Like a Rose

Chapter I

Jennifer

“Sweetest little fellow,
Everybody knows,
Don’t know what to call her,
But she’s mighty like a rose!”

Jennifer’s nurse was very fond of singing that. She would hold Jennifer on her knees and sway backwards and forwards as she sang, and then she would laugh and toss Jennifer up in her arms and hug her and kiss her and say again, “Mighty like a rose, aren’t you, honey?”

Jennifer herself quite came to believe in the appellation. “I’se like a wose, Mummy,” she said once, planted on sturdy five-year old legs, gazing up at the little known beautiful personality whom she had been taught to regard as mother.

“Are you?” Margharita Postle had answered. There was no great wealth of affection in her voice, she regarded Jennifer always with a certain mild curiosity. “Then, where are your thorns?”

And at that she had thrown back her head, laughing a little at the man standing behind her, “I’ve felt them all right, haven’t I, David?” she had said. She so soon forgot Jennifer’s presence. The child, precocious, spoilt, petted, was very aware of that. She would run to her nurse for comfort.

“Is mummy like a rose too?” she asked. “And indeed she isn’t,” nurse would answer, with almost a sniff.

Nurse and mother had no liking for each other, that was another thing that the child Jennifer was quick to discover. Not that Margharita Postle bothered the two of them very much with her presence. Nanny and Jennifer lived alone for the most part except for old cook, who formed a kind of comfortable background to their life. They lived in a small bungalow house on the banks of the river Thames. “Suntrap,” the house was called. Nanny told Jennifer that was because a sunbeam lived in it, and Jennifer knew that she was the sunbeam.

Nanny was warm with love. It oozed out of her in silly babyish nicknames, in fond endearments. She spoilt Jennifer notoriously---even cook said that.

“You’re just a little girl like other little girls,” cook would say in answer to Jennifer’s self assertion about the rose, and afterwards she spoke crossly to nurse.

“Why you stuff her head up with that sort of nonsense, Mike alone knows,” said cook. (She had an Irish strain in her, and Mike was a saint of some great knowledge to whom she often referred.) “What’s to come to the child when she’s got to go out among others?”

“It’s a mother’s love she shall get from me,” retorted nurse. “It’s mighty little she gets of it from the quarter where it should be.”

“You have a child of your own and see,” snorted cook. “It hits both ways, and how the mistress can put up with your maudlin sentimentality passes my comprehension.”

Yet they were on the whole, good friends, and Jennifer adored both of them.

Whether she adored her mother equally was a little open to doubt. She saw, for one thing, so little of her. Periodically Margharita Postle would come down to the little cottage; the gate of “Suntrap” would close behind her, and suddenly, the whole place would seem to be alive with her personality. Beautiful, soft, sweet scented, by degrees, Jennifer took to applying these adjectives to her mother. Funny how mummie could make one laugh if she was in the mood. Wonderful---she was always wonderful . . . but it did not really get any further than that . . . the wonder . . . she was always a stranger.

Jennifer fell back on Nannie. “Nannie, why doesn’t mummie live with us like other little girls’ mummies?”

Well, why did not she? Nannie, for once, seemed to have no answer; just a swift hug, a rather moist kiss. “Bless you, honey bird---what questions we ask!”

Jennifer bubbled over with questions at seven years old.

“Didn’t I ever have a daddy? Is David my daddy? Is he dead? Nannie, why do people die?”

“Because God wants them to go back to him.” Easy that question, easier than all the others. “Poor lamb, it comes hard on the child,” said nurse to cook.

“It is time she was sent to school, don’t you think, David?” Margharita languidly surveying the problem on one of her brief visits to the cottage. “Nurse spoils her so dreadfully.”

David always came with mummie in those days. He was a man, so he remained in Jennifer’s memory, very tall and straight, with grey blue eyes that looked straight through you, and a mouth like a trap.

“Isn’t David’s mouth like a trap, Nannie?” Jennifer asked when she had finally arrived at this definition for herself.

“Bless your heart, honey, what can you mean?” said Nannie, “What do you know of traps?”

“Mouse traps,” explained Jennifer, with perfect gravity. “You know how they shut, sharp and hard. You can’t open them, you can’t make them bend.”

“Yes, but Mr. Redford---though I am not saying that I like him, mind you---he’s good looking. A handsome gentleman, Jenny.”

“I don’t like him either,” Jennifer acknowledged, she snuggled close. “I’d hate to be a mouse, Nannie, if he was the trap.”

What fancies the child had. They worked on Nannie’s nerves, “It’s almost as though she knew by instinct, poor lamb,” Nannie confided to cook. “Ain’t it queer that she should feel like that about him?”

“Not as I can see,” cook answered, “Mr. Redford hasn’t much use for children---that’s all she’s noticed.”

David thought it was most certainly time Jennifer was sent to school.

“You’re queer about the child, aren’t you, Margharita?” he asked. “Have you got any love for her? Even animals love their young.”

Margharita lying in the hammock swung between two trees on the lawn that swept smoothly down from the cottage verandah to the river’s edge, let her eyes wander away from his watching grey eyes and rest on Jennifer’s figure. The child sat at the edge of the lawn, her stockingless feet dangling in the water. The sun picked out the high lights of gold in the mop of hair, touched softly on the fragrant beauty of young straight limbs. It was always difficult for anyone to read Margharita’s thoughts; they lay so very far below the surface of her eyes. She, too, was very beautiful lying there, keeping the hammock in gentle motion by one shapely foot thrust out, touching the ground.

“What is love?” she asked softly, “It depends on that, doesn’t it, David?”

“As you and I know it,” the man began . . . She waved him to silence. “You and I,” she answered, and laughed softly and delicately.

Anyway, it was decided that Jennifer should go to school. Nurse was sent packing. Only cook was to be kept on---a nursery governess would be provided for Jennifer in the holidays. What floods of tears that parting entailed. Margharita discreetly kept out of it. It was David who settled everything---David who accompanied Jennifer and Jennifer’s swagger new luggage to the school.

“What are you to me?” asked Jennifer, sitting in her corner of the railway carriage, the tears in her heart stirred to sharp anger. “You aren’t my father. Why should you interfere?”

“No, I’m not your father,” said David, “Your father is dead. He died eight years ago. Let’s say I’m your guardian. I look after you and your mother.”

“Then mother chose you,” said Jennifer, “not I.” She had a strange, unchildlike feeling that the trap had closed on her, there was no escape. “I . . . I hate you.”

“Yes,” agreed the man David. It was almost as though the coldness of his grey eyes smiled at her anger. “Well, when you get a little older, Jennifer, you will learn that it is wise to dissemble hate, whatever you may do about love.”

“A wilful little mortal with a mind of her own,” Jennifer’s head mistress wrote at the end of the first term. “But I have no doubt we shall break her into discipline.”

Did they do that? The girl Jennifer at fourteen might perhaps have told them, only that by then, she had grown oddly secretive. There was no one to whom she confided anything, and Mr. Redford’s prophecy had come true. Jennifer had learnt to dissemble.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen! Margharita, it seemed, was going through hard times. It was a question of money; Jennifer learnt that during her holidays at “Suntrap.” Mother was often at home in those days. She spent long summer hours doing nothing, lying out in the hammock, swinging, swinging. David was never there.

“What’s happened to David, Cook?” Jennifer asked; she never asked mother anything; somehow, she never had.

“There---fancy to Mike---what makes you ask that?” Cook with arms deep in flour, seemed to grow hot and red. “He’s gone, and it’s a good riddance, if you ask me.”

“He was looking after mother and me,” Jennifer was grave, her eyes studied the perturbation, though she took no apparent notice of it, “Who is doing that now?”

“Your mother looks after herself and you, too, Miss Jennifer. Run away with your questions. You’ll be spoiling these buns if you have me bothered.”

Putting two and two together, asking no one, it was pretty obvious from Jennifer’s point of view that mother was not very successful at looking after herself. Jennifer had to be removed from school. Not that she minded that. There was no one to see that she did any work at home---only cook---and cook’s suggestions took the form of housework, which Jennifer hated and cooking, which she flatly refused to learn. She did nothing, as she pointed out, with extreme success. “And it is no use your getting ratty about it, Cookie,” said Jennifer, her gold hair shaken to a halo about her young face. “Even the Bible says, ‘Consider the lilies, they toil not, neither do they spin.’”

“You and your lilies,” stormed cook, “it all comes from that silly song your nurse used to sing you.”

“I know,” said Jennifer, “I remember it.” She tilted back her head and sang; she had a very clear, sweet voice:

“Sweetest little fellow,
Everybody knows,
Don’t know what to call her,
But she’s mighty like a rose!”

The words, lilting and clear, floated out into the garden, swayed against the hammock in which Margharita lay. To-day someone was sitting in the deck chair that David had been accustomed to occupy. An elderly man, with grey hair and a rather tired, lined face. Margharita had brought him back with her from her last visit to town. It was rather noticeable how things had improved in the cottage since his arrival. He smiled now faintly, hearing that clear young voice.

“Mighty like a rose,” he repeated, “That’s your little girl, isn’t it, Margharita? My dear, we must do something for her. School . . . you’ll let me . . I’ve so little now to spend my money on.”

“Jennifer hates school,” said Margharita, she put her foot out and gave the hammock a little swing.

“It will be good for her,” said the man, slowly, “Your little daughter. Do you love her, Margharita?”

“Love---what is love?” said Margharita, and laughed lightly and turned and let her hand rest in his.

Chapter Two

“Margharita”

Seventeen year old Jennifer Postle sat very still, listening. In the gloom of the old large room, her figure, young, slim, languid, showed like a shadow. You could not see the gold of her hair, or the delicate colouring of eyes and lips. Just her long grace was faintly visible; the shaped beauty of her head and neck, her white hands lying folded on her lap.

Out in the sunlight, Jennifer’s beauty glowed. It was something definite like the loveliness of fresh spring flowers or the magic of a summer night. But here, in this dark room, stilled and silent, it was faint, like the glow of the candles burning on the brackets of the long mirror behind her.

It was a bedroom she sat in. Old fashioned, massive. A large four poster bed with a canopied top occupied the far side of the room, and on the bed propped up by many pillows, Jennifer’s mother lay dying.

Cook had told Jennifer that about half an hour ago, and ever since then she had sat quite still, listening---waiting.

Downstairs in the gaily lit lower rooms of the house, a very gay party had been in progress. Jennifer’s coming-out birthday party and suddenly out of all the noise and merriment and splendour---for it had been in its tawdry way, a splendid party---Death had come like this. Stalking treacherous, without pity or shame.

Jennifer had been dancing with one of her mother’s young men, all Mrs. Postle’s friends had been men, young, old, pleasant, unpleasant, rich, clever, successes or failures. She did not seem to have any women friends, though she had a great many acquaintances. So Jennifer had been dancing with this particular young man friend, when he had remarked quite casually that her mother looked off colour that evening.

“Margharita,” they all called her that, Jennifer’s beautiful, ridiculously young looking mother, “Margharita seems fed up to-night,” the young man had observed.

Jennifer paused in her dancing to glance at her mother, and it was just at that very moment that her mother had cried out, a funny, choking, sobbing cry, and caught at the side of her dress with her two hands and swayed and fallen.

How they all rushed round her, her men friends, and picked her up and laid her on a couch. Jennifer had knelt beside her and held her hands and called to her again and again.

“Mother! Mother!” Jennifer had said---not Margharita. Perhaps that was why Mrs. Postle had not answered, did not even seem to hear.

And yet she was not unconscious; her eyes, wide, blue, starlike eyes like Jennifer’s, only deeper, more beautiful, searched the crowd of faces gathered round her. Searched and searched as though they looked for something they could never find.

Someone had sent for a doctor. He pushed his way to the front, ordered everyone away, had the woman carried upstairs to her bedroom. He looked grave and pre-occupied. He seemed to find the house, the party, everything, even poor beautiful kneeling Jennifer, a little distasteful.

“She had been killing herself for years,” was what he said severely. “This looks like the end.”

The party melted away. Jennifer recalled to her duty as part hostess, stood at the door of the garishly lit dance room and said goodnight to them all. Some of them whispered condolences, some chucked her under the chin and told her to cheer up, several of them kissed her. She did not mind being kissed at all. Were they not all mother’s friends? One elderly man, held her by the shoulders and looked very deep into her eyes. “Margharita’s beauty,” he had said, and seemed to sigh from some deep sorrow, “Poor child, poor child.”

When the last of them had gone, Jennifer had turned and gone slowly upstairs. Her gold coloured dress of stiff silk made little whispering noises against the banisters as she passed. It was a very lovely frock, her mother’s present to her on this, her seventeenth birthday; it set off her own beauty like the gold setting of a ring shows up a jewel. She was like a fairy queen going up into the darkness. And then she had knocked softly at the door and a woman, plain of face, starchy of manner and clothes, had opened it to her.

“Are you her daughter?” the nurse had said. “Yes,” Jennifer had nodded, “Mayn’t I come in?”

“You can come in,” the nurse had answered, her voice seemed scornful, hard, “But not in those clothes. Go and put on something quiet and dark and come back quickly. She won’t last long. She is dying---you have got to understand that.”

“I do understand,” Jennifer had whispered, and she had crept away and shed all her beautiful soft rustling garments and put on her old school dressing gown, shabby, a little short in the sleeves, dreadfully unbecoming, Margharita had called it.

She did not suppose that Margharita, somehow now in her mind, she was calling her mother by that name, not mother any more, would notice the oldness or the unbecomingness now that she was dying.

Dying! What did it feel like to die? What happened after death? God and Judgment; Heaven and Hell. Jennifer had learnt all about those things as a child. As a child she had been very familiar, very friendly with God.

“To-day in the garden I threw my ball up so high that God leant out of the sky and caught it,” she had said that once. She knew she had said it because Margharita had often laughingly retold the tale to her new friends. But it must have been very long ago. That precious sense of intimacy no longer existed. She said, ‘God’ in her mind, and it meant nothing, or perhaps not nothing, so much as a vague sense of uneasiness. Margharita did not believe in God, or Church, or religion, she had quite often said so. What had Margharita’s blue eyes been looking for as she lay on the couch downstairs? Had it been for something, someone to help her to face death?

“I should be afraid to die,” Jennifer’s thoughts stole out on to the darkness round her, “I am afraid now because death is in the room. Oh God, that I used to know well enough to play with, come back just for a little, help me not to be afraid.”

“And now I am praying.” Her thoughts swirled back again. “That’s silly, for there is no one to pray to. I am afraid of Death because it’s ugly, and I hate ugliness. If I screw my head round, shall I see my own face in the glass? My face is lovely---that old man said so to-night. “Margharita’s beauty,” he said, and called Margharita a child. “Poor child! Poor child!” he said, “Poor child!” How horrid of me to think about my beauty while Margharita lies dying. What a selfish beast I am. I wonder how old she is. I am seventeen---girls don’t often have babies, at least not often, much before they are twenty-one. Margharita must be at least forty. Why---how old that is. I don’t suppose she is sorry to die, and not afraid since she is so old.”

“Jennifer,” Margharita’s voice whispering through the stillness of the room, “Is Jennifer here?”

Cook, who had taken over from nurse for a little, and who was mixing something over the stove in the fireplace, looked across at Jennifer.

“It’s you she is asking for,” she said, “Go across and speak to her. Nothing will help or hinder now.”

Jennifer rose slowly and went across to the great bed. She stood within the circle of the lamplight. How old Margharita’s face looked on the pillows, old and haggard, sagging into a myriad tiny lines.

“Why have you taken off your pretty frock?” Margharita whispered, “You looked so lovely in it, Jennifer.”

“The nurse said . . .” Jennifer began. Her mother’s old face on the pillow flashed to sudden mischievous youngness.

“Oh, she!” said Margharita, “Solid virtue, my dear.” She gave a little fleeting sigh, “Perhaps it pays in the long run,” she added. “Sit down on that chair, Jennifer, draw it close. I want to talk to you.”

Cook came across to them. She slipped an arm behind Mrs. Postle’s shoulder. She was not very deft or tactful, but she was essentially sympathetic. She knew her mistress inside out.

“Drink this,” she said. “It will give you a little strength. You’ll have things to say to her, I expect. I’ll not be listening.”

Margharita smiled. It was odd the way that smile of hers woke up her old face to a semblance of youth.

“No, don’t listen,” she said, “It mightn’t be good for you.”

Cook gave a little imperceptible flounce to all her garments. “The priest’s been sent for,” she reminded her mistress of the grimness waiting in the shadows, “You had best keep your breath for him.”

“To make my peace with God?” asked Margharita, and she laughed, really laughed, the whole room tinkled with her gaiety.

Jennifer sat down on the chair pulled up close to the bed and watched her mother. Blue star-like eyes looking at blue eyes and giving no help the one to the other. “What shall I call her?” Jennifer thought, “when I speak to her, shall I say mother or Margharita?”

“Well, Jennifer,” Margharita whispered; the gaiety had gone out of her face, “This is this, isn’t it, they say I am dying.”

“Perhaps you aren’t,” said Jennifer. “People make mistakes.”

The blue star eyes closed for a second. “Not this time though, Jennifer.” The breath came in that little shifting sigh. “I am dying---right enough. Bodies and souls and loves and sins---Jennifer, don’t ever give any man your soul. The other thing doesn’t matter---don’t let them have your soul.”

This was like talking about God. Jennifer felt extremely uncomfortable.

“Is there anything you want me to do, Mother?” she asked; the name stumbled out unawares, “Anyone I can write to for you?”

“Mother,” Margharita repeated softly; her voice seemed to play with the name, “I haven’t done much to earn that, Jennifer, have I?”

“You’ve loved me,” said Jennifer. Yet somehow she thrust it forward as an argument; she had always felt herself just a little unloved, “You’ve always given me a good time.”

“Have I?” said Margharita. She shook her head. “Not really love, Jennifer. I’ve never really loved anything or anyone.” She stirred a little, sitting up in the bed.

“Jennifer,” she said suddenly, passionately, “There is so much I wanted to teach you. I want you to laugh at life. Nothing is real in it---least of all, one’s self. Pleasure . . . Pain . . .” her voice broke. “Go away, Jennifer,” she whispered. “You can’t help me. I can’t help you. It’s all no use.”

Her head seemed to sag sideways, her eyes closed, a little splutter of froth showed at the corners of her mouth. Terror snatched at Jennifer, drove her to stand upright brusquely, to push her chair back with a harsh noise.

“Mother!” cried Jennifer. The nurse was beside her in a minute, cook was the other side of the bed.

“That’s all right,” nurse said, not ungently. She stooped and straightened the face on the pillow and wiped the white lips. She looked over her shoulder at Jennifer.

“You go, my dear,” she said, “You can’t do anything here. She won’t be conscious again. This is the end.”

Chapter Three

At Seventeen

“An immoral woman,” said Colonel Hampton. He laid rather a pronounced stress on the “im.” His faded, yet stern, light coloured eyes, his well-cut lips above a square chin, the stocky uprightness of his body, all seemed to emphasise his disapproval.

Mrs. Hampton sighed. She was a slight almost to scragginess, elderly woman. Very plainly dressed, very plainly washed---no cosmetics or cold creams had ever touched her face. The only concession she had made to present day fashions was that her hair was short, plainly brushed back grey hair. And yet one beauty she still did possess, and that was her eyes. Blue, star-like eyes.

“She was my half-sister, Reginald,” she said, looking up from her low seat at her husband’s sternness, “I cannot forget that. And Jennifer . . .”

“A fashion plate---a mannequin,” Colonel Hampton thrust in, “I cannot tolerate the girl.”

“She is only seventeen,” Mrs. Hampton persisted, “There cannot, Reginald, be much immorality about seventeen.”

Colonel Hampton snorted. “Much you know about it,” he said. “She has been brought up in an atmosphere in which no girl could be moral.”

“Perhaps that is hardly fair,” suggested Mrs. Hampton. “I think Margharita must have loved her. One’s own daughter . . .”

Again she sighed. Mrs. Hampton had no daughters. She had only had one child, and he was a boy. She loved her son better than anything else in this world, but she had always wanted a daughter.

Colonel Hampton shifted from one solid foot to the other and looked round the drawing room. It was a very plainly, pleasantly furnished room. It had wide French windows that opened on to a garden. A little place of loveliness where Colonel Hampton spent most of his time now that he was retired. One felt at once, looking at these surroundings, studying Colonel Hampton, watching his wife, that here was a typically respectable English middle class family. Nothing so drastic as immorality had ever entered their circle.

“Much you know about it,” as Colonel Hampton had snorted a little earlier in the discussion.

“What do you want to do about it?” he asked aggressively. He had always to be consulted about everything, belonging to that fast vanishing type of husband---the real ruler in his own domain. Mrs. Hampton had never even accepted an invitation to tea without first asking her husband.

You could see her nervousness as she answered now. This was something that her heart really wanted to achieve, and though she and Reginald had been married thirty years, she was not sure that he would accede to her request.

“There’s the spare room,” she said, “I thought we could have Jennifer . . . Billy won’t be home for long these holidays . . .” Her sentences were disjointed, like her thoughts and hopes. “He is going for that motor tour you know---the South of Spain. Jennifer---a girl . . . she could help me in the house . . .”

“Don’t talk rubbish, Gertrude,” Colonel Hampton interrupted, “She won’t help you any more than a butterfly helps me in the garden.”

“She is so pretty,” said Mrs. Hampton softly, “Like Margharita was. Poor Margharita.”

“Well, you know what I thought and think about that half sister of yours,” said Colonel Hampton. “She has wallowed, I think that is the right word to use---in comfortable sin for years.”

“Is sin ever comfortable?” asked Mrs. Hampton. Her thin fingers drew some intricate pattern on the plain darkness of her dress. “Poor Margharita,” her heart whispered again.

“If you’ve got no conscience, no morals and no religion---yes, decidedly yes.” Colonel Hampton seemed a little righteously indignant that it should be so. “And your half-sister, my dear Gertrude, was most thoroughly deficient in all these virtues.”

“I know---or so it seems,” agreed Mrs. Hampton. “Yet I don’t know that she was very happy, Reginald, and Jennifer . . .”

“Oh, have it your own way.” To give way always exasperated Colonel Hampton, though he often did it. “Have her here. Dangle her as a bait in front of William. You are a fool, Gertrude, or possibly you don’t realise the temptation that lies for men in a beautiful woman.”

“Billy is so like you,” said Mrs. Hampton, apparently inconsequently. Her husband turned to stare at her.

“Do you imagine I’ve never been tempted, Gertrude?” he thundered, “If it had not been for my religious principles, I could have . . .”

Mrs. Hampton did not hear the end of the sentence. He had strode out of the door and shut it behind him with some vigour.

Mrs. Hampton smiled a little to herself. A faint smile that died in seriousness almost before it was born. She sat thinking, remembering. Her own young days---Margharita; her marriage---married life with dear Reginald. It stretched behind her long---indefinite---unstirred---unbeautiful. Beauty was a sin. And how beautiful Margharita had been. Poor, poor Margharita, with her laughter and her wildness, her shame and her sin. Margharita had been younger than she was, ten years younger. Still a girl at school when Gertrude married. She had never rightly heard what happened. Reginald did not like her to hear that kind of thing. Her parents and Margharita’s parents were dead; there had been no one really to tell her. Just one flaming, wild, laughing letter from Margharita that Reginald had read and afterwards burnt.

“I am so happy, Gertrude, and I am what that stocky husband of yours would call living in sin. I am not married, Gertrude, but I am loved---loved, loved. It sings through me. I love my own body for the joy it brings me. You never told me marriage was like this, Gertrude. Oh, we were taught all wrong---the sins of the flesh---born in sin---all that tosh. If I have a child, it shall be a girl---with my loveliness and the wonder of love shall be in her from the start. I’ll teach her to laugh at life---not be afraid of it, or think it dirty.”

Poor Margharita! The laughter finished now---the joy ended. Had she been happy? Had it all been so radiant as she had thought? Gertrude had gone to see Margharita when they had written saying she was dead. Reginald had allowed her to do that. She had not seen her before that for twenty years. They had left her alone with the dead woman on the bed, and she had knelt for a little, staring at the cold, clear face of a stranger. Still beautiful---but not happy. Ah no---ah no! Reginald had been wrong when he judged like that. Poor Margharita. Mrs. Hampton could find no other adjective to fit the mask-like silence of her face.

And then there was Jennifer. On the way downstairs she had seen Jennifer. The girl had been standing in the hall of the house, talking to two men, one old man with white hair and a benign expression, the other, much younger, a bold coarse face, eager eyes, hard, cruel mouth.

The old man had introduced himself as Mr. Benson. She knew him to be the owner of the house. He had been “keeping” Margharita. He had a kind face, she thought, with very weary eyes. He kept his hand on Jennifer’s arm as they came forward to speak to Mrs. Hampton.

“You will pardon my intruding,” Mr. Benson had said, so gentle his voice was, so anxious. “Are you a relation of this little girl?”

He meant Jennifer. How lovely the child was, like Margharita had been.

“Yes,” Mrs. Hampton had answered, “It’s Jennifer, isn’t it? I’m your Aunt Gertrude, dear.”

She had kissed the soft warm cheek, a wave of tenderness had flooded over her.

“Did your mother ever speak of me?” she asked, tears stung her eyes. “We loved each other when we were your age, Jennifer.”

“Oh, often,” said Jennifer. “Whenever Margharita spoke of being a girl, she spoke of you.”

The young man with the bold, coarse face had said nothing. He stood a little behind Jennifer, staring at her. It was as though her beauty made him hungry.

“Will you spare me quarter of an hour of your time?” old Mr. Benson had asked Mrs Hampton, “I don’t think you will regret the courtesy——”

“Oh, of course,” she had blushed and stammered, and followed him into the wide beautiful room that had been Margharita’s, that still bore witness to her presence.

“You are not a young woman,” Mr. Benson had started his conversation rather queerly, “You cannot be ignorant. Your sister is dead. What are you going to do to save her child?”

“Save?” Mrs. Hampton had repeated. She had stared at him with her blue eyes, the only things about her that were in the least like Margharita.

“I am fond of the child,” said Mr. Benson “I will pay what you will let me pay for her, but my protection here can bring her nothing but harm. Will you not take her to your home? She has never known what it really is to have a home.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Hampton. She had fumbled in her mind for words, “I must ask my husband; find out . . . “

“Do not let your virtue shut her out,” Mr. Benson had interrupted gently. “Against her you can bring no sin.”

“Of course not, of course not,” she had agreed quickly, “Ah, don’t think that I . . . Margharita must have seemed to die so much alone. Of course, she was only my half-sister, and we had seen nothing of each other for years. My husband . . .”

“Indeed, it is quite understandable,” he had interrupted. “Women like Margharita live and die alone. They are outcasts. Poor pagans in a world of . . .” he broke off, “Do what you can for the child,” he added, “For men will not build her life aright for her.”

Mrs. Hampton had felt the truth of that then, she felt it now, sitting there remembering. They had gone back into the hall and Jennifer and the man with the coarse face had drawn rather hastily apart. What had they been doing? Kissing each other? Making love? Oh, surely not. The child’s cool loveliness and the man’s unpleasant animal desire!

Mrs. Hampton rose presently and moved over to her desk by the open window. It was summer outside. Reginald’s roses were in full bloom. The scent of them wafted into her. There were two photographs on her table. One of Billy as a little boy. His round bullet head thrust up in an attitude of enquiry, his eyes eager, his mouth a little open, smiling. Her little Billy, with dark stiff hair, his father’s mouth and chin, his mother’s eyes. Only they were more eager than her’s had ever been, more full of questions. The other photograph showed Billy grown up. He was twenty-three now. Next year he was going off on his own---out to Africa. He had just passed into the Colonial Civil Service. Mrs. Hampton looked for a very long time at the grown up photograph of Billy. Somehow, her heart never saw him otherwise than as a little boy. His hair was darker these days, his eyes more full of laughter. He seemed to find life a most excellent joke.

“I wonder if he has his father’s religious principles,” thought Mrs. Hampton vaguely. She ofter had queer, disconnected thoughts like that. They did not convey to her mind the same message as they would have done to any one else if she had spoken them aloud.

Then she took up her pen and started a letter.

“Dear Jennifer” (she wrote).
Your uncle and I have talked things over and we feel . . .”

Chapter Four

“Billy”

With the very best intentions in the world it is quite impossible to force love. He comes at no man’s bidding. The best of us can make up our minds to tolerate those whom we instinctively do not like; we can force ourselves to be just, tolerant, even kind, but love remains triumphantly aloof. It is not to be shackled by excellent intentions, or brought to heel by some firm order of the mind.

Mrs. Hampton meant to love Jennifer; her heart ached with pity thinking of the girl. She prepared love for her, swept aside instincts of disapproval, concentrated on Jennifer’s loveliness, her likeness to dear Margharita, and yet love would not come. Instead of that, antagonism reared its head, dislike played on strained nerves, hate raised a sudden definite barrier. Not that poor Mrs. Hampton ever admitted to any of these things---she was too good a woman in all essentials. Jennifer was her chosen guest; she had to be protected against Reginald’s disapproval; she had to be made to feel at home. Outwardly, Mrs. Hampton succeeded so well that Reginald could quite definitely grumble at her for spoiling her niece, but inwardly, Mrs. Hampton’s mind was in a state of incessant, soul-destroying conflict.

Jennifer herself did nothing. With her defiant beauty shining through the rather drab clothes which Mrs. Hampton selected for her, she moved listlessly about the house or sat in the garden. She found life in the Hampton household almost inexpressibly dull, but she had learnt her lesson of self-discipline fairly well at the school to which David had escorted her. She never expressed her boredom. She listened with extreme dutifulness to her aunt; it is doubtful whether she ever understood or really liked her. It was in the silences which grew up between them that hate first started to flicker in Mrs. Hampton’s heart. She could, so much she did admit to herself, make nothing of Jennifer.

“I don’t know what you expected to make of her,” argued Colonel Hampton. “We both know how she has been dragged up.”

He had been adamant about Mr. Benson’s money. That he would not allow Gertrude to touch. If they had to have the girl in their house, because of some silly whim of Gertrude’s, she should at least come uncontaminated by such a gift. Jennifer, it seemed, had nothing of her own, she was dependent on them for the clothes she wore, the food she ate. She never seemed to realise that; never resented it.

“She belongs to a class of parasites,” said Colonel Hampton. “They are always content to live on other people.”

“What are you going to do, Jennifer?” Mrs. Hampton brought herself to the point of asking one evening, when the two of them had been sitting silent in the drawing room with its open French windows for over an hour. Mrs. Hampton had been knitting stockings for Billy, who would be coming home in a week’s time now, who had to have all sorts of things got ready for him before he started out to take up his first appointment in Africa, “What are you going to do?”

Jennifer had been playing Patience. It was one of her tricks that most fretted Mrs. Hampton, because she did not play sensible Patience, but merely some stupid, effortless invention of her own.

“Do?” said Jennifer. She shuffled the cards together and looked up at her aunt, “I don’t know. What do you mean, Aunt Gertrude?”

“I mean with your life,” said Mrs. Hampton. “Nowadays, Jennifer, everyone, even girls, choose some profession-work for it---study . . .”

“I hate work,” said Jennifer, slowly, “Have I got to work?”

“God give me patience,” prayed the back of Mrs. Hampton’s mind, she stirred a little.

“Are you happy here with us?” she asked gently, “Doing nothing? I am afraid, sometimes, you must find it dull.”

“Well, it is dull,” admitted Jennifer. A little smile woke the dimple in her cheek. “It will be better, won’t it, when cousin Billy is here?”

Sudden and sharp hate raised its head. Mrs. Hampton herself was surprised at the quick anger that shook her.

“Try and be sensible, Jennifer,” she said. “Life isn’t just a question of amusing yourself. You have no money, you know. Do you expect your uncle to keep you for ever?”

Jennifer raised startled eyes, she was not for the moment unaware of the dislike. Then she lowered them again quickly and the mask was back again over her heart.

“What would you like me to do?” she asked. “Of course, I see what you mean. I am afraid I am awfully silly about money.”

“You appear to me to be very silly about most things,” said Mrs. Hampton. “I suppose it is the way you have been brought up.”

Her conscience pricked her later on in the privacy of her own room. It rose between her and her prayers. She could picture Jennifer, lonely, outcast, brooding over that sharp truth, crying perhaps, missing the love that had been hers. She could not rest thinking of the child and presently, she rose, slipping on her dressing gown, padding along the passage to the little room which she had striven to make so pretty and homelike for Jennifer before Jennifer had come.

She knocked very softly and opened the door quickly. She was warm with regret, and it was as though love for the second really was going to come at her command. If Jennifer was in tears, she would go to her and gather her close and whisper to her and comfort her.

Jennifer, as a matter of fact, attired in a pink and soft swansdown dressing gown, one of the bits of loveliness that she had saved from among her mother’s possessions was sitting in front of her glass, polishing her nails. She was not thinking of anything in particular; she did not in those days think very much, though she dreamt a great deal. She looked up at her aunt with very lovely, very star-like eyes.

“What is it? Did you want me, Aunt Gertrude?” she asked. Love flicked an impatient wing and departed. Mrs. Hampton, standing there in her old faded dressing gown, unlovely, unornamental, felt that she looked a fool.

“I wondered if you were all right,” she essayed. The words came stiffly---the warmth had slid out of her heart. In all her life she had never wasted (Reginald would certainly have called it that), five minutes in polishing her nails. “I was afraid perhaps you were lonely,” she ended her confession.

“I,” said Jennifer, in cool surprise, “Oh, no, I was just getting ready for bed.”

“Good-night, then,” said Mrs. Hampton, and turned and shut the door and hurried back to her own room and her unsaid prayers.

Billy arrived in the course of the next week. He had had a riotously good time motoring in Spain. Billy always seemed to have a good time doing anything; he was packed full to the brim with the joy of life. And it was a very cleanly joy, he came blowing through the house like a high, clean wind,

“Ma.” You could hear his voice before the hall door was properly open. “Where art thou, Ma?”

Jennifer, standing a little back in the shadow of the stairs, watched the meeting. She saw Billy as a big, nice looking boy. Not very like any of the men she had been used to meet in her mother’s house, more like a child, she thought, a grown up child.

“And where is my new cousin?” asked Billy. He had been told about Jennifer. Mrs. Hampton had written explaining, condoning, “She has had no chance, Billy. I have persuaded your father to let me make a home for her. She will help me to bear the loneliness when you go away.” She was not a bit like what he had pictured her to be, he felt shy in front of her from the first.

She was lovely---but it was not that so much; he had seen lovely women before, for all his boyishness he had been a good deal about, and he was no fool. But there was something about this girl that was disturbing; that left one uneasy, and for the life of him he could not tell why. He invaded his mother’s room after they had all, presumably, separated for the night. Colonel Hampton, that was a known thing in the family, always sat up reading till twelve in the dining room. He had strong theories about most things and one of them was that no man of his age needed more than six hours’ sleep. When Billy was at home, if he had anything important to say, any sin of omission or commission that he wanted to get off his chest, this was the time he did it, when ‘good-nights’ had been said downstairs.

And to-night Mrs. Hampton had been waiting for him to come, and she had been half-hoping---odd that for her, whose whole life was bound up in Billy’s---that he would not come. For how was she going to conceal from Billy’s keenness that she did not like Jennifer, and what real excuse could she put forward for not liking her. Instinctively she knew what his first question would be.

“She is very lovely, isn’t she, Mother?” said Billy; when he was serious he always called her ‘Mother’; it was only when he was like a wind blowing about the house that he shouted for her as ‘Ma.’” Do you like her?”

Mrs. Hampton, sitting at her dressing table, fronted by her own face in the glass, shook her head slowly. There had got to be truth between her and Billy, there had never been anything else.

“No,” she admitted, “I’ve tried to, Billy, but I can’t.”

“Awkward,” said Billy, “But I guessed as much.” “Could see my Ma’s face registering disapproval,” he would have said, had he been discussing it with some irreverent pal. Yet his own mind was not irreverent. He was most (to use his own words) tremendously fond of his mother.

“Wonder why you don’t like her?” he added, “Bit too exotic, eh?”

Looking from her own eyes in the glass to his browned young hand moving the things about on her dressing table, Mrs. Hampton knew suddenly of what all this time her hate had been afraid. Jennifer and Billy! What if Jennifer were to take Billy from her? She could not put her fear into words, but there was some of its passion behind the quick movement she made to catch his hand and put her face softly against the sleeve of his coat.

“You’ve got to help me to be nice to her, Billy,” she said, “It’s not her fault, poor child. You know how hard I am when I disapprove; frown at me, Billy, if you see me disapproving.”

“I’m more likely to frown at her if I see her annoying you,” said Billy stoutly. Always from his babyhood he had been her champion, standing up for her, defying other people to disapprove. “And I can’t see why you should have her in the house if she’s tiresome. Can’t she do anything?”

“Dear Billy,” Mrs. Hampton whispered. Her heart felt soothed, at rest, it had room even for Jennifer just for the time being. “It will be all right, I’m going to make myself love her, and I’ve always wanted a daughter in the house.”

“Humph!” said Billy, “I rather doubt it. I don’t fancy somehow that she is your sort.”

He, personally, never referred to the matter again. Hiding her fear as best she might, fighting her jealousy through the months that were to be Billy’s last months in England for a couple of years, Mrs. Hampton watched Jennifer and Billy and sometimes, the hate in her heart amounted almost to agony.

Youth naturally turns to youth, and mother-love, strong and pathetic as it may well be, must find itself pushed aside to let the new young love take possession.

Jennifer loved Billy. It was not as she had dreamt of loving, for Jennifer’s dream lovers included Kings and Prime Ministers and famous actors, and Billy would never be any of those things. He was just an ordinary boy with an adorable smile and clear quizzical eyes that laughed at Jennifer. And Billy loved Jennifer, seeing in her not the beautiful, languid, lazy Jennifer that Mrs. Hampton hated and Colonel Hampton consistently disapproved of, but just a girl, young as he was young, laughing when he laughed, whose blue star eyes were full of riddles he was desperately anxious to solve.

The stage one may perceive was set for tragedy as Colonel Hampton had foreseen it would be; it was Jennifer herself who brought about the climax.

“Don’t you ever?” said Jennifer, one afternoon, apropos of nothing as she and Billy strolled home after a hard game of tennis, “Don’t you ever want to kiss me, Billy?”

Want to! The thing took sudden hold of his heart, shaking him. Yet, when he answered his voice was for him, unusually stern.

“Are you accustomed to being kissed?” he asked. “It seems a queer question, Jennifer.”

She flushed. Looking down at her as they walked along, it struck Billy with new surprise how lovely she was.

She had taken off her hat, it swung in her hand, and of late years, under Margharita’s guidance, Jennifer had had her gold halo of hair shingled. It lay smooth and shining, showing the daintiness of her head, her small well placed ears, the line of her neck at the back.

“I have been kissed, Billy,” she admitted. “It’s rather nice, Billy. That’s why I wondered . . .”

The gate of the house was before them----he swung it open.

“After supper,” he said, “We’ll talk this out. In the garden, at the back, when mother’s gone to bed. You know.”

They had met several times like that out in the garden at the back, to talk, to chaff each other, young, restless, happy, when the rest of the quiet house was presumably in bed.

Jennifer flashed a smile at him as she passed. “I’ll be there,” she said, and about this assignation, there was something new, urgent, thrilling. Her whole being answered to the thrill.

She dressed herself for it with great care, slipping away early from the drawing room on the pretext of being tired. She wanted to look her best, she wanted, just for to-night, to be absolutely lovely. It should be a dressing gown---that one that had been Margharita’s, with alluring, lacey garments underneath. Instinctively her mind turned to the trapping of Billy as she had often enough subconsciously seen others trapped. And yet with all her knowledge, there went an odd innocence. It was in no sense vice, this decking of her body to please, though it may conceivably have been pagan and in the accepted sense of Colonel Hampton, not quite nice.

The household seemed a long time in going to bed. She sat curled up in her bed, with the door just a little ajar, so that she should hear Aunt Gertrude coming upstairs, but when she came, Billy came with her and the two disappeared into Mrs. Hampton’s room for what seemed to be ages, to Jennifer.

At last she heard Billy come out. She heard his voice, “Good night, Mother.” Now he was going downstairs, he was opening the back door into the garden, he had gone out!

“Now!” said Jennifer’s heart. “Now!” The whole listening world seemed to whisper back.

She slipped out of bed and down the stairs, she slid out of the back door like a soft shadow, and at last she was standing beside him on the top of the steps that led down to the garden, and the moon was all about them silver and grey, clear cut shadows, a certain magic softness in their depth.

Jennifer stood close to Billy, her head came level with his shoulder, her hands were warm and moist clinging to his.

“Kiss me, Billy,” whispered Jennifer, her face tilted up to his, “I do want you to.”

Of course he kissed her. He had come out intent on reading her a lecture. He had been more than a little shocked by her confession of the afternoon. Billy’s outlook upon love and passion which goes hand in hand with love, was essentially clean and very essentially British. Really nice girls did not like being kissed except by the one and only man, and there was something holy about the love which ultimately led to matrimony, there could be no trifling with it.

As for the other types of love, the kisses as Swinburne puts it, “which are bought and sold,” well, girls knew nothing about that, and nice women very little. Yet now with her softness pressed against him, with the fragrance of her hair and body rising into his brain like wine, Billy’s wisdom and his lecture were forgotten. Love in all his primitive splendour swept into the moon lit garden.

“I love you,” said Billy, and sold, as Colonel Hampton afterwards averred, his soul for a kiss.

It was indeed just at this critical soul parting moment that Colonel Hampton intervened. He had had his own suspicions about that garden, and the minx who was at present residing under his roof. Once or twice he had spied in secret and seen nothing; this time he saw sufficient to justify his wrath.

“William!” he said in a voice of thunder from the open door, “What are you doing, sir. Jennifer, oblige me by coming indoors.”

They should have gone in then, hand in hand, announcing their engagement. That, Billy felt, would have been the correct procedure. He very nearly carried it out only at that moment behind his father’s figure in the door, he caught sight of his mother’s face, white, strained, agonised, and with what was veritably a stab of toothache in his mind, Billy remembered how this thing would hurt his mother.

He let go of Jennifer therefore, and stood ashamed and silent. Ashamed, because suddenly all the beauty of the garden seemed to have left it, and with his eyes cleared of romance, he realised that Jennifer was dressed in such a way as would certainly shock Colonel and Mrs. Hampton.

Why had she done it? Never in all their evenings together, had she come down before, dressed, nay, rather it was undressed, like this.

Billy’s mind jumped away from what the thought involved. It rose to do battle for Jennifer and the new love in his heart.

“We weren’t doing anything very heinous, sir,” he said, “It isn’t a sin to kiss, is it . . .?”

“We can discuss that to-morrow,” said Colonel Hampton. “In the meanwhile I should suggest that Jennifer go to her bedroom---it is the only room in the house in which her present costume ought to be tolerated.”

And again beyond his father, beyond Jennifer’s shrinking, suddenly shame laden fluffiness, Billy saw his mother’s face and her eyes begging him, imploring him, kept him silent.

Chapter Five

“Young Love”

To Jennifer it was worse than tragedy that their meeting should have ended like that. She could not believe that Billy would so let it end. Long after the house was silent, and even Colonel Hampton’s muttered monotone which had gone on for some time in his wife’s bedroom, had ceased, Jennifer sat crouched up on the chair by her dressing table, waiting, waiting for Billy to come. Surely he would come, surely he had found her irresistible, lovely. Surely he loved her. It was one o’clock in the morning before she learnt her lesson, and the dressing gown discarded, crept into bed to cry herself to sleep.

At seven o’clock in the morning, there came a tap at the door.

“Come out for a walk, Jennifer,” said Billy’s voice, “I want to talk to you.”

Mrs. Hampton watched them go. Holding on to the curtains of her bedroom, she swayed a little. There were no tears now, the agony had grown beyond that. Last night, Colonel Hampton had talked to her for a long time on the subject of her foolish, mistaken generosity, and she had acquiesced with dry eyes. She could see no happiness for Billy in this love of his. She had always flattered herself that to a nice girl, she would hand over Billy’s happiness gladly. That was not true, but she did not know it. To no other woman would Mrs. Hampton either gladly or willingly have handed over her monopoly in Billy’s love, but least of all could she do it to Jennifer, whom she had from the first, instinctively disliked.

Billy was reading Jennifer a lecture. He had been lecturing his own self most of the night. Billy was very upright in his mind and the choice which had been so suddenly thrust upon him was a very momentous one. Mother did not like Jennifer; he had known that from the first, and he had known too why mother did not like her. Because she was, well---exotic. He called it that for want of a better name, because it was the adjective his mind had first found for her. And now he loved her. How was one going to reconcile the two things? All night, he had striven to reconcile them, and they refused to fit in. Love was like a fever---it inflamed the mind, just when one wanted to be able to think clearly. And Jennifer, Jennifer could not see his point of view. Jennifer, it seemed, had never loved her own mother, never loved anyone, until she had loved him. Nothing and no one in the world counted to Jennifer but him. She said that over and over again, walking beside him, her head thrown back, flushed, eager, excited.

“Why didn’t you come to me last night?” said Jennifer, “I waited for you. Oh, Billy, you can’t know how it hurt me, waiting for you, and your not coming.”

“How could I come?” said Billy, “Jennifer, one doesn’t . . . oh, good Lord, what do you think of me?”

“If you loved me, you would have come,” said Jennifer, “I was miserably unhappy. I cried.”

He slid his hand on to hers quickly. The thought of her tears hurt him. She was such a kid!

“I’m sorry, dear,” he said, “Oh, Jennifer, the whole thing is terribly complicated. What on earth are we to do?”

“You can marry me.” Jennifer was at least frank in her suggestions. “I’ll come to Africa with you. I’d love that.”

“And it’s just what I can’t do,” said Billy. He stopped and faced her. There were not many people about so early in the morning, only the milkman doing his rounds, a postman hurrying past. Just where they had stopped a laburnum tree hung out over the roadway, the pavement was all scattered gold. “There is mother,” said Billy.

“Do you like her better than me?” said Jennifer. “How can you? Billy, she is old. She has never been pretty. Don’t you think I’m pretty, Billy?”

Her words made him flush, his face grew stern. “I don’t understand you when you talk like that, Jennifer,” he said.

“Well, then, if you can’t marry me,” said Jennifer, her hands touched and caressed his coat, “It doesn’t matter, though it’s rather a pity. You can love me, Billy. I am not wrapped up in getting married.”

“What on earth do you mean?” asked Billy. “Mother wasn’t married to any of the men she lived with,” Jennifer told him, her head tilted a little back, the gold laburnum making a frame for the gold loveliness of her hair. “I don’t think she felt it mattered.”

“But it does matter, Jenny, oh, good God!” said Billy, “let’s go on walking, let me try and explain.”

That was his lecture, though indeed it was hardly so much a lecture as a very valiant attempt to make Jennifer understand the values and ethics of morals.

She found it a cold and dreary affair. Despite his eager chivalry, he could not make her think otherwise but that she had been rejected. They returned to the house, both of them, in a state of complete depression.

Colonel Hampton interviewed Billy in the study after breakfast. He was very brief like an officer on parade, and he very nearly drove Billy into a mutinous marriage.

“It will not be with my consent, you must understand that,” said Colonel Hampton. “The girl is an immoral minx. I never wanted to have her in the house, she comes of tainted stock, but your mother was sentimental about it, and here we are! However, now you understand exactly my position. It is not a question of money. I have nothing from which I could cut you off; it is a question of your seeing common sense or breaking your mother’s heart.”

That was just it. Mother stood in the line of fire. Billy felt rather as though his father thrust a revolver into his hand and challenged him to shoot.

Mrs. Hampton herself said nothing. He waited for her to speak, but it was as though she dared not put her thoughts into words. Dared not even, so it seemed to him, let her eyes rest on his.

He found her towards the end of the afternoon, when he was supposed to be out playing tennis with Jennifer, but somehow tennis had fallen through, in his room going through one of his boxes, packing it for him. He was due to leave now in a couple of weeks, the luggage was to go on ahead. The sight of her thin kneeling figure, his clothes in little orderly heaps all round her on the floor, made him remember the many times she had packed for him, sending him off to school. It had been such a desperate affair, the first sending off. No one had known about it except just they two, for it had been an understood thing between them that outwardly there was going to be no fuss.

“Little thing that I love,” she had called him that, clinging to him on the last morning. His own ridiculous, lovely---he had thought her lovely in those days---mother. And the first letters he had written to her. He had signed them “Your ever valiant son.” That had been a joke between them, a half-laughing resolution that he would be valiant whatever happened.

There were such hundreds of memories and jokes and thoughts between them.

“What are you up to, Ma?” he asked now standing in the doorway of his room, looking at her.

She turned at once. He could see that she had been crying. She seemed very pitiful somehow and old and faded, kneeling there among his things.

“I thought---” she began. She turned away putting a bundle of stockings in the box, patting it with her hands. “Have you finished your tennis?” she asked.

He came across and shut the lid of the box and sat on it and put his arms round her neck and his cheek against hers.

“Talk to me, Mother,” he said, “Your ever valiant son is in trouble and it hurts.”

He could hear her catch her breath, feel the strength of her anguish in the hands that held his for a second.

“Do you love her, Billy?” asked Mrs. Hampton, “That’s all that really counts.”

“But is it?” asked Billy. They drew apart; he helped her up and she sat on the box beside him, holding his hands.

How soft and cool her hands were, the tips of the fingers roughened with sewing. She did such a lot of sewing, most of it for him.

“There is quite a lot else that counts, isn’t there, Mother?”

“You mustn’t ask me to judge,” Mrs. Hampton spoke slowly, hardly above a whisper, “I don’t like her, Billy. I never have done. But if you love her, if she is going to make you happy . . .”

“Look here, Ma,” said Billy, he made his resolution then with her hands in his. “We are not going to be tragic about this, you and I, are we? Jennifer and I are not thinking of getting married---not yet awhile anyway. I’m going out to Africa for two and a half years. She is very young, so am I, and I think I’m sensible enough to realise that it would be madness to get married. But I do love her . . .” He flushed a little. “I don’t think I quite know how much. I’ll leave her with you, Ma. Look after her for me.”

Mrs. Hampton sat quite still, only her hands relaxed their hold of his and drew away. “I hope you won’t ever marry her, Billy,” she said softly, “I can’t but hope that.”

A good deal of consternation was caused at dinner time by Jennifer’s not being in the house. Mrs. Hampton went up to her room and came down looking pale and troubled.

“Everything is packed,” she announced. “Jennifer seems to have taken her suit case.”

“It’s a good riddance,” Colonel Hampton began. Billy pushed his chair back and rose.

“You’ll take that back,” he said fiercely. “It’s not the way to talk about Jennifer in front of me.”

“No, Reginald,” put in Mrs. Hampton from the door. “It isn’t right to say that.”

Colonel Hampton, half-way through his soup, muttered something into the next spoonful. “Where has she gone to?” he asked.

“There’s nothing to show,” began Mrs. Hampton. “Perhaps . . .” she broke off, “There is only Mr. Benson,” she added.

“Who is Mr. Benson?” Billy asked. He stood between them looking from one face to the other.

“One of her mother’s crowd,” said Colonel Hampton.

“Oh, it’s nothing like that, Billy,” Mrs. Hampton thrust in, “He is quite old---like a father to Jennifer. He was fond of her, good to her.”

“Where does he live?” asked Billy, he ignored her explanation. Mrs. Hampton gave him the address. It was the other side of London, an expensive neighbourhood behind Victoria Street.

“He is on the ’phone, Billy,” she added, “Why not ’phone and ask?”

He ’phoned from the nearest open shop. A servant answered. “Yes, Mr. Benson was in, but he was giving a dinner party. Was it urgent?”

“Very urgent,” said Billy, “I’ll hold on.” But even when Mr. Benson spoke from the other end of the wire, he could give him no news. Jennifer Postle, no, he had seen nothing of her since she had left the house with her aunt.

“I am her cousin,” Billy explained, “Jennifer said nothing about leaving this morning, she has just disappeared. Naturally, we are very upset and worried.”

“Naturally,” agreed Mr. Benson’s courteous voice. “Ah, well, I hope you will have reassuring news before morning.”

A small boy stopped Billy on his agitated walk home. He was, it seemed, the greengrocer’s lad, he introduced himself as such.

“Miss Postle, the young lady from your house, gave me this, sir,” he explained, “as she passed our shop midday.” He handed Billy an envelope, “Said would I give it to you when I saw you. Not to take it to the house.”

“Thank you,” said Billy. He fumbled in his pocket and gave the boy a shilling. Behind his anxiety, a little annoyance stirred. It was silly of Jennifer to go on like this, making such a mystery out of her departure. Departing at all for that matter. He had got quite a lot more he wanted to explain to her, an old signet ring of his that he had been going to give her.

“Dear Cousin Billy (Jennifer had written).

“This is to say goodbye. I can’t bear to stay in the same house and know that you don’t love me, and I am not quite a fool, I know perfectly well that Aunt Gertrude has never liked me. You are all wrong about love, Billy. One day I shall show you, though I don’t know how or when. Please ask Aunt Gertrude to send my box for me ‘c/o Miss Warren, Suntrap, Thames Ditton.’ That is where I am going. She is mother’s old cook, and now she takes in paying guests. Mother bought the house and gave it to her just before she died. Goodbye Billy. I think my heart is breaking, but mother always used to say hearts can’t break, they stretch and crack.”

Billy read the note and thrust it into his pocket and went on home. He told his mother where Jennifer had gone.

“I remember,” said Mrs. Hampton, “The old cook. She was there in the house when I went to see Margharita. Jennifer will be quite safe with her.”

“For to-night,” said Billy, setting his lips, “And tomorrow I will go and fetch her home.”

Mrs. Hampton made no answer, perhaps she felt there was nothing to say. Silence had come down between herself and Billy again.

And, as a matter of fact, Jennifer refused quite firmly to come home again.

“Cook quite agrees with me,” she told Billy. She interviewed him out in the garden at “Suntrap,” the garden with its lawn running down to the river, sitting under the trees where Margharita had been used to swing in her hammock. “She thinks I ought to work for my living. She knows a job that I can go to at once.”

“What kind of job?” asked Billy. He was feeling a little sore because Jennifer had been quite candid and rather rude about his mother.

“It’s as under nurse to some children in Ireland,” said Jennifer, “Cook knows the head nurse. I can go at once.”

“But, oh good Lord,” argued Billy. He looked very boyish and very unhappy. Jennifer felt like putting her arms round him and rubbing his cheek with her hair only Billy had told her only yesterday that it really was not very nice for girls to . . . “You can’t do that kind of work,” said Billy.

“Why not?” asked Jennifer, “I don’t know much about children, but I can learn, and cook says it will keep me out of mischief.”

Billy let his eyes follow the lazy ripples of the river till they lost themselves turning round a corner by the far off little island. He was thinking miserably of all the mischief to which Jenny might get up. There was no one else in the garden with them; the other paying guests, a young honeymoon couple, had taken the canoe and gone off for the day.

“I love you, Jenny,” said Billy slowly. “And I have got to leave you for two and a half years. Are you going to remember me at all?”

“I don’t suppose I shall ever forget you,” said Jenny. “Billy, let me tell you something.” She slid off her chair on to the grass beside him, putting her gold head against his knees. He could not see her face, but her voice came to him very grave and soft. “It is something mother said to me when she was dying,” Jennifer explained. “I was frightened, Billy, I think to the end of my life I shall always be frightened of death and old age and growing ugly.”

“It isn’t ugly to grow old,” Billy interrupted. The feel of her hair under his hand was filling him with soft warm thoughts. He loved her, nothing else really mattered at all.

“No, wait,” Jennifer went on, “It is something I want you to remember, whatever comes, I want you to remember it. I can see it all so awfully clearly now when I shut my eyes; the great dark bed, the scent mummy always used mixed with some other nastier, harsher smell; mummy’s face on the pillow. It looked so old, Billy, a hundred little lines I had never seen before---she had always been so lovely. And then her eyes, trying to tell me something, asking me for something. I don’t know what she wanted, Billy. I was so silly and absolutely useless. I just sat there, frightened, staring at her. “Bodies and souls, loves and sins, Jennifer,” that was what she said, “Don’t give any man your soul, Jennifer, the other thing doesn’t matter.”

“Poor sweetheart,” whispered Billy, and put his arm round her and stopped and kissed her hair.

She lifted her face with a little half sob, half laugh and clung to him, giving him her lips to kiss, her closed eyes, her fragrant cheeks.

“Oh, Billy, you haven’t understood,” she said, “But I have loved you. I have given you my soul, Billy, and that is what mummy said I ought never, never to do.”

He held her to him for a moment, letting the tumult of his heart die down and then he let go of her rather brusquely and stood up.

“One can’t give souls away, Jenny,” he said. “They are just the one bit of us that don’t belong to us at all.”

“I wonder,” said Jenny. She sat where he had left her, a certain listlessness in her poise. Her hands had picked a flower out of the grass, a wide faced daisy, she seemed to be pulling it to pieces.

“You’ll write me, won’t you?” said Billy. He was trying to recapture the comradeship that had been between them before he had kissed her. “I’ll write you every week. Jenny, two and a half years won’t take long to pass.”

“I shall be twenty when you come back,” said Jenny. She stood up and shook the daisy petals out of her skirt. “It seems a long way away.”

She walked down to the railway station with him to see him off. She seemed to have recovered her spirits, laughing and talking. She had promised to write him, promised to go and see Aunt Gertrude if she was ever in London.

“I hate your being an under nurse,” Billy returned to his first argument, “And mother will always be ready to take you back, Jenny. She knows I love you, she is quite resigned to our getting married on my first leave.”

Which was not strictly true, but youth is inclined to be buoyantly assertive about these kind of things.

“I’ll remember,” said Jennifer, “And Billy, don’t come down again to say ‘goodbye.’ I hate ‘goodbyes’---they are very nearly as ugly as death.”

“You silly kid,” remonstrated Billy and kissed her on the railway station before everyone and thought how cool her lips were, and was miserable because there seemed to be no response.

That was their parting anyway. Somehow, Jennifer felt that it was like saying ‘goodbye’ to youth.

Chapter Six

“Mrs. Martin”

Lying stretched out in the placid clear water of the bath, Jennifer studied the slim loveliness of her body. On Saturday nights, she was allowed a bath, though it is doubtful if the household had realised how much water she took whether she would have been allowed even that concession. For the other days in the week, she washed in cold water in a basin in her small, severely neat room at the top of the house. Jennifer had been under nurse at Scarton Manor, just outside Dublin, for three months now.

“I very much doubt,” so Jennifer’s thoughts ran, she had washed even her hair to-night, it lay dark and sleek and wet close to her head, “Whether I am going to be able to stand this very much longer.”

She was not referring to the temperature of the bath, though that, thanks to her prolonged immersion, had grown chilly, She was thinking of all the things involved in being an under nurse. One got up at six-thirty every morning, even Sunday, reflected Jenny with a little sigh, and dressed one’s self in very unbecoming stiff rustling garments. There was a collar one wore round one’s neck for instance that was calculated to destroy any beauty of line. Then one went downstairs and did the day nursery and helped the housemaid bring up the children’s breakfast. Then, no inconsiderate burden this, there were the children.

“I am wrongly made,” reflected Jennifer, she lifted one perfect slim leg out of the water and wiggled her toes to watch the drops chase each other down the smooth whiteness, “I don’t like children.”

She certainly did not like the Scarton Manor children. There were three of them, Honor, the eldest, a dark sombre eyed violent tempered child of seven; Anthony, fat, pugnacious and obstinate, aged five; and the baby Joy, most inappropriately named Jennifer had always felt, who had spent ten months of whining misery in a thoroughly unhappy world. That was all due to its digestion, poor lamb, nurse said. Nurse Johnson, the autocrat who ruled over Jennifer, was a large, formidable female who stood “no nonsense,” her own expression, from anyone. Least of all from the children, or the under nurse, and yet instead of her iron rule producing peace in the nursery, it appeared to have the other effect. Jennifer, personally, had never met three mortals so capable of making discordant noises as the Weldon children.

Of the rest of the household, she saw very little. There was a Mr. Weldon, long, mournful, habitually silent, who made a great deal of money out of some mysterious industry that necessitated many trips away from home, and there was a Mrs. Weldon, artistic looking, slim, willowy, rather whiney in her talk, who spent half an hour with the children every evening and seemed to thoroughly dislike the duty. Jennifer always attended these functions. At six of the clock, which sat like Fate on the nursery mantelpiece, tick, tick, ticking life away, Jennifer would put on a clean apron, straighten her cap (how that gold head of hers hated wearing a cap!), and with Honor, nearly always in a bad temper stalking ahead, and Anthony lagging behind, he hated to leave his train, she would proceed down to the drawing room, bearing a wailing Joy in her arms. Then, for half an hour, she would either stand about, or help Miss Joy to walk, or build brick castles for Master Tony to knock down, or sit very primly on the edge of one of the drawing room chairs and listen to Mrs. Weldon. The Weldons were quite wealthy; they had three cars and an immense staff of servants, but the whole family seemed, so Jennifer wrote in her letters to Billy, to be blighted by indigestion.

In the afternoons, Jennifer took the children out in the gardens and nurse rested. In the evenings, after the half-hour in the drawing room, she got their baths ready, helped Honor with hers, and put the baby to sleep while nurse bathed Tony.

“One ought, I suppose,” reflected Jennifer, she stepped out of the bath, shivering a little, she had stayed in too long, “to get pleasure out of simple things. The gardens are lovely,” she stood on tiptoe, the towel wrapped round her to peer out of the highly placed window. “And to-day there was that robin, singing away on that fir branch. He was lovely, loving life. I am sure one ought to love life.”

Her nightgown, anyway, was a thing of pleasure. She slipped it on, the silk sighed softly settling about her perfect limbs, and then there was the dressing gown, the one that had so shocked Billy and the Hamptons.

“Billy’s mind was shocked,” sighed Jennifer. She gathered the dressing gown round her, made a bundle of her day clothes, and hid them under her towel. How she hated those under nurse’s clothes!

“Yes, there is something wicked about me,” reflected Jennifer. “I just hate work and being good.”

All the same the prospect of facing nurse and beyond nurse, Mrs. Weldon, and giving notice was in some odd way, disconcerting. Upstairs in her own room, Jennifer brought out her jewel box and counted over her savings. Ten pounds. It certainly did not appear to be very much with which to face the world. Of course, there was always cook, but it seemed hardly fair to plant one’s self on cook, and Mrs. Hampton. A vision of the Hampton household rose in front of her. It was winter now, the French windows would be closed, there would be a very discreet small fire burning in the grate, and Aunt Gertrude would be sitting beside it, knitting, thinking of Billy, very silent for the most part, or else talking gently about the weather, about the sermon in church last Sunday, or the new butcher.

“And that isn’t what I want either,” thought Jennifer, and sat down in front of her glass. It was a very modest one, about five inches square; she could only just see her eyes. “What do I really want?” Jennifer asked of her eyes.

Blue, star like eyes, searching, asking. What were they looking for, what was the question they asked? Jennifer was remembering now, seeing herself in the gold frock that her mother had given her for her seventeenth birthday; she was dancing. There was a man’s face. She did not like him very much, he obtruded rather. A dark face, bold eyes, coarse mouth. Why had she ever let him kiss her? Why did she remember him now? “The not nice side of me, that,” thought Jennifer, and turned desperately to memories of Billy. “One can’t give souls away,” Billy had said. ‘They are just the one thing that doesn’t really belong to us.’ But then, what is it you want from me, Billy? Not my body, that was all yours and you would not have it. Oh, Billy, Billy, why would you not understand, why did you go away and leave me?” The not nice side of me!” Jennifer leant a little closer, looking. “What answer can you make to that, Blue Eyes? What defence bring forward?”

The ten pounds that she had been holding in her hands fluttered to the ground, recalling her to her present problem. She stooped and picked them up and smoothed them out and laid them away in her jewel box. “If I give notice,” decided Jennifer, “And work out my month, I’ll get another four pounds and they’ll have to pay my passage back. That’s the sensible thing to do. I’ve got to try to be sensible.” And so to bed and to sleep and to dream. A great person for dreaming, Jennifer in those days.

But in the end, she did not give notice. It was very difficult as Mrs. Hampton had found occasion to remark, for Jennifer to be sensible. She was docile to a certain extent, not excessively full of initiative and a great dissembler, but she was not either courageous or very bold. Things went on with Jennifer till she would suddenly wake up and decide they could not be endured one moment longer. And then she would act childishly. Till she was quite old, she retained this inconsidered impulsiveness of childhood. Her escape from Scarton Manor was essentially childish but it had about it some of the thrill of an adventure, and for that she enjoyed it.

“Mrs. Weldon says you and I may have one of the cars this afternoon, Postle,” said nurse, regally, during the course of nursery lunch, “And take the children into Dublin. There are those shoes to be got for Miss Honor and Master Anthony.”

“Yes,” acquiesced Jennifer, and it was at that moment that Jennifer decided quite definitely and silently that she could not go on being a nurse.

There was, as one may perceive, no sensible reason for her so deciding. A drive into Dublin was a most welcome change from taking the children out into the garden, and nurse to-day was amiable, even the children more affable than usual. But there it was---things could not go on. She dressed for the outing in a perfect whirl of excitement, leaving off her print frock, hiding her own coat and skirt under the prim black coat that Mrs. Weldon had presented her with as outdoor uniform. And then there was her suitcase to pack. A fabrication to make up about that. “It needed to be mended. Can I take it, and I’ve got some shoes in it.” Her felt hat, folded out of all decency, thrust in on top, to replace the hated straw bonnet as soon as possible. Her ten pounds clutched in her small purse.

She was so gay driving into Dublin that even Nurse Johnson had to unbend a little.

“A drive like this does us all good,” said Nurse Johnson, “Though it’s not often Mrs. Weldon thinks of it.”

The boot shop where Honor and Anthony were to be fitted was very near the railway station, which was fortunate for Jennifer, because when they pulled up there and nurse, very regally got out with the two elder children, leaving as she expressed it, “Postle to mind the baby,” Jennifer had just exactly ten minutes in which to catch her train to Kingstown. Excitement made the blood thump in her heart, but she had to wait, outwardly decorous, and as usual, until the swing door of the shop closed on Nurse Johnson. Then it was only a matter of a few minutes’ deft arrangement to prop Joy up in the corner, surrounded by cushions, to grab her suit case and explain to Thomas, the chauffeur, that the baby was all right and she would not be a second, just taking her shoes round the corner, and Jennifer was off, without the slightest pang of regret of deserting her post and neglecting her sacred charge---the baby.

She caught the train, though it was a question of seconds, the door slammed behind her, Dublin slid out of view. “There,” said Jennifer, with a little chuckle of laughter deep down in her heart. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to bear it a moment longer, and I haven’t.”

Indescribably dreary that journey from Dublin to Kingstown, from Kingstown to Holyhead, from Holyhead to London. It was a bleak, cold day; the sea a tumultuous wash of greyness, a steady drizzle greeting and enfolding the train all the way down through the English landscape, bare bound by winter. Jennifer’s courage had oozed out of cold limbs, the laughter had died out of her heart long before she reached London.

Where was she to go? What on earth was she to do? The ten pounds had already dwindled very considerably. There were not many passengers on the train, one could imagine no one travelling for choice on such a day.

On the boat, Jennifer had dispensed with her nurse’s coat and bonnet, she had made friends with one of the stewards, and he had found her some brown paper and string, and she had made a parcel of them and addressed it to Mrs. Weldon, Scarton Manor, near Dublin. She had time just to post that before the train left for London.

There was another woman sharing the carriage with her from Liverpool. A good-natured looking, stout lady, dressed in furs that had at one time been opulent. She seemed very interested in Jennifer, she stared at her a great deal and offered to lend her papers and at last came and sat opposite to her and started talking.

“Going to stay in London?” she asked. She had prominent, not unkindly eyes and a loose mouth, the type of mouth that always seems to carry egg stains until quite late in the day. “Know London at all?”

“I have always lived there,” said Jennifer, “At least, mostly. But this, well, it is a little different. I don’t really know where I am going to stay.”

“No one meeting you?” said the friendly lady. “That’s bad. You’re too young and too pretty to be knocking about by yourself.”

“Well, you see, I’ve left rather suddenly,” Jennifer explained, “I was doing some work I didn’t like. I felt I just couldn’t bear it any longer.” She looked away, she felt, for the moment, uncomfortably near crying. “I know someone at Thames Ditton,” she added, “I can of course, go there.”

“My name is Martin,” said the stout woman, “Mrs. Martin. I’ve been through hard times myself. God knows. I like to help other girls when I can, remembering my own hard times. Look here, you come home with me to-night. I’ve a little place off Holborn. To-morrow things will look brighter, eh . . . It’s wonderful how a night’s sleep clears things up.”

“That is most awfully kind of you,” said Jennifer. “You don’t know anything about me. I might be . . .”

“I can see you are naught but a chicken fresh out of the egg,” laughed Mrs. Martin. “You leave things to me. I’ll look after you for the night.”

She was as good as her word. She seemed to have the possessive instinct very strongly developed in her, though so far it had been thwarted. She had not got a chick or a thing in the world belonging to her, so she told Jennifer. She had apparently a certain amount of money, and though the house into which she ushered Jennifer, after a great deal of argument with the taximan as to his exact fare, was dingy enough looking from the outside, the room in which they finally found themselves was quite pleasantly furnished, well lit and comfortable. It was obviously a bed-sitting-room, the bed large and opulent, occupying one entire wall. There was, in addition to this a sofa, upon which Mrs. Martin indicated her guests were quite often provided with ‘shake-downs,’ a large round table, several chairs and a screen discreetly concealing the furniture necessary to washing and dressing.

Mrs. Martin, animated and enthusiastic about her own kindness (she was undoubtedly kind, though Jennifer found the intimacy thus thrust upon her, rather oppressive), talked most volubly the while she got Jennifer’s ‘shakedown’ ready. She made some coffee on a Primus stove, and cleared part of the table on which to eat their supper, such as it was.

“I’ve been in trouble myself,” that was the main current of her conversation, “And, there, a young girl can’t be too careful. The harpies that there are waiting to snatch her up at any of these big London stations! If you had fallen into one of their hands, my dear, now, it fair makes me shiver! Mind you, I’m not saying that immorality isn’t a paying concern.” She seemed to brood over this. Her coat discarded, she showed herself to be enveloped in a blouse of startling hue. “I could tell you some tales, my dear. But there, there is some of us, thank God, sets our virtue higher than money and having a good time.” She sighed, rather ponderously, and besought Jennifer to have some more coffee. “Isn’t that so?” she asked.

“Yes,” agreed Jennifer, “I suppose it is.”

“Married at seventeen, I was,” proceeded Mrs. Martin, her whole life’s history seemed to be going to unfold before Jennifer’s very eyes, “At seventeen, that isn’t much more than a child, is it, and a wilful passionate man, my husband. Passion, Lord, dearie, I could tell you some tales. Still, they were comfortable, well-to-do years. And then he must needs go and die all of a sudden and leave me a widow---with no children; I’ve got to be thankful for that---and the wolf at the door. Young, too, good looking I was. Dear me!” She rose and swept cups and saucers and plates and the remains of the cold tongue and boiled eggs on to a tray with an amazing disregard of safety or cleanliness. “It’s all a long way away and I’ve weathered it somehow, but I know what temptation is. There’s a man now . . .”

“Can’t I help you wash up?” asked Jennifer, in an attempt to stem the flood of confidences.

“Oh no,” said Mrs. Martin. She dropped the china with a rattle into a hand basin behind the curtain. “I do that in the morning. You slip into your bye-byes now, you’re tired out. I’m here to look after you---say ‘Thank you’ in your prayers, my dear. I could tell you some tales. There was a girl . . .”

The story was long and involved and rather unpleasant. Jennifer carried it with her into her dreams, that and a picture of Mrs. Martin, grotesque, absurd, undressing.

“It is Saturday night,” thought Jennifer, just as she dropped off to sleep. “I ought to be having a bath. Those baths were nice, though nothing else was.”

Somehow, in her dream, the bath became symbolical of all she had so wilfully deserted.

Chapter Seven

“The Open Door”

Jennifer stayed on with Mrs. Martin, not because she particularly wanted to do so, but because for the moment, it seemed the easiest thing to do. Undoubtedly, cook would disapprove of her desertion from Scarton Manor, and Jennifer, like many luxury-loving natures, disliked disapproval. And despite Billy’s repeated reassurances, she had no intention whatsoever, of going back to Aunt Gertrude. Aunt Gertrude had not liked her, dislike was even worse than disapproval.

Luxury loving she might be, she certainly got none of it at Mrs. Martin’s. They lived in a state of almost indescribable discomfort. “Pigging it,” Mrs. Martin called it with her easy, rather coarse laughter, and that came nearer the truth than anything else. But she was kind and singularly tolerant, and she seemed from the first to have developed quite an affection for Jennifer.

“I could tell you things.” The things she told Jennifer had been dragged through all the gutters of London. Mrs. Martin’s facile tongue, her searching eyes, smirched and soiled everything they rested on. Her own virtue had obviously not stayed so immune as she liked to make out. But whatever trade she may have plied in her blowsy youth, when she had been thrown down defenceless for all the temptations of London to trample on, so she often described it to Jennifer, her present mode of life was apparently quite blameless. She had no men friends that Jennifer met, only one faithful and elderly gentleman who had always wanted to marry her, who was too good to tolerate the idea of anything else, and who could not, because he was already married. Thus did romance, certainly in odd enough guise, haunt the drab environments of Mrs. Martin’s life.

She was an odd woman, kindly, impulsive, shrewd, and in a way, generous. Witness her befriending of Jennifer, for it was at the outset a purely humane impulse. That she was no fit guide for youth she, naturally, did not herself realise. Her stories may, or may not, have been true; they were of no use to anyone and far better unsaid. But Mrs. Martin had the imagination of a third class French novelist, and she simply had to talk to whoever was with her.

She was making a living in these days, at least, by buying and selling old clothes, and she had a large business connection in this respect with the theatrical profession. It was probably that which turned her mind to getting Jennifer on to the stage. Her imagination, rich in its own particular view, leapt ahead and saw Jennifer installed as some radiant queen of immorality with Mrs. Martin engaged as her housekeeper and affable chaperone.

She mooted the idea to Jennifer in suitable guise.

“There is a lot of rubbish talked about the immorality of the stage,” said Mrs. Martin, resting on Jennifer’s sofa, after a hard day’s tramping about London. “My dear, I could tell you a thing or two, but the plain unvarnished truth is that there are good girls and bad girls on the stage, just as there are anywhere else.”

Jennifer was preparing the supper. That side of their communal life had of late fallen to her share. Not that she had any liking for it. Cook, for instance, had long ago proved that it was no use trying to teach Jennifer housework or cooking. This was simply a matter of sheer necessity, for Jennifer, loving beauty to the tips of her fingers, could not abide living and eating in the state of squalor which Mrs. Martin quite happily tolerated.

With Jennifer, things had to be neat and they had to be clean, or else she had to leave them and as yet, she had not reached the stage of running away again.

“I am sure there are,” she answered Mrs. Martin’s vague assertion, and for a moment her mind turned the problem over, good and bad, moral and immoral, what did it really mean? Jennifer had no laid down rules for life like Billy had for instance. Her mother had been, she knew that now, indeed she had learnt it at her first school though she had never referred to it, what people called immoral, and though Margharita had never been an ideal mother, she had always appeared to Jennifer as lovely and desirable, full of laughter in her happy days, never acrimonious or petty, or inclined to find fault. Did God hate immorality then because in indulging it, some one broke men’s laws, or did the hate go deeper than that; did immorality in the end bring degradation to the soul? Very difficult to answer those questions at any time, especially difficult in the atmosphere of this congested stuffy room, with the supper to be got ready and Mrs. Martin’s perpetual flow of stories.

“I met a man to-day, dearie,” thus Mrs. Martin continuing her own trend of thought, “As might be useful to you. Influential he is in the theatre world---pots of money. He’s just backed that thing that’s been such a failure at the King’s. Mind you, there are stories told about him.” She eyed Jennifer with her round, rather protruding, amiable eyes. “But there, it doesn’t do to believe all one hears in the theatre.”

As a matter of fact, the extent of Mrs. Martin’s knowledge of the gentleman in question was the stories she had heard. She had never spoken to him, and her meeting with him had consisted of seeing him stalk past the stage door while she was in conversation with Thomas, the gentleman who sat in his small box at the entrance in charge apparently of the nether regions, which conduct one to the stage.

“See that,” Thomas had said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the gentleman who had just gone past with the briefest of nods, “That’s Robert Harland.”

“Well, who is he?” Mrs. Martin had asked. “Don’t you know?” Thomas had seemed contemptuous. “Why, he’s the lad as is putting all the money in to boost up this show. And, Gawd, it needs it. Dead as a doornail. But it’s being all re-produced, new stuff put in. They do say as how he’s only done it because Betty Branson, you know, the star lady in Divorce, has turned him down after having been his keeps for a couple of years, and he’s damn well going to make the girl in this show beat her hollow.”

“Turned him down, has she?” Mrs. Martin had speculated on that, her busy mind jumping from point to point. “What’s the girl here like?”

“Oh, she ain’t bad,” Thomas was not enthusiastic, “Bit too good like---no guts about her. Dances nicely, but can’t sing for rotten apples. I’ve known the days when they’d have been thrown at her, too.”

“And this Mr. Harland?”

“Oh, he---” Thomas had definitely snorted, “A young bloke what’s got money to burn. His poor pa made it in tin or something. He likes the world to know all about his lady friends---he’s that kind.”

An apt description, probably. Thomas was no mean judge of character, so many of all kinds floated past his small office. Mrs. Martin had pursued her investigations further on upstairs in one of the dressing rooms. She was engaged in trying to sell a coat, a magnificent fur coat, to the lady who took the part of the pert housemaid in the present production and who was, as a matter of fact, rather an important personage, being the wife of the producer.

Mr. Manson, the producer of many very fine successes in London, was a languid Jewish looking man, with an amazing command of language and a capacity for thrusting himself at a moment’s notice into any part. He could act as very few of the people whom he dragooned and pushed into their various positions of prominence in the public eye would ever be able to act, and yet he had never been a success as an actor. His brain was too busy, too fertile. It leapt from conception to achievement; he was never content to be a part of the whole; if he was on the stage himself, he was always prompting, nudging, urging the others to get their parts done the right way with the result that he never succeeded in impressing his own part as a finished whole on the audience. Yet, never the less, he was a personality behind the scenes, and if he took a show in hand, his word was law as far as the management was concerned.

He was sitting in one of his crumpled up positions in his wife’s dressing room when Mrs. Martin, complete with magnificent coat, was ushered in. He never sat very upright on anything, Mr. Manson, his back seemed always to be looking for some curve into which to place itself. And he was restless and apparently upset to-day, talking in a high shrill voice, making no attempt to notice Mrs. Martin’s entrance, or anything like that. Mr. Manson very rarely bothered over being polite to anyone, he had all the Jew’s magnificent contempt for what he considered underlings and his rather servile politeness to those in authority.

“It’s just sickening,” he was remarking, “I shan’t carry it on---that’s all. They give me a stuffed rag doll with pretty pink cheeks and a lisp and they say, “There you are, Manson, you are clever; you turn that into a public idol, a heroine that the pit will adore. It’s all such ghastly rubbish. I tell you in that love scene---God, I could do better myself.”

“I’m sure you could, James.” Mrs. Manson was essentially placid, not at all Jewish, very plump and pretty and fair. “Why don’t you suggest getting someone else for the job?”

“That’s it,” agreed Manson; he was suddenly enthusiastic. He stood up and swept his long arms about and tossed away the black wave of hair that was very obtrusive and would get into his eyes when he was excited. “If I could get a girl out of the gutter---somebody no one knew---not one of these made to pattern, ‘Pay-me-five-hundred-pounds-a-week stars’---I could make this piece. I could breathe life into her---my life---my genius.”

“Yes, dear,” interrupted Mrs. Manson. “But that would hardly please Harland. The lady has got to be his show in this concern.”

“Blast Harland!” said Manson; he sank back again, biting his nails; he frowned fiercely at Mrs. Martin, “What is this fat woman doing here?” he asked.

“She’s brought a coat for me to see,” explained Mrs. Manson. “Here, let me try it on. And how goes the world with you, Mrs. Martin?”

Mrs. Manson always attempted to make up for her husband’s rudeness. She held that genius was all very well, but it did not always make the world comfortable.

Mrs. Martin had found her tongue quite volubly. She had not missed a word of Manson’s ‘grouse.’ Now it all came out in a chattering stream (while Mrs. Manson studied herself in the glass), how she had found Jennifer, mothered her, Jennifer’s youth, her beauty. “Just the girl you want, Mr. Manson,” she assured his glowering silence, “You need not take my word for it. You can see her; try her . . .”

The theatre is a strange world of inconsequent happenings. Nothing ever happens there by rote. It is a world built up and fostered and kept going by the imagination of men. Imagination which can flare up to the heights, or sink to the level of a guttering candle light. Something anyway, in Mrs. Martin’s voluble utterances, which at most times, would have bored Jimmie Manson’s mind to hysterics, caught his attention now.

“I’d like to see your paragon,” he admitted. “Bring her here to-morrow, 12.15.”

Mrs. Manson swung round. “Jimmie, you’re mad,” she said, “This isn’t your show, it’s Harland’s.”

“Well, Harland can see her, too,” Manson argued. “One thing is certain. I don’t go on with this show as it is. And if---Jove, can’t you see the advertising sting in a girl like that. Slap out of the gutter to stardom!”

“Not quite out of the gutter, Mr. Manson,” Mrs. Martin had intervened, “She’s a good girl . . .”

“Oh, don’t talk rubbish!” said Mr. Manson. “We aren’t an advertising department for the Purity Brigade. Do you want that coat, Nellie? I’ll give £20 for it.”

Mrs. Martin pocketed her £20 after a little further argument. Not that it was much use discussing prices with Manson; if he named a sum, you took it or left it. She did not mention Jennifer again, or the gutter; only as she was leaving, she said with a certain fawning obtrusiveness, “12.15 to-morrow, is it then, sir?”

Manson had nodded and Mrs. Manson had followed Mrs. Martin outside the door.

“Don’t set too great store on Jimmie’s remarks, “she confided. “He’s worried and upset. He’s right enough in his judgment though. The show’s no good with the present girl, but there you are, it isn’t every girl who would tolerate Harland, and she’s got to be a fair peach for him to look at her.”

So much then, Mrs. Martin had heard. It needed some discreet cloaking.

“What do you feel like, dearie, about going on the stage?” Mrs. Martin asked Jennifer.

Jennifer poured out the coffee and pushed Mrs. Martin’s cup across the table.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve thought of it of course. They seem so happy, don’t they, and then it must be wonderful having all that admiration, everyone thinking you wonderful, It is hard work, though, isn’t it?”

“Not for those as succeeds,” said Mrs. Martin, largely. “And somehow, I sees you succeeding.”

Jennifer laughed. “Do you?” she said, “Then you and I could move into a comfortable flat, couldn’t we, and keep a servant and . . .”

“I’d look after you, my dear, as long as you’d let me,” said Mrs. Martin, “And, mind you, there are things I’d guard you against. I could tell you a story or two . . .”

“Oh, yes,” Jennifer interrupted, “You should look after me.”

She was really grateful to Mrs. Martin. Kind, grotesque, rather dirty-minded, Mrs. Martin. With Jennifer, gratitude was quite a real force. “Well, how does one set about going on the stage?” she asked.

“That is just what I was coming to,” said Mrs. Martin. “Mind you, I’ve been looking round for you ever since I first brought you home for the night. Funny all that’s come out of our chance meeting, isn’t it? You and I. I feel like a mother to you sometimes, dear. Well, as I say, I’ve been looking round and to-day I’ve heard of a chance. Such a chance . . .”

She related her day’s doings, much embroidered, carefully embellished. To Jennifer, not unnaturally, it sounded wildly exciting.

“To-morrow,” she whispered. “Oh, of course, he mayn’t like me at all. I mayn’t be pretty enough. Clever---I don’t really think I am clever. Oh, I wonder . . .”

“It’s a chance,” sighed Mrs. Martin, “Oh, dearie, don’t be washing up the supper things to-night. It don’t seem fitting, and you with such a great future in front of you.”

With the supper things unwashed, the childish thrill of imagining herself a great actress had been too much for Jennifer’s hardly acquired domesticity, Jennifer sat down to write to Billy.

“Tremendous decision been reached to-night” (she wrote). Jennifer had been very vague so far in her letters to Billy, as to what she was doing, where she was living. “Dearest Billy” (she had written in her first letter), “I really and truly couldn’t stand being an under nurse one moment longer, so I’ve left, that’s that. I am staying, for the time being, with a friend in London---a Mrs. Martin---she has a large bed-sitting-room, and I share it.” That had come in another letter.

But of her thoughts and of her good resolutions, which mostly failed, and of her depressions and her ridiculous laughters---Mrs. Martin was so funny that sometimes she had to be laughed at---Jennifer told Billy nothing at all. Very definitely she felt that in some odd way, Billy had moved into another world when he had put her from him that afternoon in the garden and stood up and said so sternly, “You can’t give your soul away, Jenny.” There was a door between her world and Billy’s and Billy’s love, his eager, boyish, loving letters, kept the door open. She loved him, but he had got nothing to do with her everyday life and one day, she seemed to know that quite well, something would shut the door between them. There would be a finality about that closed door that their love would be able to do nothing against. So now she wrote always a little timidly to this Billy of hers, who was in another world. But to-night, gladness, excitement, thrill could not be kept quite out of her letter. “I am going on the stage. I really am, Billy. I am going to be an actress. Perhaps, when you come home, I shall be famous, but, oh, I’ll throw it all up if you’ll ask me to; to go with you into your world, Billy, to be loved by you, to be allowed to love you. Isn’t it a momentous (is that spelt right?) decision? Cross your thumbs for me, Billy, when you read this, because it may be my first night, and I shall be dithering with fright.”

“Next week,” (this was added as a postscript) “I may have to write and tell you that it’s no use, and I am going back to be an under nurse---but I don’t think I could be that again, Billy, dear Billy.”

Chapter Eight

“Sir Galahad”

“Mr. Hampton is a very nice boy,” said Mrs. Rutherford, she said it with her usual forceful decision, “But he knows about as much of life as a new born babe and I should not be surprised (her brown eyes twinkled with laughter), if life did not have one or two nasty surprises for young Galahad.”

“Galahad!” asked the only other occupant of the drawing room, “What makes you call him that?”

“His strength is as the strength of ten,
Because his heart is pure.”

laughed Mrs. Rutherford. She moved a little in her chair so that the last rays of sunshine lit up the sewing in her hands. Mrs. Rutherford was large and strong and capable. She had been twenty years off and on in Africa, doing two-and-a-half years at a stretch. The life abroad, the constant journeying, the separations from either husband or children which had to be borne with a certain stoic cheerfulness, had given her a wide outlook on life, had taught her patience and tolerance and courage. She was an asset in any station where her husband had to be sent. She had mothered innumerable boys through their first tours, had given endless sound advice to new wives and harassed young mothers. She loved Africa, and yet she had learnt to be very wisely afraid of her. Not for herself, but for others.

“My Roland shall never come out to Africa, if I can help it,” was one of her best known utterances, and no one quite knew why she said it, seeing the success which she and her husband appeared to have achieved in a country of which she was undoubtedly fond.

Captain Anson, her companion in the drawing room, sitting back in his comfortable chair, drinking his “sundowner” was quite aware of this fear which Mrs. Rutherford felt. It interested him. He was a man very much inclined to be interested in his neighbours and he liked Mrs. Rutherford immensely, had known her for many years. Rutherford was at the present time the Provincial Commissioner of the district in which Captain Anson happened to be Police Officer; they had therefore seen quite a lot of each other lately. Captain Anson was small and debonair and tactful. He was popular and no one credited him with the acute powers of observation which he undoubtedly possessed.

“I see,” he said now. “Well, I suppose, the Galahads of this world probably do suffer in their journey through life.”

“There’s a certain element about purity,” said Mrs. Rutherford, “which is unbendable, and it makes one, well, you know, difficult to fit in to other people’s peculiarities.”

“And who,” asked Captain Anson, “is our young friend Hampton not fitting in with at the present moment?”

“Oh, I don’t mean anyone or anything in particular,” laughed Mrs. Rutherford, she rose, putting her work away. “Come out on the lawn, Captain Anson; it’s really too dark to see indoors, and I’ll play you an amiable game of croquet.”

“I’ve reached that age, I presume, when croquet is considered a suitable relaxation,” grumbled Captain Anson as he followed her. “I mistrusted you, Mrs. Rutherford, when I saw you eyeing me and laying down this lawn.”

It was difficult to believe out in Mrs. Rutherford’s garden that just on the other side of the hedges, neatly cut thoroughly English looking hedges, there was Africa. So completely had the wildness, the lawlessness been shut out from this quiet retreat. Here there were English flowers, growing in stately rows, hollyhocks, stocks, lupins, larkspur; here the grass had been sodded and cut and rolled to a semblance of English lawn. Here there were flagged paths, radiant flowering roses, arches of honeysuckle.

It was ridiculous, Captain Anson felt, almost presumptuous, this implanting of English flowers and atmosphere, and sometimes he got most curiously an oppressive sense of Africa pushing close against the enfolding hedges, struggling clamorously to get in. If one looked up to the blue sky, one saw tall watching, odd shaped, untidy palms peering in; if one stopped talking and listened on an evening like this, the air throbbed and hummed with queer, unnameable insect life. And native drums too, one could not shut out their haunting clamour, not even from a peace enfolded garden like this one of the Provincial Commissioner.

“There must be some jamboree on to-night, surely,” he asked Mrs. Rutherford, “Just listen to the Lihala’s drums.”

The Lihala was titulary king of the place. A big, elderly, sullen faced native. Disloyal---well, of course, he was disloyal, if you could count resentment of the curtailing of all his powers and liberties as disloyalty. Rutherford had sometimes to go through very unpleasant times with the Lihala. Teaching, explaining, trying to instil patience and forbearance, as he himself had to exercise them.

“I think the daughter is being married at the end of this week,” said Mrs. Rutherford. She hit her balls with neat precision, she looked very English and cool, and settled in the beautiful garden that her hands had fashioned. “Do you remember the panic year?” she asked, “When our new D.C. thought those drums betokened a native rising?”

They both laughed at the remembrance. It had been one of those absurd, unexpected laughable events peculiar to the mad African world that surrounded them. There had been a party at the Rutherfords’, all the white people of the district had been present. ‘All’ covered a wide boundary; it included government officials, planters, missionaries, road foremen, motor drivers. A mixed assemblage, going on after the garden party to their own individual amusements and relaxations. One of the guests, a road foreman, Scottish, taciturn, violent when in drink, had got very drunk at one of the native shops, and on his way home, to such a home as he had, late at night had fallen into the local river. He had been hauled out by the natives and immediately, half sobered and furious, had set about him with a stick, beating all and sundry. Such an unforeseen event could only in the natives’ mentality, be met with by drums. Always they beat the drums for any disaster, a lion round the cattle kraals, a fire at a chief’s house, a fight, a bad earthquake. Out rang the drums, played on from every hill, from every scattered chief’s house. Calling, answering each other, till at last the King’s drum, steady, authoritative, took up the call. Then, indeed, pandemonium reigned. When the King’s drum called, every grown man, whatsoever his work, must answer. Houseboys rushed out, cooks deserted their posts, the roads round the station resounded with the ‘pad, pad’ of naked feet.

Mrs. Rutherford herself had not been alarmed; her fear of Africa did not work along visible, even probable, lines, but several of the white ladies of the station had been badly alarmed.

How they had all laughed afterwards, thinking of that fierce turbulent Scot and the summoning drums.

“A Gilbert and Sullivan country, isn’t it?” said Captain Anson. “At least the white community makes it that. By the way, what does young Hampton think of Africa?”

“He doesn’t understand her, not at the moment,” Mrs. Rutherford answered; she paused in her play, listening to those insistent drums. “He thinks life in the station is very humdrum and suburban. He aches to be out with a gun all the time shooting wild things. If you get down to the bedrock of his sentiments,” she laughed, “I think you would find that he views Africa with all her amazing problems, her age long strifes, as a background for a big game expedition.”

The laughter died out of her eyes. “He’s got to learn so much,” she said. “And, incidentally, his schooling starts next week. Philip finds that he will have to send him to relieve Woods.”

“Ah!” said Anson. He, too, for the moment looked grave. “I gather that Africa has got him what we might call beat.”

“Do you remember him when he first came out?” asked Mrs. Rutherford; she played the last stroke of the game, winning by two hoops and a post. “He was so (she searched her mind for a word) pert and self-sufficient, wasn’t he? Immaculately dressed, immaculately educated, with a great contempt for . . .” she broke off. “Why, there’s Mr. Hampton,” she called out, waving her mallet at someone who had just turned in at the drive under the honeysuckle arch. “Come on, Mr. Hampton, you are just in time for a drink.”

Billy Hampton, walking up the garden to join them, sniffed with delighted appreciation at the flower scents stirring all round him. How gloriously like England this garden was! It was rather nice the way English people, wherever they went, set themselves down to create this impression of home. They came to a wilderness and the first thing they did was to build a gaol, a golf course and tennis courts. And then, one by one, they got down to their gardens, their houses, their entertainments, making them as English as possible. Brixton on the Equator---that was what some unkind wit had re-christened the government headquarters. Billy had been a year in the country now, and, generally speaking, he felt a slightly superior contempt towards all this genteel play acting. When you were in Africa, Billy said, you ought to rough it. You ought to live in tents with a revolver under your pillow and a rifle propped somewhere handy, and you ought to expect leopards to walk in and out, and elephants to trample you flat and lions to roar. Government people rather wrapped themselves up in cotton wool, with their scrupulously polite and comfortable houses, their tables laid with the same exactitude as you would find in any household in Ealing, their dress clothes, and the right kit for tennis or golf. Billy was just passing through a phase when he rather admired the desperate and lawless type of planter, the man who dined in his pyjamas and rarely shaved and lived in the most haphazard house you could imagine. The mighty game hunter, the fellow who did not hesitate to kick or whack a native, when it was obviously good for a native’s soul that he should be either kicked or whacked, who drank whiskey by the gallon and cared not a jot for all the regulations in the world.

But, just this evening, Billy was homesick and Mrs. Rutherford’s garden, Mrs. Rutherford’s gracious, cool presence were all rather welcome. He hoped that Captain Anson would go away soon so that he might have Mrs. Rutherford to himself for half an hour. Mr. Rutherford, he knew, was up playing tennis at the mission and would not be back till then.

It seemed that Captain Anson found himself de trop; anyway, he was dining with the Rutherfords that evening, and perhaps thought Mrs. Rutherford would have enough of him then. He said his farewells almost as soon as the three of them returned to the verandah and took himself off.

“Shall we sit out here?” asked Mrs. Rutherford of Billy, “Or do you feel like the drawing room and the gramophone?”

“Out here, please,” said Billy, “Your garden is lovely just now, isn’t it, Mrs. Rutherford? I sniffed it all up the road.”

“Ah, that wasn’t my garden,” smiled Mrs. Rutherford. “That was Africa. There is a big tree of those moon-flowers at the gate, and they flood the air with scent at this time of the evening.”

“How disappointing!” confessed Billy. “I suppose I’ve got the home fever on me to-day. Anyway, I wanted to think I was smelling England.”

Mrs. Rutherford laughed. “It’s mail day,” she said. “That explains a lot. Did you get a good mail?”

And suddenly her mind turned to her own letters, one from Roland, who was twelve, and at school. “Dear Mum, I hope you’re as well as I am. I am enjoying life thoroughly.”

He wrote that nearly every week, it was a sort of stock phrase. It brought up to her mind a picture of Roland and fourteen other little boys, all sitting at their school desks on Sunday afternoon in England, writing their home letters, just as they did their lessons, under supervision, under coercion. They told her so little, those letters, of all the hundred and one things she wanted to know. Her baby son . . . And then there were June and Roger, too young to write letters. She heard about them from the nurse, from the lady they had been left with.

She had to break off her thoughts of them there, because Billy was speaking. He was telling Mrs. Rutherford all about Jennifer, how worried he was because Jennifer had written saying she was going on the stage.

“She is so lovely,” said Billy, “She is bound to be a success, but it just makes me acutely miserable. It takes and puts her in an altogether different world to mine. Don’t you see that? How will she ever marry me and stick life out here---after that?”

“If she loves you . . .” suggested Mrs. Rutherford. It was, she knew, more or less a platitude. What did these queer aggressive young people of the present day care about love, the old fashioned type of love which Ruth, for instance, had possessed.

“You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” she asked.

“If I could have married her and brought her out with me to begin with,” said Billy. “But there was mother. Mother was most dreadfully set against it.”

“And I am sure she was right,” said Mrs. Rutherford. “You would have been very, very young to marry, and---out here, well, you know, Mr. Hampton, it’s not really easy for girls. They, you see . . . they have to depend so much on the men they marry. There is nothing else. I’ve seen heaps of marriages . . .”

Billy laughed suddenly, boyishly. “Marriages that are made in Heaven and broken in Africa,” he said. “Oh, I don’t think Jennifer and I would have been like the Gambits, for instance.”

“They were in love when they first came out,” said Mrs. Rutherford, slowly. “At least, she was very ready to be in love with him, and he wasn’t ready for a woman in his life at all. Some men aren’t, you know . . . A woman out here is both a nuisance and a responsibility.”

“Do you think I’m not ready?” asked Billy. He asked it more in chaff than anything else, because he was quite sure in himself. Her answer therefore rather surprised him.

“I know you aren’t,” said Mrs. Rutherford, calmly. “You are the most unready man I know at the moment.”

“But why?” Billy was inclined to be hurt. “Look here, seriously, Mrs. Rutherford, do you think I don’t stick to things enough? I wish you’d explain.”

“I could, in a way,” said Mrs. Rutherford, “and yet I can’t. But there are heaps of reasons why men should not come out married in their first tour. You get moved about such a lot---you don’t know the country or the work---Africa . . .” she hesitated. “Well, Africa is a very jealous stepmother,” she added, lightly.

“I can see that point of view,” Billy admitted. “At least about the moving. You know I’ve got marching orders now.”

“I know,” Mrs. Rutherford nodded, “You’re going to Kave. “Well, you couldn’t take a girl there, you know.”

“I suppose not,” agreed Billy, and sighed and thought how lovely it would be to see Jennifer just at that moment coming towards him across Mrs. Rutherford’s lawn. “In white,” thought Billy, “and the moon would make a kind of gold mist of her hair.”

A week later, he packed up and started for Kave, leaving the amenities and placidities of the station for life in the wilderness indeed. Kave was not a district of any great importance, but it was quite new. It had only recently been opened by the government, and the chiefs in the neighbourhood had given so much trouble, largely through ignorance as to how to collect the tax and administer justice that it had been deemed expedient to send a white officer into residence there. Woods had been the officer selected, and he had been in solitary possession, except for brief visits from Mr. Rutherford, for eighteen months. Woods had built the D.C.’s house; it was a mud and wattle hut with low walls, inefficient windows and a large, untidy looking verandah. He had also cleared a space and started a garden with seeds supplied by Mrs. Rutherford and he had cut one or two roads and built himself an office.

All this had been in the early days of his officialdom; then by degrees, just as the weeds and long grass invaded again the precincts of the garden; as the white ants despoiled the walls of his house, Africa had begun to eat into the mind and moral fibre of Mr. Arthur Stanley Woods.

He was not, in the first place, a man built to stand loneliness; the monotony of life out in this elephant grass surrounded country ate like a maggot into his brain. On one of Mr. Rutherford’s brief visits, he could see that the man had been drinking, and he stopped longer than usual, endeavouring to build up a tottering strength of will, suggesting new interests, further fields for work. Woods was a capable officer . . . it seemed a pity . . . Rutherfords sighed and resorted to the writing of tactful letters suggesting that a police officer stationed at Kave, or a doctor, would be useful.

Then had come desperate reports as to the illness of Bwana Woods, strange stories brought in by native runners, blurred, unreadable letters from the white man himself, and as a temporary measure, Mr. Rutherford being unable at the time to go himself, he despatched young Hampton with orders to relieve Woods and pack the older man back to the station as soon as he could.

Billy quite knew what to expect; he had been warned, yet the dreariness, the squalor and dirt of the house and its surroundings did strike a chill of disgust to his heart. He was not, as Mrs. Rutherford had noted, very tolerant in his outlook on the world. All vice was to Billy a type of bad form and as such had to be rigorously ignored. He noticed that the eskaries who rose to salute him as he drew up at the office were slackly turned out, their buttons unpolished. He gave them on the spot a thorough telling off in very indifferent Swahili, and it is to be presumed that the eskaries took note of the fact that a new regime had set in. Perhaps after he had gone, as they sat apathetically studying the elephant grass which grew very high and tall quite near the office, they may have remarked on his sweeping arrival with a certain dry sarcasm, but of that Billy was unaware. He went on up to the house; Mr. Woods he had been told by a polite, horribly polite Goanese clerk in the office, never came down after midday unless there was urgent business.

“Never does anything at all, I should think,” said Billy to himself and set his face sternly and strode into the house.

Arthur Stanley Woods was sitting at a table in the living room of the hut. It was partitioned off from the bedroom by a thin mud screen that had already been partially destroyed by white ants. He was apparently just about finishing his breakfast and through his round glasses (he had always suffered from indifferent eyesight) his eyes, bleared and frightened, stared at Billy.

“Excuse me,” said Mr. Woods with a very appreciable hiccup. “This is my house---get out.”

He rose swaying to his feet and behind him, if only Billy had had comprehending eyes, he might have seen the whole ruin of the man’s life, sapped, undermined, dragged under, finished by the cruelty of Africa’s loneliness and that twin devil that has been forced on to her by man’s civilisation--- drink.

Chapter Nine

“Robert Harland”

Jennifer and Mrs. Martin waited for over an hour in the untidy, excessively small room, wedged in among other rooms at the back of the stage and labelled Mr. Manson’s Office. All round them through the gimcrack walls came the sound of tumult. A row of some sort seemed to be in progress, feet hurried backwards and forwards; large articles of furniture crashed; a woman could be heard hysterically weeping, drowned occasionally by the angry, unexpectedly shrill voice of some man arguing.

“That’s Manson,” Mrs. Martin told Jennifer, “Lord, he do seem upset, don’t he?”

Jennifer sat on the stiff chair, which someone had shown her by the table and kept her hands clenched under cover of her hat. Mrs. Martin had said, “Take your hat off, dear, it’s such a small one, it don’t do justice to your face.” So Jennifer had taken it off, it lay on her lap and now her small gold head glowed against the dark walls of this office with almost metallic brightness. Metallic was a word that women, at least, were often going to use about Jennifer’s hair; it had that quality of shining, especially against dark backgrounds. She was almost unbearably nervous, every now and then it was as though her heart took a sudden leap into her throat and beat there, throb, throb, throb, it was very nearly painful that swift beating in her throat,

“Like as not, he’s forgotten all about us,” said Mrs. Martin, and cleared her throat and sighed and gazed round her with her protruding, inquisitive eyes, “I could tell you things . . .” Mrs. Martin’s eyes seemed to be saying. Jennifer hoped very fervently that for just this once, Mrs. Martin would refrain from imparting knowledge. Her nerves were already too strained, she could stand no more.

“Well, if anyone thinks it’s fair,” the tearful voice of the woman in the next room had gained ascendency, “they can say so in court. For an action I shall bring and I don’t mind whom it ruins.”

Sudden silence seemed to descend after that, presumably the dark vast empty theatre and stage were given over to their dust and dust sheets again. Then, presently, the door of the little office was flung open and two men came in.

Jimmie Manson first. He seemed depressed, tired; his whole body looked languid, his face white, the black lock of hair dangled above his eyes.

“God! These women!” said Jimmie Manson, entirely ignoring both Mrs. Martin and Jennifer.

The other man who was following him into the room, laughed. It was rather hard laughter; there was no real mirth anywhere in Robert Harland’s soul. He was a big man, with a huge head, rather staring eyes and a mouth, the cruelty of which was concealed by a very well trained military moustache. He was immaculately turned out and carried himself well in striking contrast to Manson, and had strong, capable broad hands, their backs covered by a quite perceptible forest of long dark hair. Unlike Manson, his eyes immediately went from Mrs. Martin to Jennifer and stayed there. He smiled at Jennifer as he spoke.

“Well, you were rather hard on the poor girl, Manson,” he said. “She knows now that she can’t act and hasn’t got a face or figure worth looking at.”

Manson had sunk into his office chair, his back curved into it.

“Act! Oh, God!” he said, and buried his face in his hands. He seemed really overcome by the uselessness of the world.

Again Robert Harland smiled at Jennifer. “Do sit down again, won’t you?” he said, for both Jennifer and Mrs. Martin had risen at Manson’s entrance. “Our friend will be himself again in a moment.”

Jennifer sat down. She felt now that she wished she had kept her hat on. This man’s eyes seemed to pass over her so slowly, noticing, appraising, valuing. He fluttered her, she felt shy and nervous and yet curiously excited. “I am beautiful,” her excitement claimed, “You won’t be able to deny that.”

Mansion raised a haggard face and glanced up at them.

“Hulloa!” he said, “You---oh, yes---I remember. Is this the girl?”

“This is the young lady, Mr. Manson,” Mrs. Martin contradicted most genteelly, “Miss Jennifer Postle. Jenny dear, this is the gentleman . . .”

Mr. Manson waved her to silence; he was staring at Jennifer. Mr. Harland had found a chair for himself. He sat on it, balanced backwards precariously against the door. If anyone came in, they would certainly upset him, but the office was so small there was nowhere else for him to sit.

“Postle---what a name!” frowned Mr. Manson. “That wouldn’t do, would it, Harland? How about Star, now, Jennifer Star. Can you act?” He shot the sudden question at Jennifer.

“I don’t know . . .” admitted Jennifer. “That’s just a question of training, isn’t it, Mr. Manson?” thrust in Mrs. Martin.

He ignored her entirely. His eyes devoured Jennifer. They were like a clean flame, she felt that, searching her all over. She did not resent them, nor feel afraid. She liked this strange, white fierce man, with that silly lock of hair that would keep interfering, that he had to keep shaking back.

“Sing?” he asked her.

“I used to,” answered Jennifer.

“Why not hear her, Manson?” asked Harland. It was the first time he had spoken. “Stand up for us, Miss Jennifer Star.” His eyes laughed at her. “Slip off your coat and sing.”

“Shall I?” said Jenny, her eyes on Mr. Manson. “I don’t think I could, I’m . . . I’m desperately frightened.”

“Well, try,” he nodded. “Any old thing---just a verse. I’m used to people being nervous.”

She stood up then. She was like something set up for sale as she stood there, though this she did not herself realise. The two men looked at her, studied her beauty, the line of her limbs, her thrown back head, her lips, her small straight nose and white throat. They did not pay much attention to her singing; other things mattered more---

“Sweetest little fellow,
Anybody knows,
Don’t know what to call her,
But she’s mighty like a rose!”

It was for the moment quite stupidly the only song she could think of, and she sang it, she knew, very badly, ending with a most deplorable quaver and a sudden unexpected burst into tears.

“The artistic temperament,” said Manson, quite gravely, studying her huddled up form and making no attempt at either consolation or reproof.

“Don’t cry, little girl.” This from Harland. “It was topping, Manson. You and I will have a talk about this later, and meanwhile I am going to take Miss Star and her friend out to lunch. Isn’t that a good idea? How about you coming too, Manson?”

“No, you lunch them,” said Manson. “I’m busy and I’ve got some sandwiches. Come back afterwards. Give her champagne, Harland, and I’ll try her on the stage. Pity the artistic temperament in woman always leads to tears.”

Jennifer had her lunch in a dream. She never thought of refusing. She did not as a matter of fact think of anything very much. The champagne thrilled her; she only took a very little, but suddenly she was talking wildly, gaily, to Mr. Harland, telling him all sorts of things, challenging him with her eyes, laughing at him, leading him on, as Mrs. Martin expressed it. Mrs. Martin said very little and chaperoned most discreetly. She enjoyed the food immensely. She was very fond of food and rarely got anything very nice to eat. She knew just why she was there, and how eager Harland was to get rid of her. After lunch, she said that if Jennifer did not mind very much, she had got another appointment to keep, but she was sure Mr. Harland would drop Jennifer at the theatre.

“Rather,” said Harland.

Jennifer did not mind. She would be quite all right. She felt that suddenly the world was wonderfully all right.

So Harland and she drove back to the theatre together and drove in his car. He drove it himself and she sat beside him, revelling in the luxury, watching his hands on the wheel, thinking what a pity it was he did not shave his hands. He was quite nice if it were not for his hands.

At the theatre stage door he rather surprisingly left her.

“I shall see Manson to-night,” he said. “And I expect him to tell me it’s all right. You and I are going to be friends, aren’t we?”

“Oh, of course,” she answered, and Thomas, overhearing from his box, smiled grimly.

Jennifer always said afterwards that those afternoons which she spent with Manson on the dimly lit empty stage at The Knight’s Theatre were the most momentous ones in her life. He coached her very hard, devoting all his time to her for a fortnight. She learnt from him the magic of movement, the mysteries which can lie in silences, how to laugh and speak and cry. He taught her to love passionately, to die magnificently, to be irresistibly gay. Through it all, behind it all, his personality moved and beckoned and urged---yet she never came to realise him as a man. He would hold her in his arms through an impassioned love scene and let her go at the end to remark rather crossly that she had held his arm in a wrong position, or that her face was not tilted quite as he would have liked to see it. He would kneel on the floor at her feet with his head bowed on her knees in the agony of a strong man’s grief till Jennifer would feel all her soul melt in pity, to find him peering up at her under his lock of black hair, sarcastic, morose. “If you cry like that, the people in the front rows will think you are drunk.”

It was quite impossible to keep pace with him, she never knew whether she had pleased or disgusted him. When the lesson was finished, he appeared to forget her very presence, turning with untiring energy to other things.

Mrs. Manson occasionally chaperoned them through these arduous hours, sitting in the wings, reading a novel, sucking sweets, or carrying on an animated conversation in whispers with a long, lean gentleman, Dawson by name, who was generally alluded to as Mr. Manson’s stage manager. He was in reality much more than that. He had been at school with Jimmie, and he worshipped Jimmie. He stood like a dragon between Manson and all the rest of the world and acted as a kind of glorified whipping post for the whole cast, when Jimmie could not bear any of them.

Jennifer liked Mrs. Manson---it was impossible to do otherwise---she was sunny tempered and amiability itself.

But one never got beyond that. None of the theatre world could imagine how Jimmie had married her, or why, since he had married her, he ever remained faithful. They glued their eyes on each new coming star, hopeful of seeing Jimmie’s fall from domesticity, but he showed no inclination to oblige them and Mrs. Manson herself never displayed the slightest anxiety. She did not make a fuss of Jimmie, but she obviously looked upon him as her property.

Of Robert Harland during that first fortnight, Jennifer saw refreshingly little.

“Harland’s putting up the money for this show,” Manson told her in one of his rare intervals of conversation. “It’s up to you to be nice to him.”

She heard, of course, from Mrs. Martin, from other sources too, for she was by degrees getting to know the other members of the company, all about the row which had preceded her coming, how Frances Tremayne, the girl whose place she was ultimately to take was suing the management, which meant Harland for £3,000 damages for loss of contract and advertisement. No one seemed to regret the loss of Frances Tremayne, she had made herself unpopular enough during her brief stay of power.

At the end of the first fortnight, Manson called a general rehearsal. The whole piece had been remoulded and refitted, redressed---the chorus was sumptuous in its new garments.

It was a semi-musical piece. An innovation, an idea of Jimmie’s with the chorus to dance and sing and the principal players to really act and live their parts. Jennifer was to be the heroine---a Nell Gwynne of modern days who was to meet and love the son of a king. She had to be noble and pitiful and wise, giving him up, not marrying him, leaving him to his kingship while she went back with a broken heart to the sawdust and glitter of the theatre where she belonged.

Not a fresh plot by any means, but with just enough sentimentality in it, Jimmie averred, to please the public, and with his new “find,” Jennifer Star to tickle their palates, and all the songs and new choruses worked in, he had an idea that it would go. He was almost certain it would go.

“It will have to go,” said Robert Harland, laughing that hard laugh of his, “if I am to get any of my money back, £3000 that little devil Frances Tremayne is getting out of me.”

“Well, that’s your fault,” argued Manson. “I told you from the beginning she wasn’t worth a tinker’s curse. But you would have it that her legs . . .”

“Her legs were her best point,” interrupted Harland. “You never denied that.”

“They were her only point,” Manson was morose. “And damn it all, you can’t build up a lovable heroine on legs alone.”

“We won’t argue about it, old son,” Harland acquiesced. “How’s our Star shaping?”

“She’ll be all right, I think,” Manson admitted, “so long as you don’t butt in too soon with your money.”

After rehearsal that afternoon, a rehearsal at which he had been present, sitting in the sheet draped stalls alone in his magnificence, Harland spoke to Jennifer.

“Manson says you’ll do,” he said, catching her for a moment alone in the wings, to which he had wandered from the stalls. “That means you’re engaged, eh what? How does £20 a week suit your royal highness?”

Jennifer stared at him with wide startled eyes. The rehearsal this afternoon had been one prolonged disastrous failure. Once she had been reduced to tears and Manson had rushed off to his office tearing his hair, followed at a suitable soothing distance by his wife. The other principal members of the cast had gathered round Jennifer, offering consolations, bars of chocolate, cups of hot coffee. “You’re tired right out,” said the principal dresser, a stout, motherly woman who had been hastily called to the scene of action, hearing a crisis was on foot. Mother Lambton, as she was called, was always summoned on these occasions; she knew how to deal with hysterics better than anyone else, and she had been known once or twice to even stand up against Jimmie Manson and defeat him.

“That man, he makes no allowances for a poor girl’s nervous temperament,” was her usual comment.

“It’s because he thinks there’s good in you that he drives at you like that,” Frank Sterman had tried to console Jennifer. Frank---everyone called him Frankie---was taking the part of the Prince, and had the appropriate pleasant sunny good looks. He was quite a nice lad, amazingly shallow for so good an actor. He really did not care two pins for anything or anyone except himself, but he was always consistently lover-like to every woman.

Jennifer had recovered with the aid of Mrs. Lambton’s smelling salts and a cup of hot coffee, doctored with brandy, and Manson had been persuaded by his soft tongued wife to return to the attack, but the rest of the rehearsal had dragged dismally and Jennifer, on the borderline of tears all the time, had felt herself a most ghastly failure.

So now she stared. “How can you say that?” she asked. “Haven’t you been watching this afternoon. Haven’t you seen . . .”

“Poor little girl,” said Harland. They were standing close together, he slipped his arm round her shoulders. In stage land, caresses of this sort from members of the other sex mean very little. It is a world in which men and women trade by and live on their emotions and Jennifer had picked up its outward symbols of good fellowship very easily. She did not resent his touch, his nearness (he was, after all, massively strong and very masculine), rather comforted her.

“I’m an utter and absolute failure,” she whispered, “I know Mr. Manson thinks so.”

And then she cried again, held close against him, her face buried in his shoulder. Of course he kissed her, the back of her neck where the soft gold hair grew, her little ears, as much of her cheek as he could find. She knew he was whispering to her, little stupid inanities.

“You lovely darling, crying for nothing. It’s all right, Jennifer, I’m going to look after you. If Manson bullies you, we’ll sack him, this is my show. You little lovely darling.”

His hands were warm all about her, searching, possessive. His hands---she had always hated his hands. With a quick smothered sob, Jennifer drew away.

“What an ass I am,” she said, mopping her eyes. “What must you think of me?”

“I think it’s a very tired girlie,” said Robert Harland. Tenderness sat with odd grotesqueness on his hard face, goggled out of his eyes. He looked absurd. Jennifer most perilously wanted to laugh.

“It shall come and have dinner with me, somewhere quiet, and over dinner we’ll discuss where Miss Jennifer Star’s new flat is going to be, and what sort of car Miss Jennifer would like to buy, and whether white fox furs suit that gold head of hers. Oh, we can do a lot on twenty pounds a week, can’t we?”

There was hidden meaning behind his words; she was not too innocent or ignorant to ignore it. Sooner or later, it was going to be very soon now that his hands had once touched her, she would come to that decision which would have to be faced.

“This is Robert Harland’s show. It’s up to you to be nice to him.”

Chapter Ten

“The Price”

She never loved him. Without a doubt, to all passionate lovers of love that was her sin. That she could give all that she did give, disliking him in her heart, has about if none of the beauty of romance. It was simply a case of following the line of least resistance. Her world, it seemed, stood round and expected her to give herself to Robert Harland. Mrs. Martin looked upon it as an accepted fact; Manson evidently thought it was bound to come; her companions in the theatre had whispered about it for some time. There remained only Billy and her love for Billy. For she still loved him. Somehow, nothing in her life with Harland altered that. It was as though she kept Billy, her thoughts, her memories, her love, in a little shut-away apartment of her heart, and into that shrine the personality of Harland never entered.

She and Mrs. Martin, meanwhile, for in those matters, Jennifer lived up to Mrs. Martin’s fondest expectations, moved into the flat which Robert Harland found for them. It was a luxurious little place in Knightsbridge, its window-sills gay with flowers, its rooms decorated and furnished by the latest fashion craze of the moment. Jennifer’s bedroom was all white and gold with the palest of primrose coloured curtains and a great gilt bed, fashioned to resemble a swan, whose back turned head carried the electric light globes in its beak. Harland’s taste in these matters was exotic, and Jennifer did not really mind very much what kind of setting he built up against which to put her. She thought, as a matter of fact, surprisingly little about him; she was, in a way, grateful to him for all he gave her, but she was quite well aware that she paid the price. Harland, as the stage door keeper had once said, liked all the world to know his lady friends. She allowed herself to be shown off, talked about, stared at. So much of her life at this time was oddly dream-like. She had become an actress in more senses than one. She had, for one thing, leapt into popularity, caught at the fancy of the mob. They liked her name---Jennifer Star; they raved over her beauty, her personality on the stage pleased them.

“Like a rose,” Manson had snatched at that phrase when she had sung for him so indifferently well that first time. He had been quick to see the advertising value of it.

“Jennifer Star---Mighty like a Rose.” How could one describe her better?

Manson had a flair for advertisement; he would seize hold of phrases, words, string them together, make them arresting---intriguing. All London in a few weeks’ time was talking about the girl whose loveliness was ‘Mighty like a rose.’

Harland was delighted. It soothed his vanity. He would take Jennifer driving in his car and show her the placards that flaunted about London, proclaiming her beauty to the world. He chose her dresses for her, asked famous designers to the house to study her figure, her colouring, her poses---so that her clothes should be just right. He entertained lavishly at her flat; there was nothing bashful about his intrigue; he was quite willing for everyone to know that he kept and ran the beautiful Miss Star. Oh, undoubtedly she paid his price. Once, idly looking through a book of poetry that Manson had given her (Manson never quite let go his hold on Jennifer; he was always educating her, showing her where she could improve her art, for to Manson the theatre was a very real art, urging her on), Jennifer came across a poem by Rosetti, and reading it was suddenly startled to attention by these lines:

“Like a rose shut in a book,
In which pure women may not look,
For its base pages claim control,
To crush the flower within the soul.”

She left a little slip of paper in to mark the page, and the next time Manson came she got it down and showed it to him. “Like a rose,” she pointed out, “That’s my advertisement, isn’t it?”

He read the poem, his head a little down, the lock of hair hiding his eyes from her.

“Well,” he said when it was finished, “It was your choice, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” she admitted.

“Here’s a funny bit,” he chuckled and read aloud to her,

“And from the pale girl’s dumb rebuke,
Whose ill clad grace and toil worn look,
Proclaim the strength that keeps her weak,
And other nights than yours bespeak.”

“Ah, don’t,” said Jennifer, and took the book away from him, turning aside, struggling with sudden tears.

Manson watched her, his rather green Jewish face still wrinkled in a smile.

“Price a bit heavy?” he asked. “Is Harland a beast?”

“Oh, no, it isn’t that,” Jennifer spoke quickly, “It’s just . . .”

But even to Manson she could not mention Billy, or explain how one can love with one’s soul and keep it something quite, quite apart from one’s body.

Mrs. Martin was, of course, in absolute clover. Stout, opulent, magnificently dressed, she moved about in the background of Jennifer’s flat. Nominally speaking, she was the housekeeper, but she liked rather to give the appearance of confidential friend, and she flourished exceedingly on the tales she could tell of Harland and the famous Jennifer Star. She had a great admiration for Harland. He reminded her, as she once told Jennifer, of her own dear passionate husband. Jennifer had reached a stage of tolerating Mrs. Martin; Harland ignored her altogether. None the less, she was intensely happy. Condescending to friendship with the servants when all else failed. Sitting in the kitchen on those evenings when Harland elected to stay at the flat, sipping her coffee, making the little housemaid’s ears tingle and turn scarlet with the reiterated things that she knew of men and women and lawless passion.

But when Jennifer and Harland were out and she had the run of the house, then she was in her element. Interviewing callers, showing stray pressmen over the flat, letting lovesick gallery-ites have a peep at the place where Miss Jennifer Star spent her days in such gilded, riotously beautiful sin.

“How they love each other,” Mrs. Martin would say, giving her imagination full play, “It ain’t likely that such love can last. I could tell you things . . .”

The show at the Knights’ Theatre had settled down into a prodigious success. Everyone was coining money out of it, Harland, Manson, the principals, even the chorus were blossoming out each in their individual way, buying fur coats, new clothes, expensive shoes. It is half the battle of life when you belong to that motley crowd which goes to make up the chorus, if you can get into a show that makes good. They all loved Jennifer Star and envied her, not a few of them dreamt of one day attaining to her heights. Meanwhile, night after night, they undressed and made up and powdered their legs and danced and sang through the evening, bringing a marvellous joie de vivre into a performance which must of necessity have grown stale in their minds. Or was it hope that kept their spirits ever at a high level? Did their bright eyes roving over the dimly seen faces in the stalls search for a possible Robert Harland, who could by the magic power of his money elevate them from the ranks of the chorus to the stardom of principal lead?

“Not that I’d sell myself for that,” as the second from the right lady in the ranks of the chorus whispered to her companion while they danced, “It’s love I’m out for, my dear.”

“Rich man, poor man, beggarman or thief?” chanted the other instead of the words she should have been singing.

They could afford to be cheerful, light hearted. “The King’s Dream,” starring Jennifer Star, had settled down to at least a two years’ run.

Every night, except Sunday and twice a day on Wednesday and Saturday, Harland’s sumptuous car would deposit Jennifer at the stage door and Thomas, smiling broadly, would hand her all the letters and cards and parcels that had been left for her during the day. Upstairs in the dressing rooms along the passages, the usual tumult would be raging. They all dressed in and out of each other’s dressing rooms, everyone was ‘hail fellow well met,’ with everyone else; the dressers would be hurrying about with trays of light refreshments, drinks varying from champagne to ginger pop, and “Have a spot of gin, old dear.” One never imagined from the pandemonium that raged that anyone would ever be on the stage in time. Frankie, for one, was always late. He was rather a trial to everyone else, Frankie, but he was very popular with the front of the house, and had quite as large a following of flappers as Jennifer herself.

Frankie was bored with the show, tired, so he said, of being a blinking Prince. He would talk of other things all through the play, make jokes in an undertone, reduce the chorus to a state of giggles. And yet every night, and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays, there would be just once in the performance when his art would rise to a high level, when all the great house would sit listening spell bound to his voice. And always when he said goodbye to Jennifer and went back to his kingship, the women in the audience would feel like weeping because of the fine restraint of his pathos.

“Dreams of a golden love,” that was the song that he and Jennifer sang together as a duet.

“Dreams of a golden love
Butterflies light as air,
Softly they touch on your lips and eyes,
Leaving your beauty fair.
Dreams that my heart shall hold
When the rest of the world is grey
So shall we pass through storm and stress
Dreaming of love alway,
Dreaming of love in his golden crown
When the rest of the world is grey.”

Jennifer thought of Billy when she sang that. Instinctively her heart would reach out and remember and hope. Always and perfectly ridiculously she hoped. It may seem that she was lacking in some essential moral fibre, she never realised that her life with Harland must mean the closing of the love between herself and Billy. Most childishly she clung to a belief that a part of her---call it a soul for want of a better name---remained pure and untouched, loving Billy, waiting for Billy through all the splendid inconsequential glamour of her theatre life.

Nobody knew of whom Frankie thought while he sang, though the gallery liked to imagine that the poor dear was hopelessly enamoured of his singing partner. Love! It is quite possible that Frankie understood it even less than Jennifer herself. He had gone through a phase of being very devoted to her, but it had soon worn itself out. “You cannot,” so Frankie said, “Remain in love with someone whose painted face has to be gazed at within a range of a few inches every night of your life. The thing loses its mystery.”

Billy had written Mrs. Hampton rather a despondent letter about Jennifer’s going on the stage. He mentioned her change of name, gave his mother her address. Of course, he read about her for himself in the illustrated papers, saw innumerable pictures of her. They made him feel that she was going most hopelessly out of reach, and in some queer way, they roused him to a deeper intensity of loving. And Jennifer and he still wrote to each other; every week the mail would bring him her long childish scrawl, telling him all the little things that had happened, leaving so much unsaid. She wrote that she loved him. “All this means nothing to me, Billy darling, compared with you,” wrote Jennifer, “I’d give it all up to go away with you. Come home soon, Billy . . . soon.”

Billy’s letters to his mother were full of Jennifer, keeping alive the animosity in Mrs. Hampton’s heart, reminding her always of how her reign was over and another lover had taken her place. She came at last to a slow realisation that it was no use fighting against this love of Billy’s. She must accept it, resign herself to being second from now onwards in his life, and it was with this thought uppermost in her mind that she acceded finally to his request and went to see Jennifer at her new address.

She was received by Mrs. Martin. Jennifer, it seemed was out, had gone for a drive with Mr. Harland. Mrs. Martin, beaming and opulent, her kindness invariably overflowed in the first half hour of meeting anyone, said that if Mrs. Hampton cared to come in and wait, she knew that Miss Star would be delighted to see her. Especially as she was some relation---Miss Star had so few relations.

Mrs. Hampton went in and waited. Jennifer’s sitting room was a blaze of flowers, though it was not a time of year when flowers were very cheap in London. There were gilt baskets of hydrangeas and sweet scented lilies, and next to them one seemed to notice the chocolate boxes. It appeared as though Jennifer lived on chocolates . . . or kept a confectioner’s shop.

“She gets so many sent her,” explained Mrs. Martin; she hovered about, possessive, eager to explain and yet, oddly enough for she was not as a rule a person very susceptible to atmosphere, there was something about Mrs. Hampton that imposed a certain silence on her.

Mrs. Hampton sat on the edge of one of the large comfortable chairs; she was dressed very plainly; her face under the nondescript black hat was quiet and infinitely sad; her blue eyes were beautiful and very like Jennifer’s; Mrs. Martin recognised that at once. Mrs. Martin talked, of course; it was quite impossible for her to do otherwise, but she found herself describing unexpected things to Mrs. Hampton, stressing Jennifer’s goodness to herself, her charity to those who came seeking it, her popularity in theatreland in general. Beyond the first mention of him, she never referred to Mr. Harland again, nor did she offer to show Mrs. Hampton over the flat.

Mrs. Hampton sat quite still and said very little. She was remembering the last time when she had gone to see Margharita. Something about this flat reminded her of Margharita lying on that great bed, her face so tired and old, her eyes closed.

“Is sin ever comfortable? Had Margharita been happy? Was Jennifer . . .”

She broke off her thoughts there because Mrs. Martin with a sudden rustle of rich garments had stopped in what she was saying to stand up.

“That’s them,” announced Mrs. Martin, “I’ll tell Miss Star.”

She moved to the door presumably to do so, but she was too late. Already it had opened, and Jennifer stood in the doorway.

“Harland is staying to dinner,” she said in that clear, soft voice of hers, “See there’s something nice for him, Mrs. Martin.”

And then she saw Mrs. Hampton, and with a little catch in her breath, she stood quite still, staring.

Mrs. Hampton had risen. Always---through everything that happened afterwards, she remembered that vision of Jennifer. The girl had grown, or so it seemed to her, into a sudden, startling loveliness. The white fur cloak which she held draped round her slender figure showed up the perfect beauty of her face as nothing else could have done. She was, of course, most exquisitely dressed, turned out, manicured and polished, and then suddenly, it was as though to Mrs. Hampton at least, all her beauty, her radiance, personified Sin, and under those small daintily clad feet, Mrs. Hampton felt that she saw Billy’s heart and soul being delicately and deliberately trampled to death.

It was, of course, a ridiculous vision. She shut her eyes to it, she strove to steady her voice, to speak as though there were nothing of agony and despair between her and this radiant girl.

“Well, Jennifer,” she said, “All this looks very successful.”

Jennifer came forward slowly. As she passed Mrs. Martin, she said with quick authority, “Tell Harland I’m engaged---that he’s not wanted---explain.”

Mrs. Martin scurried away to obey and Jennifer turned to Mrs. Hampton.

“Aunt Gertrude,” she said rapidly, “It isn’t Billy, is it? Nothing has happened to Billy, has it?”

“As if I should come to you?” Flared the antagonism in Mrs. Hampton’s heart. She shook her head.

“No,” she answered, “Billy is all right.” She heard the quick sigh Jennifer gave, saw the sudden flush to her face.

“It gave me a fright,” explained Jennifer, “seeing you, though I had a letter last week. But of course if anything happened, you would get a cable. Do sit down, Aunt Gertrude, how rude you must think me.”

She sat down herself, the fur cloak falling back, her slim, silk clad legs crossed. “How nice of you to come,” she said, “Did Billy ask you to?”

“Yes,” admitted Mrs. Hampton. She, too, sat down again. How stupid she had been to come! Of what use would be her pathetic overture of friendship? This girl had everything. It could not in the very least matter to her whether or not Colonel and Mrs. Hampton approved of her. She kept her eyes lowered when she spoke again, she noticed that the seams of her black gloves were splitting, she would have to get a new pair soon.

“Billy is still very fond of you,” she said, “Is it much use, Jennifer---wouldn’t it be kinder . . .”

“You think I don’t love him,” said Jennifer, softly.

“Well, do you?” asked Mrs. Hampton, and now she did lift her eyes and looked straight into Jennifer’s eyes. Jennifer was leaning forward, her face all flushed, her mouth soft, parted a little, her eyes troubled.

“As I understand love,” she whispered, “I love Billy.”

“Enough to give up all this?” asked Mrs. Hampton, and though her eyes never left Jennifer’s, her voice indicated that she meant all the splendour of this room, the heaped up flowers, the beauty of Jennifer’s fur coat, the string of pearls that glowed so softly against the perfection of Jennifer’s throat.

“Oh, do you think all this counts?” asked Jennifer. She laughed a little, it was still like a child’s laughter, unspoilt and clear, “Against Billy?” she asked. And still, despite the laughter, her eyes were troubled.

“It would mean giving it all up,” said Mrs. Hampton, “Ah, it’s not that I want to try to interfere again, that’s finished. I would not have chosen you for Billy because . . .”

“Because of Mother?” asked Jennifer softly.

“Because of that,” admitted Mrs. Hampton, “and other things. But Billy has chosen you for himself. I can’t fight any more. You mean more to Billy than I have ever meant. That just happens---it is not your fault or his. But I know Billy far better, my dear, than you will ever know him, and if . . .” she broke off, “Would you give up all this to marry Billy?” she asked.

“All of it,” whispered Jennifer, and still her eyes were troubled.

“Then . . .” said Mrs. Hampton, but again broke off, “Billy will be home in six months now,” she said. “He can get married then. He will want you to marry him. He will want you to go back to Africa with him. Are you going to do that?”

“If Billy will have me---yes,” said Jennifer, and she sat there, looking beyond Mrs. Hampton, as though her eyes saw some vision of Billy, and as though her answer was being made to him. Mrs. Hampton stood up.

“Jennifer,” she said, “I’ve simply got to say this to you. Perhaps you’ll think I’ve no business to, but . . . Jennifer, there are things which men like Billy never find easy to forgive. Oh, I know, though I have never had to ask for forgiveness, but, you see, all my life I’ve lived with men of that class. I don’t suppose,” she fumbled with her words (Reginald had been quite right in his scorn, she knew so little about vice. It was virtue that she knew, its hardness, its integrity), “That you meet many men like . . . like that . . . in this life. But Billy . . . loving you won’t change him. It goes deeper into his nature than even his love for you can do . . . it’s . . . it’s as though it were his soul.”

Souls! “Soul is just the one thing that is not ours to give away,” Billy had said that.

Jennifer sighed and stood up. For a moment or two, she stood close to Mrs. Hampton, then with one of her quick, impulsive movements, she put her arms round the stiff held figure and laid the fragrance of her cheek against Mrs. Hampton’s cheek.

“I understand,” she whispered, “Thank you for coming.”

And then, for the rest of the time, while Mrs. Hampton stayed, and it was not long, she talked and laughed and seemed indifferent and happy and splendid and gay.

You could not touch her soul, Mrs. Hampton went away convinced of that, because to all intents and purposes she had not got one.

Chapter Eleven

“Africa!”

Setting Kave in order proved a more strenuous job of work than even Billy had at first imagined it would be. The rot had gone deeper than was outwardly visible. One could clear the house, garden and office compound of the accumulated filth of months, one could hack down the elephant grass and mow up the weeds, and have triumphant bonfires all over the station of the rubbish thus collected; it was not as easy to get down to the unseen deterioration of the office staff and work. Billy saw to it that the eskaries polished their buttons and jumped to attention at his approach, but it took him weeks to suppress and put down their corrupt practices of taking bribes and torturing confessions out of helpless prisoners.

His own personal staff, of whom he had been justly proud and confident while in the station, descended with alarming rapidity to the level of Bwana Wood’s staff and the continual fight against dirt and slackness and disorder was only comparable, Billy felt, to the perpetual warfare that had to be carried on in the house itself against that insidious enemy of man, the white ant. Mr. Woods’s house was infested with these creatures; they had gnawed their way through all the wooden structures; at night they could be heard working, a queer, ethereal, rustling sound, myriads of microscopical teeth gnawing away, destroying, rending, tearing. It was like some infernal nightmare that white ant-infested house. Billy longed to get permission to pull it all down and make a blaze of it and build himself a new and cleaner one up on the hill which dominated the so-called station.

He wrote to Mr. Rutherford asking for permission. “Things are pretty bad down here,” he wrote bluntly, “Woods is ill---at the moment too ill to move, though I hope to get him packed off next week---and everything has been allowed to go to pieces. The house is ghastly. It seems to harbour the accumulated filth of months, and in addition it is chewed through and through by white ants. I’d like to pull it down and build myself a banda on the hill behind the station. I cannot imagine why Woods chose the present site. There’s a great rock slap in front of the house, shuts out all the view and acts like a slab of cold plum pudding on my digestion. Don’t wonder Woods found it depressing.”

There was a lot more dealing with the official state of the station, but it was that bit that Mr. Rutherford took home to tell his wife about.

“He has started to feel it fairly early, hasn’t he?” he said. “Yes,” admitted Mrs. Rutherford, “I suppose he has got to find his feet. I do hate these lonely stations though for young boys. I am, you know, Philip, ridiculously afraid of Africa.”

“I know,” he nodded, “and I’m not so sure about the ridiculousness either. By the way, we had better put up Woods when he comes into the station, and I’ll write and tell Hampton to get rid of the house if he likes. I know what he means about the dirt. I noticed it myself last time I was there.

“Oh yes, do let him build himself a new house on the hill,” agreed Mrs. Rutherford, and remembered how Billy had wanted to smell England in her garden and hoped he would not find it too utterly desolate where he was.

Billy started his new house at once and Mr. Woods, just recovered from an attack of delirium tremens, during which he had made the whole neighbourhood hideous with his yells, watched Billy drawing up his plans in the evening with only mildly sarcastic comments.

“I did all that when I first came here,” he remarked on the second evening of his convalescence. Mr. Woods was a distinctly pathetic sight after this last bout. His fingers perpetually twitched, pulling and twisting his lips, his face was haggard, his eyes frightened.

“You chose the wrong site,” said Billy. He was at this period rather contemptuously kind to Mr. Woods. To-morrow he hoped to get him started off on his way into the station. Taken in conjunction with his screaming fits, his twitching fingers and this white ant-infested house, Mr. Woods got rather badly on Billy’s nerves. It would be an immense relief to be quit of him. “That blinking rock over there gives me the pip,” he added.

Mr. Woods transferred his haggard glance to the bit of the outside world that they could see, by peering up under the very low roof of the verandah. To-night there was a full moon and the black outline of the rock stood out with almost the clearness of day.

“Perhaps,” admitted Mr. Woods, “I used to rather like the old fellow when I first came here.”

“Oh, it’s a good piece of rockery,” admitted Billy, “but in front of a house like this, it shuts out the sky, seems to smother the landscape. Get what I mean?”

“Shuts out the sky,” repeated Woods, “and why not? What is there in the blasted sky to see? Metallic---that’s what it is out here, and at night full of a million peering, watching eyes.” He sniggered rather unpleasantly. “Gad! The stars must see things sometimes, mustn’t they?”

Billy was in no mood to discuss anything with Woods. “Daresay you are right,” he said shortly, and went on with his map planning.

Woods’s eyes, staring out at that rock-filled space of moonlight, grew misty with tears of self pity. No one understood him or cared a damn what happened to him.

“You are young and new and damned conceited,” he said, suddenly with surprising viciousness to Billy. “You don’t think I have tried. You think I’ve just gone to pieces, let the whiskey rot out my guts.”

“It looks a bit like it,” said Billy, unsympathetically. “Why don’t you get off to bed, Woods. You’ve got an early start to-morrow morning.”

“It isn’t all whiskey,” Mr. Woods’s lips twitched; he kept his hands on them all the time he spoke, his words came out jumbled and distorted, “I tell you it’s Africa. Africa is dead against us. She hates us. She’s got a thousand and one ways of killing us, pushing us under, getting rid of us. I tell you I’ve felt her like a great malignant presence watching me, waiting for me to slip up. She’s all round outside, she presses against the side of the house at night, trying to get in . . . trying to trample us . . . I’ve heard her.”

Billy raised scornful eyes. “That’s the white ants,” he said. “This house is fairly rotten with them.”

“You think you are so wise,” whispered Mr. Woods.

He leant forward; he was a very unpleasant looking object. Billy did not like watching him, and yet he found that somehow the haggard intent misery of Mr. Woods’s eyes held his, would not allow him to look away. “I tell you, Africa will get you,” said Woods. “She gets all of us. She’ll do you down and trample on you and her filth will catch hold of you and crawl all over you. Like her ants.” He laughed suddenly, sharply. “Have you watched her ants at work, Hampton?”

“I think you are talking rubbish,” said Billy, sternly, partly because Woods’s eyes did impress him with their tragedy, and partly because he was afraid the other man was going to indulge in hysterics, and he did hate them. “It’s no use blaming a country, or a climate, for our own particular failures.”

Mr. Woods sank back in his chair. “No use warning people,” he muttered. “They find out; find out in time. Watch out for Shelton,” he added suddenly. “He’s hand in glove with Africa. Been here a million years. And he’s rotten through and through.”

“Who is Shelton?” asked Billy. “I didn’t know there was another white man round about here.”

“You’ll see him . . . time enough,” mumbled Woods. “He’ll not come round till I’ve gone. He’s finished with me. He raised himself to sit erect, “He’s got land about fifteen miles out. God knows what he grows on it!”

“A planter?” asked Billy, interested at once. “Mr. Rutherford did not mention him.”

“He’s anti-Government,” said Woods slowly. “He’s anti-everything. Oh, he’ll find you out, don’t you worry! If you were wise, but you won’t be, you’re a conceited young ass, you’d shut your door to him, get your fine brushed up eskaries to shoot him at sight.”

“You don’t seem to have hit it off with him,” Billy was faintly amused. “I should have thought any other white man would have been a boon in this part of the world.”

“Shelton’s not white.” Woods seemed to have grown sullen. “He is African. He is another of her blasted white ants.”

Billy pushed back his chair and stood up. “Come on,” he said, “It’s bedtime. You’ve got Africa on the brain; a spell of home leave will do you a world of good.”

“Home . . .” stammered Woods, he lurched to his feet. “England. Oh God, God, England . . .”

He burst most harrowingly into tears. The sobs seemed to wrench at his breath---he pushed past Billy and flung himself down on the bed behind the ant-eaten partition and lay there sobbing, howling like a child.

It was really unspeakably unpleasant. Billy sat down again and waited rather stiffly, for the life of him he could not attempt to offer consolation, until the noisy grief died down to low hiccoughs of distress, then he rose and went out quietly to his own tent. The night was lovely, clear, still and untroubled; the sky brilliant with the radiance of the moon. Billy threw back the flaps of his tent and undressed and got into bed and lay watching that outside world of beauty, contrasting it with the ugliness of Mr. Woods’s house and Mr. Woods’s noisy grief. And then, oddly enough, just as he was thinking how beautiful it all was, his eyes came round to rest on the rock and his imagination built a picture round it as our imagination does when we are on the border line of sleep. It was like some great crouching animal, he thought sleepily, its presence seemed suddenly to rob the night of its beauty, to invest it instead with a stealthy creeping terror. He was afraid of something or someone as he fell asleep. The rock was Africa and Africa was a beast crouched, waiting to spring.

In the morning he saw a suitably depressed and contrite Woods off. He was to be carried the first part of his journey, and after that he thought he would be well enough to manage a bicycle. Mr. Rutherford was motoring out to meet him so far as the motor road came.

“Sorry I made an ass of myself last night,” said Woods, his eyes avoided Billy’s face. “Got worked up, you know.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Billy. “Give my salaams to Mrs. Rutherford. Ask her not to forget my packet of seeds with the next post.”

“For your garden,” nodded Woods. “I won’t forget.” He clambered into the carrying chair. The porters raised him to the level of their shoulders. “Remember me to Shelton when you see him,” he called down to Billy.

Well, he had gone, that was a good job. It was hardly likely that Billy would miss him or regret his departure, and yet almost at once, with his going the station became almost unbearably lonely. After office hours, most religiously he sat in the office till four, though there was very little to do, Billy called for his gun bearer and announced that he wanted to go out and shoot something. Which was the best direction for game.

The natives of the place seemed lackadaisical even about that, though, ordinarily speaking, a black man is amazingly keen on killing and procuring meat for himself, but finally Billy got some volunteers to guide him, and they started off. It was not, seemingly, good buck country. They walked for miles and Billy returned tired and hungry at sunset with only a couple of guinea fowl in his bag. Anyway, it was good exercise and exercise he must have. Every day saw him sallying out. His house on the hill grew slowly. Labour was indescribably bad. If they brought poles, they were crooked ones, when they dug holes, unless Billy watched them all the time, they were dug in the wrong place. The people were sullen and annoyed at being stirred to labour again after long months of peace; the eskaries were almost dangerously antagonistic, smarting under constant rebuke and punishment. It cannot be said that life was in the least bit easy for Billy, but he had been warned about that; Mr. Rutherford had warned him. The fact that Mr. Rutherford and, behind Mr. Rutherford, Mrs. Rutherford with her wise and kindly advice, were watching him, waiting to see if he made good, kept Billy up to the mark, made him most anxious to succeed; and then for relaxation, there was his shooting and the periodical joy of mail day. The mails were irregular, dependent on the energies of a rather slack runner. The disappointment of a mail day that brought no letters was bad for Billy’s temper. But, on the other hand, if he missed a week or two, he would be recompensed by a veritable budget. Three letters from Jennifer, long letters from his mother, a bundle of papers. He fairly revelled in mail days.

Of the mysterious Shelton he saw nothing, though, officially, he received one or two letters from him. The man did not come to call and, remembering (though he did not naturally place much reliance on Woods’s statements), Woods’s remarks about his only white neighbour, Billy did not feel very strongly inclined to go and look him up. Then, one Sunday morning, just as Billy was preparing to set out on one of his hunting trips, he looked up to see a white man advancing up the path towards Woods’s house. Billy was still in the old house, but his own was very nearly ready. He felt a moment’s stab of annoyance that Shelton, if this should be Shelton, should see him for the first time in these surroundings.

“Good morning,” the man shouted from some distance off. “May I come along in and pay my respects?”

It obviously was Shelton. Billy put his gun aside and went forward to greet him. As they met the two men measured each other with their eyes, took stock as it were. Billy was not certain whether they met as friend or foe. He did not, that he knew in the first moment of meeting, like Shelton’s appearance. But you cannot, especially in Africa, always go by appearances. Shelton was a big, fleshy man. He had a very unbrowned face, and a thin upper lip, the under one jutting out and shutting over it when the man’s mouth was closed. When he smiled you saw that his strong white teeth had some odd resemblance to a wolf’s. The eyeteeth were unusually long and pointed. He had very steady, round, light coloured eyes. Grey blue, rather nondescript in colour, only they gave one an impression of coldness. When he spoke he stared. From the very first Billy quite definitely resented that stare.

“Guess you know me by name,” said Shelton. “I’ve been writing you lately. I’m Shelton.”

“Yes,” said Billy gravely, “Woods told me I had got one white neighbour. I’ve been hoping you’d look in.”

“Ah, Woods!” Shelton reflected on the name. “We used to see a lot of each other at one time. Poor old Woods! How was he when he left?”

“Not too fit,” admitted Billy; he turned to lead the way into the house. “He’ll be all right though after a spell of home.”

“Probably,” agreed Shelton. The two men sat on the verandah and Billy shouted for the boys to bring drink. He was conscious all the time of Shelton’s eyes; he could not have said why, but the man’s presence, his watching stare, made him oddly uneasy.

He knew, for one thing, that Shelton had taken stock of all the improvements he had tried to bring about in Woods’s surroundings. The weeded garden, the cleaned house, the boys in their smart white kansus. He rather gathered, though nothing of anything that Shelton said gave him any excuse for so thinking, that the man was cynically amused by his efforts. They sat there talking for some time, and all the while this sense of discomfort grew till Billy would have been almost glad for Shelton to say something to which he could definitely take exception, so conscious was he of a hidden inexplicable dislike stirring at the back of his mind.

It came at last, arising out of some fatuous, he knew the moment he had said it that it was fatuous, remark of Billy’s about the loneliness of Kave giving him the pip. It was almost as though on the very heels of the remark, Shelton’s cold, watching eyes woke to sudden interest.

“Lonely?” said Shelton. “Got any native women about the place?”

Billy, quite frankly stared. “What on earth?” he began. The other’s smile woke in him a wild desire to hit out and smash Shelton’s red browned face.

“I can send you some samples,” Shelton was saying. “I keep the best of the countryside up at my place.”

Billy stood up, his chair pushed back grated on the stone floor of the verandah. “Thanks,” he said, shortly. “I’m afraid the idea doesn’t appeal.”

Shelton looked up at him, the smile on his lips was almost a sneer. “No,” he acquiesced. “Well, we all tackle the country in a different way.” He, too, stood up. “I’m keeping you from your shooting,” he added, “I’ll buzz along. Come over to my place when you feel like it. I’m only sixteen miles off and you can use a piki-piki on that road I’ve made.”

“Thanks,” said Billy again, and not until Shelton had gone did it occur to him how shockingly inhospitable he had appeared, not even to ask the man to stay to lunch; his only white neighbour with a sixteen mile run between him and his next meal.

“If he hadn’t said that rotten thing,” Billy excused himself to himself, “there was nothing else objectionable about him.”

And yet he knew perfectly well that he hated Shelton and that, in some queer way, Shelton’s presence had intensified the loneliness of this house and made his fantasy of the rock more real than ever. It was like an animal crouched out there, an animal waiting to spring.

Chapter Twelve

“White Ants”

Within the next few weeks Billy got his first really bad attack of fever. He was a great many miles away from any doctor, and he was ill enough at one period to imagine in a kind of hazy way that he was going to die. A temperature of close on 105 is unpleasant enough to the experienced malarial victim, and the cold sweats and heavy drop of temperature to below subnormal leave one amazingly weak. Billy had just moved into his new house. That was in its way comforting, but it seemed to him that even the five days while he was too ill to care much what happened, produced a startling deterioration in his staff. After that, propped up by pillows, he sat up and fumed and fretted, enforcing cleanliness and order and occupying his spare time by gazing out at the rock and thinking of Jennifer. He had very little light literature to read and, of course, luck would have it that that week the mail and his budget of papers should fail him.

He grew, really, to an odd hatred of the rock, which so dominated Kave during those days of enforced idleness. The countryside would be vastly improved, he felt, had it been possible to blow up that particularly imposing piece of landscape with a really good charge of gunpowder. Then up and dressed and at work again, he could laugh at what he thought had been a sick fancy.

Shelton had been in to see him once or twice during his attack. That, at least, had been a kindly thought, and the man had been singularly quiet and sympathetic, doing little things for Billy’s comfort that the boys were only able to do indifferently well. They talked, when Billy had reached convalescence and a state of talking, mainly about shooting. It was obvious that Shelton was a very experienced hunter. That side of him, at least, Billy came to respect. There was nothing that he had not, in his day, shot and killed. His stories of elephant hunting and buffalo were hair-raising and thrilling. The man was a mystery. Once, long ages ago, it seemed, he had been at a public school, Oxford had known him, but he had not been to England now for over twenty years. He seemed to have grown into Africa; he had been too hardy for her to destroy, so she had assimilated him and all her weeds and fungi grew about him and through them all he seemed to flourish exceedingly.

He lived like a native, he admitted to that, laughing sarcastically at Billy’s endeavours to implant English manners and habits round him. He ate native food, drank native beer. It was potent stuff, but seemed to have very little effect on him. He held no communication with the outside world, neither wrote to, nor received letters from England. He had started coffee on his place, so he informed Billy, but in the third year of growth all the trees had been killed by some grub and after that, he had just let the place go to pieces. What did it matter? He did not need money the way he lived.

By slow degrees and never very willingly, Billy admitted the man into a friendship with him. Whether he felt, despite his boasted independence, the need of white companionship, or whether he was, as Woods had so luridly depicted, one of Africa’s white ants, Billy never quite knew, but he did realise that Shelton’s tenacity was engulfing him. They went out shooting once or twice together; Shelton spent several week ends at the Boma, for even Kave with its solitary white officer and its handful of native eskaries was called a Boma. And when Shelton was in the place, there was a good deal of whiskey drunk. They would sit up so late talking and drinking. Billy was never absolutely drunk, but once or twice, he realised himself to be very near it. It was on one of these occasions that he told Shelton about the rock and his hatred of the rock. A medical man, listening to Billy, would probably have realised that the thing was becoming an obsession to the boy. Shelton heard him with that queer, wolfish smile of his, his grey blue eyes staring at Billy’s face.

“You are fighting against Africa,” he said, finally. “It’s a losing fight.”

“That is surely nonsense,” argued Billy. “Oh, I grant you, it’s harder out in a Godforsaken hole like this, but we are here to make and break Africa into our way of thinking and living.”

“It’s all such damned nonsense.” Shelton seemed stirred to sudden violence. “Here you are with your potty little efforts, your conventions, your standards. You’ve built this house, cleared your garden. You make your boys wear white shirts when they wait at table, one of them is always washing and ironing your tablecloths, your shirts, your clothes. You are clean-minded, moral. I expect you dislike a cobweb almost as much as a . . . Oh well, it doesn’t matter, but here you are, with all your fussiness. Have you any idea how your boys live?” He leant forward, challenging Billy. “The filth which hides just outside your cleanliness. Bah!” he snorted. “The other day you ticked off your Toto for bringing a dirty spoon to your table. Do you know what he did? Went outside and spat on it and rubbed it with his kansu. The water was five steps further on, and he was too lazy to go to it.”

“Disgusting brute!” said Billy. “I’d have given him a sound licking if I had caught him.”

“We don’t beat the natives these days, “Shelton jeered. “Don’t forget that is the edict of your Government class.”

“You have got a grouse against the Government. What’s it done to you?” asked Billy. “I’ve often wondered.”

“Done! Nothing,” said Shelton. “What can it do? It makes potty little finnikin laws and thinks it is riding Africa on the snaffle. But it’s not really mounted on anything except its own hobbyhorse of conceit.”

To-night Billy was feeling argumentative. He studied Shelton with unfriendly eyes, all his first-felt dislike was uppermost again.

“Well, I think it is a pity when a white man like you,” he said, “lets his fellow white man, his schooling down. It’s not what we call playing the game. It’s up to each one of us in a country like this to stand firm on our traditions. Otherwise what blinking use are we? We don’t help ourselves, or the natives, or anyone.”

“And do we help the natives?” asked Shelton, his sneer deepened, “by all this paraphernalia of cleanliness, boiled shirts for dinner and so on!”

“It does help,” Billy asserted. “Oh, damn it all, can’t you see, either we must raise things to our level out here, or we, as white people, must clear out. If we lower our standards instead of raising them, the degradation is awful.”

“You use long words,” said Shelton. He laughed and rose and stretched. He looked gross, inclining to stoutness, the skin bulged in little lines under his eyes, about his odd shaped mouth. “I’m for my degraded couch anyway, it’s well past twelve.”

Billy stood up and knew vaguely that he swayed. His mind was hot and confused. He did not like Shelton and yet he did not want to fight with Shelton. Not a bad fellow really, and the only other white man in the district.

“Sorry if I’ve overstepped the mark in bluntness,” he essayed.

Shelton put a quite friendly, rather fleshy hand on his shoulder.

“That’s all right my lad,” he said, amiably. “As I said the first time I met you, we all tackle this country in our own individual ways. You are quite right to stick to yours so long as they don’t fail you.”

His words, perhaps, he had intended they should, sent Billy’s thoughts chasing down all kinds of bypaths, very foreign to his nature. He remembered, for one thing, the remark which Shelton had made to him on their first meeting, and somehow, now it failed to raise the white heat of scorn it had then engendered. The loneliness of life out here was very real; it was quite possible that monotony might be soul destroying. Jennifer was so damnably far away, so unobtainable. Was it likely that Jennifer could go on loving him through all the distractions of her splendid career? Was it possible to dream of marrying Jennifer and bringing her out to a place like this? Like this---Billy almost laughed aloud. The mud walls of his newly constructed, very far from straight house seemed to sway towards him. In the centre of the bare room stood his camp bed, the mosquito net put up on grass reed poles, most gloriously askew. There was a table made out of petrol boxes, where he kept his shaving things; another one, near the bed, that Jennifer’s picture adorned. No, it was very difficult to think of Jennifer here.

“But we shan’t be here when we’re married,” Billy’s confused thoughts tried to argue. “It would be a station, a house like Mrs. Rutherford’s, a garden full of English flowers.”

“Yes, but that’s all in the problematical future,” something cold sneered back at him. “What about now---the loneliness, the uselessness of all your overfine ideals. How are you going to combat that?”

He threw himself on the bed, still arguing. The mosquito net sagged, brushing his face. That was the fault of that blasted boy of his, he would not learn to put up the net properly. Billy tore it down, the frail supports giving way easily enough and flung it on the floor. He would sleep without one. Mosquitoes, of course there were mosquitoes, but one could not always be fussing about that kind of thing. As he dropped off to sleep he heard them, a faint hissing sound in his ears. Towards morning, he woke with a start and sat bolt upright, staring out of the roughly cut square in the wall, which served him as a window. Dawn was just breaking. Behind the great shadow of the rock, the sun showed red and mysterious.

“Oh damn, another day!” thought Billy, and flung himself back again and felt most ridiculously near to tears, while outside the red turned to a sudden golden splendour and a hot and blazing day leapt into life.

Shelton went off back to his own place after breakfast. “I’m always asking you to come,” he said in parting. “Shan’t repeat the offer, it’s open for you to accept whenever you like.”

“Thanks,” said Billy, gruffly shy. “I must seem unsociable, but I don’t like leaving the station. It’s my job.”

“Oh, if it’s your job that keeps you away,” laughed Shelton, “that’s all right. I rather fancied it was your morals.”

Billy hated the man. Hate grew in his mind all day while he dealt with the many little shawries---a good African word, which denotes anything from a row with one’s wife to murder---that cropped up daily at the office.

It is not a good thing to let hate predominate in one’s mind; it is like a strong poison that spreads from thought to thought.

A runner came in during the course of the day. He brought a few letters, including a very disappointing one from Rutherford. Rutherford had been due to visit Kave in a week’s time, and now he had had to postpone the visit unexpectedly. It would be at least a month before he could get down. It was absurd how Billy had been banking on that official visit. Rutherford, at least, would display none of Shelton’s galling contempt at his endeavours. And Mrs. Rutherford had half promised she would come too. Billy had been longing for the sight and sound of Mrs. Rutherford’s clear, cool, white womanhood. Now, they were not coming. A month---when each day dragged so intolerably, was too far to look ahead. Billy pushed the official letters aside, and turned to his home mail. There was nothing from Jennifer, only a long one from Mrs. Hampton, describing her visit to Jennifer’s flat. And all through his mother’s letter ran the persistent thought that had been in her mind, though she had tried hard to conceal it with kindly words, the thought of how useless it was for Billy to dream of marrying Jennifer.

“If she gives all this up for you, Billy, she must indeed love you very, very much, and how could my disapproval last in the face of such love. It is only your happiness, my dear, that made me hesitate. Ever since you were born, Billy, I have planned and thought and dreamt of that, and Jennifer, if she gives you happiness, must earn my love.”

Poor old mater! Probably she had stumbled through something like that in her talk to Jennifer, putting in front of the girl as her own generous impulse of loving had never done, something of the sacrifice which would be entailed, if she gave up everything to marry Billy. And Jennifer, thinking it over, had been appalled. That, of course, must be the reason of her silence. She had been driven to make her choice, without his being near to plead his cause. She could not face the sacrifice, why had he ever imagined she would.

Billy put all his work away and his letters and strode back to his house. He lunched on the verandah, and it was an indifferent, very greasy lunch, but that he was hardly in the mood to notice. He felt just exactly as though the whole of his world---oh, it had been a dream world, certainly, but very dear and necessary to him---had crumbled and lay in fragments at his feet. Only the rock remained. Its very presence, its unassailable continuance, seemed to mock at his grief.

Of course, it was all absurd. The next week’s runner brought Jennifer’s overdue letter, but by that time, Billy was down with another go of fever, raving deliriously of the rock, which to his sick fancy had moved nearer and stood now poised over his bed. The boys put his letters down among his stacked up papers, and blissfully forgot all about them, and next week again, the runner did not come through. The rains had broken and a native most thoroughly hates the rain, so that Billy came out of his fever and lay for days with white face and eyes drained of all hope, thinking that Jennifer was lost to him and nothing mattered any more.

The rain, it was for a week, tropical in its intensity, oozed into the house, trickled through the roof, churned up the half made verandah to a welter of mud, brought out fungi in profusion on all his boots and boxes. Then it cleared, as suddenly as it had come, and all Kave lay sweltering in a sullen sun that drew up the moisture in mists of hot air. It was almost unbearably, morosely still. Night after night, Billy sat listening to the stillness, pretending to read. He was studying for his law exam, in order to keep his mind occupied. The rain seemed to have drowned the thousand and one insects that, ordinarily speaking, make an African night hideous. This succeeding silence was so intense that it seemed to be brooding all round the house, waiting for something to happen.

And then, one night, lifting his head suddenly, to listen, Billy realised what the silence had all the time been waiting for. The sound of microscopical teeth gnaw, gnawing, rending, tearing, a queer, ethereal rustling sound. White ants! Here, in his new house, at work on the poles, just as they had worked at the poles of that other horror-infested house, in which he had found Woods living.

That night, Billy thinks he must have gone mad. The boys spoke sorrowfully of his doings afterwards. He called and shouted to them to bring petrol---tins of it---and with his own hands, he was shaking, they said, as though the fever had got him again, he poured it over the wooden frameworks of the house and set fire to it.

The boys saved what they could, since if a white man goes mad, it is always wise to step in and act for him. Other white men are sure to ask, “But could you not see the Bwana was ill, why did you not work to save his things?”

They dragged out into the open his clothes, some of his boots, a certain amount of stores, his shaving things---the Bwana, when well, was still very fussy about them, and his books at which he had been working before the madness came on him. None of them thought of saving Jennifer’s photograph or the stacked up letters---these went up in the blaze, which lit up the rock with such fantastic glory on that night.

But Billy did not know what was saved, and what not saved. He had mounted his motor bike and rather as though all the fiends of Hell were after him, he was riding along the track to Shelton’s house. The first round of the battle was finished and Billy had undoubtedly lost.

Chapter Thirteen

“To-Morrow”

It was Mrs. Rutherford, who pushed Rutherford into going to Kave sooner than he had intended. She was uneasy, she said, about young Hampton.

“Because he has had fever,” chaffed her husband. “My dear, that’s a thing we’ve all got to go through.”

“Yes, but you never know whether the young ones look after themselves, when they are convalescing,” argued Mrs. Rutherford, “and a little advice in time sometimes saves months of ill health.”

“All right, we’ll do a push visit,” agreed Rutherford, and they started off the next day.

They arrived at Kave on the morning after the burning. The ruins of Billy’s house still smouldered; his goods, such as had been saved, were stacked out under a neighbouring tree. No one, the servants would have looked upon that as a dangerous proceeding, a native rarely telling the truth unless compelled to, told Rutherford how the fire had originated. It had, according to them, just happened. As to the Bwana, he had gone away---they thought to Bwana Shelton. Yes, certainly, the Bwana had been very ill; he had had much fever. Rutherford was puzzled. That a fire of such destructive dimensions should have occurred after the spell of wet weather which had just taken place, was surprising. The thatch must have been soaked through---a violence of flame had had to be necessary to so attack it. The Rutherfords camped near by, they had everything with them, and were not relying on Billy’s hospitality. They discussed the incident with grave faces. Mrs. Rutherford saw in it a justification for her anxiety over Billy’s welfare, and though Rutherford laughed at her, he admitted that he, too, was worried.

He left her finally to ride over to Shelton’s place and find out if Billy was there. Mr. Rutherford only had a push bicycle, it would take him some time to cover the fifteen miles.

He arrived, as a matter of fact, somewhere between three and four in the afternoon, which is admittedly the hottest time of the day in Uganda. It seemed to him that the environments of Shelton’s house were peculiarly airless. It was shut in by high sisal hedges and the house itself gave very little indication of European residence. A tumble down affair, built after the pattern of a large native hut, rough wooden poles supporting the low thatched roof, it stood with a coterie of smaller huts grouped behind it. There was no attempt at a garden or flowers, a banana plantation occupied a large space in the compound and a flock of goats wandered about, nibbling at the grass and weeds.

A very dirty native, presumably a servant, came forward to take Mr. Rutherford’s bicycle, and on Rutherford’s enquiring for the D.C., the man answered with a broad grin:

“Dio Bwana,” and a jerk of his head towards the large central hut.

“Disgusting,” thought Rutherford. He was essentially a very cleanly man about his appearance and surroundings, and he also knew of Shelton by repute. He left his bicycle anyway and strode into the hut. No answer came to his rather indignant repetition of the word “Hodee,” which is the Swahili method of announcing your arrival. Rutherford turned to the native, who was still holding his bicycle, and staring after him, and the man grinned again, rousing a fine sense of irritation in the Provincial Commissioner’s mind.

“Go within,” said the native in Swahili. “You will find him there.”

Rutherford went in. He had to stoop to enter the doorway of the house, and immediately a smell of stale spilt liquor assailed his nose. It was like going into an unaired long shut up public house. A sense of gloom and heat prevailed, coming in out of the hard bright sunlight, he could at first hardly see, but by degrees, the shadows of the room took shape, and in the far corner he saw a native bed, its mattress composed of tightly stretched buckskin, and on the bed, thrown down across it, in an almost lifeless attitude, lay the body of Billy Hampton. Rutherford hurried across---the room was in an immense disorder, bottles lay about, broken glass, overturned stools. He knew before he stooped over Billy what was in all probability the matter with him. He could smell his breath as he bent over him. Drunk---that was about it---very disgustingly drunk on some of that filthy native stuff that Shelton always took such pride in drinking. Billy’s hand under his burned with something other than drink though. Rutherford knew in touching him that the boy was suffering from pretty high fever.

He straightened himself, glancing round and at that moment the light coming into the room by the only door was blocked by Shelton’s entering figure. Rutherford could see neither the man’s face, nor his clothing, but he was conscious of very vivid instant anger.

“The boys told me you were here,” said Shelton. He came forward and leant negligently against the table. Rutherford could see that he was still in his pyjamas. “I am afraid our young friend has been overdoing it on native beer.”

“He is also ill,” said Rutherford tersely. “Could I put you to the inconvenience of procuring me eight porters and a blanket and pole. I’ll have him carried back to the Boma.”

“Why move him?” asked Shelton. “He’ll sleep the drink and the fever out of him.”

“I should like to save him the indignity of waking under these conditions.” Rutherford spoke hotly; he was, for the moment, too angry to bother about being polite to a man in his own house, though under most circumstances, he was very punctilious about things like that.

Shelton laughed. “I see,” he admitted. “Hardly suitable surroundings for an official. Perhaps you are right.”

“They are not suitable surroundings for any Englishman of any decency,” Rutherford was on the point of declaring, but he stopped himself in time. There was no use in having a row.

“If you will let me have those porters,” he said, instead, “I’ll move him at once. We’ll just get in by nightfall.”

Shelton slouched off and Rutherford heard him shouting his orders. A native woman came in and slunk round the table, picking up the bottles and brushing the broken glass together with her hands. She glanced slyly at Rutherford once or twice as she worked. He was unpleasantly conscious of her furtively amused eyes. They came presently, the eight unclean looking porters with a red blanket, whose colour at least concealed its dirt, and Billy was hoisted into it, and slung up on the pole. He seemed utterly oblivious to his fate, only his heavy breathing, his flushed face denoted that he was alive.

Rutherford made no attempt to say goodbye to Shelton politely, he was still far too disgusted and angry. The man came as far as the entrance to the sisal hedge and watched them start off, smiling sarcastically at Rutherford’s curt dismissal.

“He thinks I made the blasted pup drunk,” he muttered to himself, “as if it mattered to me. Last night has taken down some of his stiff necked superiority anyway.”

Rutherford and his still unconscious burden did not get into Kave till long after dark. Mrs. Rutherford had sent lanterns and fresh porters along the road to meet them. She was waiting them anxiously. From some distance off she heard the momentous chanting of the porters and knew from that fact alone that they must be carrying someone in. She was a woman used to managing emergencies. Before they arrived, she had everything ready. Hot water, milk and brandy, hot soup, the bed all turned down and aired.

“What is the matter with him, Philip?” she asked, standing outside the tents to meet them. “I felt it in my bones that he was ill.”

“Well, he’s got a touch of fever,” admitted Rutherford. “But, for the moment, my dear, I am afraid it’s something in the nature of a grand debauch on native beer.”

“Oh, poor dear, clean Billy Hampton,” sighed Mrs. Rutherford. “Philip, there really must be a curse on this place.”

She was, however, just as assiduous in her nursing. Billy woke and was violently sick, which sobered him completely, and it added shame on shame to find that it was Mrs. Rutherford who was waiting on him.

“Oh God,” groaned Billy, one arm upflung, hiding his eyes. “What a beast I’ve made of myself . . .” And it was her cool hands that soothed him, her soft voice that comforted.

He lapsed from that brief moment of agonised remembrance back into the highly coloured world of fever. All night he lay tossing and muttering. Sometimes Mrs. Rutherford caught the name of Jennifer and knew that he was pleading with the girl he loved; once he cried out in a high shrill voice, “Jennifer---the rock---the rock. Quick! Run, it will crush you!”

The morning found her weary and exhausted, still patiently struggling to bring his temperature down. Sponging him, changing his sheets, wrapping him in a cold pack.

Rutherford gave his bicycle to one of the eskaries and told him to ride as fast as possible back to the terminus of the road, some fifty miles distance, from which it would be possible to send in a motor message for the doctor. But at his quickest he could not be with them under three days. Rutherford and his wife had to do what they could to save Billy, and night and day for forty eight hours, the fight went on under conditions very far from favourable to the patient. They built a shade of grass and leaves over his tent, but even then the heat seemed stifling, and at night there were cold wet dews and sudden hard chill winds to guard against. They thought once or twice that he must die, but on the evening of the second day he rallied marvellously, and by the time the doctor arrived he was to all intents out of danger, sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion. It was Mrs. Rutherford to whom the doctor attended first, ordering her to bed for at least twenty-four hours.

“The young man is all right, he’ll do,” he announced, “but I can see it’s been damn well touch and go. Blackwater, eh? He’ll have to lie here a full fortnight, then into the station and off to England as soon as he can get. What do you say, P.C.?”

“You do the ordering. I’ll see it’s carried out,” said Mr. Rutherford. “This place will have to be straightened up from the health point of view before we send our next officer out.”

“I class it as unfit to live in until a decent house is built,” agreed the doctor. “We’ll put that up to Headquarters and see what they say.”

Billy was carried back to the station at the end of his fortnight. The Rutherfords had gone on ten days earlier, leaving him to the doctor to bring in. Dr. Mackenzie was a Scotchman of solid worth and a great sense of humour. He would allow no self condemnation on Billy’s part.

“My dear good lad,” he argued. “Every man worth his salt gets drunk and goes off the deep end once or twice in a life time. You had blackwater on you before you went on the binge; it was not a specially directed act of punishment on the part of the Almighty.”

“Of course not,” flushed Billy, “I don’t think that, Only . . .”

“There’s a perfectly good poet of yours,” interrupted Mackenzie, “by name, Browning. He’s not a patch on Burns, but he has got some good sense in his writing. Here’s a bit for you, young man:---

“Let us not always say
‘’Spite of this flesh, to-day,
I rose, made strides, gained ground upon the whole.’
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us say, ‘All good things
Are ours---not soul helps flesh more
Now, than flesh helps soul.’”

Not that his philosophy quite healed the wound in Billy’s self esteem. He felt most horribly soiled by that night spent at Shelton’s. He had always hated Shelton. His method of going there had been thought out, quite brutally planned to satisfy the brute within him. In front of Jennifer’s letters, for as soon as he had been able to read, Mrs. Rutherford had given him the newly arrived post, he felt unspeakably ashamed.

Jennifer still loved him, was counting the days till he came home, and he . . . No, indeed, the thing did not bear thinking of, no philosophy could heal it.

Nor could he write to her and state his backsliding and utter contrition. The thing looked too ugly and bald on paper. He must leave it till he got home, but he would tell her about it, that would be his penance.

Mrs. Rutherford never referred to his illness, or where and how Mr. Rutherford had found him. She was her usual, placid, friendly self. Billy stayed with them for his three weeks in the station while he packed up and waited for his leave to come through. He had been ill he wrote his mother, but he was quite fit now, and it meant leave three months earlier that it was really due. “I’ll be with you a month after you get this letter,” he wrote. But from Jennifer he kept the great fact a secret. He wanted to cable from Marseilles, “Meet me to-morrow, Victoria Station.” He could picture her surprise, her radiant excitement. “Meet me to-morrow at Victoria Station,” that was what he would cable.

Chapter Fourteen

“Twenty Minutes”

That was exactly what he did cable, only he added the time, 3.15 p.m.

Jennifer got the telegram when she came in from the theatre the evening before. Harland was with her and as a natural thing, he read the signature on the telegram over her shoulder, though she had crumpled the rest of it into a ball before he could see it.

“Who is Billy?” he asked, negligently. “A long lost brother, or a dangerous rival?”

He was quite good-naturedly contemptuous of all the men who thought they loved Jennifer. His own feeling for her was one of possessive pride. Love in all its simpleness and fierceness and beauty hardly entered into it.

“Oh, it’s no one in particular,” lied Jennifer. She lied quite instinctively and with deplorable ease, “and anyway, I can’t go, can I, it’s matinee day.”

“No,” he asserted. “Though as far as I am concerned, you are free. I’ve got to go to Manchester for the weekend.”

Harland possessed a wife and a family consisting of three children in Manchester. There was no secret about them. His wife had a good income of her own, and was, according to him, most solidly virtuous. If she knew about Jennifer, and Harland was not inclined to be secretive about his affairs, she apparently made no mention of it on her spouse’s brief returns to domesticity. Harland always came back from these visits in high good humour, and as a result presented Jennifer with a new necklace, or some expensive ornament. He did that instinctively. His last lady friend, Miss Betty Branson, who had been his first introduction into the theatre world, had made it a point of honour to display intense jealousy over his wife. He had got into the habit of presenting gifts in order to placate this jealousy. He went on doing it with Jennifer, though he could not honestly persuade even himself into a belief in her jealousy.

Jennifer was an odd, cold girl. He did not really understand her. Sometimes he was quite well aware of how far away and aloof she remained from all his love making. She gave herself for what he could give her. That struck him as only sensible and fair, but in thinking it, he was further away from understanding Jennifer than ever.

Why had she done it? Standing there in the hall of that little exotically furnished flat with Billy’s telegram crumpled to a ball in her hand, Jennifer’s heart faced that question. She knew the answer perhaps less than anyone else. The reasons she put forward were childish and absurd. Because she had hated being a nurse. Because Mrs. Martin and everyone else, even Manson, had expected it of her. Because she really did love beautiful things and the loveliness of her own body. Because . . . Oh, what was the use of trying to answer it. Mrs. Hampton, at least, would say it was because she was at heart innately immoral, and what, anyway, did that mean?

Harland at her elbow gave one of his throaty hard laughs, and tilting up her chin, kissed her possessively. “I am having my suspicions, Jennifer,” he teased. “Is it a lover?”

“No,” she lied again and moved in front of him into the room and slipped off her lovely cloak and put up instinctive hands to arrange her hair.

Mrs. Martin had laid supper for the two of them on a little artistically lit table in the centre of the room. There was cold chicken and prawns in aspic and champagne, and some sweet of which Jennifer was very fond.

Mrs. Martin and the maids did not wait up to serve them on these occasions. The champagne was all ready on the ice and Harland liked being alone.

Jennifer ate her supper and sipped the champagne that Harland poured out for her. Her mind was going through one of those curious phases in its existence, when it felt rather like a wild animal that had been hunted into a corner. She just could not go on---things had got to that stage. Was it any use appealing to Harland? Once or twice, her eyes, shy-furtive, a little hopeless, watched his face. Harland was making a good supper and enjoying himself. The episode of the telegram was already out of his mind; it was not worth worrying about. His not unhandsome face was flushed with good temper and wine. But supposing she was to say to him, “Bobbie, to-night I am tired, not in the mood. Be an angel, go away after supper, leave me to myself.”

How would he answer her? To what wild surmises might his mind not leap? Oh, he was not jealous, but he was possessive, he took what he considered was his by right of all he had paid for it.

No, there was no use in asking Robert for so much grace, and yet how could she bear to go on?

She rose presently, taking a little sidelong look at the clock. It was only just twelve. There would still be a taxi in the rank at the top of the road. If she could not go on, she must run away. Once, twice before in her life she had done that.

“Give me twenty minutes, Bobbie,” she asked. There was nothing in her voice to betray the hurry and agitation of her mind. “I want to take off this dress. The fringe is so heavy.”

He glanced up at her. “Go to bed if you like,” he answered. “I shan’t be five minutes.”

“No,” she prevaricated. “I’m not tired. Besides, I haven’t had that sweet and I adore it.”

“All right,” he laughed. “Greedy baby! I’ll wait for mine till you come back.”

“Twenty minutes,” she impressed on him.

“It will be more like half an hour once you’ve got in front of your glass,” he retorted.

He was quite good tempered about it. She was probably going to go and deck herself out in some new garment with which she wanted to surprise him. She was ridiculously and rather delightfully fond of clothes.

Twenty minutes! It did not give her much time, yet the exigencies of theatre life had taught Jennifer to undress and dress quickly. In a quarter of an hour she was ready, trim and neat in a very simple coat and skirt costume with her small suit case packed with necessities and her store of money. More than she had had that last time she had run away. She could live most expensively for several weeks on what she had saved out of her salary lately. Now to tiptoe quietly down the stairs, past the room where Harland was sitting, waiting, to slip back the bolts of the front door, well oiled bolts, fortunately. Mrs. Martin saw to that, she hated doors that made a noise, and then out in the still, quiet night.

“If there isn’t a taxi, I must run,” thought Jennifer. “He won’t be likely to look for me outside.”

The wide, empty streets, the stately lampposts seemed to blink a welcome at her. There were at least three taxis on the rank. Jennifer controlled herself sufficiently to walk towards them, to hail one sedately.

“Drive to Waterloo Station, please,” she said gravely. “And I’m rather in a hurry. I want to catch the 12.45.”

“That’s easy, Miss,” grinned the taxi driver. “Not much traffic about these hours.”

At Waterloo Station, Jennifer was making up her mind rapidly, she would dismiss this taxi, walk through the station and take one the other side. Then she would drive to Jimmie Manson’s. He, amongst all the others, who praised and envied and flattered her was her one real friend. He had a flat in one of the little side streets that open off Portland Place, and he kept, she knew, ridiculously late hours. For often in the days of her apprenticeship, Jennifer had spent half the night in the queer long low sitting room of the Manson’s flat, while Manson stalked about and raved at her, or curled himself up, a limp, exhausted genius on a pile of cushions which he always kept stacked in readiness on the floor. Mrs. Manson never made any attempt to chaperone Jimmie and his midnight companions. She always kissed him placidly and went off to bed as soon as they got in from the theatre. So, even though it was so late, half past one before the taxi turned into Manson’s Street, Jennifer was quite certain she would find him up. Nor was she disappointed, Jimmie himself opened the door to her. He had got on his black velvet smoking jacket and his long wisp of hair seemed more than usually dejected.

“You!” he groaned; his reception was certainly not enthusiastic. “Oh, good God, why come to me because you have had a row with Harland?”

“I have not had a row,” said Jennifer. She looked young and childish standing there in the plain coat and skirt, the small, close pulled down little hat. No one would have dreamt of recognising in her the famous and beautiful Miss Jennifer Star.

“I’ve run away,” she said simply.

“Lord! You women!” protested Jimmie. “But why to me?”

“Because there are some things I’ve got to explain to you,” answered Jennifer. “Do let me in, Jimmie, there’s a dear!”

He stood aside rather grudgingly to let her pass. “I hate semi-domestic rows,” he grumbled. “Harland has been on the ’phone already, asking if you are here.”

He shut the hall door behind him with a definite, defiant click and preceded her into the sitting room.

“You are a blinking young ass, Jenny,” he said, tersely, but on the whole, not unkindly.

“I know you’ll think me that,” admitted Jennifer. “But . . . but, Jimmie, I could not stand it any longer. Oh, it goes further back than you can have any idea of. To-night, I had a telegram . . . from Billy.”

“Go slow,” said Jimmie. “Sit down and take your hat off. You’re all muddled up as most women are when they start explaining some perfectly unexplainable action. You had better just answer questions.”

He stood over her, his feet apart, his hands thrust into his pockets, the lock of hair tossed back.

“Now I take it you’ve left Mr. Harland? What does this entail?”

“Everything,” said Jennifer slowly. “That’s why I came to see you.”

“Your flat, your jewels, your . . .”

“More than that,” whispered Jennifer. “It means the theatre.”

He stood staring at her, his eyes sombre in his face.

“You can’t do that,” he said finally, “It breaks up the show---dozens of them thrown out of work.”

“And . . . Oh, I must,” said Jennifer. “You don’t understand. Let me tell you.”

And, very coherently, considering she was explaining something unexplainable, she told him about Billy, about the soul of her that loved Billy, how she had always kept that soul of hers apart from Harland and her life with Harland.

Jimmie had thrown himself down among the cushions before she had finished, he had lighted a cigarette, he was lying back, blowing smoke rings, studying them with his half closed eyes.

“You poor kid,” he said softly when she had done speaking, “and, oh, you damned fool! Are you going to tell your Billy all this, because, if so, we may just as well announce that Miss Jennifer Star has gone away for ten days’ holiday. You’ll come back to us all right, my dear.”

“No,” said Jennifer, “I shan’t come back.”

“Your Billy will have none of you,” said Manson. “He sounds so utterly English.” He stirred and sat up. “So you chuck it all for a whim. Women are hard to understand. I don’t say you’ve got great talent. I never have said that, but you’ve got a gift, a flair for showing off your beauty in the best poses. Oh, that doesn’t make an actress, granted. I’ve watched you. You’ve lived this part---you haven’t acted it. But you could have gone on like that for some time. I’d have made plays for you---plays that you could have lived. Till your beauty failed . . .” He leant forward looking at her. “Till your beauty failed,” he repeated.

“Yes, and after that, what?” asked Jennifer. “Isn’t it better, oh, Jimmie, isn’t it better to choose love?”

“Put the two in the balance.” He gave his shoulders an odd shake. “Love may let you down pretty badly. There’s just one thing in this world for us to hold on to, and that is work. The work of our brains, of our hands, the something which we go on fighting to achieve until the end.”

He stood up. “Well,” he said, “That’s that. You leave us, eh? Fay Danton will understudy for you tomorrow. We’ll see. She’s word perfect anyway, has a prettiness all her own. She may succeed. We’ll announce that you’ve had a nervous breakdown---that your return is uncertain.”

“Do you hate me, Jimmie?” whispered Jennifer, on the border line of tears now. “Does it all sound unbearably selfish?”

“Hate you? Good Lord, no,” said Jimmie. “Now, for God’s sake, don’t cry. I hate women crying. You’d better stay here to-night. Doss down on those pillows. I’m up before anyone else, the charlady doesn’t come till seven. I’ll let you out at half-past six. And as far as Harland and the newspapers are concerned, I don’t know a blinking thing about you.” He moved to the door. “Sleep well,” he said. “It’s close on three now. You’ve got three and a half hours in which to dream of a golden love.”

She did not sleep much. She lay on Jimmie’s heaped up cushions and stared out at the dusky outlines of the room; it never grew utterly dark, a street lamp outside kept it vaguely illuminated. Just before six the telephone bell rang and Jimmie padded downstairs in his pyjamas and bare feet to answer it. Mrs. Manson always chose Jimmie’s pyjamas for him, they made him look grotesque, being several inches too large for him and very brilliant coloured.

“Bet it’s Harland,” he nodded at Jennifer. “Slept any?”

“Not much,” she confessed, and sat up with her hands clasped round her knees, listening.

Jimmie was terse on the ’phone. You might have gathered that he did not like being disturbed so early in the morning.

“No,” he said. “Not a blinking thing . . . Yes, it is odd . . . Right, I’ll dress and come round. Oh, keep the police out of it, for God’s sake.”

He hung up the receiver and turned to Jennifer. “You’ve got him roused,” he said. “All his Manchester---is it Manchester blood---in arms! Unless I can knock sense into his silly head, and my God, it is a silly head, all Scotland Yard will be on your trail by midday.”

“Will they . . . will they put in the paper about me and Harland?” asked Jennifer.

He looked at her, the corners of his mouth curled in a smile. “You and your Billy,” he mocked. “Rest assured the papers are most discreet and the stage has a reputation for purity which it maintains at all cost. Outwardly, at least.”

He sighed. “You had better hop it, anyway,” he added, “before the wife gets up. She knows my morals are all right, but she would be bound to tell her dearest friend that you had spent the night here. Got any money?”

“Oh, Jimmie---yes, heaps,” said Jennifer.

“Then, goodbye,” said Jimmie. He made no motion to shake hands with her, he just stood there looking oddly mournful in his bright coloured pyjamas. “Miss Jennifer Star.”

“I’ll write you,” said Jennifer, “I owe you so much, everything, and I . . . I seem to be failing you so horribly.”

“You had better not write me,” grunted Jimmie. “I should leave the letter lying about and complicate things. Goodbye, and,” he moved across the room to the door leading upstairs, “good luck,” he added, as an after thought.

He was angry with her, hurt. How could it be otherwise? “These blinking women who upset even the stoutest bit of man’s work by their emotions.” Once she had heard him say that, he must be feeling it very acutely at the moment.

Jennifer did her quick brushing up and dressing in a mood of contrition, and yet she could not help it, already her heart was singing and dancing because of its freedom. The spirit of adventure was awake again. What fun it was to run away! How glorious it would be to face Billy this afternoon with the announcement, “I’ve thrown it all up. I’ve run away to be with you.”

He would think her quite mad of course. Perhaps he would frown at her to begin with, then his eyes would twinkle and his mouth laugh that delightful funny laugh of his. “You ridiculous kid,” he would say. And they would be together, arm in arm, or hand swinging in hand; together after so long a time apart with so much to tell each other. Here, uncalled for and unasked, the shadow of Harland obtruded and Jennifer shivered, ramming her hat down very firmly over her ears so that it hid her eyes. She would not think of Harland. One day, she would, of course, tell Billy about him, but not straight away at the very beginning. That would spoil everything, their joy at meeting, the touch of Billy’s hands, the dear delight of his laughter.

She had not quite made up her mind where to go for the day until Billy arrived. It would seem suspicious to any landlady if she were to go round as early as this to ask for rooms. Then, if the papers came out with reports of her disappearance, they might jump to their own conclusions and give her away at once. An hotel seemed safer. There she would be one of a hundred new arrivals, coming and going all day. They, Harland and the persons he employed to search for her would never dream of her going openly to one of the big hotels.

She walked down Regent Street, towards the Circus. The Regent Palace Hotel was the one she had selected in her mind. She had never seen London before so early in the morning. It was like a new world, the streets deserted and idle, the shops given over to the hands of cleaners. The booking clerk at the Regent Palace, a boy since the young ladies had not yet come on duty, looked at her with perky curiosity and assigned her to Room 104, on the third floor.

“We’re pretty full up, Miss,” he said, “it’s the best I can do.”

“It will do beautifully.” Jennifer smiled. “You see I’m just up from the country and this afternoon I am going to meet the boat train at Victoria---a friend who is coming back from Africa.”

She had to tell someone. She had not of late lived among people who went in for grave reticence on personal matters.

“I see,” grinned the boy. “Well, if the two of you want a suite later on, I guess it can be managed.”

“I’ve been travelling all night,” Jennifer explained. “If I go to bed now, can I have breakfast upstairs?”

“Sure thing,” said the booking clerk. “You just tell the maid on your floor.”

Jennifer went upstairs in the spacious lift, a small boy in buttons carrying her suit case for her. She had a bath and curled herself up in bed and rang the bell and ordered breakfast. She had given her name as Miss Janet Stacey. It was the first one that had come into her head, and for her last address, whimsically enough, she wrote Scarton Manor, near Dublin. She did not think the maid could possibly recognise her, even if she were the most devoted of Jennifer Star “fans,” for she had brushed her gold hair straight back and made herself look as plain as possible.

So Jennifer slept, while in the small flat at Knightsbridge, Robert Harland roused, as Manson had said, to real wrath, strode about and swore at everything and everyone, and a discreet official from Scotland Yard endeavoured to get what sense he could out of a loquacious and tearful Mrs. Martin.

“It’s the damned ingratitude of the thing that gets my goat,” stormed Harland; he did not in the least mind who heard him, but it was Jimmie Manson he was addressing in particular. “Here I give the damned little slut,” he was not, one may notice, very choice in his language, “everything and she clears out without a moment’s notice.”

“I might point out that she has not taken any of the things you have given, with her,” said Jimmie, curtly. “You’re making a darned fool of yourself, Harland, shouting your grievances abroad like this. Why don’t you go off to Manchester for the week-end and leave her alone. Women get tantrums at times---she may be back by Monday.”

“If she thinks she can treat me like that,” said Harland, “by God, she is mistaken. I’ll break her . . . I’ll. . .”

“Oh, you make me sick,” said Jimmie. “You can’t buy women, body and soul, Harland. It’s our show that is ruined if you have driven her away.”

Of course, Harland had called the police in. No arguing on Jimmie’s part had been able to avoid that. With the police came the press, eager as ferrets with a rabbit, run to ground. Jimmie met one of them as he stood morosely on the steps of Harland’s flat waiting for a taxi to take him down to the theatre. He had called a rehearsal, most of the morning he had been shouting orders across the ’phone. Fay Danton must be pushed into the part before the afternoon show. It really was rotten luck when one’s reputation and career hung on the whimsies of temperamental women!

One of the reporters approached Jimmie, ingratiatingly. He was a personality well known to the newspaper world.

“Excuse me, Mr. Manson,” the young man said, “perhaps you won’t recognise me. I represent The Evening Planet.”

He held his pencil in his mouth and produced a card. “Very sudden, eh what, this disappearance of Miss Jennifer Star?”

“Very,” snapped Jimmie. “But if you want an announcement in the press, it’s this. Miss Jennifer Star has had a nervous breakdown and by doctor’s orders is taking a complete rest from the theatre for at least a month.”

“Then I gather you know where she is,” sighed the reporter. “Disappearance is a misnomer.”

“You can gather what you like,” growled Jimmie and disappeared into the newly arrived taxi.

If you hung round the precincts of the flower-decked house in Knightsbridge, you most certainly did gather things other than Jimmie’s official announcement. Obviously, Miss Jennifer Star had had a row with Mr. Robert Harland, jealousy, probably, and she had flown off in a pet. No one did know where she was. It was all very exciting and made quite good copy for the evening papers, even though they were thoroughly discreet and merely mentioned Mr. Robert Harland as part manager of the theatre, and a very close friend of the vanished actress.

Miss Jennifer Star had vanished, that was the astounding fact. People flocked to the theatre to see if it were true that afternoon.

Chapter Fifteen

“If Billy Knew---”

“Mysterious Disappearance of Famous Actress.” Billy saw the posters flaunting on all the railway stations as the train neared London. At Grosvenor Road, where it stopped unexpectedly, he leant out of the window and bought a paper.

“Miss Jennifer Star, the girl whose beauty all London knows as of “being mighty like a rose,” left her flat in Knightsbridge last night between the hours of twelve and one, and mysteriously disappeared. The official announcement in the theatre states that Miss Star has had a nervous breakdown and is resting under doctor’s orders, but that this is an excuse, put forward to pacify the audience by a harassed management is pretty obvious since Scotland Yard has already been called in. Foul play, we understand, is not for a moment suspected, but it is feared that Miss Star may at this moment be wandering about London suffering from loss of memory, due to overstrain.”

Then followed a brief, very delicately veiled allusion to Mr. Robert Harland and the supper party at the flat, and the fact that the police had been so far able to prove that Miss Jennifer Star had taken a taxi on leaving her house at that late hour and ordered the driver to take her to Waterloo Station. She had appeared quite calm and collected and had said something about catching the 12.45 train. Beyond that, however, all trace of her had vanished; none of the ticket collectors at any of the barriers remembered anyone in the least answering to her description.

Billy read the report with some stupefaction. What in Heaven’s name could have happened to Jennifer? He had not, as it happened, very much time to worry because the distance between Grosvenor Road station and Victoria is very short.

He got out of the carriage still in a mood of perplexity. One glance, up and down, satisfied him that Jennifer was not there. He had particularly asked Mrs. Hampton not to meet him, making it out, as an excuse, that he did not know what time the train would be in. A little wrathfully, because funnily enough, it was a sense of annoyance rather than anxiety which predominated in his mind, Billy clutched up his suitcase, the heavy luggage was all coming round by boat, and strode to the barrier. From some distance off, he saw Jennifer. She was standing at the bookstall, which lay in his line of route towards the underground. She would guess, he supposed, that he would come out that way. But why in Heaven . . . He remembered the newspaper---the police search---probably all stations were very closely watched.

He put down his bag, found his ticket and handed it to the collector. He did not wave to Jennifer or show that he had seen her. She really was a little monkey to play these kinds of tricks, just when he wanted his old father and mother to approve of her. He marched straight up to her, and he tried hard not to smile. She was unobtrusively dressed, he noticed that, and she kept very still, not attracting any attention to herself.

Billy! she whispered, he saw her lips quivering.

Her beauty swept over him, she seemed so much more beautiful than he had remembered even. Her eyes were like stars in the shadows of her small hat. Manlike, he struggled with his emotion, forcing it to remain dumb.

“Well, young lady,” he asked, “What’s the meaning . . .”

“Oh, hush,” she whispered, she stood near him and slid her hand into his arm. “Billy, let’s get a taxi. I want to explain.”

“I should jolly well think you did,” said Billy, and piloted her to a taxi rank and helped her in, looking round him rather defiantly as if to say, “you need not any of you try to interfere, because you damned well can’t.”

“Tell him The Regent Palace,” said Jennifer. “I’ve got a room there.”

Billy gave the address and climbed in beside her. “Well?” he said again.

How jolly it was to feel her hands, warm and nervous in his, to smell the scent of her rising against his face!

“I’ve run away,” explained Jennifer.

“So it seems,” he nodded, “But why . . .”

“To be with you,” said Jennifer in all seriousness. “Oh, Billy, it was so difficult, at least, running away wasn’t, but it would have been if I had stayed. I should have had to be acting now this minute. I couldn’t have met you . . . I . . . “

“You dear,” whispered Billy, and all his disapproval melted and she was in his arms and he was kissing her face and lips and eyes, as he had indeed dreamt of kissing them a hundred times.

“All the same, you’ll have to go back for a bit, won’t you?” he asked, after the first rapture was over.

“No, I’m never going back,” said Jennifer. “Manson, and he is the only one that matters, knows I’m not going back. That bit of my life is all finished, Billy. It has got nothing---nothing to do with you.”

She clung to him, and laughing a little, he hugged her. “You ridiculous darling,” he said, “and I’ve rather wanted to see you, as I’ve seen you in the picture papers.”

“No, you would not like it,” she argued. “I’ve known always that you wouldn’t like it. That’s why I’ve said from the first that I would give it all up when you come.”

“I suppose the fellow on the stage makes passionate love to you,” teased Billy; he purposely mispronounced the word ‘passionate’ to show that he did not really mind. “And you picture me growing green with jealousy in my free stall?”

“Yes,” Jennifer nodded, her hair brushed against his lips when she did that, so close was she to him. “I’m frightened of your jealousy, Billy.”

“You might well be,” said Billy. A little seriousness descended on him. “Perhaps you are right,” he conceded. “I daresay I should have hated it. But what are you going to do?”

“I want to go out to Africa,” said Jennifer, “and marry you.”

“Yes, well, that’s what I want too,” said Billy. “No one more, But . . .”

“Wait,” she spoke quickly, laying a soft hand over his mouth. “I know you’ll think it absolutely mad, Billy, but it’s really the only sensible thing to do. I’m going to stay just to-day and to-morrow in London because I can’t bear going away when you’ve just come, and then I’m going over to Brittany. There’s a little place there Jimmie Manson used to tell me about. I can live there for six months. I’ve got heaps of money . . .”

Billy had wriggled his mouth free. He held both her wrists.

“I’ve never heard such nonsense talked by any human being,” he said, very sternly.

“Oh, Billy, it isn’t nonsense.” He was a little horrified to see the tears well up into her eyes. “I’m so frightened, if they find me, they’ll drag me back again. All the publicity, everyone talking . . . Oh, Billy, you don’t know how hateful it is. Millions of eyes watching you, staring at you, noticing the clothes you wear, the things you eat . . . “

She was getting quite hysterical. Billy put a brotherly arm round her shoulder. “Silly one,” he whispered. “Very well then, it shan’t, if it doesn’t want to.”

She let her head lean back against him with a sigh, the lashes hid her tears. “Oh, Billy, I love you so,” she said, “and I want a little time away from it all to make myself all yours again.”

“But Brittany---” grumbled Billy. “And I’ve only just come home.”

The taxi drew up at the hotel. They had to get out. The centre hall was full of people laughing, chattering, there was nowhere where they could talk in peace and quiet.

“Come up to my room,” said Jennifer, and flushed suddenly, remembering how shocked Billy had been at that suggestion once before.

He laughed at her flush, slipping his hand over hers. “Wasn’t I a self-righteous ass in those days, Jenny?” he teased. “Come on, let’s go and talk this over.”

They did argue it out, sitting side by side on Jennifer’s bed. It seemed he could not move her from her resolution.

“You’ve got to spend your leave with your people,” argued Jennifer. “And Billy, if they knew where I was, their conscience, you know Uncle Gerald’s got a dreadfully rigid conscience, would never let them let the police go on looking for me.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” admitted Billy. “And honestly, dear heart, I think you are rather silly about it. If you announce the fact that you are going to be married, and that’s why you’ve given up the stage, they can’t drag you back, or any nonsense like that?”

“Oh, please, Billy, please,” she begged, “I can’t do it. Even if you don’t understand, don’t force me to. I don’t want anyone, after we are married, to know that I was on the stage, or anything. I want you to marry Miss Jennifer Postle, not Miss Jennifer Star.”

“Yes, I see that point,” he conceded. It was only Mrs. Rutherford that he had told about Jennifer’s stage career. Mrs. Rutherford never gossiped, “But, then . . .”

“I’ll go out on the boat with you,” said Jennifer. “Miss Jennifer Postle. I’ll join it at Marseilles. Billy, you can fall in love with me all over again. It will be fun. And then, and then we’ll get married at Mombasa.”

“And all this, six months ahead,” grumbled Billy. It started the argument again. She frightened him finally by the vehemence of her tears. He had to hold her close and kiss the top of her gold head and promise that everything should be as she wished. Only one stipulation he made. He must be allowed to tell his mother their plan and how they were going to be married at the end of six months.

He tore himself away at last. It was getting late, and probably Mrs. Hampton had sat all afternoon with her eyes watching the garden gate. They made an arrangement to meet the next day and Billy had promised to take Jennifer’s ticket to Brittany for her and see her off on the night boat.

It had not been the home coming that he had in any sense planned, but at least she was still his, she loved him.

It seemed to Mrs. Hampton as if she knew from the very first moment of meeting that Billy had already seen Jennifer.

“Hullo, Ma!” he shouted to her, and waved his hand, as he turned in at the gate. But she knew. The knowledge made her own greeting a little cold, and yet for months and weeks and days she had hoped for, and dreamt of this meeting.

“Did you have a good journey?” she asked, and knew that her lips were stiff and that her eyes avoided meeting his.

Billy kept his arm round her. He knew his old mater. She was hurt---the innermost heart of her was hurt because she knew that his train must have got into London hours ago, and all afternoon---oh, further back than that---all these two years she had been waiting.

“I’ve got a secret for you, Ma,” he whispered, “tonight, in your room.”

Colonel Hampton stepped forward fussily. “Well, my boy, welcome,” he said. “You’ve taken some time to get here, haven’t you? Seen the paper. What’s that notorious semi-cousin of yours been up to? Nothing good, I’ll be bound.”

“And perhaps nothing bad,” said Billy. “I have just glanced at it. She seems to have done a disappearing trick.”

“Not quite decent, that kind of thing,” said Colonel Hampton. “Puts the police to a great deal of inconvenience. Swallows up the ratepayers’ money. Why are we all standing in the passage? Gertrude have you got any tea for the boy?”

Tea, with his favourite cake, had been cleared away long ago.

“Would you like tea?” she asked. “Isn’t it too late?”

“Like it?” said Billy. “Why I could fair wolf a decent tea after the stuff they gave us on board ship.”

She was happy, waiting on him, though she did it all with a certain ungracious stiffness.

It was not on the whole a very happy evening. Billy was longing to be with Jennifer. Mrs. Hampton was suspecting the longing and resenting it; Colonel Hampton was blissfully unconscious of all undercurrents as usual and holding the floor with grave joviality.

He had to be told all about Africa and Billy’s work . . . as if those things mattered, thought Mrs. Hampton, with desperation working away at her knitting.

They said good-night finally, and Billy, pleading sleepiness, followed his mother upstairs. And at last there they were together in the old bedroom, mother and son, as they had been such hundreds of times before. The room to Mrs. Hampton was full of memories of Billy as a small boy; of Billy as a young man meeting Jennifer for the first time. She sat down on her chair by the dressing table, and waited for him to speak, and on the wall opposite her, an enlarged photo of Billy in his first sailor suit, stared down at her with all the solemnity of a child being photographed.

“I’ve seen Jennifer,” said Billy. He was fidgeting with the things on her dressing table; he had always done that when he was nervous or had something to confess.

“I knew,” said Mrs. Hampton. “Where is she, Billy? Why has she done this?”

He started to explain. He sat on the edge of the big double bed and leant forward, his hands between his knees. He was very anxious that his mother should understand that Jennifer had done all this because she loved him.

“It sounds a little mad,” said Mrs. Hampton, wearily. “Wouldn’t it be better for her to come here?”

“I did suggest that,” Billy acknowledged. “But Ma, you know father. You heard him to-night. He would feel it his duty to inform the police that Miss Star had been found.”

“Yes, I suppose he would,” she admitted. “Your father, Billy, has always had a very strong sense of duty.”

“Funny old stick, isn’t he?” said Billy. “Oh, I don’t want to be disrespectful, but somehow---well, you know what I mean. Father has never been anything a quarter as real as you have been in my life, Mother.” He leant a little forward, staring at her with his eager, frank eyes. “I wish to God my love for Jennifer did not hurt you like it does.”

She shut her eyes for a moment. “That’s only my silliness, Billy,” she whispered. “My terror, in case she hurts you.”

“You’ve never trusted her, or really liked her. I’d trust my all on her love, Mother, and unless you two are friends, it is going to be pretty beastly for me.”

“Oh, my dear,” she said quickly. She put out vague, trembling hands as though she could feel him a little boy again, pressing against her knee, asking for something that she was loath to give, because it might harm him. “Billy, have you thought,” she forced herself to say it, “that there may be some other reason for this flight of Jennifer’s?”

“No,” he admitted. “Naturally it sounds puzzling to us; but Jenny is such a kid, far more of a baby than you realise, Mother.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hampton. She shut her lips on the accusation she had been about to make. “Perhaps it is just that I don’t understand her.”

They talked for a little longer. Billy felt almost satisfied that he had won his mother to their side, at least, she had promised that, for the moment, Colonel Hampton should be told nothing about the engagement.

“We must think of something to tell him, Billy, a little later on,” she had said. Her good-night kiss had been warm and soft. Mother would come to love Jennifer when she knew her better, Billy felt sure, he comforted his loyalty with the reflection.

As a matter of fact, the papers very rapidly lost their interest in the disappearance of Miss Star. Even Harland realised that he only made a fool of himself in his persistent efforts to find her. You cannot expect Scotland Yard to be violently enthusiastic over the voluntary disappearance of a mistress. Mrs. Martin, thus suddenly deprived of a very comfortable livelihood, did what she could. She remembered the address at Thames Ditton to which Jennifer had once or twice referred, and Harland called there in person, instead of going to Manchester. Cook could give him no information beyond that of the Hampton’s address, and the fact that Mrs. Hampton was a relative of Jennifer’s.

Once more Harland paid a call. His Rolls Royce created quite a sensation in the street of suburban houses. Colonel Hampton was out, but Mrs. Hampton and Billy received him in the drawing room.

He apologised, of course, profusely, for troubling them, but they would understand when he explained that he was part manager in the show in which Miss Jennifer Star had been appearing. Could they give him any news of her?

“None whatever,” said Billy, with a certain blank finality. He answered also for his mother.

He had taken, it seemed, a very instantaneous dislike to Harland. The man’s opulence, his reddened face and rather protruding eyes were, he thought, repugnant. He hated to think that Jennifer had been forced into even business relations with such a bounder.

“Ah!” said Harland. “It seems odd. We hoped, of course, that she would have held some communication with her own people.”

“Jennifer was only my step-sister’s child,” explained Mrs. Harland, “and really she hardly knows us at all.”

“She had a telegram the day before yesterday, the night of her disappearance, in fact,” Harland told them. “The police think nothing of it; but I cannot help connecting it with what followed. Unfortunately, I did not see the contents, but it had been sent by someone of the name of Billy.”

“That is my name,” announced Billy, “and it can have had nothing to do with it. I merely wired birthday congratulations.”

“Ah!” repeated Harland, and this time he favoured Billy with a hard, bold stare. “And she has not since her disappearance, communicated with you.”

“She has not,” stated Billy, again flatly and finally.

“Poisonous bounder!” he remarked to his mother, coming in again from seeing Harland off. “Don’t wonder Jennifer did a bolt, if that was the type of creature she had to deal with.”

Mrs. Hampton said nothing. Her heart had leapt with fear, seeing Harland, now its pain had died down to a smothered ache. She was remembering her visit to Jennifer’s flat, and further back still to a vision of Jennifer as she had first seen her talking to the coarse faced young man in the hall of old Mr. Benson’s house. Billy, pausing in front of her, seemed to snatch suddenly at her thoughts.

“Good Lord, mother,” he said, “you surely aren’t thinking . . .”

She could not make any answer. She could only get up and stumble past him out of the room. Oh, where was the hurt of this going to end for Billy, once he awoke to the truth!

Chapter Sixteen

“The Lie”

Damgan, the small place in Brittany to which Manson had once or twice vaguely referred as being a cheap place and not bad for the money, proved to be indeed the other end of nowhere. One went by train through miles and miles of Breton country. Chateaux, quaint villages, wayside crucifixes, flashed past repeating themselves again and again, till at last the brain and the eye grew weary and one lay back in the musty corner of the railway carriage and tried to sleep. At least, Jennifer tried to sleep, but her brain was too busy, her thoughts too frightened. What was this thing she had done? She had lied to Billy. When she shut her eyes, the lie danced about in her mind, mixed itself up with Billy’s face, his eyes, his dear, dear smile. She did not see Harland at all, he had no place in her thoughts or memories, and yet the lie had been because of Harland.

Yesterday, she and Billy had spent the afternoon together, and she had known as soon as she saw him that something had happened to Billy in the interval since they had kissed goodbye the night before. She had thought at first that it must be his mother, she could just imagine Mrs. Hampton’s cold grey disapproval, and once before she and Mrs. Hampton had fought for the possession of Billy and Mrs. Hampton had won. Billy was very fond of his mother, but surely, surely this time he would not turn away again from the love Jennifer offered him, because of his mother.

The change in him took all the joy out of her heart. When he suggested going out in a taxi for a drive down to Hampton, she accepted listlessly. He had seen about her ticket and brought it with him.

Well, they had gone. How bewilderingly that lie danced up and down, jeering at her. Why had she not told Billy the truth? She had meant, always she had meant when the time came, to tell him the truth. He had not given her time to think, that was it really, her one poor pitiful excuse. His question had leapt at her so suddenly, it had seemed so definitely to face her with the fact that in speaking the truth she would lose him.

“For God’s sake, Jennifer, let’s have this out. Was there anything between you and that brute, Harland?”

How had he heard? Who could have told him? Again, the cold grey disapproval of Mrs. Hampton slipped between them!

She had sat quite still, she had hardly been able to speak.

“Billy,” she had whispered, and he had read into the horror of her voice all the hurt affront which any girl must feel at such a question.

“I knew it could not be true,” Billy had hurried on, “but I had jolly well got to ask you myself. It’s been like hell, thinking, wondering. Oh, Jennifer, say it isn’t true. I’d like to hear you say it.”

“Of course it isn’t true,” she had said. And he had laughed with gay sudden laughter and pulled her to him and kissed her again and again.

“Harland came nosing round our place,” he had confessed. “What a hateful bounder he is! Got our address from some old lady who used to keep house for you, wanted to know if we knew where you were. We did not. I told him that pretty clearly, and saw the poor old Mater register shock at my capacity for non-truth.”

He was so immensely relieved, so radiant back in the full possession of her love that he had talked the most insane nonsense.

“But who told you?” Jennifer had been able to say at last, masking her eyes, silencing her heart. “Not Harland . . .?”

“Oh, Lord, no!” Billy had admitted. “The damned thought crept in like a snake when I wasn’t looking. You’ve got to forgive me for that. But I know, Jennifer, well, it isn’t easy, it can’t be for a girl like you . . . you’re such a kid, Jennifer, and we aren’t any of us made to be saints . . .”

And as if that had suddenly started his thoughts down some little grim channel, he had grown serious and held her hand tight and kept his eyes from hers and told her about that night at Shelton’s.

“As if that mattered, as if anything could matter between you and me,” Jennifer had wept, clinging to him.

But things did matter. She had known it then. She knew it now. Her lie mattered. Her lie jumped about and straddled over her love for Billy, making it obscene, horrible. Why had she lied? Surely his forgiveness would have been equal to hers, and, really, was any forgiveness called for from either of them? Did these things that one did with one’s body count so very much, so long as one kept one’s love, one’s soul . . . Oh, why was virtue so cold, so pitiless, so certain where the line must be drawn? One’s body! One’s body meant so little. But suppose one regarded it as the temple of one’s soul and sin came into it like a degradation.

The train drew into the fairly large seaside port where one had to disembark for Damgan. Jennifer dragged herself back from her thoughts and clambered out. It was a wide, dusty platform. All day, people had walked backwards and forwards, churning up the dust, now the air seemed stagnant, unpleasant. And it was late. Jennifer got the impression of immense unfriendliness, as one does sometimes when one arrives tired and dusty after a long journey, and there is no welcome waiting for one.

She asked her way finally of the ticket collector in her soft halting French.

“Damgan---mais oui,” he answered at once, and broke into a string of rapid explanations.

Jennifer did not understand most of them, but his ticket collecting being done, he ushered her out into the station yard and presented her---that was his own expression---to the waiting hotel bus. “Hotel Belle Vue, Damgan” was written on it in large white letters. Jennifer’s box was hoisted on top and she herself found a place inside. The bus was already full to overflowing, but not, she imagined rightly, with hotel visitors. It had been market day in the seaside town; Jennifer sat wedged in firmly between two stout Breton dames with enormous market baskets. The last stage of her journey began. The bus swayed and creaked and grumbled along the dusty lanes with their low cut hedges, and on every side field upon field of vegetables. It was motor driven, but it progressed very slowly, breaking no traffic rules. It was dark and the bus was practically empty long before it drew up in front of what she vaguely gathered must be the hotel at Damgan. The last part of their journey had been across empty sand and coarse grass dunes, now the salt smell of the sea was all about her, it blew in gusts against her face as she got out of the bus.

There was still, it seemed, no welcome for her, though she had wired reserving accommodation and they had heard the arrival of the bus. The driver struggled with her box and dumped it in the dust at her feet, then turned to have a wordy argument over a mailbag which he was apparently late in delivering. Jennifer looked round her, shivering a little. There was no concealing the simplicity of the place to which she had come. The hotel was a straight up and down whitewashed building with numerous small windows. A light shone out of the door, she could see a sanded floor, brass legged, marble topped tables, a few peasants sitting about, drinking red wine. Manson had told her it was a primitive place. She had no real right to feel so disappointed.

She went forward at last, leaving her box there on the road, and immediately a stout, pleasant, shrill voiced woman came out to greet her from behind the bar.

“Without doubt it is Madame,” she said in French, expressing a kind of satisfied surprise, “Jean---Jean!” Her voice was very shrill when she raised it. “The traps of Madame.”

Jean, rough, surly, attired in a blue blouse belted in at the waist, plunged out into the darkness and appeared to start an argument at once with the bus driver. Madame shrugged her shoulders and turned to Jennifer.

“Come,” she said, “I will show Madame her room.” The inside of the hotel was as primitive as the outside, but at least it was clean. Everything smelt of the sea. Jennifer’s room, furnished in the very simplest fashion, was wide and airy, and when Madame had gone and she could lean right out of the window, she could hear the sea murmuring, singing to itself somewhere down there in the darkness.

The sea was the one beautiful tiring about Damgan. It swept in from the Atlantic in great rolling waves; it was deep blue, green, or sometimes tossed sullen grey. It came with great rushing winds that scurried through the small village of Damgan, filling all the hotel rooms with sand, or on other days, it would lie like a spread out sheet of soft sulky blue and little tiny waves would break and murmur and sigh to each other all the length of the sea shore. From the very first day Jennifer loved the sea, but everything else about Damgan she hated. Fortunately, it was summer time, so she could spend all her days out, taking sandwiches with her from the hotel, a bathing dress and a towel. The sea made her tired, brought her dreamless sleep at night. She was able to comfort herself with the ridiculous delusion that the sea washed clean her heart and mind, as it did her body. When she met Billy again there would be no need to lie about the past, it would be all swept away and forgotten.

There was only one other English family staying at the hotel. Jennifer saw very little of them. It was a man and his wife and their little boy---a small chubby person of about seven years old with a mop of golden curls and an immense capacity for getting dirty. Jennifer sometimes stopped, passing the small boy in the passages of the hotel, and spoke to him. “Beautiful lady,” he called her. It was he indeed who drew his parents’ attention to her beauty.

“Do you know who I believe the lovely female is?” Fred Drew said one day to his wife. “I think she is the missing Star.”

“Oh, surely not,” gasped Mrs. Drew; she was a lady who adored mysteries and excitements. From thence on, she watched Jennifer, tried to get into conversation with her, ferreted out what her name was, where she came from, all that is to say, that the hotel people knew about her. They thought they were right in their suppositions, they were not sure. They were just sufficiently acquainted with the theatre world to feel very important over their discovery. They wrote about it to one or two people.

Coming back late one Saturday evening from her day on the beach, Jennifer met Harland. He was walking down the village street to meet her and there was nowhere to which to escape. The song of the sea now seemed derisive. “Wash out the past,” it chanted, “What’s it got to do with me? Why should I?”

Harland raised his hat, coming close to her. His smile and his eyes were sarcastic.

“Well, Jenny,” he said, “I’ve found you.” She could not say anything. She could just stand staring at him. He turned beside her on the road and slipped his hand into her arm.

“Don’t look so scared,” he laughed. “I’m not going to eat you. I was angry at first---but now,” he looked down at her. “Gad, I feel more like kissing you than smacking you,” he added.

She tried to draw away, but his hand was like a vice. “Please,” she managed to say, “Bobbie, there is something that has got to be explained.”

“There is,” he agreed grimly. “But we won’t do it in the village street.”

They came up to the hotel, arm in arm. The Drews, sitting at their bedroom window almost cried out in satisfaction. “It is her, by Jove,” said Drew. “There is no mistaking Harland.”

“It must be her,” breathed Mrs. Drew. “How fearfully dramatic and exciting.”

Up in the whitewashed bedroom Jennifer and Harland faced each other. He had told the people downstairs that he was Mr. Postle, her husband, she had made no attempt to contradict him.

“Now then,” said Harland, “explain, young lady, if you can.”

“I don’t suppose I can to you,” Jennifer said. She sat on the straight backed chair by the window and stared out at the sea.

“You left me looking a damned fool,” said Harland. “Hang it all, Jenny, I wasn’t bad to you. You took everything I gave with both hands. I . . . I made you . . . you know. Your success, your fame, everything. You would not have got any of it without me, would you?”

“And I paid,” whispered Jennifer, her lips trembled a little.

“Well, you owed me at least gratitude, a little consideration,” argued Harland. “To go off like that---not a word of explanation, as if my presence had suddenly grown so hateful to you, that you could not stand another moment of it.”

“I know,” she admitted, “it was dreadful of me. I . . .” She stood up suddenly, facing him, “Oh, Robert, it was just that,” she said. “I could not go on paying, and I was afraid . . . afraid.”

“Why not be truthful?” he sneered. “Why not admit to the other man?”

She stood, fighting with her fear of him, for she was most horribly afraid. It was in his power to break all her happiness with those strong hands of his that she had always instinctively hated.

“I had loved him all the time,” she said slowly. “You knew that I never loved you. You never even asked me for love. You wanted me and you took me.”

“Excuse me, my dear,” said Harland. “You gave me yourself.”

“Yes, I know, put it that way if you like,” she spoke quickly. “I gave you my body, but my heart---my soul---”

“Oh, my dear girl, don’t let’s talk rubbish,” said Harland. He looked round him. “Where is this mythical lover of yours?” he asked.

“He is not my lover---not like you mean it,” said Jennifer. “He loves me, and I love him. We are going to be married.”

She moved to him quickly and put her two hands on his shoulders, looking up at him, her eyes shadowed, her beauty all dimmed with tears. “Oh, if you have any pity, have ever liked me at all, you won’t spoil this---the one beautiful thing in my life.”

“Supposing I were to say that I loved you,” he asked. “That I am not unselfish enough to let you go.”

He drew her to him and kissed her, not unaffectionately. “Don’t be silly, Jenny. I’m not a spoilsport. If you want to marry this man and live in dull respectability I shan’t stop you by revealing your murky past or anything melodramatic like that.”

Jennifer drew back. Suddenly, her tears seemed foolish, it was as though she had indulged in mock heroics.

“I can’t see that it makes any difference to us here and now,” Harland was going on saying. “Your paragon isn’t here, is he?” He laughed. “Come, Jenny, be your own nice lovely self to me. Give me one week end . . . then I’ll go back to London and . . .” He gave his shoulders a shrug. “The news of your wedding will cause a discreet excitement to our London friends,” he said.

“No,” said Jenny. She spoke with stiff lips. “I can’t do that. You don’t understand.”

“I certainly don’t,” he admitted, his figure in the room looked large and menacing.

She looked round her with desperate eyes. Was it to be the same all over again? A new lie built up between herself and Billie?

“If you touch me,” she whispered, “I think I shall kill myself. Oh, not here in this room, with you watching. But afterwards, when you have gone, out there in the clean cold sea. It would wash me clean then, wouldn’t it? When I was dead.”

Harland stared at her. She was, he realised, hysterical, distraught----and yet her threat carried conviction with it. She did for the moment feel desperate.

“Silly kid,” he said, reverting to the grotesque baby talk with which he had first wooed her. “Did it, then, feel like that? I’m not an inhuman monster, Jenny. Come, let’s be friends. We’ll go and have dinner and see whether this hole of a hotel can put up champagne for us. I’m not forcing your affection, girlie, it shall be just as you like.”

They dined downstairs at a little table for two---the dinner consisting chiefly, greatly to Harland’s disgust, of whelks and other sea shell fish. But the champagne was procurable and excellent of its kind. The Drews found them wildly exciting to watch. Harland was so opulent and magnificent, and Jennifer had dressed for dinner. A very simple black evening frock, but her hair glimmered and shone, or so Mrs. Drew said, and she had on a lovely pair of long drop diamond earrings.

“He’s palmed himself off as her husband,” Mr. Drew told Mrs. Drew. He found that out from the hotel proprietor. “I must say that’s a bit stiff. Though I suppose it don’t matter in a place like this.”

It was as a matter of fact, Mr. Drew who found Jennifer’s body late in the afternoon of the following Monday. Harland had left the hotel by the morning bus, and the Drews had watched Jennifer go off as usual for her day on the beach. And then Mrs. Drew had had a headache and had lain down in the afternoon and Drew had gone for a walk by himself and because he was mildly interested in the beautiful Miss Star, he had had some idea of finding her, and of entering into conversation. But he had had no thought of finding her like this. The sea was rough to-day, great waves leaping and hurling themselves against the sand. Great strong clean waves. He saw the dark object that they tossed on to the shore, and then drew back again as though loath to leave it go for quite a second or two before he realised that it was a human body, and he had plunged in, over his waist into the water, as he told his wife afterwards, and was carrying the body ashore in his arms, before he ever dreamt of its being the beautiful Miss Star.

She was not dead. That he realised at once. He had had some experience in First Aid. He laid the body on the sands and worked to get the water out of it, and the air back to its lungs, before he shouted for assistance or did anything else. Then, when he was sure that now she would live, he gathered her up again, she was absurdly slim and light and started to carry her back to the hotel.

The villagers saw him coming and flocked out to meet them; there was quite a procession before they reached the hotel door. Between them all, they carried her up and laid her down on the bed and some thought of the doctor, and Mrs. Drew came and sat beside her and held her limp, quiet hand and nearly wept because Jennifer looked so young and so lovely, and last night she had seemed so radiant with all the world at her feet, and a very handsome and opulent gentleman obviously much in love with her.

Late that night, the village doctor, not very learned and rather harassed since it is always doubly unfortunate and sometimes means a lot of trouble when an illness ends fatally in the case of a complete stranger, informed Mr. Drew, who had placed himself voluntarily in charge, that the young lady had pneumonia, and he could not be solely responsible. Mr. Drew took his wife and the hotel proprietor into consultation, and searching, they found an envelope in Jennifer’s room, containing a letter from Billy. Under the circumstances, Mr. Drew considered that he was privileged to read it, and from his perusal he realised that there was more than friendship between Miss Star and this unknown man. The result was a telegram to the address given:---“Come at once. Jennifer dangerously ill.” That was how they worded it finally, adding the hotel address and “Damgan, Brittany.”

“But at the same time,” Mr. Drew informed the hotel proprietor in his very halting French, “if these other English people come to look after the young lady, there must be nothing said of yesterday’s so-called husband, for I and my wife, we know that he is not her husband. In England he is well known, and he has a wife and children, and it is not good to cause trouble and scandal.”

The lady of the hotel threw up her hands. “But no,” she said, “it is not good. And if there has been a little romance, what business is it of mine?”

Chapter Seventeen

“Their Wedding”

Billy and his mother travelled together to Damgan. Colonel Hampton might be irate about their going, but he was powerless to prevent it. Mr. Drew’s telegram had caused such consternation that all thought of further concealment was abandoned at once, and Colonel Hampton was let into the facts of the case with an entire disregard for his personal feelings in the matter. He fumed, but even Gertrude was unmoved by his righteous wrath. He could not understand.

“But, good God, Gertrude!” He said it over and over again during the harassed hours in which Mrs. Hampton packed for the journey and tried to make the necessary household arrangements. “Are you encouraging this marriage now? Because the girl is ill, does that make her any more desirable?”

Mrs. Hampton made no attempt to argue or explain. Billy’s frantic, yet dumb, misery was all she could think about; she had no time to convince Colonel Hampton of the uselessness of his anger. If Jennifer was going to die, it would mean that her wraith, faint and still beautiful, would stand for ever between Billy and his mother, and that dim ghost would be a barrier more effective than anything that human hands could ever build. Not that Billy put so grim a thought into words, she knew it, that was all.

Colonel Hampton resorted to the rather spiteful revenge of writing both to the police and the theatre about Jennifer’s re-appearance and illness, but as far as the theatre was concerned, public interest had died down too low for them to wish to revive it. Jimmy Manson was struggling with a new play, in which Fay Danton was to star, and as for the police, they merely notified Robert Harland, and the knowledge was already his.

Billy and Mrs. Hampton arrived at the Hotel Belle Vue late in the evening, as Jennifer had done. Mr. Drew came out to meet them.

“It was I who telegraphed,” he explained. “I hope I did the right thing. It seemed desirable that someone . . .”

“Of course it was right,” Billy interrupted. “But how did you find out about us? Did Jennifer tell you?”

“No.” Mr. Drew shook his head; he spoke in a solemn whisper conducting them into the hotel. Truth to tell, Mr. Drew had never felt so important in all his life. “Miss Star has never really been conscious enough to give us any information.”

“You know who she is, then?” asked Mrs. Hampton.

“I guessed at once,” Mr. Drew acknowledged. “Her beauty---we, my wife and I, have a pretty close connection with the London stage. We never spoke to Miss Star, that was not the name she went by here---but we knew from the beginning.”

“My son is engaged to be married to Miss---Miss Star,” Mrs. Hampton hesitated over the name. “Your wire came as a great shock to us.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Drew, “as would some other things, did you but know them,” he added to himself.

“My hat, she’s a dark horse, that stage beauty,” he said to his wife later on. “If she gets better, oughtn’t we to tell these people.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Drew. “Don’t be absurd, Fred. Morals are dreadfully private things----especially these days.”

A week later, Jennifer lay in a high French bed in the whitewashed bedroom and Billy sat beside her. She was over the crisis now, the doctor had said, he had opined that she would live. But she was so frail, so white, so listless. Her whiteness frightened Billy. He was afraid of his own fear. This illness seemed to have taken Jennifer right away from him. He spoke to her and touched her and sometimes she answered him, but he was terribly aware that in reality she did not hear, or see, or know him.

“What can we do, Mother?” he had asked hoarsely, “to bring her back. She’s slipping away from me. Oh, I know that fool of a doctor says that she’s all right, that she’ll live now. I don’t believe him---her life---it’s like the light of a candle. One day some wind will blow and she will go out---puff---just like that!”

“She has been very seriously ill, dear,” Mrs. Hampton had answered. She had constituted herself nurse in the sick room. “You must give her a little time.”

But she admitted to herself that she did not understand. It was as though the girl did not want to live. She had no interest in anything they did for her, she often lay with her eyes closed as though she slept, and yet Mrs. Hampton was certain it was not sleep that held her.

At the end of a fortnight very little progress had been made. The Drews had gone back to London, a new party of rather noisy French people filled the hotel. It was the middle of August. Damgan was growing unbearably hot. Also one could not, if one happened to be his wife, ignore Colonel Hampton and his righteous demands for her return much longer.

Mrs. Hampton confessed this trouble to Billy. “I shall have to go, dear,” she said, “and really there isn’t much I can do for Jennifer, other than her little French maid does,” for they had engaged a Breton girl to help Mrs. Hampton. “I have been thinking, when I get back to London, I will go and see that old servant of Jennifer’s mother, and ask her if she can come across for a little.”

“I don’t think you need,” answered Billy. He had, it seemed, been talking to the doctor. Billy’s French was not his strong point, and the doctor spoke no English, so the conversation had been stilted, but one suggestion had emerged from it. “I am going into Valois to-morrow to see the English clergyman there and fix things up with him. Jennifer and I will get married and then I’ll take her away somewhere and look after her myself.”

“But my dear,” began Mrs. Hampton. He slipped his arm round her waist and gave her a hug.

“You’ve been an angel, Ma,” he said, for the first time for many days his voice sounded gay. “If my remark about looking after her myself sounded ungrateful, I did not mean it like that. But the doctor chap says, and, somehow, this time I believe him, that Jennifer wants rousing, interesting in something, and he thinks the surprise of being married may do the trick. Besides,” he went on eagerly, “look how it does away with the difficulty of chaperoning and that sort of rot. Jennifer doesn’t really want sick nursing now---you’ve said that yourself.”

Mrs. Hampton had given up arguing against the marriage even in her heart, yet for the moment, something cold and stiff descended over her thoughts.

“It seems unwise,” she said. “Nothing that you and Jennifer have ever done together so far has been wise. I hope she will make you happy.”

She hoped, but at the same time, the optimism in her mind was outweighed by the despair. Nevertheless, she stayed for the wedding, wiring to Colonel Hampton that it was taking place and adding that she would get back immediately afterwards.

The night of Jennifer’s wedding, which was still and clear and hot, was an evening of great rejoicing in Damgan. The daughter of the local Maire had also held her marriage on the same day and the village streets echoed with the carousing of wedding guests. The supper party took place at the Hotel, and afterwards, in the open dusty square in front, the bride and bridegroom and all their attendants danced.

Billy sat by the open window of Jennifer’s room. He and Jennifer were alone now, the little Breton maid was dancing down there in the street with the others, and Mrs. Hampton had gone to her own room to finish her packing, and every now and then, Billy would thrust out his head and call back what he saw to Jennifer. Jennifer lay propped up in the bed, and the pillows were hardly any whiter than her white face, and her gold hair was soft and fluffy---longer than usual, not metallic any longer, and her eyes were wide, blue, star-like. A little frightened, Jennifer’s eyes, a little puzzled, as though they asked some continual nagging question and got no answer.

“The bridegroom fellow is all in black,” Billy was saying, “and he’s got long black velvet streamers from his hat. I do wish you could see him, Jenny. He’s a most lugubrious bridegroom. And she’s pretty---a little plump thing. She keeps laughing---giggling. It’s a joke to her, getting married. I can see Suzette. She is dancing with Jean.”

He turned to look at her. “Does the music worry you, darling?” he asked. “Shall I shut the window?”

“No,” said Jennifer, “I like it. It drowns the sound of the sea.”

He came across to her and sat down on the edge of the bed and took her hands. “Isn’t it wonderful, Jenny?” he said. “You’re my wife.”

Wonderful and terrifying, her eyes seemed to say, she shut them quickly, the long lashes lay like a shadow on her face.

“I did not mean you to marry me,” she whispered. “I’m not good enough to be your wife, Billy.”

“Jennifer, if you dare,” said Billy. He lifted her hands one after the other, and kissed the palms and the tips of her fingers. If only she could have told him then. Lifted the lie from her heart. But it was too late. She must never, never tell him now. It would always have to be between them. Perhaps, sometimes, she would forget; the jig-jig of the dance music, the hysterical laughter of the bridal party downstairs stirred across her mind; perhaps sometimes she would forget and laugh and be glad because Billy laughed, but always the lie would be there. In the nights, when she could not sleep; in the silences that must sometimes come between them. It would be like a sword in her heart and often and often, Billy’s love would twist it and the pain would cut right in, stabbing, burning. A lie between his love and hers.

“Open your eyes, Jenny,” Billy whispered. “Look at me. I want to see that you love me in your eyes.”

But when she opened them, they were full of tears, and with a sob she turned from him and buried her face in the pillows.

“It’s because I’m tired, Billy,” wept Jennifer. “That’s all. It’s really nothing else. I’m so tired.”

Billy felt very remorseful. He hurried to shut the windows and made the room quiet and then he sat beside her, with one arm thrown round her gold head, where it lay on the pillow, and soothed and comforted her, and whispered to her about his love, till, at last, it seemed as though she were ready to fall asleep. Then he got up and moved about softly and undressed and got into his own bed at the other end of the room, and lay listening to her breathing, till he fell asleep himself.

That was their wedding night and though presently the bridal party downstairs dispersed and silence crept about the house and dusty square, still Jennifer did not sleep. All through the night she lay building up her courage to face the lie in her life and live it out bravely for Billy’s sake. And outside the sea chanted and sang, a derisive sound of laughter across her thoughts.

Billy saw his mother off the next morning and stopped on his way back through the town to buy Jennifer a large bunch of carnations. The present arrangement was that he and Jennifer were to stay on at Damgan for the next few days till Jennifer was strong enough to travel and that then they would go up to Dinard for a fortnight and across to England for a farewell visit to the Hamptons, before sailing for Africa. For Billy was due to go back earlier than they had expected, and had had to give up a month of his leave. Buying the carnations, choosing them with great care, confiding to the girl who sold them to him that they were for his wife, who had been very ill, made Billy realise, in some odd way, how completely, from now onwards, he was in charge of Jennifer. How he must look after her and bring her back by slow sure roads to complete health and happiness.

She had had so little stamina to withstand her illness; the French doctor had made him understand that. Her life in London, Billy could just picture it, hectic, a never ending round of work, excitement, late nights, constant dances and suppers, had left her almost a nervous wreck. He had noticed even in their brief two days in London, how nervous Jennifer had become. Hysterical, crying easily, responding to his caresses with a passionate intensity which had rather amazed him. And then it had been such madness---the four months of loneliness at Damgan. A perfectly hateful hole, the hotel so primitive as to be uncomfortable, always smelling of strong seaweed and shell fish. How on earth had Jennifer been able to bear it! She had gone mad about bathing, it seemed. The Drews had told him that. Spending her days in the sea, overdoing it altogether, with no one to look after her or see that she was sensible, till she had come to that last bleak day when the sea had jolly nearly proved too much for her.

“Too cold a day for bathing,” Mr. Drew had said, “and rough. I must say it never occurred to me that Miss Star would venture in. It was asking for trouble.”

Silly kid! “The sea was the only clean place in Damgan.” That was the excuse she had offered for her madness, and once or twice, listening to her whispering words, when the fever had run very high, they had heard her trying to explain how she had wanted the sea to wash her clean. People did not talk sense when they had fever, that was understood, but often the paramount idea came uppermost like that. She had so obviously hated the dirt of Damgan---it had pursued her like a nightmare into her dreams.

Well, now he was going to look after her. The doctor had given him quite a lecture on the subject. Difficult to understand since it was all in French, but the main facts had emerged, and Billy was a young man who took himself and his responsibilities very seriously.

The lady proprietor of the hotel met him at the door on his return to Damgan. She had a telegram in her hand.

“The lovely flowers,” she said in her quaint English. “They are for Madame, eh! This telegram is also for her, and here I make apology. It come two, three weeks ago, and I---in the pocket of my apron I put it---it is the day on which we think the beautiful young girl will die in this our hotel, and the ill luck shakes the heart, and there it lies and is forgotten . . .”

“I don’t suppose it matters much,” said Billy, interrupting the disjointed flow. He shifted the carnations into the crook of his arm and tore open the envelope, “Better read it, I suppose.”

“Yes, now it is for Monsieur, the husband of Madame, to read it,” admitted the hotel proprietor. She watched him a little slyly. Not for worlds would she have created mischief, but if it happened . . . one might as well be there to see.

Billy’s face, however, was expressionless. He folded the telegram up very carefully and slid it into the envelope.

“It was of no consequence,” he said. “We need not even tell Madame.”

He went slowly upstairs, not waiting to listen to the landlady’s flow of congratulatory excuses. By the window, at the top of the stairs, he paused. He had an almost insane desire to throw out the bunch of carnations, it seemed as though every muscle in his body stiffened, in order to refrain.

“Find I left my tie pin on your table,” the wire ran. “Please keep it as a memento of a pleasant week-end.” And then the signature, “Robert Harland.”

Billy went on into Jennifer’s room. He laid the carnations down by her hand, but he did not stoop as was his invariable custom on coming into the room to kiss her.

“Mother caught the train all right,” he said. There was a stiffness in his voice, but it appeared that Jennifer did not notice it. She had picked up the carnations and buried her face in their fragrance.

“Oh, Billy, how lovely they are,” she was saying, “and how lovely of you to buy them for me.”

He had moved over to her dressing table, he was standing with his back to her, he seemed to be moving the things about.

“Who gave you this tie pin?” he asked rather abruptly. “The one with a diamond in it. It’s sticking in your pincushion.”

“Tie pin,” Jennifer repeated, she lifted her head from the flowers to look at him. “I haven’t got a tiepin, Billy, it can’t be mine.”

“Isn’t it?” he answered. He turned and came back to the bed and dropped the pin into her open outstretched hand. “Whose is it then?”

He knew as he watched her that she recognised the pin. He saw the fear and the hate and the shame reflected just for a second in her eyes. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, all expression left her face, the lashes veiled her eyes.

“How stupid of me,” she said. “Of course, it is mine. It was given me by Jimmie Manson.”

She mentioned the name casually. He had heard her speak of the man before. What did it matter what she said, or whose name she gave? She was lying---nothing that she could ever do now would wipe out that lie.

Chapter Eighteen

“But Love . . .”

Love can do many strange and wonderful things. It cannot altogether change the inherent nature of a man, and to some men a lie is the one unforgivable sin. Or perhaps the lie is the excuse which they seize upon so that they may not have to ask themselves to forgive the sin which the lie conceals. A man’s mind, as far as morality is concerned, is complex. Passion is in reality outside his understanding, but truth and falsehood are tangible things and they learn early in life that truth is a virtue and falsehood a crime, not only against conscience, but against all that is best in the social code.

Billy told himself, and in the telling he attempted to believe, wholeheartedly, the assertion that if Jennifer had confessed to him that she had lived with Harland as his mistress, he would have forgiven even where he could not understand, but her lies, and twice now had she lied, seemed to set her in a different world from himself. She became, on the sudden, a stranger to him.

One must admit that his position, to say the least of it, was unpalatable. He loved Jennifer. He had come home from Africa loving her. All sorts of ingredients go to the making of love. He had loved her to begin with because of the colour of her hair, the starriness of her eyes, the soft beauty of cheek and lips and neck. And then into this love had crept a sense of protection. She was so much a child. And then into those two loves had come other loves; her little gracious ways, her laughter, her voice singing across his dreams. And out in Africa he had dreamt so much about her, and passion had come to life and desire had grown in his heart, so that he had come to loving her as men love women. And then he had come to England and she had been there, all his, it seemed, for the asking, and her beauty had been like a flame in his mind; and he had followed her out to Brittany and found her, and she had been so pitiful that all that was most chivalrous and holy in his heart had risen to do her service. Out of such things do we build up our love for each other, and who of us is wise enough to say where love of body ends and love of soul begins. And because so much goes to its making, it is not easy, however much we may wish to believe it, to kill love.

So that despite the fact that her lies made her a stranger to him, Billy found that he still loved Jennifer. He could not uproot and throw away the hundred and one things that had gone to the building up of that love.

There remained to face then jealousy and the sin which Jennifer’s lie had attempted to conceal, and it was very difficult to decide which harassed him most. For to Billy, the immorality was a sin, that much he had inherited from Colonel Hampton without even being aware that it was being inherited. And as for jealousy, the desperation of that chased round and round in his mind till he thought it would end in driving him mad and he had awful moments of fancying that he must kill Jennifer. He could feel her white throat between his hands and see her terrified starry eyes lying---lying to him, even as she died.

“Or should I choke the truth out of her!” thought Billy. “The truth of what happened here that week-end before we came over.”

Things have reached a pretty impossible state of strain when a young man of Billy’s mentality starts thinking that kind of thing.

He left Jennifer to her maid for the evening, and spent the night out, walking along the sand for miles, sitting for long periods, his knees hunched up to his chin, his hands clasped round them. He was, to use his own expression, thinking things out, and love and jealousy battled in his mind. By morning, and because he was so essentially normal minded about most things, he had got his thoughts in order. One fact above all the others stood out. Or so it seemed to him. He must not, as yet, let Jennifer know that he knew. Why he had arrived at this decision is perhaps a little hard to understand. Instinctively, his attitude would have been one of frank accusation

“This is what I believe against you. Don’t let’s have any more lies.”

It is very certain that his sense of virtue prompted him to that course, and here, it is possible, love stepped in. Jennifer was in no state of health to stand an emotional crisis, and in that---looking back on it, it seemed now to have been a rather futile sacrament, but it was a sacrament of marriage which he had undertaken, he had sworn to cherish and care for her.

So for the moment the lie must stand and he must appear to be satisfied with it. But not in Damgan. He could not stand the intimacy of Damgan for a day longer. They must push on to Dinard, take rooms at one of the big hotels there, they could be separate rooms. Jennifer’s ill health was excuse enough for that, and then he must just wait and see.

“I am not content with that,” stormed jealousy, beating against the tired battalions of his mind. “I must know.”

“Well, then, I can slip across to London from Dinard,” Billy’s mind argued, “and have it out with that brute Harland.”

But even as he argued, he knew that that was a thing which he would never do. Truth when it came, must come from Jennifer, not from any other source.

Did she connect the restlessness of his manner, his sudden coldness, for he was never at any time a good dissembler, with that question of his about the diamond pin? If she did, at least she made no sign. It seemed as though with the lie once faced, she was determined to live it out with a certain bravado. She acquiesced in their move very willingly; she made no remark about their separate bedrooms. Suzette, the Breton maid, was to stay with her till they went back to London. Suzette occupied a bed in her room at night in case she wanted anything. And in the day time, Jennifer was gay. Sometimes her gaiety reduced Billy to a state of distracted rage. At the end of the first week, she was dancing in the hotel ballroom in the evenings, at the thés dansants. Billy did not dance. He said so quite firmly. Jennifer made a little grimace at him and danced with other men. She was in request from the moment they saw her dancing the first evening with a man, who sat at the next table to theirs. Her loveliness was unhideable, and her time in London had taught her a charming self assurance. Billy would stand against the wall, watching her, or sit at the little table where they had tea. He was morosely jealous, that was the general opinion.

After the dance was finished, she would leave her latest partner, and come back to Billy, face a little flushed, gold head held high, eyes starry.

“I am not a bit tired,” she would say, “and it’s so lovely outside. Let’s go down to the sands, Billy,” or “let’s go for a drive.”

He had to shut his mind to the soft inducement of her voice. He always answered in the same way, a little stiffly, his eyes looking beyond her.

“You’ll be better in bed,” he would say, and turn and lead the way to the lift, just for perhaps one second his eyes would meet hers and he would say, “Good-night, Jennifer,” and turn and walk away before even the lift started.

“Where did he go to? How did he spend his nights? She was sure he loved her, he was so good, so considerate . . . and yet . . .

Every morning, when she woke and stirred and turned and heard the gay, bright noises of life coming in at her window from the outside world of street and plage, Jennifer would whisper to herself, “To-night, it will be different. He’ll say, ‘Jenny, let me come,’ and he’ll come and Suzette will melt away---she’s waiting to do that---and we’ll explain things to each other and I’ll tell him why I lied. To-day, I’ll make him come.”

And every night, sometimes with sobs stifled against her pillow, so that Suzette should not hear, sometimes with a dull ache of anger in her heart, she was forced to say, “To-morrow---to-morrow will be different.”

Her gaiety tried to hide that. Her laughter hid something that hurt. Her dancing feet trod on agony, and always it was to-morrow, and to-night, and still he never came.

They stayed a month in Dinard, instead of a fortnight. It was doing Jennifer so much good. Billy wrote explaining that to his mother. He could be very guarded in his letters, but he was afraid of the week which must be spent with the Hamptons before he and Jennifer sailed for Africa. It would not be easy to conceal things from Mrs. Hampton, once they were all in the house together.

He did not know what to do with Jennifer; how best to arrange their lives. Vague, terrible suspicions crossed his mind, watching her dancing with other men, seeing her gaiety, knowing the traps she laid to catch him. Her loveliness was a snare. If once he surrendered to it, he must excuse so much. He remembered now all sorts of little suspicions and surprises of which he had been vaguely aware in his first meetings with Jennifer; his mother’s fears stirred across his mind; Colonel Hampton’s sternly uttered warnings. “If she’s not immoral, she’s unmoral,” Colonel Hampton had said. “Either is undesirable in a wife.” His thoughts fretted against his love; he came to look upon her almost as man looks upon a drug, from whose influence he is endeavouring to break free. And yet he could not give her up entirely, leave her behind when he went to Africa. That was what discretion and pride urged him to do. And he could not do it. She was so much a child, and the man Harland . . . God! How he hated Harland.

Jennifer, it appeared, was as alarmed at the prospect of a week with her parents-in-law as he was. “Would he mind,” she asked, timidly for Jennifer, a rather pathetic timidity had entered into her dealings with him, if she spent that last week with old Nannie down at Thames Ditton. “I’d rather like to,” said Jennifer.

It was a solution of his own difficulty, yet immediately suspicion leapt full armed to life.

“It sounds a bit extraordinary, doesn’t it?” he asked, stiffly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “Aunt Gertrude will like to have you all to herself for that time.”

“And you?” said Billy. He did not look at her. “You’ll be glad to be on your own again for a little.”

“Oh, Billy,” she whispered. But, oddly enough, she did not pursue the matter any further, just sat beside him there on the beach, picking up handfuls of sand and letting them trickle through her fingers. Billy had been bathing, he lay full length, the towel draped round him. He was hating life at that particular moment, and not knowing in the least what to do to set it right, or how to get away from it.

Jennifer’s most favourite dance-partner strolled across the sands and joined them, flinging himself down the other side of Jennifer. He was a good-looking lad, very little older than Jennifer herself, with dark waved hair and mysteriously beautiful eyes. A Jew boy, Billy called him contemptuously in his mind. “He dances divinely,” Jennifer said.

“Not bathing, Mrs. Hampton,” he asked, and put his hand under hers to catch the trickle of sand, and smiled up at her with his sad mysterious eyes.

Billy made a noise in his throat, strangely reminiscent of Colonel Hampton when annoyed, and rolled over, away from them, sitting up. Billy was good looking too, but there was nothing dark or mysterious about him; he was just six foot of ordinary English manhood, with something a little sullen and hurt in his blue eyes.

“I’ll go and dress,” he said, “I suppose we meet at lunch.”

“You aren’t happy,” said the Jew boy, when he had gone, his fingers just touched Jennifer’s hand with a furtive, caressing movement. “What’s the matter? Is he jealous?”

Jennifer shook a quick head. Tears ached in her throat, she laughed them away.

“It isn’t so much jealousy as disapproval,” she said. “He did not know how much he was going to disapprove of me when he married me.”

“If he disapproves,” said the boy, “he must be mad. What can I do to make you happy? Shall we go for a drive, or a sail? There’s nowhere where we can dance just now, is there---you’re happy dancing with me, aren’t you?”

“Not happy,” said Jennifer, “but perhaps I forget for a little. One should not love anyone with one’s soul, should one, it only hurts. Long ago someone told me that and I didn’t believe them, but now I’m proving it to be true.”

All the same, she got up presently and walked back to the hotel by herself. It was not as though anyone else could really help her to be happy. It was going up in the lift that the idea suddenly came to her to go to Billy’s room instead of her own. She knew the number, had read it up on the board. Often and often at night, after his cold, prim good-night, she had thought of going along there, and always his disapproval had stopped her. He was afraid of her at night, but in the daytime he disapproved. It came to her now that it would be easier to face his disapproval than, his fear.

She knocked on his door and his voice answered in French, “Entrez!” He must have bathed and dressed then, though she had not really sat for long on the beach with her boy friend, who had so wanted to comfort her. As she went in, Billy turned from the window to greet her; the light behind him left his face in shadow, she could not see his mouth or eyes.

“Billy,” she essayed, she shut the door and stood with her back to it. “Billy, oh, I just can’t bear it any longer. Aren’t you going to tell me what’s the matter?”

He turned from her slowly; there was a great deliberation in his manner. Out of the drawer in his dressing table, he pulled a sheet of paper and smoothed it, and held it out to her.

“Will it tell me?” asked Jennifer, “Can’t you . . .”

She looked down at the paper in her hands. She could see it was a telegram, the words danced about in front of her, she read vaguely down to the “Robert Harland.”

“Is it . . . is it because I lied?” she whispered.

“You did lie, didn’t you?” said Billy. “My God, you had good reason to.”

She stood there tearing the paper into small bits, letting them fall from her hands. “Does it make all that difference?” she asked. “Billy, I never loved him. It’s been you always, you. Oh, won’t you understand?”

“You must admit it’s difficult to understand,” said Billy. He laughed, there was hardness in his laughter, rather than amusement. “You had been living with him, I suppose. You ran away from him when I came home because you did not want me to find out.”

“No,” she essayed, her lips trembled, her eyes shut for a second on the tears. “. . . I meant to tell you. I didn’t run away so that you shouldn’t find out.”

“Yet when I asked you---you lied to me,” said Billy. He turned away and stood with his back to her and thrust his hands into his pockets. He had promised himself that there should be no scene when the time came to have this out with Jennifer. There must not be a scene.

“Because I was afraid,” Jennifer’s whisper reached him. “Afraid you wouldn’t understand. Oh, Billy, what can it matter what happens to one’s body? It did not mean anything to me, anything. I did not let it touch my thoughts of you.”

“I am afraid you can hardly expect me to fall in with that argument,” said Billy, tensely. “He followed you to Damgan, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” Her voice was hardly a whisper now.

“And stayed for a week-end with you?” He did not wait for her answer, but turned sharply and strode to the door. “Oh God,” he said fiercely. “Why argue about it? The thing’s done. From now till doomsday, I could never understand.”

Jennifer drew aside to let him pass. She made a queer little desperate gesture with her hands.

“Is it . . . finished, Billy?” she asked. “Shall I go away?”

Finished! Did she mean his love? The pain of it suddenly wrenched at his heart. Yet he answered without looking at her, his hand already on the handle of the door.

“Back to him?” he said. “Is that what you suggest? You seem to forget that you are my wife.”

“If you had known, you would not have married me,” said Jennifer, “We . . . we can wipe it out.”

“I think not,” he answered stiffly. “My inunderstandable ideas of honour would not let me do that, even if I wanted to. I am ready to take you back to Africa with me. I should like you to come.”

“But love?” asked Jennifer.

“What do you want me to say?” answered Billy, and now he turned and faced her, and she saw that his face was white and that little lines seemed to have come about his mouth, and that there was anguish in his eyes, “Love---would you understand love if I spoke to you about it? I don’t want you as Harland has had you---that’s all I know. Shall we leave it there and decide to carry on as best we can?”

She dropped her eyes quickly from his, the colour flushed painfully to her face and died away again. Downstairs the gong for déjeuner clanged forth its cheerful summons.

Part Two — The End

Chapter One

“Like a Rose”

“Don’t know what to call him,
But he’s mighty like a rose!”

The gramophone rather irritatingly chirped out the song. The singer who had recorded it had a high shrill voice. Each sharp flung note jerked at Jennifer’s nerves. She remembered so well listening to that song---and there was so much she wanted, needed, to forget.

She sat at her table in the corner of the restaurant and sipped the black coffee that the waiter had just dumped down in front of her. Black coffee, someone had once told her, was good for the nerves---and this evening her nerves needed soothing. Last night had been awful. Very often her nights were awful, but last night things had reached to a climax of horror. A man’s face, distorted, hideous with passion and drink, seemed to leer at her whenever she shut her eyes. He had been terrible, but men . . . so often men were terrible,

Jennifer shivered a little, sitting there. What was the matter with her to-night? She had come here in search of enjoyment, but she was depressed, overtired, her heart seemed stretched in an agony of remembering. How long ago was it now since that day in Dinard, that day when she had gone in to ask Billy for his love? Three years. The gulf of them lay between her and her thoughts of Billy. The ghosts of dead days and dead spent nights stood round her, pressing against her, stifling her. And yet she had to think about him, she had to remember. That was what tired nerves did to one, they caught one in a trap and forced memory.

That day in Dinard, three years ago! Billy’s face, the clangour of the luncheon gong.

“I don’t want you as Harland has had you---that’s all I know.”

Oh, Billy, Billy! But at least there was no use in crying about that now---not now with these three years in between.

She had not made any answer at the time, she had not been able to speak, and Billy had opened the door and said. “Are you coming to lunch---I suppose we might as well go down.”

“Not as Harland has had you!” Did not that mean that all his love must be dead, if he could speak to her like that, and how was she going to live with Billy now that his love was dead. All through lunch she had sat, thinking that, watching his white set face, his eyes that would not meet hers, the line of his lips whose laughter she so much loved. The shame of his scorn burnt her, silenced whatever poor futile excuses she might otherwise have made. She had not wanted Harland to come to her that time at Damgan; when he had gone, she had tried to kill herself. But the sea had been about as scornful as Billy; it had taken and tossed her back and Death had stood aside laughing. God then, if there was a God, the last three years of her life had made her no surer of that, did look upon her life with Harland as a sin, meant to punish her. Her punishment was Billy’s scorn.

She had sat up in her bedroom after lunch, how well she remembered, how horribly clear memory was to-night, and tried to put all her thoughts out in front of her in little orderly rows. Billy had gone for a long walk, he had said as they came up from lunch that he was going. “There is nothing more for us to discuss,” he added. “As far as I an concerned, I don’t ever wish to refer to it again. And if you would prefer to go to that place of yours at Thames Ditton, while I go to my people, please make any arrangements you like.”

So quietly, so firmly he shut the door. That had been one of her thoughts, and she had remembered how once before she had thought of Billy as being in another world to herself with only his love as the open door between them. And now he had shut it and all her life she must stay this side of it and beat her hands and break her heart against its dead finality.

“But I can’t do that, Billy, I can’t,” her thoughts had whispered. They had been so muddled all those thoughts of hers, she had not been able to arrange them very methodically. They groped and twisted and tried to excuse the things she had done when really she knew only too well there could be no excuse for her, and finally, or so it seemed to her, she faced truth.

“I’ve been born bad,” she had thought. “What’s the use of all this struggling? Billy never, never could have understood.”

And then very quietly and with no undue haste, she had set about packing. Just a few things in a suitcase which she could carry for herself, and she had changed her clothes and put on the coat and skirt and the little plain hat which she had worn when she ran away from Harland, and then, just after a minute’s hesitation, she had slipped off the two rings that Billy had given her and had put them in an envelope and had stuck it down and had addressed it to Billy, and had put it where Suzette would find it when she came to help her dress for the afternoon thé dansant.

So for the fourth time in her life, Jennifer had run away. She had never, she thought to herself listlessly, been very much of a fighter.

Someone wound up the gramophone again and put on a new tune:

“Now Lindy’s gone---no birds are singing,
Now Lindy’s gone, the sun don’t shine,
No happiness the day am bringing,
Now Lindy’s gone and won’t be mine.”

Silly haunting words and tune stirring across the agony of her thoughts. For now her thoughts in truth groped through agony. That first year in sordid hells of pleasure, that blunting of all shame, that queer flat acceptance of the life which was now finally hers. What did anything matter? One drifted and snatched at pleasure where one found it.

“Prostitutes, my dear girl, are born, not made.” Once some man had said that to her. He had picked her up one evening at a place rather like this, only it had been in Paris, she had spent that first year, the first two years in Paris. It was only just lately that she had come drifting back to London like this. She had thought at first that she could never, never come back. And this man, she had watched his coming towards her, and he had made her think of Manson---only he was much older, with fine greying hair, brushed back from his high clever forehead. It was because he had been like Manson, different from the type of man she most often met in those days, that Jennifer had been tempted to talk to him, to tell him, she hardly knew why, about Billy---and how she had run away from Billy---and it was then that he had made his remark, his wise eyes smiling at her not unkindly.

“Prostitutes, my dear girl, are born, not made.”

“Then I . . .” Jennifer had asked, and sudden tears had dimmed her eyes and sobs had choked her, so that she had sat there crying, while he patted her hands a little bored, a little touched, perhaps.

“Poor little daughter of joy,” he had said. “Life is a curious sarcasm on the part of the Almighty, isn’t it?”

Daughter of joy! Jennifer caught her breath, suddenly remembering.

It had not all been agony though. She only thought about it like that when she was depressed. Laughter touched some of her memories, tenderness lay lightly on one or two. Love---well some men had loved her. She could think about them without tears. And friendship---friendship is close and swift and warm among the outcast women of the world.

There had been a girl during that first year in Paris. Memory moved swiftly out of the agony into the sunlight, remembering her. Jennifer could see her now, a girl with white, yet warm flushed face and grey blue laughing eyes and brown soft hair. She had a way of tilting her chin when she spoke to you, of rolling her R’s. She gave you the impression of being frank and free and sunny tempered. She was quite obviously devoid of shame. She laughed too easily for any tears to hurt. Denise was her name. She introduced herself to Jennifer on the latter’s first arrival at the house in Paris.

“Denise Danvers,” she said, “Half English. You’re English, I guess.”

It was warming the radiance of her sudden friendship, the memory was still warm. How Denise had laughed at life. Laughter was the predominating feature in her immorality. Brave, laughter loving Denise. Did the earth lie very heavily on her gay heart? “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Jennifer had gone to Denise’s funeral, The girl had died in the isolation ward of some big hospital in Paris, but she had been English, and the English clergyman, asking few questions, had visited her at the end and had arranged her funeral. “I am the Resurrection . . .” Somehow the words had seemed to have no meaning for Jennifer. Denise—one could not think of Denise as like that, quiet and good, absolved from her sins, lying within the bosom of the Church. Denise had loved life and sin!

It was after Denise’s death that Jennifer first came to London again. Six months ago now. She and another girl, Heather Carew. One could not love Heather, as one had loved Denise. She was of an altogether different mould, bitter, a little sarcastic, in appearance like some large sensuous Persian cat, but she and Jennifer were friends, got on all right, shared rooms and pooled their earnings.

Their earnings! The word tumbled down all Jennifer’s thoughts like a pack of cards. She had got to make some money this evening. Heather was down with a bad go of influenza, and the month’s rent was all but due. Their earnings! Jennifer pushed memory away and sat more erect. Her eyes took in the occupants of the room. On whom should she settle? There were one or two new arrivals in the restaurant to-night. In the far corner, Molly, a girl whom Heather and she knew slightly, was already well away with some man, supping hilariously. Under cover of the table, yet not bothering much about concealment, why should she, was not her face her stock in trade, Jennifer drew the looking glass out of her purse and studied her own face. It was still lovely. Denise had once said, “You’ve the loveliest, quietest thing I know in life, Jennie, you ought to have been a saint.”

And in truth, there was an amazing purity about Jennifer’s beauty. Calm and still and long lashed, her eyes looked out of the perfect oval of her face, under her hat her hair shone with its clear metallic gold, her lips were soft like parted petals of a flower. Her face had that arresting waiting beauty of pure youth, and yet it was old and behind it lay all the festering knowledge of vice.

Powdering her nose, putting just the right touch of scarlet to her lips, Jennifer was suddenly aware of being watched and slanting her glance up under her lashes, she saw that the table next to her had just been taken by two men. A father and son, she rather promptly judged. The older man was very dignified, very handsome in some queer foreign way. He had grey hair and a long grey face and startlingly in the midst of so much greyness, his eyes were amazingly black and full of fire, that at least was Jennifer’s rather quaint way of summing him up. His companion was much younger, a slim, volatile youth with fair hair, over glossy, very bright, very cold blue eyes and a good deal of jewellery, including a gold link bracelet, which his left hand very constantly played with.

One glance Jennifer gave this oddly assorted couple, then putting her powder puff and lip stick away, she signed to the waiter:

“A cherry brandy,” she said softly. Henri, the waiter, was by now quite an old friend of hers. “And do you know who those two men are? The old one I have seen before quite often here.”

Henri shrugged his shoulders and stooped over her, pretending to dust the table while he gave information.

“Who does not know?” he said. “It is Prince Alexis Zamoff---the young one---and the old man is his guardian. “

She was not very much further on, for the name conveyed nothing to her.

“Russian?” she asked.

“Russian,” answered Henri. “The older man is a Russian Jew.” And then he hurried away, being summoned by the very people of whom they had been talking.

He was back again presently, standing by her table grinning a little. For some time Henri had taken a fatherly interest in Jennifer. He liked her to ‘get off’ with the right people.

“They present their compliments, Miss,” he said. “Will you honour them---that’s how the old ’un puts it---by supping with them?”

They looked like money, and, after all, that was what she was here for, to earn money, yet just for a minute, Jennifer hesitated. She was conscious, perhaps, of a sudden, surprising premonition of evil, and in that pause, glancing across at the table again, she found the two men looking at her. The boy’s face was alight with admiration, his full red lips a little parted, his eyes eager; but it was the flame of the old man’s eyes that held her, commanded as it were, drew her slowly, still unwillingly, to her feet.

They both rose to greet her as she crossed the room to them. The younger one took her hand, bent over it kissed the tips of her fingers.

“Mademoiselle---this is delightful,” he spoke in very perfect English. “Your beauty---it is like a lamp lighting up the dreariness of London.”

“Prince Alexis finds London dull,” the other man spoke slowly. He, too, took Jennifer’s hand, but he did not stoop or kiss it. She was conscious of a quick thrill of fear as he stood holding it. “It shall be our pleasure to show him that it can sometimes be otherwise---eh, Miss . . .” He hesitated, waiting for her name. His eyes were the most curious eyes she had ever seen in any man’s face.

“Jennifer,” said Jennifer quickly, “Miss Jennifer Postle, my name is.”

“And mine,” he answered, still holding her hand, still looking at her, “Is Joseph Block. An easy name to remember, eh?”

He let go of her hand and pulled out a chair for her. “Now sit down, Miss Jennifer. You shall amuse Prince Alexis, eh, and I shall watch and listen and foot the bill!”

What an odd, unpleasant old man! Jennifer tried to dismiss all thought of him, summing him up like that. Nevertheless, his personality persisted. She felt it almost as a tangible thing gathering round her, she could not escape it, or ignore it. She sat, half turned from him, her elbow on the table and talked to Prince Alexis. He, at least, was not difficult to understand. Already her beauty had inflamed him, desire shone in his eyes, went stumbling through his speech. Under the table, his knee touched and pressed against hers.

“Money from home,” that was what Denise would have said, laughing her soft, gay laughter.

And, indeed, under ordinary circumstances, Jennifer would have thought herself very lucky. There was nothing about Prince Alexis at which one could grumble. He was young and good looking and eager, he thought her beautiful and desirable; they were eating an excellent dinner, champagne frothed and bubbled in the slender stemmed glasses that Henri filled for them. And she had wanted cheering up, she had been feeling so dreadfully depressed. What was the use of life if sometimes you could not get a little fun out of it, and this---this might be fun. Bright eager eyes meeting hers, warm eager speech.

It was the waiting, watching devil who sat with them that spoilt it all. She came to think of him as that. He spoke sometimes, his slow, heavy voice, shattering their light chatter, the flame of his eyes seemed to burn her beauty, resting on it.

“He doesn’t see me as lovely, or young, or anything like that,” thought Jennifer. “When he looks at me, he sees the horrible, shrivelled up skeleton that I shall one day be.”

It was like sitting at a festive board with death as your companion. Her thoughts about him became grotesque and absurd. She could not finally bear it any longer. There was something hysterical in the way she pushed back her chair and rose; her handbag fell with a clatter to the floor; two or three of the revellers turned round to stare.

“It’s so late,” said Jennifer, “I must go. Did you know how late it was?”

The man who had called himself Joseph Block had risen too. It was he who had stooped to pick up her handbag.

“The night is made for pleasure when we are young,” he said heavily. “It is only when we grow old that we need to sleep.”

Prince Alexis had not moved, his tilted face stared at her. “Beautiful one,” he whispered, “You cannot go, I . . .”

He put out his hand as though to touch her, but with a quick shudder of fear, Jennifer drew back.

“I must go,” she repeated, yet it was not at him that she looked, nor had her shudder anything to do with him.

Joseph Block leant towards his younger companion. “Let her go,” he said. It was as though he delivered a command. “It is wise not to rush these things.”

He turned to Jennifer. “If Miss Postle will allow me,” he said, “I will see her to the door and tell our car to take her home. We can walk, eh, Alexis?”

“Of course,” Prince Alexis staggered to his feet. “To-morrow we will meet, won’t we?” he said to Jennifer, “I love you---your beauty set fire to my heart when I first saw you. The burn of it will be torture till we meet again.”

“You will meet again---perhaps,” said Joseph Block. “Now, sit down again, Alexis, wait here for me. I will see Miss Postle to the car.”

Quite ridiculously, Jennifer wanted to scream out, “No, no.” She wanted to turn and run, to summon Henri to help her, to appeal to Prince Alexis for protection. She did none of those things. Prince Alexis had sat down again dejectedly. He was like a sulky boy deprived of his amusement. But, quite obviously, he had no thought of disobedience. Nor had she. She turned, and with Joseph Block walking beside her, she crossed the restaurant and Henri holding open the swing doors, passed out into the street.

Outside, drawn up by the pavement’s edge, for in this small deserted street in Soho there seemed to be few traffic regulations, or perhaps Joseph Block had been able to subdue even a policeman, a beautiful motor car stood waiting. A footman sprang forward and opened the door as they appeared.

“Your address, Miss Jennifer,” asked Joseph Block. In the dark of the street, his eyes were hidden, and now his voice sounded half mocking, tinged with friendliness, “Or does your fear of me extend to such lengths . . .”

She interrupted, turning to face him.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “You’ve guessed right, I’m afraid. Who are you? What do you want from me? I’ve seen you heaps of times, watching me . . .”

“For myself---nothing,” he answered, not ungently. “For Prince Alexis, we shall see, eh? Meanwhile the evening shall not have been wasted.” He felt in his pocket and pressed something into her hand. Jennifer could feel the crisp rattle of banknotes. “And now your address . . .”

She gave it.

“I hope I shan’t see either of you again,” she added, with the quick uncontrol of the gutter which of late years she had been learning. “I feel I’m going to hate you. Horrid, leering old man!”

And yet that did not describe him. She knew that quite well.

As she sat back shivering in a corner of the spacious magnificent car she wondered what words could be found to describe him.

He might be either a devil or a god.

Chapter Two

“Joseph Block”

She tried to describe him to Heather. Heather had been awake when she got back. They shared three rooms, a joint sitting room and a bedroom each. They were cheaply furnished, but they were none the less pleasant rooms. Always Heather or Jennifer contrived to have money to spare on flowers for the sitting room. Heather had a fine taste in colours. The cushions were hers, the faint blue gauze curtains. Jennifer had supplied the pictures. There was “The Lazy Lute Player,” all soft blues and greys, another queer formless picture of wonderful colours called “Around us are the Everlasting Arms.”---“Queer picture for us to have,” Heather had said sarcastically when Jennifer had first brought it home. But the idea had appealed to Jennifer. Those Everlasting Arms waiting to catch one when death tumbled one into the void. It made her think of the God with whom she had been so friendly as a child. And then there were one or two queer little statuettes that one of Jennifer’s lovers, who had been a sculptor, had given her. Little laughing fauns and angels. She kept them dotted about the room.

“She likes to impress on people that fauns are only fauns, because they happen to have been born with hooves,” Heather would point out; “and angels only angels because God gave them wings. Their faces are the same, you may perceive.”

Heather was very often sarcastic at Jennifer’s expense. She was sarcastic while Jennifer tried to explain her evening’s adventure.

“Gave you two fivers for nothing,” said Heather. “Angel, I know you’ve got a lovely face, but you can’t kid me.”

“I’m not trying to,” said Jennifer. “I can’t tell you how horribly that old man made me hate myself and these . . . I’d like to burn them.”

“Well, you don’t do that, my cherub,” remonstrated Heather. She took the notes into her own keeping. “I’ll guard them for you. And now, spit out your hate. Tell me some more about these gentlemen who scorned and yet paid you. God!” She shifted her head restlessly on the pillow. “We don’t often get something for nothing, do we?”

“Have you had a rotten evening?” asked Jennifer. “Not able to sleep? Shall I make you some tea? It wouldn’t take a minute on the stove.”

“Tea!” said Heather. She made an odd face. “Tea’s an old maid’s beverage, darling. That reproach can never be levelled against me. No. Now if you’d thought to smuggle in a bottle of champagne---they gave you champagne, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Jennifer nodded. “The young man was all right, Heather. Prince Alexis Zamoff. Henri seemed to think I ought to know him.”

“It sounds to me as if you ought, too,” said Heather. “And the old one---he’s the stumbling block, I gather.”

“Oh, he is awful,” said Jennifer, slowly. She sat op the edge of Heather’s bed. She had slipped out of her grey frock, when she had first come in. She and Heather spent the greater part of their days undressed, just with a soft silk dressing gown pulled round them. They never dressed unless they were going out in the afternoon or evening. “I can’t explain him, but it was like someone sitting beside one, looking through and through one. Seeing all the beastliness, the bits we try to forget,

“Like a toad within a stone,
Seated while Time crumbles on . . .
Even so within this world is Lust.”

She quoted softly. Once long ago out of a book that Manson had lent her, she had learnt that poem from beginning to end.

“I don’t feel like no blinking toad,” said Heather. She stretched and yawned. “‘It takes two to kiss,’ as my old headmistress once wrote to the master of a neighbouring boys’ school, who had written to complain because he had caught one of her girls kissing one of his boys.”

“Whether you feel like it or not,” said Jennifer, “it’s so horribly true. He made me feel that. His eyes looked at me and they didn’t see me at all. They saw just a great festering sore. And that,” she stood up suddenly, she was very lovely standing there in all her slim young beauty with the softness of her garments about her like a cloud, “is just what Billy would see, looking at me now,” she added, and there was the tragedy of dead tears in her voice.

Heather sat up a little on one elbow, her face flushed. “Don’t talk such damned rot, Jennifer,” she said crossly. “If there is any festering sore about all this business, it isn’t ours, it’s the men’s. Men make love, a thing that can be bought and sold. You introduce me to that Joseph Block of yours, if ever he comes here, and I’ll tell him one or two things which he can remember next time he looks at one of us. Now, clear out and get to bed. You make me wild when you get sentimental. I don’t know a thing about your Billy, but if he’s got eyes like that, you are damn well rid of him, say I.”

That was Heather’s philosophy. Jennifer, unfortunately for herself, had no such protection. Her only asset was a certain shallow gaiety that kept her going, that helped her at most times to forget.

She had almost forgotten the horror of Joseph Block by the middle of next morning. When the front door bell rang and she went down herself to answer it, she was surprised more than anything else, to see him standing there.

“Oh,” she said, and made a furtive little tug at her dressing gown, gathering it round her. Underneath she was wearing a fantastic pair of pyjamas that had once taken her fancy in a shop window. Black silk, flaming all over with scarlet dragons. She had really had quite a busy morning, though no one seeing her would have judged that. She had done the rooms and made breakfast for herself and Heather, and washed Heather and made Heather’s bed. “It’s you,” she added, rather stupidly.

“Yes, Miss Jennifer, it is I,” said Joseph Block. “Is it permitted to come in?”

“You want to see me?” said Jennifer. “What about?” She looked down a little shamefacedly at her costume. She was remembering now all the things this man had made her think the night before, “I’m not . . . dressed . . .” she hesitated.

“That is of no great matter,” Joseph Block smiled a little. “I have seen ladies even more undressed. The dragons, eh, they protect you.”

She hated him. Hate suddenly flamed in her heart.

“I don’t think you and I can have anything to say to each other,” she spoke quickly, and made as though to shut the door.

“But, pardon, we have so much,” contradicted Joseph Block. He made no movement to interfere with the shutting of the door; his eyes were his only weapon.

Jennifer drew back, dumbly antagonistic. She had, it seemed, to obey.

“Very well,” she said, “will you shut the door behind you, please, and follow me upstairs?”

In their little room, his figure seemed immense. He stood impassive, looking round him, smiling a little. Jennifer crossed the room quickly and shut both bedroom doors. Heather’s she shut softly, she hoped Heather was asleep.

“Will you speak low, please?” she said, “I have a friend who shares these rooms with me. She has been ill; last night she slept badly, I hope she is resting now.”

“So,” he said softly, “this is where you live, and you have a friend.”

He put his hat down and came forward, treading, Jennifer thought, absurdly like the lions walk at the Zoo. Soft footed, heavy, ominous. “We will sit and talk, shall we?” he asked.

“What can you have to say to me?” she asked, backing from him in her mind, in her body. “What do you want of me? I know what you think of me, I saw it in your eyes last night. I sell my body for money---but I won’t sell to you---I have nothing to sell to you.”

“Now, now.” He spoke soothingly as one would speak to a child. “Come here, little one.” He sat himself down on the sofa and patted the place next to him. “Let us talk as friends. I will disclose my thoughts to you; they are not as you have thought them. In my heart there is nothing but pity . . .”

“I don’t want your pity,” said Jennifer, breathlessly. She was breathless, because she was fighting against the summons of his eyes. She wanted to resist their commands.

“No, I know,” he said impartially. “It is not pity you want. It is love and laughter and gaiety and . . . forgetfulness, and who, knows, perhaps these things, too, I can give you.”

“Who are you? What are you?” said Jennifer, as once before, and very stiffly, resistance not yet quite dead in her heart, she came and sat beside him as he had ordered. “You frighten me with your eyes. I think they try to mesmerise me.”

He shook his head, smiling at her, and it almost seemed as though the smile woke his face to a sudden benign beauty.

“Poor fluttering wings,” he said softly, and put his hand over hers. “Now for a little, let us talk. You shall tell me about yourself . . .”

“No,” Jennifer interrupted. “What should I tell you that you don’t know. You know what I am . . .”

“And I shall tell you about my Alexis,” he went on, not at all heeding her interruption, “And while I speak to you about him, you will hear in my voice wonderful things. For I love Alexis; my love for him is like a cloud all round him, protecting him, guarding him, so that in time he shall shine out in all his splendour and the great world shall see and know the wonderful thing that I---Joseph Block---have nursed and reared and brought back to life.”

He was mad. That, of course, was the reason of all his strangeness. Jennifer stirred uneasily. You must humour mad people, she had always been taught that.

“And who is your Prince Alexis?” she asked. His great dark eyes flashed down on her. He was not mad. He could not be mad with such splendour and power shining out of his eyes.

“He is the soul of Russia,” he whispered. “It has been given into my keeping for a little time---until . . .” He broke off and smiled at her. “Prince Alexis has sent me to-day with a message to you,” he went on, “and here I waste your time and mine with nonsense.”

“I don’t believe he sent you,” said Jennifer. “I don’t believe he does that kind of thing. You order and he obeys.”

His smile broadened. “How wise we are, little lady,” he said with benign fatherliness. “It is so much the better that you should not be a fool. Tell me then, is it I who love you, or is it Alexis?”

“Oh, love,” said Jennifer, as once her mother had said before her. “Is there any reason to mock me with that word?”

“He thinks it is love,” said Joseph Block. He studied her with his wise, strange eyes. “You have learnt your wisdom in a hard school, my child. As I have done. Let us then not talk of love, but of desire, which is a garden, whose flowers are choked with weeds, whose roses wither before they bloom.”

“Don’t know what to call her,
But she’s mighty like a rose!”

The words of the old song came floating round Jennifer’s mind. It was as though his voice called up a picture of herself standing in the kitchen of that house at Thames Ditton, gold head thrown back, teasing cook!

“Mighty like a rose!”

“Is Mummy like a rose, too, Nannie?” How silly she had been as a child, silly and spoilt and conceited.

And desire was a garden whose roses withered before they bloomed!

“You think of other things,” Block’s voice murmured across her thoughts. “You are back in the past, is that not so? You see yourself as a child . . .”

“Prostitutes,” said Jennifer, “are born not made. Did you know that? There’s no escape for us. We’re marked down from birth. Mother died when I was seventeen . . .”

Suddenly she was telling him her story, a jumble of words, thoughts dragged out from hidden away corners of her mind. Aunt Gertrude’s disapproval---strange how large that seemed to loom---her time in Ireland---Mrs. Martin---Manson---the theatre and Robert Harland. Now, perhaps for the first time she faced her thoughts of Robert Harland.

“I did not mind it,” she said. She had forgotten her strange companion, she sat, her elbows on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands. “He thought my body lovely, and I liked that. He made life comfortable and luxurious, and I like luxury . . . but all the time, I loved Billy . . . I love him still . . .”

She turned suddenly to look at those queer, watching eyes.

“It’s something outside of all this, my love for Billy . . . I would have been so happy as his wife . . . but you see he did not understand. Once Aunt Gertrude tried to tell me something like that about his not understanding, but then that day at Damgan, when Harland came back . . . I . . . Oh, what is the use of trying to explain it is so easy to keep on doing the same thing, isn’t it . . . but I did feel . . .” she hesitated, “unclean afterwards. It was the first time I had felt that.”

She looked away again. Her eyes were looking at that old self of hers that had felt for the first time ‘unclean.’

“I wanted to die,” she said slowly. “I wanted to put death between myself and Billy, so that he could still keep his dreams of me, clean and sweet in his mind. But I don’t suppose God could let me off as easily as all that. I hadn’t,” she gave a wry little smile, “quite fulfilled my destiny. So they rescued me and brought me back to the hotel and wired for Billy . . .”

She broke off suddenly. “It’s a long story,” she said, “Are you sure you aren’t bored?”

She had forgotten that she had said she would not tell him; she had forgotten her antagonism and fear; lifting her eyes to his, she was conscious only of a great, watching compassion.

“No,” said Joseph Block, softly. “Go on. I am here to hear.”

Jennifer looked away again. “You see I had lied to Billy,” she went on. “There is something so ugly about a lie, isn’t there? I think if I had told him the truth from the beginning, he would have forgiven me. He would not have understood, but he would have forgiven me because he loved me. It was the lie he couldn’t forgive really. And I . . . Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I must have been mad, or else it was just my life calling me. He said he did not want me as Harland had had me and I . . . I suppose I had no other way of giving. So I left Billy---that’s three years ago. I’ve lived like this ever since. I went to a woman, I had seen her once or twice in Dinard, someone had told me what she was, and she sent me to an address in Paris. I don’t think Billy made any attempt to find me. I hope he has forgotten me. I don’t know. I expect he realised I had gone back to my own world. There was no use his trying to pull me out of it. And I . . . I haven’t hated it, not all of it. O, why do you sit watching me like that . . . looking right through everything I say?”

She stood up with a sudden abrupt movement, all the flame dragons on the black silk of her pyjamas flickered to sudden life. “I tell you I don’t hate it,” she repeated.

“Good,” said Joseph Block, serenely. He veiled his eyes. Now his face looked mask-like, unreal in its repose. “You suit my purpose marvellously, Miss Jennifer,” he added.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “What can you mean? Are you mad, or just mysterious, so as to excite curiosity and make one forget hate?”

The word was out almost before she realised it. She stood trembling a little, waiting to see what answer he would make.

It was as though his large, expressive, oddly beautiful hands waved her hate aside. When he looked up, he was smiling.

“Come,” he said. “You and I shall be friends. Eh? Alexis shall love you, but I will be your friend.” He rose.

“You see now why I have come this morning,” he explained. “First, before I can let Alexis love you, I must make friends---arrange conditions. Since Alexis cannot pick up a girl from the street, her antecedents must be studied and there is then an undertaking I must make with you.”

“But,” began Jennifer. He silenced her. His eyes held hers, his hands clasped hers.

“You will come with us,” he ordered. It amounted to that. “It will be as though you were the wife of Alexis. And while you are with Alexis, while his desire rests on you, there shall be no other man.”

His eyes seemed to burn into hers, his hands were like iron, holding hers.

“That is understood, eh?” he said.

“You must be mad,” said Jennifer, wearily. Every nerve in her body ached with the extreme fatigue caused by his intensity. “Who on earth are you that you think you can arrange my life like this . . . make such conditions? “

“Nevertheless, I have made them,” he answered. “And you will agree.”

He dropped her hands and moved with his noiseless, heavy step over to the door, reclaiming his hat and stick as he went.

“The car,” he said, “will fetch you at six this evening. Prince Alexis has a suite of rooms at the Carlton, and to-morrow we cross to the Riviera. You need bring very little with you. Everything will be provided.”

He had gone before she had time to move. She heard the front door open and shut, and with his going, a sudden revulsion came to Jennifer.

“I do hate him,” she thought, “and he shan’t make me go, not if I don’t want to.”

But the last part of her thought contradicted the first, though that she did not for the moment admit.

Chapter Three

“Bought---And Sold”

Later on in the day, Heather found her packing. Heather had recovered from her indisposition and had been out. Heather was always like that; at one moment too ill to move; at the next, up and dashing out on some pretext or other. She was bitter and restless and morbid. It had not, by any means, been all pleasure living with Heather. She stood now, her hands on her hips, her large restless eyes darting about Jennifer’s room.

“You are going away,” she said. “I knew you would.”

“How do you mean ‘knew’?” asked Jennifer, “I am not really certain myself yet.”

Heather tossed her head. “Rats!” she said. “I heard you this morning. You and your Joseph Block!”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do you know who he is?” she added, mysteriously.

“No,” said Jennifer. “I don’t know any more than I did last night. So you listened this morning?”

“Yes, to bits,” Heather confessed. “Till I heard you get on to your Billy, and then I got back to bed. This afternoon I’ve been finding out about them.”

“About whom?” asked Jennifer. She was feeling stupid and tired. That was the effect Joseph Block had had on her. He had made her remember. The ache dragged at her heart.

Heather looked at her impatiently. “Your Prince Alexis,” she answered, with a snort. “Some people have all the luck. As for Block, as far as I can understand he is a dangerous lunatic.”

“Why luck then?” asked Jennifer. “I can tell you one thing---the boy, Prince Alexis, is completely under Block’s thumb. Perhaps they’ll murder me,” she added. “I don’t mind. What does it matter?”

“Oh, murder!” Heather shrugged her shoulders. She condescended to good humour; obviously what she had heard had intrigued her. “Jennifer, listen, whom do you think Joseph Block makes that boy out to be?”

“The soul of Russia . . .” said Jennifer, slowly. “Perhaps he calls it that,” Heather interrupted. “You remember the Russian Royal Family being massacred, don’t you? Or were you too young to bother? Well, there was a boy anyway, the heir; the papers were full of his pictures.” She stood up. “That’s what Block says, your Prince Alexis and this boy, well, they are one and the same.”

“But,” Jennifer began . . .

“Oh, he’s mad of course,” Heather agreed. “But think of the excitement for you. A king’s son. The Tsar of all Russia. Block hopes one day . . .”

“But where have you heard all this?” Jennifer succeeded in thrusting in her question.

A little of Heather’s excitement evaporated, she sat down again.

“From Madame Estelle,” she answered, listlessly, “I’ve been paying her five shillings for nothing as usual.”

Estelle was a lady clairvoyante in whom Heather placed unbounded reliance. “She never sees anything for me---not even Death. And then we got talking, I told her about your evening and as soon as she heard the description of the two men she stiffened. She’s half-Russian, you know. I believe she is hand in glove with the Bolshies, but she knew Block’s name all right. She says he doesn’t know that they know his little game---the Bolshies, I mean---but they watch him all right. If there was anything in it, in what he believes, or pretends to believe, they’d have knifed the lad years ago. They’ll have him yet if Block throws his weight about anywhere that it matters.”

Jennifer did not make any answer. She was thinking of the boy who had sat next to her last night, of his rather brilliant beauty, if his eager eyes, his touching warm hands. Tsar or beggar, real or pretence, it would not make much difference to her.

“They seem to have lots of money,” was what she said presently.

“Pots,” agreed Heather, she sighed and rose. “That’s what I say---you’re in luck. Madame Estelle says Block is one of the few Russian Jews who got out of Russia with all his wealth. Oh, he seems genuine enough. It’s only quite lately that he has produced this lad from God knows where, and now he’s trotting him round the big capitals, showing him life.”

“I should think Madame Estelle must have been crystal gazing harder than usual,” said Jennifer, a little contemptuously. She stood up from her packing. “Will you mind my going, Heather?” she asked. “Does it seem pretty mean to leave you with these rooms . . .”

“My dear, it’s life,” said Heather. “I’ll get someone to take your place. You’d be a fool not to go. Most of us sin in such damned drab surroundings---let’s snatch at a bit of splendour when we can.”

That was how her world would look at it, anyhow, Jennifer supposed. They would not credit her with telling the truth, if she said she went to this seemingly splendid adventure, unwillingly, with terror dragging at her soul. Nor could she say, not even to herself, of what she was afraid. Certainly not of any of Heather’s hair-raising tales, and when she attempted to dissect her feelings in regard to the mysterious Joseph Block, she could only remember the benign compassion in his eyes as he had listened to her rather silly muddled story.

She said ‘goodbye,’ anyway, gravely enough to Heather. She was leaving most of her things behind her; her pictures, her statuettes, “bequeathing them,” she said, “if I don’t turn up again. But I probably shall come back,” she added.

Yet she felt oddly certain of the permanency of her farewell. She was going out of Heather’s world for ever; she was turning another corner of that surprising muddled up road that had been her life. Who was Joseph Block? What was he? Had he really the power which she had felt him to have, when she had been talking to him? His eyes---they had seemed to read right into her soul. They had seen its shuddering dislike, its terrified retreats; they had seemed able to gauge regret and track her poor stupid tears back to the memories that held them.

It was of Block she thought, driving on her way to this new life of hers; his personality persisted, swept away all thoughts of Prince Alexis and his boyish, passionate desire.

Prince Alexis was waiting though in the outside hall of the Carlton to receive her. As the commissionaire held back the swing door to admit her, he came forward eagerly, taking her hand, raising it to his lips.

“You’ve come,” he whispered, “I felt I should die if you did not come.”

He was very good looking. She studied him more carefully than she had done the night before. He was exotic, she decided, brilliant. There were faint touches of red in his fair face, his eye lashes were long, gold tinted. As a girl he would have been absolutely lovely; his beauty was too effeminate for a boy. He moved with quick feline grace, he was eager in everything he did. It was a child’s unstudied eagerness. Jennifer felt towards him from the first a protective, almost motherly, feeling. He could not, she supposed, be much more than twenty or twenty-one and her own twenty-five years weighed very heavily on her.

“You were glad to come, weren’t you?” he asked. “You wanted to? You like me, don’t you? What shall we do? Shall we dance? They are dancing now, down through there in the conservatory. Is that what you would like to do---my people shall take your things upstairs---there is a maid, she will unpack for you.”

“Yes, I’d like to dance,” agreed Jennifer. Often in the days when she had been famous as Jennifer Star, Harland had brought her here, they had danced in the brilliantly lit room with all its mirrors. Some of her old self-assurance came back to her as she danced. It was curious---those three years in the underworld of Paris and London had left no definite outward mark. She knew that people turned to watch her with her partner. They attracted attention, they were the most striking couple in the room.

As they danced, Prince Alexis spoke to her in whispers, his lips close to her cheek.

“I love you,” he said. “You know I love you, don’t you? You are neither angry, nor offended. You have come because I love you. You are so beautiful. Your hair is like gold---here close against my face. Are you content that I should love you?”

What a queer, funny, foreign boy he was! She smiled at him, letting him look into her eyes under their lifted lashes. How easy it was to play with this boy---if that were all. As easy as their dancing. The music swayed them together, carried them along. Block! Where was Block? She asked Prince Alexis when, the music over, they sat down together on a sofa, shaded with palms and flowers.

“Where is your friend?” she asked. “You know---the strange old man who came to see me this morning.”

“Block, you mean,” he answered. “Oh, he’ll be somewhere about, watching me. He’s always watching me.”

His hand touched hers, moved caressingly up her arm. “He’s more of a gaoler than a friend,” he said, in a sudden childish burst of confidence, “He censors everything I do. Last night---it was damnable. Didn’t you think it odd that I should have had to let you go away like that. I mean any other man . . .”

“No, it wasn’t odd,” said Jennifer, “it was very wise. After all, you didn’t know anything about me. He’s very fond of you, your Mr. Block.”

“Lord, he makes me tired!” He used the catch phrase with a certain pride, laughing at her. “I tell you what. Last night I was Bolshie, that frightened old Block. I fell in love with you---you know---at first sight . . .”

Jennifer smiled, shaking her head. “Not love,” she said softly.

“How do I know? Do I use the wrong words?” he asked. “I have never known any women. Block has never let me. I have read about women---about love---about life, but,” he made an odd, rather helpless gesture with his hands. “Block’s always switching me away. I must not make friends, get to know anyone, I don’t know why, I don’t understand,” he admitted it with charming naïveté, “why he is allowing me to have you.”

“I think I do,” said Jennifer. She sat a little forward. It seemed to her that she did understand. She was to be the gilded toy, the sop thrown to Prince Alexis to keep him quiet, to make him acquiesce in whatever was planned for him. That was why Block had been so interested in her, why he had sat, evening after evening, in the restaurant watching her, searching her soul with those odd, all seeing eyes. He wanted her to serve as a plaything for his charge. Any other type of woman or girl would be dangerous, for Prince Alexis might learn to love her and love would be an enemy to Block’s plans. But she . . . A little anger stirred in Jennifer. Pride raised its head. Was it not possible that the old man was calculating on things outside his power to control? Were all the roses dead and withered in her garden of desire?

Looking up, she saw Block coming towards them, making his quiet, impressive way through the crowded room.

“There, didn’t I tell you?” said Prince Alexis. “He has been watching us from somewhere. I don’t care---you and I---we will outwit him, shall we? It will be fun having someone to help me stand up against old Block!”

Block joined them, gravely courteous he bowed over Jennifer’s hand. “The two children enjoy themselves, eh?” he said. He stared down at them. “There is a little matter I must ask you to attend to upstairs, Alexis,” he said.

The hand on Jennifer’s arm tightened. She knew the boy wanted to resist. A reckless spirit of defiance prompted her.

“Oh, don’t go, not just yet,” she said. “This tune they’ve just started is so lovely.”

“I want to dance,” said the boy, his glance shifted uneasily away from Block’s steady stare. “Can’t your business wait, Block?”

“Why then, if you want to,” said Jennifer gaily. She stood up, her smile flashed a challenge at Block. “Come on---let’s.”

She was not, however, to win her first battle as easily as that. Prince Alexis hesitated, and in that moment’s hesitation, Block had won.

“The dancing will wait,” he said with heavy gaiety, “and upstairs there are many new frocks waiting for Miss Jennifer to inspect. Is not that so, Alexis? Come, let us go.”

He turned and led the way and like two children caught out, Jennifer felt, on the verge of naughtiness, she and Prince Alexis followed. They left her at the door of her rooms. She was to have a suite, it seemed, sitting-room, bedroom, bathroom. Luxury unparalleled, never even in the old theatre days had she attained to this. She stood in the white and gold room, with its pretty furniture, its dainty fittings and stared round her. The window was open, faint and far away the noises of the London traffic swept up to her. That must be the Haymarket outside, the curve of Pall Mall. If she shut her eyes, she could see what it must look like. It would be getting on for dusk, the busses would be full of girls and women and tired, white faced men. The business world of London going home to the suburbs. Would the lamps be lit yet and loitering, furtive figures be abroad?

“Some things which are not yet enrolled
In market lists, are bought and sold.”

Jennifer shivered a little and crossed the room quickly, pulling the curtains over the window. That was not her world any longer, she need not think of it, or remember it. Only here, too, in this gilded, luxurious world, souls were bought and sold. Was not she selling hers to Joseph Block?

A neatly attired, pleasant faced maid opened the door communicating between sitting and bedroom.

“Madame’s bath is ready,” she said in French, “and if Madame will choose her gown for to-night.” She was voluble and excited. “Madame’s things are so lovely,” she said, fluttering round Jennifer. “It is difficult to choose.”

She was right. It was difficult to choose. Block, for Jennifer saw in this, Block’s hand, not that of Alexis, must have ransacked the best shops to provide the filmy, outrageously lovely garments that were spread out on the bed, draped over the chairs.

“Put them away.” She answered the maid’s ecstasy in rather stiff French. “There is an old frock. I had it packed in that little suitcase of mine. I’ll wear that to-night. I am tired. I . . . “

“But certainly, Madame,” the maid agreed. Her quick mind summed up the situation in a moment. “When one is tired . . . “She shrugged her shoulders. “Madame shall bathe, when she comes back there shall be none of all this for her to see.”

“What’s your name?” asked Jennifer, “are you . . . are you going with us to Nice?”

“But, yes, Madame,” the girl answered, “I am Stephanie. Monsieur Block has engaged me for a month at least.”

“I see,” said Jennifer, “I’m not used to a maid, you know. You’ll probably have to be rather firm with me Stephanie. I’ll wear whatever dress you think I ought to.”

The bath was heavenly. A wide, long depth of hot sweet scented water. She slipped her clothes off her, they slid with a little rustle to the cool floor, and stepped in. Heavenly, fragrant water! She lay in it, lifting one foot lazily after the other, watching the drops chase each other down the whiteness of her leg. It reminded her absurdly of her Saturday bath at Scarton Manor. It was so different, yet essentially she herself was the same. She peeped over the edge to see whether the nurse’s uniform, the stiff hated white collar was not lying with her other clothes on the floor, and laughed because they were not. And then, oddly enough, her laughter shocked her.

“I’m hopeless,” thought Jennifer, “I can’t buy or sell my soul. I haven’t got one. I must have been born without one.”

The thought sobered her. She stepped out of the bath and dried herself, sombrely putting on the fresh silk underclothes that Stephanie had put out ready for her. They, too, were very lovely, she liked the touch of their softness against her skin.

“The trap has been well baited,” she thought lazily. “How well Block must know women like myself.”

Stephanie, it seemed, had decided on Jennifer’s own choice in gowns. It lay over the back of the chair by the glass. A very gauzy black tulle, with one scarlet flat faced flower, flaming at the waist. Jennifer had had it for some time. She had bought it in Paris.

“So I wear that one, do I?” she asked, nodding at it. “What made you choose it, Stephanie? The others are so lovely.”

“It is a friend,” said Stephanie, “Madame knows every time we wear a frock a little of our ésprit goes into it. Does not Madame think that clothes take life from those who wear them?”

Something of an artist, Stephanie, it would seem. Jennifer laughed.

“Ah, but then if one moves into a new life,” she asked. “Is it not well to leave one’s old clothes behind?”

Stephanie made no answer. She had brushed Jennifer’s gold head till it shone indeed, now she discreetly slipped the black frock over the white shoulders and patted the scarlet flower into place.

“See how it brings out the colouring of Madame,” she said, standing a little back, surveying her handiwork. “We talk of new lives, Madame, but it is nonsense. You see wherever we go we take with us---ourselves.”

So Jennifer took herself in her old black frock down to dinner with Joseph Block and Prince Alexis. She sat between them, and it was only Block who knew that she had discarded all his purchases and reverted to something of her own. Did he take it as a thrown-down challenge? He gave no sign. His eyes watching the byplay of Alexis’s devotion and wholehearted absorption in Jennifer’s beauty, were weary and a little scornful. He did not join in their conversation, nor attempt any of his own. After dinner he melted away. It was as though he said, “This is your hour, gain what ascendancy you can. Only don’t forget I give it you.”

Jennifer thought of that, visioned his rather scornful gesture of giving, as she lay awake long after Alexis had fallen asleep, his head pillowed against the fragrance of her shoulder.

Chapter Four

“Billy Forgets”

Billy had not forgotten Jennifer. There are things in life one cannot forget, despite the dust of daily little happenings which would fain choke memory. His love for Jennifer was of these unforgettable things. He did his utmost to put it aside, he turned even to other loves in order to forget, still deep down among the silent memories, it persisted.

All of us have memories which we never think of dragging into the light of day. They wait for us in the twilight, they leap out at us in those hours of the night when sleep for some reason or other, has deserted us; we do not talk of them, or confide them even to our closest friends, but they are there none the less.

He did not look for Jennifer, because at the time of her desertion---he called it that---jealousy had wrapped a close bandage about his eyes, and as some very wise poet has said, “To be wroth with those we love, Doth work like madness on the brain.”

Billy had come back from that walk after his accusation of Jennifer, and the hall porter of the hotel, just in passing, confided to him the interesting fact that Mr. Karl de Heron, that was the name of Jennifer’s favourite dancing partner, had left that afternoon in rather a hurry. It seemed to Billy, looking back on the incident afterwards as though the hall porter had conveyed his information with a leer, crediting Billy anyway with most unnecessary interest in a dancing Jew boy. Then had come Suzette’s agitated, pink flushed face, her stumbling speech, the thrust forward letter.

Madame, it seemed, had also gone away---rather hurriedly.

Jealousy, flaming to sudden anger, immediately connected the two departures. Billy had gone on into his room with his face as set as a stone.

The rings fell out as he opened the letter. The plain gold one, rolled a little away and hid itself under a table; the diamond one, upon which, let it be said, Billy had expended a goodly portion of his saved up pay, lay in his palm and twinkled at him. There was no letter, not a single word of farewell. She had gone.

Lovely, volatile, deceitful, childish, and yet so immorally grown up; his Jennifer whom he had loved in the face of so much disapproval and condemnation. He was from first to last, intolerably hurt. His own hurt eclipsed and outweighed everything else. Suzette and the hall porter with their damned innuendoes, they must not be allowed to see how intolerably he had been hurt.

Billy, with the diamond ring clenched in his hand, moved quickly to the window. It opened, overlooking the terrace of the hotel’s lounge, right out over the sands. At high tide the waves lapped against the stone walls of the terrace. Into the sea, Billy threw his diamond ring. It was the first instinctive movement of hurt pride. The plain gold one he looked for a little later on and, on finding it, put it away in his cigarette case.

“She is still mine.” He had had time to think by then. “Perhaps, one day, she will want it back again.”

Then, asking no questions of anyone, and had he but known it, a few discreet questions would soon have elicited the fact that Jennifer’s departure had nothing whatsoever to do with De Heron’s, Billy had paid off a, by now, weeping Suzette, packed all Jennifer’s things and labelled them to the house in Thames Ditton, seen to the disposal of that and his own luggage, settled the hotel bill, and departed.

Where to go,he did not quite know. England and his people; his mother’s pity; his father’s scorn were unfaceable. He wrote Mrs. Hampton from Paris.

“Jennifer has left me,” was what he said in the letter. “It’s a new wound, forgive me, Mater, if I creep away and hide. I shall mess about between here and Marseilles till my boat goes, and then get back to Africa. Next leave, you shall have all of me, my allegiance will be undivided, but for the moment, I am being a damned fool, and I can’t face being told it.”

As if she would have done that! A few more lines gathered round Mrs. Hampton’s blue eyes, her lips shut with a firmer determination not to show pain, but to Colonel Hampton she said very little, nor did she show him Billy’s letter. “Gone back to where she belongs, I suppose,” Colonel Hampton had snorted, on being told the bare fact. “Well, it’s no more nor less than what I knew would some day happen. It was a fool’s marriage, and I said so from the first.”

Billy had not stayed long in Paris. He had drifted by slow stages down to Marseilles. He had pretended to be sightseeing; quite mechanically, he went through town after town, visiting the places of interest, doing the museum and so on. Of all he saw and did in that month, he retained not one single memory. It was a blur of misery behind which the ghost of Jennifer walked. Her voice her face, her smile, her tilted head, the gold of her hair the starry blueness of her eyes, all these memories were as knives that stabbed him.

He boarded the boat at Marseilles, morosely indifferent as to his fellow passengers. He had, as it happened, a cabin to himself. The boat was fairly empty, and the agents, booking for him in London, had thought that his wife would be travelling with him. There was room now and to spare for Jennifer’s ghost; she mocked him from the very intimacy of the cabin which should have been theirs.

On the third day out, the weather across the Gulf of Lyons having been peaceful and kindly to the passengers of s.s. “Mataina,” a dark, languorous lady with melting brown eyes and what is vulgarly called a kissable mouth, took him very definitely in tow. Mrs. Ruth Craven was a lady who set very great store on what she called ‘boardship’ friendships. They were sometimes called by a harsher name, but generally the people who so labelled them, were not friends of Mrs. Craven’s. Her methods, anyway, served to distract herself and one other person very successfully for the period of the voyage and since Mr. Craven never accompanied his wife on her sea voyages, and he was the only person likely to be amazed or hurt by these amorous adventures, it was really no one else’s concern.

Mrs. Craven tracked Billy down into the smoking room and sat beside him and asked him if he had got a match, and let him hold it for her while the flame caught the tip of her cigarette. She had, undoubtedly, very fine eyes and her whole face was attractive, with its air of secretive, rather sly, repose covering an intense fire of life. She was the kind of woman to whom men find it very easy to talk and as she had spent at least fifteen years of her life in studying the species man, it would have been rather surprising if she had not understood them.

She understood the heights and the deeps, the innocence and the plaguey, tormenting desires of poor Billy before she had conversed with him for half an evening, and after that, as far as she was concerned, things were perfectly plain sailing. She would never, she realised, be able to make Billy see life and men and women and boardship friendships---sometimes called by another name---from the same standpoint as she did. She sensed the, to her rather tiresome Sir Galahad, in this nice looking, interesting sullen man, and the Galahads of this world do not flirt easily. Undefeated, she proceeded through the warm moonlit nights, through the glamour of an evening ashore at Port Said and a couple of hours spent right forward watching the searchlight in the Suez Canal to adapt herself to his outlook. She was unhappily married, she gave Billy to understand, not ill treated, just misunderstood. She had never known love---now she was on the verge of love and felt afraid.

“Love shows us stars we never saw before,” she quoted to him one evening, sitting, their chairs drawn close together, after the dancing was done and the decks darkened and deserted. Ruth’s voice was one of her most attractive assets. It was low and very musical. Men often fell in love with her voice.

Billy did not fall in love with her. There was only to be one woman in Billy’s life, if one did not count his mother. And in reality, his mother was more than a little responsible for his single heartedness. But he found Ruth’s companionship comforting, her voice soothed him when she declared unexpectedly, passionately, one night as they were saying good night, that she loved him, that the thought of life without his love was unendurable, he came down from his great heights of virtue and took her into his arms as she wanted him to, and kissed her. And she, very wise in her victory, hid her face against him and wept and was afraid. So that he felt most terribly responsible for what he had done, and had at once with very real contrition to tell her about Jennifer and the unbreakability of his marriage vows.

“Because I still love her,” said Billy, “that must make me seem a damned cad to you, doesn’t it?”

But no, Ruth, it seemed, found his faithfulness most lovable.

“If anyone had ever given me love like that,” she whispered, “how proud I should have been.” And she stayed submissive in his arms until he kissed her again, not knowing what else to say or do.

They were very intimate friends indeed, by the end of the voyage, so much so that Billy talked rather fiercely about chucking up everything, his career and Ruth’s social position and going away somewhere together. But Ruth had experienced too many voyages which ended in this type of mental upheaval to be much affected.

“You must go back to your life---I must go back to mine,” was her stable quotation on these occasions, and though she said the words with a distracting break in her beautiful voice, she never had the slightest idea of revoking them.

Billy was rendered bewildered and sullen by her easy acceptance of Mr. Craven’s sudden reappearance in her life. That gentleman met the boat at Mombasa, viewed all the passengers through bland tinted glasses that rather concealed the expression of his eyes, collected his wife, was very efficient as to getting her luggage through, and departed, Ruth hanging out of the window and waving secret passionate farewells to Billy, on the first up country train.

Nevertheless, despite his inward revolt at Ruth’s duplicity (he could find no other word for her tact), Billy allowed himself to remain within the fence of her friendship. They wrote to each other, and Ruth’s letters at least provided mail day with a certain interest. She was so intensely alive, and she was a very vivid letter writer. No one who has not experienced the monotony of life in an out country station can appreciate the pleasure to be derived from an interesting letter. And indeed, Billy’s life in the months that were to follow did descend to an almost drab monotony. He had been posted to a little station in the flat cotton-growing district of Busoga. There were, beside himself, in the station a doctor and a veterinary officer. The doctor was married, he was himself a small aggressive man with a very harsh voice, and his lady wife gave one the impression of being worn out by the constant strain of listening to it. It was either that, or the country that had drained all the prettiness out of her white, tired face, and made her conversation a thing of timid whispers connected always with the wickedness of native boys and the price of stores.

There was small comfort to be got out of an evening spent with the Wisteads. The veterinary officer was unmarried, a studious, very earnest young man, immensely immersed in the study of bugs and fly diseases. He lived in an uncomfortable warren of a house which he had made no attempt to furnish, contenting himself with the Government allowance of one bed, three tables, and six chairs and surrounding himself with a veritable pack of dogs one or other of which was always sick unto death, and being assiduously nursed by its master.

Billy lived morosely withdrawn from his companions. The men he perforce met in business hours, Mrs. Wistead he dutifully called on and was as dutifully invited to dinner. But neither household was attractive, nor did they set themselves out to attract. Billy wandered about the district on lonely safaris and endeavoured to immerse himself in work, but the skein of his life had become horribly tangled and messed up, he could not find a thread which showed the slightest likelihood of leading him to happiness.

Matters were in no way improved halfway towards the end of his second year by a cable from home announcing the sudden death of his mother. He had a brooding sense of having most hopelessly failed and thereby destroyed the one pure love in his life. His memories, wakened suddenly by that bald announcement on its thin pink bit of paper, stretched right back into his childhood. She was the first person he had loved, and his love had been very wholehearted. And hers for him! In that moment he could sense it all round him, could see the patient agony in those eyes that had so waited for his coming, could feel the touch of the gentle hands that had been so piteously eager to hold and that had yet let go without a protest. For the time being, the eager lovely ghost of Jennifer stepped aside, left vacant the place which now he felt never should have been hers, and at the shrine of his mother’s memory, Billy wept the first hard tears of his manhood.

She had died, it seemed, quite unexpectedly. They had found that an operation was necessary, but neither the doctor nor the surgeon, so his father’s letters told Billy, had even hinted at death. And she herself had not suspected it. She had been most cheerful, writing Billy up to the last. Was there just a trace of farewell in that last letter of hers to him? It came, of course, long after the cable that had announced her death. It was like, in some odd way, the touch of her hand reached out to him from the seeming darkness into which she had gone.

“To-night, I’ve been thinking about you and Jennifer, darling, wondering whether . . . Oh, Billy, small dear son of mine, I remember you like that you know, even though you have grown so big and are so far away from me, I often wonder in how far I am not to blame for the thing that has gone to spoil your life. For when you first loved Jennifer, my jealousy shut her out, and I could have helped her, whereas I only harmed. She loved you, Billy, I think I knew that and I would not admit it. When one comes to the end, Billy, one sees how poor a thing jealousy is. If I could find Jennifer for you now, I would give her back. If I could find her! Billy, Billy, none of us have tried to look. What can have happened to her? Sometimes I lie awake thinking and I feel afraid. I’ll finish this to-morrow after the operation’s over, so that I can put ‘All’s well.’ Good-night, dear son, good-night.”

She had not lived to add “goodbye.” Some other hands had folded the letter and put it in its envelope and addressed it to him. “Good-night,” very faintly her voice came through the shadows of the room to him.

He put the letter away and tried again to forget. His father, it seemed, was selling the house. Had decided that he could not bear England any longer, was going to winter, at least, in Madeira, and then would wander about the Continent.

“What are you doing about the ghastly tragedy of your marriage?” he wrote. “Surely there is some method of getting it annulled---or a divorce. You cannot go on being tied to a woman of that description. The time will come when you will meet some nice, decent English girl and want to marry her, and then where will you be? If you like to authorise me to act for you, I’ll find out what are the best steps for you to take before I leave England. It’s madness to waste your life over a damned silly mistake, and I know that your mother most bitterly regretted her share in the stupidity of it all, before she died.”

Billy made no direct answer to that. It did not seem to him that his mother had meant that he should find Jennifer in order to divorce her. Very slowly within him, behind all his hurt, was coming to birth the idea of finding Jennifer. By the end of the next six months, it had become an imperative urge.

He wrote applying for short leave on urgent family affairs. Headquarters knew of his mother’s death, they would realise that there might easily be things to settle up. No one in Uganda knew of his marriage. Even Mrs. Rutherford had been kept in ignorance. She had written to welcome him back, and had added, in chaff, “And minus the bride! What’s happened?” But he had not answered her, and they had not met on this tour.

His leave came through easily enough. It was dated for three months ahead. That would bring him to August. It was on the tenth of August three years ago that he and Jennifer had been married. Three years ago! Where was she now? How was he to set about finding her? It was here that the thought of Ruth Craven became rather like a gadfly in his mind. He could not explain, not even to himself, his attitude towards Ruth. He was grateful to her, for her letters had helped him through these last two years, but he had no desire whatsoever to see her again, or renew their rather hectic friendship. Yet it seemed neither chivalrous, nor even possible, to entirely shake her off.

He wrote to tell her of his impending departure, and she sent a prepaid wire in reply asking for the name of his boat. He answered, half reluctantly. He guessed her purpose, and followed up his wire by a letter, explaining, more or less, his position. But Ruth, unperturbed, wrote back, giving the object of his search her wholehearted support.

“I quite agree with you, my dear. You must find that lovely little wife of yours. If she has grown quite impossible in three years, you must divorce her. It isn’t good for a man like you to live in single blessedness. I can’t have you myself, but I’m not selfish enough to want to keep you always from whatever happiness you’ll get elsewhere. It is funny---Fate has decreed that we shall travel once again on the same boat---now, Sir Galahad, don’t get alarmed. All shall be as you choose and I, you’ll find, can be most surprisingly good when put to it---so you’ll be able to tell me all your plans, and I’ll add my wise woman’s advice to your doubtless rather bludgeoning efforts of dealing with the lady once she is found. Consider yourself kissed, angel, by one who loves you.

“Your friend, Ruth.”

She always ended her letters like that. It did not really mean anything. All the same he wished she had not decided to come home on the boat with him and help him with his search. The thought of Ruth and Jennifer together was intolerable.

“My dear, we’re not likely to be,” Ruth countered his stammered avowal of his feelings with easy laughter. “You know, darling, you are inclined to be just a tiny little bit of a prig. Please stop looking at me as if I were some hectic sore spot of the past---and let us be friends. If you like---” She let her soft dark eyes wander past him and search out odd shaded corners of the deck, “I’ll find some one else to fall in love with for this voyage.”

That was on the second day out from Mombasa and quite time, as Mrs. Craven put it, to settle down to a companion.

Poor, sorely tried Billy! He did not quite know what he did want. He had been for two and a half years in extreme loneliness, and he had just come through a big sorrow, he needed soothing and comforting and companionship.

By the time the boat touched at Marseilles, they were very much on their old footing towards each other, one of the better known scandals on board. Ruth, it seemed, had had an invitation to join a cheery party at Nice. She found a wire waiting for her at Marseilles. “Bertie fallen out,” it ran. “If possible, bring a man with you.”

She showed it to Billy, head a little on one side, eyes and lips provocative.

“Well,” said Billy. “What about it? Is Bertie a great disappointment?”

“Not a bit,” she smiled. “Not if you’ll take his place, darling.”

“I? Good Lord, how can I?” argued Billy. “I don’t know your pals---besides . . .”

“They say ‘a man,’” Ruth pointed out. “Obviously they don’t mind whom.”

“I daresay not,” said Billy. “But I can’t be ‘It,’ I’m afraid.”

“Why not?” she asked, her eyes challenging him. “You’re rather a beast, aren’t you, Billy? You take all and give nothing.”

Good Lord! If she felt like that? And in a way, how damnably true it was!

“Do you want me to come?” asked Billy. “How long is it to be for?”

“Only three days, angel,” answered Ruth. She slipped her hand into his arm, “There’s to be a big masked ball at the Opera House, and after that---you can say goodbye and dash back to London. Coming---honey?”

“Of course, if you want me to,” he acquiesced, he hoped not too unwillingly. He was still feeling raw and flushed from that remark of hers.

So, after all, and quite unwittingly, it was to be Ruth’s hand that led Billy back to his first sight of Jennifer after three years. The lady herself never knew this, for Billy did not tell her, nor was there anyone else who could, but Billy felt that in the working out of Fate, there was undoubtedly a touch of raw edged justice. And then all other thoughts and sentiment and feelings vanished, burnt up by the quick rushing flame of his love that leapt out of the past as fierce and keen as ever it had been. He knew only one thing. He still loved Jennifer and Jennifer was further away from being his than she had ever been.

Chapter Five

“It Isn’t Any Use”

The party which Ruth and Billy joined at Nice were staying at a large, imposing looking villa, at the far end of La Promenade des Anglais. It was owned by the oldest member of the crowd, a man called Hastings, who had made a lot of rather unexpected money out of a recent theatrical venture in London.

His friends had been culled for the most part from that world of make-believe mummers, who have money and no manners and a certain flair for successful ventures without any real genius of any sort. There were nine of them assembled for this party---four girls and five men, which included a sprinkling of amicably married couples and Hastings himself, who was a renowned cocktail mixer. If there was no real vice in any of them, there were equally very small signs of virtue. Their idea of a good time was noise, excitement, rapid flirtation and the above-mentioned cocktails.

Into these surroundings, Ruth settled herself with only a slight rearrangement of the wings which she had adopted for Billy’s benefit. He, she knew, was bound to feel a bit out of things, poor darling! Through all his training under her skilful hands, he had still succeeded in retaining a, to her, rather silly refinement of aloofness. He, instinctively, would not approve of her friends or their free and easy atmosphere. But she really could not help that. She had been asked to bring a man, and it was sheer bad luck that her man of the moment should have happened to be a type of rather defeated Galahad. Once or twice, looking at him during the course of their first evening at Mr. Hasting’s villa, she almost laughed out loud. He was, in the midst of all their noisy gaiety, being so essentially a gentleman, a little dignified and very quiet.

“Gee, lovey, your latest pal,” one of the girls said to her, “Do you take a nutcracker to get a joke out of him?”

“He’ll be all right to-morrow,” opined one of the others, a lively and sparkling lady of about twenty-eight, “I’ve known even the most moral men do wonderful things once they get concealed with a domino and behind a mask.”

Mr. Hastings had most thoughtfully provided all his party with dominos and masks. There was a special trying on the following morning. The majority of them were to wear fancy dress under the dominos, as they proposed after twelve to unmask and take active part in the revels. But Mr. Hastings had in addition booked two of the large first-tier boxes in which to accommodate his guests. They could watch the revels from there, or go down and join them, just as they liked.

The scene at the Opera House was brilliant beyond conception. Tiers upon tiers of lights, flowers thrown from balcony to balcony in long wreaths of scented splendour; colour moving against colour, blending, flashing, a crowd of animated, jostling humanity. Music floating in the air; laughter caught up, re-echoed; a jumble of voices; pleasure running rampant, tossing its favours through the crowd, abandoning itself to the sway of the music, to the colour and glamour of the scene.

Billy stood against a pillar in one of Mr. Hasting’s boxes and watched the moving, dancing, hilarious crowd below. Donning a domino had made no difference to his outlook, despite the hopeful forecast of the sparkling lady. He felt unutterably alone in the midst of all these people; completely and absolutely out of it.

Perhaps he had not had as many cocktails as are expedient to put one into the right mood for pleasure; perhaps his friendship, call it that for want of a harsher name, with Ruth was proving at its end, a little bitter in the mouth; it may even be that he realised how far he had travelled down a wrong road in search of forgetfulness, only to find memory still tugging at his sleeve. Be that as it may, he was undoubtedly depressed and Ruth who had realised that earlier in the evening, had just as undoubtedly deserted him. Ruth, for this one night of hectic pleasure, was going to stay on no high level of companionship. If Billy refused to be amusing, she must find someone else. She had not put it in so many words, but her meaning had been quite plain. And the others had gone off with their various affinities. They were all dancing. There was really nothing, as far as Billy could see, which should chain him to this spot in preference to slipping away and going rather morosely to bed, and yet he stayed. Thinking, of Heaven alone knows what as he stood there, his back to the pillar, his eyes from behind the black mask gloomily watching the dancers.

He looked up presently round the house. The boxes, three in a row, and three tiers in all, were all occupied. Big parties in most of them, but the one immediately opposite him on the further side of the house had for occupants only three people. Two men and one woman, he judged them indifferently to be. One at least was a man, because disregarding all injunctions to the contrary, he was already unmasked. Seen across this distance, even with all the distraction of the moving crowd below, the man struck Billy as being oddly impressive. He took up Hasting’s opera glasses which had been left lying on the rim of the box and studied half lazily and yet with a certain interest; the man’s large white face, his beard, his queer intense eyes. The man spoke, it seemed, very little to his companions. They sat forward in the box, leaning out, looking down, from time to time, talking to each other. Billy judged them to be young, though he had no means of really knowing that; they were both in dominos and masks, but they seemed in their talk and their movements, eager and excited. It seemed to Billy that the man who had first caught his attention sat a little behind these two, and it was upon them that his eyes constantly rested. Was it boredom, or dislike, or contempt that his face displayed?

Billy felt quite ridiculously interested in the trio. A little of his own boredom vanished. He drew up a chair to the front of the box and sat down and levelled his glasses, now on this person, now on that, so as not to give offence by deliberately staring. But again and again, his eyes came back to the three people opposite.

Ruth flashed back into the box for a minute or two, “Bored to tears, honey?” she asked and leant over him, so that her perfume, she always used some particular, rather strong scent, floated all round him. “I wish you’d come and dance.”

“But I don’t dance,” he answered, “And you don’t like dancing with me. Ruth, do you see those three people in the box over there? What do you make of them?” She poised herself on the edge of his chair and took the glasses. She still wanted to be nice to Billy, though she was getting rather tired of him, and downstairs she had just scraped acquaintance with the most divine dancer.

“What a queer looking old devil!” That was how she summed up Billy’s man. “His eyes give one the creeps, don’t they?”

“Well, they are odd,” Billy admitted. “I keep trying to place the other two and why . . .”

“You’re a queer creature, darling,” interrupted Ruth. She brushed what she could see of his cheek with a kiss. Everyone was kissing everyone else to-night. “But so long as you’re not too desperately bored. We all unmask at twelve,” she added, “And there’s to be a Beauty Prize. Hastings has been roped in as one of the judges.”

“I pity him,” said Billy. He was looking at his man again and not paying much attention to Ruth.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she retorted. “They say it’s a foregone conclusion. There’s a girl here to-night---a Russian demi-mondaine she’s supposed to be. Anyway, she’s in the keep of some Russian princelet, and she’s the loveliest thing anyone ever saw. They say . . .”

“You’ve heard a lot---dancing,” said Billy. “Must have found a chatty partner.”

“He’s more amusing than you, angel,” Ruth retorted, “But, as a matter of fact, if you had read the papers this morning, even the English ones, you would have seen that Society at Nice is rather intrigued for the moment by a Russian Prince, who claims to be Alexis, the late Tsar’s son.”

“I did read it,” said Billy. “I was not awfully impressed by his claims to Tsardom.”

“You wouldn’t be,” Ruth laughed. “Billy, you are so utterly and delightfully English. Now, I find the idea exciting and romantic, especially when it is coupled, as it is in this case, with a charming personality and extremely good looks.”

“Oh, you’ve heard that too,” said Billy. “Your friend is indeed well informed.”

Ruth slid off the chair again, the music started up with fresh vigour. “He knows everyone that is anyone, here, anyway,” she retorted. “I’ll come back for the unmasking---perhaps,” she added and flitted away.

He stayed on, not really so much to see the queen of beauty as to get a glimpse of the two in the box opposite with the unknown.

“Ruth’s friend might know who he is,” he thought. “Wish I had told him to ask her.”

At midnight, there was a sudden dimming of the lights. Odd how darkness threw a quick, fantastic fear over the whole scene, as though the dancers stood caught on tiptoe, awed to silence, as though life suddenly left the brilliant, beautiful hall and for a second Death peeped in. It must have lasted longer than a second. Little uneasy sounds came floating up to where Billy sat, the giggle of some girl surprised at her own fear, the quick breathing of a great many people all herded together. Then suddenly, swish, up flashed the lights again and immediately he was looking down on a sea of upturned faces. Everyone, it seemed, having doffed mask or domino, had been watching the huge central chandelier, waiting for it to wake to life again. Laughter swirled round at its re-appearance; people shouted and yelled; the band blared forth into some fresh jazz tune. Billy glanced across at the box opposite; the two young things had gone; the elderly man sat by himself, his eyes half closed, his face infinitely weary.

Hastings looked in at the box. “Such fun,” he confided, “I’ve been helping to judge the beauties. Lord! You should have seen us---poking and punching to see whether their figures are real or faked. Coming downstairs, Hampton? The winner is to show herself at the end of this dance. There will be a big scene.”

“I find it amusing watched from here,” answered Billy. “I’m no dancer, unfortunately.”

“No,” said Hastings. He seated himself on the edge of the box for a minute’s chat. “The management are all on edge to-night,” he added, “There’s some dirty work astir. They’re afraid . . .”

“Robbery?” asked Billy. “There are certainly some amazing jewels out to-night.”

“No, it’s more than that.” Hastings looked mysterious, “It’s a rum yarn. Apparently, there is a man here tonight---calls himself Prince Alexis of Russia, claims to be the Tsar.” He chuckled. “As if any man in his senses would want to have anything to do with Russia nowadays.”

“What makes him dangerous anyway?” Billy asked, not with much interest, but since his host wanted to talk, it was obviously his duty to listen.

“Oh, it’s Bolshies,” Hastings answered indifferently. He turned sideways and peered down into the crowded dancers. “They adore stunts, don’t they? Impossible people. And between you and me, the management are afraid of bombs being thrown about.”

“Well, that would be unpleasant,” admitted Billy. “They’d get more than their claimant Tsar if they dropped a bomb amongst us.”

“Exactly,” said Hastings. “I’ve only heard of it in a roundabout way, of course, but I had half a mind to gather up my party and take them home before anything unpleasant . . .” He broke off. “What do you think about it?” he asked.

“Frankly, it sounds rot,” said Billy. “It’s probably a cleverly worked bit of self advertisement on the part of your Prince Alexis.”

“By Jove, that’s a thought,” agreed Hastings. He stood up. “He’s advertising himself all round to-night. It’s his little bit of fluff that has won the beauty prize. God, you should see her, Hampton. She certainly is some peach. And she reminds me of some English girl---used to be on the stage about three years ago . . .”

The band stopped, he made a dart for the door. “I’ve got to be in at the death,” he announced. “You train my glasses on to the box opposite. That’s where you’ll see her.”

So the unknown who had so much interested him were the very people about whom the management to-night were feeling fussed, about whom Ruth had been talking. A claimant to the Russian throne! There had been more than one or two of them since that grim day in history when the whole of the Royal family had been murdered to placate a hungry mob! What rot it was! Nevertheless, false though the claim must be, it put an edge to one’s curiosity. Billy took up the glasses and leaned forward, staring eagerly.

There was a little stir at the back of the box he was watching. The elderly man had risen and drawn back into the shadows. A young man came forward, leading a cloaked figure by the hand. Billy focussed his attention on the young man. He was brilliant looking, very foreign, very well brushed and oiled---that was Billy’s definition. Rather an effeminate ass, he guessed, with yet an attractive beauty about his smile. He stood there, holding his shrouded companion’s hand, smiling down at the crowd, taking their interest, their silent curiosity, for with the dying of the music the crowded room had grown strangely silent, and every face was turned in the direction of that box, as, one could see, homage to himself.

Then a stout little man rushed forward to the front of the box and made some sort of speech announcing presumably the prize winner, though Billy could neither make head nor tail of what he said, but, at least, in his backward movement, he withdrew the Prince with him. And now the woman’s figure stood there alone, and a little sigh of anticipation went up from the crowd as she lifted her hands and threw back her domino and faced them, gold head thrown back, her beauty wonderful against its background of the dark shadows of the box.

She was dressed presumably to represent some fabled mermaid. Every line of her fair smooth body was outlined by the glittering silver silk that clothed, yet barely concealed her, while behind her, scarce seen, trailed a marvellously lifelike long green fish’s tail. White and shimmering she stood, and her face was like some flower of perfect beauty.

The crowd caught its breath in a moment of real homage, then there was a kind of surge forward, a wave of cheering and the foremost and most daring of them all, several men making themselves into a human ladder climbed up and over the edge of the box shouting and hurrah-ing.

But Billy sat very quiet in his box and the opera glasses had fallen to the floor. His face was buried in his hands and he was trying to shut out the clamorous, shouting sounds of people intoxicated with their own amusement and a woman’s beauty.

For he had seen Jennifer, and the image of her in all her splendour and her glory and her shame was branded into his heart with hot fire.

For how long he sat like that, he did not know. When he stood up at last, the box opposite to him was empty and down below in the hall a space had been cleared and amidst much laughter and shouted compliments, Mademoiselle the Fish was being carried shoulder high by a party of riotous young men. Well in the forefront of the crowd that watched, Billy could see the boy who called himself Prince Alexis and the elderly bearded man standing in close attendance.

Thoughts hot and fierce and useless and stupid and anguished dashed through Billy’s head. What should he do?

Go, and leave her to this inglorious triumph that her three years’ freedom from him had brought her? Forget her now, utterly and entirely? She certainly needed neither his pity nor support. Or should he confront her? Search out Ruth from the crowd down below, show Jennifer . . .

That thought passed almost before it was born; his agony was too real for any false comfort to touch it. He must see Jennifer, speak to her, hold her eyes with his just for a moment. Satisfy himself that she had indeed forgotten. He loved her. Pride and anger and justice and self respect weighed so very little in the balance against that.

By the time he had laid aside mask and domino and joined the crowd downstairs, they were dancing again. The shimmering, silver clad figure with its ridiculous tail draped over one arm was dancing with the Russian prince. She had always danced so beautifully. Billy was reminded of his old impotent rage in those far-off days at Dinard when he had stood aside and watched her dancing with other men. Had she ever loved him? At least she had pretended love, she had been willing to give him herself. He could have had her, and held her! That lovely floating body, that thrown back head of gold! Now love was like a fever burning in his mind. Why had he let her go? Why had he been so moral and strait-laced. After all, she had been his. Where does love end and desire begin?

The dance ended, the couples laughing and chattering, melted away. Billy moved very deliberately and stood where she must see him in passing. And as he moved he became suddenly conscious of danger. Hastings’ carelessly uttered words flashed through his mind. Opposite him, immovable, as though with the same object as himself, stood three men. They were all somewhat sombrely attired in black with black capes over their shoulders and black hats shrouding their eyes. That was nothing, it was obviously their choice in fancy dress. It was their faces, the tense expression on the face of the one who stood a little in front of his fellows, that caught Billy’s attention. The man held his arm awkwardly. Was he concealing something under his cape?

Billy looked round, half meditating a sudden spring forward. It would be a melodramatic way of drawing attention to himself which he disliked, and if there was nothing in these three men’s strange demeanour, he would look a damned fool, which would be worse. He hesitated, and in the pause, Jennifer came almost abreast with him. Then he looked back, caught her eyes, wide and frightened, staring at him, and all else was forgotten.

The flash that followed, the blinding rocking sense of confusion, left him with only one idea. He had reached out his arms and snatched at Jennifer. She stood pressed close against him, the two of them hemmed in by the sudden rushing forward of the crowd. There were shouts and shrieks, a stampede of frightened people, the hysterical crying of some women. In the pandemonium of noise they stood staring at each other. What did she see in his eyes? Condemnation, love, or sudden harsh desire? It is certain that she shivered a little, trying to hide her eyes from him.

“Let me go, Billy,” she whispered. “It isn’t any use . . .”

As quickly as the crowd had gathered, it drew back, shuddering it seemed. Uniformed policemen had sprung suddenly into existence. They were in control. Jennifer looked beyond them. In the cleared space they had made, she saw Block kneeling on the ground by something, that moaned and turned and twisted. There was blood on the dancing floor, already several women had screamed and fainted.

“He has been assassinated---assassinated,” people shrieked. “Who can have done it? Where do they hide? Mon Dieu, are any of us safe?” All in wild excitable French.

People ran hither and thither. Others, beside Billy, had noticed the three men in black. An eager, agitated search began. All outlets were blocked. No one was to be allowed to leave. But in the centre of all the noise, Joseph Block knelt beside Prince Alexis and knew that his life’s work was finished, his dream destroyed. The Soul of Russia, for so he had believed the boy to be, lay dying on the floor.

Chapter Six

“Is Death Unkinder Than Their Love---Poor Jennifer”

She had had her brief hour of ascendancy. It ended in this. Jennifer, a cloak gathered round her finery, crouched on the floor and Alexis’s head lay on her lap. He was not to be moved; the doctor said it was useless and would only cause unnecessary suffering. The people had been cleared away and a cordon made by sympathetic retainers, so that the poor young man might die in peace. So terribly mutilated his body, the red gold of his hair all splashed with a deeper, more scarlet colour.

He asked for Jennifer. He moaned her name over and over again. It was like a baby crying for its mother. Block, he never looked at, or spoke to. Once Jennifer had come, Block had risen. He had given her his place at once. He did not attempt to argue against her ascendancy. There was something mute and tragic and pitiful in his withdrawal, there was no scorn in the gesture. Alexis was all hers, and holding him in her arms, trying to soothe a little of his agony, Jennifer’s thoughts were of Billy. What had she read in Billy’s eyes?

“Jennifer---Jennifer!” Alexis’s hands groping for hers, his head turning, twisting on her lap. Trying to get away from the agony of mind and body. “I don’t want to die, Jennifer, I am too young to die.”

She had been going to defeat Block anyway. She had known that almost from the first. The boy had loved her. Block had thought to keep love out of it altogether by feeding desire, but love had crept in. Where does desire end and love begin? And which is the stronger force? How hard Block had worked against her. Now, with this poor head lying against her arms, with these poor lips calling and calling on her name, if she liked she could turn and laugh at Block. Her victory was so sure. He had thought her a thing so cheap she could not be worth loving and out of desire she had built up this love that Alexis had for her. A love that shared laughter and simple things, a love his hands groped for when he had to die.

Was that how Billy loved her now, or were Billy’s eyes like Block’s looking at her, viewing all her set forth beauty, her shameless pose?

It had been Block’s idea, that fancy dress. He had intended that it should strip her of her laughter and her pretended youth and innocence. He had meant that Alexis, so seeing her, shown off for all men to desire and aim at, should realise how far away she must be kept from love. She had known that Block meant that; she had seen it in his watchful, scornful eyes. But Alexis had not seen it. He was such a child! If only she could comfort him, bring peace to those groping, twitching hands that pulled at hers! Alexis had laughed at her fish’s tail, been pleased because her beauty had called forth such an acclamation of praise. It had not altered his love. Was love like that then? Unalterable in its reality. Could love follow you down through byeways of grim shame and never alter? Seeing your soul all the time, despite the mistakes you made, the dirt with which you smirched your body, the lies with which you soiled your lips.

Was love like that? Did Billy love her still? Someone she supposed it must be the doctor, stooped over her touching her on the shoulder.

“It is all over, Mademoiselle,” he whispered. “The poor boy, he is at peace.”

She had not really been thinking of Alexis at all. She had been thinking of Billy, wondering whether he would be waiting to see her again, whether he was there in the crowd, watching. The doctor’s whispered words made her feel ashamed. She looked down at Alexis; his hands had fallen away from hers, his face had dropped sideways. He was dead. That was what the man meant when he said, “He is at peace.” She had always hated Death---been afraid of his nearness. The weight of Alexis’s head on her lap was terrible.

“Help me to stand up,” she said to the doctor. “I don’t think I can rise alone.”

They moved Alexis very reverently. Whatever he had been before, pretence or reality, now he was dead. Someone covered his face. Jennifer, standing shivering and shuddering with her cloak drawn round her, was aware of Block standing at her elbow.

“Come,” he said quietly, “let us go. I will take you home. There is no more you can do here.”

She had never argued with him about anything, their warfare had always been silent, secretive. She turned at once and walking beside him passed out and stepped into the motor car that was waiting for them.

Out of the darkness of the car, Block spoke softly.

“You were good to him,” he said, “I am grateful.”

“It’s finished, now, isn’t it?” said Jennifer, “your planning, your hopes. I’m sorry for you. You loved him.”

He made no answer and she moved restlessly. “Tomorrow, I’ll go away,” she went on. “You won’t want me any more. You won’t want to be reminded . . .”

“That he loved you?” asked Block. He seemed to be leaning forward, staring at her. “Where will you go?” he asked.

“Back from where I came, I suppose,” said Jennifer. She would not tell him about Billy. He should not drag her thoughts from her like he had always done from their very first meeting.

“We will talk of that to-morrow,” he answered slowly. She could hear him lean back in the car; she thought he closed his eyes. “To-night, I am very tired.”

They did not speak any more. The entire staff of the hotel where they were staying were waiting to greet them, anxious, solicitous, curious. It was so terrible a tragedy. People spoke of it in whispers.

Stephanie, helping Jennifer to disrobe, was in tears. But Jennifer did not cry. Neither did she sleep. Wide eyed and motionless, she sat all night by the open window that looked out over the sea.

They brought back the body of Alexis. It lay in state in the room next to hers. She knew it was there, but she did not go near or see him again. Alexis was not hers any longer, he belonged to the people who believed in him, who loved the myth he represented, who had prayed and worked for him. It seemed, now that it came to the point, that there were a great many people who had believed in him and loved him. All day they came and went in the room next door. Jennifer saw nothing of Block, nor did she get any message, but Stephanie told her that the cowardly assailant had not yet been caught; that they were hunting for him in all directions. The papers, according to themselves, could give no reason for the dastardly crime. Evidently the claims of Prince Alexis were to be hushed up; the more effectively since he was dead.

The police interviewed Jennifer. They spoke cautiously. Did Mademoiselle know of any personal enemies whom the Prince had had? Was she aware of the claims he had made as to his real identity?

“He never spoke of it to me,” Jennifer answered. “Neither of them ever spoke to me about that kind of thing. But I knew, of course. Other people spoke of it openly.”

“It was a false claim.” The man interviewing her spoke authoritatively. “But he has paid a heavy price for his indiscretion.”

“Could it have been so false since they bothered to kill him?” asked Jennifer.

The man shrugged his shoulders. “The mere suggestion was inimical to their case,” he answered, “or so they thought it. It helped to revive memory.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Then, if we may ask the question, Mademoiselle, how did you meet the Prince, how long have you known him?”

“Not long,” she answered. “I met them in London, about three months ago. They suggested that I should come here with them and I agreed.”

“And there is no one---” He smiled a little slyly, looking at her. She was very beautiful, but there was no doubt at all as to which world she belonged. “No jealous lover, let me suggest, out of your own past, Mademoiselle, who could have been moved to do this thing?”

“No, there is no one,” she spoke hardly. “The lovers that I have had would not do any murdering because I passed on to someone else.”

“It is not possible to say that, Mademoiselle.” He was almost gallant in his contradiction, “Mademoiselle is very lovely.”

It was pretty obvious though that it was a so-called political crime---its method of perpetration showed that. There had been three men concerned, according to most of the onlookers, the bomb used had been of extremely skilful manufacture. Questioning Jennifer at all had been merely a formal matter of curiosity. They had only one other question to put to her. The man asking it looked down at his own book as he spoke.

“Mademoiselle does not claim, or is not going to claim, in the near future to having gone through any form of marriage ceremony with the Prince Alexis,” he asked.

“No,” said Jennifer. She sat quite still, looking down at her hands, folded in her lap. She had taken off the rings which Alexis had given her that morning and put them away. “I was not, in any sense, his wife.”

“Ah!” said the man. There was a little sound of satisfaction in his voice. A legal marriage and possible complications would have carried on this stupid business of belief and unbelief into the next generation. “That is all, then, Mademoiselle, with which I need bother you.”

He rose and slipped his notebook away and bowed to her and withdrew. It had been interesting seeing anyone so notorious as Mademoiselle the Fish at such close quarters; he would have quite a lot to tell his own, not nearly so lovely, but far more respectable wife.

Half way through the afternoon, Stephanie brought Jennifer a letter from Billy. A gentleman had left it with the hotel porter, giving strict injunctions that it was to be delivered to Mademoiselle, personally.

“It is early days for men to come prowling round,” Stephanie had said rather angrily to the porter. “Do they think that we women are without heart because we have little virtue?”

She presumed that Jennifer felt this too, for she noticed that she sat for some time with the letter on her lap, not opening it. But really Jennifer was afraid, she was afraid of the hurt that Billy’s letter might bring to her.

She read it finally. It was only a rather summary request for an interview.

“Naturally, I don’t want to rush in on your tragedy,” Billy had written stiffly. “But I am only staying in Nice for a couple of days, and it seems to me imperative that we should at least meet and talk things out. After all, you are still legally my wife, and the position is intolerable both for you and for myself. If you will name your own time and place, I will make a point of being there, and I will call for my answer from the hotel porter this evening.”

Nothing in that beyond a certain cold finality of anger. She dreaded meeting him.

She had not yet answered the letter when Block came in to see her a little later on. Her one-time enemy was immensely changed. He seemed to have grown older in one night, shrunk from his great height, the fire dead in his eyes. He came in and sat down heavily and moved his hands about aimlessly.

“The funeral is not to be here,” he said presently. “I am taking him back to Russia. A dead soul to a dead country.” He turned his lack-lustre eyes on her, “and you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Yesterday I told you I was ready to go. It does not matter to you where, does it?”

“I have a proposition to make to you,” he spoke heavily. “Will you listen quietly while I make it? At first it will strike you as outrageous, even horrible, for you are still very young and there is warm blood in your veins and loveliness in your limbs, and no doubt you say to yourself, “Alexis loved me and is dead, but there are other men who may still love me.”

Jennifer moved a little, turning her face from him. Would Billy love her, she wondered? When Block, her enemy, spoke like that, he was not thinking of Billy. He was thinking of other men, men who would buy her beauty just for a little and pass on.

“Then listen.” Block’s voice had a curious way of penetrating into one’s thoughts, blending with them, weaving mind’s pictures in and out of one’s heart as one listened. “Let me tell you. See yourself Jennifer with the beauty stripped away. Creep into the shadows, cover that gold head as well you may. How ugly vice must seem to the old. What lecherous shapes creep through their minds. Go back to London, Jennifer. Her pavements swarm with such as you, her hospitals shelter them, her bleak graves yawn. Worms eat you while you live, for is not your flesh a thing of crawling impurity. What happens to the body, once the soul is dead?”

She turned a white frightened face towards him. Impossible to put into words the picture which his voice had called to life.

“You speak to me like that because you have always hated me,” she whispered. “You hate me because Alexis loved me.”

He shook his head, his eyes were like sombre fires in the pallor of his face. “For that, poor child, I love you,” he answered. “Because of that I would do you the greatest service that any man could do you, knowing the thing you are.” He leant towards her, “I offer you---Death,” he said gently; the words seemed to echo and sigh round the room.

Still she stared at him like a frightened child. She had always half believed that he must be mad, this strange old compelling Jew. Now the terror of certainty shook her heart. Now he was going to kill her---would those lean powerful hands of his reach out and clutch her throat? Would he drag her from the chair and stoop over her? Would Death be easy, or would it hurt intolerably?

“Death,” she managed to say. “Yours is a strange love, isn’t it?”

She tried to laugh, a little pitiful sound of terror. “I don’t want to die,” she said; as Alexis had said, “I am too young to die.”

He answered her question, ignoring the rest. “You talk of strange love. Is my love stranger than what other men have given you? Is Death unkinder than their love---poor Jennifer?”

He leant back, folding his hands. “You think I am mad,” he said. “You are frightened at the thought of Death, eh? Screams choke in your throat. Poor, silly child. I shall not kill you. I said I offered you Death---that is different.”

“But . . .” she began, her hands tightened on Billy’s letter. “It isn’t perhaps quite as you think,” she said. “Perhaps I needn’t go back to London. Perhaps it needn’t end like that. Alexis loved me. He did not see the ugliness---the vice. He did not think—” (A sudden sob shook her.) “That my soul was dead. He found something---oh, not just the beauty of my body, or the pleasure that I gave him---but something else in me to love. And mightn’t someone else . . .” Her words stumbled together in her eagerness. “Someone who had known me before---oh, before all this happened---mightn’t he be able to find that there was a little left in me that he could still love. The body can’t kill the soul, not if there is any truth at all in anything that religion preaches. Not if there is a God at all.”

Block watched her. Pity, contempt and indifference chased each other in his eyes. It was only because Alexis had loved her that he had any instinct at all to help. To his mind, the love of Alexis had in some way purified this girl of the gutter; he would have given her Death to keep her pure. But she---poor fool---was afraid of Death, faced life rather and the pavement’s edge.

“Let it be as you like,” he said. “I am an old man---my dreams are finished. Death is the one reality in life.”

He got up and crossing over to the table took something out of his pocket, a small phial containing a minute quantity of liquid, and put it down among the rings and jewellery that lay scattered there. “If you change your mind,” he added, “you have only to drink this and lie down on your bed. You will not find Death unkind or painful. If you do not drink it, I recommend your keeping it at least. I have given you something of more value than all these lovely gems that go to deck your beauty.”

He moved to the door. “Good-bye,” he said. His curious eyes stared at her a minute. “If I wished to,” they seemed to say, “I could make you do this thing. But I do not wish---you are not worth it.”

He veiled them, they were like the eyes of a great eagle blinking against some curious, intrusive onlooker, then without another word, he had turned and gone.

Jennifer wrote her letter to Billy. “Let’s meet out of doors,” she said. “I’d like it better. There’s a little garden up on the road above the sea. I’ll meet you there, at the first seat beyond the fountain at ten to-morrow morning.”

Chapter Seven

“As Your Wife”

Billy said goodbye to Ruth and her party the morning after the ball. Everyone, certainly all the visitors who had nothing else to think about, were in a furore of excitement about the tragedy which had ended last night’s revels. They talked of nothing else. They had talked, it seemed, most of the night for none of them had dreamt of going to bed until long after they had been released from the police inspection at the Opera House. Billy had not come home with the rest of them. Ruth questioned him about that.

“Where on earth did you get to?” she asked. “All we English visitors were herded into one part of the hall, and our hosts or hostesses had to stand guarantee for the names and addresses that we gave. But I never saw you. How did you escape?”

“I didn’t,” he acknowledged grimly. “Unfortunately, I was very much on the scene. Standing quite close to the wretched boy who was killed.”

They bombarded him with questions. Had he spoken to the lovely, outrageous lady? How had she borne up under the death of her lover? What was she like really?

“No one suspected you, darling, I do hope,” said Ruth, and ruffled his hair and whispered that it might be all very well as an excuse, but where had he spent his night?

“Most of it at the Prefecture of Police,” Billy answered. He knew she was hinting at amorous adventures and he was in no mood for that kind of insinuation. “And as I’ve been passed free of suspicion, I think I’ll get on with my journey,” he added. “You won’t mind my leaving you now.”

“Naughty boy, I strongly suspect some French damsel,” Ruth teased him and laughed at his frown. “All right, darling. What a good little boy it is!”

She walked down to the gate with him to see him off. “Shall we meet in London?” she asked.

“I don’t expect so,” Billy answered. “To tell the truth, Ruth,” he plunged at the matter weighing on his conscience, “You and I . . . well . . .”

“Dearest, the night is over,
Ended the dream divine.”

Ruth chanted. “Your method, darling, of breaking off with an old love before you get on with the new is not very gallant.”

“It isn’t,” he admitted grimly. “I don’t think that anything I’ve done in all this can be described as gallant. Admit it, Ruth, we haven’t loved each other, have we?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she pouted. “As I understand love, I’ve loved you---wonderfully---in spite . . .”

Her laughter, he noticed, was quite gay and untroubled. “Don’t look so glum, Billy boy, if I’m dreadfully on your conscience, you have my full permission to forget me.”

“I don’t think I shall ever do that,” he answered. “You’ve been a brick to me, Ruth. I felt in Hell that first time you met me on the boat.”

“I know,” she nodded. “The heart of me was sorry for you, Billy. And, my dear, I don’t regret anything, so please don’t you. I’d like to help you find a wife, Billy, and see you happily married, only, I do hope to God, that, despite her little vagaries, she is a domesticated type of woman. You’ll never understand the other sort.”

Billy thought of Jennifer as he had seen her last night, and his whole mind winced away from the memory. “You think love isn’t enough,” he suggested.

“Not on your life,” laughed Ruth. “It isn’t worth a Kenya chicken without understanding behind it. Goodbye, Billy boy, and good luck.”

He was glad she did not offer to come and see him off at the station because he had no intention of leaving Nice without first seeing Jennifer. Mr. Hastings and his party were doing a day at Monte Carlo and the next day they had booked up for a cruise on a steam yacht, so he had no fear of running into Ruth again. All the same, his conscience did feel a little guilty about her. He wrote his letter to Jennifer and took it round to the Hotel. He had not in the least made up his mind what he should do when he did meet Jennifer, but he was quite determined to meet her. Last night he had been almost maddened with jealousy, watching her with the other man’s head on her lap, hearing the audible sympathetic remarks of the crowd all round him.

“At least she loves him,” one American girl had said. “That’s easy to see. And she’s got a sweet face. It can’t be true all the dreadful things they say about her.”

“What do they say?” He had not meant to speak; the words had been rushed from him. His companion of the moment pushed up against him by the crowd had looked up a little surprised. She was one of those very frank outspoken damsels, not at all averse to talking to men, whether she knew them or not, but there had been something rather surprising in the impetuosity of this young man’s voice.

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” she answered, her voice a loud drawl. “They say she was picked up off the streets in London. That she is as immoral as she is beautiful. And that she was ruining the poor young man, body and soul. I don’t believe it, do you? I hold vice always writes unpleasantly on people’s faces.”

“I suppose so,” Billy had answered, and he had turned and edged away and tried to lose sight of her and forget what she had said. But, naturally enough, the sting of the words remained. If they were true? What a damned fool he was being meeting Jennifer again; re-opening old sores, rapping tenderness on the knuckles once more. Far, far better pretend he had never found her. Try to think of her as dead. Marriage! Well, he most certainly would never want to marry anyone else, and Jennifer obviously was not much tied or prevented by her marriage vows.

And then, obtrusively, desire raised its head, and his whole being was flooded with a memory of the feel of her body, held for those brief seconds close against him, while the crowd surged round them, and, if he shut his eyes, he could feel her hair brushing his cheek and smell the perfume of it. It was not as a wife that he thought of her now. If she had given her love to others, why should she not give it to him?

Perhaps herein lay some of Ruth’s fashioning, coming to shape. Her mind had been moulding his thoughts in a way that he scarcely realised. But the next moment, he was ashamed of himself . . . angry. He tried to concentrate on his anger. He wanted to see Jennifer because he was angry with her. She had most hopelessly muddled their lives by going off like that and never making any communication, or sign of life. None the less, it is oddly and depressingly true that we can think no thoughts, which pass away, without, in some form or other leaving their mark. Out of our thoughts, and a great many of them are so swift that we seem to pay scant attention to them, we do finally build our acts. So that those unlovely thoughts of Billy’s, hovering for a moment over his love, did desecrate it, and were in due course to bring forth most bitter results. He went, anyway, to his meeting with Jennifer, in two minds. There was anger which all night long he had done his best to fan and keep alive, and there was eagerness, which covered a longing to see and hear her, to feel her hands and kiss the perfume of her hair. None of all this, needless to say, was visible in his outward bearing, and he arrived, on purpose, ten minutes late for the interview.

She was sitting on the seat she had mentioned, waiting for him. It was a cold, grey day, and the gardens were deserted and rather bleak looking. Jennifer was dressed in black and she had on grey beautiful furs. They nestled close against the white perfection of her neck and under her small black hat the gold of her hair shone very bright. She did not rise to meet him, just lifted her face a little and let her eyes glance at him. They were timid, her eyes, frightened, the starriness seemed to have been wept away in tears. But he only saw them for a moment then she looked away quickly.

“Won’t you sit down?” she whispered, “it will be easier to talk.”

He sat down beside her, but very rigidly apart. He looked rather ridiculous, but neither of them noticed that. He appeared like a huge injured schoolboy, very deliberately not looking at her, but leaning forward, poking at the gravel with his stick.

“You agree with me, don’t you,” he said, “we have got to have things out?”

“Yes,” she answered, and sat silent. It was for him to speak, her muteness seemed to say.

Billy fidgeted and dug his stick into the gravel. It went right in, making a long straight hole, the gravel scattered in all directions as he drew it out.

“Look here, Jennifer,” he began, “are you desperately cut up about last night?”

That was not what he had meant to say, but somehow it came out first. “I mean, that man. He was your lover, wasn’t he? It must have been pretty ghastly. You . . . well, I suppose you loved him, didn’t you?”

“No,” Jennifer answered, “I did not love him. I have never loved anyone, Billy, but you.”

It was rather startling. He turned to stare at her. “Do you want or expect me to believe that?” he asked. “First there was Harland---and then that De Heron whom you seemed to have preferred to me . . .”

She interrupted him with a funny little gesture. It was as though she held something in her hand and dropped it. “There have been so many,” she whispered, “and always and only, you.”

He sat quite still, looking at her, her words really conveyed very little to him at the moment.

“Do you remember from the very first how I loved you, Billy?” Jennifer asked, “I gave you my soul. You were funny and shocked. Souls, you said, are the one thing we cannot give away, for they are not ours to give. But I gave you mine. Then you went away and left me, and I tried to be---good, as you would have me be. I tried being an under nurse.” Her lips quivered. Was it tears or laughter she was holding back?” But I could not bear it---it was dull and ugly and monotonous. Billy, in those days I thought all virtue was one or other of those three things. You see I could not help it. I was a pagan. I must have been a pagan, or I could not have given my soul away.”

He did not interrupt. He made no attempt to do so. He just sat watching her. Her beauty was like a drug that went creeping about his mind, calling to life those thoughts which he believed shame had killed. Her face was so exquisite, the gold of her hair so precious. “And then,” her voice went on, “I came back to London, and there was Robert Harland, as you say. I did not love him, he did not ask me for love. It just happened. But when you came back I knew that you would not understand its just happening, and I was afraid. So I lied. It was the lie that made you angry, wasn’t it? Did you think I wanted Harland to follow me to Damgan?” She looked away. “I think his coming made me see how far I was away from you---how little you would love me if you knew. And after he had gone, I went out and down into the sea and waded in and tried to drown. I prayed God to let me die---I wish He had---I wish these three years in between had never been.”

There was something hopeless in her voice; it sounded as though she had cried all the tears in her that could be shed and dry-eyed faced the past. Billy was moved to sudden contrition.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said. “I never guessed, Jennifer . . .”

She turned to him quickly, putting out desperate hands, clutching at his arms.

“Did you love me then, Billy?” she asked. “Do you love me now? Oh, my dear, answer me as if in very truth Death stood quite close to me waiting to hear what you have to say. I’ve loved you, Billy, always and always. Like some people love God whom they can never hope to get near. But you---have you loved me?”

“Why yes,” said Billy. They were close together suddenly, her face almost touching his coat, her hands slipped down and holding his. “I’ve tried not to, Jenny. That’s honest, isn’t it? I’ve been angry and hurt and afraid . . .”

“Afraid!” She took up the word quickly, looking up at him. “Of what, Billy?”

“Of you,” said Billy, “and life and of what life might do to you.”

“And what it did,” she asked. “Would that make any difference to your love?”

He looked away from her as he answered, “Jenny, it’s so damned difficult to explain,” he said. “Last night when I first saw you, I . . . Oh, God, Jenny, that damnable dress showing off yourself like that. Someone in the crowd said to me last night, some beast of a girl. “They say she was picked up off the streets in London. That she is as immoral as she is beautiful.”

“And would that make any difference to your love?” she asked again, and there was something like agony in her eyes.

Billy did not see them. He was looking out over her head wrestling with his thoughts.

“It would have to,” he said slowly. “You talk about souls, Jenny. Well, you couldn’t love a woman like that with your soul. Passion, why, yes---but love---oh, don’t you know what I mean? There’s got to be respect in love, and then, well, think of mother, supposing that I, grown to be a man, came to learn that my mother had been a woman like that! Don’t you see how it would knock the bottom out of things? And when a man loves a woman as I, Jenny, want to love you---” he lifted her hand shyly and held it against his face. “He likes to think of her as the mother of his son.”

He put his arm round her and drew her close; there was no one in the garden to see, and his heart felt warm and tender and soft towards her. “Jenny, we’ve made such a rotten muddle of things,” he whispered. “Loving each other, wasting our lives living with other people. Let’s forgive and forget. Let’s start a new clean life.”

“As your wife?” she asked. Odd that he did not notice the strained tension of her voice.

“Of course,” he answered. “What else?” She sat a little away from him, loosening her hands from his. An old man pottering through the garden smiled at them in amiable appreciation of their being lovers. It was so long since he had felt that pleasant thrill himself.

“And supposing,” said Jennifer, “that I tell you that what you heard last night is true. That I . . .” Her voice broke, yet she held her head very proudly erect “am not a woman whom any man could wish to have as the mother of his son.”

“Jenny!” Billy whispered. It did indeed seem as though the foundations of his world rocked round him. Through all his hurt and his anger and his intolerance he had never believed that.

“What then?” asked Jennifer, and now she turned to face him and a colour half crept into the whiteness of her cheeks and her eyes were starry with tears that would never again be shed.

Her beauty crept round him, inflaming him, inviting him. The thoughts of the night before leapt into full possession, ousting his pain, ousting for the moment his very upright sense of chivalry.

“If you are that,” he said roughly, “then I don’t suppose I am wealthy enough to claim your notice, unless for old sake’s sake, you spared me a week end.”

He saw her whiten and wince away from his words and suddenly desire and anger and everything else faded from his mind, and there was nothing but intense misery left. “Oh, God!” he said and leant forward and hid his face in his hands, “that I should have loved a thing like you.”

Yet Alexis had loved her and not been hurt! But then Alexis had been a pagan like herself, taking no thought for the future, or of the children that might be theirs. And Alexis---in time---would have tired of her and passed on. Desire is indeed a garden whose flowers wither quickly, whose roses die in the bud.

“Never mind, Billy,” she spoke softly. “It doesn’t matter. You can put me aside and forget me now that you know. It was not knowing, wasn’t it, that kept that little flame of memory alive? You made a dream of me---and loved it. Love’s finished now.”

“It isn’t,” he answered and lifted his head and looked at her with angry eyes. “Don’t you see that just isn’t what happens. Love’s dead----perhaps. Other things are left. I want you. I’m hungry for you. You’re like some damnable drug that I am ashamed of wanting, and yet the hunger drives me. I’d take you, if you’d give yourself to me. Knowing all that I know, loathing what I know, I’d take you. Love is supposed to bring men nearer to God, but you, women like you, take love and use it to turn us into beasts. Oh, don’t listen to me, Jenny. I don’t know what I’m saying. It has hurt, this thing you’ve told me, most damnably.”

He stood up. It was as though he attempted to shake something off his shoulders.

“This doesn’t end here or now,” he said. “It can’t. I’ll meet you again to-morrow. I’ll have straightened things out by then.”

Jennifer stood up too, her furs gathered round her.

“It isn’t much use meeting again, is it?” she asked. “Goodbye, Billy. There’s a poem I learnt years ago, it keeps turning up, fitting into my life. The last line of it runs:

“Only one kiss---goodbye, my dear.”

Could you, could you kiss me, just once, Billy?”

The gardens were empty, and it seemed she stood for the eternal woman tempting man.

He put his arms round her and drew her close and tilted back her head and kissed her, her warm soft lips, her white neck where the furs fell away and showed the small pulse beating in her throat.

“It’s not goodbye,” he said. “It shan’t be. We’ll meet to-morrow, Jenny.”

When he got to the gate of the gardens, he looked back and it seemed she was still sitting there, a fragile figure of loveliness with her furs gathered close about her. And just for a moment, Billy hesitated. His heart smote him. Was it true that love was dead?

Then he turned his back on her and plunged away. He had got to straighten thoughts out before he saw her again.

Chapter Eight

“A Great Price”

Several times during the course of the day, Billy’s heart smote him. He wandered about rather aimlessly, going for a long walk up into the hills and coming back on to La Promenade des Anglais late in the afternoon. The visitors to Nice were parading. Billy, for want of anywhere better to go, sat on a seat and watched. There were such swarms of women, lovely women, beautifully dressed women, women who ought long ago to have been old; young, straight limbed girls with radiant eyes and curiously blank faces. Painted women, women with pure faces and immoral clothes. Women with hard, dull faces, most plainly dressed. Some of them had men with them; they laughed and talked, they were gay and excited, or cross and bitter. One girl in particular, Billy noticed. She made him remember Jennifer as he had first known Jennifer. She was very young and very lovely. She had a young man with her. They walked arm in arm. When the girl turned her face up to the boy, it was all flushed and radiant with pleasure. Sometimes she looked at other people passing and always she smiled, she had smiles for everyone, so much happiness, that she had to share it. Perhaps they were newly married, anyway, they were lovers. They passed backwards and forwards in front of Billy several times. And then behind that happy love-warmed couple came a woman walking alone. One called her a woman but she was not much older than the girl in front. As she passed Billy, she turned her head and smiled. It was unspeakably sly that smile, it seemed to add sudden age to her lips and eyes.

“Buy pleasure,” the smile said. “It is to be bought and sold.”

The two girls, radiant eyes, smiling lips! How in God’s name, could one understand the problem---work it out? Was it chance, or pre-ordination, or self will? And Jennifer---what of Jennifer?

A little old withered fragment of a woman had sat down on the seat next to him. She was a relic of some bygone age, her claw-like hands encased in black silk mittens, her bright bird-like eyes peering out from under a poke bonnet.

“A nice afternoon,” she chirped, breaking into his thoughts with a disregard of his preoccupation. “I beg your pardon, but you are English, aren’t you?”

Billy acknowledged that he was, lifting his hat in doing so. She was so old, old enough he guessed to be his grandmother.

“I thought so,” the bird-like voice fluted at him. “I don’t often make mistakes. I sit here and mark ’em down, French, English, Russian, American---good, bad, vicious---can’t help themselves---don’t want to. Young man, you look depressed. Have you been losing money at Monte Carlo?”

“No,” Billy shook his head, “But you are right about the depression.”

He turned away from her. He hoped she would not go on talking. He did not want to seem definitely rude. She was so old, one cannot be rude to the really old.

“Humph!” said the old lady, she was not to be deterred. “Love, then I expect. Troublesome things, love and money. Tee, hee!” she crackled suddenly, surprisingly. “Age has its advantages after all.”

“I expect it has,” agreed Billy.

“Now I’ve lived, well, let me see---that won’t interest you, but I’ve wintered in Nice for the last forty years. One sees life at Nice.”

“And life,” said Billy, “still interests you.”

“Ten years ago, I should have taken that as an insult,” said the old lady. “Never mind, I forgive you. Some woman has let you down, I suppose.”

“No,” said Billy. “As a matter of fact, I was deciding when you spoke to me, that it is I who have done the letting down.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” The eyes that studied him from under the black bonnet were very keen and blue despite their age. “Men nearly always do let women down.”

“And women,” said Billy, morosely, “I suppose never fail men.”

“What did you do in the war?” she suddenly shot at him as though opening another field of conversation.

“I am afraid I was at school,” said Billy. “At least I had just got through the O.T.C. when peace was declared.”

“Lordy, lordy, how young you must be,” sighed the little old woman. She sat nodding her head for a moment or two.

“Too young,” she added, “to sit in judgment on any woman.”

“I am not attempting to do that,” said Billy, rather hotly, “But . . .”

She seemed to slide along the bench towards him one claw-like hand rested for a moment on his sleeve. “Young man, you are judging,” she said, “it’s what is making you so miserable. You’ve got to take women, you know, better or worse---as they are. Do you see that hussy over there?” Her bright eyes seemed to indicate the girl walking alone, who had smiled at Billy. “I call her that word---it belongs to my generation. Do you know what happens when we sit in judgment on her---well, it’s our own lower selves that stand at the bar---and well we know it. Though we don’t admit it. Oh, no, oh, no.”

“Do you know anything about women like that?” asked Billy, deliberately. “You will pardon my asking a question of that sort, but---well, one doesn’t know much about them, does one? Women especially, they are shut right outside your lives, aren’t they?”

“Outcasts!” The queer bird-like voice softened, was almost pitiful. “Because they make us ashamed. Yes, I think that’s it. They’ve got hearts that hurt and bodies that suffer. That’s all we know. And souls---well, we aren’t any of us certain that we have got souls, are we?”

“Yes, but . . .” began Billy.

“Dear me, dear,” the old lady interrupted, she had moved away again. “How queer of me to talk like this to a perfect stranger! Young man, aren’t you surprised at yourself! Don’t quarrel with someone you love---don’t even judge her! One grows old so soon. And in heaven---they say, don’t they---that there is no marriage. I can’t help thinking it will be nice, like old age, but a little dull---what do you think---a little dull.”

A man and woman passing in the crowd stopped, nodded laughingly at the old lady and came across.

“Hullo, Mrs. Anstruther,” they said. “Enjoying the sunshine?”

They had used a name that had been famous before ever Billy was born for the wit and the loveliness and the charm of the woman who bore it. But that Billy did not know, and certainly no one seeing Mrs. Anstruther now would have been inclined to believe it. Billy rose and took his hat off again. “Goodbye,” he said, “And . . . thank you for talking to me, I believe it’s done my depression good.”

“It ought to have,” she nodded. “I don’t waste breath. I’ve so little left.”

He moved away into the crowd and lost sight of her. She had been a queer old thing to talk to him as she had done just for the moment or two of their meeting. Queer---but wise. Not that her wisdom really helped him much. Had she known the circumstances of the case, even she would not have said that he was sitting in judgment unnecessarily. What would she have said? What would anyone say? And what was he to do about Jennifer---the Jennifer whom he loved and desired, whom his heart ached for, and his mind rejected.

He tried to think of his mother as he walked along, threading his way in and out of the sauntering, chattering, laughing crowd. If she had still been here to ask, how would she have helped him, or would he even have asked her?

“The thing is between me and Jenny,” he thought stubbornly. “Nobody else counts.”

And gradually as the day wore into evening, as a little cold wind stole out of the sea and crept whistling along the Promenade driving the pleasure seekers, the sun lovers indoors, Billy’s thoughts about Jennifer grew warmer and softer. Was it so very much to ask of his love that he should forgive? “It’s not me she has wronged,” Billy’s thoughts whispered, “it is her own lovely self. Suppose I could help her to build up self respect again, to feel safe, to see the stupidity and the awfulness of what is past. Supposing it was, in the beginning, more or less my fault? Mine and mother’s because we so loved each other.”

And he visioned Jennifer as something frail and helpless that the rough winds of life had blown about. Her soft hands seemed to touch and cling, her blue eyes implored help and pardon, and remembering the words he had said to her that morning, his whole being flushed with contrition.

Judging! Of course, he had been judging as that wise old woman had said. He had been feeling that Jennifer was no longer good enough to touch the outer fringes of his life. He had talked of passion and desire and held her in his arms and kissed her lips and thought grandly of her not being fit to be the mother of his child.

Was that what his love had come down to? A poor thing indeed!

And now pity, unwise and urgent, swept all through his being and he wanted to find Jennifer at once and take her into his arms again and be very gentle and tender with her. His Jennifer, who had so sadly missed the path, who had got so lost, and hurt, and bewildered by life. His little laughing, starry-eyed Jennifer!

With some such motive in his mind, he turned in the direction of her hotel. He would send up just a folded slip of paper, he thought, and write on it: “Dear,--- just give me five minutes to explain.” And then she would come down and he would see that her eyes were all wet with tears, and her face strained and white. And she would try to smile at him and he would slip his hand through her arm and lead her outside, where it would be dark and quiet, and there would not be dozens of people to watch what they had to say to each other.

How his thoughts swirled on after that! They would go to London, he and Jennifer, his wife. They would settle up things with old Colonel Hampton and go together to see the place where Mrs. Hampton lay. Mother would be glad seeing them, knowing that they were there together---man and wife.

“If I could find her, I would give her back to you, Billy.”

She had said that in her last letter. She would be content that he should do this thing---letting his love forgive.

The very first person he saw as he turned in at the hall of the hotel was the man who had been in the box, with Jennifer and the Prince on the night of the ball. He was standing by one of the wide open doors that led on to the outside terrace, his hands clasped behind his back, his head thrown back. Just as Billy came in, he swung round and in his slow impressive way stared across at Billy.

Later, Billy wondered what prompted him, what drove him to speak to this man. Was there something oddly compelling in those great dark eyes, that waxen face and immense framework? The man made no sign of seeing him, just stood there, with his eyes resting on Billy and his face unmoved.

Anyway, Billy did not write his note to Jennifer, instead he went straight across to the man and spoke to him.

“Excuse me,” he said, “this may seem like intrusion, but I . . . Would you spare me a few minutes’ conversation?”

Joseph Block stirred, it was almost as though he relaxed, his head sank into his shoulders.

“You want to speak to me?” he said. “Why?”

“It is difficult to explain,” admitted Billy. “But, believe me, it is not just idle curiosity.”

“No, I did not think it was that,” Block acknowledged, “I have seen you before, once, twice, three times. That may surprise you.”

“Then,” said Billy, he glanced very straight into the eyes watching him. “I was right. You noticed my coming in----your mind attracted me to come over and speak to you.”

“I wish to speak to you,” Block asserted, “though possibly not in the way you imagine. Will you come this way?”

He turned in the direction of the lift and Billy in some bewilderment followed.

“You---you can’t have known I was coming in this evening,” he said. “I did not know myself until about ten minutes ago.”

“I did not know,” Block gravely stood aside to usher him into a private sitting room, “but I wondered.”

There were three doors leading into the room---one they had come in by, the one opposite that was shut, while the one to the right side was open and draped with heavy black curtains, and beyond the curtains, Billy could see a glint of tall lighted candles and heavily massed white flowers. Obviously, there Prince Alexis lay in state, his quiet, silenced presence lending a sense of dignity and solemnity to the gaudy environment of the hotel suite.

“Will you not sit down, Monsieur?” Block indicated a chair. “My name you know---yours is of no consequence to me. In this I am right---am I not---you are here to-night in the hopes of seeing the young woman who was with us last night at the ball?”

“Yes,” Billy answered. He did not sit down, neither did the strange man. They stood facing each other. And Billy had his back turned to the darkened room beyond and the lighted candles, but Block very purposely faced them and quite ridiculously, Billy felt, that he was dragging the personality of the dead boy into their conversation. “But, if that needs explanation, I have one. She happens to be my wife.”

“Ah,” said Block. If he was surprised he did not show it. “And you have come to claim her as such.”

Billy flushed up. “Yes,” he said again. “And ten minutes ago, you did not know that you were coming,” said Block. “The thing, Monsieur, explains itself.”

Billy felt a little angry. Was there quiet contempt in the voice, in the eyes watching him? Did the man not believe him---think that he had trumped up his story to cover a sudden impulse to possess?

“I don’t know what you mean,” he spoke sharply. “You are a man of the world---you will realise that . . . I parted from my wife in anger three years ago. I had not the slightest idea where she was, or what she was doing. To find her as I found her last night at the ball came as a tremendous blow to---well, to everything.”

“Alexis,” said Block, slowly, “Loved her. She was to him as fresh as his own youth, as lovely and as pure as his own soul.”

“I’ve no doubt he did,” said Billy; one cannot say what one thinks about a dead man. “The fact remains . . .”

“She did not love him,” Block interrupted. “She came to us from a life in which women are not asked for love, nor do they expect to get it.”

“I know that,” said Billy. “She has told me that herself.”

He did not know why he wanted to explain things to this man, who, from the first, had so mysteriously impressed him---but he did want to. “It makes no difference to what I propose to do. I propose to take her back as my wife.”

Block lifted his head a little; he seemed to be speaking to the quiet figure in the room beyond.

“I chose her off the streets to be a plaything for Alexis,” he said, “and Alexis loved her. When Death came upon him, it was her hands he sought for, her name he called. She defeated me. I wanted to show her to Alexis as a thing of shame, and he lay dying and she cradled his head in her arms---and they were the arms of an angel. Perhaps Alexis was wiser than you or I, Monsieur, perhaps his eyes so near to death and so young, saw further than mine can do. Or, perhaps again, he was only a boy, pleased with the loveliness of life, mistaking lust for love, and pleasure for joy. Who can answer these questions for us, now that Alexis is dead?”

“And they have got nothing to do with me, have they?” asked Billy, a trifle sharply. “I am afraid I waste your time and mine. Will you please tell my wife that I am here and wish to speak to her?”

The great dark flaming eyes came back to him. “She saw you this morning, is not that so?” Block answered.

“Yes, we met this morning, by appointment,” Billy admitted. “She told me everything. Through it all, I still love her, that is what I have come back to say.”

“You did not say it this morning, though,” said Block. “And look, Monsieur, in your first thoughts, you were sensible. You and I are older than Alexis, we cannot be blinded by love. We know. Knowledge is a terrible burden for which we pay great price.”

His voice, Billy thought, was very heavy. A sense of almost unbearable oppression came over him. The room was stagnant with the scent of dead flowers.

“If you will tell me where my wife is,” said Billy, “I will go to her at once.”

Chapter Nine

“Goodbye, My Dear”

“Sweetest little fellow
Anybody knows,
Don’t know what to call her,
But she’s mighty like a rose!”

Like a rose! Jennifer lay high on the pillows of her bed. She had taken off the black clothes that she had worn out of pity for Alexis and dressed herself in the soft pink silks and laces that she loved. There was a little edging of swansdown on the dressing gown that slipped open at throat and neck. It was fluffy and infantile and silly, but she had always liked it. It seemed to nestle and fluff itself up against the deep pink silk. If she raised herself just a little, propped up on her elbow, she could see her loveliness reflected in the big gilt mirror opposite, but she had not raised herself to look. For a long time now she had lain very still. The sunlight had crept right across the floor and touched just the fringes of the bed and crept away again, and once Stephanie had looked in to see if Madame would like the shutters closed. But Jennifer had smiled and said “No,” very softly---hardly seeing to move her lips.

Stephanie said afterwards that the quietness should have frightened her, only that she knew that Madame was so tired. And Madame had good cause to be tired. She had not cried, and God knows that, with so much to cry over unshed tears must weary out the heart.

Like a rose!
“And so the life blood of this rose
Puddled with shameful knowledge flows
Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose.”

It was silly the way those two verses tinkled out their different stanzas through Jennifer’s tired brain; merged their meanings, called up their separate memories, only, it seemed, to plunge them into a welter of confusion. And all the time she lay there like a rose, whose beauty has been cut and thrown away.

The kitchen of the house at Thames Ditton, the green lawn that ran down to the river’s edge, the loveliness of Margharita sitting swinging in the hammock under the trees! These were among the memories that came dancing up. Herself in the gold dress her mother had given her. Billy sitting forward on the seat, his head buried in his hands, whispering, “My God---that I should have loved a thing like you.” His whisper went on and on, repeated itself even across remembered laughter. Alexis pelting her with rose leaves. “That’s how you should always lie, adorable one, smothered in rose leaves---their petals right against your lips.”

Would she lie like that when she was dead? Like a rose---like a rose.

“Why, Jenny, you’re asleep at last,
Asleep, poor jenny, hard and fast,
So young and soft and tired . . .
Mouth quiet, eyelids almost blue,
As if some sky of dreams shone through!”

Manson had given her that book. Was that Manson standing in the corner of the room, smiling at her, his faint sarcastic smile.

“Your Billy will never understand or forgive, my dear.”

Billy! Oh, poor Billy! That thought hurt. “Don’t worry about having loved me, Billy. It won’t matter now. I could not let you hurt yourself, Billy---loving me in that other way. And this---this is easy. Block promised me it shall not hurt.”

On the thought of Block, it seemed as though his personality invaded all her memories, stalked like some grim giant across her dreams, pushed the laughter of Alexis aside, frowned at her over the stooped agony of Billy’s head.

“Is my love strange?” asked Block. “Is Death unkinder than men’s love, poor Jennifer?”

Of course, in the end, Block had won. Alexis had loved her, but the love of Alexis was of no use to her, could not help her to shut out that cry of Billy’s, was not he with her now---now when she needed love most of all. For suddenly, with a choking dispersal of all her thoughts and memories, and dreams, Jennifer was afraid. Fear gathered all round her, touched her with icy hands out of the blackness that crept nearer and nearer. Was the day finished, was it night that was coming floating in at the window. Was it night---or was it Death?

Not Death---Not Death! And like a fluttered frightened bird, Jennifer’s soul flew round and round the room and beat its wings in an agony of terror.

Not Death----Not Death!

She struggled to sit up, to slip her feet off the bed, to stand---perhaps even to run. Can one run away from Death? The power of movement had left her---it was only her mind that hurried and fought and hid. Her mind and her soul fluttering, fleeing from Death.

And then suddenly, as suddenly as it had come, fear lifted. She was lying quite still in the bed again, her eyes wide open, looking in front of her. There was a picture there. She could just make out its shadowy outlines.

A dim seen angel figure---its wings folded about it, its gold aureoled head bent over something it held in its hands. She recognised the picture at once. It was the one she had bought for her room in London; the one that Heather had rather scoffed at. Her lips tried to whisper the words which she knew should be written underneath which her eyes, because of the darkness, could not see.

“About them are the Everlasting Arms.”

A great quiet peace flooded over Jennifer. The stiffness went out of her limbs---a certain content brooded about her. Even though she fell, as she was falling now, down, down through space beyond the reach of Billy’s voice or Block’s watching eyes, still Those Arms would be there.

“Yesterday in the garden I threw my ball so high that God leant out of the sky and caught it.”

The God of her childhood again. A dear, suddenly familiar figure, leaning down to her, holding out His Arms!

Jennifer lay asleep. A little smile on her lips, her eyes half closed . . . Her hands that had clutched, tearing at the swansdown at her throat in a paroxysm of terror, had fallen apart. They stayed palms upwards, the fingers a little curved, as if they had held something and just let go. Her gold head dropped a little sideways. One could have thought she dreamt happily in her sleep only if one had leant closer to look, one would have seen that the little pulse at her throat, which this morning Billy had kissed in parting, no longer fluttered and beat.

“Goodbye, my dear!”

“So you wish to see your wife.” To Billy, there was something menacing in the heavy voice, the heavy lidded eyes. “Come then, I will take you to her.”

He did not knock at the door, Billy noticed that with a little flicker of anger. This man took too much upon himself altogether. Rather he threw it open with an almost regal gesture and stood aside for Billy to enter.

It was dark in there. Billy hesitated before going in. Dusky shadows lay everywhere. He could see the faint glow of the open window, a misty, star-filled sky.

And then he saw a big gilt mirror an the wall opposite and reflected in a mirror a bed, and burning at the head of the bed, two high candles in brass candlesticks.

Billy caught his breath and clenched his fists and glanced back at the man Block, whom now in very truth he hated.

“Have you killed her?” he asked, and his voice sounded cracked and stupid. “Is that what you have taken all this time to tell me?”

“She is dead, but it is not I who have killed her. She took her own life. There was a letter, that was why I wondered if you would come. It is addressed to

‘William Hampton, Esq.
If he shall call and ask for me, or write.’

It is lying on her dressing table. I have left it there.”

He made no motion of going into the room with Billy. He drew a little back.

“Listen,” he said. “For the moment this thing hurts you, but when you will have had time to think, you will see how wise she was to die. There are some doors once shut that cannot be opened again . . . there are sins which only God has power to forgive. I think this morning you must have shown her how hard it would be for you to forgive. But go into her. You will find she lies like a rose, with roses round her. There was a silly song, she used to sing to Alexis . . . ‘Mighty like a Rose.’ . . . So I have brought roses for her. That is what Alexis would have wished.”

He talked, it almost seemed, to give Billy time to conquer his feelings . . . regret, agony, or despair.

How could Block know what they were? His eyes probed into Billy’s very soul.

“Your name need in no way come into it,” he added. “They will think she died because she loved Alexis, but you and I, Monsieur, we will know that is not true.”

Billy did not answer. He turned and went forward into the room. Now he was looking at Jennifer; her small gold head, her closed eyes, her soft smiling lips.

A sob burst in his throat; he did not care whether the other man watched or not; he knelt and laid his head against one of the out-flung hands.

“Oh, Jenny, Jenny, listen to me,” his heart cried. “You can’t have gone too far to understand. I loved you, Jenny----the other things don’t count. I was bringing you back my love to-night.”

The scent of the roses, heavy with their cut sweetness, floated round him, but Jennifer gave no answer----made no sign. Here, indeed, was a shut door that only God could open.

Presently, Billy rose and went over to the table and found her letter and opened it. Perhaps she would explain to him why she had done this thing. But Jennifer’s courage, when it had come to writing to him, had failed her.

There was so much in all that had happened that was quite unexplainable to Billy. There was only just a scrawled line across the faint coloured, scented paper, and it was what she had said to him that morning, standing beside the seat.

It was the end of her story as it had been the end of his love.

“Only one kiss. Goodbye, my dear.”

The End