The children

Mrs. Sellars’s social discipline was too perfect to permit her, even in emergencies, to neglect one obligation for another; and after Mr. Dobree had been for a week at Cortina she said one day to Boyne: “But I’ve seen nothing lately of the little Wheaters. What’s become of them?”

He assured her that they were all right, but had probably been too shy to present themselves at the châlet since Mr. Dobree’s arrival; to which Mrs. Sellars replied, with the faintest hint of tartness, that she had never had occasion to suspect the little Wheaters of being shy, and that, furthermore, Mr. Dobree did not happen to be staying at the châlet.

Boyne smiled. “No; but they know he’s with you a good deal, and he’s a more impressive figure than they’re used to.”

He saw that she scented irony in this, and was not wholly pleased with it. “I don’t know what you mean by impressive; I didn’t know anything in the world could impress the modern hotel child. But Mr. Dobree is very sorry for them, poor dears, and I’m sure it would interest him to see something of them. Why shouldn’t we take them all on a picnic to-morrow? I know Mr. Dobree would like to invite them.”

Boyne felt that, for all the parties concerned, the undertaking might prove formidable. He pointed out that, if Zinnie and the two Buondelmonte children were included in an all-day expedition, Miss Scope’s presence would be necessary, since otherwise all Judith’s energies would be absorbed in keeping the party in order; and Mrs. Sellars acquiesced: “Yes, the poor little things are dreadfully spoilt.”

Boyne was secretly beginning to be of the same mind; but Mrs. Sellars could no longer criticise his young friends without rousing his instinctive opposition. “They certainly haven’t had much opportunity to become little Lord Fauntleroys, if that’s what you mean,” he said impatiently; and his betrothed rejoined: “What I mean is that Mr. Dobree feels sorry for them because of the kind of opportunity they have had. You see, he was one of the lawyers in the Westway divorce.”

Boyne gave her a quick look, in which he was conscious that his resentment flamed. “I’m hanged if I see what there can be in Mr. Dobree’s mind to make him connect the Westway divorce with the Wheater children.”

“Why, simply his knowledge of Judith’s intimacy with that wretched drug-soaked Doll Westway, and his familiarity with the horrible details that led up to the girl’s suicide. She and Judith were together at Deauville the very summer that she killed herself. Both their mothers had gone off heaven knows where. Judith proclaims the fact to every one, as you know.”

Boyne had removed his eyes from Mrs. Sellars’s face, and was staring out at the familiar outline of the great crimson mountains beyond the balcony. A phrase of Stevenson’s about “the lovely and detested scene” (from “The Ebb-tide,” he thought?) strayed through his mind as he gazed. It was hateful to him to think that he might hereafter come to associate those archangelic summits with Mrs. Lullmer’s smooth impervious face, and Mr. Dobree’s knowledge of the inner history of the Westway divorce.

He turned back to Mrs. Sellars. “Aren’t you getting rather sick of this place?” he asked abruptly.

She gave back his irritated stare with one of genuine surprise. “Sick of what? You mean of Cortina?”

“Of the whole show.” His sweeping gesture gathered up in one contemptuous handful the vast panorama of mountain, vale and forest. “I always feel that when scenery gets mixed up with our personal bothers all the virtue goes out of it—as if our worries were so many locusts, eating everything bare.”

Mrs. Sellars was silent for a moment; then her hand fell on his. “I’ve always been afraid, dear, that this queer responsibility you’ve assumed was going to end by getting on your nerves—”

Boyne jumped up, drawing abruptly away from her. “Responsibility? What responsibility?” He walked across the room, turned back, and awkwardly laid an answering caress on her hair. “Gammon! It’s Mr. Dobree who gets on my nerves—just a little.” (“Hypocrite!” he cursed himself inwardly.) “Fact is, I liked Cortina a damned sight better when you and I and the children had it all to ourselves.” He saw the light of reassurance in her averted cheek. “Just my beastly selfishness, I know—I needn’t tell you that men are beastly selfish, need I?” He laughed, and her faint laugh echoed his.

“Mr. Dobree is going soon, I believe,” she volunteered.

Boyne pulled himself together. “Well, that makes it a good deal easier to be unselfish while he’s here, and I take it upon myself to accept his picnic for to-morrow. I’ll drop down and announce it to the children.” He flattered himself that his simulation of buoyancy had produced the desired effect, and that his parting from Mrs. Sellars was unclouded. But halfway down the hill he stood suddenly still in the path, and exclaimed aloud: “But after he’s gone; what then?”

The picnic was beautifully successful—one of those smooth creaseless well-oiled successes as to which one feels that at any moment it may slip from one’s hold and reveal the face of failure. A very Janus of a picnic, Boyne thought....

To the chief actors, however, it presented no such duality, but was the perfect image of what constitutes A Good Time For The Young People, when made out of the happy union of tact and money. To Mr. Dobree it was certainly that, and he was justified in feeling that if you order the two roomiest and most balloon-tired motors obtainable, and fill enough hampers with the most succulent delicacies of a “Palace” restaurant, and are actuated throughout by the kindliest desire to give pleasure, happiness will automatically follow.

As regards the younger members of the party, it undoubtedly did. Terry was strong enough to enjoy the long day on the heights without fear of Miss Scope’s thermometer; Blanca was impressed by the lavish fare which replaced their habitual bread and chocolate; and the small children were in the state of effervescence induced by freedom from lessons and the sense of being the central figures of the day.

And Judith—?

After lunch the younger members of the party trailed away with Miss Scope to hunt for wild strawberries while the others sat pillowed in moss beside a silver waterfall. Boyne, supine against his boulder, studied the scene and meditated from behind a screen of pipe smoke. Judith, a little way off, leaned luxuriously against her mossy cushion, her hat tossed aside, her head resting in the curve of an immature arm. Her profile looked small and clear against the auburn tremor of bracken turned inward by the rush of the water. A live rose burned in her cheeks, darkening her eyebrows and lashes, and putting a velvet shadow under her closed lids. She had fallen asleep, and sleep surrendered her unguarded to her watchers.

“She looks almost grown up—she looks kissable. Why should she, all of a sudden?” Boyne asked himself, suddenly disturbed, not by her increased prettiness (the measure of that varied from hour to hour) but by some new quality in it. He turned his eyes away, and they fell on Mr. Dobree, who sat facing him in the studied abandon of a picnicker unused to picnics. Mr. Dobree’s inexhaustible wardrobe had supplied him with just the slightly shabby homespun suit and slightly faded hat adapted to the occasion; and Boyne wondered whether it were this change of dress which made him also seem different. But no: the difference was deeper. Despite his country clothes, Mr. Dobree did not look easier or less urban; he merely looked more excited and off his guard. His clear cautious eyes had grown blurred and furtive; one could almost see a faint line stretching from them to the recumbent Judith. Along that line it was manifest that Mr. Dobree’s thoughts were racing; and Boyne knew they were the same thoughts as his own. The discovery shocked him indescribably. But he remembered that the levelling tendencies of modern life have levelled differences of age with the rest; and that Mr. Dobree was, to all intents and purposes, but little older than himself. Moreover, he was still brisk and muscular; his glance was habitually alert; in spite of his silver hair there seemed no reason why he should not share with Boyne the contemplation of Judith’s defenceless beauty.

But if this was Boyne’s conclusion it was apparently not Mr. Dobree’s. As Boyne continued to observe him, Mr. Dobree’s habitual pinkness turned to a red which suffused even his temples and eyelids, so that his carefully brushed white hair looked like a sunlit cloud against an angry sky. But with whom was Mr. Dobree angry? Why, with himself, manifestly. His eyes still rested on the dreaming Judith; but the rest of his face looked as if every muscle were tightened in the effort to pull the eyes away. “He’s frightened—he’s frightened at himself,” Boyne thought, calling to mind—with a faint recoil from the reminder—that he also, once or twice, had been vaguely afraid of himself when he had looked too long at Judith. Had his eyes been like that, he wondered? And the muscles of his face been stretched in the effort to detach the eyes? The thing was not pleasant to visualise; and he disliked Mr. Dobree the more for serving as his mirror....

But suddenly Mr. Dobree was on his feet, his whole attention given to Mrs. Sellars. Again Boyne followed his change of direction with a start. Mrs. Sellars—but then she had been there all the time! Shadowed by her spreading hat, her light body bedded in the turf, she looked almost as young and sylvan as Judith. But somehow she had been merged in the landscape, all broken up into a dapple of sun and shade, of murmurs and soughings: her way of fitting into things sometimes had this effect of effacing her. She lifted her head, and in the shade of the hat-brim Boyne caught a delicate watchfulness of brows and lips, as of tiny live things under a protecting leaf.

Mr. Dobree was challenging her jauntily. “Do you see why those young cannibals should monopolise all the wild strawberries? Suppose we leave Mr. Boyne to mount guard over the sleeping beauty, and try to bag our share before it’s too late?”

The words said clearly enough: “Take me away—it’s high time,” and Mrs. Sellars’s gay little answer: “Come on—I’ll show you a patch they’ll never find,” seemed to declare as clearly: “I know; but I’ll see that you don’t come to any mischief.”

She was on her feet before his hands could help her up; something light and bounding in her seemed to spring to his call. “This way, this way,” she cried, starting ahead of him up the boulder-strewn way. Boyne heard their voices mounting the streamside, mingling with the noise of the water, fading and flashing out again like the glimpses of her dress through the beech-leaves. He lay without moving, watching the smoke of his pipe rise in wavering spirals, twisted out of shape by puffs of air from the waterfall. With Mr. Dobree’s withdrawal the ideas suggested by his presence had gone too; Judith Wheater seemed once more a little girl. Though perplexities and uncertainties still lingered on the verge of Boyne’s mind his central self was anchored in a deep circle of peace. Every fibre of him was alive to the exquisite moment; but he had no need to fly from it, no fear of its flying from him. Judith’s sleep was a calm pool in which he rested.

He fancied he must have been watching her for a long time, his thoughts enclosing her in a sort of calm fraternal vigilance, when she opened her eyes and turned them on him, still dewy with sleep.

“Martin!” she hailed him drowsily; then, fully awake, she sat up and exclaimed: “Darling, when are you going to be married? I’ve positively got to know at once.”

She was always startling Boyne, but she had perhaps never startled him more than by this question; for even as she spoke he had been half unconsciously putting it to himself. He remembered, as something already far off, picturesque and unreal as a youthful folly, his resentment of Mrs. Sellars’s delay in fixing a date for their marriage. Was it only two or three weeks ago that he had sent her, with a basket of gentians picked on a lofty upland, a quotation from Marvell’s “Coy Mistress”? Now all that seemed an undergraduate’s impatience. She had taught him that they were very well as they were, and if he still asked himself when they were to be married, the question had imperceptibly taken another form. “What in God’s name will become of the children after we’re married?” was the way he now instinctively put it.

He too sat up, and gazed into Judith’s sleepy eyes. As he did so he was aware that an uncomfortable redness (which did not, he hoped, resemble Mr. Dobree’s) was creeping up to his temples.

“When I’m going to be married? Why? What’s the odds? I don’t know that it’s anybody’s business, anyhow,” he grumbled in an ill-assured voice.

Judith brushed the rebuff aside. “Oh, but it is—it’s mine. For a very particular reason,” she continued, as if affectionately resolved to break down the barrier of his reserve.

“A reason? Nonsense! What has a chit like you got to do with reasons?”

“You mean I’m so unreasonable?” A quick shadow crossed her face. “You didn’t really mean that?”

“I didn’t mean anything at all—any more than you do. I only meant: why aren’t we very well as we are?”

Her eyes grew wide at this, and continued to fix him with a half mocking gravity, while her lips rounded into a smile. “Oh, but, Martin dear, it’s Mrs. Sellars who ought to say that—not you!”

Boyne burst out laughing. How could one ever keep serious for two minutes with any of these preposterous children? And once more he told himself that Judith was as preposterous, and as much of a child, as the youngest of them.

“You know, darling, you ought to be empressé, impatient, passionate,” she adjured him, as if his very life depended on his following her advice.

He leaned on his elbow and examined her with deliberation. “Well, of all the cheek—!”

She shook her head, still smiling. “I’m not cheeky; I’m really not, Martin. But sometimes you strike me as having so little experience—”

(“Thank you,” Boyne interjected.)

“Oh, I mean in those sorts of ways. As if you’d lived all your life so far away from the world.”

“From your world? So I have, thank heaven.” After a moment he added with severity: “So has Mrs. Sellars—thank heaven too.”

The girl stood up, and crossing the mossy space between them, dropped down beside him and laid her hand on his arm. “Now I’ve offended you. Doll Westway always said I had no tact. And all I wanted was to explain why I have to know as soon as possible when you’re to be married.”

“Well, you certainly haven’t explained that,” Boyne answered, turning away from her to relight his pipe.

“No; but I’m going to. And you’ll be pleased. It’s because we’ve all clubbed together—even the steps and Scopy have—to give you a really jolly wedding present; and I think you’ll like what we’ve found. We unearthed it the other day at Toblach, at the antiquaire’s. And we want to know exactly the right moment to give it to you. You do love presents, don’t you, Martin?” she urged, as if straining her utmost to reach some human chord in him. He met the question with another laugh.

“Love presents? I should think I did! Almost as much as you do.” She coloured a little at the insinuation; and perceiving this, he hastened on: “It’s awfully dear of you all, and I’m ever so grateful. But there was no need to be in such a devil of a hurry.”

Her face became all sympathy and interrogation. “Oh, Martin, you don’t mean—things haven’t gone wrong, have they?” Her look and intonation showed that she would have been genuinely distressed if they had. A pang like neuralgia shot through Boyne—yet a pang that was not all bitter. He took her hand, and laid what she had once called a “grown up kiss” on it. “Of course not, dear. And thank you—thank you for everything.... Whatever you’ve all chosen for me, I shall love.... Only, you know, there’s really no sort of hurry.”

She met this in silence, as something manifestly final. Folding her arms behind her, she let her head droop back on them, and her gaze wandered lazily skyward through the flicker of boughs.

Boyne had got his pipe going again. Gradually the tumult in his mind subsided. He sank back lazily at her side, tilting his hat over his brows, and saying to himself: “What on earth’s the use of thinking ahead, anyhow?”

Directly in the line of his vision, Judith’s sandalled feet lay in a bed of bracken, crossed like a resting Mercury’s. He could almost see the little tufted wings at the heels. For the moment his imagination was imprisoned in a circle close about them.

That evening, when the children, weary but still jubilant, had been dropped at the Pension Rosenglüh, and Boyne had joined Mrs. Sellars for a late dinner at the châlet, the first thing that struck him was that his sapphire had reappeared on her hand.

He wondered afterward how it was that he, in general so unobservant of such details, had noticed that she had resumed the modest stone; and concluded that it was because of Judith’s ridiculous cross-examination about the date of his marriage. He almost suspected that, baffled by his evasiveness, the pertinacious child had ended by addressing herself to Mrs. Sellars, and that the latter, thus challenged, had put on her ring. But no—though Judith was sometimes lacking in tact (as she herself acknowledged) this indiscretion could not be imputed to her, for the reason that Mrs. Sellars—Boyne remembered it only now—had not reappeared on the scene till it was time to pack the sleepy picnickers into the motors. She and Mr. Dobree had been a long time away. They had apparently prolonged their walk, and, incidentally, had failed to find the promised strawberries—or else had consumed them on the spot. And on the way home Judith and Mrs. Sellars had not been in the same car. Why, then, had Mrs. Sellars suddenly put on her ring? Boyne would only suppose that she had decided, for reasons unknown to him, to announce their engagement that night to Mr. Dobree, who was no doubt going to join them at dinner.

The idea obscurely irritated Boyne; he felt bored in advance by the neat and obvious things Mr. Dobree would consider it becoming to say. Boyne’s whole view of Mrs. Sellars’s friend had been changed by his sudden glimpse of the man who had looked out of Mr. Dobree’s eyes at Judith. Before that, Boyne had pigeon-holed him as the successful lawyer, able in his profession, third-rate in other capacities, with a methodically planned existence of which professional affairs filled the larger part, and the rest was divided up like a carefully-weighed vitamin diet (Mr. Dobree was strong on vitamins) between exercise, society, philanthropy and travel. Now, a long way off down this fair perspective, a small, an almost invisible Dobree, lurked and prowled, staring as he had stared at Judith. A sudden irritation filled Boyne at the thought of what, unknown to Mrs. Sellars, peered and grimaced behind her legal counsellor. It was as if Mr. Dobree had unconsciously evoked for him some tragic allegory of Judith’s future....

“Where’s your friend? Are we waiting for him?” Boyne’s question sounded abrupt in his own ears, but was received by Mrs. Sellars with her usual equanimity.

“Mr. Dobree? No, we’re not waiting for him. He’s not coming.”

Boyne felt relieved, yet vaguely baffled. If Dobree wasn’t coming (he immediately thought), why the devil wasn’t he? And what was he up to instead?

“Chucked you for a party at the ‘Palace,’ I suppose? I’m glad he didn’t drag you up there to dine with him.”

“No; I don’t think he’s giving a party—or going to one. He had letters to write; and he said he was tired.”

This seemed to dispose of the matter, and Boyne, still faintly disturbed, followed his betrothed to the dining-table, at which of late he had so seldom sat alone with her.

“Don’t you like it better like this?” she asked, smiling at him across the bowl of wild roses which stood between them.

It was indeed uncommonly pleasant to be alone with her again. She gratified him, at the outset, by praising the behaviour of the children on the picnic; and as they talked he began to think that his growing irritability, and his odd reluctance to look forward to their future together, had been caused only by the intrusion of irrelevant problems and people. “When we’re alone together everything’s always all right,” he thought, reassured.

Dinner over, they drifted out onto the balcony in the old way, and he lit his cigar, and yielded to the sense of immediate wellbeing. He saw that Rose Sellars knew he was glad to be alone with her, and that the knowledge put her at her ease, and made her want to say and do whatever would maintain that mood in him. There was something pathetic in the proud creature’s eagerness to be exactly what he wished her to be.

“Judith was looking her very prettiest today, wasn’t she? Mr. Dobree was so much struck by her,” she said softly, after a silence.

It was as if she had flung a boulder into the very middle of the garden-plot she had just been at such pains to lay out. Boyne met the remark with an exasperated laugh.

“I should say he was struck. That was fairly obvious.”

“Well—she is striking, at times,” Mrs. Sellars conceded, still more gently.

“As any lovely child is. That’s what she is—a lovely child. Dobree looks at her like a dog licking his jaws over a bone.”

“Martin—!”

“Sorry. I never could stand your elderly men who look at little girls. If your friend is so dotty about Judith, he’d better ask her to marry him. He’s rich, isn’t he? His money might be an inducement—who knows?”

“Marry her? Marry Judith? Mr. Dobree?” Mrs. Sellars gave way to a mild mirth. His words certainly sounded absurd enough when she echoed them; but Boyne, for the moment, was beyond heeding anything but the tumult in his own veins.

“Why not?” he continued. “As the poor child is situated, money is a big consideration. What’s the use of being a hypocrite about it? If she’s to fight her parents, and keep the children together, she’ll need cash, and a big pile of it; and a clever lawyer to manœuvre for her, too. I call it an ideal arrangement.”

Mrs. Sellars waited a little before answering; then she said: “I don’t see how the biggest fortune, and the cleverest lawyer in the world, could keep the Wheaters from ordering their children home the day they choose to. But I’m sure that if Judith wanted help and advice no one would be more happy to give it to her than Mr. Dobree.”

“Ah, there you’re right,” Boyne agreed with an ironic shrug.

“Well, and don’t you think perhaps it might be a good thing if she did consult him—or at least if you did, for her?”

“If I intervened in any way between Dobree and Judith I don’t think he’d thank you for putting me up to it.”

“Why—what do you mean?”

“If you don’t know what I mean I can only suppose you didn’t notice how he was looking at the child this afternoon, before you carried him off for a walk.”

Mrs. Sellars fell silent again. He saw the faint lines of perplexity weaving their net over her face, and reflected that when a woman is no longer young she can preserve her air of freshness only in the intervals of feeling. “It’s too bad,” he thought, vexed with himself for having upset the delicate balance of her serenity. But now she was smiling again, a little painfully.

“Looking at her—looking at her how?”

“Well—as I’ve told you.”

The smile persisted. “I certainly didn’t see anything like that. And neither did I carry him off for a walk; as it happens, it was he who carried me—”

“Oh, well,” Boyne murmured at this touch of feminine vanity.

Mrs. Sellars continued: “And I don’t think he’s thinking of Judith in the way you imagine—or that he can have looked at her in that way. I hope he didn’t; because, as it happens, he took me off on that walk to ask me to marry him.”

The words dropped from her with a serene detachment, as if they had been her luminous little smile made audible. “I don’t know that it’s quite fair to him to tell you,” she added, with one of her old-fashioned impulses of reserve.

It was Boyne’s turn to find no answer. For some time he sat gazing into the summer darkness without speaking. “Marry him? Marry Dobree—you?”

“You see you were right: he does want to get married,” she softly bantered. “It was what he came for—to ask me. I’d no idea.... And now he’s going away ... he leaves to-morrow,” she added, with a faint sigh in which deprecation and satisfaction were perceptibly mingled. If it was her little triumph she took it meekly, even generously—but nevertheless, he saw, with a complete consciousness of what it meant.

Boyne laughed again, this time at himself.

“I don’t know what you see in it that is so absurd,” Mrs. Sellars murmured, a faint note of vexation in her voice. Again he found no reply, and she continued, with the distant air she assumed when echoing axioms current in her youth: “After all, it’s the highest honour a man can—”

“Oh, quite,” Boyne agreed good-humouredly. He rubbed his hand across his forehead, as if to brush away some inner confusion. But it was no use; he couldn’t straighten his thoughts out. He couldn’t shake off the fact that his surprise and derision had not concerned Rose Sellars at all—that his laugh had simply mocked his own power of self-deception, and uttered his relief at finding himself so deceived. “So that was all!” The words escaped him unawares. In the dusk he felt the shadowy figure at his side stiffen and withdraw from him.

“Shall we go in? It’s getting chilly,” said Mrs. Sellars, turning back toward the lamplight.

Boyne, still in the bewilderment of his own thoughts, followed her into the room. He noticed that she had grown unusually pale. She sat down beside the table, and began turning over the letters and papers which the evening post had brought. Boyne stood in front of the fireplace, his hands in his pockets, watching her movements as one letter after another slipped through her fingers. But all he could see was the sapphire ring, re-established, enthroned, proclaiming his own destiny to all concerned and unconcerned.

“So you told him you were already engaged?”

She looked up at him. “It was only fair, wasn’t it?”

“Certainly—that is, if being engaged was the only obstacle.”

“The only obstacle?”

“If you were prepared to marry Dobree, supposing you’d still been free.”

She weighed this, and then laughed a little, but without much gaiety. “How do I know what I should have done if I’d been free?”

He continued to look at her. “Do you want to try?”

The colour rose to her forehead. She dropped the letters, and composed her hands on them as if in the effort to control a secret agitation. “Is this a way of telling me you’re vexed because I announced our engagement to Mr. Dobree?”

He hesitated, feeling (and now he hated himself for feeling) that it was a moment for going warily. “Not vexed; that’s not the word. Only I did agree with you that, as long as—as nothing about our future was definitely settled—it was ever so much pleasanter keeping our private affairs to ourselves. It was your own idea, you know; you proposed it,” he reminded her, as she remained silent.

“Yes; it was my idea.” She pondered. “But you needn’t be afraid that Mr. Dobree will betray us.”

“It’s not a question of betraying. It’s just the feeling—”

“The feeling that some one else is in our secret? But all the Wheater children have been—for a long time.” She spoke the words ever so lightly, as if she had barely pencilled them on a smooth page.

Boyne was startled. He could see no analogy, but did not know how to explain that there was none. “Oh, the children; but the children don’t count. Besides, that wasn’t my fault. Judith guessed.” He smiled a little at the reminiscence. “But perhaps Mr. Dobree guessed,” he added, with a return of ease. After all, he was carrying it off very well, he thought—though what he meant by “it” he would have been put to it to say.

Mrs. Sellars gave another little laugh. “Oh, no; Mr. Dobree didn’t guess. I had to dot the i’s for him. The fact is”—she paused a moment—“he was convinced that you were in love with Judith Wheater.”

Instantly all the resentments and suspicions which Boyne had dismissed rushed back on him. He had been right, then—he had not mistaken the signs and portents. As if they were ever mistakable! “How rotten,” he said in a low voice.

Mrs. Sellars dropped one of the letters which she had absently taken up again.

“Martin—”

“Rotten. The mere thinking of such a thing—much less insinuating it to any one else. But it just shows—” He broke off, and then began again, on a fresh wave of indignation: “Shows what kind of a mind he must have. Thinking in that way about a child—a mere child—and about any man, any decent man; regarding it as possible, perhaps as natural ... worst of all, suggesting it of some one standing in my position toward these children; as if I might take advantage of my opportunities to—to fall in love with a child in the schoolroom!”

Boyne’s words sounded in his own ears as if they were being megaphoned at him across the width of the room. He dropped down into the nearest chair, hot, angry, ashamed, with a throat as dry as if he had been haranguing an open-air meeting on a dusty day.

Opposite him, Mrs. Sellars remained with her hands suspended above the letters. The sapphire burned at him across the interval. “Martin ... but you are in love with her!” she exclaimed. She paused a moment, and then added in a quieter voice: “I believe I’ve always known it.” They sat and looked at each other without speaking.

At length Boyne rose, and started to move around the table to where she was sitting.

“This is ridiculous—” he began.

She held up her hand, and the gesture, though evidently meant only to check the words on his lips, had the effect also of arresting his advance. He felt self-conscious and clumsy, and dimly resented her making him feel so. He was sure it was she who had been ridiculous, not he; yet, curiously enough, the conviction brought him no solace. Again they faced each other, guardedly, apprehensively, as if something fragile and precious, which they had been carrying together, had slipped between their fingers and been broken. He felt that, if he glanced at the floor, he might see the glittering fragments....

Mrs. Sellars was the first to recover her self-possession. She rose in her turn, and going up to Boyne laid her hand on his arm.

“I wonder why we’re trying to hurt each other?” She looked at him through moist lashes, and he felt himself a brute for not instantly taking her in his arms and obliterating their discussion with a kiss. But there lay the glittering fragments, and he could not seem to reach to her across them.

“Now I know what she thinks of Judith,” he reflected savagely.

“It’s all my fault, Martin; I know I’m nervous and stupid.” She was clasping his arm, pleading with lifted eyes and lips. Her self-abasement humiliated him. “If she really thinks what she says, why doesn’t she kick me out?” he wondered.

“I suppose I walked too far today, and got over-tired; and what Mr. Dobree said startled me, upset me....”

He smiled. “His asking you to marry him?”

She smiled back a little wearily. “No. But what he said about—about your interest in Judith. You must understand, dear, that sometimes your attitude about those children is a little surprising to people who don’t know all the circumstances.”

Boyne felt himself hardening again. “What business is it of people who don’t know all the circumstances? You do; that’s enough.”

She seized at this with a distressing humility. “Of course I do, dearest; of course it is. And you’ll try to forget my stupid nerves, won’t you? Try to think of me as I am when there’s nobody in the world but you and me?” Her arms stole up to his shoulders, her hands met behind his neck, and she drew his head down softly. “If only it could always be like that!”

As their lips touched he shut his eyes, and tried, with a violent effort of the will, to recall what her kiss would have meant to him on the far-off day when the news of Sellars’s death had overtaken him somewhere in the Nubian desert, and in the middle of the night he had started awake, still clutching the letter, and crying out to himself: “At last....”

Next day, when Boyne thought over the scene of the previous night, he found for it all the excuses which occur to a sensible man in the glow of his morning bath.

It was all the result of idling and lack of hard exercise; when a working man has had too long a holiday, and resting has become dawdling, Satan proverbially intervenes. But though at first Boyne assumed all the blame, by the time he began to shave he had handed over a part to Mrs. Sellars. After all, it was because of her old-fashioned scruples, her unwillingness to marry him at once, and let him get back to work, that they were still loitering in the Dolomites. It probably wasn’t safe for middle-aged people to have too much leisure in which to weigh each other’s faults and merits.

But then, again, suddenly he thought: “If we’d been married, and gone home when I wanted to, what would have become of the children?” It was undoubtedly because Mrs. Sellars had insisted on prolonging their engagement that Boyne had become involved in the Wheater problem; but when he reached this point in his retrospect he found he could not preserve his impartiality. It was impossible to face the thought of what might have happened to the little Wheaters if chance had not put him in their way....

After all, then, everything was for the best. All he had to do was to persuade Mrs. Sellars of it (which ought not to be difficult, since it was a “best” of her own devising), and to banish from his mind the disturbing figure of Mr. Dobree. Perhaps—on second thoughts—his irritability of the previous evening had been partly due to the suspicion that Mrs. Sellars, for all her affected indifference, was flattered by Mr. Dobree’s proposal. “You never can tell—” Boyne concluded, and shrugged that possibility away too. The thought that he might have had to desert his young friends in their hour of distress, and had been able, instead, to stay and help them, effaced all other considerations. So successfully did he talk himself over to this view that only one cloud remained on his horizon. Mrs. Sellars had said: “I don’t see how the biggest fortune, and the cleverest lawyer in the world, could keep the Wheaters from ordering their children home the day they choose to”; and in saying it she had put her finger on Boyne’s inmost apprehension. He had told himself the same thing a hundred times; but to hear it from any one else made the danger seem more pressing. It reminded him that the little Wheaters’ hold on him was not half as frail as his own on them, and that it was folly to indulge the illusion that he could really direct or control their fate.

And meanwhile—?

Well, he could only mark time; thank heaven it was still his to mark! The Lido season had not yet reached its climax, and till it declined and fell he was free to suppose that its devotees would linger on, hypnotized. As between taking steps for an immediate divorce, and figuring to the last in the daily round of entertainment, Boyne felt sure that not one of the persons concerned would hesitate. They could settle questions of business afterward; and it was purely as business that they regarded a matter in which the extent of the alimony was always the chief point of debate. And what could replace the excitement of a Longhi ball at the Fenice, or of a Marriage of the Doge to the Adriatic, mimed in a reconstituted Bucentaur by the rank and fashion of half Europe? No one would be leaving Venice yet.

But, all the same, the days were flying. The increasing number of arrivals at Cortina, the growing throng of motors on all the mountain ways, showed that before long fashion would be moving from the seashore to the mountains; and when the Lido broke up, what might not break up with it? Boyne felt that the question must at last be faced; that he must have a talk about it that very day with Judith.

It was more than a month since Judith and her flock had appeared at Cortina; and the various parents concerned had promised Boyne that the children should be left in the Dolomites till the summer was over. But what was such a promise worth, and what did the phrase mean on lips so regardless of the seasons? Nothing—Boyne knew it. He was conscious now that, during the last four weeks, he had never gone down to the Pension Rosenglüh without expecting to be told that a summons or a command had come from the Lido. But so far there had been none. The children were protected by the fact that there was no telephone at the pension, and that none of their parents was capable—except under the most extreme pressure—of writing a letter.

When it was impossible to telephone they could, indeed, telegraph; but even the inditing of a telegram required a concentration of mind which, Boyne knew, would become increasingly difficult as the Lido season culminated. Telegrams did, of course, come, especially in the first days, both to Boyne and to Judith: long messages from Joyce about clothes and diet, rambling communications from Lady Wrench, setting forth her rights and grievances in terms which, by the time they had passed through two Italian telegraph-offices, were as confused as the thoughts in her own mind; and lastly, a curt wire from Cliffe Wheater to Boyne: “Wish it definitely understood relinquish no rights whatever how is Chipstone reply paid.”

To all these communications Boyne returned a comprehensive “All right,” and, acting on his advice, Judith did the same, merely adding particulars as to the children’s health and happiness. “On the whole, you know,” she explained to Boyne, “it’s a relief to them all, now the thing’s settled—I always knew it would be.” She and Terry still cherished the hope that in the autumn she would be permitted to take the children out to Grandma Mervin, in America; or that, failing permission, she would be encouraged by Boyne to carry them off secretly. With this in view, she and Miss Scope saved up every penny they could of the allowance which Cliffe Wheater had agreed to make, and which Boyne dealt out to them once a week. But all these arrangements were so precarious, so dependent on the moods of unreasonable and uncertain people, that it seemed a miracle that the little party at the Pension Rosenglüh was still undisturbed. Certainly, if it had been possible to reach them by telephone they would have been scattered long ago. “As soon as they break up at the Lido they’ll be after you,” Boyne had warned Judith from the first; but she had always answered hopefully: “Oh, no: not till after Cowes, if they still go there; and if they don’t, after Venice there’s Biarritz. You’ll see. And before Biarritz there’s a fortnight in Paris for autumn clothes.”

Cowes, in due course, had been relinquished, the Lido exerting too strong a counter-attraction; but after a few more weeks that show also would be packed away in the lumber-room of spent follies.

The fact of having these questions always on his mind kept Boyne from being unduly disturbed by his discussion of the previous evening with Mrs. Sellars. In the wholesome light of morning a sentimental flurry between two sensible people who were deeply attached to each other seemed as nothing compared to the ugly reality perpetually hanging over the little Wheaters; and he felt sure that Mrs. Sellars would take the same view.

She did not disappoint him. When he presented himself at the luncheon hour the very air of the little sitting-room breathed a new serenity; it was as if she had been out early to fill it with flowers. Boyne was not used to delicate readjustments in his sentimental relations. For so many years now his feeling for Rose Sellars had been something apart, like a beautiful picture on the wall of a quiet room; and his other amorous episodes had been too brief and simple for any great amount of manœuvring. He was therefore completely reassured by the gaiety and simplicity of her welcome, and thought to himself once again that there was everything to be said in favour of a long social acquiescence. “A stupid woman, now, would insist on going over the whole thing again, like a blue-bottle that starts in banging about the room after you’re sure you’ve driven it out of the window.”

There was nothing of the blue-bottle about Mrs. Sellars; and she was timorously anxious that Boyne should know it. But her timidity was not base; if she submitted, she submitted proudly. The only sign she gave of a latent embarrassment was in her too great ease, her too blithe determination to deny it. But even this was minimised by the happy fact that she had a piece of news for him.

She did not tell him what it was till lunch was over, and they were finishing their coffee in the sitting-room: she knew the importance of not disturbing a man’s train of thought—even agreeably—while he is in the act of enjoying good food. Boyne had lit his cigar, and was meditating on the uniform excellence of the coffee she managed to give him, when she said, with a little laugh: “Only imagine—Aunt Julia’s on the Atlantic! I had a radio this morning. She says she’s coming over to Paris to see you.”

Boyne had pictured Aunt Julia—when he could spare the time for such an evocation—as something solid, ponderous, essentially immovable. She represented for him the obstinate stability of old New York in the flux of new experiments. It was like being told that Trinity Church, for instance, was taking a Loretto-flight across the Atlantic to see him.

Mrs. Sellars laughed at his incredulous stare. “Are you surprised? I’m not. You see, Aunt Julia was always the delicate sister, the one who had to be nursed. Aunt Gertrude, the strong one, who did the nursing, died last winter—and since then Aunt Julia’s been perfectly well.”

They agreed that such resurrections were not uncommon, and Mrs. Sellars went so far as to declare that, if she didn’t get to Paris in time to meet Aunt Julia, she was prepared to have the latter charter an aeroplane and descend on Cortina. “Indeed we’re only protected by the fact that I don’t believe there’s any landing-field in the Dolomites.”

She went on to say that she would have to leave in a day or two, as Aunt Julia, who was accustomed to having her path smoothed for her, had requested that hotel rooms fulfilling all her somewhat complicated requirements should be made ready for her arrival, a six-cylinder motor with balloon tires and an irreproachable chauffeur engaged to meet her at the station, and a doctor and a masseuse be found in attendance when she arrived—as a result of which precautions she hoped, after an interval of repose, to be well enough to occupy herself with her niece’s plans.

Boyne gasped. “Good Lord—what that cable must have cost her!”

“Oh, it’s not the cost that ever bothers Aunt Julia,” said Aunt Julia’s niece with a certain deference.

Boyne laughed, and agreed that Mrs. Sellars could not prudently refuse such a summons. Somehow it no longer offended him that she should obey it from motives so obviously interested. He could not have said why, but it now seemed to him natural enough that she should hold herself at the disposal of a rich old aunt. He wondered whether it was because her departure would serve to relieve a passing tension; but he dismissed this as a bit of idle casuistry. “The point is that she’s going—and that she and I will probably be awfully glad to see each other when she gets back.”

Mrs. Sellars cast a wistful look about her. After a pause she said: “You don’t know how I hate to think that our good evenings in this dear little room are so nearly over,” in a tone suggesting that she had rather expected Boyne to say it for her, and that he had somehow missed a cue.

“But why over? Not for more than a week, I hope? You’re not going to let yourself be permanently annexed by Aunt Julia?”

She smiled a little perplexedly: evidently other plans were in her mind, plans she had pictured him as instinctively divining. “Not permanently; but I don’t quite know when I shall be able to leave her—”

“Oh, I say, my dear!”

The perplexity lifted from her smile: it seemed to reach out to him like a promise. “But then I expect you to join me very soon. As soon as Aunt Julia’s blood-pressure has been taken, and the doctor and the masseuse and the chauffeur have been tested and passed upon.”

Boyne listened in astonishment. It had never seriously occurred to him that he was to be involved in the ceremony of establishing Aunt Julia on European soil. “Oh, but look here—what earthly use should I be? Why should I be butchered to make Aunt Julia’s holiday?”

“You won’t be. It will be—almost the other way round. I’m going to do everything I possibly can for Aunt Julia; everything to start her successfully on her European adventure. And then I’m going to present the bill.”

“The bill?”

She nodded gaily. “You’re the bill. I’m going to present you, and say: ‘Now you’ve seen him, can you wonder that I mean to marry him at once, whether you like it or not?’”

The words fell on a silence which Boyne, for the moment, found it impossible to break. Mrs. Sellars stood by her writing-table, her slender body leaning to him, her face lit with one of those gleams of lost youth which he had once found so exquisite and poignant. He found it so now, but with another poignancy.

“You mean—you mean—you’ve changed your mind about the date?” He broke off, the words “of our marriage” choking on his lips. Through a mist of bewilderment he saw the tender mockery of her smile, and knew how much courage it disguised. (“I stand here like a stock—what a brute she’ll think me!”)

“Did you imagine I was one of the dreadful women who never change their minds?” She came close, clasped her hands about his arm, lifted her delicate face, still alight with expectation. The face said: “Here I am: to be cherished or shattered—” and he thought again of the glittering fragments he had seen at his feet the night before. He detached her hands, and lifted them, one after another, to his kiss. If only some word—if only the right word—would come to him!

“Martin—don’t you want me to change my mind?” she suddenly challenged him. He held her hands against his breast, caressing them.

“Dear, first of all, I don’t want to be the cause of you doing anything that might offend your aunt ... that might interfere ... in any way ... with her views....” No; he couldn’t go on; the words strangled him. He was too sure that she was aware they did not express what he was thinking, were spoken only to gain time.

But with a gentle tenacity she pursued: “It’s awfully generous of you to think of that. But don’t you suppose, dear, I’ve been miserable at asking you to linger on here when I’ve always known that what you wanted was to be married at once, and get back to work? I’ve been imprisoned in my past—I see it now; I had become the slave of all those years of conformity you used to reproach me with. For a long time I couldn’t get out of their shadow. But you’ve opened my eyes—you’ve set me free. How monstrous to have waited so long for happiness, and then to be afraid to seize it when it comes!” Her arms stole up and drew him. “I’m not afraid now, Martin. You’ve taught me not to be. Henceforth I mean to think of you first, not of Aunt Julia. I mean to marry you as soon as it can be done. I don’t suppose the formalities take very long in Paris, do they? Then, as soon as we’re married, we’ll sail for home.”

He listened in a kind of stupor, saying inwardly: “It’s not that I love her less; it can’t be that I love her less. It’s only that everything that happens between us always seems to happen at the wrong time.”

The silence prolonged itself, on her side stretched and straining, on his built up like a wall, opaque, impenetrable. From beyond it came her little far-off laugh. “Dear, I’m utterly in your hands, you see!”

Evidently there had to be an answer to that. “Rose—” he began. Pretty as her name was, he hardly ever called her by it; he had always felt her too close to him to need a name. She looked up in surprise.

He made a fresh start. “But you see, darling, how things are—”

A little tremor ran across her face. “What things?”

“You know that, after you’d refused to consider the possibility of our getting married at once, I pledged myself....”

The tremor ceased, and her face once more became smooth and impenetrable. He found himself repeating to vacancy: “I pledged myself....”

She drew quietly away, and sat down at a little distance from him. “You’re talking about your odd experiment with the Wheater children?”

“It’s more than an experiment. When I saw the parents in Venice I told them, as you know, that I’d be responsible for the welfare of the children as long as they were left with me.”

“As long as they were left with you! For life, perhaps, then?” She leaned forward, her face drawn with the valiant effort of her smile. “Martin! Is all this serious? It can’t be! You can’t really be asking me to understand that all our plans—our whole future, yours and mine—are to depend, for an indefinite length of time, on the whim of two or three chance acquaintances of yours who are too heartless and self-engrossed to look after their own children!”

Boyne paused a moment; then he said: “We had no plans—I mean, no immediate plans—when I entered into the arrangement. It was by your own choice that—”

“My own choice! Well, then, my own choice, now, is that we should have plans, immediately.” She stood up, trembling a little. She was very pale, and her thin eyebrows drew a straight black bar across her forehead. “Martin—I ask you to come with me at once to Paris.”

“At once? But just now you said in a week or two—”

“And now I say at once: to-morrow.”

He stood leaning against the chimney, as far from her as the little room allowed. A tide of resistance rose in him. “I can’t come to-morrow.”

He was conscious that she was making an intense effort to steady her quivering nerves. “Martin ... I don’t want to be unreasonable....”

“You’re never unreasonable,” he said patiently.

“You mean it might have been better if I were!” she flashed back, crimsoning.

“Don’t be—now,” he pleaded.

“No.” She paused. “Very well. Come to Paris in a few days, then.”

“Look here, dear—all this is of no use. No earthly use. I can’t come in a few days, any more than I can come to-morrow. I can’t desert these children till their future is settled in one way or another. I’ve said I’d stick to them, and I mean to. If I turned my back on them now they’d lose their last chance of being able to stay together.”

She received this with bent head and hands clasped stiffly across her knee; but suddenly her self-control broke down. “But, Martin, are you mad? What business is it of yours, anyhow, what becomes of these children?”

“I don’t know,” he said simply.

“You don’t know—you don’t know?”

“No; I only feel it’s got to be. I’m pledged. I can’t get round it.”

“You can’t get round it because you don’t want to. You’re pledged because you want to be. You want to be because Mr. Dobree was right ... because....”

“Rose, take care,” he interrupted, very low.

“Take care? At this hour? Of what? For whom? All I care for is to know the truth....”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“You may think you are. But the truth is something very different—something you’re not conscious of yourself, perhaps ... not clearly....”

“I believe I’m telling you the whole truth.”

“That when I ask you to choose between me and the Wheater children, you choose the Wheater children—out of philanthropy?”

“I didn’t say out of philanthropy. I said I didn’t know....”

“If you don’t know, I do. You’re in love with Judith Wheater, and you’re trying to persuade yourself that you’re still in love with me.”

He lifted his hands to his face, and covered his eyes, as if from some intolerable vision she had summoned to them. “Don’t Rose, for the Lord’s sake.... Don’t let’s say stupid things—”

“But, dear, I must.” She got up and came close to him again; he felt her hands on his arm. “Listen, Martin. I love you too much not to want to help you. Try to feel that about me, won’t you? Then everything will be so much easier.”

“Yes.”

“Try to understand your own feelings—that’s the best way of sparing mine. I want the truth, that’s all. Try to see the truth, and face it with me—it’s all I ask.”

He dropped his hands, and turned his discouraged eyes on her. But he could only feel that he and she were farther apart than when he had last looked at her; all the rest was confusion and obscurity.

“I don’t know what the truth, as you call it, is; I swear I don’t; but I know it’s not what you think. Judith’s as much a child to me as the others—that I swear to you.”

“Then, dear—”

“Then, I’ve got to stick to them all the same,” he repeated doggedly.

For a time the two continued to stand in silence, with eyes averted, like people straining to catch some far-off sound which will signal relief from a pressing peril. Then, slowly, Boyne turned to Mrs. Sellars. His eyes rested on her profile, so thin, drawn, bloodless, that a fresh pang shot through him. He had often mocked at himself as a man who, in spite of all his wanderings, had never had a real adventure; but now he saw that he himself had been one, had been Rose Sellars’s Great Adventure, the risk and the enchantment of her life. While she had continued, during the weary years of her marriage, to be blameless, exemplary, patient and heroically gay, the thought of Boyne was storing up treasures for her which she would one day put out her hand and take—no matter how long she might have to wait. Her patience, Boyne knew, was endless—it was as long as her hair. She had trained herself to go on waiting for happiness, day after day, month after month, year after year, with the same air of bright unruffled vigilance, like a tireless animal waiting for its prey. One day her prey, her happiness, would appear, and she would snap it up; and on that day there would be no escape from her....

It was terrible, it was hideous, to be picturing her distress as something grasping and predatory; it was more painful still to be entering so acutely into her feelings while a central numbness paralysed his own. All around this numbness there was a great margin of pity and of comprehension; but he knew this was not the region by way of which he could reach her. She who had always lived the life of reason would never forgive him if he called upon her reason now....

“Rose—” he appealed to her.

She turned and he saw her face, composed, remodelled, suffused with a brilliancy like winter starlight. Her lips formed a smiling: “Dear?”

“Rose—”

She took his hand with the lightest pressure. “Dearest, what utter nonsense we’ve both been talking! Of course I don’t mean that you’re to desert the Wheater children for me—and of course you don’t mean that you’re to desert me for them; do you? I believe I understand all you feel; all your fondness for the poor little things. I should shiver at you if you hadn’t grown to love them! But you and I have managed to get each other all on edge, I don’t know how. Don’t you feel what a mistake it would be to go in and out of this question any longer? I have an idea I could find a solution almost at once, if only I weren’t trying to so hard. And so could you, no doubt.” She paused, a little breathlessly, and then resumed her eager monologue. “Let’s say goodbye till to-morrow, shall we?—and produce our respective plans of action when we meet again. And don’t forget that the problem may solve itself without regard to us, and at any minute.”

She had caught at the last splinter of the rock of Reason still visible above the flood; and there she clung, dauntless, unbeaten, uttering the right, the impartial word with lips that pined and withered for his kiss....

“Oh, my dear,” he murmured.

“To-morrow?”

“Yes—to-morrow.”

Before he could take her in his arms she had slipped out of reach, and softly, adroitly closed the door on him. Alone on the landing he was left with the sense that that deft gesture had shut him up with her forever.