The wooing of Rosamond Fayre

CHAPTER VII

CHECK!

At five minutes past four he was back again at that white-walled, green-shuttered Hostel, that, seemed now as familiar as if he'd spent years of his youth there.

Upon the broad sill of the open window beside the porch, a still damp bathing-costume of scarlet silk was spread out like a "DANGER" flag. Inside, that girl of his was still sitting at her bureau, writing. He was about to apologise for being a little early, when she raised her small, burnished head on its creamy neck and said, quietly, "Oh, you have come back. I am very sorry, but I am afraid I am not coming out with you this afternoon, after all."

What?

"Not coming?" He stared blankly at her. She was putting a letter into an envelope; to her hand lay two or three other letters, addressed and stamped; also, his quick glance took in, that the envelope of a newly-torn-open telegram lay upon the bureau.

He said quickly, "I say, I hope nothing has happened? I mean, I do hope you haven't had any bad news——"

"Oh dear no," broke in Rosamond Fayre, quickly and lightly. "Nothing of the kind."

"Then why—— You said you'd come. You promised."

"I know," she said, and a coldness seemed wrapped about her, hiding the sweetness and colour of her like a suddenly-risen sea-mist. "But I am not coming."

"But——!" He stood there dumfounded against that background of pink roses and plaster-white laughing Cupids with the blue blink of the sea beyond the garden. "If I may ask, why not?"

"Oh! I changed my mind," she said.

Urquhart for a moment did not trust himself to speak. He thought, "Talk about those refractory mules we had such a fearful to-do with, that time in Montana! Tractable and reasonable and sweet-tempered, compared to a woman! All right!"

He picked up his walking-stick.

"Good-afternoon, then," he said, and wasted no time in further leave-taking.

"Please!" added the girl, raising her voice a trifle as he turned. "Do you mind posting these letters for me as you pass the box by the crossroads?"

"Not at all." He took the three or four letters, of which she had laid one rather carefully on the top of the others.

"Thank you."

He was out of the gate without even a look.

Tingling with disappointment, astonishment and rage, Ted Urquhart tramped back to the crossroads where he had parted that morning from that resourceful match-maker, Pansy.

Not much of a success—her plan!

What on earth was the meaning of all this?

Nell's look at him! Her tone! That curt snub!

After her promise!

"Changed my mind——!"

What had happened to change it between his leaving her, at half-past two, and his reappearance just now?

Was it that wire?

She said there was nothing, though.

Changed her mind!

Sent him to the right-about, carrying this dashed tea-basket, and her letters to post.

Pretty cool, that last touch!

Her letters, indeed! He scowled down at them. Then his brows rose. The address in the curly, clear handwriting upon that topmost envelope, forced itself upon, his recognition. He had seen it so many times already.

"To
    E. Urquhart, Esqre."

To himself!

Nell had been writing to him. That very afternoon. While the man to whom she wrote was perhaps within a stone's throw of her!

He stood still in the road, staring at that envelope....

With a hoot of derision, a big touring-car went scorching softly by him on the way to Hardelot; tossing a dazzle of brass into his eyes, a smother of white dust all over him. He merely blinked, and stared at that envelope.... A couple of fisher-girls passed him, their voluminous stuff petticoats swinging like kilts, their high, stiff corsets, covered in corn-flower blue cloth, clipping them over their white bodices. They called a friendly "Bon jour!" to Urquhart.

He stared at that envelope addressed to him.... "Now what's inside?" he thought. So familiar was each letter of the writing that he could make for himself a mental copy of the sheet within, as far as the date, and the Hostel address and the "My dear Ted."

And then what?

Anything that would explain her behaviour just now?

If he thought that—It was almost enough to tempt a man to open—A letter addressed to him, meant for him to read!

Yes, but not now. No, dash it. A man couldn't. She'd given it to him to post. The thing, whatever it was about, would have to be posted and reach him after much wandering and many days. He made a rough calculation.

"Eight weeks, perhaps," he thought. "It'll turn up, readdressed, at The Court. Ah! With luck it will have to be readdressed from The Court again, and sent on somewhere else, supposing I was—supposing we were off by that time, on our honeymoon. After all, we're engaged——"

The sun-tanned face cleared. He started off again, and presently smiled down with increasing cheerfulness at that unbetraying grey envelope.

"Probably this is a description of the scenery of this place, and about how the phosphorescence on the high tide in the evening is like summer lightning on the waves!" he reflected. "Telling me what is to be found flourishing in the Hostel garden.... H'm ... Cupids and 'Match-Me'! Possibly some ultra-meek version of those girls and their cliff-adventure, and of the young man—some stranger—who.... Or wouldn't she? Wouldn't Nell mention him?"

He had reached the black-and-white post-box in the wall which the facteur, even in that tiny hamlet, visited thrice daily.

He dropped in the three other letters, held his own in his hand for another moment.

"It'll be something to smile over when we do get it," he told himself with a half-amused, impatient sigh. "Well! So long!"

And, with a "final" sounding little click of the iron flap, he dropped into the box his letter from Nell.

Her fair face, proud, withheld and lovely, rose above every other image in his mind. Again he saw her, sitting there at that window writing; her supple white hand on the green cloth of that bureau....

Suddenly, irrelevantly, he remembered something else about her. The first thing any woman would have looked for. He—an engaged man—had only subconsciously noticed it, and had then forgotten all about it.

He remembered now.

For though Eleanor had written back to him at the beginning of their betrothal that she had decided upon no new stones, but that she would wear an old Urquhart heirloom of a sapphire with brilliants for her engagement-ring, he was sure that the girl, sitting writing to the fiancé whom she believed far away—the girl wore no ring at all.

CHAPTER VIII

CROWS TO PLUCK

Forty-eight hours after that check to his courtship, Ted Urquhart was speeding back to The Court, fetched over from France by a message of two words—

"Eleanor here."

It found him only too anxious to believe that it had been sent off by that enchanting tease, Nell herself.

He hadn't had another glimpse of her since the afternoon that he had planned to spend in making himself known to her—and that he'd actually spent in finding himself put further away from her than ever.

Now she'd sent for him.

Oh, the interminable homeward journey!

Centuries, it seemed to him, were spent in pacing a stone quay, waiting, waiting until that never-ending luggage and those motor-cars were got aboard. Other ages in watching, from the steamer-rail, how slowly the tall hotels of Boulogne began to slide away as the boat lifted to the Channel waves. Further æons of time in tramping a short deck cumbered with long chairs and with other passengers—who grumbled, perhaps, at the idiotic restlessness of that young fellow in the brown Burberry, striding up and down as if that could bring him any sooner to his destination, with a pipe between his teeth and that unmeaning smile coming and going on his face.

For all the way home he was thinking of her.... "Why," he wondered, "did she take it into her head to be off, when she was to have stayed at that Hostel for a month? By this time, of course, Uncle Henry will have told her that I've been there, too—when I went—and why I went. The chances are that she knows now who it was she snubbed and sent away like that. She knows it's the man she's got to meet this afternoon as her fiancé!"

Pictures of his waiting sweetheart rose between him and the foam-veined jade of the water sliding past the boat. He saw her—not, as before, on the plage of a foreign country, with waves at her feet and a young moon above her head—but in another setting altogether, adding her beauty to the beauty of his old home—(her home—ah, theirs). Coming slowly down the grey stone steps of the—(their) Terrace. He would make her take him round her—(and his) gardens. Then, as she stood reflected among the other lilies in the still waters of that new fish-pond of hers (and theirs) her lover, close beside her, would proceed to teach her a lesson or so about a thing or two.

These were the anticipations that kept that smile flickering on the young man's face.

"Now then! I have a crow to pluck with you—several crows, in fact. A whole row of 'em," Ted Urquhart imagined himself saying peremptorily to that girl of his. "Look here! To begin with—Where's your engagement-ring? You promised you'd wear one," he'd say. "And you don't. What's become of that sapphire you said you'd chosen? (Matches your eyes, I expect.) Where is it?"

She'd have some impertinence ready. Then—

"Certainly I want you always to wear it," Urquhart would go on (if this dashed sea-slug of a boat ever got to the other side). "Yes. If you fetch it I will wish it on to your finger, and you need not take it off again. No! You needn't run away for it this minute, thanks. Presently will do," he'd say. "After I've plucked another crow with you first, please. Crow Number Two:—What did you mean by promising to spend the whole afternoon tête-à-tête by the sea with a strange young man?"

Here, of course (thought Urquhart), Nell would protest that he could scarcely have the assurance to call himself a strange young man?

"Yes! You didn't know, at the time, that I was anything else," he would insist. It would do her good to be bullied about it. Didn't they say that women preferred a man who could bully them? "The crime remains the same," he'd say, "as if I had been a perfect stranger. A stranger who saw no ring on your finger! An unfortunate chap who'd absolutely no idea that you were an engaged girl! Nothing to warn him! Disgraceful. Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Nell? Why, you death-trap! Think of the mischief that you might (might, mark you!) have been doing all the time," he'd say. "Think of the possible damage to that wretched young man. He couldn't guess that the pretty, unattached-looking young woman who said she'd come out to tea was already booked to make a marriage of convenience!" Yes, he could say it then; Nell would be perfectly aware what sort of a match theirs was turning out! And her lover would go on severely——

"Supposing this ignorant stranger had taken it into his head to fall in love with you at first sight? Some—young lunatics might be capable of that. Supposing that, in all good faith, he'd proposed to you?" he'd say. "No thanks to you, Miss, that that catastrophe happened to be out of the question. But here's Crow Number Three:—Having given your word to the man, what made you break it? Why didn't you keep that appointment?"

Here, he thought, he'd have Nell in a cleft stick!

For already he'd pieced out what he thought the reason for that sudden coldness of hers to the strange young man. The remembrance of one Ted Urquhart, whom she was to marry, had hinted that it wasn't wise to encourage this sort of thing—picnics and so on with young men who couldn't, perhaps, keep their admiration entirely out of their eyes. She'd have to own her duty towards her fiancé—which meant owning that "the strange young man" was at least important enough to count! She wouldn't say that, Urquhart would drive it home with——

"Crow Number Four:—Why did you give him your letter to me to post? Wasn't it so that he might see you'd got a man of your own to write to—Yes, well, of course he wouldn't necessarily see that it was to a fiancé. Of course it might have been to a father or a brother. Leave that crow for the present, then. Still, you did stick that letter on the top of the others for him to notice the address," he'd say. "Now, didn't you? ... Didn't you, Dear?"

Here her lover pictured Nell's first gesture of hesitation. He imagined the first undecided sidewards turn of the small head (soon to be drawn down to its proper place on his shoulder), bright as a golden bud against the treillage of the old rose-temple!—their rose-temple!—to which he would be slowly strolling along beside her, a lovely girl in a lovely place!

What did the place matter, though? All that mattered was summed up in the two words of her message——

"Eleanor here."

Still he was not disappointed that, after a fuming wait at Folkestone and a journey through Kent in a Victorian railway-train that had, as Urquhart expressed it, "two speeds, dead-slow and stop," he found at the tiny station for The Court no Nell to meet him.

He had not wished or expected that.

Only he commandeered the wheel from a morose and public-school-voiced chauffeur and tore his Uncle's car along homewards at a pace that made white avenue and green lime-trees whizz past in strips of white-and-green, like blades of that ribbon-grass.

And now they'd rushed up the drive; they'd turned by the huge beech to the Terrace with the shallow-worn steps between grey Court and green lawns. Now! Here was Home! Their home! He'd arrived——

One glance at the steps—No! She wasn't there——

Well, of course not——

Much more like her to withhold herself until the last minute! Possibly she thought that he had to be taught a lesson? That it was she who had crows to pluck with him? And that he must wait on her, first? Right!

She'd be in the house——

Impetuously he dashed up those steps, out of the late afternoon sunlight, into the gloom and the cool of the old Hall, nearly knocking that officious butler into the glass case with General Urquhart's giant tarpon that stood beside the study-door.

In the study he found his Uncle, craning as ever over those books of his, difficult as ever to uproot from that printed Past and awaken to the Present—embodied in a hurrying lover.

"Ah, Ted! You have come back," the old man informed him, vaguely, pulling a lock of his own white hair back with groping fingers. "You got my telegram."

"Oh, yes, Uncle—Thanks!"

H'm. So the wire was from him? Nell wouldn't send it?

"Still, she might have dictated it," thought the younger Urquhart, his eyes turning to the door that he had left ajar.

The old man shut it carefully.

"Always a draught from that hall! The worst of an old house! Yes, I wired as soon as Eleanor came back from France. She wasn't able to secure those documents. Only the least important of them. If one wants a thing properly done, Ted, one has to be on the spot oneself. It isn't always possible, I know. But writing—sit down, sit down—writing about a thing is seldom satisfactory. The delay—the waste of time——"

"I know—I know—three years!" said Ted Urquhart.

"Ah, you've found it so, too? I verily believe that everyone says the same thing. But I thought—I thought that you always transacted whatever you had had to do yourself, my boy, in those out-of-the-way places? I suppose you've had to write home for things, though, and that you'd have managed better if you could have chosen in person——"

"Not I! I should never have chosen differently, Uncle," declared Ted Urquhart quickly, his mind gay with images of the golden-haired girl he called his. "If Eleanor——"

"Ah, yes. Perhaps you would like to see Eleanor now——"

"Perhaps!" the young man laughed, flushing a little.

The elder Urquhart rose stiffly from his desk-chair.

"She said she would come down here as soon as she heard you had arrived, my boy," he said, slowly, and put that hand like a branch of pale coral out to the bell. "She was to be in her office all the afternoon. That little room off the drawing-room: she calls it her office. She has so many people to see on business; she has to have an office of sorts, Ted——"

"Of course, of course——"

A nerve-racking pause, during which an old man and a young one sat silent in the old room with its book-lined walls, arrassed with velvety glooms. Outside a rose flattened itself against a mullioned pane. Inside brooded a church-like hush.

Young Urquhart felt that the thumping of his heart must presently be heard through it.

"Crow Number Five to pluck with her presently," he thought resentfully. "Why did you keep me waiting on thorns when I know you must have heard the car drive up?"

"Dear me, I think that bell cannot have rung," said Eleanor's maddening father, presently. He rang again.

After what was possibly only the usual lapse of time, the butler appeared.

"Beeton, go—go to the little morning-room, will you, and let Miss Urquhart know that Mr. Ted Urquhart has come and that he is waiting in here."

"Yes, Sir."

Another stage-wait.

Mr. Ted Urquhart, with every nerve a-fret within him, remembered that a married man he knew once told him how nearly he had "bolted" from the altar and the bride who had let him in for the ordeal of waiting there for fifteen minutes....

This was a bad quarter of an hour that Nell was giving her man....

How long? How much longer? ...

Ah! At last! Steps across the hall.

Urquhart sprang up again at the sound of them.

Light, composed-sounding steps; not loitering, not hurrying, coming steadily across to the study-door. It opened.

As it did so, young Urquhart stood tense, just ready to step forward to greet the girl who should enter....

But he did not step forward.

For, he saw, this was not Nell who came in.

She, in her dainty insolence, had sent somebody.

This would mean the plucking of Crow Number Six. She had sent a small, dark, prim-faced little person, rather dowdily-dressed, a companion, a lady-secretary or something of that sort, to say that Miss Urquhart would be here presently, he supposed. Nell was keeping it up until the very last moment——

But in that moment old Mr. Urquhart's vague, soft voice was speaking; uttering incredible words.

"Ted, my dear boy," he said, "this is Eleanor."

"This——?" The startled, crude exclamation all but broke from young Urquhart's lips. All the blood that had just been surging, warm and eager, through his heart, seemed to have ebbed away, leaving him deathly cold. He was aghast as any ivy-wreathed lover of Mythology, who for a day had chased some laughing and elusive maid in hot pursuit—no more eagerly than this Twentieth Century engineer in his tweeds and brown boots and close-cut hair—and with no better luck! For at the end of the chase, what, in those old legends, was the hunter's reward? That disconcerting miracle of Metamorphosis! The glowing sweetheart vanished; transformed into a chilling splash of brook-water across his face—an armful of fleshless reeds against his breast——

Young Urquhart stared. A voice within him seemed to be clamouring furiously:—"But, look here! This isn't Nell! It can't be! This isn't the girl I'm here for, at all! This is the wrong one! The wrong girl, I say!"

Unconscious of all this, the strange dark girl came sedately towards him, holding out a small hand, spare and brown as the stone of a date. Upon the other she wore a noticeably fine ring.

"How do you do, Ted?" she said, composedly. And she offered to him the edge of an olive cheek—this girl upon whom he'd never set eyes before now.

This was Eleanor!

CHAPTER IX

THE WRONG GIRL

"How am I to get out of it? What excuse am I to make? How on earth am I going to break off the engagement?"

This was Ted Urquhart's first preoccupation after he had dismissed Mr. Beeton's offer of help and had begun to unpack his own traps in the lavender-scented quarters which had always been his bedroom when as a little boy he had stayed with his father at The Court. He could still hardly realise that The Court was his own property; that it would be his and that of the girl-cousin whom he had arranged to marry.

No! He couldn't marry her!

Now that he had seen her, he knew, he knew that he could never marry Eleanor Urquhart!

The small and naughty boy that lurks in every grown-up young man seemed to come out from his ambush at the back of his mind, grimacing and shrieking rebellion at the mere thought of it.—"Don't want to! Don't like it! Shan't! Won't!"

However more gently he put it, it was a rotten thing to have to tell a girl! What reason could he possibly give her? The young man pondered as he moved in his shirt-sleeves between the towering tallboys and the latticed casement darkened by ivy, unpacking and disposing his things neatly and quickly after the order of the old campaigner; the row of boots here—best light for shaving here—and here the spirit-lamp arrangement for getting himself a cup of tea in the morning at an hour before any lazy English servant was stirring!—and as he pondered, there sounded clearer and clearer in his mind the unwelcome answer to his question.

"How am I to break off this senseless engagement?"

"It can't be broken off!"

For he couldn't tell that matter-of-fact-looking young woman that he found he'd been mistaken in his feelings! In the whole question of their engagement, "feelings" had not been mentioned.

Why should they? Between a girl and a man who'd never met? They were engaged for quite another motive—and that motive—the sharing of The Court—remained; common sense as ever. He would, if he broke it off, be turning out the girl and the old man—after having deluded them for a whole year into making sure they were there for good! He'd be wasting a year of his cousin's chances of marrying somebody else. Somebody else might have wanted to marry her—a curate, say, or some kind of professional pal of Uncle Henry's....

So here was he—Ted Urquhart—with his whole Future mortgaged!

And only himself to thank for that! Asking for trouble! Asking!

Fool that he'd been!

Didn't it just show the insensate folly of getting one's self engaged for any but the one right reason?

Men did it, of course, and it seemed to work out all right.... There'd been a young French mechanician in Urquhart's last camp, married to a girl in Arles for whom he seemed constantly homesick—yet he'd never seen this bride to speak to, alone, until after the wedding. Those "arranged" marriages for family reasons, on the idea that one well-brought-up girl made a man the same sort of wife as another well-brought-up girl, panned out well in France, presumably. One young Englishman was finding it a fairly infernal sort of failure. To be tied for life to a girl who—Well! She was a nice little thing enough. Rather fine eyes—for dark eyes....

But—he summed up a vague set of impressions by ruefully telling himself that she didn't seem able to make you feel she was a girl!—Pretty hopeless kind of start, that!

A rose without scent—that was a girl without the allurement of sex. It wasn't a matter of good looks alone, either. Some girls—not always the best-looking ones!—had something about them that could surely make a man conscious of their attraction even a mile away, even on a pitch-dark night, say. They'd this "something" that called and called—inaudibly. It beckoned and beckoned—without any visible sign that could be shown. It was the undying miracle of womanhood; the appeal of the Eternal Feminine. He, Ted, had seen it again and again in the dark eyes of South American girls, in the less languorous glance of French lassies. That theatrical girl, now Pansy Vansittart, she possessed it in every movement of her sumptuous person. And it was incarnate, and a transfigured thing, in yet another girl——

He wheeled sharply as if the thought had stung him. He told himself that men could marry, and did marry, "without much of that sort of thing." Yes, and were quite reasonably happy, too, without it! thought this Empire-maker a little defiantly.

A man needn't miss it. He mightn't ever miss it unless—Until, too late, he happened to meet the other sort of girl!

Here Urquhart sat down heavily on the edge of his bed—one of those countless mausoleums in which Queen Elizabeth is reported to have slept,—and he thumped a brown fist softly and viciously against the carved black garland of the bed-post.

As if defending himself to some one, he muttered aloud—"It would have been all right! It wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't seen Nell first!"

He knew now who it was that he had been calling "Nell" all this while in his heart.

For during a nightmare of afternoon-tea just now in the great drawing-room with his Uncle and the girl whom Ted had condemned himself to marry, Eleanor Urquhart's staid little voice had broken through her fiancé's daze of consternation with questions, obviously meant to be friendly, about that anonymous, that disastrous trip of his to France.

"And so you went to my Hostel, and found that you had had a journey for nothing, after all? Oh, dear, what a pity. I should like to have shown you the place myself," Eleanor had said, pouring out tea with those little, competent, rather uncaressable-looking hands. She was doing her best, he saw, to be what she considered "nice" to this visitor who was also a prospective husband. "Sugar? Two lumps? (I must remember.) Don't you think it was a good idea to start it abroad, Ted? Such a complete change, you know——"

"Quite a change," poor Ted had absently agreed.

"Yes, to give those girls even a glimpse of another country, another sort of life from their own—Oh! I am sure it widens their minds," Eleanor had said earnestly. "It is sometimes so disheartening, the narrowness of the outlook of those girls! Some of them seem to care for nothing but just the tiny pleasures of the moment. Or what they look like. Or what one of their dreadful 'young men' says; their Tube lift-men and tram-conductors and shop-assistants! As I sometimes try to tell them—(Won't you have some more bread-and-butter? You are eating nothing.)—as I tell them, 'These young m-m-men are, in nine cases out of ten, on a lower mental plane than you are yourselves! They haven't read as much; they haven't associated as much with another class; they haven't thought as much. Why, why be swayed by their opinions? Form your own judgments!' I tell them. 'For the honour of your sex, be yourselves, not things that just talk, and dress' (as they do, Ted), and behave in a way that they think will please their quite uncultivated young men!"

"But these young men," Urquhart had suggested, diffidently enough, "are, I suppose, all those girls have to marry."

"Why should that decide everything?" Eleanor had argued, as energetically, as unembarrassedly as if she were discussing any other subject—say half-day closing—that affected her girls. "Why should not they—instead of descending to the level of the young man's intelligence—try to raise him? I beg them to do that. Isn't that a better standard to set?"

"Oh—quite——" Urquhart had said, with an irrelevant echo of the talk of Pansy ringing in his mind as he had listened to this other young woman.

"And you saw my girls, of course? Five of them there now. They wouldn't know who you were, Ted, I suppose?"

"Er—no. They didn't know."

"Not even Miss Fayre?"

"Miss Fayre," Urquhart had repeated with a boding flash of enlightenment. "Now, which was she?"

"Rosamond Fayre; a very tall girl with a great deal of fair hair; nice-looking—my secretary. I left her in charge of the place while I went to Paris."

"Ah, your second-in-command. Yes, I saw her, of course," Eleanor's fiancé had forced himself to say quietly, "but without catching her name."

"Then you will have to be properly introduced when she comes back," Eleanor had said, pleasantly precise, "on Thursday."

"She's—to come back here?" Ted Urquhart had heard himself ask. "And are you going back to France, then, yourself?"

"No. I've another most excellent person to send over to take on the Hostel until the end of this month. A Lady Miriam Settlement worker, whose holiday has fallen through in the nick of time," Eleanor had explained busily. "A Miss Wadsworth—a great-niece of The Wadsworth, you know, the Minority Report man—a most charming and cultured woman. She will be glad to take charge—especially as the more difficult of the girls are due back now—and that allows me to have Rosamond Fayre free for the Amalgamated Girls' Garden Party."

"'Rosamond Fayre!' Rosamond Fayre," Ted had echoed silently. "She was more like a 'Nell'! And so she's this girl's secretary? What on earth sort of a—Rather a bad one, I should say! What's she secretarying for, at all? Is she one of that 'intelligent' lot? Surely she doesn't go in for thinking a girl ought to be mugging up books all day about how to be 'herself,' instead of playing up to a mere man?"

But as he asked himself the question he knew that to that girl being "herself" and living to delight her lover would some day mean just one and the same thing....

Eleanor, putting her cup down, had chatted briskly on, so interested in this garden-party, whatever it was, that it preserved her from any self-consciousness before this stranger-fiancé. She had been quite ready to accept him as a matter of fact! She'd behaved as a well-brought up docile child behaves when there is ushered into her nursery "the new Nana"! She had been treating her prospective husband with the same unruffled friendliness with which she had then turned to his Uncle.

"I knew you'd resign yourself to the inevitable, Father! As soon as we heard that there was scarlatina at Park, and that the Duchess had to put the whole place into quarantine, I knew you'd say we might have the party here——"

"Very well, my dear, very well—I'll go out for the whole day," Mr. Urquhart's fatigued voice had replied. "I'll take the car over to Little Merton and have a look at that parish register I heard of the other day. No, no, I'll not stay here, Eleanor. I—I can't cope with these young ladies. I—I haven't forgotten that last reunion you had. Ladies who lost their way down the corridors—invaded my study—lectured me on the Marriage Laws. They alarmed me," the old gentleman had confessed, "with their views—They—Ah, I shall be gravely anxious, Eleanor, until they have come and gone. The pictures, Ted!—The Romney! At least we ought to have the Holbein room locked up!"

"But these are not the Suffrage-people, Father, this time," Eleanor had explained, patiently. "These are just my working girls! All the Clubs in London, amalgamated. They are bringing down——"

"Female hooligans, my dear Ted," concluded his Uncle with a deploring shake of his white head. "Mænads who hold orgies and Saturnalian gambols on these lawns——"

"Father, they only dance! Dancing is their great outlet," Eleanor had explained. "I shall have a band for them on the Terrace. I shall tell Rosamond to write to one of those ladies' orchestras——"

"More ladies!" old Mr. Urquhart had groaned. "Ted, my dear boy, you and I will be well out of it on that day. We will decamp, and leave the Bacchæ to Eleanor and Miss Fayre."

That miserable night, as Urquhart went to sleep, his last thought was that he would see Miss Fayre—since that was Nell's true name—in two days' time....

It seemed to Ted that only that thought kept him going at all during this ghastly sojourn in this house as a man engaged—to the wrong girl. It seemed to him, as he walked through those grounds and stood beside that new fish-pond, and explored the rose-temple, always with that sedate and authoritative little courier of a cousin of his—as he touched her cool olive cheek in morning or evening greeting—and listened politely to her talk of her plans and of her secretary's duties, it seemed to Ted that Life could hold nothing worse in store for him.

Here he was mistaken.

To be with the wrong girl is bad enough; but its Purgatory is peaceful enjoyment compared with what it immediately becomes with the entrance upon the scene of the right girl herself.

CHAPTER X

THE OTHER GIRL

Rosamond Fayre, secretary, returned to her employer's house on Friday evening.

It was just as Beeton was preparing to sound the dressing-bell that the tall girl, coated and veiled from the motor, came running lightly up the steps and into the hall to be met by Eleanor, over whose compact little shoulder a masculine figure might be seen lurking none too happily, in the background.

"Ah, Rosamond, you are late," Eleanor greeted her pleasantly. The girls never attempted a kiss; Eleanor, because she would not have considered it business-like to be on those terms with a salaried clerk, however much of a friend she was; Rosamond, because, like many girls of a generous temperament, she was sparing of indiscriminate caresses. (In dreams her kisses might be many ... in real life she waited for—a dream....)

They shook hands, and then Eleanor made a little summoning movement of her dusky head. The young man behind her straightened himself and came forward to that long-evaded, now inevitable introduction.

"A surprise for you, Rosamond," said Eleanor, smiling placidly. "You two have met, I hear, but without either of you knowing who the other was. This is my fiancé, Mr. Ted Urquhart."

The young man—rather wooden-faced—bowed to Miss Fayre, who, without displaying too much astonishment, gave the lightest laugh of conventional amusement as she nodded.

"How funny this is," she said brightly, "isn't it? How do you do, Mr. Urquhart? (We entertained your fiancé unawares, Eleanor, that he was wishing us all at the bottom of the sea because we could not produce the rightful mistress of the Hostel to talk to him.) Yes, a perfect crossing, thanks. What, a parcel in my room? How nice! I always like to find something unexpected waiting for me, don't you?"

She stood a little aside to let her employer precede her upstairs, then she went off to her own room, smiling.

That smile deepened as Rosamond opened her white door and stepped across the pretty room to the open latticed casement. The sunset was misty golden beyond the dove-coloured sweep of Kentish Weald with here and there a church-spire holding up a slim blue finger; the lime-trees of the Court Avenue made a dark frame for the picture. It was all utterly, unsuspectingly peaceful; and very English. After all, Rosamond found it was rather pleasant to be back again in England.

That was not why she smiled, though.

"So that's Mr. Ted Urquhart! He little knows that I have known that for nearly a week now! He shall never know how I found out, either," decided Rosamond with a little laugh.

And as she slipped off her travel-dusty costume and splashed in freshening hot water, she laughed once or twice over the pictures in her mind. A picture of the hall at the Hostel and of the walking-stick that a young man had dropped there while he went off post-haste to fetch a tea-basket, and that a young woman had, suspecting nothing, picked up. A tell-tale walking-stick with a big silver knob engraved with initials, and a crest for all the world to see. Not the sort of stick a young man ought to carry who's set his mind upon travelling incognito!

Then the picture of Ted Urquhart's straight back as seen from the Hostel window, marching off with indignation expressed in every line of it! The picture of his face just now!

"So, that is the young man of the Camp, and the runaway bulls, and the revolver fights, is it? That's 'my dear Ted,' in fact, to whom Eleanor—or I—used to send off those extremely interesting letters every mail? What a grotesque plan that was." She laughed as she unwove her plaits and twisted them again into the Clytie knot on the back of her neck.

"And how I used to wonder what he looked like, this unseen young man to whom I signed myself 'His affectionately.' Well, I know now. And he doesn't know I've seen most of his—er—love-letters." She laughed again. "How furious he would be! He is furious enough with me now," thought Rosamond Fayre. "I saw that. Furious because I had to hear his name at last. Furious because a third person knows of that silly, silly trick he played—tried to play off on his fiancée! She doesn't seem to be particularly angry," reflected Rosamond. "I shouldn't have spoken to him for weeks, if he'd been anything to do with me. As it was, I was rather annoyed with him for the moment. Not now. Oh, no! Now I'm only interested to watch him—and Eleanor. They've had a week, now, to find out each other's tastes, and so on.... I suppose he likes her? I expect he'll loathe me cordially henceforward."

She hummed lightly a scrap of an old song as she finished doing her hair:

"My father's a hedger and ditcher—

"It's getting late in the summer to dress for dinner without turning on the lights——"

Catching together her blue crêpe kimono, she stepped across to the window again. With a little jingle of brass rings she drew the cream-coloured casement curtains, catching, as she did so, the sound of a crunching step on the gravel outside, the whiff of a cigarette.

"Alone. I wonder what he's thinking about. Waiting for Eleanor to come down, of course," said Rosamond Fayre as she stepped back.

Behind those drawn curtains she snapped on the lights. They shone on that waiting parcel, a square white carton box with a dressmaker's name ("Madame Cora") splashed in scarlet letters across it, containing a new evening frock for Miss Fayre, who spent what Eleanor privately considered an utterly disproportionate amount of her salary upon clothes.

"I wonder what Eleanor is going to put on 'for Him'?" mused Rosamond as she sat down on the bed and cut the scarlet strings of the box. "Surely she'll stop having a soul above dressing to please a man now? Lots of girls could take Eleanor's looks and make them rather Spanish and piquante. But will she?"

Layer after layer of tissue paper rustled at her feet with the sound of drifted autumn leaves.

Rosamond took out the frock.

It was of three-tiered pink, fading from the deep blush of the lowest flounce to the creamy heart of the corsage, and but for the shot-weighed hems it would have seemed light as a silken scarf across her arm.

"Now there's something really mysterious about a woman's pretty frock that's not been put on yet," thought Rosamond. Her eyes drank in the dainty colour. "She doesn't yet know what will happen to her while she's wearing it. How can Eleanor call clothes 'so inessential'? A frock? Why, it's a fateful thing! Now, this——"

She stepped into the pink sheath.

"Will it be an unlucky frock? A hoodoo? Some are!" She drew it up about her pliant column of a body. "Or will it be a 'frock of fascination' that brings a good time whenever or wherever it's worn? Perhaps!" She slipped sculptured arms into those short transparent sleeves. "Oh! Feels like crisp butterfly's wings against one! Yes! Surely Eleanor will learn to enjoy clothes for his sake? Surely he'll teach her that? Though I don't think much of him, even if he does romp up and down the Andes with castings on his back. (Obstinate-looking back.) Now, which is the—ah, here——"

She joined the silken waist-belt, humming her old song:

"My father's a hedger and ditcher—
My mother must card and spin—

Fancy when they spun all their own frocks!"

With busy enjoyment she fastened silver snaps down the front, still humming——

"But I'm a poor little critcher—

That's it——"

She coaxed a tiny hook into a silken loop,

"And money comes slowly in!

Now!"

She turned to the long glass of her wardrobe a glance of triumphant enquiry.

Yes!

It was a success.

Ah, blessed fashions of Nineteen Fourteen, that revived all the frilly, feminine vanity and charm, with none of the rigidity of the Crinoline Period! That corolla of petal shapes spreading below the hips as the girl that lent it movement turned slowly, lifted an arm, took a step aside and back again! Why, this garment was just a flower made into a frock! She smiled with frankest pleasure at her own white-framed reflection. And the last cunning touch was to overlay it with that film of misty-blue chiffon which softened all that warmer colour with just the quality of pink rose-leaves!

"My frock; distinctly mine!" murmured the girl. "I've never looked so nice in anything. I'll write and tell Mrs. Core that. Clever little woman! Worth double what she charges. It is nice! M—m!"

She pursed her mouth into the shape of a kiss wafted to that preening, radiant image of gold-and-white-and-rose.

"Rather a darling! The frock, I mean, of course. Oh, I shall be happy in this, I know. Is it too idiotically silly and frivolous, after all, to think it matters so much? It's not looked upon as frivolous to enjoy a good picture? No! That's artistic interest. Then why isn't it 'artistic' to enjoy actually being the delightful colouring and the graceful 'line,' and all that? It gives such pleasure, and not only to oneself," mused Rosamond. "Now, shall I, or not, wear just a bud fastened into the lace here?"

She had chosen that bud from the bowl of roses set on her corner writing-table; she was pinning it in when a sudden thought checked her.

"Why——"

The smile faded from her face. A little, unreasonable chill seemed to pass over her.

Why, she had forgotten. This brand-new frock was not for wearing at dinner to-night! This was for "special" occasions; parties. She'd only been trying it on to see if it needed to be sent back for any alteration. It wasn't as if her sweetheart had just come home. She'd nobody—nothing to dress for, to make herself into charming pictures for, to-night. Yet here she was prinking, tittivating and taking thought of her appearance, just as if she were, say, in Eleanor's place!

The lace at her breast stirred over a little sigh. "Rather a pity, Rosamond, that you haven't got—somebody nice of your own to admire you just now," she thought. "This frock simply calls for it! ... Well, some day, perhaps, before it's quite worn out——! But I had better make haste and get out of it, now——"

Rather slowly she began to unfasten those snaps,—"since it does fit all right."

She coaxed that tiny hook out of that silken noose.

Then, with a jerk, she stepped out of the frock, and gave a little laugh. Her face cleared into gaiety again.

Briskly she began putting the new vanity away, humming as she did so, the end of her old song:

"Last night the dogs did bark.

(I hope dinner won't be long. I'm quite hungry.)

And I went out to see—

(Better stuff this tissue-paper back into the sleeves.)

And every lass had a spark,
But there's nobody comes for me!"

She turned back to the wardrobe.

"The old black ninon rag, I suppose——"

That old black ninon rag flattered her neck and shoulders as even the rose-pink lisse had not done.—"And perhaps my one and only remaining piece of modest jewellery——"

This was a tiny antique paste slide and clasp on a velvet ribbon. Another girl might wear black, to show up the contrast with her throat, but Rosamond's neck-band was of velvet insolently white, inviting comparison with the skin against which it could scarcely be seen.

She was fastening the clasp as the purr of the gong through the house rose into a growl and died down again to a mutter.

"Good.... There is dinner. I wonder if Mr. Ted Urquhart thinks that the secretary ought to be having it in the housekeeper's room, with a frock right up to her chin, and a neat little white turn-over collar?" meditated the secretary as she came downstairs. "Of course I shall have to show him, now, that I do know 'my place,' and that I realise I'm merely a menial in this house. No part of my duty to dress for the young master of the house, even if I did have to write love-letters to him! His house. What a pity I don't wear an apron," she concluded with an inward chuckle as she walked demurely into the oak-panelled dining-room of which the long table below the chandelier was unused except for a large party.

The family dined at a small oval table set in one of the windows.

Old Mr. Urquhart, with Charles II. gold buttons on his dress-waistcoat, faced his daughter, who wore an all-white lace dress that made her look as dark as a creole without a Creole's warmth. Eleanor was invariably neat, but always her neatness looked as if it had been achieved without the aid of a mirror. Surely, if she'd glanced at her "effect" in the glass, that little brunette would never have chosen a necklace of silver with sapphires, the special stone of a fair-skinned woman?

Rosamond found herself opposite to Mr. Ted Urquhart—whom Eleanor's girls, no doubt, would have considered better-looking than ever in evening dress.

"Amusing to think what a much larger party we were last time I sat down to table with Eleanor's dear Ted," reflected Miss Fayre. "Yes; there's no reason why I shouldn't get what amusement I can out of the whole thing?"

The amusement, she found, could begin at once.

It began with what was evidently a discussion by Eleanor of some features of the party arranged for next Saturday, and what was as obviously a repetition of old Mr. Urquhart's sentiments thereupon.

"Well, Eleanor, I wash my hands of it. It's Ted's turf, actually."

"But we've agreed not to ruin the turf! We'll have the dancing on the smaller lawn behind the walled garden instead! I've told Marrow he can't object to that," decreed Eleanor. "After all, this whole place doesn't belong to the g-g-gardener! He behaves as if it did! So like a man! No sense of p-p-proportion at all. We should do far better to have one of those Horticultural Hostesses here, with two or three girls from the Gardening College at Glynde under her——"

"Oh, heaven! Yet more girls," mourned old Mr. Urquhart, crumbling his bread.

And Rosamond Fayre, now taking up the attitude that she decided would bring her in the most harmless amusement, looked deprecatingly timid above her soup.

"Well, my dear, you will have the field to yourself this time. You and Miss Fayre"—the old gentleman was, by the way, a great admirer of Miss Fayre's—"will have the field to yourselves. Let me know at what hour you think it will be—ah—safe to return."

"There is to be a special train back to Charing Cross, Father, to take the girls up. They'll be gone by seven, won't they, Rosamond?"

"Oh, yes," murmured Rosamond Fayre.

All the "apron" that she had regretted being unable to tie on over her black dress sounded in her meek voice. Every note of it was calculated to impress upon her neighbour opposite that she, Miss Fayre, was now not the young lady-in-charge of that Holiday Hostel in France. Oh, no! but the humblest of secretaries. The most unassuming of hired menials at Urquhart's Court—Mr. Ted Urquhart's Court. She hoped he saw that. He hadn't looked at her—of course.

"Are you feeling a little tired?" Eleanor asked.

"Oh, no, thanks," uttered the secretary, mildly. "Why?"

"You seem so quiet to-night."

"Perhaps Miss Fayre also," pronounced old Mr. Urquhart, "is trembling at the thought of the invading hordes."

"No, really I'm not," protested Miss Fayre, shyly.

"Anyhow, Father, you needn't tremble! You'll be off before they come," his daughter told him, "and you'll be going with him, Ted, of course."

"Oh, will he be going too?" thought Rosamond. "Yes, I suppose he's sure to. He won't care to be one of a 'horde' surrounding her." Without looking at him, she saw the young engineer glance up as he said quietly—

"Oh, no, Eleanor. You're not going to shut me out of these festivities. I'll stay and see the fun."

"Fun—oh, it wouldn't be any fun for you, Ted," the young mistress of the house said absently. "I'm afraid I shouldn't be able to attend to you at all. You see, it's a regular gathering of the Clans. Not only the two hundred Club girls, but several of the workers that I don't seem to get a chance of talking to at any other time. I really shan't have a minute; that shall I, Rosamond?"

"I am afraid you won't," agreed her secretary politely, the while she thought, "That will choke him off, surely. Knowing that Eleanor won't have time for him. He won't want her Two Hundred. He'll go."

"I think I'll stay, all the same," said the quiet, easy voice of the young man who hadn't looked at Rosamond, "unless Uncle Henry wants somebody with him?"

"Ah," thought Rosamond, "will Mr. Urquhart think he wants him?" She must have been rather counting, she found, on the added amusement of watching Eleanor's dear Ted ousted for an afternoon by Eleanor's beloved girls. For it was with quite a little thrill of gladness that she heard old Mr. Urquhart tell the young man to do just what he liked.

"Then that's all right. I shall stop and lend a hand, Eleanor. Never thought of doing anything else."

"He must like her very much, after all—I mean he must like her," was Rosamond's thought, followed by, "Why, of course he likes her! He'll put up with the whole of the hen-party for her."

"And if I'm talking to these people all the time, Ted," she heard the engaged girl say later on during dinner, "you'll have to get Miss Fayre to show you what to do——"

"If—she'll be so kind," said young Urquhart.

Miss Fayre gave him a polite half-glance. It was not one of the secretary's duties to smile at him, after all. Sitting there eating his dinner as stodgily as if—well, as if he weren't capable of saving a girl's life, for instance. But perhaps he was so fond of the society of girls that he preferred them in hundreds?

"There was one young man of the Classics who insisted on looking on at the Bacchanalian Orgies," old Mr. Urquhart was intoning presently. "Remember his fate, Ted. He was torn to pieces, was he not?"

"I'm not looking on, though," announced the young man, "I'm helping you." And he raised his close-cropped brown head and looked across the centrepiece, a white china basket full of peaches held up by three white china Cupids—looked for the first time directly at Rosamond Fayre.

And this time it was she who did not look.

"Very well; you go to Mr. Ted Urquhart, then, Rosamond," said Eleanor, in her "settling" voice, "when anything's wanted."

Rosamond, intent upon the little silver-handled knife in her hand, said, deferentially, "Yes. Thank you. Only—I don't think Mr. Ted Urquhart quite realises what he has let himself in for!"

CHAPTER XI

THE HEN-PARTY

It was the afternoon of the great Hen-party at Urquhart's Court.

Imagine a giantess's piece-box of scraps of every-coloured silk, muslin, and stuff,—blue, yellow, orange, and a pervading, blasting shade of pink—tumbled out haphazard over a giant's green billiard-table, and stirred by a freakish breeze into never-ceasing movement. This was the first impression of Eleanor's invading army of guests upon the eye.

Upon the ear smote the indistinguishable unending din of their voices. It filled all the air above the grave old basking house, and the stately lawns. Not actually loud, but high-pitched, shrill....

That clatter of feminine voices without a steadying bass among them! That acre-wide flutter of feminine garments with never a jacket-suit to give them value! That pinky-white speckle of feminine faces——

There appeared to be nothing but women, women, women at The Court to-day. For Eleanor, with so many women-volunteers, never engaged waiters for these occasions.

Even Mr. Beeton, the butler, was lying low in his pantry, sulking indignantly to think that a gentleman's country-house—a house where Mr. Beeton was in service! had been turned topsy-turvy into something more like Hampstead Heath on a Whit-Monday than anything he'd ever come across in the whole course of his experience—not that he knew anything about that neighbourhood except by hearsay. (He was an old sailor.) Mr. Marrow, the gardener, broken-hearted to think what those regular hooligans of young women might be up to on his lawns and in his gardens, had also taken the afternoon off—while those lawns and gardens hummed and buzzed and twittered with the invaders.

Rosamond Fayre, wide-hatted and cool in her white gown, paused for one moment on the Terrace where rows of tables and benches were set out, before she turned into the house on her next errand.

And out of the ivy-draped entrance of the house there came out to meet her the one and only man left about the place that day.

Ted Urquhart, nut-brown against his flannels, carried a large glass pitcher in either hand. All the afternoon he'd been carrying something: pyramids of cut cake, dishes of cucumber-sandwiches, relays of jugs of hot water; and all the afternoon he had worn the ultra-sweet and restrained look of one who longs to hurl at the nearest head that which he carries.

This time it was iced lemonade.

"Where do I take this to, Miss Fayre?" he asked, quietly.

"To Nurse Agatha's Invalid Girls' table. The furthest, under the lime-trees," Rosamond instructed him, a little shortly, pointing.

And as she turned into the house she thought, "This time I shall give him the slip. Really, Eleanor's dear Ted is too absurd this afternoon! Just because Eleanor told him he was to take his orders from me he elects to take them this way! Puts on that deadly-docile manner which always means that a man is smouldering with rage, and makes himself into Eleanor's secretary's shadow!"

For that many-coloured pool of girls on the lawn might swirl and surge and re-form, but all the afternoon it had been navigated by two figures in white never far apart; the tall fair girl so closely followed by the taller sun-burnt man.

"Just because Eleanor can't attend to him. Silly of him to show he minds! Fancy his minding so much.... Eleanor must have managed to make him very fond of her somehow. That's a mercy! Curious that you never can tell what will attract any given kind of man," reflected Rosamond Fayre, as she looked into old Mr. Urquhart's usually hushed study, now delivered over to the Ladies' Orchestra, white-clad, with blue velvet Zouave jackets, who were giggling joyously over an unduly prolonged feast of Mr. Marrow's peaches and lemonade. "So sorry to uproot you, but when you've finished, would you mind playing for some more dancing on the smaller lawn?" suggested Rosamond Fayre, sympathetically.

As she came out into the corridor again she was again confronted by that suppressed, that meek figure in nut-brown and white.

In a voice as mild as Rosamond's own voice when she was very much "the Secretary," Ted Urquhart said, "All the parties have had tea now, Miss Fayre. And lemonade. And ice-cream. Can't I bring you some——"

"Oh, I had some tea with the United Laundry Girls, thank you," said Rosamond Fayre.

"Then what," persisted Ted Urquhart smoothly, "can I do for you now?"

"Well! Perhaps you might take Miss Newnham and her friends—those ladies who brought down the Kennington Road Group—and show them the grounds, and the fish-pond——"

"Is that the Stinor-Wrangler Lady and her party?" asked young Urquhart. For one second his face expressed a wish to show that party into the fish-pond and leave them there. But he only said, "I'd rather do something for the girls themselves if I might?"

"Play games with them, then?" suggested Rosamond, not without mischief, as she walked away from him into the Hall. For here they were met by a nearer sound against that background of incessant treble clamour—the sound that drifted in of a singing game, played on the cleared portion of the Terrace by one of the "nursery-parties."

These girls still wore their befrizzled hair bobbing against their backs and their skirts swinging up to their knees as their light heels kicked up Mr. Marrow's gravel as they sang in chorus:—

"We're waitin' for a part-ner!
Waitin' for a part-ner!
Open the ring! And choose your Queen
(A sound of scuffling here) And kiss her when you've got her in."

Then, more loudly as Rosamond Fayre and the one man left at Urquhart's Court appeared framed in the doorway under the old red-brick shield, the little Cockneys sang:—

"On the carpet you shall meet
As the grass grows in the wheat;
Stand up now upon your feet,
And kiss the one you love so sweet!
    We're waitin'——"

"Are you coming to play this game?" the young man in the doorway rather brusquely asked Rosamond Fayre.

"I? No time!" she said, blushing a little for no reason except that she found herself for no reason blushing a little.

She left Mr. Ted Urquhart to watch that game or play it as he chose, and descended the Terrace steps to the lawn again.

The dabs of moving colour seen from above became moving figures, most of whom Rosamond knew by sight.... She walked beset by greetings from Eleanor's girls, smiling to herself as the pervading buzz disentangled itself into tags of sentences.

"Hoo! Talk about lar-arf! If you'd 'a' seen me and her gittin' it done, ready to come, at four this mornin'——"

"Why, in the train comin' along——"

"I says to 'im, well, if I don't go to-day, I says, there may never be a next time, I says, very well, 'e says; Gow! and I—"

"Miss, dear! Trailin' a twig on your skirt! Yer sweetheart's thinkin' of you!"

"'Ilder!"

"'Ere, young Dais! You've got a cheek, to——"

"Seller! Seller!"

Then, in a very different sort of dialect——

"Has anyone seen Miss Newnham? Ah, Hypatia; there you are.... Impossible, in this mêlée.... But of course I shall come to the Meeting afterwards, if only I can hale these young barbarians back to their native wilds of Kentish Town in time——"

"Whey-ah is Eleanor Urquhart? Yes, I know! she sent some sort of a myrmidon of hers, a typist-individual, I think, to——"

Rosamond primmed her mouth. She did not greatly care for those specially-looked-up-to friends of Eleanor's who had degrees after their names and who wore hand-wrought silver Suffrage-brooches and who made little "cultured" jokes about the girls....

The enjoying girls themselves were all right. So were their other guardians. Those Hospital Nurses, for instance, cheery and crisp and trim in the mauve-and-white uniform that one of them had not taken off, as she smilingly admitted, for the last thirty-six hours—coming straight on, off duty——

"Wouldn't you like a little more to eat, Nurse——"

"My dear, I'd like a little less, if possible!"

They were dears, Rosamond thought. So were the Sisters of Mercy, who, for all their black robes and veils and twisted girdles, were the gayest of the gay; their white-linen-bound faces bright as their own silver crosses, free from all care that was not for others.

"Sister! Have you had anything yourself? You haven't, I know," said Rosamond Fayre. "I'll send——" She turned—to meet the usual resigned and following figure. "Oh, Mr. Urquhart! Would you mind going up to the house and making them bring some fresh tea here—a little tray——"

It was young Urquhart himself who brought that little tray. He carried it, without the loss of a drop, over the crowded lawn, to the garden-seat under the trees, to that Sister-in-Charge.

But this did not check him for long from this obviously deliberate and idiotic plan of dogging the footsteps of Miss Urquhart's second-in-command.

Surely, surely he could see for himself what to do? He could choose which girls to show round the place (his own place) on his own initiative, couldn't he?

Apparently not!

Rosamond, shepherding a Guild of Girl Needleworkers past the walled gardens to the other lawn where the tuning-up of three fiddles and a 'cello grew louder as they approached, found that Mr. Ted Urquhart was practically upon her heels once more.

Once more, she supposed, he'd bring out that monotonous, restrained, but temper-struck "What can I do for you now?"

No!

For at the further side of the lawn from the white and blue wooden stand where the blue-and-white-clad Ladies' Orchestra were tuning up she perceived at last Mr. Ted Urquhart's fiancée.

Eleanor, wearing her most "responsible"-looking costume of stone-grey, and too absorbed to notice her fiancé's approach, was pacing that further path beside an enlightened-looking young woman in pince-nez and brown patterned Liberty delaine, who conversed in earnest gasps, something about——

"Such a futile Committee, though! Narrow-minded Bishops! Silly old retired militarist Colonels! ... What can you expect, my dear Miss Urquhart, from imbecile survivals of that type? ... How can they hope to realise that We of To-day are not, not as women were forced to be in our grandmothers' time? ... As I say, the New Spirit has percolated even to the strata of these poor Guild-girls here! ... Even they read Wells and Galsworthy! even they are growing to probe into things for themselves! To learn to live with their Brains instead of merely——"

Here, as if in soft denial of all she had been saying, the band broke into the alluring drawl of an old-fashioned waltz-tune, played rather slowly.