PART I

DULCE DOMUM

[I]

AUNT LAVVY called Hal as he was passing through the hall:

“Is that you, Hal dear? Will you be going anywhere near Platt’s?”

“No, but I can quite easily. Why? Do you want me to look and see if your fortune’s still there?” For Aunt Lavvy banked at the local branch of Platt’s; it was only open three times a week from ten A. M. to twelve; Buckler’s Cross was not as yet a very important country suburb.

Aunt Lavvy wanted an open cheque for five pounds cashed. And after Hal had teased her a bit more as to what she could possibly want with all that money at once, he took the cheque and departed. But first of all he kissed her, because she was rather a dear little old lady, and was just the right height for the manly embraces of seventeen-and-a-half. Most men feel it a merit in their more aged female possessions to be small and frail-looking, to have pink cheeks and silvery hair, and a soft voice and delicate white hands.... Aunt Lavvy achieved all this; she was the perfect cliché among dear little old ladies, down to the very lavender-bags she placed among her linen. That was why all the young Maxwells adored her. Directly a new visitor came to the Laburnums, she or he was hauled along as a matter of course to see Aunt Lavvy and be approved by her; and her sweetness and little-old-ladyness made them vaguely discontented with their own female home belongings, equally ancient, but possibly more strident.

Correctly speaking, she was not an aunt at all. Because the Maxwells’ house was at one time too large for them, she had come as a paying-guest during a financial slump. And Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell encouraged “Aunt Lavvy” among the children, as it covered the weekly payment of two guineas with a soft slither of sentiment, and created a legend in the eyes of the world--the Buckler’s Cross world. Later on, when the financial slump was over, and the Maxwells’ house was too small for them, Aunt Lavvy remained on in the best bedroom--by dint of increasing pressure in the rest of the house--because to evict her would have destroyed the aunt legend, and clearly revealed the former reason of her being. Besides, she was already a tradition: “What should we do without Aunt Lavvy?” Everybody took their little confidences to Aunt Lavvy--except, perhaps, Mrs. Maxwell. Mrs. Maxwell had rather a reddish face, and a haggard neck, and a very loud bustling voice. No, she did not take her little confidences to Aunt Lavvy. But they got on very well together. They had known each other as girls.

And Ursula also kept rather aloof from the careless edict that Aunt Lavvy was to be worshipped. But then Ursula, like most flappers of sixteen, was in a very tumbled condition of hair and spirit. It was well known that she had had a rave on Aunt Lavvy at one time; and there is no queen so dethroned as a schoolgirl’s last rave but one. Not that Ursula went to school; she “studied” with Miss Roberts, the governess. Lottie also did her lessons with Miss Roberts--but Lottie was only ten; hence the distinction in terms. But it was the same Miss Roberts. Grace and Nina had gone to a High School about twenty minutes by train from Buckler’s Cross. They were only separated by two years in age. But Ursula came five years after Nina, with Hal between; and the governess was originally provided for her till she was old enough to follow her sisters. By the time she was nine, Lottie was three, and Miss Roberts had to be kept on for Lottie--Nurse had quite sufficient to do with William, just born--and Mr. Maxwell, still careful, though the meagre period was over, thought it extravagant to pay Miss Roberts for the education of Lottie alone. So Ursula continued to do her lessons with the governess, only they became studies, and the nursery automatically merged into a schoolroom whenever Nurse and William were not occupying it. By the time William was five, the nursery was declared altogether schoolroom, and would have remained so but for the unfortunate claims of Gracie’s babies....

[II]

MR. MAXWELL was so anxious to be thought not original that even when he made a remark of his own, he stressed it as though it were a quotation appearing between inverted commas: thus, “Good looks never stay at home” was his own summing-up of his four daughters’ futures; though it sounded like one of those wise homely proverbs spoken to us by our nurses, who in turn have had it from their grandmothers and aunts. Gracie, Nina, Ursula and Lottie were all fairly pretty girls, though Nina’s were the sort of fresh and bonny good looks that were led off by the complexion, and Gracie’s depended upon the weight and length of her straight light-brown hair. It really was the sort of heavy hair which of its own accord dragged loose from its hairpins and came lolling down--a proceeding very useful to sirens and Loreleis, but a matter of catastrophe to Grace, who, a modest, sensible girl, was sure that whenever it happened, nice men would think she was encouraging them....

Nevertheless, already at nineteen she was engaged to Stanley Watson; and a year later she married him.

Up till now, the Maxwells ought to have presented the appearance of just an ordinary family. Viewed as a group, they were entirely ordinary. Mr. Maxwell was a wholesale stationer, only peculiar in that he was a thin man who behaved as though he were burly, for he was genial and boisterous and rollicking, and when he lost his temper he bellowed. As a thin man, he should have been slightly sarcastic and querulous and timid in society. But otherwise he kept strictly to precedent--he wore a gold watch-chain dragged loosely across his middle; he caught his train to the city nearly every morning, and missed it about once a week; he was proud of his sons, and kept them short of pocket-money; he loved his wife, and gave her no pocket-money at all. Oh, there was nothing _outré_ about Mr. Maxwell! He was even far more polite to strangers than to his own family, and always remembered to ask Aunt Lavvy if she liked the outside piece, when he carved. “No favourites” was his motto where the children were concerned--yet Hal was the eldest son, and of this his sentimentality made great parade, treating him sonorously, as though he were the “heir” of which a great family had been anxiously expectant, to carry on the tradition and title ... the eldest son! Hal had received no concrete privileges in the paternal will; all seven inherited exactly alike; nevertheless--the eldest son! In the bosom of abstract emotion it ranked with “God Save the King” and “Gentlemen, the Ladies!”

“Good gracious, no, my husband doesn’t want Hal to go into the business. William, our baby, is going into the business. He’s so bloomin’ steady.” It was painful when Mrs. Maxwell used words like “bloomin’,” but when she was a handsome girl she was admired for it--and habits stick. “Hal’s going to the ’Varsity to read for the Law; and Bunny--no, we’re afraid he’ll run into debt if we send him to Oxford or Cambridge. Bunny’s very wild--he’s only fit for the Navy really. But my husband says it’s too late, so I suppose he’ll end up in the Colonies, poor old boy.”

For the Maxwells were ordinary even to the possession of the usual black sheep in their midst.

To continue with the greys: after Father--but a long way after--Mother. Father and Mother still upheld each other’s authority in the old perfunctory way: “You must obey your mother,” “You mustn’t disturb your father,” ... but they made no definite stand against the increasing freedoms and privileges of the new generation. On the whole, they were tolerant, because it was at the moment the national habit to be tolerant and not violently to enforce the precepts of right and wrong....

The war was only lately over, and youth in consequence was in a state that could only be described as “difficult.” Youth was touchy and arrogant, morbid and defiant ... and even the younger members of the young generation, those who would have gone to the war if the war had lasted longer, like the Maxwells, became slightly infected by the spirit of truculence towards mere elderliness, futile, ineffective, and powerless--now.

So Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell were indulgent, because all parents were being indulgent. And they did not know that the underneath motive was fear, because they never probed for underneath motives. And at any rate, they were safe in assuming that the children had inherited the tradition of the thoroughly commonplace, in that they were never in the least likely to do anything “different” ... “different,” in the Maxwell parlance, standing for the “wrong” of our Puritan forefathers.

Unless Bunny...

Bunny, aged fourteen, with dark eyes that charmed, and a wayward tuft of hair sticking out rebelliously from the crest of his head, was a perpetual anxiety. He was always in a scrape, and always created an atmosphere of apprehension that his next scrape might be very much worse. Idle, popular, dare-devil Bunny ... handsome, mischievous Bunny ... Bunny whistling, and Bunny penitent.... Oh, the Colonies, certainly! But meanwhile he had his place in the picture of a family group.

William idolized Bunny, and on his behalf broodingly resented Hal’s superior status. A stern-eyed child, William, and persistent, fair, and with a thick stubbiness to his eyelashes which seemed the right outward expression of an equally thick stubbiness in his character. He pushed Bunny’s claims whenever he could! but Hal--well, Hal was such a splendid big fellow, an athletic hero at his school, captain of the Cricket Eleven, and moderately intelligent into the bargain. And the eldest son. And everybody’s favourite, too; for although he was no beauty, with his large beaky nose and freckles, yet he had quiet pleasant ways, and an air of good-humoured and even, at times, whimsical authority ... his sisters could not defer to him enough, especially Nina.

And they snubbed Bunny--especially Nina. She said flippantly that it was “good for his soul.” Perhaps it was! Of all the young Maxwells, Nina was the most sure of herself. She went out more than the others--perhaps this was the cause of it. For people were wont to “take her up”; especially people with no daughters of their own; richer people than the Maxwells, who lived in larger houses, and owned cars. For Nina was such a jolly girl, and so competent; not as colourless as Gracie, nor over-shy and over-bold by fits and starts, like Ursula. She could cut sandwiches without spoiling the loaf, and play tennis and hockey, and drive a car, and manage sick animals; and could be useful in emergencies; and showed strong white teeth whenever she laughed--which was often--and she was never ill, and never unhappy, and “What _I_ like in that girl,” said old Colonel Mathers, to sum up, “is that there’s no nonsense about her!”

A man was present when this remark was made, who gathered hostile stares by ejaculating that he could imagine nothing more ghastly and revolting--yes, he used these extreme terms--nothing more ghastly and revolting than a girl with no nonsense about her; and that the ideal girl is delicately hung about with nonsense as a Chinese temple with tiny silver bells.

He went on for quite a long time in this vein; but as nobody argued with him, and as he was entirely wrong, and as he wasn’t regularly of Buckler’s Cross, but only an occasional visitor to the Mathers, his extraordinary opinions hardly mattered.

Nina had been brought up as modern public-school girls often are, to a public-school-boy cult, that despised affectation, aimed at being hard and decent and straight; to have no use for sentiment. She had an aggressive manner of addressing her younger sisters and brothers as “my good lad,” “young woman,” “Tuppence,” “my poor brat”--(the first was usually Bunny and the last William)--but with Hal she was as bright marble changed to flowing water under the moonlight. Hal was a hero. Hal could do no wrong, or if he did (but he couldn’t) it was right. By Hal, her days began and her nights ended. She wound up her watch and set the time by Hal; her rigid standards and tastes were supple as silk to defer to his. She was his trumpeter, his prophet and his slave. Triumphantly, she compelled every one to own him a marvel, both for his separate acts and for his existence as a complete unit.

He really _was_ quite a nice boy! Ursula and Grace and Lottie were just as fond of him as Nina, but they did not create such a dust about it. And Aunt Lavvy positively dimpled when the holidays drew near, and said she must get out her prettiest cap, because she had a sweetheart on the seas and his ship had been sighted ... that was Aunt Lavvy’s quaint way of talking.

She told Nina that once there had been a young spark like Hal, tall and broad and with nice manners and steady grey-blue eyes--“Did he--was he--drowned, Aunt Lavvy?” in a whisper; and after a long pause--“Yes, my dear....”

So Nina and Aunt Lavvy shared this secret and were great friends. But she puzzled Nina by liking Bunny too--and how could any one who saw the glory of Hal, put up with Bunny, who was always tearing about and whistling and getting into trouble and being gaily impudent to his elder sisters--“You don’t know everything, Nina.” “My poor lad, and you don’t know anything.” This was family repartee.

But Bunny had once tiptoed in to Aunt Lavvy’s room when she lay in bed with a headache, and tilted the entire remains of his mother’s bottle of eau-de-Cologne--borrowed for the occasion--over the sufferer’s forehead and into her eyes.... He, too, was a dear boy. Aunt Lavvy remembered these little things.

Nina, whenever re-adopted by yet another childless couple anxious to give this bright young creature a good time, was always glad to introduce Aunt Lavvy to them on first bringing them to the Laburnums; and only regretful that she could not truthfully say: “This is my mother, dear Mrs. Mathers; Mother dear, this is Mrs. Mathers, who has been so kind to me----”

_Why_ was it that Mother always had to rush away and “get dressed” at whatever hour of the day you brought in a visitor? Why couldn’t she _be_ dressed, like Aunt Lavvy? Why couldn’t she be found in the sitting-room, cool, silvery, and with that reposeful I-and-my-Maker look about her that auræd Aunt Lavvy? instead of invariably making a hurried entrance, a gasp of words beginning with, “Oh, my dear,” hands still red from recent washing, and that unfastened hook of her dress, three down from the collar-band, two up from the waist, betraying that she had dressed in too much of a hurry to summon help. And why did she wear dresses with trimming on them--half-inch trimming bought at the local draper’s by the yard, with tiny beads stitched on--two or three that hung by a thread?

Aunt Lavvy, when strangers were introduced to her, always listened attentively to Nina’s preliminaries. And once having got them rightly placed in her clear mind, she gave them discriminate welcome, and appropriately shaded conversation. But Mother--she just made a general rule of being kind to anybody who was kind to any of her children, not just Nina or Hal, as it ought to have been--but _any_ of them! and then soused them in a wash of general conversation....

After the visit, Mrs. Mathers--or her prototype--would talk exclusively of Aunt Lavvy, how she reminded them of some one or something: “my own dear grandmother” or a miniature in the Wallace Collection, or a bit of porcelain; or a poem by “some man who always writes those sort of poems--let me see, now--who _is_ it?”

“Austin Dobson,” Nina supplied swiftly. But she owed that to Ursula: “A Gentlewoman of the Old School.”... Ursula had discovered it while she had a rave on Aunt Lavvy; and the latter had been delighted.

“Listen, Aunt Lavvy--it’s just like you. I found it with a lot of mess and rubbish in my Reciter’s Treasury”--Miss Roberts painstakingly taught both Ursula and Lottie elocution. “Listen, Nina, doesn’t it fit?

“For her, e’en Time grew debonair. He, finding cheeks unclaimed of care, With late-delayed faint roses there, And lingering dimples, Had spared to touch the fair old face, And only kissed with Vauxhall grace, The soft white hand that stroked her lace, Or smoothed her wimples.”

“And yet,” Aunt Lavvy confessed, when Ursula, with a rival’s triumphant glance at Nina, read aloud this strophe, “how often, when I was younger, I longed to be dashing, like your mother!”

Perhaps she had sensitively divined Nina’s unspoken resentments about those exuberant dresses in bright cloth, untidily trimmed with braid, and the top part of the bodice filled in with silk that almost matched; perhaps she guessed that Florrie Maxwell’s children, her daughters anyhow, made mental comparisons ... longed for a more dove-coloured personality in their mother.... At all events, her remark was a secret kindness to Florrie....

“Dashing!” Ursula repeated, wide-eyed. “Is that what they’d have called Mother, then? Her own girl friends--and men? Dashing?”

“Very dashing, my dear. You should have seen her enter a ball-room!”

“Are any of us--dashing?” The word had a savour, and Ursula sniffed it up appreciatively.

“Well--Nina, perhaps, more than the rest of you.”

Nina, who liked being called “a sport,” was for once vexed with her beloved Aunt Lavvy for the selection.... “Dashing”--it sounded old-fashioned, like “The New Woman” and “bloomers.” And anyway, you didn’t want to be just only what your mother had been--especially if you didn’t admire her.

It was in Aunt Lavvy’s room that this talk took place. Presently: “I’ve got to go,” said Ursula, abruptly ending Aunt Lavvy’s reminiscences which were told in a manner whimsical, yet tinged with gentle regret, in illustration of her own foolish shyness as a girl.

“Well, go! You needn’t always talk about it for an hour first.”

But how should Nina remember the terrific difficulties of entrances and exits at Ursula’s hoyden stage of life; how to make them graceful and yet without any gawky preliminaries ... especially when your divinity was in the room, watching you, or understandingly not watching you.... It was much better when you were not romantically attached to anybody--then you just banged in and out, all anyhow--and much more successfully. Once, Nina herself was Ursula’s royalty.... Nina at seventeen was very lovely to a small twelve-year-old sister--the careless swagger of her walk and her clear gay laugh, and her established supremacy as captain of the school games ... white flannel shirt and loosely-knotted dark-green tie, and thick golden hair, hard-brushed to a door-knocker plait--like a well-groomed boy Nina was then, with such hard clean outlines that Ursula used to feel an ecstatic longing to follow them with the point of her finger.... “Dashing”--yes, it was the right word.... Only she could give you nothing from her cleanness and clearness--she walked right through your worship, cutting it.... And you began to crave for an aroma of more gracious tenderness; and there was Aunt Lavvy, ready to love you.

You had worshipped her before, of course, but not separately--just one of the cantata. But _now_....

“You’ve got to tidy up for dinner, too, Nina!”--they didn’t dress for dinner at the Laburnums, unless people were invited--they “tidied up.”

“You mind your own business, young woman. _I_ don’t have to scrape myself for hours with a pumice-stone!”

“Well----” Ursula still dawdled; it was hateful leaving those two alone, with Nina’s air of suspended confidences. The queen dethroned and the reigning queen.... Ella Wheeler Wilcox.... “The Old Stage Queen.” And then Ursula suddenly saw the humorous impossibility of Nina, broken and bowed and faded from neglect....

“What’s the joke?”

“There isn’t one. I say--I’ve got to go.”

“Still?”

“Oh--shut up!”

Aunt Lavvy said: “What a pity the key of our door has been lost, isn’t it, Ursula? You know I always call it ‘our door.’ Because otherwise we might be paying calls on each other all day long.” She had noticed how the child grudged the minutes spent away from her.

“Yes.” Ursula was demure, but a little breathless.

After she had gone, Nina said, in the relaxed tone of one to another when a third has left the room: “How exactly alike all flappers are!”

“There’s a great deal in Ursula,” protested Aunt Lavvy, in affectionate championship.

“There’s a great deal in every flapper,” Nina declared, with a flash of observation--“too much! If Ursula played more games, she wouldn’t be so rude and touchy and loving and excitable and pert and untidy and sulky----”

“Oh, Nina, Nina, what a lot of hard adjectives to pelt one little sister! Let me add a few nice ones. Ursula is honest, loyal, truthful----”

“Well, I should jolly well hope so. Hal would soon let her know about it if she wasn’t. Those are just the ordinary decent things. It’s not likely one would be anything else. Unless Bunny----”

“Hush!” Aunt Lavvy held up a warning finger. “Not a word against my Bunny, if you please. He may be a black, black Bunny among the white ones--but you take his scrapes too seriously, Nina darling. Try and laugh more at Bunny and Ursula--a kind laugh, not a sneering one. It’s only with love and laughter that you can help them over their awkward years.”

Privately, Nina thought it priggish to want to help any one with love and laughter--especially your own brothers and sisters. But as she valued Aunt Lavvy’s good opinion only next to Hal’s, she said nothing. And after a reflective pause, Aunt Lavvy went on:

“Though I have often----” she broke off. Then started again: “Hasn’t it been rather unfair to Ursula not to send her to school, like you and Gracie? Miss Roberts is a sweet, good soul, but not exactly stimulating, is she? Sometimes, Nina--I’ll confess it to you”--and Aunt Lavvy’s smile was mischievous--“I have longed for her to contradict me just once, so that I could contradict back again!”

“Poor old Gums--she is a bit flabby! But I’ll tell Mother what you say about sending Ursula away to school.”

In the room which was hers, adjoining Aunt Lavvy’s, Ursula stood for a moment gazing hard at the locked door between; wondering for the hundredth time why, adoring Aunt Lavvy, she still kept the lost key concealed under some letters in her trinket-box.

Nina’s voice, a little raised, was audible: “I’ll tell Mother what you say about sending Ursula away to school.”

Twang twang--deep down in Ursula’s inside ... that sick feeling of _un_safety--treachery--Aunt Lavvy--Uriah the Hittite.... “Wants what I’ve got, so a plot to send me away.”

“_Stick_ to what I’ve got.” Ursula flung a few steps of a dance at the locked door--an impish, impudent dance.

And now she felt extraordinarily free and happy--suddenly extricated from her thick syrupy phase of Aunt-Lavvy-worship. Hitherto, she had always been dimly afraid it might grow so intense as to involve her in the final foolishness of--of finding the lost key.

[III]

IF the Maxwells had had a place in a morality drama or in “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the name given them would have been Average--Mr. and Mrs. Average....

Mr. Maxwell had bought the Laburnums with the two thousand pounds which had come to his wife on the death of her father. It was a large house, with plenty of rooms, but Grace and Nina and Hal were already in existence, and, as Mr. Maxwell said in his usual style of a proverb already existing: “Three’s a beginning, but seven’s a family”--so the largeness of the house hardly mattered. He and Florrie had the best bedroom, with dressing-room attached, and Grace and Nina shared a room, of course, and Hal slept with Nurse; and then there were a couple of spare-rooms, a tiny “landing” room, a day-nursery, and a double-fronted attic, and the servants’ room. Mr. Maxwell had his study, and downstairs were the dining-room and drawing-room and Mrs. Maxwell’s own sitting-room; also a small conservatory. Round the back and sides of the house was a garden that had surrendered its pleasing jungle-effect to Mr. Maxwell’s persuasion, without ever quite achieving the trim cultivation that he desired. It was really just the right sort and size of house for the Maxwells, except for the discovery that it did not hold a single laburnum; but Mr. Maxwell soon had them planted firmly on either side of the front door, because, although thin, he was a bluff man and scornful of pretension--he disapproved of his neighbour in the avenue who, never having fought in the Boer War, lived in a house called “The Kopje.” “The Kopje! Ridiculous! Ha ha.” But it never struck him that it might be as exquisitely ridiculous for a man who _had_ fought in the Boer war to live in a house called “The Kopje.”

Then came Ursula, and the twin boys, Bunny and Ronald.... Hal into one of the spare-rooms now, and Ursula in the dressing-room off her parents’ bedroom, so that her mother could keep an eye on her while she was still small, as Nurse had as much as she could manage with the twins. Ronald died, from an attack of measles that Mrs. Maxwell refused to coddle--she was the sort of mother who wants all her youngsters to grow up sturdy, and says that measles will “do ’em good--clear the blood... and it’s better for ’em to have it now than later.” She’s a much better sort of mother than the over-anxious kind, only sometimes a child dies.

Lottie ... and lastly, William. But in the meanwhile had occurred the financial slump, and the installation of Aunt Lavvy in the best bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell moved into the last of the spare-rooms, Nurse had charge of the two youngest, and Bunny shared with Hal, to his enormous contentment. The extra landing bedroom was given to them for a den to romp in.

The financial slump was over, and the Maxwells prospered, and were able to afford a governess for Ursula and Bunny--young ruffians of seven and five. She slept in the attic, converted into a bedroom of romantic views and skylights and sloping murky caves quite unappreciated by Miss Roberts, who nevertheless protested with smiling gums that she would be “perfectly comfortable up here, thank you, Mrs. Maxwell. I couldn’t ask for anything nicer.” Aunt Lavvy remained as a presence of tranquil sunshine in the house, and the sum she paid for her board and lodging was so unobtrusive as to be practically invisible. But the pressure on space was beginning to be felt, and once or twice Mrs. Maxwell suggested moving. But her husband refused: “Clover’s not for the rover,” he said. He also said that he wanted the kiddies to think of the Laburnums as “home.” His real reason was a subconscious terror of change, a diffident fear of not being able to cope successfully with innovation--he always had an underneath reason he knew very little about, to correspond with every reason of which he was definitely aware. So had his wife. And, directly they were old enough, so had Grace, Nina, Hal, Ursula, Bunny and Lottie. Not William. William had only one layer of thoughts--a good stolid layer with plenty of wear in it.

Certainly, a change of residence did involve possible readjustments of habit, and so of thought: the dining-room window might be placed differently; their chairs at table might be altered round; and if the station were nearer, he might not be obliged to start till twenty-five to nine instead of twenty past eight, and that would throw the whole day out of gear.... And if they left Buckler’s Cross, the face of the new ticket-collector would be unfamiliar; and he would not know at first what time the post went out....

So they stayed at the Laburnums: They had got used to the house, and a little squashing was nothing to make a fuss about.

When Grace, at nineteen, married Stanley Watson, any of the family who minded congestion might have drawn a tentative breath in anticipation of relief in the removal of even one of their number. But Watson was a careful young man, and suggested to his pending father-in-law that he did not care to enshrine Grace in a home till he could afford one that was worthy of her. He was saving up for it; but he desired all sorts of extras in decoration and furnishing which he dragged from obscure volumes in the British Museum. He was a Profound Reader. Grace would have been contented with domesticity on a much cosier plane--she was the “domestic one,” as Nina was the “popular one,” Ursula the “beautiful one” (rather doubtfully, because the critic who had publicly pronounced this decision had a different standard of beauty from the Maxwells) and Lottie the “helpful one,” rather on the same lines as Grace, but with more initiative; she was fond of preparing “little surprises” for her family, such as drawers tidied, or a pincushion restocked; and when these were discovered, she slipped unobtrusively away to avoid thanks. But Stanley, tenderly, refused to budge an inch: “No shoddy imitation panelling for _you_, Graciewigs--not _good_ enough. I’ll have it done after the Monastery in Gewitterburg, destroyed by the invading hordes of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War. What a horrible loss”--thickly; Stanley was spasmodically rather thick in his speech, but his ideals were conscientiously pellucid.

“We can’t be mean, Will; he’s offered to pay, and it’s only for a short while,” argued Mrs. Maxwell with her husband--also a careful man.

So another bedroom had to be snatched from the living-room area; Mrs. Maxwell’s sitting-room was converted into a bedroom for Stanley and Grace--“You never use it much, Florrie; and after all, the whole house belongs to you,” said Mr. Maxwell, being generous.

A year later, Lottie went up to destroy Miss Roberts’ attic solitude; and William, who would have liked the attic, had a bed in the room which Hal and Bunny used to look on as their “den”; during the day, they insisted it was still their den, which was very upsetting to the orderly soul of William. For the night-nursery and Nurse herself were appropriated--“only temporarily, of course,” for Gracie’s first baby. The second followed two years later ... and it was very fortunate that Ursula and Lottie would soon have no more need of the schoolroom, because then it could revert to its original state of day-nursery; meanwhile, it was day-nursery or schoolroom, according to the party at the moment in possession. Nurse and Miss Roberts were quite polite to each other, and even treated the rival claim with deference.

The eye of an efficient organizer would have no doubt noted that the marriage of Grace had left Nina with a good-sized double bedroom, undisputed. Obviously, there was room for either Ursula or Lottie with her. And it seemed irrelevant, too, that Ursula’s bedroom should be adjacent to Aunt Lavvy’s; the three boys, Hal, Bunny and William, could have shared the attic, and revelled in it--attics are suitable things for boys. Then their “den,” which was also William’s room, could have been Miss Roberts’ private bedroom, always presuming that governesses have need of privacy, and that Lottie slept with Nina. An alternative grouping would have been Nina and Ursula to share Nina’s room; Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell to have retained their own bedroom, with the room leading out of it to replace Mrs. Maxwell’s sitting-room; the latter to be Aunt Lavvy’s bedroom, with Grace and Stanley in the spare-room.

And the most normal and convenient solution would have eliminated Aunt Lavvy, and sent Grace and Stanley and their paraphernalia of Nurse and babies, to a home of their own.

But the existing arrangement was not one instantaneous and successful reconstruction after one instantaneous cataclysm; but the result of gradual changes, haphazard shifts and displacements ... and it built itself up on the assumption that nobody minded anything, and that, in the Maxwell scheme of things, a sense of property in space simply did not exist. As long as chaos was bound about by four outer walls of home, the squanderings and overlappings within did not matter. Almost every room had its double uses, except Father’s study, which alone remained aloof from any sudden bewitchment or transformation. Father did not study, but he had to have his study, because he was Father.... It was sacred ground--and if not held sacred, profane. But the drawing-room, which also held the telephone and the piano, was common ground for all, as well as cold storage for unwanted callers. Stanley, in the evenings, conducted his “researches” in the dining-room; Ursula and Lottie had their morning lessons in the nursery, while the babies were out; Hal and Bunny developed photographs in William’s bedroom. When Nina was away visiting, they temporarily turned her bedroom into a guest-room. Mrs. Maxwell, of course, had the whole house.

Had the Laburnums a personality and a life of its own, you can imagine it with adenoids, and breathing heavily from the chest--that laboured bronchial breathing which forebodes trouble....

[IV]

AFTER Hal had gone out with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque, the house and garden became slumbrous.... It was September, that mercurial month of the year which at one moment raises a sigh for fires in the listless grates, and at one moment is rich with excitement of high winds and burning blue skies, and boughs that with every creak and sway fling treasure to the ground.

But today the air was grey and melancholy; the leaves were yellow and brown, without flame or gesture. Presently it began to rain. Miss Roberts, superintending Ursula’s Shakespeare hour, and Lottie’s French, in the pseudo-schoolroom, shivered a little, and corrected a rebellious thought by a dutiful amendment of how right it was of her employer not to sanction fires before October the first: “Young folk carry their fires inside ’em,” he said.

“Bijou, caillou, chou, genou, hibou, joujou, pou,” recited Lottie with fluency, and waited for praise.

“Well, dear?” Miss Roberts waited expectantly.

“Are the only nouns that take ‘x’ in the plural, or else the only ones that don’t; I’m not sure.”

“But you _ought_ to be sure, Lottie. Suppose you were in France, and had to ask for any of those things in a great hurry.”

“I don’t think she’s likely to,” Ursula argued staidly. “Jewels, pebbles, cabbage, knees----” She burst out laughing. “Fancy wanting knees in a hurry in France--or owls!”

Lottie began to giggle, too; and Miss Roberts, feeling that there was something vaguely indecent about knees--in France--changed the subject.

“It’s raining. I expect it will be too cold for Nurse to stop out with the babies. So we’d better hurry up.” She took the Macbeth, with its copious notes, from Ursula’s hands, and began to question her from the glossary:

“‘Paddock,’ a toad. Lily-livered means cowardly. Marry--a corruption of the Virgin Mary, a slight oath. Moe--more. Sinel was the Earl of Northumberland.”

“No, no, Ursula. That’s _Siward_. Sinel ... think now.”

Ursula shook her head.

“Macbeth’s father, according to Holinshed,” Miss Roberts quoted triumphantly from the book.

“Well, anyway, he doesn’t come into the play; and Shakespeare wrote it, not Holinshed, so----”

“Posset”? questioned Miss Roberts patiently. She knew that Ursula in these silly exasperating moods, when she questioned everything, must simply not be encouraged.

“Posset is hot milk poured on ale or sack, having sugar, grated biscuit, and eggs, with other ingredients boiled in it, which goes all to a curd....” The girl’s eyes grew dreamy, as they watched the nipping of the rain beyond the window.... Posset--to sip in front of the fire in solitary warmth and flickering half-lights.... “Posset” one should drink alone, always; wassail in company. Should she make festival out of the day, and light her first fire, after lessons, up in her room? Or else wait a bit longer, tantalize herself with the promise of a yet colder, drearier morning? How the others had ragged her when she asked for five hundredweight of coal as a birthday present from her parents. “_Private_ coal ... to use in my room.... I could clear out the little cupboard under the stairs just outside, and keep it there ...” stammering, wildly eager--they had asked her to name what she most wanted ... why should she ask for a wrist-watch or a new tennis racquet or a book, because these were things they thought she ought to want most? Ursula enjoyed nonchalantly telling people that she hated reading--they were always so shocked: “When I was your age, I was a regular bookworm.” There were only two sorts of books you got as presents--the first kind had a lot of gold and bright colour on the outside, and was the story of the favourite of the school, who was also the leader in all the scrapes, so impulsive and warm-hearted that even the headmistress could not help smiling indulgently at her; or else a classic suitable for her age: “Villette,” or “The Cloister and the Hearth,” or “Adam Bede,” or “Pride and Prejudice,” and Dickens and Scott, of course, bound in calf or suède, with thin leaves and gilt edges.

The first kind wasn’t bad when you were Lottie’s age. The second were just bores.

For not one of Mr. Maxwell’s children was of that well-known exceptional type who steal unobserved into the study and rummage among the shelves, and one day light by chance on Gibbon or Swinburne, and become absorbed ... and are never the same afterwards.

Books help to furnish a room, undeniably; but otherwise--“the Maxwells do not read”.... It never occurred to them. But they gave books as presents.

“Are you sure, Ursula, you wouldn’t rather----?”

A tentative, slantwise look, first at her mother, then at her father.... “I’d much rather have fires of my own, please.”

Yes, she knew she could get warm at the drawing-room fire whenever she wanted to, but that was everybody’s fire; and the schoolroom fire still belonged to Nurse; she dried the babies’ washing on the high wire guard, so that there was always that steamy stuffy smell.... And the kitchen fire was only to cook by, and--and----

“Bedroom fires are a luxury, Ursula--you know that.”

“Not if it was a _birthday_ present”--how unfair, to call it a birthday present, rightfully due, and in addition to censure it as a luxury. They wouldn’t have called a new tennis racquet a luxury every time she played with it.... Oh, didn’t they--couldn’t they--see?

They ceded her the five hundredweight of coal, but tempered the generosity by making “Ursula’s coal” the current family joke. Hal, with a great shout of laughter, suggested a poker as his birthday present--and was surprised when the offer was promptly accepted. Up came William and Lottie, then, on the morning of October the fourteenth, with two dozen penny bundles of sticks--their gift! Would she deign to accept it? Ursula was very grateful. After that, of course, everything in existence was offered her for her fire, from an empty reel of cotton to a broken umbrella. Bunny pretended to be in awe of his sister, as a fire-worshipper, and read up their rites and practices in the Encyclopædia in order to taunt her with them at the public table. Also he would ask her every breakfast-time if she had counted her five hundredweight, insisting that he had heard a burglar stealing along her passage during the night--“And you bet he was after a lump of your coal, Ursula!”

Grace wondered if it was quite safe: “Ursula’s such a scatter-brain. She might easily go to sleep and leave it burning, mightn’t she?” thinking of her two babies in the house. And Nina, by calling her “Cinders,” imagined she had thus said the final word on the matter.

But: “My own room and my own fire”--the last word was surely with Ursula. To be able to choose the mood and the moment for a fire; to say: “Now--and exactly now” without waiting for a grown-up to order it and a servant to light it; to be its supreme mistress, poke it when she pleased, draw her small basket-work armchair as near as she wanted it, dole out her coal, so that each piece should yield its utmost; and when it sank to a luminous twitching landscape of caves and archways, then to pull the faded red-serge curtains across her window, still with that consciously imperious feeling, tuck the four walls of her room warmly around her, and the dim ceiling with its waves of orange reflected above the fireplace, and the boarded floor.... Then--just to sit there and exult! Exult _at_ something ... the bumping, congested, ricochetting life in the rest of the house, perhaps--“like billiard-balls making cannons all the time,” Ursula once phrased it to herself.

She forgot these ecstasies of mutinous solitude when she was downstairs, playing an eager set of tennis with Hal or Nina, getting into scrapes with Bunny, or simply joining in the habit of general ragging or bickering which occurred regularly four times a day round a table, and which was the only up-to-date presentment of what was still symbolically known as “family life.” “Family life” occurred at meal-times, but otherwise, and as a social force, it was not in a robust condition. Each member of the large household led a curiously detached life; they saw so much of each other that they never bothered to talk; they knew so much of each other’s corporeal presence, that the spirit was taken for granted. Besides this, there was the tradition of rudeness and snubs between brothers and sisters, which it would have been bad form to violate. Familiarity breeds, not contempt, but strangeness. Thus Bunny never thought of beginning a long pally intimate talk with Ursula or Hal--he saw them both all day and every day; Nina, though she was a fanatic on the subject of Hal’s perfections, knew nothing whatever about his mental life; and carried all her own revelations of a private Nina well away from the Laburnums--to Mrs. Mather, say; or to Mary Cliffe, who understood her so well. Hal had his school-friends; Mrs. Maxwell her Buckler’s Cross ladies; Mr. Maxwell his city cronies; Ursula her room; William his neat collections of whatever was collectable, and an odd liking for snatched half-hours with Nurse, when he talked rather slowly and ponderously of his ambitions and general outlook and the injustices meted out to Bunny, and she said at intervals: “Nonsense, Master William--I don’t believe half you say, and you’re in my light”; Miss Roberts her diary--yes, bless her, she wrote a diary, and kept her soul, such meagre allowance of it as she was able to save from the day’s propinquities, tightly pressed between the leaves; Lottie walked arm-in-arm with other ten-year-olds, and invited them to tea and giggled confidentially with them in corners of the garden....

But it was a queer arrangement, although so commonplace that no one stopped to think it queer--all these people tightly jammed together, and knowing no more of each other than was visible to the eye.

Aunt Lavvy, perhaps, was deposit for the biggest proportion of real Nina, real Bunny and Hal and Grace and Ursula. But Aunt Lavvy had quaint ways which always brought out the best in all of them--a best that they were wont to leave behind with her when they carried their grubbier loads of humannesses elsewhere; they knew they could as securely count on finding it again whenever they might want it, as though Aunt Lavvy were the cloakroom in a large station.

... “Posset”--it ought to be brought in by an old woman, plump and garrulous, with rosy dimpling cheeks, wearing one of those two-horned head arrangements with folds of drapery round the chin--“Thank you, good Dame,” or--“Good my Nurse”--What a pity Nurse wasn’t either the Shakespeare or the historical kind--she had such a sharp bony little face and thin hair, and wore round hard hats when she took the babies out, instead of bonnets, so that she never looked cosily ancient....

The rain spattered impatiently at the window, but Ursula decided nevertheless not to light her first fire that morning. After tea was best--it would give her time to feel thoroughly chilled and forlorn, so as to make it more worth while; and the weather might get stormier, too, by tonight--the Equinoctial Gales--they came in September--or was it the Gulf Stream? No good to ask Miss Roberts; she’d presume on the fact that you had asked an intelligent question, to tell you much more than you ever wanted to hear about either.... And she’d look it up in the physical geography books, and some time next week: “By the way, Ursula, you were asking me about the Gulf Stream--” in her high, bright, perpetually-interested voice--long after you’d forgotten there was such a thing! Poor old Gums.... She was one of those who strove to make lessons as good as play--

A shuffling and chattering beyond the door, and Nurse came in, carrying Baby. A very pink and burbly child with scanty fair hair, replica of Stanley Watson, and Rossettishly called by him Honor Rose, clutched stumblingly at her hand. “Give over now, Rosie!”

At once, Miss Roberts began to gather up books and rulers and pens, with an air of great energy: “All right, Nurse, we’re just off; give us half a minute, and you’ll see the last of us----”

“There ain’t no call to hurry, Miss Roberts, if you’ve not done yet”--baby mysteriously upside down already, and Nurse with her mouth full of safety-pins; “I couldn’t very well keep them out in the rain till twelve o’clock----”

“No, no, of course not----”

“But you don’t disturb me if I don’t disturb you, and if you don’t mind my sewin’-machine presently.” She set baby upright again, with a little shake.

“But indeed, we can get on quite well in the dining-room----”

“It’s not cleared from breakfast yet. I noticed as I came in. That Minnie is a lazy fat thing----”

Miss Roberts gathered up the last of the schoolroom into her arms, signed to Ursula to take the inkpot, and to Lottie to put the chairs back, and prepared to leave the nursery with a touch of pleasant dignity--“because really I could hardly let myself be drawn into a discussion with Nurse about the other servants----”

“... Such a pity your walk was spoilt! Was Rosie a good little girl?--but I always think that September--Ursula, you’ve forgotten your compasses--No trouble at all to move, really--”

“Good is as good goes,” Nurse replied cryptically. “Neither of them is a patch on Master Hal and Master William--and _they_ were nothing much, neither!” hastily, to impress Lottie and Ursula with her complete detachment from an attitude of faithful devotion ... and Ursula thought regretfully of Good-my-Nurse and her Posset. “Well, if you won’t stay, don’t, but then don’t say I’m drivin’ you out of the room, because you’re welcome enough.”

“No, indeed, I’m sure it’s a great deal more your little kingdom than ours.”

“It was your schoolroom before it was my nursery,” Nurse argued against herself, struggling to maintain her part in the atmosphere of mutual courtesy. “But then, again, it was my nursery before it was ever your schoolroom, too, so----”

Baby began to roar; and Miss Roberts, still in an affable state of thanks, departed with Ursula and Lottie.

Lessons were continued in the drawing-room. Aunt Lavvy sat with the paper in the armchair near the window; Mrs. Maxwell bustled in and out, and Lottie practised at the piano, with a metronome; while Ursula, who was rather good at mathematics, evilly pretended that she could not understand why the right angle A B C _must_ be equal to the right angle X Y Z, because Miss Roberts so obviously did not understand why, either. Lottie was always “especially nice” to Miss Roberts; for Grace had explained to her that one ought to be nice to dependants; but Ursula had portions of conscience strangely undeveloped. At her very best, she was never so considerate as Grace and Lottie, nor so thoroughly decent as Nina. And Gums exasperated her by always proving softer material than the substance against which she was thrown.

“Don’t be rude to your inferiors, kid--’tisn’t sporting,” Nina bluntly told her, after overhearing a skirmish.

“It makes them feel their position so terribly,” said Grace more kindly.

“I’m rude to everybody else, so if I stopped being rude to just Miss Roberts, it ought to make her feel her position ever so much more.”

“It ought to, but it wouldn’t, because she’s got no brains,” Bunny demolished Ursula’s not unskilful defence.

“Then she oughtn’t to be our governess.”

“You’d get’em just as soft at school. One of our chaps----” Bunny told the anecdote, with himself quite well-placed as a picturesque centre. “If you’ve got real brains you don’t teach, because it makes you too sick having to listen to the duds.”

“What costly rot you talk, Bunny. I suppose that’s just because it makes them sick at Winborough having to teach _you_----”

This was just family repartee; and “costly,” imported by Hal as the latest Winborough fashion, successor to “posh” and “nimble,” could be applied almost anywhere in conversation. Stanley Watson tried to squash it by a quality of bluff humorous pedantry, which he used rather successfully--he thought--to conceal his very real pain at the way the English language was perverted and constricted by the young Maxwells; and his equally real suspicion that Hal’s attitude towards himself was more amused than respectful. And indeed, there was something about Stanley’s personality which was a perpetual twitch to Hal’s funny-bone. Stanley liked being humorous, but resented being funny; he made infamous puns which he knew would provoke groans from the entire family; but only Hal perceived that Stanley felt the groans were additionally to his credit--it was manly to be groaned at. When his eldest daughter was brought in to say good-bye to her parents and grand-parents before going ta-ta on a Sunday morning, Stanley said things like: “Hello! When is a bonnet not a bonnet? When it’s Honor Rose (on a rose),” in a deep thick voice that obviously found the passage down his nose almost impregnable. And then a ruminative twinkle might be seen in Hal’s eyes, whenever he was present; a twinkle that said: “Watson _is_ such a costly ass!”

But if Stanley humorous was funny, Stanley’s serious side was funnier still--to Hal. Grace thought, as was right and fitting she should, that Stanley had a fine character; for instance, he went regularly every Wednesday evening to play dominoes with a bedridden Boer-War veteran--“whose only pleasure it was.” “Whose only pleasure it was” must have been Gracie’s phrase, because Stanley never mentioned his little errand of quiet charity; slipped off very unobtrusively on Wednesdays; and when afterwards greeted by a forgetful: “Where have you been?” said: “Oh, just out ...” and quickly turned the subject, conveying the reproof: “If one can’t do a thing like that for a fellow human being without bragging about it----”

“But he never misses a Wednesday--” Grace again--“however tired he is.”

It was Hal’s ignoble ambition to see him miss a Wednesday. “Because if only he missed just one, the poor old chap, What’s-his-name, could at least _hope_ he’d miss another....”

Hal was a nice lad, in spite of the position of exalted lordliness he occupied in the eyes of the household--not forgetting to except Stanley and William. He taught his younger brothers and sisters their place, but not unkindly; he did not talk as eternally of cricket as might have been expected of the captain of the Winborough first eleven, because he did not talk very much at all--it wasn’t done, unless you were a costly gas-bag like Bunny. He ragged Stanley and teased Miss Roberts, and was uncommunicative with his father, like all glorious young heroes of seventeen-and-a-half. His principal occupation was, in the holidays, lounging past the doctor’s house, in a rough greeny-grey tweed coat, on the chance that either of the doctor’s two daughters, Maisie or Dorothy, might be coming out. They were both pretty, and he was quite impartial in his flirting; the latter process only meant a saunter beside one or the other while he described how he would give her tea in his own rooms at college next year, or “quite a costly hop old Dick Fraser lugged me to, night before last. Wish you’d been there, though.” Hal was especially good-natured when people were in trouble--they had to be in real trouble, not just miserable. He let his mother kiss him, whenever she really felt like it; and made his acolyte, Nina, very happy by the simple process of always finding her plenty of work to do in his service; she knitted ties and socks for him, bought his presents for other people, and kept other people well-informed as to the exact shade of his own desires in the way of presents; kept his tennis racquet in its press, and Bunny well aware of his lowliness. What more could a sister do?

Hal was without question the most masculine element at the Laburnums--excepting a back-view of William, broad and stolid, bending over a pit that he was digging at the far end of the garden, where the shrubbery degenerated into a mere tangle of shrubs. This pit was one of seven, and when asked what they represented, William said, “Earthworks”; and, if further pressed as to why he dug them--“Because I want to,” after a moment’s quiet and conscientious reflection.

Neither Mr. Maxwell nor Stanley Watson, however, was as casually masculine as Hal, because they were more preoccupied with manliness. And Bunny-- “Oh, Bunny’s like a girl,” said Nina, “he shows off!” Bunny was sensitive, too, in addition to all his other palpable faults.

[V]

THE inferior son of the Maxwells was wretchedly throwing a ball against the side of the house, on the same morning that Hal went on Aunt Lavvy’s errand, and the Watson babies drove Miss Roberts and her pupils into the drawing-room. He was remembering with apprehension a large and cleverly comical caricature which he had executed in brushwork on the inside of the lid of his late form-master’s desk, representing that gentleman himself saying waggishly: “Believe me, my boy, this is going to hurt you much more than it hurts me!”--a perversion of the popular sentiment which he had picked up from one of Saki’s books, and which he used “at least three hundred and sixty-four times a year more than it was funny!” as Bunny savagely put it. But Bunny’s report had revealed, when his father opened it, that his late form-master was not going to be late at all--in fact, that Bunny had not got his remove; which was quite bad enough in itself without the additional trouble of the caricature which would be discovered in Bunny’s presence on the first day of the coming term.

And then there was the matter of the unpaid tuck-shop bill, which the proprietor had threatened to send in to Mr. Maxwell unless settled by the end of the holidays.

Bunny for the moment did not feel at all handsome and dare-devil, which was how he best liked to see himself--not discouraged by the fact that the best sort of boy does not possess the faculty for seeing himself in any guise. One of Hal’s favourite stories against his younger brother related how Bunny, hopping pyjamaed round their bedroom one evening, paused in his carol of sheer _joie de vivre_ to say with simple sincerity: “Aren’t I lucky? I’m good-looking, brilliant, athletic--I can draw and swim and jump better than any other chap; I’m popular and brave----”

For weeks, the entrance of Bunny was the signal for a concerted roar of “Aren’t I lucky?” from his brothers and sisters; till superseded by the joke of Ursula and her coals.

Anyway, Hal was a good chap, and did not pass on the tale at Winborough. Hal _was_ a good chap ... would it be any consolation to pour out all the mess to him? Not that he could help, but Bunny was one of those who find relief in merely unburdening themselves. Only, although Hal listened with his rough fair eyebrows drawn critically together over his beaky nose, and then summed up and gave shrewd advice, semi-humorous but never didactic, Bunny, being sensitive, could not help feeling that Hal’s natural reticence was silently longing for equal reticence in Bunny; and that he was always apprehensive of an unburdening that would go beyond decency....

Perhaps Aunt Lavvy, of more porous material, might be a better selection for his present confidences. Yes, a fellow might go to Aunt Lavvy tonight after tea, when her room was genial with soft lamplight from behind the delicate pinky silk shade, and seductive with favouritism.... “I believe she likes me best of all, right enough!”

Grace would say that of course Aunt Lavvy loved them all alike. Grace was a fathead ... she talked of loving people alike as though it were a merit.

And Nina would say----,

“Oh, _sisters_!” Bunny, wet through with the drizzling rain, and thoroughly exasperated with things in general, tried to hurl his ball neatly into the open aperture of Nina’s window. It entered the room, certainly, but through the lower pane, not over it. “Damnation!” Bunny ran quickly into the house to recover his property. Once in the girls’ room, as it was still called, though Gracie had departed, he regretted that he had not brought up a fat toad he had noticed hopping in the mush of wet leaves outside, and promptly made an extra journey downstairs to fetch it. The room annoyed him with its spruce impersonal air, Nina’s cups and hockey-group photographs ranged all along the mantelpiece, as though she were a boy--as though she were Hal.

“I do hope no rotten man will ever make old Nina still more pleased with herself by getting struck on her!”--with an apprehension of the awful calamity this would be.

Bunny was quite busy and happy settling the toad in a temporary paradise of Nina’s wash-basin full to the brim with water, lifted unsteadily and set upon the carpet ... a surrounding tent of sheets pulled from Nina’s bed and draped over chairs and a tripod of golf-clubs.

Gradually, from a mischievous schoolboy, he was metamorphosed into a child again, by the unfailing fun of building up things with any odd material at hand into an erection for which they were not intended ... a child absorbed and solemn, breathing rather hard, dark rings of hair fallen over his forehead ... a crooning commentary on his own action forming at last into a little song. “That’s right, tie them together.... Hi, young Toad, you stop where you are ... this is _home_ in the basin. I’ll get you some mud presently ... here’s the other sheet ... peg it down--shall I leave an archway? ... he’ll get out, though--books so that they don’t blow up from the floor ... that’s splendid.... The Toaderies.... Paint the sheets blue so that he thinks it’s the sky above him ... ink would do ... night sky.... Bother! it’s slipped again.... Where did I put that string? ... a cave of broken flowerpots....”

“_Bunny!_”

He came up with a drowned expression--the miscellaneous heap built up on the carpet of Nina’s room slipped away from the illusion of under-the-sea grottos of which he had been inspired architect, and was merely silliness--he waited for Nina to say so, knowing there was no escape.... Why had he lugged in that old toad? It was not even as though Nina were afraid of them; then, there would have been some sense in it. If Nina had been a proper girl----

Sullenly, Bunny rose to his feet: “All right, I’ll clear it all up,” he said, hoping she would think he had used her possessions in wanton and destructive mischief, and not as it had really been, because for the past seven years he had been groping for his bricks....

“Is this your brother? I seem to remember him much bigger and fairer,” said the lady with whom Nina had just been spending the week-end, and who had accompanied her home. Mrs. Tom Fraser had been pretty once, but her tendency to fat had concentrated in the neighbourhood of her chins, so that her round little features looked as though they had been pushed upwards into a space much too small for them.

“You’re thinking of Hal,” said Nina, in a tone to correspond. “I’m sorry about this mess, Lill; come down into the drawing-room and see Aunt Lavvy--and I’ll speak to you later, young man!” Nina was very brightly flushed with the effort to keep her temper, and not betray the presence of the toad to Mrs. Fraser, who was short-sighted. She had quite a fondness for toads herself, but Lill would certainly have screamed.

Down in the drawing-room, she was soothed to find Aunt Lavvy and Hal, tempered by the less satisfactory presence of Miss Roberts and Ursula doing mathematics, and Lottie still practising with the metronome.

“Miss Roberts, do you think we might be very kind to Lottie, and give her ten minutes holiday?” asked Aunt Lavvy pleasantly, as soon as she grasped the identity of Mrs. Fraser.

“Mother,” Nina mentally worked out the usual table of contrasts, “would have apologized twenty times for the drawing-room being used as a schoolroom just today; and then she’d have explained all about Minnie not clearing the breakfast-table, and Gracie’s babies in the schoolroom, but Stanley hoped soon to find the house he wanted--and if she had known Lill was coming, etc.--all without stopping Lottie.”

That nicely-behaved child, in the meantime, had drawn a chair for Mrs. Fraser close up to Aunt Lavvy’s, and had brought her a footstool and a cushion, with the solicitude for old age which she bestowed upon every one over thirty. Then she trotted out of the room, realizing that one less of a crowd was desirable when visitors were present. If it had been afternoon, she would have left a message in the kitchen that there was one extra for tea. As it was, her period of urgent usefulness at an end, she drifted into Nina’s room to see if The Cup needed polishing; and was there ardently welcomed by Bunny, toiling to drag the sheets back to their former neatness over the bed.

“Here--catch hold!”

“Oh, Bunny, are you in a scrape _again_?”

Bunny laughed, and shook back his hair. “Oh, one more or less----” he boasted. “The sooner I come to a bad end, as old Nina puts it, the better! Then you’ll all stop waiting about for it! Think of me, Lottie, in convict’s garb, coming wearily home after twenty years’ hard, and leaning over the churchyard wall and counting your graves, and wishing I’d been a better brother and a better son----” Bunny acted the part with gusto, and collapsed into silent sobs with his arms on the bed-rail.

“You wouldn’t be wearing convict’s garb after they’d let you out,” Lottie, unimpressed by the pantomime, corrected him. “And there’s no reason why we should all be in our churchyard graves in twenty years. Unless, of course, there’s been an epidemic,” she added, after a moment’s careful thought.

Bunny started at her, and said from the fulness of his heart: “What a beastly little whelp you are!”

“Oh, Bunny, when I’m helping you!”

And he wondered, as so many of his sex have wondered before him, why just _his_ sisters should be devoid of beauty, charm, intelligence, humour and all generosity of spirit.

Down in the sitting-room, the telephone-bell rang, interrupting a pleasant conversation in which Nina, Hal and Mrs. Fraser described the latest tango fox-trot step to Aunt Lavvy.

“Hello--hello--yes?--Oh certainly. Wait a minute.” Nina laid down the receiver--“It’s for you, Aunt Lavvy.”

Hal and Mrs. Fraser, both keen dancers, lowered their voices and went on talking about the Revolving Bellows step. Mrs. Maxwell, who from upstairs had heard the telephone and thought it must be for her--most people who are at all psychic seem to catch this urgent personal note in the bell--rushed into the room, but was checked to find Aunt Lavvy at the receiver, and a visitor present: Mrs. Fraser, whom she hardly knew, but who was always so kind to Nina. She began to tell her so, with effusion, but was hushed by Nina, because Aunt Lavvy had looked round from the ’phone with a little appealing smile which meant, “Please, I can’t hear a word.”

“Yes?--Yes, it is. Platt’s Bank--this morning, yes.--Indeed, I remember, I received them not half an hour ago.--Oh, I am sorry; how very annoying for you, but--of course I will look, just one minute.” Aunt Lavvy turned round again to the room at large: “Nina darling, will you bring me my little bag. There it is, lying on the chair. The clerk at Platt’s has just found out he has given somebody an extra pound note by mistake this morning, and it may quite well be----” she drew out a little packet and counted “One, two, three, four, five--no, there are only five; I’ll just turn the bag out, in case--reticule is the word to use at my age, isn’t it, Mrs. Fraser? A dear old-fashioned word.... Only five treasury-notes, and the half-crown and sixpence I had before--thank you, Nina. Hello----”

Mrs. Maxwell had an irritating habit, when any member of the household was talking on the phone, of offering suggestions and making amendments to their remarks, during the pauses while the person at the other end was speaking. She did so now:

“Tell him the numbers, Lavvy--that may help him--it always helps ’em to know the numbers. And say they’re clean ones. That makes a difference, because the clean ones don’t stick so, greasy things some of them are, disgraceful, I always say----”

“_Mother!_” Ursula now, answering the appeal in Nina’s eyes. Nina did not want to be heard by Lill Fraser rebuking her mother twice running; but it was so awfully ill-bred, the oblivious way she ran on and on.

“Hello. No. I am so sorry for your trouble, but there has been no mistake. I counted them, only five--and my cheque was for five pounds.... Yes, Mr. Hal Maxwell brought them. I had asked him to cash the cheque for me.... Yes, he’s here.... With pleasure--it is just possible----”

“Turn your pockets out, Hal,” laughed Nina. “You’re under a cloud.”

But Aunt Lavvy’s serene face was slightly disturbed as once again she turned round.

“Hal dear, would you mind making quite sure that you have not a hole in your pocket, or a Bradbury sticking between the coat and the lining ... something like that. The young man is so persistent. It is foolish of me, but any trouble with the bank always makes me uneasy, especially when we know Mr. Fennimore so well.”

“This wasn’t old Fennimore himself though--it was the man he always sends over for this branch.” Hal was rummaging energetically in his pockets. “Hullo, here’s--no, it’s only an old letter.” One that Dorothy had written him. He was slightly flushed as he crumpled it back into his pocket. “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy, no luck.”

“I’m afraid we can’t help you to put your mistake right. Neither I nor Mr. Hal Maxwell have got the extra pound note,” said Aunt Lavvy into the mouthpiece. She emphasized her words with rather more bell-like precision than usual, and replaced the receiver with a sharp little click. Mrs. Maxwell let slip the bonds from her checked rush of indignation.

“Really, Lavvy, I don’t wonder you’re annoyed. It’s as though they suspected you, ringing up like that. Really, I wonder you were so polite, considering it was their own carelessness. And when we’ve invited Mr. Fennimore to supper tomorrow--I’m sorry I told Tom sherry as well as port. Well, it’s very unpleasant. Let’s talk about something else. How do you like your new house, Mrs. Fraser?” The conversation, thus manipulated, creaked protestingly at the lack of skill. “So jolly sporting of you to put up with Nina.”

“If only Mother wouldn’t use slang,” groaned Nina to herself; and Aunt Lavvy, more discriminating, thought: “If only poor Florrie didn’t try to please Nina by using slang.”

“It’s not a house, you know, Mrs. Maxwell. Nor even a flat, exactly. They call it a studio flat. And we found we actually have a wee musicians’ gallery on the premises--or rather a gallery without the musicians. Isn’t it quaint?”

“It would be much quainter if you found you had the musicians on the premises without the gallery,” said Ursula, bending over her sums, at the table; she had no right at all to be aware of the social entertainment part of the room; still less to enter into it. It sounded quite gracefully witty in her mind before she actually said it, but directly it was out, she knew it was a failure. It fell into the web of conversation, parting it, instead of drawing it together by tiny silken stitches.... Ursula sat with her head bent and eyelids lowered, while the hot scarlet shame dragged up over her neck. She was conscious of Nina’s astonished disapproval, of Mrs. Fraser’s perfunctory little laugh, of Gums preparing a tactless reproof. But most of all, she was conscious of having been merely clumsy where she had hoped to be effective.

“Can’t Ursula do her lessons--her studies--in the dining-room yet, Miss Roberts? They must have cleared away by now. Why, it’s nearly lunch-time.”

Whereupon Mrs. Fraser naturally said she must go home. And Mrs. Maxwell naturally tried to amend her blunder by inviting her to lunch. And Nina was apprehensive as to the quality of the lunch--quantity there always was. And Aunt Lavvy, usually to be relied upon for those deft silken stitches that were Ursula’s envy, was still not quite serenely herself--it was so disconcerting to be associated, even by a few courteous questions, with financial losses and banks and defaulting clerks.

Finally, Hal saw Mrs. Fraser into her car; and then, instead of returning into the house, disappeared into the shrubbery.

[VI]

HE sat uncomfortably on a damp, tree-stump and stared at William’s earthworks. Was it possible that he had kept back a one-pound treasury bank note? Kept back--taken--stolen.... Rats! Of course he hadn’t stolen it. Tramps stole, and burglars, and--sometimes--servants. Bank-clerks, too, occasionally. “But--but not _us_.”

If he hadn’t--taken--it, though ... and here it was, folded in his coat’s inner pocket--why not have produced it when Aunt Lavvy had turned round from the telephone, and said: “Hal----”? Why not have said: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy. The chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em.”

It was incredible that he should have lied then. That was the real lapse. He could remember the mood in which he had--the horror deepened ... the mood in which he had stolen the note, although it had receded to unfamiliarity.

Hal was magnificently independent of weather, and the colour of the sky and the haze of sunshine over bright September boughs, and such-like absurdities from which frailer natures weave their moods. So that he could, simply from his own fitness of body, feel with a sudden thrill of well-being that the world was an altogether costly place, as he strode along the prim tree-planted roads of Buckler’s Cross on that drizzling morning of dead summer. He had often enjoyed life before, but now, for the first time, he found conscious pleasure in hauling his blessings into parade....

Maisie--he had paused a moment at her gate, and watched her in the front garden, snipping the faded dahlias from their stems--a click of the scissors, and the big clumsy bloom toppled heavily sideways. The rain filmed her long ragged black hair, and glittered in tiny points as she bent and rose again. What a small head she had. If someone were to snick it off, how lightly it would fall among the roots of the Michaelmas daisies. Her old jersey was the same bluish tint as her eyes----

He did not stop to hail her cheerily, but walked quickly on. And he thought of her quite separately from Dorothy--which was a distinct advance.

Footer next term. And the following October, Oxford. Oh--_costly_! Maisie--in a punt ... having tea in his rooms ... old Nina would fix it. He’d begin to collect stuff for his rooms at Christmas.

Perhaps the pond would freeze this Christmas. If so--skating! Maisie, in a little fur cap.... He was rather a nut on the ice. A frosty Christmas would be no end of a rag.

And, beyond all these superficial reasons for elation, in defiance of the ugly road and the moist trickle down his neck, Hal, rather amused at himself for the imagery, wished he could pick up a small sharp knife and cut cleanly out from the shining curve of his future, the one black speck that spoiled it. That beastly business of his subscription to the Memorial to the Winborough Boys fallen in the Great War!

It would crop up quite early in the term, he knew. And his father had promised him an extra five bob for it. Five bob! _Well_ ... but he was Head of the School. And, in a matter like this, to be mean! If it were anything less solemn and patriotic and all that. He had known, personally, Roger Groves, and Latimer Major, and Brown, and Corbett--all among the Fallen. His would be the first name on the list. He ought to set an example of two quid, at least. The Guv’nor didn’t see it. He disapproved on principle of memorials when they took the shape of gym-halls and playgrounds and free libraries ... said that the Fallen would prefer the funds to be spent on providing employment for their discharged comrades. Hal allowed some sense in this, but he doubted if old Latimer were of the kind to worry much either way, wherever he was. But he would have understood, fast enough, that Hal, the first of Winborough’s athletic divinities, setting down his subscription prominently at the top of the list, could not put forth his Guv’nor’s principles as an excuse for shabbiness.

Five shillings. Add fifteen from his own pocket-money--and more than this would absolutely cripple him for the term--and still he was a pound short of what he wanted to give. Hal went into the Bank with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque.

Banks are impersonal things; the money that pours out from them is unlimited. It does not belong to the clerk, nor even to the branch manager. So that, when he came out, and discovered, carelessly counting the notes before thrusting them into his pocket, that he had one pound more in hand then he had to pass over to Aunt Lavvy, he could not, in his swift exultation, visualize any destination for the note except the Memorial.

His imagination, already more exuberantly goat-footed than normal, that morning, had had no time to subside, before this overwhelmingly magical response came to his wish that the blemish might be neatly removed from the radiance of all his tomorrows. His flood of relieved gratitude was as simple as that of some boy of ancient Greece who recognizes, by a gift dropped to his feet from Olympus, that he is indeed beloved of the gods.

Could God really work miracles in this altogether decent fashion, prompt, without excess, and without fuss? Hal didn’t call it God--he felt, dimly, that this would be “swank.” But acknowledging that “luck” had with intention singled him out, he called it luck with a shy reverence that confessed a salute to the Deity behind it.

The lapse had occurred then. An uncanny moral lapse--but not a guilty one. The guilt was later, when, his spirit snubbed by the fact that the pound had not materialized out of nowhere to make him happy, he had not once rapped out: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy, the chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em....”

But he had funked it, seeing then that he might have to explain his luck-loves-me mood in front of Nina and Mrs. Fraser and his mother and Ursula and Miss Roberts---- Anyhow, what were they all doing crowded up in the drawing-room?

“But when did you notice it, Hal?”

“Why didn’t you take it back at once?”

He could have pretended only to discover it in his pocket then ... it had got loose from the little bundle--“Good Lord, yes, here it is!”

But that would have been a lie, too, and secret acknowledgment that he had no claim on the note from the beginning. Before he could decide what to do, he had said: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy----” But now he repudiated the absurd childish mood which had led to his acceptance of bounty from nowhere. For a few moments, he had been more than self-conscious schoolboy; for a few moments, he had held happiness like a flask of wine, shot gold with slanting sunbeams, high above his head. For a few moments he had held it there, shouting....

These emotional chaps--all over the place--came to grief sometime.... “I warn you, Bunny. Besides, it isn’t done.”

There was a stagnant smell round the “earthworks”--rotting leaves, and moisture, and a flat grey sky....

He was, without excuse, without fine shades of “but” and “because,” a thief and a liar--and deadly miserably ashamed of himself.

Hal dragged himself to his feet, and wondered drearily to whom his first abasement and confession should be. If it were Winborough, of course he would go straight to the Head. School was so--uncomplicated, compared with home.

Nina was his natural confidante, as far as he had ever needed one, which was only a very little way. But Nina--thought such a lot of him. You need not necessarily choose your highest pedestal to fall from. Bunny? Before he could decide, Bunny came sauntering dejectedly down to the earthworks.

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Just finished doing old Nina’s bed. She’s frightfully fed-up with me,” Bunny explained inconsequently. “It wasn’t the frog she minded, it was that Fraser person.” Then, with a sudden wrench: “I’m in a deuce of a mess!”

And Hal found himself listening, with his habitual air of half-humorous authority, to Bunny boasting of his caricature and tuck-shop scrapes. Bunny always laughed and boasted when he was a little bit afraid. His eyes pleaded absolution from his senior’s jawing.

“You’ll just have to be a martyr to art and stand the racket from old Bateman. I can’t help you there. But how much d’you owe at Swayne’s? fifteen bob? Right, I’ll drop him a line presently, and say I’ll pay it on the first day of the term for certain. It needn’t get round to the Guv’nor--he’s sick with you as it is for not getting a move.” Fifteen shillings he could spare Bunny from his next term’s pocket-money, and the pound would have to go back to the Bank from whence it came. And the mean five shillings left from the two pounds of that morning’s glorious reckoning, would head the subscription list for the Memorial. He would bend his head to the discipline when it came. But meanwhile, Hal’s tormented self-respect had craved just once more to be the one to help.

“Can you really manage it, old thing?” Bunny dug one heel into the ground, the off-hand gratitude in his voice an imperfect crust to conceal the burning lava of worship within. Hal did not pour out the tale of his crime to his young brother--he could not contemplate reversing their present satisfactory attitude of give-and-take. Besides, Bunny’s almost certainly flippant treatment of the whole matter, sunnily hailing Hal on level ground, would jar badly. With a curt nod, Hal dismissed him, unburdened now, whooping the whole way up the garden.

Not Nina, and not Bunny, then. And Grace was too inconveniently one with Stanley to be considered. Ursula he still lumped together in his mind with Miss Roberts and Lottie as “schoolroom gang.” The Guv’nor would be so--so fatherish, when told: “That any son of mine----” was inevitable. And Mother----

The shock broke over him again. That he was a thief. And that they would all have to know it, all. So what was the sense of rejecting first one and then the other, as a first hearer? He might as well go straight to William! Unless Aunt Lavvy----

If Aunt Lavvy were privately confided in, her instinct would undoubtedly be to shield Hal. He could not help knowing that he was a favourite with her; that, almost as though she were a young girl again, she loved his bigness, his slow chaff of her pretty rosy little weaknesses, his arm round her shoulders. Given the missing treasury note, she could quite easily arrange the matter with the Bank so that no other member of the family need hear anything about--an hour’s theft.

“After all, I found it in my bag with the other notes--two of them had stuck together. Indeed, I do hope you will forgive me for not having looked more carefully when you telephoned....” She might explain it thus. Anyhow, Aunt Lavvy, bless her, could be trusted to manipulate the affair with her most neat-witted diplomacy. Only--would he, by this, be shirking punishment?

But though he was dazed and shocked at his own matter-of-course acceptance of the note, he still did not own to guilt at that point.... It was something that happened to him, not something that he had done. He had not yet begun to figure the special terror that this involved. But, if not guilty, need he seek punishment?

And for the silence which was deliberate and cowardly in the drawing-room just now? “Won’t it do,” Hal wondered, for the first time in his existence of straightforward rights and wrongs, trying to hold the scales on his own responsibility, doing question and answer both, worrying over cause and effect, balancing and fine adjustment, “Won’t it do if I only leave myself that five bob to plank down first on the subscription list?”

By promising Bunny that fifteen shillings, he had doled himself out quite a fair prospect of suffering. Five shillings from the magnificent Head of the School, and next on the list, thirty shillings, say, from that dud Parkinson. The ignominy would have to be endured with shut teeth. “Won’t that be enough?” Hal pleaded with himself, as he thought, enthroned as judge.... Never again, with Whoever--Whatever--had tripped him up with vision and swift miracle, that morning; had cheated him for ever of self-confidence, and given him bewilderment in its stead.... Ought a fellow’s punishment--beastly word--be finely tempered to what he had not felt wrong when he did it? or ought it to be for how wrong it looked after it was done?

Hal, in his first conflict with ethics, was about as happy as a bear in boxing-gloves, putting together the minute works of a watch. His only mitigation was that he did not recognize “the whole foul mess” as ethics, or he would have regarded his entanglement with any process so priggish, as his final humiliation.

“I’ve had enough of this----” and with a sigh of relief at a vigorous decision, he strode determinedly in search of Aunt Lavvy.

But the luncheon-gong was being sounded as he came up the few perforated iron steps that led back from the garden into the drawing-room. And Hal had to submit to another hour with a one-pound treasury note that did not belong to him hidden in his pocket, accumulating reproach with every wasted moment. By now he was violently anxious to deliver it up to Aunt Lavvy, albeit not quite sure what, even then, and after a full confession, might yet remain behind with him.

Directly after lunch, he followed her to her room:

“May I come in, Aunt Lavvy?”

“Of course, my dear boy.” She sank into one of her round chintz armchairs with their dumpy old-rose and silver-grey cushions, and smiled up at Hal, standing with his hands in his pockets--no, with one hand in one pocket--in front of the empty fireplace.

“Not too loud, if this is to be secrets,” she whispered, with a nod at the door leading to Ursula’s room, “well, and so vacation is nearly over. Don’t correct me, Hal. I’m practising for next year when you’re at the ’Varsity. It would be too, too terrible if I spoke of ‘holidays’ then, wouldn’t it?” Then, as his silence became formidable--“Is it really something serious, Hal dear? I ought to have seen you were not in the mood for nonsense. Tell me.”

He brought out a crumpled oblong of thin paper, blurred with a dull brown and green design.

“Here you are,” he said gruffly.

But the situation was fifty times stiffer than he had imagined it. He wished that Aunt Lavvy would hurry up and begin to fold it into pliable shape.

“Where did you find it?” she asked, startled.

“I didn’t find it. I had it.”

Bunny, practised in confession, would have added appeal, whether of eyes or tongue. But Hal was waiting for Aunt Lavvy’s help before he could add anything to the bald statement, though she would understand, even back to the irrelevance of Maisie and the Michaelmas daisies ... perhaps she would of her own accord propose to “put things right” with the Bank. He had come to her eager for this gift of “put-things-right,” and venerating her for possessing it.... His throat was gritty, and his knees felt weak.

“Well!” exclaimed Aunt Lavvy at last in an indignant whisper. And again, after several seconds had loudly ticked away--“_Well_”....

Hal turned his back and rushed out of the room.

What had happened to the world of usual things that, on the same morning as he had betrayed his own code, Aunt Lavvy had failed him?

He stumbled into the den which he shared with Bunny, and where William slept. Bunny was there, sprawling across William’s bed, reading “Penrod.”

“Thought you’d gone out. I say, what about a spin to Badgery Wood this afternoon?” He looked up for an answer, and saw Hal’s face. “I say ... what--what is it?”

Half an hour ago, Hal had been nervous that Bunny, hearing the tale, would be exasperatingly flippant about it. But now, after that terrifying glimpse of Aunt Lavvy metamorphosed by anger, he rather wanted to hear his brother’s light-hearted: “What’s the odds?”

When he had finished, Bunny sat staring at the floor, his face getting redder and redder.

“Well?” impatiently. And, echoing Aunt Lavvy: “Well?” Hal rapped out again.

Bunny was crying.

And then Hal gave in to the fact that one swerve from the usual had carried him into a wholly unfamiliar world of behaviour, and that he could not find any way back again from strangeness.

“When you’ve quite done,” he growled; adding, “You’d have been surprised if I’d burst out blubbing when you let on to me about your precious scrapes, out in the garden just now.”

“This isn’t a scrape,” gulped out Bunny.

Hal stopped being a mere schoolboy.

“You mean ... it’s worse? It’s the sort of thing one gets put in gaol for?”

Bunny nodded, and dabbed his eyes, too shocked and miserable even to care that he had been seen crying.

Hal sat down on the edge of the bed, hands interlocked across his knees, his broad shoulders bent forward.

“That’s just it”--after a long pause. “It puts the wind up me a bit to realize that if I could freeze on to that quid--I could do almost anything. I could do anything,” he repeated, cutting out the “almost.” “And the fact that I wasn’t really that sort of chap--that of course I was always frightfully down on lying and cheating and--and thieving--the sort of things a decent fellow doesn’t do--it wouldn’t stop me. Like it hasn’t stopped me this time. It’s awful not to be certain that one has any sort of a self that one can rely on.”

“Murder?” whispered Bunny, his imagination, always on a loose rein, beginning now to gallop. “Could it just as easily have been murder, you mean? And is that how criminals do it--in the same way as you....”

“I suppose so.”

“Then--nobody’s safe--not even ordinary people?” They both felt horror very close to them ... stirring their hair with its breath.

“And--feeling so oddly bucked just before----”

“They might have meant that. Like premonition upside down.” Bunny had a swift glimpse into the neat ironies in life’s working-out. But when Hal gruffly bade him explain himself, he pretended, out of an odd deference to his senior’s less flexible speech and fancy, that he could not. This was not the time to swank any superiority over Hal. You only did that in the days when he was indubitably the Magnificent, and in self-defence you paraded any small advantages that were yours. The significance of any need for chivalry smote Bunny with a fresh pang ... he fought back a great lump which swelled up in his throat. “Need any one know?”

“The money’s got to go back somehow, hasn’t it?”

“Aunt Lavvy----”

“I’ve just come from Aunt Lavvy.”

“Oh--good!” Bunny sighed, faintly relieved.

“No.” Hal contradicted him with a touch of grimness. “Not a bit of good. She’s as hard as nails.”

“_Aunt Lavvy?_”

And Hal suddenly made a brilliant, if embittering, discovery: “Scratch an Aunt Lavvy,” he flung into the face of Bunny’s incredulity, “and you find a paying guest underneath.”

[VII]

GRACE WATSON knocked at the door of the attic Miss Roberts shared with Lottie:

“Am I disturbing you? I looked into the nursery on my way up, and saw Lottie there with my babies, so I thought you might be alone.”

The governess beamed a welcome with her teeth, and hustled Grace out of two consecutive chairs into a third which was dubitably more comfortable.

“And I thought it would be a great help to talk over this terrible affair quietly with some one sensible,” continued Grace, who believed too firmly in the wonders achieved by quiet “talking-over.”

“Oh dear!” Miss Roberts began, tentatively, to be shocked and grieved.

And then, in sedate sentences, for even in the midst of spiritual turmoil Grace’s language never became correspondingly wild and tattered, she told the story she had just heard from her mother.

“Mother’s in the drawing-room crying, and wondering how she can bear to break it to Father this evening. He’s been so proud of Hal, you know--his eldest son.”

“He may be shielding somebody,” exclaimed Miss Roberts, brightly. “Bunny, for instance!” She had a thrilling mental picture of Hal, a head taller than Bunny, with one arm flung round his young brother’s shrinking--and unmistakably guilty--shoulders, while in those fearless steady tones of one whose own conscience knew no burdens, he confessed to a crime which was not his. Such luscious fancies sprang too easily into Miss Roberts’ mind, showing that a corner of it was in an unaired condition, for all its surface chattiness. But she was only paid thirty pounds a year, and for Lottie’s sake she slept with the attic window open all the year round, and went for a brisk walk every day in all weathers. The Maxwells, for their thirty pounds a year, could hardly expect further hygienic sacrifice from her. Then, leaving the Bunny idea in a state of incompletion: “Surely dear Miss Lavinia will settle the whole affair happily for you? That is to say, as far as it can ever be happy, knowing that Hal----” She shook her head mournfully; but the mournfulness was not very deeply rooted. Truth to tell, Miss Roberts drew more pleasure from the present excitement of the idol overthrown, than she had ever drawn from the negative rejoicing in Hal’s unquestioned integrity.

“I don’t know,” Grace replied slowly. “I haven’t seen Aunt Lavvy, but Mother says--Mother was overwrought, I suppose. She imagines that Aunt Lavvy has suddenly turned into a sort of fiend who will talk of nothing but her own good name with the Bank, which must be restored at all costs. But naturally Aunt Lavvy was a little bit annoyed, and said one or two things she didn’t mean. Mother ought to have made allowances. That’s what I’m so afraid of, Miss Roberts: that everybody in this house will be so stupefied that Hal of all boys could have committed a common theft----” Miss Roberts made shocked noises. “You can’t talk things over with any good results unless you call them by their proper names,” said Grace, firmly settling the neat little bow at her throat.

“How clear-headed you are!” admiringly, from Miss Roberts.

“Oh, I’m not. At least, if I am, it’s only what I’ve picked up from Stanley. And that reminds me, Mother actually doesn’t want me to tell Stanley when he comes home: ‘Oh do for heaven’s sake keep it in the family!’ she cried. I was rather hurt, as this is the first time that she’s mentioned Stanley as though he weren’t quite one of the family.” She paused a moment, and then clinched her argument: “Because, after all, he lives in the house.”

Miss Roberts tried to convey by her expression that she entirely agreed with Grace, but that at the same time she did not consider the fact that she herself lived in the house lifted her to an equal level of privilege and family-membership as Mr. Stanley Watson.

“It would be a terrible thing for Hal if it got known as far as Winborough or the ’Varsity, that he had taken money that didn’t belong to him. It might ruin his career. But if we all keep our heads, and don’t get hysterical--I met Bunny racing down the stairs just now with his eyes as red as fire, so I suppose he knows.”

“I confess I am surprised that Bunny should have taken it that way. He is a dear boy, but not very serious, as a rule.”

“Hal was his idol.” Grace spoke gently. “Schoolboys don’t say much about their feelings, you know, but I suspect this has gone rather deep with Bunny.”

“How you see everybody’s point of view,” murmured Miss Roberts, dripping appreciation.

“Stanley always says the one thing he can’t bear is intolerance. He can lead one right through history from the early pre-Egyptian period, and show step by step how bigotry alone has dragged great men and great nations to their ruin.”

“How interesting to hear him!” cried Miss Roberts, who, lest she be misunderstood, was not in the least a humbug nor a sycophant, but merely suffered from a nature devoid of the critical faculty.

Grace got up to go. “I think you had better tell Lottie, Miss Roberts, and Ursula, too. They are bound to notice something wrong, and Ursula, especially, has a habit lately of bursting out with such odd things.”

“She’s at the awkward age, of course”; but Miss Roberts had been having trouble with Ursula for the past year or two, and did not display quite as much gums and enthusiasm as she usually did in defence of her pupils.

“Miss Roberts, aren’t we going for a walk this afternoon?” Lottie trotted in, with the moral shine about her of having that morning helped Bunny remake Nina’s bed, and that afternoon kept Honor Rose amused for three-quarters of an hour while Nurse dressed.

“Yes, dear, now. And tell Ursula I wish her to come too. I’ve something to tell you both.”

“Something nice?”

“I’m afraid not--but,” brightly, “things can’t always be nice, can they?”

Grace, with a low: “Thank you so much. You’ve been such a help,” left the room.

The tidings of “something wrong” were beginning to creep about the house, to make themselves felt uneasily ... but Nina was still in ignorance, for the straightforward reason that Hal himself and every one else dreaded too much the ordeal of breaking it to her. In the end it was William who voluntarily undertook the task.

“I’ve just been with Lottie,” he informed Nina, in the passage outside the door of her room. “And she’s just been with Miss Roberts.”

“Get on with it,” laughed Nina, knowing that no dynamo on earth would urge William beyond his own stolid conception of speed.

“Grace told Miss Roberts, and Mother told Grace. Aunt Lavvy told Mother.”

“Well, what?” Nina was careless of the abyss on whose brink she stood.

“That Hal stole the pound belonging to the Bank.”

“You’d better be careful what you’re saying, young man.” Nina laughed scornfully. “_Hal_, indeed!”

William looked at her with round eyes that held something of pity. “You’d rather it was Bunny. But it wasn’t. It was Hal. I’m sorry he did it, but I’d rather for once it was him.” He paused. Then, with a disgusting lapse from chivalry: “You never thought much of Bunny next to Hal, did you?”

Nina stood for a moment rigid, as though the whole of her life were in suspension. Then, angrily brushing William aside, she marched straight into the boys’ den. To Hal’s moody vision, she seemed strangely out of proportion in her big hard-ringing incredulity. He clenched his hands, dreading the next few minutes; wishing that a powerful wave could lift him bodily and set him down again on the leeward side of them.

“William has the cheek to say----”

“Yes. It’s true.”

“You _didn’t_?”

He was silent.

“Hal, not ... you?”

“Why shouldn’t it be me?”

“Stealing?” Her mouth was drawn in pain as though she were sucking at some bitter fruit.

He nodded. No hope of explaining with any success to Nina, as to Bunny, the slippery differences which separated his act from stealing. He had only just learnt himself that such differences existed; and Nina certainly would not and could not admit them, except as an attempt at cowardly shirking of consequences.

He had hardly glanced at consequences, yet.

“I wish I was dead,” Nina broke out suddenly.

“Don’t be a damned idiot.”

“It’s as ghastly for me as for you. Can’t you see that? I’ve always backed you up.”

No, there were no surprises in conduct from Nina, as there had been from himself, from Aunt Lavvy and from Bunny. Every one of the raging contemptuous accusations which stammering she hurled at him, had already sounded across his mind during the past hour. Nina, like all those cool clear people who hold that it is bad form to show or even to feel emotion, was betrayed by a genuine blow into melodrama.

“I’ve always backed you up. If you had got into any _decent_ scrape.... But--Good Lord!--the commonest board-school cad would have more sense of honour.... Men sometimes steal when they’re hungry--starving--but you---- What do you suppose they’ll say at Winborough? A girl from our school was expelled once for pinching half-a-crown that didn’t belong to her--serve her right--but she was a snivelling little rat, and her people were no class. I suppose you’d cheat at games now. Oh, I--I don’t want ever to see anybody again ... they’ll be laughing at me even if they don’t say it straight out. I’ve swanked about you, and you’ve let me down.”

It was all in that last phrase.

“I never asked you to swank about me,” said Hal slowly. He was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window, and bidding good-bye to a Nina deferential in spirit, though offering, for appearance’s sake, a casual surface to his lordly good humour. A Nina persistently engaged in his service, preoccupied with his interests, obstinately compelling family and outsiders to acknowledge his supremacy. Hal sighed, relinquishing his glorious past.

“I wish to God you’d shut up and go away.”

With her hand on the door, Nina turned: “How was it found out?”

“Found out?” Hal was glad of a cue to be angry in his turn. “What the devil do you mean--found out? I told Aunt Lavvy directly----”

“Directly she asked you? It was at the ’phone, and you lied about it. I was there and heard you. You pretended to look in your pockets.”

Hal shrugged his shoulders. “All the same I told Aunt Lavvy myself. Directly after lunch.” But “directly I came to my senses ...” was what he had been going to say before.

“I suppose she’ll try and shield you. I wouldn’t in her place.”

“You would. But she won’t. She’s livid.”

“_Aunt Lavvy!_” A short scornful laugh from Nina. Aunt Lavvy, with all her gentle wisdom, her sweet eyes, her pretty dainty habits, her silvery sense of humour, her tolerance, her tact, and the secret niche of favouritism which Hal and Nina jointly occupied in her heart--_livid_ indeed!

She would be deeply sorry, yes! Nothing more damaging than that.

“Better go and find out for yourself.”

“I will, then.”

But Aunt Lavvy was down in the drawing-room, having tea.

Tea, as the first public re-union since lunch, was also the tangible betrayal of moral disorganization at the Laburnums. Aunt Lavvy, Miss Roberts, Ursula and Lottie were present. Mrs. Maxwell and Grace had been invited to tea with Mrs. Fennimore, the banker’s wife; and, after a hurried talk-over with Miss Roberts, Grace had decided it the wiser policy and the truest service to her country--i. e., the family--to go as though nothing had happened, and make excuses for Mrs. Maxwell, whose blotched and tear-swollen condition still kept her to her room. “You see, Miss Roberts, nobody outside the house _knows_ anything yet, and we mustn’t let them begin to suspect....”

Hal, aware that by some pressure of invisible law he would have to appear at dinner, renounced his tea, and, like his mother, shut himself up in his room. He shut himself up there too long, so that the prospect of ever leaving it and facing publicity swelled to abnormal difficulty.

Bunny forlornly marched away for a solitary walk; and William, with the precaution of a large bun annexed from the tea-table, had followed him. He did not catch up with Bunny, but was satisfied to march unobserved about a hundred yards behind him. He saw him fling himself face downwards in a field; sat down and waited ... and finally arrived home about eight minutes in Bunny’s rear.

Nina, bursting open the door in her search for Aunt Lavvy, had thrown a look of disgust at the “schoolroom mess” present, and rushed out again.

Lottie asked if she might carry up a cup of tea and some cake to poor Hal. Aunt Lavvy’s face became smooth and uninterested. But Miss Roberts, to Ursula’s horror, gave assent: “Do, dear, that will be very nice of you.”

“You’re not to, Lottie,” Ursula cried passionately.

“Really, Ursula----”

“She’s only curious. Let her take Mother a cup if she wants a canteen job.”

Aunt Lavvy said, with the faint lisp in her voice a little more assertive than usual: “Do you know, Lottie darling, I’d have given you the job of bringing my tea upstairs if I’d only had a little sitting-room of my own. Food in one’s bedroom is not very tempting, is it? But just today----”

She sighed. Then smiled bravely, with the corners of her mouth--not with all of it--when Miss Roberts sympathetically asked whether she had a headache, and replied: “No, I mustn’t indulge myself by pretending I have. The headache pose is fatally tempting to old ladies. You’ll know one day, Miss Roberts.”

“That was meant for Mother,” reflected Ursula; “and sending Miss Roberts down for stronger tea--she’s never done it before--was to impress Gums and the servants that she has a right to it because she pays.” Ursula was making the same discovery as erstwhile Hal had made. “‘Just today’ was a stinger for Hal. And ‘the little sitting-room of her own’ she aimed at----”

Ursula, subconsciously, winced with fear.

“Are you going to split on Hal to the Bank?” she asked, wondering what made her voice sound so noisy.

Again that curious glassy obstinacy passed over Aunt Lavvy’s usually mobile prettiness. She replied nothing, but with careful selection she put aside the slices of the Swiss Roll and cut herself a piece from the uncut portion.

“Ursula, really, this is going too far. This is disloyal. When your Aunt Lavvy is doing her best to behave as though nothing had happened----”

“Why should she? Something _has_ happened. But it’ll be like that all the time, I know. Mother will come down to dinner trying to look as though she hadn’t cried, and we’ll all look as though of course she hadn’t. And Father will simply shut up and not play. He’s never supposed to join in when the rest of us pretend. And Grace will talk tactfully to Stanley about the babies, and how town is looking, and her tea-party, and the leaves falling. And Gums will ‘draw out’ Lottie, and we’ll all of us not stare at Hal, and feel beastlier than we’ve ever felt before, and goodness knows what Nina and Bunny will do, because I haven’t seen them since it happened. But it might be a bit better--not much, but a bit--if we could all be as glum as we liked.”

“Would you have said that during the war, Ursula? Why, I think it was splendid how every one hid their own feelings and were cheerful.” Miss Roberts, having been officially given charge of the situation by Grace--who had not got it to give--and asked to take care of it until a quarter to six, was feeling the hours unwontedly taut and thrilling.

“This isn’t the war. It’s _us_.”

[VIII]

MR. MAXWELL and Stanley returned together from the golf-house about six o’clock, and were at once anxiously taken possession of by their wives. Presently, Hal received the summons he expected to the study.

It was not to be the old thunderous “You young rascal” business, such as Bunny always encountered, but a Serious Talk; the kind that began: “Don’t be afraid of me, my boy....”

Hal _was_ afraid. A wrathful parent was a thing that might happen to any fellow. There was, however, a strange solemnity, proving his crime in an unspeakable category, about a father who suddenly treated him as an equal. “I want your confidence, my boy. After all, I’m your father. What was your motive?”

If Hal had kept the money to extricate himself from some tangible male scrape--such as a bar-maid--he might have been able to respond to the spirit of gruff intimacy which the crisis had brought about. It was obviously impossible to pour out in his own defence a lot of vaporous drivel about Michaelmas daisies and the goodness of God. He was miserably certain in his own mind that his father was going to drag in religion pretty soon--_real_ religion, the Sunday kind.

And sure enough, Tom Maxwell, really staggered in his pride and his safe trust in permanence, by Hal’s lapse from everyday honesty, was unable to find any other contribution to the scene than the Eighth Commandment.

“Yes, I know,” muttered Hal.

For the last six years they had talked only of sport: cricket, football, boxing, rowing, and, occasionally, to humour the older man, golf. On this basis, they had presented an appearance of chumminess which, the world declared, was so typical of the modern unformidable relations between two generations.

Now--“Can I go, father?”

“Suppose it gets talked about round here? Suppose your Aunt Lavvy refuses.... Your future career.... A good name travels by road, a bad name by express.” Mr. Maxwell was too dispirited even to disavow his originality by a pretence of inverted commas.

Hal’s dread of public humiliation did not stretch beyond Winborough. That was bad enough, and too bad to face. Home was only an episode that occurred three times a year.

Mr. Maxwell went slowly back to his wife, and closed the bedroom door behind him. “He won’t confess. I did my best.”

“She’ll tell.” Florrie Maxwell, with shaking fingers, tried to fasten up her plentiful black hair.

“Nonsense. What nonsense you talk, Florrie. One would think Lavvy was a vindictive woman. She’s as fond of the children as we are. After all these years! Besides, the thing that matters is not whether everybody gets to know, but that Hal should have----”

“Hal’s Hal to me, whatever he did. I want to save him being punished, that’s all. But Lavinia _is_ vindictive. You’ve never seen it. You’ve only seen that she’s got a best-china-tea-set face and a pretty refined voice, and knows just the right thing to say.... D’you think I’ve liked it, having her always in the house to put matters right with you or Nina or Bunny, after I’ve maybe been too quick or clumsy and blundered somewhere? I’d have rather they stayed wrong, thank you. A paying guest’s one thing, for you know exactly what you’re getting from her; and how much ‘Aunt Lavvy’ here, and ‘Aunt Lavvy’ there, you can allow her for the money. But what she’s been doing in the house for the last fifteen years ... unless it was for you to keep on comparing her with me, as I’ve seen you doing over and over again. And the children, too. But they can be excused, because she’s clever, and she worked for it, and the Lord gave her silver hair and a sweet voice, and it’s worth a bit of play-acting to be the one in the house that everybody comes to first. But you, Tom, to have been taken in too--she’s selfish and hard, for all her soft ways, and as obstinate.... Well, you’ll see in the next few days, and I’m glad of it, because for you to have thought she was the sort of lady you’d rather have married--and I’ve seen you thinking it over and over again. Oh, I may talk too loud and laugh too heartily, and perhaps I’m not dainty enough, and my dresses don’t look like Lavvy’s.... Nina says they always gape where they do up.... For all that, when it comes to a wife, you’re better off with me than with her, or else you ought to have known beforehand which was the kind you admire, and not have special manners for her and the ordinary kind will do for me....”

And having several times worked up to a climax without achieving it, Mrs. Maxwell went on with the suspended work of fastening that thick untidy tail of black hair. She was rather tremulous, but hopeful, now that she had at last relieved herself, that Tom would give the cue for a sentimental reconciliation. As a matter of fact, the poor woman believed that she had expressed her secret bitterness far more poignantly than was actually the case. Her personality was not fitted to translate pathos ... with those dropping hairpins, and the bodice of her purple stuff dress dangling limply downwards from the waist, where she had just now slipped her arms out, to wash.

Her husband was angry. He fumbled for his justification. Florrie knew quite well _why_ Miss Lavinia had become Aunt Lavvy, and why she had stayed on in the house after they could have afforded to manage without her. If the world accepted her welcome entrance in the character of delightful-old-Aunt, her sudden exit as a superfluous lodger would have upset the whole illusion. No need for Florrie to pretend that she wouldn’t have minded Buckler’s Cross knowing it had been a vulgar financial arrangement. And then, Florrie owned up barely half her own shortcomings as though these were all, which he felt vaguely was an injustice to his tolerance; not only had he suffered her loud voice and coarse laugh and her dresses that were always failures, and her lamentable lack of tact; but she had no delicate little reserves; and her fresh complexion had deepened to mauve with tiny scratching red lines where the colour was most violent; and she was too intimate with inferiors, hoping vainly thus to ingratiate herself ... and ... oh, thousands of minor irritations! If she owned she was one thing, she ought to own to the rest, in fairness to what he had to put up with.

Her dressing-table ... useless china ornaments and stands and trays pushed about anyhow, and her brush with the handle broken off years ago and never mended; she wielded it from the jagged stump. A lace collar that had not been put away; a bottle of medicine, half empty, dusty; pins and safety-pins and brooches; a photograph of her parents; and a twist of paper screwed into the support of the looking-glass so that it should not swing backwards....

He was conscious of a tired nausea at the sight of her dressing-table.... What did Lavvy’s look like? Ah, that was it? She did not see that Lavvy could still represent to him a woman mysterious and fragrant, coming down to dinner from behind closed doors. He remembered now having once said to Florrie in a burst of confidence after a successful “musical evening,” that they ought to be right-down proud of having Lavvy to live with them, because anybody could spot that she was better-class than themselves.

If Florrie had been offended then, why didn’t she say so? Hang it, he had included himself in the inferiority!

He was accumulating grievances, while he moved about the room, changing from his golfing tweeds into “something comfortable,” while Florrie waited, with turbulent heart, for the miracle of understanding to take place in him.

The children. They carried their confidences to Lavvy, and Florrie was jealous. Women were always jealous, and never logical. If, instead of being cattish, she had studied the reason why Grace and Nina and Hal and Ursula and Bunny and Lottie and William preferred Aunt Lavvy, except for the perfunctory “of course Mother comes first” ... Florrie was so brusque and boisterous with them--laughed at their bruises and snubbed their sorrows; furthering her ridiculously overdone theory of “not putting up with any nonsense.” Had Florrie been tenderer----

Then Ronald might have been alive still.

And Hal would probably not have disgraced them all by keeping money which did not belong to him.

Queer--how this stormy business with Hal had tossed up the forgotten jetsam of the years! How long was it since he had grieved for Ronald? The child was only three when he had died of the measles.... “Better let ’em all have it together, and get it over” ... that was Florrie. And Ronald had got it over--promptly.

But if Florrie had only taken a decent mother’s care of the little chap....

And Mr. Maxwell said so, quite suddenly, having reached this point in his reflections without giving his wife any clue as to how he got there. She had hoped he was all the while dreaming back to their courtship. Perhaps he might break out with: “By George, Flo, d’you remember that drive home from Richmond in the hansom, after the Wilkinsons’ ball?”

But ... Ronald? She stared, stupefied. And then she gulped: “You might as well say straight out I’m a murderess.”

“I didn’t say that, but it doesn’t do to be too slapdash with babies. Tender at the two ends, tough in the middle, is most persons’ lives!”

“I’ve brought up seven healthy ones for you. Or perhaps _Lavvy_ brought them up?” Her uncontrollable grievance had possessed her again, and she linked it on to his, with: “I suppose--if Lavvy had been Ronald’s mother----”

“He might not have,” Tom Maxwell answered her. And left the room.

Downstairs in the hall, on the salver, a letter awaited him, just come by the seven o’clock post. And next to the letter stood Bunny:

“It’s for you, dad.”

“Ah--thank you, my boy!”

With eyes more than usually bright and dark, Bunny watched him read it. He had known from the postmark and uncertain handwriting, “Mr. Maxwell” instead of “T. Maxwell, Esq.,” that it was from the tuck-shop to which he owed fifteen bob. Hal’s note, written after lunch, and containing a postal order for that sum, was too late to save him from exposure. But Bunny was glad of it. His imagination had given birth to a scheme in bold colourings and with some surprising dramatic effects, directly he had spotted that letter on the salver.

“I thought I’d forbidden you to owe to the tradesmen round your school, Bunny.”

But it would have been “Bernard,” and a much sterner tone, if Hal’s crime had not dwindled a mere scrape to insignificance.

“Yes, I know, dad. I’m sorry. You’ve guessed now, of course, why Hal kept back that quid from the Bank?”

“You asked him----?” And the burden of depression lightened with Bunny’s answer:

“Yes, I was dead scared that old Swayne would write to you. He’d threatened to; so I owned up to Hal--and he sent off the fifteen bob today, and told me not to worry any more. It--was awfully decent of him, wasn’t it, dad?”

“Theft is never decent, my boy.”

“But it makes a difference,” Bunny urged, “that he grabbed the note to shield me from your wrath?”

“To shield me from your wrath” was overdoing it. And if Mr. Maxwell had remembered more about boys in their teens, he would have realized here that Bunny’s confession was too glib and well-produced to be natural. If Bunny had been relating a true state of affairs, his manner would have been either sullen or abashed, and his speech a stumbling incoherence.

“It makes a difference, yes. Go and tell Hal I want him.”

Hal listened disgustedly to Bunny’s account of the altered situation.

“You costly young fathead. What in the name of Mike made you spin him a yarn like that?”

“Just an idea,” Bunny explained airily.

“Idea your grandmother! Well, you can march straight down again, and tell him it’s all bunkum.” Hal hated theatricals. And no small part of his shame at the recent situation was the fact that it seemed to twitch everybody’s behaviour well away from the normal.

Bunny had known Hal well enough not to expect from him a quick flush of emotion, a grateful hand laid on his shoulder, a gruff: “It’s--awfully decent of you, Bunny, old man. I shan’t forget ...” which was the way a boy accepted another boy’s sacrifice in the noblest type of school fiction. But he had just hoped to persuade Hal to acquiesce in the inspired falsehood.

“The letters crossed. You _did_ send off fifteen bob for me today. Wasn’t it the same quid?”

“No.”

“Well, but it works out to the same. When you hung on to Aunt Lavvy’s pound, wasn’t it because lending me that fifteen bob made you fifteen bob short?”

“No. Nothing to do with it. She’d had her ’phone call from the Bank, and asked me about that extra pound note, before you came out to me at the earthworks about your tuck-shop scrape.”

Bunny immediately collapsed into tears again.

“Oh--_don’t_!” Hal was unhappy and frightened beyond ordinary exasperation now. He simply could not understand what had occurred to Bunny, to weaken him like this. Nor could Bunny, except that his own scrapes always left him something to do, something to suffer, some poise to maintain, and an inner conviction that, in spite of all the surface fuss, they really did not fundamentally matter. Whereas Hal’s loss of moral prestige did matter. And it had, moreover, robbed Bunny of a prerogative. Bunny liked being the bad boy of the family. Hal’s usurpation of the position was unnatural; and when Bunny tried to adjust the look of things--only the look of them--Hal resisted and made brutal statements of fact. And Bunny felt helpless.... Especially as he had lulled his quivering and damaged faith in Hal into a belief that the money had really been annexed in his own interest, and that, therefore, the tuck-shop scrape was at the bottom of all the recent widdershins action of the world.

Still showing stained cheeks, and with listless feet, Bunny returned to his father, and repeated Hal’s dogged denial of his tale. And Mr. Maxwell spread about the house how Bunny had tried to shield his elder brother by pretending his elder brother was shielding him. And Bunny gained more halo, and was correspondingly more downcast and wretched, wearing it uneasily, as a woman in a resplendent new hat which does not suit her.

[IX]

DINNER forced the scattered agitations of the Laburnums round the same table. It was Hal’s reluctance, and not his sense of climax, which brought him last into the dining-room. The occasion was very much as Ursula had foretold, except that she had not reckoned on the swift personal misery which conquered her at the first sight of Hal, hitherto invulnerable, now exposed without his armour of unconscious lordliness.

Up till now, she had been aware of the blow which the family had sustained, without, as it were, becoming intimate with it. But now--“I can’t bear it,” she told herself, fingers interlocked and crushed together under the cloth, knees rigid, and heart pounding at a ridiculous pace....

Aunt Lavvy was saying to Stanley: “I’m afraid all your favourite books are too solemn for me, Stanley. I tried hard to read more than seven pages of ‘Archæological Splendours of the Dolomites,’ but it was doleful work!”

Did none of them _see_ ... that unless he could be quickly protected, big splendid Hal was injured for life?

Surely Aunt Lavvy would not make him face the world--school and ’Varsity and Buckler’s Cross--as he now faced the family, apologetically, and with careful eyes that fixed themselves only on inanimate objects. Oh, surely she would not tell?

But Ursula knew she would.

Aunt Lavvy was wearing her prettiest lilac dress, with a strip of black velvet ribbon round the throat, and a cobwebby lace fichu held in its place by a pearl miniature brooch. But Mr. Maxwell was pointedly not admiring her, with a--“There you are?” to the false suspicions of his wife; and Florrie Maxwell was thinking of her sons Ronald and Hal, but mostly of Ronald; and Grace tried, in low tones and by dumb pressure of hand, to cheer her up. Bunny moped, and Nina displayed an attitude of savage silence that defied any reminder of her lifelong championship of a Hal without peer. Lottie, who only had milk and biscuits, passed things to Hal far more often than was necessary; and Stanley and Miss Roberts and Aunt Lavvy divided the conversation between them.

“And they’re the only three not of the family,” thought Ursula, to whom alone that night the foggy atmosphere was pellucid. “And they’d none of them do a thing to help Hal, either!”

She lifted her lids suddenly, and met Hal’s gaze full upon her. It was as though he pleaded: “Get me out of this ...” and then his eyes were downcast again, leaving her with the responsibility.

Stanley Watson and his father-in-law remained over their wine, after the others had left the table with a precipitation that suggested escape rather than withdrawal. Stanley immediately tackled the delicate subject from the point of view neither of Hal nor of Aunt Lavvy, but the bank-clerk:

“Just because our natural desire is to shield Hal, we ought to remember that all the time the poor chap who made the mistake in cashing the cheque will get into trouble unless the guilt is clearly acknowledged in other quarters. Don’t you agree with me, sir?”

“No,” said Mr. Maxwell resentfully, wondering what his eldest daughter had ever seen in this long-winded prig of a fellow.

Afterwards, he tackled Grace in a corner of the drawing-room.

“But I do so respect Stanley for being able to be just and impartial about it, when, of course, we’re all so over-heated, father dear.”

“I don’t save your husband rent and rates all the year round so that he should be just and impartial when I don’t want him to be!” and Mr. Maxwell strode wrathfully away to his study.

Grace, in a sudden shower of tears at the unkind reminder of an obligation, flew in search of her confidante, Miss Roberts. The nursery slid back into a schoolroom directly the babies were in bed; but finding there only Ursula, Bunny, Nina, Lottie, and William in pyjamas--five in hot conclave--she gave them a mere glimpse of her piteously working features, and ran on up to the attic bedroom.

“Now, what’s the matter with ‘our sensible one’?” Ursula mimicked her mother’s usual introduction of Grace to strangers.

“I expect Stanley’s taking Aunt Lavvy’s side, and father’s rowed her about it,” was the solution laid down by William’s drawl.

“And she tells Gums _everything_, and they say, ‘it’s been such a relief to talk matters over and get something settled,’” Lottie contributed towards enlightenment. She was a child who could usually be trusted by her elders not to tittle-tattle, but William need not suppose he was unrivalled in the intelligence department.

“Stanley--Aunt Lavvy--Gums----” Ursula sat sideways on the big rocking-horse, her small smooth head, with its lustreless gold hair brushed back to a long plait, tilted against the wallpaper, on which the legend of Miss Muffet and the spider was stamped in nauseous pale-blue-and-mustard repetition. “Hasn’t anything funny struck you about just those three being against us?”

“Against Hal, you mean?”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

Silence duly acknowledged that it was. Nina might be horrified, and Bunny shocked, and William tactlessly quick to emphasize a Bunny no longer inferior, but even in their disillusion they were all untried in the endeavor not to let Hal’s humiliation escape beyond the radius of the Laburnums itself.

“Well, what about them?” asked Lottie.

“I know.” Bunny listlessly supplied the correct answer to Ursula’s flung question. “They’re just the only three in the house who aren’t family.”

Ursula nodded at him. “And it’s a mistake to have people living with you who don’t belong to the family,” she said. “In a crisis, they’re black-legs.” She was not sure of the exact meaning of black-legs, but it expressed her secret angry conviction of a citadel betrayed from within.

“I don’t believe Aunt Lavvy’s really not one of us, and I’m going to her now,” and Nina dashed off in a spasm of fierce impulsive energy.

“We should look awf’ly silly,” Lottie remarked after a pause, “if she came back and said that Aunt Lavvy said that _of course_ she wouldn’t tell on Hal, and never meant to, and why hadn’t any of us asked her about it before.”

William chimed in: “After all, no one except Hal himself and Mother have heard Aunt Lavvy say a word about telling Mr. Fennimore when he comes to supper tomorrow.”

“Is _that_ when she means to, William? Who told you?”

It proved on closer examination that William had not been told. It had just drifted into his consciousness that Sunday evening after supper was the time when Aunt Lavvy would elect to inform Buckler’s Cross and the world that Hal Maxwell was a thief. They had all wondered _exactly_ when ... but uncertainty penned them in no longer. Somehow they felt William had answered the unspoken query correctly.

“I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now,” continued William in thoughtful tones.

Immediately, he was smote upon the head. “Why the devil should I?” demanded the second son of the Maxwells.

“Well--” William was in no way perturbed, “now that everything’s changed----”

“_Nothing’s_ changed!”

And then Nina returned to them with the expression of one who has dashed her head with violence into hard clear glass where she expected to find only air.

“Time you were back in bed again, Sweet William,” was all she said. “And you, too, Lottie.”

“I was just saying,” William repeated, with a subtle relevance which was almost incredible, considering his years, “that I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now.”

[X]

THE Laburnums next morning resembled a fever-patient whose temperature has inexplicably rushed up in the night.

Everybody in the disturbed household had either lain awake, quietly working up the dimensions of their grievance, viewed from all four points of the compass; or else had awoken with a start to remember that their average life was now occupied by a bogey of horror, which, during the few hours’ oblivion, had swelled to a frightfulness out of all proportion.

Aunt Lavvy’s bogey was “What must the Bank think of Me.” She lay and chafed at the thought that she had not yet freed herself, in the Bank’s eyes, from all complicity with the theft of the missing pound note. A good many little spinsters, with an otherwise well-balanced set of values, have this curiously over-rated respect for all male-run institutions connected with capital, income, investments, dividends and cheques. It struck her, while the rain spattered at the window, and the wind creaked the boughs, that she had probably been thrust--through Hal--nearer than ever before to the outer edge of that safe circle which enrings the Law abiding. Her impeccable name had perished.... She was entangled in an Unpleasant Affair with the Bank.... Oh, Mr. Fennimore must be told when he came. She would explain the whole situation to him, down to the final details. It was urgent.... She was not afraid, but angry, very angry. Sheer impertinence of Nina to have urged her so impatiently to save Hal at all costs. Hal, indeed!--and unless she looked after her own good name, who would do it for her? The Maxwell children did not really love her, as they always pretended to do; they merely used her as an auntly convenience. And now they all turned upon her as the cause of trouble, even though it was obviously hers and not theirs to be resentful and vindictive.... But that was always the way, living with families not your own.... She ought to have taken a flat at the time, and not heeded the Maxwells’ financial difficulties. A charming, bijou flat--then she could have owned a parma and primrose boudoir as well as a bedroom----

Ursula, who had been dreaming, woke up with a thumping heart, and stretched out her hand to fumble for the matches.... She wanted sight of dear familiar things to lull this dreadful uneasiness that sleep and the darkness and memory of yesterday had smuggled into the room.

Familiar things.... The tiny grate, in which she had not yet lit her first triumphantly solitary fire; a framed coloured picture, on the wall, of pierrots and a vivid blue background and balloons that were balls of gold fire; very popular for four-and-sixpence in the picture-shops at the time; and very popular with the flappers of a period grown beyond “Sir Galahad” and Burne-Jones, and far indeed beyond “The Souls Awakening,” to a taste that was “quaint” and “whimsical” or sometimes (proudly) “barbaric.”

Ursula, in her barbaric phase, had hung over the mantlepiece a necklace of beads and shark’s teeth once given to her by Aunt Lavvy, who had known a missionary.

The pierrot picture and the beads and the fireplace represented to her the supreme gems of the room.

The rag-mat on the linoleum was faded, and the other mat, near the door, did not match it. The wallpaper merely covered the wall with a yellowish-brown effect, and the chintz on the one rickety basket-chair was dim; the cushion a crewel-work relic. The white lumpy spread had been carefully turned back over the iron bedposts. The blind was awry, and showed, beyond the window, a corner of wall and a cistern belonging to the house beside the Laburnums. Warm red stuff curtains which Ursula rather liked, and a light wood dressing-table and washstand which she would have hated had they not also been, like everything else in the room, emphatically hers,--these, with another curtain run on a rod across the bulging corner, behind which were her dresses, completed the actual furnishings. She had coaxed Hal to fix up a shelf for her books--about a couple of dozen, with none of the battered look to them which indicates an owner who is also a lover. Indeed, Ursula valued them more because their rich, cosy appearance covered part of the wall, than for their contents. She treasured far more intimately the lumps and sticks of coloured sealing-wax, gold and lilac and black and emerald-green, and the squat seal, stamped with a “U,” which, with her ink-bottle, lay on the small bamboo table. Also the blue pottery jug on the mantleshelf, holding its bright spread of autumn leaves.

How can one explain the magic of enjoyed loneliness which made each object in the room, the room itself, the shape of it, and the door that kept it apart from the rest of the house, and the view contained in the window, precious and significant to the little girl, sitting up in the bed?

A single bedroom can hold a thousand different dreams--a double bedroom only one reality. And so we imagine wide-eyed sixteen in an obviously appropriate setting of spotless white walls and rosebud cretonne; with a deep-cushion window-seat, and a view of the sea and moonlight, or a wild-cherry tree in bloom.

Ursula was very far from being a woman yet; very far from being a child. She could be sullen--tomboyish--sedate--pert, without knowing yet which of these personalities was the fundamental herself. Actually, the fundamental herself was Ursula sedate, shyly impudent, deliciously clear-cut, her brows drawn low and straight over demurely amused eyes; her voice uttering with conscious gentleness some startling decision or idea. “I am the cat that--without defiance and without fuss--walks by itself.” That was the real Ursula, which would outlast the romp, the flapper and the stormy adolescent, but which was now only rarely visible through her inevitably tormented years of trying to imitate everybody she admired; and trying to grab and make permanent those glints and hints of splendour which shook pure lights from the leaves on late afternoons in May, or glowed suddenly in the lit wet hedges of October when, towards evening, the sun battled its way from under a day of rain.

Life at the Laburnums was--well, not exactly dull; not a bit dull, in fact, but lacking in wayward glory. No action was ever performed that filled her with bursting gladness, amazement, pride, or a queer big sorrow. Every one was just rather ragged and incomplete, getting over the patchwork somehow, yes--but Ursula’s veneration was for completeness. She once thought Aunt Lavvy had achieved it in porcelain fashion. Hence her phase of Aunt-Lavvy-worship. She once thought Nina had achieved it, in her sporting well-groomed golden-boy fashion, hence her phase of Nina--worship. And now--oh, couldn’t they see what Hal had lost? What he had lost for ever if Aunt Lavvy kept to her threat of “telling”? He had been invulnerable, a broad-shouldered, careless, lordly creature. It was, she felt dimly, and then with sudden sureness, Hal’s one asset, and the one asset of ten thousand Hals, that they were the type of youth who were ever unconscious of what they did, because what they did was so naturally the right and decent thing.

And now he was maimed--spoilt. His family knew, and that was why he came into dinner with such a poignantly defenceless feeling about him. His family knew, but they might easily forget in a little time, if the rest of the world could be kept in ignorance. Ursula’s simply-splendid Hal was menaced, but not yet actually destroyed. And she was aware that since she alone recognized the menace, she was--somehow--responsible.

After some restless tossing, she fell asleep.

[XI]

THE LABURNUMS spent the next day in viciously proving how much too small it was for its occupants.

It was Sunday, and the men were at home. All the morning and afternoon it rained. Everybody had slept badly.

On the previous day, uneasy ancient feuds were swelling up in their pods of silence. Now they suddenly burst from tight enclosure, and were very definitely present and visible. Bitter words had been spoken; accusations flung from one member of the family to another. They were repeated, and rolled round, within limits of the walls of the house--loyalty would not suffer any outlet to beyond--and rolled back again to their owners. It seemed impossible that so much grievance and anger had lain stagnant until Hal’s lapse from the average had sanctioned everybody’s lapse. Had Mr. Maxwell really been brooding for years on Florrie’s criminal carelessness in letting Ronnie die? Had Florrie Maxwell from the very beginning hated and distrusted and been jealous of her friend, Lavinia? Was all Aunt Lavvy’s sweetness and affection for the family hitherto, a mere disguise for her malignant stubborn will, that cared not how she wrecked them all to keep her white reputation at the bank from the faintest suggestion of grubbiness? And Hal--had he never been the splendid Hal, the traditional eldest son, the athletic hero of his almost first-class public-school? And if Mr. Maxwell had resented having the Watsons in the house, and did not consider Stanley as one of the family, why had he waited until now to say so? And _whose_ territory was the schoolroom-nursery?... The politeness of Miss Roberts and Nurse had become an Awful Politeness; Nurse was an indignant ally on the side of Hal, her first male nursling; and Miss Roberts, flattered by Gracie’s confidences, and thoroughly sympathizing with the Watson point of view, followed their lead of strict impartiality and constant references to the probable state of mind of the bank-clerk, and the injury done to Miss Lavvy, who had always been so kind.

There was no room for all the currents and cross-currents and complications of feeling. They were jostled and bruised together; rebounded, reeling, from one contact, only to bump up against another. There was only just room at the Laburnums for everyday harmony to fit itself in, with no fraction of margin where emergency emotions might expand at ease ... they were learning that at last. The first big out-of-the-ordinary upset showed them how they were cramped. Perpetually banging doors jarred a dozen headaches, as those who sought an empty room or one special person in the room, irritably vented their disappointment at an unexpected encounter with the wrong occupant. Snatches of irrelevant quarrel drifted about. Crashing voices were overheard, and those who did not shout, whispered and rustled and cast meaning looks. Alliances were suddenly formed that were a surprise even to themselves, and the old unassailable partnerships of ten and twelve years had come unglued.

And that rough intruder, Passion, was the unseen tenant at the Laburnums.

Nobody cared to meet anybody face to face, and they were doing it sixty times an hour. Florrie Maxwell had no means of avoiding; Aunt Lavvy unless either of them stopped in their bedrooms; and the servants, mercilessly curious, were all over the bedrooms, clattering slop-pails, purposely slow at their jobs, until one o’clock. Besides, Aunt Lavvy had recently discovered that a gentlewoman’s gracious passage through a day should lead her inevitably from a fragrant toilet and a dainty meal, to a pretty boudoir or parlour, and not back again to the disturbed scene of the toilet. In other words, she sat in the drawing-room. So did Mrs. Maxwell, with intervals in the dining-room, when she could bear no longer the torture of Aunt Lavvy placidly behaving as though nothing had happened.

But Stanley and Grace were in the dining-room; Stanley good-humouredly detached from the Upset (the comprehensive name they had begun to use, for want of a better, in allusion to all that was happening), and Grace offended, because what “father” had said naturally involved “mother.” Sometimes she slipped away to talk things over with Miss Roberts. “If only they would all be as sensible as you” was soothing to hear; besides, whenever by quiet policy they re-settled a by-issue, they had a pleasant illusion that, as representatives, they had thereby settled the main issue once and for all.

Miss Roberts was sitting up in her attic room that Sunday morning; but Ursula and Lottie were hanging about in the schoolroom, barely tolerated by Nurse, who, recognizing them as Hal-ites and nurslings of the second generation and not the despised third, yet could not forget that their presence officially stamped the nursery as a schoolroom.

At one moment, Lottie felt that inaction was unbearable, and stole up into Aunt Lavvy’s empty room to see if anything within her scope could be done to sweeten matters and lighten them. She found to her content that the plump little pincushion on the dressing-table was almost void of pins; and, returning to the nursery, waited for Nurse’s temporary absence, to tear off several rows from the long bristling paper in the work-basket. Gleefully, she confided her purpose in Ursula, and then trotted back to prick the pins into the cushion to form a huge and elaborate L.

William, not a nice child, had chosen this day of crisis for a bilious attack, which meant a stay in bed, so that Hal was denied the solace of his “den” to himself, and had to endure a series of stray visits, with William listening, and afterwards making thoughtful remarks with the Bunny bias clearly visible in their roll. Nina came to release her pent up nerves in a storm of “_Why_ did you do it?” and “How _could_ you?” His mother came, sat down on William’s bed, and talked cheerily to Hal about various topics, with frequent pauses in which he felt her dumb push towards an assurance that she did not care “any old way” about that “silly old pound.” And when Bunny entered, and just threw himself down moodily and glowered at William, Hal was so burdened by the atmosphere of criminal’s cell, that he suggested a tramp in the rain. Bunny’s gaze of sheer horror conveyed clearly his reproof--“What--as though nothing had happened?” But he merely said: “You couldn’t get out without meeting somebody or other----” so that Hal shrugged his shoulders, and remained where he was.

“... Shut up, William!” Bunny shouted presently, when William had not uttered a word, and refused to hear the youngster’s righteous expostulations; and knocked over a tooth-glass, breaking it.

A knock at the door, and Stanley Watson came in: “Look here, Hal old chap, you mustn’t think me interfering----”

“Oh Lord----” Bunny dived for the door. He had never agreed with Hal in thinking Stanley humorous; and a fourth statement of the bank clerk’s point of view “which, just because he is _not_ one of the family, we ought, by the law of common justice, to recognize before our own----” was more than his overwrought condition could stand.

Mr. Maxwell, who, alone of the family, could have remained secluded in his study, walked about the drawing-room, laboriously drawing his wife’s attention to the fact that he was not paying any special heed to Aunt Lavvy; grumbling because the Watsons were “all over the dining-room”; and suggesting from time to time that Florrie had better run up and have a look at William, whose illness might be more serious than it visibly appeared....

“I suppose you’re trying to say I’m one to let my sons die and not care!”

Mr. Maxwell chose to regard the fact that she had “taken it like that”--his perfectly innocent remark--as significant of guilty memory. Had he been honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that he had scratched the memory of Ronnie into such an itching and inflamed condition that he simply could think and speak of nothing else, and that his remark about William had indeed been intended for wounding reminder. Like all jovial men, he had an especial talent for this.

“Our William is a particularly robust child. He cannot live less than ninety years. So I’m sure, Tom, that Florrie has no need to worry about him,” said Aunt Lavvy, who, except on the subject of Hal and the bank and Mr. Fennimore’s impending visit, was just as sweet and nice as she had ever been.

The midday dinner-gong sounded brazenly. And William, who felt better, appeared in a dressing-gown to ask if he might come down to dinner.

“I believe the little Busy-Gnomes have been in my room this morning,” Aunt Lavvy smiled at Lottie, who quivered with pleasure up to the very bow at the crest of her head. For a blissful instant it seemed to her, as it had also seemed to Grace and Miss Roberts after “talking it over,” that the problem was solved by dint of single effort.

But when the roast beef and apple-tart were over, and after the two servants had cleared away the plates ready for fruit, and left the room, the master of the house startlingly got up and cleared his throat--“I want to say something to you all....”

He went on to suggest, into a circle of stricken silence, that it was Hal’s duty to publicly apologize to their dear Aunt Lavvy for ...

(Was he going to put it--actually--into words?... No, he couldn’t! he couldn’t! Ursula’s breath was held back by an iron pressure of suspense.)

“----for the injury he has recently done her. Now, my son,” genially not disowning him.

None of them had expected this. The upset had not yet been acknowledged in so many words as existent, except between groups of two or three. Now, in defiance of the sore atmosphere, it was thrown on to the dining-room table.

Mr. Maxwell’s motive was to propitiate. The roast beef had stimulated his imagination; and while showing him more luridly than ever how dreadful would be the results to his own prestige, and to Hal’s future, if Aunt Lavvy told the whole truth to Fennimore, it likewise suggested to him--falsely--that all the dear little lady wanted to appease her was probably a slight testimony to her importance in front of them all.

Hal, victim of the strategical error, had never dreamt he was to be trapped into active ignominy. It seemed to him, as it does to most people at one or another nightmare of their lives, that the moment was so awful that it simply could not really exist, could not lead to another as bad. He heard himself stumble out a rather shaky: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy, if I ... if I ...” then, fiercely self-despising, managed a gruffer, firmer voice, and stood up straight, pushing back his chair: “I’m sorry if I was a rotter to keep back that quid, Aunt Lavvy.”

“If?” repeated Aunt Lavvy, sadly. “If? Oh, Hal!”

“I didn’t mean ‘if.’ I just meant that I was sorry.” He looked very white, and his forehead was damp with sweat. Even Stanley Watson pitied him in the pillory, and threw off a magnanimous:

“Oh, leave the boy alone now.”

“I’m glad you realize what a serious matter a theft can be, my dear boy,” said Aunt Lavvy, stretching out a plump hand for the fruit-dish, “but I don’t want you to believe, though I’ve forgiven you personally, that either for my own sake or for the sake of the clerk at the Bank, I can do anything else but give Mr. Fennimore a clear, straightforward explanation, this evening, of what has happened. Honor Rose, look at this lovely plum your Aunt Lavvy is getting ready for you.” But intention and time were clearly stated at last.

“Nina, d’you want my handkerchief?” proposed Lottie. “Oh no, you’re laughing--I thought you were crying!”

“She is crying,” William announced, with a certain stolid exuberance.

Nina, in fact, was in hysterics.

[XII]

OUTSIDE the dining-room door, Ursula and Hal became aware of each other--separately fled from the turmoil. They hesitated, self-conscious after what had passed.

“I suppose that sort of thing’s not dangerous? She’ll be all right, won’t she?” Hal jerked his head in the direction of Nina’s sobs.

“Oh Lord, yes. Some girls--not Nina’s kind, though--often get hysterical.”

“Do they?” Perhaps Hal wished that boys did, too. He walked slowly away upstairs. And Ursula, giving him time to disappear, rushed for her room, banged the door behind her and bolted it, all in one swift movement, as though she were desperately in escape from the ugliness she had left in the dining-room: Aunt Lavvy and Miss Roberts and Grace crowding round Nina’s noisy agitation, admonishing her, thrusting forward remedies; Miss Roberts making futile dabs and sprinkles with the water-jug; Stanley trying to catch hold of Nina’s wrists and saying with a stern note of authority the while: “You _must_ be quiet. You _must_ be quiet”--and, aside: “The one way to treat hysterics--if you’d only leave her to me!” Her mother upbraiding her father for having brought about the scene; Lottie’s shrill: “May I fetch your salts, Aunt Lavvy? May I? Let me, or would you rather I didn’t?” Honor Rose frightened, and in tears; Mr. Maxwell’s: “Can’t you keep that kid of yours out of the way, Grace, when she’s not wanted?”... The smell of roast beef.... A sudden clamour and concentration of hatred.

But up here, in her room, was refuge and loneliness and space. Ursula’s grateful love for her room at that moment was so extreme that she longed to express it. It looked chilly and grey with the drops of rain dripping down the window, and falling dankly from the opposite drain-pipe of the next-door house. She suddenly determined that this was the moment for her first fire, her first _possession_ of a fire. She would put it off no longer. From the little cupboard she brought sticks and newspaper and some small lumps of coal. It was a very tiny grate, and quite soon it was alight, with an exciting crackle of wood and spurts of flame.... Ursula crouched down in front of it, in dreamy ecstasy. Her gaze roamed about the familiar objects, so as to become acquainted with them in their new shimmer and glow. She sprang up and twitched the red curtains across the window, shutting out the disappointing wall beyond ... you could so easily dream a perfect view, with the curtains drawn, and the room bewitched by warm flame. In future nights she would lie in bed hearing the red embers creak and flop, and more than ever she would be herself, owning herself, gravely exultant in self-possession.... Perhaps Mother and Father might give her for Christmas a small round clock-creature with a small round face and no hair--but friendly. And then time would be privately hers, too, as well as space. For now she shared time with everybody else who could hear the striking hours from the big clock in the hall.

When the Maxwells stayed on the river near Cookham for one summer holiday, Ursula nosed about until she found a willow tree up a back-water, where the branches swept round her boat like a tent and enclosed it. When they went, as they usually did, to the seaside, she would discover for herself special places on the leeside of a deserted breakwater, or between hedge and tree-trunk in a corner of a field. Wherever she could find an equivalent for the room, she was happy. It was her funny instinct (and certain small animals have it, too) to burrow and squirm her way into some hedged-in space, and curl up with a sigh of content, naming it hers. Her romantic sense of property was, maybe, over-developed from the edged contrast of life in a family where the sense of property barely existed at all, and who only in a crisis, and then but dimly, felt the need for more room. In everything else she was more or less like the other Maxwells.

But--watch Ursula as she claims a privacy even so fleeting as an empty train compartment. Already, as the door slams on her before the platform has been well left behind, the rushing haven is intimately hers. She leans eagerly forward, hands clasped between her knees, and enjoys it--a slim girl in a rather pathetically skimpy navy-blue coat and skirt, which always associates itself with the Ursula type of flapper, a dull, fair rope of hair falling over one shoulder, staid lips, pale as apple-blossom, curved in a slight smile of triumph, brows level above her softly thoughtful eyes.... Ursula!... She is not showy, but she may claim loveliness later on. There is a delicate artistry in the cut of her head and chin and neck, and in the brave square moulding of her eyelids. Ursula.... Not a musical name! She would have liked to be called Naomi or Rosalind or Pamela....

Aunt Lavvy’s cough and rustle on the other side of the locked door--and:

“I shall have to give up my room to her,” thought Ursula, “so that she shan’t tell old Fennimore tonight.” And she knew that the necessity had been stammering up in her ever since, the evening before, Hal had looked at her across the dinner-table.

That was why she had slept uneasily; and why she had squatted so long motionless, and fiercely loving her solitude, in front of her first fire--her last fire.

People can only be bribed by something you are sure they want. And, except Ursula, nobody at the Laburnums could imagine, in this crisis, anything that Aunt Lavvy desperately wanted.

Aunt Lavvy wanted the little room next to her bedroom, for a sitting-room. She wanted to be able to say she had a suite--two rooms adjoining. She had wanted this with tranquil obduracy for several years now. And Ursula, aware of it, had taunted the locked door between, with elvish dances and curtsyings.

At first the idea of bribing Aunt Lavvy with the room had occurred quite simply as an eleventh hour expedient to save Hal. But directly afterwards, Ursula saw her deed spring out in brilliantly illuminated letters, like the advertisements in Piccadilly Circus by night, as a Sacrifice.

And a Sacrifice, of course--if it be big enough--would make all the difference of colour and wind and enchantment to the days following it--days that would be as though they were of running liquid gold.

Ursula was tremendously excited by the prospect of Sacrifice. She had always dreamt how it would touch life with miraculous fingers, touch and transform it. Life that was hitherto all right, but only just all right, and not even vigorously wrong, humdrum and patchy and drab and lacking in power, a picture in muddy paint! Ursula held out her longing arms towards glamour....

Sacrifice! And, after it had happened, everything different!

So the child made up her mind, gambling for splendour.

But it meant giving up the room. Giving up--room.

... That time--she was huddled on the floor again in front of the fire, one arm resting on the armchair’s seat--that time a year ago, when Nina gave a party; and she, with hair recently washed to fall in a loose shimmering cloud down her back, and wearing a new bluish-grey party-frock, graceful folds of pale soft satin, was so flushed and stimulated with the sudden achievement of real prettiness that she behaved as though she were a delicately intoxicated fairy--and laughed and talked as if it were _her_ party, and gave orders, and tossed herself about, and was imperious, and a flirt, and a queen ... until Nina said to her, when everybody had gone: “What _was_ the matter with you, kid? Everybody was laughing at you; and that good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, told Bobbie you ran after him till he was afraid to stay. How could you make such a fool of yourself?”

The room had seen her through, then; had mercifully hidden her shame and her stung vanity and her hot disgust with herself. Supposing, though, that same evening of blunder were still to come, and no place for her to be alone in after Nina had said: “Everybody was laughing at you....”

For a moment the memory was vivid again, and Ursula clenched her hands against the humiliation. Ambitious to be neither rich nor a genius, and scornful of sentimental slush, she had always hoped for fame as a hostess, a quaintly witty, worldly yet serene personality, who was an influence in a shining spacious atmosphere, where only supple minds and graceful figures were suffered. Her idea of the perfect setting in which to be serene and witty was acres of parquet floor, and one little twisty gold and brocade sofa, and a sort of mellow amber light in it, and miniatures, and low, cool voices, and long, cool necks.

And when she tried--only just tried--to realize her conception of a Social Personality, Nina said....

The good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, did not figure distinctly in her aftermath of rage and shame. He was merely an indecipherable part of it. Men ... they didn’t count yet. Sometimes Ursula’s imagination played games in which, queerly, she forsook her own part, and became a chivalrous ardent squire to one Ursula, touched up and ennobled, but in the main essentials herself. Narcissus and Narcissa.... It was good to be a male, a swashbuckler; and it seemed quite natural, as such, to fall in love with the demure grey-eyed Ursula.... “But you know your eyes aren’t grey at all, they’ve got green and brown and blue, all mixed in. Once, in a storm off Lagos, I saw the hollow of the waves just that colour a second before they shattered over the deck.... God, I’d like to have had you there with me!”

And Ursula took this, how? But it was impossible to _be_ Ursula as well as Ursula’s lover. So the girl in the scene remained always objective, seen but not felt. She was sweet, but adamant, this Ursula, and elusive with some mysterious want he could not satisfy. The man wondered what it was; and “I wonder, too,” reflected Ursula, puzzled, in her rôle of lover, by the subtleties of her own projection.

Games--but it was good-bye to them now! They would not play themselves elsewhere but alone in the room.

The summons to tea left her still crouching before her bowl of red fire. Tea!--if she as much as opened that door, all the widened feuds and jealousies and passions, pressing against the farther side, would tumble in. The door was a barricade. Who knows how much fresh horror had accumulated beyond it since dinner, or how many irretrievable blows newly dealt, or old injuries exhumed from burial?

Restraint was inside out. It might stop anywhere, or--it might never stop ... since Nina had begun to be hysterical, and Aunt Lavvy proved an enemy, and Bunny was shockable, and Father was beastly to Mother, Mother starting such odd sentences that she nearly finished--but not quite--so that you caught your breath; and Mother hating Aunt Lavvy, and Grace huffy, and Gums and Stanley blacklegging from the Maxwell Union, and Nurse speaking her mind, and the servants a nudging community of gossip, and all the rooms chaotically surrendered for quarrel, and Hal morally in the dock.... Nobody kind, oh, nobody kind, and Mr. Fennimore expected tonight!

The blessing of being out of it! Ursula forgot, for the moment, that if she stuck to her purpose, solitude was already a fugitive with a price upon its head. Revelling in the four quiet walls, she reached out an indolent hand for the crumpled sheet of newspaper in which to pick up more coal. She had no shovel.

It was last Sunday’s paper. She glanced at it, after laying the coal in the shaking hollows of flame. Glanced ... and then was absorbed.

From the cheap print, the lurid relishing headlines, the blurred semi-grotesque photographs of criminals, the whole sinister underworld came swarming up at her. Creatures who lived within reaching grasp of the law, creatures who crawled into the papers.... Subterranean folk, dwelling where gas hissed and cisterns dripped, and half-starved cats slunk through the gutter. And they had faces with swollen lips and large, fierce eyes, and their names were not the names of people one knew, and their clothes were unfamiliar. Their last incoherent letters were printed in neat, straight, passionless lines down the column. Something more complex than just “the poor”; a twilight more sinister, where drunken sexless figures dealt each other blows with, oddly, implements that were meant for homely use, pokers, and rolling-pins and chairs. In this stunted sallow underworld, boys and girls actually killed themselves in sudden rages of love and despair. And the inhabitants were hungrier than ordinary hunger. “Any previous conviction?” asked the magistrate. “Two against the woman Hobbs, Your Worship.”... A world where women were known by their surnames to magistrate and policeman and court missionary.... To Ursula it seemed as though into the room had drifted a raw fog, and beyond it the strident yell of newsboys. Over a barrow of rusty old garments, a row of naphtha lights flapped uneasily ... a lad furtively running was pursued by two policemen.... He was wanted for theft.... As, breathing hard, he padded round the corner, Ursula saw his face ... Hal’s face!

Hal had brought the underworld quite close to the Laburnums. He had done something which might--oh no! no!--which might get into the papers.

Wild with panic, Ursula scrambled to her feet. What time was it? How long had she been squatting there with that horrible beastly paper, reading it and imagining things. It was getting dark. Six--seven o’clock. And Mr. Fennimore came at eight. And Aunt Lavvy was going to tell him, and he might think it his duty--as Stanley would--to tell the police. And Hal....

It wasn’t safe to wait a second longer. What had to be done was urgent. Without even a conscious glance of renunciation at her room, Ursula left it, and knocked at Aunt Lavvy’s door.

“Come in.”

With direct action, panic had vanished. She was confident now, and powerfully gentle, and even, with a tinting of irony, amused. Leaping ten or fifteen years of slow development to the grown-up Ursula she would undoubtedly become.

“Aunt Lavvy, I wondered if you would be a darling”--Aunt Lavvy, with a stiffening of her concealed obstinacies, waited for the plea for Hal--“and visit me in my room. You see, I’ve lit my first fire--you remember my birthday present?--and it seems silly to sit in front of it by oneself, and, well, it would be ever so jolly if you came in for a little while,” with a rush of shy impulsiveness--calculated.

Aunt Lavvy beamed like a cluster of little pink and silver suns.

“Why, what a delightful surprise. The rain is so dreary, I was simply longing for firelight, but I had no idea an invitation was on its way.”

“Then may I borrow one of your cushions?” Ursula was a spectacle of pretty, though rather childish excitement. She pulled Aunt Lavvy by the hand into the next-door room, and arranged her in the one armchair, and poked the smouldering coal to flames, and tugged at the window-curtains anew, and then settled herself with crossed legs, tailor-fashion, on the rag-mat on the opposite side of the hearth. She looked over at Aunt Lavvy with an air of affectionate content.

“It was lonely--till I brought you in,” she said. “I sometimes wish I shared a room with somebody.”

“This one would be too small, of course. But you’ve made it look so nice, Ursula dear.”

“Have I? But you can’t do much with a bed and dressing-table sticking themselves out .... It ought really to be a sitting-room with a bedroom next door.” And Ursula’s gaze at Aunt Lavvy was full and pure and empty of all significance.

Aunt Lavvy reflected for a moment or two ... and understood.

“Let’s pretend, then,” she suggested at last, her plump little mouth bent to a whimsical smile, “that I have been whisked away to Terra del Fuego on a broomstick, so that you are able to have my room for your bedroom, and could do as you liked with this one. How would you plan it?”

Aunt Lavvy might be a sweet-scented malignant little bundle of implacability, but she had to her credit a delightfully light and sensitive touch with the situation. Ursula, to whom clumsiness would have been unbearable in her own inspired mood of fine execution, appreciated the bland twist by which Aunt Lavvy had made it appear that _she_ was to be the one eliminated from tenancy.

“Well--help me, then! I’d have the wallpapers that very deep cream tint that you’re so fond of, Aunt Lavvy----”

“More primrose than cream,” supplied Aunt Lavvy. “And wistaria cretonne curtains, Ursula, and the same on two armchairs, and a lot of cushions, mauve and blue and primrose-yellow. Wouldn’t that be rather quaint and pretty?”

“And a bluey-mauve carpet, also the colour of wistaria.” Ursula threw the same enthusiasm into these furnishings as though she were not intuitively leading Aunt Lavvy on to describe exactly how, again and again, from the farther side of the door, she must have imagined Ursula’s room furnished to her own private desires. The more these desires were allowed to escape and take form, the easier would she fall to the bribe ... presently, when the time came to talk about Hal.

“And your lovely tea-set--Spode, isn’t it? Would you bring that in here, and have shelves put up for it?”

“That wouldn’t be very safe, would it? No, shelves for my books, and my low cupboard with the glass doors could be moved in for the china.” Aunt Lavvy had forgotten that they were arranging the room for Ursula. “A primrose silk shade for the light, I think, and a small round table for potpourri. I wonder if my little davenport would fit slantwise across that corner recess near the window?”

“With a shade to match for the lamp, and a whole lot of mauve and yellow bowls and vases. Oh, there are such lots of flowers that would look too heavenly in here: violas and pansies and blue irises and primroses and larkspur and Michaelmas daisies--anything that isn’t pink or red. Daffodils, of course--and cowslips. And your miniatures hung over the fireplace.... Aunt Lavvy, if you said nothing to Mr. Fennimore tonight, but explained to them at the Bank tomorrow that after all you had found the pound note loose at the bottom of your bag, I’m sure they’d believe you.”

“Will you be quite frank with me, my dear child?” With a sudden tender seriousness, Aunt Lavvy set aside the irrelevancy of rooms and a room. She had her data now! “You really called me in here to plead for poor Hal.”

“I’m not pleading, Aunt Lavvy,” steadily.

“It’s dreadful for me that you should all think me hard and unforgiving. Nina came to me last night----”

“Yes, I know. I suppose she was rude, and blurted things out.”

“She hurt me,” Aunt Lavvy confessed, with a little sigh. “And your mother, too. Ursula”--with a gesture of confidence--“you’re a wise girl, and we’ve always been friends, haven’t we? Do _you_ see how unfair they are? I love Hal--but what am I to do?” She threw out her hands, and her diamond rings twinkled as the firelight burnished them.

Ursula comprehended that she _was_ to plead, and so give Aunt Lavvy an excuse for “coming off her perch”--to borrow a phrase from Bunny. She accepted the cue for a sedate, sensible little sister, rather old-fashioned, a bit of a prig, perhaps.... Her hidden demon was doubled up with laughter!

“Wouldn’t you say that Hal had been punished enough, Aunt Lavvy darling?”

After about ten minutes of parleying along these lines, Aunt Lavvy conceded that Hal’s moral chastisement had indeed been severe. Quite suddenly she gave way, admitting, with the impulsiveness of a contemporary, that she had longed to do so all along.... Her glance strayed to the niche beside the window, still not quite satisfied that it was wide enough for her davenport to stand there.

“And I’ll move for good into Nina’s room,” said Ursula, speaking aloud the last line of their contract.

[XIII]

MR. FENNIMORE came that evening to the Laburnums, and Mr. Fennimore went. Aunt Lavvy did not betray Hal to him, though the Maxwells were taut with apprehension from minute to minute. After he had gone, Ursula privately informed her mother that she was henceforth going to share Nina’s bedroom, and that Aunt Lavvy, in consideration of the gift of an adjoining sitting-room to her present apartment, would gloss the matter over with the Bank tomorrow.

“So Hal’s all right, and I’m moving my things over so’s to sleep with Nina tonight.”

“But, darling,” exclaimed Mrs. Maxwell, almost weeping with relief, “won’t it do in the morning?”

“No, _tonight_,” insisted Ursula, who had passed from the ageless wisdom of Medea, to a stage of crude and intensely youthful heroics, when it seemed urgent that her sacrifice should begin immediately, without the anti-climax of postponement. Because, beyond surrender of the room, and beyond suffering, lay that diffusion of gold over a grey world which was to be her recognition from the gods. She knew that “Virtue is its own reward,” must not be taken materially, in the sense that an automatic machine promptly doles out chocolate on insertion of a penny--(bent or battered coins not accepted); but--oh, surely she might count on _something_ happening! “People would be different” ... and she, too, would be different, conscious of a deepening of colour, a more vivid meaning, scents sharper and sweeter, all sounds harmonized, everywhere a lightness and a quickening up, less drag and shuffle, the same clean happy intoxication of spirit that can usually be won by actual high speed ... by gallop on horseback over soft turf, or two-reefed sailing, or a race in one of those long lean cars that crouch low to the road.

In fact, Ursula’s modest expectation demanded, in return for one room delivered, to dwell henceforth and continually in that state of jubilant ecstasy which may have come to our one or two really great poets for two or three minutes on completion of their three or four most perfect lines.

She moved into Nina’s room that night. Nina helped her carry her things. And Mrs. Maxwell went to Mr. Maxwell--whom she found in his study, having a distinct row with his only son-in-law--and told him it was all right about Hal. And Stanley told Grace, who told Miss Roberts, who woke up Lottie to tell her. And Mr. Maxwell told Bunny, who told Hal. And everybody at the Laburnums slept better that night, because of the news, except William, who had remained asleep and slept well in spite of it.

The next day, the effect of Ursula’s act on the household was like a window flung open on to an enclosure where there had been a gas-escape. Gradually the fumes noticed the window and crept out and were dissipated.

Aunt Lavvy walked along the pleasant half-country road towards the shops of Buckler’s Cross. And, passing the branch of Platt’s Bank, dropped in, and told the clerk, leaning politely over the polished counter, that she had, after all, been the thief of that pound-note which he had missed on Saturday morning. She used the word “thief” whimsically, and the young man’s amusement proved to her that certainly her name had not suffered from the incident. “At the bottom of my bag. They weren’t pinned together, and it must have been the outside one. I collect so many bills and papers and letters loose in my bag--you men will always blame me for that....” She dimpled at the bank-clerk, and handed him back the pound. And he thought what a delightful little old lady she was, and wished his mother, a large, gaunt and incredulous woman, were more in that style. He apologized for his own carelessness, and hoped she would not punish them by depositing elsewhere. They parted in the attitudes of a Marcus Stone picture. Then Aunt Lavvy went on into the town, and arranged with the local decorators to paper her sitting-room at once, a deep cream with a wistaria frieze. Luckily, they were able to show her a sample of the latter in stock; but for her cretonne and carpet she knew she would have to take a day in London. Impulsively, she determined to go that very afternoon.

Mr. Maxwell and Stanley were, of course, at business. They were still resenting each other when they left the house; but before they reached the station, they had realized the flatness of disputing over a bank-clerk who, as far as the moral point at issue was concerned, no longer existed. But with regard to Mr. Maxwell’s taunt that Stanley, if he wanted his own opinions, ought also to maintain his wife and child in his own home--Stanley left private injunctions with Grace ... and she, too, was out most of the day. She did not tell Miss Roberts where, as she was afraid she had rather let herself go too much to poor Gums the last day or two, and it was not quite a nice thing to do, to grumble about your parents to the governess in their employ.

It was awfully sweet of Aunt Lavvy to put things right with the Bank, without involving Hal. And distinctly clever of Ursula, too, to think of offering her the room. It looked as though Ursula were going to be unselfish, “and that would be so nice for Mother when Nina marries, and I....”

Miss Roberts and Nurse resumed a courteous recognition of each other’s claim to the nursery-schoolroom. Nurse said she was sorry if she’d spoken too plain, and Miss Roberts understood that it _was_ very irritating to come in with the babies and find the only table strong enough for the sewing-machine, littered up with lesson-books.

Nina, when they were dressing the next morning, asked Ursula suddenly and fiercely:

“What did you expect to get out of it?”

“Out of what?” Ursula, with the comb, swept her long hair to a veil in front of her face.

“Giving up your room. Look here, Ursula, squarely, between you and me, you must have meant to get something out of it. What?”

Ursula understood that if she disclaimed all hidden purpose of a benefit in the matter, there would be no other name for her than a prig, from the viewpoint of her sister and brothers. Simple nobility was indeed a completely priggish quality. Ursula felt ashamed. Even Bunny would censure her for it, in his soul. Even Hal, whom she had rescued....

“Well, d’you suppose I was just ‘being good’ for its own sake?” scoffed Ursula, thereby thoroughly deserving to be termed traitor.

Nina nodded, placated. “Tell me, though?”

“It’s my business.”

“Something from Aunt Lavvy? From Dad? From Hal?”

Tiny green imps twinkled for a second in Ursula’s eyes.... Already Nina was mentioning Hal’s name with some of the old reverence. Already Nina was arrogant.... Ursula had not been to school herself, but she had learnt enough from her brothers and sisters not to remind Nina of hysterics, though not enough to refrain from regret that decency should forbid such gentle reminder.

“Don’t be a nuisance, Nina. I’ll say what I like, and shut up when I like.”

“You needn’t think you can be as cheeky as you like, though, in this room. It was mine before you came to share it, so in a way I’ve given up as much as you.”

Ursula turned, not an indignant scarlet as Nina expected, but white. Nina?--why, Nina had never cared about her room except to sleep in it, never minded how many visitors at the Laburnums overlapped her return home from her own visits, was quite content to have the shrine spoken of as the “spare-room” during her absence. Nina never fled to her room during trouble, she’d be just as content if her hockey group photographs and silver cups had their place anywhere else in the house. Oh, Ursula was sure--surer than sure--that the strange listening _growing_ feeling never happened to Nina in solitude.

And now Nina was claiming an equal part in the sacrifice.... Put in that desperately reasonable way, it certainly had the appearance of being a half-and-half affair, but--would it truly look like that to--to whoever attended to haphazard sacrifices which came drifting up from the world? Might Ursula not even say to herself that she, and no one else, responsible by seeing Hal in his lordliness, was also responsible for keeping him so?

For there was no damage done that would not be covered by the new skin even now growing thickly over his rawness.

Nina, with a last sturdy backward brush at her gleaming hair, swung to the door, ready for breakfast. She was careless and spruce and clear-cut as ever. Ursula remembered the days when she had worshipped her for these effects.

“I say, kid, I didn’t mean half of what I said just now, so you needn’t look so wretchedly serious. I rather appreciate having you in here, really. It’s some one to talk to while I’m putting on my stockings. And it really was quite decent of you to fix things up with Aunt Lavvy--though, mind you, I don’t believe she’d have told old Fennimore when it came to it. She was ruffled up the wrong way, but she’s rather an old darling, and frightfully fond of Hal and the rest of us.”

[XIV]

THE weather was not sufficiently self-conscious to clear up at precisely the same instant as the psychological clearing-up; but the day after, the sun flashed out, and the workman sang as he distempered Aunt Lavvy’s sitting-room, and the carrier’s boy whistled as he delivered her carpet and other packages from Whiteley’s furnishing department. And Hal and Nina and Bunny and Ursula and Maisie and Dorothy played their last tennis foursomes on the doctor’s asphalt court, taking turns to be the two out, because on Wednesday the boys were due back at Winborough. Hal was a great deal easier in his mind when he discovered that the blend of Maisie and Michaelmas daisies--though she played a jolly good game, and of course the daisies were all right in their way--yet did not make a second attempt to play any incomprehensible wizard trick with him which had resulted in the bad dream of the week-end just over. He was not quite comfortable yet, though, with his family, and consoled by the prospect of Winborough, where nobody except Bunny knew anything about his downfall; and, a term after that, Oxford, where nobody at all would know. By Jove! Supposing Aunt Lavvy had kept her word, and had spread the whole hateful business all over the place.... It was clever of that kid Ursula to have thought of a way to bribe her. Decent of her, too ... gratefully he served her with a soft ball, which she missed, because she was expecting a hard one.

Hal and Maisie won their set against Ursula and Bunny. Then Hal and Dorothy played Nina and Bunny, and again Hal and his partner won.

“Not one of you is any good at the net,” he pronounced at last. “And you ought to practise your backhand shots, Dorothy.”

Meanwhile, Aunt Lavvy and Florrie Maxwell, sitting by the French windows of the drawing-room, open to the garden, were drifting into leisurely intimate talk ... the children at tennis ... the croquet they had played as girls ... that odd man with the canary-silk waistcoat and the lively eyes who had wanted to marry Aunt Lavvy.... “D’you remember, Florrie, that picnic when I wore the rose-coloured dress which looked so awful near his waistcoat, and he couldn’t understand why I ran away from him all day ...” (and remembering, they giggled, two silly girls together). From the rose-coloured to other dresses ... the present time, and what suited Nina, and what suited Ursula--not Grace, because the Decisive Dress which suited Grace had already been worn--the dress which first attracted her husband’s attention. The “marrying mother” dies hard. “Mr. Barry Noyes once said that Ursula would be the beauty of the family; and really, I don’t think men like fine girls as they used to ...” and Tom’s taste in women ... and Tom ... and--confidence finally unleashed--what Tom had brought up against her about poor little Ronnie!

And Florrie’s unspoken penitence for each hard thought she had ever had of Lavvy, separated the gossip like commas and semi-colons and exclamation marks. Lavvy was so sympathetic.... And how delicious for two women, how invigorating yet soothing--the resemblance to cocoa is accidental!--the ripple backward and forward between them, on those certain subjects in which neither men nor girls nor young married women nor one’s own husband nor anybody but just that other woman, are in the least intelligent.

Tom Maxwell came home on Monday evening to an atmosphere a-quiver with a few memories and traces of the recent heavy storm, but otherwise peaceful, united, and, metaphorically, lit by quiet sunshine. He thought: “When a good row clears the air, it always proves the air needed it!” By Tuesday evening it occurred to him, however, that the air was not clear between himself and Florrie; and he remembered, as one with the difficulty of remembering a grotesque nightmare, that he had been amazingly hectic on the subject of a baby who had died of measles eleven years ago. He marvelled at his agitation, now limp to his proddings as a dead caterpillar. Had he actually charged Florrie with neglecting the kid? Preposterous!

“It isn’t as though things didn’t happen,” blurted out Mr. Maxwell, bending over his trouser-press, to his wife already in bed. “And of course it stands to reason that if one could help them happening, one would. And, say what you like, to rear seven out of eight’s not bad. My mother lost three in a family of five.”

Florrie, understanding all that lay beyond the articulate apology, stretched out her hand towards her back view of him, and replied, after one or two happy gulps, “Lavvy and I had such a nice talk today while the children were out. It would be so dull for me here without her.”

[XV]

AMONG her other purchases in London, Aunt Lavvy had bought Hal a beautiful fountain pen--value about twenty-five shillings--which she gave him on his return to Winborough for the Christmas term. Bunny she tipped ten shillings. But her gift to Hal proved, among a variety of subtle points, that it was not the _money_ loss she had minded in the episode of the pound-note.

[XVI]

URSULA was just big enough to make a sacrifice, but not big enough to carry it off. For the first three or four days afterwards, she was able to behave gallantly enough, expectant of what Wordsworth, who had not, perhaps, a slender grace in titles, called “intimations of immortality”--but then, all at once, her belief snapped, and with it her patience, and she began to moon about the house in the spirit of a restive martyr who, after burning at the stake, has just discovered that the gates of heaven are only “cultured” pearl, and the streets an inferior rolled gold.

Then Aunt Lavvy remarked at breakfast one morning: “My little sitting-room is ready now, and it looks charming, but I’ve just remembered that there’s no key to the door between the two rooms. I must send for Marks to have the lock fitted. Oh dear, and I had hoped I had done with workmen. They’re such friendly dears, and _will_ talk to me about the Government. Haven’t you noticed, Tom, how sound I’ve been in my politics just lately?”

“Is the door locked, then?”

“Oh yes, it has been as long as I can remember. And the key lost.”

Mrs. Maxwell said breezily: “Ursula, it’s a topping day. It’d do you good to jump on your bike and pedal down to the town for Aunt Lavvy, before Miss Roberts is ready to study with you.”

“Nina can go,” suggested Ursula, hating the errand. “She’s bursting with loving-kindness this morning.”

“I’m going up by the eleven-forty to a matinée with Dorothy.”

Mrs. Maxwell teased Ursula merrily for being a “lazy-bones.” Stanley came in with a scientific fact about the stimulant of exercise just before mental concentration, together with statistics proving the large percentage of millionaires who had started their successful careers by living far enough from the station to entail a run for the train every morning. Mr. Maxwell waggishly remarked that, in that case, cooks ought to be bribed to serve the breakfast late; and Ursula said indolently: “Send Honor Rose to the locksmith’s. She’s got your steadfast sense of responsibility, Stan.”

Grace cried: “At _her_ age! Alone into Buckler’s Cross! You must be mad, Ursula. I sometimes let her toddle to the pillar-box at the corner, but----”

“Do let me go to the locksmith’s for you, Aunt Lavvy darling, directly Miss Roberts has finished with me. I’d love to.” The offer was Lottie’s.

“So as to miss your practising? What a brain!”

“Ursula, it’s right-down shabby of you to tease your sister because she’s more obliging than you are.”

Ursula flared up. “It wasn’t Lottie, was it, who gave up her room to Aunt Lavvy when she--when Hal----” She struggled with scalding tears at the back of the throat. Why do they always come hotter for injustice and self-pity than for sorrow?

Her hearers were startled and embarrassed beyond words at the reminder. They wanted to forget that episode, now that they were all united and kind and jovial again. It was indecent of Ursula to have hurled their obligation at them in this violent fashion, especially as there was no reply possible. They had all been grateful and thanked her. She could not exact gratitude twice over. Downcast eyelids and tightly-pressed mouths all round the table.... Of course she was only a child still, a charming undisciplined young colt, but even then----

The fact was that Ursula’s rather-more-than-usually-good deed had created a greater uneasiness among the Maxwells than Hal’s rather-more-than-bad deed which had preceded it. A thoroughly average family is not accustomed to either extension from the normal. Both Hal and Ursula were disturbingly “different.” Hal’s moral lapse had rapidly developed into a problem of consequences, which had been as rapidly wiped out, leaving next to nothing of the original shock. And then he had gone back to school.... Somehow, it was all not so uncomfortably evident as the sight of Ursula round the house, a disconsolate moping Peri emphasizing her yielded Paradise. For if she could be as noble as all that, she might at any moment be equally noble, or nobler. And the rest of them would have to live up to it, or else feel inferior.

So that Hal, who could be forgiven, and who was eager to forget, was easily a more popular figure than Ursula, who had been their rescuer, and now prevented them from forgetting.

“But I shall enjoy a walk to Marks, to see about a new key.” Aunt Lavvy broke the silence. “The hedges are just beginning to turn colour all along the road. It’s my favourite season.”

Ursula had dashed out of the room, they all thought, in tears ... but presently she came back like a gale, and flung a small heavy object on to the breakfast-table.

“There’s your key,” defiantly.

“The key of the door between?” Aunt Lavvy picked it up. “You clever child! Where did you find it?”

“I didn’t find it. I had hidden it--at the bottom of my handkerchief-box.”

“You had hidden it? And why, pray?” demanded her father.

Ursula thrust her hands into the pockets of her jersey, and tilted back her head. She was not crying now--indeed, there was urchin roguery sparkling in her eyes, and the corners of her lips were enigmatic:

“To protect myself from visitors,” she replied sweetly.

“Plain speech is a short cut,” said Tom Maxwell, getting angry with this young daughter, who, from being more or less of a cipher, had dared first to place him under an obligation, and then to taunt his helplessness with insubordination.

“Well, then”--Ursula spoke with even greater sweetness--“to protect myself from our Paying Guest.”

[XVII]

BUT in spite of these impertinences, Aunt Lavvy had the room, and Aunt Lavvy had the laugh of her. Moreover, now that the room was completely ready to sit in, and charming in its lilac and primrose tints as when their imaginations had planned it together, Aunt Lavvy did not sit in it. She sat downstairs with the others. She was more than usually convivial, and fragrant with content when somebody--Mrs. Maxwell or Nina or Lottie or Miss Roberts--asserted playfully that she could not be spared from them to go and sit in solitude.

Tenacious in her desire to own a sitting-room, it now stood empty and unused in that packed house.

Ursula, moping homeless about the stairs and landings of her home, was conscious of that sequestered oblong of space as though it were alive. She infected the rest of the household, who also became conscious of it--and, more than ever, of her. One or the other of them was wont to say to her, guiltily off-hand: “Oh, by the way, Ursula, there’s nobody in the dining-room for half an hour, if you want to be alone. I looked in on my way up,” and “Then I’ll tell Minnie not to disturb you.”... And behold Ursula, mooching disconsolately round the dining-room, a conspicuous captive to the misapprehension that she “liked to be alone sometimes.”

“Look here,” Mr. Maxwell anxiously consulted his wife one evening. “What’s all this trouble about Ursula? I mean, she’s quite comfortable digging-in with Nina, isn’t she? Sisters, and all that. What’s she in such a deuced queer state about ever since----Damn it, it was the girl’s own suggestion to change rooms.”

“Nina’s much easier to understand than Ursula. Nina’s much more like me--hot-tempered and says right out what’s in her mind and then it’s all over.”

For it is a pet illusion with most people that they have exactly this popular sort of temper, and no other.

Her husband drew closer. “Look here, Florrie. Hadn’t you better have a quiet talk with Ursula. A serious talk. You’re the girl’s mother. Get her to confide in you. I dunno--but it doesn’t seem ... natural to me, this fuss about not sleeping alone. Was there anything wrong going on when she----Well, what do you think?”

His suggestion of an interview with Ursula in the spirit of “you’re the girl’s mother” was a parallel to his serious talk with Hal--“After all, I’m your father.”... Thus, twice in the last week or two, parenthood had ceased to be nominal.

“What do you think, Florrie?” He had been nice to her ever since their reconciliation, and especially nice in insisting on her prior right to be consulted and even listened to with deference, on all subjects connected with the children.

Mrs. Maxwell said slowly: “Yes--I’ll talk to Ursula. But I think I know.... A sort of shyness--some girls are like that. Oh, _I_ wasn’t--not I!” and she laughed heartily.

“Look here, Ursula, my dear”--it was always easiest to approach a significant interview with “look here”--“I’m not going to mince words with you. If the trouble is that you don’t like undressing right down in front of Nina, because you’re not used to it--well, it’s false modesty, my dear, that’s what it is, but you can’t help your feelings.” And, very red in the face, but determined not to be put off either from her theory or her remedy, she described how Ursula could put on her nightgown over all her underclothes, and undress decently beneath it, manœuvering unseen knots and buttons until each garment flapped from concealment on to the floor; and, in the same way, could dress completely underneath her nightgown, and then only take it off--“It’s just a knack, and you’re not clumsy, so with a bit of practice--though, mind you, Ursula, you may say I’m too broad-minded, but it’s better than being morbid, which you are when you act as though your body’s something to be ashamed of.”

“Darling Mummie, I don’t care twopence if Nina or anybody else sees me stark naked.”

Florrie Maxwell collapsed on to the ledge of the landing-window. For though the Laburnums was now in its wonted pleasant humour, it still gave father the advantage of a study for “serious talks” with his offspring, and left mother to be despised for her less successful efforts in the uncertain privacy of the landings or the stairs.

Mrs. Maxwell was annoyed with Ursula. She had enjoyed being broad-minded and advanced, in a wind-on-the-open-heath voice, to a prim, shy, absurd little daughter ... but Ursula’s “stark naked” had at once reversed their positions, and discouragingly forced her back into the distasteful attitude of a slightly shocked parent.... For why “stark” naked? “Stark” nakedness contains an impropriety beyond the mere heartiness of a body unclothed.

“Then if it’s not that that’s upsetting you, what is it?” bluntly.

Ursula became impenetrable. Oh, Nina with her “What did you hope to get out of it?” and now the grown-ups with “Why do you mind not sleeping alone?” hinting at--Ursula did not know what they were hinting at; and nor, as a matter of course, did they, except for an uneasy conviction that it was unnatural.

But Aunt Lavvy understood. That was what so exasperated Ursula. Of all of them, Aunt Lavvy, who did not belong to them, who did not love them (not really), and who was, moreover, her enemy, should alone possess subtle mastery of whatever situation arose at the Laburnums. She did not _want_ to be understood by Aunt Lavvy. But in truth she was, and to herself she owned it.

When--when would it begin ... the glorious transformation of the commonplace, reward of sacrifice? Would it never begin? Not today? Not tomorrow? If there were any place to cry and cry and cry out the fulness of her heart and the tightness of her throat, the disappointment might not press so heavily. The room had been a lovely place to cry in.

[XVIII]

“SHE’D be best at boarding-school,” said Mr. Maxwell one evening in the drawing-room, after Ursula had gone to bed. His wife and Aunt Lavvy and Grace and Nina and Stanley and Miss Roberts all agreed. Grace, because she had liked school, and was sure Ursula would like it, and had always pitied her for being cheated of it; Nina, because she honestly believed it would supply some qualities lacking in her young sister--sporting Winborough qualities; Miss Roberts, because Ursula was growing beyond her in temperament, intelligence and impertinence--and anyway, Lottie would suffice to keep her in employment until Honor Rose was old enough to require a governess; and Aunt Lavvy for a reason dissimilar to Grace’s, and also from a feeling not dissimilar to Ursula’s--that she disliked a presence at the Laburnums that understood where it did not love her. But the main reason for agreement with all of them was not mentioned; that it was impossible for the scar of recent conflict to be properly healed, or for the Laburnums to settle down to its former complacency, while the main reminder of the unusual was still in the house--reminding them. Metaphorically, they still twitched their shoulders when Ursula was about. Ursula was a dear, quaint kid, but--when people took to sacrifices you could never be sure what would be their next out-of-the-way freak. Something higher, nobler still perhaps, and even more uncomfortable.... They did not see that there was nothing to be frightened of in poor little Ursula, who was just not big enough to carry it off. If, indeed, she had followed up her lapse from the average by letting them all forget it--ah, then their spirits might well have been awed by the sudden distance separating her from the rest of them.

“I’ll go and see Miss Luther tomorrow,” said Florrie Maxwell. “As you say, Nina, the term will have started, but it’s too long to wait for the half-term, so perhaps they’ll make an exception, as you and Grace were there, and let her enter at once.”

Then Stanley broke it to them. “I may as well tell you now, Mother and Father”--he only called them thus when on the brink of some significant announcement--“that I’ve been negotiating for the remainder of the lease of ‘The Kopje’--we shan’t call it that, naturally. Old Gurney wants to move out at once; it’s too small for him. I think it’s fairly certain that we’ll get it. It’s time Grace and the babies had the run of their own house; and, quite frankly, sir”--turning with good-humour to his father-in-law--“from something you said to me the other day, I gathered you’d prefer it.”

“Well, well.” Mr. Maxwell remembered with regret that he had been irritable in the matter. “Perhaps we are rather tumbling over each other’s toes in the old Laburnums. And as long as you’re still in the same road--we can’t let our grandchildren go too far away, can we, mother?”

Mrs. Maxwell nodded absently, for her thoughts were already bustling about the rooms, re-arranging them. It really seemed as though the sudden exodus would be like releasing a spring, and that they would all reel out into spaciousness, rather crumpled and breathless from having been packed so close. Lottie and Miss Roberts could now have an undisputed schoolroom, and also move down into their old bedroom, where Nurse and the Watson babies had been sleeping. Because an attic was much more suitable for boys--she had always known it, and if Hal were going to college next year, that was the signal that he was grown-up--her grown-up son!--and ought to have a room to himself. Bunny and William would be perfectly happy, rampaging about the attic. And Mrs. Maxwell realized with pride that at last they would actually be able to boast a spare-room, at present Grace and Stanley’s bedroom. “And that makes Nina’s room much more hers as well--I must say she’s been very good about visitors in it--but now she won’t be plagued except during Ursula’s holidays. And the spare-room will do splendidly if Hal wants to bring home his college pals.”

[XIX]

MISS Luther, headmistress of Regina Hall, Tunbridge Wells, had just said good-bye to Mrs. Maxwell; and was discussing the prospective new pupil with Miss Greyling, her second in command:

“Her sisters were both thoroughly nice girls, and Nina, I remember, was one of our best hockey captains. But there seems to be something mysterious about this one--Ursula. At all events, they’re in a special hurry to get rid of her. As far as I can gather from the mother’s manner, she had got herself into some sort of a scrape at home....”

[XX]

THINGS were not different after a sacrifice. Things were exactly the same--only horrider. Ursula knew now.

The taxi sprang away from the open front door of the Laburnums. Sitting on a back seat, she was able to see, through the rain-blurred windows, her mother in the porch, and Aunt Lavvy and Lottie.... They drew in out of the wet, their last smiles still encouraging her with the formula: “You’ll love it when the first homesickness is over.”

Nina and Grace were taking her down, both eager for a glimpse of their old school.

Ursula’s beautiful mouth was set and grave, her eyelids downcast, her hands, as usual, clenched in the deep pockets of her coat. It was simply not worth while to be good. At Regina Hall would be dozens of girls, eating, working, sleeping together. Herded even in thought. There would be confidences and slop and brimming-over affection.... “Oh, a _mess_ of girls!”

But after all, Hal was all right. She had given him back to the world as a complete specimen of hero--a careless, lordly, invulnerable being, good-natured, with a voice of lazy authority. Anything so complete was surely precious, though it was said that only suffering and humiliation enriched the soul ... but so many people with doubtlessly enriched souls, yet dragged about, to all appearances maimed and burdened and spoilt. So might not an occasional Hal remain splendidly poised, neither fretted by consciousness, nor torn by imagination? And Ursula had achieved that for him. She had power. There was sudden dazzlement in the thought.... She lifted her head proudly.... To have secret vision, and to act on it, swiftly, clearly, successfully ... why, she was almost God!

The luminous moment was swept into grey commonplace again, and only a disconsolate little girl in a taxi was on her way to the station.

But she broke into a happy gurgle of laughter, remembering how Lottie had tried to deal with the situation by arranging pins in a pattern on Aunt Lavvy’s cushion.