The room

IT was Ursula’s way to endure haphazard circumstances quietly and dreamily, for years; and then, inspired and shaken by sudden fierce impatience, to spring at them. For just beyond drastic alteration, just beyond the limit of things wrong, lay that right and glorious world for which she ached ... where whatever you did, you keenly wanted to do; where no time was wasted in sitting about among people whose speech and habits recurred monotonously from day to day; where the air was sharp and golden as early morning in early summer....

Oh, merely this world, this ordinary old world, but twisted round from hatefulness because you dared to twist it.... Surely those moments, rare and swift, when you were amazingly happy, confident, bewitched, and for no reason at all, surely, Ursula had argued once with Aunt Lavvy, they could be made permanent, if you could once find out the cause of them? And Aunt Lavvy with a wise little smile had lent her Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird.”

Ursula groaned, but inwardly, for at this moment she worshipped Aunt Lavvy. “The Blue Bird”—the few pages she read of it were not bad; but the fairy-tale “humble cottage” of Tyltyl had seemed to have practically no connection with “The Laburnums.” Some people thought everything could be answered with a book. Ursula preferred, however, to puzzle and experiment without guides bound in soft calf.

She had given up her room at home, hoping, in her impatience of days that were nothing special, with people who were burdened with false small misunderstandings as a dog is burdened with a tin can tied round its neck, that thus she might force access to a kingdom of perpetual ecstasy. She had given up the room ... and that was all there was to it. Sullenly she discounted sacrifice—and also, with the iconoclasm of sixteen-and-a-half, religion—“it all amounts to the same!”

And for a couple of years she was acquiescent; a schoolgirl, forgetting to wish madly to change things—change them and change them—a saraband defying stagnancy. Then Doug came ... and Doug talked ... and all the world was a romantic platitude of lagoons, and moonlight, and the domes and minarets of Eastern cities, quays of Rio, humming-birds and flying fish, and stars blazing on a phosphorescent sea. Doug-land. His richly-coloured wooing had dwindled her loss of the room to a size unimportant and of no significance; a small shabby bedroom with outlook on to a cistern and a wall—what a silly fuss her spirit had made of it! The after spectacle of her husband falling freshly in love each time he happened to see a moderately attractive girl crossing the room, began, after several years, to impress Ursula as again something ugly and unnecessary enough for another wild spurt of divine interference. “Divine” to be interpreted not as humble prayer for intercession from the skies; but as that sudden wrath which burst from her, and “chucked the furniture about!” as she once expressed it.

The result of furniture-chucking, in this instance, was their removal to Arcadia.

Now, in August of that summer, Ursula, lying on a flat rock at the base of the cliffs nearly level with the sea, realized that she had not even seen Arcadia, for the Arcadians.

The Arcadians—and Doug.

Doug came between her and the sky-line. She saw it over his shoulder.

She looked around her, in search of that balm which is said to be concealed in beauty: sea ... yes, green—a great many greens. But what is green, after all, without hysteria to describe it in simile and rapture? And the royal moors turned back in brocaded purple from the top of the cliff.

“‘Royal’ and ‘brocaded’ are affectation,” murmured Ursula. “At least—I don’t know—I suppose I’m tired.”

She may well have been tired; for Doug, of late, had been most abnormally fit. The open-air life agreed with him—he positively zig-zagged health from all angles of his body, like the gentleman in magazine advertisements. His energy ran over and spilt itself in all directions; he raced and jumped and bathed and dived and climbed, and leapt three times backwards and forwards over a stile, where once would have done; he talked louder than usual, because he had so much abundant voice left over from ordinary talking. And all this exercise gave him appetite for huge meals, and the huge meals built up his strength for further superlative exercise; he dragged Ursula out for long, rough, cross-country walks in all weathers, but preferably during the cold rainy spells which whipped June into July that year. Wraps he forbade, because of a certain fetish called “hardening”; he himself strode exultantly through all weathers, clad in loose cotton shirts and footer shorts; the skin of his knees, chest and arms, burnt to a crude mahogany, were his perpetual delight and boast. He did not sit—he flung himself down; he did not stand—he leapt to his feet. A portion of his left-over vitality after a stiff morning’s farm-work, he worked off on a patter-shuffle-clog-dance of his own invention; a little more, on the unwearied training of his dog to impossibilities. His dog was a good-looking young wire-haired terrier; a living affirmative of the axiom that the dog is the dumb devoted friend of man, but a stubborn contradiction of the further proposition that the dog is an intelligent beast. Rough was a fool, and most anxious to please Doug. For hours at a stretch, he strode beside Ursula across the moors, “training” Rough to follow. “Rough—Rough—good dog—hi—here—drop that—to heel, I say—heel—heel ... good dog ... good little fellow.... Rough (Sorry darling, what were you saying?)—Hi—Rough—here, I say....”

Nor did his vigour content itself without battering on all the doors of Ursula’s life—“Ouvre moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu”—like Love-locked-out fortified by Sanatogen!

“We must be all-in-all to each other, Teddy!” he declared again and again. And: “Tell me what you’re thinking about!”

Discovering, surprised, at this period, that her shyness resented his loving “stand and deliver” attitude—for she had thought shyness was over long ago—she invented a reserve store of thoughts that would do well enough for these occasions. Thoughts not too obvious—sometimes she became quite interested in them as they unwound into speech....

“What are you thinking of, Teddy?” Doug flopped out of the sea, and lay in a damp glow beside her on the rock.

Ursula considered him attentively, then she said: “Anyone can bask, after a bathe, in hot sunshine; but it takes you to bask in a cutting wind under a grey sky.”

“Oh, I’m most tremendously fit,” replied Doug. “At least—I’m normal. One ought always to feel like this; everybody ought. It’s their own fault if they don’t. Why didn’t you dip today, Teddy? Where’s the old Ruffian? What were you thinking about just before I came out?”

“About the Watsons,” said Ursula convincingly; “I was wondering why Stanley’s idea of a holiday was to shave only twice a week, and wear a collar and no tie, and a pencil still clipped to his waistcoat pocket.”

“I think he cast his tie out of compliment to me,” laughed Doug; “but his respectability still clung to the neat collar-stud and efficient pencil! He did rather upset the scenery whenever he appeared. The kids were jolly, though—especially the one with the idiot name; she was a real little sport in the water!”

Grace and Stanley, with Gums, the four children and Lottie, had recently returned to “Merlin’s Isle” at Buckler’s Cross, after a month’s painstaking holiday enriching Mr. Wenn at the Polpinnock Temperance Hotel. They were very disappointed that Grey Stone had not been able to accommodate them all. “Poor Ursula will be glad to have some of her own family around her,” Grace had explained their choice of a place to Miss Roberts. “A husband isn’t like a sister, after all.”

“Not in the least,” Miss Roberts agreed fervently. “And I’ve always longed to see some really wild country....” In fact, she was positively disappointed when the country of Morcar did not rise and spring at her.

Ursula did indeed welcome Grace and Lottie warmly. But she would have preferred a visit from Bunny, who, following his destiny, was now black-sheeping it in New Zealand.

“Auntie Teddy, what does father mean when he says Uncle Bunny’ll never be anything but a Mittens Man,” Freda, the youngest niece, had inquired.

Ursula forthwith sought out Stanley and hotly tackled him.

“Look here, Stanley, why do you label poor old Bunny a remittance man?”

“My dear Ursula, I don’t want my children to grow up believing there’s anything advisable in not sticking to their home and jobs.” But he re-told the anecdote of the Mittens Man with considerable pride and relish to any one trapped to listen by his off-hand: “Rather a smart thing I heard a kid say the other day. Well, as a matter of fact, it was my own youngster——”

Perhaps her brother-in-law’s measured patronage of the rocks and coves, their formation, their antiquity, their historical interest and their effect upon his own psychology (a) where they exceeded expectations and (b) where they fell below it, had something to do with Ursula’s present apathy towards nature. A yet sadder spectacle was a genial Stanley going about among the fishermen and palling up with them, punning hearty puns to suit their intelligence, or listening with deliberate respect to their views on politics—“You know, Barrison, sometimes these chaps say something worth hearing. They think, you know!”

“God, what a stumor!” was Doug’s final verdict on Stanley, as the train from Gullick bore him away, with his womenfolk.

“Well, I’m going to take old Rough for another swim; it freshens him up.” Doug poised for an instant in clean outline against the dark waves, and then plunged, followed in untidy, spluttering fashion by his dog, who detested the water, and only went in uttering sharp yelps of anguish because he believed each time that Doug was in the extremities of a life-and-death struggle.

Ursula watched the pair till they disappeared round the headland which jutted from the opposite side of the cove. Doug was swimming magnificently; he was certainly in superb physical condition.... And so ready for a romantic episode, that he was only kept from it by the sheer fact of no accessible girl—“And that’s a fact which can’t go on for ever,” mused Ursula.

So she had achieved nothing more than false security, by their withdrawal to loneliness and the country. He was bursting to talk of Doug-land and the horizon that pulled and pulled, to some one—not herself, oh, not herself!—to some one fresh and tremulous, who would say “we mustn’t, Doug....” and long for such a ringing love-adventure with so superb a hero.

It must come some time, sooner or later; Ursula knew she could not always strain to hold at arms-length the inevitable meeting. She had mistaken delay for prevention. But she had not altered Doug.

The very next girl.

“Ahoy—y—y!” Doug was exultantly calling her attention to himself from the opposite headland of rock. Sure of his audience, he treated her to a careless ripple of his muscles, then stood taut and dived. His black head reappeared on the surface several yards nearer to her.

“Oh—he does want his nice brand-new romance!” And with that, her sense of property flared up to a fierce height. You ought never to have to give up what has once been yours. Not a room nor a husband; and not the illusion that whatever sudden change you make in your life, is the right change.

The very next girl.

[II]

URSULA began to think quite a lot about her intangible rival. Then to be irritated by her. If she could have fixed her mind on a certain definite personality—been jealous of it, she might have wrestled better with jealousy than now, when compelled to alter over and over again the shape and colour of a girl, the way she moved, and the intonations of her voice, to alter all these and twist them a thousand times, and then destroy the revision and throw the whole girl away and pick up a totally different one.

All that Ursula knew for certain was that the girl would come. And that this anticipation of her, the wondering and the waiting, was a thousand times more torturing than the actual spectacle of Doug in the throes of an episode. This one, which perforce was bound to overtake him, had gained importance by the elaborate way in which she had drawn him to step backward and backward from it.

One morning at breakfast, Doug said unexpectedly:

“Teddy, d’you remember the reason why we chucked everything and came to live here?”

“Yes....”

“Hasn’t it worked splendidly?” He jumped a chair which stood between them, and coming up behind her, gripped her shoulders. She twisted round to face him, smiling a little. “It’s safe to talk of a cure now, isn’t it, Teddy? Middle of August—we’ve been here four—five—let me see, end of March—four-and-a-half months. And all this time, have you had any trouble with me at all? Trouble of the old kind——?” His blue eyes twinkled mischievously. “It was a tremendous experiment, and it’s been a success. Behold the unsusceptible Douglas!” He struck a mock heroic attitude; and, glancing upwards, discovered that it was possible to swing by the hands from the thick overhead beams from which hams and joints used to dangle when the whole lower half of Grey Stone had been a kitchen. So he swung by the hands, thoroughly enjoying it. And Ursula, as a matter of habit, made everybody’s indulgent remark to him: “What a great boy you are still, Doug!”

He grinned, gratified. Then, as he nearly always did, dropped from buffoonery to a gruffer and more sincere note: “I’m not proud of my—my—well, what I used to be, because I joke about it, Teddy. And I didn’t talk of it before because I wanted to be sure”—and also because he had forgotten! “Men live a hectic artificial life in towns, and their will-power gets jaded. My will-power is tremendous now....” He lunged forward with his right arm, in proof of it, and then slowly bent back the forearm, admiring his biceps. “You feel safe about me now, don’t you, Teddy old girl?”

“So safe,” said Ursula, quite suddenly resolved that she would rather materialize her shadowy fear and actually cope with it on the premises, than watch its approach, wondering when, wondering how it would all happen to hurt her—“so safe, that I’m going to invite an awfully nice kid down to stay with us for a bit. No, it’s not just to test you, though, as you say, it proves that our experiment has been a success; but I’m getting fed up with my own company, with you such a lot up at the farm. Do you remember little Christine Powys, at the boarding-house? she hinted she’d love a holiday with us in Morcar—at least, she didn’t hint, she quite frankly asked, but I dared not promise it to her, then.” She selected at random the very first girl who came into her head. Christine Powys—round dark head—tomboyish ways—she would do ... or another. Whoever it was—Doug’s next romance. And Ursula’s hot searching mind craved to fix itself on one actual face and name, and banish to rest all the rivals in the realms of perhaps. One girl—all girls.... Well, Christine was one girl, the very first girl for Doug to meet, after his “cure.” Yes, Christine would do.

Thus Ursula, again impatient, again played understudy to the Deity.

“Christine Powys? No, I don’t remember. Where did she sit?”

“Over by the door. With grandfather and an aunt. They came about three weeks before we left.”

“Did they?” Doug had been absorbed by Doreen then. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, if this Christine of yours is to be solemnly applied like a thermometer to my temperature——”

“Don’t be a goose, Doug”—lightly.

Unsuspicious, he kissed her and departed to work.

Ursula wrote her letter. And then went up to the room above the cabin; down three solid but uneven stairs that cut it off from the rest of the cottage.... The door was thick, too. Beyond it, loneliness could come true. It had amused Ursula to furnish the room as much as possible like the one she had lost to Aunt Lavvy, only in creamy white—walls, bed, hangings. But the two windows were full of sea in the daytime; and the lamp had a round silk shade, rich gold as an October moon. The floor was covered by a rug of some animal with coarse white fur.

“I’d have liked it ...” murmured Ursula. She sat down on the edge of the bed ... then saw herself merely preparing to be wistful, and hastily went for a tramp into St. Miniot, to see Miss Gregson, now established with her barely-tolerated Eye-talian at Parc Gooth.

Her brother Louis was staying with her; a short, ugly, dandified man. Ursula disliked his clipped black moustache which lay too high above his lips; disliked his deliberately experienced glance at her; disliked his sophisticated conversation, which held such gems as: “All women want until they cease to want, and then they want more!” When she departed, he said with affected abruptness: “When we meet again—we must talk together.”

[III]

CHRISTINE POWYS wrote: “May I really, really come next week already? May I? Oh, it is jolly decent of you. This place is like hell in summer—it stinks of cats. Only we can’t afford to get away. Yesterday I was so fed up with it that I picked the green paint blisters off the front door like I used to when I was about four....”

They met her at Gullick with Champion’s car. She wore a very woolly white sweater and cap, and short plaid skirt, and had dabbed her mouth with incongruous scarlet—“Sweater to show us she knows how to dress for the sea—poor hot child! skirt, the plaid of no clan that was ever invented. Lip-salve? Subconscious tribute to Doug already.... I wonder?” But on second thoughts Ursula decided it was probably because Christine’s greatest pal at the boarding-house was just then using lip-salve—“she’ll leave it off after she’s been with me twenty-four hours, and take to some of my tricks instead.”

Christine was attractive, though, in the Pierrot style. Her black hair was cut smooth and round to her head as the top of a penny bun. The lashes of her big brown eyes curled up inquiringly, and so did her ridiculously short soft nose of which the three-cornered nostrils lay almost flat to her face. A very long upper lip lent her expression an air of incredibly droll roguery. Her rounded cheeks were scarlet with excitement, but dimmed by the powdery bloom which dims and transfigures very ripe fruit and very young cherubim. A round curling mouth and a round babyish chin completed the resemblance to a Pierrot who pleads sometimes in the moonlight for love—and sometimes crudely on the pier for pennies. In fact, there was quite a lot of the pier about Christine. But:

“Help!” thought Ursula, “I’m going to like her!”

With which brief expostulation of horror, she sat down to watch the tragi-comedy she had with such reckless lordliness prepared for herself.

It all happened quite amusingly. For within a few hours Doug capitulated; and Ursula, tranquilly studying him, was able to mark exactly how many days later he acknowledged the truth to himself. Roughly, about five. He concealed his fall from Ursula, of course; and successfully, he had not a doubt. But his long period of immunity from romantic episode had doubled its present intensity, so that he believed as never before it was the romantic episode, and he had to curb himself from shouting robust oaths at Ursula, who alone stood between him and the lagoons, etc., with Christine.

Christine had no chance of resistance from the very beginning. Boarding-house life, and a mysterious wave of feeling called “the modern tendency,” had weakened the tradition which used to exist for the protection of maidens of eighteen from foolishness, that a married man was “no good.” And Doug, bare-throated, and with hefty brown knees, was surely large and splendid as never man had been before. “How funny I never noticed him at the boarding-house!”

And as it happened, that little shut-off white room which overhung the sea was “sort of perfect” in which to spend nights with a tremulous coloured dream.... At the boarding-house Christine shared a room with her aunt. But here——

The world glowed and was strange ... “as though some one had turned it over on to its right side,” murmured Christine, glad, nevertheless, that her friend Gladys Willoughby, who was scornful and disillusioned and a cynic and used lip-salve (Ursula was right), could not know she was making an idiot fool of herself—enjoying being alone with the thin banjo note of the cricket in the grass below her window.

“I’m right and Gladys is wrong!” Christine discovered ... and was happier still.

Of course she did not know yet that Doug cared for her. But she had noticed some odd characteristics of his: the way, for instance, in the middle of his carefree rollicking nonsense, he would suddenly add something in quite a different voice—and then break off ... he was one of those real men who find it difficult to show their feelings. “I expect he’s got a repression,” said sage Christine, to Christine her submissive and admiring confidante.

She lies in bed, clothes half tumbled off, innocent, sensuous, lulled by thoughts of a bewitched today—a boat with a brown sail drifts across her window, dips again behind the wall ... her following eyes find it for yet an instant in the other window ... pretty boat with a brown sail.... Christine, enamoured of tomorrow, drops asleep.

She folded the sheet and put it in an envelope. Then, suddenly, she burst out crying:

“Oh God, oh, please, please, God—don’t take it all away because I’ve written like that—it’s not done, nowadays, to pray or—or be priggish—but don’t, don’t punish me over Douglas.... It’s all so different and heavenly, and I love him, but I’m not sure even now if I believe in You.”

Impulsively, she tore up the letter, and re-wrote it:

There was nothing deliberately offensive to Gladys or to God in this compromise. Christine dared not risk upsetting God (if He existed) with her first letter. Nor dared she send Gladys—who was a rake and a cynic—the tumbled hymn and song and stutter of thanksgiving, which God (He must exist, if He sent me Douglas!) might commend as truthful.

[IV]

URSULA was jealous of Christine. Stretched and wry with jealousy. And especially of Christine going to bed down the passage and the three little steps, into her small room with the white walls, hearing Doug’s good-night voice and look into solitude with her. Morning’s awakening, to Ursula, was always a first sharp spring to the mind’s realization of Christine’s lazy, englamoured awakening in the room; and then a desperate longing to turn back, nauseated, from the flat, heavy day to come ... to burrow her head once more into night’s quiet dark wrappings ... until a shout from beside her, and a colossal leap and thump of bedclothes and Doug combined, on to the floor, proclaimed that her husband was awake and up, in full possession of his joie de vivre.

One afternoon on their way home from the cove, Doug and Christine quarreled:

“——I don’t care. It is dirty to let a dog lick your mouth.”

“He jumps up. And anyway, it’s not like a strange dog. Hi—Rough—Rough—good feller then——”

Rough, excited by his master’s shouts and gesticulations, jumped again and again at Doug’s face, with frantic, ill-directed dabs.

“It may not be a strange dog,” Chris insisted, funnily fastidious on this point, “but the tongue he’s licking you with has been in some damned strange places.”

“I say, little girl, I—I wish you wouldn’t swear.”

“I wish you’d learn to be clean, then.”

“Clean?”

“Men! They’d die if they missed their hot bath and their cold plunge and all the rest of it. Your sort of men.” She rolled over from her back on to her front in the short grass dotted by Mrs. Thomas’ second crop of haycocks; with chin propped in her hands, she gazed upwards at Doug, and perversely, from her happiness in him, tried anew to prod him to anger. “Baths aren’t everything, when you let a horrid dog run about with his face in the dust and then let him—let him——” she was shy of using the word kiss again. “It’s more than dirty, it’s filthy,” she finished, half crying with the queer rich excitement of being in love.

“What’s the difference?” he teased her.

“Well,” she laughed, “I’m dirty,” displaying her small square-fingered hands glittering in the sun with sharp points of sand, for they had been making castles in the cove; “I’m dirty, but I’m not filthy.” The glowing September warmth, and Ursula’s initiative, had led her to abandon her thick knitted sweaters, and to wear instead a short-sleeved butcher-blue jumper. Her thin brown legs were bare and also sandy, stretched carelessly from the shelter of her wriggled-up old skirt. Her skin was golden velvet where the glinting ladders of sunset fell across it. It was an oddly fascinating Pierrot-face turned up towards Doug, all bloom and roundness and impudence.

“You’re sticky with sand,” he informed her abruptly.

“’M. I know. It sticks to me. Good thing I’ve got hair like a boy, or it would be a mass of sand.”

“Why don’t you wear it short, but hanging soft and square round your cheeks, like girls do?”

“Mine only grows this shape,” despondently.

“Poor little penny bun. Never mind—I like it.” He looked down upon her tenderly ... and cried out, in a harsh voice quite different from his own: “You know, Chris!”...

At that moment Louis Gregson sauntered round an adjacent haycock.

“Hullo, old man,” cried Doug, who could never help being convivial, even to an intruder interrupting a scene which was obviously leading up to what Ursula called the lagoon speech....

Louis nodded to him, sat down beside Chris, and in his cheap, deft, confidential fashion, caused her at once to feel especially feminine, each bit of her separately, and all at once. She contrasted his carefully preserved dark moustache, his slight dapper figure, and eyes that were narrow and knowing, with her splendid Doug, tanned, athletic and burly, his boyish speeches blurted out heedless of consequences, his record as a wanderer and a scapegrace and a man of action. And because she was exulting in Doug, and her eyes hazed by magic, she did not understand that the epicure’s treatment of her as a slight but not untantalizing Deauville episode, was in the least insulting.

Directly he left them: “Why do you let that bounder speak to you?” demanded Doug sternly.

“Is he a bounder?” in musing innocence. “I didn’t let him speak to me. He spoke.”

They quarrelled after that. And Doug went off sailing for the evening, and came home laden with mackerel and stiff with brine. His talk at late supper was spattered with fishing and ferocious weather technicalities, and well dashed with dialect. And afterwards, when he and Ursula went upstairs, he crushed strong arms around her and broke out:

“I’m fed up with this farming business, Teddy. Let’s run away—just you and me—and breed dogs on the Yorkshire moors.”

She brooded thoughtfully for a moment ... and a little sigh shook her. Doug imagined it was a sigh of longing.

“Teddy,” he whispered, “tell me what you’re thinking of. Let’s be all in all to each other again.”

But Ursula had just made what was perhaps the most illuminating discovery of her married life.

That she was still jealous of Christine, alone in the room.

And yet—if she chose to make him so—Doug was hers, not Christine’s. And after a while, Chris would be to him as Doreen, who was as Monica and Kitty ... hardly even a memory! What phenomenal powers of oblivion this man possessed!

She realized that she must make some response, however idiotic.

“Yorkshire terriers, did you say, Doug?”

“No. Fussy little brutes. Bull-pups—or Great Danes—but they eat such a devil of a lot. A Swedish forester I once knew told me....”

Then it was not because of Doug that she so thirstily envied the other girl. It was because of the room. It was because of—no Doug.

Ursula was breathless and aghast at what had taken place within herself. Up till now she had been genuinely unconscious that she had ceased to love her husband. She had suffered during the Doreen episode, during all the pre-Doreen episodes. And now here was Chris....

Oh, lucky, lucky Chris. Curled up between white walls, in a kingdom of solitude in which romance happens, and sorrow can be hidden and cried over, and dreams build themselves, and joy is borne away and buried as a dog lovingly buries a bone among the warm straw in its kennel and all night long nuzzles it and is glad of it; during the day thinks of it with sudden tiny ecstatic thrills as though it had whispered reminder....

Funny little mysterious child curled up alone between white walls. And here was the solid intimate Doug.

[V]

FOR a week Ursula, Doug and Christine each guarded their secret. Christine’s silent passion for Doug yet acknowledged him as remote and inaccessible—married. So far away had love carried her from the old cheap morality she had once shared with Gladys Willoughby. Besides, in Chris an urchin and a stoic dwelt together.... Supposing that Doug—who was good right through—else he was not Doug—should despise her for her bewitchment?

“He mustn’t know, and neither must Ursula” ... Ursula had been awfully decent on the whole.

“Perhaps I had better go home,” Chris began to think, disconsolately.

Doug, just emerging from the illusion that Ursula’s cure had worked splendidly, and that he had ceased to be susceptible to every wavelet of romance, was very careful indeed that Ursula should not guess how in Christine he had met the irresistible seventh wave which engulfs every strong man only once in a lifetime. He never meant that Chris should guess either, but he was less careful with her than with Ursula, and was often led by the primitive but reverent state of his feelings into such semi-betrayals as: “Oh, God, if only——” and then square-jawed silence—when describing to his little love the picturesque corners of the globe into which his restless wanderings had taken him, and would take him again and again ... each time the horizon pulled.

But with Ursula he behaved truculently. Till she longed for peace and solitude and the room, as a stale soul longs for adventure.

Ursula was fully awake to the girl’s infatuation for a being of heroic stature who had for the moment become identified with Doug. She knew, too, that Chris believed it to be her own white-walled secret, and that she was pluckily determined neither herself nor Doug should guess it. Happiness enough to hug it close ... ah, always and again, lucky Chris!

And Ursula knew that Doug believed his wife unsuspicious of the Real Thing which had come into his life, and of his impending renunciation. She knew that unless suddenly and with a light word she pierced it through, Doug would keep up the stalwart pretence of being cured, more from vanity than from consideration for Ursula’s broken heart—“he broke it often and cheerily enough over Doreen and Co!” Ursula’s unspoken thrusts towards Doug were audacious and without pity ... her eyes were naked of love, and only recently naked; a man stands least chance at such a time.

A week’s hard rain and storm shut them up together, a trio of two deluded and one wise, in Grey Stone. Mr. Wenn discovered some technical flaw in the cess-pit, and digging it down again to its original depth, floated about on a raft in a six-foot square of water at the bottom, “like a St. Miniotish Peter Pan,” Ursula said. If any of them passed down that part of the garden, and looked over the edge of the pit, Wenn’s formidable list of the improvements he was effecting on the property, shouted up, threatened unmistakably that this was going to cost the Barrisons “good money.” Doug could be with difficulty restrained from emptying buckets of dirty water into the cess-pit, in deliberate forgetfulness of Mr. Wenn’s navigations therein.

“He’m nothin’ but a gurt boy at heart,” said Mrs. Endellion leniently. But Mrs. Endellion had to leave them, and her comfortable presence in the home had been replaced by Genesis Mitch, usually called Cissy. Cissy was a good girl, meek and slightly idiotic and fervently devoted to her master and mistress. She had no chin and humble devoted eyes. Louis Gregson, who during these dull and dripping days visited Grey Stone fairly often, named her “the Wordsworth child”: “Wordsworth was meeting that type of child all over the place, wherever he went; it seems a pity he should be dead, and your Cissy wasted.

Ursula laughed. She had learnt “Lucy Grey” and “We are Seven” while at Miss Luther’s.

“Parc Gooth had a visit from the Abbotts in their pony-cart, yesterday evening,” Gregson remarked. “Delightful people. We played bridge, and then Miss Abbott accompanied my sister’s Eye-talian in a few songs at the piano, while Abbott and I discussed harnesses and the resemblance between mediaeval witch-craft and modern Psychometry; and it was all so genial and harmonious that I could hardly believe some rumours I have heard at Mr. Wright’s shop——”

“Embassy,” Ursula corrected him.

“I beg his pardon—in Mr. Wright’s Embassy, that there were once scenes of violence, stabbings and hard words, over the tenancy and rents of Parc Gooth.”

“Ah, how sylvan and idyllic,” he murmured affectedly, at the close of Ursula’s description. “How shall I be able to tear myself away, next week, from this pastoral atmosphere?”

“You are returning to London next week?”

“Friday, yes.”

“Take me with you.”

[VI]

LOUIS GREGSON, self-confessed as “an Authority upon the Unfair Sex,” was always careful to behave in accordance with his own epigram: “Never be astonished at a woman, unless she says or does what you expect her to do!”

Nevertheless, Ursula’s astounding request, dropped in her most gentle and matter-of-fact tones, did indeed tempt him to startled exclamation. For he certainly admired in Ursula the elusive beauty which took at least three meetings to declare itself to the senses. He perceived her, too, to be deep—perhaps he was right—and capable of swift and subtle audacities. In fact, his present state of mind, vulgarly expressed, was such that could hardly believe in its own luck. Nevertheless, taking his cue from her, he substituted mere polished gratification for his first rushed instinct to express himself in terms of raw ardour.

“Isn’t he a detestable little cad,” reflected Ursula, listlessly disdainful. She was not very much interested in him.

He was handy ... and would not suffer by her whim, when its purpose was revealed.

It had so quickly unfurled itself in her secret mind, that it seemed to her now hardly any length of time had elapsed between the moment she realized she was free from loving Doug, to this final irrevocability of “Take me with you” when Louis announced his return to London.

Doug and Christine loved each other. And she, Ursula, was the unwanted third. So again she would make lonely sacrifice. She would run away and leave them to be happy: “But of course he must marry her. And while I’m alive, I’m in the way. I don’t intend to drown myself—I’m not nearly miserable enough.” The only alternative was to give Doug ostensible cause to divorce her. Her reputation must complete the sacrifice. Well—she would do that ... gladly. “It needn’t, it shan’t go beyond—just my reputation.” Ursula’s cheeks, though she was alone while thinking all this out, flamed a vivid scarlet. She could herself be gallant squire in cool defence of Ursula ... her old childish dreams in the room at the Laburnums, brought to action at last.

Louis Gregson, it was evident, must be the dummy lover in the classic situation she was evolving with such unclassic differences in her personal point of view. She could manage Louis Gregson. He was commonplace. The obvious man in the case. Nothing need be damaged except his amour propre. And Doug, given the appearance of Ursula’s guilt—all evidence supplied by Ursula—would instruct his solicitors to file a petition; and she would not defend.

All this was unimportant and rather lumbering mechanism. It was a pity that the law made it necessary. The reality was the romance of Doug and Christine; pearl in the clumsy oyster.

“If I don’t love Doug myself, I’ve no right to lie about and spoil things.” Ursula, sure of this, was able serenely to go on with her plans.

Convention again reminded her that when she slipped away and effaced herself, Doug and Christine must not be left unchaperoned at Grey Stone. She could trust Doug to be chivalrous; she could trust Christine to be loyal to chastity. But it was Ursula’s responsibility, impetuously undertaken, to arrange for them a future of clear happiness with no gossip to smudge it. Besides—Christine was the guest in her charge. A whimsical notion occurred to Ursula, solving the problem; and she wrote a charming note to Aunt Lavvy, at the Laburnums, inviting her to Grey Stone for a month’s holiday—“Would next Friday suit you?”

Aunt Lavvy would be the ideal chaperone for a young girl. Undoubtedly, too, Doug must adore the little porcelain lady; and she in her turn would be entirely captivated by the big, boyish, sunny-hearted Doug. Ursula smiled, imagining the harmonious trio ... the smile twisted into mockery, as she recited to herself Aunt Lavvy’s outburst of sweet and silvery indignation on discovery that Ursula could have wantonly deserted such a man; “But then Ursula always was queer and headstrong, under her quiet ways!” And very, very tactfully she would console Doug’s perplexity; or, if he roughly blamed himself, argue with him; at last, guide him to see that the catastrophe was no catastrophe at all, but a blessing in disguise: “The false princess has slipped out of your life, Boy” (Yes, she would call him Boy) “but the real little princess is not so far away ... is she? In a year or two perhaps you will be able to fit her with the glass slipper.”

Ursula could hear Aunt Lavvy tinkling out some such speech; her voice lifted to a second’s arch raillery as she spoke of the “real little princess,” and then her plump hand resting lightly for a moment on Doug’s bowed head: “You know, Boy, I may be old-fashioned, but I am not so narrow-minded as to think that one mistake should spoil your whole life——”

“Oh well, she always hated me!” thought Ursula, stamping her letter, and with a shrug dismissing the envisioned scene of a week hence. Anyhow, she would be gone. The night train from Gullick, by which she and Louis had planned to travel, left Gullick at seven-twenty-three p. m., exactly ten minutes before the arrival of the express from London, with Aunt Lavvy.

“Let me see, Doug will give up our room to Aunt Lavvy, of course, and sleep in his cabin berth. Christine needn’t move out of the sea-room.”

And once again she paused, before dropping the letter into the box: “She understands things ... clever little Aunt Lavvy. She can’t fail to wonder, afterwards, why I invited her—at such a selfish crisis of my life. Oh damn—she’ll guess more than other people. She always did. That time over Hal and the room. Let her wonder and guess!” The letter was viciously hurled through the slit. “She’ll come, in the first place, because she’s curious. And she’ll stay because she’s comfortable and because I’m in black disgrace, which is bound to be soothing; and because poor Doug is my victim, and he and Chris are a pair of babes in worldly matters—and mainly because the situation is dramatic and needs delicate handling. Her gifts don’t get much chance to be used with only mother and father and Lottie and William at home now.”

Aunt Lavvy accepted the invitation, saying gracefully that she was looking forward to a better acquaintance with her nephew-in-law, whom she had only very occasionally met at the Laburnums dinner-table.

Ursula did not inform Doug of the impending arrival. He would naturally ask: “Where are we to put her?” and she was not prepared to answer: “I’m making room for her by running away with Louis Gregson on the same day.” Aunt Lavvy’s opportune arrival, in the midst of chaos and bewilderment, should be a miracle to Doug—until she explained Ursula’s invitation. And even then, he would never be able to account for it.

“This is all—fun!” thought Ursula, exultant at the way the figures and dates in her plan slipped neatly into shape, without objection or hitch. Fun, too, that she was doing it all alone; that whereas Louis knew of her flight from Doug, and Aunt Lavvy knew she was expected at Grey Stone on the following Friday, and Doug knew that his love for Christine was the love of his life, yet these were only shreds and particles of the sumptuous whole, Ursula’s whole, containing all secrets and all knowledge. It was she who was welding them together, with added touches of her own sprite’s mischief; rounding it off, remembering here and there a flaw to be adjusted.... Proud; for she was not doing wrong. To efface herself so that Doug and Christine should be happy together. Ah, surely that was sacrifice; and it would not count against her, in that she had worked her scheme skilfully, with a laugh of renunciation instead of the eternal tears.

She took no pains over the arrangement of her end of the escapade. Her own future, once disentangled from Doug and Christine, she trusted to hazard or inspiration. On only one point she set her teeth and pressed her lips sternly together: that Louis would—have—to—be—managed.

[VII]

THURSDAY evening, Ursula was in the kitchen with Cissy—explaining patiently for perhaps the fortieth time that cold water poured directly into a saucepan which had held milk will clean it better than hot. She felt a little bit unreal as she did so. Christine swung her legs indolently from the kitchen table, and listened to the lecture. A strong gale was buffeting the house.

Suddenly an urgent rapping shook the door. Mr. Wright hurled it open and staggered into the lamplight, with the bread-basket. The wind and rain leapt in after him. He turned and fought the door, closing it after a grim struggle.

“Good evening, Mrs. Barrison.” He was rather breathless, and spoke in the voice of one amazed at his own calm.

Ursula was mildly surprised. This was more or less the wonted time for their loaves to arrive, but Mr. Wright usually sent the boy, and did not bring them himself.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s a wild evening, isn’t it?”

“There’ll be wilder evenings before we’ve done with the year. I don’t want to alarm you, Mrs. Barrison, but there’s rumours of negotiations broken down, and the railway strike starting at midnight. In fact, I’ve had news through”—he stopped abruptly, recollecting prudence. “So I thought I’d better take the bread round myself tonight,” he finished.

“But why?” inquired Chris, pertly. “It isn’t the French Revolution, is it?”

“That’s not a word I’d throw about lightly just now, Miss Powys,” replied Mr. Wright, respectfully—but his hand went to his coat pocket with a gesture grimly significant. “Well—if there’s trouble, I’m ready for them. I’ve got my six-shooter handy. Not that I’m one to lose my head. I don’t expect any real rioting in a place like this till supplies begin to be cut off. And then my shop’ll be the first.... I must go on.” He buttoned himself up, pulled forward his hat, and by mere suggestion achieved a muffled effect. “Good night, Mrs. Barrison. You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

“Will you yourself bring the bread tomorrow evening too?” asked Chris, joyously, determining that Doug should not fail to be present.

“God willing!” Mr. Wright was silhouetted for a brief moment against the stormy and perilous blackness beyond the open door, and then went forth—distinctly went “forth” and not merely “out.” Quick retreating footsteps ... and he and his bread basket were seen no more that night.

In silence, Ursula continued to scour the saucepan she held.

“Is it true, or d’you think he made it all up?” demanded Christine, still flushed with the effort not to laugh in the very face of Mr. Wright’s histrionics.

“It may quite well be true that the negotiations have broken down at the eleventh hour. Haven’t you read the papers lately?”

Christine shook her head. “The papers” were many million miles removed from her sea-room and enchantment.

“They expected it all to be settled quite happily by now, so I didn’t bother, but....”

“Then we’ll none of us be able to travel after midnight, will we?”

“Not for two or three weeks, or however long the strike lasts.”

“Oh well,” Chris exclaimed philosophically, springing from her perch on the table, “we none of us want to, so it doesn’t much matter!” And now she could not possibly go home, however conscience might prompt it. No trains from Gullick! Perfection enclosed Grey Stone and snapped around it indivisibly like a bracelet. Christine began to sing. At the same moment, Cissy Mitch started feebly to cry.

Ursula lost her temper ... the saucepan clattered on to the red flagstones, and the kitchen door banged and reverberated behind her. Christine’s fresh pipings were not to be endured!

“No wonder she’s in a rage with you,” Chris remarked blithely to Cissy Mitch. “What on earth are you crying about?”

“Eh, miss, but tes dreadful, about they trains,” sobbed Cissy.

“But, my dear kid, have you ever wanted to go as far as Gullick in your life? No? Well—have you even been to the next village, then? to Polpinnock?”

Cissy, piteously damp, confessed that she had been once as far as Polpinnock Cove, in a school treat. It was a great event to her. But, in spite of Christine’s laughing expostulations, she continued to shed tears over the breakdown of England’s railway system. Perhaps the manner of Mr. Wright’s entrance and exit had shaken her nerves.

“It must all wait,” Ursula said to herself, when she had recaptured control over her disappointment. After all, if she and Louis could not go, neither could Aunt Lavvy come.

The next morning, on her way back from the village, whither she had been in a vain attempt to obtain certain news of the strike, Ursula was met by Christine racing along the grassy track from Grey Stone.

“I say, what do you think? A perfectly darling old lady has arrived. She says you invited her. She came by the night train instead of waiting till today, in case the strike started before it was expected. Old Wright was twenty-four hours wrong in his news—it’s tonight, not yesterday night, that the last trump sounds and all the engine-drivers throw down their spanners or whatever it is they use. I say, Ursula, why didn’t you tell us you’d ask her? Did you mean it for a surprise? I simply worship her already. She’s not really your aunt, is she? And where is she going to sleep?”

Doug, when he returned from the farm, for lunch, promptly settled the final question: “Lucky I had that bunk fixed up in my cabin, isn’t it, Teddy? Only a glorified shelf on hinges, of course, but I can doss there perfectly well.... Oh, that’s all right, Aunt Lavvy—may I call you that? Good! That’s all right, I’m an old campaigner. And then you and Teddy can share, and Chris can stop in the little end room. It’s rather too cramped, isn’t it, Teddy, for any one but an infant?” (“And I like to think of you in that room, Chris ...” he told her afterwards.)

Ursula’s fleet resolve was to carry out her plan now, strike or no strike. She and Louis must make a dash for it. Perhaps some volunteer trains would be run.

At all events, she could not remain at Grey Stone, sharing quarters with Aunt Lavvy. Aunt Lavvy, Chris and Doug, and herself—what an incongruous house-party in Arcadia! With emotions and purposes as fierce, as overlapping and as secret as they had once been in the tightly packed Laburnums. And the railway strike ringing them in without means of escape.

“And I invited Christine, and I invited Aunt Lavvy. What makes me do these goblin things? I don’t care, I must see Louis and tell him. I’ll chance it. Let him think I’m desperate for love of him.”

Aunt Lavvy had hardly changed in looks during the past nine years. Her skin was still the colour and texture of apple-blossom; her snowy hair as beautifully arranged; her dainty uncrumpled appearance made it seem impossible that she had been travelling all night. When she smiled at Christine across the luncheon-table, the young girl felt a sudden lump in her throat; felt that she wanted to be good; and also that she was going to pour out everything—yes, about Doug and everything, to this adorable little old lady, the instant they were alone.

And when she smiled at Doug, he wanted to protect her from some danger; and also to tell her what a rotter he’d been. He saw that she had taken quite a special fancy to him; and he rejoiced that Teddy should have invited her to Grey Stone.

And when she smiled at Ursula, Ursula knew she had to get away before night.

“Will the other two think me a bore, Ursula dear, if I unload a little family gossip? To begin with, William really has been taken into the business, starting—well, from as near the bottom as the proprietor’s son can ever genuinely start. Your father is delighted with him. He’s a sound little fellow, our William. I think he’ll be Lord Mayor one day, don’t you, Ursula? And the harder he works, the stouter he seems to grow. Your father says sometimes that it’s queer to have only his youngest son to succeed him in the firm; but Bunny.... Ah, Bunny! I comfort myself by thinking that he’s the rolling stone who will gather the most moss in the end, even if it’s moss of the kind invisible to ordinary people. He was in New Zealand when we last heard. And Hal preferred ’Varsity and law. And now that his first love, Maisie, is engaged to somebody else—didn’t you hear about it, Ursula? I expect poor old Hal feels a little too sore about it to write. But he’s not quite so stricken as he thinks he is. He’s handsomer than ever, too, and doing wonderfully well; I must say we were all surprised that Maisie preferred her father’s young locum. However—one person is mightily relieved that his dream has been puffed away, and that’s Nina. It means so much to her, keeping home for Hal. Have you got any idolized big brothers, Christine? No? Then you wouldn’t quite understand how Nina feels about Hal. Lottie is still a little kind trotting thing, contented to be useful at home. But Nina, never. And Ursula, of course, was the family beauty and bound to be captured early.” Aunt Lavvy directed a saucy dimple at Doug, who replied boyishly:

“Oh, if it were just a question of looks, Aunt Lavvy, what about you?”

“What about me?” she flirted with him.

“I love powdered hair!” was his quickly gallant response.

“You—sailor!” laughed Aunt Lavvy, fatally.

Doug was a sailor for the rest of that meal.

After lunch, Miss Gregson and Louis walked into the house. “My sister has brought me to say good-bye,” he said, after they had duly been introduced to Aunt Lavvy. “Or rather, to ask your combined advice as to whether I should make my dash for liberty tonight.”

And Ursula, alert for signals, grasped that he was coolly going to discuss plans, and grope for hers, in front of the others; indeed, he had no option but to do so. She waited, amused, for her cue to enlighten him.

Miss Gregson said, “I told him he’d do much better to wait until we had certain news about the strike, and Umberto agrees with me——”

(“That’s the Eye-talian,” murmured Louis to Ursula.)

Doug gave his opinion that a journey to London, under the circumstances, would be no end of a rag.

“They might even let me drive the engine,” Louis agreed heartily. He just glanced at Ursula then, with the air of a man who can bide his time, and who can trust an intelligent woman to annex this same biding as special tribute to her wits, and not as detrimental to her charm.

“Have you ordered Champion’s car to drive you into Gullick?” Ursula inquired. “I wonder——” she paused, doubtfully knitting her brows. Then:

“What do you think, Doug? Shall I go in, too, if Mr. Gregson will give me a lift, and bring out some stores? We’ve two extra in the house now, you know, and the strike may mean a tightness of provisions, if we rely entirely on our Mr. Wright.”

“I wouldn’t fuss,” said Doug, “we can always raid the shop.”

“He has his six-shooter handy,” Christine reminded him, half seriously.

“He has also special and private information about the probable strike,” Louis pattered on in his glib fashion. “So has the post office. So have the coastguards. The coastguards are apparently crystal-gazers in their spare time, for they are always credited, in a place like this, with mysterious advance knowledge. Some say the strike has started, some that it will start at sundown, or at midnight, or on Thursday week, or not at all. My business can’t wait until the day-before-yesterday’s papers come in the day-after-tomorrow. It’s no good clinging round my knees and sobbing, Sister Ann, because I have made up my mind” ... he had done so directly Ursula answered his unspoken “Will you risk it?” by her suggestion of driving into Gullick with him, to bring out stores.

Miss Gregson snapped: “I’ve no intention of clinging round your knees, thanks. You’ve been here a goodish time, my lad, and Umberto and I are tired of you.”

“Mr. Gregson must come to Grey Stone for true hospitality,” purred Aunt Lavvy. “Here, they welcome an old lady without even minding or noticing that she had arrived without any luggage! And yet”—playfully—“luggage is supposed to be a certificate of respectability, isn’t it?”

A chorus of contrition broke from Doug, Christine and Ursula.

“By Jove, nor you had! I am an unobservant beast!”

“I was quite sure, somehow, that it had gone up to your room. I was going to ask you if I might help you unpack.”

“Where did you leave it, Aunt Lavvy?”

“At Gullick Station, till called for. Don’t look so worried, my dear children; of course I couldn’t expect a car to meet me, when I arrive twelve hours before I am expected. I was just wondering how I should cover the ten miles to St. Miniot, when a charming old gentleman with white hair—a General, I think he said, but I have his card—sent me a message by the porter——”

The episode of old-world courtesy to a gentlewoman in distress, acquired, in the telling, that typical Watteau atmosphere which seemed conveniently to attend Aunt Lavvy wherever she went. Even the Gullick porter was translated. Briefly, the General had offered her a lift out in his own car; but his wife’s luggage was so voluminous that Aunt Lavvy’s trunk could not be squeezed in—“And so I wondered, Ursula darling, if you were driving out to Gullick anyhow this evening, for stores, would you mind calling at the station and bringing it back with you? But not if——”

“Of course Teddy will!” Doug promised, settling the matter. “Quite a good notion of yours about stores, Teddy. Don’t forget a few tins of tunah-fish. I like it. They called it tunny-fish once, but during the war and the food shortage it went up in social tone. Tunah-fish!”

“Tunah-fish!” echoed Chris, haughtily.

“We’ll all rattle in with you to Gullick, if you like?” Doug suggested further to Louis, who, without a flicker of an eyelid, murmured that he would be honoured by their united company.

“Bounder!” thought Doug, for the fifteenth time.

“With you and your luggage to go in, Louis, and Mrs. Barrison, and Champion driving, and a fresh lot of luggage and Mrs. Barrison and stores to go back, I should think you’d be as full as you can manage,” Miss Gregson said.

Louis was aware that this argument was so obvious that he could safely acquiesce in Doug’s proposal, and leave somebody else to point it out.

“Will there at least be room for my empty suitcase, going out?” Ursula asked of Louis.

“To bring it home full of tunah-fish? Oh, yes, I think it can be managed. And if no trains run up to town tonight?” Dangerously he aimed his last question full at her; and dangerously she answered him: “Oh—chance it!”

Louis got up to go. He said he would call for her. He said he must pack. He said that he had been delighted to meet Aunt Lavvy. He did not say that knowing now all he wanted to know, there was no further reason to prolong the visit.

[VIII]

THE room was on the first floor back of the second-best hotel in Gullick. The low green hills beyond the window, by day strangely biblical in their quiet outline, were by now a still simpler affair of ups and downs scrawled black on a wash of dim sky. The blind was drawn and the short muslin curtains, and a still further muffler of red stiff curtains. Ursula sat primly on the edge of an upright wooden chair, and waited for Louis to come in. He had gone, after dinner in the coffee-room, to make a last inquiry about a train to London that night; to London, or even as far as Exeter or Plymouth. But she knew already that the inquiry would be futile. The stationmaster had been most discouraging when they had confidently driven up in time for the seven-twenty-three. “We’ve had our orders from the Trades Union. Trains stopped at noon today. By tomorrow, though, I dare say Govemment’ll be runnin’ some,” he added gloomily.

Then Ursula had ordered Aunt Lavvy’s trunk to be lifted on to Champion’s car, and had told him to drive it back to Grey Stone: “I shall take the last bus out,” she said. “The nine-ten. But I don’t want my aunt to wait for her things.”

Doug and Christine and Aunt Lavvy had accepted an invitation from Miss Gregson, on parting that afternoon, to dine with her at Parc Gooth: “And will you join them, Mrs. Barrison, when you get back from Gullick?”

“Thanks very much. I certainly will, when I get back from Gullick ... if I’m not too tired.”

Now—she was waiting for Louis. He would enter presently, expectant and debonair—“knowing his part backwards,” and Ursula’s mouth curved gaily as she reflected that for once a surprise was in store for Lothario.

The setting, too, was somewhat less tropical and exotic than he must be accustomed to, under similar circumstances, along the lines of red roses, gleaming mirrors and silk eiderdowns. The second-best hotel at Gullick did not cater for luxurious clients. Over the hard double bed the white counterpane was like a winding-sheet. The chest of drawers, with its small mirror on top, was mahogany, and so was the washstand. In the basin stood a can of hot water. One armchair was placed on a small yellowish hair rug in front of the fireplace, hidden by a painted glass screen; a shelf supported a few books lopping sideways in a dejected fashion. On the nondescript wall hung some prints of what might have been the Vatican and the Coliseum, if any one were sufficiently interested to inspect them. Ursula was in a vivid dancing mood; the small fidgety discomforts and disappointments of the evening, which might have daunted any girl in a lovelorn condition, only excited her spirit yet more. Her cheeks were scarlet, and her long-shaped lazy grey eyes shone with dark fires under her straight brows. She surveyed herself in the foggy glass, between two tall candle-flames. Her clothes were staid and unconspicuous as usual: a navy blue coat and skirt; a white silk shirt, open at the throat; a pliable grey suède hat of the Whittington shape.

“Poor Louis!” Again she re-seated herself on the stiff chair, and folded her gloved hands in front of her; her feet, in small grey suède shoes, rested on her suitcase, with toes slightly turning in. She lowered her eyelids—“I’m glad he’s common and glib and bold; the sort of dapper little whelp who has made women suffer, and rather boasts of it....”

Louis came in.

“No chance of a train. We must stay here.” He cast round a comical look of distaste. Then, thrillingly: “Ursula....”

She did not stir. Only her cheeks’ scarlet faded and faded till she was white as milk. Louis was disconcerted. After all, a man does not expect shyness after a woman has taken all the initiative, thrown herself at his head, one might say, in an ungallant translation of her behaviour.

“I gave our names, downstairs, as Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Please, will that do?” Her “please” was meekness itself.

“Oh yes, as well as anything”—impatiently. Had she not recognized that the tiresome preliminaries and the mechanism were all over now, and that he had begun the emotional love-scene?

“Let me take off your things and make you comfortable,” Louis suggested, and laid a seductive hand on her coat, giving it a gentle pull. But her whole frame resisted. “Or shall I unpack your suitcase?” Her feet pressed downwards. “I have never seen your hair down yet, Ursula; your beautiful honey-gold hair....”

“Please, I would rather keep on my things”—in the same unaccountably meek voice which reminded Louis of cold moonlight, school-teachers, and lukewarm sago pudding—all good, and all by him abominated.

“For how long?” mocking eyebrows raised.

“Till—till I’m acclimatized, please.”

Louis laughed uneasily. “And how do you suggest we should while away the time, until you’re—acclimatized, please?”

“There are some books on that shelf. If you read to me, I could crochet, couldn’t I?” And with an air of innocent glee, she pulled out her work from her handbag.

Louis slowly crossed the room to the bookshelf.... He could not be happy until he had ousted her from her lordship of the slippery situation, treating it and him in a spirit of dainty buffoonery; and for the moment, he, usually so nimble and astute at solving the woman riddle, was utterly bewildered by this elusive crescent-moon of a girl, slender and pale and swathed in flying clouds of mystery.

Of course a woman ought to be mysterious. It was part of her appeal, her stock-in-trade. Louis had no objection to the conventional Mystery of Woman. He had written sophisticated articles about it. But this Ursula Barrison——

He decided not to force the situation, but to give it time.

“Here is a treatise on physical geography, a psalm-book, ‘Home Influence,’ ‘Happy Thoughts from Day to Day,’ ‘Pigs, the Care and Feeding of,’ and ‘Little Ellen’s Dream,’” he read, from the backs of the volumes on the shelf. “Which will interest you most?” And he began to read aloud, with very precise utterance, a passage from “Little Ellen’s Dream.”

“Kind little Ellen could not bear to see the snow, because she had two pairs of shoes, and perhaps some poor little girl had none. ‘Mama darling,’ she cried, ‘if I am good, may I take my shoes as a present to Nelly Carter, and also some eggs and my nicest hoop? I dreamt that it was her birthday today and she cried because she had no presents.’ ‘Do, my darling,’ said Ellen’s mother——”