Book I (continued 3)

"I think psychology is simply the most absorbing thing in the world," he declared earnestly. "I hope you don't fight shy of long words, do you?"

Alex uttered a breathless disclaimer.

"I'm glad. So many people seem to think that if any one says anything in words of more than two syllables it's affectation. Oxford and that sort of thing. But, of course, you're not like that, are you?"

He did not wait for an answer this time, but went on talking very eagerly about the scheme that he entertained for obtaining material for his book.

"It might revolutionize the whole standard of moral values in the country," he said very simply. "You know, just put things in a light that hasn't struck home in England yet at all. Of course, on the continent they're far more advanced than we are, on those sort of points. That's why I want to travel, before I start serious work. Of course, I've got a mass of notes already. Just ideas, that have struck me as I go along. I'm afraid I'm fearfully observant, and I generally size up the people I meet, and then make notes about them—or else simply dismiss them from my mind altogether. My idea is rather to classify human nature into various types, so that the book can be divided up under different headings, and then have a sort of general summing up at the end. Of course, that's only a rough sketch of the whole plan, but you see what I mean?"

"Yes, I do," said Alex with conviction. "I've always, all my life, thought that people mattered much more than anything else, only I've never found anybody else who felt like that too."

"It's rather interesting to look at things the same way, don't you think?" Noel enquired.

"Oh, yes," Alex answered with shy fervour, her heart beating very fast.

She was only anxious to prolong the tête-à-tête, and had no idea of suggesting a return to the drawing-room, in spite of the damage that she subconsciously felt the damp ground to be doing to her satin slippers. But presently Lady Isabel called to her from the window, and she came into the lighted room, conscious both of her own glowing face and of a certain kindly, interested look bent upon her by her seniors.

X

Noel

In the ensuing days, Alex met that look very often—a look of pleased, speculative approval, pregnant with unspoken meanings.

Noel sought her company incessantly, and every opportunity was given them of spending time in one another's society. For five glowing, heather-surrounded days and five breathless, moonlit evenings, they became the centre of their tiny world.

Then Lady Isabel said one night to her daughter:

"You've enjoyed this visit, haven't you, darlin'? I'm sorry we're movin' on."

"Oh," said Alex faintly, "are we really leaving tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow morning, by the early train," her mother assented cheerfully.

The true instinct of the feeble, to clutch at an unripe prize lest it be taken from them, made Alex wonder desperately if she could not postpone her departure.

But she dared not make any such suggestion, and Lady Isabel, looking at her dismayed face, laughed a little as though at the unreason of a child. Alex blushed with shame as she thought that her mother might have guessed what was in her mind. That evening, however, Lady Isabel came into her room as she was dressing for dinner.

"I thought you'd like to put this over your shoulders, Alex," she said negligently. "It will improve that cream-coloured frock of yours."

It was a painted scarf that she held out, and she stood gazing critically while the maid laid it across Alex' shoulders.

"You look so nice, darling child. Are you ready?"

"Yes, mother."

They went downstairs together.

Alex was acutely conscious of a certain maternal pride and tenderness, such as she had not experienced from Lady Isabel since the first days of her return from Liège, when she had finally left school. She did not let herself speculate to what such unusual emotion might portend.

But at the sight of Noel Cardew, better-looking than ever in evening clothes, a chaotic excitement surged up within her in anticipation of their last evening together.

Almost as she sat down beside him at the dinner-table, she said piteously, "I wish we weren't going away tomorrow."

"You're not?"

"Oh, yes. Didn't you know?"

"I hadn't realized it," said Noel, and although she avoided looking at him, she noted with a feeling of triumph the dismay in his voice.

"Oh, I say! What a shame. Must you really go?"

"We're going to pay two more visits and then leave Scotland altogether."

"I shan't stay much longer myself," observed Noel nonchalantly.

Alex was conscious of keeping the words as it were at the back of her mind, with the implication which she attached to them, while the conversation at the small table became general.

As she followed her hostess and Lady Isabel from the room, Noel, holding open the door, said to her in a rapid, anxious tone, very low:

"You'll come out into the garden afterwards, won't you?"

An enigmatic "perhaps" was not in Alex' vocabulary.

She gave him a quick, radiant smile, and nodded emphatically.

It never occurred to her eager prodigality that she ran any risk of cheapening the favours that so few had ever coveted.

In the garden she moved along the gravelled walk beside him, actually breathless from inward excitement.

"There was heaps more I wanted to say to you about the book," Noel remarked disconsolately. "I shan't have any one to exchange ideas with now. They're all so old—and besides, I don't think English people as a rule care much about psychology and that sort of thing. They're so keen on games. So am I, in a way, but I must say it seems to me that the study of human nature is a good deal more worth one's while."

"People are so interesting," said Alex. She was perfectly aware of the futility of her remark as she made it, but in some undercurrent of her consciousness there floated the conviction that one need not put forth any great powers of originality in order to obtain response from Noel Cardew.

"I can be perfectly natural with him—we think alike," She defended herself against her own unformulated accusation with inexplicable anger.

"I think they're frightfully interesting," said Noel with conviction. "Of course, men are far more interesting than women, if you don't mind my saying so, simply from the psychological point of view. I hope you don't think I'm being rude?"

"Oh, no."

"You see, women, as a general rule, are rather shallow, though, of course, there are a great many exceptions. But you know what I mean—as a rule they're rather shallow. That's what I feel about women, they're shallow."

"Perhaps you're right," said Alex, rather discouraged. She would not admit to herself that his sweeping assertion awoke no echo whatever within her.

To her immaturity, the essence of sympathy lay in complete agreement, and abstract questions meant nothing to her when weighed in the balance against her desire to establish, to her own satisfaction at least, the existence of such sympathy between herself and Noel Cardew.

"I've got another mad plan," said Noel slowly. "You'll think I'm always getting insane ideas, and this one rather depends on you."

"Oh, what?"

"I hope you won't mind my suggesting such a thing—" He paused so long that Alex' imagination had time for a hundred foolish, ecstatic promptings, such as her reason knew could not be forthcoming, but for which her whole undisciplined sense of romance was crying.

"Well, look here: what should you think of collaborating with me over the book? I'm sure you could write if you tried, and anyway, you could probably give me sidelights on the feminine part of it. It would be most awfully helpful to me if you would."

"Oh," said Alex uncertainly. She was invaded by unreasoning disappointment. "But how could we do it?"

"Oh, well, notes, you know—just keep notes of anything that struck us particularly, and then put it in together later. We should have to do a good deal of it by correspondence, of course.... I say, are you a conventional person?"

"Not in the least," said Alex hastily.

"I'm glad of that. I'm afraid I'm rather desperately unconventional myself. Of course, in a way it might be rather unconventional, you and me corresponding—but would that matter?"

"Not to me," said Alex resolutely.

"That's splendid. We could do a lot that way, and then I hope, of course, that you'll let me come and see you in London."

"Of course," Alex cried eagerly. "I don't know the exact date when we shall be back, but I could let you know. Have you got the address?"

"Clevedon Square—"

She hastily supplied the number of the house.

"Oh, that's all right. I'm sure to forget it," said Noel easily; "but I shall find you in the books, I suppose."

"Yes," said Alex, feeling suddenly damped.

She herself would have been in no danger of forgetting the number of a house wherein dwelt any one whom she wished to see, but with disastrous and quite unconscious humility, she told herself that it was, of course, not to be expected that any one else should go to lengths equal to her own. In her one-sided experience, Alex had always found herself to be unique.

That Noel Cardew was not in despair at the idea of her departure was evident. But he repeated several times that he wished she were not going so soon, and even asked whether she would stay on if invited to do so.

"I'm sure they'd all love you to," he assured her. "Then Lady Isabel could pay the other visits and call for you on her way back."

"I'm sure I shouldn't be allowed to stay on by myself," said Alex dolefully.

"There you are! Conventionality again. My daughters," said Noel instructively, "if I ever have any, shall be brought up quite differently. I've made up my mind to that. I daresay you'll laugh at all these theories of mine, but I've always been keen on ideas, if you remember."

But for once Noel did not receive the habitual ready disclaimer called for by his speech.

His easy allusion to his hypothetical daughters had reduced Alex to utter silence.

Afterwards, alone in the darkness of her own room, she wondered why such a startling sense of protest had revolted within her at his words, but her mind shied away instinctively from the question, and she found herself unable to pursue it.

The next morning, in the unromantic atmosphere induced by an early breakfast, and Sir Francis' anxiety to make sure of catching the connection, politely concealed, but quite evident to the perceptions of his wife and daughter, Noel Cardew and Alex exchanged their brief and entirely public farewell.

"I'll write about the book," was his cheerful parting assurance.

"Don't forget," said Alex.

Lady Isabel was rather humorous on the subject of fin de siècle emancipation, amongst the house party in the midst of which she and her daughter found themselves that evening.

"What are boys and girls coming to? I hear young men gaily promisin' to write to Alex on all sorts of subjects, and making private assignations with her," she declared amusedly. "Aren't you and that nice-looking Cardew boy writin' a book in collaboration, or something, darling?"

The slight jest was made popular amongst her seniors, and Alex was kindly rallied about her modern freedom and assumption of privileges undreamed of by the older generation. The inference obviously placed upon her friendship with Noel Cardew was evident, and pleased her starved vanity even more than the agreeable amount of flattery and attention which at last was being bestowed upon her.

It was her first hint of success achieved amid standards which she had been taught to believe were all-prevalent. Brushed lightly by the passing wing of triumph, she became eager and self-confident, even rather over-clamorous in the assertion of her own individuality, as had been the child Alex in the nursery at Clevedon Square.

Lady Isabel did not check her. She made subtle exploitation of Alex' youth and sudden, rather boisterous gaiety, and occasionally laughed a little, and alluded to the collaboration scheme between her and Noel Cardew. "But all the same, darlin' child," she observed to Alex in private, "I can't have you correspondin' with young men all over the country unbeknown to me. Once in a way is all very well, perhaps, but you'll have to let me see the letters, I think."

Alex was only mildly resentful of the injunction. She surmised shrewdly enough that her mother was more anxious to establish the authentic existence of a correspondence between Noel Cardew and herself than to supervise the details of it. She herself waited with frantic, furtive eagerness for his first letter.

It did not reach her until after her return to London. Secretly bitterly disappointed, she read the short, conventional phrases and the subscription:

"I never know how to end up a letter, but hope this will be all right—Yours very sincerely,

"NOEL E. CARDEW."

Across the top of the front page was a postscript.

"Next month I shall be in town. Don't forget that I am coming to call upon you. I hope you won't be 'out'!"

Alex, to whom nothing was trivial, saw the proposed call looming enormous upon the horizon of her days.

Every afternoon she either sat beside Lady Isabel in the carriage in an agony, with only one thought in her mind—the expectation of finding Noel's card upon the hall table on their return—or else took her part disjointedly and with obvious absent-mindedness in the entertainment of her mother's visitors.

When, during a crowded At Home afternoon, in the course of which she had necessarily ceased to listen for the sound of the front-door bell, "Mr. Cardew" was at length announced, Alex felt almost unable to turn round and face the entering visitor.

Her own imagination, untempered either by humour or by experience, had led her to picture the next encounter between herself and Noel so frequently, and with such a prodigal folly of romantic detail, that it seemed incredible to her that the reality should take place within a few instants, amidst brief, conventional words and gestures.

Noel did not talk about the book that they were to write together, although he remained beside Alex most of the afternoon. Only just as he was leaving, he asked cheerfully:

"You've not forgotten our collaboration, have you, partner? I've heaps of things to discuss with you, only you were so busy this afternoon, looking after all those people."

"We shall be in on Sunday," Alex told him eagerly, "and there won't be such a crowd."

"Oh, good," said Noel. "Perhaps we'll meet in the Park before that, though."

"I hope so," said Alex.

They met in the Park and elsewhere, and Noel, all through the ensuing weeks before Christmas, called often at the house in Clevedon Square.

Lady Isabel twice asked him to dinner, but although he was once placed next her, on neither occasion, to Alex' astonished resentment was he assigned to her as a partner.

Alex, for the first time conscious of being sought after, and receiving with avidity the fragments that fell to her share, forced herself to believe that they would eventually constitute that impossible whole of which she had dreamed wildly and extravagantly all her life.

Into the eager assents which she gave to all Noel's many theories, she read a similarity of outlook, into her almost trembling readiness to fall in with his every suggestion, a community of tastes, and into his interminable expositions of his own views an appeal to her deeper sympathies that surely denoted the consciousness of affinity between them.

She was happy, although principally in a nervous anticipation of happiness to come. She was able, when alone, to imagine that from absolutely impersonal good comradeship, Noel would suddenly plunge into the impassioned declarations of her own fancy, but when she was actually with him, his cool, pleasant, boyish voice dispelled the folly, and her fundamental shyness, that never deserted her save in the realm of her own thoughts, was relieved, with an intense and involuntary relief, that it should be so.

She saw Noel's father and mother again, and was greeted by the latter with a bright and conditional affectionateness that inspected even while it acclaimed.

It was after this that the trend of Noel's thoughts appeared suddenly to change, and he spoke to Alex of the place in Devonshire.

"One's first duty is to the place, of course," he said reflectively, "and I'm not at all sure that I oughtn't to look into the management of an estate, and all that sort of thing, very thoroughly. Some day—a long, long time hence, of course—I shall have to run our own place, and I'm rather keen about the duties of a landlord, and improving the condition of the people. I used to be a Socialist, as you know, but I must say one's ideas alter a bit as one goes on through life, and I've had some talks with the pater lately."

He broke off, and looked rather oddly at Alex for a moment.

"They want me to think of settling down, I believe," he said, almost shyly.

Alex spent that night in feverishly placing possible and impossible interpretations on the words, and on the look he had given her.

The sense of an approaching crisis terrified her so much that she felt she would have given worlds to avoid it.

The following evening it came.

Most conventionally, she met Noel Cardew at an evening reception, and he conducted her rather solemnly to a small conservatory where two chairs were placed, conspicuously enough, beneath a solitary palm.

An orchestra was just audible above the hum and buzz of conversation.

"It's luck getting in here," said Noel. "I wanted to see you very particularly tonight. I must say I never thought I should find myself particularly wanting to see any girl—in fact, I'd practically made up my mind never to have anything to do with women—but I see now that two people who had very much the same sort of ideas about life in general could do a tremendous lot for a place, and for the country generally; don't you agree?—and, of course—" He became hopelessly incoherent, "... knowing one another's other's people it all makes such a difference ... I could never understand fellows running after Gaiety girls and marrying them, myself!! After all, one's duty to the estate is ... and then, later on, perhaps, if one thought of Parliament—"

Alex felt that the pounding of her heart was making her physically faint, and she raised her head desperately, in the hope of stopping him. Noel met her eyes courageously.

"I wish you'd let me tell our people that you—that we—we're engaged," he said hoarsely.

His words struck on Alex' ear almost meaninglessly.

Irrationally in love as she was, with Love, she knew only that he was asking something of her—that she had at last an outlet for that which no one had ever yet desired.

Unable to speak, and unconscious of bathos, she vehemently nodded her head.

Noel immediately took both her hands and shook them wildly up and down.

"Thank Heaven, it's over," he cried boyishly. "You can't imagine how I've been funking asking you—I thought you'd say yes, but one feels such an awful fool—and I've never done it before. I say, Alex—I can call you Alex now, can't I—you're like me, aren't you? You don't want sentimentality. If there's one thing I bar," said the newly-accepted lover, "it's sentimentality."

XI

Engagement of Marriage

"I am engaged to be married," Alex repeated to herself, in a vain endeavour to realize the height to which she must have now attained. But that realization, by which she meant tangible certainty, for which she craved, continually eluded her.

The preliminary formalities, indeed, duly took place, from her own avowal before a graciously-maternal Lady Isabel, to Noel's formal interview with Sir Francis in the traditional setting of the library.

After that, however, a freakish fate seemed to take control of all the circumstances connected with Alex' engagement.

Noel Cardew's father became ill, and in the uncertainty consequent upon a state of health which his doctor declared might be almost indefinitely prolonged, there could be no question of immediately announcing the engagement.

"Just as well, perhaps. We're all delighted about it, but they're both young enough to wait a little while," Lady Isabel smilingly made the best of it. "Next year will be quite time enough to settle anything."

Her serenity was the obvious outcome of an extreme contentment.

Alex found herself better able to regard herself in the light of one betrothed in her mother's company than in that of Noel. He treated her almost exactly as he had always done, with cheerful good-fellowship, and only at the very outset of the engagement with any tinge of shyness in his bearing.

"Of course, I ought to have got a ring," he said very seriously, "but I don't believe in taking any chances, and so, just in case there was any hitch, I waited. Besides, I don't know what you like best—you'll have to choose."

Alex smiled at the words. There was a glamour about such a choice, even beyond that with which her own sense of the romantic perforce enveloped it.

She wondered whether she would be allowed to go with Noel to a jeweller's, or whether he would, after all, choose his token alone, and bring it to her, and place it on her finger with one of those low, ardently-spoken sentences which she could hear so clearly in her own mind, and which seemed so strangely and utterly impossible in Noel's real presence.

But the arrival of Noel's ring, after all, took her by surprise.

He had been lunching with them in Clevedon Square, when the jeweller's assistant was announced, just as Lady Isabel was rising from the luncheon-table.

She turned enquiringly.

"Noel?"

"I told him to come here. I thought you wouldn't mind. You see, I want Alex to choose her ring."

"Oh, my dear boy! how very exciting! But may we see too?"

Mrs. Cardew was also present.

"Oh, rather," said Noel heartily. "We shall want your advice."

They all trooped hastily into the library, where the man was waiting, with the very large assortment of gleaming rings ordered for inspection by Noel.

"What beauties!" said Lady Isabel. "But, really, I don't know if I ought to let him."

She glanced at Mrs. Cardew, who said in a very audible voice:

"Of course. He's so happy. It's quite delightful to watch them both."

She was looking hard and appraisingly at the rings as she spoke.

Alex looked at them too, quite unseeing of their glittering magnificence, but acutely conscious that every one was waiting for her first word.

"Oh, how lovely!" she exclaimed faintly.

She chid herself violently for the sick disappointment that invaded her, not, indeed, at the matter, but at the manner of the gift.

And yet she realized dimly, that it was impossible that it should have happened in any other way—that any other way, indeed, would have been as utterly uncharacteristic of Noel Cardew as this was typical.

"Which do you like?" he asked her. "I chose all the most original ones I could see. I always like unconventional designs better than conventional ones, I'm afraid. Where's that long one you showed me this morning?"

"The diamond marquise, sir?" The assistant deferentially produced it, glancing the while at Alex.

"That's it," said Noel eagerly. "Try it on, Alex, won't you?"

He used her name quite freely and without any shyness.

Alex felt more of genuine excitement, and less of wistful bewilderment, than at any moment since Noel had first asked her to marry him, as she shyly held out her left hand and the jeweller slipped the heavy, beautiful ring onto her third finger.

She had long, slim hands, the fingers rather too thin and the knuckles, though small, too prominent for beauty. But, thanks to the tyranny of old Nurse, and to Lady Isabel's insistence upon the use of nightly glycerine-and-honey, they were exquisitely soft and white.

The diamonds gleamed and flashed at her as she moved the ring up and down her finger.

"We can easily make it smaller, to fit your finger," said the jeweller's assistant.

"It really is beautiful. Look, Francis," said Lady Isabel.

Alex' father put up his glasses, and after inspection he also exclaimed:

"Beautiful."

"You've such little fingers, dear, it'll have to be made smaller," said Mrs. Cardew graciously.

"Is it to be that one, then?" Lady Isabel asked.

Alex saw that her mother's pretty, youthful-looking flush of pleasurable excitement had mounted to her face. She herself, conscious of an inexplicable oppression, felt tongue-tied, and unable to do more than repeat foolishly and lifelessly:

"Oh, it's lovely, it's perfectly lovely. It's too beautiful."

Noel, however, looked gratified at the words of admiration.

"That's the one I like," he said with emphasis. "I knew when I saw them this morning that I liked that one much the best. We'll settle on that one, then, shall we?"

"You silly boy," laughed his mother, "that's for Alex to decide. Perhaps she likes something else better. Try the emerald, Alex?"

"Oh, this is lovely," repeated Alex again, shrinking back a little. Furious with herself, she was yet only desirous that the scene should not be prolonged any longer.

"Come and look at it in the light?" The urgent pressure of Lady Isabel's hand on her arm drew her into the embrasure of the window.

"Alex," said her mother low and swiftly, all the time holding up her hand against the light as though studying the ring. "Alex, you must be more gracious. What is the matter with you?"

"Nothing," said Alex childishly, feeling inclined to burst into tears.

"Then for Heaven's sake do try and smile and show a little enthusiasm," said her mother with unwonted sharpness.

Alex, scarlet, and most visibly discomposed, returned to the group round the library table.

Forcing herself to make some attempt at obeying her mother's behest, she picked up the nearest jewel, two pearls in a prettily-twisted setting, and began to examine it.

"I like that design, too. It's original," said Mrs. Cardew.

"Oh, but pearls are unlucky—she couldn't have pearls," protested Lady Isabel.

"They mean tears, don't they?" Alex contributed to the discussion, for the sake of making her mother see that she was willing to do her best.

"Are you superstitious?" Noel asked rather reproachfully. "I can't say I believe in all that sort of thing myself, you know. In fact I make rather a principle of doing things on a 13th, or walking under ladders, and all the rest of it, just to prove there's nothing in it."

Sir Francis fixed the young man benevolently through his monocle.

"I presume, however, that in this instance you prefer not to tempt the gods," he remarked affably, and Noel, always obviously in awe of his betrothed's father, hastily agreed with him.

"Then it's diamonds, is it?—unless Alex prefers the emerald."

"I like the diamond one best," Noel reiterated. "I really pitched on that one the minute I saw it. I like originality."

"Well, it couldn't be lovelier," said Lady Isabel contentedly.

The jeweller was shown out, leaving the diamond marquise ring, in its little white-velvet case, on the table in front of Alex.

Sir Francis opened the door for his wife and Mrs. Cardew.

"Oh," said Noel urgently. "You must stay and see her put it on."

Both ladies laughed at the boyish exclamation, and Alex flushed scarlet once more.

Noel opened the case and looked proudly at his gift.

"You must put it on for her," said his mother, "when it's been made smaller."

The hint was unmistakable.

Noel held out the ring.

"Let's see it on now at once, Alex. It can go back to the shop later."

Alex, in a sort of utter desperation, thrust out her hand, and Noel, politely and carefully avoiding touching it with his own, slipped the heavy hoop over her finger.

"Thank you," she stammered.

There was another laugh.

"Poor dears! Let's leave them in peace," cried Mrs. Cardew mockingly, and rustled to the door again.

"Did you ever see anything so young as they both are?" she murmured sweetly to Lady Isabel, audibly enough for Alex to guess at the words, if she did not actually hear them.

She was thankful that they should no longer be watching her, and turned with something like relief to Noel's gratified, uncritical looks.

It became suddenly much easier to speak unconstrainedly.

Perhaps she was subconsciously aware that of all of them, it was Noel himself who would expect the least of her, because his demands upon her were so infinitesimal.

"It's a beautiful ring; thank you very, very much. I—" She stopped and gulped, then said bravely, "I love it."

She emphasized the word almost without knowing it, as though to force from him some response.

Although she had never actually realized it, it was a word which, in point of fact, had never yet passed between them. Noel's fair face coloured at last, as his light eyes met her unconsciously tragical gaze.

"Alex a son air bête aujourd'hui."

With horrid inappropriateness, the hated gibe of her schooldays flashed into Alex' thoughts, stiffening her face into the old lines of morbid, self-conscious misery.

Part of her mind, in unwilling detachment, contemplated ruefully the oddly inadequate spectacle which they must present, staring shamefacedly at one another across the glittering token of their troth.

Frenziedly desirous of breaking the silence, heavy with awkwardness, that hung between them, she began to speak hastily and almost at random.

"Thank you so very much—I've never had such a lovely present—it's lovely; thank you so much."

"I thought you'd like it," muttered Noel, more overcome with confusion, if possible, than was Alex.

"Oh, yes, yes. It's lovely."

"I thought you'd like something rather original, you know, not a conventional one."

"Oh, yes!"

"You're sure you wouldn't rather have one of the others—that emerald one that mother liked?"

"Oh, no."

"I dare say they'd let me change it, the man knows us very well."

"Oh, no, no."

"Well, I, I—I'm awfully glad you like it."

"Yes, I do like it. I—I think it's lovely."

"I—I thought you'd like it."

Alex began to feel as though she was in a nightmare, but she was mysteriously unable to put an end to their sorry dialogue.

"It's perfectly lovely, I think. I don't know how to thank you."

Noel swallowed two or three times, visibly and audibly, and then took a couple of determined steps towards her.

"I think you—you'd better let me kiss you," he said hoarsely. "You haven't yet, you know."

Something deep down within Alex was surging up in angry bewilderment, and she was sufficiently aware of a sense of protest to rebut it indignantly and with lightning-swift determination.

It was the humility of love that had prompted her lover to crave that permission which should never have been asked.

So she told herself in the flash of a moment, while she waited for Noel's kiss to lift her once and for all into some far realm of romance where trivial details of manifestation should no longer obscure the true values of life.

Unconsciously, she had shut her eyes, but at an unaccountable pause in the proceedings, she opened them again.

Noel was carefully removing his pince-nez.

"I say," he stammered, "you're—you're sure you don't mind?"

If Alex had followed the impulse of her own feelings, she must have cried out at this juncture:

"Not if you're quick and get it over!"

But instead, she heard herself murmuring feebly:

"Oh, no, not at all."

She hastily raised her face, turning it sideways to Noel, and felt his lips gingerly touching the middle of her cheek. Then she opened her eyes again, and, scrupulously avoiding Noel's embarrassed gaze, saw him diligently polishing his pince-nez before replacing them.

It was the apotheosis of their anti-climax.

Alex possessed neither the light-heartedness which is—mistakenly—generally ascribed to youth, nor the philosophy, to face facts with any determination.

She continued to cram her unwilling mind with illusions which her innermost self perfectly recognized as such.

It was, on the whole, easier to place her own interpretation upon Noel's every act of commission or omission when the shyness subsequent to their first ill-conducted embrace had left him, which it speedily did. Easier still, when intercourse between them was renewed upon much the same terms of impersonal enthusiasm in discussion as in Scotland, and easiest of all when Alex herself, in retrospect, wrenched a sentimental significance out of words or looks that had been meaningless at the time of their occurrence.

When Noel went to Devonshire, whither his father by slow, invalid degrees had at last been allowed to move, he said to Alex in farewell:

"I shall expect to hear from you very often, mind. I always like getting letters, though I'm afraid I'm not much good at writing them. You know what I mean: I can write simply pages if I'm in the mood—just as though I were talking to some one—and other days I can't put pen to paper."

"I don't think I write very good letters myself," said Alex wistfully, in the hope of eliciting reassurance.

"Oh, never mind," said Noel consolingly. "Just write when you feel like it."

Alex, who had composed a score of imaginary love-letters, both on his behalf and her own, tried to compensate herself the following evening for the vague misery that was encompassing her spirit, by writing.

She was alone in her own room, the fire had fallen into red embers, and her surroundings were sufficiently appropriate to render attainable the state of mind which she desired to achieve.

As she involuntarily rehearsed to herself the elements of her own situation, she lulled herself into a species of happiness.

His ring on her finger, his letter on its way to her—she was going to write to the man who had asked her to become his wife.

There was really some one at last, Alex told herself, to whom she had become the centre of the universe, to whom her letters would matter, to whom everything that she might think or feel would be of importance.

She remembered Maurice Goldstein, his knowledge of Queenie's every movement, his triumphant rapture at being allowed to take her out to luncheon or tea. Even now, Alex had seen him follow his wife with his ardent, glowing gaze, as she moved, serene and graceful, round a crowded room on the arm of some other man—and the look had made her heart throb sympathetically, and perhaps not altogether unenviously.

Almost fiercely she told herself that she had Noel's love. She was to him what Queenie was to young Goldstein.

To every rebellious doubt that rose within her, she opposed the soundless, vehement assertions, that the indelible proof of Noel's love lay in the fact that he had asked her to marry him.

Gradually she persuaded herself that only her own self-consciousness, of which she was never more aware than when with Noel, was responsible for that strange lack, which she dared not attempt to define, lest in so doing she should shatter the feeble structure built out of sentimentality and resolute self-blinding.

Partly because she instinctively craved a relief to her own feelings, and partly because she had really almost made herself believe in the truth of her own imaginings, Alex wrote her first love-letter, the shy, yet passionately-worded self-expression of a young and intensely romantic girl, in love with the thought of Love, too ignorant for reserve, and yet too conscious of the novelty of her own experience for absolute spontaneity.

Alex did not sleep after she had written her letter, but she lay in bed in the warm, soft glow of the firelight, and saw the square, white envelope within which she had sealed her letter, leaning against the silver inkstand on her writing-table.

When the maid came to her in the morning, she brought a letter addressed in Noel's unformed hand.

It was quite short, and began:

"DEAREST ALEX (is that right?)"

It told her of the journey to Devonshire, of an improvement in the invalid's state of health, and of Noel's own projected tour of inspection round the estate, which he thought had been neglected by his agent of late.

"But I shall be able to put all that right, I hope, as I'm rather keen about the housing of the poor, and questions of that sort. You might look out for any decent book on social economy, will you, Alex?"

The letter did not extend beyond the bottom of the second page, but Noel was going to write again in a day or two, when there was more to tell her, and with love to every one, he was hers for ever and a day, Noel.

Alex' reply went to Trevose the same day, but the letter she had written in the firelight, she burnt.

XII

Christmas Pantomime

The engagement was not announced, but a good many people knew about it.

Their congratulations pleased Alex, as did her mother's obvious pride and satisfaction.

She liked wearing her diamond ring, although she only did so at home, and she even found pleasure in writing of her new dignities to Barbara at Neuilly.

In such trivial anodynes did Alex seek oblivion for the ever-increasing terror that was gaining upon her.

Noel came back from Devonshire after Christmas—and Lady Isabel sometimes spoke tentatively to Alex of a wedding early in the season.

"Jubilee year would be so charming for your wedding, my darling," she said effusively.

Alex thought of a white satin dress and long train, of orange blossom and a lace veil, of bridesmaids, presents, the exciting music of Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and the glory of a wedding-ring. On any other aspects of the case her mind refused to dwell.

Nevertheless, she made little or no response to her mother's hinted suggestions. Neither Noel nor Alex ever exchanged the slightest reference to their marriage, although Noel often discoursed freely of a Utopian future for the tenantry at Trevose, the basis of which, by implication, was his suzerainty and that of Alex.

"I rather believe in the old-fashioned feudal system, personally. You may say that's just the contrary of my old socialistic ideas, Alex, but then I always think it's a mistake to be absolutely cast-iron in one's convictions. One ought to assimilate new ideas as one goes through life, and, of course, sometimes they're bound to displace preconceived notions. I'm a tremendous believer in experience; it teaches one better than anything else. Besides, Emerson says, 'Dare to be inconsistent.' I'm keen on Emerson, you know. Are you?"

"Oh, yes," said Alex enthusiastically, wishing to be sympathetic. "But I only read Emerson a long while ago, when I was at school. Noel, were you happy at school?"

"Oh, yes," said Noel unemotionally. "The great thing at school is to be keen, and get on with the other fellows. They were always very decent to me."

"I wasn't very happy," said Alex. She was passionately desirous of sympathy, and was full of youth's mistaken conviction, that unhappiness is provocative of interest.

Noel cheerfully and unconsciously disabused her of the idea.

"Of course, girls don't have nearly such a good time as boys do at school. But don't let's talk about rotten things like being unhappy. I always believe in taking things as they come, don't you? I never look back, personally. I think it's morbid. One ought always to be looking ahead. I tell you what I'll do, Alex—I'll give you a copy of Emerson's Essays. You ought to read them."

Noel was very generous, and often made her presents. Alex was disproportionately grateful, but to her extreme, though unavowed relief, he never again claimed such a recognition as that which had followed the bestowal of her engagement-ring.

She drifted on from day to day, scarcely aware of her own unhappiness, but wondering bitterly why this, the supreme initiation, should seem to fail her so utterly, and still hoping against hope that the personal element for which she looked so avidly, might yet enter into her relation with Noel.

One day she told herself, with shock of discovery, that Noel was curiously obtuse. He had taken her with Lady Isabel and his brother Eric to Prince's skating-rink. Alex did not skate, but she enjoyed hearing the band and watching the skaters. Eric Cardew was among the latter, and Alex recognized Queenie Goldstein, in magnificent furs.

"Noel, do you see that very fair girl—the one in blue? She was my great friend at school."

Alex at the same instant saw a look of fleeting, but unmistakable vexation on her mother's face at the description.

"Why, that's Mrs. Goldstein, isn't it?" said Noel, screwing up his eyes in an interested look.

"Yes. I wish I could catch her eye." Alex was reckless of her mother. "I haven't talked to her for such a long while. Do you know her?"

"I've met her once or twice."

"Couldn't you go and speak to her, and bring her over here?" asked Alex wistfully.

Noel looked at her, surprised.

"I don't think I can do that. She wants to skate."

"Of course not," broke in Lady Isabel. "Don't be a little goose, Alex. What do you want her for?"

"Oh, nothing," Alex replied dejectedly, and also very crossly.

She was in the frame of mind that seeks a grievance, and her nerves were far more overstrained than she realized.

She felt a sudden, absolute anger when Noel said didactically:

"I don't think it would be very good manners for me to go and force myself on Mrs. Goldstein's notice. I don't know her at all well, and there are heaps of people who want to talk to her—just look at all those fellows!"

"You might do it just to please me," muttered Alex, less from coquettery than from injured pride.

Noel became rather red, and after a minute he remarked in a severe voice:

"I must say, Alex, I think that's rather a ridiculous thing to say."

Alex was silent, but from that day the spirit of resentment had at last awakened within her.

She became irritable, and although she still strove to persuade herself that her engagement meant the ultimate realization of happiness, she often spoke impatiently to Noel, and no longer sought to conform herself to the type of womanhood which he obviously desired and expected to find her.

The old sense of "waiting for the next thing" was strong upon her, and she spent her days in desultory idleness, since Lady Isabel made fewer engagements for her, and Noel's calls upon her time were far from excessive.

She made the discovery then, less illuminating at the time than when viewed afterwards in retrospect, that she could not bear to read novels.

All of them, sooner or later, seemed to deal with the relations between a man and a woman in love, and Alex found herself reading of emotions and experiences of which her own seemed so feeble a mockery, that she was conscious of a physical pang of sick disappointment.

Was all fiction utterly untrue to life? or was hers the counterfeit, while the printed pages but reproduced something of a reality which was denied to her?

She dared not face the question, and was further perplexed by the axiom mechanically passed on by successive authorities in rebuke of her childhood's passion for reading:

"You can't learn anything about Real Life from story-books."

At all events, Alex found the story-books of no solace to her mental sickness, and turned away from their perusal with a sinking heart.

She seldom quarrelled with Noel because, although he was sometimes unmistakably offended at her petulance, he never lost his temper. On the contrary, he argued with her at such length that Alex, although the arguments left her quite unconvinced of the rightness of his point of view, often gave in from sheer weariness and the sense of hopeless, exhausting muddle.

She could visualize no possible eventual solution of the intangible problem that somewhere lay heavy, undefined and undefinable, at the back of all her thoughts.

It seemed to her that such a state of affairs had endured for a lifetime, and must extend into eternity, when her relations with Noel entered into the inevitable crisis to which a fortnight's mutual fret and dissatisfaction had been only the prelude.

Sir Francis, graciously benevolent, invited Noel Cardew to make one of an annual gathering that, for the Clare children, amounted to an institution—to view the Christmas pantomime at Drury Lane. For more years than any of them, except Alex, could remember, a box at the pantomime had been the yearly almost the solitary, expression of Sir Francis Clare's recognition of his younger children's existence as beings other than merely ornamental adjuncts to their mother.

Lady Isabel, who detested pantomimes, never joined the party, and Alex could remember still—had, indeed, never altogether lost—the feeling of extreme awe that rendered unnecessary old Nurse's severe injunctions to the children as to the behaviour suitable to so great an occasion.

This year, Barbara was at Neuilly, and it was considered inadvisable to "unsettle" her by a return to London for the Christmas holidays. But Cedric was at home, and Archie and Pamela, as clamorous as they dared to be for their father's treat.

Sir Francis did not sacrifice himself to the extent of foregoing late dinner altogether, but he dined at seven o'clock, and issued what more nearly approached to a royal mandate than an invitation, to Alex, Cedric and Noel to bear him company.

The big cuckoo clock in the hall still showed the hour as short of eight o'clock when Pamela and Archie, the former muffled in a large pink shawl, and both of them prancing with ill-restrained impatience, were at last permitted to dispatch the footman in search of a cab.

The carriage, in the opinion of Sir Francis, would be amply filled by himself, his two daughters and Noel Cardew, and it was part of the procedure that the boys should be allowed to journey to the theatre by themselves in a hansom-cab.

The streets were snowy, and as shafts of light from the street-lamps fell across the crowded pavements and brilliant shop windows, still displaying the Christmas decorations put up a month ago, something of the old childish glamour surrounding the yearly festival came upon Alex.

Pamela, already a modern child in the lack of that self-conscious awe of their father that had kept Alex and Barbara tongue-tied in his presence, nevertheless, had none of the modern child's blasé satiety of parties and entertainments of all kinds.

The Drury Lane pantomime was her solitary annual experience of the theatre, and she was proportionately prepared to enjoy herself to the full. When Sir Francis, with kind, unhumorous smile, made time-honoured pretence of having forgotten the tickets, Pamela gave Alex a shock by her cheerful and unhesitating refusal to carry on the dutiful tradition of her elder sisters and conform tacitly to the jest by a display of pretended consternation.

"Oh, no, I know you haven't forgotten them," Pamela cried shrilly. "I saw you look at them just before we started. Besides, you said last year you'd forgotten them, and you had them in your pocket all the time. I remember quite well."

She began to bounce up and down on the seat of the carriage, the accordion-pleated skirts of her new pink frock billowing round her.

"Sit still," said Alex repressively. She reflected that she herself as a little girl, and even Barbara, had been very much nicer than was Pamela.

She wondered what Noel had been like as a little boy, and looked at him almost involuntarily.

His glance met hers, and he smiled slightly. The response touched Alex suddenly and acutely, and she felt a pang of remorse for the intense irritation that his presence had often caused her lately.

When the carriage stopped and he sprang out to offer her his hand in descending, she gave hers to him with a tiny thrill, and her fingers lingered for an instant in his, as though awaiting, almost in spite of herself, an all-but-imperceptible pressure that was not forthcoming.

"It's begun," gasped Pamela in an agony of impatience in the foyer.

Sir Francis, always punctilious, placed Alex in the right-hand corner of the box, the two children in the centre, and then, with a slight smile, offered Noel his choice of the remaining chairs.

Alex was conscious of a throb of gratification, perhaps more attributable to vanity than to anything else, when the young man placed himself just behind her own chair.

Sir Francis, the comparative isolation of the engaged couple sufficiently sanctioned by the family party surrounding them, immediately disposed himself behind Cedric at the extreme left of the box.

The curtain went down to the sound of applause almost as they took their places, and the lights were turned up. Alex looked round her.

The huge house was everywhere sprinkled with groups of children—Eton boys in broad, white collars such as Archie wore, little girls in white frocks with wide pink or blue sashes and hair-ribbons.

When the orchestra began a medley of old-fashioned popular airs, Home, sweet Home, Way down upon the Swanee River, Bluebells of Scotland, and the like, Alex overwrought, fell an easy victim to the cheap appeal to emotionalism.

In the irrational, passionate desire for reassurance that fell upon her, she leant back until her shoulder almost touched Noel's.

"Look at all those children!" she whispered, hardly knowing what she said.

Noel gazed at the stalls through his pince-nez.

"The place is crammed," he said. "They say it's the best show they've ever had. Of course, I haven't seen it yet, but my own idea about these pantomimes is that they don't stick enough to the original story. Take 'Cinderella,' now, or 'The Babes in the Wood.' The whole thing is simply a mass of interpolations—they never really follow the thread of one idea all the way through. I can't help thinking it would be much better if they did, you know. After all, a pantomime is supposed to be for children, isn't it?"

"Yes."

Alex wondered what reply she had expected from him to her sudden ejaculation, that the actuality should bring such a sense of ironical disappointment.

She leant forward again as the curtain went up.

She was still child enough to enjoy a pantomime for its own sake, but the swing of catchy tunes and sentimental ballads brought with them something more than the easy heartache to which youth falls so ready a victim.

As the crash of the orchestra heralded a big scenic effect of dance and colour, Noel leant a little towards her and began to speak.

"Of course, it's a good show in its way. Look, Alex, you can see the man manipulating the coloured lights, up there. If you lean right back into this corner—there, up there."

His voice was full of interest and almost of eagerness. Alex leant back as he suggested and gazed obediently up at the lime-light operator, although she felt no interest, but rather a faint distaste.

"It's the ingenuity of these things I like," Noel's voice in her ear was explaining. "Of course, the dancing's good, and the comic bits, though I don't know that I care tremendously about that. They're always apt to be rather vulgar, even in front of a lot of ladies and children. Pity, that is. But take the songs, now, Alex; wouldn't you think that it would pay some one to write really good libretto, and get it taken on at a place like this and set to decent music? The tunes are good enough, but it's the words that are so poor, I always think."

Alex listened almost without hearing. The time had gone by when she could tell herself, with vehement attempt at self-deception, that such assertions indicated a fundamental resemblance between her tastes and those of Noel Cardew.

She was now only unreasonably angry and disappointed because of her baffled desire for the introduction, however belated, of a personal element into their intercourse.

She actually felt the tears rising to her throat as the evening wore on, and an intolerable fatigue overcame her.

Sitting upright became more and more of an effort, and the box seemed narrow and over-full.

The instinct of self-pity made her attempt to draw Noel's sympathy indirectly.

"Could you move back a little?" she half whispered. "I am getting rather cramped."

"Are you?" returned Noel with surprise, as he pushed his chair back.

But he did not appear to be in the least concerned about the matter. She looked at him once or twice and he met her glance absently. She knew that her face must show signs of the fatigue that she felt, but she knew also that they would not be perceptible to Noel.

For a moment, one of the rebellious gusts of misery of her stormy childhood shook Alex.

Why—why should there be no one to care, no one to whom it mattered that she be weary or out of spirits, no one to perceive, unprompted, when she was tired? She realized what such instinctive protection and care would mean to her, and the almost passionate gratitude with which she could welcome and return such solicitude.

But with Noel, she need not even exercise it. Had she loved him as she had endeavoured to persuade herself that she did, instead of only the figure of Love called by his name, Alex knew that Noel would have passed by all the smaller manifestations of her love unheeding and uncomprehending.

Her gods were mocking her with counterfeit indeed.

"You look tired, Alex," said her father's courteously-displeased voice.

Alex knew that on the rare occasions when he personally supervised a party of pleasure, Sir Francis liked the occasion to be met with due appreciation. She gave a forced smile and sat rather more upright.

"To be sure," her father said seriously, "it is a prolonged entertainment."

But Alex knew that neither Cedric, Archie nor Pamela would hear of any curtailment of their enjoyment, and Pamela was already urgently whispering that they must stay for the clown—they always did.

Sir Francis yielded graciously, evidently well-pleased, and they remained in the theatre for the final humours of the harlequinade.

Snow was actually falling when at length Sir Francis Clare's carriage was discovered, and Alex, her always low vitality at its lowest, was shivering with mingled cold and fatigue.

"Get in, children," commanded their father. "Noel, my dear boy, we can give you a lift, but pray get in—we must not keep the horses standing. What a terrible night!"

Crouched into a corner of the carriage, with Pamela half asleep on her lap, Alex was conscious of the relief of the darkness and the swift motion of the wheels.

Noel was next her, and in the sudden sense of almost childish terror and loneliness that possessed her, Alex sought instinctive comfort and reassurance in the unavoidable contact. She leant against his shoulder in the shelter of the dark, closely-packed carriage, and was sorry when Clevedon Square was reached at last, and she found herself obliged to descend.

"Good-night—thanks most awfully," said Noel at the door. "Good-night, Alex. I say, I'm afraid you were frightfully jammed up in the corner there—I'm so sorry, but I simply couldn't move."

XIII

Decision

On making up her mind that she must break off her engagement, Alex, unaware, took the bravest decision of her life.

She was being true to an instinctive standard, in which she herself only believed with part of her mind, and which was absolutely unknown to any of those who made up her surroundings.

She hardly knew, however, that she had taken any resolution in her many wakeful nights and discontented days, until the moment when she actually put it into execution. She wrote no eloquent letter, entered into no elaborate explanation such as would have seemed to her, after the manner of her generation, theoretically indispensable to the situation.

She blurted out three bald words which struck upon her own hearing with a sense of extreme shock the moment they were uttered.

"It's no use."

Noel looked hard at her for a moment, and then did not pretend to misunderstand her meaning.

"What, us being engaged?"

His intuitive comprehension, of which Alex had received so little proof ever before, might be unflattering, but it struck her with immense relief.

"Yes."

They gazed at each other in silence for a few moments, and Alex was furious with herself for a phrase sprung from nowhere that reiterated itself in her brain as she looked at Noel's handsome, inexpressive face—"Fish-like flaccidity...."

And again and again "Fish-like flaccidity."

They were in the drawing-room at Clevedon Square, and Noel, as though seeking to relieve his obvious embarrassment by moving, got up and walked across the room to the window.

"Of course, I've felt for some time that you weren't very happy about it all, and naturally—if you feel like that...."

All the seething disappointment and wounded vanity and aching loneliness that had tortured her since the very first moments of her engagement to Noel Cardew, rushed back on Alex, but she sought vainly for words in which to convey any part of her feelings to him.

It would be like trying to explain some abstruse principle of science to a little child. The sense of the utter uselessness of any attempt at making clear to him the reasons which were chaotic even to herself, paralysed Alex' utterance.

"I don't think it's any use going on," she repeated feebly.

"You're perfectly free," Noel assured her scrupulously; "and though, of course, I—I—I—you—we—it would be—" He broke off, very red.

Alex wished vaguely that it was possible for them to talk it all out quite frankly and dispassionately with one another, but the hard, crystalline detachment of the generation that was to follow theirs, had as yet no place in the scheme of things known to Noel and Alex.

They made awkward, conventional phrases to one another.

"Naturally," the boy said with an effort, "the whole blame must rest with me."

"Oh, no, I'll tell father and mother that I wanted to—to—break it off."

Alex stopped, conscious that she could not think of anything else to say.

But rather to her surprise, it appeared that Noel had something else to say.

He faced her with hands thrust into his pockets, his hair and little, fair moustache and his brown eyes looking very light indeed contrasted with his flushed face.

"Of course, you're absolutely free, as I said, only I must say, Alex, that you're making rather a mistake. Every one was awfully pleased about it, and we've known each other since we were kids—since you were a kid, at any rate—and a broken engagement—well, of course, I don't want to say anything, naturally, but it does put a girl in a—a—well, in what's called rather an invidious position. Especially when it isn't as though there was any particular reason for it."

"The principal reason—" Alex began faintly, not altogether certain of what it was that she was about to say.

"You see, I always thought we should hit it off together so well. We always did as kids—when you were a kid, I mean," Noel explained. "We always seemed to like the same things, and have a good deal in common."

"I don't think that you liked any of the things I cared about especially," Alex said, with a flash of spirit.

"What does that matter?" Noel demanded naïvely, "so long as one of us likes the things that the other does? It would be exactly the same thing."

Alex had never told herself, and was therefore quite unable to tell Noel, that she had never liked anything particularly, except his liking for her, which she had striven almost frenziedly to gain and retain by means of an artificially-stimulated display of sympathetic interest in his enthusiasms.

"There's another thing—I don't know whether I ought to say it to you, quite—but, of course, after one's—well, married—there's a lot more one has in common, naturally."

"Yes," said Alex forlornly. She quite believed it.

There was an awkward silence.

"Are you angry, Noel?"

She did not think he was at all angry, or very violently moved in any way, but she asked the question from an instinctive desire to hear from him any expression of his real feelings.

He replied stiffly, "Not at all. Of course, it's much better that you should say all this in time ... as I say, I've felt for some time that you weren't particularly cheerful. But I must say, Alex, I'm dashed if I know why."

"I don't know why, exactly—except that I—I don't feel as if we—really—cared enough for one another—"

Alex spoke with a pause between each word, blushing scarlet, as though it really cost her a physical effort to break through the barrier of reserve that she had been taught so relentlessly should always be erected between her own soul and the naked truth of her own sensations and intimate convictions.

Noel blushed too and Alex felt that he was shocked, which increased her own self-contempt almost unbearably.

"Naturally, if I hadn't—" he left a blank to supply the words, "I shouldn't have asked you to be engaged to me. I must say, Alex, I think you're rather exacting, you know."

Alex quivered from head to foot, as though he had insulted her most brutally. She, who had shrunk, with a genuine dread that had surprised herself, from Noel's few, shyly-uttered endearments, and had found so entire a lack of response in herself to his occasionally-attempted displays of tenderness, to be accused of having been exacting!

She did not for an instant realize, what even Noel faintly surmised, that she had indeed been exacting, of a romantic fervour which she was as incapable of inspiring as he of bestowing; from which, had it existed, the outward expressions of love would have leapt spontaneously, supremely appropriate, and necessary to them both.

In the mental chaos and muddle of their extreme youth, they looked at one another confused and bewildered, almost like two children suddenly conscious of the magnitude of their own naughtiness.

Noel said, rather proudly, as though one of the children suddenly tried to appear grown-up:

"You must allow me to undertake the distressing task of—breaking it to—them."

Alex almost shuddered, so acute was her own apprehension of the disclosure to her father and mother.

"I shall tell mother at once," she said, lacking the courage even to mention Sir Francis.

It was typical of the whole time and circumstances of their brief engagement that both Noel, and, in a lesser degree, Alex, had looked upon the relation into which they had entered as one in which their parents held the stakes and were of primary concern. They themselves were only puppets for whom strings were pulled, so as to cause certain vibrations and reactions over which they had no personal control.

This belief, unformulated by either, and entirely characteristic of a late Victorian generation, was, perhaps, that which they held most in common.

Alex even wondered whether she ought to wait and speak to Lady Isabel before taking the next step which she had in mind, but her desire to try and raise their trivial, shamefaced parting to a higher level by one dramatic touch, was too strong for her.

She slowly pulled the diamond engagement-ring off her finger, and handed it to him.

"Oh, I say," stammered Noel. He looked miserably undecided, and she knew that he was wondering whether he could not ask her to keep it just the same.

But in the end he slipped it into his pocket, after balancing it undecidedly for a moment in the palm of his hand.

She sat on the sofa, her left hand feeling strangely bare, unweighted by the heavy, glittering hoop, and Noel looked out of the window.

"I think I shall go abroad," he announced suddenly, and with mingled relief and mortification, Alex detected the sound of satisfaction latent in his voice. She felt that he thought himself to be doing the proper thing in the circumstances, and the sting inflicted on her pride by his acquiescence in their parting, though she had expected nothing else, gave her the sudden impulse necessary to rise and cross the room until she stood beside him at the window.

"Please forgive me, Noel."

"Oh, there's nothing to forgive," he returned hastily. "Of course, if you feel like that, it's all over."

He looked at her steadily and Alex felt the suspicion rush over her that he was trying obliquely to convey a warning to her that if she dismissed him now, it would be of no use to recall him later.

Alex felt passionately that in the depths of his stubborn vanity lay the truest presentment of himself that Noel would ever show her. If there was another side to his personality—and she was dimly willing to believe it for all her utter ignorance of him—the power to call it forth did not dwell in her.

Her momentary feeling of anger gave way to humiliation, and she half held out her hand.

"Good-bye, Noel," she said humbly.

As though to atone for the lack of feeling in his tone, Noel wrung her hand until it hurt her, as he replied automatically: "Good-bye, Alex."

"I suppose we shall never meet again," thought Alex, with all the finality of youth, and felt dazed as she saw him open the door.

Mechanically, she rang the bell in order that the servants downstairs might know that he was leaving, and come into the hall to find his hat and stick and to open the door for him.

Lady Isabel had instilled into Alex that it was part of her responsibility in grown-up life to ring the bell for departing guests, as unostentatiously as possible, at just the right moment, and every time that she remembered to do it, she always felt rather proud of herself.

This time she thought:

"It's the last time Noel will ever be in this room with me. He is going right out of my life."

She was quite unconsciously trying to awaken in herself an anguish of regret that might yet justify her to herself in recalling her lover.

If he turns round at the door and says, "Alex!" She tried to cheat herself with a hope that was yet not a hope.

Noel turned at the door.

In a solemn, magnanimous voice he said:

"Alex! I don't want you to feel—ever—that you need reproach yourself, whatever any one may say. Remember that, if"—he suddenly looked like a rather frightened little boy—"if there's a great fuss."

Then the door closed very quietly behind him, and Alex heard him go downstairs slowly.

It seemed to her that Noel's farewell had plumbed the final depth of his inadequacy.

Presently she sank into an armchair before the fire, and tried to visualize the effects of her own action.

She was principally conscious of a certain amazement, that a step which seemed likely to have such far-reaching consequences should have been so largely the result of sudden impulse. She had not thought the night before of breaking off her engagement. It had all happened very quickly in a few minutes, when the sense of tension which had hung round her intercourse with Noel had suddenly seemed to reach an unbearable pitch, so that something had snapped. Was this how Important Things happened to one through life?

Alex felt that she could not believe it.

But a broken engagement—could there be anything more important, more desperate? Alex felt with melancholy satisfaction that at least it was real life, as she had always imagined it, full of drama and tragedy. With, of course, a glory of happiness as final climax, that would make up for everything.... More physically tired than she knew, Alex abandoned herself dreamily to the old, idle visions of the wonderful, perfect love that should come to crown her life. There was no faint, latent sense of disloyalty to Noel now, in returning to her old dreams, that had been hers in one form or another ever since her childish ideal of a perfect friend who would always understand, and yet love one just the same.

It was with a violent start that Alex came back to reality again. She had dismissed Noel Cardew, had given him back his beautiful diamond engagement-ring, and now she would have to tell her father and mother, with no better reason to adduce than her own caprice.

She felt sick with fright.

She remembered Sir Francis's silent but unmistakable pride and pleasure in his engaged daughter, and Lady Isabel's additional display of affection, and even of deference to Alex' taste in choosing her frocks and hats, and her own sense of having at last atoned to them both for her unsatisfactory childhood and lack of any conspicuous social success, such as they had coveted for her.

Alex, cowering in her chair now, wondered how she could face them. Her only shred of comfort lay in the remembrance that Lady Isabel had said to her:

"My darlin', I'm so thankful to know you are marrying for love."

Alex, in bitter bewilderment, remembered those words again and again in the days which followed.

No one reproached her, she heard hardly a word of blame, and the most severe censure spoken to her was in her mother's soft voice, far more distressed than angry.

"But, Alex, do you know what people say, about a girl who's behaved as you have? That she's a vulgar jilt, neither more nor less. To throw over a young man after being engaged to him for four weeks, with no reason except a capricious fit.... Oh, my darling, why couldn't you have asked me first? To go and give him back that lovely ring, and hurt and insult him.... Of course, he'll never come back. Your father says how well he's behaved, poor boy.... Alex, Alex, what shall I do with you?"

Tears were running down her pretty face, so slightly lined even now.

Alex cried too, from pity for her mother and wretched, undefined remorse, and a growing conviction that in acting on her own distorted impulse she had once more involved herself, and, far worse, others, in far-reaching and disastrous consequences.

"Thank Heaven, we hadn't announced the engagement, but, of course, it will all get about—things always do. And there's nothing worse for a girl than to get that sort of reputation, especially when she's not—not tremendously sought after, or pretty or anything."

Lady Isabel had never before come so near to an avowal that her eldest daughter's career had proved a disappointment to her, and Alex in the admission, rightly gauged the extent of her mother's dismay.

"Why did you do it, Alex?"

Alex tried haltingly to explain, but she could only say:

"I—I felt I didn't care for him enough."

"But you hadn't had time to find out! You accepted him when he proposed, so you must have been quite ready to like him then, and you'd only been engaged for four weeks. How could you tell—a little thing like you?" wailed Lady Isabel.

"Oh, Alex, if you'd only come to me about it first—I could have explained it all to you—girls often get fancies about being in love."

"I thought you wanted me to marry for love. You said so," sobbed Alex.

"Of course, I don't want you to marry without it. But it's the love that comes after marriage that really counts—and a boy you'd known all your life, practically—that we all liked—you could have been ideally happy, Alex." Lady Isabel looked at her almost resentfully.

"I don't know what will happen to you, my darling, I don't indeed. I sometimes think you are just as headstrong and exaggerated as when you were a little girl. And, Alex, I don't like even to say such a thing to you—but—there's never been any one but Noel, and I'm afraid this isn't the sort of thing that makes any man.... Nothing puts them off more—and no wonder."

Alex thought momentarily of Queenie, but she knew that was different. In the supreme object of woman, to attract, Queenie stood in a class apart. Nothing that Queenie could ever do would ever rob her of the devotion that was hers, wherever she chose to claim it, by mysterious right of attraction.

From her father, Alex heard very little. She was left, in her abnormal sensitiveness, to measure his disappointment and mortification by his very silence.

Feeling again like the naughty little girl who had been responsible for Barbara's fall from the balusters, and had been sent to Sir Francis for sentence, she listened, in a silence that was broken only by the sobs that she could hardly control, to his few, measured utterances.

"You are old enough to know your own mind." Sir Francis paused, swinging his glasses lightly to and fro in his hand. Then he deliberately put them across his nose and looked at her.

"At least," he added carefully, "I suppose you are. Your mother tells me that you appear to have been—er—rather suddenly overwhelmed by a fear of marrying without love. I don't wish to say, Alex, that such a sentiment was not more or less proper and natural, but to act upon it so hastily, and with such a heartless lack of consideration, appears to me to be the action, my dear child"—Sir Francis paused, and then added calmly—"of a fool. The word is not a pretty one, but I prefer it to the only other alternative that I can see, for describing your conduct."

"Have you anything to say, my dear?"

Alex had nothing to say, and would, in any case, have been rendered by this time powerless of saying it. Sir Francis looked at her with the same grief and mortification on his handsome, severe face that had been there eight years before when the nursery termagant, sobbing and terrified, had stood before him in her short frock and pinafore.

"You could have asked advice," he said gently. "You have parents whose only wish is to see you happy. Why did you not go to your mother?"

Alex tried to say, "Because—" but found that the only reason which presented itself to her mind was her own conviction that Lady Isabel would not have understood, and she dared not speak it aloud.

The Clare axiom, as that of thousands of their class and generation, was that parents by Divine right knew more than their children could ever hope to learn, and that nothing within the ken of these could ever prove beyond their comprehension.

Sir Francis shook his head sadly.

"I will tell you, my poor child, since you will not answer me, why you did not seek your mother's advice. It was because you are weakly impulsive, and by one act of impetuous folly will lay up for yourself years of unavailing remorse and regret."

Alex recognized with something like terror the truth of his description. Weakly impulsive.

She had blindly followed an instinct, and, as usual, all her world had blamed her and she had found herself faced by consequences that appalled her.

Why must one always involve others?

She ceased to see clearly that marriage with Noel Cardew would have meant misery, and blindly accepted the vision thrust upon her by her surroundings. She had hurt and disappointed and shamed them, and they could only see her action as a cruel, capricious impulse.

Alex, weakly impulsive, as Sir Francis had said, and sick with misery at their unspoken blame and silent disappointment, presently lost her always feeble hold of her own convictions, and saw with their eyes.

XIV

Barbara

Alex became more and more unhappy.

It was evident that Lady Isabel felt hardly any pleasure now in taking her daughter about with her, and the consciousness of not being approved rendered Alex more self-conscious and less sure of herself than ever.

It was inevitable that one or two of her mother's more intimate friends should know of her affair with Noel Cardew, and it did not need Lady Isabel's occasional sorrowful comments to persuade Alex that they took the same view of her conduct as did her parents. The sense of being despised overwhelmed her, and she fretted secretly and lost some of her colour, and held herself worse than ever from the lassitude that overwhelmed her physically whenever she was bored or unhappy.

Towards Easter Lady Isabel sent for Barbara to come home from Neuilly.

Alex revived a little at the idea of having Barbara at Clevedon Square again.

She thought it would impress her younger, still schoolgirl sister to see her as a fully-emancipated grown-up person, and she could not help hoping that Barbara, promoted to being a confidante, would thrill at the first-hand story of a real love affair and a broken engagement. Alex was prepared to attribute to Noel a romantic despair that had not been his, at her ruthless dismissal of him, in order to overawe little, seventeen-year-old Barbara.

But behold Barbara, after those months spent in the household of the Marquise de Métrancourt de la Hautefeuille!

No need to tell her to keep her shoulders back.

She was not quite so tall as Alex, but her slim figure was exquisitely upright. Encased in French stays that made even Lady Isabel gasp, she wore, with an air, astonishing French clothes that swung gracefully round her as she moved, and her hair, which had developed a surprising ripple, was gathered up at the back of her head with a huge, outstanding bow of smartly-tied ribbon that seemed to form a background for the pale, pointed little face, that was still Barbara's, but had somehow acquired an elusive charm that actually seemed more distinguished than ordinary, healthy English prettiness.

And the self-assurance of the child!

Alex was disgusted at the ease with which Barbara, hitherto shy and tongue-tied in the presence of her parents, chattered lightly to them on the evening of her return, and offered—actually offered unasked!—to sing them some of her new songs. "New songs" indeed, when it was only a year ago that she had written to ask whether she might have a few singing lessons with the Marquise's daughter! But neither Sir Francis nor Lady Isabel rebuked her temerity, and they even exchanged amused, approving glances when the slim, upright figure moved lightly across the room to the big grand piano.

Alex, in her pink evening dress, with her elaborately-coiled hair, felt infinitely childish and awkward as she watched Barbara slip off a new gold bangle from her little white, rounded wrist, and strike a couple of chords with perfect self-assurance.

She was going to play without music! It was absurd; Barbara had never been musical.

Certainly the voice in which she sang a couple of little French ballades, was a very tiny one, but there was a tunefulness, above all, a vivacity, about her whole performance which caused even Sir Francis to break into unwonted applause at the finish. Alex applauded too, principally from the desire to prove to herself that it would be impossible for her ever to feel jealous of little Barbara.

When they had sent her to bed, Lady Isabel laughed with more animation than she often displayed.

"How the child has developed!"

"Charming, charming!" said Sir Francis. "We must show her something of the world, I think, even if she is rather young."

But it soon became evident, to Alex, at least, that Barbara had not been without glimpses of the world, even at Neuilly. She listened with interest, but very coolly, to Alex' attempted confidences, and finally said, "Well, I can't imagine how you could have borne to give up the diamond ring, and it would have been fun to get married and have a trousseau and a house of your own. But I don't think Noel would make much of a husband."

The calm disparagement in her tone annoyed Alex. It seemed to rob her solitary conquest of any lingering trace of glory.

"I don't think you know very much about it," she said rather scathingly. "You haven't met any men at all, naturally, so how can you judge?"

Barbara laughed.

Something of security that would not even take the trouble to dispute the point, pierced through that cool, self-confident little laugh of hers.

Later on, she told Alex, with rather overdone matter-of-factness, that a young Frenchman, a cousin of Hélène de la Hautefeuille, had fallen very much in love with her at Neuilly.

Alex at first pretended not to believe her, although she felt an uncomfortable inward certainty that Barbara would never waste words on an idle boast that could not be substantiated.

"You need not believe me if you don't want to," said Barbara indifferently.

"But how could you know? I thought the Marquise was so particular?"

"So she was. They all are, in France, with jeunes filles. It's ridiculous. But, of course, as Hélène was his cousin, they weren't quite so strict, and he used to give her notes and things for me."

"Barbara!"

"You needn't be so shocked, Alex. Of course, I never wrote to him—that would have been too stupid; but he's very nice, and simply madly in love with me. Hélène said he always admired le type Anglais, and that I was his ideal."

Alex was thoroughly angered at the complacency in Barbara's voice.

"You and Hélène are two silly, vulgar, little schoolgirls. I didn't think you could be so—so common, Barbara. What on earth would father and mother say?"

"I daresay they wouldn't mind so very much," said Barbara calmly, "so long as they didn't know about the notes and our having met once or twice in the garden."

"I don't believe it!" exclaimed Alex. "You think it sounds grown-up, and so you're exaggerating the whole thing."

Barbara looked at her sister, with her eyebrows cocked in a provoking, conceited sort of way, not angrily, but rather contemptuously.

"Really, Alex, to hear you make such a fuss about it, any one would think that you'd never set eyes on a man. Of course, that sort of thing happens as soon as one begins to get grown-up. It's part of the fun."

"You know mother would say it was vulgar."

It was almost a relief to see one of Barbara's rare blushes at the word.

"I don't see why it should be more vulgar than you and Noel."

"How can you be so ridiculous! Of course, that was quite different. We were both grown-up, and properly engaged and everything."

"Alex," said Barbara suddenly, "when you were engaged, did he ever kiss you?"

Alex turned nearly as scarlet as her sister had been a moment before.

"Shut up!" she said savagely. A thought struck her. "You don't mean to say you ever let that beastly French boy try to do anything like that?" she demanded.

"No, no," said Barbara hastily; "of course not. But he's not such a boy as all that, you know. He has a moustache, and he's doing his service militaire now. Otherwise," said Barbara calmly, "I daresay he would have followed me to England."

"You conceited little idiot! He must have been laughing at you."

Barbara shrugged her shoulders, with a gesture that had certainly not been acquired in Clevedon Square.

"You'll see for yourself presently," she remarked. "He's going to get his permission next month, and he's coming to London."

"You don't suppose you'll be able to go sneaking about writing notes and meeting him in corners here, do you?" cried Alex, horrified.

Barbara looked at her disdainfully, and gave deft little pulls and pats to the bow on her hair, so that it stood out more than ever.

"What on earth do you take me for, Alex? Of course, I know as well as you do that that sort of thing can't be done in London. It will all be perfectly proper," said Barbara superbly. "I have given him permission to call here."

Alex remained speechless.

She was quite unable to share in the tolerant amusement with which her parents apparently viewed the astonishing emancipation of Barbara, although it was true that Barbara still retained a sufficient sense of decorum to describe M. Achille de Villefranche to them merely as "a cousin of Hélène's, who would like to come and call when he is in London."

Lady Isabel acceded to the proposed visit with gracious amusement, and Alex wondered jealously why her own attempts to prove grown-up and like other girls never seemed to succeed as did Barbara's preposterous, demurely-spoken pretensions—until she remembered with a pang that, after all, she had never had to ask whether admiring strangers might call upon her. She knew instinctively that however much Lady Isabel might exact in the way of elaborate chaperonage, she would secretly have welcomed any such proof of her daughter's attraction for members of the opposite sex.

One day Barbara, more boastful or less secretive than usual, showed Alex one of Achille's notes, written to her on the day that she had left Neuilly.

Alex deciphered the pointed writing with some difficulty, and then turned first hot and then cold, as she remembered the few letters she had ever received from Noel Cardew, written during the period of their lawful, sanctioned engagement, when she had so fiercely told herself that, of course, a man was never romantic on paper, and that his very reticence only proved the depth of his feeling.

And all that time Barbara, utterly cold and merely superciliously amused, had been the recipient of this Latin hyperbole, these impassioned poetical flights:

"Ma petite rose blanche anglaise Ma douce Sainte Barbe."

(Good Heavens! he had never seen Barbara in one of her cold furies, when she would sulk in perfect silence for three days on end!) And finally, with humble pleadings that he might be forgiven for such a débordement, Achille apostrophized her as "ma mignonne adorer."

Alex could hardly believe that it was really Barbara who had inspired these romantic ebullitions.

"How did you answer him?" she asked breathlessly.

"I didn't answer at all," Barbara coolly replied. "You don't suppose I was so silly as that, do you? Why, girls get into the most awful difficulties by writing letters and signing their names, and then the man won't let them have the letters back afterwards. Achille has never had one single scrap of writing from me."

Alex felt as much rebuked as angered by this display of worldly wisdom. She knew, and was sure that Barbara, pluming herself over her own shrewdness, knew also, that had she herself been able to provoke similar protestations, no considerations of prudence or discretion would have restrained the ardour of her response.

During the Easter holidays Barbara remained in the schoolroom, sometimes playing with Archie and Pamela, but generally engaged on one of the many forms of embroidery which she appeared to have learned at Neuilly, or diligently practising her French songs at the schoolroom piano.

She did not appear to be at all envious of Alex' grown-up privileges, for which Alex felt rather wonderingly grateful to her, until one day when she was out driving with Lady Isabel, when a sudden enlightenment fell upon her.

"What do you think of this ambition of little Barbara's?" her mother asked her, with a trace of hesitation.

"What?" asked Alex stupidly.

"Why, this frantic wish of hers to be presented next May and allowed to make her début. She will be seventeen, after all, and she seems to have set her heart on it."

"Barbara! She wants to be presented and come out in May! Why, it's nearly April now, mother. That would mean in another six weeks."

Alex was stupefied.

"Hasn't she said anything to you?" said Lady Isabel, with a sort of vague, unperceiving wonder. "Funny little thing! I thought she would have been sure to have talked it all over with you. She's been beggin' and implorin' us ever since she got back from Neuilly, and your father is half inclined to say she may."

How like Barbara! Begging and imploring them to let her be presented next May, and all the time saying nothing at all to Alex, and slyly pretending to care nothing for coming out, and listening with deceptive quiet to Alex' little occasional speeches made to mark the difference between twenty and seventeen. No doubt Barbara knew very well that she would get her own way by dint of ardent pleading, and did not want the effect of her arguments and reasonable-sounding representations to be spoilt by Alex' vigorous protest.

For, of course, Alex was indignant. Why should Barbara come out when she was barely seventeen, when her sister had had to wait until the orthodox eighteen?

Alex might not value her privileges highly, but she was far from wishing Barbara to share them.

In the depths of her soul was a lurking consciousness that neither did she want sharp-eyed, critical Barbara to see how poor and dull a figure her sister cut, after the imaginary triumphs of which she had so often boasted.

Lady Isabel might be disappointed, but she never voiced her disappointment or hinted at it, and Alex thought she tried to conceal it from herself. But Barbara would not be disappointed. She might be rather pleased, and make the small, veiled, spiteful comments by which she occasionally, and always unexpectedly, paid one back for past slights or unkindnesses.

Alex felt that she could not bear any further mortifications.

The question of Barbara's coming out was still undecided, principally owing to Alex's strenuous efforts to persuade her mother not to allow it, when M. Achille de Villefranche made the ceremonious visit to Clevedon Square which Barbara had announced.

He came on a Sunday, so soon after three o'clock that Lady Isabel's luncheon guests had barely departed, and sat on the extreme edge of his chair, a slim, beautifully-rolled umbrella between his knees, and his silk hat balanced on the top of it. His tie was tied into an astonishing bow with out-spread ends that irresistibly reminded Alex of Barbara's hair-ribbon.

He spoke excellent English, very rapidly, but occasionally lapsed into still more rapid French, in which he poured forth his enthusiasm for "cette chère île des brouillards," which description of her native land was fortunately uncomprehended by Lady Isabel.

Altogether Achille was so like a Frenchman on the stage that Alex almost expected to see him fall upon his knees in the drawing-room when Barbara demurely obeyed the summons sent up to the schoolroom by her mother, and appeared in her prim, dark-blue schoolroom frock. He certainly sprang to his feet with a sort of bound, but any further intentions were frustrated by his elegant umbrella, which got between his feet and nearly tripped him up, and sent his beautiful top-hat rolling into the furthest corner of the drawing-room.

Alex had to recognize that Achille behaved with great presence of mind, even taken at such a disadvantage. He bowed over Barbara's hand, at the same time kicking his umbrella carelessly aside. He waved a contemptuous hand which made the behaviour of his hat a thing of no account, and he did not even trouble himself to retrieve it until Barbara was seated, when he strolled away to pick it up in a nonchalant manner, talking all the time of other things.

But in spite of the high-handedness of Achille, Alex felt that the whole affair was of the nature of a farce, and was ashamed of herself for deriving unmistakable satisfaction from the conviction that no one could take Barbara's conquest seriously.

Even Sir Francis, who found Achille still discoursing in the drawing-room on his return from the Club at seven o'clock, indulged in a little mild chaffing of his younger daughter when M. de Villefranche amid many bows, had finally taken his leave.

Barbara responded with a sprightly amiability that she had never displayed in her pre-Neuilly days, and which Alex angrily and uncomprehendingly perceived both pleased and amused Sir Francis.

"But I am not sure I approve of your taste in the selection of your admirers, my dear," he said humorously, his right hand lightly swinging his glasses against his left.

"I have never met any Englishmen, you know, father," said Barbara piteously, opening her eyes very wide. "If mother would only let me come out this year and see a few people!"

Alex was aghast at Barbara's duplicity, recognizing perfectly her manœuvre of implying that only her mother's consent was still required for her début.

"Well, well, well," said Sir Francis, wearing the expression of an indulgent parent; "but surely young ladies are expected to wait till their eighteenth birthday?"

"Oh, but I should so like a long frock," sighed Barbara, her head on one side—an admirable rendering of the typical "young lady" known and admired of her father's generation.

Sir Francis laughed, unmistakable yielding foreshadowed in his tone, and in the glance he directed towards his wife.

"'Gad! Isabel, we shall have a regular little society butterfly on our hands; what do you think?"

Lady Isabel, also smiling, nevertheless said almost reluctantly, as though to imply that assent would be in defiance of her better judgment:

"Of course, this year will be exceptionally gay because of the Jubilee. I should rather like her to come out when there is so much going on, but I don't quite know about taking two of them everywhere." She glanced at Alex and sighed almost involuntarily. It was impossible not to remember the tentative plans that they had discussed so short a while ago for a brilliant wedding that should take place, just when all London was busy with festivals in honour of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. The same recollection shot like a pang through Alex, feeling the pain of her mother's disappointment far more acutely than her own humiliation, and making her speak sharply, and almost unaware of what she said, sooner than endure a moment's silence:

"You can take Barbara instead of me. I hate balls and I'm sick of going to things."

She was horrified at the sound of the words as she spoke them, and at her own roughened, mortified voice.

There was a moment's silence.

"That," said Sir Francis gently and gravely, "is neither a very gracious nor a very dutiful speech, Alex. Your mother has spared herself neither trouble nor fatigue in conducting you to those entertainments organized for your pleasure and advantage, and it is a poor reward for her many sacrifices to be told with a scowling face that you are 'sick of going about.' If those are your sentiments, I shall strongly advise her to consult her own convenience in the future, instead of making everything give way to your pleasures, as she has done for the last two years."

Lady Isabel looked distressed, and said, "It is very difficult to know what you want, Alex. If you'd only say!"