PART ONE (continued 3)

Old Burgetrode gave a quick lift of his head.

“You don’t like your present place, then?”

“No,” said Tod.

“Why not?”

“They don’t want you to tell the truth.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Burgetrode fiercely.

Tod edged himself nearer to the bath-chair. He had a feeling that he could talk to Mr. Burgetrode.

“They want you to lie about things. It was the same in the other shop I was in, and I got chucked for that—and something else.”

Mr. Burgetrode was watching him with great intentness.

“So you don’t like it?”

“I loathe it,” said Tod. “Why should you have to lie to people?”

“It means money, Western, more money.”

“Well, we ought to get rid of money. Or supposing there was so much money that it was cheap as the shingle down there, people wouldn’t tell lies to get it.”

“That’s a problem, young man. You seem to have discovered the trick of running your head against problems.”

The Shaston Corporation Orchestra who inhabited the bandstand, woke to sudden life after an interval of twenty minutes. Mr. Burgetrode grew impatient.

“Take me away from that noise, will you?”

Tod descended from the railings and trundled the bath-chair in the direction of the Hotel Majestic.

“That will do,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “it will take my friend Smith another ten minutes to find us. Do you play any games, young Ajax?”

“Cricket,” said Tod, “and I played right-half for Shaston last winter. I can swim a mile, and box a bit.”

“Keep it up, Western. What did you want to be before you got trapped in a shop?”

“A doctor.”

Mr. Burgetrode did not seem prejudiced in favour of such a career. He gave Tod to understand that there were doctors and doctors, and that if you wanted to become a first-class surgeon you might count on earning very little money for fifteen years. He talked rather strangely about doctors trying to patch the roof, when the foundations were rotten. He said that the doctors were not to blame, and that you could not get at the foundations, because the Vested Interest fence kept you out.

“What’s a Vested Interest?” Tod asked.

“You have got to find that out,” said Mr. Burgetrode.

Then he made a sudden suggestion.

“Would you like to take up houses, Western?”

“I think I should, sir.”

“Study them inside out, and from top to bottom, how they are built, and how they shouldn’t be built?”

“That’s it,” said Tod.

Mr. Burgetrode looked hard at him with those queer, fierce eyes of his.

“Very well, Ajax. I shall be at that hotel for another month. If you want me, you will know where to find me.”

Chapter Twelve

Someone had once nicknamed Mr. Burgetrode “Old Mischief.” That was ten years ago, and if Shaston had been asked to place and describe Mr. Julian Burgetrode, Shaston would have stared at you uncomprehendingly, or would have asked whether you were referring to “that old chap who stayed at the Majestic?” Even the Hotel Majestic knew very little about Mr. Burgetrode. He was sarcastic, and fierce and laconic. He had an abundance of money, and he appeared to despise money, judging by the size of his tips. People gossiped about him. He was mysterious, eccentric, fabulously wealthy. The old ladies who sat in the drawing-room and read Marie Corelli, and Mr. Garvice and “The Rosary,” spun all sorts of romances about Mr. Burgetrode. They said he was a misogamist, an atheist and other unwholesome and unnatural things. His wife had committed suicide, or run away with another man, and he had chronic dyspepsia, and took drugs. Mr. Burgetrode did not care at all what the old ladies said of him. He disliked old ladies, disliked them as much as a fierce dog hates cats, and he never attempted to compromise.

“Reynolds,” he once said to the head waiter, “I’ll give you ten pounds a week if you promise not to put one of those minute guns within ten yards of me.”

“Minute guns, sir?”

“Old women, Reynolds, old women.”

“Rather difficult, sir; you see——”

“Yes, I know; it rains old women and caps and artificial fringes, and bead bags and novels, in a place like this. Put something young, or something in trousers at those tables, something that doesn’t want to grin at you like a Cheshire cat.”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” said Reynolds.

The queer part of it was that the “staff” of the Hotel Majestic liked Mr. Burgetrode. They rather sympathised with him about the old ladies. The maid who looked after his bedroom and private sitting-room laid it down as an axiom that she would rather “do” for ten Mr. Burgetrodes than for one of those old cats. “He’s a sport,” she asserted; “he’s got a tongue on him, but if you’ve got anything straight to say, he don’t mind you answering back.” The lift boys were Mr. Burgetrode’s devoted slaves. Nor did largesse account for it all. There was something fiercely human about the old man; he could be extraordinarily severe and extraordinarily kind.

There were, however, one or two people in Shaston-on-Sea who knew who and what Mr. Julian Burgetrode was in the larger world up north. He came south to escape from the roar and the smother of the factory and the market, Shaston was a sort of toy-town to him, and he strolled about and looked down on it like an amused Colossus. Yet there was a memory behind it all, a smell of the blue sea, a glory of golden broom and white black-thorn, a girl and a boy honeymooning in one of the old white Georgian houses under the cliff. Ten days of marriage, and then death, death in the blue sea on a sweet spring morning. In one of the Old Town churchyards there was a stone that told how Elsie Burgetrode had been buried there nearly forty years ago.

Such was Shaston’s sentimental hold on Julian Burgetrode. He liked the slothfulness of the place after the hard shallowness of the North. He came south when he wanted to think, and went tramping for miles over the beech-covered hills and into the soft blueness of the Weald. Away in the north men were dominated by the idea of the machine. They had forgotten to wonder how green life started in the dim slime of primeval seas. Burgetrode was lord of many machines, but never the slave of one of them. He could still jump a fence, delight in Anatole France, and sit up thinking with Bergson.

Shaston was his toy-town. How much of it was his and what a grip his brown hands had on it, very few people suspected. One lawyer knew; so did a bank-manager; so did Rathbone Cragg of Rathbone Cragg and Son, Estate and House Agents. And when Julian Burgetrode limped into the office of Rathbone Cragg in Caroline Place, old Cragg fell from his perch of supercilious greed and flopped and squawked most unctuously upon the floor.

“Good morning, sir. Will you please come in my private room, sir.”

“I want a few words with you, Mr. Cragg.”

“Quite so, sir. Thomas, will you see that we are not disturbed?”

Burgetrode detested Mr. Cragg. The man was such a Lord Chief Justice to little people, yet he was so easily mastered by a dog bigger than himself.

“You would be able to find room in your office for a youngster of eighteen or nineteen?”

“For instruction, sir?”

“Yes, in the ordinary way of business. He would start at the bottom and work his way up. I happen to be interested in a boy whom I want to train. When he had spent two or three years with you, I should put him to a builder.”

Mr. Cragg nodded.

“It shall be done, to oblige you, Mr. Burgetrode. I presume——”

“The boy is not to know that I have any ultimate interest in his future. I want you to understand that, Mr. Cragg. Any breach of confidence——”

“You can rely on me, sir, absolutely.”

“Very good. The youngster’s name is Western. He will call on you one day with a letter from me. I want you to treat him as you would treat any other clerk in your office. Good morning.”

Tod guessed nothing of Mr. Burgetrode’s sudden interest in him. It had not struck Tod that he was something of a phenomenon, a lad in a shop who was sturdily set against the telling of lies. Mr. Burgetrode had been handling men all his life, dull men, grumbling men, good men, bad men, men who were contented provided they got beer, men who would have been discontented if they had been drowned in that beverage. Then there was the new type of man, the keen-witted, implacable revolutionist, who knew what he wanted and meant to get it. Mr. Burgetrode was making a special study of that type of man, for he saw in him the man of the future. He needed mellowing; he needed a little more honest pudding in his stomach, and less poison under his tongue. At present the new man was ugly, and Mr. Burgetrode detested ugliness.

He had been impressed at once by the unusualness of Tod. He liked the lad’s intelligent square head, his brown face, and alert unfearing eyes. The boy was sensitive too, and not in the least arrogant. He looked at life and asked questions, the very questions that a thinker like Julian Burgetrode knew to be the great questions that the world had to answer. The boy’s sincerity was a thing of wonderful significance. It was like one of those magic swords, hammered out by goblins in the underworld, and then belted to some blue-eyed, innocent, fate-predestined hero.

Meanwhile Tod was feeling very unheroic in John Snape’s shop. The regular dispensing of prescriptions was but a small part of the business. There was plenty of honest stuff to sell, from photographic plates to toothpicks, but Tod could never forget those quack medicines and the sham doctoring that was carried on by Snape and his assistants. Tod foresaw that his days were numbered. He was getting discredited. Some day there would be a row, and Mr. Snape would suggest his returning to the farm.

Tod felt the storm gathering. Mr. Snape had taken to bullying him, and using a dry sarcasm on every possible occasion. For a pink, well-fed man he had a most ingenious and spiteful tongue.

“Is that the way you wrap up bottles, Western? Here, let me show you. You’ve got no snap or neatness in your fingers, bodgering a bottle in paper till it looks as though it were dressed in a dirty nightshirt!”

“A place for everything, Western, and everything in its place. For goodness’ sake get some method in that head of yours. And your hair wants cutting.”

“You had better oil that voice of yours, young man. This isn’t a school playground.”

Tod took all this heckling as a good boxer takes punishment, but it was providing him with the justification for getting in a good straight punch to Mr. Snape’s jaw. He was not like poor old Wisdon with his wife and three children and his eighty pounds a year. Wisdon was not a certified dispenser, he was just so much casual labour, living in perpetual fear of being out of work. Snape bullied Wisdon, and daily cut the throat of his hired man’s self-respect, and Wisdon went like a sheep to the slaughter, offering the neck of his man’s pride so that his children might live.

Tod saw Mr. Burgetrode on several evenings, and entered into long discussions with his new friend. He put forward the case of “Mr. Any-think-else,” arguing hotly that a man of Wisdon’s age should not be so placed in life that he could be bullied and sneered at by a man younger than himself.

“Money again,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “your Mr. Snape seems something of a swashbuckler.”

“I couldn’t stand what old Wisdon has to stand,” said Tod; “I’m just waiting, and one day I’ll land Snape one and walk out of the shop.”

“Just for love, young Ajax?”

“No, sir, I’m waiting till he comes at me crooked over something I should have lied about, and then I’ll hit out straight.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Burgetrode in his fierce way; “come and tell me about it when it happens.”

It happened the very next day. About half an hour before closing time a pale woman with tired eyes walked into the shop, and it fell to Tod to serve her. Cook had left early; old Wisdon was in one of the stock rooms upstairs looking out trusses; Tod knew that Mr. Snape was in his office at the back of the shop. Tod noticed that the pale woman looked rather shabby, and that her face made him think of his mother as he remembered her six months before her death.

“Have you got Bartrup’s Consumption Cure?”

“Yes,” said Tod.

“Is it—is it any good?” asked the pale woman.

Tod happened to know something about Bartrup’s Consumption Cure. Cook had told him that he had seen the analysis of that very popular remedy and that the best thing to do with it was to pour it down the drain.

Tod looked straight into the woman’s tired eyes.

“It’s rubbish,” he said.

“Rubbish!” echoed the woman.

“I’d see a doctor,” Tod added, “before I touched any drugs.”

The woman thanked Tod and left the shop, and it was then that Tod became aware of Mr. Snape standing at the far end of the counter like a little pink Napoleon who had caught one of his sentries giving secret information to an enemy patrol.

“So Bartrup’s Consumption Cure is rubbish, Mr. Western, is it?”

“I have been told so,” said Tod stubbornly.

“And who gave you that valuable information?”

“It’s not my business to tell.”

John Snape lost his temper, and came and stood very close to Tod, so close that he spluttered in Tod’s face.

“You’re a damned fool, that’s what you are, Western. Nice sort of idiot for a man to have in his shop. Get me discredited—discredited! D’you understand? Supposing Bartrups were informed that their preparation had been called rubbish in my shop? You’d get me tabooed by Bartrups; they might take legal action——”

Mr. Snape drew breath, and Tod waited, blinking a little because he did not like Mr. Snape’s splutter.

“Where’s your loyalty to me? Didn’t I take you in here to give you a chance, and all you can do is to blab silly lies over the counter!”

“They’re not lies,” said Tod; “half the quack stuff we sell is just cheating.”

“Cheating!”

Mr. Snape gasped, and took a deep breath, but Tod got his blow in first.

“I’m leaving this evening,” he said, “this sort of business doesn’t suit me.”

“Well, of all the impertinent young cubs——!”

“You needn’t call me names,” said Tod; “I’m not going to be responsible for Bartrup and Co., that’s all.”

Chapter Thirteen

The intervention of Mr. Julian Burgetrode initiated one of the good seasons of Tod’s career. Some big hand seemed to push open a heavy door and draw back a curtain, and Tod stepped easily into a new and more spacious life.

The office of Rathbone Cragg and Son, Auctioneers and Estate Agents, had a certain Victorian calmness, a deliberate and leisurely way of doing things that was decent and almost pontifical. The Craggs, both father and son, were very polite people, and with a politeness that suited the more civilised end of Shaston and the ritual beloved of the symbolists who attended the church of St. Alban the Martyr. Mr. Rathbone Cragg, lean, bald-headed, round shouldered, with that emaciated and cartilaginous throat of his, and the head of a benignant vulture, served as a sidesman at St. Alban’s Church, and also as a Justice of the Peace. His son, a younger and more anæmic sort of vulture, with a queer axe-shaped head, its edge fronting forwards in chin and nose, clove his way into the intellectual life of West Shaston with an indefatigable and supercilious seriousness that made more full blooded young men hate him as buoyant savages must hate your irrepressible missionary. Frederick Rathbone Cragg was for ever improving himself. He knew too much; facts and figures rolled off him like turnips off an overladen cart. He was the sort of young man who sat solemnly and grimly at breakfast with a part of Handsworth’s Encylopædia in front of him, munching eggs and bacon with teeth of virgin gold.

Tod discovered a new atmosphere. If you walked down Beacon Hill with the western sun behind you, you had a vision of a fresh and vivid Shaston, Shaston as the Georgians had schemed it, shorn of its base speculative excrescences in yellow brick and grey stucco, a white town strung between the blue of the sea and the green of the hills. In the beyond loomed the White Cliff, a little hazy with the smoke of the Old Town, the yellow sand making a dim gleam between it and the sea. There were the masts of the Shaston fishing fleet, black and crowded like the ships of the Greeks beached before Troy. Above the White Cliff the lighthouse painted a white streak against summer skies. The parade in front of the tall houses had breadth and dignity, and could stand and answer the roar of a rough sea. On the hills above the town the beeches and holm oaks and wind-beaten pines of Effingham Park, broke up and softened the firm white lines, and spread a rolling frieze between the white houses and the yet whiter clouds.

The Craggs had their office in Caroline Crescent, a bow of solid houses with the parade as its bowstring. Caroline Crescent suggested the Regency, gentlemen in gay coloured coats and white breeches, high-stepping horses, “tigers” hanging on to the backs of yellow-wheeled dog-carts, young gentlewomen with side curls, Pickwickian worthies with Hessian boots, and solid, round, white-breeched stomachs. The houses had balconies with long and steeply sloping green roofs, and from any of these balconies one of Marcus Stone’s sentimental young ladies might have thrown a red rose at some quite impossibly handsome and romantic young man on a horse. Such things had ceased to happen in Caroline Crescent. A little colony of doctors lived there, two solicitors and a dentist. Brass plates were as thick as gold teeth in the mouth of a nigger.

The Craggs were very discreet and restrained, and confined themselves to gold letters on the lower windows of No. 10. Blatancy did not pay in the west end of Shaston. Notice boards, posters and advertisements of houses to be let and sold were to be found only in the big hall and in the main office. Once upon a time there had been litigation in Caroline Crescent over the keeping of a cockatoo that screamed. The Craggs did not scream. You were careful of your manners when you practised your profession in the company of gentlemen who felt pulses or drafted people’s wills.

Tod felt all boots and hands on that first morning when he entered the establishment of the Craggs, and stood in the middle of the big office with Mr. Burgetrode’s letter of introduction between thumb and forefinger. A young woman with a high forehead and pince-nez was typing at a table. Two clerks were busy at their desks, one of them making entries in a ledger, the other sorting out a chaos of keys. Tod stood and waited till the younger of the two clerks chose to discover him.

“Yes?”

“I’ve a letter for Mr. Cragg.”

“All right. Hand it over. Any answer?”

“I’ll wait and see,” said Tod.

The letter and the clerk disappeared through a glazed door on which “Mr. Rathbone Cragg” was painted in black letters. Tod noticed that there was a second and similar door with Mr. Frederick Rathbone Cragg’s name upon it. He stood and stared at the bills on the walls, at the maps and photographs of houses, at the typist clicking sedulously on her machine, until she stopped and stared at him in turn. Tod veered away, and felt uncomfortable. The young woman behind the table made him absurdly conscious of the fact that he was a creature that wore clothes.

The clerk reappeared with a new geniality towards Tod.

“Mr. Cragg will see you at once, Mr. Western.”

That interview puzzled Tod. Mr. Cragg stood up behind his desk and shook hands with him, and Tod felt embarrassed. This hard-eyed old gentleman who gobbled in his throat like a turkey, and was so jerkily and parentally polite, made Tod wonder what Mr. Burgetrode had said concerning him.

“Sit down, Mr. Western. So you want to be an estate agent?”

Tod sat down.

“I’m interested in houses,” he said.

Mr. Cragg appeared to approve.

“Enthusiasm is the great secret of success. I have this little note here from Mr. Burgetrode, and it is possible that I may be able to oblige him. I understand that you are an orphan, Western.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Cragg tilted his head like a benignant bird.

“A great deprivation, Western. And—about your education?”

“I was at Chipperton’s school at Pentworth for five years, sir.”

“An excellent school too. Well, let me see, you wish to enter my office immediately?”

“If you can take me, sir.”

“I think I may say that I can.”

It all seemed so absurdly easy. There were no clouds, no complications, nothing but geniality and sunshine and an avoidance of all awkward questions; no reference to Mr. Flowerdew or Mr. Snape. Mr. Cragg suggested terms that made Tod feel a plutocrat. And then Mr. Frederick Rathbone Cragg was called in and presented to Tod as though he were a friend of the family.

Frederick Cragg gave Tod’s hand a hard and earnest squeeze. He stared impressively at people when he was introduced to them, and he stared very hard at Tod.

“Very glad to meet you, Western.”

Tod felt ten years older. He began to wonder whether he ought not to have come in a bowler hat.

Two months later Tod had become an enthusiastic student of houses, houses of all sorts and descriptions, stolid houses, frivolous houses, snobbish houses, houses that were disreputable yet happy. And Tod too was happy though he was in danger of being sucked over the edge of his youth into that respectable and genteel world that is death and destruction to any adventurous soul. Mr. Frederick Rathbone Cragg had taken control of Tod; he had a penchant for cultivating boys and young men as though they were puppies, and trying to teach them his own tricks. He was interested in houses, but his interest was different from Tod’s. He was a bit of commercialised intelligence, yet in spite of his fish blood and flat feet he mimicked all sorts of strange people, like a vain and clever ape who copies a gesture without understanding its real meaning. Young Cragg was an intellectual. He had read Browning and Henry James, Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw. In fact he had read a little of everything, and he was the secretary of the St. Margarets Literary Society. He posed. He liked to hand out queer and startling opinions. Nothing pleased him better than to drag around a youth like Tod, let off intellectual fireworks and see the little fellow skip and open his eyes very wide.

Tod, in his innocence, was flattered. He was impressed by “Young Supercilious,” as some of the scoffers called Mr. Frederick Cragg, the energetic person who had an answer to everything. He trailed Tod round with him and talked mediæval architecture with the dogmatism of a Ruskin, and was so much the philosopher and the man of the world that Tod had ears and no tongue.

“You always want to know the right people, Western; it’s just the same as going into the right sort of house.”

Very soon he was criticising Tod’s clothes, and telling him with an air of great impressiveness that such and such things were not worn.

“You mustn’t do it, old chap. No pink or red ties, and don’t wear brown boots on Sunday. Good form, you know; it counts, it counts with the right people.”

Mr. Burgetrode had gone north again, and Tod was left to the earnest egotism of Mr. Frederick Cragg. Life in the office was not unpleasant, and Tod’s growing enthusiasm flattered the pride of the firm. Mr. Burgetrode had hinted that Clarence Todhunter Western was an original child, and with such a sponsor life in the house of Cragg and Son was bound to be easy. They had been very ready to make the best of Tod, and Tod the learner was keen and indefatigable.

“That boy has got a future,” Fred said to his sister.

Miss Bertha Cragg was always tripping up the toes of her brother’s impressiveness.

“Because old Burgetrode has taken a fancy to him? Nice sort of wet nurse you make, Fred!”

“You women don’t understand.”

But he continued to make a sort of East End Settlement of Tod and to cultivate that young heathen. Tod went to Hanson’s the gentleman’s tailor, and had a suit of clothes made to measure. His ties grew more conservative and refined. He ceased to wear a cloth cap on the back of his head. Frederick Cragg rescued him from the bathos of Mrs. Budd’s cottage, and persuaded him to take a bed-sitting room in St. Helen’s Terrace in the house of an impoverished gentlewoman who read Tennyson and genuflected regularly at the church of St. Alban the Martyr. He lent Tod books, went for country walks with him, declaimed Keats and Rossetti, and talked a lot of nonsense that sounded very clever and rather shocking.

Caroline Crescent was teaching Tod all sorts of things about real estate. Tod had no immediate vision of the financial aspect of the business, and he had lost some of the distrust that the world of Flowerdew and Snape had roused in him. The Craggs were polite people. They were always and ever your most obedient servants, and they appeared to let or sell you a house for the pure social joy of doing you a service. They taught Tod about leases and agreements, the writing up of houses, the making of inventories, the valuing of fixtures, the business of insurance and of rent-collecting; and all the ritual of a successful sale. They had little to do with the cottage property of old Shaston. They confined their activities to the gentlemen’s residences and the red villas of St. Margarets and the Grand Parade; moreover, they were the “county people” and much county property had passed through their hands.

Young Cragg had taken Tod in to tea at “Clovelly,” the Craggs’ house in Salisbury Road, but Tod’s real emergence from the caterpillar state dated from the day when he was invited to tennis.

“My mater wants you to come up on Saturday, Western, and play tennis. Just a little party, you know.”

Tod confessed that he knew nothing about tennis.

“You’ll soon learn,” said his mentor with his usual impressiveness; “come up half an hour before the other people, and I’ll put you up to the main points.”

This was very gallant and chivalrous, but Tod was worried about clothes.

“Suppose I had better buy a racket?”

“Yes, you ought to have a racket, Western. And shoes.”

“And shoes?” echoed Tod.

He wanted to ask Fred Cragg about the various details of his toilet, but shirked the confession of ignorance and in shirking it challenged his own imagination. What sort of shoes ought he to buy—white or brown?—and what should be the colour of a tennis-player’s trousers and shirt? And did one wear a belt or braces? That was a devil of a dilemma. He was so pestered and baffled by the whole problem that he dashed up to the St. Margarets Tennis Club that evening, and lifting his chin over the top of a wooden fence studied the details of dress as exemplified by the gentlemen of that club. Braces were not worn. You fastened your white flannel trousers with a coloured scarf or a leather belt. The shoes were white, so were the shirts, and any old coat that was not black seemed fit to complete the picture. Tod gave a gulp of spiritual relief. If he had turned up at the Craggs’ wearing those red braces of his, what a scandal he would have created!

Tod spent quite a respectable sum on a racket, buckskin shoes, two pairs of white trousers, two white shirts and soft collars, a chocolate and light blue scarf, and a straw hat with a black band. He began to dress about half-past one on the Saturday afternoon, and the business lasted an hour. He went downstairs, swinging his new racket, and met his landlady, the gentlewoman who read Tennyson and genuflected daily at the church of St. Alban the Martyr.

She liked Tod. He was such a fresh, clean, and considerate youngster, and rather shy.

“Tennis, Mr. Western?”

“Tennis,” said Tod.

“How nice. You ought to have those new clothes marked before they go to the wash.”

“Suppose I ought.”

“I will do it for you.”

And Tod went on his way, feeling cheered, and of the opinion that life was quite good and that people were awfully decent.

At “Clovelly” a maid showed him down to the tennis lawn where Frederick Cragg was sitting under a young lime tree and reading Zola’s “Paris” in French. Fred was a very shaky French scholar, but it was rather impressive to leave a book like that about.

“Hallo, Western.”

He looked Tod over comprehensively.

“Yes, that’s quite all right. But just one thing, old chap, you won’t mind——”

He got up, and gave a little jab to the rear portion of the brim of Tod’s straw hat; for Tod had tilted that hat too much on the back of his head.

“Like that, Western; excuse me, you know.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Tod, flushing, but the remedying of that defect dashed his self-confidence for the rest of the afternoon.

It was the first function of its kind that Tod had ever attended, and it reduced him to a state of stubborn shyness. There was that big red villa “Clovelly” in the background, a mysterious house half hidden behind a great pergola and masses of flowering shrubs. A curly path and a flight of stone steps led to the tennis lawn, and down this social highway a succession of people and things descended upon Tod, girls in summer frocks, elderly women who rustled, young men who looked surprisingly cool and unflurried, old Rathbone Cragg in a grey flannel suit and a white Panama hat, a gardener who carried deck-chairs, and later a couple of maids with tables and tea. Tod was introduced to one or two people by Frederick Cragg.

“Mr. Western, Miss Lavibond.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Tod, holding out a hand, and then remembering to take off his hat.

He stood by Miss Lavibond’s chair and tried to think of something to say to her. The frocks and the chatter and the puzzling and refined correctness of the business had him stifled. The Craggs were the leaders of a definite social circle, a coterie of well-to-do middle-class people whom a connection with trade had segregated in that little world of gentlemen’s residences. There were old Horrox’s two daughters, the Playles, who owned the biggest grocery in Shaston, Vintners the wine merchants, and many more. It is possible that they were a little more correct and polite and stiffly self-conscious than the class just above them, for they were not such old hands at the game, and they had to take great care of their manners.

“Weren’t the rhododendrons lovely this year,” said Miss Lavibond to Tod.

Tod didn’t know what rhododendrons were but he did not say so.

“Yes, very fine, weren’t they? Do you like the band we have got this year?”

“Just a little too much brass, I think. I heard them murder a thing of Grieg’s the other night.”

“Hard luck!” said Tod, and wondered why Miss Lavibond stared.

He decided that it was time to get away from the lady before she discovered that he was conversing in the dark. He felt she was dangerous, that she would denounce him if he launched into any more conversational ventures, and he seized the chance of going to hunt for a tennis ball that had disappeared in a bank of laurels. Tod took a preposterously long time finding that ball, and when he did find it he was confronted with Mrs. Rathbone Cragg and the ordeal of tea.

“Now you are going to help me, Mr. Western, aren’t you?”

She was a very large woman, a duchess of a woman, all black silk and white lace, and she had ideas about putting Tod at his ease. She sat at a wicker table with two big silver teapots and a crowd of cups in front of her, and all around him on other tables Tod saw a bewildering wealth of cakes, thin bread and butter in rolls, cucumber sandwiches, potted meat sandwiches, biscuits, little dishes of sweets, strawberries, cream pots, sugar bowls and plates.

“What’ll I do, please?”

“If you will hand round the tea-cups as I fill them, the maids will take round the sugar and milk.”

Tod disgraced himself over that tea. He spilt one of the cups over somebody’s dress and over his own flannel trousers, and ended by wishing that he was dead. He was glooming in the background, and contemplating making a bolt for it, when Miss Cragg swept in from somewhere and rescued him from himself.

“Do come and have some tea, Mr. Western.”

“I’m not at all hungry,” he said politely.

“But I am, and I haven’t had tea yet. Let’s get a little table all to ourselves and be greedy. Nearly all the other people have finished.”

Her frankness and her smiling brown eyes recovered the man in Tod. She was a dark girl of about five-and-twenty, neither pretty nor plain, the type of girl that is called a “good sort,” the girl whom no man marries. Moreover, she had a brain, and a pair of eyes that were learning to watch life with a rather wistful shrewdness. She had begun to realise that she had no lure for the average men of her class, nor had they any very great attraction for her. They were so obvious, and so very complacent, and so up-to-date and cheap. They had all the tricks and catchwords of the season. The weather was always “top hole” or “the limit”; “priceless” was the adjective in vogue for the moment and it was applied to everything, frocks, plays, flirtations, boots and drinks. If you were keen on tennis or golf you were a “tennis merchant” or a “golf merchant.” Everything that was unpleasant was “rotten.” Bertha Cragg had been listening for a new and original note from some unconventional male.

Tod had appealed to her. He was shy and unhappy, and there were possibilities about him that were lacking in the more complacent young men as exemplified by her brother. Bertha had a secret contempt for her brother, that infallible young man whose greatest joy was to create an impression.

“You haven’t had a game yet, have you?”

“No,” said Tod, “I can’t play tennis.”

“Let’s take this table. You’d soon learn; you are good at games. I remember seeing you play football last winter.”

Tod blushed.

“Did you?”

“You saved the match for Shaston. Yes, let’s have some of these mixed cakes, and we’ll take a teapot all to ourselves.”

Tod lost much of his palsied shyness. This girl was restoring his self-respect; she had seen him do something finely and well, and she did not make him feel a consummate and ignorant ass. He liked her frank brown eyes, and her broad white teeth when she smiled, and that simple white dress of hers. She was not so terribly fluffy and ornate as a lot of those other women.

“Do you like games?”

“I like anything that’s natural.”

“So do I,” said Tod; “I like my swim each morning, especially when it’s a bit rough. You feel you have beaten something.”

“I know just how you feel.”

Tod accepted her goodwill in the frank way that it was given. He was grateful to Bertha Cragg, nor did the vanity of the self-pleased young male suggest that the girl was “making up to him.” Tod was not fashioned in that way. In half an hour he was talking to her without any trace of self-consciousness, and towards the end of the afternoon he was playing tennis as her partner, and getting the feel of his racket with the natural quickness of a boy who had always been good at games.

They combined so well, and grew so merry and light-hearted over it that Tod managed to forget the incident of the tea-cup and the brown stains on his flannel trousers. And Bertha Cragg was kind to him with a new and subtle motherliness that was very pleasant to a rather plain girl of five-and-twenty. She liked Tod. The woman in her liked him very much indeed.

Her brother blundered against her at the close of the afternoon. “Thanks for looking after the kid, B. He was making rather an ass of himself. One can’t always be running round can one?”

Bertha Cragg bent down and retied her shoe lace.

“He was shy, that’s all. You are never shy, Fred.”

“Can’t say I ever felt that way.”

“Yes, it’s rather a pity.”

Chapter Fourteen

Caroline Crescent and “Clovelly” had taken possession of Tod Western.

Through all those rapidly moving months he was being peacefully persuaded towards middle-class culture. The women had conceived an interest in Tod, Miss Truebody of St. Helen’s Terrace who lent him her Tennyson and persuaded him to go occasionally to St. Alban’s Church, Mrs. Rathbone Cragg, Bertha Cragg, even the girl who typed in the office. Tod had become attractive to women. He piqued the sex in them, and with an innocence that was all the more provoking in that he was not acutely conscious just then of the sex in himself.

Tod was finding life very interesting. He was so busy doing things that he did not drift into any of those sauntering moods that are apt to end in the sentimental discovery of petticoats and ribbons. He had grown to love his work, and so keen was he that he procured books on architecture and building construction and sat up at night reading. His day began with a swim or a brisk walk. He played football that winter for the West Shaston Sports Club and in the summer he spent the evenings at tennis. There were no gaps in his day, no dawdling interludes. Sex was dormant in him, waiting like a cunning woman for the moment when the young male should tire of merely hitting a ball and developing his strength.

Sex too had relieved Tod of Mr. Frederick Rathbone Cragg’s mentorship. The impressive Fred was cultivating the elder Miss Horrox, and he had no time now for the tutelage of Tod. His sister had slipped unobtrusively into his place. Tod went very often to “Clovelly,” and came to look on Fred’s sister as a jolly girl without any nonsense. The sex in her never touched him, and Bertha, with that unusual instinct of hers, hid her sex and played the man. She was in love with Tod, and she waited.

Yet her secret tenderness, the love of a clever yet rather plain girl for a healthy, game-playing boy, watched over Tod jealously and followed him into all the corners of his life. She knew more about Tod perhaps than Tod knew about himself. She knew how he spent his day, and how he passed his evenings; Miss Truebody told her, for Miss Truebody owed much to the Craggs. And she was at one with Mr. Julian Burgetrode in her sensing of the unusual in Tod. She knew that he was quite unlike any young male thing she had ever met; there was a directness about him, a kind of delightful simplicity, the look of going a far journey in his blue eyes, a promise of something clean and adventurous in his squarish head and brown face. For Tod was clean, and it was his cleanness that appealed to Bertha Cragg, who was a sensitive, a spiritual “sport” in that very material and middle-class world.

Tod found it very easy to talk to her. She was a comrade, just like a man friend, and he had not discovered the woman behind the frank and game-loving girl. She had very pleasant brown eyes, white teeth, and rather a shapely figure, and she could play a fast game at tennis and swim almost as well as Tod. They made a pleasant, laughing, unselfconscious pair, and Mrs. Rathbone Cragg folded her hands over it, and did not interfere. Tod had a future and some capital. Mr. Julian Burgetrode loomed big in the North.

Tod’s quaint franknesses were not unlike the sayings of his father, and Bertha caught them in her lap and then hid them away in her heart.

“What do people want to make money for? It’s much jollier doing things for love.”

“I should like to be able to swim across the Channel.”

“I can’t stand cheats.”

“Wasting your time with a lot of girls!”

She laughed over that saying, with a little twinge of self-pity—yet she knew that he had spoken the truth. He did not spend his evenings loafing round the bandstand, playing with a lot of fluffy young flappers or young women with red necks and chests and sun-scorched faces. There were no huddlings into dark corners, giggles and a curiosity that might end in a little mock protesting scream. And she was glad.

Tod saw very little of old Shaston, the Shaston of the Flowerdews and the Snapes. Kitty Flowerdew was married to Edwin Rook, and was expecting a baby, but Tod knew nothing of that. Mossup was married too and settled in that little white cottage of his, and Tod went and had tea with them one Sunday afternoon. Mossup took him all over the house and garden, and simpered with pride.

“Nice little kitchen, isn’t it? Olive’s a wonder. Did you ever see such pots and pans? Come and see the chickens. Yes, nothing but egg-boxes, old chap; the house took six at ninepence each, not so bad. Eggs? Oh, yes, we’ll get plenty of eggs.”

After tea he led Tod into the garden and became mysteriously confidential.

“I’m setting up on my own this autumn. Little shop in Duke Street; just two windows and a door in between. Olive’s going to do the hats. She’s a wonder at hats. So if you can send anyone along, old chap——”

Tod promised to tell all West Shaston and St. Margarets of Mossup’s shop. Mossup was such a good chap, even though he did not play games.

One evening Tod met Bob Twine. He was strolling back from the St. Margarets Tennis Club, a brown young man in very white flannels, meditating deeply on the improving of his forehand drive.

“Hallo, Tod.”

“Hallo, Bob, old man. Haven’t seen you for years.”

Bob Twine looked shabbily smart, and that black chin of his seemed blacker than ever.

“Say, you are some knut, kid! How’s life?”

“Quite good,” said Tod.

Bob looked him over with the eyes of a connoisseur. There was no doubt about it, Tod was “it.” His flannel trousers were nicely creased, his buckskin shoes white as milk, his Oxford shirt, soft collar and tie the best productions of Messrs. Mummery, the gentleman’s outfitters in Pomeroy Place. Tod’s hat was at the correct angle. He had collected and absorbed all the subtle details pertaining to costume, and he carried them with that utter lack of self-consciousness that puzzles and piques the more florid bounder.

“They are making a pukka gent of you, old man. Quite the Burlington, what!”

“Shut up,” said Tod.

“It’s a fact. Real West Shaston china, the genuine article. Got a dress suit, I suppose?”

“Not yet.”

“It will come, old man. Play bridge and go to dances, and eat strawberries and cream in people’s gardens.”

“Shut up. Come and have some supper one night.”

Twine refused, and refused with a kind of awkward sulkiness.

“Rather full up just now, kid. I’ve got a girl, and she takes some satisfying. Well, don’t forget us all.”

“I shan’t,” said Tod, “but why not bring your—your fiancée along with you.”

“That’s some word, old man. But she isn’t that—yet; that’s the trouble. Well, so long.”

They parted, Tod wondering why he thought Bob Twine rather a coarse beast, and whether he—Tod—had changed as Twine said he had. Twine loafed away, smiling a queer, sensual, slightly cynical smile.

“They’ve got him,” he thought, “he’s going up into the real respectable pew. Would I swop? Damn it, no! You can’t be respectable and have such a time with the girls.”

Ten minutes later he met a fair-haired, and richly coloured young woman on the parade. She had been waiting in one of the shelters, eating sweets and reading a paper novel. And the face of the young woman was the face of “Giggles,” Miss Millie Hornblower, to whom Tod had once given a German-silver ring.

The greater part of a year had passed since Mr. Julian Burgetrode had last played the Colossus in his toy-town, but he reappeared one day at the Hotel Majestic, and two evenings later Miss Truebody found him on her doorstep. The bell of No. 11 St. Helen’s Terrace had been rung with unnecessary vigour, and Miss Truebody’s instinct was to protest. The maid was out, and she answered the door herself.

“Yes? What do you want, please?”

She had meant to remark that the inmates of No. 11 were not deaf, but people did not use sarcasm on Mr. Burgetrode. The fierce blue eyes, and the red tie, and the masterful brown face were so very vivid and arrestive. Mr. Burgetrode was always treated like a big and rather doubtful tempered dog, and Miss Truebody forgot about the bell.

“Is Tod Western in?”

“Mr. Western? No I think he is at the tennis club.”

“Will he be long?”

Mr. Burgetrode’s fierce manner quite agitated Miss Truebody.

“Oh, no, he may be in any minute; you see, he always comes home and has a little supper and studies before going to bed.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Burgetrode, and Miss Truebody winced.

“He studies quite hard, you know, such a nice, gentlemanly, quiet fellow.”

“I’ll come in and wait.”

“Oh, certainly. Are you——”

“My name is Burgetrode. Will you show me his room, please?”

Miss Truebody continued her “agitato” on her way up the stairs.

“Quite a healthy, sunny room, I’m sure. I have got him a nice arm-chair; the windows look south, you know, and he has his meals in my sitting-room. Yes, it has been very hot to-day, hasn’t it?”

“Very,” said Mr. Burgetrode tersely, wondering if the lady was married and had a daughter. He did not believe in a man marrying before thirty, and he did not want Tod to marry any girl in Shaston. Mr. Burgetrode had unusual views on sex and marriage.

Sheer nervousness kept Miss Truebody holding the door handle of Tod’s room and making polite conversation.

“I expect he’ll be playing tennis with Miss Cragg, Mr. Burgetrode. Such a very nice girl, and Mrs. Cragg is one of the kindest and most Christian of women. Yes, he does smoke, just a little, poor dear boy, but such mild tobacco, I’m sure.”

Mr. Burgetrode had picked up a brier pipe, and he took not the slightest notice of Miss Truebody. Believing in allowing such clockwork ladies to run themselves down, he idled round Tod’s room, looking at the books and the furniture with the interest of a man who had vivid memories of his own youth. Tod’s blue bathing suit was hanging over the back of a chair, and Miss Truebody, with great decency and presence of mind, threw a towel over it, and then “chasséd” towards the door.

“You’ll find that chair quite comfortable, Mr. Burgetrode.”

“I have no doubt of it, madam,” he said, removing the towel from the blue bathing suit, and staring at it fixedly till Miss Truebody had closed the door.

He was very interested in Tod’s room. The Truebody part of it was quaint and old maidish and precise, but Tod’s share was that of the healthy young male. There were glass lustre candlesticks, and a little white marble cross on the mantelpiece. The furniture was mahogany of the most obviously Victorian pattern. It appeared that Miss Truebody had dabbled much with the paint brush at some period of her life, and the splasher above the washstand showed a bunch of white Madonna lilies. A couple of tambourines that hung one on each side of the overmantel had been decorated with very wooden and wall-eyed tom-tits balancing with a grim determination on bits of twig. But the room was snug and clean and full of Tod and his possessions, tobacco tins, books, a pair of trousers thrown on the bed, a collar and tie and a pair of mauve socks on the chest of drawers, a little table in the window with ink, writing paper and notebooks. Julian Burgetrode picked up some of Tod’s books, and found that he was reading architecture, and practical building, and an elementary handbook on sanitation. Mr. Burgetrode smiled. The Craggs had sent him very flattering reports on Tod.

His protégé arrived and found Mr. Burgetrode sitting side-saddle on the window-sill, and enjoying that evening glimpse of old Shaston and the sea.

“Well, Master Ajax?”

Tod was pleased to see Mr. Burgetrode, and Mr. Burgetrode was pleased with the pleasure on the boy’s brown face.

“I’m sorry you had to wait, sir; I would have stayed in if I had known.”

“Not a bit of it. You’ve grown.”

“Have I?” laughed Tod.

“Let’s see, how old are you?”

“Nearly twenty, sir.”

“Wish I could be twenty again. You are coming out to dinner with me, Tod, yes, just as you are. This seems a clean and comfortable sort of place.”

“Miss Truebody is very kind, a good sort,” said Tod.

“And religious?”

“Very religious, sir. People are very kind—and I am having a good time, and I like the work.”

“Houses?”

“I never get tired of houses, sir, all sorts of houses. I’m reading quite a lot.”

“Excellent!” said Mr. Burgetrode, with a queer gleam of the eyes. “Now come along to dinner.”

Tod dined at the “Majestic,” and Mr. Burgetrode saw that the lad had changed. He had developed poise, and he was no longer embarrassed by waiters and people in evening dress. He had put on new social clothes. But the real Tod was there as of old, frank, fearless quaintly direct and eager, a happier Tod perhaps, a boy who had the makings of a very big man.

He talked away to Mr. Burgetrode, and if the “Colossus” asked a few questions they were very significant and pertinent questions, and Tod responded to them with ingenuous readiness.

His talk was all of houses, not only of houses as they were, but houses as they might be and ought to be. He was interested in the conceiving and building of houses and cottages, and in the atmosphere of their surroundings. Tod had seen some of the “county” houses during the year, and the beauty and the soft serenity of many of them had left a vivid picture in his brain. He had not forgotten that house-hunting adventure with Arthur Mossup, and those stuffy and dreary little grey boxes at the back of Shaston town, and Tod, with the natural idealism of youth, believed that such mean beastliness in brick should never have been perpetrated.

“There ought to be gardens and trees,” he said, “and plenty of places to play in. Why should people live in rabbit-hutches?”

“The speculator’s idea of economics, my boy.”

“Well, it oughtn’t to be,” said Tod; “and all those dirty little houses, each with a dirty little kitchen, and making more dirt and mess. And no baths.”

“You would like to make a new town all out of your own head, with gardens and baths, and playing grounds, and concert halls and fine cookhouses?”

“I should,” said Tod, his eyes alight, “but who’d pay for it?”

“Exactly!” said Mr. Burgetrode; “we don’t like paying for other people’s health and comfort.”

It was rather obvious to Mr. Burgetrode that the Craggs had not pushed Tod against the financial thorns of the business. He had not got himself pricked and exasperated as he had done in the shops of Messrs. Flowerdew and Snape. The Craggs were respectable people. They did not perpetuate the more flagrant cynicisms, and West Shaston was too comfortable and well fed and wealthy to bother about elemental economics. The Craggs had made money rather easily; they had not developed the clawing hands, the fierce masticating muscles and the canine teeth of the average Flowerdew. Tod had not yet discovered “commercial competition,” that devil god of the industrial age, the god of the unprincipled and the greedy.

Mr. Burgetrode even persuaded Tod to betray his views on girls, and discovered, more by inference, that Tod was not interested in them for the moment. Mr. Burgetrode had introduced the Craggs into the conversation, and he heard all about Fred Cragg the impressive, Mrs. Cragg whose lap was full of charity, and Bertha Cragg who could swim like a man and place a back-hand volley down the side line with fine precision.

“She’s a good sort,” said Tod; “no nonsense, just like a man, you know. Can’t stand the giggling sort, all ribbons and hat brim. The Craggs have been very kind to me, sir, very kind indeed.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Mr. Burgetrode, beginning to wonder whether Miss Cragg was not a rather dangerous young woman. He did not want Tod to marry for many years to come, and he did not want him to marry a girl of the middle classes.

Chapter Fifteen

Tod made another friend that summer, a Mr. Lavender, who kept a quiet little tobacco shop in Greek Street, behind Caroline Crescent. Mr. Lavender made a living by selling pipes and tobacco, but in the life that mattered he was a naturalist and a lover of birds. He was a big, fair, quiet man with a soft voice and blue eyes that were always ready to smile, a great placid, lovable creature, a born countryman and hunter of the woods and uplands, an idler by rivers, one of the few who cared more for life than for money. As an ornithologist he was no mean authority, and it is probable that he was the best read man in Shaston. He read because he loved good books, and not with the spirit of Fred Cragg, who wanted to collect information, borrowed stones and brilliants with which to dazzle fools. Mr. Lavender had lost his egotism in the great lap of Nature. He knew things that Frederick Cragg would never know—because Life was his book, Life that cares nothing for the intellectual vanities of the fussily clever people.

Tod bought his first pipe from Mr. Lavender, but their friendship began when Tod discovered by some chance that Mr. Lavender had known his father.

“I should think I did know him! We had a tramp’s holiday together twenty-five years ago. Your father was one of the rare birds.”

“In what way?” Tod asked, intensely interested.

“Cared for the real things. Money was dirt to your father, useful dirt, just what it should be.”

“My mother used to say that my father ought to have been a great man.”

“He was a great man, but he wasn’t a successful one according to modern standards. There’s a difference.”

Tod supposed there was; and in the course of a few weeks he and Mr. Lavender became close friends.

Tom Lavender spent each Sunday in the country. He would take the early train for Bidhurst or Willoborough, and walk five and twenty miles before sunset, carrying a haversack, a pair of field-glasses and a stout ash stick. He would lie in a ditch or under a tree for an hour, watching some bird, and sometimes he turned into a village church and joined in the service. There was not a wild flower that he could not tell you the name of, and he could spin all sorts of fascinating yarns about the life of an ant or a bee. Nor was he a mere naturalist. He had a sense of colour and of atmosphere, a love of landscape and an eye for all the strangeness of beauty.

He made a disciple of Tod, and they spent many Sundays together tramping the lanes and the field-paths and watching the life of the woods. Tod learnt many things from old Tom Lavender: the tricks of the squirrel, the notes and plumage of shy and elusive birds, how the woodpecker earns his living, where bumble bees live, how trees should be grown, how to tell an adder, where to look for plovers’ eggs, where trout might still be found; but the most precious picture of all was the picture of old Lavender himself. Tod was the better for having realised the gentleness and the wisdom of the old man. Lavender gave his youth a new outlook on life, a new choice, a new understanding. Here was a man who loved things for themselves, who despised money and pitied greed, a man who was not feverish, and to whom the world could offer no bribe.

“It’s up to all of us to choose,” he told Tod. “There are two ways of owning things—by loving them and not wanting to put them in your pocket, or by grabbing Life and trying to sell it. It’s up to all of us to choose.”

“I don’t want a lot of money,” said Tod.

“Somebody else may.”

“Who?”

“The woman you marry.”

Tod had not thought of that.

“Why should she?”

“Women like a man to be successful. In the old days you got a horse and knocked over other men, or you went on a great adventure. Success and money are synonymous nowadays.”

“I shan’t marry a girl like that. Besides, my mother loved my father.”

“She wasn’t a money fool. She thought of the inside of her man before she thought of the furniture.”

“That’s true,” said Tod.

So life promised well for Julian Burgetrode’s protégé. He had his feet on the upland track and his eyes on the clear sky ahead of him. He was healthy in body and mind, and he seemed in a fair way to escape the two things that damn a young man most, cheap women and cheap money. He played a good deal of tennis that summer, and he played much of it with Bertha Cragg. He had joined the local club and had become something of an expert.

He was known among the gossips as “Bertha’s boy.” The middle-class young women were making a jest of it, but Tod was the most innocent thing on earth just then.

Bertha knew.

But Bertha Cragg was not an average young woman. There was a fineness about her, a reticence, a shrewdness that could watch and wait. She understood Tod, glimpsed him as a healthy wholesome, delightful boy whose whole attention was concentrated on the life outside him, on doing things, and on doing them well. He was deep in his book of adventure, his Crusoe story, and there was no woman in it. Some day a ship would heave-to off Crusoe’s Island, the ship of sex, and Bertha Cragg hoped to be the young mistress of that ship.

She loved Tod very dearly, but she hid her love so well that he never caught the sheen of it. She wanted him to come to her, to open his eyes to her and find that she had played herself into his life.

“Dear Bertha is growing quite pretty.”

Old ladies made that remark to her mother, and it was true.

She had a mass of fine dark hair, good teeth, very pleasant eyes, and the bloom of her sex was upon her. She took great trouble with her dress, wore the neatest of shoes, and was never gaudy.

Yet Tod remained blind. He liked her better than any other girl in Shaston, and he liked her so well and in such a fashion that she wondered whether he would go on liking her in that way till—— But Bertha always shrank from the thought of the other girl who might swoop in and carry Tod off in a night’s flirtation. She bore with the beastly gossip and the sniggers and the knowledge that she was being watched by the merciless eyes of competing flappers. She was always frank and merry with Tod. She was his playmate, his sports-woman; and her dream was that some day he would look into her eyes and discover the woman.

They entered at the local tournament as partners in the mixed doubles, and they won.

Tod had been so keen on winning. Their last match was an uphill affair against a pair who were the local experts. Tod, over zealous, had struck an uncertain and eccentric patch, and was smashing into the net and putting his drives out of the court. It was the girl who steadied him and pulled them through.

“You’re worrying too much——”

“I know. I’m a silly rabbit; I want you to win.”

“I shan’t be cross if we don’t. Let’s stonewall for a while.”

They did, and Tod’s serenity came back. Bertha was returning everything with that beautiful forehand drive of hers, and finding the side lines with nearly all her shots.

“Set all, four all!”

“We are going to beat them, Tod.”

She wanted to call him “dear.”

And beat them they did, Bertha making the finishing stroke with a crisp volley down the centre of the court. Tod had turned to her with an exultant, happy face, “Oh, great shot!” and had tossed his racket in the air.

He was almost the lover as they walked off the court together, and the woman in her thrilled.

“You won it, you know. I should have been all over the place but for you.”

She laughed softly and coloured.

“We never annoy each other, do we?”

“Rather not! I say, you must be tired. Come over here and sit down, and I’ll get you something to drink.”

She was very happy when he made her put on her white blanket-coat.

She was very happy, too, when they took the prize, and Tod made an ingenuous and half-shy little speech.

“My partner did it. She was the best player on the court.”

And some chit remarked to a friend:

“I believe she’s hooked him at last.”

But Tod remained as platonic and as innocent as ever, her playmate and nothing more. The winter arrived, and he bought a dress-suit, took dancing lessons and learnt to play bridge. He was popular and had nice manners, and it leaked out that some very influential person was interested in him. The tennis club carried on weekly subscription dances during the winter, and Tod danced a great deal with Bertha Cragg. He danced with other girls also, and she made a point of being very gay whenever Tod had other partners. There were certain girls whom she hated, mischievous little wretches who made eyes at Tod, and were quite ready to make Bertha look a fool.

In fact, there was a game played by several of them, and they called it “Bagging Bertha’s boy.” It did not prove to be a very successful game, because Tod appeared to be so preposterously unsentimental and so loyal to his comrade.

“You dance better than anyone else,” he told her; “most girls seem to be such silly fools.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Mrs. Rathbone Cragg should intervene. She had eyes and ears and a maternal pride, and she was very fond of her daughter. Nor had she any spite against Tod; she was quite ready for him to become engaged to her girl. That was just it: the relationship needed labelling, giving proper social significance.

She spoke to Bertha, and there was a quarrel. Mrs. Cragg had not thought of quarrelling, but it happened. Some women are very sensitive.

“But, my dear, it can’t go on like this. You must realise that you are getting talked about. It’s not nice. I know the boy is thoughtless——”

“I’m in love with him,” said the daughter with a queer, hard frankness.

“My dear child, that may be, but you ought to make him realise——”

Bertha flared out with sudden passion.

“You mean, I ought to do what most girls would do, grab him for myself and land him on the sentimental hook. I know it could be done; he’s such a dear boy, and sensitive. But I won’t.”

“You prefer to make a fool of yourself? Really, you are old enough——”

Bertha stood up.

“Mother, I have got a sort of pride that you don’t understand. I’m not going to be clever with Tod; I love him in a better way than that. I want him to come to me, if he is to come at all. As for all the beastly gossip, it is not going to make me a little cad. I’m his friend; I can’t help it—if I am not yet anything else.”

She was much moved, and almost in tears when she reached the door. Her mother, a good soul in spite of all her conventionality, jumped up and held out her hands.

“Bertha dear, we ought not to quarrel. You always were such a proud child.”

“I can’t help it, Mother.”

“Don’t you think it may be that Tod doesn’t realise? I know you have never helped him to realise, and he has seen so much of you. If you were to make a kind of little break—like taking something away from a child so that he missed it and found out how much he wanted it?”

Bertha looked straight into her mother’s eyes.

“Perhaps. To please you, I’ll try. Supposing I go and stay with Aunt Ethel for a month?”

Mrs. Cragg kissed her.

“The very thing,” she said.

If Tod had had more personal vanity he might have discovered Bertha’s secret. She went away to her aunt who lived at Surbiton, and Tod managed to see her off at the station, a piece of boyish courtesy that clouded the issue. He was not conscious of any gap in his life when Bertha Cragg had gone. He did his work, played his games, took his food with the usual zest, and went out with Thomas Lavender on Sundays, for the country was never dead to old Lavender; he loved it wet and he loved it fine. Tod danced once a week, and Mrs. Cragg had him to “Clovelly” to play bridge. She was rather motherly and mysterious with Tod, but Tod remained the most healthily unsubtle young idiot, and most ingenuously blind.

The Horroxes were giving a big dance after the New Year, and Bertha wrote to Tod to ask him if he would go with her. Each girl was taking a man. Tod accepted, and thought no more about it. He liked dancing with Bertha Cragg because it always seemed so easy, and he had not to chatter; they both loved dancing for itself, the quick glide of their youth together and the lilt of the music. There had never been any mystery in it to Tod, no quiver of madness in the nearness of her, in the whiteness of her shoulders or the smell of her hair. She had not the spark to set him alight, and that was her woman’s tragedy.

Bertha did not return to Shaston till the day before the dance, and she did not see Tod until he came up to “Clovelly” to share her cab. She had brought a new dress with her from town, a most beautiful rose silk thing, and she had spent more than an hour in dressing. It was her “Flaming June,” her challenge of the youth in him, the conscious and romantic assertion of the sex in her. She had scented her hair, and fastened a spray of roses in her dress, and as she came down the stairs a little pair of silver shoes flashed in and out under the rose-red skirt.

Tod was waiting for her in the hall. He was glad to see Bertha, but it was a sort of brother gladness, a cheerful “Hope-you-have-a-good-time” welcome. There was no mystery about him. He took her black velvet cloak and placed it over his shoulders.

“Very good of you to ask me to come,” he said; “the cab is waiting. Do you think you’ll be warm enough in that thing?”

“Quite,” she answered very calmly, and smiling at her mother who had come into the hall to see them off.

“Mind you take great care of her, Tod.”

“Of course I shall,” said Tod.

“I think we were lucky to get her back safely from Surbiton. She was rather gay there.” And Mrs. Cragg smiled mysteriously and conspiringly at Tod.

Bertha betrayed a moment’s impatience. She loathed being advertised.

“Time we were off. Come along, Tod.”

It is probable that that was the most unhappy evening the girl had ever spent. Tod sat like “good dog Tray” in the cab, and talked like a brother. The dance was a very sumptuous affair, for old Horrox had plenty of money and knew how to spend it. He liked “display,” and the Regent’s Hotel knew how to cater for people with social vanity. The string band had been brought from town, and the room was decorated with rambler roses. To do the unexpected and the expensive thing in the middle of winter was an extravagance old Horrox loved. He had been an expert at window-dressing in the days of his youth.

“Aren’t the roses lovely?”

“They are just the colour of your dress,” said Tod.

That was the only suggestively personal remark he made to her during the evening. The interlude had taught him nothing. She was still his playmate and nothing more, and he was as much at his ease with her as though she were a man. She had hoped perhaps for a sudden and subtle shyness in this boy, a sense of strangeness, an unfamiliar “What has happened to you?” in his frank eyes. She gave him five dances, and he always welcomed the return of their partnership, but he did not come to her with the look of a lover, but with the air of a man calling her to a game.

She was strangely silent as they drove home in the cab, lying well back in her corner with a kind of languor. Tod was puzzled by her silence. He did not understand.

“Tired?”

“A little.”

“It’s nearly three, you know, and I’m called at seven.”

“Poor Tod!”

She was strangely gentle with him; all her bitterness was against herself. A sort of mother pathos softened her mood. She would not let him leave the cab when it reached “Clovelly.”

“No. You need not fuss about me. You can drive straight on to the terrace.”

“It’s been a jolly evening, hasn’t it?”

“Splendid! Good night!”

The cab rolled on, and Tod felt a healthy pleasure in the prospect of going to bed. Bertha Cragg was in her room, bending forward and looking at her face in her mirror. It was a plain face—a little drawn, tired, colourless, for the joy of life had left it. She felt that she hated that face of hers, hated it as she had never hated anything on earth before.

“You fool!”

Her hands went to the shoulder straps of that exquisite dress of hers, and ripped it relentlessly from bosom to waist.

Chapter Sixteen

Three weeks later Tod met Millie Hornblower, the lady of the German-silver ring.

It was a sunny February afternoon, with a cold north-east wind blowing, the sea a deep blue ridged with white. Tod had been “writing up” a house on the seafront, and he was walking back along the Colonnade, and had stepped aside to let a perambulator pass, when some one spoke to him.

“I don’t suppose you remember me, Mr. Western?”

He turned and found himself looking into the china-blue eyes of a girl who was wearing a set of black furs. Her gloves were black and so was her hat, but beneath it her hair shone out like a red-gold wreath, a flash of colour that made him forget her sombre clothes. The “Giggles” of Pentworth had grown into a perilously handsome girl. She had one of those soft, round, glowing faces, with a complexion that old-fashioned ballad writers called “cream and roses”; moreover, it was natural. She was of middle height, deep of bosom, with a beautiful plump throat and well-shaped shoulders. But her mouth was the live flame of her beauty. It was a disastrous mouth—beautifully sensual and provoking, very red, the upper lip slightly lifted at the centre, a mouth that made men look at her with eyes of desire.

“It’s Miss Hornblower,” said Tod.

He had given her a little grudging lift of the hat, and he stood considering her with a shy reserve. Yes, he remembered her very well, for had she not killed the wonder-heroine of those books of adventure and most basely sold his love for a bag of chocolate creams?

“So you are at Craggs’,” said the girl, sensing those memories in the stare of his eyes.

“Yes.”

“Quite the man-about-town.”

“Oh?” said Tod, abrupt and uneasy.

He could not think of anything to say to her, though he was acutely conscious of her as a compellingly pretty girl. He thought that she had changed, and that her face looked softer and pleasanter, and that the memories of Pentworth were no longer fit to be remembered. Physical beauty is so convincing to a young man whose ideals have not been tarnished, and who does not know that a little harlot may have the face of an angel.

“You have changed a good deal,” said the girl; “I wonder if you would have spoken to me if you had seen me first?”

“Of course I should,” said Tod; “that’s to say if I——”

He got bogged there, and she did not try to help him out. His awkwardness made him stiff and difficult, and she felt that he was putting on side.

“Oh, don’t explain. You’re in a hurry, I expect. Of course, Wednesdays don’t affect you.”

“So you’re in a shop?”

It was an innocent bit of blurting idiocy, and he knew at once that he had said something disastrous, though to the self in him it had meant nothing at all. She gave a little lift of the head, looked at him queerly, lips pressed together, the pupils of her eyes small and very black.

“Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Western,” and she set her face westwards and walked on.

Tod saw that he had hurt her, and Tod had always hated hurting people. He walked back to the office with a furious sense of soreness inside him, and the growing realisation of the fact that the girl must have assumed him to be a snob. A remark of Bob Twine’s recurred to him: “Suppose you will be getting too big for us shoppies.” Tod had been indignant, but his present indignation was a chivalrous rage. The mood was miraculous. Miss Hornblower became in a moment a vision of softness, accusation and pathos. He remembered noticing that her gloves were shabby, and then he realised the suggestiveness of her black clothes and hat.

And so Tod landed on Calypso’s island, and his Calypso had a tragic mouth and grieved blue eyes.

He spent the whole of the following week in trying to cross paths with Millie Hornblower, and to win a chance of wiping that rage out of his heart. His chivalry went nightly down the parade into old Shaston town, and into every likely and alluring street. He tried two churches on the Sunday, and discovered no grieved and blue-eyed girl in either of them; but Tod had a good deal of obstinacy, and the smart did not wear away from him as quickly as it melted from the hearts of most people.

When at last he did meet her she was walking down Duke Street with a girl friend, and though Tod lifted his hat and broke his step with the hesitation of a man who wanted her to stop, she swept past him, a proud young ship in full sail. She had given him a nod of the head and no smile.

“Who’s that?” asked her friend.

“A boy I used to know.”

“He wanted you to stop.”

“He can want it a little more. I’m on my dignity, old thing.”

Tod was piqued and troubled. He was such an innocent man thing in the Garden of Eden that, unlike Father Adam, he accused himself and not Eve; and he behaved as though this particular Eve was made like a male. Bertha Cragg had clouded his conception of the other sex. She played the game of life like a good man, never cheated, and had hidden all her subtlety, showing him only the face of a frank and straightforward boy. If Tod had taken up his picture of Miss Hornblower where his Pentworth memories had left it, and not let sex smudge it, he would not have been the dear fool of a sensitive imagination. When a girl uses both her sex and her wits, the only opponent who can do her justice is a cynic or a roué.

Mr. Thomas Lavender had no Tod trudging with him over the Sussex hills on that first warm Sunday in March. There was spring in the air, an adventurous blueness in the sea, suggestion in the soft swish of the waves along the shingle, a “Come and find me” in the mood of the day. And Tod went forth like a pagan, with no thoughts of Miss Truebody and church bells, and the blood of St. Alban the Martyr, a young man patrolling the parade with a vague foresense of adventure tingling in his spine. In one of the glass shelters half hidden behind a hedge sat my Lady Propriety, reading a book with an air of careful and ladylike isolation. Her blue eyes looked vague and inattentive, and virginal as the sea and the sky. She was aware of nothing and of everything, and she did not appear to see Tod until his shadow was at her feet.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning!”

Her upward glance was surprised and critical. She waited, her book open on her lap, a virgin fortress with gates closed and flag flying.

Tod had to attack.

“May I sit down a moment?”

“It’s not my seat.”

He sat down a good yard away, very uneasy, the young male thing unconsciously full of its maleness.

“I’m afraid I offended you the other day?”

Her blue eyes held him baffled with the opaque and defensive stare of a moment.

“Oh?”

“If I did, it was quite——”

“Unimportant.”

She supplied him with the word, and then returned rather obviously to her book. A moment later, like the retiarius of old, she made a quick throw of the net.

“I work in a shop, you know.”

“So do I,” said Tod.

“That’s news. I shouldn’t have called an estate office a shop. St. Margarets rather fancies itself.”

“Do you mean I’m a snob?”

He had said it. He had sounded his trumpet, marched out his men and offered battle. The field was his.

“One can’t help one’s impressions, Mr. Western. I have learnt to take people as I find them. After all, it doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does,” said Tod obstinately.

She gave him an ironical glance.

“Oh, why?”

“Because I’m not a snob.”

“Am I to take your word for it? I suppose I was a silly, impulsive ass to speak to you that afternoon.”

“It was very nice of you to speak to me. And you went off in such a hurry.”

She turned over a page and smiled.

“Perhaps I’m rather touchy. I just did the natural thing, and you looked over your collar like a shocked curate. I’m not used to being snubbed.”

“But I didn’t mean to snub you.”

“Well, I felt snubbed, anyhow. And a girl’s rather touchy when things have gone wrong, and she is beastly poor.”

Tod sat there in silence for a while, tapping the toe of a boot with his cane, a very serious and generously sentimental Tod. She had set the youth alight in him, and though he was still unconscious of the fire that was to be, he had no suspicion that all this was strategy and part of the campaign. Millie Hornblower had seen Tod in Shaston long before he had seen her, and the promise of the man in Tod had pleased her. He was a brown, strong, quick-moving youngster, with alert eyes and an air of adventure. And there was a glamour about Tod. He was supposed to have a little money, and what was more important, inside influence. He was going up. Millie Hornblower had learnt quite a number of things about men and life, and the sort of future a girl in a shop might expect. She intended to get out of that shop with éclat and romance, and not as the wife of some dull and semi-paternal middle-class husband vaguely fat and forty.

“I’ve been trying to see you ever since that day,” said Tod at last.

“Have you?”

“You wouldn’t stop that afternoon in Duke Street.”

“Did you want me to stop?”

“Yes, I felt I’d offended you—hurt your feelings.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know that I’m asking for anybody’s pity.”

Tod fought stubbornly, like a man who was being outboxed and punished in every round.

“It’s not pity. And I’m not a snob. I was in two shops before I went to the Craggs. Besides——”

“Well?”

“I want to be friends.”

She gave him a quick side-glance, and then looked out to sea. She had her suppliant obstinately chastened, but those Pentworth memories needed final contradiction, and her desire was to appear somewhat unapproachable and proud, no casual girl to be picked up just as a man pleased.

“We’re not a couple of kids—now,” she said seriously.

“Of course not.”

“I was a mischievous little wretch at Pentworth, wasn’t I? I don’t make friends now in five minutes; if a girl has any self-respect she keeps herself to herself, especially if she’s in a shop.”

Tod’s answer came like an echo.

“That’s it,” he said; “that’s why I feel that it’s awfully good of you to let me sit here and talk. I’m not a cad, you know, and I’m grateful.”

She let herself smile at him.

“You used to be rather a nice boy—Mr. Western, otherwise I shouldn’t have let you—— Oh, well, I’m not very fond of men; they are such mean beasts.”

“I should not have thought anyone could be mean to you,” said Tod.

So Tod was forgiven and his conscience satisfied. He sat there with blue sea in front of him and the blue eyes beside him, and made polite conversation that tended towards the inevitably personal plane. Miss Hornblower put her book aside and allowed Tod to possess all her attention, but she was tantalisingly cool and correct, the very antithesis of the “Giggles” of Pentworth. Tod was not to be allowed to think that he could open the gate and walk into the garden just as he chose.

By one of those curious coincidences Bertha Cragg, the elder Miss Horrox and Frederick Cragg passed that shelter while Tod was absorbed in propitiating Millie Hornblower. Tod did not see them, nor did he guess what was happening in another woman’s heart. Bertha had glanced at the other girl’s eyes and mouth, that mouth that was like the red mouth of the woman in Rossetti’s picture of “Fazio’s Mistress.” The thing had happened. Tod had met that other sort of woman, the woman who did not rush about in the sun, but who just sat and waited for young Adam to steal her the apples.

Chapter Seventeen

The morning dip in the sea, the smiting of a white ball down a length of green grass, marching into Sussex village with Mr. Tom Lavender, spring woods and primrose time and the watching of birds; work in the office, houses, favourite books, all the healthy ritual of a young man’s open air life, gave place to a loitering at corners, a parading of the seafront, the game of the moth and the candle. A girl had taken all the colour of life for her eyes and her mouth and her clothes. She had put on the veil of make-believe, and the real face of her soul was hidden.

Tod Western had ideals, very clean and sturdy ideals. There was nothing mawkish or decadent about them, no ladylike pre-Raphaelite milk and moonlight hyper-refinement. He had never had to analyse what he felt about women; youth and instinct go hand in hand, and it may be that instinct has the face of a boy’s mother. It is the man of forty who stands and analyses, and has the subtle understanding of a mature wisdom. Tod had a sort of soul-picture of the girl a man should love. He wanted her to be beautiful and he expected her to be gentle, truthful, not greedy about money, not cheap or noisy, no player of mean tricks. All that is inside a man who has had a mother worth loving. It is part of his blood and his brain. If love and youth did not wish to make things better and finer than we know them to be, life would be a sorry business. Christ was a young man. Happy is that man who rediscovers that young Christ in himself when the hairs of his worldly head are turning grey.

And “Giggles” played the part of my Lady Propriety, a pink and white Chloe who exclaimed, “La, sir!” and who was serious, sedate and coy. In her natural and unpremeditated moments she was one of those girls who always had a finger in her mouth, or was patting her hair or looking obliquely at mirrors, shop windows or men. In Millie Hornblower’s case it was the little finger of her right hand that crooked itself into the left corner of her red mouth and dragged the lower lip down very slightly. She had very fat white hands with dimples where the knuckles should be and fingers tapering to soft, blunt ends. She was very fond of sweets and of strong scents, but her sensing of the man in Tod taught her to suppress these predilections and to eschew too much colour.

Some things were not “naice.” She was using the word “nice”—or “naice,” as she pronounced it—a great deal just then.

“I’d rather not sit on the stands, Mr. Tod.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not quite naice.”

And Tod found himself learning to make all sorts of subtle discriminations, and the natural and sensitive decency of the lad made him an apt learner. Miss Hornblower had a quick eye for all the proper formalities. She liked Tod to wear gloves and a bowler hat, and to take off his right hand glove before he shook hands with her. They walked very sedately up and down the Parade, and if they sat on a seat it was sure to be some very public seat, the sort of seat where a “naice girl” would sit with a man and advertise the niceness of her virtue to passers-by.

She softly but firmly suppressed any suggestion of walks in the country; it was still primrose time, and not quite the month of June. She let Tod take her once or twice to the pier concerts, but a girl friend went with them, and on one particular evening Tod had a great experience in trying to explain away a rather vulgar “turn” in a variety show that was running there for a week.

Miss Hornblower got up and walked out, and Tod found that the responsibility was his. She was on her dignity, a pretty prude who accused him.

“I don’t think it was naice of you to take me to that.”

“How did I know?” said Tod, honestly upset.

“Do you mean that you thought I shouldn’t mind?”

“Good heavens, no, Millicent!”—she had ordered him to call her Millicent—“I didn’t know there was anything in the show that would——”

“You ought to have known. A man oughtn’t to chance a thing being beastly and vulgar.”

“I’m awfully sorry. I ought to have gone and seen it first. I’m awfully sorry.”

She had impressed him. He had liked the way she had got up and walked out, like a Christian martyr refusing to burn incense before the altar of a pagan god.

Meanwhile, she was entangling him in a net of confidences—confidences that make a passionate appeal to a generous boy. There were the disasters that had fallen upon the Hornblower family. Millie’s father had died of pneumonia, a drunkard’s pneumonia, but she did not tell Tod that. He had left no money, and the family had scattered. One of the boys had gone to sea; two of the girls were in London shops; Mrs. Hornblower herself was living with a brother whom Millie described as a gentleman in business. Millie had had to face the hard realities of life, and to set about procuring herself food and clothes.

“I don’t think there is anything dishonourable in a girl having to work,” she said to Tod, with touching simplicity.

“Dishonourable! I respect you so much for doing it.”

“And then, of course, there’s Mother,” she explained. “I have to help Mother.”

She allowed Tod to understand that Mrs. Hornblower’s impecuniosity was almost a joy to a loving daughter.

“I don’t grudge the little I can give her. Uncle Alfred is quite well off, but Ma has her pride, and so have I.”

“I think you are splendid,” said Tod, with shining eyes.

But she refused to be regarded as a heroine.

“It’s nothing to boast about. It’s little enough after all the years Mother looked after me. But it’s beastly being poor.”

“How do you find it beastly?”

“Well, there’s Horrox’s—the shop. You don’t know perhaps how a girl can get treated in a shop. A naice boy like you wouldn’t believe it.”

“What do they do?” Tod asked.

She looked at her shoes with an air of rich embarrassment.

“Oh, I couldn’t talk about it; it’s too beastly. Some of the men are such cads; they expect a girl to let them do things.”

“What things?”

Tod was getting up on his horse, the same gallant war-horse that had been ridden by his father.

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes the shopwalkers, or even the ‘heads’ want a girl to sell herself, and if she’s a naice girl and respectable, she gets dismissed for putting a cad in his place.”

Tod flamed up.

“I’d like to talk to a cad like that. I’d give him such a thrashing!”

Her blue eyes held his.

“Would you?”

“I should think I would. I never knew there were such cads about.”

“And they are such liars, too. If a girl flouts them they tell all sorts of horrid lies about her, and what can a girl do?”

“The cowards! But has it ever happened to you?”

She became confused—almost frightened.

“Don’t! Don’t talk about it, Tod. There was someone who—well, I don’t think he’ll try it again.”

“If he does, you’ll tell me?”

“Perhaps.”

“Promise to tell me; a cad like that wants a lesson.”

“You’d thrash him?” she asked, with flattering simplicity and wonder.

“I’d tear the heart out of him,” said Tod.

Knowing that Mr. Robert Twine still served at Horrox’s Tod had referred to him as a friend, but Miss Hornblower had spoken discouragingly of Mr. Twine.

“That black man? Yes, he’s in the glove department, but he’s not my style.”

“Bob’s not a bad sort.”

“I don’t like him,” she had insisted; “not that I know much about him, but he is the kind of man a naice girl doesn’t trust.”

Tod had said no more. He remembered having felt that Bob Twine was rather a coarse beast in his attitude towards women.

Tod was on the way to getting himself talked about in West Shaston. He was breaking with his old haunts and habits. He had been seen but rarely at the tennis club, and people noticed his absence from “Clovelly.” “Bertha’s boy” had become a bandstand and seafront devotee, and the inference was obvious. Some flapper soon discovered that Mr. Western was always walking about with one of the girls from Horrox’s shop, a girl whose beauty had made her undisguisable, for Millicent Hornblower was one of those sun-women whom everybody notices and whom nobody forgets. People wondered what the Craggs thought about it, and Bertha Cragg in particular, Bertha who had been so conspicuously interested in Mr. Burgetrode’s protégé, but the Craggs satisfied nobody’s curiosity. Tod lapsed gradually from their circle—that was all.

Bertha Cragg dominated the family during that obscure social crisis, and impressed her spirit upon them. She bathed and played tennis with more than her old enthusiasm, and went about with such an air of healthy cheerfulness that people had no excuse for referring to her as “poor Bertha.” She snubbed her brother when he thought it his duty to be confidential and impressive. After all, it was a very trivial matter, a boy of twenty falling in love with a golden-haired shop-girl, very trivial and very natural. You did not stand on the seafront and draw everybody’s attention to the remarkable fact that the sea was coming in.

When she met Tod she showed him the same old frankness, and Tod’s eyes were never opened to the woman in her. She forgave him because she realised his innocence, and because she was rather unusual. The bitter jest was against herself, and she accepted it, making no moan and showing no malice; but she hated the girl who had captured Tod—hated her almost as much as she hated her own plain face.

She had been ambitious for the boy—her boy.

“I think I could have made him happy, and I know I could have helped him,” she said in her own heart.

But that other girl? What would she make of Tod?

So poignant and strong was her curiosity that she went more than once to the shop of Horrox & Horrox, and contrived to be served by the girl with the red mouth and the flamboyant hair, the girl whom she had seen sitting with Tod in that shelter. These two women were antipathetic, fire and snow, even across a haberdashery counter.