BOOK IV

XXV

Boyne had been wrong in imagining that Mrs. Sellars might come back unannounced to assure herself of the effect of her letter. She did not do so; and after two days he decided that he could no longer put off sending some kind of answer.

Only, what could he say?

Being with the children all day and every day, sharing their meals, their games and scrambles, had gradually detached his thoughts from Mrs. Sellars, reducing her once more to the lovely shadow she had so long been; with the difference that she was now a shadow irrevocably, whereas before he had always believed she might become substantial. Finally he girt himself to the task; and at once his irritation, his impatience, seemed to materialise her again, as if she were fated to grow real only when she thwarted or opposed him. He wondered if that were another of the peculiarities of being in love. “People get too close to each other—they can’t see each other for the nearness, I suppose,” he reflected, not altogether satisfied with this explanation. He wrote: “And as to what you propose about the children, do please believe that I don’t mean to be unreasonable—but, unless I’m a little mad, your suggestion apparently amounts to this: that I should shove them straight back into the hell I’ve temporarily got them out of. For them that hell, at least the worst of it, is being separated from each other; and you ask me to separate them, when to keep them together is the one thing that they and I have been fighting for. I make no comment on your proposal to hand over the younger ones to Lady Wrench and Buondelmonte; women like you are what they are at the price of not being able even to picture such people as those two. But I know what they are, and never, as long as I can help it, will I be a party to giving back into such hands these children who have trusted me. And when you say that Judith, thanks to whom the younger ones have developed a sense of solidarity and mutual trust in a world which is the very negation of such feelings—that Judith should be asked to see her work deliberately wrecked, and all the feelings she has cultivated in the others trampled on—” He broke off, flung down the pen, and sat hopelessly staring at what he had written. “Oh, hell—that’s no use,” he groaned.

The truth was that, even in his most rebellious moments, he could not trick himself into the idea that he had a grievance against Mrs. Sellars. In reality it was the other way round. When he had gone to Venice to negotiate with the Wheaters about the future of their mutinous family he had gone as an affianced man. In pledging himself to his strange guardianship he had virtually pledged Mrs. Sellars also, and without even making his promise depend on her consent. He had simply assumed that because she loved him she would approve of whatever he did, would accept any situation he chose to put her in. He had behaved, in short, like a romantic boy betrothed to a dreamer of his own age. All this was true, and it was true also that Mrs. Sellars had never reproached him with it. The sense of her magnanimity deprived his argument of all its force, and benumbed his angry pen. He pushed away the letter, pulled out another sheet, and scrawled on it: “Awfully sorry but cannot undo what I have done do try to understand me dearest.”

Yes, a telegram was better: easier to write, at any rate.... He tore up the letter, put on his hat, and walked down to the post-office with his message.

For its answer he had only twenty-four hours to wait; and when Mrs. Sellars’s telegram came it merely said: “I do understand you letter follows....” Well, that was not unsatisfactory, as far as it went; but when two days more had elapsed, it was not a letter but a small registered packet which the postman put into Boyne’s hands. Even in the act of signing the receipt, at his very first glance, he had guessed what the packet contained. He went up to his room, a little dizzy with the abruptness of the event, and angrily ripped off seal and string, revealing the morocco box he had expected to find there. For a minute or two he sat looking at the box, almost as unconscious of what he was feeling as a man in the first minute or two after being stabbed or shot. “So that’s that,” he said aloud. But what “that” was going to be he had as yet no notion. It was a wound, of course—but was it mortal? He didn’t know. Suddenly, with a mumbled curse at his own plight, he snapped the box open and saw a thin slip of paper twisted about the sapphire ring. On the paper he read: “I shall always remember; I shall never resent; and that is why I want you to give this to some woman who can make you as happy as you have made me.” He pitched the box and the paper aside, and hid his face in his hands. After all he must have loved her, he supposed—or at least the vision of her which their long separation had created....

He was roused by a knock, and looking up with dazed eyes saw Judith Wheater standing doubtfully on the threshold.

“Oh, Martin dear—were you asleep, or have you got one of those beastly headaches?” She came in and closed the door without waiting for his answer. “Have I disturbed you most awfully?” she questioned, passing her cool hand softly over his hair.

“Yes—no.” He wondered whether her sharp eyes had already detected the open ring-box, and the paper signed with Rose’s name. But to try to conceal them would only attract her attention. He put up his hand and pressed hers. “Yes—I believe I have got a beastly headache,” he said.

“Then I’d better be off, perhaps?” she interrupted reluctantly. She was bending over him with the look she had when one of the children fell and scraped a knee, and Boyne could not help smiling up into her anxious eyes. “That depends on what you came for. What’s up? Anything wrong at _Rosenglüh_?”

“Not particularly. But, you know, dear, we haven’t seen you for two whole days....”

“You haven’t?” In the struggle which had been going on in his mind since he had received Mrs. Sellars’s letter he had completely forgotten the passage of time. “No more you have,” he exclaimed. “I didn’t realise I’d neglected you all so shamefully. Fact is, I’ve been tied up to a boring piece of business that I had to get off my chest. Sit down and have a cigarette.” He fumbled for a box, and shoved it across the table to Judith, who had settled down comfortably into his only armchair. “Oh, Martin, how lovely to be here all alone with you!”

“Well, I don’t believe you’ll find me particularly good company,” he rejoined, suddenly conscious of the ears of the acrimonious spinster next door, and wondering if he ought not to propose to Judith to finish her visit in the garden.

“Oh, yes, I shall, if you’ll let me talk to you,” she declared with her rich candour; and Boyne laughed in spite of himself.

“I’ve never been able to prevent your talking when you wanted to,” he remarked, lighting a cigarette; and Judith thrust her thin shoulder-blades into the chair back, crossed her legs, and sighed contentedly: “Few can.”

“Well, then—what’s your news?”

“A letter from mother, this morning.”

The laugh died on Boyne’s lips. The expected menace—here it was! He knew Joyce never wrote unless she had news of overwhelming importance, and usually of a disagreeable nature, to impart. “What does she say?” he asked apprehensively.

“Not much. I can’t quite make out. She just says she’s given up Gerald, and that she realises for the first time what a rotten rubbishy life she’s been leading, and wants us all to forgive her for it.”

“She _does_? But then—?”

Judith shrugged away his anticipations with a faint smile. “Oh, that’s not particularly new. Mother always realises about the rottenness of her life when she’s going to make a change.”

“A change? What sort of a change?”

“Getting engaged to somebody else, generally.”

“Oh, come, my dear! Why shouldn’t it mean, this time, just what I’ve always hoped: that your father and mother see they can’t get on without you—all of you—and that they’re going to patch it up for good and all?”

Judith scanned him half-humorously through the veil of her cigarette-smoke. “Like in the nicer kind of movies?”

“You young sceptic, you! Why not? Your mother’s too intelligent not to be fed up with jazz some day—”

“That’s what she says. She says she’s met somebody who’s opened her eyes to how wrong it all is—and that always means she’s going to get engaged again.” Boyne was silent, and Judith added: “Anyhow, she’s leaving at once for Paris to start divorce proceedings, because she says it’s too wicked to live any longer with a man like father.”

The load dropped from Boyne’s heart. If Mrs. Wheater was leaving for Paris without suggesting that the children should join her, it was at least a respite—how long a one he couldn’t guess, but at any rate enough to provide an excuse for deferring action. That was as far as his hopes dared venture. But he met Judith’s eyes, and was surprised at their untroubled serenity. “Aren’t you afraid—?” he began; and she rejoined immediately: “With you here? Why should we be?”

Immediately the sense of his responsibility descended on him with a redoubled weight. To have taken the risks he had for these children was mad enough; but to find that his doing so had deified him in their imagination, made them regard him as a sort of human sanctuary, turned his apprehensions to dismay.

“But, my child—look here. We’ve been awfully lucky so far; but we mustn’t forget that, any day, this arrangement of ours may go to smash. How can I prevent it?”

She gave him all her confidence in a radiant look. “You have till now, haven’t you? And if there’s another row, couldn’t we all nip over quietly to America with you?” She paused, and then began again, with a shade of hesitation that was new in her: “I suppose you’ll be married very soon now, won’t you, Martin? And when I got mother’s letter this morning we wondered—Terry and I wondered—whether, if Grandma Mervin is afraid to take us in, we couldn’t all go and live with you in New York, if we children paid a part of the rent? You see, father and mother couldn’t possibly object to that, and I know you and Mrs. Sellars are fond of Chip and the steps, and we big ones really wouldn’t be any trouble. Scopy and I have saved up such a lot out of father’s allowance that I daresay you could afford to take a biggish house; and we’d all be awfully decent in the morning about not keeping the bath a minute longer than we had a right to.”

The abruptness of Judith’s transitions from embittered shrewdness to nursery simplicity was always disconcerting. When ways and means had to be considered, the disenchanted maiden for whom life seemed to have no surprises became once more the helpless little girl in the hands of nurses and governesses. At such moments, Boyne thought, she was like a young Daphne, half emerging into reality, half caught in the foliage of fairyland.

“My dear child—”

She always responded to every change in his intonation; and as he spoke he saw the shadow in her eyes before it reached her lips. Trying to keep a smile on them, she interrupted: “Now I’ve said something stupid again.”

“You’ve said something unexpected—that’s all. Give me a little time—”

She sprang up, and moved toward him with one of her impulsive darts. “Martin! When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say. And now you’ll hate me for asking you something that you’ve got to take time to answer.”

“Not a bit of it. I want time because I’ve got several answers. And the first is: how do you know your Grandma Mervin won’t take you all in?”

She shook her head. “Because I wrote to her a month ago, and she’s taking time before she answers. And besides—really and truly—I’ve always known that if Grandma Mervin did take us in, she’d give us up again the minute father shouted loud enough. You see,” Judith added, with a sudden spring back to her wistful maturity, “grandma gets a big allowance from father.”

“All right; that brings me to my second answer. How do you know your father won’t order you back at once to the Lido—or wherever he is—if your mother has definitely decided to leave him?”

“Because father’s gone off to Constantinople on the yacht with Syb—Mrs. Lullmer, I mean—and a whole crowd of people.”

In spite of himself, Boyne again drew a breath of relief. If Wheater was off on the “Fancy Girl” with a band of cronies, and his wife rushing to Paris to start divorce proceedings, there might indeed be no need for an immediate decision. Never had procrastination seemed so sweet.

“Well, my dear, in that case it would appear that they’re both going to let you alone—for a while, at any rate. So why jump unnecessary ditches?”

Judith responded with a joyful laugh. “Who wants to, darling? I don’t! As long as you’re with us I always feel safe.” Again a little shiver of apprehension ran over Boyne; but he dissembled it by joining in her laugh. The more precarious was the tie between himself and the little Wheaters, the more precious seemed the days he could still hope to spend with them; he would not cloud another with vain fears. “Right you are. Suppose we go and do something desperate to celebrate the occasion? What about a good tramp for you and me, and then supper with the little Wheaters?”

She stood looking at him with her happiest eyes. “Hurrah, Martin! I haven’t seen you so jolly for days. Terry was afraid you were moping because Mrs. Sellars had gone—he thought that was why you hadn’t been to see us, and we decided that I’d better come up and find out.”

“Trust you to find out,” he grinned; and added sardonically: “I’m bearing up, as you see. But come along. Don’t let’s waste any more sunshine.”

She moved obediently toward the door, but stopped short halfway with an exclamation of surprise. Boyne, who was rummaging in a corner for his stick, turned about to see her standing before the ancient cradle.

“Oh, Martin, you—you keep your boots in it!” A reproachful flush rose to her face, and was momentarily reflected in his own. Hang it—why was he always such an untidy fellow? And why was a cradle so uncommonly handy to hold boots? “Jove—how stupid! Must have been that confounded chambermaid—” But he broke off in confusion as he caught Judith’s incredulous eye. “Well, hang it, you know—I’ve nothing else to put in it just at present,” he cried defiantly.

Her face softened, and she met his banter with the wistful tentative gaze that he called her Monreale look. “But very soon you will have, won’t you? A baby of your own, I mean,” she explained. “I suppose you and Mrs. Sellars are going to be married as soon as she gets back with her trousseau, aren’t you? Blanca and I were wondering if perhaps she’d ask us to be bridesmaids....”

Boyne was flinging the boots out of the cradle with an angry hand, and made no answer to this suggestion. Judith stood and watched him for a few moments; then she went to his side and slipped her arm through his. “Why, Martin—I believe you’re very unhappy!” she exclaimed.

“Unhappy? Unhappy?” He swung around on her, exasperated. “Well, yes; I suppose I am unhappy. It’s a way people have, you know. But, for the Lord’s sake, can’t you ever let things be? Can’t you ever keep from treading on people’s toes? I—oh, damn it, Judy; look here, for God’s sake don’t cry! I didn’t mean to say anything to hurt you.... I swear I didn’t.... Only sometimes....”

“Oh, I know, I know—you mean I have no tact!” she wailed.

“Damn tact! I’m thankful you haven’t. There’s nothing I hate as much as tact. But here—don’t look so scared, child. There’s no harm done ... only don’t try meddling with grown up things. It’ll just wreck everything if you do....”

“But how can I not meddle when I love you so, and when I see that things are going wrong for you? Martin,” she flung out breathlessly, “you don’t mean to say you’re not going to be married after all?”

Temptation suddenly twitched through him. It was as if saying “Yes” to her question might be the magic formula of freedom. After all, there lay the ring; he _was_ free, technically—had only to utter the words to make them true. But he thrust his hands into his pockets and stood sullenly planted before the corner of the table on which he had tossed the open ring-box. “Not in this way,” he thought. Aloud he said: “I mean that I don’t yet know when I’m going to be married. That’s all.”

“Positively all?” He nodded.

“Ah,” she sighed, relieved. It was evident that she identified herself whole-heartedly with his sentimental troubles, of whatever nature and by whomsoever they were caused.

She was still looking up at him, her face full of compunction and perplexity, and suddenly he put his arm about her and bent his head to her lips. They looked round and glowing, as they did in laughter or emotion; they drew his irresistibly. But he turned his head aside, and his kiss fell harmlessly on her cheek, near the tear-hung lashes. “That’s my old Judy. Come, cheerio. On with your hat, and we’ll go up the mountain.” He saw that she was still trembling, and took her by the arm in the old brotherly way. “Come,” he repeated, “let’s go out.”

In the doorway she paused and flung a last tragic glance at the cradle. “You poor old Martin, you! I suppose it’s because you’re so unhappy that you put your boots in it?” she sighed.

XXVI

To Boyne the calm of the next day brought no reassurance. Too many uncertainties hung close. After a night of pondering he had sent back the ring to Mrs. Sellars, with a brief line saying that she was of course free if she chose to be, but that he could not so regard himself till they had had a talk, and she had convinced him that she would be happier if their engagement ended.

He knew that he was merely using an old formula, the accepted one in such cases, and he longed to get away from it, to be spontaneous, honest, himself. But as he wrote it became clear to him that he was terribly sorry for Rose Sellars, terribly sorry for having disappointed her; and that such phrases—the kind he had been brought up on—were the devices of decent people who hated to give pain, and were even capable of self-sacrifice to avoid it. “After all, they were a lot better than we are,” he thought; and the thought softened the close of his letter, and impelled him to add: “Do be patient with me, dear. As soon as I can get away I’ll come.”

This done, the whole problem vanished to the background of his mind. He was hardly aware that he was no longer thinking of it. His life of practical activities and swift decisions had given him the habit of easily dismissing matters once dealt with. He flattered himself that he could thus dispose of sentimental cares as easily as of professional problems; and to a certain extent it was true. Behind the close-knit foreground of his daily life there had hung for years the mirage of Rose Sellars; but that mirage was now the phantom of a phantom, and he averted his eyes lest he should find that it had faded into nothing.

After Mrs. Wheater’s letter to Judith there came no more alarms to the _Pension Rosenglüh_; and the days slipped by in a security which seemed satisfying to Judith, and even to Miss Scope. But summer was waning in the high valleys of the Dolomites; tourists were scattering, the big hotels preparing to close. By-and-by a cold sparkle began to fill the air in the early mornings, and at night the temperature fell to freezing. On the lower slopes the larches were turning to pale gold, and the bare cliffs burned with an intenser fire against a sky as hard as metal. The very magic of the hastening days warned Boyne that they could not last, and that the change in the landscape symbolized another, as imminent, in the fortunes of his party.

Mrs. Sellars had written again—sweetly and reasonably—saying that she intended to remain for the present with Aunt Julia, who was settled in Paris for two or three months. If Boyne really wished for another talk, she added, she hoped he would be able to come before long; but in any case he could count on her affectionate understanding. She closed her letter with a friendly message to the children.

Boyne had been afraid that Judith would revert again to the subject of his private anxieties; but she contrived, by a visible effort which made him feel for the first time that she was really growing up, to keep off the forbidden topic. His own return to a more equable mood no doubt helped her; and so did the presence of the younger children and their preceptors. Boyne half unconsciously avoided being alone with Judith; and the shortening days and freshening temperature curtailed their expeditions, and gave more time for games and romps around the cheerful stove in the children’s dining-room.

It was there that, one rainy afternoon, he found himself sitting with the younger children. Judith had gone with Miss Scope and Nanny to Toblach, to fit out the family with autumn underclothes, Terry was upstairs, working with his tutor, Chip asleep in Susan’s care; and Blanca, in the corner nearest the stove, was brooding over a torn copy of “The Tatler” with the passionate frown she always bent on the study of fashion-plates. “Skirts _are_ going to be fuller,” she said. “I’ve been telling Judy so for a month....”

Zinnie lifted her head from the rapt contemplation of an electric engine which Bun was putting together under Boyne’s directions. “The lady that was here today had her skirt longer; a lot longer than Judy’s,” she remarked.

Beechy, whose attention was also riveted on the motions of Bun’s agile fingers, interrupted indignantly: “She wasn’t pretty like our Judy.”

“The lady? What lady?” Boyne interposed, vaguely apprehensive. “Have you got a new lodger here?”

Blanca re-entered the conversation with a sniff. “You wouldn’t have taken her for one if you’d seen her. She’s not the _Rosenglüh_ kind. She would certainly have been at the ‘Palace’ if it hadn’t been closed. Not exactly smart, you know—smartness has been so overdone, hasn’t it? She was—what’s that funny old word that Scopy loves?—distinguished. At least, I _think_ that’s what distinguished means ... the way that lady looked. Her clothes awfully plain; but not the least ‘sports.’ Rather governessy, really ... like Scopy young, if Chanel could have dressed her....” Blanca paused, reduced to silence by the hopelessness of the attempt to fit her words to her meaning.

Boyne looked up from the engine. “Perhaps when you’ve finished with her clothes you’ll tell me what she came for.”

“To see you—you—_you_!” cried Zinnie, executing a double handspring she had lately learned from Bun, to the despair of Beechy, who was so fat that she invariably collapsed midway of the same attempt. “I could have told you that,” Zinnie added, “for I spoke to her.”

“You did? What impertinence!” cried Blanca, bounding from her seat. Bun, flat on his stomach, his legs in the air, his curls mixed with the engine, chanted over his shoulder: “Girls are always butting in—butting in....”

“Nasty rotters, girls are!” sympathised Beechy, always ready to champion her brother, and not as yet very clear as to her own sex.

Zinnie’s reprisals were checked by the discovery that the landlady’s gold-fish aquarium, which usually stood in the larger and colder public dining-room, had been brought in and placed on a stand before the window. She tiptoed off to inspect this forbidden Paradise while Boyne got to his feet and picked up the electric wire. “Where’s the battery? Are your rails straight? Now, then, Bun, are you ready?” He turned to Zinnie. “To see _me_, did you say? What on earth for? Did she tell you?”

“Tell Zinnie! So likely!” ejaculated Blanca with a shrug. She turned to Boyne, drawing her lids together with her pretty cat-like smile. “_Félicitations, cher ami. Elle était plutôt bien, la dame, vous savez._”

“Oh, shucks—zif we didn’t all of us talk French!” commented Zinnie, still watchfully circling about the aquarium.

The door opened, and a maid came in with a card which she handed hesitatingly to Boyne. The name on it was: _Princess Buondelmonte_, and underneath was written: “begs Mr. Boyne to see her on important business.” Boyne crammed the card into his pocket without speaking, conscious that the eyes of all the children were upon him.

“It’s the lady, it’s the lady, I know it is!” Zinnie piped. “I heard her say she was coming back to see Martin. She’s come all the way from Rome to see him.”

Blanca, at his side, had slid an insinuating hand in his. “From Rome? Oh, Martin, who is it? Mayn’t I come with you, at any rate as far as the door? I do want to see if her dress is made of kasha or crepella ... just to be able to tell Judy....”

Boyne checked her firmly. “You’ve got to stay here and mind the infants. It’s nothing important—I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He thanked his stars that the lady had sent in her card instead of confiding her name to the maid. He could not imagine what his noble visitor wanted of him, but the very sight of the name had let loose all his fears. As he left the room he turned and sent a last glance toward the group sprawling around the engine, which had after all refused to start—orange curls mixed with brown and dusky, sunburnt legs kicking high, voices mixed in breathless controversy. How healthy and jolly they all looked! And how good they smelt, with that mixed smell of woollen garments, and soap, and the fruity fragrance of young bodies tumbled about together. As Boyne looked back at them he thought how funny and dear they were, and how different the world might have been if Rose Sellars had freed herself when he and she were still young....

A lady with a slim straight back was standing in the sitting-room, attentively examining the stuffed eagle above the stove. She turned at Boyne’s entrance and revealed a small oval face, somewhat pale, with excessively earnest gray eyes, and a well-modelled nose and brow. It puzzled him to discover why an assemblage of such agreeable features did not produce an effect of beauty; but a second glance suggested that it was because their owner had never thought about being beautiful. That she had graver preoccupations was immediately evident from the tone of her slow and carefully-modulated speech. “Mr. Boyne?” she asked, as though she feared he might deny his identity, and was immediately prepared, if he did, to disprove the denial; and on his saying that he was, she continued, with a touch of nervousness: “I have come all the way from Rome to see my children.”

“Your children—?” Boyne echoed in astonishment; and she corrected herself with a slight blush. “I should say the Prince’s. Or my step-children. But I hate the word, for I feel about them already as if they were my own.”

Boyne pushed an armchair forward, and she sat down, crossing her feet neatly, and satisfying herself that the skirt which Zinnie described as long was so adjusted as not to reveal too much of the pretty legs above her slender ankles. “They _are_ here—Astorre and Beatrice?”

Boyne heard her with dismay, but kept up a brave exterior. “Here? Oh, yes—certainly. Mr. and Mrs. Wheater sent all the children here a few weeks ago—for the climate.”

Princess Buondelmonte met this with a smile of faint incredulity. “In your charge, I understand? Yes. But of course you must know that Mr. and Mrs. Wheater have really no business whatever to send my husband’s children here, or anywhere else.” She paused a moment, and added: “And I have come to take them home.”

“Oh, Princess—” Boyne exclaimed.

She raised her handsome eyebrows slightly, and said: “You seem surprised.”

“Well—yes. At any rate, I’m awfully sorry.”

“Sorry? Don’t you think that children ought to be in their own home, with their own parents?”

“Well, that depends.”

“Depends! How can it ever—?” She crimsoned suddenly, and then grew even paler than before. “I don’t suppose you intend to insinuate—?” She broke off, and he saw that her eyes had filled with tears. “For, of course, that I won’t tolerate for a single instant,” she added a little breathlessly, as though throwing herself on his mercy in a conflict she felt to be unequal if it should turn on Prince Buondelmonte’s merits as a father.

Boyne felt so sorry for her that he answered: “I wasn’t thinking of insinuating anything. I only meant that this little group of children have always been together, and it has made them so fond of each other that they really regard themselves as one family. It seems a pity, it seems cruel....”

“Cruel?” she interrupted. “The real cruelty has been to deprive the poor little things for so long of a father’s influence, to take advantage of ... of Prince Buondelmonte’s misfortunes, his undeserved misfortunes, to keep his children without a real home, without family associations, without ... without any guiding principle....” She leaned forward, her grave almost terrified eyes on Boyne. “What guidance have they had? What moral training? What religious education? Have you or your friends ever thought that? It’s a big responsibility you’ve assumed. Have you never thought you might some day be asked to account for the use you’ve made of it?”

Boyne heard her with a growing wonder. She spoke slowly but fluently, not as if repeating a lesson learned by rote, but as though she were sustaining a thesis with the ease of a practised orator. There was something didactic—perhaps forensic, rather—in her glib command of her subject. He saw that she was trembling with nervousness, yet that her nerves would never control her; and his heart sank.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer all your questions,” he said, “I’ve only been with the children for a few weeks. Mr. and Mrs. Wheater asked me to keep an eye on them during the ... the settling of certain family matters; but I can assure you that since I’ve known them they’ve always been in an atmosphere of the greatest kindness and affection; and I’m inclined to think that’s the most important thing of all.”

Princess Buondelmonte listened attentively, her brows drawn together in a cautious frown. “Of course I’m not prepared to admit that unreservedly. I mean, the kindness of salaried assistants or ... or of inexperienced persons may do as much harm as good. To any one who has gone at all deeply into the difficult and absorbing subject of child-psychology—” she paused, and added with an air of modest dignity: “I ought perhaps to explain that I took my degree _cum laude_, in Eugenics and Infant Psychology, at Lohengrin College, Texas. You may have heard that my grandfather, Dr. Judson Tring, was the founder of the college, and also its first President.” She stopped again, glanced half proudly, half shyly at Boyne, as though to see how much this glimpse of her genealogy had impressed him, and then pursued: “Can you give me, for instance, any sort of assurance that Astorre and Beatrice have ever been properly psychoanalyzed, and that their studies and games have been selected with a view to their particular moral, alimentary, dental and glandular heredity? Games, for instance, should be quite as carefully supervised as studies ... but I know how little importance Europe still attaches to these supremely vital questions.” No adequate answer occurred to Boyne, and she rose from her seat with an impatient gesture. “I don’t know that there is any use in continuing a discussion which would not, in any case, affect my final decision, or Prince Buondelmonte’s—”

“Oh, don’t say that!” Boyne exclaimed.

“Don’t—?”

“Not if it means you won’t listen to any plea—won’t first consider what it’s going to be to these children to be suddenly uprooted....”

She interrupted: “It was not Prince Buondelmonte who first uprooted them. It was through circumstances of which he was himself the victim—I may say, Mr. Boyne, the _chivalrous_ victim—that he found himself obliged (or thought himself obliged) to trust Astorre and Beatrice for a while to Mrs. Wheater. He did it simply in order that no breath of calumny should touch her.” The Princess paused, and added, with a genuine tremor in her voice: “Though Mrs. Wheater was not his children’s mother, my husband always remembers that for a time she bore his name.”

If the Princess’s aim had been to reduce her interlocutor to silence, she had at last succeeded. Boyne sat speechless, wondering how much the granddaughter of Dr. Judson Tring believed of what she was saying, and to what extent her astounding version of the case was the result of patient schooling on her husband’s part. He concluded that she was incapable of deliberate deception, and fully convinced of the truth of her assertions; and he knew this would make it all the harder to reason with her. For a few moments the two faced each other without speaking; then Boyne said: “But surely the fact that Prince Buondelmonte did leave his children with Mrs. Wheater ought to be considered. If he was willing to have her keep them he must have thought she knew how to take care of them.”

The Princess again interrupted him. “My husband left his children with Mrs. Wheater for the reasons I’ve told you; but also because, owing to unfortunate circumstances, he had at the time no home to give them, and they had no mother to care for them. Now all that is changed. Since our marriage we have fortunately been able to buy back the Buondelmonte palace in Rome, and I am as anxious as he is that his children should come and live with us there.”

Boyne stood up impatiently. The talk was assuming more and more the tone of a legal debate; conducted on such lines there seemed no reason for its ever ending. If one accepted the Princess’s premises—and Boyne had no way of disproving them—it was difficult to question her conclusions. All he could do was to plead his lack of authority. He reminded his visitor that Mrs. Wheater, to whom, for whatever reason, their father had confided Bun and Beechy, had, in her turn, passed them over to their present guardians, who were therefore answerable to her, and her only. The Princess’s lips parted nervously on the first syllable of a new protest; but Boyne interrupted: “Princess! It’s really so simple—I mean the legal part. If your husband has a right to his children, no one can prevent his getting them. The real issue seems to me quite different. It concerns only the children themselves. They’re so desperately anxious not to be separated; they’re so happy together. Of course none of that is my doing. It’s their eldest step-sister—or whatever you like to call her—Mrs. Wheater’s eldest daughter, Judith, who has kept the six of them together through all the ups and downs of their parents’ matrimonial troubles. Before you decide—”

The Princess lifted an imperative hand. “Mr. Boyne—I’m sorry. I can see that you’re very fond of the children. But fondness is not everything ... it may even be a source of moral danger. I’m afraid we shouldn’t altogether agree as to the choice of the persons Mrs. Wheater has left in charge of them—not even as to her own daughter. The soul of a child—”

“Yes,” Boyne acquiesced; “that’s the very thing I’m pleading for. If you could see them together....”

“Oh, but I intend to,” she responded briskly.

Her promptness took him aback. “Now, you mean?”

She gave a smiling nod. “Certainly. You don’t suppose I came from Rome for any other reason? But you needn’t be afraid of my kidnapping them.” Her eyes became severe again. “I hope it won’t have to come to that; but of course I intend to see my husband’s children.”

“Oh, all right,” Boyne agreed. He was beginning to divine, under her hard mechanical manner, something young and untried, something one might still reach and appeal to; and he reflected that the sight of the children would perhaps prove to be the simplest way of reaching it. “The children are playing in the other room,” he said. “Shall I go and get Bun and Beechy, or do you prefer to see them first with the others?”

The Princess said, yes, she thought she would like to see them all together at their games. “Games have such a profound psychological significance,” she explained with a smile.

“Well, I’m glad you’re going to take them by surprise. It’s always the best way with children. You’ll see what jolly little beggars they are; how they all understand each other; how well they get on together.... I’m counting on the sight to plead our cause.”

He led her down the passage and threw open the door of the children’s dining-room.

On the threshold they were met by a burst of angry voices. Everything in the room was noise and confusion, and the opening of the door remained unheeded. In all his experience of the little Wheaters, Boyne had never before seen them engaged in so fierce a conflict: it seemed incredible that the participants should be only four. Some were screaming, some vituperating, some doing both, and butting at each other, head down, at the same time. The floor was strewn with the wreckage of battle, but the agitated movements of the combatants made the origin of the dispute hard to discover. “God,” Boyne ejaculated, stepping back.

Zinnie’s voice rose furiously above the others. “It wasn’t me’t upset the ’quarium, I swear it wasn’t, Blanca—and those two wops know it just as well as I do....”

Bun squealed back: “It was you that tried to bathe Chip’s rabbit in it, you dirty little lying sneak, you!”

“No, I didn’t, neither; but Nanny don’t never give him enough to drink, ’n so I just ran up and brought him down while Chip was asleep, ’n if Beechy hadn’t gone and butted in—”

“You rotten little liar, you, you know you were trying to find out if rabbits can swim.”

“No, I wasn’t, either. And it was Beechy pushed me ’gainst the ’quarium, and you know it was....”

“’Cos the rabbit was drownding, and Judy’d have killed you if you’d of let it,” Beechy wailed.

“She’ll kill you anyhow if you call us wops again,” roared Bun.

Blanca, reluctantly torn from her study of “The Tatler,” had risen from the stove-corner and was distributing slaps and shakes with a practised hand. As she turned to the door, and saw Boyne and his visitor on the threshold, her arms dropped to her sides, and she swept the shrieking children into a corner behind her. “Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry! Did you ever see such a pack of savages? They were playing some silly game, and I didn’t realise....” She addressed herself to Boyne, but, as usual, it was the newcomer who fixed her attention. “What will your friend think?” she murmured with a deprecating glance.

Princess Buondelmonte, pale and erect, stood in the doorway and returned her gaze. “I shall think just what I expected to,” she said coldly. She turned to Boyne, and continued in a trembling voice: “It is just as I was saying: nothing in a child’s education should be left to chance. Games have to be directed even more carefully than studies.... Telling a child that an older person will kill it seems to me so unspeakably wicked.... This perpetuating of the old militarist instinct.... ‘Kill’ is one of the words we have entirely eliminated at Lohengrin....” Still nervously, she addressed herself again to Blanca. “I do hope,” she said, “that the particular little savage who made that threat doesn’t happen to be mine—to be Prince Buondelmonte’s, I mean?”

Blanca was looking at her with a captivated stare. “You don’t mean to say you’re his new wife? Are you the Princess Buondelmonte, really?”

“Yes, I’m the Princess Buondelmonte,” the visitor assented, with a smile of girlish gratification which made her appear almost as young as Blanca. It was manifest that, however heavily the higher responsibilities weighed on her, she still enjoyed the sound of her new title.

But Bun, brushing aside the little girls, had flung himself impetuously upon her. “Are you really and truly my father’s new wife? Then you must tell him he’s got to send me a gun at once, to shoot everybody who calls me and Beechy a wop.”

The visitor stooped down, laying a timid yet resolute hand on his dark head. “What I shall do, my dear, is to carry you off at once, you and little Beatrice, to your own home—to your own dear father, who’s pining for you—to a place where nobody ever talks about shooting and killing....”

Bun’s face fell perceptibly. “Won’t my father give me a gun, don’t you suppose? Then I don’t believe Beechy ’n me’d care such a lot about going.”

The Princess’s lips narrowed with the same air of resolution which had informed her hand. “Oh, but I’m afraid you’ve got to, Astorre. This is not your real home, you know, and I’m going to take you both away to the loveliest house ... and your father’ll give you lots of other things you’ll like ever so much better....”

“Not than a gun, I won’t,” said Bun immovably.

XXVII

“Take away my children? Take them away from me?” Judith Wheater had pushed open the door, and stood there, small and pale, in her dripping mackintosh and bedraggled hat. She gave a little laugh, and her gray eyes measured the stranger with a deliberate and freezing scrutiny. “I don’t in the least know who you are,” she said, “but I know you don’t know what you’re talking about....” She glanced away to the ravaged scene, and the frightened excited faces of the children. “Heavens! What an unholy mess! What on earth has been happening? Oh, the poor drenched rabbit.... Here, wrap it up in my scarf.... Nanny, take the children upstairs, and send Susan at once to tidy up. Yes, Blanca; you must go too. If you can’t keep the little ones in order you’ve got to be treated like one of them.” She turned to the bewildered visitor. “I’m Miss Wheater. If you want to see me, will you please come into the sitting-room?” Her eye fell on Boyne, who had drawn back into the dusk of the passage, as if disclaiming any part in the impending drama. “Martin,” she challenged him, “was it you who brought this lady here?”

“It’s the Princess Buondelmonte, Judith.”

Judith again scanned her with unrelenting eyes. “I’m afraid that won’t make any difference,” she said. The Princess stood drooping her high crest a little, as if unused to receiving instructions from one so much smaller and younger than herself. Boyne remembered how Judith had awed and baffled Mrs. Sellars on their first meeting, and his heart swelled with irrational hopes. “Judith,” he cautioned her, below his breath.

“This way. You’ll come too, please, Martin.” She led them down the passage, and into the sitting-room. After she had closed the door she pushed forward a chair for the Princess Buondelmonte, and said with emphasis: “Perhaps you don’t know that Mr. Boyne has been appointed the guardian of the children.”

The Princess did not seat herself. She leaned on the back of the chair, and smiled down at the champion of the little Wheaters. “They seem to have a great many guardians. I hear you’re one of them too.”

“Me?” Judith’s eyes widened in astonishment. “I’m only their eldest sister. All I do is just to try to look after them.”

Something in her accent seemed to touch the Princess, who seated herself in the chair on which she had been leaning, made sure that her skirts did not expose more than a decent extent of ankle, and began to speak in a friendlier tone. “I’m sure you’re perfectly devoted to them—that all you want is what’s best for them.”

Judith paused a moment. “That depends on what you mean by best. All I want is for us all to stay together.”

The Princess made a sign of comprehension. “Yes.... But supposing it was not what’s best for the children?”

“Oh, but it is,” said Judith decisively. The other hesitated, and she pressed on: “Because nobody can possibly love them as much as Martin and Miss Scope and me.”

“I see. But you seem to have forgotten that they have parents....”

“No. It’s the parents who’ve forgotten,” Judith flashed back.

“Not all of them. Since I’m here,” the Princess smiled.

“What? Because you’ve just married Prince Buondelmonte, and probably think he ought to have remembered to look after Bun and Beechy? Well, I think so too. Only he didn’t, you see; not when they were little, and had to be wiped and changed and fed, and walked up and down when they were cutting their teeth. And now that they’re big enough to cut up their own food and be good company, I suppose you and he think it would be fun to come and carry them off, the way you’d pick out a pair of Pekes at a dog-show ... only you forget that in the meantime they’ve grown to love _us_ and not you, and that they’re devoted to all the other children, and that it would half kill them to be separated from each other....”

“Oh—devoted?” the Princess protested with her dry smile.

“Of course they are. Why do you ask? Because they were having a scrap when you came in? Did that tussle about a gold-fish frighten you? Have you never seen children bite and scratch before?” Judith gave a contemptuous shrug. “I pity you,” she said, “the first time you try to give Bun castor-oil....”

Was it victory or defeat? Boyne and Judith sat late in the little sitting-room, asking themselves that, after the Princess Buondelmonte had gone. It had been Boyne’s idea—and almost his only contribution to the fiery dialogue between the two—that the Princess should be invited to return in the evening and share the children’s supper. The proposal, seconded by Judith after a swift glance at Boyne, seemed to surprise their visitor, and to disarm her growing hostility. The encounter with Judith had not tended to soften her feelings, and for a moment it looked as if things were taking a dangerous turn; but Boyne had intervened with the suggestion that the Princess, having seen the children at their worst, should be given a chance to meet them in pleasanter circumstances. He added that he would be glad of another talk with her; and as she did not leave till the next day, and was staying at an hotel near his own, he asked if he might walk back there with her, and fetch her down again for supper. She accepted both suggestions, and after a mollified farewell to Judith, started up the hill with Boyne. He saw that she was still inwardly agitated, and clutching desperately at what remained of her resolution; and he put in a pacifying word in excuse of Judith’s irritability, and assured the Princess that the Wheaters would make no difficulty in recognising the Prince’s legal right to his children. The real question, he went on, was surely quite different; was one of delicacy, of good taste, if you chose to call it so. Mrs. Wheater had taken in Beechy and Bun when their father was not able to; she had given them the same advantages as her own children (the Princess, at this, sounded an ironic murmur), and had shown them the same affection; though all she had done, Boyne hastened to add, was as nothing to the patient unflagging devotion of their step-sister—who technically wasn’t even a step-sister. On that theme Boyne did not have to choose his words. They poured out with a vehemence surprising even to himself. The Princess, he supposed—whatever her educational theories were—would agree that the first thing young children needed was to be loved enough; above all, children exposed as they were in the Wheater world, where every new divorce and remarriage thrust them again into unfamiliar surroundings. Through all these changes, Boyne pointed out, Judith had clung to her little flock, loving them, and teaching them to love each other; she had even inspired governesses and nurses with her own passionate fidelity, so that in a welter of change the group had remained together, protected and happy. If only, Boyne pleaded, they could be left as they were for a few years longer; perhaps if they could it would be found, when they finally rejoined their respective families, that under Judith’s care they had been better prepared for life than if their parents had insisted on separating them.

The Princess listened attentively to his arguments, but said little in reply; Boyne suspected that she had been taught not to commit herself unless she was on familiar ground, and apparently she was unfamiliar with the kind of plea he made. The sentiments he appealed to seemed to have a sort of romantic interest for her, as feudal ruins might have for an intelligent traveller; but he saw that there were no words for them in her vocabulary.

When they went back to the _Pension Rosenglüh_ for supper the children, headed by Terry and Blanca, presented a picture of such roseate harmony that the Princess was evidently struck. To complete the impression, Chip, who was always brought down at this hour to say goodnight, walked in led by Nanny, placed a confiding palm in the strange lady’s, said “Howoodoo,” and wound his fingers in her hair, which he pronounced to be “ike Oody’s”—for Chip was beginning to generalise and to co-ordinate, though his educators could not have put a name to the process, any more than the Princess could to the instinctive motions of the heart.

Supper, on the whole, was a success. The children were unusually well-behaved; even Zinnie subdued herself to the prevailing tone. Bun and Beechy, seated one on each side of their new step-mother, and visibly awed by her proximity, demeaned themselves with a restraint which the Princess made several timid attempts to break down. It was evident that what she had said about the prohibition of fire-arms still rankled in Bun, and both children were prim and non-committal, as they always were—to a degree unknown to the others—once their distrust was aroused. The Princess, to conceal her embarrassment, discoursed volubly about the historic interest of the ancestral palace which her husband had succeeded in repurchasing, and promised Bun that one of its spacious apartments should be fitted up as a modern playroom, in which he would learn to replace his artless antics by the newest feats in scientific gymnastics. Bun’s eyes glittered; but after a reflective silence he shook his head. “We couldn’t,” he said, “not ’f we wanted to the most awful way; ’cos we’ve all sworen a noath on Scopy’s book that we wouldn’t.”

This solemn self-reminder caused Beechy’s eyes to fill, and Zinnie to cry out: “We’d be damned black-hearted villains if we did!”

The Princess looked distressed. “What do you mean by swearing an oath, Astorre?” she asked, pronouncing the words as if they were explosives and must be handled with caution.

“I mean a nawful oath,” Bun explained, with an effort at greater accuracy.

“But I can’t bear to hear children talk about swearing—or about villains either,” his step-mother continued, turning with a reproachful smile to Zinnie, who promptly rejoined: “Then you’d better not ever have any of your own”; which caused the Princess to blush and lower her grave eyes.

To hide her constraint she addressed a question to the company in general. “What is this book that you children speak of as Miss Scope’s? The choice of books is so imp—”

None of the younger children could pronounce the name of the book, and they therefore preserved a respectful silence; but Terry interrupted with a laugh: “Oh, it’s the book that Scopy cures us all out of. It’s called the ‘Cyclopædia of Nursery Remedies’.”

The Princess received this with a dubious frown. “I don’t remember a book of that name being used in our courses at Lohengrin; is it a recent publication?”

Miss Scope sat rigid and majestic at the opposite table-end. Thus directly challenged, she replied reassuringly: “Dear me, no; it’s been thoroughly tested. My mother and all my aunts used it in their families. I believe even my grandmother—”

“Even your grandmother? But then the book must be completely obsolete—and probably very dangerous.”

Miss Scope smiled undauntedly. “Oh, I think not. My mother always found it most reliable. We were fourteen in the family, ten miles from the railway, in Lancashire, and she brought us through all our illnesses on it. In a family of that size one couldn’t always be sending for the doctor....”

This gave her interlocutor’s dismay a new turn. “Fourteen in your family? You don’t mean to say your mother had fourteen children?”

Miss Scope replied with undisguised pride that that was what she did mean; and the Princess laid down her fork with the air of one about to spring up and do battle against such deplorable abuses. “It’s incredible...” she began; then broke off to add in a lower tone: “But I suppose that at that time—” her glance at Miss Scope’s white head seemed to say that the whole business was an old unhappy far-off thing, and she resumed more hopefully: “In the United States such matters will soon be regulated by legislation....”

She met Miss Scope’s horrified stare, and glanced nervously about the table, as if realising that the subject, even at Lohengrin, might hardly be considered suitable for juvenile ears. To relieve her embarrassment she leaned across Bun and addressed herself once more to Zinnie.

“You must be Lady Wrench’s little girl, aren’t you, my dear? Only think, I saw your mother the other day in Venice,” she said, in an affable attempt to change the conversation.

Zinnie’s face sparkled with curiosity. “Oh, did you see her, truly? What did she have on, do you remember?”

“Have on—?” The Princess hesitated, with a puzzled look, and Judith intervened: “Zinnie has a passion for pretty clothes.”

“I think _yours_ are awfully pretty,” Zinnie insidiously put in, addressing the Princess; and added: “Are you sure my mother didn’t give you any presents to give us?”

“Zinnie!” came reprovingly from Miss Scope.

The Princess shook her head. “No; she didn’t give me any presents. Perhaps she thinks you ought to come and get them. But she gave me a message for you when she heard that I was coming here—she told me to tell you how dreadfully she wanted to see her little girl again.”

Zinnie grew scarlet with excitement and gratification; such notice lifted her at once above the other children. But an afterthought soon damped her pride. “If she really feels like that I’d of thought she’d of sent me a present,” she objected doubtfully.

“Presents aren’t everything. And it’s not very nice to associate the people you love with the thought of what they may be going to give you. Besides,” continued the Princess illogically, “if your mother is so generous, think how many presents you’d get if you were always with her.”

This seemed to plunge Zinnie into fresh perplexity. “Always with her? How could I be? She doesn’t want to ’dopt the lot of us, does she? ’Cos you see we’ve all sweared—”

“You mustn’t say swear,” said the Princess.

“Swore,” Zinnie corrected herself.

“I mean, not use such words,” the Princess explained.

“But we _did_,” said Zinnie, “on Scopy’s book; so she’d have to ’dopt us all, with Judy. Do you s’pose she would?”

“I don’t know about that; perhaps it might be difficult. But why shouldn’t she want to have her own little daughter with her?” The Princess again leaned over, and laid a persuasive hand on Zinnie’s. “Don’t you want me to take you back to Venice, to your own real mother, when I go to-morrow?”

There was a pause of suspense. Boyne signed to Judith to keep silent, and the children, taking the cue, remained with spoons above their pudding, and eyes agape, while this perfidious proposal was submitted. Zinnie, from crimson, had grown almost pale; the orange spirals of her bushy head seemed to droop with her drooping lips. Her head sank on her neck, and she twisted about in its crease of plumpness the necklace her mother had given her. “What kind of presents ’d you s’pose they’d be?” she questioned back with caution.

“Oh, I don’t know, dear. But you oughtn’t to think about that. You ought to think only of your mother, and her wanting so much to have you. You must give me an answer to take back to her. Shan’t I tell her you want to go to her, Zinnie?”

Zinnie hung her head still lower. If it had been possible for a Wheater child to be shy, she would have appeared so; but in reality she was only struggling with a problem beyond her powers. At last she raised her head, and looked firmly at the Princess. “I should like to consult my lawyer first,” she said.

Boyne burst out laughing, and the Princess nervously joined him, perhaps to cover the appearance of defeat.

Having so obviously failed to inspire the children with confidence, she once more addressed herself to Miss Scope. “I should be so much interested in talking over your educational system with you. I suppose you’ve entirely eliminated enforced obedience, as we have at Lohengrin?”

“Enforced—?” Miss Scope gave an incredulous gasp, and her charges, evidently struck by the question, again remained with suspended spoons, and eyes eagerly fixed on the Princess. Miss Scope gave a curt laugh. “I’ve never known children to obey unless they were forced to. If you know a way to make them, I shall be glad to learn it,” she said drily.

This seemed to cause the Princess more disappointment than surprise. “Ah, that’s just what we won’t do; _make them_. We leave them as free as air, and simply suggest to them to co-operate. At Lohengrin co-operation has superseded every other method. We teach even our little two-year-olds voluntary co-operation. We think the idea of obedience is debasing.” She turned with a smile to her step-son. “When Astorre and Beatrice come to live with me the first thing I shall do is to make them both co-operate.”

Bun received this unsmilingly, and Beechy burst into passionate weeping and flung her arms jealously about her brother. “No—no, you bad wicked woman, you mustn’t! You shan’t operate on Bun, only on me—if you _must_!” she added in a final wail, her desperate eyes entreating her step-mother.

“But, my dear, I don’t understand,” the Princess murmured; and Judith hurriedly explained that Blanca had been operated upon for appendicitis the previous year, and that the use of the word in connection with her illness had had an intimidating effect on the younger children, and especially on Beechy.

“But this is all wrong ... dreadfully wrong ...” the Princess said with a baffled sigh. No one found an answer, and supper being over, Judith proposed that they should return to the sitting-room. The children followed, marshalled by Miss Scope, and the Princess again tried to engage them in talk; but she could not break down the barrier of mistrust which had been set up. Finally she suggested that they should all play a game together—a quiet writing game she thought would be interesting. A table was cleared, and paper and pencils found with some difficulty, and distributed among the children, the youngest of whom were lifted up onto sofa-cushions to make their seats high enough for collaboration. The Princess explained that the game they were going to play was called “Ambition,” and that it had been introduced into the Vocational Department of Juvenile Psychology at Lohengrin in order to direct children’s minds as early as possible to the choice of a career. First of all, she continued, each was to write down what he or she would most like to be or to do; then they were to fold the papers, and Mr. Boyne was to shake them up in his hat, and read them out in turn, and as he read the children were to try to guess who had made each choice.

The game did not start with as much _élan_ as its organiser had perhaps hoped. The children were still oppressed by her presence, and all of them but Terry hated writing, and were unused to abstract speculations on the future; moreover, they probably felt that if they were to state with sincerity what they wanted to be their aspirations would be received with the friendly ridicule which grown ups manifest when children express their real views.

All this made for delay and hesitation, and it was only Terry’s persuasion, and the fear of disobeying the tall authoritative lady who had suddenly invaded their lives, which finally set their pencils going. Boyne received the papers, shook them up conscientiously, and began to read them out.

“Al If Boy—oh, a _lift-boy_; yes—.” Zinnie’s burning blush revealed her as the author of this ambition, and Boyne read on: “An Ambassadoress”—Blanca, of course; and the added vowel certainly gave the word a new stateliness. “A great Poet, or the best Writer of Detective Stories,” in Terry’s concise hand, showed him torn between a first plunge into Conan Doyle, and rapturous communion with “The Oxford Book of English Verse.”

Boyne read on: “Never brush meye tethe,” laboriously printed out by Beechy; “A Crow Bat”—an aspiration obviously to be ascribed to Bun: “A noble character” (bless Scopy! As if she wasn’t one already—); and lastly, in Judith’s rambling script: “An exploarer.” At the reading of that, something darted through Boyne like a whirr of wings.

The ambitions expressed did not long serve to disguise the choosers, and there was a prompt chorus of attributions as Boyne read out one slip after the other. The Princess had apparently hoped that something more striking would result. She said the game usually promoted discussion, and she hoped the next stage in it would lead to freer self-expression. The children, she explained, were now to say in turn why—that is, on what grounds—they wanted to be this or that. But an awestruck silence met her invitation to debate, and Beechy again began to show signs of emotion. The Princess seemed much distressed, but was assured by Miss Scope that this breach of manners was due only to over-excitement, and the strain of sitting up later than usual—she hoped the Princess would excuse her, but really the children had better go to bed. At this suggestion all the faces round the table lit up except Zinnie’s, which was clouded by a pout. She slipped down from her cushions with the others, but when her turn came to file by the Princess for goodnight, she held up the march-past to ask: “N’arn’t there going to be any prizes after that game?”

She was swept off in Miss Scope’s clutch, and the Princess, after a timid attempt at endearment, imperfectly responded to, when Bun and Beechy took leave, sat down for a talk with Boyne and Judith. Much as she had evidently seen to disapprove of in the bringing-up of the little Wheaters she was in a less aggressive mood than in the afternoon; something she had been unprepared for, and had only half understood, in the relation of the children to each other and to their elders, seemed imperceptibly to have shaken her convictions. Though she continued to repeat the same phrases, it was with less emphasis; and she listened more patiently to Boyne’s arguments, and to Judith’s entreaties.

Judith was presently called away to say goodnight to the children, and as soon as the Princess and Boyne were alone, the former began abruptly: “But you must listen to me, Mr. Boyne; you must understand me. It’s not only that I cannot conscientiously approve of the way in which Beatrice and Astorre are being brought up: it is that I need them myself—I need them for my husband.” She coloured at the avowal, and went on hastily: “If he is to begin a new life—and he _has_ begun it already—his first step ought to be to take back his children. You must see that.... You must see how I am situated....” Her voice broke, and Boyne suddenly felt the same pity for her as when she had shown her fear that he might be hinting a criticism of Prince Buondelmonte’s past.

“I’ll do what I can—only trust me,” he stammered.

Judith came back, and the Princess, still a little rigid from the effort at self-control, began at once to thank her for her kindness, and to say that she was afraid it was time to go. She would tell Prince Buondelmonte, she added, with an effort at cordiality, that the children seemed very well (_“physically_ well,” she explained), and she would give him the assurance—she hoped she might?—that some sort of understanding as to their future would soon be reached.

Victory or defeat? Judith and Boyne, sitting late, asked each other which it was, but found no answer.

XXVIII

All the next day the rain continued. It was one of those steady business-like rains which seem, in mountain places, not so much a caprice of the weather as the drop-curtain punctually let down by Nature between one season and the next. Behind its closely woven screen one had the sense of some tremendous annual scene-shifting, the upheaval and overturning of everything in sight, from the clouds bursting in snow on the cliff-tops to the mattresses and blankets being beaten and aired in the hotel windows.

These images were doubtless born of Boyne’s own mood. When he opened his shutters on the morning after the Princess Buondelmonte’s apparition it seemed to him as if she herself had hung that cold gray mist before the window. He was afraid of everything now—of what the post might bring, of what his own common-sense might dictate to him, above all, of seeing Judith again, and having his apprehensions doubled by hers.

The worst of it was that, even should all their tormentors agree to leave them in peace, they could not—more particularly on Terry’s account—delay on that height through the coming weeks of storm and rain. Moreover, all the hotels and _pensions_, which would reopen later for the season of winter sports, were preparing to close for their yearly cleaning and renovating. After the middle of October there would be no demand for accommodation till the arrival of the Christmas lugers and ski-ers. If it proved possible to keep the little Wheaters together any longer the best plan would probably be to transport them to Riva or Meran till winter and fine weather were established together in the mountains.

Boyne turned over these things with the nervous minuteness with which one makes plans for some one who is dying, and will never survive to see them carried out. It seemed to give him faith in the future, a sense of factitious security, as it sometimes does, beside a deathbed, to think: “To-morrow I’ll see what the doctor says about a warmer climate.”

Judith and Miss Scope shared his idea about Meran or Riva, and for some time had been talking vaguely of going down to look for rooms. But the ever-recurring difficulty of persuading a boarding-house keeper to lodge seven children made them decide that it would be best to try to hire an inexpensive villa. The episode of the gold-fish and the rabbit had not endeared them to their present landlady, and they felt the hopelessness of trying to ingratiate themselves with another, in a place where they were unknown, and where the autumn season would be at its height. It had therefore been decided that Judith, Miss Scope and Boyne should motor to Meran that very week to look over the ground. But on reflection Boyne hesitated to leave the children alone with their nurses, even for so short an absence. With Joyce in Paris, once more reorganising her life, and the Princess Buondelmonte returning to Rome unsatisfied, danger threatened on all sides. Any one of these cross-blasts might dash to earth the frail nest which had resisted the summer’s breezes; and Boyne, heavy-hearted, set out to call another council at the _Pension Rosenglüh_.

As he left the hotel a telegram was handed to him. He glanced first at the signature—Sarah Mervin—then read what went before. “I will gladly receive own dear grandchildren subject to parents’ final settlement of affairs fear cannot assume responsibility step-children letter follows”.... “A lawyer’s cable,” Boyne growled as he pocketed it. “That’s the reason it’s taken so long to compose.”

Fresh bitterness filled him as he saw one more prop withdrawn from under the crazy structure of his hopes. “These people,” he reflected, “all act on impulse where their own wants are concerned, and call in a lawyer when it’s a question of anybody else’s.” But in his heart he was not much surprised. Mrs. Mervin was no longer young, and it is natural for ageing people to shrink from responsibilities. Besides, she might well plead that it was no business of hers to take in children she had never seen, and whose parents were eager, and financially able, to care for them. On second thoughts, it really did not need Judith’s bald hint as to the allowance her grandmother received from Cliffe Wheater to account for the poor lady’s attitude. “I don’t see what else she could have done,” the impartial Boyne was obliged to admit in the course of his interminable argument with the other, the passionate and unreasonable one.

What a Utopia he and Judith had been dreaming! He wondered now how he could have lent himself to such pure folly.... Well, the dream was over, and his was the grim business of making her see it.... Heavily he went down the hill through the rain.

At the _pension_ Judith was watching for him from the window. She opened the door and led him into the sitting-room, where a sulky fire smouldered, puffing out acrid smoke. The landlady said it was always like that—the stove always smoked on the first day of the autumn rains, unless there was a little wind to make a draught. And there was not a breath today; the only way was to leave a window open, Judith explained as she turned to Boyne. Her face was colourless and anxious; he could see that she had been treading the wheel of the same problems as himself. The sight made him resolve to try and hide his own apprehensions a little longer.

“Well, old Judy—here we are, after all; and not a breach in the walls yet!”

“You mean she’s gone—the Princess?”

He nodded. “I saw her off to Rome an hour ago.”

Her eyes brightened, as they always did at his challenge; but it was only a passing animation. “And you haven’t had any telegram?” she questioned.

The question took him unprepared. “I—why, have you?”

“Yes. From mother. Here.” She produced the paper and thrust it feverishly into his hand. Boyne’s anger rose—evidently; he thought, old Mrs. Mervin had waited to communicate with her daughter before answering him. What cowardice, what treachery! He pictured all these grown up powers and principalities leagued together against the handful of babes he commanded, and the bitterness of surrender entered into him. It was not that any of these parents really wanted their children. If they had, the break up of Judith’s dream, though tragic, would have been too natural to struggle against. But it was simply that the poor little things had become a bone of contention, that the taking or keeping possession of them was a matter of pride or of expediency, like fighting for a goal in some exciting game, or clinging to all one’s points in an acrimoniously-disputed law-suit. Boyne unfolded Mrs. Wheater’s telegram, and read: “You must come to Paris immediately bringing Chip I must see you at once do not disobey me stop telegraph Hotel Nouveau Luxe Mother.”

The vague phrasing made it impossible to guess whether the message were the result of a cable from Mrs. Mervin, or simply embodied a new whim of Joyce’s. Boyne, on the whole, inclined to the latter view, and felt half ready to exonerate Mrs. Mervin. After all, perhaps she had kept faith with him, and her message was only the result of her own scruples.

He tossed the telegram onto the table with a shrug. “Is that all? You’ve heard nothing else?”

Yes; it appeared she had. Nanny, the day before, had received a letter from Mrs. Wheater’s maid Marguerite, an experienced person who wielded a facile but rambling pen. This letter Judith had coaxed from Nanny, unknown to Miss Scope; for Miss Scope, even in the extremest emergencies, would not admit the possibility of her charges using, as a means of information, what the Princess would have called “salaried assistants.”

Marguerite’s news, if vague, was ample. It appeared that Mrs. Wheater had met in Venice a gentleman a good deal older than herself, whose name the maid could not even approximately spell, but who was quite different from any of the other gentlemen in her mistress’s circle.

“Different—different how?”

“She says he’s made a different woman of mother,” Judith explained. “He’s made her chuck Gerald, to begin with.”

“But, for God’s sake, why? I thought she was chucking your father on account of Gerald.”

Judith went into this with the lucid impartiality she always applied to the analysis of her parents’ foibles. She reminded Boyne that Joyce never stuck long to one thing, and that she had decided to marry Gerald chiefly in order to annoy her husband, and to have an excuse for detaining the young tutor at the Lido when the children left. “He’s rather a Lido man, Gerald is,” Judith commented, “and it made all the other women so furious. That’s always rather fun, you know.”

But, after all, she pursued, her mother had much more sense than her poor father, who was always the prey of women like Zinnia Lacrosse or Sybil Lullmer. “She does pull herself together sometimes—especially since that awful time with Buondelmonte. And so, when she met this other gentleman, who is so much older, and very religious, and enormously rich, and who only wants to influence her for good, Marguerite says it made her feel how dreadfully she’d wasted her life, and what a different woman she might have been if she’d known him years before. You see, he doesn’t want to marry her, but only to be her friend and adviser. He thinks she’s been married often enough. And so, in order not to leave Gerald at a loose end, she’s kept him on as secretary till he can get another job, and she and Gerald and the other gentleman have gone to Paris together to see what had better be done. And the gentleman says she ought to have us all with her; and he feels awfully fond of us already, and knows mother will be ever so much happier if we’re with her....”

“Oh, my God—then it’s all up with us,” Boyne groaned.

Judith made no answer, and he went on: “It only remains now to hear from Lady Wrench and the Princess!”

“Or Grandma Mervin—there’s still grandma,” Judith rejoined, half hopefully.

Boyne hesitated a moment; then he said to himself that there was no use in any farther postponement. “No; I’ve heard from her,” he said.

Judith’s eyes were again illuminated. “You have? Oh, Martin! If she’d only take us all, perhaps it would satisfy mother and the new gentleman. Oh, Martin, she doesn’t say no?”

Silently—for no words came to him—he gave her the cable, and walked away to the window to be out of sight of her face. For a while he stood watching the gray curtain of failure that hung there between him and his golden weeks; then he pulled himself together and turned back.

“Judy—”

She handed him the cable.

“After all, you expected it, didn’t you?” he said.

She nodded. “It doesn’t make so much difference, anyhow,” he continued, in an unconvinced voice, “if Bun and Beechy have to go....”

She pondered on this for a few moments without answering. Then, with one of her sudden changes of tone: “Martin,” she broke out impetuously, “do you suppose she was right, after all—I mean the Princess—about our being so dreadfully behind the times? Do you suppose, if we did all the things she suggested: if we got new teachers and new books, and somebody for Bun’s gymnastics, it would make any difference—do you think it would?” Every line of her face, from lifted eyebrows to parted lips, was a passionate demand for his assent. “After all, you know—perhaps she was right about some things: that stupid old book of Scopy’s, for instance. Of course we all know poor darling Scopy’s a back number. And about Bun’s gymnastics too. Do you suppose if we took a villa at Meran we could afford to fit up a room like the one she described, and get an instructor—didn’t she call him an instructor? And then there’s fencing and riding—I dare say she was right about that too! But after all—” she paused, and her eyes looked as the rain did when the sun was trying to break through it. “After all, Martin,” she began again, “the main thing is that the children are so well, isn’t it? Look at our record—see what the summer has done! You wouldn’t know Terry, would you, if you were to see him now for the first time after meeting us on the boat at Algiers? And Chip—isn’t Chip a miracle? Every one stops Nanny in the street to admire him, and they always think he must be three years old. He was just beginning to walk alone when he came here—now he runs like a hare! Nanny gets worn out chasing him. And the tricks he’s learnt to do! He can imitate everybody; I believe he’s going to be a movie star. Have you seen him do the lion, with Bun as lion-tamer? Or the old man at the market, all doubled up with sciatica, who leans on a stick, and holds one hand behind his back? But it’s a wonder! Oh, Martin, wait, and I’ll fetch him down now to do the old man for you—shall I?”

Once again her grown up cares had vanished in the childish pride of recounting Chip’s achievements. Would it always be like this, Boyne wondered, or would life gradually close the gates of the fairyland which was still so close to her? He would have given most of his chances of happiness to help her keep open that communication with her childhood. And what if he were the one being who could do it? The question wound itself through his thoughts like a persuasive hand insinuating itself into his. This heart-break of separation that was upon her—what if he alone had the power to ease it? He stood looking down at her perplexedly.

“Judy—Chip’s a great man, and I’d love to see him do the old gentleman with the sciatica. But first....”

“Yes—first?” she palpitated. But under his gaze her radiance gradually faded, and her lips began to tremble a little. “Ah, then you don’t think ... there’s any hope for us?”

“I think you’ve got to go to Paris and see your mother.”

“And take Chip? I’ll never take Chip! I won’t!”

“But listen, dear—.” He sat down, and drew her to the sofa beside him, speaking as he might have to a child on a holiday who was fighting the summons back to school.

“Listen, Judy. We’ve done our best; we all have. But the children are not yours or mine. They belong to their parents, after all.” How dry and flat his phrases sounded, compared with the words he longed to say to her!

She drew back into the corner of the sofa. “That Buondelmonte woman’s got at you—she’s talked you over! I knew she would.” She was grown up again now, measuring him with angry suspicious eyes, and flinging out her accusations in her mother’s shrillest voice.

“Why, child, what nonsense! You said just now that perhaps the Princess was right....”

“I never did! I said, perhaps we ought to get a new Cyclopædia for Scopy, and have Bun taught scientific gymnastics; and now you say....”

“I say that fate’s too much for us. It didn’t need the Princess Buondelmonte to teach me that.”

She made no answer, and they sat in silence in their respective corners of the sofa, each gazing desperately into a future of which nothing could be divined except that it was the end of their hopes. Suddenly Judith flung herself face down against the knobby cushions and broke into weeping. Boyne, for a few minutes, remained numb and helpless; then he moved closer, and bending over drew her into his arms. She seemed hardly aware of his nearness; she simply went on crying, with hard uneven sobs, pressing her face against his shoulder as if it were the sofa-cushion. He held her in silence, not venturing to speak, or even to brush back her tumbled hair, while he pictured, with the acuity of his older and less articulate grief, what must be passing before her as the fibres of her heart were torn away. “It’s too cruel—it’s too beastly cruel,” he thought, wincing at the ugly details which must enter into her vision of the future, details he could only guess at, while she saw them with all the precision of experience. Yes, it was too cruel; but what could he or she do? He continued to hold her in silence, listening to the beat of the rain on the half-open window, and smelling the cold grave-yard smell of the autumn earth, while her sobs ran through him in shocks of anguish.

Gradually her weeping subsided, and Boyne took courage to lift his hand and pass it once or twice over her hair. She lay in his hold as quietly as a frightened bird, and presently he bent his head and whispered: “Judy—.” Why not? he thought; his heart was beating with reckless bounds. He was free, after all, if it came to that; free to chuck his life away on any madness; and madness this was, he knew. Well, he’d had enough of reason for the rest of his days; and a man is only as old as he feels.... He bent so close that his lips brushed her ear. “Judy, darling, listen.... Perhaps after all there’s a way—.”

In a flash she was out of his arms, and ecstatically facing him. “A way—a way of keeping us all together?” Ah, how hard her questions were to answer!

Boyne drew her down again beside him. Crying was a laborious and disfiguring business to her, and her face was so drawn and tear-stained that she looked almost old; but its misery was shot through with hope. If he could have kept her there, not speaking, only answering her with endearments, how easy, how exquisite it would have been! But her face was tense with expectation, and he had to find words, for he knew that his silence would have no meaning for her.

“Judith—” he began; but she interrupted: “Call me Judy, or I shall think it’s more bad news.” He made no answer, and she flung herself against him with a cry of alarm. “Martin! Martin! You’re not going to desert us too?”

He held her hands, but his own had begun to tremble. “Darling, I’ll never desert you; I’ll stay with you always if you’ll have me; if things go wrong I’ll always be there to look after you and defend you; no matter what happens, we’ll never be separated any more....” He broke off, his voice failing before the sudden sunrise in her eyes.

“Oh, Martin—” She lifted his hands one by one to her wet cheeks, and held them there in silent bliss. “Then you don’t belong any longer to Mrs. Sellars?”

“I don’t belong to any one but you—for as long as ever you’ll have me....”

Her eyes still bathed him in their radiance. “My darling, my darling.” She leaned close as she said it, and he dared not move, in his new awe of her nearness—so subtly had she changed from the child of his familiar endearments to the woman he passionately longed for.... “Darling,” she said again; then, with a face in which the bridal light seemed already kindled, “Oh, Martin, do you really mean you’re going to adopt us all, and we’re all going to stay with you forever?”

XXIX

Boyne felt like a man who has blundered along in the dark to the edge of a precipice. He trembled inwardly with the effort of recovery, and the shock of finding himself flung back into his old world. Judith, in a rush of gratitude, had thrown her arms about him; and he shrank from her touch, from the warm smell of her hair, from everything about her which he had to think back into terms of childhood and comradeship, while every vein in his body still ached for her. There was nothing he would have dreaded as much as her detecting the least trace of what he was feeling. His first care must be to hide the break in their perfect communion—the fact that for a moment she had been for him the woman she would some day be for another man, in a future he could never share. He undid her hands and walked away to the window.

When he turned to her again he had struggled back to some sort of composure. “Judy, child, I wish you wouldn’t take such terrible life-leases on the future.” He tried to smile as he said it. “I’m always afraid it will bring us bad luck. We’d much better live from hand to mouth. I’m ready to promise all that a reasonable man can—that I’ll put up another big fight for you, and that I don’t despair of winning it. At any rate, I’ll be there; I’ll stand by you; I won’t desert you....” He broke off, reading in her unsatisfied eyes the hopelessness of piling up vague assurances....

“Yes,” she assented, in a voice grown as small and colourless as her face.

He stood before her miserably. “You do understand, dear, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure....” She hesitated. “A little while ago I thought I did.”

His nerves began to twitch again. Could he bear to go into the question with her once more—and what would be the use if he did? The immediate future must somehow or other be dealt with; but the last few minutes had deprived him of all will and energy. He had the desolate sense of her knowing that he had failed her, and yet not being able to guess why.

“Of course I’ll do what I can,” he repeated.

She remained silent, constrained by his constraint; and he saw the disappointment in her eyes.

“You don’t believe me?”

Still she looked at him perplexedly. “But you said.... I thought you said just now that you’d found a way of keeping us all together. No matter what happened; you had a plan, you said.”

His senseless irritation grew upon him. Could such total simplicity be unfeigned? Could she have such a power of awaking passion without any inkling of its meaning? He hated himself for doubting it. In time—a short time, perhaps—her rich nature would come to its ripeness; but as yet the only full-grown faculties in it were her love for her brothers and sisters, and her faith in the few people who had shown her kindness in a world unkindly.

“I’m sorry,” she continued, after pausing for an answer which did not come. “I must have misunderstood you, I suppose.”

Boyne gave a nervous laugh. “You did, most thoroughly.”

“And—you won’t tell me what you really meant?”

He stood motionless, his hands in his pockets, staring down at the knots in the wooden floor, as he had stared at them on the day when she had owned to having taken her father’s money—but in a mental perturbation how much deeper! A few minutes before, it had seemed like profanation to brush her with the thought of his love; now, faced by her despair, by her sense of being left alone to fight her battles, he asked himself whether it might not be fairer, even kinder, to speak. At the thought his heart again began to beat excitedly. Perhaps he had been too impetuous, too inarticulate. What if, after all, a word from him could wake the sleeping music?

The difficulty was to find a beginning. What would have been so simple if kisses could have told it, seemed tortuous or brutal when put in words. He shrank not so much from the possibility of hurting her as from the sudden fear of her hurting him beyond endurance.

“Judith,” he began, “how old are you?”

“I shall be sixteen in three months—no, in five months, really,” she said, with an obvious effort at truthfulness.

“As near as that! Well, sixteen is an age,” he laughed.

She continued to fix her bewildered eyes on him, as if seeking a clue. “But I look a lot older, don’t I?” she added hopefully.

“Older? There are times when you look so old that you frighten me.” He remembered then that she had spoken to him with perfect simplicity of Gerald Ormerod’s desire to marry her, as of the most natural thing in the world; and his own scruples began to seem absurd. “I’m always forgetting what a liberal education she’s had,” he thought with a touch of self-derision.

He cleared his throat, and continued: “So grown up that I suppose you’ll soon be thinking of getting married.”

The word was out now; it went sounding on and on inside of his head while he awaited her answer. When she spoke it was with an air of indifference and disappointment.

“What’s the use of saying that? How can I ever marry, with all the children to look after?” It was clear that she regarded the subject as irrelevant; her tone seemed to remind him that he and she had long since dealt with and disposed of it. “You might as well tell me that I ought to be educated,” she grumbled.

He pressed on: “But it might turn out ... you might find....” He had to pause to steady his voice. “If we can’t prevent the children being taken away from you, you’ll be awfully lonely....”

“Taken away from me?” At the word her listlessness vanished. “Do you suppose I’ll let them be taken like that? Without fighting to the very last minute? Let Syb Lullmer get hold of Chip—and Bun and Beechy go to that Buondelmonte man?”

“I know. It’s hateful. But supposing the very worst happens—oughtn’t you to face that now?” He cleared his throat again. “If things went wrong, and you were very lonely, and a fellow asked you to marry him—”

“Who asked me?”

He laughed again. “If I did.”

For a moment she looked at him perplexedly; then her eyes cleared, and for the first time she joined in his laugh. Hers seemed to bubble up, fresh and limpid, from the very depths of her little girlhood. “Well, that would be funny!” she said.

There was a bottomless silence.

“Yes—wouldn’t it?” Boyne grinned. He stared at her without speaking; then, like a blind man feeling his way, he picked up his hat and mackintosh, said: “Where’s my umbrella? Oh, outside—” and walked out stiffly into the passage. On the doorstep, still aware of her nearness, he added a little dizzily: “No, please—I want a long tramp alone first.... I’ll come in again this afternoon to settle what we’d better do about Paris....”

He felt her little disconsolate figure standing alone behind him in the rain, and hurried away as if to put himself out of its reach forever.

XXX

It was still raining when the Wheater colony left Cortina; it was raining when the train in which Boyne and Judith were travelling reached Paris. During the days intervening between the receipt of Mrs. Wheater’s telegram and the clattering halt of the express in the gare de Lyon, Boyne could not remember that the rain had ever stopped.

But he had not had time to do much remembering—not even of the havoc within himself. After the struggle necessary to convince Judith that she must go to Paris and take Chip with her—since disobedience to her mother’s summons might put them irretrievably in the wrong—he had first had to help her decide what should be done with the other children. Once brought round to his view, she had immediately risen to the emergency, as she always did when practical matters were at stake. She and Boyne were agreed that it would be imprudent to leave the children at Cortina, where the Princess, or even Lady Wrench, might take advantage of their absence to effect a raid on the _pension_. It took a three days’ hunt to find a villa in a remote suburb of Riva where they could be temporarily installed without much risk of being run down by an outraged parent. Boyne put the _Rosenglüh_ landlady off the scent by giving her the address of Mrs. Wheater’s Paris banker, and letting it be understood that Judith was off to Paris to prepare for the children’s arrival; and Blanca and Terry, still deep in Conan Doyle, gleefully contributed misleading details.

The excitement of departure, and the business of establishing the little Wheaters in their new quarters, left no time, between Boyne and Judith, for less pressing questions; and Boyne saw that, once their plan was settled, Judith was almost as much amused as the twins by its secret and adventurous side. “It will take a Dr. Watson to nose them out, won’t it?” she chuckled, as she and Boyne, with Chip and Susan, scrambled into the Paris express at Verona. It was not till they were in the train that Boyne saw the cloud of apprehension descend on her again. But then fatigue intervened, and she fell asleep against his shoulder as peacefully as Chip, who was curled up opposite with his head in Susan’s lap. As they sat there, Boyne remembered how, on the day of Mr. Dobree’s picnic, he had watched her sleeping by the waterfall, a red glow in her cheeks, velvet shadows under her lashes. Now her face was pinched and sallow, the lids were swollen with goodbye tears; she seemed farther from him than she had ever been, yet more in need of him; and at the thought something new and tranquillizing entered into him. He had caught a glimpse of a joy he would never reach, and he knew that his eyes would always dazzle with it; but the obligation of giving Judith the help she needed kept his pain in that deep part of the soul where the great renunciations lie.

In Paris he left his companions at the door of the _Nouveau Luxe_, where Mrs. Wheater was established, drove to his own modest hotel on the left bank, and turned in for a hard tussle of thinking. He could no longer put off dealing with his own case, for Mrs. Sellars was still in Paris. He had not meant to let her know of his arrival till the next day; he needed the interval to get the fatigue and confusion out of his brain. But meanwhile he must map out some kind of a working plan; must clear up his own mind, and consider how to make it clear to her. And after an unprofitable attempt at rest and sleep, and a weary tramp in the rain through the dusky glittering streets, he suddenly decided on immediate action, and turned into a telephone booth to call up Mrs. Sellars. She was at home and answered immediately. Aunt Julia was resting, she said; if he would come at once they could talk without fear of interruption.

He caught the tremor of joy in her voice when he spoke her name—but how like her, how perfect of her, to ask no questions, to waste no time in exclamations; just quietly and simply to say “Come”! The healing touch of her reasonableness again came to his rescue.

He would have liked to find her close at hand, on the very threshold of the telephone booth; at the rate at which his thoughts were spinning he knew he would have to go over the whole affair again in his transit to her hotel. But there was no remedy for that; he could only trust to her lucidity to help him out.

Aunt Julia’s apartment was in a hotel of the rue de Rivoli, with a row of windows overhanging the silvery reaches of the Tuileries gardens and the vista of domes and towers beyond. The room was large, airy, full of flowers. A fire burned on the hearth; Rose Sellars’s touch was everywhere. And a moment later she stood there before him, incredibly slim and young-looking in her dark dress and close little hat. Slightly paler, perhaps, and thinner—but as she moved forward with her easy step the impression vanished. He felt only her mastery of life and of herself, and thought how much less she needed him than did the dishevelled child he had just left. The thought widened the distance between them, and brought Judith abruptly closer.

“Well, here I am,” he said—“and I’ve failed!”

He had prepared a dozen opening phrases—but the sudden intrusion of Judith’s face dashed them all from his lips. He was returning to ask forgiveness of the woman to whom he still considered himself engaged, and his first word, after an absence prolonged and unaccountable, was to remind her of the cause of their breach. He saw the narrowing of her lips, and then her victorious smile.

“Dear! Tell me about it—I want to hear everything,” she said, holding out her hand.

But he was still struggling in the coil of his blunder. “Oh, never mind—all that’s really got nothing to do with it,” he stammered.

She freed her hand, and turned on the electric switch of the nearest lamp. As she bent to it he saw that the locks escaping on each temple were streaked with gray. The sight seemed to lengthen the days of their separation into months and years. He felt like a stranger coming back to her. “You’ve forgiven me?” he began.

She looked at him gravely. “What is it I have to forgive?”

“A lot—you must think,” he said confusedly.

She shook her head. “You’re free, you know. We’re just two old friends talking. Sit down over there—so.” She pointed to an armchair, sat down herself, and took off her hat. In the lamplight, under the graying temples, her face looked changed and aged, like her hair. But it was varnished over by her undaunted smile.

“Let us go back to where you began. I want to hear all about the children.” She leaned her head thoughtfully on her hand, in the attitude he had loved in the little sitting-room at Cortina.

“I feel like a ghost—” he said.

“No; for I should be a little afraid of you if you were a ghost; and now—”

“Well—now....” He looked about the pleasant firelit room, saw her work-basket in its usual place near the hearth, her books heaped up on a table, and a familiar litter of papers on a desk in the window. “A ghost,” he repeated.

She waited a moment, and then said: “I wish you’d tell me exactly what’s been happening.”

“Oh, everything’s collapsed. It was bound to. And now I—”

He got up, walked across the room, glanced half-curiously at the titles of some of the books, and came back and leaned against the mantelpiece. She sat looking up at him. “Yes?”

“No. I can’t.”

“You can’t—what?”

“Account for anything. Explain anything—” He dropped back into his chair and threw his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve been a fool—and I’m tired; tired.”

“Then we’ll drop explanations. Tell me only what you want,” she said.

What he really wanted was not to tell her anything, but to get up again, and resume his inarticulate wanderings about the room. With an effort of the will he remained seated, and turned his eyes to hers. “You’ve been perfect—and I do want to tell you ... to make you understand....” But no; that sort of talk was useless. He had better try to do what she had asked him. “About the children—well, the break up was bound to come. You were right about it, of course. But I was so sorry for the poor little devils that I tried to blind myself....”

His tongue was loosened, and he found it easier to go on. After all, Mrs. Sellars was right; the story of the children must be disposed of first. After that he might see more clearly into his own case and hers. He went on with his halting narrative, and she listened in silence—that rare silence of hers which was all alertness and sympathy. She smiled a little over the Princess Buondelmonte’s invasion, and sighed and frowned when he mentioned that Lady Wrench was also impending. When he came to Mrs. Wheater’s summons, and his own insistence that Judith and Chip should immediately obey it, she lifted her eyes, and said approvingly: “But of course you were perfectly right.”

“Was I? I don’t know. When I left them just now at the door of that Moloch of a hotel—”

She gave a little smile of reassurance. “No; I don’t think you need fear even the _Nouveau Luxe_. I understand what you’re feeling; but I think I can give you some encouragement.”

“Encouragement—?”

“About the future, I mean. Perhaps Mrs. Wheater’s news about herself is not altogether misleading. At any rate, I know she’s taken the best legal advice; and I hear she may be able to keep all the children—her own, that is. For of course the poor little steps—”

Boyne listened with a sudden start of attention. He felt like some one shaken out of a lethargy. “You’ve seen her, then? I didn’t know you knew her.”

“No; I’ve not seen her, and I don’t know her. But a friend of mine does. The fact is, she ran across Mr. Dobree at the Lido after he left Cortina—”

“_Dobree?_” He stared, incredulous, as if he must have heard the wrong name.

“Yes; hasn’t she mentioned it to the children? Ah, no—I remember she never writes. Well, she had the good sense to ask him to take charge of things for her, and though he doesn’t often accept new cases nowadays he was so sorry for the children—and for her too, he says—that he agreed to look after her interests. And he tells me that if she follows his advice, and keeps out of new entanglements, he thinks she can divorce Mr. Wheater on her own terms, and in that case of course the courts will give her all the children. Isn’t that the very best news I could give you?”

He tried to answer, but again found himself benumbed. Her eyes continued to challenge him. “It’s more than you hoped?” she smiled.

“It’s not in the least what I expected.”

She waited for him to continue, but he was silent again, and she questioned suddenly: “What _did_ you expect?”

He looked at her with a confused stare, as if her face had become that of a stranger, as familiar faces do in a dream. “Dobree,” he said—“this Dobree....”

She kindled. “You’re very unfair to Mr. Dobree, Martin; you always have been. He’s not only a great lawyer, whose advice Mrs. Wheater is lucky to have, but a kind and wise friend ... and a good man,” she added.

“Yes,” he said, hardly hearing her. All the torture of his hour of madness about Mr. Dobree had returned to him. He would have liked to leap up on the instant, and go and find him, and fight it out with his fists....

“I can’t think,” she continued nervously, “what more you could have hoped....”

He made a weary gesture. “God knows! But what does it matter?”

“Matter? Doesn’t it matter to you that the children should be safe—be provided for? That in this new crash they should remain with their mother, and not be tossed about again from pillar to post? If you didn’t want that, what did you want?”

“I wanted—somehow—to get them all out of this hell.”

“I believe you exaggerate. It’s not going to be a hell if their mother keeps them, as Mr. Dobree thinks she’ll be able to. You say yourself that she’s fond of them.”

“Yes; intermittently.”

“And, after all, if the step-children are taken back by their own parents, that’s only natural. You say the new Princess Buondelmonte seems well-meaning, and kind in her way; and as for Zinnie—I suppose Zinnie is the one of the party the best able to take care of herself.”

“I suppose so,” he acceded.

“Well, then—.” She paused, and then repeated, with a sharper stress: “I don’t yet see what you want.”

He looked about him with the same estranged stare with which his eyes had rested on her face. Something clear and impenetrable as a pane of crystal seemed to cut him off from her, and from all that surrounded her. He had been to the country from which travellers return with another soul.

“What I want...?” Ah, he knew that well enough! What he wanted, at the moment, was just some opiate to dull the dogged ache of body and soul—to close his ears against that laugh of Judith’s, and all his senses to her nearness. He was caught body and soul—that was it; and real loving was not the delicate distraction, the food for dreams, he had imagined it when he thought himself in love with Rose Sellars; it was this perpetual obsession, this clinging nearness, this breaking on the rack of every bone, and tearing apart of every fibre. And his apprenticeship to it was just beginning....

Well, there was one thing certain; it was that he must get away, as soon as he could, from the friendly room and Rose’s forgiving presence. He tried to blunder into some sort of explanation. “I don’t suppose I’ve any business to be here,” he began abruptly.

Mrs. Sellars was silent; but it was not one of her speaking silences. It was like a great emptiness slowly widening between them. For a moment he thought she meant to force on him the task of bridging it over; then he saw that she was struggling with a pain as benumbing as his own. She could not think of anything to say any more than he could, and her helplessness moved him, and brought her nearer. “She wants to end it decently, as I do,” he thought; but his pity for her did not help him to find words.

At length he got up and held out his hand. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had—and the dearest. But I’m going off on a big job somewhere; I must. At the other end of the world. For a time—”

“Yes,” she assented, very low. She did not take the hand he held out—perhaps did not even see it. When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness—as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.

“You’ve forgotten your umbrella,” she said, as he reached the door. He gave a little laugh as he came back to get it.

XXXI

The next day Boyne lunched at the _Nouveau Luxe_ alone with Mrs. Wheater and Judith. He had wondered if it would occur to Joyce that it might be preferable to lunch upstairs, in her own rooms; but it had not; and his mind was too dulled with pain for him to care much for his surroundings. No crowd could make him feel farther away from Judith than the unseeing look in her own eyes.

Mrs. Wheater was dressed with a Quaker-like austerity which made her look younger and handsomer than when he had last seen her, in the rakish apparel of the Lido. She had acquired another new voice, as she did with each new phase; this time it was subdued and somewhat melancholy, but less studied than the fluty tones she had affected in Venice. Altogether, Boyne had to admit that she had improved—that Mr. Dobree’s influence had achieved what others had failed to do. After lunch they went upstairs, and Joyce proposed to Judith that, as the rain had stopped, she should take Chipstone and Susan to the Bois de Boulogne. She herself wanted to have a quiet talk with dear Martin—Judith could send the motor back to pick her up at four; no, at half-past three. She had promised to go to a wonderful loan exhibition of Incunabula with Mr. Dobree.... Judith nodded and disappeared, with a faint smile at Boyne.

Mr. Dobree had opened her eyes to so many marvels, Joyce continued when they were alone. Incunabula, for instance—would Boyne believe that she had never before heard of their existence? Mr. Dobree had thought she must be joking when she asked him what they were. But Martin knew how much chance she had had of cultivating herself in Cliffe’s society.... Yes, and she was beginning to collect books—first editions—and to form a real library. Didn’t he think it would be a splendid thing for the children—especially for Terry? She blushed to think that while the family travelled over Europe in steam-yachts and Blue Trains and Rolls-Royces, poor Terry had had to feed on the rubbish Scopy could pick up for him in hotel libraries, or the _cabinets de lecture_ of frowsy watering-places. Mr. Dobree had been horrified when he found that Cliffe, with all his millions, had never owned a library! But then he didn’t know Cliffe.

Joyce went on to unfold her plans for the future. She spoke, as usual, as if they were fixed and immutable in every detail. She had decided to buy a place in the country—near either Paris or Dinard, she wasn’t sure which. Probably Dinard on account of Terry’s health. The climate was mild; and it was said that there were educational advantages. If the sea was too strong for him she could find a house somewhere inland. But they must be near a town on account of the children’s education, and yet not in it because of the demoralising influences, and the lack of good air. In a few days she was going down to look about her at Dinard....

Boyne knew, she supposed, that she had begun divorce proceedings? Of course she ought to have done it long ago—but in that _milieu_ one’s moral sense got absolutely blunted. Evidence—? Heavens! She already had more than enough to make her own terms. Horrors and horrors.... There was no doubt, Mr. Dobree said, that the courts would give her the custody of all the children. And from now on they would be the sole object of her life. Didn’t Boyne agree that, at her age, there couldn’t be a more perfect conclusion? Oh, yes, she knew—she looked younger than she really was ... but there were gray streaks in her hair already; hadn’t he noticed? And she wasn’t going to dye it; not she! She was going to let herself turn frankly into an _old woman_. She didn’t mind the idea a bit. Middle-age was so full of duties and interests of its own; she had a perfect horror of the women who are always dyeing and drugging themselves, in the hopeless attempt to keep young—like that pitiable Syb Lullmer, for instance. She had learned, thank heaven, that there were other things in life. And her first object, of course, was to get the children away from hotels and hotel contacts—from all the _Nouveaux Luxes_ and the “Palaces.” She was counting the minutes till she could create a real home for them, and make them so happy that they would never want to leave it.... She knew Boyne would approve.... The monologue ended by her expressing her gratitude for all he had done for the children, and her delight at being reunited to Judith and Chip—Chip, oh, he was a wonder, so fat and tall, and walking and talking like a boy of four. And Judith told her it was all thanks to Boyne....

Mrs. Wheater seemed genuinely sorry to think that Bun and Beechy would probably have to return to their father. But perhaps, she added, if the new Princess Buondelmonte was so full of good intentions, and so determined to have her own way, the two children might get a fairly decent bringing-up. Buondelmonte wasn’t as young as he had been, and might be glad to settle down, if his wife made him comfortable, and let him have enough money to gamble at his club. And as for Zinnie—Joyce shrugged, and doubted if either her mother or Cliffe would really take Zinnie on, when it came to the point. She was rather a handful, Zinnie was; no one but Judy could control her. Still, grieved as Joyce would be to give up the “steps,” poor little souls, she was too much used to human ingratitude not to foresee that they might be taken from her at any moment. But her own children—no! Never again. Of that Boyne might be assured. She had learned her lesson, her eyes had been opened to her own folly and imprudence; and Mr. Dobree had absolutely promised her—oh, by the way, wasn’t Martin going to stay and see Mr. Dobree, who would be turning up at any minute now to take her to see the Incunabula? She thought he and Martin had met at Cortina, hadn’t they? Yes, she remembered; Mr. Dobree had been so struck by Martin’s devotion to the children. She hoped so much they might meet again and make friends.... Boyne thanked her, and thought perhaps another time ... but he was leaving Paris, probably; he couldn’t wait then.... He got himself out of the room in a confusion of excuses....

All day he wandered through the streets, inconsolably. His will-power seemed paralysed. He was determined to get away from Paris at once, to go to New York first, in quest of a job, and then to whatever end of the world the job should call him. There was no object in his lingering where he was for another hour. He and Rose Sellars had said their last word to each other—and to Judith herself what more had he to say? Yet he could not submit his mind to the idea that his happy unreal life of the last weeks was over; that he would never again enter the _pension_ at Cortina, and see the little Wheaters flocking about him in a tumult of welcome, begging for a romp, a game, a story, clamouring to have their quarrels arbitrated, demanding to be taken on a picnic—with Judith serene above the tumult, or laughing and twittering with the rest.... When he grew too tired to walk farther he turned in at a post-office, and wrote a cable which he had been revolving for some hours. It was addressed to the New York contractors who had written to ask if he could trace the young engineer who had been his assistant. Luckily he had not been able to, and he cabled: “Should like for myself the job you wrote about. Can I have it? Can start at once. Cable bankers.”

This message despatched, he turned to the telephone booth, rang up the _Nouveau Luxe_, and asked to speak to Miss Wheater. Interminable minutes passed after he had put in his call; Mrs. Wheater’s maid was found first, who didn’t know where Judith was, or how to find her; then Susan, who said Judith had come back, and gone out again, and that all she knew was that the ladies were going to dine out that evening with Mr. Dobree, and go to the theatre. Then, just as Boyne was turning away discouraged, Judith’s own voice: “Hullo, Martin! Where are you? When can I see you?”

“Now, if you can come. I’m off tonight—to London.” He suddenly found he had decided that without knowing it.

She exclaimed in astonishment, and asked where she was to meet him; and he acquiesced in her suggestion that it should be at a tea-room near her hotel, as it was so late that she would soon have to hurry back for dinner. He jumped into a taxi, secured a table in a remote corner of the tea-room, and met her on the threshold a moment later. It was already long after six, and the rooms were emptying; in a few minutes they would have the place to themselves.

Judith, a little flushed with the haste of her arrival, looked gracefully grown up in her dark coat edged with fur, a pretty antelope bag in her gloved hand. The bareheaded girl of the Dolomites, in sports’ frock and russet shoes, had been replaced by a demure young woman who seemed to Boyne almost a stranger.

“Martin! You’re not really going away tonight?” she began at once, not noticing his request that she should choose between tea-cakes and _éclairs_.

He said he was, for a few days at any rate; the mere sound of her voice, the look in her eyes, had nearly dissolved his plans again, and his own voice was unsteady.

The fact that it was only for a few days seemed to reassure Judith. He’d be back by the end of the week, she hoped, wouldn’t he? Yes—oh, yes, he said—very probably.

“Because, you know, the children’ll be here by that time,” she announced; and, turning her attention to the trays presented: “Oh, both, I think—yes, I’ll take both.”

“The children?”

“Yes; mother’s just settled it. Mr. Dobree wrote the wire for her. If Nanny gets it in time they’re to start to-morrow. Mr. Dobree thinks we may be able to keep the steps too—he’s going to write himself to Buondelmonte. And he doesn’t believe the Wrenches will ever bother us about Zinnie ... at least not at present. He’s found out a lot of things about Lord Wrench, and he thinks Zinnia’ll have her hands full with him, without tackling Zinnie too.”

She spoke serenely, almost lightly, as if all her anxieties had been dispelled. Could it be that the mere change of scene, the few hours spent with her mother, had so completely reassured her? She, who had always measured Joyce with such precocious insight, was it possible that she was deluded by her now? Or had she too succumbed to Mr. Dobree’s mysterious influence? Boyne looked at her careless face and wondered.

“But this Dobree—you didn’t fancy him much at Cortina? What makes you believe in him now?”

She seemed a little puzzled, and wrinkled her brows in the effort to find a reason. “I don’t know. He’s funny looking, of course; and rather pompous. And I do like you heaps better, Martin. But he’s been most awfully good about the children, and he can make mother do whatever he tells her. And she says he’s a great lawyer, and his clients almost always win their cases. Oh, Martin, wouldn’t it be heavenly if he could really keep us together, steps and all? He’s sworn to me that he will.” She turned her radiant eyes on Boyne. “Anyhow, the children will be here the day after to-morrow, and that will be splendid, won’t it? You must get back from London as soon as ever you can, and take us all off somewhere for the day, just as if we were still at Cortina.”

Yes, of course he would, Boyne said; on Scopy’s book he would. She lit up at that, asking where they’d better go, and finally settling that, if the rain ever held up, a day at Versailles would be jollier than anything.... But it must be soon, she reminded him; because in a few days Mrs. Wheater was going to carry them all off to Dinard.

Yes, she pursued, she really did feel that Mr. Dobree, just in a few weeks, had gained more influence over her mother than any one else ever had. Judith had had a long talk with him that morning, and he had told her frankly that he was doing it all out of interest in the children, and because he wanted to help her—wasn’t that dear of him? Anyhow, they were all going to stand together, grown ups and children, and put up a last big fight. (“On Scopy’s book,” Boyne interpolated with a strained smile.) And they were to have a big house in the country, with lots of dogs and horses, she continued. And the children were never to go to hotels any more. And Terry was to have a really first-rate tutor, and be sent to school in Switzerland as soon as he was strong enough; in another year, perhaps.

Boyne sat watching her with insatiable eyes. She looked so efficient, so experienced—yet what could be surer proof of her childishness than this suddenly revived faith in the future? He saw that whoever would promise to keep the children together would gain a momentary hold over her—as he once had, alas! And he saw also that the mere change of scene, the excitement of the flight from Cortina, the encouragement which her mother’s new attitude gave her, were so many balloons lifting her up into the blue.... “It will be Versailles, don’t you think so?” she began again. “Or, if it rains deluges, what about the circus, and a big tea afterward, somewhere where Chip and Nanny could come too?” She looked at him with her hesitating smile. “I thought, perhaps, if you didn’t mind—but, no, darling,” she broke off decisively, “we won’t ask Mr. Dobree!”

“Lord—I should hope not; not if I’m giving the party.” He found the voice and laugh she expected, gave her back her banter, discussed and fixed with her the day and hour of the party. And all the while there echoed in his ears, more insistently than anything she was saying, a line or two from the chorus of Lemures, in “Faust,” which Rose had read aloud one evening at Cortina.

_Who made the room so mean and bare— Where are the chairs, the tables where? It was lent for a moment only—_

A moment only: not a bad title for the history of his last few months! A moment only; and he had always known it. “An episode,” he thought, “it’s been only an episode. One of those things that come up out of the sea, on a full-moon night, playing the harp.... Yes; but sometimes the episodes last, and the things one thought eternal wither like grass—and only the gods know which it will be ... if _they_ do....

“_L’addition, mademoiselle?_ Good Lord, child; four _éclairs_? And a Dobree dinner in the offing! Ah, thrice-happy infancy, as the poet said.... Yes, here’s your umbrella. Take my arm, and we’ll nip round on foot to the back door of the _Luxe_. You’ve eaten so much that I haven’t got enough left to pay for a taxi....”

From the threshold of the hotel she called to him, rosy under her shining umbrella: “Thursday morning, then, you’ll fetch us all at ten?” And he called back: “On Scopy’s book, I will!” as the rain engulfed him.

On the day fixed for the children’s picnic Boyne lay half asleep on the deck of a South American liner. It was better so—a lot better. The morning after he had parted from Judith at the door of the _Nouveau Luxe_ the summons had come: “Job yours please sail immediately for Rio particulars on arrival”; and he had just had time to pitch his things into his portmanteaux, catch the first train for London, and scramble on board his boat at Liverpool.

A lot better so.... The busy man’s way of liquidating hopeless situations. It reminded him of the old times when, at the receipt of such a summons, cares and complications fell from him like dust from a shaken garment. It would not be so now; his elasticity was gone. Yet already, after four days at sea, he was beginning to feel a vague solace in the empty present, and in the future packed with duties. No hesitating, speculating, wavering to and fro—he was to be caught as soon as he landed, and thrust into the stiff harness of his work. And meanwhile, more and more miles of sea were slipping in between him and the last months, making them already seem remote and vapoury compared with the firm outline of the future.

The day was mild, with a last touch of summer on the lazy waves over which they were gliding.... He closed his eyes and slept....

At Versailles too it was mild; there were yellow leaves still on the beeches of the long walks; they formed golden tunnels, with hazy blueish vistas where the park melted into the blur of the forest. But the gardens were almost deserted; it was too late in the season for the children chasing their hoops and balls down the alleys, the groups of nurses knitting and gossiping on wooden chairs under the great stone Dianas and Apollos.

Funny—he and the little Wheaters seemed to have the lordly pleasure-grounds to themselves. The clipped walls of beech and hornbean echoed with their shouts and laughter. What a handful the little Wheaters were getting to be! Terry, now, could run and jump with the rest; and as for Chip, rounder than ever in a white fur coat and tasselled cap, his waddle was turning into a scamper....

In the sun, under a high protecting hedge, Miss Scope and Nanny sat and beamed upon their children; and Susan flew down the vistas after Chip....

Boyne and Judith were alone. They had wandered away into one of the _bosquets_: solitary even in summer, with vacant-faced divinities niched in green, broken arcades, toy temples deserted of their gods. On this November day, when mist was everywhere, mist trailing through the half-bare trees, lying in a faint bloom on the lichened statues, oozing up from the layers of leaves underfoot, the place seemed the ghostly setting of dead days. Boyne looked down at Judith, and even her face was ghostly.... “Come,” he said with a shiver, “let’s get back into the sun—.” Outside of the _bosquet_, down the alley, the children came storming toward them, shouting, laughing and wrangling. Boyne, laughing too, caught up the furry Chip, and swung him high in air. Bun, to attract his attention, turned a new somersault at his feet, and Zinnie and Beechy squealed: “Martin, now’s the time for presents!” For, since the Princess Buondelmonte had been so shocked by their cupidity, it had become a joke with the children to be always petitioning for presents.

“Little devils—as if I could ever leave them!” Boyne thought.

“Tea, sir?” said the steward. “Ham sandwiches?”

XXXII

Boyne was coming back from Brazil. His steamer was approaching Bordeaux, moving up the estuary of the Gironde under a September sky as mild as the one which had roofed his sleep when, nearly three years earlier, he had dreamt he was at Versailles with the little Wheaters.

Three years of work and accomplishment lay behind him. And the job was not over; that was the best of it. A touch of fever had disabled him, and he was to take a few weeks’ holiday in Europe, and then return to his task. His first idea had been to put in this interval of convalescence in America; to take the opportunity to look up his people, and see a few old friends in New York. But he was sure to find Rose Sellars in New York, or near it; he could hardly go there without being obliged to see her. And the time for that had not yet come—if it ever would. He looked at his grizzled head, his sallow features with brown fever-blotches under the skin, and put away the idea with a grimace. The tropics seemed fairly to have burnt him out....

Rose Sellars had been kind; she had been perfect, as he had foreseen she would be. He knew that, after a winter on the Nile with Aunt Julia, she had returned to her own house in New York; for, once re-established there, she had begun to write to him again. From her letters—which were free from all recriminations, all returning to the past—he learned that she had taken up her old life again: the reading, the social round, the small preoccupations. But he saw her going through the old routine with transparent hands and empty eyes, as he could picture the ghosts of good women doing in the world of shadows.

His own case was more fortunate. His eyes were full of visions of work to be, his hands of the strength of work done. Yet at times he too felt tenuous and disembodied. Since the fever, particularly—it was always disastrous to him to have to interrupt his work. And this flat soft shore that gave him welcome—so safe, so familiar—how it frightened him! He didn’t want to come in contact with life again, and life always wooed him when he was not at work.

It was odd, how little, of late, he had thought of the Wheaters. At first the memory of them had been a torture, an obsession. But luckily he had not given his address to Judith, and so she had not been able to write; and Mrs. Sellars had never once alluded to the children. His work in Brazil lay up country, far from towns and post-offices; but bundles of American newspapers straggled in at uncertain intervals, and from one he had learned that the Wheater divorce had been pronounced in Mrs. Wheater’s favour, from another, about a year later, that Cliffe had married Mrs. Lullmer. There had been an end of the story ... and Boyne had lived long enough to know that abrupt endings were best.

As his steamer pushed her way up the estuary he was still asking himself how he should employ his holiday. All his thoughts were with his interrupted work, with the man who had temporarily replaced him, and of whose judgment and temper he was not quite sure. He could not as yet bring himself to consider his own plans for the coming weeks, because, till he could get back to Brazil, everything that might happen to him seemed equally uninteresting and negligible.

At dinner that evening, at the famous _Chapeau Rouge_ of Bordeaux, the fresh truffles cooked in white wine, and washed down with a bottle of Château Margaux insensibly altered his mood. He had forgotten what good food could be like. His view of life was softened, and even the faces of the people at the other tables, commonplace as they were, gradually began to interest him. At the steamer landing the walls were plastered over with flamboyant advertisements of the watering-places of the Basque coast: Cibour, Hendaye, St. Jean de Luz, Biarritz. A band of gay bathers on a white beach, under striped umbrellas, was labelled Hendaye; another, of slim ladies silhouetted on a terrace against a cobalt sea, while their partners absorbed cocktails at little tables, stood for Biarritz. The scene recalled to Boyne similar spectacles all the world over: casinos, dancing, gambling, the monotonous rattle and glare of cosmopolitan pleasure. And suddenly he felt that to be in such a crowd was what he wanted—a crowd of idle insignificant people, not one of whom he would ever care to see again. He fancied the idea of bands playing, dancers undulating over polished floors, expensive food served on flowery terraces, high play in crowded over-heated gaming-rooms. It was the lonely man’s flight from himself, the common impulse of hard workers on first coming out of the wilderness. He took the train for Biarritz....

The place was in full season; but he found a room in a cheap hotel far from the sea, and forthwith began to mix with the crowd. At first his deep inner loneliness cut him off from them; that people should be leading such lives seemed too absurd and inconsequent. But gradually the glitter took him, as it often had before after a long bout of hard work and isolation; he enjoyed the feeling of being lost in the throng, alone and unnoticed, with no likelihood of being singled out, like Uncle Edward, for some agreeable adventure.

Adventure! He had come to hate the very word. His one taste of the thing had been too bitter. All he wanted now was to be amused; and he hugged his anonymity. For three days he wandered about, in cafés, on terraces above the sea, and in the gaming-rooms. He even made an excursion across the Spanish border; but he came back from it tired and dispirited. Solitude and scenery were not what he wanted; he plunged into the Medley again.

On the fourth day he saw the announcement: “Gala Dinner and Dance tonight at the _Mirasol_.” The _Mirasol_ was the newest and most fashionable hotel in Biarritz—the “Palace” of the moment. The idea of assisting at the gala dinner took Boyne’s fancy, and in the afternoon he strolled up to the hotel to engage a table. But they were all bespoken, and he sat down in the hall to glance over some illustrated papers. The place, at that hour, was nearly empty; but presently he heard a pipe of childish laughter coming from the corner where the lift was caged. Several liveried lift-boys were hanging about in idleness, and among them was a little girl with long legs, incredibly short skirts and a fiery bush of hair. Boyne laid down his paper and looked at her; but her back was turned to him. She was wrestling with the smallest of the lift-boys, while the others looked on and grinned. Presently a stout lady descended from a magnificent motor, entered the hotel and walked across the hall to the lift. Instantly the boys stood to attention, and the red-haired child, quiet as a mouse, slipped into the lift after the stout lady, and shot up out of sight. When the lift came down again, she sprang out, and instantly resumed her romp with the boys. This time her face was turned toward Boyne, and he saw that she was Zinnie Wheater. He got up from his chair to go toward her, but another passenger was getting into the lift, and Zinnie followed, and disappeared again. The next time it came down, two or three people were waiting for it; Zinnie slipped in among them, flattening herself into a corner. Boyne sat and watched her appearing and disappearing in this way for nearly an hour—it was evidently her way of spending the afternoon. And not for the first time, presumably; for several of the passengers recognised her, and greeted her with a nod or a joke. One fat old gentleman in spats produced a bag of sweets, and pinched her bare arm as he gave it to her; and a lady in black with a little girl drew the latter close to her, and looked past Zinnie as if she had not been there....

At last there came a lull in the traffic, the attendants relapsed into lassitude, and Zinnie, after circling aimlessly about the hall, slipped behind the porter’s desk, inspected the letters in the mahogany pigeon-holes against the wall, and began to turn over the papers on the desk. Then she caught sight of the porter approaching from a distance, slid out from behind the desk, waltzed down the length of the hall and back, and stopped with a yawn just in front of Boyne. For a moment she did not seem to notice him; but presently she sidled up, leaned over his shoulder, and said persuasively: “May I look at the pictures with you?”

He laid the paper aside and glanced up at her. She stared a moment or two, perplexedly, and then flushed to the roots of her hair. “Martin—why, I believe it’s old Martin!”

“Yes, it’s old Martin—but you’re a new Zinnie, aren’t you?” he rejoined.

Her eyes were riveted on him; he saw that she was half shy, half eager to talk. She perched on the arm of his chair and took his neck in her embrace, as Judith used to.

“Well, it’s a long time since I saw you. I’m lots older—and you are too,” she added reflectively. “I don’t believe you’d have known me if I hadn’t spoken to you, would you?”

“Not if you hadn’t had that burning bush,” he said, touching her hair. His voice was trembling; he could hardly see her for the blur in his eyes. If he closed his lids he might almost imagine that the thin arm about his neck was Judith’s....

“Well, how’s everybody?” he asked, a little hoarsely.

“Oh, awfully well,” said Zinnie. “But you don’t look very well yourself,” she added, turning a sidelong glance on him.

“Never mind about me. Are you here together, all of you—or have the others stayed at Dinard?”

“Dinard?” She seemed to be puzzled by the question.

“Wasn’t your mother going to buy a house in the country near Dinard?”

“Was she? I dunno. We’ve never had a house of our own,” said Zinnie.

“Never anywhere?”

“No. I guess it would only bother mother to have a house. She likes hotels better. She’s married again, you know; and she’s getting fat.”

“Married?”

“Didn’t you know about that either? How funny! She’s married to Mr. Dobree,” said Zinnie, swinging her legs against Boyne’s chair.

Boyne sat silent, and she continued, her eyes wandering over him critically: “I guess you’ve had a fever, haven’t you—or else something bad with your liver?”

“Nothing of the sort. I was never better. But you’re all here, then, I suppose?” His heart stood still as he made a dash at the question.

“Yes; we’re all here,” said Zinnie indifferently. “At least Terry’s at school in Switzerland, you see; and Blanca’s at a convent in Paris, ’cos she got engaged again to a lift-boy who was a worse rotter than the first; and Bun and Beechy are in Rome, in their father’s palace. They hate writing, so we don’t actually know how they are.”

“Ah—” Boyne commented. He looked away from her, staring across the deserted hall. “But Chip’s here?” he asked.

Zinnie shook her red curls gravely. “No, he isn’t here either.” She hesitated a moment, swinging her legs. “He’s buried,” she said.

“Buried—?”

“Didn’t you know that either? You’ve been ever so far away, I suppose. Chip got menin—meningitis, isn’t it? We were at Chamonix, for Terry. The doctors couldn’t do anything. It was last winter—no, the winter before. We all cried awfully; we wore black for three months. And so after that mother decided she’d better marry Mr. Dobree; because she was too lonely, she said.”

“Ah, lonely—”

“Yes; and so after a while we came to Paris and she was married. It must have been two years ago, because the steps were with us still; and Beechy and I wore little pink dresses at the wedding, and Bun was page. I wonder you didn’t see our photographs in the ‘Herald.’ Don’t you ever read the ‘Herald’?”

“Not often,” Boyne had to admit.

Zinnie continued to swing her legs against the side of his chair. “And it’s then we found out what Mr. Dobree’s Christian name is,” she rambled on. “We had work doing it; but Terry managed to see the papers he had to sign the day of the wedding, and so we found out. His name’s Azariah. We never thought of that, did we? It’s the name of a man who made millions in mines; so I s’pose when he died he left all his money to Mr. Dobree.”

“Made millions in mines?”

“Well, that’s what Scopy said. She said: ‘Not know that? You little heathens! Why, of course, Azariah was a minor prophet.’”

“Oh, of course; naturally,” Boyne murmured, swept magically back to the world of joyous incongruities in which he had lived enchanted with the little Wheaters.

“So we think that’s why he’s so rich, and why mother married him,” Zinnie concluded, with a final kick on the side of the chair; then she slid down, put her hands on her hips, pirouetted in front of Boyne, and held out the bag of pink glazed paper which the old gentleman who wore spats had given her. “Have a chocolate? The ones in gold paper have got liqueur in ’em,” she said. Boyne shook his head, and she continued to look at him attentively. At last: “Martin, darling, aren’t those _Abdullahs_ you’re smoking? Will you let me have one?” she said in a coaxing voice.

“Let you have one? You don’t mean to say you smoke?”

“No; but I have a friend who does.” Boyne held out his cigarette-case with a shrug, and she drew out a small handful, and flitted away to the lift. When she came back her face was radiant. “It’s awfully sweet of you,” she said. “You always were an old darling. Don’t you want to come upstairs and see mother? She was a little tired after lunch, so I don’t believe she’s gone out yet.”

Boyne got to his feet with a gesture of negation. “Sorry, my dear; but I’m afraid I can’t. I—fact is, I’m just here for a few hours ... taking the train back to Bordeaux presently,” he stammered.

“Oh, are you? That’s too bad. Mother will be awfully sorry—and so will Judy.”

Boyne cleared his throat, and brought out abruptly: “Ah, she’s here too—Judy?”

Zinnie stared at the question. “Course she is. Only just today she’s off on an excursion with some P’ruvians. They’ve got an awfully long name—I can’t remember it. They have two Rolls-Royces. She won’t be back not till just before dinner. She’ll have to be back then, because she’s got a new dress for the dance tonight. It’s a pity you can’t come back and see her in it.”

“Yes—it’s a pity. But I can’t.” He held out his hand, and she put her little bony claw into it. “Goodbye, child,” he said; then, abruptly, he bent down to her. “Kiss me, Zinnie.” She held up her merry face, and he laid his lips on her cheek. “Goodbye,” he repeated.

He had really meant, while he talked with her, to go back to his hotel and pack up, and catch the next train for anywhere. The place was like a tomb to him now; under all the noise and glitter his past was buried. He walked away with hurried strides from the _Mirasol_; but when he got back to his own hotel he sat down in his room and stared about him without making any effort to pack. He sat there for a long time—for all the rest of the afternoon—without moving. Once he caught himself saying aloud: “She’s got a new dress for the dance.” He laughed a little at the thought, and became immersed in his memories....

Boyne dined at a restaurant—he didn’t remember where—turned in at a cinema for an hour, and then got into his evening clothes, and walked up through the warm dark night to the _Mirasol_. The great building, shining with lights, loomed above a tranquil sea; music drifted out from it, and on the side toward the sea its wide terrace was thronged with ladies in bright dresses, and their partners. Boyne walked up among them; but as he reached the terrace a drizzling rain began to fall, and laughing and crying out the dancers all hurried back into the hotel. He stood alone on the damp flagging, and paced up and down slowly before the uncurtained windows. The dinner was over—the restaurant was empty, and through the windows he saw the waiters preparing the tables again for supper. Farther on, he passed other tall windows, giving on a richly upholstered drawing-room where groups of elderly people, at tables with shaded lamps, were playing bridge and poker. Among them he noticed a stout lady in a low-necked black dress. Her much-exposed back was turned to him, and he recognised the shape of her head, the thatch of rippled hair, silver-white now (she had kept her resolve of not dyeing it), and the turn of her white arms as she handled her cards. Opposite her sat her partner, also white-headed, in a perfectly cut dinner-jacket; the lamplight seemed to linger appreciatively on his lustrous pearl studs and sleeve-links. It was Mr. Dobree, grown stouter too, with a reddish fold of flesh above his immaculate collar. The couple looked placid, well fed, and perfectly satisfied with life and with each other.

Boyne continued his walk, and turning an angle of the building, found himself facing the windows of the ballroom. The terrace on that side, being away from the sea, was but faintly lit, and the spectacle within seemed therefore more brilliantly illuminated.

At first he saw only a blur of light and colour; couples revolving slowly under the spreading chandeliers, others streaming in and out of the doorways, or grouped about the floor in splashes of brightness. The music rose and fell in palpitating rhythms, paused awhile, and began again in obedience to a rattle of hand-clapping. The floor was already crowded, but Boyne’s eyes roved in vain from one slender bare-armed shape to another; then he said to himself: “But it’s nearly three years since I saw her. She’s grown up now—perhaps I’m looking at her without knowing her....”

The thought that one of those swaying figures might be Judith’s, that at that very instant she might be gazing out at him with unknown eyes, sent such a pang through him that he moved away again into the darkness. The rain had almost ceased, but a faint wind from the sea drove the wet air against his face; he might almost have fancied he was crying. The pain of not seeing her was unendurable. It seemed to empty his world....

He heard voices and steps approaching behind him on the terrace, and to avoid being scrutinised he mechanically turned back to the window. And there she was, close to him on the other side of the pane, moving across the long reflections of the floor. And he had imagined that he might not know her!

She had just stopped dancing; the arm of a very tall young man with a head as glossy as his shirt-front detached itself from her waist. She was facing Boyne now—she was joining a group near his window. Two or three young girls greeted her gaily as she passed them. The centre of the room was being cleared for a pair of professional dancers, and Judith, waving away a gilt ballroom chair which somebody proffered, remained standing, clustered about by other slender and glossy young men. Boyne, from without, continued to gaze at her.

He had not even asked himself if she had changed—if she had grown up. He had totally forgotten his fear that he might not recognise her. He knew now that if she had appeared to him as a bent old woman he would have known her.... He watched her with a passionate attentiveness. Her silk dress was of that peculiar carnation-pink which takes a silver glaze like the bloom on a nectarine. The rich stuff stood out from her in a double tier of flounces, on which, as she stood motionless, her hands seemed to float like birds on little sunlit waves. Her hair was moulded to her head in close curves like the ripples of a brown stream. Instead of being cut short in the nape it had been allowed to grow, and was twisted into a figure eight, through which was thrust an old-fashioned diamond arrow. Her throat and neck were bare, and so were her thin arms; but a band of black velvet encircled one of her wrists, relieving the tender rose-and-amber of her dress and complexion. Her eyes seemed to Boyne to have grown larger and more remote, but her mouth was round and red, as it always was when she was amused or happy. While he watched her one of the young men behind her bent over to say something. As she listened she lifted a big black fan to her lips, and her lids closed for a second, as they did when she wanted to hold something sweet between them. But when she furled the fan her expression changed, and her face suddenly became as sad as an autumn twilight.

“_Judith!_” Boyne thought; as if her being Judith, her being herself, were impossible to believe, yet too sweet for anything else in the world to be true.... It was one of her moments of beauty—that fitful beauty which is so much more enchanting and perilous than the kind that gets up and lies down every day with its wearer. This might be—Boyne said to himself—literally the only day, the only hour, in which the queer quarrelling elements that composed her would ever join hands in a celestial harmony. It did not matter what had brought the miracle about. Perhaps she was in love with the young man who had bent over her, and was going to marry him. Or perhaps she was still a child, pleased at her new dress, and half proud, half frightened in the waking consciousness of her beauty, and the power it exercised.... Whichever it was, Boyne knew he would never know. He drew back into an unlit corner of the terrace, and sat there a long time in the dark, his head thrown back and his hands locked behind it. Then he got up and walked away into the night.

Two days afterward, the ship which had brought him to Europe started on her voyage back to Brazil. On her deck stood Boyne, a lonely man.

THE END

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_By EDITH WHARTON_

THE CHILDREN TWILIGHT SLEEP HERE AND BEYOND THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE OLD NEW YORK FALSE DAWN THE OLD MAID THE SPARK NEW YEAR’S DAY THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON THE AGE OF INNOCENCE SUMMER THE REEF THE MARNE FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Added table of Contents. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.