VII LILY: The Philanderer

I

The party had divided in London, three to Wales, Courtney Wallace and Vance to Cornwall and Devon. Vance had been rather insistent on the southern tour. The other man had yielded without enthusiasm.

“I’ve done it before,” he said resignedly. “Lyme Regis, Torquay, Tintagel, Clovelly! And you’ve done it before, Vance. Is it possible, by any accident, that the lady from the Theatre Royal is—going south?”

Vance flushed, although he laughed.

“She is motoring with a party of friends. I believe that is their general direction. There is hardly a chance of our running into them.”

Wallace smoked reflectively. Beneath their hotel window all London passed. Schoolboys with top hats and canes scrambled to the tops of buses, flower women disputed on the pavements, coster carts dodged the traffic; the street was a thousand miracles.

Suddenly Wallace bent forward.

“Ah!” he said. “That’s too bad! That’s—that’s horrible!”

A coster’s donkey, hardly larger than a dog, had gone down and a bus had passed over its foot. It lay on its side, a little island of tragedy in the river of traffic that promptly divided around it. The coster, with his face working, was on his knees beside it, fumbling with the harness buckles.

Vance rose and glanced over the other man’s shoulder.

“It’s infamous!” he cried. “What chance had the little beast, anyhow? Look at that! No room for it to live and hardly room for it to die!”

He flung away from the window. Wallace himself, less highly organised perhaps, did not care to look again. Instead, he turned meditative eyes on his companion. It was his work to study people, and Vance was good holiday material, psychologically, not too complex for hot weather. It was interesting to watch Vance decide that he wanted a thing and to follow the steps by which he got it; further still, to see him justify himself, standing his soul at attention and telling it what it needed, what was good for it, generally bullying it into line. He liked an audience for the process. More than once he had chosen Wallace. The argument differed little from time to time.

“Every now and then,” he would say, “I have got to cut clean loose from work, from everything. You know how hard I work—constant strain, and all that. Most men leave their business when they close the office door behind them, and don’t take it up until the next morning. But I’m always at it. Creative work’s the devil and the strain is cumulative. At the end of ten months, I’ve done a year’s work, and I feel it.”

“Yes,” Wallace would agree. He knew that he was only the remote audience, that Vance was really talking to his soul, and enjoying it.

“If I were a drinking man I’d go on a terrific bust—nervous explosion, you know. Or, if I could afford it, I’d hike to Monte Carlo. I don’t do either. But one thing I can do, and it isn’t selfish. It’s sheer self-preservation. I can get away from my family, and I do.”

And so on, ending of course in a eulogy of Edith, his wife, and of the children.

“Only woman in the world who could live with me,” he would say. “She has poise; she understands! She knows as well as I do when I’ve reached my limit. Came down to see me off—but you saw her at the dock, of course. How do you think she looked?”

Vance had the egotist’s habit of repeating himself, and twice now Wallace had faced this question. Both times he had evaded it.

“There’s a certain amount of strain about such partings,” he had said. “I thought she was depressed, naturally. I don’t see her very often, of course.”

On one such occasion Vance had roused from his self-engrossment, at something in Wallace’s voice.

“You used to be bully friends,” he said. “I’m sorry you don’t come out oftener.”

“There’s a perfectly good reason why I don’t go,” Wallace returned easily. “There is nothing quite so painful to a bachelor as the married happiness of his friends.”

Vance had been quite satisfied.

To Wallace, sitting back in the hotel window, came the memory of Edith’s face that day on the pier. In repose her face had been enigmatic—a sort of tolerant resignation, with a flash now and then of humour. It was almost, Wallace thought uneasily, as if she had reached a point where she must laugh at herself, or weep.

There came to the older man’s mind, as Vance moved to a writing table, odds and ends of Vance’s philosophy of life.

“I’m not a saint, of course, but my good times have never hurt anybody.”

“I am a better husband and a better father for getting away now and then. It’s perfectly true that all of us need to invite our own souls once in a while.”

“All my capital is in my head, and about once a year I have to look after the investment.”

And that very ingenuous statement on the steamer, apropos of a triangle which was holding the interest of the smoking room—

“After all, if a man has any breadth of intelligence, any larger view of life, it is almost impossible to find one woman who understands all sides of him, isn’t it?”

Wallace had had a quizzical vision of Vance’s soul, rather nice and young and naïve, saluting and accepting this second-hand wisdom as Truth.

Vance was examining the proposed itinerary of the excursion and copying it into his letter. He was writing eagerly, boyishly, and when he rose it was with a mischievous appearance of having, by sending the word home to Edith, clinched the arrangement. But he held two letters in his hand, not one.

“When do you want to start?” Wallace asked.

“The car will be ready to-morrow. Why not go while the weather’s good?” Under his carefully casual tone was an eagerness that could not be entirely suppressed.

Vance made a good travelling companion. His enthusiasm, which even infected Wallace, surmounted the minor mishaps of the journey—a broken brake rod, tire trouble, three days of rain which tied them up in Bournemouth, and beat the sea to a sodden plain. It was at Bournemouth that they got to the subject of dreams. Vance had had a dream. He was still shaken at breakfast, and he reverted to it when, in weather-proof tweeds, they ventured through the rain to the pier.

“I daresay it’s overwork, isn’t it?”

Wallace eyed him. He looked almost ill, strained, his mouth set hard.

“Dreams are curious things,” Wallace said reflectively. “You know there’s a theory that our dreams are our real selves.”

“I thought they were the reasonable soul run mad.”

“Not at all. During sleep seems to be the only time that the unconscious self gets to the surface. All barriers are down. The highly cultured part of one, which is only superstructure, of course, is off guard. Suppressed desires come up, wishes that would horrify us in waking moments, fears that are founded on such wishes; it’s rather abstruse.”

“ ‘The flattering truth of sleep,’ ” said Vance cynically, but he changed colour. “It’s ridiculous! I refuse to be such stuff as dreams are made of. I have never had a dream that was not incongruous, absurd. Even this about Edith—”

“The brain, of course, when the will is suspended during sleep, is like an engine without a governor. I’ll acknowledge that.”

Vance wheeled on him.

“And this dream of seeing Edith and the children sinking in a quicksand—are you going to classify that as a fear that is founded on a wish?”

It was a direct challenge. Wallace, who, dealing in the things of the soul, dealt in intangibilities that were the realest things in the world to him, could forswear neither his belief nor his friend, and compromised.

“Not exactly that. Your unconscious self may realise that there are times when a man, to do his best work, should not have his interests divided. I should hardly call that disloyalty.”

Vance recovered himself slowly. It was as if he had peered over the edge of an abyss. Wallace realised to his surprise that he was profoundly shaken; that he must be more careful. It was a dangerous thing to turn a man’s thoughts in. Vance, thoroughly objective, must not become subjective. He was too mental, too imaginative. Perhaps Vance himself was right, had, in his graceless young way, solved his own psychology, and the girl from the Theatre Royal was a safety valve.

They had not yet encountered the other party, and after the morning on the sands at Bournemouth, Vance seemed determined to ignore its possible proximity. He ceased peering ahead at each motor they overtook; the inns where they lunched were selected at random, and not, as earlier, as if in accordance with some preconceived itinerary. He seemed to have placed his affairs on the cold knees of the gods and was waiting.

But he still dreamed. Wallace, sharing a room with him in a small inn on the edge of Dartmoor, found him sitting up by the window one night.

“It’s those damned dreams,” he said fretfully. “Of course I know she’s all right, and the children too. But do you realise that I can’t send a cable from this God-forsaken hole?”

But the mere outburst helped him. He went back to bed and almost immediately to sleep. It was Wallace who lay awake.

Until he met the girl, Wallace could not understand the depths to which he felt Vance had been stirred. It was not their first holiday together; Vance, always attractive to woman, was attracted by them. More than once, Wallace had known these holidays of the younger man complicated by a pretty woman, had witnessed his penitential or aggressively virtuous return, as the case might be. But this time there was a difference. Vance was harder hit, or perhaps he had been more brain-weary than before, and the reaction was stronger. He was not sleeping well. And when they were near the sea he took to long walks over the cliffs.

It was at Lynton that they came up with the other party, a Mr. and Mrs. Byron, and the girl herself. Her name was Lily Ruskin; she was a slender girl, much younger than Wallace had anticipated, simply dressed and without make-up. He drew a deep breath. She was so much better than he had expected; even the way her brown hair was twisted low on her neck was without affectation, without even that studied simplicity that is most artificial of all. The girl was absolutely natural, rather lovely in a slim, graceful way.

The Byrons were impossible, frankly. Mrs. Byron was a vivid person, noisily dressed and not flawless in speech. Wallace gathered at dinner that her main interest in life was her bull terrier, travelling with her, and named George Broadhurst after the American playwright.

“It was in one of Broadhurst’s plays that I made my first success,” she confided to Wallace. “I’ve got a New York offer upstairs now. If it wasn’t for Byron, I’d go in a minute.”

“You’re not going without me. You can lay to that,” Byron put in, his tone surly. “In this game it’s either double harness or single harness, and no half way about it, as far as I’m concerned.”

She shrugged her heavy shoulders and turned her attention to her dinner, eating with slow and deliberate appreciation. But later in the meal, when Byron’s attention was distracted, she reverted for a moment to the American tour.

“I’m going, nevertheless,” she said frankly. “If Lily goes I go. I know a lot of Americans. We’ll have rather a cheery time.”

Lily Ruskin left the table before the others had finished, making an excuse of the heat of the room, and Vance rose with her. Mrs. Byron looked after him, with much the same air of deliberate appreciation she had shown to her food.

“Rather a nut, your friend. Lily is quite mad about him,” observed Mrs. Byron, and took some raisins.

“He’s a brilliant chap, in his line,” Wallace observed. He had lost nothing of Vance’s protective droop toward Lily, of her almost shivering consciousness of his nearness. And because the girl was straight—he knew that now; he had not expected it—the situation had taken on a new quality of tenseness. Lily was mad about Vance, mad with the unspoiled passion of the woman who has saved herself, through God knows what filth, clean for the one man, and who having found him is ready to give her all. And there was worse to come.

“Fancy!” drawled Mrs. Byron. “Brilliant, handsome and young! And yet your clever American ladies have let him escape!”

“Escape?”

“Unmarried,” she explained. “It is one of the most charming things about America. So many of your men remain unmarried!”

Wallace caught a swift glance from under her heavy lids and met it squarely.

“American standards of luxury are rather high,” he said gravely. “Comparatively speaking, we have few hereditary fortunes. A man must work for years to establish himself, before he can marry.”

Although he had preserved his impassivity, underneath Wallace was seething with fury. Vance had gone too far. He was passing with these people as a single man; it was puerile, childish, damnable. It was a great deal more—it was dangerous. Wallace found himself an involuntary accomplice, and his gorge rose.

They had their coffee in the garden that clung to the edge of the cliff. For months after, Wallace was to remember that twilight hour, with the terraced paths winding beneath them, the heavy fragrance of flowers opening to the first dew of the night, the lights of a battleship far out from land, the distant sound of the sea far below, the excited whimpering of George Broadhurst, who had flushed a rabbit in the shrubbery.

Vance and Lily sat a little apart. They were very silent. The girl’s face looked set and white; she refused coffee, took a cigarette, forgot to light it. The air seemed charged with feeling. Rather suddenly Wallace knew that Vance had told her. Mixed with his relief came sympathy for her. Mrs. Byron had been right. She was quite mad about Vance. And she did not care who knew it, apparently. She sat, bent a little forward, gazing out to sea, and one of her hands lay on Vance’s knee. He was uncomfortable about it for a minute—then he covered it with one of his own.

The conversation languished. They had no common ground on which to meet. Vance made no effort. Wallace tried the Ulster uprising, and was countered by Mrs. Byron with the flat statement that she detested the Irish and Lady Gregory’s plays. Was Wallace a playwright? But of course not; he was Doctor Wallace—she’d forgotten.

“M. D.,” Vance made an effort. “Doctor of Minds. Be very careful, Mrs. Byron. He knows all sorts of spooky things. He’s a psychologist.”

It was clear that Mrs. Byron confused Wallace at once with the Society of Psychic Research. She roused to the first interest of the evening.

“Ghosts!” she said. “Do tell me a ghost story!”

Wallace smiled.

“I deal with ghosts, of course,” he admitted, “but they are ghosts of the mind’s own raising.”

“Any sort of ghost,” she persisted. “Once in Warwickshire, we stopped in a haunted house. Do you remember, Lily? And how you sat up and nothing happened?”

The girl did not reply. She spoke past Mrs. Byron, to Wallace.

“What do you mean by ghosts of the mind’s own raising?”

Having caught her attention, Wallace was determined to hold it. He had already formulated a plan of a sort. If he could get Vance through the evening, he thought he could talk him into reason. It was the next two hours he dreaded. For there was mischief afoot. Vance stirred, lighted a cigar. In the flare of the match his eyes were reckless, the eyes of a man who has ceased to think.

When he chose, Wallace could be vastly entertaining. He made the effort then. He held the conversational lines taut, driving hard to one point, to hold Vance and the girl to the group. So he spoke mostly to her, held her attention close, ignored the pitiful appeal of her white face. For twenty minutes or more he held them all. At the end of that time Mrs. Byron dropped asleep, her head falling forward. Byron, who had suffered complete metaphysical submergence early in the game, emerged enough a few moments later to take himself to the end of the terrace, the terrier at his heels. And still Wallace talked on.

“Dreams!” he said. “Now there’s a field for fancy, Miss Ruskin!” He was conscious that he had caught Vance’s attention. “You know, dreams show us that we never forget things. We don’t, you know. They’re all there, big and little. Along comes the scent of a flower, or some combination of scents, or a strain of music, and presto, the little memory cell closes up, completes the circuit, and we are off.”

Vance, leaning forward, lifted the girl’s hand to his cheek.

“The smell of the sea over the land of Lorna Doone,” he said unsteadily, “and all of us, here to-night.”

“In dreams,” Wallace persisted grimly, “we’re particularly liable to go back. Far back. I know of an interesting case of the sort. You know, no soul is safe from us.” The girl shivered. “In the case I speak of a young and charming woman finds she has made a mistake in her marriage. Somewhere, deep in her soul, she holds the image of a man she wishes she had married. Very deep in her soul—it took me two months to get to it, for she would not acknowledge it, even to herself.”

“I know,” said Lily. “Women have to bury—so much.”

“This chap, whoever he is, evidently represents a refuge in time of trouble, to her. It’s all unconscious. She does not know it herself. Anyhow, when things get pretty hard for her—the husband wanders, although he loves her—she goes back in her dreams to her early childhood, to a fright she had, a dog that turned on her. The dream is always the same; she sees the dog coming, and it is the other man—the chap she did not marry, that she calls to for help. It’s incongruous, like all dreams, but vastly interesting.”

He had the girl’s attention, at least.

“I see,” she said, slowly. “And to you this symbolizes something?”

“Perhaps not the dream alone. There were other circumstances, of course. What she is burying is probably a feeling that in a crisis of any sort, the—the other man would be more dependable than the husband. It is possible, of course, that she has always cared for the other chap. If there is a crisis, and the husband fail her—”

Lily rose, shaking off Vance’s detaining hand. She stood near Wallace, looking down.

“And when the crisis comes, what will the husband matter, after all?” she demanded. “Your philosophy of life is wrong—all philosophy of life is wrong, when it is founded on law, and not on love.”

“Colonies have been founded on that principle—and failed.”

She hardly heard him. Her hands hung before her, clasped so close that her slim fingers were blue-white.

“Law that is best for the many may be criminally wrong for the few,” she said, and leaving them, joined Byron and the terrier at the end of the terrace. Vance did not look up after her, but Wallace knew that no movement of her white figure was lost to him. He waited for Vance to speak, but he made no effort. When she did not come back, but with Byron penetrated deeper into the garden shadows, Vance rose and flung away his cigar.

“I’m going up to bed,” he said irritably. “This whole damned party has hung together this evening as if every member of it was afraid of his own society.”

Perturbed as he was, Wallace smiled. It was so like Vance to be childish at a big moment. Of course, he knew Vance was not going to bed. He would break up the party and then come down for his cheated hour with Lily. Wallace stifled a groan of very weariness, and shut his jaw grimly. He would see the thing out, if he had to sit up all night. And it came very nearly to that.

Wallace sat alone on the terrace. A launch put off from the shore and headed for the battleship. The lantern in the bow moved across the black water like the reflection of some swift star. Wallace’s thoughts, too, crossed the sea. He thought of Edith Vance, of the day of her wedding, of the calm confidence in her eyes until the service had begun, of the shade of panic in them when, at the signal, she had held out her hand for the ring. Wallace had noticed her hands that day at the dock. It was warm and she had slipped off her gloves. The ring had hung a little loose.

Lily came back along the terrace, and sat down beside him. He had thought she would come. The battle, after all, was between them! Vance, sulking in his room, had already surrendered.

“I’ve been watching that boat,” he said. “There’s something inevitable about the way it’s making for the ship. It hasn’t varied a foot. That’s life, in its best sense, isn’t it—knowing what one wants, and going directly for it?”

The speech was unlucky.

“That is life,” she replied. Her voice, that had seemed light, was deeper now; the bell tone of passion was in it. “To know what one wants, and to go directly—over no matter what depths.” She turned suddenly and faced him. “You are not going to let me see him alone again. Why?”

“Because I’m in deadly fear of you.” Wallace tried to smile, saw her eyes, and looked away instead.

“You think he—cares?”

“I think he thinks he cares. It’s just as disastrous, under the circumstances.”

“He is—like that?”

The loyalty of male to male made Wallace hesitate.

“Well, not as bad as I’m letting you think. He’s fond of women—he is temperamental; you can’t measure his sort with the usual yard-stick. He’s decent enough.”

“Do you know his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me about her?”

Wallace eyed her steadily.

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

“She is mad about him, of course. I wonder—will you let me tell you a bit about myself?”

“Do you think—”

“I should like you to know. And afterwards—I shall ask you something. I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-three. And I have been—straight. I wanted you to know that.”

She paused. Wallace’s profile was impassive. But she knew he was keenly alert to what she was saying.

“I have no great talent. My appearance helped—I made up well—and my voice is good. I’ve had a lot of temptation, of course. That’s in the game. If I stayed straight it wasn’t because of any traditions behind me, or of any special quality in me. You know what I mean—when everywhere around one there is a sort of elastic creed, one—”

“I understand, of course.”

“I want you to know the truth, before I come to the other. I was good because in the end it paid. I couldn’t amount to much on the stage, but if I was straight, I could make a good marriage. That had to be my future. I had no other. It sounds revolting—but isn’t that after all the truth about a great many women? Only—you never heard it before.”

“Possibly,” said Wallace. “But I absolutely refuse to believe it.”

She shrugged her slender shoulders.

“It is the absolute truth with me, anyhow.”

Perhaps Wallace’s attitude disconcerted her. She did not go on at once. Byron passed them, the dog at his heels, and with a curt good-night went into the hotel. Some one above flung up a window. The launch, its star swaying in the ocean swell, clung to the side of the battleship. Lily sat bent forward, her restless fingers interlaced.

“Of course you know—he did not tell me he was married until to-night. All the time I said to myself that I was glad I had been straight, because now he could marry me, and there would be nothing to forget. But he cannot marry me.”

The little car of the cliff railway came up, after its final trip. The night had grown so still that they could hear the guard closing and locking the doors, could follow his footsteps as he moved, whistling softly, along the curving street.

“I knew a girl once,” Lily went on in her sweet, deepened voice. “She cared a lot about a man. They were not married, but everybody liked them both. They were amazingly popular. They used to have Sunday teas at their house, and—well, he died after a while. She was young and good-looking, and she’d had a good offer for the next season—with Fred Terry, I think. But she went out to the country where he was buried, and shot herself. It’s like that, sometimes.”

The thrill in her voice took him rather by the throat. All his life he had been denying this right of love to the throne of reason, had been fighting the cause of the mind against the heart—except once, and that was long ago, as love flies. It came to him all at once that the machine is always more powerful than the engineer that controls it, that this slim girl, in her primal appeal, was stronger than all law. For just that moment he wondered, were Vance and she right, and he wrong? Why sacrifice the few on the altar of the multitude? He found himself mumbling a response.

“Yes. It is like that, sometimes. But there are few great passions. Once in a thousand years two people meet, and there is a sort of psychic explosion. After that, I suppose in all the world there is only for the man the one woman—”

“—And for the woman the one man,” she finished, softly. “It happens oftener than you think. Only—they are afraid.”

The whole thing began to seem unreal to Wallace. The women he had known did not do battle for love. He had no precedent to guide him in such a situation. And, like most men, in spite of his profession, he feared subtleties. He moved out into the open.

“What do you want me to do?” he demanded. “Vance is married. I know his wife, and I like her. I can’t stand back and see him disloyal to her. I’m not going to leave him here—or anywhere.”

“Does she care as much as I do?”

“That’s not the question.”

“Isn’t that the question?”

“There are children. Has he told you that?”

She winced, but her determination did not waver.

“Perhaps you do not understand. I am not asking him to give them up. I understand better than you think. He cares a great deal now, but not as I care. There is always one who kisses, and one who turns the cheek. I think he will never forget me. Years from now, if he hears my name, he will thrill to it. But it will be to a memory. And where he will thrill to a memory, I shall go white. That’s the difference. You see, I know. But he cares.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go away. Let us have the next few weeks, if that is all we are to have out of life.” She mistook Wallace’s incredulous silence for hesitancy. “Just think,” she went on, “I who should have all my life before me, am offering it for a month with him. Oh, I shan’t kill myself,” as he started. “I shall go on. You know. Stars live for big moments. I am asking you for my big moment.”

She looked up at him, faintly smiling. Then, without warning, she buried her face in her hands and cried, silently, stonily, while Wallace sat helplessly by. The break did one thing; it gave him time. When she lifted her head at last, he was ready.

“Perhaps you are right, from your viewpoint. You are free; your life is yours. You can do what you like with it. I’m not preaching morality now. It’s hardly a question of that. I mean, of course, that you are determined to evade that issue. But we cannot live to ourselves alone. If Vance wanted to go to the devil and it involved himself only, I’d probably let him alone. But he has a wife.” He met her eyes squarely. “I’m going to prevent this thing if I can.”

A coarser woman would have defied him, confident in her power over the other man. But Lily only eyed him rather wistfully.

“I see,” she said slowly. “How solicitous you are for her! I wonder—” She hesitated, more careful of him than he had been of her. “I hope you are not in love with her. If you are, and if you are suffering what I have suffered to-night—”

Wallace drew his breath in sharply. But she had risen, and stood looking up at the darkened façade of the hotel. Somewhere, behind its windows, Mrs. Byron slept placidly. Byron had exchanged his half-sullen apathy of the day for noisy slumber. Tourists gorged with sight-seeing rested tired muscles and weary eyes. On all save these two in a garden, and Vance keeping vigil above, the night had descended with healing wings.

Lily had noticed Wallace’s sharply taken breath after all. For she turned and held out her hand.

“How we take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies!” she said wistfully. “I with my perplexities, your dream-woman with hers, and now—you. Good-night.”

She turned and went into the house.

II

Wallace did not sleep that night. He was up at early dawn, and roused the chauffeur. Then he went to Vance’s room.

Vance was awake, lying back on his pillows, his arms under his head.

“Well?” he demanded, sulkily.

“It’s going to be a great day. If we start now, we can make Bath early, and—”

“I’m not going to Bath.”

Wallace stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at him. Against Vance’s childish peevishness he stood the genuine passion of Lily Ruskin, and he marvelled. What was there about Vance that enlisted such devotion? That kept Edith faithful, brought Lily to her knees, had cost him a night’s sleep and the entire pleasure of the journey? Certainly the element of boyishness that kept him, Wallace, always on the look-out to save him from danger, was not his attraction for Lily. There was nothing maternal in Lily’s love. He was her man.

“I’m not going to Bath,” Vance repeated.

Wallace suddenly lost his temper.

“You’re going to the devil,” he snapped. “That’s what you’re doing. And I’m pretty sick of holding you back. I’m tired of mothering you.”

With one of his quick changes of mood, Vance laughed. Then, with a great leap, he sprang out of bed and went to the window.

“God, what a day!” he said. “I’m not going to spend it riding between these confounded hedgerows. It’s the sea for me.”

He turned and put an arm around Wallace’s shoulders.

“I’m sane this morning. Don’t look so—nervous. We’ll get a sailboat, all of us, including George Broadhurst, and put our thumbs to our noses as we pass old Johnny Bull’s cruiser out there. Look at the colour of that water!”

He had thrown off the coat of his pajamas, and his splendid torso was bare. He went to the window again, and threw out one magnificent arm toward the sea.

“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll,” he declaimed; “Ten thousand fleets sail over thee in vain!”

Some outraged Britisher in the next room rapped sharply on the wall, and his oratorical flight died in a chuckle.

“Go on out,” he said to Vance. “Order the car back to the garage, and ask some one to call Lily, like a good chap. She oughtn’t to miss that sea.”

Wallace was helpless against the flood tide of his morning good humour. He tried to argue, to voice with Lily’s face before him the resolutions of the night before. Vance splashed in his tub, and sang between warnings.

More than once that morning Wallace was tempted to give up the fight and go away. It was so evident that Vance’s infatuation was a temporary madness, a wound that would quickly heal. After all, if anything happened, it was up to the girl. Mrs. Byron, sitting under a sunshade in the bow of the boat, found the situation amusing, a little leaven to the unutterable boredom of the sail. Byron slept, face down in the sun, on the little deck of the fishing boat. The fisherman sat with the tiller ropes in his hand, and spat over the gunwale.

In the shadow of the sail Vance and Lily talked of immaterial things, or sat, flushed and star-eyed, not talking at all. As the night before Vance’s hand lay over hers, and once, when Wallace turned against the wind to light his cigarette, Mrs. Byron laughed a quickly hushed outburst. Wallace hated his situation and voiced his disgust.

“I’m not the watchdog,” he said. “If you two young idiots want to kiss each other, you needn’t wait until I am barking around a corner.”

From the tragedy of the night before, the thing seemed to have descended to broad farce. Wallace’s æsthetic sense was outraged. If the thing was to be a summer flirtation, with its accompaniment of kisses stolen behind the chaperon’s back, it was time he got out. His position was neither dignified nor necessary.

But with the exuberance of Vance’s morning mood, passed the gaiety of the excursion. Lily’s eyes were sombre as the boat came about and tacked along her angular course back toward the pier. Something was said about Avignon. Lily, it seemed, had the offer of a cottage there for the summer. Her eyes met Vance’s, steadily.

Mrs. Byron babbled on, under her sunshade.

“Men always look so well in flannels,” she said. “You should always wear flannels, Mr. Vance. You look like a Greek god in them.”

“Greek gods,” said Vance easily, “were mighty thrifty about flannels, or any sort of clothes.”

The accident happened on their way back to the hotel. Long afterwards, Wallace looked back on that morning, and wondered over many things. What would have happened had the car of the cliff railway not made that sudden jump? Would Lily and Vance have gone to Avignon? Why did the car jerk? Was there, after all, a personal God to direct his puppets?

The party had gone soberly enough along the promenade, Lily, Mrs. Byron and Vance ahead, Wallace and Byron behind, smoking. The terrier formed a connecting link of palpitating life between the two divisions of the party. The hot midsummer sun had made them all languid. Vance strode along, easily conversational, but with eyes only for Lily. The girl walked by his side, head bent, but every atom of her vibrant under his gaze.

The little car started without the dog, and Vance volunteered to go back for him. They had gone a few feet up the cliff face, and he was bent forward, ready to jump. Then the cable jerked, and he went out on his head.

The car climbed steadily. There was no way to stop and return. All of that dreadful time Wallace stood on the platform holding tight to Lily, who did not move, and staring down at the white bundle that was Vance.

He had been picked up when they got down to him, quite unconscious and his head lolling back on the arms of his bearers. Wallace took charge then, and they got him back to the hotel. It was concussion, possibly fracture. His general condition was fair, under the circumstances.

Lily waited outside the door during the consultation, her face set like stone. Then she went in and took charge. Wallace had sent for a nurse and the two women worked together. Vance took a sinking spell in the night, almost went under. During all that time the girl never whimpered, but worked steadily, doing what she was told, with set lips and burning eyes. And somehow, perhaps by the very will of her, he pulled through.

Wallace had notified Edith as soon as he knew definitely. The responsibility was too great to bear alone. And that next morning, early, he showed Lily a cablegram.

“Sailing to-day. Arrive Tuesday. Edith.”

She drew a long breath.

“Will you let me stay until then?”

“Do you think it wise?”

“What harm can it do? I am some one you know. I have helped a little. What of it? I have helped. And I can help more. He knows when I put my hands on him. He is quieter. There is a sort of sixth sense that we have when we love, that tells us if the one we love is near.” She shivered. “I think, if I were dying, and he touched me, I should come back.”

After that, Wallace left things as they were. Vance went into delirium, and opiates did little for him. But Lily, in her white frock, telling him over and over about the cottage at Avignon, could quiet him for hours. And into those whispered words she put all the dream month that was to have been theirs and now never would be.

“This morning we breakfasted on the terrace,” she would croon in her lovely voice. “Purple grapes from the hillside and butter from the whitewashed farmhouse across the valley. And after breakfast we wandered along the path, hand in hand. When we were weary we came back, and you read to me. It was warm, and your voice—was very soothing. I—fell—asleep.” Then, over and over: “I—fell—asleep”—until his wide eyes closed, and he, too, slept.

And the fifth day he was clearly better. The mental confusion persisted, but his general condition had improved. And that day he put his hand over hers, as it lay on the bed. Lily went white and closed her eyes. The nurse was walking on the terrace, and only Wallace was in the room. Lily bent over the sick man, until her cheek was close to his.

“Last night,” she whispered, “last night we sat in the moonlight, under the trees before the cottage. Do you remember? And at last I slid to your feet, with my head against your knee, my dear, my dear. And I told you all the things you are never to forget, never, so long as you live. That I shall always love you, always. That I shall never love any one else. Whenever you think of me you can know that I am thinking of you. For I shall always be thinking of you. And I kissed you on your dear eyes, like this. You will never forget that, either.”

Wallace looked at her and marvelled. She had taken on during the week a spiritual quality which amazed him. The shadow of death lay in her eyes. Sometimes he thought that Vance’s death would have been easier for her than what was coming.

When Vance had dropped asleep, she took up the nurse’s prayer book. She had fallen into that habit. Wallace remembered the couple who had been so amazingly popular in Lily’s queer individualistic world, and the woman who had shot herself on the man’s grave. “It is like that sometimes,” she had said. Looking across the bed at her, he knew that it was like that with her.

Edith came the next morning. Wallace met her, clothed in that garment of old friendship which for so long had covered his heart.

“I got your wire in London,” she said briefly. “It was good news.” And in the cab she turned to him, a little flushed. “All the way over, I said to myself that you were with him, and if he could be saved, you would do it.”

Where Lily had English reserve, Edith had poise. She told Wallace of the children, had herself well in hand. Wallace, who had had some fore-knowledge of Edith’s intuitions, had feared her questions. She asked none.

The Byrons had left that morning. He was grateful for so much. But Lily was still at the hotel. “I can’t do anything with her,” Mrs. Byron had said, hysterically. “She says she will go to-night, but she scares me. Did you ever know any one so strange? If you could know the men who have been mad about her! And to see her hanging over that poor wreck!”

He had a poor opinion of Lily’s power to dissemble. If she were only not in sight!

She was not in the room. She had promised that. The nurse was there, in a state of mental confusion and some dismay. Wallace felt that he could trust her discretion. Nevertheless he was anxious. But everything went off well. Vance knew Edith and smiled at her. Edith was singularly controlled. She told him about the little girls, and he listened with his eyes on her face. Then she had brought news—a splendid cast for the new play, the revival under favourable conditions of an early comedy. Whereas Lily had soothed him with the cottage at Avignon, Edith roused him with the thought of work.

In the midst of Wallace’s anxieties one of Vance’s own quips came to him—“Every woman,” he had said, “should have two husbands, one to love and cherish, the other to honour and obey.” What one woman could ever satisfy Vance’s dual nature? What one woman ever could take the place of all other women to him?

Edith dressed for dinner that night. The relief from strain had revived her colour. Wallace thought she had never been so lovely. Lily had moved to another table and dined alone. Wallace saw that she was not eating; her eyes hardly left Edith’s face, a puzzled look, as if she were trying to fit this wife into Vance’s life, trying to readjust all she knew of him from this new angle. Wallace was uneasy.

It was when the fish had gone that Edith turned to him.

“The girl in black, to my right, Courtney—is she the woman?”

“What woman?”

Edith did not reply at once. She glanced at Lily, and for a moment their eyes met.

“I see she is. She is very lovely.”

“Why should you think there is a woman?”

“There is generally a woman. You know that. I knew, of course, when he changed his plans so suddenly. Am I a shock, or—did she know of me?”

“She knew of you,” said Wallace gravely.

“Just one thing more, Court, I’ll not ask any more questions. It was an accident?”

“Absolutely.”

“He’s emotional, you know. Fearfully intense in each new affair. I—wondered.”

The mutton had come on, and she sat calmly while they were served.

“I’ve often thought,” she said, “how curious things are. He loves us all. He wouldn’t break up the family. He likes to feel that, somewhere behind him, we are there to come back to. He feels that I am solid, dependable. In a way he could hardly do without me. But—”

There seemed to be nothing to say. Wallace pretended to eat. Lily had given up the pretence, and sat, her chin cupped in her palm.

“She’s badly hurt, poor thing,” said Edith, after a time. “Life’s an awful mess, Court. Shall we have coffee on the terrace?”

Wallace had schooled himself so long that he had no longer any fear. There had been times, earlier, when he had not often dared to see Edith Vance. Now he had achieved, on a foundation of old friendship, a sort of superstructure of philosophy. He took what the gods gave, and built contentment from the fragments. So they sat together on the terrace, where a week before Lily had poured out her plea to him.

Edith refused coffee.

“To be quite frank,” she said, “I’m giving the—the girl a chance to say good-bye. She’d manage it somehow, judging by her eyes. So why not be gracious and give it?”

“You are very wonderful.”

“Not at all. Only rather resigned and very experienced.”

“I suppose there’s nothing to do. If I talk to him—”

“You’d make him unhappy, and give him a grievance. It wouldn’t change anything. Sometimes I think, if I made him fiercely jealous, it would help. But it would be too humiliating, under the circumstances. I try to think that, with him, it’s the desire to be loved. We all have that, I suppose.”

“You?”

“I daresay. I’m very human, Court.”

Just for a moment the guards were down between them. No flame leaped into Wallace’s eyes, but the yearning tenderness of a man who has loved a woman long and hopelessly. She bent forward and touched his arm lightly.

“It is a great comfort to me, always, to know that you are behind me.”

The flame was there, then, but she did not see it. He bent over and kissed her hand.

Lily was gone. What her good-bye had been lay between her and Vance and the bewildered nurse who waited in the passage. One thing was certain—there was no resignation in her farewell. She went because she must, creeping like a broken thing out of the room, and along the corridor. Just inside the door of her bedroom was a small straight chair. She dropped into it, and sat there, her hands in her lap. Inconsequential things came into her mind—that she had packed her fresh gloves and sent them in her box, that the early Victorian furniture of the room was hideous, that she must remember to write and give up the cottage at Avignon.

She shivered, and getting up, went to the window. The launch was once again moving across the bay far below, but it was early twilight and there was no star in the bow. She felt rather ill. By stepping out onto the narrow stone balcony, she could see the window of Vance’s room. The nurse had turned on the light. The wife was there now, probably, and Vance’s friend, who had hated her and been kind to her. Three of them, with years of old association to hold them together. And she, alone, on the balcony in the night.

It was the end. She knew that. Had she had her chance, she might have held him forever, held him with the thin strong chain of passion. But they had jockeyed her out of her chance, all of them together. And now she was going.

Wallace had offered to see her off, but she had refused. So now she went down the staircase, very white, looking straight ahead, and crossed the dingy lower corridor. She never even saw the suave lady manager who bowed her out. The cab was waiting, and by it, in the dusk, Vance’s wife. She had thrown a wrap about her; her head was uncovered and a light summer breeze was blowing her fine hair about. She held out her hand.

“I heard you were going. I—please let me thank you for all you have done.”

The same amazing frankness that had characterised Lily’s love for Vance persisted to the end. She ignored Edith’s hand, but there was no defiance in her voice. It had all the hopelessness and directness of one who leaves a dying message.

“I nursed him because I loved him,” she said, and got into the cab.

Vance hugged his grief sullenly for two days; refused to talk, drove Edith frantic by lying for hours with his head pillowed on his arms, generally sulked. But he was improving steadily, and on the third day they got him out of bed.

Much to Wallace’s relief, Lily had not wired or written. Evidently she had played her game hard, and knew herself beaten. It was up to Vance, of course. He might have been harder hit than they thought, might elect to follow her. Wallace, watching Edith with eyes that worshipped, knew that she, too, was thinking of this. She voiced it at last.

“It is worse than I had thought, Court,” she said. “It’s not so much that he’s in love with her. But he keeps thinking how mad she is about him. It’s eating him like a fever.”

She was right. Vance’s one thought now was to see Lily again. He argued to himself that if they were to part, he owed her that much. After all, she had cared for him in his illness, and there had been nothing in their relations to be ashamed of. When he found that Edith’s plan was to go directly to Liverpool, he grew resentful. He would go to London, anyhow. He could slip away at night and leave word he would join them at the ship.

He reached his determination the day the nurse had gone. He would pack a small bag that night and get away early in the morning. And having made his plan, he was vastly cheerful all day, wrote some business letters, dressed and went down to dinner, strutted a bit, if the truth be told, over the interest his return to the life of the place aroused in the hotel.

They had their coffee, as usual, on the terrace, Vance, beside Edith, running his fingers caressingly up and down her arm; Wallace, a little aloof, looking out over the sea.

“I’ll be glad to get back to work and to the kids,” Vance said, suddenly. “What dreams I had about you all, Edith.”

“The children are quite well. Mademoiselle cabled to-day.”

He looked out at the sea, his cup in his hand.

“Court has a lot of theories about dreams—bally nonsense most of them. Do you remember the lady you told us of, who dreams about a dog? What was that, Courtney?”

“I was illustrating a point,” said Wallace, uncomfortably. “I don’t usually cite cases from my practice.”

“Well, this was interesting. Court drew a moral and adorned a tale with it. The lady is in trouble and deep in her soul is buried the fact that she doesn’t love her husband as much as she loves somebody else. Do you see? But every now and then, when she’s asleep, she dreams that a dog is attacking her—isn’t that it, Court?—and she calls for the other man.”

“It sounds very thrilling,” said Edith, quietly. “Does your information include the other man’s name, Court?”

Wallace put down his cup and rose.

“No,” he replied shortly.

Vance’s program was still one of early hours. By ten he was in his bedroom, and Edith, in one of the soft white silk negligées she affected, was reading on the couch in her room beyond. So impatient was Vance to begin his preparations for London that he risked discovery, and put a few things in his bag. He was exultant, almost triumphant. To-morrow he would see Lily. Then he would go back to work, and he would work as never before. Lily! Lily!

At something before midnight he went to the door of Edith’s room and spoke to her. She was asleep on the couch, the book open on the floor beside her. Had he not known Edith as a woman who seldom wept, he would have said that she had been crying.

It was his custom to waken her with a caress. Quite frequently he kissed her closed eyes until they wakened. But out of the delirium after his accident rose vividly Lily’s kisses on his eyelids. His good taste refused this particular caress now. He stood and looked down at her.

And then, quite suddenly, Edith spoke in her sleep, a low tone, quite distinct, full of terror.

“It’s the dog again. He’s coming toward me! Drive him away. Courtney, drive him away.”

She stirred, and her set muscles relaxed. Vance stood, staring at her. Then he went into the next room and sat down. He was still rather weak. His forehead was covered with cold sweat.

“Courtney!” he said. “So it’s been Courtney all these years. God!”

A madness of jealousy seized him. Weak as he was, he flung up and down the room. He recalled, year after year, their married life, the affection that he knew now had not been love, her sweetness, her beauty, Wallace’s eyes as he looked at her. Deep buried, this love of hers; that was like her. And Courtney Wallace did not know that he was the man. What a mess the whole thing was!

From balcony to door and back to balcony he paced. Once he stopped in front of the mirror and surveyed himself.

“She treated me like a child,” he panted. “She thinks I’m a weakling. She pets me as she would a dog. She’s kind to me. By God, I’ll show her I’m a better man than Courtney.”

Quite suddenly he saw his half packed bag on the bed. With an oath he flung its contents back into the drawers. Then, quieter, but determined, he went to his wife’s room and stood beside her.

“Edith!” he said. “You’d better waken and go to bed.” He stooped and kissed her on the eyelids. He had quite forgotten Lily.