PART I (continued 2)

“Oh, good,” said Diana again, this time with rather more enthusiasm in her tone.

“He can bowl a very good overarm ball already, and funnily enough he’s a natural left-hand bowler. Don’t know where he gets it from.”

“Very disconcerting thing, to stand up to a left-hand bowler, I always think,” said Sir Thomas.

“Has your boy begun cricket yet?” Lord Charlesbury asked Rose, to her surprise.

She was astonished, but gratified and pleased at any friendly allusion to Cecil.

“How did you know I’d got a little boy?” she asked naïvely.

Lady Aviolet looked disturbed, but Charlesbury laughed low and pleasantly.

“Of course I knew. He and my little fellow must be much about the same age. We must arrange a meeting these holidays.”

“He would like another boy to play with. He’s never had anybody.”

“Ah, well, school will put that right. Hugh is an only child, too. But he’s found his level all right. Hurst is a good place.”

“Is that his school?”

“Preparatory school—yes. I’ve got his name down for Eton and Winchester, at present.”

Rose wondered why any one’s name should be down for two different places, but the subject was not one that she wanted to pursue.

“Cecil’s not quite eight, yet, and he’s backward too, from being brought up in Ceylon.”

“You’ve not been back from the East so very long, have you?”

“It seems ages.”

Charlesbury was looking at her with such evident interest and admiration that Rose rapidly felt at her ease with him, and began to talk in the manner—and also at the pitch—natural to her.

“Heaps of people at home seem to think that Ceylon is the same as India, but it isn’t, in the least,” she told him. “Ceylon is an island that has nothing to do with India, really. It’s not half a bad place, especially up in the hills. We were in a place called Newara Eliya most of the time, and it was as cool as anything. Colombo is sweltering, of course, and as damp as can be. It’s on the sea, you know.”

“Rose,” said Ford’s very quiet and distinct voice at her elbow, “as Lord Charlesbury happens to be a distinguished member of the Geographical Society and the author of several books about the East may I suggest that you are, in the vulgar phrase, importing coals to Newcastle?”

Rose flushed scarlet, rather from anger than from confusion, but before she could speak Charlesbury had interposed quickly and courteously:

“Indeed, I cannot claim anything like Mrs. Aviolet’s acquaintance with Ceylon. I have never had a stay of more than twenty-four hours there, much as I should have liked it. Like the wretched traveller of the song ‘From place to place they hurry me—and think that I forget,’ which is only too true. It takes years in a place to retain any real impression of it. Now you, Mrs. Aviolet, are young, and I am sure have a most excellent memory. Your description of life in the East would have the true, authentic ring about it, whereas mine could only be an imperfect hash of muddled recollections.”

His speech gave Rose time to collect herself. But it was her vivid recognition of the kindliness that had prompted it, which made her conscious of an ardent rush of intense gratitude at the restoration of her self-esteem.

With candid rudeness, she deliberately moved her chair round so that her back was turned to Ford.

No flicker of expression betrayed whether or not Lord Charlesbury took note of this unusual form of social repartee.

He continued to talk in his low, cultivated tones, every now and then appealing to Rose’s judgment and always listening, interested and deferential, to her replies.

She found him delightful, and was entirely undisturbed by any realization of the fact that she was monopolizing the principal guest present.

Her inexperience did not even perceive that it was he who presently contrived to include their hostess in the conversation.

She went up to her room to dress for dinner with the pleasant consciousness, strange to her since she had come to Squires, of having been a success.

“It’s only Ford that always tries to make a fool of me,” was her self-consolatory résumé of the unfortunate moment when she had been abruptly arrested in her description of Ceylon.

As soon as she was dressed, Rose went upstairs, two steps at a time as she always did, to wish Cecil good-night.

“Mummie, Miss Wade says there’s a gentleman staying here who has a little boy the same age as me, and he’s at school and can play cricket.”

“He’s not the same age as you, he’s older,” said Rose sharply.

“When am I going to school?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you like doing lessons with Miss Wade?”

“No. I want to go to school and play cricket. Grandpapa says all boys play cricket.”

“Well, you can play cricket here.”

“Who with?” Cecil not unnaturally demanded.

“We’ll see. Now say your prayers.”

Cecil knelt up in bed, folding his hands and closing his eyes, and repeated rapidly:

“Pray God bless Mummie, an’ Grandpapa an’ Grandmama an’ everybody an’ make me a good boy for Chrissakeamen. An’ let me go to school and play cricket best of all the boys.”

At the last unexpected petition he slyly peeped through his long lashes at Rose, as though to see how the innovation would strike her. She said nothing, but inwardly she was both frightened and angered.

“Good-night, precious. Sleep well.”

“Good-night, Mummie.”

She kissed him and went away.

At the door of the nursery she paused.

“Miss Wade.”

“Yes, Mrs. Aviolet?”

The little governess was meek and inoffensive. She generally wore a conciliatory smile and coloured up to her spectacles with nervousness when she was spoken to unexpectedly.

“Has Ces been having ideas put into his head about going to school?”

Miss Wade looked very much astonished.

“I don’t think I quite understand what you mean, Mrs. Aviolet.”

She looked so frightened that Rose burst out laughing.

“He said something about it just now, that’s all, and you know, nothing’s settled yet, and he’s very backward about lessons.”

“I am doing my best to get him on as fast as possible,” replied Miss Wade, now obviously rather offended, “but of course if you’re not satisfied with his progress, Mrs. Aviolet, I’d much rather be told so. I quite understand——”

“Oh, my Lord!” was the exasperated exclamation of Rose Aviolet. “I don’t mean that at all. He’s getting on like a house on fire. I only mean that it isn’t any good, him or anybody else, thinking that he’s going dashing off to school as a matter of course, just because it’s supposed to be the proper thing to do.”

Rose’s explanation did not appear to afford any illumination to little Miss Wade.

“Lady Aviolet distinctly informed me that I was preparing Cecil for school,” she said. “If he were not so behindhand in English—though I’m sure it’s very natural that he should be so, after India—I should have started him in Latin by this time.”

“Ceylon isn’t India,” said Rose, infuriated, and walked out of the nursery.

Half-way downstairs again, remorse suddenly overtook her.

“What a pig I am! Worse than the Pryce-Jones woman was to me, and, after all, it might just as well be me sitting stuffed up in that old nursery mending Cecil’s clothes and her prancing down to dinner in a low frock. I’d better——”

She turned round and dashed upstairs once more, and burst open the nursery door.

“I’m sorry I seemed cross. It wasn’t anything to do with you, really, and I think Ces is getting on first-rate, truly I do. ’Night-night.”

Late for dinner and stumbling over her long dress as she hastened downstairs, Rose felt better satisfied with herself.

Miss Wade, who had perceived from the first moment of her arrival that Mrs. Aviolet was no lady, felt her opinion to have received confirmation good and strong, and from that moment she despised Cecil’s mother from the bottom of her little soul.

Dinner that evening was the most amusing gathering at which Rose had assisted since coming to Squires, although she was disappointed not to find herself placed next to Lord Charlesbury.

She sat between Sir Thomas and a young fox-hunting squire, the only other guest staying in the house, whom everyone excepting herself seemed to call Toby. As soon as she had discovered that he liked playing cards, they discussed whisky-poker, made very familiar to Rose both in Ceylon and on board ship.

On the other side of the table, Lord Charlesbury listened to Miss Grierson-Amberly’s flat, pleasant tones with exactly the same appearance of intense interest that he had accorded to Rose’s monologue earlier in the day. But every now and then he adjusted his single eyeglass and glanced across the glittering expanse of white cloth, crystal, and silver.

The conversation only became general when Rose’s neighbour spoke animatedly upon the subject of billiards.

“We might have a game after dinner,” said Sir Thomas. “Though I’m afraid we don’t muster very strong here.”

He paused a moment.

Jim Aviolet had played billiards.

“I’m a very poor performer,” said Ford. “Toby could give me fifty in a hundred and a beating, easily. Are you an expert, Diana?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know one end of a cue from the other,” she confessed, and then discounted the admission by adding: “but I can mark for you.”

“I can play,” said Rose, “but I’m awfully bad.”

“I’m afraid that Toby is ‘awfully’ good,” Ford told her, stressing the slang qualification. “If you want a foe worthy of your steel, Toby, we might ask Dr. Lucian up one evening. He’s a local worthy—and a very fine player at that.”

Something in the patronizing inflection of the words, no less than the implied rebuke to herself, roused Rose’s never very deeply dormant pugnacity.

“Dr. Lucian is most awfully nice,” she proclaimed very loudly. “I like him and his sister. They’re—they’re awfully nice.”

She coloured and unconsciously tossed her head as she bore her haltingly worded testimony. There was a moment’s silence.

“I remember Lucian,” said Lord Charlesbury. “A clever fellow, too. I should like to meet him again.”

“Perhaps he could dine here one night, and you might have some good billiards,” said Lady Aviolet.

She looked at Diana Grierson-Amberly and they both rose.

In the drawing-room, Lady Aviolet turned to Diana.

“I hope your violin is down here, Di.”

“It’s upstairs, but I’ll fetch it.”

“Your coffee, my dear....”

“Mother doesn’t let me have it, Cousin Catherine, because of my complexion.”

“Ah, well, you can’t be too careful,” the elder lady acquiesced.

When the girl had gone upstairs, she said to her daughter-in-law:

“I should like to ask Dr. Lucian to dinner, Rose, since he is a friend of yours. But I am afraid that I have never called upon his sister.”

Rose could think of no reply to the last half of the announcement, and therefore ignored it.

“I hope he’ll come,” she said. “He’s very nice and he’s awf—very interested in Cecil.”

“He knew Cecil’s father many years ago, and in fact he has known all of us for many years—ever since he first came down here from London. I believe he’s very highly thought of in his profession. A clever man, Ford calls him.”

She was complacently secure that Ford’s judgment must be infallible, but in this instance Rose felt no desire to dispute it.

“Won’t you look through my pieces, Mrs. Aviolet?” Diana’s voice inquired behind her.

The girl had returned with her violin-case and a neat pile of music.

She opened the grand piano that Rose had never dared to touch, as she spoke. Her pieces, as she had called them, were thoroughly deserving of the name. There was Thomé’s “Simple Aveu” and somebody’s “Variations in F,” and some Operatic Selections, and a good deal of French music.

Already Rose was regretting the rash impulse that had moved her to volunteer the accompaniments.

“I’m more used to songs than to violin pieces,” she answered nervously.

“We’ll have a practice together to-morrow morning, before we perform in public,” Diana good-naturedly suggested.

But when the men came into the drawing-room, the youth Toby was clamorous for some music, and Sir Thomas politely seconded his urgent requests.

“Try this,” Diana said to Rose again and again. “It’s so very easy, really.”

And Rose, giggling nervously, repeated loudly: “No, I couldn’t—really, I couldn’t,” a great many times.

At last she agreed to attempt the “Variations” and sat down at the piano, endeavouring to give herself confidence by the preliminary sketchy “run” that had been the orthodox prelude to all piano solos at school.

Her fingers, stiff from absence of practice, bungled it badly, but she regained courage at the first bars of the very simple music.

“One, two and three, four,” murmured Rose under her breath, violently stressing the first beat in every bar, regardless of phrasing, and vaguely hopeful that the application of the loud pedal would drown any false notes.

If Diana’s playing was mediocre, that of Rose was definitely vulgar, although she possessed a real ability to read at sight, and considerable muscular power and agility.

“Oh, thanks awfully!” cried Toby, when it was over. “Have you got that ripping waltz out of ‘The Strawberry Girl’?”

“Well played, well played,” muttered Sir Thomas, not looking up from his Times.

Charlesbury said nothing at all, and Ford, going over to the piano, silently assisted Rose to close it, with an air which plainly implied that there remained nothing else to be done.

“I suppose I made a fool of myself,” she observed with an angry laugh.

He made no reply.

“She—your cousin—doesn’t play awfully well herself, does she? On her fiddle, I mean.”

“She has had some very good teaching, I believe.”

“Of course, she was miles better than I was,” Rose added with belated generosity. “Not that that’s saying much. I’m awfully out of practice.”

Ford made no reply at all, and Rose, in her desire for reassurance, found temerity to cross the length of the room and sit down beside Charlesbury.

He stood up, as she dropped into her armchair with the flouncing movement of a schoolgirl, but to her relief sat down again almost at once and looked at her with his kind, interested smile.

“I am sure you love music,” he said to her.

“Yes, I do. Not that you’d have thought so, from the row I made just now. I don’t know why I ever said I’d play her accompaniments. I’ve never accompanied a violin before, only songs.”

“You husband didn’t care for music, did he?” said Charlesbury, rather as though stating a fact.

“Not a bit. Did you know Jim?”

“I knew him a little. I’ve known them all for years. But Ford is the one I’ve seen the most of, although he is younger than I am by several years.”

“They told me you were his friend, and I was so surprised, after I’d seen you.”

Charlesbury smiled a little.

“Why were you surprised?”

“Well, you know, I think he’s odious,” said Rose.

Even Lord Charlesbury’s calm wavered slightly before the singular candour of this unvarnished revelation.

“H’sh—his mother may hear you ...” he indicated Lady Aviolet, knitting placidly.

“I daresay she knows quite well what I think,” said Rose gloomily, her voice obediently lowered.

“I hope not.”

He looked down at the monocle, idle between his fingers.

“I’m so sorry you feel like that, Mrs. Aviolet. It must make it so extraordinarily lonely for you here.”

She felt a rush of warm gratitude for the sympathy in his voice.

“Oh, it does. I’m a—a fish out of water, altogether, and I’d go away to-morrow if it wasn’t for little Ces. It isn’t only Ford—though I hate him the worst—it’s the whole life—everything.”

“I’m so sorry for you,” he repeated gently.

“Thank you,” said Rose Aviolet, her honest, child-like brown eyes gazing at him, and her rouged mouth trembling a little with the sincerity of her feelings.

V

“What do they want to start off so early for?” said Rose disconsolately, when the men of the party went away the next morning with their guns as soon as breakfast was over.

She envisaged without enthusiasm the prospect of a morning spent tête-à-tête with Miss Grierson-Amberly.

“Where’s Cecil?” Diana asked. “Couldn’t we take him out?”

Rose’s face lightened immediately.

“That’d be lovely, and it’s simply sweet of you to think of it. He has lessons in the morning, but I should think he could come with us at lunch time.”

They were to meet the guns for luncheon.

“He’d enjoy that, wouldn’t he, and it would be great fun to have him,” Diana said in her placid voice.

Rose wondered whether she ever spoke vehemently or with passion. It did not seem likely.

Lady Aviolet was in her own room, and Rose felt, uneasily, that upon her devolved the entertainment of the visitor.

“What would you like to do?” she demanded abruptly, far too unsure of her ground to make any suggestion, and completely convinced that Diana would be at no loss.

“Please don’t let me be a bother, I’m sure you’re very busy. I’d love to go round the garden, if I may.”

The garden, of course!

Rose never could remember that a garden was interesting.

“I’ll come with you,” she volunteered.

She did not like to ask Miss Grierson-Amberly to wait while she went upstairs and changed her shoes, so she went out in her thin house-slippers and inappropriate openwork stockings. The girl, she noticed, had come down to breakfast wearing thick, heavy shoes with fringed tongues and woollen stockings.

“How’s the rock-garden?” Diana inquired.

“Oh, it’s all right.”

“Lady Aviolet always has such nice things. Are you keen on gardening too?”

“I don’t really know anything about it.”

“Neither do I,” Diana assured her, but Rose felt that their disclaimers were based upon the radically differing foundations of modesty and truthfulness respectively.

Their progress round the garden was punctuated by interested exclamations and inquiries from Diana, to which Rose made but inadequate rejoinders.

“What is that? I know I ought to know, we’ve got some at home, but I can’t remember.”

“It’s a lily,” said Rose, surprised.

“Yes. I meant what sort,” Diana explained gently.

They went into the hothouses.

“It reminds me of Colombo,” Rose said, of the moist, hot atmosphere.

An odd wave of nostalgia came over her, less for the East than for the sense of something familiar, well known to her, and holding none of the pitfalls that she felt to be everywhere in the strange surroundings of her new life.

“Why, I’ve only this minute thought of it, but of course you must have known the Powerfields in Colombo!” Diana’s tone of pleased discovery interrupted her thoughts.

“The Powerfields?”

“Betty Powerfield was a friend of mine before she married. I haven’t seen her since she married Sir William.”

“We were up-country most of the time, we didn’t know any of the Government House people; of course I’ve seen them at the Races, and places like that, but that’s all.”

“How stupid of me! I forgot you were up-country. Of course, one forgets the distances out there.”

Rose swallowed audibly.

“We were in Colombo quite a lot, as well as up-country but we didn’t know the Government House people anyway. Jim didn’t even put our names down in the book, so of course we didn’t get asked to even the official parties. It wouldn’t have been any use.”

Diana did not try to elucidate this cryptic remark.

She talked about gardening again.

“Are you very fond of the country?” Rose said to her at last.

“I like it better than London, I think, really.”

It seemed as though superlatives were for ever outside the range of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s vocabulary.

“London is great fun, of course, though I always think it’s rather a pity to go there just when the country is nicest—May and June, you know. But, of course, in the winter, there’s the hunting. Do you hunt, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Oh, Lord, no!”

“I suppose your little boy will want to start. All the Aviolets ride so well.”

“Ces can ride,” said Rose proudly. “He took to it quite naturally and wasn’t a bit afraid.”

“Oh, good. Shall you let him hunt this winter?”

“Yes, if they want him to.”

Rose was quite steady and resolved upon that point. She herself was afraid of horses, knowing nothing about them. Her stock comment, at the Sunday after-church progress of inspection round the stables, was always: “That horse is a pretty colour, isn’t it?” But she was eager that Cecil should be less ignorant than she was herself, and proud that he should have learnt to ride. She began to tell Miss Grierson-Amberly of his prowess, boasting freely, and almost unheeding of the civil sounds of interest and attention that her companion from time to time emitted. Indeed, as they returned to the house, Rose was inwardly congratulating herself naïvely on having found a congenial topic that had caused the time to pass so quickly.

In the hall she stopped dead, and jerked her head in the direction of Lady Aviolet’s morning-room, of which the door stood ajar, revealing a glimpse of the grey-headed, square-shouldered figure at the table.

“I say—you ask her, won’t you?”

“Ask her—who? What?”

“If Ces may come out to lunch with us,” whispered Rose, like a schoolgirl. “I don’t like to, and besides she’ll be more likely to say Yes if you ask.”

Diana laughed rather uncertainly, as though slightly disconcerted by the manner of the request, but she obligingly made her suggestion to Lady Aviolet.

“A very good idea, if Rose will allow it, and there is no objection on the score of lessons. Rose, will you arrange it with Miss Wade, my dear?”

Lady Aviolet always deferred to Cecil’s mother in all such minor questions, and yet Rose never doubted for a moment that the older woman deplored her upbringing of little Cecil, and looked forward to his schooldays as to a time of regeneration.

As she thought of it, Rose’s young face assumed slowly a look of almost mule-like stubbornness. It was as though, like an animal, she was unable to formulate the terms of her problem rationally, and sought refuge in blind, unassailable instinct.

“Ces isn’t going to school,” she muttered. “They’ll make him worse there.”

She often thought of Cecil’s boyish untruthfulness as a disease, just as Lady Aviolet viewed it as the result of a lack of education, Sir Thomas as a vulgar form of childish naughtiness, and Ford——?

It was not so easy to penetrate to Ford’s convictions, but he had hinted that a mixed heredity led to strange results, and Rose knew that his family pride was outraged by the infusion of Smith blood in Cecil’s veins. She even had a certain tolerant understanding of his feelings, though none for his unpleasing manifestations of them.

It annoyed her, secretly, to see that little Cecil admired his uncle, even although he sometimes seemed to be afraid of him.

Cecil was joyful and excited at the prospect of lunch out of doors. In the pony-cart, he chattered incessantly, and Lady Aviolet responded with great patience, until he suddenly said:

“I can carry the partridges for them. I always carry the rabbits when Uncle Ford shoots. Sometimes they’re all bleeding, but I don’t mind a bit. I always carry them.”

“Cecil,” said his grandmother sharply, “don’t boast! How many times have you carried the shot rabbits for Uncle Ford?”

There was just that suggestion of a trap for inaccuracy in her tone that always scared Cecil, and Rose hastily answered for him.

“Only once, wasn’t it, Cecil?”

“Then why does he say ‘always’?” said Lady Aviolet.

She had long ago told Rose that they must be very particular never to let any mis-statement from Cecil pass unchallenged. It was their one hope, she explained, of inculcating the habit of truthfulness. Cecil now looked confused and alarmed, and as his grandmother fixed her eyes upon him severely he said: “I meant once, Grandmama.”

“Try and always say what you mean, my dear,” she told him.

Cecil was silent for the rest of the drive, but when they reached the keeper’s lodge in the wood he pulled Rose into a corner:

“Are you angry, Mummie?”

“No, of course not.” She kissed him resoundingly.

“I did, really and truly, carry the rabbits for Uncle Ford.”

“But not lots of times, Ces.”

“Three times,” he said, nodding his head. “That first time of all, when Dr. Lucian was there too, and once the day that Miss Wade came, and the day before yesterday. That makes three.”

Rose suddenly remembered. It was true that Cecil had performed the office three times for Ford.

“But then—you told Grandmama just now that you meant only once!”

“I thought that was what she wanted me to say,” explained Cecil piteously.

“Oh, good Lord!” said Rose.

A sort of blank terror invaded her spirit, as the total lack of any apprehension of truth now and then betrayed by Cecil confronted her again.

For a moment she could not speak.

“Come and unwrap the potatoes, Cecil,” called Diana gaily, arriving on foot with Miss Wade, and he ran off quite happily.

The men came in soon afterwards, and Diana asked suitable questions, and made suitable comments on their replies.

Rose remained silent until they were all seated at the long table that had been put up in the patch of ground surrounding the cottage. Even in the perturbation of her spirit, she had noticed with relief and pleasure that Charlesbury had chosen the seat next to hers. Cecil was on her other side, interested in his Irish stew.

“I hope you are coming out with us presently,” said Lord Charlesbury. “We’re shooting over the home farm.”

“It’s all on our way back. I’d like to walk there. But I won’t watch the poor things being killed—I think it’s cruel.”

“It does seem a barbaric form of amusement, doesn’t it?” He smiled at her gently, and changed the subject, on which Rose had been prepared to uphold her views vehemently. She talked to him freely throughout the meal and looked forward as a matter of course to walking with him after it was over.

Deliberately, she slackened her pace until they were well behind the others.

“Lord Charlesbury, I want to ask you something.”

She was looking full at him as she spoke, and for an instant caught a fleeting glimpse of something like apprehension in his face. Even as her perceptions registered the look, it vanished, so that she was not even sure if it had really been there.

“I’m sure you have influence with my brother-in-law, with Ford. Will you try and make him leave Cecil to me?”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“You see it’s like this,” she spoke breathlessly. “Ford is Cecil’s guardian. Poor Jim arranged that—he was always doing tiresome things. And, of course, the Aviolets have got the money. I’ve nothing at all, and Jim—naturally—only left debts. So here we are on charity.”

“You can’t call it that—your boy’s own people.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a bit.” Rose assured him hastily. “At least hardly at all. I wouldn’t mind anything, if it were good for Ces, and of course he’s having splendid advantages here. Isn’t he?”

She looked at him wistfully, as though in sudden needed of reassurance.

“Yes, certainly. He looks such a jolly, happy little chap, too.”

“Well, I think he is. But I—Lord Charlesbury, I don’t want him sent to school.”

He gave a low whistle.

Rose watched him anxiously.

“It would be a dreadful wrench for you—I understand absolutely. It isn’t so very long since I sent my Hugh off, looking such a little fellow too—and, of course, for a mother——”

“Oh, it’s not that!” cried Rose. “You don’t suppose that I’d stand in his way for one moment, if I thought school was going to be the best thing for him! But you see, I don’t.”

“But why not?”

“He’s not like other children. He—he’s got a fault. Poor darling! He doesn’t speak the truth.”

“That is a great pity,” said Charlesbury gravely. “But unfortunately it’s not a very uncommon failing. Children outgrow it.”

Rose suddenly felt that she and this kind, well-bred man, whom she liked so much, were not really talking the same language. He did not despise or condemn, as did the Aviolets, but neither did he understand.

“I don’t think Cecil knows what truth is,” she faltered despondently. “It’s something lacking in him—I don’t even believe that it’s his fault. But it’s dreadful!”

“Poor little fellow! But indeed, if I may say so, I’m quite sure that you’re taking it a great deal too seriously, Mrs. Aviolet. How old is he?”

“Not quite eight.”

“Why, he’s only a baby. You know they say that the age of reason is seven years old, not before. You’ll have broken him of his bad habit long before he has to go to school.”

“If I thought it was only a bad habit—I can’t explain properly, but it seems to me more than that. I can’t get anybody to understand what I mean,” she said confusedly. “It’s like a sort of kink in his mind. And while that’s there, I don’t think he’s fit for school—not any more than if he was physically deformed. They won’t understand him there—I know they won’t.”

“Masters are necessarily men with a wide experience, you know. They are accustomed to deal with every type of boy, after all. Perhaps they may be more understanding than you imagine.”

“Then you think Cecil ought to go to school? You won’t speak to Ford about it?”

There was a sound of pitiful disappointment in her voice. Charlesbury, loyal to the traditions of his caste, yet spoke with quick and sincere compassion.

“Don’t—don’t think that I can’t sympathize with you. I can and do, intensely. Only forgive me if I ask whether you quite realize what a frightful handicap it is for any boy, any English boy, to miss that magnificent public-school training of ours? It’s like nothing else, you know—I mean, there’s no substitute.”

“I suppose not. Most of the men I’ve known haven’t been public-school boys, except, of course, my husband.”

The silence that fell between them made rather too clear their mutual conviction that Jim Aviolet, at least, had been a singularly unfavourable advertisement for the system of education that had produced him.

“What did Jim want, himself, for the boy?”

“I don’t know. He talked about Sir Thomas perhaps offering to pay for his education, but I don’t think he really expected it. In fact I don’t suppose they’d have done it, if Jim had lived. They were pretty well fed up with him,” said Mrs. Aviolet, with her usual inexorable determination that spades should be spades. “Tell me, did Ford hate poor old Jim?”

“They were on very unfriendly terms,” said Lord Charlesbury. “I am afraid there was much jealousy between them. It was never a happy relation.”

“I daresay that’s one reason why Ford is so beastly to me. He always is, you know. He sneers at me, and if I make mistakes—well, when I made mistakes, I suppose I ought to say—he always tries to make it out worse than it is. Oh, he’s hateful!”

“Ford Aviolet always strikes me as a disappointed man,” Lord Charlesbury said reflectively. “He has always just missed things. Although he was not brought up in an intellectual milieu, by any means, he has only just missed being a very clever man. And he has missed a certain popularity that Jim, if I may say so, always obtained whenever he chose to ask for it—especially amongst women. I sometimes think that Ford has resented that. He did well in South Africa, too, but somehow he was passed over, when it came to promotion or decorations. One affects not to care about these things, but I don’t know—I don’t know.”

“I can’t feel a bit sorry for him,” Rose declared. “He’s somehow too contemptuous to seem like a person who has, as you say, just failed. Why doesn’t he marry, and have a son, and then they wouldn’t bother so much about my Cecil.”

Charlesbury turned upon her a gaze that, for all its kindliness, was exceedingly penetrating.

“Do you really wish that?”

She stared back at him.

“Of course. Oh, I see what you mean! But I should hate to think that Cecil would ever have Squires, and be obliged to live there, and do just what the other Aviolets have done before him. I’d rather he made a life for himself.”

“Well done!” He laughed softly.

“Are you laughing at me?” said Rose, offended.

“Indeed I’m not—or only in the way one is allowed to laugh, between friends. I hope you and I are to be friends?”

“Yes,” Rose said directly. “I’d like to be. I haven’t found anybody, in England, that I wanted to be friends with—except Dr. Lucian and his sister. They’ve been very kind to me. As for that Diana creature, that they all talk of as if she was so wonderful, I think she’s too deadly for words. Quite nice, you know, but dull, and extraordinarily stupid.”

Lord Charlesbury carefully displaced his eyeglass before speaking, polished it with a silk handkerchief, and then replaced it.

“As I am to have the pleasure of your friendship, will you allow me to say something very frankly?”

“Yes,” said Rose, wide-eyed.

“I want you to let me have the honour of being the only person to whom you express yourself so very outspokenly about people whom you don’t like. It would be—well, at least unwise, to give your opinion of Diana Grierson-Amberly in quite those words, to someone who might very possibly resent them. You see, English society is quite a small clan, really, isn’t it? And perhaps especially so in the country. It’s a pity to make enemies, after all.”

“Oh!”

“You forgive me for talking like a prig? I’m so much older than you are, and, if you’ll let me say it, so much interested—and so sorry for you.”

“You may well be that,” said Rose Aviolet, with tears in her eyes. “I seem to be always making a fool of myself—if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. But I don’t mind being told by you, because you’re so kind. I’ll try and remember what you said about talking about people.”

“That will be very nice of you. Perhaps you’ll take me for another walk, some day. I should like it very much if you would.”

“I’d like it, too,” said Rose. “You aren’t going away for a few days, are you?”

“I’m afraid I must be off to-morrow. My boy will be home, and I don’t want to miss too much of his holidays. He and I are very great friends, I’m glad to say.”

“Is he like you?”

“No, I don’t think so. One of these days I hope you’ll see him, Mrs. Aviolet. I should like you to bring Cecil over to Charlesbury, and let the two little lads make friends.”

“Thank you very much. I often wish Ces had more to do with other children. I think it would be good for him.”

“One does feel that, with an only child. Hugh has improved in every possible way since he’s been with other boys.”

“At school, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Rose received the reply in silence. She was far too grateful for Charlesbury’s evident liking and sympathy for herself to retort with her habitual assertion that generalities which might apply to other children did not apply to Cecil. Moreover, her shrewdness had quite well perceived that Lord Charlesbury had avoided committing himself to any promise of interference between herself and Ford. After all, he was Ford’s friend, Rose reflected, liking him none the less on that account, although still marvelling somewhat that it should be so.

She was sorry when they came into the home farm and her walk with Charlesbury was over.

The men, spread out in a thin line, began to walk up the steep slope of the first field, Diana Grierson-Amberly walking beside Ford, looking very trim and efficient in her short, brown tweed coat and skirt and close-fitting hat.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to walk with them, Rose?” her mother-in-law asked her, from the pony-carriage in the lane.

“Quite sure, thank you,” Rose said, shuddering, and as a bird rose suddenly and the first shot went off, she uttered a loud and startling scream.

Ford’s head was turned, for a searing moment, in her direction.

“Get in quickly,” said Lady Aviolet.

Her tone was one of forbearance.

“Where’s Ces?”

“He is walking home with Miss Wade. I hope you don’t think it will be too far for him?”

“Oh, no, it won’t hurt him.”

They often deferred thus, politely, to one another’s judgment in matters concerning Cecil, Lady Aviolet from a conscientious desire to respect the rights of motherhood, and Rose from some strange, elementary idea of diplomacy.

“Laurence Charlesbury is a particularly charming person, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do.” Rose’s reply was emphatic, after her fashion.

“We have known him for many years, and I am particularly fond of him.”

“What was his wife like?”

“She had a good deal of foreign blood in her, I believe, but otherwise she was delightful. She was only twenty-four when she died. Such a pretty creature, too.”

“What was her name?” Rose asked abruptly. She was conscious of an impelling curiosity.

“Mona le Breton. Her father was the well-known polo-player, you know.”

Rose, of course, did not know, and was a good deal more interested in trying to obtain some glimpse of the personality that had lain behind the romantic name.

Lady Aviolet, however, possessed no talent for transmitting such impressions.

“They were only married two years. She died when her baby was born, poor thing!”

“Were they very happy together?”

“I believe it was a very happy marriage. He was devoted to her, poor man. Everyone thought he was sure to marry again, if only for the poor little boy’s sake, but he has never shown any signs of doing so.”

“It must have been dreadful for him, losing her. What was she like?”

“She was very pretty,” repeated Lady Aviolet, a little helplessly. “Tall and slim, with brown, curly hair and very dark blue eyes. Quite an unusual type, in fact.”

“What else?”

“How do you mean, my dear? She wasn’t clever, or anything like that, so far as I know. Lady Cowderham was her aunt, and used to take her about before she married. She was the same age as Lady Cowderham’s own girl, who afterwards married one of the Troyles of Lawley—the second son, I think it was.”

They had got back to names and categories again. Rose ceased to feel any interest in what her companion was saying, and therefore, after her wont, ceased to pay any attention to it. Lady Aviolet, naturally, was not thereby encouraged to proceed with her observations and they drove on for a time in silence.

Rose felt pleased and excited by the idea of her friendship with Laurence Charlesbury. She found him attractive, and she had been long enough removed from admiration to welcome it with passionate eagerness.

She heartily wished that Lord Charlesbury were not going away on the morrow, to leave Squires once more intolerable to her.

“Is Lord Charlesbury obliged to go away to-morrow?” she suddenly demanded with great abruptness.

“I suppose so. It’s certainly a pity, but I hope we shall see him again one of these days. He generally comes over once or twice every year.”

“It’s been a very short visit,” said Rose disconsolately.

“It’s not been like a regular shooting-party at all, I’m afraid, my dear. Another year we shall do rather more entertaining, I hope, but, naturally, it was out of the question for us all, just now. However, Diana is staying on for a day or two, I’m glad to say. She’s always so bright.”

“Is she?” said Rose, and then remembered her conversation with Charlesbury, and added in a determined sort of way: “She’s nice and willing, isn’t she? Does she enjoy herself a lot in London?”

“Her mother is very strict about only allowing her a certain number of late nights in the week. But she has a good deal of going out, on the whole, and I’m told that she is a great success everywhere. Men always like her so much.”

Rose felt very much surprised to hear it, but hoped that her silence might be taken as a tribute to the indisputability of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s charms.

“I hope you and she will make friends, my dear. I feel that you have very little companionship of your own age, amongst us all.”

Rose was acutely touched, as she always was by any kindness.

“It is very good of you. I’m afraid you think I’m an ungrateful pig, sometimes——”

Alarm was latent in Lady Aviolet’s grey, obtuse eyes. It crept there, slowly, because all her reactions were slow, but always quite unmistakably, at the introduction of a personal note in conversation. Emotional outbursts, such as Rose was addicted to, she very evidently viewed as indiscretions that only too surely classified their perpetrators.

“My dear—please.... Hark! Can you hear the guns? They must be doing very well.”

“Damn the guns,” said Rose without malice, only resenting her rebuff.

Lady Aviolet slightly drew down her already lengthy upper lip and said nothing whatever.

“I didn’t mean it! It was frightfully rude of me—please forgive me!”

“Don’t, my dear, don’t upset yourself, please. That expression doesn’t sound nice on any one’s lips, but especially not on those of a woman. The use of it is a bad habit, and I’m told it’s very much on the increase—a pity, I think. One knows that no irreverence is intended, but one dislikes hearing such a word at all.”

The fastidious distaste in the elder lady’s voice was quite impersonal, and caused Rose to feel herself relegated to some more than ever remote distance from the world in which the Aviolet standards prevailed.

Her mother-in-law, with deliberate obviousness, changed the subject.

“Ford has probably told you that he is going to talk to Laurence Charlesbury about Hurst, Hugh’s preparatory school. He thinks it might do very well for Cecil, and it would be nice to feel that the little chap would find a friend there. Hugh is a particularly nice boy.”

“And where do I come in?”

Lady Aviolet looked her interrogation at the truculence that had suddenly sprung into Rose’s voice.

“Ford this, and Ford that. Ces is my kid, and I think I ought to be consulted, if there’s going to be talk about where he’s going to, and all the rest of it.”

“I don’t know what you mean, my dear. Ford will talk it all over with you before anything is settled, naturally. Here we are! Now do go and rest quietly in your own room till tea-time. I’m sure you’re tired.”

Rose understood only too well that this forbearing epithet was applied to what she herself ruefully stigmatized as her own crossness. She felt herself, indeed, to be in a strangely restless mood, and disinclined in the extreme to follow Lady Aviolet’s advice and rest.

Instead, she threw off her hat, with its detested little black veil, the moment she reached her room, and stared earnestly at herself in the glass.

Even to her own perceptions, it was an innocent, almost child-like face that gazed back at her, in spite of her big frame and the very patent artificial colour on her full lips.

“I certainly don’t look twenty-five,” she reflected with satisfaction.

Her yellow hair fell in loose strands across her forehead and temples, and she pushed it back impatiently. That unusual corn-colour was an asset, especially with brown eyes and dark lashes, but she had always longed for curly hair. To-day, she thought that she would like to have had brown curly hair, and dark blue eyes, and to have been slim, as well as tall.

“I bet I weigh all of eleven stone,” she murmured disgustedly, her eyes travelling across the square breadth of her fine shoulders and the deep, full curves of her breast.

“And my weight’ll go up every day in this place, with the meals they have and never anything to do worth doing!”

She revolved in her own mind, as often before, foolish and unpractical plans for maintaining herself and Cecil independently of Aviolet assistance. But she knew too much of poverty to take her own flights of fancy seriously. Cecil should have all that the Aviolets could give him.

She held, however, the gifts of their bestowal to be confined within the limits of the material. For the things of the spirit, she was convinced that Cecil had only herself to look to, and the thought added weight to her blind determination of trusting to her own instinct rather than to Ford’s specious logic.

“Perhaps, after all, Lord Charlesbury will say something to Ford,” she thought. “I believe he’d help me if he could.”

The dimple deepened at the corner of her mouth and she smiled, with a curious pleasure at the thought.

Lord Charlesbury did not tell her whether he had spoken to Ford, but he talked to her most of the evening, and the exhilarating conviction of his liking increased in her. She even became rather exuberant in her triumphant consciousness of success, and her manner to Diana Grierson-Amberly took on an unconstraint that hitherto she had been unable to afford.

But at the foot of the stairs, when Charlesbury handed her a lighted candle, he said: “Good-night, and good-bye, I’m afraid. I shall be off early to-morrow morning.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

He smiled at her.

“So am I. You won’t forget that you’re coming to visit Charlesbury and bringing the boy?”

“Oh, no, I shan’t forget,” she assured him seriously.

Shaking hands, he detained hers in his for a moment before releasing it.

VI

Maurice Lucian could only remember having dined at Squires once or twice before, although he had sometimes played billiards with the young men there. It was, he imagined, in order to afford another game of billiards, that he had been invited there now.

It interested him to see the drawing-room at Squires, when he entered it at a quarter past eight that evening.

The pictures on the walls, nearly all of them rather old-fashioned water-colour copies “from the flat,” were carefully lit up by candles in sconces grouped amongst them.

Very beautiful hot-house plants were arranged here and there in stiff groups.

Also arranged in stiff groups, and very much less beautiful than the hot-house plants, were the inmates.

He saw Rose Aviolet, of whom he was thinking most, directly.

Whereas the square neck of Lady Aviolet’s black velvet gown was carefully filled in with equally black net, and Miss Grierson-Amberly’s plain white satin displayed only a tiny triangular patch of fair, sunburnt red neck, Rose Aviolet’s evening dress was cut low, showing her fine neck and shoulders to great advantage. There was a great deal of jet about it, that jingled when she moved, and the doctor noticed that she wore a ring on her middle finger, and that the other women did not, and that instead of a pearl necklace, she had on a string of carved black wooden beads.

Her lips were not more heavily rouged than he had previously seen them, and the powder on her face was, on the whole, less conspicuous than that which lay in rather ineffectual patches on the red splotches of sunburn on Diana Grierson-Amberly’s delicate, mottled skin.

But Miss Grierson-Amberly sat erect on her chair, and her clear blue eyes looked out politely and interestedly from the smooth vacuity of her young face, and her voice was very low, and distinct, and well-bred.

Perhaps Rose Aviolet’s voice——?

It certainly rang out above any other voice in the room.

“I always think it’s an awfully difficult name to pronounce if you’ve only seen it written,” came over audibly from Rose. “Someone in Colombo once read out a letter from me, and she said the signature as if it was Rosa-Violet!”

Diana Grierson-Amberly smiled, looking at Sir Thomas. He remained entirely grave, and Lucian surmised that he saw no cause to be anything but pained at the idea that people should exist who did not know how his name should be pronounced. Moreover, the personal note, never long absent from Rose’s conversation, had sounded oddly out of place.

The others, collectively, were saying:

“There was certainly a touch of frost the other night—not a doubt of it.”

And: “You must take a cutting next time you’re in the garden.”

And from Sir Thomas: “What do you think of the chances of this bye-election?”

Very much the same topics, so far as Lucian could hear, seemed to prevail at the dinner table. He sat next to Lady Aviolet, and she talked about the housing of the poor.

“They want more fresh air. I hardly ever see an open window when I go into a cottage,” she said impressively.

The doctor had often heard her say the same thing before, and he replied mechanically, having long since outgrown the delusion that to reiterate words of pain and indignation at a regrettable state of affairs, is a step towards redressing it.

The sound of Rose Aviolet’s voice reached him very often, and he detected in it presently a new note that caused him to bestow at least half of his attention upon her, instead of the whole of it upon his hostess.

Already she had turned most of the contents of a glassful of sherry into her soup plate, and she was now freely drinking glass after glass of Sir Thomas’s admirable hock.

Lucian could see that her colour had deepened, and could hear that her voice and her laughter were rising steadily. She exchanged loud and rather elementary pleasantries with her partner, the youth Toby. By the time that Lady Aviolet rose from the table, Lucian felt tolerably certain that although Rose Aviolet was not intoxicated, neither was she entirely sober.

Except for his attentive, and far from unkindly, interest in watching her, Lucian would have found his evening very dull.

The four men sat round the dinner table for some time, and their slow talk was confined almost entirely to matters of agriculture.

When they adjourned to the billiard-room, Rose and Lady Aviolet had already taken places on the raised red leather-cushioned seats against the wall. The elder lady, knitting, sat upright. Rose lounged back, her knees crossed, and polished the nails of one hand against the palm of the other.

Diana offered to mark for the players.

Ford stood beside her, ostensibly watching the game, but every now and then, as though by stealth, he turned his eyes and fixed them upon her smooth fair hair and pleasantly serious face, with its slightly open mouth.

From against the wall, Rose’s voice and her laughter cut across the room all too frequently, with an effect of stridency.

Lucian saw that Sir Thomas glanced at her once or twice, frowningly.

“You’re too good for me, doctor,” said Toby good-humouredly.

It was undeniably true.

“Shall we come back into the drawing-room?”

Lady Aviolet led the way, talking to her guest.

“Curiously enough, Lord Charlesbury, who does everything else so well, is not a billiard-player. He left us this morning, I’m sorry to say. Such a delightful man.”

“A short visit,” said Ford curtly, “and I saw less of him than I should have liked. However, he and I had some instructive conversation on the subject of preparatory schools.”

He laughed softly as though at some amusing thought.

Something in the doctor’s mind seemed to leap to attention. As he held open the drawing-room door, he glanced sharply at Rose.

“We’re all interested in the subject of schools just now,” said Lady Aviolet very placidly, “on little Cecil’s account, you know.”

Rose stared rather stupidly at her mother-in-law out of her big brown eyes, and after an instant Diana Grierson-Amberly broke the awkward little silence.

“But of course——”

The inane little civility seemed to rouse Rose Aviolet.

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” she remarked, still in that over-loud voice. “I told Lord Charlesbury that Cecil wasn’t going to be sent to school at all, and what’s more, I’ll tell all of you the same. You needn’t trouble to talk to any more people about it, Ford. It won’t be any use.”

As soon as they had rallied their perceptions—and none of them, the doctor saw, except Ford Aviolet, did so within the first second or two of amazement—the atmosphere became electric as though charged with the force that lay behind Rose’s trenchant syllables.

The boy Toby, with the instincts of his kind, stifled a whistle as it left his lips, and swiftly retreated from the threshold of the room where emotion threatened. Lucian, acutely interested, unconsciously took two steps forward and shut the door.

He saw that Rose Aviolet, taken unawares, was about to force an issue.

Was there to be a scene at Squires after all? His quick glance took in the setting of the odd little drama.

Lady Aviolet, elderly, squat, and ugly, yet strangely dignified, sat back in an armchair, her dress, in weighty folds, falling about her feet on the parquet floor. Behind her stood Sir Thomas, frowning heavily. His shirt-front bulged a little, and his heavy shoulders were bowed.

Ford stood upon the hearthrug, one arm resting on the marble carving of the mantel. His eyebrows were moving slightly up and down, but otherwise his finely chiselled face, like and yet so unlike his mother’s, was expressionless. One hand held his eyeglasses.

Opposite to Lady Aviolet sat the girl Diana. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked perplexed, but not at all perturbed. Her lax mouth, with its narrow formation of palate, and two prominent, white front teeth, looked quite ready either to smile, or to droop slightly in dismay.

Rose Aviolet was standing. She looked big and heavy, with her square shoulders almost bare, her large proportions contrasting with Lady Aviolet’s shortness, Ford’s narrowness of shoulder, and Diana Grierson-Amberly’s flat-chested figure and slender neck and arms.

One strand of hair lay loose across her forehead, and she kept on pushing it back into place again angrily. Her whole appearance was untidy, lacking entirely the repose that kept Lady Aviolet unmoved, and the girl Diana trim and well-groomed-looking at the end of the evening. Her condition, that barely verged upon insobriety, was perfectly evident to Lucian and, he felt sure, to Sir Thomas also. Lady Aviolet and Diana, he was equally convinced, had noticed nothing. Whether or not Ford had a suspicion, Lucian could not tell. But at least it seemed certain that they must all realize that Rose Aviolet was on the brink of making the “row” that she had threatened. Her high voice, pitched higher than usual, broke upon the big, echoing room once more.

“I may just as well say this now, mayn’t I? Ces isn’t going to be sent to any school.”

The challenge was flung at her brother-in-law, but it was Lady Aviolet who replied in a quiet, unruffled voice:

“We can talk about it later, my dear. There’s no hurry.”

“Yes, there is.” Rose contradicted the elder lady flatly, making Ford wince at the crudity.

“There’s this amount of hurry, that I’m not going to stand being badgered about it any longer. Cecil’s my child, and I won’t have him sent to school.”

“We can think about it when the time comes. He won’t be ready for another five or six months, perhaps not even then.”

Lady Aviolet spoke with the same perfect placidity.

“I’ll never consent.”

“Indeed, my dear? We must talk it over and see if we can persuade you to alter your views. Meanwhile, I think we’d better go to bed.”

The anti-climax seemed to madden Rose.

“I’ll discuss it now, while you’re all here. I’m not going on day after day with this hanging over me. We’ll have it out now, and have done with it.”

Whether by accident or design, she was standing in a direct line with the big double-doors that Lucian had closed, so that no one could easily go out.

“I don’t think there’s anything to discuss,” said Lady Aviolet. “But if you propose to keep us all out of our beds, Rose, perhaps someone will be good enough to reach me my knitting. It’s on the little table. Thank you, Diana.”

The girl was hesitating, as though wondering whether to leave the room, but the elder woman invited her, with an amiable gesture, to remain beside her.

She took up the scarlet mass of wool and began unhurriedly to ply the wooden needles. From time to time she counted stitches, half under her breath.

Then Sir Thomas spoke, also unhurried, but with his coarse grey eyebrows drawn close together and coming down well over his wrinkled lids.

“What’s all this nonsense about? Of course the boy goes to school—all boys go to school.”

“It’ll ruin Ces,” said Rose, panting. “Look here, I’d not say a word if he was like other boys. But he isn’t, and he’ll get worse and worse if he’s put with people who don’t understand him. There’s a kink in him somewhere, and he’s not fit for the sort of treatment that runs all boys into a mould and turns them out to pattern.”

“Your opinions of the English public-school system are extremely interesting, Rose,” said Ford with great suavity, “but perhaps you’ll allow me to ask what experience you have had on the subject. Your father was not a public-school man, I believe?”

“He was a bankrupt North London tradesman, and you know it.”

“Quite so. Your other relations?”

“We needn’t go into all that, my boy. Rose has a very natural objection to parting from her only child, but I hope we can make her realize that it’s all for the boy’s own good in the end.”

Sir Thomas’s intention was obviously conciliatory, but Lucian realized, and saw that Ford realized, that his implication of amiable maternal weakness was infuriating to Rose Aviolet’s vanity.

“I’m not a fool,” she cried out. “I’ve told you before that if Ces was an ordinary child, I’d be the first person to say he should go to school.”

Ford’s low, slight laugh jarred on the doctor with a sudden intensity that surprised himself.

“It’s extremely easy to say ‘if,’ isn’t it?”

“Thirty-four—thirty-five—” came softly from his mother. Then she raised her eyes.

“Children never seem ordinary to their parents,” she remarked comfortably. “I had to part with both my boys, Rose, my dear, and you’ll find that poor little Cecil will be much easier to manage after he’s seen something of other boys.”

Rose clenched both hands, as though the sense of being at cross-purposes might drive her to physical violence.

It was evident enough to Lucian that her fierce arguments had conveyed no slightest sense of her meaning to any one in the room save to himself and to Ford Aviolet.

It was again to Ford that she addressed herself, although the light in her eyes as she faced him held something very like hatred.

“You know what I mean. You know perfectly well. I’m not just a fool of a mother saying that she won’t let her little darling go and rough it. I’d let Ces go to school to-morrow, if he wasn’t what he is. You all know what’s wrong with him. He can’t tell the truth. How do you suppose they’ll deal with that at a big school?”

“Successfully, I hope,” said Ford, with an emphasis on the first word. “On your own showing, a home education hasn’t cured the boy of an extremely unpleasant trick. It’s a very good argument for trying a new system.” He looked round, very quietly triumphant, and as his eye caught that of Diana Grierson-Amberly, he smiled slightly.

Then the girl spoke, suddenly and rather breathlessly, turning with a little air of pleading, to Rose Aviolet.

“You know, my brothers are awfully happy at school. Tony’s at Eton still, and he simply loves it. The games and things, you know.”

Now that she, who was, though not in the same sense of the word as himself, an outsider, had made her small, inefficient contribution of words, Lucian felt that he, also, might speak. He, like Rose, chose to address Ford Aviolet, as the only possible interpreter between Rose’s vehemence and the unimaginative, unruffled obtuseness of the old people.

“As I understand it, Mrs. Aviolet’s contention is that her boy, individually, is unsuited for the system of education that the average English boy profits by. Is there no possible alternative?”

His glance involuntarily shifted, almost pleadingly, to Lady Aviolet.

“Do you think little Cecil delicate?” she said in a surprised way. “Some boys are too delicate for school-life, but it always seems such a pity.”

The doctor was silent.

“Pray let us know, Lucian, if the boy looks to you physically unfit?” said Ford. The irony in his tone was most delicate.

The doctor understood perfectly that his interference was being punished. He knew, and Ford Aviolet knew that he knew, that Cecil was a strong and a healthy child.

“Physically, he seems perfectly sound as far as I can tell.”

Rose Aviolet snatched at the cue he had given her.

“His little body’s all right. It’s his mind, or his soul—whatever you like to call it.”

Sir Thomas abruptly emitted a sound which appeared to imply that his grandson had no business to possess anything but a body.

“If he were a hunchback, you wouldn’t send him to school. Why should a mental deformity receive less consideration than a physical one?”

“What’s the use of talking like that, Rose?” said her mother-in-law. “(Fifty—fifty-one—fifty-two) Cecil isn’t a hunchback, or anything in the least like it, thank Heaven!”

Ford Aviolet smiled again.

“Tell them what I mean!” Rose hurled at him, with an intensity that made the girl Diana shrink back, looking bewildered.

Ford’s eyeglasses swung gently to and fro. His eyebrows were raised.

“Plead your own cause, my dear Rose,” he said easily. “You know I don’t see with you. In my humble opinion, school is exactly what Cecil requires.”

“All boys go to school,” Sir Thomas again reiterated. “It’s the greatest disadvantage in the world to a boy to be brought up in any other way. I used to know an unfortunate Roman Catholic fellow who’d been brought up by monks—put him at the greatest disadvantage with other fellows all his life. Of course, a delicate lad may have to be educated at home, but it’s a great disadvantage. I couldn’t allow it for my grandson.”

“You heard Dr. Lucian say Cecil wasn’t delicate, Rose,” said Lady Aviolet.

They were imperturbable in their lack of comprehension.

Rose Aviolet’s breast was rising and falling as though she breathed with difficulty.

“Why don’t you sit down, my dear?” inquired Lady Aviolet.

Rose turned to Lucian as though she had not heard.

“You say Cecil’s bodily health is good, as far as you know. Can you say the same of his soul?”

Her eyes challenged him.

“Rose, Rose—(sixty-eight—nine—and seventy)——Please!——”

The doctor made his voice expressionless as he replied: “You must remember that I’ve only hearsay—except for one instance that might happen with any child—on which to form an opinion. But if the boy, as you say, seems incapable of speaking the truth, then, certainly, morally, he’s unsound!”

“But oh!——” The gasp came from Diana Grierson-Amberly. “Wouldn’t—wouldn’t school be the very thing to cure him of that?”

“I can’t tell.”

“No,” said Rose Aviolet swiftly, “you can’t tell. You’ve studied the subject, and you’re an expert, but you can’t tell off-hand. It’s only people who think in a rut and never get out of it, that don’t know there are two sides to every question. I’m Cecil’s mother, and I’m not a fool about things that really matter, but my opinion goes for nothing!”

“There’s no need to raise your voice, my dear,” said Lady Aviolet. “Of course you’re Cecil’s mother, and we shouldn’t think of doing anything inconsiderate by you, I hope, but you know, poor Jim did leave his boy to Ford’s guardianship. That shows that he wanted him brought up as he’d been brought up himself; now, doesn’t it?”

Jim Aviolet, however brought up, had, the doctor well knew, barely escaped expulsion from school on at least two occasions. He thought Rose Aviolet capable of voicing the fact then and there, and spoke before she could do so.

“Given time, isn’t there the possibility that this tendency may be eradicated?”

Rose looked at him eagerly.

“The study of psychology is taking immense strides, especially on the Continent. Have you ever heard of treatment by auto-suggestion?”

Lady Aviolet made a low sound, something between a cluck and an inarticulate ejaculation.

“I could never approve of that,” she said firmly.

They stared at her, Ford and Sir Thomas no less than the others.

“Anything to do with spiritualism,” said Rose Aviolet’s mother-in-law, shaking her head. “Quite against the teachings of religion, and great nonsense besides.”

Ford Aviolet looked at the doctor.

“Is it necessary to make such a mountain out of a molehill?” he inquired. “My little nephew tells lies. Excuse me, Rose, for saying so, but I think we have your word for it. It is quite a common failing amongst children. His contemporaries will teach him the disadvantages attached to fibbing in a very much more practical manner than we can. Need we discuss it any longer? Lucian, a whisky-and-soda? Mother, you must be tired.”

“Yes.” The old lady rolled up her knitting. “Think it over quietly, Rose. There’s no hurry.”

Rose’s dilated eyes were fixed upon her brother-in-law, and Lucian made one movement forward.

He felt a rush of relief when the tension snapped with a torrent of words, hurled straight at Ford Aviolet.

“You snob—you prig! You could help me—and you won’t. You only care that your nephew should do what every other boy does—so that he shall turn out a little gentleman, able to play games, and talk the right slang, and get the rotten public-school point of view. You don’t care what he’s like, so long as he never gets found out. That’s what your public-school education will teach him: that he may go on telling lies, so long as nobody catches him at it—that sex is just a dirty sort of joke—that religion is going to church in a top hat—that the only thing that matters is to conform—conform—conform to type, all along the line.”

Rose Aviolet had made her scene.

She had hurled her fury, her passionate invective, like a wave against the rock of their immoveable good breeding.

Lucian, the sharpness of his perceptions seeming doubly intensified, could view the wreckage. It was Rose that was spent and broken.

Lady Aviolet, he guessed, had been offended and alienated by Rose’s mention of sex. It was a word that she had hitherto probably only met, and then with reluctance, in literature. She had changed countenance.

The girl Diana, her mouth fallen wide open, had sidled furtively along the floor until she stood beside Ford.

Sir Thomas emitted a sharp sound of disgust.

“You’re not yourself, Rose. Be quiet,” he commanded her.

His arm swept her aside as he opened the door.

Ford moved slowly from his place at the marble mantelpiece.

As he passed Rose he said pleasantly: “You’ll feel upset about this, I’m afraid, when you come to yourself again. But pray let us have no apologies. Personally, I’ll take them as said, if you’ll spare us another dramatic display. These things, you know, really aren’t done.”

That was it: these things weren’t done.

Lucian realized it very thoroughly, as he saw the contemptuous distaste evident on the habitually inexpressive face of Sir Thomas when the women had passed out of the room.

Rose had flung down her gage with all the violence of the strong, undisciplined feeling that governed her. These people had been too well-bred to pick it up. To them, there was never anything to be angry, or noisy, or emotional, about. They were self-controlled by instinct. Their spirits knew no revolt at all. Nothing mattered to them, as almost everything mattered to Rose, the vulgar, the vehemently alive.

He made no doubt that they would not talk very much about her outburst, even amongst themselves. He, the outsider, would never hear any more of it from them. He had no right to have been present.

Prompted by the thought, he began his farewell, taking it as the measure of Lady Aviolet’s perturbation that she had only bowed a mechanical good-night to him as she left the room, forgetting that he was not a guest in the house.

“No hurry,” growled Sir Thomas. “I’m going to get a drink in the smoking-room. Come along.”

A gesture from Ford detained the doctor.

“One moment. I really should like to consult you on this absurdly magnified subject now that it has been raised.”

The doctor’s experience, both of Ford and of humanity, was too large to allow of his being greatly surprised when the consultation took the form of a very lucid résumé of Ford Aviolet’s own impressions.

“In a sense, the boy is certainly abnormal. He has never been taught the value of truth. He romances. But I refuse to regard it seriously.” Ford made his characteristic gesture, a small, elegant waving of his pince-nez.

“My dear mother is hyper-sensitive on the subject. She imagines that it denotes an ineradicable tendency to criminal deceit. That was the old idea, I suppose. What he needs is to me perfectly obvious.”

So few things were, in the doctor’s opinion, perfectly obvious, that he waited with some curiosity to be enlightened.

“School,” said Ford. “School. A thoroughly healthy English atmosphere, where he’ll get plenty of wholesome knocking about, and be called a little liar when he deserves it.”

“A bloody little liar,” Lucian corrected, and Ford, as the doctor had expected, winced slightly.

“Boys are very brutal, no doubt. But brutality of that kind is exactly what Cecil needs. And, my dear fellow, between ourselves, it’ll be half the battle to get him away from his mother.”

“You think she spoils him?”

“No,” said Ford, in a reasonable voice. “No. In the vulgar sense of over-indulgence, she does not spoil him. But her ideas are quite horribly crude, and she is, as you must have perceived, a—an uneducated—how shall I put it? Let us say that hers is a third-rate mind. Look,” cried Ford with a slight shudder, “at her taste in literature.”

“Tout les goûts sont respectables. What is her taste in literature?”

“What, indeed!”

Lucian waited, a flippant desire crossing his mind to inquire whether Ford Aviolet was feeling sick.

“She weeps over the early death of a mawkish infant in a work of fiction that I believe is called ‘Misunderstood.’”

“I’ve read the book.”

The tone of the doctor’s reply implied, as indeed he meant it to imply, that he considered “Misunderstood” to be a highly respectable subject for emotion.

“Then I will say no more.”

“What are you going to do if Mrs. Aviolet still refuses to let the boy go to school?”

“She can’t refuse. Fortunately she hasn’t a penny. One hates to emphasize it, but my father gives her an allowance, and is, of course, undertaking the whole expense of Cecil’s education. Personally, I advise sending him to his preparatory school at once. It’s the very best chance of breaking him of this silly, vulgar habit of telling lies.”

“You think so?”

The eyeglasses described their graceful little curve once more.

“The only hope, I may say. He’ll get kicked out of it.”

“Unless he’s kicked further into it. What’s the alternative to school?”

“There isn’t one.”

“But what does his mother suggest?”

“Oh, a home education. A tutor. No doubt she visualizes him as Little Lord Fauntleroy on a pony riding about amongst the tenants. Very typical of her ideals, poor thing.”

Ford’s tone was tolerant in the extreme.

“So you are very much in favour of the public-school system of education, are you?” inquired the doctor.

To himself, he added:

“And yet, my fine fellow, I’m very much mistaken if your own life at school was anything but a misery and a degradation.”

“Don’t you agree with me?”

“I’m not a public-school man.”

Lucian was conscious of having evaded the question, but he did not think that Ford would remark it. Nor did he.

“It will make a gentleman of the boy, as the odious expression is. My dear man, I’m not one of those people who can see nothing admirable in the institutions of their own country. To my mind, a fine Englishman is the finest man in the world.”

As he spoke, he threw back his slender shoulders in a gesture that was evidently an unconscious one. It struck Lucian rather strangely, as though it were the almost automatic expression of a desire for reassurance.

It was as if Ford was trying to impress Ford with his own claim to be a “fine Englishman.”

“I’m sorry if I sound—er—disgustingly snobbish, but the fact remains that Rose is entirely unfitted, by birth and education, to bring up my father’s grandson. You’ve seen for yourself what she’s like.”

“Very devoted to the boy.”

“Oh, very. I’ve not a word to say against that. The maternal instinct in women and animals is generally in inverse ratio to the intellectual development. But we’re having this difficulty with her on that very account. She raves, as she did to-night, about his temperament requiring a home education and special supervision—but in reality it’s simply class-prejudice. She dreads sending him to acquire a veneer that she knows she doesn’t possess herself—it will separate them. It’s instinctive, of course.”

He shrugged his shoulders, as though dismissing a competently analyzed problem.

“That be damned for a tale,” said the doctor curtly. “You won’t make me believe that—and, what’s more, you won’t make yourself believe it. She was in dead earnest to-night, and whether her view is right or wrong, she’s sincere. She does believe that child to be unfitted for school-life, and there’s a considerable chance that her view may be the right one. I tell you professionally that you’ll be taking a big risk if you disregard it.”

The doctor, under lowered brows, looked full at Ford, but Ford, as usual, was looking down.

Presently he made a low sound like a laugh, that was nevertheless singularly devoid of amusement.

“A storm in a tea-cup, isn’t it? Children have been known to tell fibs before now. Rose may, as you say, be in earnest, but surely that is only one proof the more of her utter lack of balance. If Cecil’s life were at stake, her tragedy-queen airs might be justifiable—but then Cecil’s life is not at stake.”

“I wonder,” said the doctor.

VII

Of the forces arrayed against Rose—and she found them many—the most potent was the strong desire for school that they had implanted in little Cecil himself.

He was always begging to go to Hurst.

“Don’t you want me to be friends with Lord Charlesbury’s little boy, Mummie?”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Well, he’s at Hurst. He’s in the Eleven there.”

“I know.”

“Shouldn’t I be in the Eleven, too?”

“No. You don’t play nearly well enough yet, darling.”

Cecil flushed and then said defiantly: “Diana thinks I would be, and she knows more about cricket than you do, Mummie—you said yourself that she does. She said—she said——”

“What did she say?”

Diana Grierson-Amberly was surely not prone to the paying of unmerited compliments, and Rose felt curious.

“She said I ought to be at Hurst and that I bowled better than that other little boy, Hugh. She did, Mummie.”

“Ces!” said Rose warningly.

“Yes, she did. That was because I bowled her out first ball, just as easy as anything. And the bails stayed on, Mummie, and only the middle stump went down, really and truly.”

She knew, necessarily, that he must be boasting, and the circumstantial details with which he amplified his story made her, from previous experience, forlornly certain that he knew himself to be inventing.

“When did this happen?”

“Last night, when we played on the lawn after tea.”

“Well, I know you did play on the lawn with Uncle Ford and Diana and Miss Wade. But she didn’t really say you bowled better than Hugh Charlesbury, now did she, Ces? You only said that for fun, didn’t you?”

Her coaxing voice pleaded with him for the admission.

“I can’t help it if you won’t believe me, Mummie,” said Cecil with dignity, “but it’s perfectly true all the same.”

Miss Wade descended upon them with her usual air of timorous determination.

“Come along, Cecil dear, it’s time to go out. You’d like me to bowl to you, wouldn’t you? Remember what Miss Grierson-Amberly said to us last night!”

“What?” Rose asked almost involuntarily.

“She said Cecil would never get into the Hurst Cricket Eleven unless he practised really hard. And she told us about Lord Charlesbury’s little boy—didn’t she, Cecil?—who bowled some other boy out first ball, and the middle stump actually went flying, although the bails stopped on.”

“I see,” said Rose dully.

Not for the world would she have exposed Cecil in Miss Wade’s presence. She would not even look at him.

“Come along,” said Miss Wade, in her voice of manufactured brightness.

Cecil had rapidly turned from white to scarlet, but when he saw that his mother had no intention of humiliating him by any spoken comment, his face cleared. He ran up to her and kissed her, and said “Good-bye, Mummie,” quite cheerfully before he went away with Miss Wade.

She felt that he would easily succeed in putting the whole incident quite out of his thoughts.

“But why—why does he do it?” reflected Rose miserably.

She was incapable of searching out the basic foundations for Cecil’s perversion of the truth. The crux of the matter, to her, lay in the bald fact that he told lies; not at all in the existence of a fundamental self-distrust and craving for the reassurance of praise and approval that provided a motive for the lies.

“I can’t make him good,” said Rose to herself desperately.

She was too unsure of the orthodoxy of her own beliefs to have made out of religion an instrument for the chastisement of Cecil’s spirit, and when he had informed her that Miss Wade said all story-tellers went to hell, she had heatedly replied: “Bosh! don’t think about hell. Think about heaven instead.”

Lady Aviolet, she knew, had suggested once or twice to Cecil, with characteristic reticence of expression, that his besetting sin should be made the subject of nightly intercession in his prayers. But Rose herself, and, she felt certain, Cecil with her, had looked upon the mechanical petitions, “Help me always to speak the truth, for Christ’s sake, Amen,” as the merest shelving of responsibility. Religious susceptibilities were no more apparent in Cecil than in herself, and Rose instinctively mistrusted resolutions rooted rather in a supine faith in Divine omnipotence than in a personal will to achieve.

A sense of utter frustration assailed her after the expenditure of nervous energy that she had flung into her “scene” on the previous evening. It had been of no use. The old people had not understood; their stupidity was as impenetrable as their good breeding. Ford, who might have interpreted her ill-chosen words to them, had chosen, malignantly, to play a little comedy of obtuseness that was never meant to deceive Rose, but only to make her angrier and more incoherent.

Thinking it all over, the tears burned in her eyes and she clenched her teeth. It seemed incredible to her that so much vehemence should have proved so completely impotent.

The conviction of defeat was ready to invade her, but her indomitable sense of the issue at stake refused to let her be overwhelmed.

“He shan’t go—he shan’t go——” she repeated to herself, half sobbing. “I know he isn’t fit for school.”

She slowly prepared to put in action a plan that she had evolved in the course of a sleepless hour of the night.

She wrote a letter.

This was to Rose a laborious undertaking at all times, since she disliked letter-writing and had had very little occasion to practise it. Her handwriting, that had an inappropriate appearance on the stamped blue notepaper of Squires, was large and painstaking, and very legible.

My dear Uncle Alfred,

It seems a long time since I wrote to you after poor Jim’s death, and I daresay you will be interested to hear that Cecil and myself are now with Jim’s people at the above address. Well, Uncle, this is to say that things are not going as I should wish with regards to Cecil, and they want very much to send him to a Preparatory School and then to a Public School. This I do not want, because it would be bad for Cecil, and I know what I am talking about. Well, Uncle, I cannot make them see this here, and so I write to you. Will you have Ces and me up at your place for a bit if this is not too inconvenient? I could help in the business like Mother used to, and have a talk with you about Cecil. He’s a lovely little boy, really, and I do want to do the best possible for him.

I must stop now, Uncle, hoping to hear from you before long.

Your affectionate niece, Rose.

She sealed her letter very carefully before putting it herself into the oaken box on the hall-table. The late Mrs. Smith had imparted pessimistic views to Rose on the subject of private correspondence if left unprotected.

“It isn’t in nature not to read what isn’t meant for you, if it’s lying about,” had said Mrs. Smith, in simple explanation of her own well-informedness upon various affairs that might strictly have been regarded as the concern of her neighbours rather than her own.

Rose, not sufficiently endowed with curiosity herself to indulge in the reading of other people’s correspondence, was quite tolerantly prepared to believe that this was nevertheless the general practice.

When she had finished her letter, she felt happier. No one had said anything to her about her outburst of the preceding evening. She had come down to breakfast heavy-eyed and apprehensive, although no whit less resolved to maintain her own cause, but there had been no sign that any one remembered the existence either of a cause or of a champion.

The conversation had circled placidly round the customary subject of “plans for the day” and the necessity of sending the young man Toby to the station for the 10.39 train.

Rose had been partly relieved, partly disappointed, and wholly perplexed.

She found the Aviolets, their standards, their aims and avoidances, alike incomprehensible. She felt as though it would be an untold relief to return to Uncle Alfred and his shop, where all the pitfalls were of an obvious kind and where approval and disapproval were alike manifested on equally established and well-defined lines.

“Would you care for a walk?” said Diana Grierson-Amberly, coming upon her in the hall.

“Always walks!” thought Rose with uncomprehending resignation, but Diana’s voice had sounded friendly, and she was grateful, although she could never understand the satisfaction to be derived from walking for half an hour along a country lane, with no shop windows to look into and no given objective, and then turning round and walking along the same road for another half hour back again.

“It isn’t even as though we had anything to say to one another,” she reflected.

But it appeared that Miss Grierson-Amberly had something to say on this occasion.

She sang the praises of the Aviolet family.

“I’ve always been so awfully fond of them all, here. Cousin Catherine is such a dear.”

“Oh, yes,” said Rose, with more of uncertain interrogation than of assent in her tone.

“I used to play with the boys a lot when I was younger, and they were always so nice to me, though they were so much older. Ford and I have always been great pals.”

There was a silence.

“He did so splendidly in South Africa. You know he was wounded at Spion Kop?”

“Yes, I know.”

“They say that he went on encouraging his men and calling out to them long after he was hit.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. We never could quite understand why he didn’t get recommended for promotion, or something like that.”

Another silence.

“Of course, very likely his Colonel did recommend him for decoration, and nothing came of it. I’m afraid there’s a certain amount of wire-pulling that one doesn’t know about,” said Diana solemnly.

Once more Rose made no answer, and once more Diana persevered.

“This world is such a queer place, isn’t it? I mean, there’s so much jealousy and pettiness to be found.”

“I suppose so.”

“Perhaps,” Diana laboriously amended, “I ought to say it’s not so much the world that’s queer, as the people in it.”

On this last subtle commentary of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s upon mankind, the silence that ensued was of so abysmal a character that it remained unbroken for nearly ten minutes. Rose, although her vocabulary hardly comprised the word platitude, was ruthlessly recognizing and condemning the quality of her companion’s conversation as “utter bunkum,” and Diana Grierson-Amberly, not without good cause, was discouraged.

Presently she tried again.

“Cousin Catherine is so fond of children, I expect she loves having Cecil here. I always think it’s such an ideal place for a child, too.”

“Do you? Why?” said Rose, interested for the first time.

Unfortunately, Miss Grierson-Amberly’s observation had been rhetorically, rather than literally, intended.

“Well, the garden, you know, and—and the house—and then Ford can teach him to shoot, later on, and he can have a jolly time in the holidays. Miss Wade is nice, too, isn’t she? I think it must be much more fun to have a young governess.”

“She’s all right, but rather an ass, don’t you think?”

“I thought she seemed a nice little thing. You know, Mrs. Aviolet, I do really think there’s heaps of good in everyone if you only look for it,” said the girl, quite earnestly.

“Well, I don’t. I don’t see one single atom of good in that precious Ford of yours, for instance,” Rose declared with sudden recklessness.

Diana’s face grew very grave and very pink. She turned and looked at Rose, with the corners of her mouth rather turned down, and when she spoke her voice was full of distress.

“Of course, to me, it sounds so dreadful to hear you say a thing like that. I simply can’t understand it. Why, Ford is really a perfect dear, when you know him.”

“What about last night?”

“Well, you know, he can’t help what he thinks, now can he, Mrs. Aviolet?” said the girl pleadingly. “You see, what I always feel, is that there are two sides to every question. I think you ought to remember that, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

The effect of reasonableness with which Diana uttered what Rose regarded as futilities was remarkable.

It even impelled Rose to reply to them as though she felt them to be worth a reply.

“I’m not angry with Ford for thinking that Ces should go to school. It’s quite natural he should think so, I suppose. He’s only mixed with two kinds of people all his life—those who go to public schools and those who go to the national schools. He evidently doesn’t know anything about the in-between people. That’s not his fault. But what puts my monkey up, is him pretending to think that I’m a fool; that I want to keep Cecil a molly-coddle, just for the sake of having him tied to my apron-strings. He’s playing up to old Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet, that’s all, because they’re so stupid. They really do think it’s only that. Why Ford hates me is more than I can tell you—but he does. He’s made things difficult for me ever since I came here.”

“May I say what I think?”

“Of course.”

Rose could not imagine why any one should ever want to do anything else.

“Well, then—I do hope you won’t think it rude of me to say this, but you’ve given me leave to—it seems to me that you take a simply terribly exaggerated view of things. Not only about Ford. (Of course, what you say about his hating you is perfectly absurd. Why, he’s your relation!) But it isn’t only about him. It struck me that you did last night, when you were talking about your little boy. You say that he—well, that he doesn’t always tell the truth. Of course I know it’s a great pity, and the thing of all others that one minds most—it seems so awfully un-English, doesn’t it?—but, after all, Mrs. Aviolet, he’s only a baby, isn’t he? He’ll begin to understand, in a very little while, that he mustn’t tell stories, surely.”

“He knows that now,” said Rose wearily. “You don’t understand. Sometimes I don’t think it’s his own fault, poor darling! He can’t help it.”

“Well, that’s just what I say,” the girl argued perseveringly. “He’ll know better later on. And really and truly, it’s perfectly wonderful what school does for them. My young brother Tony was very delicate as a baby, and I’m afraid we spoilt him dreadfully, but he improved in the most marvellous way after his first term at a preparatory school. It seems to make them so much more manly and sensible, you know.”

“Ces is manly already,” cried Rose, going off at a tangent. “I don’t know what you’d say if you could see what ordinary children are like, after being born and brought up in the tropics. They haven’t got a kick left in them by the time they get home, as a rule, nor for months afterwards.”

“I didn’t mean——”

“That’s all right. I know you didn’t. I suppose the whole thing’s got on my nerves, rather. It’s always Cecil this, and Cecil that, it seems to me.”

“Only because they’re so—so interested in him.”

“I daresay, but it’s a funny way of showing it. You’d think they’d have the sense to see, old people like them, that of course I know more about him than they do.”

“But you know, he wants to go to school himself—really he does. He says so.”

“I know,” said Rose briefly and bitterly.

“Well, then——?”

“Oh, of course, they’ve made him keen, telling him about the games and all the rest of it. He didn’t want to go to school till it was put into his head. You can make a child think it wants anything, even castor oil, if you bluff it enough.”

“But school isn’t a nasty thing, like castor oil,” said Diana, with a sort of ingenious stupidity.

“Chuck it,” Rose advised briefly. “You and me aren’t talking the same language. We shouldn’t understand one another if we went on jawring till we turned black in the face.”

No such disastrous consummation was achieved, but Miss Grierson-Amberly seemed quite unable to abandon the discussion.

“But I do understand you, really and truly I do. Only it seems to me, if you’ll forgive me for saying such a thing, that it would be more unselfish of you to let Cecil do what he wants, and what everybody else thinks best for him, than just to try and make him do what you like. I’m afraid I’m expressing it stupidly, but I daresay you’ll understand. After all, if one loves any one, one wants the best thing for them, doesn’t one? And you know, boys learn heaps of things at school that one simply can’t give them at home—playing the game generally, and esprit de corps, and all that sort of thing.”

“I’ve heard every bit of this before, and I daresay it’s all quite true. But as long as Ces remains what he is, he’ll go to no school. I’d as soon send an epileptic child to school as him.”

“Oh, how can you!” The distress in Diana’s voice was most unmistakably genuine. “Indeed, indeed, I’m certain you’re exaggerating the whole thing most dreadfully. And even if he is as naughty as you think, surely school would be the very——”

“Naughty!” Rose, like an explosion, repeated. “Who said he was naughty? I’ll thank you to keep your advice about my boy till you’ve got one of your own. You’ll know a bit more about it by that time, perhaps.”

For the second time, Diana coloured deeply; but after a moment she said unresentfully:

“I’m afraid I’ve vexed you, and I’m so awfully sorry. I really only said it because I’ve known the Aviolets all my life, and Cecil is such a dear little boy.”

The last words mollified Rose instantly.

“It’s all right. I’m sorry, too, if I was rude. Don’t let’s talk about it any more.”

They made spasmodic conversation upon indifferent subjects until Squires was reached. Rose, tired and out of spirits, trailing slowly upstairs, heard Diana’s voice incautiously raised in Lady Aviolet’s morning-room.

“I hope I’ve done some good, Cousin Catherine. I’ve been reading the Riot Act, but of course——”

The door was closed, and Rose proceeded on her way, muttering sub-audibly, “Damn her impudence!”

Her perceptions, acute, if inarticulate, sensed in Diana Grierson-Amberly all the blind, limitless cruelty of the obtuse. She felt strangely weak and frightened at the thought of it, as though knowing that from that cruelty of the unimaginative there is no appeal.

In the nursery, she found Cecil strutting about, reciting a sort of saga, with the intensely disapproving eyes of Miss Wade fixed upon him in a horrified stare.

“An’ there was elephants there, and a tiger, and—and horses as big as lions; and they all lay down in front of me until I said, ‘Up!’ Like that I said it, very loud and grand—‘UP!’ I said. That was in Colombo, once.”

“Hallo, Ces,” Rose said rather wearily. She guessed, from the expression of the governess, what was coming.

“I’m glad you’ve just happened to come in, Mrs. Aviolet. There’s a little boy here who hardly seems to know the difference between pretence and reality, I’m afraid.”

“What’s the matter?” Rose demanded ungraciously. She would not even look at Miss Wade, and she kept one hand on Cecil’s forehead, stroking back his thick, soft hair.

“Oh, I hope nothing’s the matter,” Miss Wade declared with sudden, spurious brightness. “I’m sure Cecil will tell you himself that he’s only been talking nonsense.”

“I’m not talking nonsense——”

“If you mean that rubbish I heard as I came in, about elephants and tigers, it was nonsense, Ces, and you know it. You weren’t trying to make Miss Wade believe it was true, were you? You wouldn’t be so silly, a big boy like you.”