PART I (continued 3)

The appeal to Cecil’s vanity seemed to make him hesitate. At last he gave an uncertain little laugh, and said: “No, Mummie. I only said it for fun. It was just something I was inventing.”

Rose kissed him in sudden, passionate thankfulness.

“My precious! That’s a good boy!”

“It’s a pity, isn’t it, that Cecil should think it amusing to invent things that never happened,” said Miss Wade mildly, “especially as we know that he isn’t always quite as brave as he ought to be about telling the exact truth. But I’m glad he’s been straightforward this time.”

Rose did not think that she looked glad.

“If Cecil may go into the garden for a while, Mrs. Aviolet, I should be glad to speak to you.”

“All right.”

Rose made no attempt at all at displaying an amiability which she was far from feeling.

“As we’re on the subject,” said the little governess nervously, “I thought I’d really better speak to you. Cecil is a dear little boy and I’m very fond of him, but I really don’t know what to do about his want of truth. I’m sorry to have to say it, Mrs. Aviolet, but he’s untruthful—downright untruthful.”

“Have you just found it out or did his grandmother tell you so?” Rose asked truculently.

“Lady Aviolet never mentioned such a thing to me, nor did any one else. I am in the habit of forming my own opinions as to the character of my pupils. I am a student of child-psychology,” said Miss Wade with dignity. “It is a most serious fault, and one that cannot be corrected too young.”

“If you’re thinking of his nonsense just now, Miss Wade——”

The governess interrupted her firmly. “No, that has nothing to do with it. I have been meaning to speak to you for some little while. I should have thought little or nothing of his wild inventions of imaginary adventures, if I had not, more than once, found him out in a direct untruth.”

Rose groaned almost involuntarily.

“You knew of this fault already?”

“Yes, of course I did.”

“He is so young, and such a dear little boy, and so good otherwise that I feel sure he can be corrected. But I must ask you, Mrs. Aviolet, to let me have a free hand in dealing with this.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“I said, ‘No.’”

Miss Wade looked quite confounded.

“Now do you suppose,” Rose impatiently inquired, “that I should give anybody a free hand, as you call it, in punishing my own child? What am I his mother for, if I’m to go giving free hands to other people all over the place? But you can tell me what your idea is—unless it’s school, which, I may tell you, I’ve heard enough about—and a bit over.”

“Cecil is hardly fit for school until he has learnt to speak the truth.”

“That’s the first word of sense I’ve heard spoken about it yet. Well, fire ahead.”

“Mrs. Aviolet, I do not wish you to take it upon my word alone, and therefore I will refer you to my authority. Monroe on the ‘Moral Education of Children.’”

“And what has Monroe got to say about it?”

“‘There are two faults, and two only, for which corporal punishment should be inflicted: deliberate cruelty, and deliberate untruth. We need not add that it should be made perfectly clear to the child that the punishment is not given in anger, still less in revenge.’” Miss Wade relinquished the head voice by which she had denoted that she was quoting, and resumed her natural rather nasal accents.

“I am deeply distressed at having to say it, but Cecil will never realize the full gravity of this dreadful fault unless he is punished in such a way that he will remember it. I have tried reasoning with him, and coaxing him, and scolding him, and he is always sorry, but it produces no real effect at all. Indeed, Mrs. Aviolet, I dislike the idea more than I can tell you, and I have never in my life had to punish a pupil in such a manner before, but I should be failing in my duty if—if——”

Miss Wade faltered and produced her handkerchief, choked by what Rose instantly recognized as a perfectly real emotion.

“Oh, don’t cry! Anyway, you know, it wouldn’t be you who’d have to do it. You’re not nearly strong enough. Besides, you’d never go through with it. I shouldn’t myself. I should sob and howl—roar, in fact. But it’s a man’s job.”

Miss Wade looked at her with an air of rather resentful astonishment.

“Then you have contemplated the idea of corporal punishment already?”

“Spare the rod and spoil the child. Of course I have, Miss Wade.”

“In general, I am thoroughly opposed to the system of corporal punishment,” said Miss Wade gloomily. “I follow Dr. Monroe’s teaching, and he is quite averse to it. But, as he says himself, persistent lying and persistent cruelty are in a class apart and must be dealt with accordingly.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I hope that the occasion may not present itself, but if it does, Mrs. Aviolet, if Cecil tells a direct lie again, then I must ask you either to deal with him on the lines that I have indicated, or else to let his uncle do so.”

“Ask for something you’re a bit more likely to get, I should,” Rose advised the outraged little governess. “If Cecil tells a direct lie, as you call it, again, he shall be whipped. We’ve tried everything else, and it may as well be that. But it’ll be me who’ll settle when it’s done, and how, and who by. And another thing—I’m going to give Ces fair warning about it. Perhaps it’ll help him to be careful, poor lamb.”

She turned to go.

“One moment, Mrs. Aviolet, if you please. Has Cecil ever been—castigated—before?”

“He’s been hit by his father,” said Rose briefly. “He’s never had exactly what you might call a state whipping, so perhaps the disgrace might make an impression on him. But I hope to goodness we shan’t have to do it.”

She let the door slam on Miss Wade’s solemn reiteration of the hope, already feeling that exasperation had committed her to a course of action that her inner self disapproved.

Yet the thought of punishing little Cecil by beating him did not horrify her. Her own mother had administered hearty and impetuous slaps throughout Rose’s childhood, in moments of impatience, and afterwards, as heartily and as impetuously, had smothered her with kisses and given her slices of new bread thickly covered with jam. Rose had borne no malice for the slaps, although they had always caused her to roar lustily, for Mrs. Smith’s heavy-handed blows had never been half-hearted affairs, and she had enjoyed the kisses and the bread-and-jam.

“No bunkum from Dr. Monroe’s little books on Moral Education about Mother!” Rose reminded herself, and smiled in a loving retrospective appreciation of her parent’s thoroughness.

VIII

Two days later, Diana Grierson-Amberly left Squires, and Rose received an answer to her letter.

298 Ovington Street, London, S. W.

My dear Niece,

Yours of the 6th to hand, for which I thank you. I am willing to receive you and the boy as you suggest, at any date convenient to yourself, on a short visit. There will be no need for you to help in the shop, as the time will be so limited.

I have given much anxious thought and prayer to yourself and to your child, my dear Rose, left alone in worldly surroundings as I fear you are. If you have discovered the hollowness and falseness of mere earthly grandeur, turn your thoughts to that which never fails, if sought in true humbleness of spirit. I will gladly advise you to the best of my poor powers, but there is but One true Counsellor for us all.

Kindly advise later as to date and hour of arrival.

Yours, etc., Alfred Smith.

A certain lack of enthusiasm as to the projected visit, apparent in Uncle Alfred’s letter, no less than the careful underlining of his pietistic sentiments, recalled him with singular vividness to the mind of his niece as she read.

“It’ll be something, to get away from here,” she consoled herself.

After all, Uncle Alfred had nearly always been kind, in his own strange way. She and her mother had laughed at him, but Mrs. Smith had always steadily upheld Uncle Alfred’s claim to affection and gratitude, because for many years he had given them a home. And he had been nicer to Rose after her mother’s death, she remembered.

“And, anyway, he won’t talk about ‘plans for the day’ at breakfast every blessed morning, and I shall have Ces to sleep in my room again.” She laughed out loud for very joy at the thought. There was a foolish and inexplicable hope in her heart that if she and Cecil once got away from Squires, they need never go back there. To herself, Rose added in all honesty a modification of her ardent wish to cut adrift from everything that the Aviolets stood for:

“After all, I daresay Lord Charlesbury would look us up in London. And it would be much nicer to see him away from all of them.”

In spite of herself, she was nervous at the thought of making her new plan known to Lady Aviolet, and she therefore did so in a casual and blustering manner that gave the announcement an air of unreality.

“Oh—did I tell you I’d heard from my uncle? He’s Mr. Alfred Smith, who has a business in Ovington Street. (Well, it’s a pawnbroking business, really.) I haven’t seen him since I married—and thought of going up to him.”

“Did you, my dear? The train service is very good, so you have only to let me know which day suits you and the carriage can take you to the station for the early train, and meet you again at the six o’clock, or the half-past eight, if you prefer it.”

“Oh, well, thank you very much, but I meant to stay there,” Rose said awkwardly.

“Would that be necessary?”

“I should like it,” Rose replied defiantly.

Her mother-in-law was unmoved. “As you prefer, my dear.”

“I should want to take Cecil, of course.”

“Indeed? Do you think it any real kindness to disturb him? He seems very happy, and looks so well. Besides, he is getting on nicely at his lessons, and it seems hard on Miss Wade that they should be interrupted.”

“She could have a holiday for a bit.”

“She has hardly been with us long enough to expect that. Irregularity is so unsettling to a child, too. I hope you will be unselfish enough to leave Cecil here, Rose, while you pay your visit.”

Lady Aviolet fixed her pale eyes upon Rose as she spoke, and they expressed melancholy, in the very slight degree in which their flaccid shallows ever expressed anything.

“I am Cecil’s grandmother, my dear, and so I am going to take upon myself to tell you that you are a very selfish mother to the boy. I see that you’re very fond of him—I quite see that—but you seem to have so little idea of the tremendous sacrifices that motherhood demands. Take this question of going away: you may say that you want Cecil with you, because you can’t bear to be away from him, but don’t you see that you’re only thinking of yourself? If you thought more of Cecil, and less of yourself, you’d see the folly and unkindness of disturbing and upsetting him by a change just when he is settling down to a regular routine for the first time in his little life. And London isn’t healthy for children like the country is. It won’t do him any good.”

Lady Aviolet’s implacable, unselfconscious certainty of the complete rightness of her own point of view daunted Rose curiously. Through her mind there floated, incoherently, words and phrases that should express her resentment. Difficulties—they always made difficulties—nothing was ever allowed to happen without these complications of argument, disapproval, condemnation ... things that ought to be simple, made difficult. It was tiring ... and it made one angry too. And how could any one decide that someone else was selfish, in that arbitrary way? But she was unable to formulate her thoughts in words, and stood shifting her weight from one foot to the other, like a schoolgirl that is being scolded.

At last she said in a sulky tone that might, equally, have emanated from the schoolgirl:

“I don’t see that at all. I’ve looked after Ces ever since he was born, and I suppose I know what’s best for him.”

She was angrily aware, as she spoke, of the futility of the assertion.

So, apparently, was Lady Aviolet.

“That is as it may be, my dear. And of course you will do as you think best. I can only advise you. But I should have thought that for little Cecil’s own sake, you might be willing to forget yourself. I hope I don’t expect to find old heads on young shoulders, but I should have thought you had seen enough of life to realize that we mothers have to sacrifice a great deal for our children. And they very often disappoint us at the end of it all. But at least there is the comfort of having done all one can.”

Rose, by an unwonted effort, repressed the retort that she longed to utter. If the self-sacrifice of their mother had been responsible for the ultimate evolution of the personalities of Ford and Jim Aviolet, her most ardent wish would be never to emulate such disastrous abnegation for the benefit of Cecil.

“Well, I’m sorry you don’t like the idea, but I’m afraid I’ve made up my mind,” she said, abruptly and ungraciously.

“Then there is no more to be said, my dear. Perhaps you will be able to explain matters to Miss Wade so that she does not resign her situation, but you are acting with great unfairness towards her. If Cecil is to be taken out of her hands like this, and his whole time upset, you cannot expect her to have any real authority over the child. I was beginning to hope that he was improving in every respect under her management.”

Lady Aviolet’s intonation made it clear that her “every” meant “one.”

“Her latest idea is that he ought to be whipped for telling a story.”

“Painful though that would be, it might be the truest kindness to the poor little fellow himself in the end. But I hope we need not consider the question at all. I really do hope and believe that, under Miss Wade’s management, Cecil is losing his weakness.”

Lady Aviolet’s hope—a plant of frail and ill-supported growth—was not destined to fulfilment.

Rose appeared in the Lucians’ drawing-room one afternoon with swollen eyelids, and said miserably to Henrietta:

“They’ve made me punish Cecil. At least, I suppose it wasn’t them that made me, but I’ve had to do it. And yet I don’t really believe in whipping a child—I was going dead against my own instinct, and I knew it in a sort of way, but it seemed the only thing I hadn’t tried.”

“What happened?”

“Ces—poor darling—told a perfectly flat lie to Ford, of all people, and that beast wanted to punish him himself, but, of course, I said I wouldn’t allow that, and that I was the proper person to do it. But in the end Sir Thomas did. I said he might, because I knew it would impress Ces far more—and, besides, I knew I should howl and cry if I had to hit his darling little body.”

Rose laughed tremulously, and openly put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“Poor lamb, how did he take it?” Henrietta Lucian asked.

“He didn’t cry,” Rose said proudly. “He’s a plucky little fellow, and he’s proud, too. I knew he wouldn’t make a sound, and he didn’t. Even his grandfather said he’d been brave over it. Sir Thomas was fairly decent about the whole thing, I will say. He gave Ces a talking to about truth and all that, but it was very short, and then he gave him six cuts with a little cane and left him. And I didn’t go to him.”

“Very brave of you, and I should think quite right.”

“It was hard,” Rose admitted.

“I’m so sorry for you, about the whole thing. Maurice and I often talk about it. He’s interested, you know. I’m pretty sure he thinks it isn’t little Cecil’s fault, in a way, but more like a congenital misfortune.”

“He’s so brave about other things, it’s difficult to understand. I suppose he’s had a rotten bringing up, poor darling, and that’s my fault as much as any one’s. Don’t you think a marriage like mine is a great mistake?”

“In what way?” Henrietta temporized.

“Marrying into a different class.”

“It’s apt to create difficult situations, I suppose.”

“You may say so!” Mrs. Aviolet remarked in heartfelt accents. “But it isn’t only that—though to my dying day I don’t suppose I shall ever see what they’re driving at, half the time—it’s the children. Inheriting two lots of instincts, so to speak, poor little things. I know quite well that my mother-in-law thinks poor little Cecil’s trouble is all owing to his belonging what-you-may-call to the people, one side of him. In a way, I suppose I agree. The high-and-mighty Aviolets were never anything but honourable, were they?”

“In the conventional sense of the word, perhaps not,” said Miss Lucian.

“The conventional sense of the word is all they want,” said Rose simply, quite without irony.

She was very glad when the time came for her to take Cecil to London. He had been wildly and defiantly naughty since his punishment, but he had not again been untruthful.

“Wilful naughtiness is one thing, and underhand ways are another,” Miss Wade primly observed. “I can understand a child—a boy especially—being spoilt and disobedient from time to time, but there is something terrible about a child that is habitually untruthful. It seems so unnatural.”

“I think little Cecil’s disgrace the other day has shown him what a frightful thing untruth is,” Lady Aviolet said. “I hope we may never have to repeat such a thing.”

“It was evidently what the boy needed,” Sir Thomas said curtly.

It struck Rose that all of them unconsciously relied upon their own powers of observation to tell them what effect the experiment in discipline had had upon Cecil.

Hardly aware of the elementary psychological instinct that prompted her, Rose trusted neither to their perceptions nor to her own. She tried to find out from the little boy, himself, what their punishment had meant to him.

“You won’t let them say ever again that you tell stories, will you, darling? If one does slip out, come and tell Mother, and I promise no one shall be angry or punish you. Only tell me about it.”

“Yes, Mummie.”

He was not looking at her.

“I had to ask Grandpa to whip you the other day, Ces, but it made me very unhappy.”

“I’m so sorry, Mummie.” He had put his arms round her neck and was kissing her eagerly. She hugged him.

“Sweetheart! You know we had to do something to make you remember, and you will remember now, won’t you?”

“Yes. I didn’t cry when Grandpa hit me with his cane.”

“I know you didn’t, my own brave little man.”

“I wanted to scream out loud—it hurt so.”

She involuntarily tightened her hold round him.

“I was brave, wasn’t I, Mummie?” he asked her wistfully.

“Very brave, my darling.”

She could not deny him the acknowledgment, and it was only afterwards that she realized herself to have been dimly puzzled by his insistence.

Rose told Miss Wade that she was to have a holiday, and the governess was quite as much offended as Lady Aviolet had predicted that she would be, and offered to resign her situation. Rose only wished that she possessed the courage to accept the offer.

The night before they went to London, she spoke to Ford, who had detained her, with his air of suave autocracy, as she was following Lady Aviolet upstairs.

“One moment, Rose. I want to know how soon you are likely to bring Cecil back from town?”

Rose opened her brown eyes very widely, and spoke with a purposely exaggerated astonishment.

“Why?”

“Because Cecil’s movements concern me, as his guardian,” said Ford calmly.

“I’m his mother, thank you.”

Ford smiled very pleasantly.

“Oh, yes, you have equal rights of guardianship, of course. I had no intention of implying anything else.”

“Equal!” Her voice held unbounded scorn.

“Quite equal.”

She swung round and faced him, her hands on her hips in an attitude that had been frequently characteristic of her mother, her head a little thrust forward.

“What utter nonsense you talk, Ford! You may call yourself Cecil’s guardian till the cows come home, but a child belongs to its mother, I’d have you know.”

“Ladies know so little about the English law,” Ford murmured. “Are you really not aware, Rose, that in law a child has only one parent—its father? If Jim were alive, he would have, strictly speaking, the right to take Cecil away from you altogether, if he pleased. I’m not for an instant suggesting that he would have thought of such a thing—naturally—but I see you altogether fail to realize your position. It has been ruled, very wisely, I think, that the father of a child can appoint a guardian to act with the surviving parent, after his own death. Now a mother has no such power. She can only appoint a guardian after the death of both herself and the father. So you see that your ownership of Cecil is very limited.”

Rose had turned white.

“If that’s the law of the land, it’s enough to make one sick. But I don’t believe it.”

She did believe it, however. Ford was invariably accurate, and his manner had carried conviction with it.

“Then I strongly advise you to inform yourself on the matter. It has really seemed quite necessary for me to mention these facts that you find so unpleasant, owing to your very persistently hostile attitude to me, Rose. You appear to imagine that my attempts at directing matters in which Cecil is concerned, rank as interference pure and simple. So it seems to me better that I should state my case frankly, and make you understand that I have quite a substantial claim behind me.”

“Cecil’s grandparents——” Her voice shook so much from anger and dismay that she could not go on.

“Have nothing to do with it, strictly speaking. The issue lies between you and me, whilst Cecil is under sixteen, and I feel sure that we shall work together more amicably after my little explanation. All I ask you to remember is that our rights of guardianship”—his pause stressed the words—“are equal. Yours and mine.”

“Damn Jim!” said Rose passionately. “And damn the laws of this country, too, if they’re as unjust as all that.”

“H’sh—h’sh—h’sh——” He raised a slim hand authoritatively. “Forgive me if I say that you yourself have done, and are doing, more than any one to convince me of poor Jim’s wisdom in having appointed me joint guardian with you to his son. No woman is fit to bring up a boy entirely unaided, in my humble opinion.”

“She can bring him into the world unaided, though,” said Rose bitterly. “It looks to me like all kicks and no halfpence, for the woman, according to you.”

“Spare me a discussion on Woman’s Rights, Rose, I beg of you. The subject holds not the least interest for me, and, moreover, I feel convinced that we should differ widely in our views. All I ask you to do is to let me know when Cecil is to return to his usual routine.”

“When I please, and not a day or a minute sooner,” said Mrs. Aviolet with unconcealed temper blazing in her eyes and heightening the pitch of her always high-pitched voice.

Ford shrugged his shoulders at the ill-breeding and turned away.

They exchanged no farewells on the following day.

In Rose’s mind was an unspecified determination that she and her child would not return to Squires on the same terms as before, and vague dreams of independence and freedom possessed her as the train carried them towards London.

Cecil was openly delighted at the prospect of holidays and new surroundings. He had only once before been taken by her to London from Squires, for the purpose of visiting the dentist, and his reminiscences of the occasion, his continual questions and exclamations, pleased Rose as much as they did himself, in her sudden exhilaration of spirits.

At the terminus, they engaged a hansom cab, symbolical to Rose of “treats” that her mother had given her during her schooldays. In spite of the excited little boy beside her, she could almost have believed herself a schoolgirl again, her married life, Ceylon, and the months spent at Squires, had all become equally misty and unreal.

She wondered if Uncle Alfred would have changed, and could hardly realize that it was years since she had seen him.

“Mummie,” said Cecil, “will Uncle Alfred be nice? Will he like me?”

“If you’re good,” Rose made the traditional reply.

“Has he got a nice house?”

A faint misgiving assailed her. “It won’t be like Squires, you know, darling. Not a big house.”

“But there’ll be a garden?”

“Well—no. But I’ll take you to the park sometimes.”

“Shall I be able to play cricket there?”

“Perhaps. Look, Ces, this is the Brompton Road.”

He looked eagerly out at the lighted thoroughfare. “Isn’t it noisy, Mummie?”

“I suppose it is. I don’t know. One gets used to it pretty quickly. But Uncle Alfred lives in a smaller street than this, and it’ll be quieter there.”

The cab turned into a side street, then entered a narrower road again, and finally drew up before a corner house at the furthest end of the street.

“Goodness! Here we are!” said Rose. She fumbled excitedly for her purse. “Get out, Ces. No, wait—let me get out first, and I’ll help you. Hold the umbrella, like a good boy.”

“It’s raining, Mummie.”

“Never mind, we’ll be indoors in a minute. I’ll ring the area bell, Cabby, and someone’ll give you a hand with the trunk.”

Rose pulled vigorously at the bell handle on the iron railings that surmounted the area, but before the jangling reverberations had ceased, a man had hurried out on to the pavement, now glistening with wet.

“Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Hullo—why, it’s never Artie Millar! How are you?”

“I’m quite well, thank you, Mrs. Aviolet.”

They shook hands, and Rose said, “This is my kid—Cecil. Makes you feel time’s gone on a bit, doesn’t it?”

“I should never have guessed it but for this young gentleman,” Mr. Millar declared gallantly. “You haven’t altered in the very least.”

“Gammon!” said Mrs. Aviolet with a jovial heartiness that she had seldom permitted herself at Squires. “Give the cabby a hand with the box, will you? Is Uncle A. in the shop?”

“Upstairs. There’s a sitting-room on the first floor, now-a-days. Here’s the girl, she’ll show you the way.”

“A girl too! Whatever next?” murmured Rose.

She paid the cabman, took Cecil’s hand, and followed the small maid into the house. Cecil’s eyes widened as they went through the shop, with a counter down one side of it, glass show-cases on the other, an iron safe beyond the counter, and a match-board partition across one half of the room. Beyond this, again, was a dark and steep staircase, which they ascended.

“Why is it so dark, Mummie?”

“Hush! There’s Uncle Alfred.”

A short, stout figure loomed at the top of the stairs, and a small white imperial scrubbed Rose’s face. With Cecil, Uncle Alfred only shook hands.

“Come in, come in!”

His plump, curiously white hand, with a very large signet ring gleaming on the little finger, waved them into the room. It was not at all like any room at Squires. It was hung with a blue paper powdered all over by large silver stars, and there was a round table bearing an aspidistra in a pot on a ruffled lace mat, several books, and an enormous Bible.

A lighted gas-jet hung from the middle of the ceiling and illuminated the only two pictures, one above the mantelpiece, and the other one at the far end of the room.

Both were coloured lithographs, framed alike in black-and-gilt wood, one representing a fleshly Jewish woman drawing water at a well, the other one depicting the prophet Daniel, erect and haughty, amongst a crouching company of innocuous-looking lions.

“You haven’t changed, Uncle Alfred, not one bit.”

“Unless it’s to put on flesh, I daresay not. Well, I can’t say as much for you, Rose. You look fully your age,” said Uncle Alfred cheerfully.

“Well, I’ve been through a lot, one way and another. And my age is only twenty-five, so I don’t mind if I do look it.”

Mrs. Smith had early impressed upon Rose the advisability of “standing up to” Uncle Alfred, and her exhortation had fallen upon receptive ears. Quite instinctively, the old habit of years ago resumed its sway.

Uncle Alfred turned his attentive, shrewd eyes, light green, like a cat’s, upon little Cecil. His teeth were so prominent that the front ones jutted out far beyond his lower lip. Even when he was serious, as he usually was, and when, as now, he smiled—a rather slow, wary smile—almost the whole row was exposed.

“How old are you, young sir?”

“I’m nearly eight.” Cecil always preferred this form to the more direct declaration that he was seven years old.

“And do you know your catechism?”

“Some of it.”

“Very good. I shall examine you one of these days.”

Cecil looked rather alarmed. Miss Wade had taught him the meaning of “examination.”

“No, not now. We are going to have supper now.”

“Do you still have supper in the old basement, Uncle A.?”

“No, Rose,” said Uncle Alfred with dignity. “My servant inhabits the basement, and meals are served to me and my assistants in the dining-room.”

“Assistants?”

“I have two assistants—Artie Millar, who has served me very well indeed, and is now my salesman, and a young lad, who does the work that Artie used to do when he first came here.”

“You must have done well with the business,” said Rose, impressed.

“The Lord has prospered me—to a certain extent,” Uncle Alfred admitted. “If you will go upstairs to the room next to the store-room you will find it ready for yourself and your child. What is his name?”

“Cecil, Uncle.”

“Neither Scriptural nor historical,” said Uncle Alfred sweepingly. “Take him upstairs and wash his hands, and then we can sit at table together.”

Rose obeyed, feeling fifteen years old again.

“Oh, Ces, it’s the very room mother and I had. There’s the old picture of ‘The Soul’s Awakening’—look, Ces, isn’t it pretty?—but he’s got new furniture. I wonder who’s been in here since I slept here last.”

“Where’s the nursery, Mummie?”

“Where—oh, well, darling, you’re going to sleep in here with Mummie, you know. Won’t that be fun?”

“Yes,” said Cecil rather doubtfully. “And where shall I play, and do my lessons?”

“You’ll see to-morrow. Now wash your hands quickly—never mind a sponge; I’ll unpack afterwards, and there’s a towel here.”

“It’s a very thick towel,” said Cecil, examining the coarse cotton fibre, “and there’s no hot water.”

“Cold will do,” said Rose curtly.

For the first time it occurred to her that the months Cecil had spent at Squires were as a lifetime to his childishness. He had come to take the material comforts, to which Rose was naturally indifferent, for granted. And it appeared that to him they were not indifferent.

He was very good during supper, but the cold mutton and salad did not attract him, and the cheese that concluded the meal, Rose would not let him eat. She remembered with a pang of remorse his mug of fresh milk and his plate of biscuits, brought on a tray to the nursery at Squires every evening.

“But I’ll be able to fix it all up with Uncle A. to-morrow,” she thought.

For her own part, she felt herself to have come home again. There had hardly been a moment at Squires when she had not known constraint of spirit, and her dependence upon entertainers whom she whole-heartedly disliked had galled her incessantly.

Both Millar and the young assistant, a pale-faced youth introduced to her as Felix Menebees, had supper with them.

As soon as the meal was over, Rose took Cecil upstairs and put him to bed.

He was quiet, and seemed rather inclined to cry, but Rose effectually checked this by a promise of the Zoo, and by undertaking to come to bed herself in a very short time.

He had become accustomed to a night-light and she was obliged to leave the gas lighted—the electric light was confined to the shop downstairs—after making him promise that he would not touch it.

“I hope Uncle A. won’t find out,” Rose thought, with the old, apprehensive feeling of half-amused guilt.

In the sitting-room, Uncle Alfred was reading The Pawnbrokers’ Gazette. The boy Felix had already gone downstairs, presumably to Artie Millar’s old sleeping quarters in the shop beside the safe, and Millar himself, the pawnbroker informed his niece, now lived in lodgings at Wimbledon and only came in to business daily.

“Is he married?” Rose inquired. Certain old recollections, that did not amount to emotions, had stirred within her at the sight of her first fancy.

“He is a very God-fearing youth,” said Uncle Alfred, and after a pause sufficient to mark the significance of the word, he added solemnly, “now-a-days. He is not married.”

They exchanged hardly any other conversation, but Rose felt, with a relief as profound as it was inexplicit, that she and her strange, undemonstrative relative were mutually gratified at resuming a tie that, however severely strained by incongruities of temperament, was yet securely founded upon some essential similarity of outlook.

“Whatever else Uncle Alfred is, he’s alive,” Rose reflected. “And those Aviolets at Squires are as dead as mutton—every blessed one of them.”

IX

It appeared paradoxical that, whereas Rose had resented Squires largely on Cecil’s account, she found the familiar life in Ovington Street, agreeable to herself, resented by her little boy.

After the novelty of the first two days, he fretted and was discontented. Rose took him for walks, but when it rained he was obliged to remain in the sitting-room, with no amusement beyond a small musical box that played “Rousseau’s Dream” over and over again, and some old bound numbers of The Quiver.

He missed the garden at Squires, the animals, the rides and drives to which he had become accustomed. As his mother ruefully perceived, he even missed his governess, little Miss Wade. He was not exactly naughty, but lifeless and fretful, and Rose began to see, at first dimly and unwillingly, that her fanciful plan of resuming existence over the pawnbroker’s shop was not destined to mature.

The routine of that life was little changed from the days when she remembered it first.

Breakfast was at eight, and by nine o’clock, Millar had arrived and Felix Menebees had taken the steel door of the shop off its hinges, pushed up the steel blinds, and taken away their grooved supports to the yard at the back of the house. Every day Felix cleaned the windows, threw sawdust on the floor, and swept it up again. The endless task of cleaning and polishing the plate and silver in stock was also his, and Rose gave him the assistance that she had sometimes, in the past, given to Artie Millar. Dinner was at mid-day, and the afternoon work was almost a repetition of the morning’s. At seven the pledge-office shut, and at eight the shop.

It seemed to Rose that even Uncle Alfred’s clients were identical with those she had known years ago. The same shabby women seemed to come in, with the same small pieces of jewellery, faithfully put into pawn every Thursday morning and redeemed every Saturday afternoon. The same depressed and earnest-looking Jews brought in praying-shawls, brass candlesticks, and small brass mortars and pestles, the latter to be redeemed only in time for the Passover. Even the self-same arguments, that had once taken place between Uncle Alfred and various of his clientèle, now took place between them and Artie Millar.

“How much?”

“Thirty bob.”

“Just a moment.”

The moment was the one, or frequently the four or five, during which Millar would examine the gold ring brought by the customer, and find it, in the majority of cases, just below the market weight required for the sum asked.

“Is twenty-five shillings any good to you?”

“No. I want thirty shillings badly. The fact is, the lady friend I’m lodging with is laid up, and I’ve had to get in one or two little things, and there’s been a trouble, like, with the landlord....”

The assistant always ruthlessly cut short these interpolations that as invariably awoke in Rose an eager thrill of interested curiosity.

“Sorry, can’t let you have more than twenty-five shillings; it’s not heavy enough.”

“Could you make it twenty-seven and six?”

Impossible, to Rose, to disappoint that last humble attempt at a compromise. But Artie Millar never seemed to find any difficulty in disassociating sentiment from business.

“Can’t be done. Twenty-five is all I can manage.”

“Very well, let’s have it.”

The client always succumbed, and Artie Millar always concluded by calling out impassively:

“Felix, make out this ticket.”

He seldom asked whether or no the penny for the ticket were forthcoming. His experienced eye told him, apparently, whether it would be produced, or, without words, must be deducted from the money handed over the counter in exchange for the trinket.

Rose felt a little surprised sometimes, recalling her early affair with Millar. Her view of him was now singularly devoid of glamour, and she wondered at the complete absence of the magnetic attraction that each had once had for the other.

“It was youth, I suppose,” she told herself rather wistfully.

It had been youth, also, that had caused her to fall in love with graceless Jim Aviolet, and give herself to him in marriage.

“As bad a day’s work as ever I did in my life,” Rose now summed up that episode to herself with a sigh, adding always with remorseful loyalty, “except for Ces.”

She had Cecil with her all day now, and at night he slept in a cot drawn across the foot of her bed. She felt him to be hers again, as she had never felt him so at Squires, and rejoiced fiercely.

Nevertheless it dawned upon her slowly, but certainly, that Cecil was neither as well nor as happy as he had been at Squires.

Healthy he had always been, but he was not a robust child, and in rather less than a week the difference in diet, the cramped accommodation, and, perhaps, most of all, the absence of country air and exercise, had taken some of the colour from his face and drawn dark lines beneath his eyes.

“Grandmama would say I was selfish, fast enough, if she saw him now, and I’m not sure she’d be so far out as she generally is, either,” Rose reflected desperately.

She consulted Uncle Alfred.

“About how I’m to live, Uncle,” she began abruptly. “What would you say would be a good way for me making money?”

“I thought your husband’s family were providing for you?”

“I mean, supposing I didn’t want them to go on providing for me.”

“Why should I suppose you wishful of casting aside that which the Lord has raised up for the widow and the orphan? Be thankful for their assistance, and do nothing to forfeit it, is my advice to you.”

The Scriptural turns of phrase employed by Mr. Smith rarely interfered with the eminent practicalness of his point of view.

“You don’t know what the life is like, at that place. I’d go mad if I had to go on there year after year. They never do anything but go for walks in the mud and talk about their beastly gardens and their horrid animals.”

“Fashionable folk are very godless, I understand,” said Uncle Alfred.

“I wouldn’t so much mind their being godless—and they aren’t, all—my mother-in-law is as ‘pi’ as can be—but they all seem to me to be half alive. There’s a girl there that they all seem dotty about—I daresay she’ll marry Ford one of these days. Well, I give you my word, Uncle, she’s a perfect fool. She can mess about with dogs and things, and shoot, and they all think she’s clever, just because of that. It shows you what they’re like, doesn’t it?”

“You need not adapt yourself to their standards,” Uncle Alfred said, uncompromising rather than tactful. “But I presume that when your boy once goes to school you will make your home elsewhere.”

“I haven’t made up my mind about Cecil going to school.”

“It is your duty to ensure the advantages of a good education for him, Rose. Did I understand that there is a governess engaged especially for him?”

“Yes. The best of everything is their motto, I will say that for them.”

“H’m. Are they interested in antiques—china and the like?”

“They’ve got more antiques in the house, and have had for about a thousand years, than goes through the shop in a twelvemonth,” returned Rose with candour.

“You can take some catalogues with you when you go back,” said her uncle, unmoved.

“All right. If I do go back.”

“If?”

“Uncle, I do want to bring up Cecil my own way, and I’ve been wondering if him and me need go back to Squires at all.”

“My dear niece, listen to me. You are flying in the face of Providence when you suggest quarrelling with those who are prepared to give your child all the advantages to which he is entitled, but which you yourself are not in a position to bestow upon him. Wealth is dross compared to the riches of the Spirit, and the highest in the land are but as the beasts of the field that perish, if they know not Christ,” said Uncle Alfred with great rapidity, “but you should look upon all these things as being means to an end. You can do a great deal for others with riches at your command.”

His eyes glistened covetously, and Rose remembered her mother’s tolerant verdict that Uncle Alfred was always on the near side, unless it was for a Foreign Mission.

“Haven’t they offered to send Cecil to a good school?”

“Not so much offered, as taken it for granted that I’d want him to go.”

“It is most handsome—most handsome. I consider you a very fortunate woman, Rose. And if, when the boy has gone to school, you wish to return to your old quarters here, I am perfectly prepared to come to an arrangement with you.”

“I’m sure it’s very kind of you, Uncle Alfred, but the fact is, I’m not keen on Ces going to any of their precious schools. What I’m wondering is if him and me couldn’t get off somewhere on our own, and if the Aviolets get their monkey up and cut off my allowance, what I can do to earn enough money for us both.”

“Nothing,” said Uncle Alfred crisply. “Nothing. Untrained young women with no especial aptitude can only earn their living in one profession, and that is not one which I could pollute your ears by mentioning.”

“Goodness, Uncle A., you do pass the most far-fetched remarks,” his niece exclaimed, stifling a laugh.

“Let me hear no more nonsense as to your husband’s relations. God is not mocked, and it would be neither more nor less than deliberate mockery to reject the provision that He has obviously made for you and your child. You must bow to His decrees, and let me tell you that the task, in your case, should be a particularly easy one.”

There was a tone of finality about Uncle Alfred’s delivery of his exordium that Rose knew of old.

His verdict, once given, would never be recalled.

“However, thank goodness, I know Uncle A.,” his niece reflected. “His bark’s worse than his bite, and he’d keep us here, worst come to the worst, if I could scrape up money for our board. Only what can I do with Cecil?”

When she had been away for nearly a fortnight, a letter came from Squires. The sight of the thick blue-grey notepaper, with the stamped address on the corner, brought the atmosphere of the place for an instant into the crowded, untidy bedroom, full of cheap and ugly furniture, where Rose stood and read it.

My dear Rose,

I had hoped to hear from you before this. Could you let me know what day you and Cecil are returning, as I must write to Miss Wade?

I hope the boy is well, and not giving you too much trouble, with no one to relieve you of him. We quite miss him here, and I do not like to think of him in London fogs, which I see by the papers are beginning now. Quite fine weather here since you left, though not much sun, and the poor garden is beginning to look dull.

Yours affectionately, Catherine Aviolet.

P. S. Ford has been down to Hurst, the preparatory school we thought of for Cecil, and was very favourably impressed. He is anxious to talk it all over with you.

Rose was roused to one of her sudden, vehement furies.

“That settles it! I won’t go back there, nor let Cecil either.”

She dashed into the shop, where Felix Menebees had just put up the shutters.

“Is Mr. Millar there?”

“Here, Mrs. Aviolet.”

“I say, I want to ask you something. Is it true that a person—a child’s guardian—has equal rights with the child’s mother?”

“In what respect, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Any respect,” said Rose impatiently. “If he’s appointed by the child’s father’s will, I mean.”

“Felix, bring me Whittaker’s Almanac,” commanded Millar.

“Oh, will it be there? I never thought of that. It might tell me a lot of things. May I have it?”

“Certainly. If I can be of any assistance——?”

“No, no, I know you’re busy.”

Rose snatched the volume from the hands of Felix Menebees and took it away.

That night she asked Cecil, who was awake and restless when she came to bed:

“Wouldn’t you like to come right away with Mummie somewhere?”

“Away from here?” Cecil asked eagerly. “I’d like to, Mummie. It’s dull here, isn’t it?”

“Poor darling! But you did enjoy the Zoo, and going on the tops of the ’buses, you know.”

“Those were treats,” Cecil observed shrewdly. “Treats are always fun, but when it isn’t a treat day, I don’t like London, Mummie. I’d rather be at home again.”

She realized that by “home” he meant Squires, and that Squires, though she felt it hostile, herself, had been home to his forbears for many generations. She stifled within herself a lurking remorsefulness.

“Wouldn’t it be fun if you and I went in a ship together, to a very nice country place—real country—and stayed there for a bit?”

“Ceylon?” inquired Cecil in a puzzled voice.

“No, no, not as far as that. Perhaps France, or somewhere like that.”

“But aren’t we going back to Squires?”

“I don’t know, lovey.”

“But I want to ride again, and to play cricket. And I want to go to school, where that little boy is who bowls so well.”

Rose realized with dismay the odd tenacity of a child’s memory.

Cecil had begun to cry.

“I don’t like London any more.”

“I’m going to take you away from London, my precious ducky, truly I am.”

“Back to Squires?” sobbed Cecil.

“I don’t know. Don’t cry, lovey. Don’t you feel well?”

She kissed and petted him with vehement affection and secret anxiety at his unwonted fretfulness.

Long after he had fallen asleep, Rose lay wide awake, revolving in her own mind Family Herald schemes for taking Cecil abroad and living there with him under her maiden name, while she earned money for them both by some unspecified means that refused persistently to materialize into a concrete probability.

She could not make up her mind to answer Lady Aviolet’s letter next day, and instead of doing so, took Cecil to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works.

The little boy was wildly excited, and Rose, herself childishly delighted at his pleasure, let him remain there until it was almost closing time.

“We shall be late for supper, Ces. I hope we get a ’bus quickly.”

Mrs. Smith’s training had not led Rose to look lightly upon the taking of cabs.

They came out into Baker Street to find that a thick London fog had enveloped everything.

“Lord! Catch hold of my hand, Ces,” said his mother, dismayed. “This is the pea-soup variety and no mistake. You could cut it with a knife.”

“Why are there no lights? Oh, doesn’t it smell funny! What’s that bell?” chattered Cecil.

Rose paid scant attention to his excitement, beyond gripping him more firmly by the hand.

“I know there’s a policeman at the crossing,” she muttered.

It took them ten minutes to reach the policeman, and a very great deal longer to obey his injunctions and return to Ovington Street by Underground Railway.

Cecil was coughing before they arrived, and that night, for the first time, had a mild attack of croup.

Rose was terrified.

She had never seen croup before, had not the least idea of what to do, and frantically tore downstairs in her dressing-gown in search of Uncle Alfred’s old-fashioned volume of “The Doctor in the Home.”

It was Felix Menebees who turned up the page for her, as soon as he understood why Mrs. Aviolet was in the shop in the middle of the night.

“I’ll find it, and I’ll get what’s wanted. You go back to him,” said the boy, vigorously licking his thumb in order to turn the pages faster.

He heated water for her, and carried it upstairs, and together they plunged little, gasping Cecil into the bath, and watched his terrified face slowly lose its blueish tinge and his laboured breathing gradually become natural.

“He’s better now, Mrs. Aviolet,” said Felix consolingly. “I’ll run out and get the doctor for you, though, if you like.”

“You are a brick. I’ll never forget it, never! Look, he’ll be asleep directly. I don’t think we need have the doctor now, though I’ll have to send for him to-morrow. Go back and get some sleep, Felix. You’ve been so kind and such a help.”

“Don’t mention it, Mrs. Aviolet,” said Felix politely.

He went back to his mattress beside the safe.

Rose sat by the side of the cot where Cecil, still rolled in his dressing-gown under the sheet and blankets, lay asleep against his pillow.

Her yellow hair, thick and straight, kept on falling across her forehead, and she pushed it back, absently, again and again.

Her eyes were fixed upon the child, her thoughts, in her inexperience, full of the terror of losing him.

“He wasn’t ever ill at Squires ... and if he had been, there’d have been Dr. Lucian, and no difficulty about hot water, either, whatever time of night.... Felix was good! The idea of a lad like him getting the mustard for the bath, and helping me, and everything. But if he hadn’t been there, I’d have been properly done—I bet Uncle A. wouldn’t be any more use than a poke in the eye with a dirty stick, and I suppose the girl sleeps like the dead, the same as all servants. That old Dawson would have come, though, at Squires ... and they’d have had ipecacuanha in the house, for certain, and anything one wanted. A fire in his room, most likely, on a night like this. And Cecil was happier there than he is here!”

Tears filled her eyes.

“If I go back, they’ll send him to one of their schools, and he isn’t fit for it—he isn’t fit for it.”

That impassioned conviction was still there, as vehemently as on the night when she had confronted the Aviolets in the drawing-room after dinner, and had made her scene. But Cecil’s illness, and his wistful and unconscious resignation to the lack of those material comforts of which Squires was so prodigal, caused Rose to suffer a new misery of uncertainty.

In the morning, she asked Felix to go for the doctor.

“I’ll stop on my way to fetch the milk, Mrs. Aviolet. How is he?”

“All right, thank goodness. Only just a little bit hoarse, and coughing the tiniest bit. It was all that rotten fog; he isn’t a bit delicate really, and he’s never had croup in his life before.”

She repeated this to the doctor when he came, a common, overworked little man, who barely listened to her.

“All right, all right. He may get another attack about the same time to-night—or he may not. If he does, make him sick—that’ll cut it short. Croup isn’t dangerous, so you needn’t be frightened. Keep him indoors while this weather lasts.”

“In bed?”

“What for? He’s all right, you know. These attacks are nasty while they last, but there’s nothing to make a fuss about. Good-morning, Mrs.—er—H’m.”

The doctor hurried away, leaving Rose to assimilate the difference between Mrs. Jim Aviolet sending for the doctor to come to Squires, and Mrs.—er—H’m summoning medical assistance to the bedroom over the pawnbroker’s shop in Ovington Street.

“I’ve told the girl that she may light the gas-fire in the sitting-room,” Uncle Alfred announced to her later, “so the little chap can go down there; and I’ve put out Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ to amuse him.”

“Thank you very much, Uncle,” said Rose, sincerely grateful.

It was Wednesday, when the shop closed early, and Felix Menebees came upstairs after dinner and said that he would play Halma with Cecil. He blushed all over his pale, spectacled face when Rose thanked him ardently.

“It’s nothing, Mrs. Aviolet. Pleased to do it, I’m sure,” he murmured.

“Well, I’ll go out for a bit. I want some things from the chemist. That doctor seemed to think the croup might come on again to-night, and I’m not going to be taken unawares again, if I know it.”

She went out into the damp, foggy afternoon, very raw and cold.

Her mind misgave her more and more as she thought of writing to Lady Aviolet, announcing that she and Cecil would not return to Squires. How could she cope with the economic problem that might ensue?

The streets seemed to be crowded with shoppers, hurrying, as she herself was hurrying, many of the women holding muffs against their cold faces, as though to protect themselves from the foulness of the atmosphere.

“Mrs. Aviolet!”

Rose turned her head sharply and confronted Lord Charlesbury.

“Oh, I am surprised to see you!” she cried, loudly and naïvely. “I didn’t know you were in London.”

“Then I had the advantage of you, for I saw your brother-in-law yesterday, and he told me you were here. Which way are you going?”

“Only as far as the chemist at the corner there, and then straight back home.”

“It’s beastly weather, isn’t it?” he agreed. “May I come with you?”

“Oh, do,” said Rose.

She was rather surprised at the extent of her own pleasure in the meeting. But he, also, had looked pleased.

Besides, it was nice to walk beside a man again, and have the swing-door of the chemist’s shop pushed open for one, and one’s parcel taken charge of as a matter of course.

“Won’t you let me take you somewhere for some tea? It’s such a dismal afternoon, do take pity on me and cheer me up.”

“Aren’t you busy?”

“My business is done, and I have an hour or more before I need think of catching my train. If you’ve no other engagement yourself——”

“Oh, no. I want to get back to Cecil, but he’ll be all right for a little while. I’d like to come.”

“I’m so glad.” His voice really did sound glad. “Now, where would you like to go?”

“There’s an A.B.C. shop not far from here,” Rose suggested.

“That would be very nice. Or suppose we go to that place in Bond Street—Verreys? Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Then do let me take you there. It’s really quite a nice place.”

He raised his stick for an instant, and a hansom drew up beside the kerb. Rose involuntarily recollected the impassioned gesticulations and shrill whistling with which cabs, when rendered inevitable on account of luggage, were summoned to the door by Uncle Alfred.

“Have you heard from Squires lately?”

“I had a letter from my mother-in-law a few days ago, asking when me and Ces were going back there. And I haven’t answered it yet, either.”

A sigh lifted her breast as she remembered the necessity for answering that letter.

Lord Charlesbury’s kind, grave eyes looked at her with their interested gaze. She suddenly felt that it would be a relief to tell him of her perplexity.

When they were seated at the small table in the warm, lighted restaurant, she did so.

“Look here, I want to tell you something. I’ve practically made up my mind—at least I had till yesterday—not to go back to Squires at all.”

Charlesbury put up his eyeglass with a quick gesture that seemed to indicate that he was startled, but made no reply.

“You’ve seen me there, me and Ces—you know very well we don’t fit in there,” she said defiantly.

“Forgive me if I say that I think that could be put right easily enough, if you were willing to try,” he said gently. “And I’m sure your boy is happy there.”

Rose winced. “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” she curtly admitted. “That’s just what’s threatening to upset my apple-cart. Ces was happy there, in spite of that silly ass of a Wade, and he was well and strong there. He’s been ill since I’ve had him up here. Not really ill, you know, but he had croup last night and he doesn’t look like the same kid.”

“Poor little chap! I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he’s getting better.”

“The croup is better—at least, unless he gets it again to-night. But I don’t think London suits him like the country.”

“Probably not. The country is the place for kiddies, isn’t it, and London is no great catch for any one at this time of year.”

Their tea was brought to them, and Rose poured it out, carefully putting milk into the bottom of each cup first.

“Sugar?”

“No, thanks.”

She dropped two lumps into her own cup and stirred them round and round with her teaspoon, absently, while she went on talking.

“I did think of perhaps taking Ces abroad with me somewhere. One can live awfully cheaply at some of those French places, I believe.”

Lord Charlesbury reflectively answered, “I see,” but it was obvious enough that he was puzzled. At last he said:

“D’you know, I can’t help feeling that there’s something at the back of your mind that I haven’t quite grasped. I’m a stupid fellow, Mrs. Aviolet, and you must help me. What’s the idea of leaving England?”

“I didn’t mean to give any one my address. I don’t want Ford to have anything to do with Cecil’s bringing up.”

“But isn’t he his guardian?”

“Yes,” said Rose viciously. “Thanks to Jim’s absurd will, he is. But isn’t there something called the Law of Extradition—I found it in Whittaker’s Almanac—that would prevent him doing anything in a foreign country? I didn’t understand it all, but it gave me the idea of going abroad.”

“I see,” said Charlesbury again, and passed his hand across his mouth.

“No, I don’t think the Laws of Extradition would really help you very much. For one thing, the legal guardian of a minor has a certain right to determine the minor’s place of residence, and I don’t think Ford Aviolet would care about having your little boy brought up in France. In fact, if you think it over I’m almost sure you won’t really care about the idea yourself, you know. Cecil is English, after all. Don’t you really think it would be better for him to grow up in his own country?”

“Of course I do!” she cried. “But I’ve told you before—and I’ve told them, too—that Cecil isn’t fit for the ordinary English public-school education.”

“I remember.”

Charlesbury remained silent, his face reflective.

Rose stared at him hopefully, half expecting that he would present some hitherto undreamed-of solution to her problem.

“Is there any reason to decide that question of the public school at all, at present? You told me at Squires that it wasn’t the general principles of the public-school system that you disliked, but its application in Cecil’s particular case. Isn’t that so?”

She nodded vehemently.

“Why not wait and see how the boy gets on? Why, it’s at least four years and a half before he could enter any public school. Let Ford put his name down for half a dozen places if he likes, and reserve to yourself the right of re-opening the whole question by the time the boy is old enough for it to be thought of seriously. He may have altered in all sorts of respects by that time.”

“And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile,” said Charlesbury, smiling at her, “let him go back to Squires and get thoroughly strong and healthy. A sound mind in a sound body, you know.... I know you’ll put up with a possibly uncongenial atmosphere for yourself, if it’s for his sake.”

“But that Wade woman won’t stay on for ever. She thinks she’s getting him ready for school, as it is.”

“I hope she is.”

Rose made a quick, protesting movement.

“Don’t be vexed with me,” he said, smiling. “I know you won’t think me impertinent, if I say that I do so want you to go and have a look at Hurst for yourself, one day. Where my boy Hugh is, you know. I think you’d like the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. Lambert. A visit won’t commit you to anything at all, and I think you’d be struck by the amount of individual attention that each boy gets. They’re only little fellows, there, after all, and not more than fifty of them, all told. Mr. Lambert makes a point of their manners and morals, as well as their health. His own boy is in the school, too.”

“I might perhaps go and see the place,” said Rose slowly. “But don’t think for a minute that I’m likely to change about my Cecil. I’m not. As long as he’s what he is, I’m certain he isn’t fit for school.”

“He’s such a little fellow, and they alter so quickly. The faults that trouble you so much now will probably disappear as he grows older and wiser. And do, please, realize that they do really want to do the best thing for him at Squires. Even if they are rather slow, and very conservative.”

“Perhaps the old people do. It isn’t their fault if they’re stupid. But Ford—oh, he’s different!”

Charlesbury smiled at her.

“I don’t think you’ll find Ford nearly so difficult when you get back to Squires.”

She noticed that he was taking her return for granted, but it did not vex her.

“The fact is, I heard a piece of news from him yesterday. They’re probably waiting to tell you till they see you—but I’m going to forestall them, as I’m an old friend, and they must forgive me. Ford Aviolet is going to be married.”

X

Rose opened her brown eyes very wide. “The great Ford! I can guess who it is, can’t I?”

“I expect so,” said Charlesbury, smiling.

“The Grierson-Amberly girl? I thought so. Aren’t the Aviolets delighted about it?”

“I think they are. She’s a distant cousin, you know, and it’s very suitable in every way. I know Lady Aviolet has been hoping for something of the kind; I believe they’ve been rather afraid that Ford would never marry.”

“I suppose they thought no one would ever be good enough for him. I’m certain he thought so himself.”

Lord Charlesbury shook his head. “I wish I knew why you’re so hard on my friend Ford. I grant you that he’s been spoilt, and he has some irritating mannerisms, but he’s all right if you take him the right way. And he has brains, too, which ought to appeal to you.”

Rose smiled frankly at the implied compliment to herself.

“I’m not sure, though, that that isn’t the most sickening thing of all, about Ford. He has got brains. Time and again he could have explained what I really meant about Cecil, for instance, to the old people—and he just didn’t. He could have made them understand things—he’s educated, and I know very well I’m not,” said Rose calmly, “but he never helped me out—not once. The night after you left Squires, them and me had a bit of a flare-up. At least, I was frantic. They were as calm as could be, just thinking what a pity it was I should be so common. I was trying to tell them why I wouldn’t let Ces go to school, but they hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was driving at. They couldn’t understand that a thing which had always been a success in a general way might fail in a particular case. When I tried to explain, they just thought it was because I didn’t know anything about public schools, or because I spoilt Ces, and thought him delicate. Talking to them was like trying to describe a colour to people who’ve been born blind. But not Ford. He understood. He could have made the others see what I meant, even if they hadn’t agreed with me. But he didn’t. Ford hates me.”

“Why should he hate you?”

“I think,” said Rose Aviolet slowly, “that it’s because I’m alive, and Ford isn’t. He can’t get away from traditions. I think he tried to, especially when he went out to South Africa to fight, but he just couldn’t.”

Charlesbury looked keenly at her. “Do you know that you’re something of a psychologist, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“I don’t think I know what a psychologist is, exactly. But that’s what I think about Ford. He just doesn’t fit in. He is a tiny bit different, if you come to think of it—he’s clever, and he likes books, and china, and he reads. And doesn’t he say he’s a Socialist? He breaks away from the Aviolet tradition in those sort of ways, doesn’t he? But what I feel is, that he’s holding on to it with the other hand all the time too. He wants to be alive, but he wants to belong to Squires as well.”

“And the two don’t square. I see,” said Charlesbury reflectively.

“Some people could make them square. You could,” she returned crudely. “But it wants somebody stronger than Ford to do it, and I think he knows it. He’s sort of afraid, isn’t he?”

“That’s, as you say, tradition—holding him back all the time. Perhaps you’re right, and he hasn’t the courage of his emotions.”

“That’s just what I meant,” Rose assented admiringly, “only I couldn’t have described it like that. He hasn’t got the courage of his emotions. And I think, myself, that he’s jealous, downright jealous, because he knows that I have.”

“The things that matter, to you, do matter so very much?”

She nodded. “Ford knows that he doesn’t care about anything in the world one quarter as much as I care about Cecil’s little finger. And I think he wants to care—he wants to come alive.”

“Won’t Diana Grierson-Amberly help him to come alive, now?”

Rose looked at him, as though to see if he were really in earnest, and then uttered a derisive laugh.

“He’ll go down among the dead men for ever and ever now,” she asserted sweepingly. “But they’ll have Aviolet babies, and one of them will cut out my Cecil, thank goodness, and carry on the Squires traditions.”

“You don’t want Squires for your boy?”

“Part of me does, perhaps,” she confessed. “When I see how safe and solid it all is, you know, and when I think of what it means to be poor, and always hard up, and more or less in debt. But I know all the time, really, that Ces would never belong. Not altogether. After all, he’s half Smith. And if you don’t belong, well, it’s like Ford. You’re shamming and struggling and captive, all at the same time. And that’s awful.”

“You are very wise,” said Charlesbury slowly.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Indeed, I’m not. But I do want you, very much, to be wiser still. Won’t you, for Cecil’s sake, compromise, and come back to Squires for a little while?”

“And have them badger me about school again?”

“I don’t think they will. Besides, you know,” he smiled at her, “I’m still secretly hoping that Hurst and Mrs. Lambert will make a difference to your views. You see, supposing Cecil went there for a term or two, it would be simply experiment. It need not commit you to sending him to a public school later on. It may, even, prove to the Aviolets that your idea is correct, and Cecil is unsuited to school-life altogether. Hurst would be the test.”

“It sounds to me like the thin end of the wedge,” said Rose bluntly. “But, at least, you do see my point of view, and don’t talk as if I were a fool that just couldn’t face parting with her darling.”

“I know very well that you only want what will be best for the boy in the long run,” said Charlesbury gravely.

“That’s all. And it isn’t only the long run. It’s now, too. He isn’t well and happy like he was there. I never realized the difference that fresh air, and plenty of room, and the best of everything can make to a kid.”

“It does make a difference,” Charlesbury said levelly. “And moral fitness depends a great deal on physical fitness, doesn’t it, so that one wants to keep them up to the mark, from every point of view.”

Rose gazed at him, her honest, startled eyes full of a new apprehension.

“You mean that it mayn’t even be the best thing for his—his character, to take him away from Squires? Oh, I never thought of that.”

Charlesbury let her assimilate it in silence, her strong, capable hand twisting the wedding-ring on her big, straight-cut finger.

At last she lifted her head. “Perhaps you’re right. And, anyway, I don’t know how I can stand him being ill, and not comfortable. Though mind you,” she added with sudden warmth, “my Uncle Alfred that I’m with, he’s as kind as ever he can be, and had a fire lit on purpose for Ces—and he’s on the near side, is Uncle A., so it means something, coming from him. But, of course, his house isn’t run like Squires is, not by long chalks, and there’s no use pretending it is.”

“Very few houses are as comfortable as Squires. And I know Lady Aviolet looks forward to having Cecil there again. She told me so.”

“They think I’m coming back all right?”

“Certainly they do. I don’t think it’s ever entered their minds that you should do anything else.”

Rose laughed in a rather shame-faced manner. “Perhaps that’s as well. No one likes eating humble pie, now, do they? I’d just as soon they didn’t know I thought of not coming back at all—if I do go back, that is.”

“I think you mean ‘When I do go back,’ don’t you?” said Charlesbury with his friendly smile. “Why not let me send off a telegram for you, saying you’ll be back by the three o’clock train to-morrow? I don’t mind betting you’ll find sunshine in the country.”

“Wouldn’t that be good for Ces!” she murmured aloud wistfully. “Well, I suppose I’ll do it. One thing is, they’ll be too busy about Ford to think much about me.”

“Of course they will. A wedding is always an excitement.”

“I shouldn’t think my in-laws could ever get excited about anything, any more than a couple of old cod-fish,” said Mrs. Aviolet nonchalantly. “But it’ll be something to talk about, besides Cecil’s going to school and that everlasting old garden. I must get back now to Cecil,” she added abruptly.

Lord Charlesbury asked for his bill, and paid it, in spite of an ungracefully worded attempt from Rose to make herself responsible for her own share.

He took her to Ovington Street in a hansom, and they sent a telegram, on the way, to Lady Aviolet, to announce Rose’s return.

“Good-bye,” said Rose, at the door of the pawnshop. “It’s early closing to-day. I’m going in by the area. Thank you for the tea.”

“I’m so glad to have seen you. Thank you for giving me one of the pleasantest afternoons that I’ve spent for a long while.”

“I haven’t made you late for your train, have I?” she cried in sudden alarm.

“No, there’s plenty of time. I shall keep this fellow on and go straight to the station. I hope the little chap will be all right to-night, and I shall think of you both in the country to-morrow. Good-bye.”

Rose ran upstairs, astonished at finding herself committed to an immediate return to Squires, and yet surprisingly unperturbed at the prospect.

She found Cecil entertaining Felix Menebees with stories of his life in Ceylon, to which she did not allow herself to pay conscious attention. The little boy was not coughing, but he looked pale and languid, and her heart contracted strangely at his sudden flush of joy when she told him that they would go back to the country next day.

“Oh, Mrs. Aviolet!” said Felix Menebees, and looked at her in dismay through his spectacles.

“It’ll be the best thing to put him right, won’t it?” Rose said. “And we’re really only supposed to be here on a visit, you know. But we shall be back again one of these days, I expect.”

She had only the vaguest of projects in her mind, besides the desire to cheer the disconsolate Felix, but Cecil, with one of the sudden, uncanny intuitions of childhood, put the idea into words for her.

“Mummie’ll come here when I’ve been sent to school, Felix. And perhaps I’ll spend some of my holidays here, and tell you all about my school.”

“You know nothing about it,” cried his mother abruptly. “Come on, lovey, say good-night to Felix and thank him for being so kind to you.”

She hurried him upstairs to bed.

At supper, Uncle Alfred learned that his guests were proposing to leave him on the morrow.

“You are very impetuous, Rose,” he remarked with displeasure. “Why not have warned me of your intentions earlier? The girl, by my instructions, has ordered butcher’s meat for to-morrow, entirely on your child’s account.”

Rose entered whole-heartedly into this practical objection to her scheme.

“If it hasn’t been delivered yet, couldn’t we stop it?”

“I will speak to the girl.”

“It isn’t that we haven’t been happy, as you very well know, Uncle Alfred. But I daresay the country will get rid of Cecil’s cough before it’s got a hold on him, so to speak, and they’re expecting us back at Squires.”

“If you’ve told them you’re coming to-morrow, you must abide by it,” Uncle Alfred declared gloomily. “It’s worse than useless to have extra food ordered in twice over. Are they expecting you?”

“Yes, they are.”

Rose dared not admit to the telegram. The sight of a telegram was not infrequent at Squires, but in Ovington Street, a telegram signified a first cause of considerable magnitude. She knew that Uncle Alfred would have considered that a post-card could sufficiently announce the date and hour of her arrival, and in her heart, Rose agreed with him. The telegram had been Lord Charlesbury’s doing, like so much else.

Cecil had no return of croup, and the next day they left the rooms over the pawnshop.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Aviolet,” said Felix Menebees wistfully. “I hope the country will do Cecil a great deal of good.”

“Good-bye, Felix. Thank you for what you did that night he was ill. I’ll never forget it. I expect you’ll see us here one of these days again.”

Rose heartily shook the pale youth’s hand.

Her farewell to Artie Millar, in whom she had long ceased to be interested, was tepid by comparison. Uncle Alfred addressed his parting speech to his guests from the top of the stairs, where he had received them a fortnight earlier.

“Good-bye to you, Rose, good-bye to you, my little fellow. You are extremely fortunate in having one of the stately homes of England, as the poet calls them, thus thrown open to you. I feel sure,” said Uncle Alfred, with a doubting eye fixed upon his niece, “I feel certain that you appreciate your good fortune to the full. And I am equally sure, my dear niece, if you will allow an old man to speak a word in season, that you will remember from Whom all blessings flow. Take no credit unto yourself for those things which are Cæsar’s. And remember that I am prepared to enter into an arrangement with you, Rose, at any time, should you wish to return here when your boy has gone to school.”

Rose quite understood that this was the nearest approach to a cordial invitation that Uncle Alfred would permit himself, and enough of his blood ran in her own veins for her to take the suggested “arrangement” in the matter-of-course spirit in which he proposed it.

She said, “Thanks very much indeed, Uncle,” in an affectionate way, kissed him resoundingly, and ran downstairs.

Cecil was in high spirits. “Shall I ride the pony again, Mummie, and will Uncle Ford let me carry the rabbits for him when he’s been shooting?”

“I daresay, darling.”

“Will Miss Wade be there?”

“Yes. Are you glad?”

“I’ll be able to tell her all about London,” said Cecil reflectively. “I don’t think she knows much about London, Mummie.”

As the train took them further away from the city, the air lightened, and they presently ran into clear autumn sunshine.

At the end of the journey, the carriage from Squires was awaiting them.

Their return, which Rose looked upon as a milestone, roused no excitement at Squires.

“How are you, my dear?” said Lady Aviolet placidly, and gently bumped Rose’s face with her own. She kissed her grandson with more cordiality, remarked that he was looking pale, and told him that Miss Wade was returning from her holiday the next day.

“And you’ll have to work hard at your lessons, Cecil, to make up for your time away.”

“I went to Madam Tussawds in London,” Cecil announced.

“Mme. Tussaud,” said Lady Aviolet.

“Mummie says Tussawd.”

“Don’t answer back, Cecil, it’s a bad habit. Ring the bell for the hot water, and we’ll have tea.”

The silver kettle and the hot scones, the cut bread-and-butter and the various cakes, seemed oddly elaborate after Ovington Street.

“What a good tea!” said little Cecil.

Neither Ford nor Sir Thomas was present.

“We have a piece of news for you, Rose,” her mother-in-law presently said, when Cecil had been sent away in Dawson’s charge to the nursery.

“I think I know already.”

“Indeed?”

“I met Lord Charlesbury yesterday, and he told me—about Ford, isn’t it?”

“Did you meet Laurence Charlesbury?”

“Yes. I had tea with him.”

To her own disgust, Rose suddenly heard her voice becoming loud and defiant.

“Oh, yes—how nice! Where did you meet?”

“In the Brompton Road, and we went to a place in Bond Street. He told me that Ford is engaged to be married.”

“Yes, my dear, to Diana. Sir Thomas and I are very pleased about it. Let me give you another cup of tea?”

“No, thanks. Do tell me how it all happened.”

Rose, however much she might dislike Ford, and however cheaply she might hold Diana, was quite incapable of being anything but thrilled and excited over every detail concerning an engagement.

“How it happened?” Lady Aviolet repeated with a certain blankness.

“When did he propose to her and where, and has he given her a ring yet?” Rose earnestly inquired.

Lady Aviolet laughed gently. “How very nice of you to be so much interested in them!”

Her voice held the intonation that generally accompanies the words, “How very foolish of you ...” but she looked at Rose with her usual bleakly kind obtuseness of gaze.

“I believe, since you want so much to hear details, that they settled it in the train, last Saturday. Ford had been to see a man on business, and on his way back he met Diana at the Junction. She was travelling home—with her maid, of course—from some visit or other, and they got into the same train.”

“Is she—are they—does she—are they very much in love?” Rose blurted out, intensely curious.

“They’ve known one another all their lives, you know. Ford has always been very devoted to her, and I’m sure she is to him. Diana is such a thoroughly nice girl.”

“Has he been in love with her long?”

“I really couldn’t tell you, my dear. One always felt that if Ford did ask any girl to marry him, it would probably be Diana. But two or three men have very much wanted to marry her, and I’ve sometimes been afraid that Ford might delay too long.”

“Have they really?”

Rose’s voice held all the astonishment that she invariably experienced at each allusion to the attractions of Miss Grierson-Amberly.

“She could have made a most excellent marriage the year she came out. But her mother, of course, would never have dreamt of persuading her in any way, though I believe she was disappointed at the time. But they’re delighted about this, now, and so all is very well.”

“When are they going to be married?”

“Well, that’s hardly settled yet. Diana is coming to stay here for a little while, we hope, next month, and no doubt they’ll arrange it then. I hope it may be some time in the spring or early summer.”

“I do love weddings,” said Rose emphatically.

“Do you, my dear?” Lady Aviolet’s voice, though amiable, displayed not the least interest in Rose’s gushing enthusiasms.

“There will be a good deal of business to be settled before their wedding takes place, quite apart from Diana’s preparations, and her trousseau and things. Of course, in a sense, this alters your little Cecil’s prospects, but I think you can trust Ford to see that his interests are considered in every possible way.”

“I only hope to goodness,” said Rose fervently, “that Ford and Diana will have half a dozen kids of their own.”

A certain quality of taken-abackness in the silence that ensued conveyed to Rose that her aspirations might be open to the accusation of a lack of delicacy.

With unwonted discretion, she did not endeavour to rectify the mistake by volubly explaining it.

She found, to her surprise, that her stay in London had the effect of rendering Squires more bearable to her. She appreciated anew the material comfort of the big, luxurious house, and was happy when she saw Cecil regaining his colour and his appetite.

Ford was very often away, sometimes in London on business connected with his marriage, and sometimes at Diana’s home on the other side of the county.

He received Rose’s congratulations, which were curt, with his habitual equanimity, and added, after thanking her:

“You need not be afraid that Cecil’s interests will be allowed to suffer by this, Rose.”

“I wasn’t.”

“His welfare still remains one of my first responsibilities,” said her brother-in-law suavely.

She made no answer.

A little later on, Diana Grierson-Amberly came to stay at Squires.

She was friendly to Rose, very kind to Cecil, deferentially affectionate to Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet—but then she had been all of these things before. Equally, her manner towards Ford was almost unaltered.

Her nearest approach to an endearment was “My dear old boy,” and she displayed neither blush nor tremor at the mild, stereotyped jokes about engaged couples in which her future father-in-law occasionally indulged.

To Diana, it was evidently all relegated to the same class as that which she cheerfully and pleasantly hailed as “chaff.”

She seemed amused, if also faintly gratified, by Rose’s schoolgirl excitement.

“What’s your ring? Oh, it’s lovely! What an enormous diamond! Are diamonds your favourite stones?”

“Yes, I think they are. Ford had several down from Hunt’s for me to choose from. He’s given me a beautiful pendant too, but I shan’t wear that till I’m married.”

She uttered the words most matter-of-factly, and Rose remembered her own brief, delirious engagement to Jim, and the glamour of romance that had surrounded every token of their hastily plighted troth.

“But then,” she reflected, “I was much younger than Diana, and I’d never had a proposal before, and apparently she’s had dozens—God knows why, or what any one can see in her. And she’s known Ford all her life, and I’d only known Jim three weeks, and come to that, I’d have done better never to have set eyes on him—except for my Ces.”

But although her habit of facing facts refused to allow Rose the sentimental luxury of a slurred retrospect, she felt very certain that her short-lived and exceedingly ill-starred love-affair had given her such moments of bliss as Diana, in her decorous betrothal, had never known, and never would know. Diana, however, in place of these, had a number of very substantial satisfactions.

She was much absorbed in her trousseau, a great part of which was being made for her at one of the many charitable institutions in which Lady Aviolet was interested, and she received an enormous number of wedding presents, testifying to her own popularity as well as to the good-will of her friends and relations.

There was also, to occupy her, the question of her new home.

“Naturally, we want to live in the country and to stick to these parts,” said Diana.

“I suppose so.” Rose’s acquiescence was dubious.

“I don’t really think it would be a good plan to start at Squires, do you?”

“Rotten.”

“I’m very fond of Cousin Catherine, and all of them, and they’ve been perfectly sweet to me, always, but Mother says, and I must say I agree with her—that those arrangements are always rather a risk.”

“I should think so.”

“I’ve got heaps of ideas for furnishing. You must help me choose the chintzes and things, won’t you?”

“I’d love to,” said Rose, gratified.

She was ready to take an eager interest in their selection, and in fact did so, but the violent blues and purples that she admired accorded ill with the blended art-shades preferred by Diana. They agreed better over the furniture, for Rose had imbibed from Uncle Alfred a genuine respect for what she termed “the antiques line” and Diana shared Ford’s fondness for picking up possible bargains in second-hand shops.

Once or twice Rose accompanied the bride-elect on such expeditions when Ford was not available. She felt herself to have done Diana a service by arguing so violently with the old proprietor of the curiosity-shop they visited that he at last parted with the Empire gilt mirror selected by Diana for a price that was very little above its intrinsic value.

Diana, however, seemed more embarrassed than obliged, and did not again invite Rose to shop with her.

It was finally arranged that the wedding should take place early in June, and Diana lost herself in a maze of letter-writing, consulting of catalogues, and trying-on of clothes.

She paid another visit to Squires three weeks before the date of her wedding, and declared her intention of having a thorough rest.

Rose thought her indeed looking tired and with something less than her usual well-bred security of manner.

“Isn’t all this preliminary fuss rather awful?” she one day abruptly inquired.

“How do you mean, Rose?”

Rose had no aptitude for definitions. “I know I should hate it, that’s all,” she said vaguely. “But I was only engaged a week.”

“But why?” Diana inquired, politely puzzled.

“Oh, it all happened on board ship, and I had a row with the woman I was travelling with, and I didn’t know anybody out there, so Jim just had to fix things up as quickly as he possibly could, and we were married two days after we landed. A woman who’d been on the boat was kind to me, and had me to stay with her till the wedding——”

“But how dreadful for you—and you must have been so very young, too!”

“Seventeen, I was.”

“I’m very glad I wasn’t married at seventeen,” said Diana, with an unaccustomed wistfulness that robbed the words of any offensive intention. “I think one’s so romantic at seventeen, don’t you? I mean, one expects so much.”

“So one ought to, in marriage,” Rose declared stoutly. “I daresay you know that I made rather a hash of things myself, but I do believe one can be most frightfully happy in this world, whatever any one says. It can be more glorious than one’s maddest dreams——”

She stopped short. Diana had attempted her usual rather meaningless little laugh, but had broken down half-way.

“What’s the matter?” said Rose. She put out her hand rather timidly, but Diana did not repulse it—rather did she appear to cling to the big, warm, enveloping grasp.

“Are you frightened?” asked Rose wonderingly.

“I’m tired and—and silly, I daresay. You see, it’s such a tremendous step in one’s life, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Rose energetically. “And it lasts for ever, too. At least, unless they die, like mine did, but you can’t marry on the off-chance of that, after all.”

“Oh, don’t!”

“I didn’t mean that I thought you meant that,” Rose explained, with habitual lucidity. “I suppose you wouldn’t be marrying him, unless you felt sure?”

“No,” said Diana faintly.

Rose looked at her. “You know, it’s still not too late, if you don’t feel perfectly certain. I know how awful it would be, after all those good, expensive presents, and all the money that’s been spent on furnishing the house, too—but, if I were you, I’d chuck it all up now, sooner than do it when you don’t really feel like it. I don’t suppose I’d have married Jim, you know, if I’d been a bit older, but I did have a certain amount of run for my money, because I was in love with him—at first. Just enough to show me that if one really cared, and the man did too—it would simply be heaven.”

“That’s what they say in books.”

“Well, I suppose that the people who write the books know,” said Rose simply.

Diana began to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“I don’t know why I’m so silly and unlike myself. Of course, I’ve known him all my life, and we’ve always been fond of one another. It’s only that being married to a man is—is rather frightening, in a way, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t be, if you loved him.” Rose was staunch to her creed. “When I was a schoolgirl my mother used to tell me that when one really cared about a man, one cared with one’s body as well as one’s soul. And nothing to be ashamed of, either, she used to say.”

That Diana did not share Mrs. Smith’s opinion was evident. Her fair face and neck crimsoned.

“Oh, please——” she said hurriedly, and burst into tears.

“You poor kid! I’m awfully sorry—I didn’t mean to upset you!”

“It’s all right—I’ll go to my room. I don’t think I can be very well. Do forgive me for being so stupid.”

She hastened to the door, but Rose caught her hand again and said very earnestly:

“Look here, just half a minute. Listen: if you do really feel that you can’t carry on with this Ford business, will you tell me, and I swear I’ll stand all the racket for you—tell him myself, even if it’s only five minutes before he starts for the wedding—and—and——”

Diana wrenched her hand away. “I know you mean to be kind, but you mustn’t talk like that. I’m tired, and silly, and I’ve made you think all sorts of nonsense. Please, please forget it—and don’t let’s ever speak about it again.”

Her voice broke once more, and she hurried upstairs, leaving Rose staring blankly after her.

XI

The wedding duly took place in June.

Ford and Diana went to the Channel Islands, and Lady Aviolet, in a quiet, relentless manner, began to urge upon Rose once more the question of school for Cecil.

“He’s improving very much in every way, under Miss Wade, but it’s time he saw something of other boys. It is such a handicap to be an only child. I don’t say it’s urgent—but I do say, go and look at various places. There’s Hurst, now——”

It was not Lady Aviolet’s arguments that prevailed upon Rose at last, but the recollection of her conversation in London with Charlesbury, and—still more—a renewal of nursery tragedy.

Rose, persisting in a habit that was silently, but intensely, disapproved of by Miss Wade, and entering the nursery unexpectedly, discovered the governess in fits of spasmodic laughter before a paper that she held in her hand.

Cecil, his back turned to her, appeared to be absorbed in gazing out of the window. He did not turn round at his mother’s entrance. Rose’s intuition, far more developed than her reasoning powers, warned her of tension in the atmosphere.

“What’s up?”

“I think this will amuse you, Mrs. Aviolet,” tittered the governess.

She handed to Rose the paper, that bore a strange, pencilled outline, resembling a depressed fox rather than anything else, with the words, “This is Puge,” printed underneath in Cecil’s straggling round-hand.

“That is Cecil’s idea of poor Pug,” Miss Wade remarked, in a tone that exploited the comical inadequacy of the conception. “I tell him that he must learn the rules of drawing before he tries anything quite so ambitious as a portrait again.”

Rose gazed at the drawing. It was very poor, indeed, even for eight years old, but she experienced no particular amusement at the sight of it.

“Cecil’s like me—can’t draw a straight line,” she said. “Come here, lovey.”

She had felt dimly afraid that Cecil was resentful of Miss Wade’s tactless ridicule, but she was not prepared for the furious little face that he turned upon her.