CHAPTER XII

THE SOUND OF A KISS

Rosamond Fayre told herself that it was just like Cecil Bray to carry out his written intention to come and look her up at Urquhart's Court, on the very afternoon of that hen-party.

Poor dear boy! He simply couldn't have chosen a worse time for his visit!

To begin with, he must needs make his appearance in the middle of that vortex of getting the assorted flocks of girls off in the brakes that were to carry them, laughing, chattering and calling like homing rooks, to the station and the London-bound special train.

Then it was such an age before Rosamond could find and disentangle Eleanor and introduce this old friend of her brother's to her employer.

And then Eleanor, instead of doing it herself, must turn to her dear Ted (who'd come up with the other man) to ask him to ask Mr. Bray to stay to dinner.

Dinner, too, seemed a disorganised, spiritless, after-the-party sort of meal!

Nobody dressed. Everybody was tired, dull with reaction. The whole air still seemed a-twitter with the treble clamour of the lately-departed hen-party. Nobody appeared to wish to talk; with the exception of old Mr. Urquhart, who had returned from his motor-expedition in what was for him quite a sociable mood.

He discovered that he had been up at Magdalen with this young Mr. Bray's father—no, grandfather; indeed, he had corresponded with him for several years afterwards, on the subject of some manuscripts that had been found appertaining to some marriage settlements of a Dame Urquhart who had married a de Braye or Braie in the reign of....

Presently he was saying that there would scarcely be time to go into all those very interesting old letters in just one evening. The best plan would be for his young friend, Mr. Bray, to stay the night—to stay the week-end, if he would, at the Court—would it not?

"Awfully kind of you, Sir," murmured the young man fervently. His china-blue eyes lighted up. Evidently he asked for nothing better than to stay the week-end. He glanced round the oval table expecting the conventional "Yes, do," and "That would be very nice," from the rest of the party.

The rest of the party remained almost forbiddingly mute.

Poor Cecil Bray, a sensitive youth, felt thereby obliged to decline the invitation with a rueful "But I'm awfully sorry, I'm afraid I really have to get back to-night," without knowing why no one but the old gentleman had made any attempt to keep him.

The reason was——

As far as Eleanor was concerned, she hardly heard what was going on at the table. Her striving, earnest little mind was still with the party of the afternoon. Had it been a success? Had no one been offended or overlooked? Would it have been better to have had Votes of Thanks proposed to those University Group Ladies? Besides these problems, there was another more disquieting memory of the afternoon. Something Miss Fabian had just been beginning to tell Eleanor about a friend of hers, a lady rent-collector in Brixton. This friend seemed to know "something" about one of Miss Urquhart's protegées, something "not very creditable" about the theatrical girl, Pansy Vansittart. About Pansy? A Club girl who had enjoyed the special privilege of being one of those who were taken into Eleanor's Normandy Hostel? What could this be? Someone had called Miss Fabian away before she said more. But she had promised to make enquiries of that friend, to write to Miss Urquhart later. What could it be? pondered Eleanor uneasily. No wonder her attention had wandered leagues away from this young man who'd come to call on Rosamond!

As for Rosamond—Well! She couldn't press Cecil Bray to stay at Urquhart's Court.

It wasn't her house.

It was the house of Eleanor's fiancé.

Rosamond was only one of the staff!

Besides, even had it been otherwise, he didn't want Cecil there. She knew what would happen if he stayed for a week-end where she was. He'd promised not to "bother" her again. But she knew what became of that sort of promise made by that sort of young man. Of course he'd propose again. She saw every symptom of it threatening in every line of his fair, fifth-form-room face. She could prophesy, verbatim, the old familiar, futile, ever-recurring dialogue between man and maid that must presently ensue.

He (gabbling with earnestness): "I would do anything, Miss Fayre, anything to make you happy. Can't you try and——"

She: "I am most frightfully sorry, but it's no good. No man can 'make' a woman happy. Either she is happy with him or she isn't. And I know I couldn't be with you. Not in that way, Cecil."

He (clearing his throat for a fresh start): "You don't care for me yet, I know. But look here, give me a chance, just a chance! If you saw more of me you'd grow to care——"

She (miserably): "No, no. People may 'grow' to like other people. But nobody ever, ever yet 'grew' to love anybody.... Please, please don't go on like this.... I'm so sorry. I like you so. Very well then, I won't say I feel like your sister.... But there are other girls——"

He (gruffly): "Not for me!"

She (strenuously persuasive): "If you only knew, one girl is much the same as another. Some are prettier. But otherwise they don't vary. Honestly! It's you men who vary so——"

And so on. Again Rosamond repeated to herself ruefully and gently what she was fated to be saying presently aloud: "Oh, Cecil! I am so sorry!"

Even if she were the mistress of the Court, she would not ask Cecil Bray to stay.

As for the master of that Court, well! He was very well aware that this guest opposite couldn't take his eyes from the girl he'd come to see. He, Ted Urquhart, could give a very good guess at what had brought the young beggar down. And he wasn't going to have him staying under his roof for one moment longer than he could help. The sooner he packed off, out of the place, the better.

There was a jolly good train up to town at eight-forty....

But it struck eight as they finished dinner; and confound him, the young beggar made no sign of packing off. He would have to be put up with, then, until the last train that night.

Not longer!

In the drawing-room, Eleanor looked up over the coffee-cups, murmured to her father that she must see him about something, drew him away into the little morning-room, and shut the door.

Ted Urquhart, left with the other two, knew what Eleanor meant. She meant to rescue this Mr. Bray from old Mr. Urquhart's conversational clutches. After all, it was Rosamond he'd come down to see. He must be allowed a little talk with her.

For a second Urquhart found himself hesitating.

Must he go?

Well, he could hardly stay!

He was the host.

Common politeness .... Yes! He'd have to go.

He'd have to leave the coast clear for this young cub with that unfair advantage of being an old acquaintance. He'd go.

A nice situation for any man. Forced, in his own house, to take himself off while another man proposed, as likely as not, to——

The girl who wasn't supposed to be anything at all to the master of the house.

That was the maddening part of it.

Raging silently, Urquhart went.

And he met the only girl whose doings Ted Urquhart had any right to resent or arrange, in the hall.

Eleanor's small face—sallow with tiredness—was turned up to his in the ivy-softened frame of the door-way, just where that other girl—the secretary-girl in whom he hadn't any right—had stood this afternoon, blushing like a rose to hear that ironic mistake blared abroad by that American lady with the voice.

"Oh, Ted——"

"Hullo, Eleanor, I haven't had a word with you all day," said her fiancé, outwardly pleasantly civil, inwardly savage because he had no valid right to feel savage at all.

"Oh, Ted, I was just going to ask you if you'd mind if I didn't come out for my little walk with you to-night. There's something I do so want to finish," said the engaged girl. "I am never really happy unless I can check all the caterers' accounts the very day they——"

"Oh, all right," agreed her betrothed, quickly. "Not if you've anything more important to do."

More important! Accounts, visitors, anything at Urquhart's Court was reckoned of more importance than Ted Urquhart himself to-night, thought the young man bitterly as he strode out.

Precious little consideration he got from either of these girls!

A rum idea of the position of an engaged girl his cousin seemed to have! Pretty unsatisfactory for him, if he'd happened to be madly in love with her. And even if he wasn't in love with her, he was engaged to her. Yes. A curious notion she had of playing the game. She treated her lawful fiancé a good deal more off-handedly than that other young fellow was treated. Young Bray, now, was to have a solid couple of hours tête-à-tête and the whole drawing-room to himself with the girl—the other girl....

Or they'd go out for a stroll together, thought Urquhart angrily, as his long legs carried him over the wide and empty lawn in the golden, slowly-gathering dusk. He clenched his brown hands in his jacket-pocket as he pictured that other fellow picking up a wrap out of the hall, putting it, reverently as he might have put his own arm, about the supple shoulders of—— "My girl," exclaimed Ted Urquhart aloud and violently to the lime-trees. "My girl——"

The sound of his own voice and the preposterous thing it said checked him.

More slowly he struck into the Avenue. He walked along between those late-blossoming lime-trees with their scent of thyme-and-white-currants-mixed. And as he walked, he thought, seriously and deliberately, over the whole complicated situation that had just condensed itself into two words.

Two simple words that may be said to sum up the problem of life so often, and to so many a worried-to-death young man!

His girl....

It was now perfectly clear to Ted Urquhart that he could never think of Eleanor's secretary as anything else. No getting out of it. Every atom of him had recognised her, from the first moment that he'd come upon her, swinging along by the waters' edge in France with the happy sea-wind making free with that hair of hers.

His!

Yes; he'd recognised his love, his mate. He'd tell her——

But stop. He'd no right to tell her anything of the sort while he was still pledged to marry somebody else.

He lighted his pipe; then strode on smoking, thinking doggedly over a problem that seems each time too ghastly to be hackneyed.

This couldn't go on. Not this Hades of a life in the same house with the wrong girl to whom he was bound, while the right girl was dangled incessantly before his tantalised eyes. He couldn't stand another day of it. No!

Well, there were two ways of putting a stop to it.

One—Marry Eleanor and clear out.

Two—Break off his engagement with the wrong girl.

That was the dickens!

That was about the most unpleasant job a man is ever called upon to face. Lord, how it would make him wish himself back in the Andes; under 'em!

Messing up a girl's life——

Still, wasn't it far, far more of a mess if, instead of breaking with, a man married the wrong girl? Common sense said yes. Common sense said it was making the mistake of a lifetime, and with one's eyes open. Involving two people ... perhaps three ... sometimes four! Ruining all chance of future happiness, just to save a present wrench. Just because one felt a cur not to go on.

Breaking it off was the only possible solution. Yes! Even after a year. Even at the eleventh hour. That must be done. It remained "the dickens," all the same....

Here the brooding Ted came to the wrought-iron lodge-gates. He pushed them aside.

The very Deuce and All!

He went on down the lane between tall hedges, where coloured flowers were darkening to black blots while white blossoms were gleaming whiter in the gradual dusk.

Eleanor. She was the difficulty. Of his own making!

Yes, he'd got himself into it. Ass! Ass that he'd been!

Now he'd got to get himself out—and to feel, as well as feeling an ass, a cad about it all....

Here a gap in the hedge showed a cornfield where men, evidently mistrusting the holding-up of the dry weather, were still working, late as it was, carting the early-ripened sheaves.

Ted Urquhart leant over the gate, watching mechanically the big, galleon-like shape of the waggon against the open, lilac sky, the steady movements of the men in the fading light. At another time he would have offed with his coat, vaulted that gate into the field, and offered to lend a hand. This evening he'd something else to do.

He'd got to consider, definitely, how he was going to put it to Eleanor.

To tell her he'd thought better of marrying her—after this whole year of having it peacefully and satisfactorily settled that he was going to do so.

What on earth would she say? She'd have every right to say she thought he'd behaved—most extraordinarily. (He had.) Would she ask, "Is it that you are disappointed in me?"

What could a chap say to that?

He wasn't "disappointed." That didn't even enter into it at all.

Supposing she said, "Have you met somebody else, then?"

Whew!

The shaded lane behind him was growing darker, darker. But over the cornfield in front of him the moon was slowly rising, the bright, coppery, shield of a full moon that had looked a mere silver trifle to ornament a girl's gold hair on the evening of the first day that he'd met——

Never mind that yet. Eleanor.

Supposing she said, "If there's somebody else, why didn't you write and tell me? You have been here for days. Why didn't you tell me directly you came?"

Well, why hadn't he? He wished to Heaven he had, instead of procrastinating to make sure of—what he'd been as certain of as if it had been going on from the beginning of all things.

Supposing Eleanor went on, "Who is it?"

Or, "Do I know her?"

Would he have to set forth the whole embarrassing story to the poor little soul? Inflict upon her something that would offend and wound the heart of any girl alive, whether or not she had ever cared passionately for the wretched man who was practically explaining to her that she (whom he'd found excellent reasons for asking to become his wife) was now considered inadequate, shoved out of existence in his mind by one glance from—No! Not even from, but at the girl she employed!

And then, what about that arrangement about the Court?

Damn that old house, thought the young owner of it. He was in a mood to contemplate rushing up to his lawyers' on Monday morning about drawing up a deed-of-gift to his Uncle. Couldn't he hand it over bodily like that? Or refuse to take anything but a quit-rent of say a basket of Kentish cherries or a pink rose at Midsummer ... anything!

He knew he'd never live in the place himself. These last few infernal days had about fed him up with a peaceful—as they called it—English country-life. Let Eleanor and the old man stay on. And even if they insisted that now they'd have to turn out, it needn't come to that. That part of it could be allowed to drift until something happened. Or, as is more frequent in such a programme, until nothing happened. He, Ted, would clear. He'd sink some other property and buy a steam-yacht. Then he'd be off with his wife to——

H'm. Here he was thinking of her as his wife now, this girl whose hand he had never touched, and to whom he hadn't, when he came to examine it, actually said a word of anything but the merest commonplaces.

What did words matter—in a miracle?

He'd take the shortest cut. She'd got to have him.

Surely she had the sense to see that she was made for him?

She might have the sense; but, Urquhart thought with a memory of that demure stare of hers, that meek, pretty, mocking voice, she might not choose to admit it all at once.

He'd make her.

However, all that was for afterwards....

With a jerk he took his arms from the gate, turned his back on the cornfield in the moonlight, and began to make his way back towards the lodge—and Eleanor.

For now his mind was made up. To break off his idiotic "engagement" first. Then try his luck with ... his own girl.

He'd tell Eleanor, he decided, to-night. He'd go in and get that perfectly rotten interview over as soon as possible.

He'd trust to luck and the first words—remorseful but unmistakable—that came into his head when he stood before her.

It was quite dark under the lime-trees now. Later than he'd thought. Still, Eleanor would be in the little office where she sometimes sat balancing books after she'd come in from the every-evening stroll which she was now accustomed to take with her fiancé....

Yesterday had meant the last of those flavourless walks, then. There was a flicker of comfort in the thought. Still there was the Old Harry to pay for it!

Through the darkness Urquhart heard the stable-clock slowly striking ten.

That Bray boy—he was only a youngster, after all!—would probably have gone, thought Urquhart, hurrying doggedly along to his perfectly rotten interview; to the Old Harry. Yes: that lad would be off by this time....

The sounds of steps and voices, approaching on the lawn on the other side of the lime-trees, told Urquhart that he was wrong. The Bray boy was only going now. He was making his way down to the drive by the shortcut across the lawn. And "She" was seeing him off.

That meant nothing, of course. But——

There followed something that suddenly held up Ted Urquhart in his stride just as if a barbed barricade had crashed down across his path.

In that blankly horrible moment of revelation he could not move.

For without premeditation or warning he caught the sound of Miss Fayre's voice, which was speaking to young Bray in a tone that Urquhart, who thought he knew by heart every one of its pretty mocking cadences, had never heard. No. He had not been privileged to hear that note in the voice that seemed to utter a whole volume of gentle wistful tenderness in just two words. Yes; for the second time that evening a couple of words gave the whole of a situation. This time they were these:—

"Oh, Cecil!"

That alone was enough to smash a dream!

And then worse followed. Another, an unmistakable sound that struck a sledge-hammer blow full on the heart of the young man who heard it. Yet, such a soft little whisper of a sound; not louder than the chirp of a sleepy thrush on the bough above him.... This sound, though, was not to be confused with the noise that might be made by any bird, or by any rustling of the lime-branches that separated young Urquhart from those two standing there in the darkness. There are not two sounds like it.

It was the sound of a kiss.

CHAPTER XIII

A WHITE NIGHT

"Got a sweetheart already, has she," thought Ted Urquhart grimly.

It was his first clear thought as he jerked himself at last out of the stupor into which he'd been plunged by a blow dealt in the dark.

Slowly and heavily he walked up the rest of that darkened scented corridor of an avenue into the lighted hall of his house.

And there slipped into the hall behind him the girl who was not his. The girl who'd murmured, "Oh, Cecil," in a tone as soft as the sound of that good-bye kiss which had been overheard by another man.

Ted Urquhart stood aside for her to pass. A black transparent scarf that she'd put on trailed away from her white dress. He picked it up and handed it to her.

"Oh, thanks," she said a little wearily, as she passed upstairs. "Good-night!"

"Good-night."

He had not meant to look at her. But for one instant, his eyes strayed to her face—not lighted up by any mischief now. That mouth of hers was grave. And was it a wet gleam on her eye-lashes?—Yes.

Of course.

She'd been crying because that young—that young Bray had had to go. "Oh, Cecil," she'd sighed. He called her "Miss Fayre," Urquhart had noticed, before people. For some reason or other it was not announced yet. But they were sweethearts all right.

That soft exclamation, that other soft sound, were no further business of Ted Urquhart's. For a moment he stood, however, torturing himself with the remembrance of them, and gripping the balustrade on which his hand rested.

Then he let it go with a little jerk.

Yes. That ended it. Very well.

It was a very tight-lipped young man who took his peg of whisky rather brown, Mr. Beeton noticed, before preparing to go off early to his room.

"I beg your pardon, sir, I think you overlooked this," said the butler. "This letter came for you by the last post, sir."

Ted Urquhart took that letter upstairs with him.

In his room he glanced at it. A thin foreign envelope, the address of the Court scrawled over that of his Camp. It had been forwarded from South America. Then he saw, above the hasty re-direction, his name in a clear pretty writing he knew very well.

Eleanor's. This was a letter of hers that had reached the Camp just after he'd left it, and it had been sent on to follow him here. It must be weeks old by now. And he might expect now to have these re-directed letters from her turning up every week, for she would have written her duty-letter to her fiancé for three mail-days in succession, not knowing that even as she wrote he was already on his way home to take her by surprise.

A pretty collection of surprises it had turned out to be from the first moment that he'd seen, not Eleanor, but her lovely Second-in-command——

"Here! None of that." Urquhart peremptorily called off his own thoughts as if they'd been straying spaniels. He'd got, somehow or other, to keep his mind off that savagely rankling memory of what he'd just heard in the lime-walk. "Better read the letter."

He tore it open. He set it down before him on the dressing-table, beginning listlessly enough to read it while he undressed.

He began listlessly. But presently he lifted his head with a little movement that was reflected in the Sheraton mirror; he stood for a moment alert, a graceful, wide-shouldered figure of a man in shirt-sleeves, his braces dangling about his narrow loins, while he read again.

"My dear Ted——

"Of course I am not offended that your plans do not allow you to come over this year to see me, I quite understand. I am such a busy person Myself"——

Here followed the catalogue of Miss Urquhart's activities for the summer. Her fiancé could imagine the little brown head conscientiously writing them all down; the dusky head bent over the paper. Then came the phrases which—he didn't know why—had arrested him.

"In fact, I must break off now to attend to the Head of one of my Clubs. (This sounds rather like golf, doesn't it? She might quite well be described as 'The Driver' too!)"

Ted Urquhart's eyes left the letter and turned towards the closed white door of his room almost as though he thought he had heard a call. Yet there had been no sound. Then they returned to that last paragraph. Then he found himself looking away again, and staring, without any reason, at the long serried row of his boots—foot-gear of every make and material and several nationalities. What was there about this part of the letter that had given him a sense of being puzzled over something? He read it again.

Then it dawned upon him.

He thought, "How unlike Eleanor to write that!"

A couple of hours later the young man, tossing and turning between his blankets in the dark, clutched at that thought again. He would have clutched at any idea that would distract him even for a moment from the black jealousy and despair caused by that memory of a man's name murmured in a girl's voice——

"Oh, Cecil!"

—and the other sound ... the other death-knell to his hope.... This brooding would not do. He fixed his mind resolutely on that letter of Eleanor's.

Yes, by Jove. How oddly unlike Eleanor that last paragraph had read!

He simply couldn't imagine Eleanor writing so primly, so characteristically up to that point, and then "letting herself go" in a sentence that seemed almost to be laughing at her own solemnity. That gay little gibe! From a girl who took everything with such a deadly seriousness! All her other letters to him had been so consistently typical of her. None of them had shown a gleam of that sort——

"Stop a bit, though. There was the other letter with that unaccountable Thing in it," young Urquhart reminded himself, sitting up suddenly in bed an hour or so later. "By Jove, yes. Supposing to-night's letter proves to be a sort of sidelight upon that other one? I say! I'll have a look at it now."

He slipped out of bed and snapped on the lights. He went to the dressing-table. Here, beside pipe, pouch and matches, lay a worn and favourite pig-skin pocket-book. He picked it up and took out of it——

First, his receipted bill from that little French hotel.

Next, a little sheaf of visiting cards with addresses; home-people he'd promised to "look up" for some of his pals at the Camp.

Then, some letters. No! It wasn't this one, or this one.... Here it was, at last, in one of the well-known grey envelopes. He shook out of the envelope a handful of once-pink rose-petals, and laid them carefully aside on the open pocket-book. He scarcely looked at them now; he'd looked at them often enough already. It was the letter at which he now stared. The only other one of Eleanor's letters which was uncharacteristic of the girl as he knew her. The one he'd received to-night seemed to have a girl's laugh rippling between the lines. But this first one held something more betraying. Something which, because it was incomprehensible, Ted Urquhart had "given up." Well, here it was for him to puzzle over once again. The letter that had brought him home!

In his lighted room, orderly and deathly silent, it seemed for a moment as if something were holding its breath behind the shoulder of that young man in pyjamas. There was nothing specially striking in the actual contents of that letter. "And she ends up so precisely," he mused for the hundredth time, "with her

'There seems to be nothing else that would interest you'——

And then, by George, over the page"——

He turned it.

—"there's this!"

The sight of "This" would have been a petrifying shock to the girl who'd written it.

For Rosamond Fayre, secretary, prided herself on her neatness and accuracy. She boasted that she'd never made the mistakes that every writer of letters is said to make once in a life-time. Namely, to slip A.'s letter into an envelope addressed to B., or to tear up the fair copy of a note while sending off the rough draft.

But it was a compromisingly rough draft that Ted Urquhart held now in his hand.

He held it up to the light, as if he hadn't already held it so many a time, to examine that scribbled—

"Darling. My darling!"

That was on it. It was all scrawled over with a pen-drawn spiral that looked like "the smoke from the engine" of a child's drawing. There were one or two beginnings of it, a copper-plate "Dar—" "My darl——"

"My darling!"

From Eleanor, if you please. Yes, from Eleanor, who never by any chance called him anything but his name.

And so much had been packed into the time since that sunny morning in France when he'd met—No! None of that again—since the day he'd met Eleanor that he'd forgotten to notice the contrast between herself and that one letter of hers.

And now, in this second letter that he'd received, he seemed to trace the possibility of some clue to the mystery, of the astonishing difference between the Eleanor who wrote and the Eleanor who spoke.

He put down the letter with the "Darling" post-script, enclosing those rose-leaves. Again he took up the letter that had arrived this evening.

Perhaps he might find in it something he had overlooked? He examined it minutely, from the "My dear Ted" at the beginning to the little flourish under the "Eleanor Urquhart" at the end.

Ah! Wait a bit! There! Could it be? Was it——

Yes. Tucked away, all but hidden in the loop of the flourish, his eye, now that it was on the look-out for it, detected something. Two almost imperceptible hieroglyphics; the marks of two crosses.

Cupid, his mark! For all the world over that stands, in a letter, for one thing only.

Kisses.

From Eleanor? From the unawakened girl whose only notion of a caress seemed to be that twice-daily cousinly peck on the cheek? She had sent half-concealed love-messages to the man to whom she was, by contract, engaged?

Of course it might amuse a girl to do that, reflected Ted Urquhart, lighting his pipe. But surely not that girl? Wasn't she as chilly and youthfully hard as the unripest of the green apples in the Court Orchard? Or—here he knit his brows and stared into the puff of smoke—had he been mistaken from the very beginning in his fiancée Eleanor?

The clocks all over the house chimed One and Two and Half-past Two while Ted Urquhart, tramping barefoot up and down his bedroom and smoking hard, went on wondering (still resolutely) over this question.

A moth flew in, with a whirr and drone as of a tiny biplane, and circled about under the ceiling. His own were the only lights on, of course. Everybody else fast asleep hours ago. He wondered if She had cried any more over the departure of "Cecil" after she'd gone up— Stop there! Think of something else.

Was Eleanor, whom he thought he got "summed up," a girl he'd never really understood?

The rising wind outside dashed a cold spatter of drops against the young man's cheek as he passed the open casement. He looked out. Those farmer-fellows had been wise to get in their corn while they could. Out there in the indigo darkness it was coming on to rain like blazes; the light from his room gleamed on the lines of it as on the strings of a harp. He half closed the window and took up those letters once more. And he was conscious of the oddest feeling about them; this young man who'd never "bothered" much about feelings until—fairly recently.

But it was with a little, sudden, warm thrill of positive tenderness that he handled these messages from a girl for whom he'd never had any tenderness ... so far.

But supposing that came? Supposing Eleanor did turn out to be this utterly unknown quantity?

He'd heard of people who could be delightful, charming, and warmly friendly while they talked to you, but who, on paper, seemed cold and repellently stiff. Simply, they couldn't write letters. Perhaps, then, there were other people who could express themselves in letters, but who simply couldn't talk? Became cold, self-conscious, too shy to be themselves? Perhaps Eleanor's real self was the bashful, passionate little soul who, greatly daring, sent furtive "darlings" and kisses and rose-leaves to the lover she'd never seen?

If that were Eleanor, he must meet her. He must know her. He must get her to declare herself. The very thought of the quest seemed to bring hope with it....

He heard the clocks striking Three, and stretched himself wearily....

Then suddenly checked himself, with long sinewy arms above his head. Ah! Another idea had just occurred to him.

There were those other belated letters already written by Eleanor that would be coming on, forwarded from the Camp. He might expect to receive these here, one at a time! They were already on their way to "Edward Urquhart, Esqre.," at this moment. One just sent on from the Camp; probably, one at the port of embarkation; one crossing the South Atlantic....

Would any of them throw fresh light upon the subject of their writer?

Would they be entirely formal and flavourless? Mere Club reports? Minutes of meeting?

Or might they hold just a dash of the other thing? The dab of jam in the otherwise so very doughy nut? That remained to be seen. How soon, though? Each week he'd get one....

He dropped his arms. He turned to the ivory-leaved calendar that stood on the writing-table beside the leather-framed, faded photograph of his father in the uniform of a Woolwich cadet; he ran his finger down until it reached a date.

What an infernal while to wait until he got another letter from this new Eleanor!

Her letters were all he had to help him to find her.

A regular paper-chase!

Find her he must; would——

Here at last he found himself yawning.

He turned off the lights, and the velvet darkness of the window-square was transformed to weeping grey as he rolled over in his blankets again.

He was dog-tired. Rain pattered loudly on the lime-trees of that Avenue where, half a life-time ago, he'd heard ... what left him still aching with misery, frustration, hopelessness.

No. No! Not that. He was not going to think of it. He'd got something to think of. The hope of this new Eleanor. Getting on to the track of the girl who'd slipped hints of such a different personality into two of her letters.

Eleanor had thought of sending him those petals; had smuggled in crosses for him to find....

Rose-leaves....

And kisses, of all things....

Here Ted Urquhart rolled over for the last time and slept.

CHAPTER XIV

A PAPER-CHASE

Long afterwards it seemed to Ted Urquhart as if for many summer days he lived at Urquhart's Court two distinct and separate lives.

The Ted Urquhart of one life made himself interestedly busy about his estate. He listened patiently enough to the conversation of his Uncle on cyphers, ancient parish registers, and the Impossibility of War between civilised nations then of that present date (of June, Nineteen Fourteen). He took his fiancée out in the car, to pay a round of calls, as an engaged couple should, upon people in the neighbourhood who "had always known the Urquharts" (and a deadly bar to conversation he found it). He suggested to Eleanor that, as an antidote, he and she might do another round, of London theatres, music-halls, Opera.

"Oh, that's very kind of you, Ted," he was told, "but I'm afraid I couldn't possibly spare the time."

"Not even for a few evenings and afternoons?"

"Oh, I'm afraid not."

(What a fiancée! What an engagement! All this must be altered!)

"I think, then," he said, "that I shall go up alone for a couple of days."

He did so. He looked up and haled forth to dinners and lunches such old schoolfellows of his as he could find. He beheld a youth who had been his fag make a century at Lord's. He took pilgrimages into the dullest suburbs to visit the faded, patient women-folk of some of his mates whom he had left, bronzed and keen and jolly and disreputable, at the South American Camp. He gave "the latest news" (publishable) of these young men, and received worshipping hospitality in return. He asked other men down to The Court for lazy days. He persuaded himself, quite often, that he was having a very good time at home. This was the first of his two lives.

But in his second life he was far more occupied. Those other surface things were trifling compared to what he was really doing. He was for ever keeping a look-out for that girl of his; not Miss Fayre, who was engaged to that other fellow, nor the Eleanor he saw, up to her eyes in good works he could not follow; but that new Eleanor of the letters.

It exasperated him to find how skilfully she managed to keep herself hidden away!

His fiancée was always the same to him; matter-of-fact, dutifully pleasant.

He ransacked his brains for some opportunity to bring up the subject of those letters. Stupid—her own letters! How could he say to Eleanor, "I say, do you know what you wrote—?"

It couldn't be supposed that the girl didn't know what she'd written herself, could it? Yet it looked very like it!

In fact, young Urquhart was beginning to wonder whether he hadn't imagined the whole thing, when something happened to set him off on the trail again, keener and more curious than ever.

He received another of those belated letters from his fiancée.

The post arrived while they were at breakfast, which Miss Urquhart "liked early." Her father breakfasted an hour later in his room. So the young owner of The Court sat at the oval table, bright with the glitter of morning sunshine on Mr. Beeton's wonderful silver and Mr. Marrow's freshest sweet-peas, opposite to his fiancée and to the right of his fiancée's secretary. As usual, Eleanor's plate was snowed under with correspondence; begging letters, circulars, estimates. As it happened, he and Miss Fayre had only one letter apiece that morning. (He didn't allow himself to wonder who hers was from.) He tore open his travelled-looking envelope and began to read.

The crisp bacon on his plate was allowed to grow cold as he read. For it was a long letter. More, it was an interesting letter. That is, it possessed the factor which renders any letter, any conversation interesting to a young man.

Namely, it was all about himself.

Yes! For the first time, his fiancée's weekly letter held direct questions about his work, his life out there, his thoughts.

These were interspersed, certainly, with more familiar phrases about the weather for the time of year and the people who had been to call. But this was the smooth surface; underneath was the unmistakable bubbling of curiosity. Those questions kept cropping up. They made him feel that a girl in Kent was saying to an unknown young man in South America, "I will know you! I will find out what sort of a creature you are!" It was just as he himself was grimly determined to find out "what sort of a creature" this Eleanor of his really was under all her reserves and preoccupations and fussinesses.

One paragraph at the end mentioned a name now familiar to Ted. But it mentioned it in such an unfamiliar spirit!

"A very clever Collegy sort of woman was here to lunch; a Miss Fabian, who had a tremendous argument with father. She said she was sure that the Antagonism of Sex was far stronger to-day—though perhaps more hidden—than its usual attraction. She said that the 'hideous handicap' of being a woman was removed. I wondered."

The girl who wrote that had surely never found that being a woman was any handicap? It sounded as if she had been demurely revelling in its glorious advantage, thought the young man.

He lifted his head to give a long and very direct look above the table at Eleanor. Absently she put out the hand that wore his ring. The other held a sheaf of papers. She said, vaguely in his direction, "Some more coffee?"

"Thanks, I've still got some," he said resignedly.

He re-read the end of the letter that was so uncharacteristic.

"Wishing that I could see exactly where you would be and what you would be doing and looking like when you get this

    from
            ELEANOR."

Well! Here he was, and she could see for herself, exactly, if she took the trouble to look across the table at him!

But no; there she was, deep in her blessed circulars! Absorbed in anything that had nothing to do with the man she had arranged to marry! Or was she merely pretending to be absorbed? Which?

Ted Urquhart determined to spring a mine upon her there and then. Up to then he hadn't said a word to his fiancée about these letters forwarded on. He was keeping that for a convenient and useful occasion. This, he thought, was the occasion.

He made a little rustling with the thin sheet in his bronzed hand, then sat back and looked straight at her again. Then he said, perhaps a trifle more loudly and emphatically than he usually spoke, "Well, Eleanor!—I have to thank you for a rather specially nice letter."

Eleanor looked up from her circulars behind the French, glass-globed coffee-machine.

"Letter?"' she echoed, puzzled. "I haven't written you any letter, Ted."

"Not lately, I know," said Ted Urquhart blandly. "This one"—he folded it into its envelope and laid it on the table beside him almost with the movement of a man who is playing a card in some game—"this one must have reached the Camp after I'd left. One of those fellows forwarded it on here from South America. It's weeks old now. I'm glad I got it back safely, though."

He was watching Eleanor, hard, as he spoke.

It never occurred to him to watch the tall, golden-haired secretary-girl who made the third at this bright breakfast-party of young people.

But if at this moment he had happened to look at her, he would have seen quite a startling change come over the attractive face of Miss Rosamond Fayre.

It was gone as quickly as it came. The next moment she was apparently deep in the one letter that had come for her. But in reality she was keenly on the alert. A sudden fright had taken her. For what the secretary-girl was thinking was——

"Now! I see what's happened! Eleanor's dear Ted has just got one of the letters that I wrote to him, for her! And he suspects something! He knows that Eleanor never wrote it! He knows! She's caught—that is, we're caught! Oh——"

She would have given her month's salary to know even which one of those proxy-letters it was. If only Eleanor's dear Ted would (but of course he wouldn't) give some hint now about which phrase it was that he found so "specially nice!"

With perfect outward composure Miss Fayre helped herself to a piece of toast and began to butter it.

Anyhow, he had said he was "glad he'd got it," That ought to apply to any letter from one's fiancée, though.

The question was, did Eleanor realise what had just happened? No! She didn't seem to, thought Eleanor's secretary, with her eyes fixed on her own share of the morning's post. It was nothing much (a mere note about some alterations to be made in Miss Fayre's costume by that obscure but clever little dressmaker who had created that still unworn pink frock), but Miss Fayre studied the sheet as if it came from a declared lover, whilst her ears were pricked up to catch what Eleanor was going to say next.

Eleanor said casually, "Ah, one of my letters come back again? How quick that seems!"

The next moment Rosamond's trepidation over this proxy-letter affair had become absolute panic. For she'd heard Mr. Ted Urquhart's quiet reply:

"Oh, I've had more than one."

He'd had more than one? thought the quailing Rosamond. Then it didn't matter which of them he'd got this morning. He'd guessed something. He'd received letters here, from Eleanor, and this apparently was the first time that he mentioned them. Of course that meant that he suspected something about them!

Rosamond Fayre's blue eyes stole up, from her dressmaker's note, to the every-coloured bank of sweet-peas and above it, for one quick covert glance at the brown face of the young man.

Absolutely exasperatingly calm; inscrutable. A sort of irritatingly good-looking male Sphinx.

"Looking just as he did that afternoon at the Hostel when nothing on earth would induce him to give away his name," thought Rosamond resentfully. "He's not the sort of young man who will give anything away, ever, until he chooses!"

And the thought of the Hostel brought another; a thought of terror. Yes; to complete her own rout there broke over her the overwhelming recollection of the last letter that she had written to the address of "E. Urquhart, Esqr." That letter she'd handed through the Hostel window for E. Urquhart, Esqre., to post to himself, just after she'd refused to come out to tea with him. H'm! He thought this morning's letter was "rather specially nice," did he? What would he think of that Hostel one? Heavens! That letter would be enough to blow the three of them, breakfast-table and all, through the ceiling as a bomb would have blown them!

That letter was on its way to Urquhart's Court, to complicate matters, even worse....

And matters were quite complicated enough as they stood. That probably suspecting young man was the master of the situation, thought Rosamond ruefully. She and Eleanor were something like fellow-conspirators.

It wasn't her—Rosamond's—fault! She'd jibbed; she'd said what she could! She'd done it under protest, to save her post. Still, she had helped his fiancée to play what now suddenly seemed like a very shabby trick on the young man!

And when that trick all came out, as it might?

Well, it might conceivably mean that Miss Urquhart's highly convenient engagement would be broken off, and that Miss Fayre's quite desirable post would be lost after all!

But this state of affairs didn't seem to dawn upon the other girl.

Obviously, Rosamond must have a talk over the whole thing, now, as soon as possible, with Eleanor.

CHAPTER XV

FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS

Half-an-hour later Rosamond Fayre tried to open the subject in Miss Urquhart's office.

"Eleanor, I wanted to speak to you——"

"I'm just coming, with the letters."

"It's not about the letters. Not the business-letters, I mean——"

"Then I'm afraid it will have to wait, Rosamond. We must get these done first."

The impatient Rosamond "took down" and typed as if during an examination for speed, but it was twelve o'clock before the morning's correspondence was out of the way. Fortunately Miss Urquhart's fiancé was also out of the way in the motor-pit with the chauffeur, strenuously busy over some hitch in the mechanism which was causing Her Ladyship (the car) to "get very sarcastic coming up the hills." Rosamond hoped the job would keep him nice and late for lunch while she had her consultation with Eleanor.

This took place on the smaller lawn beyond the gardens.

Here, on the warm turf where the Club girls had waltzed on the afternoon of the Hen-party, Eleanor had now laid down sheets and sheets of newspaper. Upon these she and her secretary were going to spread out rose-leaves to dry for pot-pourri, that would be sent up to a London depôt and sold in perforated vases for the benefit of some Guild.

The two girls walked up to the lawn together, looking the queerest contrast to one another; dark Eleanor, whose "good" coat-and-skirt of one of the more trying shades of shantung seemed specially chosen to conceal every line of her stiff, affairée little figure; fair Rosamond, tall and dainty and loose-limbed, lending all her own shapeliness to one of those ready-made voile frocks, rose-sprigged, with a belted and befrilled tunic—of which a thousand duplicates had been sold in the summer sales, and which would look cheap and common enough on many of its wearers. It seemed impossible that they should have a single interest, a single occupation in common—this pair of girls whose handwritings alone were alike! Both girls now carried shallow, large wicker baskets full of the scented petals that seemed all ready to strew upon the path of a bride. They knelt down close together on the turf as they proceeded to spread the rose-leaves on the paper.

"Just like conspirators ... down to the attitude! ... On all-fours, just as if we were taking cover," thought Rosamond, ruefully amused.

Then, with a "Now-for-it!" expression on her face, she cleared her throat. She began to explain, hurriedly and softly and almost as if she were afraid of being overheard, that she "had been made to feel rather uneasy, this morning...."

Her difficulty, she found, was to make Eleanor Urquhart see that there could be anything to feel uneasy about.

Eleanor only said in mild surprise, "How do you mean, you 'think Mr. Ted Urquhart has got an idea that I didn't write my letters to him myself'?" She was sorting out long leaves of lemon-verbena, grey-blue heads of lavender, jagged carnation-petals to mix with the roses, as she talked. "How can he guess you wrote for me, Rosamond? It isn't very likely that he's noticed anything about our having the same sort of handwriting——"

"Ah, it's nothing at all to do with handwritings! It's not come to that yet. It hasn't come to his thinking I've anything to do with the letters. But I'm sure that he's noticing that there's something different about the letters themselves," declared Rosamond emphatically, as she smoothed that confetti of pink-and-white-and-damask petals into a thinner layer on her sheet. "I know he is."

"It must be your imagination," came Eleanor's concise little voice. "What 'something' has there been for him to notice? You wrote exactly as if you were me——"

"Can anybody write exactly as if they were somebody else? I've always known they couldn't! A letter's bound to 'catch' something characteristic of the writer! Something creeps in, like the tone of one's own voice, speaking! One can't help that, Eleanor——"

"But you did. I saw!" said the other girl reassuringly. "I passed all the letters myself. Except two or three, perhaps. There was that afternoon I motored Miss Fabian back to her rooms and I couldn't get back before post-time, or something else happened. But I'm sure they would be all right—these little white roses are the sweetest of all—they were just the usual thing, weren't they? I know how careful you are with all my correspondence."

"I've tried. Yes, I have tried to be careful," said the secretary-girl uneasily. "But——"

She paused. Here was something of which she had to make a clean breast. "In one of those letters to Mr. Ted Urquhart I'm afraid I wasn't quite careful, Eleanor," she admitted. "I must have been in a mood——"

She stopped again. "Moods" were things Eleanor rather despised, as Rosamond knew. All this was embarrassingly difficult! It's so much easier to own up to wrong-doing than to having done something silly! She took another handful of petals out of her basket and began again.

"Just for fun, I suppose, I sent something ... as from you. I put——"

Eleanor's dark head turned a little impatiently.

"Well? You put what?"

With a suspicion of bravado in her pretty voice Rosamond Fayre confessed to the ultimate folly of what she'd put. "Kisses."

"What!" ejaculated Eleanor. And she moved still kneeling, so suddenly that she upset her basket. The rest of the rose-leaves spilled softly out into a fragrant stack before her. Above it she stared with dark, incredulous eyes at her secretary. "Kisses?"

Rosamond Fayre, feeling more than foolish, put forward an historic excuse. "They were only very little ones!"

"But you actually wrote that I—I sent kisses to——"

"No! I didn't write that!" Rosamond broke in still more quickly, bending over the overturned heap of rose-leaves as she spoke. "It was at the very end of one letter; hidden away in the twirly thing you do under your name. I think I wanted to see if you'd notice when you passed the letter; and you didn't. So Mr. Ted Urquhart probably wouldn't see them at all—unless he was looking for them. Two quite tiny ones I put; like this——"

She took up the small pencil-case she wore dangling from a silver chain, and on the margin of the newspaper-sheet before her she drew a couple of those hieroglyphics over which a sleepless young man had pored and pondered more than a week ago....

Mr. Ted Urquhart's fiancée contemplated those hieroglyphics silently and as if they were noisome insects that had just crawled out of the rose-leaves.