The children

On the afternoon of the fourth day Boyne stood again in the sitting-room of the châlet facing the Cristallo group.

He had wired to Judith Wheater: “All right, don’t worry”; but to Mrs. Sellars he had made no sign. He knew she did not wholly approve of his journey, though she had made no unfavourable comment, and had even offered of her own accord to keep an eye on the Pension Rosenglüh in his absence. It was not necessary for Rose Sellars to formulate objections; they were latent everywhere in her delicate person, in the movements of her slim apprehensive fingers, the guarded stir of her lashes. But the sense of their lurking there, vigilant guardians of the threshold, gave a peculiar quality to every token of her approval. Boyne told himself that she was not a denier, but that rarer being, a chooser; and he was almost certain where her choice would lie when all the facts were before her.

She was out when he reached the châlet, and his conviction strengthened as he sat awaiting her. It drew its strength from the very atmosphere of the place—its self-sufficing harmony. “Willkommen, suesser Daemmerschein!” His apostrophe took in the mighty landscape which overhung him; the sense of peace flowed in on him from those great fastnesses of sun and solitude, with which the little low-ceilinged room, its books and flowers, the bit of needle-work in the armchair, the half-written letter on the desk, had the humble kinship of quietness and continuity. “I’d forgotten that anything had any meaning,” he thought to himself as he let the spell of the place weave its noiseless net about him.

“Martin—but how tired you look!” She was on the threshold, their hands and lips together. He remembered that kiss afterward.... She lingered close, her arms on his shoulders. “I didn’t even know you’d got back.” There was the faintest shadow of reproach in her tone.

“I didn’t know till the last minute when I could get away—I just jumped into the first train,” he explained. He was conscious of the weariness in his voice. He passed his hand over his eyes as though to see if it would brush away her image, or if there were still women like her in the world, all made of light and reason. “Dear!” he said, more to himself than her.

“You’ve failed?” Her eyes were full of an unmixed sympathy; there was nothing in them to remind him that they had foreseen his failure.

“No,” he exclaimed, “I’ve succeeded!”

“Oh—.” He fancied he detected a hint of flatness in the rejoinder; there are occasions, he knew, when one has to resign oneself to the hearing of good news. But no; he was unfair. It was not that, it was only the echo of his own fatigue. For, as she said, he was tired—thoroughly tired....

She continued, with a faint smile: “You don’t look like somebody who has succeeded.”

“I daresay not. I feel rather like one of the fellows they let down into a disused well, and haul up half-asphyxiated....”

“It was—asphyxiating?”

“Some of it; most of it. But I’m coming to. And I’ve got what I wanted.” He returned her smile, and sat down beside her.

“How wonderful! You mean to say you’ve reconciled the Wheaters?”

“I’ve reconciled them to the idea of not separating the children—for the present, at any rate.”

“Oh, Martin—splendid!” She was really warming to the subject now. Her face glowed with a delicate appreciation. “It will do Terry more good than all the Alps and Dolomites piled on top of one another.”

“Yes; and Judith too, incidentally.” He had no intention of not including Judith in his victory.

“Of course; but Judith’s a young lady who is eminently capable of fighting her own battles,” Mrs. Sellars smoothly rejoined.

“She ought to be—she’s had to fight everybody else’s.”

He leaned his head against the back of his armchair, and wondered what had become of the glow with which he had entered the room. It had vanished instantly under the cool touch of Mrs. Sellars’s allusion to Judith. He had succeeded, it was true: there could be no doubt that he had succeeded. The mere fact of gaining time was nine tenths of the battle; and that he had already achieved. But already, too, he was beginning to wonder how he was to fit Rose Sellars into the picture of his success. It was curious: when they were apart it was always her courage and her ardour that he felt; as soon as they came together again she seemed hemmed in by little restrictions and inhibitions.

“Do tell me just what happened,” she said.

“Well—at the very last minute they decided to make me, informally, into the children’s guardian: a sort of trial-guardian, you might call it.”

“A trial-guardian?” Her intonation, and the laugh that followed it, lifted the term into the region of the absurd. “What a jolly thing to be a trial-guardian!”

“Well, I’m not so sure.” Boyne faced her irritably. “It’s not a joke, you know.”

“I shan’t know what it is till you explain.”

Explain—explain! Yes; he knew now that the explaining was just what he was dodging away from. To Judith and Terry no explanations would be necessary. He would only have to say: “It’s all right,” and be smothered in hugs and jubilations. Those two would never think of asking for reasons—life had not accustomed them to expect any. But here sat lovely Logic, her long hands clasped attentively—

“Oh, by Jove!” Boyne exclaimed, clapping his own hands first on one pocket, then on another. “Here’s something I got for you in Venice.”

He drew forth a small parcel, stringless and shapeless, as parcels generally seemed to be when they emerged from his pockets, unwrapped the paper, and pressed the catch of a morocco box. The lid flew open, and revealed a curious crystal pendant in a network of worn enamel.

“Oh, the lovely thing! For me?”

“Oh, no; not that,” he stammered. He jerked the trinket back, wrapped the box up, and pushed it into his pocket with the exasperated sense of blushing like a boy over his blunder.

“But, Martin—”

“Here—.” He delved deeper, pulled out another parcel, in wrappings equally untidy, and took up one of the long hands lying on her knee. “This is for you.” He slipped on her fourth finger a sapphire set in diamonds. She lowered her lids on it in gentle admiration. “It’s much too beautiful,” her lips protested. Then her mockery sparkled up at him. “Only, you’ve put it on the wrong hand—at least, if it’s meant for our engagement.”

“Looks as if it were, doesn’t it?” he bantered back; but inwardly he was thinking: “Yes, that’s just the trouble—it looks like the engagement ring any other fellow would have given to any other woman. Nothing in the world to do with her and me.” Aloud he said: “I hadn’t time to find what I wanted—” and then realised that this was hardly a way of bettering his case. “I wanted something so awfully different for you,” he blundered on.

“Well, your wanting that makes it different—to me,” she said; and added, more tepidly: “Besides, it’s lovely.” She held out her left hand, and he slipped the jewel on the proper finger. “It’s rotten,” he grumbled. The ring had cost him more than he could afford, it had failed to please her, he saw himself that it was utterly commonplace—and saw also that she would never forgive him for pocketing the trinket he had first produced, which was nothing in itself, but had struck her fancy as soon as she knew it was not meant for her. Should he pull it out again, and ask her to accept it? No; after what had passed that was impossible. Judith Wheater, if he had been trying an engagement ring on her finger (preposterous fancy!) would have blurted out at once that she preferred the trinket he had shoved back into his pocket. But such tactlessness was unthinkable in Mrs. Sellars. Not for the world, he knew, would she have let him guess that she had given the other ornament a thought.

She sat turning her hand from side to side and diligently admiring the ring. “And now—do tell me just what happened.”

“Well—first, of course, a lot of talk.”

He settled himself in his chair, and tried to take up the narrative. But wherever he grasped it, the awkward thing seemed to tumble out of his hold, as if, in that respect too, he were always taking the wrong parcel out of his pocket. To begin with, it was so difficult to explain to Mrs. Sellars that, after the Wheaters had been reassured as to the safety and wellbeing of the children, the negotiations had been carried on piecemeal, desultorily, parenthetically, between swims and sun-baths, cocktails and foxtrots, poker and baccara—and, as a rule, in the presence of all the conflicting interests.

To make Mrs. Sellars understand that Lady Wrench, her husband and Gerald Ormerod had assisted at the debates as a matter of course was in itself a laborious business; to convey to her that Mrs. Lullmer—still notorious as the former Mrs. Westway—had likewise been called upon to participate, as Joyce’s possible successor, was to place too heavy a strain on her imagination. Her exquisite aloofness had kept her in genuine ignorance of the compromises and promiscuities of modern life, and left on her hands the picture of a vanished world wherein you didn’t speak to people who were discredited, or admit rivals or enemies to your confidence; and she punctuated Boyne’s narrative with murmurs of dismay and incredulity.

“But in that crowd,” Boyne explained, “no man is another man’s enemy for more than a few minutes, and no woman is any other woman’s rival. Either they forget they’ve quarrelled, or some social necessity—usually a party that none of them can bear to miss—forces them together, and makes it easier to bury their differences. But generally it’s a simple case of forgetting. Their memories are as short as a savage’s, and the feuds that savages remember have dropped out. They recall only the other primitive needs—food, finery, dancing. I suppose we are relapsing into a kind of bloodless savagery,” Boyne concluded.

Besides, he went on, in the Wheater set they could deal with things only collectively; alone, they became helpless and inarticulate. They lived so perpetually in the lime-light that they required an audience—an audience made up of their own kind. Before each other they shouted and struck attitudes; again like savages. But the chief point was that nobody could stay angry—not however much they tried. It was too much trouble, and might involve too many inconveniences, interfere with too many social arrangements. When all was said and done, all they asked was not to be bothered—and it was by gambling on that requirement that he had finally gained his point.

“And your point is, exactly—”

Well, as he got closer to it, Boyne was not even sure that it could be defined as a point. It was too shapeless and undecided; but he hoped it would serve for a time—and time was everything; especially for Terry....

“They’ve agreed to leave the children together, and to leave them here, for the next three or four months. The longest to bring round was Lady Wrench. Her husband has taken a fancy to Zinnie, and he’s so mortally bored by life in general that his wife clutches at anything that may amuse him. Luckily, according to the terms of the divorce—”

“Which divorce?” Mrs. Sellars interpolated, as though genuinely anxious to keep her hand on all the clues.

“Wheater versus Zinnia Lacrosse. It was Wheater who got the divorce from the present Lady Wrench. Legally he has the final say about Zinnie, so the mother had to give in, though she has a right to see the child at stated intervals. But of course my battle royal was over Chipstone; if the Wheaters had insisted on keeping Chipstone till their own affairs were settled in court the whole combination would have been broken up.”

“And how did you contrive to rescue Chipstone?”

Boyne sank down more deeply into his armchair, and looked up at the low ceiling. Then he straightened himself, and brought his gaze to the level of Mrs. Sellars’s. “By promising to stay here and keep an eye on the children myself. That’s my trial-guardianship.” He gave a slight laugh, which she failed to echo.

“Martin!”

His eyes continued to challenge hers. “Well—?”

She turned the sapphire hesitatingly on her finger. “But these children—you’d never even heard of them till you met them on board your steamer a few weeks ago....”

“No; that’s true.”

“You’ve taken over a pretty big responsibility.”

“I like responsibilities.”

Mrs. Sellars was still brooding over her newly imprisoned finger. “It’s very generous of you to assume this one in such a hurry. Usually one doesn’t have to go out of one’s way to find rather more of them than one can manage. But in this case, I wonder—”

“You wonder?”

“Well, I had understood from Terry—and also from your friend Judith—that what all the children really want is to go to America: to Mrs. Wheater’s mother, isn’t it?”

“Yes; that’s it; and I hope they’ll pull it off by-and-by. But at present the Wheaters won’t hear of it. I never for a moment supposed they’d consent to putting the ocean between themselves and Chip. My only chance was to persuade them that, now Terry’s in the mountains, they’d better leave him here, and the others with him, till the hot weather’s over. With those people it’s always a question of the least resistance—of temporizing and postponing. My plan saved everybody a certain amount of mental effort; so they all ended by agreeing to it. But of course it’s merely provisional.”

“Happily,” Mrs. Sellars smiled; and added, as if to correct the slight acerbity of the comment: “For you must see, dear, that you’re taking a considerable risk for the future—”

“What future?”

“Why—suppose anything goes wrong during these next few months? You’ll be answerable for whatever may happen. With seven children—and one of them already grown up!”

Boyne frowned, and stirred uneasily in his chair. “If you mean Judith, in some ways she’s as much of a child as the youngest of them.”

Mrs. Sellars smiled confidentially at her ring. “So a man would think, I suppose. But you forget that I’ve had four days alone with her.... She’s a young lady with very definite views.”

“I should hope so!”

“I agree with you that it makes her more interesting—but conceivably it might lead to complications.”

“What sort of complications?”

“You ought to know better than I do—since you tell me you’ve been frequenting the late Mrs. Westway at the Lido. Judith doesn’t pretend to hide the fact that she lived for a summer in the bosom of that edifying family....”

“She doesn’t know it’s anything to hide. That’s what’s so touching—”

“And so terrifying. But I won’t sit here preaching prudence; you’d only hate me for it. And all this time those poor infants are waiting.” She stood up with one of her sudden changes of look and tone; as if a cloud had parted, shedding a ray of her lost youth on her. He noticed for the first time that she was all in white, a rose on her breast, and a shady hat hanging from her arm. “Do go down and see them at once, dear. It’s getting late. I’ll walk with you to the foot of the hill; then I must come back and write some letters....” He smiled at the familiar formula, and she took up his smile. “Yes; really important letters—one of them to Aunt Julia,” she bantered back. “And besides, the children will want to have you all to themselves.” Magnanimously she added: “I must say they all behaved beautifully while you were away. They seemed to feel that they must do you credit. And as for Terry—I wish he were mine! When the break up comes, as of course it will, why shouldn’t you and I adopt him?”

She put on her hat, and linked her arm in Boyne’s for the walk down the hill; but at the fringe of the wood, where the path dipped to the high road, she left him.

“You’ll come back and dine? I’ve got some news for you too,” she said as he turned down to the village.

Recent memories of Armistice Day—remote ones of Mafeking Night, which he had chanced to experience in London—paled for Boyne in the uproar raised by the little Wheaters when, entering their pension dining-room, he told them that everything was all right.

He had not imagined that seven could be so many. The miracle of the loaves and fishes seemed as nothing to the sudden multiplication of arms, legs and lungs about that rural supper-table. At one end of the expanse of coarse linen and stout crockery, Miss Scope, rigid and spectacled, sat dispensing jam without fear or favour; at the other Judith was cutting bread and butter in complete unawareness of her immortal model. Between the two surged a sea of small heads, dusky, ruddy, silver-pale, all tossing and mixing about the golden crest of Chipstone, throned in his umpire’s chair. For a moment, as usual, Bun and Zinnie dominated the scene; then Terry, still pale, but with new life in his eyes, caught his cap from the rack with a call for three cheers to which the others improvised a piercing echo. (“Luckily we’re the only boarders just now,” Miss Scope remarked to Boyne as he pressed her hand.)

In this wonderful world nobody asked any questions; nobody seemed to care for any particulars; their one thought was to bestow on their ambassador the readiest token of their gratitude, from Blanca’s cool kiss to the damp and strangulating endearments of Beechy. To Boyne it was literally like a dip into a quick sea, with waves that burnt his eyes, choked his throat and ears, but stung him, body and brain, to fresh activity. “And now let’s kiss him all over again—and it’s my turn first!” Zinnie rapturously proposed; and as he abandoned himself once more to the battering of the breakers he caught a small voice piping: “We suppose you’ve brought some presents for us, Martin.”

The law which makes men progressively repeople the world with persons of their own age and experience had led Boyne, as he grew older, to regard human relations as more and more ruled by reason; but whenever he dipped into the universe of the infant Wheaters, where all perspective ceased, and it was far more urgent to know what presents he had brought than what fate had been meted out to them by their respective parents, he felt the joy of plunging back into reality.

The presents were there, and nobody had been forgotten, as the rapid unpacking of a small suit-case showed—nobody, that is, but Judith, who stood slightly apart, affecting an air of grown-up amusement, while Blanca and the little girls were hung with trinkets, and Bun made jubilant by an electric lamp. Even Miss Scope had an appropriate reticule, Nanny a lavishly garnished needle-case; and the bottom of the box was crammed with books for Terry.

The distributing took so long, and the ensuing disputes and counter-claims were so difficult of adjustment, that twilight was slipping down the valley when Boyne said to Judith: “Come and take a turn, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

They walked along the road to a path which led up the hillside opposite to the hotels, and from there began to mount slowly toward the receding sunlight. Judith, unasked, had slipped her arm through Boyne’s, and the nearness of her light young body was like wings to him. “What a pity it’s getting dark—I believe I could climb to one of those ruby peaks!” he said, throwing his head back with a deep breath; and she instantly rejoined: “Let’s run back and get Bun’s lamp; then we could.”

Boyne laughed, and went on, in a voice of leisurely satisfaction: “Oh, Bun wouldn’t part with that lamp—not yet. Besides, we’re very well as we are; and there’ll be lots of other opportunities.”

“There will? Oh, Martin—they’re really going to let us stay?” Her strong young hands imprisoned him in a passionate grasp.

“Well, for a time. I made them see it was Terry’s best chance.”

“Of course it is! And, Martin—they’ll leave us all together? Chip and all?”

“Every man of you—for the summer, at any rate.” They had stopped in the fern-fringed path, and he stood above her, smiling down into her blissful incredulous eyes. “There’s one condition, though—” Her gaze darkened, and he added: “You’re all to be accountable to me. I’ve promised your people to keep an eye on you.”

“You mean you’re going to stay here with us?” Her lips trembled with the tears she was struggling to keep back, and he thought to himself: “It’s too much for a child’s face to express—.” Aloud he said: “Let’s sit down and watch the sunset. This tree-trunk is a pretty good proscenium box.”

They sat down, and he set forth at length the history of his negotiations. Complicated as the narrative was, it was easier to relate to his present hearer than to Mrs. Sellars, not only because fewer elucidations were necessary, but because none of the details he gave shocked or astonished Judith. The tale he told evidently seemed to her a mere bald statement of a matter-of-course affair, and she was too much occupied with its practical results to give a thought to its remoter bearings. She listened attentively to Boyne’s report of the final agreement, and when he had ended, said only: “I suppose father’s made some arrangement about paying our bills?”

“Your father’s opened an account for me: Miss Scope and I are to be your ministers of finance.”

She received this in silence; for the first time since his return he felt that the news he brought was still overshadowed for her. At last she asked: “Was father awfully angry ... you know ... about that money?”

The question roused Boyne with a start. He perceived that in his struggle to adjust conflicting interests he too had lost sight of the moral issue. And how confess to Judith that, as for her father, he had hardly been aware of it? He felt that it was a moment for prevarication. “Of course your father was angry—thoroughly angry—about the whole thing. Anybody would have been.”

She lowered her voice to insist: “But I mean about my taking his money?”

“Well, he’s forgiven you for that, at any rate.”

“Has he—really and truly?” Her voice lifted again joyfully. “Terry was sure he never would.”

Boyne turned about on her in surprise. “Terry—then you told him after all?”

She made a mute sign of assent. “I had to.”

“Well, I understand that.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “I’m glad you did.”

“He was frightfully upset, you know. And furious with me. I was afraid I’d made him more ill. He wouldn’t believe me at first. He said if I had no more moral sense than that, the first thing I knew I’d land in prison.”

“Oh—.” Boyne could not restrain a faint laugh.

“That didn’t worry me very much, though,” Judith confessed in a more cheerful tone, “because I’ve seen a good deal more of life than Terry, and I’ve known other girls who’ve done what I did, and none of them ever went to prison.”

This did not seem as reassuring to Boyne as it did to the speaker; but the hour for severity was over, the words of rebuke died on his lips. At last he said: “The worst of it was hurting Terry, wasn’t it?” and she nodded: “Yes.”

For a while after that they sat without speaking, till she asked him if he thought the Wheaters had already started divorce proceedings. To this he could only answer that it looked so, but he still hoped they might calm down and think better of it. She received this with a gesture of incredulity, and merely remarked: “There might have been a chance if Syb Lullmer hadn’t been mixed up in it.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t call that woman by her Christian name,” Boyne interrupted.

Judith looked at him with a gentle wonder. “She wouldn’t mind. Everybody else does.” She clearly assumed that he was reproving her for failing in respect to Mrs. Lullmer.

“That’s not what I meant. But she’s such a beast.”

“Oh, well—.” Judith’s shrug implied that the epithet was too familiar to her to have kept more than a tinge of obloquy. “I rather hope she won’t marry father, though.”

“I hope to God she won’t. What I’m gambling on is that he and your mother will get so homesick for you children that they’ll patch things up on your account.”

Her smile kept its soft incredulity. “They don’t often, you know; parents don’t.”

“Well, anyhow, you’ve got a reprieve, and you must make the most of it.”

“I wish you’d say ‘we,’ not ‘you,’ Martin.”

“Why of course it’s ‘we,’ my dear—that is, as long as you all behave yourselves.”

They both laughed at this, and then fell silent, facing the sunset, and immersed, in their different ways, in the overwhelming glory of the spectacle. Judith, Boyne knew, did not feel sunsets as Rose Sellars did—they appealed to a different order of associations, and she would probably have been put to it to distinguish the quality of their splendour from that of fireworks at the Lido, or a brilliant finale at the Russian ballet. But something of the celestial radiance seemed to reach her, remote yet enfolding as a guardian wing. “It’s lovely here,” she breathed, her hand in Boyne’s.

He remembered, at a similar moment, Rose Sellars’s quoting:

and he murmured the words half aloud.

Judith’s pressure tightened ardently on his hand. “Oh, Martin, how beautifully you do describe things! The words you find are not like anybody else’s. Terry says you ought to be a writer.”

“Well, in this case, unluckily, somebody found the words before me.”

“Oh—.” Her enthusiasm flagged. She hazarded: “Mrs. Sellars?”

He gave a little chuckle at her sharpness. “In a way, yes—but, as a matter of fact, Robert Browning got ahead of both of us.”

This seemed to give her a certain satisfaction. “Then she just cribbed it from him? Is he another friend of hers?”

“Yes; and will be of yours some day, I hope. He died long before you were born; but you’ll find some of the best of him in one of the books I brought to Terry.”

“Oh, he’s just an author, you mean,” she murmured, as if the state were a strictly posthumous one. Her attention always had a tendency to wander at the mention of books, and he thought she was probably a little vexed at having been betrayed into a conversational slip; but presently, with a return of her habitual buoyancy: “I’d rather hear you talk than anybody who’s dead,” she declared.

“All right; I’ll make it a rule to give you only my own vintage,” he agreed, gazing out past her into the light. They continued to sit there in silence, the sea of night creeping softly up to them, till at length they were caught in its chill touch. Boyne got reluctantly to his feet. “Come along, child. Time to go down,” he said.

“Oh, not down yet—up, up, up!” She caught his arm again, pulling him with all her young strength along the pine-scented steep to where the mystery of the forest drew down to meet them. “I want to climb and climb—don’t you? I want to stay up all night, as if we were coming home at sunrise from a ball. It’s like a great ballroom over there, isn’t it,” she cried, pointing to the west, “with the lights pouring out of a million windows?”

Boyne laughed, and suffered himself to be led onward. The air on that height was as fresh as youth, and all about them were the secret scents that dew and twilight waken into life. He knew that he and Judith ought to be turning homeward; but, even if she had released his captive arm, it was growing too dark to consult his watch. Besides, the wandering man in him, the man used to mountains, to long lonely tramps, to the hush and mystery of nights in the open, felt himself in the toils of the old magic. It was no longer Judith drawing him on, but the night itself beckoning him to fresh heights. The child at his side had travelled with him into the beauty as far as she could go, and now he needed nothing from her but the warmth of her nearness. His highest moments had always been solitary....

She seemed to guess that there was nothing else to say, and they continued to mount the hill in silence. As they rose the air turned colder, the fires faded, and above them arched a steel-blue heaven starred with ruddy points which grew keen and white as darkness deepened. It was not till they passed out of the fringes of the forest to an open crag above the valley, and saw the village lights sprinkling the black fields far below, that Boyne unwillingly woke to the sense of time and place.

“Oh, by Jove—you must come!” he exclaimed, swinging round to guide his companion down the ledge.

She made no answer, but turned and followed him along the descending path. He could feel that she was too tired and peaceful for reluctance. She moved beside him like a sleepy child bringing back an apronful of flowers from a happy holiday; and the fact of having reassured her so quickly awed Boyne a little, as if he had meddled with destiny. But it was pleasant, for once, to play the god, and he let himself drift away into visions of a vague millennium where all the grown people knew what they wanted, and if ever it happened that they didn’t, the children had the casting vote.

By the time they reached the pension, and Judith had loosed her hold of Boyne’s arm, he was afraid to look at his watch, but pushed her through the gate with a quick goodnight—and then, a moment later, called to her in an imperious whisper. “Judith!” She hurried back to the summons.

“Did you really think I hadn’t brought you any present?”

She gave an excited little laugh. “N—no; I really thought perhaps you had; only—”

“Only what?”

“I thought you’d forgotten some one else’s, and had imagined I shouldn’t much mind your taking mine, because I’m so much older than the others....”

“Well, of course I should have imagined that; but here it is.”

He pulled out the parcel he had inadvertently produced in Mrs. Sellars’s sitting-room, and Judith caught it to her with a gasp of pleasure.

“Oh, Martin—”

“There; own up that you’d have been fearfully sold if I’d forgotten you.”

She answered solemnly: “If you’d forgotten me I should have died of it.”

“Well—run off with you; we’re hours late,” he admonished her.

“Mayn’t I look at it before you go?”

“You baby, how could you see in the dark? Besides, I tell you there’s no time.”

“Not even time to kiss you for it, Martin?”

“No,” he cried, slamming the gate shut, and starting up the hill toward his hotel at a run.

When they started on their walk nothing had been farther from Boyne’s mind than this disposal of the crystal pendant, though it was for Judith that the trinket had been chosen. Since Mrs. Sellars, owing to his blunder, had seen and coveted it, he felt a certain awkwardness about letting it appear on Judith’s neck, and decided that his little friend must again be left out in the general distribution of presents. But during their walk in the mountain dusk, while she hung on his arm, pressed close by the intruding fir-branches, he needed more and more to think of her as a child, and, thinking thus, to treat her as one. He knew how the child in her must have ached at being left out when he unpacked his gifts; and when the time came to say goodnight it was irresistible to heal that ache. There was no way of doing it but to take the pendant from his pocket—the pendant which he had meant for her, and which it had taken so long to unearth at the Venetian antiquary’s that there was no time for much thought of Mrs. Sellars’s—the pendant which was Judith’s by right because, like her, it was odd and exquisite and unaccountable.

“If only she doesn’t parade it up at the châlet!” the coward in him thought, as he climbed the hill. But all the while he knew it was exactly what she would do.

“Oh, well, damn—after all, I chose it for her,” he grumbled, as if that justified them both.

In the châlet sitting-room Mrs. Sellars, in her cool evening dress, looked up from the table at which she sat, not writing a letter but reading one. She laid it down thoughtfully as he entered.

“I’m afraid it’s awfully late—I hadn’t time to go to the hotel and brush up; you don’t mind?” he said, blinking a little in the lamplight, and passing his hand through his rumpled hair. As he bent to kiss her his glance fell on the admonishing needles of the little travelling clock at her elbow. “You don’t mean to say it’s after nine?”

“What does it matter? As a matter of fact, it’s after half-past. I was only afraid something had gone wrong about the children.”

He tossed his hat down with a laugh. “Bless you, no! Everything’s as right as right. But I had to get the Lido out of my lungs; and a long tramp was the only way.”

Her smile told him how much she loved him for hating the Lido. “And what do you think my news is? You know I said I had something to tell you. Mr. Dobree is coming here to see me—he arrives next week.” She announced the fact as if it were not only important, but even exciting.

“Oh, damn Mr. Dobree!” Boyne rejoined with a careless benevolence. The door had opened on the candlelight of their little dinner-table, on its sparkle of white wine and smell of wild strawberries and village bread. “Well, this is good enough for me,” Boyne said, as he dropped into the seat opposite Mrs. Sellars with a sense of proprietorship which made Mr. Dobree’s movements seem wholly negligible.

The next day there occurred, with a fatal punctuality, exactly what Boyne had foreseen. Mrs. Sellars had invited Judith, Terry and Blanca to lunch; and when they appeared Mrs. Sellars’s eye instantly lit on the crystal pendant, Judith’s on the sapphire ring. The mutual reconnaissance was swift and silent as the crossing of search-lights in a night sky. Judith said nothing; but Blanca, as Mrs. Sellars bent to kiss her, raised her hostess’s hand with an admiring exclamation. “A new ring! What a beauty! I never saw you wear it before.”

Mrs. Sellars smiled, and tapped Blanca’s cheek with her free hand. “What sharp eyes! But everybody seems to have had a present from Venice—so why shouldn’t I?”

Blanca returned the smile, lifting her own wrist to display a hoop of pink crystal. “Isn’t mine sweet? Nobody finds presents like Martin.”

“So I thought when he showed me Judith’s last night.”

Mrs. Sellars turned to the older girl, but not to kiss her. She reserved her endearments for the younger children, and merely laid a friendly touch on Judith’s shoulder. “Such a wonder, that pendant—I never saw one like it. Decidedly, not Venetian; seventeenth century Spanish, perhaps? It’s a puzzle. You’re lucky, my dear, to have a connaisseur to choose your presents.”

That was all—and then a jolly lunch, simple, easy, full of chaff and laughter, Mrs. Sellars, always a perfect hostess, was at her best with Terry and Blanca. The boy touched and interested her, the little girl (Boyne divined) subtly flattered her by a wide-eyed but tactful admiration. Boyne wondered if Mrs. Sellars had noticed how Blanca’s clear gray eyes darkened with envy at the praise of the crystal pendant. What a fool he had been not to give the crystal to Blanca, and the tuppenny bracelet to Judith, who would have liked it best because it came from him! Decidedly, he was doomed to blunder in his dealings with women, even when they were no more than little girls. Meanwhile Terry was telling Mrs. Sellars about the books Boyne had brought him, and how he and Judith had already hunted down Boyne’s quotation from “The Grammarian’s Funeral”—“You know, that splendid one he told Judith yesterday, about ‘all the peaks soar’; she came home last night saying it over and over for fear she’d forget it, and woke me up to hunt for it before she went to bed.”

“It was so splendid, hearing it up there on the mountain, in the dark, with the stars coming out,” Judith glowed, taking up the tale, while Blanca ingenuously added: “It was so late when Judy got home that we were all asleep, and Scopy had to go down and let her in. Did you see Scopy in her crimping-pins, Martin; or had you gone when she opened the door?”

“Yes—the coming of twilight up on the heights is something to remember,” Mrs. Sellars intervened, letting her eyes rest attentively on Boyne’s before she turned them again to Terry. “But there are better things than that in Browning, you know. Bring me your book to-morrow, and I’ll show you....”

It all went off perfectly—and Boyne, when he started the children homeward after lunch, was wondering whether tact were as soothing as a summer breeze, or as terrible as an army with banners.

He was to drop the young Wheaters at their pension, and afterward meet Mrs. Sellars at the post-office for a climb in the direction of Misurina. At the corner of the highroad descending to Cortina he signalled the hotel omnibus, packed in the twins, and walked on with Judith. At the moment he would rather have escaped from the whole party; but Judith had declared her intention of walking, and he could not do otherwise than go with her. They waited under the trees for the omnibus to sweep on with its load of dust and passengers, and almost at once Judith said: “I suppose you’re engaged to Mrs. Sellars, aren’t you, Martin?”

The suddenness of the question struck him like a blow, and he realised for the first time that he had never spoken to Rose Sellars about making their engagement known. He had never even asked her if she had broken the news to her formidable aunt, or to the galaxy of minor relatives with whom she maintained her incessant exchange of letters. Her insistence that their marriage should be put off for nearly half a year seemed to make the whole question too remote for immediate decisions. “I suppose I ought to have asked her if she wanted it announced,” he thought, reflecting remorsefully that his long exile had made him too careless of the social observances. He turned an irritated eye on Judith. “What in the world put such an idea into your head?”

“Why, your bringing her a ring from Venice, and her putting it on the finger where engagement rings are worn,” Judith replied with a smiling promptness.

“Oh, that’s the finger, is it?” Boyne said, temporising; and then, with an abrupt clutch at simplification; “Yes; I am engaged to Mrs. Sellars. But I don’t think she wants it spoken of at present.”

He turned his gaze away to the long white road glinting through the trees under which he and Judith were withdrawn. Things happened so suddenly and overwhelmingly in Judith’s face that he did not feel equal to what might be going on there till he had steadied his gaze by a protracted study of the landscape. When he looked at her again he received the shock of smiling lips and eyes, and two arms thrown filially about him.

“You darling old Martin, I’m so glad! At least I am if you are—really and truly?”

Her hug was almost as suffocating as Zinnie’s, and given—he divined it instantly—with the same wholehearted candour. “So Blanca was right after all! How lovely it must be to be in love! For I suppose that’s the reason why you’re marrying? I know you’re awfully romantic, though you sometimes put on such a gruff manner; I’m sure you wouldn’t marry just for position, or for money, or to regularise an old liaison; would you?”

“An old liaison?” Boyne laughed, but with a touch of vexation. “The ideas you’ve picked up—and the lingo! You absurd child—why, ‘regularise’ isn’t even English.... And can’t you see, can’t you imagine, that a man’s first need is to—to respect the woman he hopes to marry?”

Judith received this with a puzzled frown. “Oh, I can see it; I have, often—in books, and at the movies. But I can’t imagine it, exactly. I should have thought wanting to give her a good hug came before anything.”

Boyne shrugged impatiently. Things that seemed funny, and utterly guileless, when she said them to others, shocked him when she commented on his private concerns in the vocabulary of her tribe. “What’s the use? You’re only a baby, and you repeat things like a parrot, as all children do. Mrs. Sellars is the most perfect, the most exquisite...” He broke off, feeling that such asseverations led nowhere in particular, and continued at a tangent: “I can tell you one thing—I should never have dared to take on the job of looking after you children if she hadn’t been here—”

Judith’s face fell. “Oh, is she going to stay all summer, then?”

“I devoutly hope so! Being with somebody like her is so exactly what...” This, again, seemed to land him in a sort of rhetorical blind alley, and he stepped down from it into the dust of the highroad. “Come along; we mustn’t dawdle. I’m due at the post-office.” He was aware that a settled anger was possessing him, he hardly knew why. Hardly—yet just under the surface of his mind there stirred the uneasy sense that he was perhaps disappointed by Judith’s prompt congratulations. Half an hour earlier, he would have said that her approval would add the final touch to his happiness; that there was nothing he wanted more than to have her show herself in fact the child he was perpetually calling her. “The youngest of them all”—that was how he had described her to Mrs. Sellars. Was it possible he had not meant what he said?

He was roused by Judith’s squeeze on his arm. “I don’t know why you’re so cross with me, old Martin. I do really want anything you want....”

“That’s a good Judy ... and what rot, dear, thinking I’m cross. Only, remember, it’s your secret and mine, and not another soul’s.” After all, he tried to tell himself, Judith’s knowing of his engagement was already a relief. It would do away with no end of hedging and prevaricating. And he was sure he could trust to Judith’s discretion; sure of it without her added pressure on his arm, and the solemn: “On Scopy’s book!” which had become the tribal oath of the little Wheaters. Boyne had sometimes winced at Judith’s precocious discretion, as another proof of what she had been exposed to; now he hailed in it a guaranty of peace. “Perhaps there’s something to be said for not keeping children in cotton wool—for she is only a child!” he repeated to himself, insistently.

That very evening, while he and Mrs. Sellars were talking over the likelihood of picking up some kind of a tutor for Terry, she asked irrelevantly: “By the way, do the children know of our engagement?”

Contradictory answers rose to Boyne’s lips, and he gulped them down to mumble: “I didn’t suppose I was authorized to tell anybody.”

“But hasn’t anybody guessed?”

“Well—as a matter of fact, Judith has. Today. I can’t imagine—”

Mrs. Sellars smiled. “My ring, of course. Trust Blanca, too! It was stupid of me not to think of it. But perhaps it’s better—”

“Much better.”

She pondered. “Only I’d rather no one else knew—at least for the present. Out of regard for Aunt Julia—till I’ve heard from her.” Boyne, relieved, expressed his complete agreement. “Besides,” she continued, “I like it’s being our secret, don’t you? We won’t even tell Mr. Dobree.”

“Oh, particularly not Mr. Dobree,” Boyne replied emphatically.

Two days later Mr. Dobree arrived; and Boyne learned that an event which seems negligible before it happens may fill the picture when it becomes a fact. The prospect of Mr. Dobree’s arrival had now become the fact of Mr. Dobree’s presence; and Mr. Dobree, though still spare and nimble for a man approaching sixty (he was ready, and glad, to tell you to what exercises he owed it), took up a surprising amount of room. He was like somebody who travels with a lot of unwieldy luggage—his luggage being, as it were, the very absence of it, being his tact, his self-effacingness, his general neatness and compactness. Wherever you turned, you were in the aura of Mr. Dobree’s retractility, his earnest and insistent dodging out of your way, which seemed to leave behind it a presence more oppressive than any mere physical bulk—so that a dull fat man rooted in your best armchair might have been less in the way than the slim and disappearing Mr. Dobree. Mr. Dobree’s tact seemed to Boyne like a parody of Mrs. Sellars’s; like one of those monstrous blooms into which hybridizers transform a delicate flower. It was a “show” tact, a huge, unique, disbudded tact grown under glass, and destined to be labelled, exhibited, given a prize and a name, and a page to itself in the florists’ catalogues. Such at least was Boyne’s distorted vision of the new guest at the châlet.

Mr. Dobree (as became a man with such impedimenta) was lodged, not at Boyne’s inn, but at the “Palace” where Boyne and Mrs. Sellars had once dined. From there a brisk five minutes carried him to the châlet; except when his urgent hospitality drew Mrs. Sellars and Boyne to the big hotel. The prompt returning of invitations was a fundamental part of Mr. Dobree’s code. He seemed to think that hospitality was something a gentleman might borrow, like money, but never, in any circumstances, receive as a gift; and this obliged Mrs. Sellars to accept his repeated invitations, before, in the battle of their tacts, hers came off victorious, and she made him see that it may be more blessed to receive than to be invited out. The sapphire had vanished from her finger before Mr. Dobree’s arrival; and this precaution, for which Boyne blessed her, made him, for Mr. Dobree, simply an old friend, a guest of the Sellars’s in New York days, whom one could be suitably pleased to meet again.

Boyne was less pleased to meet Mr. Dobree. His coming was natural enough; and so was Mrs. Sellars’s pleasure at seeing him, since he brought not only the latest news of Aunt Julia but papers which settled satisfactorily the matter of Mr. Sellars’s will. Boyne had resented what promised to be a tiresome interruption of pleasant habits; but before long he discovered that Mr. Dobree’s presence left him free to spend much more time with his young friends of the Pension Rosenglüh. This made him aware that during the last weeks he had forfeited a certain amount of his liberty, and he found himself perilously pleased to recover it. He assured Mrs. Sellars that it would look very odd to Mr. Dobree, who had come to discuss family matters with his client, if a third person were present at these discussions; and armed with this argument he proceeded to dispose of his time as he pleased.

His liberation gave a new savour to the hours spent with the little Wheaters; and as for Mr. Dobree (with whom the children had had only one brief and awe-inspiring encounter), he came in very handily as the theme of the games they were always calling on Boyne to invent. To ascertain Mr. Dobree’s Christian name (Boyne told them) had long been his secret ambition; but hitherto he had not even been able to learn its first letter. A chance glimpse of Mr. Dobree’s glossy suit-cases showed his initials to be A.D., and the letter A was one calculated, as Boyne said, to give them a good gallop. Indeed, he found the puzzle so absorbing that one day, when Judith remarked on his unusual absent-mindedness, he had to own that he had not been listening to what she said because all his faculties were still absorbed in the task of guessing Mr. Dobree’s Christian name.

“But Mrs. Sellars must know—why don’t you ask her?”

“Must know? Do you think so? I doubt it.”

“But she talks of him as an old friend—as old as you.”

“Even that doesn’t convince me. I doubt if anybody knows Mr. Dobree’s Christian name. How should they? Can you imagine anybody’s ever having called him by it, or dared to ask him what it was?”

“Well, you might ask her,” suggested Judith, from whose make-up a taste for abstract speculation was absent.

“Ask her? Not for the world! Suppose she did know? All our fun would be over.”

“Of course it would,” cried Terry, plunging into the sport. “If she knows, she mustn’t be asked till we’ve exhausted every other possibility; must she, Martin?”

“Certainly not. I see you grasp the rules of the game. And now let’s proceed by elimination. Abel—Abel’s the first name in A, isn’t it, Terry?”

“No! There’s a Prince Aage of Denmark, or something; I saw him in ‘The Tatler,’” exulted Terry.

“All right. Let’s begin with Aage. Do any of you see Mr. Dobree as Aage?” This was dismissed with a general shout of incredulity.

“Well, then: as Abel—Abel Dobree? Don’t be in a hurry: try to deal with this thing in a mood of deliberateness and impartiality.”

“No, no, no—not Abel!” the assistance chorused.

“Oh, I’m going to sleep,” Judith grumbled, stretching out at full length on the sunburnt grass-bank on which the party were encamped.

“Let her—for all the use she is!” Boyne jeered. “Now then—Adam?”

“Adam’s a Polish name, isn’t it? Who was Adam?” Judith opened her eyes to ask.

“A national hero, I think,” said Blanca, with a diligent frown.

Miss Scope, perched higher up the bank, cut through these conjectures with a groan. “Children—children! One would think I’d brought you up like savages. Adam—”

“Oh, Scopy means the Adam in the Bible: but Mr. Dobree’s parents wouldn’t have called him after anybody as far away as that,” Blanca shrugged; while Zinnie interposed: “Who was already dead, and couldn’t have given him a lovely cup for his christening.” Beechy, her face wrinkling up in sympathy at such a privation, wailed out: “Oh, poor little Mr. Dobree—”; and Boyne, recognizing the difficulty, pursued: “Aeneas, then; but he’s almost as far away as Adam, I’m afraid.”

This drew him into a discussion with Terry regarding the relative seniority of the Biblical and Virgilian heroes, in the intervals of which Miss Scope continued to demand despairingly: “But what in the world are you all arguing about, when we know that Adam was the First Man?”

Judith lifted her head again from its grassy pillow. With half-closed eyes she murmured to the sky: “I don’t believe Mr. Dobree would care a bit if his godfather was Adam or not. He could buy himself any christening cup he liked. I believe he’s a very rich man.”

“Oh, then, do you think he’ll give us all some lovely presents when he goes?” Zinnie promptly inferred.

“What makes you think he’ll ever go?” Judith retorted, closing her eyes.

“Annibal—Annibal! Annibal begins with an A! I know because he was a Prince, my ancestor,” shouted Bun, leaping back into the game.