THE WOOING OF
ROSAMOND FAYRE

THE WOOING OF ROSAMOND FAYRE

PART I

IN TIME OF PEACE

INTRODUCTION

TWO GIRLS AND A MAN-IN-THE-AIR

"Love-letters are the paper-currency for kisses, after all. So imagine having to write another girl's love-letters! Imagine an engaged girl who commissioned another girl to kiss her fiancé for her! Really, it wouldn't be much more extraordinary than what she wants me to do!"

And Rosamond Fayre, the secretary-girl (who was incidentally a golden-blonde, goddess built) sat back in the Sheraton chair before the drawing-room of Urquhart's Court, Kent, and gasped again.

"I write to her young man for her? A girl's courtship letter? The sort of live, intimate personal thing that oughtn't to have the trace of a third person's touch about it? It's not my job at all," Rosamond told herself, indignantly. "No one would have thought of giving me such a thing to do—except Eleanor!"

Now the "Eleanor" in question was Miss Urquhart of Urquhart's Court. She was a small olive-skinned brunette, with dark conscientious eyes, a tiny, tight-lipped mouth, and a spare brown hand. That hand wasn't the kind of hand upon which one expects to see the blaze of the sapphire-set-with-diamond engagement ring that Miss Urquhart wore. She was immersed in "good works" of every description.

And because "good works" bring in their train an endless string of business-letters—because Eleanor Urquhart, though she possessed a fine head for figures, lacked the pen of a readier writer, she usually employed the readier click of the typewriter belonging to a lady secretary (who lived at the Court with herself and her father) to cope with her correspondence....

Really reliable secretary-girls are about as plentiful as really Heaven-born cooks, or artists.

The arrangement had been rather reminiscent of the tragedy of those ten little niggers!

For one secretary-girl had contradicted Miss Urquhart. She, of course, went. The next had kept a charitable duchess waiting in the ante-room. The next had appropriated blouses, sent for the Jumble Sale, for her own use. The next had had a South London accent that had jarred too painfully on old Mr. Urquhart's sensitive, scholarly nerves. The next secretary-girl had done worse than all; she had got up a flirtation with the Public-School-educated and handsome young chauffeur at Urquhart's Court! Yea; after dinner she had slipped out into the rose-garden to meet him. This sort of thing Miss Urquhart simply did not understand, did not wish to understand,—and did not mean to have. That secretary-girl left at a moment's notice.

And it was the day after Miss Urquhart had been forced to dismiss her fifth amanuensis in two months that she discovered the favourite of her old school, Rosamond Fayre, the Army Doctor's daughter, now orphaned and penniless except for what she could earn, fainting from over-fatigue in a cash desk at the Hotel Midas, London.

Miss Fayre possessed a clerical training that Miss Urquhart lacked. She possessed also an appearance and a voice that were invaluable in interviews with snobbish subscribers. Lastly she possessed a clear handwriting that Eleanor had admired even to mimicry while the girls were still at school together.

To Miss Fayre, pale and lovely in her black, cotton-backed satin business-frock, Eleanor had offered the vacant post.

Rosamond had wept with delight as she had accepted it. Then and there she had arranged to undertake that endless writing to the President of the Guild of Mothercraft and to the eleven thousand odd members of the Working Girls' Holiday Hostel Club.

Little dreaming of the other letters that she would presently be called upon to write!

Still dazed at the thought of this task, she stared out of the long French window at the grey stone Terrace with steps leading down to the sun-washed lawn, at the famous lime-tree avenue beyond that, and, far beyond that again, the glimpse of flat, blue Kentish Weald, in the midst of which this old house seemed to bask and doze, padded with ivy to its red chimney-stacks. In the late May, before the War, it nestled under the very wing of the Angel of Peace.

Urquhart's Court! A lovely place!

Rosamond was lucky to be there, instead of at the Midas.

But she forgot her "luck" as she remembered the quick, authoritative young voice of Eleanor Urquhart, half an hour ago, giving her instructions in the walled garden where both girls had been gathering flowers to send to a Hospital.

"It's mail-day, the day for Ted's letter, and I haven't a minute now," she had said, standing by the green door. "So, Rosamond, you'll put it together for me, please."

Rosamond had opened her pansy eyes so wide that one would have expected to see blue petals fall out upon her cheeks. She had gasped, "Put it together? You can't mean in my own handwriting?"

"Well—'our' writing! They're so very much alike, Rosamond."

"But you won't want that copy sent?"

"Of course. There isn't t-t-t-time to make another," from Eleanor Urquhart, who, when she was flurried, uncertain, or vexed, showed a danger-signal in the form of a tiny stutter. "Y-y-yes!"

"D'you mean it, Eleanor?"

Apparently Eleanor had meant it. And Rosamond, walking beside her, flower-laden, up the lawn, had said in turn what she meant.

"My darling employerette! I'll do 'anything in reason' to earn my position in this lap of luxury, but it's not in reason to want me to write to an engaged young man and tell him that his sweetheart hasn't got time!"

Fastidious Eleanor had frowned a little. Sometimes Rosamond, in her laughing, careless way, used expressions that made her, Eleanor, feel shy and cold. She disliked the old English word "sweetheart" that came without a thought to Rosamond's lips. "Sweetheart"—How Club-girlish! Why, it was almost as bad as "followers"! It would be "walking out with" next! In a girl like Rosamond, all this was "a pity." However, Eleanor was otherwise satisfied with the Secretary who had proved so efficient, up to now. So, as they reached the Terrace, she explained gravely:

"I don't want you to tell him that. I hate hurting people's feelings, and Ted might not understand why I was so busy. Men don't understand! But I promised he should have a weekly letter, and I never break promises. So I want you to write, Rosamond, as if you were me. Sign it with my name."

"But—my dear!" from the freshly aghast Rosamond. "That's impossible! Can't you understand? Heavens! It—it would be a kind of forgery!"

"No, it wouldn't. Not if I tell—ask you to do it. You wrote and signed for me those dinner-invitations."

"Dinner-invitations, yes. But a girl's l—her personal letter to a man—no! I simply couldn't."

"Why not, Rosamond? You've known more men than I have. You do sometimes write——"

"To admirers?" The secretary stopped. In Eleanor's little dark "shut" face she had observed that this too was a disapproved-of expression. "Men-friends of my own, perhaps! But never ... never a real love-letter; sheets and sheets, tiny handwriting, five postscripts, snapshots and pressed pansy enclosed and fourpence extra to pay for postage! I've never yet achieved one of those!"

"Well, n-n-n-nor have I," from the young fiancée, with a new coldness that had chilled the girl who lived on her salary. "You have written my letters before from dictation. You know what I should wish to have said. And you know as well as I do what has been happening here for the last few weeks. It won't take you long, Rosamond."

"No, but—"

"I will give you his last letter to me, so that you may answer any question he puts."

"And what about ... him? ... Mr. Ted Urquhart? Is he supposed to notice no difference——?"

"Why need he notice?" from the girl "he" was to marry. "Those dinner-party people didn't."

"No! But——"

As they reached the ivy-draped front of the house Rosamond was remembering another, a very young man, who, then in College rooms with her brother, had once written to her, "When the postman brings letters for Fayre, I know when there is one from you! It seems to make a sound of its own, as it's pushed through the letter-box. It's different! I swear this isn't imagination! Won't you ever write to me?"

Eleanor knew nothing about letters of this sort! She was saying, "It is only so that my fiancé does not miss a mail. That seems to mean so much to a man—Abroad. And I am—as you see—prevented. Come and write in the drawing-room," concluded Miss Urquhart less stiffly, as she passed through the huge open French windows, "it's so cool."

"Not as 'cool' as what she proposes to let me do there!" thought the reluctant Rosamond, following the small, composed figure of her girlish employer. "Writing forged letters to a young man-in-the-air! An engaged man! A man I've never seen!"

"Here you are," Eleanor had said, drawing out the topmost foreign envelope of a neat pile in a right-hand drawer of her escritoire. "This is his last. You've got a pen and plenty of ink?—blotting paper.... It's a twopenny-ha'penny stamp. There are some in the little red leather box on the left there; and the foreign note-paper is here.... Now you've got everything you want."

"Stop—Oh, wait a minute! How do I begin?" urged Miss Fayre, with a vague "Dearest" balancing a "My own Boy" at the back of her mind. Surely the "edited" editions of those dictated letters held Eleanor's own expressions before they were sent off? "If you don't mind telling me——"

"Begin? Why, 'My dear Ted.' That's all, isn't it? G-G-Good-bye!"

And the secretary-girl had been left alone to her grotesque and unthinkable and impossible new duty!

CHAPTER I

"DARLING" PER PRO

Sitting there at Eleanor's desk, staring at Eleanor's blotter and biting the end of her pen, it was long before Rosamond so much as dipped that pen in the ink.

"Oh, I can't do this," was her first decision. "Can't! Anybody but that benighted little philanthropic innocent of an Eleanor would realise that it was quite impossible. She really is—'Handwritings so alike,' she said! As if that were all there was in a letter! As if the young man mightn't suspect from a dozen things that it wasn't the usual letter. He'd be hideously annoyed with her—oh, with both of us, but I don't matter, I'm just 'the pen.' Perhaps she wouldn't mind his annoyance? But she must learn to mind! After all, she's going to be a very different sort of girl presently, one hopes. When the young man comes home, that will be the crisis! Then, she'll grow to mind. Then she'll be precious sorry she ever deputed a mere salaried menial like me to do such a crazy thing! I shall refuse."

Her blue eyes strayed about the stately old room, from lustre chandelier to Adams fireplace, its grate hidden by a cataract of fern. They rested, scarcely seeing it, on a gilt-framed Baxter print of "The Lover's Letter-box," the picture that shows a pretty Victorian in a soap-bubble of white muslin skirts, who is slipping a sealed note into the fork of a hollow tree. How unlike Eleanor's methods!

Presently came the grim thought: "Eleanor has had secretaries who 'refused' one thing or another. They went!"

And then, "Oh, but I can't go! Not back to all those horrors that I've only, by good luck and Eleanor's job, just escaped! Orders, in Cockney accents, from men who ought by rights to be calling me 'Madam'! Compliments, from the same—and worse——

"And what about London in this heat? And the stuffiness? and the smells? and washing one's own hankies in the bath-room? and the shop eggs for breakfast? and no room to put one's things? (even supposing one had 'things' to put!), and how about losing your looks, Rosamond, my child?" she addressed herself. "How about getting 'washed-out' with tiredness and round-shouldered with work, and old and out of mischief before your time?

"No! ... I won't! ... I will, I mean!" And she drew her chair a little nearer the desk.

"I shall have to pay for the other. Pay by writing letters from Eleanor to 'her dear Ted.' Very well!" decided the secretary-girl with a little reckless laugh. "It's not as if he or she were the 'usual' type of engaged people. It's not as if the whole engagement weren't—well! rum in the extreme!"

For Eleanor Urquhart's engagement to her cousin Ted was a thing that never failed to amuse, puzzle and even exasperate her friend, Rosamond Fayre.

In one way, it was "so business-like."

For what could be more business-like than the action of the young man? Here he was, left heir to the beautiful old Kentish estate out of which—unless some better arrangement could be made—he would have to turn the uncle and the girl-cousin who had always lived there. And his idea of a "better arrangement" had been to propose to marry the girl-cousin, who could then continue to live in the place as if she were the heiress and the mistress thereof—merely keeping house for one extra in the family, a husband as well as her father.

Satisfactory enough.

Only, how un-business-like in another way! That was how it appeared to Rosamond.

Fancy being prepared to marry and to spend the rest of your life with—a person whom you have never even seen!

For, thanks to one accident after another, the Urquhart cousins had never happened to meet. Eleanor had found it impossible to leave her College the last time that Ted Urquhart had stayed with his Uncle at Urquhart's Court, three years ago. And it was two years after this visit that General Urquhart, Ted's father, had died where he had always preferred to live, abroad. The beautiful Kentish mansion, which had always seemed to belong to the bookish, stay-at-home brother, had passed by right of entail to that rolling-stone, young Ted, then prospecting in Mexico; for he was a born traveller, adventurer, ranger, even as his soldier father had been.

It had been by letter that the curious arrangement of the Urquhart engagement had been made. And by letter—for Ted, deep in schemes that were Greek to the home-keeping Urquharts, had remained abroad from that day to this—the courtship had been carried on.

"If you can call it a courtship!" Rosamond Fayre had laughed when she had first heard of it. But Eleanor had refused to see anything "odd" about this contract.

"Why, it's the best possible solution." This was Miss Urquhart's view. "There's this Court; it's Ted's only home when he isn't wandering all over the earth. And I must have it for my drawing-room meetings and for the Working Girls' Garden Parties. And there's the library for father. He'd never get accustomed to another study. Ted couldn't turn us out! He said so."

"And is there no happy medium between brutally turning a young woman out of house and home, and ... marrying her?"

Not in this case, Eleanor had pointed out. How could she be the mistress of Urquhart's Court unless she were either the daughter or the wife of the owner?

And the owner himself? Rosamond had put amused, eager questions as to what he could be like?

Eleanor was not vivid in description. She'd informed Rosamond that "Father had seemed to like him as much as he ever did like young men." He had seemed to think Ted Urquhart "nice"—though all his interests were "out-of-doors" and "crude." He'd said he would have been a soldier himself but for considering that there "wasn't enough going on, nowadays," for a man in the Service. Level-headed enough, Eleanor's father had thought. Then Eleanor had fetched a letter from this Ted and read aloud:

"I don't know when you're likely to get this. You ask me how I got to this place; well, it's in a steamer from Southampton—then a three days' journey by train up-country to where the line runs out, then three more days up a river in canoes. Then mules. This last journey we couldn't even use mules, because of our machinery. We had to take the castings of it in big pieces, so somehow we managed to cart along the pieces ourselves over the roughest parts; don't ask what we wore, or looked like at this job"——

Here Rosamond had lifted her bright head.

"My dear! Do you know, he sounds rather a ripper to me. Why does this type of young man always live Abroad, where one doesn't see him? Why don't they raise a splendid great Army of them, for Home? Do read me some more, Eleanor!"

Eleanor's incongruously precise little voice had read out scraps about runaway mustangs, tornadoes, the mild excitement of an earthquake, of a ride in front of a runaway bull.

"And he always seems to be getting among people with knives and revolvers 'going for' each other. Or else nearly breaking his neck somewhere——"

Rosamond's eyes had danced over this description.

"I say, what a lovely man! Good-looking?"

"I've no photograph; I lost the snapshots he sent," Eleanor had said. "Father said not."

"Fathers are the worst possible judges of looks in young men. I do like him for hoisting about those great hulking castings! So different from anything we ever have to do!" the secretary-girl had sighed whimsically. "And his being so keen on concessions for that oil they're prospecting about! What's the oil for, Eleanor?"

"Lamps, I expect,"

"Ah! You've never written to ask! You can't be really fearfully interested in this man!"

"Rosamond, no girl would be 'fearfully interested' in a man she hadn't seen."

"Oh, wouldn't she? Not when she'd promised to marry him? Not when he was going to be all that in her life? A fiancé! Well, if he's nothing else, he is at least the man who keeps the other men out!"

Eleanor had said nothing. Extraordinary, the interest that Rosamond showed in this subject! Rosamond had continued:

"And you've all his letters to piece him together out of! To keep guessing about! I could imagine a girl being perfectly thrilled over a fiancé of that sort. Much more so than over an ordinary young man with a bowler and a walking-stick, say, that she had seen!"

"Yes, but you're romantic. I am not. I'm so practical," Eleanor had gravely explained. "And I think that it'll make me a very good wife for a man who will probably spend three-quarters of his time carrying those castings and things up and down precipices at the other end of the earth. He's his interests; I've mine. And when we meet, we've this place in common. I am sure we shall be quite good friends."

"Friends!" Rosamond had echoed, pityingly.

"Some married people who begin by—by adoring each other," Eleanor had remarked, "end by being n-n-n-not even friends."

"M'm. But then they've had something out of it," her friend and secretary had said, thinking—"like going to a music-hall show with one ripping 'turn' in it, and all the rest feeble. Better than sitting out a whole long dull play without one redeeming laugh!" Rosamond Fayre had decided. "I'd risk being bored for the rest of my married life, to pay for a really thrilling courtship!"

"Well, he's practical, too," Eleanor had concluded before she took up her Club accounts again. "At least from his letters. That's all I really know about him!"

The letter which Rosamond Fayre had just been given to answer was certainly "practical" enough.

It was written in the particularly small masculine handwriting which is so often guided by a particularly large masculine hand, and the crackling foreign sheet of it had arrived from some out-of-the-way No-Man's Land beyond the Andes, where Ted Urquhart with a party of other men had been sinking wells for that precious, that coveted oil. The rough, open-air camp-life, the bonfires, the tea-tins, the scraps of men's talk and laughter, the blue, up-curling cloud of tobacco-smoke, the jingling of horse's harness—a whiff of this unfamiliar atmosphere seemed brought right over the seas to that secluded English drawing-room by the few terse sentences of Urquhart's—well, it certainly could not be called a love-letter, Rosamond decided, with stars of amusement shining in her larkspur-blue eyes. It began, "My dear Eleanor," and ended, "Yours ever affectionately, T.U." Like a brother and sister!

There was a post-script which merely said, "It will be nearly June, I suppose, by the time this letter gets to the dear old Court. Write and tell me what is out in the garden, and if those last roses which Uncle Henry was so keen on have turned out any good. The place ought to be looking lovely."

"The place looking lovely!" commented Rosamond. "Not even one question about how the girl is looking! I wonder if he doesn't even want to know? How sick I shall be if the man I marry—when that fortunate individual turns up—ever writes like this! He won't, though. Rosamond's lover won't be 'level-headed'—at any rate, not as far as anything to do with Rosamond is concerned," decided that young woman, with a toss of her own beautiful head. "But to work!"

She dipped her pen in the ink and primmed her rather large red begonia of a mouth into an imitation of Eleanor's small one as she wrote:—

"My dear Ted,

"Thank you for your letter of April the First. I was very glad to hear that you were quite well, and that you had arrived safely at your destination."

("Not that she—Eleanor—really cares a capital Dee how you are, or where you've arrived," interpolated Eleanor's new secretary, aside. "It's a matter of life and death to her that five hundred factory girls should have a rise of a shilling a week in wages, but as to what happens to a mere prospective husband—Well, but what ought she to say to him? It's always 'ought' with her. I wonder if she'll get any better—worse, I mean—when Ted comes home and tries to teach her—other things, I do hope so. Well——")

She took up her pen again.

"Yes!—The place——"

("Better put a capital P there to show how all-important.")

—"The Place looks delightful. It's a great pity that you can't see it, since you've missed every June here for so many years. I hope that you may contrive to come home, as you suggest some time next summer——"

("That's not too eager and forward, I trust," thought Rosamond.)

—"and that you will not be disappointed in——"

("your reception as a lover.—No, I mean, of course——")

—"the alterations that there are—such as the new fish-pond, and the continuation of the hedge beyond the cherry-orchard at The Court."

She leant back.

("Now what had I better put? He's not wildly interested in her crêches and clubs and girls, I can tell. I'll just sum it up vaguely.")

"I have been very busy lately. We had a garden-party here last week. Need I add that there was a thunderstorm in the middle of it? The purple dahlias in Mrs. Bishop's toque got drenched and dripped in mauve streaks down her face. It looked as if her complexion had run very badly."

("Steady! Eleanor wouldn't have written that. She never makes fun of people," said Rosamond. "I shall have to make a fair copy—a Rosamond Fayre copy—of all this. I'll begin again from 'thunder-storm.'")

"and on Wednesday we had a dinner-party. A friend of mine is staying here now. She has trained as a clerk, and I am keeping her to help me with my business correspondence——"

("This very letter, for example.")

—"and her name is Rosamond Fayre."

("Hope you think it's a pretty one, Sir.")

—"Father is quite well now, and sends his love. The roses that you ask after have done splendidly——"

("Flowers are safe, so I suppose I can say what I like here.")

—"They will trail in heavenly, scenty garlands and festoons of pink and white round the grey stone balustrades of the Terrace, just like decorations for a visit from Royalty. Also the 'Blue Border' is planned out. At the back stand the tallest larkspurs and delphiniums, then the clumps of deep blue borage; then come the blue Canterbury bells, then the corn-flowers; then blue pansies, then forget-me-nots, and lastly a thick blue row of lobelia, 'underlining' it, I think this is all. So believe me, dear Ted," wrote the girl, demurely, in the handwriting that was as like her school-friend's as the voices of some twins are alike,

    "Yours ever affectionately,
                "R——"

"Oh, how silly," she broke off impatiently, to scribble a thick "E" over the "R" which she had inadvertently written. Very nearly she had signed, in spite of everything, her own name. But it didn't show. No; it read quite evenly and naturally

    "Yours ever affectionately,
                "Eleanor Urquhart."

She must practise that signature. She began to do so on a loose sheet of paper. Then she must make that fair copy of this epistle. But there was no particular hurry.... "To think that another girl—not Eleanor—might, instead of deputing the job to a paid clerk, be getting quite a lot of fun out of writing love-letters to a fiancé who'd never set eyes on her!" she reflected as her pen traced curly "E's" and "U's."

"For instance, I—if I were Eleanor—should make quite a good game out of interesting the man, making him keener to see me every letter I wrote. (She crosses the 't' in Urquhart more like this.) One or two should be as brief and brisk and business-like as if they came from the Manager of his Bank. The next should ask him what colours he liked a girl—his girl—to wear? Then I'd write rather a piteous one, as if I were begging, between the lines, to be set free from an arrangement that was spoiling my life, standing in the way of my possible happiness with somebody else!"

Rosamond, taking out a fresh sheet of paper to make her fair copy, laughed enjoyingly over this immemorial scheme.

"That would be a good one! But the same mail should bring him another note asking him whether he did not think that it might not sometimes seem a tiny bit dull for a girl all alone in this great Convent of a Court? I should wait until he replied to that, I think."

She tucked the rose she wore into greater security at her breast.

"Then," she told herself, "I'd begin to flirt a little; on paper. There might even be a pet name or so tucked into a postscript—so——"

She began scribbling idly on the rough draft.

—"and crossed out again—not that a man couldn't read it, if he tried. So!"

She made a charming picture as she sat there, this royally built, golden-haired girl smiling at the desk, playing this "game" with a phantom-lover of her own, for at the moment Eleanor and Eleanor's fiancé—probably a milk-sop, and surely a stick!—were forgotten. Rosamond Fayre, lost in a very silly, very common, and very natural form of day-dream, was away with the Prince Charming whose elusive face smiles back into every girlish face that has ever bent over a wishing-well.

"Of all the over-worked words in the English language, the strangest seems to be 'Darling,'" Rosamond Fayre told herself and her dream-sweetheart of the moment. "You say it to a girl, but it wouldn't sound silly and out of place to a man—provided it were the right man. 'My darling!' Everybody uses it—yet it isn't hackneyed. Jokes and comic-paper stories and music-hall songs are cram-full of it—and still it's never, never vulgar——"

Her thoughts broke off, as from the tall white mantel-piece the clock, held up between two gilded nymphs, chimed twice.

"Half-past four!" she exclaimed. "Mercy! I must take this up for Eleanor to pass.... H'm. I suppose Eleanor has never written to her young man in that way in her life. Well, you can't very well dash off 'darlings' per pro. I'll copy this tidily."

She did so. She tore up one letter; then she carried the other to the big, airy lavender-breathing linen-room where Miss Urquhart, among the imposing piles of sheets, looked small and dark and busy as an ant in a snow-drift.

"Eleanor, do you mind looking over this? Will it do?"

"'Do'—oh, yes, dear, I am sure it will do beautifully," said Eleanor, with the merest perfunctory glance above an armful of pillow-cases marked URQUHART. HOSTEL. 1914. "Thanks so much, Rosamond. Will you see that it goes off?"

"What!—As it is?" suggested Rosamond, mischievously. "No postscripts?"

"Postscripts? What about?" said Eleanor the practical.

"Oh, I don't know," murmured Rosamond.

She herself could have thought of half a dozen tiny written messages that would have been as a hand waved, a glance thrown, to any young man who had received them.

"It's really a waste that I haven't any one to write to on my own account! Except Cecil—No, I'm not going to write to him or to any one unless it's for the one and only real right reason," decided Rosamond, even while her employer, holding back that note to her secretary, decreed, "This says all that's needed."

Rosamond took back that note with a small, half-humourous shrug.

The gesture shook the rose that Rosamond wore in the breast of her white crêpe shirt into shedding a shower of pink petals upon the open sheet.

"Ah, I tell you what," said Rosamond, upon one of her sudden impulses. "Those had better be sent in the letter! Won't you?"

"What? Those loose petals?" said Eleanor over her shoulder. "Why? Those aren't from the new roses Ted was asking about, are they?"

"Never mind. They're English rose-leaves from an English garden—ah, think of that, in a foreign country! Don't you think they'd please any Englishman, far from his home? I know they would," pleaded Rosamond, in a voice still soft from that day-dream of hers. "Put them in, Eleanor!"

"Very well, if you like." And the other girl, kind and untouched as any child, slipped into the crisp grey foreign envelope a dozen sweetly scented pink petals.

"Those," said Rosamond Fayre, with a smile, "will do instead of a postscript!"

She did not think again of the saying that the post-script is the part which contains all that is most interesting in a woman's letter.

CHAPTER II

A MAN'S ANSWER

"Many thanks, my dear Eleanor, for the last three letters which have just arrived together—especially for the one all about the Blue Border, and the Roses."

"Nothing about the petals," thought Rosamond, to whom this letter had been handed as a matter of course for the Secretary to answer by Eleanor.

"By the way," the letter went on, "were you in the least little bit of a temper when you wrote? Or is that my mistake? Don't you think people's moods show in their handwriting? Your writing this time seemed to have got more dashing and determined," wrote Mr. Ted Urquhart. "Thank you for hoping I may come home next summer, but I don't know if I shall do that after all. The man I'm with has determined to—" Here followed a catalogue of the man's plans—very level-headed ones they seemed to Rosamond. Then came—

"Don't be offended, will you, about my having said that about a temper. A girl ought to have a gleam of a temper of her own, just to show a man she's not

"'Too bright and good
For human nature's daily food.'

You know the rest of that ancient verse."

Rosamond did; she laughed. Then she blushed a little.

"I never read verse; one really hasn't time," Eleanor excused herself. "What is the quotation, Rosamond?"

"Oh, it's from Wordsworth. I will look it up for you—something about 'human nature's daily food—'Praise, blame, tears'—and er—those sort of things."

And she continued to herself, "Somehow one can't quote even the milkiest sort of love poetry right through to Eleanor! One can't say 'Praise, blame, tears, kisses'—'Kisses' wouldn't ever be 'daily food' to her——"

She checked herself.

"But they'll have to be, some day! She is engaged, and after all he will come back, I presume, in the course of time, this weird young man? Then there'll be a difference, surely? For instance, she'll begin 'minding' what she puts on—instead of not seeming to see what's becoming and what isn't. When she begins to want to please him, she'll drop those District-visiting blouses and those virtuous little hats of hers. Oh, he'll teach her.... His last letter was comparatively personal! It seemed to be taking quite an interest in her temper and her handwriting—mine, by the way. I'm glad he liked the bit about the Blue Border."

She laughed again. What did it matter to Rosamond what another girl's fiancé had liked in the letter that had been written by her secretary?

"Anyhow," she reminded herself, "it didn't seem to make him want to come home and see her any sooner! Interesting sort of affair—and here am I allowed to peep at both sides of it!"

Her interest was not much more than this kind of curiosity. For the next three weeks it—and things in general—remained just the same.

Then something happened.

In the June of Nineteen Fourteen, when it still seemed as if Peace would never spread her dove's wings to fly from this country, when red English roses were ablaze on the Terrace of The Court, and bees noisy in the borders of mignonette and in the tall towers of sweet-peas, there arrived at Urquhart's Court, unheralded, a visitor; a tall, lithe, abnormally sun-burnt young man, in clothes that spoke—first of hard weather and harder wear, and next of the first-rate Bond Street outfitters that had known them new. This stranger, ignoring the new butler's pompous "What name, Sir?" strode gaily into the great hall as if the house were his by right, and called in a big, boyish voice—

"Uncle!"

The study-door opened, and Eleanor's father looked out. He was a half-dreamy, half-fretful looking old gentleman, with a silvery beard like the portraits of Lord Tennyson, to whose period Mr. Henry Urquhart belonged far more than to the present hustling Twentieth Century.

"What's happened—who's this? Why, my—my dear boy,—Ted!" he cried, incredulously, with his faded, grey scholar's eyes blinking under his white locks at the splendidly vital figure of the young man before him—"It is Ted, isn't it? Bless me—and nobody was sent to meet you! Now, how was that, how was that?" rather querulously—"Eleanor never told me you were coming. Nobody ever tells me anything. Most unfortunate! Nobody to meet—— My dear boy, if you'll believe me, I—I never even heard that you'd written to say you were coming!"

He put out a hand like a pale and chilly root, and laid it on the young man's hard shoulder.

"I never said so, Uncle Henry, I meant to turn up unannounced. I meant to take you all by surprise!" declared the traveller hurriedly. "Now, will you be very kind and excuse me for the present, Uncle? I want to introduce myself to Eleanor, and——"

The pale, chilly hand was lifted again.

"Wait a bit, wait a bit. Come into my study and sit down for a few minutes. Dear me! I was never so startled in my life. Take us by surprise—— Yes, but I wish you'd said you were going to," protested the elder Urquhart, as he led the way into his own room. It was overshadowed by those great yews at the back of The Court; and, with its four walls lined with brown books, its wide table littered with manuscript, seemed as chilly as a cellar, as sunless as a vault, as void of life and homeliness as a museum. Young Urquhart of the impatient eyes involuntarily shivered a little as he looked about it. She—Eleanor—wouldn't spend too much time in this family mausoleum, surely—He didn't want to see her, even for the first time, here!

"Won't you sit down, boy? Bless my soul, you're very like my brother Clive, your poor father. He didn't seem able to sit still for a minute...." said the old man. "It'll be luncheon in a quarter of an hour——"

The young man laughed, springing up from his chair again.

"Yes, I know that, Uncle. That's why I wanted to pay my respects to her—to Eleanor at once."

"Dear me!—the unrest—the hurry of this generation——"

"Hurry? I'm afraid I've scarcely hurried as much as I might," said Ted Urquhart, with a flash of very white teeth in that very brown face. "I've waited three years before...."

The old man blinked at him. Years did not convey much to him. But he said, "Then I don't quite understand why you've rushed back without any warning now?"

"Er—no; it seems queer," said Eleanor's fiancé, who didn't quite understand it himself. Why had the interest he'd felt about the nice little girl at home whom he was, for such excellent reasons, to marry—all in good time, and when more important things had been attended to—why had this very mild interest flamed up all of a sudden, and for the first time, into a blazing curiosity to see, after all, what she was like? Why had there seemed some subtle hint of the girl's atmosphere, her charm, her lure, conveyed for the very first time between the even lines of her very last letter to him? Why had he felt that a handful of once pink, still sweet rose-petals, pressed in the envelope, had brought with them the message—"Come home and seek me. Come and court in person the girl who picked this rose"? It was irrational—fantastic. Still—there it was—Yes! This was what had happened to him!

"I had to come over sometime!" he laughed, fidgeting. "So now I'm here, the sooner the better. Will you do me a favour, Uncle? Don't send for Eleanor, let me go to her myself. Where am I likely to find her? Where will she be? In the lily-garden, near that new fish-pond she tells me of, or——"

He was at the door, ready to search the grounds, before his uncle put in——

"My dear boy, I am very sorry, but really, you have only yourself to blame. Why didn't you give us due warning? For your own sake you ought to have written—or even if you'd sent a wire! The fact is—most unfortunate!—that you won't find Eleanor anywhere about," announced Eleanor's father, fussily regretful, "she isn't here."

The sun-burnt face fell.

"Not here!" echoed Eleanor's fiancé, very blankly. "Why, where is she, then?"

"She's in France. It's a little fishing-village near Boulogne, where she has one of her undertakings. She's up to her eyes in work over it, inaugurating this Holiday Hostel for her 'girls.' You know her girls, Ted; she cares for them more than for anything else in the world," said the old man, "always will, I'm afraid."

Ted Urquhart smiled again. He was not "afraid." If it had been not just fifty girls, but one young man who occupied all Eleanor's time and thought, things would have looked black. But a couple of hundred other girls. Well! The thought, of them weighed lighter than a dozen dry rose-petals.

"Yes; she's over there now, with her friend, Miss Fayre," her father was explaining, "and it's very little I hear from them beyond a line or so on a postcard with a view of the harbour or a girl in a Boulogne fish-wife's cap on it. They were to stay a month. However, as you are here, Eleanor shall be sent for——"

"No, no, she shan't," said young Ted, impetuously. "I shall go on over there to her, at once."

"You will? Bless me, how you fly about, you young fellows, nowadays!" murmured Mr. Urquhart. "It's a long way to France, Clive—Ted, I mean."

Ted laughed. From Urquhart's Court, via the South-Eastern Railway, Charing Cross, and Boulogne, across to this little village where Eleanor was putting in her time before marriage, seemed no more of a "trek" to him after his journeyings, than a stroll across the mint-sauce lawn at the Court.

"At least you'll write and tell her that you are coming? We'll both write, Ted," said the old man, turning to that littered table.

"If you don't mind, Sir, we'll do nothing of the sort," put in the young man. "I've just been struck by an idea."

He had. It was one of those ideas which seem at first so eminently satisfactory—and sane. Afterwards they appear so fatuously silly. And, later still, what would one not give to recall them, these tragically ill-fated "ideas"?

"I shall go over there and see if I can't get to know her without letting her guess who I am!" declared the young man who was engaged to Eleanor Urquhart. "If, after all these years, we have a sort of prepared meeting, each of us trying to say and do the correct thing and to make it pleasant and easy for the other party, it'll be—quite simply—a frost! We shall be desperately self-conscious, and hard-boiled stiff with shyness. At least that's how it would take me, Sir! Enough to put any girl off at once. I want her to see me first without her having any idea that I'm the man she's pledged herself to marry."

"I don't see," said old Mr. Urquhart, mildly, "what difference this idea of yours will make."

"It'll make all the difference in the world," said Ted Urquhart, speaking more truly than he knew.

And so it was that he would only stay at the Court for luncheon, and then left that rose-garlanded earthly paradise, which somehow seemed more desirable to him now even than in his dreams as a wanderer, for the express up to Charing Cross, the boat-train to Folkestone, the boat across to Boulogne, and the cart that took him a jolting ten miles further to the sleepy village that was then just a cluster of fishermen's cottages, two hotels, a post-office and Debit Tabac and—Eleanor's Hostel.

Ted, carrying a walking-stick and a kit-bag patterned with a score of different coloured luggage-labels, made the whole journey in under eleven hours from the moment that he had set foot in the hall of the Court.

Such was his hurry, after a dilatory year, to face his Fate at last.

And the very next morning he did meet his Fate—with a vengeance.

CHAPTER III

THE MEETING

Of all the duties which Rosamond Fayre had so far performed in her capacity as secretary and right-hand woman to her friend Eleanor Urquhart, she most enjoyed accompanying her on that trip to the Holiday Hostel in the little fishing-village on the still so peaceful French coast.

Rosamond adored France, the land known to Sir Philip Sidney as "that sweet Enemy!" the country that even in the June before the War was friendly ground to an Englishwoman.

She loved to wake up to find people—different in look and dress from people at home—doing unusual things at unusual times. She loved that unfamiliar atmosphere of roasting coffee, combined with the smell of sun-on-seaweed. She loved the clack of a foreign tongue. She loved to feel that higher tide of gaiety and vitality which seems to sweep the other side of the Channel only. She loved the little village with its busy "door-step" life; she loved to see the fisher-women, in their little white sun-bonnets, sitting mending their nets in the cobbled yards; the children, with their burnt-straw-coloured hair cropped to the bone, shrimping for "crevettes" in the rock-pools; the smart French visitors—little girls dressed as sailor-boys, plump mammas who appeared at their hotel doors at eleven o'clock in the morning dressed in white bed-jackets, over bright satin tango-petticoats; and she particularly enjoyed all these details in the society of Eleanor's girls, upon whom they were dawning for the first time.

"Eleanor's girls," for whom the house built by an artist at the other end of the village had been converted into a Hostel, were to be brought over, six at a time, during the summer months. There were at present, however, only five of them. The sixth candidate was an English milliner's assistant who worked in a Paris hat-shop, and, as Eleanor had only heard of her by letter, and as she (who had accepted a husband by letter only) preferred to select her "girls" by a personal interview, she had judged it better to make a short trip to Paris, combining a commission of her father's with regard to some rare Rosicrucian documents with some personal enquiries as to the young shop-girl.

Thus it was that, for a whole week, Rosamond was left in charge of the Hostel and of the five girls.

Now, these girls, who were any age from nineteen to thirty, and who were treated by strict little Eleanor Urquhart as if they were children, treated her in turn as if each one of them were her devoted nurse. They admired her—immensely; but not for the qualities on which she prided herself; not for her managing powers, not because she could arrange with railway companies and steamship authorities to give them trips abroad on money which they could not have made go further than a week-end at Clacton, but because that sort of child-like, incomprehensible innocence of hers seemed to set her apart from them and above them. Instinctively they checked any "rowdiness," they "censored" conversation, expressions, risky songs, when Miss Urquhart was near. For in the three great divisions of girlhood one finds, in nine cases out of ten, the Potential Mother and the Potential Coquette alike ready to pay homage to the Potential Nun.

Yes; Miss Urquhart they revered—and obeyed. Rosamond they loved; Rosamond, who could trim hats for them, and play tango-music, and tell fortunes, and advise them with regard to that question of perennial poignancy—their young men.

"Miss Fayre knows all right," as one of the girls declared one day through a mouthful of liqueur chocolates bought at the Debit Tabac. This girl was a Jam-Hand, who worked at that Corner of Charing Cross Road that always smells of hot strawberries and pickles, and her costume, no matter how warm the weather, was always completed by a long black velvet coat, heavily trimmed with braid, a wide black hat with an ostrich-plume, and a stole of black fox. She gave the furs a toss as she continued, still munching—"Somehow you can't see any one—except p'raps Pansy, out of cheek—talking about fellows to Miss Urquhart!"

"Yet," murmured the girl who was sitting on the sands with her in the patch of shadow cast by an upturned boat, "Miss Urquhart's got off herself."

"She has and she hasn't. Her chap's always away!"

"Anyhow—here, greedy, greedy! Have you finished the lot? I never!—she ought to understand——"

"Well, she does and she doesn't, if you know what I mean," said the Jam-Hand. The other girl, pale, slender, and wearing glasses, was one of the young ladies who work a model typewriter in a big plate-glassed shop-front under the eyes of the passer-by down a crowded City thoroughfare.

For they were of all sorts and conditions, Eleanor's protegées! With the Jam-Hand and the Typist there stayed the Salvation Army Lassie, a scrap of big-eyed, sweet-voiced nervousness, who nevertheless took the solo in street meetings, the red-haired, rather "superior" Blouse-finisher, and, last but not least of Eleanor's responsibilities, a young woman of opulent figure and with a pair of eyes that were even saucier than her voice and manner, who had played "Principal Boy" in a provincial Christmas pantomime, and who at other times was "on with the crowd" in a sketch at the "Halls."

She was at present what she described as "resting"—but this did not mean that she was ever weary in her work of causing Miss Urquhart constant anxiety on the score of the Hostel Rules. They were few, necessary, and judicious, but to the Principal Boy they seemed to act as a spur rather than a curb.

"Pansy, my dear!" Miss Urquhart would say, quite gently, as that buxom, yawning beauty sat down to the breakfast-table with her hair, curling riotously over a dressing-jacket of flimsiest muslin and lace, down to her sumptuous hips. "I think you have forgotten your hair."

"Why! Miss Urquhart, I never get the chance! I'm never left long enough alone about it!" with a twisting of a tress that shaded from tangerine-colour at the tip to burnt-sienna at the root round two plump fingers. "Oh, if there's a thing that the boys admire, it's a nice head of hair! Now, Miss Fayre! You back me up about that, eh?"

Rosamond, primming her mouth, would look another way, while the skirmish between her employer and the Terror of the Hostel would shift ground to the subject of another regulation. No girl was to appear with powder or paint upon her face.

"But a soup song of powder, Miss Urquhart! Why, whatever's wrong with that? Why, they use it for the little babies! They do, straight! Turn 'em up after they come out of their little tubsies and powder 'em all over lovely! Haven't you seen 'em, Miss Urquhart? You know, at your mothers' meetin's?"

Then Eleanor, a little more stiffly: "That is different. That is not the same as your face——"

"Oh, come! Give us a chance! I know that, Miss Urquhart!" with a burst of rollicking laughter. "Still—! Oh, I do think a quite little baby is ser-sweet (sometimes). Don't you? I could eat 'em! But if you don't keep their poor little skins nice and soft—"

"I explained the—the—the rules to you before you came," Eleanor would go on manfully, to this young person, her senior by five years in age, and by a century according to other reckonings. "P-P-P-paint——"

"No paint on me, Miss Urquhart!" virtuously from the Principal Boy. "Haven't brought a stick of it with me——"

"B-But your mouth——"

The mouth in question, large and moist and curly, opened as if to sudden enlightenment.

"Oh! Lip-salve! Two-and-a-half-Rose! You can't call a touch of that paint? It's doctor's orders"—from the unabashed Pansy. "Keeps the chaps off. No, I don't mean what you mean, Miss Urquhart——"

And so on.

Before lunch-time, however, the Principal Boy would have removed the abhorred make-up, and would be having a competition for the quickest and brownest coat of sunburn with Annie the Salvation Lassie and Miss Beading the Blouse-finisher.

It says much for Eleanor's authority and influence that she kept the reins in her own hands, and caused these varying elements to live in comparative peace and charity with each other while they were under her charge. She was always the head of them—even of rebellious Pansy! while Rosamond, as she herself would have frankly told you, was one of themselves, even though they did call her "Miss, dear," and allow her to go first into a room.

"I do hope I shall be able to keep even that vestige of authority while Eleanor's away," thought Rosamond to herself, doubtfully, at half-past seven in the morning of the day after Ted Urquhart had turned up unexpectedly in search of his fiancée at The Court. "Here are four whole more days of my viceregency to run; if only I manage to keep the dear, bubbling-over things out of mischief so long! Heaven send that they don't get cut off by the tide, or drowned with cramp, or that they don't make clandestine expeditions into Boulogne"—going into Boulogne unaccompanied by Eleanor or her second-in-command was contrary to Hostel rules—"as long as I'm in charge! Girls are always breaking out in some fresh place! Pansy, having promised me as a personal favour to leave off that mask of powder, takes to liquid white! One comfort about them all is, that quite a nice large slice of the day's over before they roll out of their little beds, and I have that to the good." So she finished her café complet early and alone, and then strolled out of the Hostel, along the green downs where the courses of tiny rivulets were marked by meandering strips of tall mint that hid the water. She skirted a tall cliff of crumbling red earth, and passed along to the great stretches of sand bordering a greeny-blue belt of sea. Rosamond followed the creamy tide-mark of it towards Le Touquet.

As it was still so early in the morning, her hair was down, long past the belt of her white skirt, not that she shared the preference of the girls for breakfasting in uncoiffed hair, not because it was wet from bathing. Rosamond Fayre had far too much respect for her beautiful hair to ruin it with sea-water. When bathing, it was always protected by a rubber cap, the crudeness of which was concealed by the swathing of a long silk sash. But the early morning sunshine seemed to bring out all the light in that great mane, and Rosamond gave it a sun-bath as often as possible. She shook it well over her cheeks, however, so that the sun which brought lights to her hair need not bring freckles to her face.

Presently she turned, and followed the track of her own white sand-shoes back again along the water's edge. Even as she walked, she became conscious, very gradually, of a feeling of something impending, something going to happen. Whether it was a pleasant or a tragic happening she did not know; part of the feeling was that something, some one strange had been following her, even as she walked. She was going to turn round. Then something else happened which rooted her to the sand where she stood.

Her face was still shielded by that falling golden shower, but the little pink ears under the hair caught a sound which for the moment froze Rosamond's warm young blood. The sound of a scream! A shrill, girlish voice—two voices—screaming in terror.

It came from the direction of the cliff.

Flinging back her hair, Rosamond looked up.

There, half-way between the sands at the bottom and the thymy turf at the top of the cliff, she saw what seemed for an instant like one splash of dark-blue paint, and another splash of vivid cherry-colour against the dark-red wall of earth. Two figures on a ledge that was as far above her head as it was below the cliff-edge—two girls—two of Eleanor's—of her own charges!

For that brilliant-cherry-coloured frieze coat, belonged to the Principal Boy; that slender shape in blue was the Salvation Army Lassie. Yes! They had "broken out in a fresh place" after all! And this before eight in the morning!

They'd climbed up, somehow, and now they'd turned giddy and could not take another step one way or the other. Clinging like drowning insects to the side of a cistern, flattening themselves to the rock, shrinking as far as possible from that dizzy edge, they could do nothing but scream, panic-stricken, for help.

They had lost their heads completely. Catching sight of Rosamond hurrying along the sea-margin, the Salvation Army Lassie shrieked again:

"Miss, dear! Miss!"

Now, the correct thing for Rosamond to have done would have been to call back, composedly, for the girls to stay as they were, without moving or looking down, while she fetched help from the nearest fishermen, then set off immediately—a matter of a few minutes only. This is what she should have done.

The unfortunate and humiliating fact is, however, that at this juncture Rosamond also lost her head.

For a second more she stood rooted where she was. Then she took an aimless run forward; then another backward, like those pedestrians so dreaded by drivers of motor-buses, who complicate London's traffic by their highly nervous attempts to cross the streets. Then she cried out, as helpless with terror as the girls above her, "Oh, what shall I do? They'll fall and break their necks—I know they will— Oh——"

Then she whirled round again, almost into the arms of some one who had come quickly up from behind a jutting-out rock, a tall some one in a blue blazer and white flannel trousers and with a rough bathing-towel cast muffler-wise about his neck.

"What, is it?" asked a quick, very pleasant masculine voice. "Can I help——!"

It was with these six words that the situation—and incidentally the life-history of Rosamond Fayre—were broken into by Ted Urquhart.

Who—what he was, she had no time to think. Here in this solitary spot, dropped down by some special dispensation of Providence upon the sands, appeared at this awful moment a man—she scarcely realised at the moment the added advantages of his being an Englishman and a gentleman—to the rescue!

"Look!" she gasped, and pointed upwards at the cliff—at the girls perched like a couple of alien birds upon that ledge.

This man took in the situation with less than a look.

Then he spoke quickly, but unhurriedly.

"It is quite all right. There's no danger. But you must— No! Don't look up there. Look at me. Listen!" He had caught her arm, and, holding it, gave it a short, authoritative, and very heartening shake. "Now! You have to go up to the village by the short-cut. There. Call at the nearest cottage for a rope. You understand? A rope. 'Ficelle' in French, I believe. Anyhow that's near enough. Make them let it down over the top of the cliff, so that I can hang on to it while I'm getting those girls down by the way they came. Cliff; falaise—It's all right. But be quick."

Without a backward glance Rosamond fled stumblingly up the short-cut.

The young man in the blue blazer began making his way, with the same unhurried quickness, up the cliff that became only gradually very steep.

After the precipices to which young Urquhart was accustomed, precipices up which men crawled like black-beetles scaling a kitchen-wall, and down which mules felt their way as if they were descending the roof of a house, this cliff of crumbling French earth seemed nothing at all. But the two London girls above there—they were in terror of their lives. Their terror was the danger—for if they lost what remained to them of their heads—looked down—let go—slid—there would be at the very least a nasty fall and broken limbs.

There was room on the narrow ledge for three. Presently Ted Urquhart was standing beside the slight form in navy-blue, which immediately clutched him as a midge will clutch at the grass that fishes it out of a picnic tea-cup.

"It's quite all right," Ted Urquhart said, again distinctly, slowly, and cheerily. "There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You could get down quite all right by yourselves."

"Oh, no," gasped the blue-clad girl, clutching more wildly, while the young woman beyond her added in a tense voice, "I couldn't take a step down for love nor gold!—and I shall begin to scream again in a minute!"

"Why not?" said Ted Urquhart briskly, "screaming's free. Only—it doesn't help you one scrap. Still, if you want to, do."

This checked any further outcry on the part of the Principal Boy. Her eyes clung to the rescuer even as her companion's hands clutched him. He went on.

"The young lady who was down there has gone to fetch a rope; it will be let down from the top."

"Oh, I'm not going to hang on to no rope, like a spider! Rope-dancing's not my particular line!" protested the Principal Boy, hoarsely, but with a touch of bravado now that she was fortified by something of an audience. "I'd as soon come up through the star-trap—that is, if I ever get down again alive!"

"Pooh!" Urquhart laughed, encouragingly. Then, shifting his position a little, he freed one arm from the Lassie's clutch and put it out towards the theatrical girl.

"If you don't mind," he said to Pansy, "I'm going to borrow that very pretty sash-arrangement you've got round your waist. What is it, a sports-scarf? Jolly things, aren't they? Girls hadn't begun to wear those when I was last at home."

The Principal Boy shifted her scared gaze to the scarf he had drawn from about her. "Whatever d'you want it for?"

"To blindfold your friend here," explained the self-possessed stranger. And, almost before she knew what he was doing, the Salvation Army Lassie found that the woven, petunia-coloured scarf was being tied firmly about her terrified eyes, while the stranger went on without a break in that soothing tone of encouragement.

"Don't you know that firemen do this if they have to bring people down from a height where they aren't quite comfy? Or, if a steeplejack gets up to the top of a high chimney and thinks he can't come down—as they do, sometimes, you know,—very foolish, because they always can come down," said Urquhart, authoritatively.

He ran on, outwardly careless, until presently—