Desolate splendour

FOR more than one reason Viola was glad to leave Gloucestershire for a short London visit. If challenged, she would probably have said that she wanted some clothes, or was eager to see the Empire’s capital. Certainly her time spent with Corinne at Morvane was pleasantly strenuous, and her guardian, after one more brief interview in which he had shown himself prompt and generous in regard to money, made no demands upon her privacy. But her enjoyment was spoilt, with a completeness incommensurate to their intrinsic importance, by the events of a conversation between herself and old Mrs. Plethern. They met in the garden. The dowager, in her long chair, was knitting in the shade of the cedars. Viola was alone, for Charles had driven Lady Grieve and the Welwyns to the Agricultural Show at Sawley, and Corinne, who had been thrown while riding in the morning, was prostrate with headache in her room.

“All alone, my dear?” queried the old lady. “Where are the others? I thought you would be playing tennis.”

Viola explained.

“Poor Corinne! I am so sorry. But you should not risk these madcap jumps alone, you foolish children. At least I am the gainer, for you can help me in with these things. Perhaps you will come and have tea with me? I am just ready.”

Laden with a basket of wools and two cushions, Viola followed Mrs. Plethern to the tower door.

“This is the first time you have been in my tower. It is an interesting old place. The lift is a little odd, is it not? But I was never very strong and there were so many stairs. Yes, just pull the cord and check it when I tell you. I dare say they have all kinds of new-fangled lifts now, but this was very modern once. Now pull again. That’s right, and here we are.”

They stepped on to a small landing. Viola saw that the lift-shaft ended and that a spiral stair led to an upper floor.

“This is not the top, then?” she asked.

“No. My bed- and dressing-rooms are above here. This is my sitting-room—the one I generally use. Has it not a lovely view over the park and garden? I cannot see the house at all from here. To do that I must go upstairs to my dressing-room. That overlooks the house. Please put those things down, dear. I will ring for Bathsheba and tell her to fetch us tea. Sit anywhere you like and make yourself quite at home. I do not have many visitors. Folks think it too far to come, I suppose. And then I am so old. Most of my contemporaries have gone. You young people cannot imagine what it is to feel oneself left behind by death.”

The door opened to admit a middle-aged woman, sandy-haired like her mistress and with something also of the old lady’s heavy pallor.

“Bathsheba,” said Mrs. Plethern, “this is Miss Marvell who has come to keep us all company.” The woman bobbed a curtsy, glancing sullenly at Viola from under her pale lashes. “We want some nice tea, please; just for the two of us.”

“What a curious name!” said Viola, as the maid disappeared. “Is it a local one?”

“Bathsheba has been with me for many years,” replied the old lady. “Her home is in Norfolk, near Ely—near my old home. She suits me and I let her take liberties now and then. Old servants, you know—they have a hold on us!” She chuckled unpleasantly. “I hope you did not mind my introducing you? I should have been so scolded this evening had I not done so!” The affectation of shudder was as unpleasant as the chuckle. The old lady’s grotesque playfulness had at once imbecility and nastiness. In the discomfort of the moment Viola failed to smile in response to her hostess’ humour. Mrs. Plethern noticed the failure, and her wrinkled eyelids flickered. She continued in the same even, mumbling voice:

“You are right in noticing the name of Bathsheba. But it is not uncommon among the East Anglian peasantry. Perhaps they bathe, when they do, in public. That was the lady’s forte, I believe? Not that my maid would be so indiscreet, or any audience forthcoming if she were. Women need to be young and lovely to draw the eyes of dwellers in palaces and towers. Beware of tower-dwellers, my dear. They are well-placed for keeping watch!”

Again that bad, reflective chuckle. Viola felt herself blushing. Mrs. Plethern took her up.

“Do not trouble to keep up polite conventions with me, my dear. I am an old woman and know my sex well. You need not be ashamed in my company to have read Bible stories or any others for that matter. Women who do not realize the power of their beauty are fools indeed. Worse fools even than the men they rule. I do not know which is the greater idiot, the woman who will not admit she has a body or she that puts no proper price on it. It is a mistake to give, without taking first.”

As she spoke, the old lady looked eagerly at the girl and marvelled at her evident discomfort. The scene glimpsed through the library windows was vivid to Mrs. Plethern’s mind. And yet this embarrassment was surely not assumed? She changed the subject, thinking better to relax for a moment the pressure of suggestion and later, when the victim was off her guard, to apply it once again. A clink of tea-cups gave her rational excuse.

“Here is tea,” she said pleasantly. “I shall be glad of it. One gets fond of one’s tea with years.”

During the arrangement of trays and tables and the pouring of tea, Viola contrived to collect her startled wits. Why the conversation had so troubled her, she did not wholly know. Never before had anyone talked to her thus. Not only were the words of unpleasant meaning, but they were charged with sinister suggestion. What was suggested she could not tell; none the less the presence of dimly realized evil stirred the nerves of her innocence. She longed to escape from this tower and from the white mass of age that leered at her from the deep chair. Flight until after tea was impossible. She must talk, talk of anything, rather than leave the guidance of conversation in her hostess’ incalculable hands.

“Are those cards in the glass cases?” she asked.

“My collection,” nodded Mrs. Plethern. “I have collected playing cards for years. They are a fascinating subject. After tea we will look at some of the more interesting. I have them of all periods. Notebooks full of history and observation are in those drawers. Perhaps, when I am gone, some one will make a book of my notes and publish them. They tell many curious things. The whole science of fortune-telling is to be found in them, and through fortune-telling one comes easily to magic and to witchcraft.”

The mention of witchcraft held Viola’s attention. If witches there were, this old lady would surely be of their number. The thought of her flying from her tower on a broomstick was as nearly amusing as was possible to any thought or incident of this horrid tea-party. Murmuring polite interest in the subject of playing cards, the girl set down her cup and wandered to the window. The garden spread itself below her, its pattern defined, its trees foreshortened to incidents in a general vague design. The avenue, slanting away toward the ridge of the hill, was like the humped back of some sleeping monster. She had not realized how high the tower was. The very topmost branches of the cedars were level with her eyes.

“How many floors are there between us and the ground?” she asked.

“Three, my dear—not counting the ground floor of all. That is used for gardening things. Above that is my box-room and kitchen and Bathsheba’s bedroom. Above that my guest-room and a bathroom. Above that again my dining-room and a little room behind with a bed in it. Then this room—also a small room in which I keep much of my collection and other special things. Above, my bedroom and bath-dressing room. Above that the dome. The dome is curious. Corinne shall take you up. There is provision for a light up there—you know the legend perhaps? No? I must lend you the book about Morvane. It is a strange story.”

“I should like to read that,” said Viola.

“So you shall my dear, so you shall. Do you read much? There are books in Canada, I suppose?”

Viola laughed.

“Yes, indeed! Father had quite a number, but mostly scientific and I thought them dull. But the Toronto Library is very fine and our friends lent us novels and so on. There seem to be some beautiful books in the house here. I must ask Mr. Plethern if I may look at them.”

“Ah—in the library, you mean? Yes, there are a great many books there, but no one ever reads them. You have been in the library then?”

This time the speaker had satisfaction. The abrupt question brought a sudden colour to Viola’s cheek. The next instant, shutting her mind to memories of the evening upon which she had betrayed her mother, she spoke steadily enough:

“Yes, once or twice. Mr. Plethern asked me to go.”

The old lady was cheered. She had, a while ago, trembled on the edge of doubt even of her own eyes. Now, however, she felt reassured. The girl was ashamed of something that had taken place in the library. Probably she had let Charles go farther than she meant, unaware of his competence and dispatch in the making of love. Then she had repented her own rashness and was now deliberately cultivating virginal modesty, lest inclination should once more prevail against self-interest. Mrs. Plethern felt this explanation to be satisfactory. She did not believe in the ‘modern girl.’ The phrase was a modern euphemism, and independence a convenient cloak for licence. Either a girl was subject to her parents and an ignorant miss or she was a woman of the world, grown beyond silly ideas of reserve or self-respect, other than those dictated by prudence and expressible in things material. It did not occur to her to question the validity of this opinion, to remind herself that she belonged to an earlier generation and had not for many years mingled with her younger countrywomen. In solitude she had fed her own malevolence and cynicism on books grateful to her prejudice and had allowed to harden into dogma what was in origin only personal taste. Mrs. Plethern, as her favourite son well said, was clever. But she was not wise, a fact which both she and her beloved James failed to reckon. And yet it was neither the old lady’s folly nor her cleverness that at this moment impelled Viola to take her leave. She would herself have been quite unable to explain why it was that instant departure became then and not a moment sooner frankly imperative. Only was she conscious of an urgent, almost a physical thrust, that sent her doorwards.

“I must go down now, Mrs. Plethern,” she said. “Corinne will be expecting me.”

“But, my dear, it is early! I have strange things to show you—my rarer and more curious cards, a little manual of gipsy fortune-telling lore that is two hundred years old and more——”

But Viola could only repeat, while still the invisible pressure on mind and body urged her to flight:

“Corinne will be expecting me.”

For a moment the old woman looked the young one in the eyes. Then without a word she turned away and shuffled to her usual chair.

“Very well then,” she muttered. “Another time, another time....”

Viola was not half-way across the lawn before there crept over her a great fatigue. Hardly could she drag her legs up the staircase, with difficulty could she, wrists nerveless and hands trembling, turn the handle of her bedroom door. Making an effort of will she steadied herself, closed the door and locked it. Then, with a sudden stagger, she leant to a chair. The room whirled round her.

It was a short faint, and she had soon sufficient control of will and limb to climb on to her bed. There she lay, striving to comprehend what had befallen her. She was conscious of having fled some evil thing, but of corroborating fact she could recall no atom. Gradually, in the place of fact, came fancy. She felt herself alone in the midst of enemies. A malevolence of which she was aware, but against which she could make no movement of self-defence, threatened to envelop her. Miserably, like trapped birds, her thoughts darted from side to side of the cruelty that was caging them in. Almost hysterical, she lost herself in distraught foreboding, piling in terrified anticipation peril on grisly peril. A shadow seemed to close down upon her, heavily, broodingly, and suddenly from the vague darkness of its menace sounded the slow, salacious chuckle that had so startled her when first in Mrs. Plethern’s tower she heard it. Her nerves began to quiver. Shrinking against her pillow she had a moment of growing fear, then another of blind, shuddering terror. But before terror’s cause could show itself, before even she could scream, the room was light and free and peaceful once again and she saw through the open window the golden calm of the summer afternoon. Her imagination drooped, bruised with the weariness of an uncanny fight. She fell asleep.

She woke to find Corinne standing over her.

“Viola, darling! What’s the matter? Why aren’t you dressed? It’s eight o’clock!”

She struggled to wakefulness. The room was shrouded in dusk. Corinne in her white dress hovered against shadowy furniture.

“Eight o’clock?” she stammered. “Eight o’clock? It is dark. Why——”

With an effort she rallied a more complete consciousness. “I have been asleep,” she said with awkward futility.

Corinne laughed.

“You don’t say so! But the door was locked. I found your water in the corridor and couldn’t get in. So I tried the door from the next room. Luckily it bolts on the other side. Are you ill?”

“No. I’m quite all right. Merely dropped off, like a fool. I must rush!”

Glad to conceal embarrassment, she plunged into a rapid toilet.

“Is your head better?” she asked.

“Nearly. Anyway I’m coming to dinner. There’s the drum. I’ll run on and make excuses.”

By ten o’clock that night Viola could wonder whether she had not imagined her afternoon adventure. Dinner and the games which followed it were so friendly and so normal; the silver and polished mahogany, the drawing-room chintz, the lights blazing on the billiard table were so comfortably, so happily themselves, that the tower and its aged mistress seemed the phantoms of a nightmare world. When she went to bed, she craned from her window in faint but unmistakable hope to see whether, after all, the campanile had not vanished. However small the disappointment of finding it still there, proud and pale and silent in the moonlight, there was in its serene propinquity enough of menace to give zest to plans for leaving Morvane and enthusiasm to acceptance of Corinne’s invitation.

§ 2

James Plethern lived in Montagu Square. Before the Boer War, while yet a bureaucrat and, later, a politician, he had found Hyde Park Terrace suitable and adequate. But now, having made brave use of commercial opportunity and having won to wealth and social eminence, he overstepped the subtle boundary of the Edgware Road.

Why not to Mayfair or Belgravia? His choice of district had its subtlety, sprang from the deepest instinct of his nature. He was complacent toward his riches, took them for proof of his own industry and intelligence; yet for their very origin he despised them. From his Victorian forbears he inherited respect for property. They had loved property and plotted for it, married and died to save or add to it. So would have James, had fortune given him the only property that mattered. Land, land inherited, was to his queer conviction the sole delectable possession; but land, being a younger son, he had not.

Cruel, the ceaseless smart of juniority, no balm for which was found in money earned! He was a younger son; a thing of nought beside his brother. Rich as Charles he was, but vainly; for in all that made a man respected and admirable, Charles, as the owner of Morvane and lord of the Plethern lands, must remain always and impregnably supreme.

From this sense of personal inferiority to his brother grew in James’ angry heart a conviction that he belonged altogether to a lower social order. Younger sons, younger brothers, the unhappy world of those condemned by later birth to make their own lives or to live on other’s bounty, these were his equals. He was absurdly sensitive to this distinction (a distinction which, had he defined it, would have been unclear to most of his contemporaries and unintelligible to their children), so much so that he would not force his way into Mayfair, into Belgravia, nor even, north of Oxford Street, into those areas in which dwelt many of the truly propertied. Montagu Square was, to his judgment, suited to his predicament and there, among wealthy dilettanti, captains of industry, and other junior scions of ancient families he set up his over-emphatic household gods.

The building of his choice was tall and dignified and sombre, its grave proportions slighted but unconquered by a trite vulgarity of tiling and exotic decoration lavished on its front-door and ground-floor façade. The interior, more helpless than an eighteenth century elevation in the grip of a tenant’s tastelessness, was loaded to suffocation with Italian and French antiquities. Wrought-iron grilles; elaborate fire-furniture; richly carved cassoni; a chimney breast from a Loire château; a ceiling from Venetia; chairs and settees in faded crimson velvet, their tassels trailing lifeless in this alien air; long sideboards in marqueterie; leather screens of burnished gold over which flowers and leaves and birds sprawled in dark magnificence; on the walls darkly oppressive pictures in tremendous frames; on the floors carpets and rugs, once brilliant, now dulled with age and wear—such to typical excess were the adornments of James Plethern’s home.

Seated alone at breakfast, two days after Viola had come to her guardian’s house, he received a letter from his mother. He finished his meal and was passing to his own room, as his son came gaily down the stairs.

“Good morning, dad,” said Chris.

“Good morning, Chris,” replied his father. “Have you seen your mother? Is she up?”

“More or less,” replied the young man. “Anyway she’s having breakfast.”

And he disappeared, in search of his own. After a moment’s thought James went to his study, took a letter from a Japanned dispatch box and walked slowly upstairs. He found his wife in an embroidered kimono eating buttered egg.

“Well?” she asked. “Is the head better?”

He smiled and laid a hand on her head.

“Thank you, yes. And Rosalind? A good night? Excellent. I have another letter from mother. The girl has arrived.”

“Well?” queried his wife once more.

James stretched his long legs in a deep chair and for a moment studied his faultless finger-nails.

“Yes, the girl has arrived,” he repeated meditatively.

Mrs. Plethern showed no further curiosity. Not only did she know her husband, but she was a woman to whom all emotion was personally distasteful. She bent her coldly stylish head over her tray and went on with her breakfast.

“Mother is a very clever old lady,” said James at last. “I have brought up her first letter on this matter so that you can see how clever she is. You remember that when first Charles broke the news of this foolish scheme and when I had failed to dissuade him from acknowledging the applicant without very careful investigation, I sent mother a note giving my point of view and yours.”

The woman nodded and took some marmalade. James proceeded in the judicial manner now usual with him.

“You remember also that she replied by return of post and that her letter, among other things, contained the following sentences.” He read aloud:

“I have thought the matter over and believe that your fears are exaggerated. Charles of course will tell me nothing. He says he has no idea what the girl is like. If this is true, we must wait and see. She may be impossible, in which case he will hide her away somewhere and merely foot the bill. She may, on the other hand, be presentable. What will happen then? I am myself unconvinced that the whole affair is not an elaborate joke on Charles’ part. For all I know, he may have devised this way of providing distraction for himself while at Morvane. He is always bored here and restless, because he is debarred from his usual amusements. May it not be that this guardian story is merely an invention? The girl may not be coming from Canada at all. I have only his word for the existence of the original letter, said to have been received from her father. In such a case we need not worry. Nevertheless, it will not do to count on this solution as correct. Assuming that the girl is genuine and presentable, what will happen? Charles will make love to her. That goes without saying. Perhaps she will refuse to respond? He is not used to rejection and will take it hardly. Surely in these circumstances he will pack her off and we shall not be troubled further? On the other hand, she may respond. If she yields immediately, there will be little danger of anything serious arising. He will tire of her in time. If, however, she is clever as well as attractive and genuine, she may lead him slowly on—into what? Here will be our difficulty, but here only. I urge you therefore, and dear Rosalind, not to let the matter weigh upon your minds. I will write to you when I have seen the girl and again when I can tell how matters are moving. In the meantime give no sign to Charles that you have thought of the business any more.”

James glanced up at his wife. She was nibbling toast and gazing at the fire-screen. As his voice ceased, she nodded slightly and flashed him a look.

“Go on,” she said.

James settled himself lower in his chair and crossed his legs. His admirable patent boots flashed in the sunshine that filtered between the slats of the blind.

“Now for this morning’s letter. It is written late the day before yesterday but not posted until yesterday at noon.

Mrs. Plethern had lit a cigarette and was standing at her mirror. In one hand she held the cigarette; in the other a stick of lip-salve.

“It’s too bad!” she said angrily as her husband stopped reading. “Too bad, after all we have done! The beastly little interloper——”

“One moment, my dear, one little moment. Let me finish. There is a postscript and postscripts often make a lot of difference.

James replaced the letter in his pocket and regarded his wife with a triumphant smile. She frowned thoughtfully as she looked back at him.

“It seems to be going all right, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Certainly the postscript is better,” admitted the woman grudgingly, “but I am puzzled. It doesn’t seem possible.”

“What doesn’t seem possible?”

“I have a letter from Corinne this morning,” explained Mrs. Plethern, “a letter raving about this girl and how good and beautiful she is and how I shall like her——”

James got up from his chair.

“Why didn’t you say so sooner?” he demanded crossly. His wife ignored the interruption.

“Now I do not believe Corinne would write like that about a girl who let Charles make love to her the moment she got to England and into his house. Girls are very quick at sizing one another up and Corinne is such an innocent child. There is some mistake, Jim. Either your mother is wrong or Corinne, and I cannot believe that Corinne has written except from genuine excitement.”

“Let me see the child’s letter.”

He read it quickly and without comment. His broad, pale face remained impassive and expressionless; only the deep, sensitive nostrils twitched slightly, as they would at moments of interest or puzzlement. Corinne’s letter was an outpouring of girlish enthusiasm. Viola was just lovely and a perfect darling. They were to ride in the afternoon, and Aunt Belinda had said how much she liked Viola, and Corinne proposed to bring her up to London the day before the ’Varsity match, so that they could all go together. In conclusion the writer announced that this new friend would stop a fortnight and come again in the winter.

James took two turns up and down the room, his forehead lined with thought.

“Yes, it is very odd,” he said at last, handing the letter back. “We must see the girl for ourselves. Send Corinne a line to say Miss Marvell will be welcome here.”

And he left his wife to the completion of her toilet.

§ 3

“Let her alone,” James had said. “Let her alone and we can see what she is made of. Corinne will keep her happy and at ease.”

Mrs. Plethern obeyed and was careful to welcome Viola with no more emphasis than she would likely have shown to any one of her daughter’s friends. Relieved thus informally to be accepted, Viola slipped easily into the life and diversions of the London household. Excusably she overlooked a motive in the detachment of her hosts. Excusably also she allowed their aloofness to colour her own attitude. Her cool reserve jarred a little on Corinne’s brother.

“Delighted to see you!” he said heartily, extending a large, strong hand. “You’ve timed your coming over splendidly. It’ll be a fine game.”

She smiled at him and shook her head.

“Shameful confession! I never heard of the Oxford and Cambridge match nor knew there was one till a day or two ago. Indeed I have been regretting the coronation and ignoring my real good fortune.”

“Ha! Ha! Well, that’s frank, at all events! Don’t they play cricket in Canada? Jolly old baseball all the time, what?”

Again she shook her head.

“They may do,” she said indifferently. “I really don’t know. I never inquired.”

Christopher vented his spleen on Corinne, in her little room among the attics.

“Stand-offish,” he said with finality. “Topping girl, all right, but stand-offish.”

“Nonsense, Chris! She’s not a bit like that. She’s only shy.”

“No girl was ever shy of me before,” he objected, “not in that way, anyhow.”

He was a large young man, rosy cheeked and fair haired, with that almost aggressive cleanliness often met with among blond Englishmen. Although a boy in years and boyish in many aspects of his nature, security was in his blood and centuries of complacent lordship. From these he derived an obstinate dogmatism and the gestures of a spurious maturity.

“At any rate not in that way,” he repeated a little jauntily. The turn of the arm with which he flicked ash from his cigarette was at once rakish and traditional. As his forbears had slapped their tall boots with their riding crops or, with a click of the tongue, had replaced their port glasses on polished mahogany, even so did Chris Plethern powder with tobacco ash the carpet of his sister’s sitting-room.

Corinne watched him with a half smile. She admired her brother, but she had full share of the mischievous feminine humour that likes a man to strut, at once enjoying his absurdity and loving it.

“She is so strange in England. You must remember that. At Morvane she was very quiet and talked little enough, even to me. She’ll get used to us, Chris.”

He had wandered to the window and was studying the unclouded sky. Cares of a cricketer had thrust trivialities of feminine character from his mind. He replied to his sister’s words with an absent grunt.

“Still beastly fine,” he remarked. “But it might shower, mightn’t it?”

Corinne knew her job.

“It must do soon,” she agreed. “It’s been baking for ages. I dare say it’ll rain to-night.”

He brightened immediately.

“Topping. Sun again to-morrow. Nasty sticky wicket. Put ’em in. All out hundred and fifty. Wicket recovers. We go in. Whsst—whsst—four hundred for six!——”

With a ruler and round pin-cushion he scored freely all round the wicket. The demise of a china dog, miraculous survivor from Corinne’s childhood, brought the innings to a close.

“Sorry!” he said cheerfully. “Poor old Towser!”

§ 4

Within two days of her arrival in London, Viola was plunged into the massed enthusiasm and bewildering unreality of Lords. The game itself made little or no impression on her mind. Corinne’s excited prophecies, the technicalities of those about her, passed with the muted beat of a bat’s wings. Amusedly aloof from the partisan sparring of her companions, she watched the slim white figures scattered in seeming hazard round the wickets, the multi-coloured seethe of the crowded stands, and told herself, rather for the relief of her own satiety than from logical deduction, that the smart crowd and those individual members of it among whom she was thrown were masked for carnival, that their pranks and gestures were of tradition, that from externals only need the weary questing of a stranger mind seek teaching or enlightenment.

By four o’clock on the second day even externals had begun to pall. Everything was so laboriously the same; repetition so meticulously complete. Corinne still twittered over her match card; Hilda Crossley, Oxford and argumentative, still hummed engrossedly at each light-blue catastrophe. Christopher’s spirited if fortunate innings of fifty-two had brought the party of his special supporters to a fever of excitement but, as their pleasure mounted and stood in drops of sweat upon their brows, Viola sank lower into the tedium of a speciality whose formulae she had never learnt. The jostling languor of yet another interval menaced her boredom. She could hardly endure the strained attention of her hosts. Then Corinne, turning to put some question to her father, caught sight of an interest that was not purely cricket. Viola saw her turn, saw her eyes light to eager mischief. Is it, she wondered swiftly, is it relief at last? And in the moment of her thought, Corinne cried out:

“Daniel, by all that’s wonderful! Dan, darling, what a condescension!”

Viola turned her head in discreet curiosity. Below her on the grass she saw a slim young man, olive skinned, with an oval womanish face and soft brown eyes. He was raising a gleaming hat to Corinne in mock obeisance. His glance travelled casually from Corinne to her companions; lit on Viola. For a moment they looked each other in the eyes, silently, across the gulf of mutual strangeness. Then the young man turned his head brusquely toward the game and stood, in silent elegance, gazing over the field.

A sudden murmur of disapproval buzzed along the crowded stands.

“Ran away from it!” grunted James Plethern.

With a something of petulance Viola gave attention to the game of which secretly she was so passionately tired.

“What’s the trouble?” she asked Miss Crossley.

“Funking Shaw,” responded Hilda crisply. “He’ll be out in a second.”

Rather bewildered, Viola glanced one by one at her neighbours. They glowered angrily at the distant scatter of flannelled heroes. A queer gloom hung over the scene. On a sudden impulse she bent toward the young man on the grass below her.

“Do tell me what is the matter,” she whispered.

He smiled quietly into her face.

“You are Viola Marvell?” he asked.

She blushed, remembering that her familiarity had no social sanction.

“I am sorry——” she murmured.

“And I am glad,” he replied. His voice was very low but very clear. He possessed the feminine faculty of speaking audibly to one near neighbour but inaudibly to all the rest. “Mother has spoken of you.”

Something in the friendliness of the word ‘mother’ warmed Viola’s heart.

“She was very kind to me,” she said simply, and he knew that she knew him for Daniel Grieve.

There was a roar of cheering. With a sigh and a rustle the huge crowd relaxed its joyous or disapproving interest in the game. The tenth wicket had fallen and the players were coming in for tea. Argument broke out on the Plethern coach. With the solemn irritation of elderly enthusiasts James Plethern and Sir Algeron Grieve bore testimony to the failings of their side.

“What induced them to play the fellow, I cannot understand!”

“He’s been doing very well, earlier in the season,” pleaded Corinne. “I expect the poor man’s nervous.”

Miss Crossley drawled an unpleasant interruption.

“He has never been able to play fast bowling,” she said.

Corinne tossed her head.

“If you had a fast bowler,” she snapped.

The other laughed nastily.

“Darling Corinne——”

Once again petulance rose in Viola. What a fuss they made of their wretched game, growling and scratching as though the world depended on it! Seemingly in purposeful harmony with her momentary impatience, the cool, quiet voice of Daniel Grieve sounded in her ear:

“It would be interesting to know how all these righteous critics would themselves stand to a bumping ball....”

“You play?” she queried.

“Oh—at my age? Hardly. I used to.”

“At your age! Twenty-six? Seven maybe?”

He drew himself up.

“Thirty in August, Miss Marvell, and a fine child!”

She laughed, less at the words spoken than at the gently mocking glance that accompanied them.

Corinne broke upon their privacy. Weary of technical discussions she had climbed to the ground and having run behind the coach, now flung herself on Daniel’s arm.

“Danny, I’m so glad to see you! How are you and how’s Moggs and the camel and——” she broke off, seeing Viola’s amused eyes watching her from their post of vantage. “Viola—this is Daniel! Dan—Viola.”

Both smiled at the tardy introduction. Corinne chattered on:

“He has been preaching anti-cricket to you, I’m sure. He’s dreadfully superior! Goes to watch chess tournaments—long distance ones played by cable. Don’t you, Dan? Nothing so vulgar as a ball game.”

“Rinka, you make me out barely human.”

She danced against his arm, delighted to tease him, delighted to bring out for Viola the calm aloofness of his studied manner.

Lady Grieve joined the group.

“Daniel dear, what a compliment! Or is it a conventional lion’s den—force majeure?”

“Now mother’s at me too!” He smiled to Viola, and his glance was a humorous appeal for sympathy. “Mumsy dearest, I am your very humble servant and follow wherever you go. But keep the governor away. I don’t feel equal to post-mortems on the afternoon’s play.”

“He’s in the middle of his tea, you disrespectful imp. Where I should be, also, if I hadn’t taken pity on your thirst, all of you. I’m sure poor Viola is parched. Come and feed, child.”

Daniel offered his hand. She jumped lightly to the ground.

“Tea,” he said confidingly as they moved away, “is what I came for. The Plethern brothers have a genius for meals.”

As they strolled in search of food Viola drew attention to the huge figure of Chris Plethern, hung about with adoring relatives.

“There’s the great man,” she said. “He hit very hard. Is that good cricket?”

“Sometimes the best of all. But not always. Chris is a lusty bat, but he won’t use his head.”

As they approached, the hero of the morning turned and saw them.

“Hullo, Dan!” he roared. “How goes it, old son?”

“It goes,” replied Daniel, “about fifty-two to the hour. Very hot stuff, master Christopher. I congratulate you.”

“Wasn’t it splendid!” chorused Corinne and her excited friends.

The great man waved a deprecatory hand.

“Oh, shut it!” he said. “I had a bad let off at slip and another at mid-on. Got on top of ’em all right now and again, I suppose, but nothing great.”

He turned to Viola, his face aglow with health, heat and pride of achievement.

“Are you enjoying yourself, Miss Marvell, or are we too slow for you?”

“I do my best to keep up,” she returned. “At any rate I know enough to cheer the right side.”

“That’s tophole,” he rejoined and glanced at his watch. “Time to toddle. Just dashed out to see you all. So long, ladies. So long, dad.”