow buhl cabinet, and filled exactly its right space in the

composition and balance of the room. From wherever you sat it seemed to confront you as the dominating

feature of its surroundings. There was a pleasing serenity about the great pompous battle scene with its

solemn courtly warriors bestriding their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely in

earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression that their campaigns were but vast serious picnics

arranged in the grand manner. Francesca could not imagine the drawingroom without the crowning

complement of the stately wellhung picture, just as she could not imagine herself in any other setting than

this house in Blue Street with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.

And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the roseleaf damask of what might otherwise

have been Francesca's peace of mind. One's happiness always lies in the future rather than in the past. With

due deference to an esteemed lyrical authority one may safely say that a sorrow's crown of sorrow is

anticipating unhappier things. The house in Blue Street had been left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof,

but only until such time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to pass to her as a wedding

present. Emmeline was now seventeen and passably goodlooking, and four or five years were all that could

be safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood. Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching

asunder of Francesca from the sheltering habitation that had grown to be her soul. It is true that in

imagination she had built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single span. The bridge in question

was her schoolboy son Comus, now being educated somewhere in the southern counties, or rather one should

say the bridge consisted of the possibility of his eventual marriage with Emmeline, in which case Francesca

saw herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed and incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue

Street. The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light in its place of honour, the Fremiet

and the Dresden and Old Worcester would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches. Emmeline could

have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca sometimes drank her afterdinner coffee, as a separate

drawing room, where she could put her own things. The details of the bridge structure had all been carefully

thought out. Only it was an unfortunate circumstance that Comus should have been the span on which

Francesca's husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange Pagan name, and had not lived long enough

to judge as to the appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance. In seventeen years and some odd months

Francesca had had ample opportunity for forming an opinion concerning her son's characteristics. The spirit

of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward

sort of mirth of which Francesca herself could seldom see the humorous side. In her brother Henry, who sat

eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of

Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless

little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless

children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and

who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt

whose cubic space for lumber was limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so

frequent in family life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both

money and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even

its parents could consider worth repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the idea of

making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose

death can produce the item "another byelection" on the news posters can be wholly a nonentity. Henry, in

short, who might have been an embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and

counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on her part, with the partiality which a

clever and lazilyinclined woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel but frequently

Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with Henry for a brother, Francesca could well

set the plaguy malice of the destiny that had given her Comus for a son. The boy was one of those

untameable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe themselves through nursery and preparatory and

publicschool days with the utmost allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the least possible

amount of collarwork, and come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that has reduced

everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandralike forebodings. Sometimes they sober down in afterlife

and become uninteresting, forgetting that they were ever lords of anything; sometimes Fate plays royally into

their hands, and they do great things in a spacious manner, and are thanked by Parliaments and the Press and

acclaimed by galaday crowds. But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave school and turn

themselves loose in a world that has grown too civilised and too crowded and too empty to have any place for

Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and settled down like a duststorm refreshed, to

discuss one of the fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of destitution.

"It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one might say, at the present moment," he observed,

"but it is one that will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before long. The first thing that

we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and academic way of approaching it. We must collect and

assimilate hard facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it

Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of sympathetic grunt which was meant to indicate that

she was, to a certain extent, listening and appreciating. In reality she was reflecting that Henry possibly found

it difficult to interest people in any topic that he enlarged on. His talents lay so thoroughly in the direction of

being uninteresting, that even as an eyewitness of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would probably have

"I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on this subject," continued Henry, "and I pointed out at

Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority that will not stop to consider.

"Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were down there?" she interrupted; "Eliza Barnet is rather

In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas of life and struggle, the fiercest competition

and rivalry is frequently to be found between closely allied types and species. Eliza Barnet shared many of

Henry Greech's political and social views, but she also shared his fondness for pointing things out at some

length; there had been occasions when she had extensively occupied the strictly limited span allotted to the

platform oratory of a group of speakers of whom Henry Greech had been an impatient unit. He might see eye

to eye with her on the leading questions of the day, but he persistently wore mental blinkers as far as her

estimable qualities were concerned, and the mention of her name was a skilful lure drawn across the trail of

his discourse; if Francesca had to listen to his eloquence on any subject she much preferred that it should be a

"I've no doubt she means well," said Henry, "but it would be a good thing if she could be induced to keep her

own personality a little more in the background, and not to imagine that she is the necessary mouthpiece of

all the progressive thought in the countryside. I fancy Canon Besomley must have had her in his mind when

he said that some people came into the world to shake empires and others to move amendments."

"I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the subjects she talks about," was her provocative

Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being drawn out on the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he

"From the general air of tranquillity about the house I presume Comus has gone back to Thaleby," he

"Yes," said Francesca, "he went back yesterday. Of course, I'm very fond of him, but I bear the separation

well. When he's here it's rather like having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that in its quietest moments

"It is only a temporary respite," said Henry; "in a year or two he will be leaving school, and then what?"

Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to shut out a distressing vision. She was not fond of

looking intimately at the future in the presence of another person, especially when the future was draped in

"Don't sit there looking judicial. I'm quite ready to listen to suggestions if you've any to make."

"In the case of any ordinary boy," said Henry, "I might make lots of suggestions as to the finding of suitable

employment. From what we know of Comus it would be rather a waste of time for either of us to look for

"I know he must; but he never will. At least, he'll never stick to anything. The most hopeful thing to do with

him will be to marry him to an heiress. That would solve the financial side of his problem. If he had

unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know

what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our

Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout, was scornfully superior on the subject of big

Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion. "I don't know about an heiress," she said reflectively.

"There's Emmeline Chetrof of course. One could hardly call her an heiress, but she's got a comfortable little

income of her own and I suppose something more will come to her from her grandmother. Then, of course,

"That would be very convenient," said Henry, probably following a line of thought that his sister had trodden

many hundreds of times before him. "Do she and Comus hit it off at all well together?"

"Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion," said Francesca. "I must arrange for them to see more of each other

in future. By the way, that little brother of hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to Thaleby this term. I'll

write and tell Comus to be specially kind to him; that will be a sure way to Emmeline's heart. Comus has

"It can only be for prominence in games," sniffed Henry; "I think we may safely leave work and conduct out

Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily scribbling a letter to her son in which the delicate

health, timid disposition and other inevitable attributes of the new boy were brought to his notice, and

commanded to his care. When she had sealed and stamped the envelope Henry uttered a belated caution.

"Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the boy to Comus. He doesn't always respond

Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother's opinion; but the woman who can

LANCELOT CHETROF stood at the end of a long bare passage, restlessly consulting his watch and fervently

wishing himself half an hour older with a certain painful experience already registered in the past;

unfortunately it still belonged to the future, and what was still more horrible, to the immediate future. Like

many boys new to a school he had cultivated an unhealthy passion for obeying rules and requirements, and

his zeal in this direction had proved his undoing. In his hurry to be doing two or three estimable things at

once he had omitted to study the noticeboard in more than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a

football practice specially ordained for newlyjoined boys. His fellow juniors of a term's longer standing had

graphically enlightened him as to the inevitable consequences of his lapse; the dread which attaches to the

unknown was, at any rate, deleted from his approaching doom, though at the moment he felt scarcely grateful

"Rather. So that every cut can be aimed exactly at the same spot. It hurts much more that way."

Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an element of exaggeration in this uncomfortably

Meanwhile in the prefects' room at the other end of the passage, Comus Bassington and a fellow prefect sat

also waiting on time, but in a mood of far more pleasurable expectancy. Comus was one of the most junior of

the prefect caste, but by no means the least well known, and outside the masters' commonroom he enjoyed

a certain fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant

player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous

pleasure, and his weird swearwords whenever he got hurt were eagerly treasured by those who were

fortunate enough to hear them. At athletics in general he was a showy performer, and although new to the

functions of a prefect he had already established a reputation as an effective and artistic caner. In appearance

he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name. His large greengrey eyes seemed for ever asparkle with goblin

mischief and the joy of revelry, and the curved lips might have been those of some wickedlylaughing faun;

one almost expected to see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark hair. The chin was firm,

but one looked in vain for a redeeming touch of illtemper in the handsome, halfmocking, halfpetulant

face. With a strain of sourness in him Comus might have been leavened into something creative and

masterful; fate had fashioned him with a certain whimsical charm, and left him all unequipped for the greater

purposes of life. Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character, but in many respects he was

Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and wondering, from the depths of a very ordinary

"I know it's not," said Comus, fingering a very serviceablelooking cane as lovingly as a pious violinist

might handle his Strad. "I gave Greyson some mintchocolate to let me toss whether I caned or him, and I

The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such measure of popularity as he enjoyed among

his fellows did not materially help to endear him to the succession of masters with whom he came in contact

during the course of his schooldays. He amused and interested such of them as had the saving grace of

humour at their disposal, but if they sighed when he passed from their immediate responsibility it was a sigh

of relief rather than of regret. The more enlightened and experienced of them realised that he was something

outside the scope of the things that they were called upon to deal with. A man who has been trained to cope

with storms, to foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be pardoned if he feels a

Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger belief in their own powers were ready to

"I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your opportunities," a formmaster once remarked to a

colleague whose House had the embarrassing distinction of numbering Comus among its inmates.

"Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements, and if you start in to tame the obviously

"Millions of boys are. There are just a few, and Bassington is one of them, who are Nature's highly finished

product when they are in the schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding raw material, are

"They never do grow up," said the housemaster; "that is their tragedy. Bassington will certainly never grow

"I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan," said the other. "With all reverence for the author of that

masterpiece I should say he had a wonderful and tender insight into the child mind and knew nothing

whatever about boys. To make only one criticism on that particular work, can you imagine a lot of British

boys, or boys of any country that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing children's games in an

underground cave when there were wolves and pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on the other

The formmaster laughed. "You evidently think that the 'Boy who would not grow up' must have been

written by a 'grownup who could never have been a boy.' Perhaps that is the meaning of the 'Never never

Land.' I daresay you're right in your criticism, but I don't agree with you about Bassington. He's a handful to

deal with, as anyone knows who has come in contact with him, but if one's hands weren't full with a thousand

And he went his way, having maintained a formmaster's inalienable privilege of being in the right.

In the prefects' room, Comus busied himself with the exact position of a chair planted out in the middle of the

Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in the Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction

Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations in his earlier school days, and was able to

appreciate to the last ounce the panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed victim, probably at this

moment hovering miserably outside the door. After all, that was part of the fun of the thing, and most things

There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in response to a hearty friendly summons to "come in."

"I've come to be caned," he said breathlessly; adding by way of identification, "my name's Chetrof."

"That's quite bad enough in itself," said Comus, "but there is probably worse to follow. You are evidently

"We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our charge is two extra cuts. That will be eight. Get over."

And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinister isolation in the middle of the room. Never had an article

of furniture seemed more hateful in Lancelot's eyes. Comus could well remember the time when a chair stuck

in the middle of a room had seemed to him the most horrible of manufactured things.

Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which he would have scorned to apply to a diagram

"Bend a little more forward," he said to the victim, "and much tighter. Don't trouble to look pleasant, because

I can't see your face anyway. It may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going to hurt you much more than

There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was made vividly aware of what a good cane can be

made to do in really efficient hands. At the second cut he projected himself hurriedly off the chair.

"Now I've lost count," said Comus; "we shall have to begin all over again. Kindly get back into the same

position. If you get down again before I've finished Rutley will hold you over and you'll get a dozen."

Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was rearranged to the taste of his executioner. He stayed there

somehow or other while Comus made eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots at the chalk line.

"By the way," he said to his gasping and gulping victim when the infliction was over, "you said Chetrof,

didn't you? I believe I've been asked to be kind to you. As a beginning you can clean out my study this

afternoon. Be awfully careful how you dust the old china. If you break any don't come and tell me but just go

"You'd better find it or I shall have to beat you, really hard this time. Here, you'd better keep this chalk in

your pocket, it's sure to come in handy later on. Don't stop to thank me for all I've done, it only embarrasses

As Comus hadn't got a study Lancelot spent a feverish halfhour in looking for it, incidentally missing

"Everything is very jolly here," wrote Lancelot to his sister Emmeline. "The prefects can give you an awful

hot time if they like, but most of them are rather decent. Some are Beasts. Bassington is a prefect though only

Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in the gaps for herself with the lavish splendour of

ON the evening of a certain November day, two years after the events heretofore chronicled, Francesca

Bassington steered her way through the crowd that filled the rooms of her friend Serena Golackly, bestowing

nods of vague recognition as she went, but with eyes that were obviously intent on focussing one particular

figure. Parliament had pulled its energies together for an Autumn Session, and both political Parties were

fairly well represented in the throng. Serena had a harmless way of inviting a number of more or less public

men and women to her house, and hoping that if you left them together long enough they would constitute a

SALON. In pursuance of the same instinct she planted the flower borders at her weekend cottage retreat in

Surrey with a large mixture of bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden. Unfortunately, though you may

bring brilliant talkers into your home, you cannot always make them talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what

is worse you cannot restrict the output of those starlingvoiced dullards who seem to have, on all subjects, so

much to say that was well worth leaving unsaid. One group that Francesca passed was discussing a Spanish

painter, who was fortythree, and had painted thousands of square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom

no one in London had heard till a few months ago; now the starlingvoices seemed determined that one

should hear of very little else. Three women knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt that

she must go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures, another had noticed that there were always

pomegranates in his later compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar knew what the pomegranates

"meant." "What I think so splendid about him," said a stout lady in a loud challenging voice, "is the way he

defies all the conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions stand for." "Ah, but have you noticed

" put in the man with the atrocious collar, and Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering dimly as she

went, what people found so unsupportable in the affliction of deafness. Her progress was impeded for a

moment by a couple engaged in earnest and voluble discussion of some smouldering question of the day; a

thin spectacled young man with the receding forehead that so often denotes advanced opinions, was talking to

a spectacled young woman with a similar type of forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair. It was her ambition

in life to be taken for a Russian girlstudent, and she had spent weeks of patient research in trying to find out

exactly where you put the tealeaves in a samovar. She had once been introduced to a young Jewess from

Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week; the experience, slight as it was, constituted the

spectacled young lady an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her immediate set.

"Talk is helpful, talk is needful," the young man was saying, "but what we have got to do is to lift the subject

out of the furrow of indisciplined talk and place it on the threshingfloor of practical discussion."

The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical fullstop to dash in with the remark which was already

"In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy

She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but recovered her breath quickly enough to start

afresh on level terms with the young man, who had jumped into the stride of his next sentence.

"They got off to a good start that time," said Francesca to herself; "I suppose it's the Prevention of Destitution

they're hammering at. What on earth would become of these dear good people if anyone started a crusade for

Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an elusive presence, she caught sight of someone

that she knew, and the shadow of a frown passed across her face. The object of her faintly signalled

displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spurwinner who seemed absurdly youthful to a generation

that had never heard of Pitt. It was Youghal's ambition or perhaps his hobby to infuse into the greyness of

modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of

AngloSaxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him.

His success was only a halfmeasure. The public missed in him that touch of blatancy which it looks for in

its rising public men; the decorative smoothness of his chestnutgolden hair, and the lively sparkle of his

epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were

as wasted efforts. If he had habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece, or worn spats of

Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting man, and the gush of the paragraphmakers might have been

unreservedly his. The art of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a

It was not Youghal's lack of political sagacity that had brought the momentary look of disapproval into

Francesca's face. The fact was that Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was now a social problem,

had lately enrolled himself among the young politician's associates and admirers, and as the boy knew and

cared nothing about politics, and merely copied Youghal's waistcoats, and, less successfully, his

conversation, Francesca felt herself justified in deploring the intimacy. To a woman who dressed well on

comparatively nothing a year it was an anxious experience to have a son who dressed sumptuously on

The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of the offending Youghal was presently

succeeded by a smile of gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a

portly middleaged gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that

"We were just talking about my new charge," he observed genially, including in the "we" his somewhat

depressedlooking listeners, who in all human probability had done none of the talking. "I was just telling

Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an ingratiating smile, though the character of the deaf

adder that stoppeth her ear and will not hearken, seemed to her at that moment a beautiful one.

Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons distinguished for its high standard of

wellinformed mediocrity, and had harmonised so thoroughly with his surroundings that the most attentive

observer of Parliamentary proceedings could scarcely have told even on which side of the House he sat. A

baronetcy bestowed on him by the Party in power had at least removed that doubt; some weeks later he had

been made Governor of some West Indian dependency, whether as a reward for having accepted the

baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that West Indian islands get the Governors they deserve, it would

have been hard to say. To Sir Julian the appointment was, doubtless, one of some importance; during the span

of his Governorship the island might possibly be visited by a member of the Royal Family, or at the least by

an earthquake, and in either case his name would get into the papers. To the public the matter was one of

absolute indifference; "who is he and where is it?" would have correctly epitomised the sum total of general

Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the likelihood of the appointment, had taken a deep

and lively interest in Sir Julian. As a Member of Parliament he had not filled any very pressing social want in

her life, and on the rare occasions when she took tea on the Terrace of the House she was wont to lapse into

rapt contemplation of St. Thomas's Hospital whenever she saw him within bowing distance. But as Governor

of an island he would, of course, want a private secretary, and as a friend and colleague of Henry Greech, to

whom he was indebted for many little acts of political support (they had once jointly drafted an amendment

which had been ruled out of order), what was more natural and proper than that he should let his choice fall

on Henry's nephew Comus? While privately doubting whether the boy would make the sort of secretary that

any public man would esteem as a treasure, Henry was thoroughly in agreement with Francesca as to the

excellence and desirability of an arrangement which would transplant that troublesome' young animal from

the too restricted and conspicuous area that centres in the parish of St. James's to some misty corner of the

British dominion overseas. Brother and sister had conspired to give an elaborate and at the same time cosy

little luncheon to Sir Julian on the very day that his appointment was officially announced, and the question

of the secretaryship had been mooted and sedulously fostered as occasion permitted, until all that was now

needed to clinch the matter was a formal interview between His Excellency and Comus. The boy had from

the first shewn very little gratification at the prospect of his deportation. To live on a remote sharkgirt

island, as he expressed it, with the Jull family as his chief social mainstay, and Sir Julian's conversation as a

daily item of his existence, did not inspire him with the same degree of enthusiasm as was displayed by his

mother and uncle, who, after all, were not making the experiment. Even the necessity for an entirely new

outfit did not appeal to his imagination with the force that might have been expected. But, however lukewarm

his adhesion to the project might be, Francesca and her brother were clearly determined that no lack of deft

persistence on their part should endanger its success. It was for the purpose of reminding Sir Julian of his

promise to meet Comus at lunch on the following day, and definitely settle the matter of the secretaryship

that Francesca was now enduring the ordeal of a long harangue on the value of the West Indian group as an

Imperial asset. Other listeners dexterously detached themselves one by one, but Francesca's patience

outlasted even Sir Julian's flow of commonplaces, and her devotion was duly rewarded by a renewed

acknowledgment of the lunch engagement and its purpose. She pushed her way back through the throng of

starlingvoiced chatterers fortified by a sense of wellearned victory. Dear Serena's absurd SALONS served

Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only just beginning to mobilise on the breakfasttable

next morning when a copy of THE TIMES, sent by special messenger from her brother's house, was brought

up to her room. A heavy margin of blue pencilling drew her attention to a prominentlyprinted letter which

bore the ironical heading: "Julian Jull, Proconsul." The matter of the letter was a cruel disinterment of some

fatuous and forgotten speeches made by Sir Julian to his constituents not many years ago, in which the value

of some of our Colonial possessions, particularly certain West Indian islands, was decried in a medley of

pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour. The extracts given sounded weak and foolish enough,

taken by themselves, but the writer of the letter had interlarded them with comments of his own, which

sparkled with an ironical brilliance that was Cervanteslike in its polished cruelty. Remembering her ordeal

of the previous evening Francesca permitted herself a certain feeling of amusement as she read the merciless

stabs inflicted on the newlyappointed Governor; then she came to the signature at the foot of the letter, and

the laughter died out of her eyes. "Comus Bassington" stared at her from above a thick layer of blue pencil

Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could have written an Episcopal charge to the clergy

of any given diocese. It was obviously the work of Courtenay Youghal, and Comus, for a palpable purpose of

his own, had wheedled him into foregoing for once the pride of authorship in a clever piece of political

raillery, and letting his young friend stand sponsor instead. It was a daring stroke, and there could be no

question as to its success; the secretaryship and the distant sharkgirt island faded away into the horizon of

impossible things. Francesca, forgetting the golden rule of strategy which enjoins a careful choosing of

ground and opportunity before entering on hostilities, made straight for the bathroom door, behind which a

"Me washee," came a cheerful shout; "me washee from the neck all the way down to the merrythought, and

"You have ruined your future. THE TIMES has printed that miserable letter with your signature."

There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering hastily out of the bath. Francesca fled. One

cannot effectively scold a moist nineteenyear old boy clad only in a bathtowel and a cloud of steam.

Another messenger arrived before Francesca's breakfast was over. This one brought a letter from Sir Julian

FRANCESCA prided herself on being able to see things from other people's points of view, which meant, as

it usually does, that she could see her own point of view from various aspects. As regards Comus, whose

doings and nondoings bulked largely in her thoughts at the present moment, she had mapped out in her

mind so clearly what his outlook in life ought to be, that she was peculiarly unfitted to understand the drift of

his feelings or the impulses that governed them. Fate had endowed her with a son; in limiting the endowment

to a solitary offspring Fate had certainly shown a moderation which Francesca was perfectly willing to

acknowledge and be thankful for; but then, as she pointed out to a certain complacent friend of hers who

cheerfully sustained an endowment of halfadozen male offsprings and a girl or two, her one child was

Comus. Moderation in numbers was more than counterbalanced in his case by extravagance in

Francesca mentally compared her son with hundreds of other young men whom she saw around her, steadily,

and no doubt happily, engaged in the process of transforming themselves from nice boys into useful citizens.

Most of them had occupations, or were industriously engaged in qualifying for such; in their leisure moments

they smoked reasonablypriced cigarettes, went to the cheaper seats at musichalls, watched an occasional

cricket match at Lord's with apparent interest, saw most of the world's spectacular events through the medium

of the cinematograph, and were wont to exchange at parting seemingly superfluous injunctions to "be good."

The whole of Bond Street and many of the tributary thoroughfares of Piccadilly might have been swept off

the face of modern London without in any way interfering with the supply of their daily wants. They were

doubtless dull as acquaintances, but as sons they would have been eminently restful. With a growing sense of

irritation Francesca compared these deserving young men with her own intractable offspring, and wondered

why Fate should have singled her out to be the parent of such a vexatious variant from a comfortable and

desirable type. As far as remunerative achievement was concerned, Comus copied the insouciance of the field

lily with a dangerous fidelity. Like his mother he looked round with wistful irritation at the example afforded

by contemporary youth, but he concentrated his attention exclusively on the richer circles of his acquaintance,

young men who bought cars and polo ponies as unconcernedly as he might purchase a carnation for his

buttonhole, and went for trips to Cairo or the Tigris valley with less difficulty and financestretching than he

Gaiety and goodlooks had carried Comus successfully and, on the whole, pleasantly, through schooldays

and a recurring succession of holidays; the same desirable assets were still at his service to advance him

along his road, but it was a disconcerting experience to find that they could not be relied on to go all distances

at all times. In an animal world, and a fiercely competitive animal world at that, something more was needed

than the decorative ABANDON of the field lily, and it was just that something more which Comus seemed

unable or unwilling to provide on his own account; it was just the lack of that something more which left him

sulking with Fate over the numerous breakdowns and stumblingblocks that held him up on what he

Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of anyone else in the world, and if he had been

browning his skin somewhere east of Suez she would probably have kissed his photograph with genuine

fervour every night before going to bed; the appearance of a cholera scare or rumour of native rising in the

columns of her daily newssheet would have caused her a flutter of anxiety, and she would have mentally

likened herself to a Spartan mother sacrificing her bestbeloved on the altar of State necessities. But with the

bestbeloved installed under her roof, occupying an unreasonable amount of cubic space, and demanding

daily sacrifices instead of providing the raw material for one, her feelings were tinged with irritation rather

than affection. She might have forgiven Comus generously for misdeeds of some gravity committed in

another continent, but she could never overlook the fact that out of a dish of five plovers' eggs he was certain

to take three. The absent may be always wrong, but they are seldom in a position to be inconsiderate.

Thus a wall of ice had grown up gradually between mother and son, a barrier across which they could hold

converse, but which gave a wintry chill even to the sparkle of their lightest words. The boy had the gift of

being irresistibly amusing when he chose to exert himself in that direction, and after a long series of moody

or jangling mealsittings he would break forth into a torrential flow of small talk, scandal and malicious

anecdote, true or more generally invented, to which Francesca listened with a relish and appreciation, that

"If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable set you would be doubtless less amusing, but there

Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had been betrayed into a broader smile than she

"I'm going to move in quite decent society tonight," replied Comus with a pleased chuckle; "I'm going to

"You don't mean to say Caroline has asked you to dinner tonight?" she said; "and of course without telling

Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say and do what you like in defiance of people's

most sensitive feelings and most cherished antipathies. Not that she had waited to attain her present age

before pursuing that line of conduct; she came of a family whose individual members went through life, from

the nursery to the grave, with as much tact and consideration as a cactushedge might show in going through

a crowded bathing tent. It was a compensating mercy that they disagreed rather more among themselves than

they did with the outside world; every known variety and shade of religion and politics had been pressed into

the family service to avoid the possibility of any agreement on the larger essentials of life, and such

unlookedfor happenings as the Home Rule schism, the TariffReform upheaval and the Suffragette crusade

were thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion for further differences and subdivisions. Lady Caroline's

favourite scheme of entertaining was to bring jarring and antagonistic elements into close contact and play

them remorselessly one against the other. "One gets much better results under those circumstances" she used

to observe, "than by asking people who wish to meet each other. Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a

She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you applied it to Parliamentary debates. At her own

"Courtenay Youghal. He'll probably sit next to you, so you'd better think out a lot of annihilating remarks in

"Nobody in particular, but rather nicelooking in a solemn sort of way, and almost indecently rich."

"Marry her" was the advice which sprang to Francesca's lips, but she choked it back with a salted almond,

having a rare perception of the fact that words are sometimes given to us to defeat our purposes.

"Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one of the grandnephews," she said, carelessly; "a

Comus tucked in his underlip with just the shade of pugnacity that she wanted to see.

An advantageous marriage was so obviously the most sensible course for him to embark on that she scarcely

dared to hope that he would seriously entertain it; yet there was just a chance that if he got as far as the

flirtation stage with an attractive (and attracted) girl who was also an heiress, the sheer perversity of his

nature might carry him on to more definite courtship, if only from the desire to thrust other more genuinely

enamoured suitors into the background. It was a forlorn hope; so forlorn that the idea even crossed her mind

of throwing herself on the mercy of her BETE NOIRE, Courtenay Youghal, and trying to enlist the influence

which he seemed to possess over Comus for the purpose of furthering her hurriedly conceived project.

Anyhow, the dinner promised to be more interesting than she had originally anticipated.

Lady Caroline was a professed Socialist in politics, chiefly, it was believed, because she was thus enabled to

disagree with most of the Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of the day. She did not permit her

Socialism, however, to penetrate below stairs; her cook and butler had every encouragement to be

Individualists. Francesca, who was a keen and intelligent food critic, harboured no misgivings as to her

hostess's kitchen and cellar departments; some of the human sidedishes at the feast gave her more ground

for uneasiness. Courtenay Youghal, for instance, would probably be brilliantly silent; her brother Henry

The dinner party was a large one and Francesca arrived late with little time to take preliminary stock of the

guests; a card with the name, "Miss de Frey," immediately opposite her own place at the other side of the

table, indicated, however, the whereabouts of the heiress. It was characteristic of Francesca that she first

carefully read the menu from end to end, and then indulged in an equally careful though less open scrutiny of

the girl who sat opposite her, the girl who was nobody in particular, but whose income was everything that

could be desired. She was pretty in a restrained nutbrown fashion, and had a look of grave reflective calm

that probably masked a speculative unsettled temperament. Her pose, if one wished to be critical, was just a

little too elaborately careless. She wore some excellently set rubies with that indefinable air of having more at

home that is so difficult to improvise. Francesca was distinctly pleased with her survey.

"I almost think I've seen her before," said Francesca; "her face seems familiar to me."

"The narrow gallery at the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da Vinci," said Youghal.

"Of course," said Francesca, her feelings divided between satisfaction at capturing an elusive impression and

annoyance that Youghal should have been her helper. A stronger tinge of annoyance possessed her when she

heard the voice of Henry Greech raised in painful prominence at Lady Caroline's end of the table.

"I called on the Trudhams yesterday," he announced; "it was their Silver Wedding, you know, at least the day

before was. Such lots of silver presents, quite a show. Of course there were a great many duplicates, but still,

"We must not grudge them their show of presents after their twenty five years of married life," said Lady

"I should hardly call twentyfive years of married life a cloud," said Henry Greech, lamely.

"Don't let's talk about married life," said a tall handsome woman, who looked like some modern painter's

conception of the goddess Bellona; "it's my misfortune to write eternally about husbands and wives and their

variants. My public expects it of me. I do so envy journalists who can write about plagues and strikes and

Anarchist plots, and other pleasing things, instead of being tied down to one stale old topic."

"Who is that woman and what has she written?" Francesca asked Youghal; she dimly remembered having

seen her at one of Serena Golackly's gatherings, surrounded by a little Court of admirers.

"I forget her name; she has a villa at San Remo or Mentone, or somewhere where one does have villas, and

plays an extraordinary good game of bridge. Also she has the reputation, rather rare in your sex, of being a

"Oh, several novels of the thinnish ice order. Her last one, 'The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,' has

"Only because Comus lent me your copy yesterday," said Youghal. He threw back his handsome head and

gave her a sidelong glance of quizzical amusement. He knew that she hated his intimacy with Comus, and he

was secretly rather proud of his influence over the boy, shallow and negative though he knew it to be. It had

been, on his part, an unsought intimacy, and it would probably fall to pieces the moment he tried seriously to

take up the ROLE of mentor. The fact that Comus's mother openly disapproved of the friendship gave it

Francesca turned her attention to her brother's end of the table. Henry Greech had willingly availed himself of

the invitation to leave the subject of married life, and had launched forthwith into the equally wellworn

theme of current politics. He was not a person who was in much demand for public meetings, and the House

showed no great impatience to hear his views on the topics of the moment; its impatience, indeed, was

manifested rather in the opposite direction. Hence he was prone to unburden himself of accumulated political

wisdom as occasion presented itself sometimes, indeed, to assume an occasion that was hardly visible to

"Our opponents are engaged in a hopelessly uphill struggle, and they know it," he chirruped, defiantly;

"Surely the Gadarene swine went downhill," put in Lady Caroline in a gently enquiring voice.

Henry Greech hastily abandoned simile and fell back on platitude and the safer kinds of fact.

Francesca did not regard her brother's views on statecraft either in the light of gospel or revelation; as Comus

once remarked, they more usually suggested exodus. In the present instance she found distraction in a

renewed scrutiny of the girl opposite her, who seemed to be only moderately interested in the conversational

efforts of the diners on either side of her. Comus who was looking and talking his best, was sitting at the

further end of the table, and Francesca was quick to notice in which direction the girl's glances were

continually straying. Once or twice the eyes of the young people met and a swift flush of pleasure and a

halfsmile that spoke of good understanding came to the heiress's face. It did not need the gift of the

traditional intuition of her sex to enable Francesca to guess that the girl with the desirable banking account

was already considerably attracted by the lively young Pagan who had, when he cared to practise it, such an

art of winning admiration. For the first time for many, many months Francesca saw her son's prospects in a

rosecoloured setting, and she began, unconsciously, to wonder exactly how much wealth was summed up in

the expressive label "almost indecently rich." A wife with a really large fortune and a correspondingly big

dower of character and ambition, might, perhaps, succeed in turning Comus's latent energies into a groove

which would provide him, if not with a career, at least with an occupation, and the young serious face

opposite looked as if its owner lacked neither character or ambition. Francesca's speculations took a more

personal turn. Out of the wellfilled coffers with which her imagination was toying, an inconsiderable sum

might eventually be devoted to the leasing, or even perhaps the purchase of, the house in Blue Street when

the present convenient arrangement should have come to an end, and Francesca and the Van der Meulen

A woman's voice, talking in a discreet undertone on the other side of Courtenay Youghal, broke in on her

"Tons of money and really very presentable. Just the wife for a rising young politician. Go in and win her

Youghal and his instructress in worldly wisdom were looking straight across the table at the Leonardo da

Vinci girl with the grave reflective eyes and the overemphasised air of repose. Francesca felt a quick throb

of anger against her matchmaking neighbour; why, she asked herself, must some women, with no end or

purpose of their own to serve, except the sheer love of meddling in the affairs of others, plunge their hands

into plots and schemings of this sort, in which the happiness of more than one person was concerned? And

more clearly than ever she realised how thoroughly she detested Courtenay Youghal. She had disliked him as

an evil influence, setting before her son an example of showy ambition that he was not in the least likely to

follow, and providing him with a model of extravagant dandyism that he was only too certain to copy. In her

heart she knew that Comus would have embarked just as surely on his present course of idle selfindulgence

if he had never known of the existence of Youghal, but she chose to regard that young man as her son's evil

genius, and now he seemed likely to justify more than ever the character she had fastened on to him. For once

in his life Comus appeared to have an idea of behaving sensibly and making some use of his opportunities,

and almost at the same moment Courtenay Youghal arrived on the scene as a possible and very dangerous

rival. Against the good looks and fitful powers of fascination that Comus could bring into the field, the young

politician could match halfadozen dazzling qualities which would go far to recommend him in the eyes of

a woman of the world, still more in those of a young girl in search of an ideal. Goodlooking in his own way,

if not on such showy lines as Comus, always well turnedout, witty, selfconfident without being bumptious,

with a conspicuous Parliamentary career alongside him, and heaven knew what else in front of him,

Courtenay Youghal certainly was not a rival whose chances could be held very lightly. Francesca laughed

bitterly to herself as she remembered that a few hours ago she had entertained the idea of begging for his

good offices in helping on Comus's wooing. One consolation, at least, she found for herself: if Youghal really

meant to step in and try and cut out his young friend, the latter at any rate had snatched a useful start. Comus

had mentioned Miss de Frey at luncheon that day, casually and dispassionately; if the subject of the dinner

guests had not come up he would probably not have mentioned her at all. But they were obviously already

very good friends. It was part and parcel of the state of domestic tension at Blue Street that Francesca should

only have come to know of this highly interesting heiress by an accidental sorting of guests at a dinner party.

Lady Caroline's voice broke in on her reflections; it was a gentle purring voice, that possessed an uncanny

"The dear Archdeacon is getting so absentminded. He read a list of boxholders for the opera as the First

Lesson the other Sunday, instead of the families and lots of the tribes of Israel that entered Canaan.

ON a conveniently secluded bench facing the Northern Pheasantry in the Zoological Society's Gardens,

Regent's Park, Courtenay Youghal sat immersed in mature flirtation with a lady, who, though certainly young

in fact and appearance, was some four or five years his senior. When he was a schoolboy of sixteen, Molly

McQuade had personally conducted him to the Zoo and stood him dinner afterwards at Kettner's, and

whenever the two of them happened to be in town on the anniversary of that bygone festivity they religiously

repeated the programme in its entirety. Even the menu of the dinner was adhered to as nearly as possible; the

original selection of food and wine that schoolboy exuberance, tempered by schoolboy shyness, had pitched

on those many years ago, confronted Youghal on those occasions, as a drowning man's past life is said to rise

The flirtation which was thus perennially restored to its oldtime footing owed its longevity more to the

enterprising solicitude of Miss McQuade than to any conscious sentimental effort on the part of Youghal

himself. Molly McQuade was known to her neighbours in a minor hunting shire as a hardriding

conventionally unconventional type of young woman, who came naturally into the classification, "a good

sort." She was just sufficiently goodlooking, sufficiently reticent about her own illnesses, when she had any,

and sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours' gardens, children and hunters to be generally popular. Most

men liked her, and the percentage of women who disliked her was not inconveniently high. One of these

days, it was assumed, she would marry a brewer or a Master of Otter Hounds, and, after a brief interval, be

known to the world as the mother of a boy or two at Malvern or some similar seat of learning. The romantic

Her romances were mostly in serial form and suffered perhaps in fervour from their disconnected course what

they gained in length of days. Her affectionate interest in the several young men who figured in her affairs of

the heart was perfectly honest, and she certainly made no attempt either to conceal their separate existences,

or to play them off one against the other. Neither could it be said that she was a husband hunter; she had

made up her mind what sort of man she was likely to marry, and her forecast did not differ very widely from

that formed by her local acquaintances. If her married life were eventually to turn out a failure, at least she

looked forward to it with very moderate expectations. Her love affairs she put on a very different footing and

apparently they were the allabsorbing element in her life. She possessed the happily constituted

temperament which enables a man or woman to be a "pluralist," and to observe the sage precaution of not

putting all one's eggs into one basket. Her demands were not exacting; she required of her affinity that he

should be young, goodlooking, and at least, moderately amusing; she would have preferred him to be

invariably faithful, but, with her own example before her, she was prepared for the probability, bordering on

certainty, that he would be nothing of the sort. The philosophy of the "Garden of Kama" was the compass by

which she steered her barque and thus far, if she had encountered some storms and buffeting, she had at least

Courtenay Youghal had not been designed by Nature to fulfil the ROLE of an ardent or devoted lover, and he

scrupulously respected the limits which Nature had laid down. For Molly, however, he had a certain

responsive affection. She had always obviously admired him, and at the same time she never beset him with

crude flattery; the principal reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was the fact that it

only flared into active existence at convenient intervals. In an age when the telephone has undermined almost

every fastness of human privacy, and the sanctity of one's seclusion depends often on the ability for tactful

falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative of the circumstance that his lady fair

spent a large part of the year pursuing foxes, in lieu of pursuing him. Also the honestly admitted fact that, in

her human hunting, she rode after more than one quarry, made the inevitable breakup of the affair a matter

to which both could look forward without a sense of coming embarrassment and recrimination. When the

time for gathering ye rosebuds should be over, neither of them could accuse the other of having wrecked his

On this particular afternoon, when old reminiscences had been gone through, and the intervening gossip of

past months duly recounted, a lull in the conversation made itself rather obstinately felt. Molly had already

guessed that matters were about to slip into a new phase; the affair had reached maturity long ago, and a new

"You're a clever brute," she said, suddenly, with an air of affectionate regret; "I always knew you'd get on in

"I'm coming to the front," admitted Youghal, judicially; "the problem is, shall I be able to stay there. Unless

something happens in the financial line before long, I don't see how I'm to stay in Parliament at all. Economy

is out of the question. It would open people's eyes, I fancy, if they knew how little I exist on as it is. And I'm

"It will have to be a rich wife, I suppose," said Molly, slowly; "that's the worst of success, it imposes so many

conditions. I rather knew, from something in your manner, that you were drifting that way."

Youghal said nothing in the way of contradiction; he gazed steadfastly at the aviary in front of him as though

exotic pheasants were for the moment the most absorbing study in the world. As a matter of fact, his mind

was centred on the image of Elaine de Frey, with her clear untroubled eyes and her Leonardo da Vinci air. He

was wondering whether he was likely to fall into a frame of mind concerning her which would be in the least

"I shall mind horribly," continued Molly, after a pause, "but, of course, I have always known that something

of the sort would have to happen one of these days. When a man goes into politics he can't call his soul his

"Most people who know me would tell you that I haven't got a heart," said Youghal.

"I've often felt inclined to agree with them," said Molly; "and then, now and again, I think you have a heart

"I hope I have," said Youghal, "because I'm trying to break to you the fact that I think I'm falling in love with

Molly McQuade turned sharply to look at her companion, who still fixed his gaze on the pheasant run in front

"Don't tell me you're losing your head over somebody useless, someone without money," she said; "I don't

For the moment she feared that Courtenay's selfishness might have taken an unexpected turn, in which

ambition had given way to the fancy of the hour; he might be going to sacrifice his Parliamentary career for a

life of stupid lounging in momentarily attractive company. He quickly undeceived her.

Molly gave a grunt of relief. Her affection for Courtenay had produced the anxiety which underlay her first

"Is she young and pretty and all that sort of thing, or is she just a good sort with a sympathetic manner and

"Young and quite goodlooking in her way, and a distinct style of her own. Some people would call her

beautiful. As a political hostess I should think she'd be splendid. I imagine I'm rather in love with her."

Youghal threw back his head with the slight assertive movement that Molly knew and liked.

"She's a girl who I fancy would let judgment influence her a lot. And without being stupidly conceited, I

think I may say she might do worse than throw herself away on me. I'm young and quite good looking, and

I'm making a name for myself in the House; she'll be able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me

in the papers at breakfasttime. I can be brilliantly amusing at times, and I understand the value of silence;

there is no fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing a cheerful talkative husband. For a girl

"You are certainly in love, Courtenay," said Molly, "but it's the old love and not a new one. I'm rather glad. I

should have hated to have you headoverheels in love with a pretty woman, even for a short time. You'll be

much happier as it is. And I'm going to put all my feelings in the background, and tell you to go in and win.

You've got to marry a rich woman, and if she's nice and will make a good hostess, so much the better for

everybody. You'll be happier in your married life than I shall be in mine, when it comes; you'll have other

interests to absorb you. I shall just have the garden and dairy and nursery and lending library, as like as two

peas to all the gardens and dairies and nurseries for hundreds of miles round. You won't care for your wife

enough to be worried every time she has a fingerache, and you'll like her well enough to be pleased to meet

her sometimes at your own house. I shouldn't wonder if you were quite happy. She will probably be

There was a short pause; they were both staring at the pheasant cages. Then Molly spoke again, with the swift

nervous tone of a general who is hurriedly altering the disposition of his forces for a strategic retreat.

"When you are safely married and honeymooned and all that sort of thing, and have put your wife through

her paces as a political hostess, some time, when the House isn't sitting, you must come down by yourself,

and do a little hunting with us. Will you? It won't be quite the same as old times, but it will be something to

look forward to when I'm reading the endless paragraphs about your fashionable political wedding."

"You're looking forward pretty far," laughed Youghal; "the lady may take your view as to the probable

unhappiness of a future shared with me, and I may have to content myself with penurious political

bachelorhood. Anyhow, the present is still with us. We dine at Kettner's tonight, don't we?"

"Rather," said Molly, "though it will be more or less a throat lumpy feast as far as I am concerned. We shall

have to drink to the health of the future Mrs. Youghal. By the way, it's rather characteristic of you that you

haven't told me who she is, and of me that I haven't asked. And now, like a dear boy, trot away and leave me.

I haven't got to say goodbye to you yet, but I'm going to take a quiet farewell of the Pheasantry. We've had

some jolly good talks, you and I, sitting on this seat, haven't we? And I know, as well as I know anything,

that this is the last of them. Eight o'clock tonight, as punctually as possible."

She watched his retreating figure with eyes that grew slowly misty; he had been such a jolly comely

boyfriend, and they had had such good times together. The mist deepened on her lashes as she looked round

at the familiar rendezvous where they had so often kept tryst since the day when they had first come there

together, he a schoolboy and she but lately out of her teens. For the moment she felt herself in the thrall of a

Then, with the admirable energy of one who is only in town for a fleeting fortnight, she raced away to have

tea with a worldfaring naval admirer at his club. Pluralism is a merciful narcotic.

ELAINE DE FREY sat at ease at bodily ease at any rate in a low wicker chair placed under the shade

of a group of cedars in the heart of a stately spacious garden that had almost made up its mind to be a park.

The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose wide ledge a leadenmoulded otter for ever preyed on a

leaden salmon, filled a conspicuous place in the immediate foreground. Around its rim ran an inscription in

Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and exhorting him to make the most of his

hours; after which piece of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who might pass that

way into an abandonment of contemplative repose. On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread away,

broken up here and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches cast

a laced pattern of shade beneath them. On one side the lawn sloped gently down to a small lake, whereon

floated a quartette of swans, their movements suggestive of a certain mournful listlessness, as though a weary

dignity of caste held them back from the joyous bustling life of the lesser waterfowl. Elaine liked to imagine

that they reembodied the souls of unhappy boys who had been forced by family interests to become high

ecclesiastical dignitaries and had grown prematurely Right Reverend. A low stone balustrade fenced part of

the shore of the lake, making a miniature terrace above its level, and here roses grew in a rich multitude.

Other rose bushes, carefully pruned and tended, formed little oases of colour and perfume amid the restful

green of the sward, and in the distance the eye caught the variegated blaze of a manyhued hedge of

rhododendron. With these favoured exceptions flowers were hard to find in this wellordered garden; the

misguided tyranny of staring geranium beds and be flowered archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the

suburban gardener, found no expression here. Magnificent Amherst pheasants, whose plumage challenged

and almost shamed the peacock on his own ground, stepped to and fro over the emerald turf with the assured

selfconscious pride of reigning sultans. It was a garden where summer seemed a partproprietor rather than

By the side of Elaine's chair under the shadow of the cedars a wicker table was set out with the paraphernalia

of afternoon tea. On some cushions at her feet reclined Courtenay Youghal, smoothly preened and youthfully

elegant, the personification of decorative repose; equally decorative, but with the showy restlessness of a

dragonfly, Comus disported his flannelled person over a considerable span of the available foreground.

The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered no immediate dislocation from the

circumstance that they were tacitly paying court to the same lady. It was an intimacy founded not in the least

on friendship or community of tastes and ideas, but owed its existence to the fact that each was amused and

interested by the other. Youghal found Comus, for the time being at any rate, just as amusing and interesting

as a rival for Elaine's favour as he had been in the ROLE of scapegrace boyaboutTown; Comus for his part

did not wish to lose touch with Youghal, who among other attractions possessed the recommendation of

being under the ban of Comus's mother. She disapproved, it is true, of a great many of her son's friends and

associates, but this particular one was a special and persistent source of irritation to her from the fact that he

figured prominently and more or less successfully in the public life of the day. There was something

peculiarly exasperating in reading a brilliant and incisive attack on the Government's rash handling of public

expenditure delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in every imaginable extravagance. The actual

extent of Youghal's influence over the boy was of the slightest; Comus was quite capable of deriving

encouragement to rash outlay and frivolous conversation from an anchorite or an Eastend parson if he had

been thrown into close companionship with such an individual. Francesca, however, exercised a mother's

privilege in assuming her son's bachelor associates to be industrious in labouring to achieve his undoing.

Therefore the young politician was a source of unconcealed annoyance to her, and in the same degree as she

expressed her disapproval of him Comus was careful to maintain and parade the intimacy. Its existence, or

rather its continued existence, was one of the things that faintly puzzled the young lady whose soughtfor

favour might have been expected to furnish an occasion for its rapid dissolution.

With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly attractive, courting her at the same moment,

Elaine should have had reasonable cause for being on good terms with the world, and with herself in

particular. Happiness was not, however, at this auspicious moment, her dominant mood. The grave calm of

her face masked as usual a certain degree of grave perturbation. A succession of wellmeaning governesses

and a plentiful supply of moralising aunts on both sides of her family, had impressed on her young mind the

theoretical fact that wealth is a great responsibility. The consciousness of her responsibility set her

continually wondering, not as to her own fitness to discharge her "stewardship," but as to the motives and

merits of people with whom she came in contact. The knowledge that there was so much in the world that she

could buy, invited speculation as to how much there was that was worth buying. Gradually she had come to

regard her mind as a sort of appeal court before whose secret sittings were examined and judged the motives

and actions, the motives especially, of the world in general. In her schoolroom days she had sat in

conscientious judgment on the motives that guided or misguided Charles and Cromwell and Monck,

Wallenstein and Savonarola. In her present stage she was equally occupied in examining the political

sincerity of the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the goodfaith of a honeytongued but possibly loyal hearted

waitingmaid, and the disinterestedness of a whole circle of indulgent and flattering acquaintances. Even

more absorbing, and in her eyes, more urgently necessary, was the task of dissecting and appraising the

characters of the two young men who were favouring her with their attentions. And herein lay cause for much

thinking and some perturbation. Youghal, for example, might have baffled a more experienced observer of

human nature. Elaine was too clever to confound his dandyism with foppishness or self advertisement. He

admired his own toilet effect in a mirror from a genuine sense of pleasure in a thing good to look upon, just as

he would feel a sensuous appreciation of the sight of a wellbred, wellmatched, wellturnedout pair of

horses. Behind his careful political flippancy and cynicism one might also detect a certain careless sincerity,

which would probably in the long run save him from moderate success, and turn him into one of the brilliant

failures of his day. Beyond this it was difficult to form an exact appreciation of Courtenay Youghal, and

Elaine, who liked to have her impressions distinctly labelled and pigeonholed, was perpetually scrutinising

the outer surface of his characteristics and utterances, like a baffled art critic vainly searching beneath the

varnish and scratches of a doubtfully assigned picture for an enlightening signature. The young man added to

her perplexities by his deliberate policy of never trying to show himself in a favourable light even when most

anxious to impart a favourable impression. He preferred that people should hunt for his good qualities, and

merely took very good care that as far as possible they should never draw blank; even in the matter of

selfishness, which was the anchorsheet of his existence, he contrived to be noted, and justly noted, for doing

remarkably unselfish things. As a ruler he would have been reasonably popular; as a husband he would

Comus was to a certain extent as great a mystification as Youghal, but here Elaine was herself responsible for

some of the perplexity which enshrouded his character in her eyes. She had taken more than a passing fancy

for the boy for the boy as he might be, that was to say and she was desperately unwilling to see him and

appraise him as he really was. Thus the mental court of appeal was constantly engaged in examining

witnesses as to character, most of whom signally failed to give any testimony which would support the

favourable judgment which the tribunal was so anxious to arrive at. A woman with wider experience of the

world's ways and shortcomings would probably have contented herself with an endeavour to find out whether

her liking for the boy outweighed her dislike of his characteristics; Elaine took her judgments too seriously

to approach the matter from such a simple and convenient standpoint. The fact that she was much more than

half in love with Comus made it dreadfully important that she should discover him to have a lovable soul, and

"At any rate he is honest," she would observe to herself, after some outspoken admission of unprincipled

conduct on his part, and then she would ruefully recall certain episodes in which he had figured, from which

honesty had been conspicuously absent. What she tried to label honesty in his candour was probably only a

"You look more than usually thoughtful this afternoon," said Comus to her, "as if you had invented this

"If I had the power to create improvements anywhere I think I should begin with you," retorted Elaine.

"I'm sure it's much better to leave me as I am," protested Comus; "you're like a relative of mine up in

Argyllshire, who spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising

and irritating to the Almighty I should think, to go about putting superior finishing touches to Creation."

"Whatever else you take in hand," said Youghal, "you must never improve this garden. It's what our idea of

Heaven might be like if the Jews hadn't invented one for us on totally different lines. It's dreadful that we

should accept them as the impresarios of our religious dreamland instead of the Greeks."

"It seems largely a question of geography," said Elaine; "in England no one really is antiSemitic."

Servants had quietly, almost reverently, placed tea and its accessories on the wicker table, and quietly receded

from the landscape. Elaine sat like a grave young goddess about to dispense some mysterious potion to her

And he walked off with a little silver basketdish containing brown breadandbutter.

"It's so like Comus," she said, "to go off with our one dish of breadandbutter."

Youghal chuckled responsively. It was an undoubted opportunity for him to put in some disparaging criticism

of Comus, and Elaine sat alert in readiness to judge the critic and reserve judgment on the criticised.

"His selfishness is splendid but absolutely futile," said Youghal; "now my selfishness is commonplace, but

always thoroughly practical and calculated. He will have great difficulty in getting the swans to accept his

offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing us to a breadandbutterless condition. Incidentally he will get

Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled. If Youghal had said anything unkind it was about

"If my cousin Suzette had been here," she observed, with the shadow of a malicious smile on her lips, "I

believe she would have gone into a flood of tears at the loss of her breadandbutter, and Comus would have

figured ever after in her mind as something black and destroying and hateful. In fact I don't really know why

"For two reasons," said Youghal; "you are rather fond of Comus. And I am not very fond of

The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to Elaine's heart. She had known full well that she cared for

Comus, but now that Courtenay Youghal had openly proclaimed the fact as something unchallenged and

understood matters seemed placed at once on a more advanced footing. The warm sunlit garden grew

suddenly into a Heaven that held the secret of eternal happiness. Youth and comeliness would always walk

here, under the lowboughed mulberry trees, as unchanging as the leaden otter that for ever preyed on the

leaden salmon on the edge of the old fountain, and somehow the lovers would always wear the aspect of

herself and the boy who was talking to the four white swans by the water steps. Youghal was right; this was

the real Heaven of one's dreams and longings, immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise

about which one professed utterly insincere hankerings in places of public worship. Elaine drank her tea in a

happy silence; besides being a brilliant talker Youghal understood the rarer art of being a non talker on

"Swans were very pleased," he cried, gaily, "and said they hoped I would keep the breadandbutter dish as a

souvenir of a happy tea party. I may really have it, mayn't I?" he continued in an anxious voice; "it will do

"It's got the family crest on it," said Elaine. Some of the happiness had died out of her eyes.

"It's been in the family for generations," protested Elaine, who did not share Comus's view that because you

"I want it dreadfully," said Comus, sulkily, "and you've heaps of other things to put breadandbutter in."

For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to keep the dish at all costs; a look of greedy

determination dominated his face, and he had not for an instant relaxed his grip of the coveted object.

Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily telling herself that it was absurd to be put out over

such a trifle; at the same moment a sense of justice was telling her that Comus was displaying a good deal of

rather shabby selfishness. And somehow her chief anxiety at the moment was to keep Courtenay Youghal

"Happy mistress of your destinies," laughed Youghal; "you can suit your disputations to the desired time and

temperature. I have to go and argue, or what is worse, listen to other people's arguments, in a hot and

"Chiefly about breadandbutter," said Youghal; "our great preoccupation is other people's

breadandbutter. They earn or produce the material, but we busy ourselves with making rules how it shall

be cut up, and the size of the slices, and how much butter shall go on how much bread. That is what is called

legislation. If we could only make rules as to how the breadandbutter should be digested we should be

Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something to be treated with cheerful solemnity, like

illness or family reunions. Youghal's flippant disparagement of the career in which he was involved did not,

however, jar on her susceptibilities. She knew him to be not only a lively and effective debater but an

industrious worker on committees. If he made light of his labours, at least he afforded no one else a loophole

for doing so. And certainly, the Parliamentary atmosphere was not inviting on this hot afternoon.

Youghal looked ruefully at his watch. Before he could answer, a cheerful hoot came through the air, as of an

owl joyously challenging the sunlight with a foreboding of the coming night. He sprang laughing to his feet.

"Listen! My summons back to my galley," he cried. "The Gods have given me an hour in this enchanted

It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking and laughing that he was really keenly enthralled

in the work that lay before him. It was the one little intimate touch that gave Elaine the knowledge that he

Comus, who had emptied his cigarettecase, became suddenly clamorous at the prospect of being temporarily

stranded without a smoke. Youghal took the last remaining cigarette from his own case and gravely bisected

"Friendship could go no further," he observed, as he gave onehalf to the doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit

"It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours effect," said Youghal; "I hate smoking when I'm rushing

The departing galleyslave stepped forth into the sunlight, radiant and confident. A few minutes later Elaine

could see glimpses of his white car as it rushed past the rhododendron bushes. He woos best who leaves first,

Somehow Elaine's garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded in its imagery. The girlfigure who

walked in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and

Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself. Tomorrow, he reflected, Elaine would read his speech

in her morning paper, and he knew in advance that it was not going to be one of his worst efforts. He knew

almost exactly where the punctuations of laughter and applause would burst in, he knew that nimble fingers

in the Press Gallery would be taking down each gibe and argument as he flung it at the impassive Minister

confronting him, and that the fair lady of his desire would be able to judge what manner of young man this

was who spent his afternoon in her garden, lazily chaffing himself and his world.

And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she would be vividly reminded of Comus for days to

come, when she took her afternoon tea, and saw the breadandbutter reposing in an unaccustomed dish.

TOWARDS four o'clock on a hot afternoon Francesca stepped out from a shop entrance near the Piccadilly

end of Bond Street and ran almost into the arms of Merla Blathlington. The afternoon seemed to get instantly

hotter. Merla was one of those human flies that buzz; in crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she

attained to the proportions of a human bluebottle. Lady Caroline Benaresq had openly predicted that a special

flypaper was being reserved for her accommodation in another world; others, however, held the opinion that

she would be miraculously multiplied in a future state, and that four or more Merla Blathlingtons, according

"Here we are," she cried, with a glad eager buzz, "popping in and out of shops like rabbits; not that rabbits do

"Don't you love Bond Street?" she gabbled on. "There's something so unusual and distinctive about it; no

other street anywhere else is quite like it. Don't you know those ikons and images and things scattered up and

down Europe, that are supposed to have been painted or carved, as the case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus,

or somebody of that sort; I always like to think that some notable person of those times designed Bond Street.

"One can't be sure," persisted Merla; "when one wanders about as much as he did one gets mixed up and

forgets where one HAS been. I can never remember whether I've been to the Tyrol twice and St. Moritz once,

or the other way about; I always have to ask my maid. And there's something about the name Bond that

"I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek," objected Francesca; "the word wouldn't have the least resemblance."

"So dreadfully noncommittal to go about pamphleteering in those bizarre languages," complained Merla;

"that's what makes all those people so elusive. As soon as you try to pin them down to a definite statement

about anything you're told that some vitally important word has fifteen other meanings in the original. I

wonder our Cabinet Ministers and politicians don't adopt a sort of dogLatin or Esperanto jargon to deliver

their speeches in; what a lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved. But to go back to Bond Street

"I'm afraid I must leave it now," said Francesca, preparing to turn up Grafton Street; "Goodbye."

"Must you be going? Come and have tea somewhere. I know of a cosy little place where one can talk

"I know where you're going," said Merla, with the resentful buzz of a bluebottle that finds itself thwarted by

the cold unreasoning resistance of a windowpane. "You're going to play bridge at Serena Golackly's. She

Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having to play bridge anywhere in the near

neighbourhood of Merla's voice was not one that could be contemplated with ordinary calmness.

"Goodbye," she said again firmly, and passed out of earshot; it was rather like leaving the machinery section

of an exhibition. Merla's diagnosis of her destination had been a correct one; Francesca made her way slowly

through the hot streets in the direction of Serena Golackly's house on the far side of Berkeley Square. To the

blessed certainty of finding a game of bridge, she hopefully added the possibility of hearing some fragments

of news which might prove interesting and enlightening. And of enlightenment on a particular subject, in

which she was acutely and personally interested, she stood in some need. Comus of late had been

provokingly reticent as to his movements and doings; partly, perhaps, because it was his nature to be

provoking, partly because the daily bickerings over money matters were gradually choking other forms of

conversation. Francesca had seen him once or twice in the Park in the desirable company of Elaine de Frey,

and from time to time she heard of the young people as having danced together at various houses; on the

other hand, she had seen and heard quite as much evidence to connect the heiress's name with that of

Courtenay Youghal. Beyond this meagre and conflicting and altogether tantalising information, her

knowledge of the present position of affairs did not go. If either of the young men was seriously "making the

running," it was probable that she would hear some sly hint or open comment about it from one of Serena's

gossip laden friends, without having to go out of her way to introduce the subject and unduly disclose her

own state of ignorance. And a game of bridge, played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for

convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one could always find

The afternoon was too warm to make bridge a generally popular diversion, and Serena's party was a

comparatively small one. Only one table was incomplete when Francesca made her appearance on the scene;

at it was seated Serena herself, confronted by Ada Spelvexit, whom everyone was wont to explain as "one of

the Cheshire Spelvexits," as though any other variety would have been intolerable. Ada Spelvexit was one of

those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in what are called "movements." "Most of the really

great lessons I have learned have been taught me by the Poor," was one of her favourite statements. The one

great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have taught her, that their kitchens and sickrooms

were not unreservedly at her disposal as private lecture halls, she had never been able to assimilate. She was

ready to give them unlimited advice as to how they should keep the wolf from their doors, but in return she

claimed and enforced for herself the penetrating powers of an east wind or a dust storm. Her visits among her

wealthier acquaintances were equally extensive and enterprising, and hardly more welcome; in

countryhouse parties, while partaking to the fullest extent of the hospitality offered her, she made a practice

of unburdening herself of homilies on the evils of leisure and luxury, which did not particularly endear her to

her fellow guests. Hostesses regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which everyone had to

The third prospective player, Francesca noted without any special enthusiasm, was Lady Caroline Benaresq.

Lady Caroline was far from being a remarkably good bridge player, but she always managed to domineer

mercilessly over any table that was favoured with her presence, and generally managed to win. A

domineering player usually inflicts the chief damage and demoralisation on his partner; Lady Caroline's

"Weak and weak," she announced in her gentle voice, as she cut her hostess for a partner; "I suppose we had

Francesca wondered at the old woman's moderate assessment of the stake, knowing her fondness for highish

"I don't mind what we play," said Ada Spelvexit, with an incautious parade of elegant indifference; as a

matter of fact she was inwardly relieved and rejoicing at the reasonable figure proposed by Lady Caroline,

and she would certainly have demurred if a higher stake had been suggested. She was not as a rule a

successful player, and money lost at cards was always a poignant bereavement to her.

"Then as you don't mind we'll make it ten shillings a hundred," said Lady Caroline, with the pleased chuckle

of one who has spread a net in the sight of a bird and disproved the vanity of the proceeding.

It proved a tiresome dingdong rubber, with the strength of the cards slightly on Francesca's side, and the

luck of the table going mostly the other way. She was too keen a player not to feel a certain absorption in the

game once it had started, but she was conscious today of a distracting interest that competed with the

momentary importance of leads and discards and declarations. The little accumulations of talk that were

unpent during the dealing of the hands became as noteworthy to her alert attention as the play of the hands

"Yes, quite a small party this afternoon," said Serena, in reply to a seemingly casual remark on Francesca's

part; "and two or three nonplayers, which is unusual on a Wednesday. Canon Besomley was here just before

"A strong man with a wonderfully strong message," said Ada Spelvexit, in an impressive and assertive tone.

"The sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of his age and lunches with them afterwards," said Lady

"Hardly a fair summary of the man and his work," protested Ada. "I've been to hear him many times when

I've been depressed or discouraged, and I simply can't tell you the impression his words leave "

"At least you can tell us what you intend to make trumps," broke in Lady Caroline, gently.

"Doubled," said Lady Caroline, with increased gentleness, and a few minutes later she was pencilling an

"I stayed with his people down in Herefordshire last May," said Ada, returning to the unfinished theme of the

Canon; "such an exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and healing to the nerves. Real country scenery; apple

Ada Spelvexit gave up the attempt to reproduce the decorative setting of the Canon's homelife, and fell back

on the small but practical consolation of scoring the odd trick in her opponent's declaration of hearts.

"If you had led your highest club to start with, instead of the nine, we should have saved the trick," remarked

Lady Caroline to her partner in a tone of coldly, gentle reproof; "it's no use, my dear," she continued, as

Serena flustered out a halting apology, "no earthly use to attempt to play bridge at one table and try to see and

"I can generally manage to attend to more than one thing at a time," said Serena, rashly; "I think I must have

"Much better to economise and have one really good one," observed Lady Caroline.

"LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI scoring a verbal trick or two as usual," said a player at another table in a

"Did I tell you Sir Edward Roan is coming to my next big evening," said Serena, hurriedly, by way, perhaps,

"Poor dear, good Sir Edward. What have you made trumps?" asked Lady Caroline, in one breath.

Francesca was a Ministerialist by family interest and allegiance, and was inclined to take up the cudgels at the

"He amuses me so much," purred Lady Caroline. Her amusement was usually of the sort that a sporting cat

derives from watching the Swedish exercises of a wellspent and carefully thoughtout mouse.

"Really? He has been rather a brilliant success at the Foreign Office, you know," said Francesca.

"He reminds one so of a circus elephant infinitely more intelligent than the people who direct him, but quite

content to go on putting his foot down or taking it up as may be required, quite unconcerned whether he steps

on a meringue or a hornet's nest in the process of going where he's expected to go."

"I can't," said Lady Caroline; "Courtenay Youghal said it in the House last night. Didn't you read the debate?

He was really rather in form. I disagree entirely with his point of view, of course, but some of the things he

says have just enough truth behind them to redeem them from being merely smart; for instance, his summing

up of the Government's attitude towards our embarrassing Colonial Empire in the wistful phrase 'happy is the

"What an absurdly unjust thing to say," put in Francesca; "I daresay some of our Party at some time have

taken up that attitude, but every one knows that Sir Edward is a sound Imperialist at heart."

"Most politicians are something or other at heart, but no one would be rash enough to insure a politician

"Anyhow, I don't see that the Opposition leaders would have acted any differently in the present case," said

"One should always speak guardedly of the Opposition leaders," said Lady Caroline, in her gentlest voice;

Lady Caroline had just remembered that her hostess was on the Opposition side in politics.

Francesca and her partner scored four tricks in clubs; the game stood irresolutely at twentyfour all.

"If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given to the Maid of Athens and returned my heart we

should have made two more tricks and gone game," said Lady Caroline to her partner.

"Mr. Youghal seems pushing himself to the fore of late," remarked Francesca, as Serena took up the cards to

deal. Since the young politician's name had been introduced into their conversation the opportunity for

turning the talk more directly on him and his affairs was too good to be missed.

"I think he's got a career before him," said Serena; "the House always fills when he's speaking, and that's a

good sign. And then he's young and got rather an attractive personality, which is always something in the

"His lack of money will handicap him, unless he can find himself a rich wife or persuade someone to die and

leave him a fat legacy," said Francesca; "since M.P.'s have become the recipients of a salary rather more is

"Yes, the House of Commons still remains rather at the opposite pole to the Kingdom of Heaven as regards

"There ought to be no difficulty about Youghal picking up a girl with money," said Serena; "with his

prospects he would make an excellent husband for any woman with social ambitions."

And she half sighed, as though she almost regretted that a previous matrimonial arrangement precluded her

Francesca, under an assumption of languid interest, was watching Lady Caroline narrowly for some hint of

The question came from George St. Michael, who had strayed over from a neighbouring table, attracted by

St. Michael was one of those dapper birdlike illusorilyactive men, who seem to have been in a certain

stage of middleage for as long as human memory can recall them. A closecut peaked beard lent a certain

dignity to his appearance a loan which the rest of his features and mannerisms were continually and

successfully repudiating. His profession, if he had one, was submerged in his hobby, which consisted of

being an advanceagent for small happenings or possible happenings that were or seemed imminent in the

social world around him; he found a perpetual and unflagging satisfaction in acquiring and retailing any stray

items of gossip or information, particularly of a matrimonial nature, that chanced to come his way. Given the

bare outline of an officially announced engagement he would immediately fill it in with all manner of details,

true or, at any rate, probable, drawn from his own imagination or from some equally exclusive source. The

MORNING POST might content itself with the mere statement of the arrangement which would shortly take

place, but it was St. Michael's breathless little voice that proclaimed how the contracting parties had

originally met over a salmonfishing incident, why the Guards' Chapel would not be used, why her Aunt

Mary had at first opposed the match, how the question of the children's religious upbringing had been

compromised, etc., etc., to all whom it might interest and to many whom it might not. Beyond his

industriouslyearned preeminence in this special branch of intelligence, he was chiefly noteworthy for

having a wife reputed to be the tallest and thinnest woman in the Home Counties. The two were sometimes

seen together in Society, where they passed under the collective name of St. Michael and All Angles.

"We are trying to find a rich wife for Courtenay Youghal," said Serena, in answer to St. Michael's question.

"Ah, there I'm afraid you're a little late," he observed, glowing with the importance of pending revelation;

"I'm afraid you're a little late," he repeated, watching the effect of his words as a gardener might watch the

development of a bed of carefully tended asparagus. "I think the young gentleman has been before you and

He lowered his voice as he spoke, not with a view to imparting impressive mystery to his statement, but

because there were other table groups within hearing to whom he hoped presently to have the privilege of

"Miss de Frey," broke in St. Michael, hurriedly, fearful lest his revelation should be forestalled, even in

guesswork; "quite an ideal choice, the very wife for a man who means to make his mark in politics.

Twentyfour thousand a year, with prospects of more to come, and a charming place of her own not too far

from town. Quite the type of girl, too, who will make a good political hostess, brains without being brainy,

you know. Just the right thing. Of course, it would be premature to make any definite announcement at

"It would hardly be premature for my partner to announce what she means to make trumps," interrupted Lady

Caroline, in a voice of such sinister gentleness that St. Michael fled headlong back to his own table.

"Thank you. No trumps," declared Lady Caroline. The hand was successful, and the rubber ultimately fell to

her with a comfortable margin of honours. The same partners cut together again, and this time the cards went

distinctly against Francesca and Ada Spelvexit, and a heavily piledup score confronted them at the close of

the rubber. Francesca was conscious that a certain amount of rather erratic play on her part had at least

contributed to the result. St. Michael's incursion into the conversation had proved rather a powerful

Ada Spelvexit emptied her purse of several gold pieces and infused a corresponding degree of superiority into

"I must be going now," she announced; "I'm dining early. I have to give an address to some charwomen

"Why?" asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting directness that was one of her most formidable

"Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I daresay they will like to hear," said Ada, with a thin laugh.

Her statement was received with a silence that betokened profound unbelief in any such probability.

"No one has ever said it," observed Lady Caroline, "but how painfully true it is that the poor have us always

Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred impressiveness of her retreat came as a culminating

discomfiture on the top of her illfortune at the cardtable. Possibly, however, the multiplication of her own

annoyances enabled her to survey charwomen's troubles with increased cheerfulness. None of them, at any

Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune attending on her, succeeded in winning back most of

her losses. A sense of satisfaction was distinctly dominant as she took leave of her hostess. St. Michael's

gossip, or rather the manner in which it had been received, had given her a clue to the real state of affairs,

which, however slender and conjectural, at least pointed in the desired direction. At first she had been

horribly afraid lest she should be listening to a definite announcement which would have been the

deathblow to her hopes, but as the recitation went on without any of those assured little minor details which

St. Michael so loved to supply, she had come to the conclusion that it was merely a piece of intelligent

guesswork. And if Lady Caroline had really believed in the story of Elaine de Frey's virtual engagement to

Courtenay Youghal she would have taken a malicious pleasure in encouraging St. Michael in his confidences,

and in watching Francesca's discomfiture under the recital. The irritated manner in which she had cut short

the discussion betrayed the fact, that, as far as the old woman's information went, it was Comus and not

Courtenay Youghal who held the field. And in this particular case Lady Caroline's information was likely to

Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossingsweeper or matchseller she chanced across after a

successful sitting at bridge. This afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen shillings to the bad, but

she gave two pennies to a crossing sweeper at the northwest corner of Berkeley Square as a sort of

IT was a fresh rainrepentant afternoon, following a morning that had been sultry and torrentially wet by

turns; the sort of afternoon that impels people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of good, its

chief merit in their eyes probably having been its recognition of the art of moderation. Also it was an

afternoon that invited bodily activity after the convalescent languor of the earlier part of the day. Elaine had

instinctively found her way into her ridinghabit and sent an order down to the stables a blessed oasis that

still smelt sweetly of horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol, and now she set her mare

at a smart pace through a succession of longstretching country lanes. She was due some time that afternoon

at a garden party, but she rode with determination in an opposite direction. In the first place neither Comus

or Courtenay would be at the party, which fact seemed to remove any valid reason that could be thought of

for inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place about a hundred human beings would be gathered

there, and human gatherings were not her most crying need at the present moment. Since her last encounter

with her wooers, under the cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised that she was either very happy or cruelly

unhappy, she could not quite determine which. She seemed to have what she most wanted in the world lying

at her feet, and she was dreadfully uncertain in her more reflective moments whether she really wanted to

stretch out her hand and take it. It was all very like some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of

Pagan Hellas, and consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on the methodical

lines of Victorian Christianity. Her appeal court was in permanent session these last few days, but it gave no

decisions, at least none that she would listen to. And the ride on her fast lightstepping little mare, alone and

unattended, through the freshsmelling leafy lanes into unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at

the moment. The mare made some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the staring doltlike kind of

nervousness that shows itself in an irritating hangingback as each conspicuous wayside object presents

itself, but the nerveflutter of an imaginative animal that merely results in a quick whisk of the head and a

swifter bound forward. She might have paraphrased the mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into

The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and whir of a passing motorcar or the loud vibrating

On turning a corner out of a narrow coppicebordered lane into a wider road that sloped steadily upward in a

long stretch of hill Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string of yellowpainted vans,

drawn for the most part by skewbald or speckled horses. A certain rakish air about these oncoming road

craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling wildbeast show, decked out in the rich primitive

colouring that one's taste in childhood would have insisted on before it had been schooled in the artistic value

of dulness. It was an unlookedfor and distinctly unwelcome encounter. The mare had already commenced a

sixfold scrutiny with nostrils, eyes and daintilypricked ears; one ear made hurried little backward

movements to hear what Elaine was saying about the eminent niceness and respectability of the approaching

caravan, but even Elaine felt that she would be unable satisfactorily to explain the elephants and camels that

would certainly form part of the procession. To turn back would seem rather craven, and the mare might take

fright at the manoeuvre and try to bolt; a gate standing ajar at the entrance to a farmyard lane provided a

As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man standing just inside the lane, who made a

"Thank you. I'm just getting out of the way of a wildbeast show," she explained; "my mare is tolerant of

motors and tractionengines, but I expect camels hullo," she broke off, recognising the man as an old

acquaintance, "I heard you had taken rooms in a farmhouse somewhere. Fancy meeting you in this way."

In the not very distant days of her littlegirlhood, Tom Keriway had been a man to be looked upon with a

certain awe and envy; indeed the glamour of his roving career would have fired the imagination, and wistful

desire to do likewise, of many young Englishmen. It seemed to be the grownup realisation of the games

played in dark rooms in winter firelit evenings, and the dreams dreamed over favourite books of adventure.

Making Vienna his headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he listed through the lands of the

Near and Middle East as leisurely and thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris. He had wandered

through Hungarian horsefairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely Balkan hillsides, dropped himself

pebblewise into the stagnant human pool of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through the

strange racial mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused politeness to the shallow ultramodern opinions of a

voluble editor or lawyer in some wayside Russian town, or learned wisdom from a chance tavern companion,

one of the atoms of the busy antstream of men and merchandise that moves untiringly round the shores of

the Black Sea. And far and wide as he might roam he always managed to turn up at frequent intervals, at ball

and supper and theatre, in the gay Hauptstadt of the Habsburgs, haunting his favourite cafes and winevaults,

skimming through his favourite newssheets, greeting old acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors

down to cobblers in the social scale. He seldom talked of his travels, but it might be said that his travels

talked of him; there was an air about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase: "a man that

And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in his route; a severe illness shook half the life

and all the energy out of him, and a heavy money loss brought him almost to the door of destitution. With

something, perhaps, of the impulse which drives a stricken animal away from its kind, Tom Keriway left the

haunts where he had known so much happiness, and withdrew into the shelter of a secluded farmhouse

lodging; more than ever he became to Elaine a hearsay personality. And now the chance meeting with the

"What a charming little nook you've got hold of," she exclaimed with instinctive politeness, and then looked

searchingly round, and discovered that she had spoken the truth; it really was charming. The farmhouse had

that intensely English look that one seldom sees out of Normandy. Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden,

outbuildings, horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems rightfully to belong to outoftheway

farmyards, an air of wakeful dreaminess which suggests that here, man and beast and bird have got up so

Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little paddock by the side of a great grey barn. At the

end of the lane they could see the show go past, a string of lumbering vans and great striding beasts that

seemed to link the vast silences of the desert with the noises and sights and smells, the naphthaflares and

advertisement hoardings and trampled orangepeel, of an endless succession of towns.

"You had better let the caravan pass well on its way before you get on the road again," said Keriway; "the

Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some defiantly prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a

"I don't know when I've seen anything so utterly charming and peaceful," said Elaine, propping herself on a

seat that a peartree had obligingly designed in the fantastic curve of its trunk.

"Charming, certainly," said Keriway, "but too full of the stress of its own little life struggle to be peaceful.

Since I have lived here I've learnt, what I've always suspected, that a country farmhouse, set away in a world

of its own, is one of the most wonderful studies of interwoven happenings and tragedies that can be imagined.

It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe in the days when there was a sort of ordered anarchy between

feudal lords and overlords, and burggrafs, and mitred abbots, and prince bishops, robber barons and

merchant guilds, and Electors and so forth, all striving and contending and counterplotting, and interfering

with each other under some vague code of loosely applied rules. Here one sees it reproduced under one's

eyes, like a musty page of blackletter come to life. Look at one little section of it, the poultrylife on the

farm. Villa poultry, dull eggmachines, with records kept of how many ounces of food they eat, and how

many pennyworths of eggs they lay, give you no idea of the wonderlife of these farmbirds; their feuds and

jealousies, and carefully maintained prerogatives, their unsparing tyrannies and persecutions, their calculated

courage and bravado or sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human chapter from the annals of

the old Rhineland or medieval Italy. And then, outside their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies

that come up against them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among the coops like a mosstrooper

raiding the border, knowing well that a charge of shot may tear him to bits at any moment. And the stoat, a

creeping slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and unstayably out for blood. And the hungertaught

master of craft, the red fox, who has waited perhaps half the afternoon for his chance while the fowls were

dusting themselves under the hedge, and just as they were turning supperward to the yard one has stopped a

moment to give her feathers a final shake and found death springing upon her. Do you know," he continued,

as Elaine fed herself and the mare with morsels of currantloaf, "I don't think any tragedy in literature that I

have ever come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I spelled out slowly for myself in words of

three letters: the bad fox has got the red hen. There was something so dramatically complete about it; the

badness of the fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to heighten the horror of the hen's

fate, and there was such a suggestion of masterful malice about the word 'got.' One felt that a countryside in

arms would not get that hen away from the bad fox. They used to think me a slow dull reader for not getting

on with my lesson, but I used to sit and picture to myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly,

screeching in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape and silent, and

eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever. I have seen bloodspillings and downcrushings and abject

defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless tragedy."

He was silent for a moment as if he were again musing over the threeletter drama that had so dwelt in his

childhood's imagination. "Tell me some of the things you have seen in your time," was the request that was

nearly on Elaine's lips, but she hastily checked herself and substituted another.

And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in

the hills, of beast lore and wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border of witchcraft

passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness of those who know nothing, but with the averted glance

of those who fear to see too much. He told her of those things that slept and those that prowled when the dusk

fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as curious

and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock

that they tended. It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of old world children's books had been fetched

down from some cobwebbed lumberroom and brought to life. Sitting there in the little paddock, grown

thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by the weatherbeaten old grey barn, listening to this

chronicle of wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely believe that a few miles away

there was a garden party in full swing, with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable refreshments

and fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of social strivings and snubbings. Did Vienna and the

Balkan Mountains and the Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to the man sitting

by her side, who had discovered or invented this wonderful fairyland? Was it a true and merciful arrangement

of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust out the aftertaste of the things that had been? Here was

one who had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and lost it all, and he was happy and

absorbed and wellcontent with the little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept. And Elaine,

who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her hand, could not make up her mind to be even

moderately happy. She did not even know whether to take this hero of her childhood down from his pedestal,

or to place him on a higher one; on the whole she was inclined to resent rather than approve the idea that

illhealth and misfortune could so completely subdue and tame an erstwhile bold and roving spirit.

The mare was showing signs of delicatelyhinted impatience; the paddock, with its teasing insects and very

indifferent grazing, had not thrust out the image of her own comfortable wellfoddered loosebox. Elaine

divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of bunloaf and jumped lightly on to her saddle. As she rode

slowly down the lane, with Keriway escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had seemed to

her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old farmstead, a place of beehives and hollyhocks and gabled

cartsheds; now it was in her eyes a magic city, with an undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.

"You are a person to be envied," she said to Keriway; "you have created a fairyland, and you are living in it

He shot the question out with sudden bitterness. She looked down and saw the wistful misery that had come

"Once," he said to her, "in a German paper I read a short story about a tame crippled crane that lived in the

park of some small town. I forget what happened in the story, but there was one line that I shall always

IN the warmth of a late June morning the long shaded stretch of raked earth, gravelwalk and rhododendron

bush that is known affectionately as the Row was alive with the monotonous movement and alert stagnation

appropriate to the time and place. The seekers after health, the seekers after notoriety and recognition, and the

lovers of good exercise were all well represented on the galloping ground; the gravelwalk and chairs and

long seats held a population whose varied instincts and motives would have baffled a social

cataloguemaker. The children, handled or in perambulators, might be excused from instinct or motive; they

Pleasingly conspicuous among a bunch of indifferent riders pacing along by the rails where the onlookers

were thickest was Courtenay Youghal, on his handsome plumroan gelding Anne de Joyeuse. That delicately

stepping animal had taken a prize at Islington and nearly taken the life of a stableboy of whom he

disapproved, but his strongest claims to distinction were his good looks and his high opinion of himself.

"Please stop and talk to me," said a quiet beckoning voice from the other side of the rails, and Youghal drew

rein and greeted Lady Veula Croot. Lady Veula had married into a family of commercial solidity and

enterprising political nonentity. She had a devoted husband, some blonde teachable children, and a look of

unutterable weariness in her eyes. To see her standing at the top of an expensively horticultured staircase

receiving her husband's guests was rather like watching an animal performing on a musichall stage.

One always tells oneself that the animal likes it, and one always knows that it doesn't.

"Lady Veula is an ardent Free Trader, isn't she?" someone once remarked to Lady Caroline.

"I wonder," said Lady Caroline, in her gently questioning voice; "a woman whose dresses are made in Paris

and whose marriage has been made in Heaven might be equally biassed for and against free imports."

Lady Veula looked at Youghal and his mount with slow critical appraisement, and there was a note of

"You two dear things, I should love to stroke you both, but I'm not sure how Joyeuse would take it. So I'll

stroke you down verbally instead. I admired your attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of course I don't

agree with a word of it. Your description of him building a hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he

was isolating it was rather sweet. Seriously though, I regard him as one of the pillars of the Administration."

"So do I," said Youghal; "the misfortune is that he is merely propping up a canvas roof. It's just his

regrettable solidity and integrity that makes him so expensively dangerous. The average Briton arrives at the

same judgment about Roan's handling of foreign affairs as Omar does of the Supreme Being in his dealings

Lady Veula laughed lightly. "My Party is in power so I may exercise the privilege of being optimistic. Who is

that who bowed to you?" she continued, as a dark young man with an inclination to stoutness passed by them

on foot; "I've seen him about a good deal lately. He's been to one or two of my dances."

"Andrei Drakoloff," said Youghal; "he's just produced a play that has had a big success in Moscow and is

certain to be extremely popular all over Russia. In the first three acts the heroine is supposed to be dying of

"Gloomloving but not in the least gloomy. They merely take their sadness pleasurably, just as we are

accused of taking our pleasures sadly. Have you noticed that dreadful Klopstock youth has been pounding

past us at shortening intervals. He'll come up and talk if he half catches your eye."

"I only just know him. Isn't he at an agricultural college or something of the sort?"

"Yes, studying to be a gentleman farmer, he told me. I didn't ask if both subjects were compulsory."

"You're really rather dreadful," said Lady Veula, trying to look as if she thought so; "remember, we are all

"If I and Ernest Klopstock are really equal in the sight of Heaven," said Youghal, with intense complacency,

There was a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching of saddleleather, as the Klopstock youth

lumbered up to the rails and delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his ears well back as

the ungainly bay cob and his appropriately matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was reflected and

"I've been having a nailing fine time," recounted the newcomer with clamorous enthusiasm; "I was over in

Paris last month and had lots of strawberries there, then I had a lot more in London, and now I've been having

a late crop of them in Herefordshire, so I've had quite a lot this year." And he laughed as one who had

"The charm of that story," said Youghal, "is that it can be told in any drawingroom." And with a sweep of

his widebrimmed hat to Lady Veula he turned the impatient Joyeuse into the moving stream of horse and

"That woman reminds me of some verse I've read and liked," thought Youghal, as Joyeuse sprang into a light

showy canter that gave full recognition to the existence of observant human beings along the side walk. "Ah,

"How much I loved that way you had Of smiling most, when very sad, A smile which carried tender hints Of

sun and spring, And yet, more than all other thing, Of weariness beyond all words."

And having satisfactorily fitted Lady Veula on to a quotation he dismissed her from his mind. With the

constancy of her sex she thought about him, his good looks and his youth and his railing tongue, till late in

While Youghal was putting Joyeuse through his paces under the elm trees of the Row a little drama in which

he was directly interested was being played out not many hundred yards away. Elaine and Comus were

indulging themselves in two pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just a little from the serried rows of

sitters who were set out like bedded plants over an acre or so of turf. Comus was, for the moment, in a mood

of pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of pointed criticism and unsparing anecdote concerning those of the

promenaders or loungers whom he knew personally or by sight. Elaine was rather quieter than usual, and the

grave serenity of the Leonardo da Vinci portrait seemed intensified in her face this morning. In his leisurely

courtship Comus had relied almost exclusively on his physical attraction and the fitful drollery of his wit and

high spirits, and these graces had gone far to make him seem a very desirable and rather lovable thing in

Elaine's eyes. But he had left out of account the disfavour which he constantly risked and sometimes incurred

from his frank and undisguised indifference to other people's interests and wishes, including, at times,

Elaine's. And the more that she felt that she liked him the more she was irritated by his lack of consideration

for her. Without expecting that her every wish should become a law to him she would at least have liked it to

reach the formality of a Second Reading. Another important factor he had also left out of his reckoning,

namely the presence on the scene of another suitor, who also had youth and wit to recommend him, and who

certainly did not lack physical attractions. Comus, marching carelessly through unknown country to effect

what seemed already an assured victory, made the mistake of disregarding the existence of an unbeaten army

Today Elaine felt that, without having actually quarrelled, she and Comus had drifted a little bit out of

sympathy with one another. The fault she knew was scarcely hers, in fact from the most goodnatured point

of view it could hardly be denied that it was almost entirely his. The incident of the silver dish had lacked

even the attraction of novelty; it had been one of a series, all bearing a strong connecting likeness. There had

been small unrepaid loans which Elaine would not have grudged in themselves, though the application for

them brought a certain qualm of distaste; with the perversity which seemed inseparable from his doings,

Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings in some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly

profitless extravagance, which outraged all the canons of her upbringing without bringing him an atom of

understandable satisfaction. Under these repeated discouragements it was not surprising that some small part

of her affection should have slipped away, but she had come to the Park that morning with an unconfessed

expectation of being gently wooed back to the mood of gracious forgetfulness that she was only too eager to

assume. It was almost worth while being angry with Comus for the sake of experiencing the pleasure of being

coaxed into friendliness again with the charm which he knew so well how to exert. It was delicious here

under the trees on this perfect June morning, and Elaine had the blessed assurance that most of the women

within range were envying her the companionship of the handsome merryhearted youth who sat by her side.

With special complacence she contemplated her cousin Suzette, who was selfconsciously but not very

elatedly basking in the attentions of her fiance, an earnestlooking young man who was superintendent of a

People's somethingorother on the south side of the river, and whose clothes Comus had described as

Most of the pleasures in life must be paid for, and the chair ticket vendor in due time made his appearance

Comus paid him from out of a varied assortment of coins and then balanced the remainder in the palm of his

hand. Elaine felt a sudden foreknowledge of something disagreeable about to happen and a red spot deepened

"Four shillings and fivepence and a halfpenny," said Comus, reflectively. "It's a ridiculous sum to last me

"Yes?" commented Elaine dryly and with an apparent lack of interest in his exchequer statement. Surely, she

was thinking hurriedly to herself, he could not be foolish enough to broach the matter of another loan.

"The card debt is rather a nuisance," pursued Comus, with fatalistic persistency.

"You won seven pounds last week, didn't you?" asked Elaine; "don't you put by any of your winnings to

"The four shillings and the fivepence and the halfpenny represent the rearguard of the seven pounds," said

Comus; "the rest have fallen by the way. If I can pay the two pounds today I daresay I shall win something

more to go on with; I'm holding rather good cards just now. But if I can't pay it of course I shan't show up at

Elaine took no notice of this indirect application. The Appeal Court was assembling in haste to consider new

evidence, and this time there was the rapidity of sudden determination about its movement.

The conversation strayed away from the fateful topic for a few moments and then Comus brought it

"It would be awfully nice if you would let me have a fiver for a few days, Elaine," he said quickly; "if you

"If you are really bothered about your card debt I will send you the two pounds by messenger boy early this

afternoon." She spoke quietly and with great decision. "And I shall not be at the Connor's dance tonight,"

she continued; "it's too hot for dancing. I'm going home now; please don't bother to accompany me, I

Comus saw that he had overstepped the mark of her good nature. Wisely he made no immediate attempt to

force himself back into her good graces. He would wait till her indignation had cooled.

His tactics would have been excellent if he had not forgotten that unbeaten army on his flank.

Elaine de Frey had known very clearly what qualities she had wanted in Comus, and she had known, against

all efforts at selfdeception, that he fell far short of those qualities. She had been willing to lower her

standard of moral requirements in proportion as she was fond of the boy, but there was a point beyond which

Suzette, on whom she felt a thoroughly justified tendency to look down, had at any rate an attentive and

considerate lover. Elaine walked towards the Park gates feeling that in one essential Suzette possessed

something that had been denied to her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse and his spruce young rider preparing

"Get rid of Joyeuse and come and take me out to lunch somewhere," demanded Elaine.

"How jolly," said Youghal. "Let's go to the Corridor Restaurant. The head waiter there is an old Viennese

friend of mine and looks after me beautifully. I've never been there with a lady before, and he's sure to ask me

The lunch was a success in every way. There was just enough orchestral effort to immerse the conversation

without drowning it, and Youghal was an attentive and inspired host. Through an open doorway Elaine could

see the cafe readingroom, with its imposing array of NEUE FREIE PRESSE, BERLINER TAGEBLATT,

and other exotic newspapers hanging on the wall. She looked across at the young man seated opposite her,

who gave one the impression of having centred the most serious efforts of his brain on his toilet and his food,

and recalled some of the flattering remarks that the press had bestowed on his recent speeches.

"Doesn't it make you conceited, Courtenay," she asked, "to look at all those foreign newspapers hanging there

and know that most of them have got paragraphs and articles about your Persian speech?"

"There's always a chastening corrective in the thought that some of them may have printed your portrait.

When once you've seen your features hurriedly reproduced in the MATIN, for instance, you feel you would

And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the nearest mirror, as an antidote against possible

Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that this young man, whose knowledge of the Middle East

was an embarrassment to Ministers at question time and in debate, was showing himself equally

wellinformed on the subject of her culinary likes and dislikes. If Suzette could have been forced to attend as

"Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?" asked Elaine, when Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had

finished collecting her sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta from the hands of obsequious attendants.

"It would be horrid to disappoint him when he's looked after us so charmingly," said Elaine; "tell him that we

THE Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood of the teabuffet, by a fashionable

throng of artpatrons which had gathered to inspect Mervyn Quentock's collection of Society portraits.

Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just receiving due recognition from the critics; that the

recognition was not overdue he owed largely to his perception of the fact that if one hides one's talent under a

bushel one must be careful to point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is hidden. There are two

manners of receiving recognition: one is to be discovered so long after one's death that one's grandchildren

have to write to the papers to establish their relationship; the other is to be discovered, like the infant Moses,

at the very outset of one's career. Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner. In an age when

many aspiring young men strive to advertise their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock

turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint, but he contrived to herald his output

with a certain fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention which might otherwise have

strayed past his studio. In appearance he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except, perhaps, that

his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian Nights; his clothes matched his appearance and

showed no taint of the sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the gardencity and the Latin Quarter

anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship with art and thought. His eccentricity took the form of flying in the

face of some of the prevailing social currents of the day, but as a reactionary, never as a reformer. He

produced a gasp of admiring astonishment in fashionable circles by refusing to paint actresses except, of

course, those who had left the legitimate drama to appear between the boards of Debrett. He absolutely

declined to execute portraits of Americans unless they hailed from certain favoured States. His

"watercolourline," as a New York paper phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal of

Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were the things that Quentock most wanted.

"Of course he is perfectly right," said Lady Caroline Benaresq, calmly rescuing a piledup plate of caviare

sandwiches from the neighbourhood of a trio of young ladies who had established themselves hopefully

within easy reach of it. "Art," she continued, addressing herself to the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, "has always

been geographically exclusive. London may be more important from most points of view than Venice, but the

art of portrait painting, which would never concern itself with a Lord Mayor, simply grovels at the feet of the

Doges. As a Socialist I'm bound to recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon, but one

"Exclusiveness," said the Reverend Poltimore, "has been the salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is proving

the downfall of religion. My colleagues of the cloth go about zealously proclaiming the fact that Christianity,

in some form or other, is attracting shoals of converts among all sorts of races and tribes, that one had

scarcely ever heard of, except in reviews of books of travel that one never read. That sort of thing was all

very well when the world was more sparsely populated, but nowadays, when it simply teems with human

beings, no one is particularly impressed by the fact that a few million, more or less, of converts, of a low

stage of mental development, have accepted the teachings of some particular religion. It not only chills one's

enthusiasm, it positively shakes one's convictions when one hears that the things one has been brought up to

believe as true are being very favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and Kanakas."

The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in himself to Voltaire, and had lived alongside the

"No modern cult or fashion," he continued, "would be favourably influenced by considerations based on

statistics; fancy adopting a certain style of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely worn in Lancashire

and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain brand of champagne because it was being extensively patronised

in German summer resorts. No wonder that religion is falling into disuse in this country under such

"You can't prevent the heathen being converted if they choose to be," said Lady Caroline; "this is an age of

"You could always deny it," said the Rev. Poltimore, "like the Belgians do with regrettable occurrences in the

Congo. But I would go further than that. I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for Christianity in this

country by labelling it as the exclusive possession of a privileged few. If one could induce the Duchess of

Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as the British Isles are concerned, is strictly

limited to herself, two of the undergardeners at Pelmby, and, possibly, but not certainly, the Dean of

Dunster, there would be an instant reshaping of the popular attitude towards religious convictions and

observances. Once let the idea get about that the Christian Church is rather more exclusive than the Lawn at

Ascot, and you would have a quickening of religious life such as this generation has never witnessed. But as

long as the clergy and the religious organisations advertise their creed on the lines of 'Everybody ought to

believe in us: millions do,' one can expect nothing but indifference and waning faith."

"Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever and advanced in the early 'nineties.

Today they have a dreadfully warmedup flavour. That is the great delusion of you wouldbe advanced

satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a couple of decades saying daring and startling things

about the age you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is certainly not standing still. The whole

of the Sherard Blaw school of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture in a travelling

circus. However, you will always have relays of people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of

yesterday, and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of something new and revolutionising."

"WOULD you mind passing that plate of sandwiches," asked one of the trio of young ladies, emboldened by

"With pleasure," said Lady Caroline, deftly passing her a nearly empty plate of breadandbutter.

"I meant the place of caviare sandwiches. So sorry to trouble you," persisted the young lady

Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her attention to a newcomer.

"A very interesting exhibition," Ada Spelvexit was saying; "faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of

technique, and quite a mastertouch in the way of poses. But have you noticed how very animal his art is? He

seems to shut out the soul from his portraits. I nearly cried when I saw dear Winifred depicted simply as a

"I wish you had," said Lady Caroline; "the spectacle of a strong, brave woman weeping at a private view in

the Rutland Galleries would have been so sensational. It would certainly have been reproduced in the next

Drury Lane drama. And I'm so unlucky; I never see these sensational events. I was ill with appendicitis, you

know, when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband, after seventeen years of estrangement,

during a State luncheon party at Windsor. The old queen was furious about it. She said it was so disrespectful

Lady Caroline's recollections of things that hadn't happened at the Court of Queen Victoria were notoriously

vivid; it was the very widespread fear that she might one day write a book of reminiscences that made her so

"As for his fulllength picture of Lady Brickfield," continued Ada, ignoring Lady Caroline's commentary as

far as possible, "all the expression seems to have been deliberately concentrated in the feet; beautiful feet, no

"To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an eccentricity, but it is scarcely an indiscretion,"

One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing flutter of attention was a costume study of Francesca

Bassington. Francesca had secured some highly desirable patronage for the young artist, and in return he had

enriched her pantheon of personal possessions with a clever piece of work into which he had thrown an

unusual amount of imaginative detail. He had painted her in a costume of the great Louis's brightest period,

seated in front of a tapestry that was so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely be said to form

part of the background. Flowers and fruit, in exotic profusion, were its dominant note; quinces,

pomegranates, passion flowers, giant convolvulus, great mauvepink roses, and grapes that were already

being pressed by gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian vintage, stood out on its woven texture. The same note

was struck in the beflowered satin of the lady's kirtle, and in the pomegranate pattern of the brocade that

draped the couch on which she was seated. The artist had called his picture "Recolte." And after one had

taken in all the details of fruit and flower and foliage that earned the composition its name, one noted the

landscape that showed through a broad casement in the lefthand corner. It was a landscape clutched in the

grip of winter, naked, bleak, blackfrozen; a winter in which things died and knew no rewakening. If the

"It leaves a great deal to the imagination, doesn't it?" said Ada Spelvexit, who had edged away from the range

"Oh, yes, it's a good likeness of dear Francesca," admitted Ada; "of course, it flatters her."

"That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait painting," said Serena; "after all, if posterity is going to stare

at one for centuries it's only kind and reasonable to be looking just a little better than one's best."

"What a curiously unequal style the artist has," continued Ada, almost as if she felt a personal grievance

against him; "I was just noticing what a lack of soul there was in most of his portraits. Dear Winifred, you

know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at my gatherings for old women, he's made her look just an

ordinary dairymaidish blonde; and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless woman I've ever met, well, he's

Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the feeling of one who comes suddenly across a

oncefamiliar halfforgotten acquaintance in unfamiliar surroundings. The likeness was undoubtedly a good

one, but the artist had caught an expression in Francesca's eyes which few people had ever seen there. It was

the expression of a woman who had forgotten for one short moment to be absorbed in the small cares and

excitements of her life, the money worries and little social plannings, and had found time to send a look of

halfwistful friendliness to some sympathetic companion. Comus could recall that look, fitful and fleeting, in

his mother's eyes when she had been a few years younger, before her world had grown to be such a

committeeroom of ways and means. Almost as a rediscovery he remembered that she had once figured in

his boyish mind as a "rather good sort," more ready to see the laughable side of a piece of mischief than to

labour forth a reproof. That the bygone feeling of good fellowship had been stamped out was, he knew,

probably in great part his own doing, and it was possible that the old friendliness was still there under the

surface of things, ready to show itself again if he willed it, and friends were becoming scarcer with him than

enemies in these days. Looking at the picture with its wistful hint of a long ago comradeship, Comus made up

his mind that he very much wanted things to be back on their earlier footing, and to see again on his mother's

face the look that the artist had caught and perpetuated in its momentary flitting. If the projected

Elainemarriage came off, and in spite of recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still counted it an assured

thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement between himself and his mother would be removed, or

at any rate, easily removable. With the influence of Elaine's money behind him he promised himself that he

would find some occupation that would remove from himself the reproach of being a waster and idler. There

were lots of careers, he told himself, that were open to a man with solid financial backing and good

connections. There might yet be jolly times ahead, in which his mother would have her share of the good

things that were going, and carking thinlipped Henry Greech and other of Comus's detractors could take

their sour looks and words out of sight and hearing. Thus, staring at the picture as though he were studying its

every detail, and seeing really only that wistful friendly smile, Comus made his plans and dispositions for a

The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring an amount of overcrowding that would have

been fiercely resented in a railway carriage. Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock was talking to a Serene

Highness, a lady who led a life of obtrusive usefulness, largely imposed on her by a goodnatured inability to

say "No." "That woman creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars she opens," a

frivolouslyspoken exCabinet Minister had once remarked. At the present moment she was being

"When I think of the legions of wellmeaning young men and women to whom I've given away prizes for

proficiency in artschool curriculum, I feel that I ought not to show my face inside a picture gallery. I always

imagine that my punishment in another world will be perpetually sharpening pencils and cleaning palettes for

unending relays of misguided young people whom I deliberately encouraged in their artistic delusions."

"Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments in another world for our sins in this?" asked

"Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they are the things which do the most harm and cause the

greatest trouble. I feel certain that Christopher Columbus will undergo the endless torment of being

discovered by parties of American tourists. You see I am quite old fashioned in my ideas about the terrors

and inconveniences of the next world. And now I must be running away; I've got to open a Free Library

somewhere. You know the sort of thing that happens one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a speech

about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and read 'Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?'

Don't forget, please, I'm going to have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting on a sundial. And just one

thing more perhaps I ought not to ask you, but you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make

daring requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely chestnutandchickenliver sandwiches? I

know the ingredients of course, but it's the proportions that make such a difference just how much liver to

how much chestnut, and what amount of red pepper and other things. Thank you so much. I really am going

Staring round with a vague halfsmile at everybody within nodding distance, Her Serene Highness made one

of her characteristic exits, which Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off

a piece of toast. At the entrance she stopped for a moment to exchange a word or two with a young man who

had just arrived. From a corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a group of teaconsuming

dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as Courtenay Youghal, and began slowly to labour his way

towards him. Youghal was not at the moment the person whose society he most craved for in the world, but

there was at least the possibility that he might provide an opportunity for a game of bridge, which was the

dominant desire of the moment. The young politician was already surrounded by a group of friends and

acquaintances, and was evidently being made the recipient of a salvo of congratulation presumably on his

recent performances in the Foreign Office debate, Comus concluded. But Youghal himself seemed to be

announcing the event with which the congratulations were connected. Had some dramatic catastrophe

overtaken the Government, Comus wondered. And then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of

AFTER the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned to Manchester Square (where

she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of competing

emotions. In the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not

wholly uninfluenced by pique, she had settled the problem which hours of hard thinking and serious

heartsearching had brought no nearer to solution, and, although she felt just a little inclined to be scared at

the headlong manner of her final decision, she had now very little doubt in her own mind that the decision

had been the right one. In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should have been so long in doubt as to

which of her wooers really enjoyed her honest approval. She had been in love, these many weeks past with an

imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely walked out of her dreamland she saw that nearly all the

qualities that had appealed to her on his behalf had been absent from, or only fitfully present in, the character

of the real Comus. And now that she had installed Youghal in the first place of her affections he had rapidly

acquired in her eyes some of the qualities which ranked highest in her estimation. Like the proverbial buyer

she had the happy feminine tendency of magnifying the worth of her possession as soon as she had acquired

it. And Courtenay Youghal gave Elaine some justification for her sense of having chosen wisely. Above all

other things, selfish and cynical though he might appear at times, he was unfailingly courteous and

considerate towards her. That was a circumstance which would always have carried weight with her in

judging any man; in this case its value was enormously heightened by contrast with the behaviour of her

other wooer. And Youghal had in her eyes the advantage which the glamour of combat, even the combat of

words and wirepulling, throws over the fighter. He stood well in the forefront of a battle which however

carefully stagemanaged, however honeycombed with personal insincerities and overlaid with calculated

mockheroics, really meant something, really counted for good or wrong in the nation's development and the

world's history. Shrewd parliamentary observers might have warned her that Youghal would never stand

much higher in the political world than he did at present, as a brilliant Opposition freelance, leading lively

and rather meaningless forays against the dull and rather purposeless foreign policy of a Government that was

scarcely either to be blamed for or congratulated on its handling of foreign affairs. The young politician had

not the strength of character or convictions that keeps a man naturally in the forefront of affairs and gives his

counsels a sterling value, and on the other hand his insincerity was not deep enough to allow him to pose

artificially and successfully as a leader of men and shaper of movements. For the moment, however, his place

in public life was sufficiently marked out to give him a secure footing in that world where people are counted

individually and not in herds. The woman whom he would make his wife would have the chance, too, if she

There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not wholly suffice to drive out the feeling of pique

which Comus had called into being by his slighting view of her as a convenient cash supply in moments of

emergency. She found a certain satisfaction in scrupulously observing her promise, made earlier on that

eventful day, and sent off a messenger with the stipulated loan. Then a reaction of compunction set in, and

she reminded herself that in fairness she ought to write and tell her news in as friendly a fashion as possible to

her dismissed suitor before it burst upon him from some other quarter. They had parted on more or less

quarrelling terms it was true, but neither of them had foreseen the finality of the parting nor the permanence

of the breach between them; Comus might even now be thinking himself halfforgiven, and the awakening

would be rather cruel. The letter, however, did not prove an easy one to write; not only did it present

difficulties of its own but it suffered from the competing urgency of a desire to be doing something far

pleasanter than writing explanatory and valedictory phrases. Elaine was possessed with an unusual but quite

overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette Brankley. They met but rarely at each other's houses

and very seldom anywhere else, and Elaine for her part was never conscious of feeling that their opportunities

for intercourse lacked anything in the way of adequacy. Suzette accorded her just that touch of patronage

which a moderately welloff and immoderately dull girl will usually try to mete out to an acquaintance who

is known to be wealthy and suspected of possessing brains. In return Elaine armed herself with that particular

brand of mock humility which can be so terribly disconcerting if properly wielded. No quarrel of any

description stood between them and one could not legitimately have described them as enemies, but they

never disarmed in one another's presence. A misfortune of any magnitude falling on one of them would have

been sincerely regretted by the other, but any minor discomfiture would have produced a feeling very much

akin to satisfaction. Human nature knows millions of these inconsequent little feuds, springing up and

flourishing apart from any basis of racial, political, religious or economic causes, as a hint perhaps to crass

unseeing altruists that enmity has its place and purpose in the world as well as benevolence.

Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the formal announcement of her engagement to the

young man with the dissentient tailoring effects. The impulse to go and do so now, overmastered her sense of

what was due to Comus in the way of explanation. The letter was still in its blank unwritten stage, an

unmarshalled sequence of sentences forming in her brain, when she ordered her car and made a hurried but

wellthoughtout change into her most sumptuously sober afternoon toilette. Suzette, she felt tolerably sure,

would still be in the costume that she had worn in the Park that morning, a costume that aimed at elaboration

Suzette's mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with obvious satisfaction. Her daughter's engagement, she

explained, was not so brilliant from the social point of view as a girl of Suzette's attractions and advantages

might have legitimately aspired to, but Egbert was a thoroughly commendable and dependable young man,

who would very probably win his way before long to membership of the County Council.

"Have you seen their photographs, taken together?" asked Mrs. Brankley, abandoning the subject of Egbert's

"No, do show me," said Elaine, with a flattering show of interest; "I've never seen that sort of thing before. It

used to be the fashion once for engaged couples to be photographed together, didn't it?"

"It's VERY much the fashion now," said Mrs. Brankley assertively, but some of the complacency had filtered

out of her voice. Suzette came into the room, wearing the dress that she had worn in the Park that morning.

"Of course, you've been hearing all about THE engagement from mother," she cried, and then set to work

"We met at Grindelwald, you know. He always calls me his Ice Maiden because we first got to know each

other on the skating rink. Quite romantic, wasn't it? Then we asked him to tea one day, and we got to be quite

"He wasn't the only one who was smitten with Suzette," Mrs. Brankley hastened to put in, fearful lest Elaine

might suppose that Egbert had had things all his own way. "There was an American millionaire who was

quite taken with her, and a Polish count of a very old family. I assure you I felt quite nervous at some of our

Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather alluring reputation among a large circle of

untravelled friends as a place where the insolence of birth and wealth was held in precarious check from

"My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the sphere of my life enormously," pursued Suzette.

"Yes," said Elaine; her eyes were rather remorselessly taking in the details of her cousin's toilette. It is said

that nothing is sadder than victory except defeat. Suzette began to feel that the tragedy of both was

concentrated in the creation which had given her such unalloyed gratification, till Elaine had come on the

"A woman can be so immensely helpful in the social way to a man who is making a career for himself. And

I'm so glad to find that we've a great many ideas in common. We each made out a list of our idea of the

"Oh, he's not at all a bookworm," said Suzette quickly, "though he's tremendously wellread. He's quite the

"What a pity," commented Elaine; "I don't think I could marry a man who wasn't fond of riding."

"Of course that's a matter of taste," said Suzette, stiffly; "horsey men are not usually gifted with overmuch

"There is as much difference between a horseman and a horsey man as there is between a welldressed man

and a dressy one," said Elaine, judicially; "and you may have noticed how seldom a dressy woman really

knows how to dress. As an old lady of my acquaintance observed the other day, some people are born with a

sense of how to clothe themselves, others acquire it, others look as if their clothes had been thrust upon

She gave Lady Caroline her due quotation marks, but the sudden tactfulness with which she looked away

A young man entering the room at this moment caused a diversion that was rather welcome to Suzette.

"Here comes Egbert," she announced, with an air of subdued triumph; it was at least a satisfaction to be able

to produce the captive of her charms, alive and in good condition, on the scene. Elaine might be as critical as

she pleased, but a live lover outweighed any number of welldressed straightriding cavaliers who existed

Egbert was one of those men who have no small talk, but possess an inexhaustible supply of the larger

variety. In whatever society he happened to be, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of an

afternoontea table, with a limited audience of womenfolk, he gave the impression of someone who was

addressing a public meeting, and would be happy to answer questions afterwards. A suggestion of gaslit

missionhalls, wet umbrellas, and discreet applause seemed to accompany him everywhere. He was an

exponent, among other things, of what he called New Thought, which seemed to lend itself conveniently to

the employment of a good deal of rather stale phraseology. Probably in the course of some thirty odd years of

existence he had never been of any notable use to man, woman, child or animal, but it was his

firmlyannounced intention to leave the world a better, happier, purer place than he had found it; against the

danger of any relapse to earlier conditions after his disappearance from the scene, he was, of course,

powerless to guard. 'Tis not in mortals to insure succession, and Egbert was admittedly mortal.

Elaine found him immensely entertaining, and would certainly have exerted herself to draw him out if such a

proceeding had been at all necessary. She listened to his conversation with the complacent appreciation that

one bestows on a stage tragedy, from whose calamities one can escape at any moment by the simple process

of leaving one's seat. When at last he checked the flow of his opinions by a hurried reference to his watch,

and declared that he must be moving on elsewhere, Elaine almost expected a vote of thanks to be accorded

him, or to be asked to signify herself in favour of some resolution by holding up her hand.

When the young man had bidden the company a rapid businesslike farewell, tempered in Suzette's case by

the exact degree of tender intimacy that it would have been considered improper to omit or overstep, Elaine

For the second time that afternoon Suzette felt a sense of waning enthusiasm for one of her possessions.

Mrs. Brankley detected the note of ironical congratulation in her visitor's verdict.

"I suppose she means he's not her idea of a husband, but, he's good enough for Suzette," she observed to

herself, with a snort that expressed itself somewhere in the nostrils of the brain. Then with a smiling air of

heavy patronage she delivered herself of her one idea of a damaging counterstroke.

"Now," said Elaine quietly, but with electrical effect; "I came to announce it to you but I wanted to hear all

about Suzette first. It will be formally announced in the papers in a day or two."

"But who is it? Is it the young man who was with you in the Park this morning?" asked Suzette.

"Let me see, who was I with in the Park this morning? A very good looking dark boy? Oh no, not Comus

Bassington. Someone you know by name, anyway, and I expect you've seen his portrait in the papers."

Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy of their minds the occasion when Elaine should

come to pay her personal congratulations to her engaged cousin. It had never been in the least like this.

On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found an express messenger letter waiting for her. It

"I suppose I ought never to have asked you for it," he wrote, "but you are always so deliciously solemn about

money matters that I couldn't resist. Just heard the news of your engagement to Courtenay. Congrats. to you

both. I'm far too stoney broke to buy you a wedding present so I'm going to give you back the breadand

butter dish. Luckily it still has your crest on it. I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating

That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine had been preparing to write a long and

kindlyexpressed letter, closing a rather momentous chapter in her life and his. There was not a trace of

regret or upbraiding in his note; he had walked out of their mutual fairyland as abruptly as she had, and to all

appearances far more unconcernedly. Reading the letter again and again Elaine could come to no decision as

to whether this was merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether it represented the real value that Comus

And she would never know. If Comus possessed one useless gift to perfection it was the gift of laughing at

Fate even when it had struck him hardest. One day, perhaps, the laughter and mockery would be silent on his

A DOOR closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well beloved drawingroom. The visitor who

had been enjoying the hospitality of her afternoontea table had just taken his departure. The teteatete had

not been a pleasant one, at any rate as far as Francesca was concerned, but at least it had brought her the

information for which she had been seeking. Her role of lookeron from a tactful distance had necessarily left

her much in the dark concerning the progress of the allimportant wooing, but during the last few hours she

had, on slender though significant evidence, exchanged her complacent expectancy for a conviction that

something had gone wrong. She had spent the previous evening at her brother's house, and had naturally seen

nothing of Comus in that uncongenial quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at the breakfast table the

following morning. She had met him in the hall at eleven o'clock, and he had hurried past her, merely

imparting the information that he would not be in till dinner that evening. He spoke in his sulkiest tone, and

his face wore a look of defeat, thinly masked by an air of defiance; it was not the defiance of a man who is

Francesca's conviction that things had gone wrong between Comus and Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the

day wore on. She lunched at a friend's house, but it was not a quarter where special social information of any

importance was likely to come early to hand. Instead of the news she was hankering for, she had to listen to

trivial gossip and speculation on the flirtations and "cases" and "affairs" of a string of acquaintances whose

matrimonial projects interested her about as much as the nesting arrangements of the wildfowl in St. James's

"Of course," said her hostess, with the duly impressive emphasis of a privileged chronicler, "we've always

regarded Claire as the marrying one of the family, so when Emily came to us and said, 'I've got some news

for you,' we all said, 'Claire's engaged!' 'Oh, no,' said Emily, 'it's not Claire this time, it's me.' So then we had

to guess who the lucky man was. 'It can't be Captain Parminter,' we all said, 'because he's always been sweet

The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks with a comfortable purring complacency that

held out no hope of an early abandoning of the topic. Francesca sat and wondered why the innocent

acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of indifferent claret should lay one open to such unsparing punishment.

A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no further enlightenment on the subject that was

uppermost in her mind; what was worse, it brought her, without possibility of escape, within hailing distance

of Merla Blathington, who fastened on to her with the enthusiasm of a lonely tsetse fly encountering an

"Just think," she buzzed inconsequently, "my sister in Cambridgeshire has hatched out thirtythree White

"Then I don't see anything remarkable in the result. If she had put in crocodile's eggs and hatched out White

"What funny fascinating things these little green parkchairs are," said Merla, starting off on a fresh topic;

"they always look so quaint and knowing when they're stuck away in pairs by themselves under the trees, as

if they were having a hearttoheart talk or discussing a piece of very private scandal. If they could only

speak, what tragedies and comedies they could tell us of, what flirtations and proposals."

"Let us be devoutly thankful that they can't," said Francesca, with a shuddering recollection of the

"Of course, it would make one very careful what one said before them or above them rather," Merla rattled

on, and then, to Francesca's infinite relief, she espied another acquaintance sitting in unprotected solitude,

who promised to supply a more durable audience than her present rapidly moving companion. Francesca was

free to return to her drawingroom in Blue Street to await with such patience as she could command the

coming of some visitor who might be able to throw light on the subject that was puzzling and disquieting her.

The arrival of George St. Michael boded bad news, but at any rate news, and she gave him an almost cordial

"Well, you see I wasn't far wrong about Miss de Frey and Courtenay Youghal, was I?" he chirruped, almost

before he had seated himself. Francesca was to be spared any further spinningout of her period of

uncertainty. "Yes, it's officially given out," he went on, "and it's to appear in the MORNING POST

tomorrow. I heard it from Colonel Deel this morning, and he had it direct from Youghal himself. Yes,

please, one lump; I'm not fashionable, you see." He had made the same remark about the sugar in his tea with

unfailing regularity for at least thirty years. Fashions in sugar are apparently stationary. "They say," he

continued, hurriedly, "that he proposed to her on the Terrace of the House, and a division bell rang, and he

had to hurry off before she had time to give her answer, and when he got back she simply said, 'the Ayes have

"Just the sort of inanity that would go the rounds," remarked Francesca, with the satisfaction of knowing that

she was making the criticism direct to the author and begetter of the inanity in question. Now that the blow

had fallen and she knew the full extent of its weight, her feeling towards the bringer of bad news, who sat

complacently nibbling at her teacakes and scattering crumbs of tiresome smalltalk at her feet, was one of

wholehearted dislike. She could sympathise with, or at any rate understand, the tendency of oriental despots

to inflict death or ignominious chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune and defeat, and St.

Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly aware of the fact that her hopes and wishes had been

centred on the possibility of having Elaine for a daughterinlaw; every purring remark that his mean little

soul prompted him to contribute to the conversation had an easily recognizable undercurrent of malice.

Fortunately for her powers of polite endurance, which had been put to such searching and repeated tests that

day, St. Michael had planned out for himself a busy little timetable of afternoon visits, at each of which his

selfappointed task of forestalling and embellishing the newspaper announcements of the Youghalde Frey

"They'll be quite one of the bestlooking and most interesting couples of the Season, won't they?" he cried,

by way of farewell. The door closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her drawing room.

Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection on the downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to

take precautionary measures against unwelcome intrusion. Summoning the maid who had just speeded the

departing St. Michael, she gave the order: "I am not at home this afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq." On

second thoughts she extended the taboo to all possible callers, and sent a telephone message to catch Comus

at his club, asking him to come and see her as soon as he could manage before it was time to dress for dinner.

She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a castle in Spain, but a structure well on the

probable side of the Pyrenees. There had been a solid foundation on which to build. Miss de Frey's fortune

was an assured and unhampered one, her liking for Comus had been an obvious fact; his courtship of her a

serious reality. The young people had been much together in public, and their names had naturally been

coupled in the match making gossip of the day. The only serious shadow cast over the scene had been the

persistent presence, in foreground or background, of Courtenay Youghal. And now the shadow suddenly

stood forth as the reality, and the castle of hopes was a ruin, a hideous mortification of dust and debris, with

the skeleton outlines of its chambers still standing to make mockery of its discomfited architect. The daily

anxiety about Comus and his extravagant ways and intractable disposition had been gradually lulled by the

prospect of his making an advantageous marriage, which would have transformed him from a ne'erdowell

and adventurer into a wealthy idler. He might even have been moulded, by the resourceful influence of an

ambitious wife, into a man with some definite purpose in life. The prospect had vanished with cruel

suddenness, and the anxieties were crowding back again, more insistent than ever. The boy had had his one

good chance in the matrimonial market and missed it; if he were to transfer his attentions to some other

welldowered girl he would be marked down at once as a fortunehunter, and that would constitute a heavy

handicap to the most plausible of wooers. His liking for Elaine had evidently been genuine in its way, though

perhaps it would have been rash to read any deeper sentiment into it, but even with the spur of his own

inclination to assist him he had failed to win the prize that had seemed so temptingly within his reach. And in

the dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw the threatening of her own. The old anxiety as to her precarious

tenure of her present quarters put on again all its familiar terrors. One day, she foresaw, in the horribly near

future, George St. Michael would come pattering up her stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline

Chetrof was going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record Office as the case might be, and

then there would be an uprooting of her life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a wandering forth to

some cheap unhappy faroff dwelling, where the stately Van der Meulen and its companion host of beautiful

and desirable things would be stuffed and stowed away in soulless surroundings, like courtly emigres fallen

on evil days. It was unthinkable, but the trouble was that it had to be thought about. And if Comus had played

his cards well and transformed himself from an encumbrance into a son with wealth at his command, the

tragedy which she saw looming in front of her might have been avoided or at the worst whittled down to

easily bearable proportions. With money behind one, the problem of where to live approaches more nearly to

the simple question of where do you wish to live, and a rich daughterinlaw would have surely seen to it

that she did not have to leave her square mile of Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks and mortar. If

the house in Blue Street could not have been compounded for there were other desirable residences which

would have been capable of consoling Francesca for her lost Eden. And now the detested Courtenay

Youghal, with his mocking eyes and air of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown those golden

hopes and plans whose nonfulfilment would make such a world of change in her future. Assuredly she had

reason to feel bitter against that young man, and she was not disposed to take a very lenient view of Comus's

own mismanagement of the affair; her greeting when he at last arrived, was not couched in a sympathetic

"Yes," said Comus, coolly; "Courtenay Youghal has added her to his other successes."

"And you have added her to your other failures," pursued Francesca, relentlessly; her temper had been tried

"I thought you seemed getting along so well with her," she continued, as Comus remained uncommunicative.

"We hit it off rather well together," said Comus, and added with deliberate bluntness, "I suppose she got

rather sick at my borrowing money from her. She thought it was all I was after."

"You borrowed money from her!" said Francesca; "you were fool enough to borrow money from a girl who

was favourably disposed towards you, and with Courtenay Youghal in the background waiting to step in and

Francesca's voice trembled with misery and rage. This great stroke of good luck that had seemed about to fall

into their laps had been thrust aside by an act or series of acts of wanton paltry folly. The good ship had been

lost for the sake of the traditional ha'porth of tar. Comus had paid some pressing tailor's or tobacconist's bill

with a loan unwillingly put at his disposal by the girl he was courting, and had flung away his chances of

securing a wealthy and in every way desirable bride. Elaine de Frey and her fortune might have been the

making of Comus, but he had hurried in as usual to effect his own undoing. Calmness did not in this case

come with reflection; the more Francesca thought about the matter, the more exasperated she grew. Comus

threw himself down in a low chair and watched her without a trace of embarrassment or concern at her

mortification. He had come to her feeling rather sorry for himself, and bitterly conscious of his defeat, and

she had met him with a taunt and without the least hint of sympathy; he determined that she should be

tantalised with the knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had stood between the realisation and ruin of

"And to think she should be captured by Courtenay Youghal," said Francesca, bitterly; "I've always deplored

Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding. Through the tears of vexation that stood in her eyes, she

looked across at the handsome boy who sat opposite her, mocking at his own misfortune, perversely

"Comus," she said quietly and wearily, "you are an exact reversal of the legend of Pandora's Box. You have

all the charm and advantages that a boy could want to help him on in the world, and behind it all there is the

"I think," said Comus, "that is the best description that anyone has ever given of me."

For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something like outspoken affection between mother and

son. They seemed very much alone in the world just now, and in the general overturn of hopes and plans,

there flickered a chance that each might stretch out a hand to the other, and summon back to their lives an old

dead love that was the best and strongest feeling either of them had known. But the sting of disappointment

was too keen, and the flood of resentment mounted too high on either side to allow the chance more than a

moment in which to flicker away into nothingness. The old fatal topic of estrangement came to the fore, the

question of immediate ways and means, and mother and son faced themselves again as antagonists on a

"What is done is done," said Francesca, with a movement of tragic impatience that belied the philosophy of

her words; "there is nothing to be gained by crying over spilt milk. There is the present and the future to be

thought about, though. One can't go on indefinitely as a tenantforlife in a fools' paradise." Then she pulled

herself together and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum which the force of circumstances no longer permitted

"It's not much use talking to you about money, as I know from long experience, but I can only tell you this,

that in the middle of the Season I'm already obliged to be thinking of leaving Town. And you, I'm afraid, will

have to be thinking of leaving England at equally short notice. Henry told me the other day that he can get

you something out in West Africa. You've had your chance of doing something better for yourself from the

financial point of view, and you've thrown it away for the sake of borrowing a little ready money for your

luxuries, so now you must take what you can get. The pay won't be very good at first, but living is not dear

"West Africa," said Comus, reflectively; "it's a sort of modern substitute for the oldfashioned OUBLIETTE,

a convenient depository for tiresome people. Dear Uncle Henry may talk lugubriously about the burden of

"My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of yesterday. While you have been wasting your time at

school, and worse than wasting your time in the West End, other people have been grappling with the study

of tropical diseases, and the West African coast country is being rapidly transformed from a lethal chamber

"What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds one of the Psalms and even more of a company

prospectus. If you were honest you'd confess that you lifted it straight out of a rubber or railway promotion

scheme. Seriously, mother, if I must grub about for a living, why can't I do it in England? I could go into a

Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the sort of steady work Comus was likely to

accomplish, with the lodestone of Town and the minor attractions of racemeetings and similar festivities

always beckoning to him from a conveniently attainable distance, but apart from that aspect of the case there

"Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate money to start with; one has to pay premiums or invest

capital in the undertaking, and so forth. And as we have no money available, and can scarcely pay our debts

He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed, but he was looking straight at the Van der

For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness, as though her heart was going to stop beating.

"When I am dead my things can be sold and dispersed. As long as I am alive I prefer to keep them by me."

In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around her, this dreadful suggestion had been made.

Some of her cherished household gods, souvenirs and keepsakes from past days, would, perhaps, not have

fetched a very considerable sum in the auction room, others had a distinct value of their own, but to her they

were all precious. And the Van der Meulen, at which Comus had looked with impious appraising eyes, was

the most sacred of them all. When Francesca had been away from her Town residence or had been confined

to her bedroom through illness, the great picture with its stately solemn representation of a longago

battlescene, painted to flatter the flatteryloving soul of a warriorking who was dignified even in his

campaigns this was the first thing she visited on her return to Town or convalescence. If an alarm of fire

had been raised it would have been the first thing for whose safety she would have troubled. And Comus had

almost suggested that it should be parted with, as one sold railway shares and other soulless things.

Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of time and energy where Comus was concerned, but

this evening she unloosed her tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her surcharged feelings. He sat

listening without comment, though she purposely let fall remarks that she hoped might sting him into

selfdefence or protest. It was an unsparing indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably true,

the more tragic in that it came from perhaps the one person in the world whose opinion he had ever cared for.

And he sat through it as silent and seemingly unmoved as though she had been rehearsing a speech for some

drawingroom comedy. When she had had her say his method of retort was not the soft answer that turneth

The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in each other's company of late, was a silent one.

Now that the full bearings of the disaster had been discussed in all its aspects there was nothing more to be

said. Any attempt at ignoring the situation, and passing on to less controversial topics would have been a

mockery and pretence which neither of them would have troubled to sustain. So the meal went forward with

its draggedout dreary intimacy of two people who were separated by a gulf of bitterness, and whose hearts

Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the maid the order to serve her coffee upstairs.

Comus had a sullen scowl on his face, but he looked up as she rose to leave the room, and gave his

"You needn't look so tragic," he said, "You're going to have your own way. I'll go out to that West African

COMUS found his way to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the stream

of distinguished and distinguishable people who made their appearance as a matter of course at a First Night

in the height of the Season. Pit and gallery were already packed with a throng, tense, expectant and alert, that

waited for the rise of the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a dilatory human prepare for

outdoor exercises. Stalls and boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component units

seemed for the most part to recognise the probability that they were quite as interesting as any play they were

likely to see. Those who bore no particular facevalue themselves derived a certain amount of social dignity

from the near neighbourhood of obvious notabilities; if one could not obtain recognition oneself there was

some vague pleasure in being able to recognise notoriety at intimately close quarters.

"Who is that woman with the auburn hair and a rather effective belligerent gleam in her eyes?" asked a man

sitting just behind Comus; "she looks as if she might have created the world in six days and destroyed it on

"I forget her name," said his neighbour; "she writes. She's the author of that book, 'The Woman who wished it

was Wednesday,' you know. It used to be the convention that women writers should be plain and dowdy; now

we have gone to the other extreme and build them on extravagantly decorative lines."

A buzz of recognition came from the front rows of the pit, together with a craning of necks on the part of

those in less favoured seats. It heralded the arrival of Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered

himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world. Lady Caroline, who was already

directing little conversational onslaughts from her box, gazed gently for a moment at the new arrival, and

"They say the poor man is haunted by the fear that he will die during a general election, and that his obituary

notices will be seriously curtailed by the space taken up by the election results. The curse of our party system,

The Archdeacon smiled indulgently. As a man he was so exquisitely worldly that he fully merited the name

of the Heavenly Worldling bestowed on him by an admiring duchess, and withal his texture was shot with a

pattern of such genuine saintliness that one felt that whoever else might hold the keys of Paradise he, at least,

"Is it not significant of the altered grouping of things," he observed, "that the Church, as represented by me,

sympathises with the message of Sherard Blaw, while neither the man nor his message find acceptance with

Lady Caroline blinked her eyes. "My dear Archdeacon," she said, "no one can be an unbeliever nowadays.

The Archdeacon rose with a delighted chuckle. "I must go and tell that to De la Poulett," he said, indicating a

clerical figure sitting in the third row of the stalls; "he spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory

of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it."

The door of the box opened and Courtenay Youghal entered, bringing with him subtle suggestion of

chaminade and an atmosphere of political tension. The Government had fallen out of the good graces of a

section of its supporters, and those who were not in the know were busy predicting a serious crisis over a

forthcoming division in the Committee stage of an important Bill. This was Saturday night, and unless some

successful cajolery were effected between now and Monday afternoon, Ministers would be, seemingly, in

"Ah, here is Youghal," said the Archdeacon; "he will be able to tell us what is going to happen in the next

fortyeight hours. I hear the Prime Minister says it is a matter of conscience, and they will stand or fall by it."

Youghal greeted Lady Caroline and subsided gracefully into a chair well in the front of the box. A buzz of

"For the Government to fall on a matter of conscience," he said, "would be like a man cutting himself with a

No one can effectively defend a Government when it's been in office several years. The Archdeacon took

"I believe Lady Caroline sees the makings of a great Socialist statesman in you, Youghal," he observed.

"What is the play about tonight?" asked a pale young woman who had taken no part in the talk.

"I don't know," said Lady Caroline, "but I hope it's dull. If there is any brilliant conversation in it I shall burst

In the front row of the upper circle a woman with a restless starlingvoice was discussing the work of a

temporarily fashionable composer, chiefly in relation to her own emotions, which she seemed to think might

"Whenever I hear his music I feel that I want to go up into a mountain and pray. Can you understand that

"You see, I've heard his music chiefly in Switzerland, and we were up among the mountains all the time, so it

"In that case," said the woman, who seemed to have emergency emotions to suit all geographical conditions,

"I should have wanted to be in a great silent plain by the side of a rushing river."

"What I think is so splendid about his music " commenced another starlingvoice on the further side of the

girl. Like sheep that feed greedily before the coming of a storm the starlingvoices seemed impelled to extra

effort by the knowledge of four imminent intervals of acting during which they would be hushed into

In the back row of the dress circle a latecomer, after a cursory glance at the programme, had settled down

into a comfortable narrative, which was evidently the resumed thread of an unfinished taxidrive monologue.

"We all said 'it can't be Captain Parminter, because he's always been sweet on Joan,' and then Emily said "

The curtain went up, and Emily's contribution to the discussion had to be held over till the entr'acte.

The play promised to be a success. The author, avoiding the pitfall of brilliancy, had aimed at being

interesting and as far as possible, bearing in mind that his play was a comedy, he had striven to be amusing.

Above all he had remembered that in the laws of stage proportions it is permissible and generally desirable

that the part should be greater than the whole; hence he had been careful to give the leading lady such a clear

and commanding lead over the other characters of the play that it was impossible for any of them ever to get

on level terms with her. The action of the piece was now and then delayed thereby, but the duration of its run

The curtain came down on the first act amid an encouraging instalment of applause, and the audience turned

its back on the stage and began to take a renewed interest in itself. The authoress of "The Woman who

wished it was Wednesday" had swept like a convalescent whirlwind, subdued but potentially tempestuous,

"I've just trodden with all my weight on the foot of an eminent publisher as I was leaving my seat," she cried,

with a peal of delighted laughter. "He was such a dear about it; I said I hoped I hadn't hurt him, and he said, 'I

suppose you think, who drives hard bargains should himself be hard.' Wasn't it petlamb of him?"

"I've never trodden on a pet lamb," said Lady Caroline, "so I've no idea what its behaviour would be under

"Tell me," said the authoress, coming to the front of the box, the better to survey the house, and perhaps also

with a charitable desire to make things easy for those who might pardonably wish to survey her, "tell me,

Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of the stalls, on the opposite side of the house to where

Comus had his seat. Once during the interval she had turned to give him a friendly nod of recognition as he

stood in one of the side gangways, but he was absorbed at the moment in looking at himself in the glass

panel. The grave brown eyes and the mocking green grey ones had looked their last into each other's depths.

For Comus this firstnight performance, with its brilliant gathering of spectators, its groups and coteries of

lively talkers, even its counterfoil of dull chatterers, its pervading atmosphere of stage and social movement,

and its intruding undercurrent of political flutter, all this composed a tragedy in which he was the chief

character. It was the life he knew and loved and basked in, and it was the life he was leaving. It would go on

reproducing itself again and again, with its stage interest and social interest and intruding outside interests,

with the same lively chattering crowd, the people who had done things being pointed out by people who

recognised them to people who didn't it would all go on with unflagging animation and sparkle and

enjoyment, and for him it would have stopped utterly. He would be in some unheardof sun blistered

wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and raucous throated crows fringed round mockingly on one's

loneliness, where one rode for sweltering miles for the chance of meeting a collector or police officer, with

whom most likely on closer acquaintance one had hardly two ideas in common, where female society was

represented at long intervals by some climatewithered woman missionary or official's wife, where food and

sickness and veterinary lore became at last the three outstanding subjects on which the mind settled or rather

sank. That was the life he foresaw and dreaded, and that was the life he was going to. For a boy who went out

to it from the dulness of some country rectory, from a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket

match formed the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very crushing, might indeed

be lost in the sense of change and adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to

regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly

regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit

invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. He was being put aside, as a

wine is put aside, but to deteriorate instead of gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his youth and

health and good looks in a world where youth and health and good looks count for much and where time

never returns lost possessions. And thus, as the curtain swept down on the close of each act, Comus felt a

sense of depression and deprivation sweep down on himself; bitterly he watched his last evening of social

gaiety slipping away to its end. In less than an hour it would be over; in a few months' time it would be an

In the third interval, as he gazed round at the chattering house, someone touched him on the arm. It was Lady

"I suppose in a week's time you'll be on the high seas," she said. "I'm coming to your farewell dinner, you

know; your mother has just asked me. I'm not going to talk the usual rot to you about how much you will like

it and so on. I sometimes think that one of the advantages of Hell will be that no one will have the

impertinence to point out to you that you're really better off than you would be anywhere else. What do you

think of the play? Of course one can foresee the end; she will come to her husband with the announcement

that their longedfor child is going to be born, and that will smooth over everything. So conveniently

effective, to wind up a comedy with the commencement of someone else's tragedy. And every one will go

Lady Veula moved back to her seat, with her pleasant smile on her lips and the look of infinite weariness in

The interval, the last interval, was drawing to a close and the house began to turn with fidgetty attention

towards the stage for the unfolding of the final phase of the play. Francesca sat in Serena Golackly's box

listening to Colonel Springfield's story of what happened to a pigeoncote in his compound at Poona.

Everyone who knew the Colonel had to listen to that story a good many times, but Lady Caroline had

mitigated the boredom of the infliction, and in fact invested it with a certain sporting interest, by offering a

prize to the person who heard it oftenest in the course of the Season, the competitors being under an

honourable understanding not to lead up to the subject. Ada Spelvexit and a boy in the Foreign Office were at

present at the top of the list with five recitals each to their score, but the former was suspected of doubtful

"And there, dear lady," concluded the Colonel, "were the eleven dead pigeons. What had become of the

Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently inscribed the figure 4 on the margin of her theatre

programme. Almost at the same moment she heard George St. Michael's voice pattering out a breathless

piece of intelligence for the edification of Serena Golackly and anyone else who might care to listen.

"Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest Department. He's got nothing but his pay and they can't

be married for four or five years; an absurdly long engagement, don't you think so? All very well to wait

seven years for a wife in patriarchal times, when you probably had others to go on with, and you lived long

enough to celebrate your own tercentenary, but under modern conditions it seems a foolish arrangement."

St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance. A marriage project that tied up all the small pleasant

nuptial gossipitems about bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant aunts and so forth, for an indefinite

number of years seemed scarcely decent in his eyes, and there was little satisfaction or importance to be

derived from early and special knowledge of an event which loomed as far distant as a Presidential Election

or a change of Viceroy. But to Francesca, who had listened with startled apprehension at the mention of

Emmeline Chetrof's name, the news came in a flood of relief and thankfulness. Short of entering a nunnery

and taking celibate vows, Emmeline could hardly have behaved more conveniently than in tying herself up to

a lover whose circumstances made it necessary to relegate marriage to the distant future. For four or five

years Francesca was assured of undisturbed possession of the house in Blue Street, and after that period who

knew what might happen? The engagement might stretch on indefinitely, it might even come to nothing

under the weight of its accumulated years, as sometimes happened with these protracted affairs. Emmeline

might lose her fancy for her absentee lover, and might never replace him with another. A golden possibility

of perpetual tenancy of her present home began to float once more through Francesca's mind. As long as

Emmeline had been unbespoken in the marriage market there had always been the haunting likelihood of

seeing the dreaded announcement, "a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place," in connection

with her name. And now a marriage had been arranged and would not shortly take place, might indeed never

take place. St. Michael's information was likely to be correct in this instance; he would never have invented a

piece of matrimonial intelligence which gave such little scope for supplementary detail of the kind he loved

to supply. As Francesca turned to watch the fourth act of the play, her mind was singing a paean of

thankfulness and exultation. It was as though some artificer sent by the Gods had reinforced with a

substantial cord the horsehair thread that held up the sword of Damocles over her head. Her love for her

home, for her treasured household possessions, and her pleasant social life was able to expand once more in

present security, and feed on future hope. She was still young enough to count four or five years as a long

time, and tonight she was optimistic enough to prophesy smooth things of the future that lay beyond that

span. Of the fourth act, with its carefully held back but obviously imminent reconciliation between the

leading characters, she took in but little, except that she vaguely understood it to have a happy ending. As the

lights went up she looked round on the dispersing audience with a feeling of friendliness uppermost in her

mind; even the sight of Elaine de Frey and Courtenay Youghal leaving the theatre together did not inspire her

with a tenth part of the annoyance that their entrance had caused her. Serena's invitation to go on to the Savoy

for supper fitted in exactly with her mood of exhilaration. It would be a fit and appropriate windup to an

auspicious evening. The cold chicken and modest brand of Chablis waiting for her at home should give way

In the crush of the vestibule, friends and enemies, personal and political, were jostled and locked together in

the general effort to rejoin temporarily estranged garments and secure the attendance of elusive vehicles.

Lady Caroline found herself at close quarters with the estimable Henry Greech, and experienced some of the

joy which comes to the homeward wending sportsman when a chance shot presents itself on which he may

"So the Government is going to climb down, after all," she said, with a provocative assumption of private

"I assure you the Government will do nothing of the kind," replied the Member of Parliament with befitting

"My dear Mr. Greech," said Lady Caroline, "we all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but

Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so slowly that the lights were already being

turned down and great shroudlike dustcloths were being swaythed over the ornamental giltwork. The

laughing, chattering, yawning throng had filtered out of the vestibule, and was melting away in final groups

from the steps of the theatre. An impatient attendant gave him his coat and locked up the cloak room. Comus

stepped out under the portico; he looked at the posters announcing the play, and in anticipation he could see

other posters announcing its 200th performance. Two hundred performances; by that time the Straw

Exchange Theatre would be to him something so remote and unreal that it would hardly seem to exist or to

have ever existed except in his fancy. And to the laughing chattering throng that would pass in under that

portico to the 200th performance, he would be, to those that had known him, something equally remote and

nonexistent. "The goodlooking Bassington boy? Oh, dead, or rubbergrowing or sheepfarming or

THE farewell dinner which Francesca had hurriedly organised in honour of her son's departure threatened

from the outset to be a doubtfully successful function. In the first place, as he observed privately, there was

very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in it. His own particular friends were unrepresented.

Courtenay Youghal was out of the question; and though Francesca would have stretched a point and

welcomed some of his other male associates of whom she scarcely approved, he himself had been opposed to

including any of them in the invitations. On the other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this

job that he was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money for the necessary outfit, Francesca

had felt it her duty to ask him and his wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to cling to some people

like a garment throughout their life had caused Mr. Greech to accept the invitation. When Comus heard of the

circumstance he laughed long and boisterously; his spirits, Francesca noted, seemed to be rising fast as the

The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the latter having been asked on the inspiration of

the moment at the theatrical firstnight. In the height of the Season it was not easy to get together a goodly

selection of guests at short notice, and Francesca had gladly fallen in with Serena's suggestion of bringing

with her Stephen Thorle, who was alleged, in loose feminine phrasing, to "know all about" tropical Africa.

His travels and experiences in those regions probably did not cover much ground or stretch over any great

length of time, but he was one of those individuals who can describe a continent on the strength of a few

days' stay in a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a paleontologist will reconstruct an extinct

mammal from the evidence of a stray shin bone. He had the loud penetrating voice and the prominent

penetrating eyes of a man who can do no listening in the ordinary way and whose eyes have to perform the

function of listening for him. His vanity did not necessarily make him unbearable, unless one had to spend

much time in his society, and his need for a wide field of audience and admiration was mercifully calculated

to spread his operations over a considerable human area. Moreover, his craving for attentive listeners forced

him to interest himself in a wonderful variety of subjects on which he was able to discourse fluently and with

a certain semblance of special knowledge. Politics he avoided; the ground was too well known, and there was

a definite no to every definite yes that could be put forward. Moreover, argument was not congenial to his

disposition, which preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation modified by occasional helpful questions

which formed the starting point for new offshoots of wordspinning. The promotion of cottage industries, the

prevention of juvenile street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the furtherance of vague

talkative religious movements the fostering of interracial ENTENTES, all found in him a tireless exponent,

a fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very convincing, advocate. With the real motive power behind

these various causes he was not very closely identified; to the spadeworkers who carried on the actual

labours of each particular movement he bore the relation of a trowelworker, delving superficially at the

surface, but able to devote a proportionately far greater amount of time to the advertisement of his progress

and achievements. Such was Stephen Thorle, a governess in the nursery of Chelseabred religions, a skilled

windowdresser in the emporium of his own personality, and needless to say, evanescently popular amid a

wide but shifting circle of acquaintances. He improved on the record of a socially muchtravelled individual

whose experience has become classical, and went to most of the best houses twice.

His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinnerparty was not a very happy inspiration. He was inclined to

patronise Comus, as well as the African continent, and on even slighter acquaintance. With the exception of

Henry Greech, whose feelings towards his nephew had been soured by many years of overt antagonism, there

was an uncomfortable feeling among those present that the topic of the blacksheep export trade, as Comus

would have himself expressed it, was being given undue prominence in what should have been a festive

farewell banquet. And Comus, in whose honour the feast was given, did not contribute much towards its

success; though his spirits seemed strung up to a high pitch his merriment was more the merriment of a

cynical and amused onlooker than of one who responds to the gaiety of his companions. Sometimes he

laughed quietly to himself at some chance remark of a scarcely mirthprovoking nature, and Lady Veula,

watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an element of fear was blended with his seemingly

buoyant spirits. Once or twice he caught her eye across the table, and a certain sympathy seemed to grow up

between them, as though they were both consciously watching some lugubrious comedy that was being

An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the meal. A small stilllife picture that hung

over the sideboard had snapped its cord and slid down with an alarming clatter on to the crowded board

beneath it. The picture itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall had been accompanied by a tinkle of broken

glass, and it was found that a liqueur glass, one out of a set of seven that would be impossible to match, had

been shivered into fragments. Francesca's almost motherly love for her possessions made her peculiarly

sensible to a feeling of annoyance and depression at the accident, but she turned politely to listen to Mrs.

Greech's account of a misfortune in which four soupplates were involved. Mrs. Henry was not a brilliant

conversationalist, and her flank was speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum experience in

"The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented them with a set of table crockery apiece, the tears in

their eyes and in their voices when they thanked me, would be impossible to describe."

The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather evidence as to how this rather disconcerting remark

had been received, but Thorle's voice continued uninterruptedly to retail stories of East end gratitude, never

failing to mention the particular deeds of disinterested charity on his part which had evoked and justified the

gratitude. Mrs. Greech had to suppress the interesting sequel to her brokencrockery narrative, to wit, how

she subsequently matched the shattered soupplates at Harrod's. Like an imported plant species that

sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and makes itself at home to the dwarfing and overshadowing of all native

species, Thorle dominated the dinnerparty and thrust its original purport somewhat into the background.

Serena began to look helplessly apologetic. It was altogether rather a relief when the filling of champagne

glasses gave Francesca an excuse for bringing matters back to their intended footing.

"We must all drink a health," she said; "Comus, my own dear boy, a safe and happy voyage to you, much

prosperity in the life you are going out to, and in due time a safe and happy return "

Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the glass, and the wine went streaming across the

tablecloth in a froth of yellow bubbles. It certainly was not turning out a comfortable or auspicious dinner

"My dear mother," cried Comus, "you must have been drinking healths all the afternoon to make your hand

He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again Lady Veula caught the frightened note in his

laughter. Mrs. Henry, with practical sympathy, was telling Francesca two good ways for getting wine stains

out of tablecloths. The smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch of learning for Mrs. Greech, but

she studied them as carefully and conscientiously as a stayathome plain dwelling English child commits

to memory the measurements and altitudes of the world's principal mountain peaks. Some women of her

temperament and mentality know by heart the favourite colours, flowers and hymntunes of all the members

of the Royal Family; Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that nature, but she knew

Francesca did not renew her speechmaking; a chill seemed to have fallen over all efforts at festivity, and she

contented herself with refilling her glass and simply drinking to her boy's good health. The others followed

her example, and Comus drained his glass with a brief "thank you all very much." The sense of constraint

which hung over the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause in the conversation.

Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that

descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself

as thoroughly as possible in private life. He did not propose to sit through dinner as a mere listener to Mr.

Thorle's personal narrative of philanthropic movements and experiences, and took the first opportunity of

launching himself into a flow of satirical observations on current political affairs. Lady Veula was inured to

this sort of thing in her own home circle, and sat listening with the stoical indifference with which an

Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more, in the course of an Arctic winter. Serena

Golackly felt a certain relief at the fact that her imported guest was not, after all, monopolising the

conversation. But the latter was too determined a personality to allow himself to be thrust aside for many

minutes by the talkative M.P. Henry Greech paused for an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of

"Oh, you politicians!" he exclaimed, with pleasant superiority; "you are always fighting about how things

should be done, and the consequence is you are never able to do anything. Would you like me to tell you

A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of the unexpected. Henry Greech's witticisms at the

expense of the Front Opposition bench were destined to remain as unfinished as his wife's history of the

broken soupplates. Thorle was primed with an ample succession of stories and themes, chiefly concerning

poverty, thriftlessness, reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which carried him in an almost

"What I want to do is to make people think," he said, turning his prominent eyes on to his hostess; "it's so

As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to pick up one of Lady Veula's gloves that had fallen

"I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall this evening," she said.

"I saw it myself tonight; it ran from behind my chair just as I was sitting down. Don't say anything to the

Lady Veula said nothing. She knew that Comus had lost his father at the age of six.

"Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to the eyes in all sorts of movements. Just the sort of

person to turn loose at a drawingroom meeting, or to send down to a missionhall in some unheardof

neighbourhood. Given a soundingboard and a harmonium, and a titled woman of some sort in the chair, and

he'll be perfectly happy; I must say I hadn't realised how overpowering he might be at a small dinnerparty."

"I should say he was a very good man," said Mrs. Greech; she had forgiven the mutilation of her soupplate

The party broke up early as most of the guests had other engagements to keep. With a belated recognition of

the farewell nature of the occasion they made pleasant little goodbye remarks to Comus, with the usual

predictions of prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate auspicious return. Even Henry Greech sank his

personal dislike of the boy for the moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a homecoming, which, in

the elder man's eyes, seemed possibly pleasantly remote. Lady Veula alone made no reference to the future;

she simply said, "Goodbye, Comus," but her voice was the kindest of all and he responded with a look of

gratitude. The weariness in her eyes was more marked than ever as she lay back against the cushions of her

Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and Francesca stood alone for a moment at the head of the

stairway watching Comus laughing and chatting as he escorted the departing guests to the door. The icewall

was melting under the influence of coming separation, and never had he looked more adorably handsome in

her eyes, never had his merry laugh and mischiefloving gaiety seemed more infectious than on this night of

his farewell banquet. She was glad enough that he was going away from a life of idleness and extravagance

and temptation, but she began to suspect that she would miss, for a little while at any rate, the highspirited

boy who could be so attractive in his better moods. Her impulse, after the guests had gone, was to call him to

her and hold him once more in her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and goodluck in the land

he was going to, and her promise of his welcome back, some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving.

She wanted to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable jangling and sharp discussions, the

months of cold aloofness and indifference and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus as in the

days of yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable pickle into a weariful problem. But she feared lest

she should break down, and she did not wish to cloud his lighthearted gaiety on the very eve of his

departure. She watched him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his tie before a mirror, and then

went quietly back to her drawingroom. It had not been a very successful dinner party, and the general effect

Comus, with a lively musicalcomedy air on his lips, and a look of wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit

ELAINE YOUGHAL sat at lunch in the Speise Saal of one of Vienna's costlier hotels. The doubleheaded

eagle, with its "K.u.K." legend, everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in which the

establishment basked. Some several square yards of yellow bunting, charged with the image of another

doubleheaded eagle, floating from the highest flagstaff above the building, betrayed to the initiated the fact

that a Russian Grand Duke was concealed somewhere on the premises. Unannounced by heraldic symbolism

but unconcealable by reason of nature's own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great

republic of the Western world. One or two Cobdenite members of the British Parliament engaged in the

useful task of proving that the cost of living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale, flitted with restrained

importance through a land whose fatness they had come to spy out; every fancied overcharge in their bills

was welcome as providing another nail in the coffin of their fiscal opponents. It is the glory of democracies

that they may be misled but never driven. Here and there, like brave deeds in a dustpatterned world, flashed

and glittered the sumptuous uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military caste. Also in evidence, at

discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic tribe that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been

Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed luncheon table, gay with high goblets of Bohemian

glassware, was mistress of three discoveries. First, to her disappointment, that if you frequent the more

expensive hotels of Europe you must be prepared to find, in whatever country you may chance to be staying,

a depressing international likeness between them all. Secondly, to her relief, that one is not expected to be

sentimentally amorous during a modern honeymoon. Thirdly, rather to her dismay, that Courtenay Youghal

did not necessarily expect her to be markedly affectionate in private. Someone had described him, after their

marriage, as one of Nature's bachelors, and she began to see how aptly the description fitted him.

"Will those Germans on our left never stop talking?" she asked, as an undying flow of Teutonic small talk

rattled and jangled across the intervening stretch of carpet. "Not one of those three women has ceased talking

"They will presently, if only for a moment," said Courtenay; "when the dish you have ordered comes in there

will be a deathly silence at the next table. No German can see a PLAT brought in for someone else without

being possessed with a great fear that it represents a more toothsome morsel or a better money's worth than

The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side of the room by an even more penetrating

conversation unflaggingly maintained by a party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment on the cuisine

of the country they were passing through, and finding few extenuating circumstances.

"What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real DEEP cherry pie," announced a lady in a tone of dramatic and honest

"Why, yes, that is so," corroborated a gentleman who was apparently the Mr. Lonkins in question; "a real

"We had the same trouble way back in Paris," proclaimed another lady; "little Jerome and the girls don't want

to eat any more CREME RENVERSEE. I'd give anything if they could get some real cherry pie."

"Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was real good," said Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of

reminiscence that presently flowed to a cascade. The subject of pies seemed to lend itself to indefinite

"Do those people think of nothing but their food?" asked Elaine, as the virtues of roasted mutton suddenly

came to the fore and received emphatic recognition, even the absent and youthful Jerome being quoted in its

"On the contrary," said Courtenay, "they are a widelytravelled set, and the man has had a notably interesting

career. It is a form of homesickness with them to discuss and lament the cookery and foods that they've

never had the leisure to stay at home and digest. The Wandering Jew probably babbled unremittingly about

some breakfast dish that took so long to prepare that he had never time to eat it."

A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of Elaine. At the same moment a magic hush fell

upon the three German ladies at the adjoining table, and the flicker of a great fear passed across their eyes.

Then they burst forth again into tumultuous chatter. Courtenay had proved a reliable prophet.

Almost at the same moment as the luncheondish appeared on the scene, two ladies arrived at a neighbouring

table, and bowed with dignified cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay. They were two of the more worldly and

travelled of Elaine's extensive stock of aunts, and they happened to be making a short stay at the same hotel

as the young couple. They were far too correct and rationally minded to intrude themselves on their niece, but

it was significant of Elaine's altered view as to the sanctity of honeymoon life that she secretly rather

welcomed the presence of her two relatives in the hotel, and had found time and occasion to give them more

of her society than she would have considered necessary or desirable a few weeks ago. The younger of the

two she rather liked, in a restrained fashion, as one likes an unpretentious wateringplace or a restaurant that

does not try to give one a musical education in addition to one's dinner. One felt instinctively about her that

she would never wear rather more valuable diamonds than any other woman in the room, and would never be

the only person to be saved in a steamboat disaster or hotel fire. As a child she might have been perfectly well

able to recite "On Linden when the sun was low," but one felt certain that nothing ever induced her to do so.

The elder aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did not share her sister's character as a human restcure; most people found

her rather disturbing, chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking unimportant questions with enormous

solemnity. Her manner of enquiring after a trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more

concerned with the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and when one got rid of a cold one felt that she

almost expected to be given its postal address. Probably her manner was merely the defensive outwork of an

"A telephone call for Courtenay," commented the younger of the two women as Youghal hurriedly flashed

through the room; "the telephone system seems to enter very largely into that young man's life."

"The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its sting," said the elder; "so much more discreet than pen

Elaine's aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were the natural outcome of a stock that had been

"Sorry to be away so long," he said, "but I've arranged something rather nice for tonight. There's rather a

jolly masquerade ball on. I've 'phoned about getting a costume for you and it's alright. It will suit you

beautifully, and I've got my harlequin dress with me. Madame Kelnicort, excellent soul, is going to chaperone

you, and she'll take you back any time you like; I'm quite unreliable when I get into fancy dress. I shall

A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented Elaine's idea of enjoyment. Carefully to disguise one's

identity in a neighbourhood where one was entirely unknown seemed to her rather meaningless. With

Courtenay, of course, it was different; he seemed to have friends and acquaintances everywhere. However,

the matter had progressed to a point which would have made a refusal to go seem rather ungracious. Elaine

"What is your character?" asked Madame Kelnicort that evening, as they uncloaked, preparatory to entering

"I believe I'm supposed to represent Marjolaine de Montfort, whoever she may have been," said Elaine.

"But what a mistake to go as a character you know nothing about. To enjoy a masquerade ball you ought to

throw away your own self and be the character you represent. Now Courtenay has been Harlequin since

halfway through dinner; I could see it dancing in his eyes. At about six o'clock tomorrow morning he will

fall asleep and wake up a member of the British House of Parliament on his honeymoon, but tonight he is

Elaine stood in the ballroom surrounded by a laughing jostling throng of pierrots, jockeys, Dresdenchina

shepherdesses, Roumanian peasantgirls and all the lively makebelieve creatures that form the ingredients

of a fancydress ball. As she stood watching them she experienced a growing feeling of annoyance, chiefly

with herself. She was assisting, as the French say, at one of the gayest scenes of Europe's gayest capital, and

she was conscious of being absolutely unaffected by the gaiety around her. The costumes were certainly

interesting to look at, and the music good to listen to, and to that extent she was amused, but the ABANDON

of the scene made no appeal to her. It was like watching a game of which you did not know the rules, and in

the issue of which you were not interested. Elaine began to wonder what was the earliest moment at which

she could drag Madame Kelnicort away from the revel without being guilty of sheer cruelty. Then Courtenay

wriggled out of the crush and came towards her, a joyous laughing Courtenay, looking younger and

handsomer than she had ever seen him. She could scarcely recognise in him tonight the rising young debater

who made embarrassing onslaughts on the Government's foreign policy before a crowded House of

Commons. He claimed her for the dance that was just starting, and steered her dexterously into the heart of

"You look more like Marjolaine than I should have thought a mortal woman of these days could look," he

declared, "only Marjolaine did smile sometimes. You have rather the air of wondering if you'd left out

enough tea for the servants' breakfast. Don't mind my teasing; I love you to look like that, and besides, it

makes a splendid foil to my Harlequin my selfishness coming to the fore again, you see. But you really are

to go home the moment you're bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of dances throughout the winter, so

A little later in the evening Elaine found herself standing out a dance with a grave young gentleman from the

"Monsieur Courtenay enjoys himself, doesn't he?" he observed, as the youthfullooking harlequin flashed

past them, looking like some restless gorgeoushued dragonfly; "why is it that the good God has given your

countrymen the boon of eternal youth? Some of your countrywomen, too, but all of the men."

Elaine could think of many of her countrymen who were not and never could have been youthful, but as far

as Courtenay was concerned she recognised the fitness of the remark. And the recognition carried with it a

sense of depression. Would he always remain youthful and keen on gaiety and revelling while she grew staid

and retiring? She had thrust the lively intractable Comus out of her mind, as by his perverseness he had thrust

himself out of her heart, and she had chosen the brilliant young man of affairs as her husband. He had

honestly let her see the selfish side of his character while he was courting her, but she had been prepared to

make due sacrifices to the selfishness of a public man who had his career to consider above all other things.

Would she also have to make sacrifices to the harlequin spirit which was now revealing itself as an

undercurrent in his nature? When one has inured oneself to the idea of a particular form of victimisation it is

disconcerting to be confronted with another. Many a man who would patiently undergo martyrdom for

"I think that is why you English love animals so much," pursued the young diplomat; "you are such splendid

animals yourselves. You are lively because you want to be lively, not because people are looking on at you.

"I was going to say you are an angel," said the Russian, in some embarrassment, "but I do not think that

would do; angels and animals would never get on together. To get on with animals you must have a sense of

humour, and I don't suppose angels have any sense of humour; you see it would be no use to them as they

"Perhaps," said Elaine, with a tinge of bitterness in her voice, "perhaps I am a vegetable."

"I know," she said, "the Narrow Gallery at the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da Vinci."

Was that how Courtenay regarded her? Was that to be her function and place in life, a painted background, a

decorative setting to other people's triumphs and tragedies? Somehow tonight she had the feeling that a

general might have who brought imposing forces into the field and could do nothing with them. She

possessed youth and good looks, considerable wealth, and had just made what would be thought by most

people a very satisfactory marriage. And already she seemed to be standing aside as an onlooker where she

"Does this sort of thing appeal to you?" she asked the young Russian, nodding towards the gay scrimmage of

"But yes, of course," he answered; "costume balls, fancy fairs, cafe chantant, casino, anything that is not real

life appeals to us Russians. Real life with us is the sort of thing that Maxim Gorki deals in. It interests us

Madame Kelnicort came up with another prospective partner, and Elaine delivered her ukase: one more dance

and then back to the hotel. Without any special regret she made her retreat from the revel which Courtenay

was enjoying under the impression that it was life and the young Russian under the firm conviction that it

Elaine breakfasted at her aunts' table the next morning at much her usual hour. Courtenay was sleeping the

sleep of a happy tired animal. He had given instructions to be called at eleven o'clock, from which time

onward the NEUE FREIE PRESSE, the ZEIT, and his toilet would occupy his attention till he appeared at the

luncheon table. There were not many people breakfasting when Elaine arrived on the scene, but the room

seemed to be fuller than it really was by reason of a penetrating voice that was engaged in recounting how far

the standard of Viennese breakfast fare fell below the expectations and desires of little Jerome and the girls.

"If ever little Jerome becomes President of the United States," said Elaine, "I shall be able to contribute quite

The aunts were discreetly inquisitive as to the previous evening's entertainment.

"If Elaine would flirt mildly with somebody it would be such a good thing," said Mrs. Goldbrook; "it would

Elaine, however, did not gratify their hopes; she referred to the ball with the detachment she would have

shown in describing a drawingroom show of cottage industries. It was not difficult to discern in her

description of the affair the confession that she had been slightly bored. From Courtenay, later in the day, the

aunts received a much livelier impression of the festivities, from which it was abundantly clear that he at any

rate had managed to amuse himself. Neither did it appear that his good opinion of his own attractions had

"The secret of enjoying a honeymoon," said Mrs. Goldbrook afterwards to her sister, "is not to attempt too

"Courtenay is content to try and keep one person amused and happy, and he thoroughly succeeds."

"I certainly don't think Elaine is going to be very happy," said her sister, "but at least Courtenay saved her

from making the greatest mistake she could have made marrying that young Bassington."

"He has also," said Mrs. Goldbrook, "helped her to make the next biggest mistake of her life marrying

IT was late afternoon by the banks of a swiftly rushing river, a river that gave back a haze of heat from its

waters as though it were some stagnant steaming lagoon, and yet seemed to be whirling onward with the

determination of a living thing, perpetually eager and remorseless, leaping savagely at any obstacle that

attempted to stay its course; an unfriendly river, to whose waters you committed yourself at your peril. Under

the hot breathless shade of the trees on its shore arose that acrid allpervading smell that seems to hang

everywhere about the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous musty stillroom where herbs and spices have

been crushed and distilled and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows have seldom been

opened. In the dazzling heat that still held undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed

preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours through the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked

dust in the full swing and pursuit of their several businesses; the flies engaged in Heaven knows what, and the

flycatchers busy with the flies. Beasts and humans showed no such indifference to the temperature; the sun

would have to slant yet further downward before the earth would become a fit arena for their revived

activities. In the sheltered basement of a wayside resthouse a gang of native hammockbearers slept or

chattered drowsily through the last hours of the long midday halt; wide awake, yet almost motionless in the

thrall of a heavy lassitude, their European master sat alone in an upper chamber, staring out through a narrow

windowopening at the native village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt around with cultivated

vegetation. It seemed a vast human ant hill, which would presently be astir with its teeming human life, as

though the Sun God in his last departing stride had roused it with a careless kick. Even as Comus watched he

could see the beginnings of the evening's awakening. Women, squatting in front of their huts, began to pound

away at the rice or maize that would form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots preparatory

to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats made tentative forays through gaps in the illkept fences

of neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here at least someone was keeping alert and

wakeful vigil. Behind a hut perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the resthouse, two boys were

splitting wood with a certain languid industry; further down the road a group of dogs were leisurely working

themselves up to quarrelling pitch. Here and there, bands of evillooking pigs roamed about, busy with

foraging excursions that came unpleasantly athwart the borderline of scavenging. And from the trees that

bounded and intersected the village rose the horrible, tireless, spitefulsounding squawking of the

Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching depression. It was so utterly trivial to his eyes,

so devoid of interest, and yet it was so real, so serious, so implacable in its continuity. The brain grew tired

with the thought of its unceasing reproduction. It had all gone on, as it was going on now, by the side of the

great rushing swirling river, this tilling and planting and harvesting, marketing and storekeeping,

feastmaking and fetishworship and lovemaking, burying and giving in marriage, childbearing and

childrearing, all this had been going on, in the shimmering, blistering heat and the warm nights, while he

had been a youngster at school, dimly recognising Africa as a division of the earth's surface that it was

It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its serious intensity, when his father and his grandfather in

their day had been little boys at school, it would go on just as intently as ever long after Comus and his

generation had passed away, just as the shadows would lengthen and fade under the mulberry trees in that far

away English garden, round the old stone fountain where a leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon.

Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily across the hut to another windowopening which

commanded a broad view of the river. There was something which fascinated and then depressed one in its

ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its tons of water rushing on for all time, as long as the face of the earth

should remain unchanged. On its further shore could be seen spread out at intervals other teeming villages,

with their cultivated plots and pasture clearings, their moving dots which meant cattle and goats and dogs and

children. And far up its course, lost in the forest growth that fringed its banks, were hidden away yet more

villages, human herdinggrounds where men dwelt and worked and bartered, squabbled and worshipped,

sickened and perished, while the river went by with its endless swirl and rush of gleaming waters. One could

well understand primitive early races making propitiatory sacrifices to the spirit of a great river on whose

shores they dwelt. Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to matter here.

It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch the village life that was now beginning to

wake in earnest. The procession of waterfetchers had formed itself in a long chattering line that stretched

riverwards. Comus wondered how many tens of thousands of times that procession had been formed since

first the village came into existence. They had been doing it while he was playing in the cricketfields at

school, while he was spending Christmas holidays in Paris, while he was going his careless round of theatres,

dances, suppers and cardparties, just as they were doing it now; they would be doing it when there was no

one alive who remembered Comus Bassington. This thought recurred again and again with painful

Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human anthill Comus marvelled how missionary enthusiasts

could labour hopefully at the work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions of fatherly

parochial benevolence, in this heatblistered, fever scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait

and died like flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one's imagination in healthy check, but a

kindly allmanaging God, never. Somewhere in the west country of England Comus had an uncle who lived

in a rosesmothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle hearted creed that expressed itself in the spirit

of "Little lamb, who made thee?" and faithfully reflected the beautiful homely Christchild sentiment of

Saxon Europe. What a far away, unreal fairy story it all seemed here in this West African land, where the

bodies of men were of as little account as the bubbles that floated on the oily froth of the great flowing river,

and where it required a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit them with undying souls. In the life he

had come from Comus had been accustomed to think of individuals as definite masterful personalities,

making their several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most

cases indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way to. In any case,

humdrum or outstanding, they had their spheres of importance, little or big. They dominated a breakfast table

or harassed a Government, according to their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had

irritating mannerisms. At any rate it seemed highly probable that they had souls. Here a man simply made a

unit in an unnumbered population, an inconsequent dot in a looselycompiled deathroll. Even his own

position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a horde of black natives did not save Comus from the

depressing sense of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown over him. He was a lost,

soulless body in this great uncaring land; if he died another would take his place, his few effects would be

inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish off any tea or whisky that he left behind

It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting place where he would dine or at any rate eat

something. But the lassitude which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium of travelling through

interminable foresttracks a weariness to be deferred as long as possible. The bearers were nothing loth to let

another halfhour or so slip by, and Comus dragged a battered papercovered novel from the pocket of his

coat. It was a story dealing with the elaborately tangled love affairs of a surpassingly uninteresting couple,

and even in his almost bookless state Comus had not been able to plough his way through more than

twothirds of its dull length; bound up with the cover, however, were some pages of advertisement, and these

the exile scanned with a hungry intentness that the romance itself could never have commanded. The name of

a shop, of a street, the address of a restaurant, came to him as a bitter reminder of the world he had lost, a

world that ate and drank and flirted, gambled and made merry, a world that debated and intrigued and

wirepulled, fought or compromised political battles and recked nothing of its outcasts wandering through

forest paths and steamy swamps or lying in the grip of fever. Comus read and reread those few lines of

advertisement, just as he treasured a muchcrumpled programme of a firstnight performance at the Straw

Exchange Theatre; they seemed to make a little more real the past that was already so shadowy and so utterly

remote. For a moment he could almost capture the sensation of being once again in those haunts that he

loved; then he looked round and pushed the book wearily from him. The steaming heat, the forest, the rushing

The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their labours and straightened their backs; suddenly

the smaller of the two gave the other a resounding whack with a split lath that he still held in his hand, and

flew up the hillside with a scream of laughter and simulated terror, the bigger lad following in hot pursuit. Up

and down the steep bushgrown slope they raced and twisted and dodged, coming sometimes to close

quarters in a hurricane of squeals and smacks, rolling over and over like fighting kittens, and breaking away

again to start fresh provocation and fresh pursuit. Now and again they would lie for a time panting in what

seemed the last stage of exhaustion, and then they would be off in another wild scamper, their dusky bodies

flitting through the bushes, disappearing and reappearing with equal suddenness. Presently two girls of their

own age, who had returned from the waterfetching, sprang out on them from ambush, and the four joined in

one joyous gambol that lit up the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of flying limbs. Comus sat and

watched, at first with an amused interest, then with a returning flood of depression and heartache. Those

wild young human kittens represented the joy of life, he was the outsider, the lonely alien, watching

something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he had no part or lot. He would pass presently out

of the village and his bearers' feet would leave their indentations in the dust; that would be his most

permanent memorial in this little oasis of teeming life. And that other life, in which he once moved with such

confident sense of his own necessary participation in it, how completely he had passed out of it. Amid all its

laughing throngs, its card parties and race meetings and countryhouse gatherings, he was just a mere name,

remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went away. He had loved himself very well and

never troubled greatly whether anyone else really loved him, and now he realised what he had made of his

life. And at the same time he knew that if his chance were to come again he would throw it away just as

surely, just as perversely. Fate played with him with loaded dice; he would lose always.

One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer than he could remember, cared for him perhaps

more than he knew, cared for him perhaps now. But a wall of ice had mounted up between him and her, and

The words of a wellknown old song, the wistful cry of a lost cause, rang with insistent mockery through his

If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile for ever. His epitaph in the mouths of those that

And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms, that he might not see the joyous scrambling

THE bleak rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James's Park, that sanctuary of lawn and tree

and pool, into which the bourgeois innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he must take

the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on which he stands is hallowed ground.

In the lonely hour of early afternoon, when the workers had gone back to their work, and the loiterers were

scarcely yet gathered again, Francesca Bassington made her way restlessly along the stretches of gravelled

walk that bordered the ornamental water. The overmastering unhappiness that filled her heart and stifled her

thinking powers found answering echo in her surroundings. There is a sorrow that lingers in old parks and

gardens that the busy streets have no leisure to keep by them; the dead must bury their dead in Whitehall or

the Place de la Concorde, but there are quieter spots where they may still keep tryst with the living and

intrude the memory of their bygone selves on generations that have almost forgotten them. Even in

touristtrampled Versailles the desolation of a tragedy that cannot die haunts the terraces and fountains like a

bloodstain that will not wash out; in the Saxon Garden at Warsaw there broods the memory of longdead

things, coeval with the stately trees that shade its walks, and with the carp that swim today in its ponds as

they doubtless swam there when "Lieber Augustin" was a living person and not as yet an immortal couplet.

And St. James's Park, with its lawns and walks and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a bygone

order of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are woven into its history, dim and grey as they were

once bright and glowing, like the faded pattern worked into the fabric of an old tapestry. It was here that

Francesca had made her way when the intolerable inaction of waiting had driven her forth from her home.

She was waiting for that worst news of all, the news which does not kill hope, because there has been none to

kill, but merely ends suspense. An early message had said that Comus was ill, which might have meant much

or little; then there had come that morning a cablegram which only meant one thing; in a few hours she would

get a final message, of which this was the preparatory forerunner. She already knew as much as that awaited

message would tell her. She knew that she would never see Comus again, and she knew now that she loved

him beyond all things that the world could hold for her. It was no sudden rush of pity or compunction that

clouded her judgment or gilded her recollection of him; she saw him as he was, the beautiful, wayward,

laughing boy, with his naughtiness, his exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable folly and perverseness,

his cruelty that spared not even himself, and as he was, as he always had been, she knew that he was the one

thing that the Fates had willed that she should love. She did not stop to accuse or excuse herself for having

sent him forth to what was to prove his death. It was, doubtless, right and reasonable that he should have gone

out there, as hundreds of other men went out, in pursuit of careers; the terrible thing was that he would never

come back. The old cruel hopelessness that had always chequered her pride and pleasure in his good looks

and high spirits and fitfully charming ways had dealt her a last crushing blow; he was dying somewhere

thousands of miles away without hope of recovery, without a word of love to comfort him, and without hope

or shred of consolation she was waiting to hear of the end. The end; that last dreadful piece of news which

The lively bustle in the streets had been a torture that she could not bear. It wanted but two days to Christmas

and the gaiety of the season, forced or genuine, rang out everywhere. Christmas shopping, with its anxious

solicitude or selfcentred absorption, overspread the West End and made the pavements scarcely passable at

certain favoured points. Proud parents, parcelladen and surrounded by escorts of their young people,

compared notes with one another on the looks and qualities of their offspring and exchanged loud hurried

confidences on the difficulty or success which each had experienced in getting the right presents for one and

all. Shouted directions where to find this or that article at its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good

wishes. To Francesca, making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with that lonely deathbed

in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery of her pain; could not people remember that there were

crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world? Every mother that she passed happy in the company of

a freshlooking cleanlimbed schoolboy son sent a fresh stab at her heart, and the very shops had their bitter

memories. There was the teashop where he and she had often taken tea together, or, in the days of their

estrangement, sat with their separate friends at separate tables. There were other shops where

extravagantlyincurred bills had furnished material for those frequently recurring scenes of recrimination,

and the Colonial outfitters, where, as he had phrased it in whimsical mockery, he had bought graveclothes

for his buryingalive. The "oubliette!" She remembered the bitter petulant name he had flung at his destined

exile. There at least he had been harder on himself than the Fates were pleased to will; never, as long as

Francesca lived and had a brain that served her, would she be able to forget. That narcotic would never be

given to her. Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be with her always to remind her of those last days of

tragedy. Already her mind was dwelling on the details of that ghastly farewell dinnerparty and recalling one

by one the incidents of illomen that had marked it; how they had sat down seven to table and how one

liqueur glass in the set of seven had been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped from her hand as

she raised it to her lips to wish Comus a safe return; and the strange, quiet hopelessness of Lady Veula's

"goodbye"; she remembered now how it had chilled and frightened her at the moment.

The park was filling again with its floating population of loiterers, and Francesca's footsteps began to take a

homeward direction. Something seemed to tell her that the message for which she waited had arrived and was

lying there on the hall table. Her brother, who had announced his intention of visiting her early in the

afternoon would have gone by now; he knew nothing of this morning's bad news the instinct of a wounded

animal to creep away by itself had prompted her to keep her sorrow from him as long as possible. His visit

did not necessitate her presence; he was bringing an Austrian friend, who was compiling a work on the

FrancoFlemish school of painting, to inspect the Van der Meulen, which Henry Greech hoped might

perhaps figure as an illustration in the book. They were due to arrive shortly after lunch, and Francesca had

left a note of apology, pleading an urgent engagement elsewhere. As she turned to make her way across the

Mall into the Green Park a gentle voice hailed her from a carriage that was just drawing up by the sidewalk.

Lady Caroline Benaresq had been favouring the Victoria Memorial with a long unfriendly stare.

"In primitive days," she remarked, "I believe it was the fashion for great chiefs and rulers to have large

numbers of their relatives and dependents killed and buried with them; in these more enlightened times we

have invented quite another way of making a great Sovereign universally regretted. My dear Francesca," she

broke off suddenly, catching the misery that had settled in the other's eyes, "what is the matter? Have you had

"I am waiting for very bad news," said Francesca, and Lady Caroline knew what had happened.

"I wish I could say something; I can't." Lady Caroline spoke in a harsh, grunting voice that few people had

"Heaven help that poor woman," said Lady Caroline; which was, for her, startlingly like a prayer.

As Francesca entered the hall she gave a quick look at the table; several packages, evidently an early batch of

Christmas presents, were there, and two or three letters. On a salver by itself was the cablegram for which she

had waited. A maid, who had evidently been on the lookout for her, brought her the salver. The servants were

well aware of the dreadful thing that was happening, and there was pity on the girl's face and in her voice.

"This came for you ten minutes ago, ma'am, and Mr. Greech has been here, ma'am, with another gentleman,

and was sorry you weren't at home. Mr. Greech said he would call again in about halfanhour."

Francesca carried the cablegram unopened into the drawingroom and sat down for a moment to think. There

was no need to read it yet, for she knew what she would find written there. For a few pitiful moments Comus

would seem less hopelessly lost to her if she put off the reading of that last terrible message. She rose and

crossed over to the windows and pulled down the blinds, shutting out the waning December day, and then

reseated herself. Perhaps in the shadowy halflight her boy would come and sit with her again for awhile and

let her look her last upon his loved face; she could never touch him again or hear his laughing, petulant voice,

but surely she might look on her dead. And her starving eyes saw only the hateful soulless things of bronze

and silver and porcelain that she had set up and worshipped as gods; look where she would they were there

around her, the cold ruling deities of the home that held no place for her dead boy. He had moved in and out

among them, the warm, living, breathing thing that had been hers to love, and she had turned her eyes from

that youthful comely figure to adore a few feet of painted canvas, a musty relic of a long departed craftsman.

And now he was gone from her sight, from her touch, from her hearing for ever, without even a thought to

flash between them for all the dreary years that she should live, and these things of canvas and pigment and

wrought metal would stay with her. They were her soul. And what shall it profit a man if he save his soul and

On a small table by her side was Mervyn Quentock's portrait of her the prophetic symbol of her tragedy; the

rich dead harvest of unreal things that had never known life, and the bleak thrall of black unending Winter, a

Francesca turned to the small envelope lying in her lap; very slowly she opened it and read the short message.

Then she sat numb and silent for a long, long time, or perhaps only for minutes. The voice of Henry Greech

in the hall, enquiring for her, called her to herself. Hurriedly she crushed the piece of paper out of sight; he

would have to be told, of course, but just yet her pain seemed too dreadful to be laid bare. "Comus is dead"

"I have bad news for you, Francesca, I'm sorry to say," Henry announced. Had he heard, too?

"Henneberg has been here and looked at the picture," he continued, seating himself by her side, "and though

he admired it immensely as a work of art he gave me a disagreeable surprise by assuring me that it's not a

genuine Van der Meulen. It's a splendid copy, but still, unfortunately, only a copy."

Henry paused and glanced at his sister to see how she had taken the unwelcome announcement. Even in the

"My dear Francesca," he said soothingly, laying his hand affectionately on her arm, "I know that this must be

a great disappointment to you, you've always set such store by this picture, but you mustn't take it too much

to heart. These disagreeable discoveries come at times to most picture fanciers and owners. Why, about

twenty per cent. of the alleged Old Masters in the Louvre are supposed to be wrongly attributed. And there

are heaps of similar cases in this country. Lady Dovecourt was telling me the other day that they simply

daren't have an expert in to examine the Van Dykes at Columbey for fear of unwelcome disclosures. And

besides, your picture is such an excellent copy that it's by no means without a value of its own. You must get

over the disappointment you naturally feel, and take a philosophical view of the matter. . . "

Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel of paper tightly in her hand and wondering if the

thin, cheerful voice with its pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would never stop.