PART I DULCE DOMUM

[I]

AUNT LAVVY called Hal as he was passing through the hall:

“Is that you, Hal dear? Will you be going anywhere near Platt’s?”

“No, but I can quite easily. Why? Do you want me to look and see if your fortune’s still there?” For Aunt Lavvy banked at the local branch of Platt’s; it was only open three times a week from ten A. M. to twelve; Buckler’s Cross was not as yet a very important country suburb.

Aunt Lavvy wanted an open cheque for five pounds cashed. And after Hal had teased her a bit more as to what she could possibly want with all that money at once, he took the cheque and departed. But first of all he kissed her, because she was rather a dear little old lady, and was just the right height for the manly embraces of seventeen-and-a-half. Most men feel it a merit in their more aged female possessions to be small and frail-looking, to have pink cheeks and silvery hair, and a soft voice and delicate white hands.... Aunt Lavvy achieved all this; she was the perfect cliché among dear little old ladies, down to the very lavender-bags she placed among her linen. That was why all the young Maxwells adored her. Directly a new visitor came to the Laburnums, she or he was hauled along as a matter of course to see Aunt Lavvy and be approved by her; and her sweetness and little-old-ladyness made them vaguely discontented with their own female home belongings, equally ancient, but possibly more strident.

Correctly speaking, she was not an aunt at all. Because the Maxwells’ house was at one time too large for them, she had come as a paying-guest during a financial slump. And Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell encouraged “Aunt Lavvy” among the children, as it covered the weekly payment of two guineas with a soft slither of sentiment, and created a legend in the eyes of the world—the Buckler’s Cross world. Later on, when the financial slump was over, and the Maxwells’ house was too small for them, Aunt Lavvy remained on in the best bedroom—by dint of increasing pressure in the rest of the house—because to evict her would have destroyed the aunt legend, and clearly revealed the former reason of her being. Besides, she was already a tradition: “What should we do without Aunt Lavvy?” Everybody took their little confidences to Aunt Lavvy—except, perhaps, Mrs. Maxwell. Mrs. Maxwell had rather a reddish face, and a haggard neck, and a very loud bustling voice. No, she did not take her little confidences to Aunt Lavvy. But they got on very well together. They had known each other as girls.

And Ursula also kept rather aloof from the careless edict that Aunt Lavvy was to be worshipped. But then Ursula, like most flappers of sixteen, was in a very tumbled condition of hair and spirit. It was well known that she had had a rave on Aunt Lavvy at one time; and there is no queen so dethroned as a schoolgirl’s last rave but one. Not that Ursula went to school; she “studied” with Miss Roberts, the governess. Lottie also did her lessons with Miss Roberts—but Lottie was only ten; hence the distinction in terms. But it was the same Miss Roberts. Grace and Nina had gone to a High School about twenty minutes by train from Buckler’s Cross. They were only separated by two years in age. But Ursula came five years after Nina, with Hal between; and the governess was originally provided for her till she was old enough to follow her sisters. By the time she was nine, Lottie was three, and Miss Roberts had to be kept on for Lottie—Nurse had quite sufficient to do with William, just born—and Mr. Maxwell, still careful, though the meagre period was over, thought it extravagant to pay Miss Roberts for the education of Lottie alone. So Ursula continued to do her lessons with the governess, only they became studies, and the nursery automatically merged into a schoolroom whenever Nurse and William were not occupying it. By the time William was five, the nursery was declared altogether schoolroom, and would have remained so but for the unfortunate claims of Gracie’s babies....

[II]

MR. MAXWELL was so anxious to be thought not original that even when he made a remark of his own, he stressed it as though it were a quotation appearing between inverted commas: thus, “Good looks never stay at home” was his own summing-up of his four daughters’ futures; though it sounded like one of those wise homely proverbs spoken to us by our nurses, who in turn have had it from their grandmothers and aunts. Gracie, Nina, Ursula and Lottie were all fairly pretty girls, though Nina’s were the sort of fresh and bonny good looks that were led off by the complexion, and Gracie’s depended upon the weight and length of her straight light-brown hair. It really was the sort of heavy hair which of its own accord dragged loose from its hairpins and came lolling down—a proceeding very useful to sirens and Loreleis, but a matter of catastrophe to Grace, who, a modest, sensible girl, was sure that whenever it happened, nice men would think she was encouraging them....

Nevertheless, already at nineteen she was engaged to Stanley Watson; and a year later she married him.

Up till now, the Maxwells ought to have presented the appearance of just an ordinary family. Viewed as a group, they were entirely ordinary. Mr. Maxwell was a wholesale stationer, only peculiar in that he was a thin man who behaved as though he were burly, for he was genial and boisterous and rollicking, and when he lost his temper he bellowed. As a thin man, he should have been slightly sarcastic and querulous and timid in society. But otherwise he kept strictly to precedent—he wore a gold watch-chain dragged loosely across his middle; he caught his train to the city nearly every morning, and missed it about once a week; he was proud of his sons, and kept them short of pocket-money; he loved his wife, and gave her no pocket-money at all. Oh, there was nothing outré about Mr. Maxwell! He was even far more polite to strangers than to his own family, and always remembered to ask Aunt Lavvy if she liked the outside piece, when he carved. “No favourites” was his motto where the children were concerned—yet Hal was the eldest son, and of this his sentimentality made great parade, treating him sonorously, as though he were the “heir” of which a great family had been anxiously expectant, to carry on the tradition and title ... the eldest son! Hal had received no concrete privileges in the paternal will; all seven inherited exactly alike; nevertheless—the eldest son! In the bosom of abstract emotion it ranked with “God Save the King” and “Gentlemen, the Ladies!”

“Good gracious, no, my husband doesn’t want Hal to go into the business. William, our baby, is going into the business. He’s so bloomin’ steady.” It was painful when Mrs. Maxwell used words like “bloomin’,” but when she was a handsome girl she was admired for it—and habits stick. “Hal’s going to the ’Varsity to read for the Law; and Bunny—no, we’re afraid he’ll run into debt if we send him to Oxford or Cambridge. Bunny’s very wild—he’s only fit for the Navy really. But my husband says it’s too late, so I suppose he’ll end up in the Colonies, poor old boy.”

For the Maxwells were ordinary even to the possession of the usual black sheep in their midst.

To continue with the greys: after Father—but a long way after—Mother. Father and Mother still upheld each other’s authority in the old perfunctory way: “You must obey your mother,” “You mustn’t disturb your father,” ... but they made no definite stand against the increasing freedoms and privileges of the new generation. On the whole, they were tolerant, because it was at the moment the national habit to be tolerant and not violently to enforce the precepts of right and wrong....

The war was only lately over, and youth in consequence was in a state that could only be described as “difficult.” Youth was touchy and arrogant, morbid and defiant ... and even the younger members of the young generation, those who would have gone to the war if the war had lasted longer, like the Maxwells, became slightly infected by the spirit of truculence towards mere elderliness, futile, ineffective, and powerless—now.

So Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell were indulgent, because all parents were being indulgent. And they did not know that the underneath motive was fear, because they never probed for underneath motives. And at any rate, they were safe in assuming that the children had inherited the tradition of the thoroughly commonplace, in that they were never in the least likely to do anything “different” ... “different,” in the Maxwell parlance, standing for the “wrong” of our Puritan forefathers.

Unless Bunny...

Bunny, aged fourteen, with dark eyes that charmed, and a wayward tuft of hair sticking out rebelliously from the crest of his head, was a perpetual anxiety. He was always in a scrape, and always created an atmosphere of apprehension that his next scrape might be very much worse. Idle, popular, dare-devil Bunny ... handsome, mischievous Bunny ... Bunny whistling, and Bunny penitent.... Oh, the Colonies, certainly! But meanwhile he had his place in the picture of a family group.

William idolized Bunny, and on his behalf broodingly resented Hal’s superior status. A stern-eyed child, William, and persistent, fair, and with a thick stubbiness to his eyelashes which seemed the right outward expression of an equally thick stubbiness in his character. He pushed Bunny’s claims whenever he could! but Hal—well, Hal was such a splendid big fellow, an athletic hero at his school, captain of the Cricket Eleven, and moderately intelligent into the bargain. And the eldest son. And everybody’s favourite, too; for although he was no beauty, with his large beaky nose and freckles, yet he had quiet pleasant ways, and an air of good-humoured and even, at times, whimsical authority ... his sisters could not defer to him enough, especially Nina.

And they snubbed Bunny—especially Nina. She said flippantly that it was “good for his soul.” Perhaps it was! Of all the young Maxwells, Nina was the most sure of herself. She went out more than the others—perhaps this was the cause of it. For people were wont to “take her up”; especially people with no daughters of their own; richer people than the Maxwells, who lived in larger houses, and owned cars. For Nina was such a jolly girl, and so competent; not as colourless as Gracie, nor over-shy and over-bold by fits and starts, like Ursula. She could cut sandwiches without spoiling the loaf, and play tennis and hockey, and drive a car, and manage sick animals; and could be useful in emergencies; and showed strong white teeth whenever she laughed—which was often—and she was never ill, and never unhappy, and “What I like in that girl,” said old Colonel Mathers, to sum up, “is that there’s no nonsense about her!”

A man was present when this remark was made, who gathered hostile stares by ejaculating that he could imagine nothing more ghastly and revolting—yes, he used these extreme terms—nothing more ghastly and revolting than a girl with no nonsense about her; and that the ideal girl is delicately hung about with nonsense as a Chinese temple with tiny silver bells.

He went on for quite a long time in this vein; but as nobody argued with him, and as he was entirely wrong, and as he wasn’t regularly of Buckler’s Cross, but only an occasional visitor to the Mathers, his extraordinary opinions hardly mattered.

Nina had been brought up as modern public-school girls often are, to a public-school-boy cult, that despised affectation, aimed at being hard and decent and straight; to have no use for sentiment. She had an aggressive manner of addressing her younger sisters and brothers as “my good lad,” “young woman,” “Tuppence,” “my poor brat”—(the first was usually Bunny and the last William)—but with Hal she was as bright marble changed to flowing water under the moonlight. Hal was a hero. Hal could do no wrong, or if he did (but he couldn’t) it was right. By Hal, her days began and her nights ended. She wound up her watch and set the time by Hal; her rigid standards and tastes were supple as silk to defer to his. She was his trumpeter, his prophet and his slave. Triumphantly, she compelled every one to own him a marvel, both for his separate acts and for his existence as a complete unit.

He really was quite a nice boy! Ursula and Grace and Lottie were just as fond of him as Nina, but they did not create such a dust about it. And Aunt Lavvy positively dimpled when the holidays drew near, and said she must get out her prettiest cap, because she had a sweetheart on the seas and his ship had been sighted ... that was Aunt Lavvy’s quaint way of talking.

She told Nina that once there had been a young spark like Hal, tall and broad and with nice manners and steady grey-blue eyes—“Did he—was he—drowned, Aunt Lavvy?” in a whisper; and after a long pause—“Yes, my dear....”

So Nina and Aunt Lavvy shared this secret and were great friends. But she puzzled Nina by liking Bunny too—and how could any one who saw the glory of Hal, put up with Bunny, who was always tearing about and whistling and getting into trouble and being gaily impudent to his elder sisters—“You don’t know everything, Nina.” “My poor lad, and you don’t know anything.” This was family repartee.

But Bunny had once tiptoed in to Aunt Lavvy’s room when she lay in bed with a headache, and tilted the entire remains of his mother’s bottle of eau-de-Cologne—borrowed for the occasion—over the sufferer’s forehead and into her eyes.... He, too, was a dear boy. Aunt Lavvy remembered these little things.

Nina, whenever re-adopted by yet another childless couple anxious to give this bright young creature a good time, was always glad to introduce Aunt Lavvy to them on first bringing them to the Laburnums; and only regretful that she could not truthfully say: “This is my mother, dear Mrs. Mathers; Mother dear, this is Mrs. Mathers, who has been so kind to me——”

Why was it that Mother always had to rush away and “get dressed” at whatever hour of the day you brought in a visitor? Why couldn’t she be dressed, like Aunt Lavvy? Why couldn’t she be found in the sitting-room, cool, silvery, and with that reposeful I-and-my-Maker look about her that auræd Aunt Lavvy? instead of invariably making a hurried entrance, a gasp of words beginning with, “Oh, my dear,” hands still red from recent washing, and that unfastened hook of her dress, three down from the collar-band, two up from the waist, betraying that she had dressed in too much of a hurry to summon help. And why did she wear dresses with trimming on them—half-inch trimming bought at the local draper’s by the yard, with tiny beads stitched on—two or three that hung by a thread?

Aunt Lavvy, when strangers were introduced to her, always listened attentively to Nina’s preliminaries. And once having got them rightly placed in her clear mind, she gave them discriminate welcome, and appropriately shaded conversation. But Mother—she just made a general rule of being kind to anybody who was kind to any of her children, not just Nina or Hal, as it ought to have been—but any of them! and then soused them in a wash of general conversation....

After the visit, Mrs. Mathers—or her prototype—would talk exclusively of Aunt Lavvy, how she reminded them of some one or something: “my own dear grandmother” or a miniature in the Wallace Collection, or a bit of porcelain; or a poem by “some man who always writes those sort of poems—let me see, now—who is it?”

“Austin Dobson,” Nina supplied swiftly. But she owed that to Ursula: “A Gentlewoman of the Old School.”... Ursula had discovered it while she had a rave on Aunt Lavvy; and the latter had been delighted.

“Listen, Aunt Lavvy—it’s just like you. I found it with a lot of mess and rubbish in my Reciter’s Treasury”—Miss Roberts painstakingly taught both Ursula and Lottie elocution. “Listen, Nina, doesn’t it fit?

“And yet,” Aunt Lavvy confessed, when Ursula, with a rival’s triumphant glance at Nina, read aloud this strophe, “how often, when I was younger, I longed to be dashing, like your mother!”

Perhaps she had sensitively divined Nina’s unspoken resentments about those exuberant dresses in bright cloth, untidily trimmed with braid, and the top part of the bodice filled in with silk that almost matched; perhaps she guessed that Florrie Maxwell’s children, her daughters anyhow, made mental comparisons ... longed for a more dove-coloured personality in their mother.... At all events, her remark was a secret kindness to Florrie....

“Dashing!” Ursula repeated, wide-eyed. “Is that what they’d have called Mother, then? Her own girl friends—and men? Dashing?”

“Very dashing, my dear. You should have seen her enter a ball-room!”

“Are any of us—dashing?” The word had a savour, and Ursula sniffed it up appreciatively.

“Well—Nina, perhaps, more than the rest of you.”

Nina, who liked being called “a sport,” was for once vexed with her beloved Aunt Lavvy for the selection.... “Dashing”—it sounded old-fashioned, like “The New Woman” and “bloomers.” And anyway, you didn’t want to be just only what your mother had been—especially if you didn’t admire her.

It was in Aunt Lavvy’s room that this talk took place. Presently: “I’ve got to go,” said Ursula, abruptly ending Aunt Lavvy’s reminiscences which were told in a manner whimsical, yet tinged with gentle regret, in illustration of her own foolish shyness as a girl.

“Well, go! You needn’t always talk about it for an hour first.”

But how should Nina remember the terrific difficulties of entrances and exits at Ursula’s hoyden stage of life; how to make them graceful and yet without any gawky preliminaries ... especially when your divinity was in the room, watching you, or understandingly not watching you.... It was much better when you were not romantically attached to anybody—then you just banged in and out, all anyhow—and much more successfully. Once, Nina herself was Ursula’s royalty.... Nina at seventeen was very lovely to a small twelve-year-old sister—the careless swagger of her walk and her clear gay laugh, and her established supremacy as captain of the school games ... white flannel shirt and loosely-knotted dark-green tie, and thick golden hair, hard-brushed to a door-knocker plait—like a well-groomed boy Nina was then, with such hard clean outlines that Ursula used to feel an ecstatic longing to follow them with the point of her finger.... “Dashing”—yes, it was the right word.... Only she could give you nothing from her cleanness and clearness—she walked right through your worship, cutting it.... And you began to crave for an aroma of more gracious tenderness; and there was Aunt Lavvy, ready to love you.

You had worshipped her before, of course, but not separately—just one of the cantata. But now....

“You’ve got to tidy up for dinner, too, Nina!”—they didn’t dress for dinner at the Laburnums, unless people were invited—they “tidied up.”

“You mind your own business, young woman. I don’t have to scrape myself for hours with a pumice-stone!”

“Well——” Ursula still dawdled; it was hateful leaving those two alone, with Nina’s air of suspended confidences. The queen dethroned and the reigning queen.... Ella Wheeler Wilcox.... “The Old Stage Queen.” And then Ursula suddenly saw the humorous impossibility of Nina, broken and bowed and faded from neglect....

“What’s the joke?”

“There isn’t one. I say—I’ve got to go.”

“Still?”

“Oh—shut up!”

Aunt Lavvy said: “What a pity the key of our door has been lost, isn’t it, Ursula? You know I always call it ‘our door.’ Because otherwise we might be paying calls on each other all day long.” She had noticed how the child grudged the minutes spent away from her.

“Yes.” Ursula was demure, but a little breathless.

After she had gone, Nina said, in the relaxed tone of one to another when a third has left the room: “How exactly alike all flappers are!”

“There’s a great deal in Ursula,” protested Aunt Lavvy, in affectionate championship.

“There’s a great deal in every flapper,” Nina declared, with a flash of observation—“too much! If Ursula played more games, she wouldn’t be so rude and touchy and loving and excitable and pert and untidy and sulky——”

“Oh, Nina, Nina, what a lot of hard adjectives to pelt one little sister! Let me add a few nice ones. Ursula is honest, loyal, truthful——”

“Well, I should jolly well hope so. Hal would soon let her know about it if she wasn’t. Those are just the ordinary decent things. It’s not likely one would be anything else. Unless Bunny——”

“Hush!” Aunt Lavvy held up a warning finger. “Not a word against my Bunny, if you please. He may be a black, black Bunny among the white ones—but you take his scrapes too seriously, Nina darling. Try and laugh more at Bunny and Ursula—a kind laugh, not a sneering one. It’s only with love and laughter that you can help them over their awkward years.”

Privately, Nina thought it priggish to want to help any one with love and laughter—especially your own brothers and sisters. But as she valued Aunt Lavvy’s good opinion only next to Hal’s, she said nothing. And after a reflective pause, Aunt Lavvy went on:

“Though I have often——” she broke off. Then started again: “Hasn’t it been rather unfair to Ursula not to send her to school, like you and Gracie? Miss Roberts is a sweet, good soul, but not exactly stimulating, is she? Sometimes, Nina—I’ll confess it to you”—and Aunt Lavvy’s smile was mischievous—“I have longed for her to contradict me just once, so that I could contradict back again!”

“Poor old Gums—she is a bit flabby! But I’ll tell Mother what you say about sending Ursula away to school.”

In the room which was hers, adjoining Aunt Lavvy’s, Ursula stood for a moment gazing hard at the locked door between; wondering for the hundredth time why, adoring Aunt Lavvy, she still kept the lost key concealed under some letters in her trinket-box.

Nina’s voice, a little raised, was audible: “I’ll tell Mother what you say about sending Ursula away to school.”

Twang twang—deep down in Ursula’s inside ... that sick feeling of unsafety—treachery—Aunt Lavvy—Uriah the Hittite.... “Wants what I’ve got, so a plot to send me away.”

“Stick to what I’ve got.” Ursula flung a few steps of a dance at the locked door—an impish, impudent dance.

And now she felt extraordinarily free and happy—suddenly extricated from her thick syrupy phase of Aunt-Lavvy-worship. Hitherto, she had always been dimly afraid it might grow so intense as to involve her in the final foolishness of—of finding the lost key.

[III]

IF the Maxwells had had a place in a morality drama or in “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the name given them would have been Average—Mr. and Mrs. Average....

Mr. Maxwell had bought the Laburnums with the two thousand pounds which had come to his wife on the death of her father. It was a large house, with plenty of rooms, but Grace and Nina and Hal were already in existence, and, as Mr. Maxwell said in his usual style of a proverb already existing: “Three’s a beginning, but seven’s a family”—so the largeness of the house hardly mattered. He and Florrie had the best bedroom, with dressing-room attached, and Grace and Nina shared a room, of course, and Hal slept with Nurse; and then there were a couple of spare-rooms, a tiny “landing” room, a day-nursery, and a double-fronted attic, and the servants’ room. Mr. Maxwell had his study, and downstairs were the dining-room and drawing-room and Mrs. Maxwell’s own sitting-room; also a small conservatory. Round the back and sides of the house was a garden that had surrendered its pleasing jungle-effect to Mr. Maxwell’s persuasion, without ever quite achieving the trim cultivation that he desired. It was really just the right sort and size of house for the Maxwells, except for the discovery that it did not hold a single laburnum; but Mr. Maxwell soon had them planted firmly on either side of the front door, because, although thin, he was a bluff man and scornful of pretension—he disapproved of his neighbour in the avenue who, never having fought in the Boer War, lived in a house called “The Kopje.” “The Kopje! Ridiculous! Ha ha.” But it never struck him that it might be as exquisitely ridiculous for a man who had fought in the Boer war to live in a house called “The Kopje.”

Then came Ursula, and the twin boys, Bunny and Ronald.... Hal into one of the spare-rooms now, and Ursula in the dressing-room off her parents’ bedroom, so that her mother could keep an eye on her while she was still small, as Nurse had as much as she could manage with the twins. Ronald died, from an attack of measles that Mrs. Maxwell refused to coddle—she was the sort of mother who wants all her youngsters to grow up sturdy, and says that measles will “do ’em good—clear the blood... and it’s better for ’em to have it now than later.” She’s a much better sort of mother than the over-anxious kind, only sometimes a child dies.

Lottie ... and lastly, William. But in the meanwhile had occurred the financial slump, and the installation of Aunt Lavvy in the best bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell moved into the last of the spare-rooms, Nurse had charge of the two youngest, and Bunny shared with Hal, to his enormous contentment. The extra landing bedroom was given to them for a den to romp in.

The financial slump was over, and the Maxwells prospered, and were able to afford a governess for Ursula and Bunny—young ruffians of seven and five. She slept in the attic, converted into a bedroom of romantic views and skylights and sloping murky caves quite unappreciated by Miss Roberts, who nevertheless protested with smiling gums that she would be “perfectly comfortable up here, thank you, Mrs. Maxwell. I couldn’t ask for anything nicer.” Aunt Lavvy remained as a presence of tranquil sunshine in the house, and the sum she paid for her board and lodging was so unobtrusive as to be practically invisible. But the pressure on space was beginning to be felt, and once or twice Mrs. Maxwell suggested moving. But her husband refused: “Clover’s not for the rover,” he said. He also said that he wanted the kiddies to think of the Laburnums as “home.” His real reason was a subconscious terror of change, a diffident fear of not being able to cope successfully with innovation—he always had an underneath reason he knew very little about, to correspond with every reason of which he was definitely aware. So had his wife. And, directly they were old enough, so had Grace, Nina, Hal, Ursula, Bunny and Lottie. Not William. William had only one layer of thoughts—a good stolid layer with plenty of wear in it.

Certainly, a change of residence did involve possible readjustments of habit, and so of thought: the dining-room window might be placed differently; their chairs at table might be altered round; and if the station were nearer, he might not be obliged to start till twenty-five to nine instead of twenty past eight, and that would throw the whole day out of gear.... And if they left Buckler’s Cross, the face of the new ticket-collector would be unfamiliar; and he would not know at first what time the post went out....

So they stayed at the Laburnums: They had got used to the house, and a little squashing was nothing to make a fuss about.

When Grace, at nineteen, married Stanley Watson, any of the family who minded congestion might have drawn a tentative breath in anticipation of relief in the removal of even one of their number. But Watson was a careful young man, and suggested to his pending father-in-law that he did not care to enshrine Grace in a home till he could afford one that was worthy of her. He was saving up for it; but he desired all sorts of extras in decoration and furnishing which he dragged from obscure volumes in the British Museum. He was a Profound Reader. Grace would have been contented with domesticity on a much cosier plane—she was the “domestic one,” as Nina was the “popular one,” Ursula the “beautiful one” (rather doubtfully, because the critic who had publicly pronounced this decision had a different standard of beauty from the Maxwells) and Lottie the “helpful one,” rather on the same lines as Grace, but with more initiative; she was fond of preparing “little surprises” for her family, such as drawers tidied, or a pincushion restocked; and when these were discovered, she slipped unobtrusively away to avoid thanks. But Stanley, tenderly, refused to budge an inch: “No shoddy imitation panelling for you, Graciewigs—not good enough. I’ll have it done after the Monastery in Gewitterburg, destroyed by the invading hordes of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War. What a horrible loss”—thickly; Stanley was spasmodically rather thick in his speech, but his ideals were conscientiously pellucid.

“We can’t be mean, Will; he’s offered to pay, and it’s only for a short while,” argued Mrs. Maxwell with her husband—also a careful man.

So another bedroom had to be snatched from the living-room area; Mrs. Maxwell’s sitting-room was converted into a bedroom for Stanley and Grace—“You never use it much, Florrie; and after all, the whole house belongs to you,” said Mr. Maxwell, being generous.

A year later, Lottie went up to destroy Miss Roberts’ attic solitude; and William, who would have liked the attic, had a bed in the room which Hal and Bunny used to look on as their “den”; during the day, they insisted it was still their den, which was very upsetting to the orderly soul of William. For the night-nursery and Nurse herself were appropriated—“only temporarily, of course,” for Gracie’s first baby. The second followed two years later ... and it was very fortunate that Ursula and Lottie would soon have no more need of the schoolroom, because then it could revert to its original state of day-nursery; meanwhile, it was day-nursery or schoolroom, according to the party at the moment in possession. Nurse and Miss Roberts were quite polite to each other, and even treated the rival claim with deference.

The eye of an efficient organizer would have no doubt noted that the marriage of Grace had left Nina with a good-sized double bedroom, undisputed. Obviously, there was room for either Ursula or Lottie with her. And it seemed irrelevant, too, that Ursula’s bedroom should be adjacent to Aunt Lavvy’s; the three boys, Hal, Bunny and William, could have shared the attic, and revelled in it—attics are suitable things for boys. Then their “den,” which was also William’s room, could have been Miss Roberts’ private bedroom, always presuming that governesses have need of privacy, and that Lottie slept with Nina. An alternative grouping would have been Nina and Ursula to share Nina’s room; Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell to have retained their own bedroom, with the room leading out of it to replace Mrs. Maxwell’s sitting-room; the latter to be Aunt Lavvy’s bedroom, with Grace and Stanley in the spare-room.

And the most normal and convenient solution would have eliminated Aunt Lavvy, and sent Grace and Stanley and their paraphernalia of Nurse and babies, to a home of their own.

But the existing arrangement was not one instantaneous and successful reconstruction after one instantaneous cataclysm; but the result of gradual changes, haphazard shifts and displacements ... and it built itself up on the assumption that nobody minded anything, and that, in the Maxwell scheme of things, a sense of property in space simply did not exist. As long as chaos was bound about by four outer walls of home, the squanderings and overlappings within did not matter. Almost every room had its double uses, except Father’s study, which alone remained aloof from any sudden bewitchment or transformation. Father did not study, but he had to have his study, because he was Father.... It was sacred ground—and if not held sacred, profane. But the drawing-room, which also held the telephone and the piano, was common ground for all, as well as cold storage for unwanted callers. Stanley, in the evenings, conducted his “researches” in the dining-room; Ursula and Lottie had their morning lessons in the nursery, while the babies were out; Hal and Bunny developed photographs in William’s bedroom. When Nina was away visiting, they temporarily turned her bedroom into a guest-room. Mrs. Maxwell, of course, had the whole house.

Had the Laburnums a personality and a life of its own, you can imagine it with adenoids, and breathing heavily from the chest—that laboured bronchial breathing which forebodes trouble....

[IV]

AFTER Hal had gone out with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque, the house and garden became slumbrous.... It was September, that mercurial month of the year which at one moment raises a sigh for fires in the listless grates, and at one moment is rich with excitement of high winds and burning blue skies, and boughs that with every creak and sway fling treasure to the ground.

But today the air was grey and melancholy; the leaves were yellow and brown, without flame or gesture. Presently it began to rain. Miss Roberts, superintending Ursula’s Shakespeare hour, and Lottie’s French, in the pseudo-schoolroom, shivered a little, and corrected a rebellious thought by a dutiful amendment of how right it was of her employer not to sanction fires before October the first: “Young folk carry their fires inside ’em,” he said.

“Bijou, caillou, chou, genou, hibou, joujou, pou,” recited Lottie with fluency, and waited for praise.

“Well, dear?” Miss Roberts waited expectantly.

“Are the only nouns that take ‘x’ in the plural, or else the only ones that don’t; I’m not sure.”

“But you ought to be sure, Lottie. Suppose you were in France, and had to ask for any of those things in a great hurry.”

“I don’t think she’s likely to,” Ursula argued staidly. “Jewels, pebbles, cabbage, knees——” She burst out laughing. “Fancy wanting knees in a hurry in France—or owls!”

Lottie began to giggle, too; and Miss Roberts, feeling that there was something vaguely indecent about knees—in France—changed the subject.

“It’s raining. I expect it will be too cold for Nurse to stop out with the babies. So we’d better hurry up.” She took the Macbeth, with its copious notes, from Ursula’s hands, and began to question her from the glossary:

“‘Paddock,’ a toad. Lily-livered means cowardly. Marry—a corruption of the Virgin Mary, a slight oath. Moe—more. Sinel was the Earl of Northumberland.”

“No, no, Ursula. That’s Siward. Sinel ... think now.”

Ursula shook her head.

“Macbeth’s father, according to Holinshed,” Miss Roberts quoted triumphantly from the book.

“Well, anyway, he doesn’t come into the play; and Shakespeare wrote it, not Holinshed, so——”

“Posset”? questioned Miss Roberts patiently. She knew that Ursula in these silly exasperating moods, when she questioned everything, must simply not be encouraged.

“Posset is hot milk poured on ale or sack, having sugar, grated biscuit, and eggs, with other ingredients boiled in it, which goes all to a curd....” The girl’s eyes grew dreamy, as they watched the nipping of the rain beyond the window.... Posset—to sip in front of the fire in solitary warmth and flickering half-lights.... “Posset” one should drink alone, always; wassail in company. Should she make festival out of the day, and light her first fire, after lessons, up in her room? Or else wait a bit longer, tantalize herself with the promise of a yet colder, drearier morning? How the others had ragged her when she asked for five hundredweight of coal as a birthday present from her parents. “Private coal ... to use in my room.... I could clear out the little cupboard under the stairs just outside, and keep it there ...” stammering, wildly eager—they had asked her to name what she most wanted ... why should she ask for a wrist-watch or a new tennis racquet or a book, because these were things they thought she ought to want most? Ursula enjoyed nonchalantly telling people that she hated reading—they were always so shocked: “When I was your age, I was a regular bookworm.” There were only two sorts of books you got as presents—the first kind had a lot of gold and bright colour on the outside, and was the story of the favourite of the school, who was also the leader in all the scrapes, so impulsive and warm-hearted that even the headmistress could not help smiling indulgently at her; or else a classic suitable for her age: “Villette,” or “The Cloister and the Hearth,” or “Adam Bede,” or “Pride and Prejudice,” and Dickens and Scott, of course, bound in calf or suède, with thin leaves and gilt edges.

The first kind wasn’t bad when you were Lottie’s age. The second were just bores.

For not one of Mr. Maxwell’s children was of that well-known exceptional type who steal unobserved into the study and rummage among the shelves, and one day light by chance on Gibbon or Swinburne, and become absorbed ... and are never the same afterwards.

Books help to furnish a room, undeniably; but otherwise—“the Maxwells do not read”.... It never occurred to them. But they gave books as presents.

“Are you sure, Ursula, you wouldn’t rather——?”

A tentative, slantwise look, first at her mother, then at her father.... “I’d much rather have fires of my own, please.”

Yes, she knew she could get warm at the drawing-room fire whenever she wanted to, but that was everybody’s fire; and the schoolroom fire still belonged to Nurse; she dried the babies’ washing on the high wire guard, so that there was always that steamy stuffy smell.... And the kitchen fire was only to cook by, and—and——

“Bedroom fires are a luxury, Ursula—you know that.”

“Not if it was a birthday present”—how unfair, to call it a birthday present, rightfully due, and in addition to censure it as a luxury. They wouldn’t have called a new tennis racquet a luxury every time she played with it.... Oh, didn’t they—couldn’t they—see?

They ceded her the five hundredweight of coal, but tempered the generosity by making “Ursula’s coal” the current family joke. Hal, with a great shout of laughter, suggested a poker as his birthday present—and was surprised when the offer was promptly accepted. Up came William and Lottie, then, on the morning of October the fourteenth, with two dozen penny bundles of sticks—their gift! Would she deign to accept it? Ursula was very grateful. After that, of course, everything in existence was offered her for her fire, from an empty reel of cotton to a broken umbrella. Bunny pretended to be in awe of his sister, as a fire-worshipper, and read up their rites and practices in the Encyclopædia in order to taunt her with them at the public table. Also he would ask her every breakfast-time if she had counted her five hundredweight, insisting that he had heard a burglar stealing along her passage during the night—“And you bet he was after a lump of your coal, Ursula!”

Grace wondered if it was quite safe: “Ursula’s such a scatter-brain. She might easily go to sleep and leave it burning, mightn’t she?” thinking of her two babies in the house. And Nina, by calling her “Cinders,” imagined she had thus said the final word on the matter.

But: “My own room and my own fire”—the last word was surely with Ursula. To be able to choose the mood and the moment for a fire; to say: “Now—and exactly now” without waiting for a grown-up to order it and a servant to light it; to be its supreme mistress, poke it when she pleased, draw her small basket-work armchair as near as she wanted it, dole out her coal, so that each piece should yield its utmost; and when it sank to a luminous twitching landscape of caves and archways, then to pull the faded red-serge curtains across her window, still with that consciously imperious feeling, tuck the four walls of her room warmly around her, and the dim ceiling with its waves of orange reflected above the fireplace, and the boarded floor.... Then—just to sit there and exult! Exult at something ... the bumping, congested, ricochetting life in the rest of the house, perhaps—“like billiard-balls making cannons all the time,” Ursula once phrased it to herself.

She forgot these ecstasies of mutinous solitude when she was downstairs, playing an eager set of tennis with Hal or Nina, getting into scrapes with Bunny, or simply joining in the habit of general ragging or bickering which occurred regularly four times a day round a table, and which was the only up-to-date presentment of what was still symbolically known as “family life.” “Family life” occurred at meal-times, but otherwise, and as a social force, it was not in a robust condition. Each member of the large household led a curiously detached life; they saw so much of each other that they never bothered to talk; they knew so much of each other’s corporeal presence, that the spirit was taken for granted. Besides this, there was the tradition of rudeness and snubs between brothers and sisters, which it would have been bad form to violate. Familiarity breeds, not contempt, but strangeness. Thus Bunny never thought of beginning a long pally intimate talk with Ursula or Hal—he saw them both all day and every day; Nina, though she was a fanatic on the subject of Hal’s perfections, knew nothing whatever about his mental life; and carried all her own revelations of a private Nina well away from the Laburnums—to Mrs. Mather, say; or to Mary Cliffe, who understood her so well. Hal had his school-friends; Mrs. Maxwell her Buckler’s Cross ladies; Mr. Maxwell his city cronies; Ursula her room; William his neat collections of whatever was collectable, and an odd liking for snatched half-hours with Nurse, when he talked rather slowly and ponderously of his ambitions and general outlook and the injustices meted out to Bunny, and she said at intervals: “Nonsense, Master William—I don’t believe half you say, and you’re in my light”; Miss Roberts her diary—yes, bless her, she wrote a diary, and kept her soul, such meagre allowance of it as she was able to save from the day’s propinquities, tightly pressed between the leaves; Lottie walked arm-in-arm with other ten-year-olds, and invited them to tea and giggled confidentially with them in corners of the garden....

But it was a queer arrangement, although so commonplace that no one stopped to think it queer—all these people tightly jammed together, and knowing no more of each other than was visible to the eye.

Aunt Lavvy, perhaps, was deposit for the biggest proportion of real Nina, real Bunny and Hal and Grace and Ursula. But Aunt Lavvy had quaint ways which always brought out the best in all of them—a best that they were wont to leave behind with her when they carried their grubbier loads of humannesses elsewhere; they knew they could as securely count on finding it again whenever they might want it, as though Aunt Lavvy were the cloakroom in a large station.

... “Posset”—it ought to be brought in by an old woman, plump and garrulous, with rosy dimpling cheeks, wearing one of those two-horned head arrangements with folds of drapery round the chin—“Thank you, good Dame,” or—“Good my Nurse”—What a pity Nurse wasn’t either the Shakespeare or the historical kind—she had such a sharp bony little face and thin hair, and wore round hard hats when she took the babies out, instead of bonnets, so that she never looked cosily ancient....

The rain spattered impatiently at the window, but Ursula decided nevertheless not to light her first fire that morning. After tea was best—it would give her time to feel thoroughly chilled and forlorn, so as to make it more worth while; and the weather might get stormier, too, by tonight—the Equinoctial Gales—they came in September—or was it the Gulf Stream? No good to ask Miss Roberts; she’d presume on the fact that you had asked an intelligent question, to tell you much more than you ever wanted to hear about either.... And she’d look it up in the physical geography books, and some time next week: “By the way, Ursula, you were asking me about the Gulf Stream—” in her high, bright, perpetually-interested voice—long after you’d forgotten there was such a thing! Poor old Gums.... She was one of those who strove to make lessons as good as play—

A shuffling and chattering beyond the door, and Nurse came in, carrying Baby. A very pink and burbly child with scanty fair hair, replica of Stanley Watson, and Rossettishly called by him Honor Rose, clutched stumblingly at her hand. “Give over now, Rosie!”

At once, Miss Roberts began to gather up books and rulers and pens, with an air of great energy: “All right, Nurse, we’re just off; give us half a minute, and you’ll see the last of us——”

“There ain’t no call to hurry, Miss Roberts, if you’ve not done yet”—baby mysteriously upside down already, and Nurse with her mouth full of safety-pins; “I couldn’t very well keep them out in the rain till twelve o’clock——”

“No, no, of course not——”

“But you don’t disturb me if I don’t disturb you, and if you don’t mind my sewin’-machine presently.” She set baby upright again, with a little shake.

“But indeed, we can get on quite well in the dining-room——”

“It’s not cleared from breakfast yet. I noticed as I came in. That Minnie is a lazy fat thing——”

Miss Roberts gathered up the last of the schoolroom into her arms, signed to Ursula to take the inkpot, and to Lottie to put the chairs back, and prepared to leave the nursery with a touch of pleasant dignity—“because really I could hardly let myself be drawn into a discussion with Nurse about the other servants——”

“... Such a pity your walk was spoilt! Was Rosie a good little girl?—but I always think that September—Ursula, you’ve forgotten your compasses—No trouble at all to move, really—”

“Good is as good goes,” Nurse replied cryptically. “Neither of them is a patch on Master Hal and Master William—and they were nothing much, neither!” hastily, to impress Lottie and Ursula with her complete detachment from an attitude of faithful devotion ... and Ursula thought regretfully of Good-my-Nurse and her Posset. “Well, if you won’t stay, don’t, but then don’t say I’m drivin’ you out of the room, because you’re welcome enough.”

“No, indeed, I’m sure it’s a great deal more your little kingdom than ours.”

“It was your schoolroom before it was my nursery,” Nurse argued against herself, struggling to maintain her part in the atmosphere of mutual courtesy. “But then, again, it was my nursery before it was ever your schoolroom, too, so——”

Baby began to roar; and Miss Roberts, still in an affable state of thanks, departed with Ursula and Lottie.

Lessons were continued in the drawing-room. Aunt Lavvy sat with the paper in the armchair near the window; Mrs. Maxwell bustled in and out, and Lottie practised at the piano, with a metronome; while Ursula, who was rather good at mathematics, evilly pretended that she could not understand why the right angle A B C must be equal to the right angle X Y Z, because Miss Roberts so obviously did not understand why, either. Lottie was always “especially nice” to Miss Roberts; for Grace had explained to her that one ought to be nice to dependants; but Ursula had portions of conscience strangely undeveloped. At her very best, she was never so considerate as Grace and Lottie, nor so thoroughly decent as Nina. And Gums exasperated her by always proving softer material than the substance against which she was thrown.

“Don’t be rude to your inferiors, kid—’tisn’t sporting,” Nina bluntly told her, after overhearing a skirmish.

“It makes them feel their position so terribly,” said Grace more kindly.

“I’m rude to everybody else, so if I stopped being rude to just Miss Roberts, it ought to make her feel her position ever so much more.”

“It ought to, but it wouldn’t, because she’s got no brains,” Bunny demolished Ursula’s not unskilful defence.

“Then she oughtn’t to be our governess.”

“You’d get’em just as soft at school. One of our chaps——” Bunny told the anecdote, with himself quite well-placed as a picturesque centre. “If you’ve got real brains you don’t teach, because it makes you too sick having to listen to the duds.”

“What costly rot you talk, Bunny. I suppose that’s just because it makes them sick at Winborough having to teach you——”

This was just family repartee; and “costly,” imported by Hal as the latest Winborough fashion, successor to “posh” and “nimble,” could be applied almost anywhere in conversation. Stanley Watson tried to squash it by a quality of bluff humorous pedantry, which he used rather successfully—he thought—to conceal his very real pain at the way the English language was perverted and constricted by the young Maxwells; and his equally real suspicion that Hal’s attitude towards himself was more amused than respectful. And indeed, there was something about Stanley’s personality which was a perpetual twitch to Hal’s funny-bone. Stanley liked being humorous, but resented being funny; he made infamous puns which he knew would provoke groans from the entire family; but only Hal perceived that Stanley felt the groans were additionally to his credit—it was manly to be groaned at. When his eldest daughter was brought in to say good-bye to her parents and grand-parents before going ta-ta on a Sunday morning, Stanley said things like: “Hello! When is a bonnet not a bonnet? When it’s Honor Rose (on a rose),” in a deep thick voice that obviously found the passage down his nose almost impregnable. And then a ruminative twinkle might be seen in Hal’s eyes, whenever he was present; a twinkle that said: “Watson is such a costly ass!”

But if Stanley humorous was funny, Stanley’s serious side was funnier still—to Hal. Grace thought, as was right and fitting she should, that Stanley had a fine character; for instance, he went regularly every Wednesday evening to play dominoes with a bedridden Boer-War veteran—“whose only pleasure it was.” “Whose only pleasure it was” must have been Gracie’s phrase, because Stanley never mentioned his little errand of quiet charity; slipped off very unobtrusively on Wednesdays; and when afterwards greeted by a forgetful: “Where have you been?” said: “Oh, just out ...” and quickly turned the subject, conveying the reproof: “If one can’t do a thing like that for a fellow human being without bragging about it——”

“But he never misses a Wednesday—” Grace again—“however tired he is.”

It was Hal’s ignoble ambition to see him miss a Wednesday. “Because if only he missed just one, the poor old chap, What’s-his-name, could at least hope he’d miss another....”

Hal was a nice lad, in spite of the position of exalted lordliness he occupied in the eyes of the household—not forgetting to except Stanley and William. He taught his younger brothers and sisters their place, but not unkindly; he did not talk as eternally of cricket as might have been expected of the captain of the Winborough first eleven, because he did not talk very much at all—it wasn’t done, unless you were a costly gas-bag like Bunny. He ragged Stanley and teased Miss Roberts, and was uncommunicative with his father, like all glorious young heroes of seventeen-and-a-half. His principal occupation was, in the holidays, lounging past the doctor’s house, in a rough greeny-grey tweed coat, on the chance that either of the doctor’s two daughters, Maisie or Dorothy, might be coming out. They were both pretty, and he was quite impartial in his flirting; the latter process only meant a saunter beside one or the other while he described how he would give her tea in his own rooms at college next year, or “quite a costly hop old Dick Fraser lugged me to, night before last. Wish you’d been there, though.” Hal was especially good-natured when people were in trouble—they had to be in real trouble, not just miserable. He let his mother kiss him, whenever she really felt like it; and made his acolyte, Nina, very happy by the simple process of always finding her plenty of work to do in his service; she knitted ties and socks for him, bought his presents for other people, and kept other people well-informed as to the exact shade of his own desires in the way of presents; kept his tennis racquet in its press, and Bunny well aware of his lowliness. What more could a sister do?

Hal was without question the most masculine element at the Laburnums—excepting a back-view of William, broad and stolid, bending over a pit that he was digging at the far end of the garden, where the shrubbery degenerated into a mere tangle of shrubs. This pit was one of seven, and when asked what they represented, William said, “Earthworks”; and, if further pressed as to why he dug them—“Because I want to,” after a moment’s quiet and conscientious reflection.

Neither Mr. Maxwell nor Stanley Watson, however, was as casually masculine as Hal, because they were more preoccupied with manliness. And Bunny— “Oh, Bunny’s like a girl,” said Nina, “he shows off!” Bunny was sensitive, too, in addition to all his other palpable faults.

[V]

THE inferior son of the Maxwells was wretchedly throwing a ball against the side of the house, on the same morning that Hal went on Aunt Lavvy’s errand, and the Watson babies drove Miss Roberts and her pupils into the drawing-room. He was remembering with apprehension a large and cleverly comical caricature which he had executed in brushwork on the inside of the lid of his late form-master’s desk, representing that gentleman himself saying waggishly: “Believe me, my boy, this is going to hurt you much more than it hurts me!”—a perversion of the popular sentiment which he had picked up from one of Saki’s books, and which he used “at least three hundred and sixty-four times a year more than it was funny!” as Bunny savagely put it. But Bunny’s report had revealed, when his father opened it, that his late form-master was not going to be late at all—in fact, that Bunny had not got his remove; which was quite bad enough in itself without the additional trouble of the caricature which would be discovered in Bunny’s presence on the first day of the coming term.

And then there was the matter of the unpaid tuck-shop bill, which the proprietor had threatened to send in to Mr. Maxwell unless settled by the end of the holidays.

Bunny for the moment did not feel at all handsome and dare-devil, which was how he best liked to see himself—not discouraged by the fact that the best sort of boy does not possess the faculty for seeing himself in any guise. One of Hal’s favourite stories against his younger brother related how Bunny, hopping pyjamaed round their bedroom one evening, paused in his carol of sheer joie de vivre to say with simple sincerity: “Aren’t I lucky? I’m good-looking, brilliant, athletic—I can draw and swim and jump better than any other chap; I’m popular and brave——”

For weeks, the entrance of Bunny was the signal for a concerted roar of “Aren’t I lucky?” from his brothers and sisters; till superseded by the joke of Ursula and her coals.

Anyway, Hal was a good chap, and did not pass on the tale at Winborough. Hal was a good chap ... would it be any consolation to pour out all the mess to him? Not that he could help, but Bunny was one of those who find relief in merely unburdening themselves. Only, although Hal listened with his rough fair eyebrows drawn critically together over his beaky nose, and then summed up and gave shrewd advice, semi-humorous but never didactic, Bunny, being sensitive, could not help feeling that Hal’s natural reticence was silently longing for equal reticence in Bunny; and that he was always apprehensive of an unburdening that would go beyond decency....

Perhaps Aunt Lavvy, of more porous material, might be a better selection for his present confidences. Yes, a fellow might go to Aunt Lavvy tonight after tea, when her room was genial with soft lamplight from behind the delicate pinky silk shade, and seductive with favouritism.... “I believe she likes me best of all, right enough!”

Grace would say that of course Aunt Lavvy loved them all alike. Grace was a fathead ... she talked of loving people alike as though it were a merit.

And Nina would say——,

“Oh, sisters!” Bunny, wet through with the drizzling rain, and thoroughly exasperated with things in general, tried to hurl his ball neatly into the open aperture of Nina’s window. It entered the room, certainly, but through the lower pane, not over it. “Damnation!” Bunny ran quickly into the house to recover his property. Once in the girls’ room, as it was still called, though Gracie had departed, he regretted that he had not brought up a fat toad he had noticed hopping in the mush of wet leaves outside, and promptly made an extra journey downstairs to fetch it. The room annoyed him with its spruce impersonal air, Nina’s cups and hockey-group photographs ranged all along the mantelpiece, as though she were a boy—as though she were Hal.

“I do hope no rotten man will ever make old Nina still more pleased with herself by getting struck on her!”—with an apprehension of the awful calamity this would be.

Bunny was quite busy and happy settling the toad in a temporary paradise of Nina’s wash-basin full to the brim with water, lifted unsteadily and set upon the carpet ... a surrounding tent of sheets pulled from Nina’s bed and draped over chairs and a tripod of golf-clubs.

Gradually, from a mischievous schoolboy, he was metamorphosed into a child again, by the unfailing fun of building up things with any odd material at hand into an erection for which they were not intended ... a child absorbed and solemn, breathing rather hard, dark rings of hair fallen over his forehead ... a crooning commentary on his own action forming at last into a little song. “That’s right, tie them together.... Hi, young Toad, you stop where you are ... this is home in the basin. I’ll get you some mud presently ... here’s the other sheet ... peg it down—shall I leave an archway? ... he’ll get out, though—books so that they don’t blow up from the floor ... that’s splendid.... The Toaderies.... Paint the sheets blue so that he thinks it’s the sky above him ... ink would do ... night sky.... Bother! it’s slipped again.... Where did I put that string? ... a cave of broken flowerpots....”

“Bunny!”

He came up with a drowned expression—the miscellaneous heap built up on the carpet of Nina’s room slipped away from the illusion of under-the-sea grottos of which he had been inspired architect, and was merely silliness—he waited for Nina to say so, knowing there was no escape.... Why had he lugged in that old toad? It was not even as though Nina were afraid of them; then, there would have been some sense in it. If Nina had been a proper girl——

Sullenly, Bunny rose to his feet: “All right, I’ll clear it all up,” he said, hoping she would think he had used her possessions in wanton and destructive mischief, and not as it had really been, because for the past seven years he had been groping for his bricks....

“Is this your brother? I seem to remember him much bigger and fairer,” said the lady with whom Nina had just been spending the week-end, and who had accompanied her home. Mrs. Tom Fraser had been pretty once, but her tendency to fat had concentrated in the neighbourhood of her chins, so that her round little features looked as though they had been pushed upwards into a space much too small for them.

“You’re thinking of Hal,” said Nina, in a tone to correspond. “I’m sorry about this mess, Lill; come down into the drawing-room and see Aunt Lavvy—and I’ll speak to you later, young man!” Nina was very brightly flushed with the effort to keep her temper, and not betray the presence of the toad to Mrs. Fraser, who was short-sighted. She had quite a fondness for toads herself, but Lill would certainly have screamed.

Down in the drawing-room, she was soothed to find Aunt Lavvy and Hal, tempered by the less satisfactory presence of Miss Roberts and Ursula doing mathematics, and Lottie still practising with the metronome.

“Miss Roberts, do you think we might be very kind to Lottie, and give her ten minutes holiday?” asked Aunt Lavvy pleasantly, as soon as she grasped the identity of Mrs. Fraser.

“Mother,” Nina mentally worked out the usual table of contrasts, “would have apologized twenty times for the drawing-room being used as a schoolroom just today; and then she’d have explained all about Minnie not clearing the breakfast-table, and Gracie’s babies in the schoolroom, but Stanley hoped soon to find the house he wanted—and if she had known Lill was coming, etc.—all without stopping Lottie.”

That nicely-behaved child, in the meantime, had drawn a chair for Mrs. Fraser close up to Aunt Lavvy’s, and had brought her a footstool and a cushion, with the solicitude for old age which she bestowed upon every one over thirty. Then she trotted out of the room, realizing that one less of a crowd was desirable when visitors were present. If it had been afternoon, she would have left a message in the kitchen that there was one extra for tea. As it was, her period of urgent usefulness at an end, she drifted into Nina’s room to see if The Cup needed polishing; and was there ardently welcomed by Bunny, toiling to drag the sheets back to their former neatness over the bed.

“Here—catch hold!”

“Oh, Bunny, are you in a scrape again?”

Bunny laughed, and shook back his hair. “Oh, one more or less——” he boasted. “The sooner I come to a bad end, as old Nina puts it, the better! Then you’ll all stop waiting about for it! Think of me, Lottie, in convict’s garb, coming wearily home after twenty years’ hard, and leaning over the churchyard wall and counting your graves, and wishing I’d been a better brother and a better son——” Bunny acted the part with gusto, and collapsed into silent sobs with his arms on the bed-rail.

“You wouldn’t be wearing convict’s garb after they’d let you out,” Lottie, unimpressed by the pantomime, corrected him. “And there’s no reason why we should all be in our churchyard graves in twenty years. Unless, of course, there’s been an epidemic,” she added, after a moment’s careful thought.

Bunny started at her, and said from the fulness of his heart: “What a beastly little whelp you are!”

“Oh, Bunny, when I’m helping you!”

And he wondered, as so many of his sex have wondered before him, why just his sisters should be devoid of beauty, charm, intelligence, humour and all generosity of spirit.

Down in the sitting-room, the telephone-bell rang, interrupting a pleasant conversation in which Nina, Hal and Mrs. Fraser described the latest tango fox-trot step to Aunt Lavvy.

“Hello—hello—yes?—Oh certainly. Wait a minute.” Nina laid down the receiver—“It’s for you, Aunt Lavvy.”

Hal and Mrs. Fraser, both keen dancers, lowered their voices and went on talking about the Revolving Bellows step. Mrs. Maxwell, who from upstairs had heard the telephone and thought it must be for her—most people who are at all psychic seem to catch this urgent personal note in the bell—rushed into the room, but was checked to find Aunt Lavvy at the receiver, and a visitor present: Mrs. Fraser, whom she hardly knew, but who was always so kind to Nina. She began to tell her so, with effusion, but was hushed by Nina, because Aunt Lavvy had looked round from the ’phone with a little appealing smile which meant, “Please, I can’t hear a word.”

“Yes?—Yes, it is. Platt’s Bank—this morning, yes.—Indeed, I remember, I received them not half an hour ago.—Oh, I am sorry; how very annoying for you, but—of course I will look, just one minute.” Aunt Lavvy turned round again to the room at large: “Nina darling, will you bring me my little bag. There it is, lying on the chair. The clerk at Platt’s has just found out he has given somebody an extra pound note by mistake this morning, and it may quite well be——” she drew out a little packet and counted “One, two, three, four, five—no, there are only five; I’ll just turn the bag out, in case—reticule is the word to use at my age, isn’t it, Mrs. Fraser? A dear old-fashioned word.... Only five treasury-notes, and the half-crown and sixpence I had before—thank you, Nina. Hello——”

Mrs. Maxwell had an irritating habit, when any member of the household was talking on the phone, of offering suggestions and making amendments to their remarks, during the pauses while the person at the other end was speaking. She did so now:

“Tell him the numbers, Lavvy—that may help him—it always helps ’em to know the numbers. And say they’re clean ones. That makes a difference, because the clean ones don’t stick so, greasy things some of them are, disgraceful, I always say——”

“Mother!” Ursula now, answering the appeal in Nina’s eyes. Nina did not want to be heard by Lill Fraser rebuking her mother twice running; but it was so awfully ill-bred, the oblivious way she ran on and on.

“Hello. No. I am so sorry for your trouble, but there has been no mistake. I counted them, only five—and my cheque was for five pounds.... Yes, Mr. Hal Maxwell brought them. I had asked him to cash the cheque for me.... Yes, he’s here.... With pleasure—it is just possible——”

“Turn your pockets out, Hal,” laughed Nina. “You’re under a cloud.”

But Aunt Lavvy’s serene face was slightly disturbed as once again she turned round.

“Hal dear, would you mind making quite sure that you have not a hole in your pocket, or a Bradbury sticking between the coat and the lining ... something like that. The young man is so persistent. It is foolish of me, but any trouble with the bank always makes me uneasy, especially when we know Mr. Fennimore so well.”

“This wasn’t old Fennimore himself though—it was the man he always sends over for this branch.” Hal was rummaging energetically in his pockets. “Hullo, here’s—no, it’s only an old letter.” One that Dorothy had written him. He was slightly flushed as he crumpled it back into his pocket. “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy, no luck.”

“I’m afraid we can’t help you to put your mistake right. Neither I nor Mr. Hal Maxwell have got the extra pound note,” said Aunt Lavvy into the mouthpiece. She emphasized her words with rather more bell-like precision than usual, and replaced the receiver with a sharp little click. Mrs. Maxwell let slip the bonds from her checked rush of indignation.

“Really, Lavvy, I don’t wonder you’re annoyed. It’s as though they suspected you, ringing up like that. Really, I wonder you were so polite, considering it was their own carelessness. And when we’ve invited Mr. Fennimore to supper tomorrow—I’m sorry I told Tom sherry as well as port. Well, it’s very unpleasant. Let’s talk about something else. How do you like your new house, Mrs. Fraser?” The conversation, thus manipulated, creaked protestingly at the lack of skill. “So jolly sporting of you to put up with Nina.”

“If only Mother wouldn’t use slang,” groaned Nina to herself; and Aunt Lavvy, more discriminating, thought: “If only poor Florrie didn’t try to please Nina by using slang.”

“It’s not a house, you know, Mrs. Maxwell. Nor even a flat, exactly. They call it a studio flat. And we found we actually have a wee musicians’ gallery on the premises—or rather a gallery without the musicians. Isn’t it quaint?”

“It would be much quainter if you found you had the musicians on the premises without the gallery,” said Ursula, bending over her sums, at the table; she had no right at all to be aware of the social entertainment part of the room; still less to enter into it. It sounded quite gracefully witty in her mind before she actually said it, but directly it was out, she knew it was a failure. It fell into the web of conversation, parting it, instead of drawing it together by tiny silken stitches.... Ursula sat with her head bent and eyelids lowered, while the hot scarlet shame dragged up over her neck. She was conscious of Nina’s astonished disapproval, of Mrs. Fraser’s perfunctory little laugh, of Gums preparing a tactless reproof. But most of all, she was conscious of having been merely clumsy where she had hoped to be effective.

“Can’t Ursula do her lessons—her studies—in the dining-room yet, Miss Roberts? They must have cleared away by now. Why, it’s nearly lunch-time.”

Whereupon Mrs. Fraser naturally said she must go home. And Mrs. Maxwell naturally tried to amend her blunder by inviting her to lunch. And Nina was apprehensive as to the quality of the lunch—quantity there always was. And Aunt Lavvy, usually to be relied upon for those deft silken stitches that were Ursula’s envy, was still not quite serenely herself—it was so disconcerting to be associated, even by a few courteous questions, with financial losses and banks and defaulting clerks.

Finally, Hal saw Mrs. Fraser into her car; and then, instead of returning into the house, disappeared into the shrubbery.

[VI]

HE sat uncomfortably on a damp, tree-stump and stared at William’s earthworks. Was it possible that he had kept back a one-pound treasury bank note? Kept back—taken—stolen.... Rats! Of course he hadn’t stolen it. Tramps stole, and burglars, and—sometimes—servants. Bank-clerks, too, occasionally. “But—but not us.”

If he hadn’t—taken—it, though ... and here it was, folded in his coat’s inner pocket—why not have produced it when Aunt Lavvy had turned round from the telephone, and said: “Hal——”? Why not have said: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy. The chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em.”

It was incredible that he should have lied then. That was the real lapse. He could remember the mood in which he had—the horror deepened ... the mood in which he had stolen the note, although it had receded to unfamiliarity.

Hal was magnificently independent of weather, and the colour of the sky and the haze of sunshine over bright September boughs, and such-like absurdities from which frailer natures weave their moods. So that he could, simply from his own fitness of body, feel with a sudden thrill of well-being that the world was an altogether costly place, as he strode along the prim tree-planted roads of Buckler’s Cross on that drizzling morning of dead summer. He had often enjoyed life before, but now, for the first time, he found conscious pleasure in hauling his blessings into parade....

Maisie—he had paused a moment at her gate, and watched her in the front garden, snipping the faded dahlias from their stems—a click of the scissors, and the big clumsy bloom toppled heavily sideways. The rain filmed her long ragged black hair, and glittered in tiny points as she bent and rose again. What a small head she had. If someone were to snick it off, how lightly it would fall among the roots of the Michaelmas daisies. Her old jersey was the same bluish tint as her eyes——

He did not stop to hail her cheerily, but walked quickly on. And he thought of her quite separately from Dorothy—which was a distinct advance.

Footer next term. And the following October, Oxford. Oh—costly! Maisie—in a punt ... having tea in his rooms ... old Nina would fix it. He’d begin to collect stuff for his rooms at Christmas.

Perhaps the pond would freeze this Christmas. If so—skating! Maisie, in a little fur cap.... He was rather a nut on the ice. A frosty Christmas would be no end of a rag.

And, beyond all these superficial reasons for elation, in defiance of the ugly road and the moist trickle down his neck, Hal, rather amused at himself for the imagery, wished he could pick up a small sharp knife and cut cleanly out from the shining curve of his future, the one black speck that spoiled it. That beastly business of his subscription to the Memorial to the Winborough Boys fallen in the Great War!

It would crop up quite early in the term, he knew. And his father had promised him an extra five bob for it. Five bob! Well ... but he was Head of the School. And, in a matter like this, to be mean! If it were anything less solemn and patriotic and all that. He had known, personally, Roger Groves, and Latimer Major, and Brown, and Corbett—all among the Fallen. His would be the first name on the list. He ought to set an example of two quid, at least. The Guv’nor didn’t see it. He disapproved on principle of memorials when they took the shape of gym-halls and playgrounds and free libraries ... said that the Fallen would prefer the funds to be spent on providing employment for their discharged comrades. Hal allowed some sense in this, but he doubted if old Latimer were of the kind to worry much either way, wherever he was. But he would have understood, fast enough, that Hal, the first of Winborough’s athletic divinities, setting down his subscription prominently at the top of the list, could not put forth his Guv’nor’s principles as an excuse for shabbiness.

Five shillings. Add fifteen from his own pocket-money—and more than this would absolutely cripple him for the term—and still he was a pound short of what he wanted to give. Hal went into the Bank with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque.

Banks are impersonal things; the money that pours out from them is unlimited. It does not belong to the clerk, nor even to the branch manager. So that, when he came out, and discovered, carelessly counting the notes before thrusting them into his pocket, that he had one pound more in hand then he had to pass over to Aunt Lavvy, he could not, in his swift exultation, visualize any destination for the note except the Memorial.

His imagination, already more exuberantly goat-footed than normal, that morning, had had no time to subside, before this overwhelmingly magical response came to his wish that the blemish might be neatly removed from the radiance of all his tomorrows. His flood of relieved gratitude was as simple as that of some boy of ancient Greece who recognizes, by a gift dropped to his feet from Olympus, that he is indeed beloved of the gods.

Could God really work miracles in this altogether decent fashion, prompt, without excess, and without fuss? Hal didn’t call it God—he felt, dimly, that this would be “swank.” But acknowledging that “luck” had with intention singled him out, he called it luck with a shy reverence that confessed a salute to the Deity behind it.

The lapse had occurred then. An uncanny moral lapse—but not a guilty one. The guilt was later, when, his spirit snubbed by the fact that the pound had not materialized out of nowhere to make him happy, he had not once rapped out: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy, the chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em....”

But he had funked it, seeing then that he might have to explain his luck-loves-me mood in front of Nina and Mrs. Fraser and his mother and Ursula and Miss Roberts—— Anyhow, what were they all doing crowded up in the drawing-room?

“But when did you notice it, Hal?”

“Why didn’t you take it back at once?”

He could have pretended only to discover it in his pocket then ... it had got loose from the little bundle—“Good Lord, yes, here it is!”

But that would have been a lie, too, and secret acknowledgment that he had no claim on the note from the beginning. Before he could decide what to do, he had said: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy——” But now he repudiated the absurd childish mood which had led to his acceptance of bounty from nowhere. For a few moments, he had been more than self-conscious schoolboy; for a few moments, he had held happiness like a flask of wine, shot gold with slanting sunbeams, high above his head. For a few moments he had held it there, shouting....

These emotional chaps—all over the place—came to grief sometime.... “I warn you, Bunny. Besides, it isn’t done.”

There was a stagnant smell round the “earthworks”—rotting leaves, and moisture, and a flat grey sky....

He was, without excuse, without fine shades of “but” and “because,” a thief and a liar—and deadly miserably ashamed of himself.

Hal dragged himself to his feet, and wondered drearily to whom his first abasement and confession should be. If it were Winborough, of course he would go straight to the Head. School was so—uncomplicated, compared with home.

Nina was his natural confidante, as far as he had ever needed one, which was only a very little way. But Nina—thought such a lot of him. You need not necessarily choose your highest pedestal to fall from. Bunny? Before he could decide, Bunny came sauntering dejectedly down to the earthworks.

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Just finished doing old Nina’s bed. She’s frightfully fed-up with me,” Bunny explained inconsequently. “It wasn’t the frog she minded, it was that Fraser person.” Then, with a sudden wrench: “I’m in a deuce of a mess!”

And Hal found himself listening, with his habitual air of half-humorous authority, to Bunny boasting of his caricature and tuck-shop scrapes. Bunny always laughed and boasted when he was a little bit afraid. His eyes pleaded absolution from his senior’s jawing.

“You’ll just have to be a martyr to art and stand the racket from old Bateman. I can’t help you there. But how much d’you owe at Swayne’s? fifteen bob? Right, I’ll drop him a line presently, and say I’ll pay it on the first day of the term for certain. It needn’t get round to the Guv’nor—he’s sick with you as it is for not getting a move.” Fifteen shillings he could spare Bunny from his next term’s pocket-money, and the pound would have to go back to the Bank from whence it came. And the mean five shillings left from the two pounds of that morning’s glorious reckoning, would head the subscription list for the Memorial. He would bend his head to the discipline when it came. But meanwhile, Hal’s tormented self-respect had craved just once more to be the one to help.

“Can you really manage it, old thing?” Bunny dug one heel into the ground, the off-hand gratitude in his voice an imperfect crust to conceal the burning lava of worship within. Hal did not pour out the tale of his crime to his young brother—he could not contemplate reversing their present satisfactory attitude of give-and-take. Besides, Bunny’s almost certainly flippant treatment of the whole matter, sunnily hailing Hal on level ground, would jar badly. With a curt nod, Hal dismissed him, unburdened now, whooping the whole way up the garden.

Not Nina, and not Bunny, then. And Grace was too inconveniently one with Stanley to be considered. Ursula he still lumped together in his mind with Miss Roberts and Lottie as “schoolroom gang.” The Guv’nor would be so—so fatherish, when told: “That any son of mine——” was inevitable. And Mother——

The shock broke over him again. That he was a thief. And that they would all have to know it, all. So what was the sense of rejecting first one and then the other, as a first hearer? He might as well go straight to William! Unless Aunt Lavvy——

If Aunt Lavvy were privately confided in, her instinct would undoubtedly be to shield Hal. He could not help knowing that he was a favourite with her; that, almost as though she were a young girl again, she loved his bigness, his slow chaff of her pretty rosy little weaknesses, his arm round her shoulders. Given the missing treasury note, she could quite easily arrange the matter with the Bank so that no other member of the family need hear anything about—an hour’s theft.

“After all, I found it in my bag with the other notes—two of them had stuck together. Indeed, I do hope you will forgive me for not having looked more carefully when you telephoned....” She might explain it thus. Anyhow, Aunt Lavvy, bless her, could be trusted to manipulate the affair with her most neat-witted diplomacy. Only—would he, by this, be shirking punishment?

But though he was dazed and shocked at his own matter-of-course acceptance of the note, he still did not own to guilt at that point.... It was something that happened to him, not something that he had done. He had not yet begun to figure the special terror that this involved. But, if not guilty, need he seek punishment?

And for the silence which was deliberate and cowardly in the drawing-room just now? “Won’t it do,” Hal wondered, for the first time in his existence of straightforward rights and wrongs, trying to hold the scales on his own responsibility, doing question and answer both, worrying over cause and effect, balancing and fine adjustment, “Won’t it do if I only leave myself that five bob to plank down first on the subscription list?”

By promising Bunny that fifteen shillings, he had doled himself out quite a fair prospect of suffering. Five shillings from the magnificent Head of the School, and next on the list, thirty shillings, say, from that dud Parkinson. The ignominy would have to be endured with shut teeth. “Won’t that be enough?” Hal pleaded with himself, as he thought, enthroned as judge.... Never again, with Whoever—Whatever—had tripped him up with vision and swift miracle, that morning; had cheated him for ever of self-confidence, and given him bewilderment in its stead.... Ought a fellow’s punishment—beastly word—be finely tempered to what he had not felt wrong when he did it? or ought it to be for how wrong it looked after it was done?

Hal, in his first conflict with ethics, was about as happy as a bear in boxing-gloves, putting together the minute works of a watch. His only mitigation was that he did not recognize “the whole foul mess” as ethics, or he would have regarded his entanglement with any process so priggish, as his final humiliation.

“I’ve had enough of this——” and with a sigh of relief at a vigorous decision, he strode determinedly in search of Aunt Lavvy.

But the luncheon-gong was being sounded as he came up the few perforated iron steps that led back from the garden into the drawing-room. And Hal had to submit to another hour with a one-pound treasury note that did not belong to him hidden in his pocket, accumulating reproach with every wasted moment. By now he was violently anxious to deliver it up to Aunt Lavvy, albeit not quite sure what, even then, and after a full confession, might yet remain behind with him.

Directly after lunch, he followed her to her room:

“May I come in, Aunt Lavvy?”

“Of course, my dear boy.” She sank into one of her round chintz armchairs with their dumpy old-rose and silver-grey cushions, and smiled up at Hal, standing with his hands in his pockets—no, with one hand in one pocket—in front of the empty fireplace.

“Not too loud, if this is to be secrets,” she whispered, with a nod at the door leading to Ursula’s room, “well, and so vacation is nearly over. Don’t correct me, Hal. I’m practising for next year when you’re at the ’Varsity. It would be too, too terrible if I spoke of ‘holidays’ then, wouldn’t it?” Then, as his silence became formidable—“Is it really something serious, Hal dear? I ought to have seen you were not in the mood for nonsense. Tell me.”

He brought out a crumpled oblong of thin paper, blurred with a dull brown and green design.

“Here you are,” he said gruffly.

But the situation was fifty times stiffer than he had imagined it. He wished that Aunt Lavvy would hurry up and begin to fold it into pliable shape.

“Where did you find it?” she asked, startled.

“I didn’t find it. I had it.”

Bunny, practised in confession, would have added appeal, whether of eyes or tongue. But Hal was waiting for Aunt Lavvy’s help before he could add anything to the bald statement, though she would understand, even back to the irrelevance of Maisie and the Michaelmas daisies ... perhaps she would of her own accord propose to “put things right” with the Bank. He had come to her eager for this gift of “put-things-right,” and venerating her for possessing it.... His throat was gritty, and his knees felt weak.

“Well!” exclaimed Aunt Lavvy at last in an indignant whisper. And again, after several seconds had loudly ticked away—“Well”....

Hal turned his back and rushed out of the room.

What had happened to the world of usual things that, on the same morning as he had betrayed his own code, Aunt Lavvy had failed him?

He stumbled into the den which he shared with Bunny, and where William slept. Bunny was there, sprawling across William’s bed, reading “Penrod.”

“Thought you’d gone out. I say, what about a spin to Badgery Wood this afternoon?” He looked up for an answer, and saw Hal’s face. “I say ... what—what is it?”

Half an hour ago, Hal had been nervous that Bunny, hearing the tale, would be exasperatingly flippant about it. But now, after that terrifying glimpse of Aunt Lavvy metamorphosed by anger, he rather wanted to hear his brother’s light-hearted: “What’s the odds?”

When he had finished, Bunny sat staring at the floor, his face getting redder and redder.

“Well?” impatiently. And, echoing Aunt Lavvy: “Well?” Hal rapped out again.

Bunny was crying.

And then Hal gave in to the fact that one swerve from the usual had carried him into a wholly unfamiliar world of behaviour, and that he could not find any way back again from strangeness.

“When you’ve quite done,” he growled; adding, “You’d have been surprised if I’d burst out blubbing when you let on to me about your precious scrapes, out in the garden just now.”

“This isn’t a scrape,” gulped out Bunny.

Hal stopped being a mere schoolboy.

“You mean ... it’s worse? It’s the sort of thing one gets put in gaol for?”

Bunny nodded, and dabbed his eyes, too shocked and miserable even to care that he had been seen crying.

Hal sat down on the edge of the bed, hands interlocked across his knees, his broad shoulders bent forward.

“That’s just it”—after a long pause. “It puts the wind up me a bit to realize that if I could freeze on to that quid—I could do almost anything. I could do anything,” he repeated, cutting out the “almost.” “And the fact that I wasn’t really that sort of chap—that of course I was always frightfully down on lying and cheating and—and thieving—the sort of things a decent fellow doesn’t do—it wouldn’t stop me. Like it hasn’t stopped me this time. It’s awful not to be certain that one has any sort of a self that one can rely on.”

“Murder?” whispered Bunny, his imagination, always on a loose rein, beginning now to gallop. “Could it just as easily have been murder, you mean? And is that how criminals do it—in the same way as you....”

“I suppose so.”

“Then—nobody’s safe—not even ordinary people?” They both felt horror very close to them ... stirring their hair with its breath.

“And—feeling so oddly bucked just before——”

“They might have meant that. Like premonition upside down.” Bunny had a swift glimpse into the neat ironies in life’s working-out. But when Hal gruffly bade him explain himself, he pretended, out of an odd deference to his senior’s less flexible speech and fancy, that he could not. This was not the time to swank any superiority over Hal. You only did that in the days when he was indubitably the Magnificent, and in self-defence you paraded any small advantages that were yours. The significance of any need for chivalry smote Bunny with a fresh pang ... he fought back a great lump which swelled up in his throat. “Need any one know?”

“The money’s got to go back somehow, hasn’t it?”

“Aunt Lavvy——”

“I’ve just come from Aunt Lavvy.”

“Oh—good!” Bunny sighed, faintly relieved.

“No.” Hal contradicted him with a touch of grimness. “Not a bit of good. She’s as hard as nails.”

“Aunt Lavvy?”

And Hal suddenly made a brilliant, if embittering, discovery: “Scratch an Aunt Lavvy,” he flung into the face of Bunny’s incredulity, “and you find a paying guest underneath.”

[VII]

GRACE WATSON knocked at the door of the attic Miss Roberts shared with Lottie:

“Am I disturbing you? I looked into the nursery on my way up, and saw Lottie there with my babies, so I thought you might be alone.”

The governess beamed a welcome with her teeth, and hustled Grace out of two consecutive chairs into a third which was dubitably more comfortable.

“And I thought it would be a great help to talk over this terrible affair quietly with some one sensible,” continued Grace, who believed too firmly in the wonders achieved by quiet “talking-over.”

“Oh dear!” Miss Roberts began, tentatively, to be shocked and grieved.

And then, in sedate sentences, for even in the midst of spiritual turmoil Grace’s language never became correspondingly wild and tattered, she told the story she had just heard from her mother.

“Mother’s in the drawing-room crying, and wondering how she can bear to break it to Father this evening. He’s been so proud of Hal, you know—his eldest son.”

“He may be shielding somebody,” exclaimed Miss Roberts, brightly. “Bunny, for instance!” She had a thrilling mental picture of Hal, a head taller than Bunny, with one arm flung round his young brother’s shrinking—and unmistakably guilty—shoulders, while in those fearless steady tones of one whose own conscience knew no burdens, he confessed to a crime which was not his. Such luscious fancies sprang too easily into Miss Roberts’ mind, showing that a corner of it was in an unaired condition, for all its surface chattiness. But she was only paid thirty pounds a year, and for Lottie’s sake she slept with the attic window open all the year round, and went for a brisk walk every day in all weathers. The Maxwells, for their thirty pounds a year, could hardly expect further hygienic sacrifice from her. Then, leaving the Bunny idea in a state of incompletion: “Surely dear Miss Lavinia will settle the whole affair happily for you? That is to say, as far as it can ever be happy, knowing that Hal——” She shook her head mournfully; but the mournfulness was not very deeply rooted. Truth to tell, Miss Roberts drew more pleasure from the present excitement of the idol overthrown, than she had ever drawn from the negative rejoicing in Hal’s unquestioned integrity.

“I don’t know,” Grace replied slowly. “I haven’t seen Aunt Lavvy, but Mother says—Mother was overwrought, I suppose. She imagines that Aunt Lavvy has suddenly turned into a sort of fiend who will talk of nothing but her own good name with the Bank, which must be restored at all costs. But naturally Aunt Lavvy was a little bit annoyed, and said one or two things she didn’t mean. Mother ought to have made allowances. That’s what I’m so afraid of, Miss Roberts: that everybody in this house will be so stupefied that Hal of all boys could have committed a common theft——” Miss Roberts made shocked noises. “You can’t talk things over with any good results unless you call them by their proper names,” said Grace, firmly settling the neat little bow at her throat.

“How clear-headed you are!” admiringly, from Miss Roberts.

“Oh, I’m not. At least, if I am, it’s only what I’ve picked up from Stanley. And that reminds me, Mother actually doesn’t want me to tell Stanley when he comes home: ‘Oh do for heaven’s sake keep it in the family!’ she cried. I was rather hurt, as this is the first time that she’s mentioned Stanley as though he weren’t quite one of the family.” She paused a moment, and then clinched her argument: “Because, after all, he lives in the house.”

Miss Roberts tried to convey by her expression that she entirely agreed with Grace, but that at the same time she did not consider the fact that she herself lived in the house lifted her to an equal level of privilege and family-membership as Mr. Stanley Watson.

“It would be a terrible thing for Hal if it got known as far as Winborough or the ’Varsity, that he had taken money that didn’t belong to him. It might ruin his career. But if we all keep our heads, and don’t get hysterical—I met Bunny racing down the stairs just now with his eyes as red as fire, so I suppose he knows.”

“I confess I am surprised that Bunny should have taken it that way. He is a dear boy, but not very serious, as a rule.”

“Hal was his idol.” Grace spoke gently. “Schoolboys don’t say much about their feelings, you know, but I suspect this has gone rather deep with Bunny.”

“How you see everybody’s point of view,” murmured Miss Roberts, dripping appreciation.

“Stanley always says the one thing he can’t bear is intolerance. He can lead one right through history from the early pre-Egyptian period, and show step by step how bigotry alone has dragged great men and great nations to their ruin.”

“How interesting to hear him!” cried Miss Roberts, who, lest she be misunderstood, was not in the least a humbug nor a sycophant, but merely suffered from a nature devoid of the critical faculty.

Grace got up to go. “I think you had better tell Lottie, Miss Roberts, and Ursula, too. They are bound to notice something wrong, and Ursula, especially, has a habit lately of bursting out with such odd things.”

“She’s at the awkward age, of course”; but Miss Roberts had been having trouble with Ursula for the past year or two, and did not display quite as much gums and enthusiasm as she usually did in defence of her pupils.