"Piracy"

BOOK THE THIRD

THE ANTAGONISTS

CHAPTER I

In the first month of the year 1919, when the world, released at last from the epidemic of flags, was racked by the epidemic of influenza (then the most present of the many plagues of peace), Ivor Marlay was living in a small house by the River Kennet in Berkshire, which he had bought furnished towards the end of the previous year. The house was a little beyond the straggling village of Nasyngton, and a little over two miles from Hungerford Station: a Queen Anne house of sweet reserve and severity, with an orchard behind that wandered up a slight incline towards the main road: and, in front, a twisting little drive to the wooden gates by the bridge, and a wide lawn, not at all immaculate, which breasted the quiet waters of the Kennet. To the right of the house and lawn rose the wide stone bridge of Nasyngton, and a mighty bridge it looked in that quiet and small place, a seared and ancient bridge of strength and dignity; and over this bridge passed the traffic of the London-Bath Road, as well it might and as it had done ever since the days when Bath was the splendid corollary of the metropolis and both as one beneath the light step of Beau Nash.... Relieved of the bridge, the main road swept widely to the right, and, skirting the back of Ivor’s domain, so through the village of Nasyngton towards its immense destiny. But even this wide road, so arrogantly unrolling its Tarmac through the quiet places of Berkshire, could be humbled by things greater than itself; by things not eternal, but magnificently temporal. For how furtively this London-Bath road swept by the great iron gates of Lady Hall, two miles Londonwards from the village, the seat of the Earls of Kare! How meek and shrunken did that haughty Tarmac become as it slunk by the wide circle of asphalt of the yellow sort, that was loosely strewn before the great iron gates of Lady Hall as a forerunner of the consideration that awaited the guests of Rupert, Earl of Kare, whose fortunes had lately been revived by a Chilian marriage.

His small house by Nasyngton suited Ivor very well. He had bought it from two spinster sisters, the Misses Cloister-Smiths, and not only because of its pleasant situation but because its interior and its simple appointments had instantly pleased his taste. And, keeping his flat in Upper Brook Street, there he had settled since November: adding to its comforts only his cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Hope, his man Turner, and as many books as he had thought to require.

Ivor’s nature, while not at all of a solitary bent in itself, was the direct cause of his solitude; for though he had surprisingly little of that self-consciousness which so often gets between a sensitive man and his power to entertain or be entertained, he was definitely a “rather difficult person”: in that he was neither easily amusing nor easily amused—an irritating lack of accommodation which was growing on him every year, every month almost. People thought him superior. He was, however, a very concentrated person in his intimacies; and to his friendships he had always applied himself with steady and undiminished pleasure, he intensely enjoyed the practices of intimate friendship. “Let there be restraint, but no secrecy!” Where was secrecy, there Ivor was not; which was silly of him, for thus he was to a great degree cut off from that amiable pastime which is called friendship in cities, those manly and uninquiring companionships that have lasted for years (since we were boys together, say) and will last till death do us part, and were among the most charming of the many charming ties that bound together our public life and body politic until the recent advent of rude adventurers from the Board schools.

Rodney West, since Trevor’s death, had become Ivor’s most intimate male friend; but Sir Rodney, as he by now inevitably was, was as a rule too busy being a foremost K.C. and a rather bad-tempered M.P. of the outmoded Liberal persuasion, which he and a few other bitter-reasonables had just succeeded in dragging through the Hang-the-Kaiser Elections of 1918. No one but a half-wit or a non-combatant ever thought the Kaiser would be hanged, but at the time there was a premium on half-wits, and Rodney West made himself rather unpopular in the House by pointing that out at every opportunity. “But some one’s got to do it,” said Rodney West; and he could afford to, with his income.

As for Magdalen, she had been away from England for the last year, and maybe she would never return. Magdalen had gone with her husband—to Peru! Tristram Gray, a keen and gray man of more than fifty (who had never in his life compromised about anything but his wife, which his friends considered rather interesting of him, as an instance of the queer effects love can have on a reasonable man), had surprised Magdalen and every one else, on being invalided out in 1917, by an absurdly grim determination to set out on his travels again. Modern England, it seemed, did not at all please that hardened and decisive gentleman: it was too confused and too confusing, he pleaded. He was going to Peru, where he had years ago acquired, in an adventurous way, a kind of minor castle in the mountains of the interior. “A splendid home,” Colonel Gray described it, “and, let’s hope, an imposing sepulchre. Mountains, you know, all over the place, and not toy ones. Things you can get hold of. You’d better come with me, Magdalen.” That is all he said, and never before had said as much. And Magdalen, surprising woman, had straightway answered, “I will!” And had gravely gone with him—to Peru!

Rodney West and Ivor had accompanied them up to Liverpool to see them off, and there had been a last dinner at the Midland Adelphi Hotel. Those three men and Magdalen—those two men of more than middle years (for West was five-and-fifty) and Ivor, just thirty, equalised all in a quite amazing friendship. A good friendship it was, with a kind of chivalry about it which was not the less real because it was rather odd—very odd, some might think. But Magdalen had a way of melting things and men, a Renaissance way she had of bringing the godlessness out of a man so that it seemed to him he was a god. She was romantic to the end, this Magdalen, in her shadowy way, saying to the youngest of her three friends: “Perhaps one day you will come out to join us, Ivor. But not until you are very tired, remember, for I hear it’s no place for a striving person, and you are a striving person, you know. No, you mustn’t come until you are certain that you don’t want to come back here again—and oh! I hope that won’t happen! But I don’t think it will, for you’re not stationary and still absurdly young, and maybe soon the lovely thing you want will happen to you. And please promise me, Ivor, never to believe those tiresome people who will tell you with a plausible air of impatience that there are more important things in this world than love or who will tell you to stick to one woman and be done with it. Such people lie in wait for young men with crusading eyes, but don’t you believe them—go on until you find a woman worth living for and dying with, for love fills a man’s life while ‘more important things’ can only occupy it. And that’s the truth I’m telling you, Ivor....”

Magdalen had looked her age the night of that last dinner, she had seemed a little strange, a little remote, a little tired, as though she had already arrived in Peru and the journey had tired her.

2

During this last year his solitude had, as it were, forced Ivor to an ambition; for it is in his solitary moments that a man conquers men. He was reading now, for the first time in his life, with a set and serious purpose; and as he read he thought, and when he had thought he made notes, any amount of them; for he was not going to waste what knowledge he purposed to acquire, he quite definitely wanted to talk and write about it—especially to talk. There were two things this maddened world of to-day plainly wanted, special knowledge and fine endeavour; and Ivor Marlay was trying to discipline himself....

In the wake of many older and wiser men of Europe and America—that surge of disenchantment, in 1919!—Ivor was realising that “though the war was over nothing else was over;” and that the world was still sliding to a queer hell. It wasn’t enough to say that the world was in an infernal mess and showed no likelihood of getting out of it, the good old world of progress and respectability. It was in more than the infernal mess through which it had so often safely plunged: it was deeply dirtied and befouled with every lawless idiocy of which angry peoples seem increasingly capable. France was still livid with the passions of nationality. France had learnt a cruel lesson, and was intent to profit by it. France was angry, France was patriotic, France was pathetic, France was sensitive, France was determined not to open any windows to let the air in. Frenchmen set their shoulders, they had ceased to shrug their shoulders: other people shrugged their shoulders at them. La France, la France.... The mess of Reparations and Reconstruction was already foreshadowed; and Mr. Maynard Keynes was sharpening his pen. Wise men saw, even then, whither the passions of nationality would lead Europe in the next few years; and while some said the aggressive instinct of nationality was a fine thing, others pointed to the mess. Wise men saw, but wise men can do nothing. Wise men cannot deliver, they can only hail a deliverer.

It was obvious that if ever there was a time to be up and doing things, in a quite heroic sense, this was the time—this changing, transitional time! Here, now, was chance for fine endeavour. Whosoever was articulate could now be heard, ... which was very strange in the life politic, a quite new departure; for once on a time the Commons held only gentlemen, but now they let in quite clever fellows—if such could be persuaded to enter it; so that anything might happen, anything—in this transitional time! And it was the business of English youth to make things happen, in the finest way. But the basis of every endeavour must be work and knowledge; and it was the impulse to the one and the desire for the other that were now so plainly lacking in the “young men of opportunity”; which was a favourite phrase of Ivor’s in many talks with Magdalen and Rodney West.

All men who thought and wrote were at this time thinking and writing about the conflicting aims and principles of labour and capital. The calamity of Europe’s tumbling credit did not yet obsess people to the degree that it very soon did—indeed it had not yet crashed to anywhere near its lowest depth; but it was crashing. It seemed, then, that everything would come out smooth and straight if only a sensible accommodation could be found between the wage-earners and the employers in each country; but in each country angry men never tired of passionately crying in capital letters that there can be no accommodation between Principles of Living, that each must have its day—“or night!” dramatically thought sober men with their eyes on Russia. For sober men were as like the men in Mr. Beresford’s Revolution as a fish in the sea is like a fish in an aquarium, and in them was a growing fear of the spectre of anarchy.

“The best way to beat a real revolution is to lead it; the next best way is to talk to it; and the worst way of all is to fight it. Just because some ancient idiot—probably the same Roman idiot who wrote si vis pacem, para bellum, so that other idiots throughout history could take it for gospel truth simply because it was in Latin—just because some idiot once said that there’s no use talking to an angry man, no one has ever tried it until knocking the angry man down has failed. There’s no use doing anything else but talk to an angry man; and the idea that an angry man must temporarily be a fool is one of the misconceptions on which civilisation has been based ever since Saint Peter lost his temper with the ear of the law....

“You cannot fight and beat revolutions as you can fight and beat nations. You can kill a man, but you simply can’t kill a rebel. For a proper rebel has an Ideal of living, while your only ideal is to kill him so that you may preserve yourself. And the reason why no real revolution, or religion, has ever been beaten is that rebels die for something worth dying for, the future, but their enemies die only to preserve the past: and makers of history are always stronger than the makers of Empire. It is foolish to fight a revolutionary machine-gun with a loyalist machine-gun, gun for gun, or a Soviet machine-gun with a bourgeois machine-gun, gun for gun. You can only fight and beat them with an Idea, a clean and fearless Idea. And there is only one such Idea, the oldest in the world, the most blooded in the world, the aristocratic idea: which really means that you can only keep and strengthen your own freedom by acknowledging other peoples’. Mainly, it must mean that....”

Ivor Marlay made notes. He was trying to get somewhere: as, one day much later, he finally did. But a solitary man becomes very theoretical; which, maybe, is why all revolutions have been born of solitary men and all religions have come from the East.

CHAPTER II

Thus Virginia happened—she who had been Virginia Tracy, then Mrs. Sardon, now Lady Tarlyon. But the years that had passed sat as lightly on her as pearls about her throat, her years decorated Virginia; and yet where was the young poet among the many young poets she knew, to take folly by the horns and sing of her complexion, crying that white samite was black beside its sheen?

They grinned at each other, she above and he below. Fairly caught they both were.

“I say, Virginia!” he cried with amazed pleasure.

“That’s me!” she laughed at him. The horse doubtfully came to rest, and it breathed contemptuously into Ivor’s face.

“After all these years, these long years!” she exclaimed wonderingly, staring down at him. Her eyes were clear, blue lights in the gloom. “Did I frighten you, Ivor Marlay?”

“You nearly killed me, that’s all. But I would have died happily, Virginia, saluting you with my pleasure at seeing you again....”

“You see,” he explained, “I had no idea you were so lovely. Someone should have told me....”

“Oh, you’ve changed, Ivor Marlay!” Virginia mocked him deftly. “You are being nice to Virginia. You are not despising Virginia....” That slightly hoarse, breathless voice of hers—so pregnant somehow!

His happy gesture answered her. They were very pleased with each other.

“So I please you now, do I?” Lady Tarlyon gravely asked him.

She was so fair and straight and cleanly drawn; and there was gallantry in her poise and in the way she dared his eyes. Was this the sharp, antagonistic Virginia, this woman ...?

“I simply can’t tell you,” he said, from her stirrup, “how pleased I am to see you, Virginia. And it’s a heartfelt truth dragged out of me by my surprise at seeing you, by my pleasure at being nearly killed by you....”

“That’s all very well, my friend, but it’s up to me to say that kind of thing to you.” She swayed, and waved an intimidating gauntlet across his eyes. “I’ll say them too, but later. People talk about you here and there....”

He was beside her, beneath her. The horse and the lady, a warm picture. She swayed above him in her saddle, she was exquisite. And there was that clearness over her small face, that clear, dry sheen of chill air; and the taut lips, bitten dry by the winter air, hard riding.... The same Virginia, but how different! The same little white face, so white and firm-featured, so proudly set and lightly carried; the same tiny little flesh spot in the furrow of the chin—an inconsiderable little chin it was, you remember?—the same wide blue eyes, so lazy in look, so quick to retort, so light and dark, so kind and mocking, so hard and soft: a soldier’s eyes they were really, but a soldier of fortune. And “Swan and Edgar,” there they were! Ivor laughed to see them, he asked after their unruly health—those twin Virginian curls, tumbling down each cheek in golden-gay cascades from the wide-brimmed, so very rakish, black felt hat! And how it became her in her severe habit, that wide anarchist hat set gallantly about her golden hair!

This sudden meeting of the two former antagonists seemed to bring all the sweetness out of each. It was in their eyes as they smiled at each other in the January gloom of that little lane, with darkening Kare Park on their right, on their left the wintry rolling land of Berkshire, and all about them the pungent smell of sodden earth.

“Do you realise, Ivor, that we’re people of thirty now? Thirty, Ivor!”

“I’m glad enough for you,” he said. She understood. She charmed him by her quick little smile of understanding. He admired her frankly....

“I say, Virginia,” he said eagerly, “we must talk a good deal. I want to hear all about your life since we last spoke together at the Hallidays’ that night. I’ve seen you often in the distance since then, but we’ve somehow never come to grips, it’s just not happened. And whenever I go to the Mont Agel, M. Stutz always tells me that you were there the evening before or that you will not be there for a long time for you are abroad. M. Stutz worships you, Virginia, and quite right he is. But he never tells me anything about you—and now I’ve found you I want an official account of your life, for the rumours about you are so conflicting....” He seemed to plead; and he was really pleading for her to intrude upon his loneliness.

“You haven’t believed the nasty things, have you, Ivor?” she asked him very suddenly. Her eyes were very serious on him. Hard eyes they were, sometimes. Lady Tarlyon knew a lot.

“Oh, stuff!” he smiled at her. “Didn’t we make a pledge, Virginia, the very last time we met? We’ll be friends, we said. Those were our exact words. Well then!”

She pointed a finger dramatically down at him. “That pledge,” she said, “is going to be redeemed. See if it isn’t!”

“I always thought,” he mocked, “that a man and a woman didn’t meet in a lonely place for nothing.”

And then she thought to ask him how he came to be there anyway, in that little lane. He told her of his house by the bridge, and of the Misses Cloister-Smiths, remembering how in the old days Virginia had been amused by the oddities of names. And as she listened, her first gaiety at seeing him seemed somehow to leave her, she grew very quiet and silent, as though a cloud from the bleak sky had sombrely caressed her; and her eyes, so clear and merry but a moment before, wandered about the bleak countryside, beyond his shoulder. Virginia’s eyes were like sentinels, put there to beguile you while Virginia was far away, in some curious unknown place. Only once she swayed to a sudden step of her horse: she was quite immobile, a little sad. He watched her.

Then she told him what he had already guessed, that she and her husband were staying with Rupert Kare for a week or so. No one in the place, she remarked, had said a word about his living round above.

“I doubt if they know,” Ivor said. “I’m living a frightfully private life.”

“So you never go up there, then?” she wondered curiously. “Though I seem to remember your knowing Rupert quite well once upon a time.”

“Oh, yes!” But he might just as well have said, “Oh, no!” for all the real answer he gave. But he knew that Virginia was peculiarly able to understand people’s dislikes and distempers, and that she allowed for them; it used commonly to be her own feeling about a good many people. Yes, she understood.

“But it isn’t so easy for me—to outlaw myself like that,” she told him gravely. “For there I am, you see, still in it. Same men, same women, same places, same baubles. And only dress and dancing changes.... And so I insisted on escaping this afternoon for an hour or so.”

“You are very wise, Ivor,” she suddenly said, “to have left all that as suddenly as you did, so long ago. You annoyed us, but then you wanted to annoy us, and you were wise. And do you know, I’ve always said that you are very wise. Whenever your name is mentioned, whether it’s about a book or a woman, I always say I knew you once and that you are very wise. He knew us all once, I add, but now he is very wise and exclusive. He is indiscriminately exclusive, I say....”

“It’s only that I’m trying to work,” he earnestly explained, looking up at her. And she stared down at him, and under the shadow of her hat her mouth seemed twisted into a queer little smile which puzzled him.

It was darkening; and it was as she was about to leave him that he suddenly asked her:—

“I say, Virginia, do you remember being made to copy out in your first copy-book as a child that marvellous sentence: ‘When gentlefolk meet, compliments are exchanged’? Do you remember, Virginia?”

“That’s us to-day,” he explained.

Her eyes contracted just a little, quizzically. And with her head a little sideways, she examined him. She was curiously detached, this Virginia, yet curiously warm....

“Yes, but that’s not me, Ivor. It’s not my nature.” And it was as though she wanted to tell him an ulterior something; but there was no time, it was quickly darkening; the horse stamped eagerly, and she swung away with it. “I’m not like that at all, really, Ivor,” she said swiftly. “It’s you who draw it out of one ... maybe.”

“That’s your particular quality, Ivor,” she cried to him, a woman on a horse, going away. Strangely come, strangely gone! He stared after her through the hedge, a swaying figure through the darkening parkland. A shadow astride a horse ... so fair and gallant! She turned and waved a hand to him, she cried a word, but he didn’t hear it, it was a lost word. A sable wraith she was in the parkland, fading away into the dolorous crypt of winter. She was a symbol for something....

And Ivor thought: “O mystic and sombre Virginia....”

And he wondered if he would see her again. He wondered.... And he didn’t know. He knew nothing about this Virginia—whom he had thought he had judged so well! And as he strode homewards through the chill gloom he mocked the judgments of his early “twenties” a little viciously. “Christ, how they must have loathed me!” he thought.

CHAPTER III

Glamour! Now this glamour is a very remarkable thing, a strange and indefinable thing, and very rare: for it does not fall on women because they have many lovers, it does not fall on women because they are wonderfully constant to one lover, and it certainly does not fall on women who Do Things. Sometimes it happens on a courtesan, sometimes on a great lady; but this glamour is no snob, it cares nothing for the claims of fashion, for it may quite well happen on a dairymaid, so that a whole countryside grows aware of her and a whole country sorrows for her death. Philosophers have spun and metaphysicians toiled, yet this stuff of glamour still evades the mortal coils of definition. And whence it comes, no one can tell; nor why it comes—nor whither it goes! though poets do say that they can smell the faint, musty smell of tragedy in its destiny, and historians can never resist ascribing it to luckless men and women of high degree. And sometimes you may love a woman mightily, yet try as you will you cannot find glamour in her, you simply cannot; she is just a woman, yours to love but not to dream about. Yes, this glamour is a wayward thing, it just comes and touches a lovely woman in each generation, and because of it her youth is long remembered and her middle-age forgiven, if she live so long. It carries something fey with it, this glamour. It is a mysterious and uncommon thing. Poetry is written about it, and it is as wan as the poetry that is written about it....

2

Virginia’s marriage to the American in 1913 had turned out a sorry business. He was never known but as “the American”—but how unlike Henry James’s it only appeared later!—and it was only by an effort of memory that Ivor remembered his name had been Hector Sardon. He was dead. Ivor had never met him, but had heard of him as a small, very feverish man, and handsome of his kind, which was deep-eyed and sardonic; he was said to speak with charming and vivid gestures of the hands. It had been a love-match between him and Virginia, people said. Later, it was whispered that “the American” had turned bad. The fever of his deep-set eyes and nervous gestures was now explained. Cocaine. But all this leaked very gradually out, for Virginia was secret, she never confided. Virginia was always with him, they were silent companions, exquisite dancers together; other people might whirl round a ballroom—for exercise?—but Virginia and “the American” danced slowly, softly, in exquisite certainty of movement. In life they might fumble, but not in dancing.... And then, in the awful winter of 1915, Hector Sardon died suddenly.

He died so suddenly that there had to be an inquest; and the question of drugs was for some time uppermost in the minds of the public, the press, and the coroner—so intimate did they become with it, indeed, that it was never called but by its christian name of “dope.” The coroner, Mr. Odleby Ingle, was inclined to be critical, though of course always just. The press was also critical. And in warlike minds the question of “drugs” was found to be inseparable from the question of “aliens.” It was suggested that this kind of thing was un-English; and the “Huns” got somehow mixed up with the death by cocaine of an American gentleman. The Daily Mail, in quest of honour, Mr. Asquith’s head, two-million circulation and as yet uninterned Germans, jousted once again with The Hidden Hand of the Hun. Fierce gentlemen in Parliament were moved to denunciation of England’s levity in its treatment of “aliens”; and Mr. Pemberton Billing got the whole thing frightfully mixed up with the inadequacy of London’s Air Defences.... The war-fever was at its highest in 1915. The only person who kept his head, besides the soldiers who were too busy fighting, was Mr. Bernard Shaw: which was why every one wanted to punch it for him. It was generally conceded that England was altogether too kind to aliens. (Before the war only foreigners without money were called “aliens”; during the war all foreigners were called aliens. Bella, horrida bella!) It was suggested that the march of civilisation had taken us past the point when gentlemen need be gentlemen in war-time. “Remember we are at war!” you could say, and at once forget everything else. Only the police exempted themselves from this remembering business in their treatment of aliens; for the English police are the most courtly and the most incorruptible police in the world—which was why every one said they were inefficient about the “alien menace.” Soldiers laughed, but among civilians the alien-fever ran brave and high, and ever braver and higher. “We cannot fight in Flanders, but we will do our duty here!” cried fierce, and otherwise quite pleasant, old gentlemen in clubs and trains.

The French civilian, imagined by the English civilian to be so excitable, managed these things differently; the French civilian, in fact, did not manage them at all; the French civilian said “Nous sommes trahis!” at least once every day, and then, carelessly leaving the “alien menace” to the police, set about the bloodshot business of life in war-time. But the English civilian was made of sterner stuff; and while young men were dying in the sky and on the land, on the sea and under the sea, old men waxed worthy of the sons and nephews they had “given” to England. “We are all pacifists at heart,” they said grimly, “but war is the test of manhood.”

(It has become the fashion to slang old men in general. It is not a bad fashion. Superior people despise all fashions; they smile. But it is a pity that superior women despise all fashions.)

The inquest on Hector Sardon, conducted though it was with every tact and discretion by Mr. Odleby Ingle, gave the alien agitation yet another impetus. All this “dope” mess was due to aliens, it was said. No Englishman took dope, unless he was lured to it by an alien’s fiendish charm. (The fiendish charm of aliens in war-time, male and female, is of course notorious. Ladies of title were supposed to fall to it every day, and policemen had to harden their hearts like anything. Every one had to harden his or her heart.) Nor did our allies take “dope.” Neither France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Serbia, Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia, Japan, Montenegro, Siam, nor the Hedjaz—only neutrals and “alien enemies.” And it was suspected (shrewdly) that an American citizen would not so readily have died of “dope” if America had been fighting with us; the death by cocaine of Hector Sardon was considered to serve President Wilson jolly well right for being “too proud to fight.”

The inquest was, of course, a very sad business for Virginia. Many people carried away from the inquest an “indelible” picture of a hard, white face with tired, defensive eyes; and the illustrated papers had to pay through the nose for her likenesses from the photographers who had always made Virginia’s life a burden by clamours for a “sitting.” The traffic in “dope” was noticeably on the overworked police’s nerves that year; and common-or-garden policemen were discovering an acute nose for opium—“It makes you sick, the first pipe,” said people who had friends who knew—all the way from Dover Street to Chinatown. (Poor little Chinatown! what a boon thou hast been to Mr. Burke, and what little profit hast thou had from him!) The dead American, that quiet and feverish gentleman of the nervous gestures, was made the scapegoat of the public’s interest and the press’s violence. An overdose of cocaine was found to be the direct cause of Hector Sardon’s death. And the just but severe inquisition of Mr. Odleby Ingle, “in probing this matter to its very core,” unearthed some nasty details about Hector Sardon’s even more private life. It was a bad look-out for certain gentlemen of his acquaintance, it seemed. People began to read Petronius. It was only too evident that Hector Sardon had gone the limit in more ways than one; and Mr. Bottomley was furious about it, crying: “What shall be done with these Pests? Shall England never be clean?” A nasty business! Virginia suffered her ordeal intelligently, but in cold contempt. What had she to do with this? There was no one but sympathised with her, and even Mr. Odleby Ingle was noticeably considerate, though just, towards innocence in so sorry a plight. Every one sympathised with Virginia; it was an awful shame for her, they said. And yet, somehow, there was in their voices a suggestion, ever so faint, that it was rather the kind of thing which just might happen to Virginia rather than to any other woman....

3

“The American” had left her all his money, and Virginia was thus a very rich woman, for her mother, a Colter from Yorkshire, had already left her a considerable income. (Lady Carnal had adored her only child. As Virginia, before her first marriage, would come in late from a party, her mother would dart out at her from her bedroom and peck at her. Virginia hated being pecked at, especially at that time of night, and her face was a mask. “Pouf! you’ve been drinking!” would cry Lady Carnal in desperation, and dart back into her bedroom again.) A year after the American’s death Virginia married George Tarlyon—George Almeric St. George, sixth Viscount Tarlyon. It was commonly admitted that you couldn’t do better than marry George Tarlyon, for he was the perfect thing of his kind. The war lost him nothing, had gained him everything in an extraordinary degree—Major the Viscount Tarlyon, D.S.O., M.C., etc. Foreign countries contributed magnificently to the et ceteras, while Virginia contributed herself and her fortune; for George Tarlyon, at thirty-four, had spent everything he had ever had, except his place in Galway, which was as unsaleable as it was uninhabitable—by him, anyway. It was said to be a love-match. They had been seen together now and then during Hector Sardon’s last year, and after his death they were always together. Natural enough that she should try to forget that unpleasantness in such gay and gallant and clean companionship. But their marriage had not been thought quite inevitable, for nothing was quite inevitable in dealing with people like Virginia and George Almeric St. George—especially George Almeric St. George. Virginia, for all her wits and beauty, might not hold Lord Tarlyon, poor though he was. It was commonly said, and easily believed, that many women had loved him.

They were married in 1916. And there they were, Lord and Lady Tarlyon, a notable couple everywhere. The only thing George Tarlyon had ever lacked was money, and now he had as much as he wanted, for Virginia was indifferent about money, she was generous. They spent magnificently during his “leaves.” And their lives were open for the world to see, a straight pair of English people: a gallant pair of the same colour, the same quality, and the same hazardous blue eyes. Tarlyon’s eyes were of a slightly frozen blue, a little mocking, very charming. He was an extraordinarily fair man: weathered brick-dust face generally smiling, just a little: an easy man to get on with, a very easy man. A remarkably amusing man, Tarlyon. It was said that he and Virginia were very good companions for each other.

And pleasant it was to see them together, fair to fair, height to height, English to English, most perfectly and elegantly paired. A charming sight for foreigners to see, walking together of a morning from their house in Belgrave Square: George Tarlyon in the long gray coat of the Brigade, that extravagant, high-waisted, red-lined gray coat, tall and straight and with a swing in his walk: and Virginia, his lady, enwrapped in furs—not, like so many women, smothered in them, for Virginia was always mistress of what she wore—or better still, on an autumn morning, in a high-collared black coat lined with green, which very gallantly became her tall, slim person and imperious head. They looked what they were, perfectly, people of degree—and how rare that is nowadays, people said.

Yet Virginia did not lose her glamour, nor did her glamour lose that queer rot; it was always there, about her, something musty in something fine. Her father’s friends wondered a little about it. She had always something in reserve, a vague something, and people took vague licence with that vague something. That is a way people have. Virginia seemed not to be quite of the society which she graced so brilliantly; she seemed to despise it, she passed people swiftly. A queer provocative indifference there was about her.... Take a drawing-room full of people at any hour of night, and watch Virginia there, an ornament in the most brilliant company. Watch now! Watch the pretty lady, the lovely, the remote, the queerly ungracious Virginia! Suddenly, swiftly, silently, she leaves the room. She waits for no man. She leaves the house. Just like that, she leaves it. Maybe this departure offends—Virginia doesn’t care! And if she cares, she will be forgiven. Now, whither does this swift and secret passage take her? Sometimes to her house in Belgrave Square, a mausoleum of a house which Virginia bitterly hates: sometimes to meet some one in some place: more often to the Mont Agel.

She would enter the Mont Agel at any hour of night by the hotel entrance, having rung the bell; and she would sit in the deserted and shuttered restaurant, in the light of a candle stuck in its own grease on a saucer—it was war-time then, you understand. There she would sit, with the polite and amiable M. Stutz hovering about, for that urbane gentleman never went to bed, never. Sometimes M. Stutz would be encouraged to sit at the table and discuss a glass of Vichy Water with Lady Tarlyon, for she seldom drank anything but Vichy Water, which just shows how little mothers know about their daughters. But more often he would leave her alone, guessing that it was for solitude she had come hither, this lady of high fashion in all her finery: not hard, nor brazen, but queerly childish and infinitely remote.

She would write letters, sitting there, and every now and then she would sip her Vichy Water. Half a glass of Vichy Water would last Virginia a long time; but cigarettes would fade before her contemplation, a box of ten cigarettes would fade away. Her doctor would have something to say about that soon. She never wrote her letters but in pencil, a scrawling hand. And she would write, maybe, to Mr. Kerrison, in his semi-demi-quasi-social part of Hampstead, telling him in an ironic way of what she had done that night, and of the people she had seen; she would comment on the people she had seen and talked to that evening, ironically. It wasn’t that she liked Mr. Kerrison, in fact she thought of him as a very absurd man indeed, but she had somehow got into this habit of writing letters to him in a particular spirit; and when people protested about Mr. Kerrison, or any other of her friends, saying that some of them were really too awful, she would give her slight, hoarse little laugh, and answer that they were quite inevitable in her life, quite inevitable; and, having said that, she would laugh a little again, and the subject of Mr. Kerrison or any one else would be closed for the time being.... Or she would write letters to a young artist whose work, person, or “mentality” (oh, useful word!) had made some call on her sympathy. Her letters from the Mont Agel, addressed in that pencilled scrawl, would suddenly drop on studios in all parts of London, sometimes on very poor studios indeed, asking them what they were doing and if they were working well these days, and if they would care to come to luncheon with her one day, and naming a day for that luncheon, either at the Mont Agel, the Café Royal, or Belgrave Square. And sometimes, if it was a very poor little artist she was writing to, there would be a cheque tucked away in the letter. But no poor little artist ever received a cheque twice who was tactless enough to thank her, no matter how elegantly.

And then, in the early hours of the morning, she would leave the Mont Agel. Swiftly she would penetrate the black solitudes of Soho in war-time: a rich and fragile figure braving all the dangers of the city by night, an almost fearful figure to arise suddenly in an honest man’s homeward path: so tall and golden and proud of carriage, so marvellously indifferent to his astonished stare! Sometimes she would have to walk a long way before she could find a taxi—through Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue, and up that to Piccadilly Circus. Sometimes men would murmur in passing, sometimes they would say the coarsest things, and once or twice a man caught at her arm as she swiftly passed him; and Virginia looked at him straightly, for a swift second, as though secretly understanding his desire and mocking it; and then she went on her way as though her way had been uninterrupted ... homewards to Belgrave Square.

Virginia often capped the most conventional evenings with this swift and solitary vagabondage of the early hours, homewards from the Mont Agel.

4

“Virginia has a mind like a cathedral,” said her father, gay Lord Carnal of the Gardenia.

“Of course every cathedral has its gargoyles,” added my Lord Carnal wistfully.

Lord Carnal was the ninth baron. It will be remembered by students of Court history that the first Lord Carnal[D] was so created by the exceeding love of that charming Stuart king who, however, later again lost his head about his Grace of Buckingham—the more justly, Puritans have said, to be deprived of it by Oliver Cromwell. Since when the Carnals have come to be known for many things, not the least among which is their quality of sociability and their talent for longevity. “No Carnal ever dies—but, my God, how well they live!” some one is reported to have said sometime. And of the baron of the day, whose portrait by Gainsborough is one of the treasures of Carnal Towers in Hampshire, Lord George Hell found breath to exclaim: “There’s no fight but a Carnal’s in it, no bed but a Carnal’s on it, no table but a Carnal’s under it—no Carnal has ever been seen alone, sir!”

The ninth baron, who never said a careless thing and never condemned a correct one, looked not at all likely to break the record of the previous eight’s longevity. There was only one day in the year when Lord Carnal did not wear a gardenia, and that was on Alexandra Rose Day, when he wore a carnation.

That and Virginia are the only remarkable things the ninth baron ever did.

CHAPTER IV

Her hat, that so black and anarchichal hat, made a loose black stain on the polished table; and her golden-tawny hair shone bright between the firelight and the lamp. Lithe and long and slack this Virginia looked, deliciously at rest in the deep expanse of her chair. And her bright, yellow silk jumper coloured the room with a sudden luxury and meaning. Fantasy has come into the room, thought Ivor.

“I’m finding,” he told her, “that this room is not the complete room I had thought. I have liked the decoration of this room until this moment——”

“Thank you!” said Virginia.

“—— but now I see that the decoration it really needs, Virginia, is that yellow silk jumper—how nice it would be if you left it behind with me, so that I could hang it up on the wall! and every time I saw it I would think: ‘Virginia came to see me once!’”

Her face was laid sideways against her palm, and her eyes smiled faintly into the fire; and she held up a very little foot to the fire.

“I walked three miles on a winter day,” she said, “to hear you talk. That was my great idea for to-day, Ivor. I myself have not been doing very much talking of late—and, you know, I’m very tired of being with people whose main purpose in conversation is to massacre syntax and evade sense.”

“But it’s not quite fair to come to talk to a man who has been alone for weeks! Maybe you will be washed away in the raw stuff—and there will be headlines in the papers: Disappearance of famous beauty—thought to have been washed away in the froth of a hermit’s sudden speech.’ ...”

But she was silent, provoking him. She was yielding up her interest in him to him, to do as he liked with—on a January afternoon! And in the nervous stress of that moment he jumped up from his chair and stood by the fire, and bent to it to light a spill for his cigarette; and he stared into it, his face sideways to her.

Virginia watched him curiously.

“You told me yesterday that you were working, Ivor. Now I would like to hear about that—may I? Are you writing a new novel?”

He stood above her on the hearth, she sprawled lazily in the chair beneath him.

“I’m not writing anything, Virginia—I’m trying to learn how to play a game. It’s called a ‘game’ anyway—that one which it used to be the fashion for you and me and all cleverish young people to despise—the game of trying to understand the country we live in so that we might help in the working of it. It sounds a pompous business, and so we despised it.”

“Oh!” And Virginia made a little face, as though a little puzzled and a little bored. “Do you seriously mean to tell me that you are going to stand on that hearth and talk politics to me? Oh, Ivor, must you do that!” She put such pathos into her words that they laughed together.

“Yes, Ivor?” she asked gently.

“But I’m very serious about it, Virginia, so it’s no good your saying, “Yes, Ivor” at me as though I needed humouring. I’ve got a frightfully English feeling about me these days,” he explained, “and I can’t bear to think of the way we’ve all slacked—all we young and youngish people. Just utterly slacked!”

“But what about losing lives and legs and arms?” she put to him. “How did you manage to do all that and slack as well?”

“People are getting fat on that remark,” he told her darkly, “and are going to get still fatter—until one day something pricks them and then they’ll be all thin and miserable. I beg you not to play the fool with your lovely slim figure, Virginia. But I’m sure you said that as a way of sympathising about my arm, which is nice of you, but not an argument....”

“I’m not arguing,” Virginia said. “I’m being treated like a public institution. Very queenly I feel....”

He wanted her to understand.

“But you do know, don’t you, that it’s as easy to fight for a country as for a woman, particularly if they are yours? And that it’s much easier to fight for a country or a woman than to understand either—or even want to, for the matter of that! Why, Virginia, they said the war was going to teach us things, they’ve actually got the cheek to say now that the war has taught us things, fine things. Well, I’m damned if I see what the war has taught us except that it’s pretty easy for every sort of man to die—and now the peace is mobilising to teach us that it’s jolly difficult for every sort of man to live. That’s a platitude, of course, but that doesn’t make it less true.” He seemed to be angry about it.

Virginia nodded. It wasn’t difficult for her to live, if having money is living, but she understood. This was fairly good sense, anyway, for politics. Virginia had always thought that politics were only interesting from a bad-tempered point of view.

“That’s what I meant,” he went on, “when I said all the youngish people are slacking. They are taking no hand in the work of the country, they are doing nothing about it and thinking nothing about it. At least our fathers tried to use what energy and intelligence they had left over from riding horses and talking about them; they tried to do something as a matter of course, even if they had to sandwich that something between a salmon and a grouse, and a pretty fine mess they made of it—but we don’t even make a mess, we sit and watch other people making a mess for us.”

The light of argument peeped faintly out of Virginia’s eyes.

“You don’t seem to realise,” she said, “that England expects every young man not to get in the way of other people doing their duty. So our young men have simply had to stand aside—or go into the Foreign Office, which is the same thing—for it’s been so dunned into them that they’re no use for anything that now they jolly well aren’t. You can’t tell the public-schools for years and years that they produce nothing but fatheads and then expect them to turn out geniuses....”

“It’s been made very difficult for us not to slack,” she said.

Ivor made an impatient gesture. He had heard that before.

“It’s got something to do with the will to enjoy,” she went on. “I heard some one say that....”

“And we did enjoy, too,” she added oddly, “just before the war and during the war—we and our lovely dead and dying men!”

And that is about the last word Virginia said. For Ivor talked—tremendously. Talk was seething darkly within him, and it had to come out—and this woman had asked for it! And so out came the “Ivory” intolerances and prejudices which Magdalen had used to tease and Rodney West to encourage, thinking that no man was good for anything if he wasn’t fierce about something. Here, in this animus of Ivor’s against the “young men of opportunity,” in that they strove to be so little worthy of it, spoke the Aunt Moira in him: “Whatever you do, you must do Something! For Heaven’s sake, Ivor, don’t be slack, don’t be shoddy, don’t be sodden! You must think Something, do Something!” That Aunt Moira who, ever mightily contradicting herself, had so efficiently helped that fine gentleman of promise, her younger brother, to do nothing at all, nothing but love....

And Ivor made a joke. The occasion, Virginia suggested, called for a little imagination on his part, so he had better imagine something. So Ivor imagined a revolution for her—oh, a very imaginary revolution! There was blood, of course. He told her how one day, with a crash and a bang and a mighty cry, the people of England rose in one body and hurled themselves at Whitehall. Of course there was a reason for this, as they tried to explain to Whitehall. They had come from factories and mills and mines and all the other places that rebels come from, all with the one mighty cry, “We’ll larn ’em to be gentlemen!” For this revolution was one of the people at last utterly sick of government by feeble gentlemen. A young man from Owens College headed the revolution, but he died soon after. And at that time the charming but sinister M. Caillaux was President of France....

“We are the New Gentlemen,” the rebels cried. Men of the lower sort had everywhere raised their heads, and behold! they had seen England as one vast knighthood, but what knights were those! Whereupon men made a great cry that the land of England was being sloppily governed and that something must be done about it. And of course there was no lack of agitators to point out, with plausible arguments, that the war had helped the British Lion to find out the British Ass—which last, the agitators insisted, was an immaculate man, hitherto known as a gentleman, with red tabs and gold braid about him, a long tradition behind him, and a bloody fine mess all round him. “It is up to you,” the agitators cried, “to put the lid on all that.” Which thing was done, so that traditions were instantly withered into offal, the mad dream of Master Jack Cade came true at last, and the hapless middle-class had more reason than ever to wail, “What shall we do with our sons?” for no one cared what they did with them so long as they made them work. And Chivalry, most shy and most beautiful of all the birds that grace the aviary of human virtues, was found at last with broken wings in the gutters of Fleet Street, was tenderly nursed back to life and on a memorable holy-day was released from Hyde Park Corner—a lovely thing to entrance the eye and stir the heart of Britain, from Cornwall to Aberdeen and even farther. The king was escorted in exceeding splendid state to Windsor, the route thither being lined by such a vast concourse of cheering people as had never before been seen gathered together but at a football match. And there was instantly begun the building of a National Opera House, in which Sir Thomas Beecham could conduct for evermore without breaking his heart or his purse. And there was organised a massacre of maîtres d’hôtel, who have gone so far in making English youth obsequious. Many of the old order were tried for their lives before an extraordinary tribunal especially got together to try people for their lives on the capital charge of whether they had or had not been gentlemen: of course there was the usual controversy as to the exact definition of a gentleman, and many suggestions were put forward, among which that “a gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude to any one,” was accorded the most favour; but in the end Mr. Bernard Shaw’s definition was unanimously adopted, as being both brief and practical, that “a gentleman is a man who puts more into life than he takes out.” Good old Shaw, people cried. Mr. Churchill and some few others were finally acquitted on their disarming plea, that they belonged to a different age from this, a feudal age, and were therefore not responsible for their actions in this; it was further pleaded on behalf of Mr. Churchill that he had been educated without heed to cost, in that England had spent more than a hundred million sterling in giving him a thorough working knowledge of geography alone, particularly as regards Gallipoli, Antwerp, Mesopotamia, and Russia; and that England could not afford to waste, but must rather reserve for the highest office, one to whom she had given the most expensive public-school education obtainable. But there were many who did not discover so much ingenuity, and were never heard of again. While there were some who proved their worth by banding themselves together with warlike cries, to the effect that though they might not have put more into life than they had taken out, they had taken out of their banks a good deal more than they had put in, and so did not mind dying. And these straightway entrenched themselves within Devonshire House and the Ritz, the last a very stout and solid building in the manner of the old Bastille, originally conceived, no doubt, with a fearful eye on class-prejudice. Devonshire House was stormed through a breach on the Stratton Street side, and many were killed but none taken, but the siege of the Ritz was long and bloody, as of course it would be. Both sides were fertile in invention, and Piccadilly was a shambles from Bond Street to Clarges Street; but both in bravery and invention the besieged had something of the advantage, for they were led by the men of White’s, the most gallant of all those who asserted their right to be gentlemen when and how they pleased: and were, moreover, greatly assisted by their exact knowledge of every corner of the building, which was of course known to the New Gentlemen only from passing buses or from the Green Park on Sunday afternoons. But one night Wimborne House, which lies behind the Ritz and was valiantly held by my lord Viscount Wimborne and his men, all veterans of his Irish vice-royalty, was betrayed by a Hebrew gentleman lately black-balled from the Royal Automobile Club: the New Gentlemen poured through the breach, and the defenders of the old order were slain to the last man—and he a gay and handsome man of stuttering speech and many parlour-tricks, now at last dying formidably on the steps of the foyer with a great laugh and a cry, “For King and Cocktail!” And when again the old order raised its head it was only to be finally crushed at the rout of Kensington, where the flower of Oxford and Cambridge, marching to the relief of London, was surprised and overthrown while awaiting the issue of a dog-fight at the corner of Church Street....

“At what time will you dine, sir?” Turner asked patiently from the door.

“Lord, it’s half-past eight!” Virginia cried.

“Do you think,” she asked shyly, “that I could share your homely kipper! ‘Now I’m here’ sort of thing, you know....”

“Turner,” cried Ivor to the man at the door, “you heard that? What are you going to do about it?... You see,” he explained, when Turner had gone out, “you are my first guest in this house.”

“Well, you are an odd man, I do think!” Virginia suddenly attacked him. “Do you mean to say that you aren’t in the least curious to know what my host, friends, and husband will think at my not turning up to dinner?”

“But, Virginia, they wouldn’t be your host, friends, and husband if they were very surprised at a little thing like that, would they? Of course we can send a message,” he added. “I’ve got a kind of car somewhere about the house. It’s an American car——”

“Oh, no! To send a man three miles to say I’m not turning up for a dinner which they’ll have eaten by then—oh, no! They’ll just think I’m lost, that’s all.”

“And so I am!” she added, with a sudden smile.

She touched her hair, she jumped up and looked into the mirror, and she made a face at what she saw.

“If you will show me to your bedroom, Ivor,” she turned to him to say, “I will somehow or other put the fear of God into ‘Swan and Edgar’....”

3

It was after eleven when they heard the rustle of a car on the little gravel drive. The rustle stopped.

Ivor grandly waved a hand towards the curtained windows: “Here come the messengers of Kare and Tarlyon to demand a very fair lady.”

Virginia, again in the depths of her chair after dinner, looked mildly surprised; but just a little more than mildly when her husband came in almost on top of Turner. George Tarlyon stood grinning at Virginia from the doorway, and at Ivor. And Ivor couldn’t help smiling back at the “clever fellow” expression on the handsome face.

“Here we are, you see!” Tarlyon cried; and the grin was all over his face, a gay, mocking grin.

“Well, I’m very pleased,” Ivor met him in the middle of the room. They were of a height, dark and fair, but Tarlyon was much the stronger set of the two. His extraordinarily fair hair was crisply curly from his wide, reddish forehead; he looked clean and scrubbed and weathered—always as though the salt of the sea had just whipped his face. And so gay, with that attractive smile that never left the slightly frozen blue eyes....

Virginia vaguely introduced the two men. And she examined her husband, rather severely.

“This is very odd, I do think,” she said.

Lord Tarlyon turned very frankly to Ivor, appealing to him:—

“I say, you know, I’m awfully sorry to have rushed in on you like this. But, don’t you see——”

“Will you have a drink?” asked Ivor.

“Certainly. Used to hear about you, you know, from a man in my mess called Transome. Thought no end of you, he did. I was sorry he went....” He turned to Virginia, still appealing: “What I mean to say is, my dear, that I knew you’d be grateful for a lift home in the car, so I brought the blessed thing along....” He took the glass from Ivor. “Damned good husband I am, I do think,” he teased Virginia. Splendid he was, standing there by the table between the two, simply glowing with the pleasure of the moment, laughing at them, teasing Virginia with that sideways little grin under his fair, clipped moustache. He mocked Virginia. He toasted Virginia....

“Yes, but how did you find out I was here?” Virginia asked. “For I left no word as to where I would be, and my footprints are too small to be visible to the human eye....”

“Easy, my dear, dead easy! On your not turning up for dinner, with every excuse, I must say”—he bowed to Ivor—“Kare put inquiries through the butler to the servants’ hall to find out whether anything had been heard of any dark, handsome strangers of superior mentality in the neighbourhood. On the name Marlay being mentioned we all naturally stood to attention at once. That’s our man, we cried with one voice. Anyway, I cried and they echoed. And so here I am! Easy, Virginia, dead easy!”

“But it won’t be so easy to get home,” Virginia remarked, “if you have another drink....”

George Tarlyon leaned against the edge of the table: enjoying himself immensely, it seemed. So gay, so slack.... Ivor was immensely amused by him; anyway, he thought he was. He gave him another drink.

But Virginia looked tired, staring into the bright fire. She seemed suddenly to have lost all interest in the two men in the room.

“I say, I liked that book of yours,” Tarlyon said comfortably to Ivor. He stretched his legs out a little, towards the fire. “You know, that one called—something about a courtesan....”

“The Legend of the Last Courtesan,” Virginia said into the fire.

“That’s it, Virginia! Splendid book, I thought. I don’t have time to read as a rule, but I finished that—Virginia saying she knew you once, you know, and that you were clever.... Just the kind of book I’d like to write myself if I wasn’t a half-wit....”

“Which half?” asked Virginia softly. “So that I’ll know....”

“There you are, Marlay!” Tarlyon cried; and he laughed with his head thrown back and his eyes wrinkled up. “Virginia thinks I’m a most consummate ass, but when I do try talking the clever stuff for which I’ve a natural aptitude she quickly puts the lid on me.... But, seriously, Marlay, I did like that book of yours. You got the eighteenth century uncommonly well, I thought. And I think that word ‘courtesan’ is a considerate word—what I mean is that it was very decent of you to trouble to write a long word like ‘courtesan’ time over again, when you could have used a couple of short but septic ones just as well. Virginia, are you with me in this?... She yawns at me! Marlay, my wife yawns at me! All women yawn at the men they love—did Oscar Wilde say that, Marlay, or have I said a marvellous thing?”

“A marvellous thing, I think,” Ivor just managed to say. “Wilde said something like ‘All men kill the thing they love....’”

“Oh, that’s just a quibble—they come to the same thing. The man loves, the woman yawns, and then the man kills her! So I have said a marvellous thing after all! Are you listening, Virginia?”

Virginia looked very tired indeed. She smiled at him sleepily. George always made her smile in the end.

“I feel myself getting more brilliant every moment,” Tarlyon said comfortably. “It’s this room, Marlay, that’s having a witty effect on me, I think. And I also think it’s pretty clever of you to have a quiet little house like this, where you can receive the lovely ladies who get bored with our conversation at Rupert Kare’s....”

“But their husbands can come too,” Ivor pointed out, “if they behave themselves.”

“Oh, I say!” Tarlyon stared, and laughed.

Virginia suddenly jumped up. In desperation, it seemed. And with a gesture the black anarchical hat crowned her head, her coat was to hand, and she was ready to go; and she was gone. Tarlyon followed reluctantly.

As he started off the car, she said to Ivor, in the front doorway: “We’ve had a lovely talk, Ivor—I’ve loved my evening with you. I’ll try to come again, only we are due off to the South any day——”

“Come on, Virginia!” came Tarlyon’s voice from the glistening shape of the car—charming young Charles Rolls’s legacy to England.

“Good-night, Ivor,” she said, and went swiftly.

“Good-night, Marlay, good-night,” came the gay waving voice of George Tarlyon, as the car curved softly round the drive and away to the London road. Ivor heard his laugh in the distance. An amusing man. Those two, out there....