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CONTENTS

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THE VICTIM	7
THE WORM	177

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CHAPTER I

Oliver P. Brett sat under the shade of a giant yew and regarded a hedge of red and purple fuchsias with thoughtful eyes.

“These bees,” he said to himself, “(if they ain’t wasps which is just as likely), make the calmest sound in the universe.

“They act brisk, but they hum as if they were dreaming. They’re like the English.

“You could make a skipping run over the face of the earth and not find a quieter place to decline in than England, and yet while you’re declining the English get things done. They’re slow but they go on, and they go on after everything else has stopped.

“I put my flashiest into giving them a boost when they needed it most, and they tried hard to turn me down for showing them how. Mad! I was so mad that if I could have got my papers in a hurry I’d have gone out of this old country as fast as their kindergarten railway cars would have taken me. But they hung me up over my papers—just the same as they hung me up over my gas—and by the time they knew what my mother’s maiden name was, and what made my great-aunt kick the bucket at 92, they’d decided to have a go at the gas after all. I’d have lost time if I’d gone elsewhere then, so I stayed.

“That ain’t gas the Germans used to start off with—that was just a little parlour scent squirted out so as to surprise the troops that weren’t looking for perfumes at the moment, but it looked bad. I admit it looked real bad. Those Canadians and all were splendid chaps, and it riles me to think they stood and died of it; they needn’t have died of it, if they hadn’t drunk it in wrong, and breathed too quick. Why, when I practised at it myself (after we got some over to experiment with) I sat kind of near the cylinder, and smoked a cigar right into it. I wasted that cigar, but I got no more harm than a turtle dove swallowing a gnat. My gas—well—it’s a real gas! Thinking don’t matter to it, any more than Christian Science matters to a jug of prussic acid half way down your throat.

“But gee! How long it took these English to see it! They just kinder felt they ought to be good about war.

“I guess they don’t feel that way now; it’s been submarined out of them.

“If we could have morally won this war—we wouldn’t have needed to have started it. We had all the morals in a row on our side sitting on the Belgian fence; but a good knock down blow at the fence kinder dispersed the morals.

“That’s the way war acts. You can have morals before, and you can have morals after; in between you want to study the swiftest kicks.”

Mr. Brett leaned back still further in his steamer chair, and drew his hat almost over his keen half shut eyes.

“I guess,” he continued to himself dreamily, “that I shall just sit here and watch the English till I pan out. America’s my home, but I don’t want to die in it. I should feel too lively. You can live just as dead here as you like. No newspaper men, no prominent citizens, no delegates, nothing to keep up, and no one thinking how many million dollars you own and trying to creep inside them.

“I’ve had my fight and Theodora’s dead; and I guess I feel played out. If there was a harp here I’d think I was in Heaven, but so long as Theodora’s in the next world I’m a good deal better off in this.”

Oliver P. Brett sighed retrospectively at a passing butterfly. There was something in the tilt of its white and flashing wings that reminded him of Theodora.

“It wiggle woggles to put you off,” said Mr. Brett thoughtfully, watching the insect’s tortuous approach to the fuchsias, which was causing much confusion to a more direct and simple minded bee, “but it knows what it’s about. That’s like Theodora too.

“She wanted to die, and she always had to do what she wanted, and on that occasion she hadn’t time to change her mind before she really was dead. The Almighty acted spry and took her at her word, which was more than I ever succeeded in doing.”

Mr. Brett’s thoughts at this point did not stop, but they ceased to take the form of words; they crystallized into pictures. For the first time for forty years he was resting.

In the quiet, old, creeper-covered, brick house behind him there was no one to thwart or work against him.

There were half a dozen perfectly trained English servants who knew nothing about him but his superficial tastes, which they studied as easily and silently as possible to satisfy. And then there was Elise. Elise was his unmarried daughter; it made Mr. Brett’s sardonic deep lined mouth smile tenderly when he thought of Elise. She slipped in and out of the big sweet rooms as if she were a shaft of travelling sunshine.

Elise was as pretty as a picture, and as gentle as the fall of dew on the wide emerald lawns.

She was generally to be found in the garden, and when she was in the house she never looked as if it belonged to her. She looked as if she were one of the flowers waiting on a side table to be arranged by the stiff backed parlour-maid.

Yet Elise could have had half a dozen houses if she had wanted them. She was dimly aware that her father would never set a limit to her desires, but it made it still simpler that she had very few, and that he satisfied them all without her asking him for anything. All except one.

Unfortunately, this one wish was a very strong and frequent wish, and all Papa ever said when Elise expressed it was, “Why, no, Elise. I guess I don’t see my way to it.”

It really did look as if Papa was cruel about Hermione.

Elise knew that it was not the fault of her beautiful and enchanting elder sister that her marriage with a Roumanian Prince had turned out a disastrous failure. In spite of her wit, her beauty and her charm, nobody had ever breathed a word against Hermione. Her virtue was as undisturbed as her complexion.

She was bereft of her husband (a comfort under the circumstances, but a comfort which could always be used as a grievance), and, by the wickedest of European laws, she was parted from her only child.

She lived (Papa no doubt gave her a great deal of money to live on) the life of a broken-hearted invalid in the best apartments that the Ritz could offer.

She wrote that she didn’t like Paris, but Papa wouldn’t have her come to stay at Mambles.

When the air raids became troublesome in Paris, Hermione was moved with an extraordinary amount of care and the best attentions of the highest officials in France and England, with all her papers especially signed and eased of their usual restrictions, to London.

Papa found two trained nurses for her and a house in one of the quietest of London squares, but he did not relax his inexplicable refusal to have Hermione at Mambles.

“Why, no, Elise,” he repeated. “You can go up to see Hermione (if she isn’t too ill to speak, and I don’t understand that her illnesses take that form), as long as you won’t make her any deathbed promises. I should object to that. But I don’t want her down here.

“You just tell her it’s a dull place and damp, unless you find she hankers after damp and wants it dull—then you tell her it’s lively and dry as a bone.

“You can take Whisket and go and stay at Claridge’s Hotel, stay there just as long as you want, and remember, if you stay after you’ve stopped wanting, I shall send John to bring you away.

“I notice John is as good as a rain gauge about your feelings, and I will say for John, though he has all the faults of the English that rile me most, if he puts his foot on a wasp he gets the wasp.

“Hermione will probably say it’ll kill her to have you leave her, but don’t you believe it. Hermione is so tough she can die that way 365 times in the year and start up all over again on New Year’s Day with resolutions of ill health that would weaken a hefty elephant.

“People who can stand dying as often as Hermione, don’t die—not under sixty.”

Elise flushed painfully, and set her delicate, weak little mouth into stiffness.

It was hard not to be angry with Papa, and she had to remind herself of his tragedy in order to forgive him.

Papa’s tragedy was that he had lost his only son in France and that the telegram announcing it had killed Mamma on the spot.

Mamma had opposed Arnold’s going from the first, and curiously enough, Papa, who always seemed so much more fond of Arnold than Mamma ever was, hadn’t stopped it. Mamma said that as long as his country wasn’t in, why should Arnold fight?

Mamma despised the English anyway. If Arnold had wanted to go in with the French, and taken a good staff appointment, not anywhere near the front, Mamma wouldn’t have minded.

The French were smart and Mamma adored Paris. She said if Papa chose to back Arnold and help the French Government, they’d be sure to give Arnold just the kind of job she wanted for him, and a lovely uniform. But Papa had just come right over to England with Arnold, and done unspoken of, mysterious things for the English Government, who didn’t appreciate him, or make any fuss over any of them; and after all Papa had done, Arnold only got the plainest commission in a line regiment, and was killed before America came in.

Mamma had died with the whole household round her in the hall—they had all rushed in terrified at the scream she gave when she opened the telegram.

She screamed till they were all there, and then she said “My son!” like a person on the stage, and fell forward.

Papa had picked her up and laid her down on the sofa without looking at her.

When he did look at her, he found that she was dead.

Papa never said anything at all about Mamma’s death, which showed how much he felt it. But that night when he was sitting up with Elise, who had fallen seriously ill from shock, he said to her quite cheerfully:

“I think we can feel happy about Arnold now. I used to think he’d live to carry out my plans—but he’s done a better thing than that—he’s died carrying out his own. I want you to remember that you’ve got a man in your family to be proud of Elise. Lots of men die for their country, but Arnold did a bigger thing than that—he died for the future. He was up against the best army in the world, because he felt that if we knocked it out, there wouldn’t have to be any more armies.

“I guess I’ll stay over here in England and see the thing through. They want petrol and I can raise petrol. But if you feel badly, honey, I’ll see you safely home again. You’ve only got to say the word.

“You’ve got your life before you, and our own country is the finest in the world for young life—don’t you worry any about me. I find England feels like a cushion in the small of my back, but you’re too young to need a cushion.”

“I’d rather stay with you, Papa,” Elise asserted.

That had been her great decision, and she had never regretted it; even when Papa was most unkind about Hermione.

Mr. Brett’s eyes lost their smile. His mind ceased to rest on the picture of Elise. They hardened a little as if what they rested on was the face of an enemy; then they became fixed. It was not wholly grief that held the imagination of Mr. Brett, though down whatever avenue of thought his fancy carried him, this one picture always met him at the end. The picture that held him was that of a small hillside near Ypres.

He had visited this sector of the front on one of his many silent unnoticeable missions. He wanted to see how his gas worked, and where his son was buried.

When the officer conducting him had pointed out that on account of a promiscuous shell fire that morning, the situation was not a healthy one for the living, Mr. Brett had given a curious little laugh and replied, “Why, I guess I’ve been quite lately in a more unhealthy spot than this.”

The officer supposed that Mr. Brett was referring to the Chemin des Dames, in which quarter the quiet American had also had some business to transact. But Mr. Brett had not been thinking of that famous and precarious ridge—his mind had returned to a large south room in the Hotel Ritz in Paris where he had last watched Princess Girla drinking excellent chocolate before the air raids had persuaded her to leave for a more convenient spot.

“I guess,” Mr. Brett observed, regarding a shell-burst to the left of them with lacklustre eyes, “you men up here in the front don’t know what danger is.”

The young officer looked offended, but Mr. Brett patted him gently on the shoulder.

“Sure, you know all about death,” he said kindly, “but when you get away from here, you’ll have to start afresh and learn something about life, and as far as I can see the worry about life is—that it goes on. Death only stops.”

The A.D.C. pointed to a small stick in the ground.

“We think Captain Brett is buried here,” he explained. “We aren’t perfectly certain because, as you see, the place has been a good deal shelled lately and there are a lot of graves.”

“It’s near enough,” said Mr. Brett quietly, as if he were talking to himself. “He lies where good men lie. He’s had a short life and a clean death. I don’t need to worry any more about Arnold.”

Mr. Brett had gone on steadily with his inventions and his adaptations, but, when he sat under the yew tree and watched the bees in the fuchsia hedge, the sunshine and the flowers had a trick of fading out and leaving in their places a shell-swept muddy hillside under a low grey sky.

CHAPTER II

Mr. Brett was aroused from his reverie by a firm, heavy tread along the brick path. He tilted his hat further back and watched the approaching figure with a kindly eye.

Mr. Brett liked John Sterling; he had chosen him three years previously out of fifty applicants to be his private secretary, and he had had no reason to regret it.

Mr. Brett had not been moved by sentimental reasons in his choice of a secretary, though John Sterling had distinguished himself by dogged pluck, where all were plucky, and lost an arm at Mons.

The reasons that decided the great inventor to take the unknown young Englishman were two. He explained them to one of his business friends afterwards.

“He knows what he doesn’t know,” Mr. Brett observed with satisfaction, “and he’s not too sharp to learn.

“I don’t want a sharp man. I’m kinder sharp myself. I had a brainy young secretary once who kept on having good ideas. He’d have ’em before breakfast and right on up to supper time. They kept him so busy, and me so busy listening to them, and pointing out from time to time where they wouldn’t work, that none of my own ideas panned out. I had to bounce him. I said, ‘Look here, my son, I paid you to carry out my notions, and I find I’m being loaded down with yours. Now I can stand quite a lot of other men’s notions, in general conversation, or once a week when I’m preparing my soul for Heaven—but not over my desk in my office. I just kinder like to keep that desk for any little notions of my own.’ Of course he was too sharp to see that, so he got bounced.

“Now John Sterling hasn’t got any ideas except how to carry out mine.

“All the other candidates made pace by telling me what they could do. They ought all to have been Prime Ministers—and they knew it—they’d have been thrown away as private secretaries. But John sat there looking at me with those steady grey eyes of his, and all he said was, ‘If you tell me what to do I think I can do it. I write a plain hand.’

“I guess the universe is going to remain just the way it was before John came into it. But that’ll suit me all right. I haven’t any quarrel with the universe.”

“You’re earlier than usual, John,” observed Mr. Brett as his secretary reached him, “and you’ve overlooked your tea. Has anything in that little village of yours on the Thames discomposed you?”

“No, Sir, everything has gone straight,” said John Sterling, taking a seat opposite his chief and drawing out some notes.

“I just took down what some of the Committee said in case you wanted to run over it. They were very disappointed you couldn’t be there. Young Simpson the engineer has sent in his report. He said he’d been over some of that Cork country you mentioned and it didn’t look like petrol; but he admitted it hasn’t been tested.”

“Well, you write to young Simpson,” said Mr. Brett, “and ask him if a germ looks like typhoid. Tell him if it does, not to worry about testing for oil. I’ll find another engineer. I guess he’s mistaken his vocation, and thought I wanted an artist to paint me a cork tree.

“Did you make any statement to the Committee, John, or did you just sit there and hear it talk its hind legs off?”

“No, Sir, I didn’t make any statements,” replied John. “They weren’t deciding anything in particular, and I thought if I just put down their main points you’d say what you wanted done after considering them.”

“I could say it before as far as that goes,” said Mr. Brett wearily. “You’ve got to have a Committee same as you have to have an umbrella in case it rains—but I just naturally hate walking about with an umbrella—I’d rather have both hands free.

“You haven’t said yet, John, why you didn’t stop with Elise and have your tea?”

John Sterling drew a deep breath. He folded up his notes and met his employer’s eyes across them.

Mr. Brett had long dark eyes with no expression in them. All his expression was in his smile; but he very seldom smiled. He was smiling now with an encouraging friendliness.

“I wanted to speak to you before I saw Elise,” began John nervously. “You may feel you’d rather I didn’t see her afterwards. The fact is—I’m afraid Mr. Brett I want to marry her. I can’t help it. I have only two hundred a year besides my salary and I’m nobody in particular. I have no earthly business to ask for a millionaire’s daughter, but I don’t want her to have a penny except what I can make, and I’ve seen enough of her to know that she doesn’t care about money either!”

John stopped defensively.

Mr. Brett was laughing softly.

“Of course she don’t care about money,” he said. “That man that was fed by ravens in the wilderness didn’t hanker after meat either. He had enough.

“See here, John, have you said anything to Elise?”

“No,” said John Sterling. “That’s why I didn’t go in to tea. I know I shall the next time I am alone with her, unless you turn me down.”

Mr. Brett laughed again.

“You’re a good boy, John,” he said, “and on this occasion I accept the European method of tackling the parent first.

“Elise is young. She’s full young. Unless Theodora misdirected me, Elise was nineteen last birthday. It kinder goes against the grain with me to think of her marrying yet awhile.

“But maybe it would go against the grain later on too. Parents are apt to jib at their children for being made the same way as themselves. They’d like to check ’em with a little spiritual gin, and keep them down to clock-work dolls.

“Elise has always been a child to me, and for a long time she was a sick child.

“I kept her away from home at a Sanatorium by the sea for four years. I guess she’s told you about it. There ain’t anything organic the matter with Elise now, but she’s frail.”

“I’d take care of her,” John interjected quietly and without emphasis; but his tone was convincing.

Mr. Brett nodded. “Sure you’d take care of her,” he agreed. “But it won’t be quite the kind of care you mean, John, that you’ll have to take. It’s a taller order.

“I see I’ll have to go into this thing with you pretty thoroughly.

“I warned my first son-in-law, but he was a Roumanian, and he hadn’t made much study of nervous temperaments. Roumanians sound kind of playful and romantic, but when they aren’t pleased I understand they get rough. He said nobody in his family had ever had nerves, and as it was about fifteen hundred years old, it was what you might call an encouraging record. But Hermione broke it. She is a high-strung American woman and she showed that Roumanian family what nerves mean—she showed it them from start to finish.”

Mr. Brett looked away from John Sterling and drew a long breath.

“Now John,” he said, “I guess I’ve got to go into things deeper with you than I did with that Roumanian Prince. I’ll go slow and you follow slow—there are things I can’t say, and there are things I must.

“Did you know you’re the first secretary I ever had in my house?”

John nodded.

“But you don’t know why?” asked Mr. Brett. “I didn’t have a secretary to live in till Theodora died. After that I had. It was more convenient. The reason I didn’t have one before was that in two days he’d have been Theodora’s secretary or he’d have been out of the house.

“I expect you know that Theodora means the gift of God?

“Well, Theodora was no slouch of a gift: she was what the French call a ‘Maîtresse femme.’ I presume that means a winner, don’t it? Sometimes Theodora won because she’d extracted my kick—sometimes she won because she was at death’s door, and made me feel the draught from under it—and sometimes she won because I didn’t know what she was up to. But she always won.

“Now Elise isn’t like her mother. She’s got no nervous energy, but she’s got no resistance to nervous energy either. I guess I used all the resistance up in my home life from day to day, and hadn’t any to hand on to the child.

“Marriage is a queer thing, John, and the results of it are queerer.

“Most young people think marriage is going to set them free to do what they like. It doesn’t. It ties them up to do what they like.

“There ain’t any harm in being tied up, providing you like what you’re tied up to, and go on liking it.

“If you don’t marry you get tied up sooner or later, to your business, or your habits, or maybe to a dog.

“But they ain’t quite so incessant. Nothing is so incessant as marriage. Even parents die sooner or later, and children grow up.

“It’s not so easy to get rid of a contemporary, bar murder, and there’s nothing, not even in the new divorce laws, to justify the murder of one married person by the other.

“Now don’t run away with the idea that I’m against marriage. If there is a place where you can go most wrong, you can bank on it that it’s the place where you can go most right.

“All I say is choose your partner and then look out for squalls. You get to know which way the wind’s blowing and act according.

“Now you take Elise. Naturally she has to see her sister sometimes. And that’s what’s going to be the matter with your marriage.

“Hermione is her mother all over again. She’s just full of nervous energy. You haven’t met her but you will; and she won’t like Elise’s marrying. First thing she don’t want Elise to marry—and second she’s got a grudge against marriage. Well, when Hermione don’t like things they very seldom happen.”

John laughed reassuringly.

“I knew there would be a good many solid reasons against my marrying Elise, Sir,” he said, “but I don’t think I need worry about the influence of a sister-in-law. If Elise loves me, and I would never have dared to come to you if I hadn’t hoped she did, the Princess Girla won’t stand in my way.”

Mr. Brett smoked in silence for a few minutes. He made no reply to this jaunty forecast; but he said, after a pause:

“Well, John—nothing else does. I like you. I trust you. It don’t matter to me a row of pebbles whether you have money or not, or who your great-grandparents thought they were.

“I’ve got enough money for anything any of my family are likely to want this side of Judgment; and it’s this generation I keep my eye on—not family vaults.

“You’ve got the kind of grit I’d like in Elise’s husband. You have horse sense and you’ll be gentle with her.

“But mind, Theodora and Hermione could get ill and recover conveniently to suit themselves. It won’t be so with Elise.

“If she gets ill, it’ll be because she can’t help it, and she’ll not be able to get better to suit either you or herself.”

“I don’t see why she should get ill,” said John sturdily.

“She got ill before,” said Mr. Brett, withdrawing his cigar and speaking slowly and impressively, “because her mother and Hermione couldn’t get on. They pulled two ways and Elise loved them both—she was one of the ways they pulled. They all but tore her life out. I got her away and kept her away for four years, the doctors helping me; then mercifully Hermione married, and started in on that Roumanian Prince.

“Elise is all right under one influence; but she can’t stand two. What you’ve got to see to, John, is that the influence is yours.”

“Do you really mean, Sir,” asked John, trembling for the first time in his life, with excitement and felicity, “that you give your consent to our marriage?”

Mr. Brett held out his hand unsmilingly, but with great heartiness.

“I’ll back you, John, with the last ounce I’ve got,” he said quietly. “Cut along now and get that cold tea.”

“I can’t thank you,” John exclaimed. “It’s too jolly fine of you.” Then he hurried off to Elise.

Mr. Brett looked after his solid figure with a curious solemnity.

“All that talk of mine,” he said to himself, “has been so much cotton batting. John only took out of it what he wanted.

“I bought my wisdom dear, but wisdom’s a mighty cheap goods second hand and it don’t hardly seem to pay for its keep.”

CHAPTER III

Elise sat in the big dark drawing-room with the tea things before her.

She knew that it was half an hour after John’s usual time, but there was nothing expectant in her attitude. She was doing embroidery. As she bent her head over her work, the sun caught her light gold hair and made a glory of it. She was finishing the wing of a bee drawing honey from a larkspur. The design was her own and when it was finished she was going to give it to Hermione.

Sometimes Elise thought she ought to do war work, but on the whole she believed that making Papa comfortable was war work.

Papa invented wonderful things for the Allies, and he had diabetes.

The diet system of a famous Viennese doctor had saved Mr. Brett’s life and might indefinitely prolong it. But a good deal depended on his keeping still and having his mind at rest. Elise knew that one of the things which rested Mr. Brett’s mind most was seeing her at Mambles, and watching her come in and out of the long French windows to see if there were anything he wanted. Hermione had pointed out to Elise that she was wasting her life, and Elise had felt rather upset, but she had gone on wasting it.

From the age of fifteen Hermione had sat on piazzas black with young men. When she took a country excursion young men followed her as a string of ducks follow their leader across a field. When she was in town, she drew the young men away from other girls with the faultless placidity of a magnet.

Elise might not have achieved so long a line of ducks, or such responsive needles, but she could certainly draw young men. Hermione told her that she ought to go to America and draw them. She would literally have New York, or if she preferred it, Washington, at her feet. Elise had listened quietly to these dazzling pictures. It was difficult to tell Hermione without appearing unpatriotic that she did not want New York, or even Washington, at her feet. So she said a little vaguely that Europe was very interesting just now. Hermione skimmed the vagueness off the top of Elise’s mind.

“Europe isn’t Mambles,” she said with some sharpness, and she offered Elise London; but the mere thought of London petrified Elise. She had a dread of its indiscriminate, sophisticated rabble, its precedences and pitfalls, its stiff old families and their lax young offshoots.

The life of a social circle had always petrified Elise, but Hermione, even when she was almost dead, thought of people in circles.

Mercifully Papa said that when Elise wanted London she could go to Harrod’s Stores; he wasn’t going to live in a place where you could get everything, including air raids, at first hand when he didn’t need to. “If you want to be quick,” he explained, “you go to a quick country and you naturally take the quickest place in it. But if you want to be slow, you go to a slow country and you go to the slowest place in it. I’ll hunt about till I find the slowest place in England.”

At length Papa had found Mambles. A very few country people called on the Bretts slowly and as if it didn’t matter. They talked about wasps, and how the best plan was to get the milkman to bring your coal from the station on the milk cart. They were chiefly old ladies who called, and they seemed quite satisfied with being old ladies, indeed they made Elise feel as if she ought to be rather apologetic for being so young, but as if they would agree to overlook it on account of her not being at all noisy.

Elise was very quiet. She had no American accent, and only the faintest interrogative note at the end of her sentences, which sounded submissive.

In her loveliness and her quietness with her enormous expectations and her extraordinarily small claims, Elise won a place for herself in the neighbourhood which, if she had known it, was as rare as it was enviable.

Nobody who didn’t play games had ever been so liked before.—When John came in at the window Elise looked up at him over her embroidery as if it were his usual time.

Her eyes were very wide and blue, as blue as the azure delphiniums in front of the drawing-room window.

They were set some distance apart, the shape of her small face was oval, and her little mouth was tenderly curved and very sensitive. It was without humour.

“It must have been very hot in London,” Elise said gently. “Is Papa all right in the garden?”

“It’s heavenly to be here,” said John, “and anywhere that isn’t here is as bad as London. I had to go first to Mr. Brett, but I came as soon as I could. Yes, he’s all right. He says he can just sit in the sun without an overcoat, so he expects to read in the paper that the heat is tropical.”

“I hope the tea isn’t cold,” said Elise, devoting herself to the tea table.

John didn’t want any tea, but he watched her with fascinated eyes.

It seemed to him that no one ever had such small white hands or had so wonderfully manipulated tea cups and copper kettles. Elise never asked people twice what their tastes were; she persistently studied tastes, and she never forgot them. If she had had an analytical mind she would have known that there was nothing she enjoyed so much as supplying the wants of others, and that nothing so dismayed her as when those wants conflicted.

“I had to see Mr. Brett before I saw you,” John repeated. He seemed unable to take his eyes off Elise’s face, or to say anything which didn’t explain why he hadn’t been there before.

“Why certainly,” agreed Elise, noting with disapproval but without reproof that John was neglecting his tea. “I know it’s the greatest comfort to Papa your going up to town and seeing people for him, it saves him so much fatigue, and he relies so on your judgment. He says you’re the only man who doesn’t have to tell him all you said yourself in reply to what the other people said.”

Elise broke off under John’s supplicating eyes: he was looking at her as if he wanted more than she was giving him, more than either her attention or his tea. Elise’s breath came quickly, and the heavy row of pink pearls round her small white throat rose and fell spasmodically.

“When I first saw you,” said John irrelevantly, “you were wearing those pearls, and you had your hair up for the first time.”

Elise smiled faintly. “I remember,” she said. “Papa had just given them to me because Hermione said I ought only to wear white, and I wanted to wear pink. Of course Hermione was right—in America that summer girls were only wearing white; but Papa said it didn’t matter what the other girls wore. You could have lilies and pinks in the same garden without any one’s throat being cut. So he gave me these. And you said if I were an English girl and only sixteen years old I’d still be a flapper, and I didn’t know what a flapper was, but I do now. I know lots of English things.”

“Do you like England?” asked John earnestly, as if it were a personal question. “Does it seem like home to you now, Elise?”

She hesitated a moment, then she said gently, “I should think any country seems like home when the people you love are in it. You see what I like best is being with the people I like as long as I know which to attend to first.” Elise gave the ghost of a sigh, then she smiled because she did not want John to know that she had voiced her only grief. She didn’t want any one to be inconvenienced by knowing that she had a grief at all.

There are many people who love to spare others pain and enjoy carrying their brothers’ burdens; but they do not mind an audience. Elise never wanted any one to know that she was bearing anything.

“Elise,” said John firmly, “do you know what I want? I want you to attend to me first?”

Elise drew a quick breath, her eyes lingered on John’s, a little startled, but not at all distressed. She had long ago wanted to attend to John first. Her clear colourless skin became suffused with a deep rose blush. Elise knew that John loved her, but she had not known, she did not know now, what his love meant to her. John’s love for her was three years old. Mambles was full of it, it was the background of her life; she had grown used to its protectiveness.

A little frown fixed itself between her tender brows.

“You wouldn’t,” she murmured, “if I did like you John, want me to ever give up Papa? You see he hasn’t any one now—not Mamma, or Arnold, and just being wonderful must be so dull, if it only means outsiders.”

John shook his head.

“Never,” he said emphatically. “There isn’t a man on earth I admire and like as I do your father. I consider it an honour to work for him. I don’t ever want to take you away from him; but I do want to have you as well.”

“More than this?” Elise asked gently.

“A great deal more than this,” said John with unmistakable solidity.

Elise’s eyes wavered; she wanted of course that John should have what he wanted. It would be lovely to make his eyes stop looking anxious, and smile. But, on the other hand, her mind was full of an apprehensive picture. How would Hermione bear it? She had seen Hermione bearing things she didn’t like before. John would probably bear them very much better.

“But Hermione,” Elise said under her breath, “you won’t want me ever to give up Hermione?”

“I don’t suppose for a moment I shall want you to give up your sister,” John said in a more measured tone than he had used in referring to Mr. Brett. “Why should you, darling, have to give up anything? I only want you to have more.”

Elise did not reply that in her small but deeply felt experience having more had invariably implied certain renunciations. She only said, “You don’t know Hermione, John; but if you did, you’d feel the way I do about her, and you’d help me so that she and dear Papa could understand each other better. Hermione’s heart is broken, that’s what makes her so ill, and sometimes so—difficult.

“Don’t you think if your heart’s broken, you just have to act difficult at times? Papa’s so clever, but he’s been too happy himself to realise about Hermione. Why he and Mamma had just an ideal marriage. I never heard Papa say one sharp word to Mamma, so naturally he can’t feel the way I do about Hermione. I haven’t been able to do anything, but oh, John—don’t you think that perhaps you and I together could work it so that Papa could understand Hermione?”

John had a very great respect for Mr. Brett’s judgment, but he belonged to the younger generation, and he knew how misguided parents are apt to be about their children, and how wise children necessarily are about their parents. He decided to keep an open mind on the subject of Hermione.

“My dearest,” he said fervently, “I will always help you in whatever you want—all my strength is yours.”

Elise gave a soft sigh of relief. All John’s strength would do beautifully.

Very slowly she lifted her blue eyes again, and John knew that he had received his signal.

He kneeled down beside her and kissed her. There seemed to both of them to be nothing in the world so simple or so straightforward as their love.

CHAPTER IV

John called twice upon Hermione in London. On each occasion he was told that the Princess was extremely sorry but she was too ill to receive visitors. However, Elise assured him that Hermione had been “perfectly lovely” about their marriage.

Everything was “perfectly lovely.” Mr. Brett cracked jokes all day long; John had never looked so radiant; the neighbourhood rejoiced openly that it was to keep Elise, suitably attached to an Englishman who understood and respected the game laws; the servants showed a well bred toleration for John. John’s relations (he turned out to have very few and they all lived in Yorkshire) wrote charming letters; but in spite of all these advantages there was a slight hitch somewhere.

It took John some time to discover, in all the flutter of delight around him, where the hitch was. Mr. Brett was unchanged. He moved as usual very slowly and carefully about the house and garden, reposed in long chairs, took the points in or out of schemes, and smiled more benevolently than usual at his secretary.

Elise continued to declare with obvious evasiveness that she was “too happy for words,” but John, who had a persistent nature and was clear sighted where he loved, asked why, if she was too happy for words, her eyelids should be red?

Elise confessed at last, with tears, that there was just one thing she wanted most dreadfully and couldn’t get.

Hermione wished to spend the last few weeks before their marriage at Mambles, and Papa wouldn’t allow it. He was quite adamant, he had said: “After you’re married this house is yours, you can have whom you like to it—including me—but until I hand you over to John, Hermione stays away. If she’s tired of London she can hire in the country. England ain’t full.”

If Elise wanted, she could go to London and see Hermione; but that, Elise explained to John, wasn’t what Hermione meant. Hermione was too sick to enjoy London. She had a feeling that if she could lie on a long chair in the garden and just watch Elise’s happiness, it would make up for the loss of her own.

Hermione had been perfectly lovely about it.

Couldn’t John make Papa change his mind?

It was awkward for John to try, for on that very morning Mr. Brett had presented him with Mambles.

“I shall settle Mambles on you, with an income on Elise,” Mr. Brett had explained, with his eyes half shut, “and then if you and Elise want me to stay on as she says, I’ll decline here. I may have years to decline in, I may only have months, or, according to one doctor, I may not decline at all, but go out splashless. But I want you and Elise to live in your own home here at Mambles, not mine—it don’t do to start living in other people’s homes. Dying can be done anywhere, it’s not as important as it looks.”

After this renunciation on the part of Mr. Brett it seemed ungracious to present him with a speedy request for another.

But Elise’s tears overcame John’s scruples. He found Mr. Brett in the library by the open door which led on to the south terrace. He was watching the birds fluttering about the edge of a stone bath.

“They’re having the deuce of a time,” he explained to John, without turning his eyes, “step quiet so as not to disturb them. A whole raft get round the rim together and shove—just like humans.”

“Mr. Brett,” said John resolutely, “I’ve been talking to Elise.”

“Sure,” agreed his father-in-law reassuringly. “As long as she don’t fire you, let her talk: the great point with a woman is to have everything out on the carpet. Whatever she thinks you don’t want her to say, she’s got to say anyway; but if she puts it off, she gets cold-blooded about it, the way Jael felt to Sisera when she planted that nail, and palmed off the butter. If Jael had been encouraged to speak right out and tell Sisera what she thought of him when he first arrived, she wouldn’t have driven in that nail, she’d have put it away for the first Hoodoo that made her keep things back.”

“Elise and I haven’t quarrelled,” explained John, ignoring this unpleasant analogy, “but I have found her upset. It seems she wants Hermione to stay here before our marriage, and if you’ll forgive me saying so, Sir, I don’t see why she shouldn’t have her.”

“I’ll forgive you right along, John,” said Mr. Brett with a chuckle. “I’m prepared to forgive anybody anything once it’s happened, but I’m not prepared to let things happen that I don’t want to have to forgive. And I’m damned if I’ll have Hermione inside this house before your marriage.”

“I don’t quite see why—” said John a little resentfully.

Mr. Brett pulled his lean slanting limbs together and sat up straight; he even stopped watching the birds. He looked at John attentively.

“Now, see here my son,” he observed, “marriage is tough. It takes a lot of what you might call hand to hand breaking, with the law against you, to spoil a marriage. Engagements is just the opposite, they break as easily as a grasshopper’s hind leg—I guess that’s about the thinnest thing in nature. You just keep calm and wait. You’ll have Mambles and Hermione too, soon enough.”

“But Elise says,” urged John, faithful but faint-hearted, “that her sister’s been wonderful about our engagement. She’s awfully keen for Elise to be happy, and she thinks—from what Elise has said—that I’m the man to make her so.”

“John,” said Mr. Brett grimly, “you’re so innocent a white owl would get you! I’ve watched white owls, they show up in the dark, and that’s against them, and they squeak before they’ve got their mouse, and that’s against them too. I should reckon a white owl loses ten to one on each mouse, every doggone evening of its life; but you’d be the time it got home with the bacon.

“Of course Hermione is perfectly lovely about your marriage. She’d be perfectly lovely about your engagement, when she’d broken it. Perfect loveliness is Hermione’s line. I’ve never once seen that girl get riled, and I’ve said things to her that’d make a lizard get on to its hind legs and roar.

“All she ever said back was, ‘Dear Papa, I guess you’ve got the indigestion I had.’ She’d given it to me.”

“But are you quite sure,” said John reflectively, “that you do full justice to her? Sometimes you sound to me as if you were prejudiced against Hermione.”

Mr. Brett did not laugh at this ingenuous suggestion of John’s. He remained silent for a moment or two, then he said gently,

“John, do you in general think I know what I’m about?”

“I’ve never known you wrong, Sir,” said John with conviction. “You know I have implicit confidence in your judgment—only—”

“Only,” interrupted Mr. Brett, holding up a warning forefinger and shooting a glance at John that was as sharp as the edge of a knife, “when it’s about the happiness of the one creature in the world I care more for than one of those sparrows—you think I’m liable to judge wrong?”

John had never seen Mr. Brett roused before. In a flash he saw what his employer was like, and understood why, when he spoke even in his flattest voice, his committees and employees jumped to obey him. John was conscious that he was confronted by the power of a dynamic mind.

It was a benevolent power, but it was not the kind of power to gainsay. John felt suddenly convinced that Mr. Brett was right even if Elise thought he wasn’t.

“I see I’ve made a mistake in pressing the matter, Sir,” he muttered.

Mr. Brett nodded. “Never you mind, John,” he said kindly, “a man who isn’t liable to be made a fool of by the woman he’s in love with would make a very bad husband. Maybe he’d remain a bachelor. I don’t like to upset Elise any more than you like to see her upset—that’s why I mean to keep the upsets down to a good limit. It’s strain enough on a young girl getting married; she don’t want to add not getting married on to the top of it.”

Mr. Brett dismissed the subject and transferred his attention to the bird bath.

“There—” he said, “now those sparrows have had all the bath they want, but they sit on just the same: they’re going to prevent any of the other birds having a dip—and they’ll do it too—unless I shy a stone at ’em. They’re the most high-strung birds I know. Hand me over a round pebble before you go, John.”

The controversy ended in Elise and Mr. Brett going to Claridge’s Hotel for a flying visit. London never suited Mr. Brett, and on this occasion it suited him less than usual. His long heavy-jawed face turned as grey as his light summer suit; but it was a great convenience for dressmakers and Hermione had been perfectly lovely about it, though she was afraid she was too ill to see John.

The Bretts had a large private sitting-room in which their meals were always served. Mr. Brett said he could never get over the feeling that it was unfriendly not to know people in public dining-rooms and pay for their food. It made him feel uncomfortable to think of their separate bills.

John had come to dine after a long day in the City. The table was beautifully set, and decorated with blue and purple sweet peas. He saw with a slight feeling of surprise that it was laid for four. No one was in the room when he entered, but after a few minutes the door opened softly behind him, and he turned to greet an unknown guest.

A woman stood quite still in the open doorway. A long white, chiffon velvet cloak hung over her shoulders and a white gauze wrap framed her head and face—out of its softness shone the hard glitter of diamonds. Her eyes were fixed on John. They were luminous grey eyes with exquisitely chiselled eyelids, and very long fair lashes.

Her features were cut as clear as the features on a coin; she had no colour in her face except for her lips, which were the deepest carmine. They looked as if they were painted, but they were not painted. Hermione sometimes bit her lips before she came into a room, but she never used artificial aids, unless they looked perfectly natural.

As she glided forward into the room, her gauze wrap fell on to her shoulders, and revealed a crown of thick fair hair, as vivid as a sunbeam. She held out both her hands, and murmured softly:

“John, it is John?”

John had an absurd moment of sheer panic. Who was this lovely and perfectly strange woman who called him John?

He was a good young man, but for one awful moment he wondered if this lady had any previous right to his Christian name?

She held his hands, and it appeared as if she might be intending to kiss him. John looked as non-committal as only a man of his race and class can look in a moment of danger. Hermione did not kiss him: she pressed his hands, sighed deeply and sank gracefully into the easiest chair in the room.

“To think I have not seen you till to-night,” she murmured. “I am Hermione.”

John felt relieved, but guilty. He forgot that he had been twice turned away from the Princess Girla’s door—and apologised.

Hermione smiled wistfully and forgivingly up at him.

“Oh, I know! I know!” she said, “I have been through it all. I have come out the other side now! But I can make allowances for lovers. Isn’t it all too wonderful! And now I have seen you I can be glad. My dear little Elise! You won’t take her wholly away from me, will you?”

John murmured that he shouldn’t think of such a thing, and sought refuge by looking at his boots. There was a peculiarly thrilling tone to Hermione’s voice which made him feel as if he were in church having his better feelings appealed to, and John always looked at his boots in an emotional crisis.

“Let us be quite frank with each other,” Hermione said with great gentleness.

“The word marriage is hateful to me. It has the sound of death in it. Believe me, John—marriage can be as cruel as the grave.”

John cleared his throat and prayed that Elise might come in. He had no idea that any one could speak so intimately to him in so short a time.

“Just at first,” said Hermione, “I faltered—Elise is dearer to me than any other creature. I had hoped to spare her the bitterness of experience. I did not want to see her as other women are—forgive my speaking in French—une femme initiée. But now I have seen you I feel a weight off my heart. You are a loyal, faithful Englishman—I think I can trust that dear child to you, John—I think I can say with an easy mind—‘Take my child—’ ”

Hermione’s voice quivered, but she kept her grave, controlled eyes on John. John felt profoundly uncomfortable, but he was also deeply touched. No one who listened to Hermione ever measured the sense of her words—her low silvery voice entrapped them like a magic flute. John forgot that Elise happened to be Mr. Brett’s daughter—and that as Hermione had married very young and was considerably older than Elise, she had, as a matter of fact, seen very little of her. It seemed to him that he was receiving a sacred charge—and though he could not be eloquent in reply, the quick responsive look he gave his future sister-in-law was one of the finest tributes to her power which Hermione had ever received.

Before she had time to fix this impression any deeper the door opened again and Mr. Brett came in.

“Well, Hermione,” he said, without a change of countenance, “your resurrections contradict the hymn—they don’t come off in the morning.”

Hermione said nothing: she waited until her father had walked the length of the room towards them, then with a little movement of grace and affection she threw herself into his arms.

“Dear, dear Papa,” she murmured.

There was an instant of complete unresponsiveness on her parent’s part before Hermione with equal grace disengaged herself and retook the easiest chair in the room.

“Dear Papa,” she murmured, “how terribly aged and different you look. I must speak to darling Elise about it—these young people are perhaps a little blind in their great happiness. Suffering gives one eyes!”

Hermione spoke perfect English and when she said Papa she laid the stress on the last syllable.

“I must beg you not to worry your sister, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett quietly. “If you think I look ill, I’d be obliged if you’d grieve in secret. I don’t happen to be specially ill, so you don’t need to grieve unless you want to.”

“I shall have to depend on John, then,” said Hermione, turning her beautiful magnetic gaze upon her future brother-in-law. “He must tell me everything—since I am exiled. I feel already as if I could depend on John!”

Mr. Brett’s half closed eyes met his brilliant daughter’s. Something passed between them as vivid and as antagonistic as the report of a pistol, but there was no explosion.

They looked at each other until Elise, flushed with excitement, came in to greet them. She gave a little cry of joy as she caught sight of her sister.

“How too perfectly sweet of you, Hermione!” she cried. “I hardly dared hope you’d come. I told them to set for you, but I was so afraid you’d be too sick—I didn’t even warn John!”

Hermione closed the sentence with a kiss.

“Why, honey,” she said, “did you suppose I wouldn’t just be alive to please you?”

Hermione said this beautifully, with an exquisite maternal gentleness which hung about her like a sunny atmosphere.

John was unable to say afterwards what Hermione did with the situation, but she certainly transformed rather an awkward little family dinner party into a successful pageant.

All her challenges were soft as gossamer, but they made John sit up. He felt himself growing brilliant to meet them. He said some really neat things about the war, sound, sensible things with a flavour to them. He revised the Cabinet and explained the subtle points of allied diplomacy.

He saw that Elise was proud of him.

Elise was transformed also; she had more colour in her, and more life, and she was, strangely enough, more American. She sat up, very straight and slim, with a little triumphant flush on her cheeks. Her pink pearls were twisted round her throat and she wore a rest gown of pink and silver brocade. Nothing ever made Elise feel so sure of herself as the sight of those she loved appearing to their advantage.

Hermione leaned back in her easy chair, and every now and then the light caught the diamonds round her throat and in her hair; but they were the only things that shone about her.

A less clever woman than Hermione might have tried to impress John with her own personality and she would have failed. John was too deeply in love to notice any personality that did not contribute to the credit of his beloved.

Mr. Brett sat in impenetrable silence. He poured out their wine and handed cigarettes, and he ate with his usual indifference the small and regulated dishes which kept him alive.

When Elise tried to make him talk (and even in her finest flights Elise never forgot him) he responded to her with unvarying gentleness, but he never started a subject, and neither illustration nor analysis escaped him.

His silence made him look a little churlish, and Hermione added just the least edge to his churlishness by the careful manner in which she avoided rubbing it in. It was as if she silently conveyed to her companions, “Just see how careful I am not to show him up! I could, you know, by a turn of the wrist, make him look sulky, and even say something to me which would sound downright rude. But I sha’n’t. I let him off. He is a bear with a sore head, but I won’t even let you know how thoroughly I understand that the sore head is levelled solely at me.”

The evening passed like a draught of southern wine. At last Hermione rose slowly to her feet, holding on to the armchair with her white, emaciated hand. John’s eyes fell on it, and he realised with a shock of pity how thin Hermione was, and, as his eyes met hers, how suffering. She smiled an heroic, unflinching smile back at him.

“Honey,” she said to Elise, “it’s time your little old sister ran away.”

In an instant Elise was by her side; the two sisters left the room with their arms round each other’s waists. John held the door open for them to pass. He was about to accompany them to see if he could help Hermione, when Mr. Brett called him back.

“Well?” said Mr. Brett. He lifted a grey face in which the humour seemed curiously overlaid by pain. “Well, John Sterling,” he said, “you’ve seen Hermione. What do you make of her?”

John hesitated. Mr. Brett’s face was in shadow, he did not notice that Mr. Brett looked ill, because that was the way he usually looked. People were so accustomed to seeing Mr. Brett ill that they sometimes thought he must be accustomed to the sensation.

“Surely,” John said at last a little uncomfortably, “she’s very fond of her sister?”

“No she ain’t,” said Mr. Brett positively, “she’s only fond of one person on God’s earth, and that person is Hermione; and she’s just a little mite, not as much as I should like, afraid of me.”

Elise re-entered, exultant with happiness. She did not notice her father, who was half concealed by a heavy curtain. She threw her arms around her lover’s neck.

“Oh, John,” she cried breathlessly, “isn’t Hermione perfect? Isn’t she just too sweet? She says you’re the only man in the world she could have trusted me with.”

“God help you John,” said Mr. Brett under his breath. Neither of them heard him. He got up softly and crept out of the room.