CHAPTER XVI

"NOT TO BE FORWARDED"

Miss Urquhart's secretary was not the only person at Urquhart's Court who thought of "that Hostel-letter."

For presently the young man to whom it had been written, the young man who had been forced into posting it to himself in that French pillar-box at the crossroads, yes, Mr. Ted Urquhart himself, remembered that last letter that was to come.

And he'd realised that there was something odder than all the rest of it about the posting of that letter.

Hadn't it been handed to him to post, by Eleanor's secretary, through the window of Eleanor's Hostel? But Eleanor herself had been at that moment in Paris. Now what was the meaning of that? thought Urquhart.

Why hadn't his _fiancée_ written direct from Paris, where she had put in a whole week?

Why, in the name of all that was mysterious, had she left that letter behind her?

Was Eleanor in the habit of writing letters and addressing envelopes for him at odd times, and then deputing them to be posted, one by one, at the right time--_or what_?

Young Ted Urquhart, brooding over these questions in that second inner life of his, had a presentiment that perhaps that Hostel-letter might prove the key to a situation.

Once before he had reckoned up how long it would be before that letter reached him. This had been as he stood on the dusty, white French road, weighing in his hand the letter which he then imagined had been written to him by that goddess-built, golden blonde whom his thoughts had called "Nell"----

Never mind that now. Here he was walking along an English road that wound between English hop-fields, and reckoning up how long it would be before he received the last of Eleanor's letters that she had ever written before she met him in the flesh.

He remembered--and he laid his plans accordingly.

These were his plans.

He determined to say nothing to Eleanor on the subject of letters. To wait at The Court until that last letter arrived. Then--well, there was an open invitation to the house of an old schoolfellow in Wales, for some fishing. He'd fit that in. He'd go away, first making Eleanor promise to write to him. Then he'd have letters to compare. With luck he'd have some definite excuse to speak out his mind to Eleanor upon his return.

It was a little thing that nipped Ted Urquhart's plans in the bud.

The old schoolfellow wrote to him from Wales begging him to try and fit in his week at once if he possibly could.

Ted Urquhart was obliged to go two days before he intended. Before the arrival of that Hostel-letter.

It is not necessary to describe in detail that Welsh visit, or how young Urquhart fished without very much luck.

Wales, with its jagged skylines and rich crazy-work colours should have been a change to him after those flat miles of dove-coloured weald about The Court; but the fact is that Ted Urquhart didn't seem to care what sort of country he was in just then. For the first time in his whole life he was more interested in things that were going on inside his own mind. He had moods, like a girl....

Also he found the people amazingly dull....

He never knew how dull the people found him, or what strictures the girls of the house passed upon the stodginess and the apathy of engaged young men.

Only, he overheard a remark of his hostess's that set him wondering again.

--"hope they'll be happy! But I am afraid the man who marries Eleanor Urquhart will find that he's let himself in for marrying S. Ursula's eleven thousand----"

Here a door had shut.

What could his hostess mean?

Did she mean that his Eleanor was such a many-sided little creature that the man who got her found eleven thousand different types of wife rolled into one? He wished he could have catechised his hostess....

Every day he received a note from Eleanor. An absolutely deadly one. Dutiful, short, and in the style of all her first letters from The Court.

But the Hostel-letter wasn't forwarded on.

Yet he'd thought he'd made sure of the date when that Hostel-letter ought to have arrived.

It didn't come.

Odd!

Now that Hostel-letter, with the French stamp and postmark under the South American scrawl had arrived at The Court.

Weeks ago that unbetraying grey envelope had been stared at resentfully, in a passion of curiosity, by some one who, standing on a road in France, longed to open the letter, but knew that he mustn't. And now it was being eyed as if it were a bomb timed to go off at a given hour, by two girls standing in the hall of an English country-house.

Young Urquhart had held the letter, weighing it in his hand. Eleanor Urquhart and Rosamond Fayre gazed at it as it lay on the oaken hall-table, on the top of a boot-maker's catalogue, and an advertisement for fishing-rods addressed to E. Urquhart, Esq.

"Here's this letter of mine--of ours to Ted. And goodness knows if there may not be something in it that'll give us away worse than the others did, if we could only go over it and see," exclaimed Ted's _fiancée_ to her secretary in low, dismayed tones. "Oh! To think that it's practically mine--and yet I can't touch it, Rosamond!"

Rosamond knowing all too well that this particular letter was _not_ Eleanor's, returned, "Well! _I_ can't touch it, either!"

In Eleanor's dark eyes she read the unuttered longing that it were possible to suppress that possibly tell-tale letter; to burn it without saying a word. The engaged girl heaved a big sigh, turning away from the hall-table almost as if from a temptation. She murmured ruefully, "Well, it will have to be forwarded on to him in Wales. Re-address it with the other two, Rosamond, please."

"I?" remonstrated Rosamond.

"Of course! My dear! We c-c-can't have both our handwritings on the same envelope. That really might show something. You've the Welsh address, haven't you? With all those double Ls----"

"Yes, but--it does seem such an irony to have to forward it with one's own hand. Sort of signing one's own dismissal! And to tell you the truth," broke from the secretary-girl, "I hate thinking of his getting it behind our backs, so to speak, and of our not knowing what he may be planning against us until he comes!"

"Wait till he comes then, if you think it's better," suggested Eleanor Urquhart, turning a flurried, irritable little face. "He'll be back in four days. Don't send the letter on. Only, if it stays down here, Beeton has such a c-c-c-conscientious way of re-addressing letters he thinks we've forgotten." She turned away again towards her office. "It had better be put up on Ted's dressing-table, Rosamond."

Rosamond took a step after her, speaking in the conspiratorial murmur which now seemed to be growing upon both girls.

"Eleanor, the servants know your _fiancé_ isn't coming home till Monday. Mightn't they think it odd if they were told to keep the letter for him----"

"Yes, I suppose they might. Oh, dear, what a lot of things there are to be careful about now," complained Eleanor. "I suppose _you'd_ better p-p-put the letter into Mr. Ted Urquhart's room."

Rosamond straightened her back.

She felt like using the phraseology of a rebellious housemaid, and saying, "That's not _my_ place." Eleanor was growing more impossible nowadays; her salary certainly had to be worked for, thought Rosamond. She said aloud, rather shortly, "It wouldn't 'show,' on the envelope, which of us put the letter into his room."

"No," said Eleanor, also shortly. "But I hate going into other people's rooms."

Rosamond suppressed a Pansy-like inclination to think, "Well, it'll be _your_ room soon; that is if we're lucky, and if your engagement isn't broken off."

She took that letter, written by herself on an impulse now bitterly regretted. She went upstairs with it; and then, stepping almost as softly as if she were a thief who might be stopped by an enquiry of "What business have you in here?" she entered the young man's deserted room.

How that faint pleasant smell of leather-mixed-with-cigarettes seemed to pervade the place!

The tall fair girl stood for a second hesitating with the letter in her hand. She sent the swiftest glance about her, then gave one touch to her burnished hair before the glass on Mr. Ted Urquhart's dressing-table.... Then, a sudden quick sound made her start violently, flushed to the brow.... Oh! It was only a starling, whirring out of the ivy that framed the window outside. This dressing-table--here--was the conventional place to put a note. Rosamond put it down and dashed out of the room.

On the stairs again she thought, "I'd like to see his face when he reads _that_! Well, he'll get it the minute he comes back."

Ted Urquhart came back late on Monday afternoon to find his uncle, his _fiancée_ and Miss Fayre, the secretary, grouped in the bay about the tea-table listening to the conversation of an elderly man, some friend of his Uncle's. Young Urquhart dropped into a chair beside Eleanor, who bestowed upon him a cup of tea and a half-deprecating, half-absent-minded little smile.

"Just when the only thing to do in the circumstances would be to keep her hold on her _fiancé_ by being nicer and more on-coming than usual to him," thought Rosamond from the other side of the tea-table. As tactics, she bitterly resented Eleanor's manner to young Mr. Urquhart. "Of course a girl should make herself so indispensable to the man that he'd think, '_Oh, be hanged to letters! They're only stop-gaps anyhow. I don't care how many other people she got to write to me for her, provided I keep her within speaking distance of me now, until the finish!_' But Eleanor hasn't a notion of that sort in her head!"

And Rosamond turned her own golden head away from the unrewarding view of that engaged couple and began again idly to listen to what the elderly Professor-person had to say to old Mr. Urquhart.

It was a haze of words and phrases that Rosamond's acquisitive feminine mind "let through," as her shallow wicker-work basket, made to hold rose-leaves, would let through heavier grain. It seemed to be all about "literary criticism" and "style"--things that had far less interest for Miss Fayre than the slope on the shoulders of a blouse she'd been cutting out before tea.

Suddenly, however, her mind leapt to attention.

The old Dryasdust-man was violently tapping his palm with his forefinger and almost shouting at Mr. Urquhart, who looked intensely irritated, "but, my dear sir, the personal elements of style can _never_ be eliminated! The plagiarist may imitate the writing, the general trend of argument may arrive at the same conclusions, but the _unconscious_ elements of style remain." This Rosamond thought she grasped.

"Unconscious elements"--Those were not rose-leaves, or the little "plus" signs that stood for kisses, but _the give-away tone_ as of a voice speaking between the lines, the things in writing that the writer can't help!

Good Heavens!

And men recognised the fact? These literary people called Bently, and Boyle, and--was it Faleris?--had had arguments about it all before Rosamond was born! There might be some pitfall here that she and Eleanor had never dreamt of; and they didn't know enough about it to avoid it; how dreadful!

Desperately the secretary-girl turned to the expounding Professor. "That's very interesting," she said, as old Mr. Urquhart was silent; his gray elf-locks seemed almost to bristle with annoyance at being worsted in whatever this argument was. "But please do explain it a little more; does it mean that if you had two letters, typewritten say, by different people, and unsigned, that you could be certain to find out which of them was written by the----"

Here her pretty, interested voice trailed suddenly off into an appalled silence.

She'd met the eyes of Mr. Ted Urquhart full and square upon her. And he was listening, intently. He was looking as if this subject of the identification of a style of writing held some arresting interest _for himself_!

Instantly she looked away again, but not before the blush that rose so easily to her soft cheeks had flooded them with the deepest, most betraying pink.

"_He_ saw that. Oh, _why_ must I turn colour like a mid-Victorian missy always? He'll put two and two together now," Rosamond raged at herself as that scorching, lovely blush faded slowly. "As soon as he reads my letter that's in his room he'll guess why I turned so idiotically red and why Eleanor's letters had the wrong sort of 'unconscious elements' and everything! There! He's going!" she thought in an added flurry as the young man set down his cup and rose. "In two minutes he'll find that fatal, fatal Hostel-letter on his dressing-table. And he's bound to say whatever he means to say directly! This evening, for certain----"

But that evening passed without event.

Several days passed. And still two girls in an English country-house waited anxiously, while a young man in whose sun-burnt and restrained mask of a face the impatient eyes seemed on the look-out for something far away, said absolutely nothing further on the subject of letters.

"There you are, you see, Rosamond! You were wrong, and it is quite all right," Eleanor reassured her secretary in the trite little voice to which all the self-assurance had returned. "Ted hasn't said a word, in spite of getting another letter that you'd written!"

"It's almost enough to make one think he hasn't got the wretched letter," thought Rosamond. "Yet I left it staring him in the face on his dressing-table! If he insisted on 'having it out' with me about the odious letter it would be horrid enough of him. But if he isn't going to have anything out, _ever, it's--it's--unpardonable!_"

The fact was that Miss Rosamond Fayre's first surmise had been right. Ted Urquhart had not found the letter that she had left on his dressing-table. It was lying hidden where he would not readily see it.

For as Rosamond was closing the door behind her that morning, a chance breeze from the open window, stirred into a strong draught, had lifted the light, foreign-papered letter as it lay and had swept it off the table and down towards that serried row of young Urquhart's so varied footwear; brown brogues, black boots, soft moccasins, shooting-, fishing-, and riding-boots....

It was at the bottom of one of Ted's tall riding-boots that Rosamond's Hostel-letter had found a hiding-place!

And the days went by--days fraught with fate for England, nodding over her sheathed sword.

_PART II_

IN TIME OF WAR