Part 2

"Don't go, Emily. Don't shove off for a second. I only get wound up like this once in a blue moon, and I'd better get it off my chest now once and for all. Don't imagine I think these Miss Smedleys represent women war-workers. I know they're a minority, but they represent a type. I know something about the other sort--the ones who've helped us to bash the Hun, and they make me feel like a piffling slacker sometimes. How would you like to stand on your feet for twelve hours a day doing acetylene gas welding, or ride eighty miles carrying spare parts on a stink-bike through a snow blizzard--not once, but as a daily routine? I was shipmates with a bloke whose sister did that for two consecutive years. How would you like swabbing out a gangrened wound in a part of a man's anatomy polite civilisation makes him hide under clothes---? Don't raise your eyebrows, Emily! The point I'm driving at is that thousands of women do these things, and somehow manage to remain women----" He mused reminiscently upon a then recent article in Blackwood's Magazine--"Even when they pull off their petticoats and put on breeches to plough an acre a day."

"I am sorry," said Lady Manners, on the threshold of the hall. "But I quite fail to see the application of all this--this rant."

"It applies to Josephine Smedley and her kidney," replied the seeker-after-ideal-womanhood. "It is my 'statement in mitigation.' You, my dear Emily, having donned the black cap and condemned me to a tea-party with the lady in question, cannot do less than listen to my views." Graeme beamed at her irate ladyship, his ill-humour blown away on the winds of vehemence. "And now here is Malcolm bowed down with the affairs of the nation."

Sir Malcolm Manners, who wore a preoccupied air and carried a sheaf of letters in his hand, entered as Graeme spoke. He was a meagre individual with absent blue eyes and a drooping moustache tinted by nicotine. His thin grey hair was parted unsymmetrically down the centre, and one wisp, perpetually overlooked or rebellious against restraint, stuck up from the crown like a cock's tail in miniature.

He stopped when he saw his wife and referred fussily to the letters he carried, as if to refresh his mind from notes preparatory to making a speech.

"We must go up to town for a few days, Emily. These fellows are going to muddle everything without someone on the spot."

By "someone" he meant himself. The baronet was Chairman of a Committee charged with the task of repatriating certain classes of refugees. The refugees having no wish to be repatriated and the Committee boasting not a single business man in its composition, matters were not progressing as rapidly--so said the type-written report in the Chairman's hands--as could be hoped.

"Ha!" said the lady, scenting muddle like a war-horse sniffing battle. There are women who rush to straighten out other people's affairs with a gusto only equalled by the discovery of dust in their own rooms. They make admirable housewives. Then, somehow, into the pleasurable anticipation of good work ahead, of fussy Committee meetings and the rounding up of expostulating unintelligibles, there floated the recollection of Graeme into their minds.

"You don't mind if we run away for a few days, Graeme--you can amuse yourself all right till we come back I dare say? It's a nuisance--but you know what these confounded fellows are if you leave them to themselves."

Sir Malcolm brandished the papers in vague admonition of his absent fellow-repatriators.

"Quite," said Graeme, wondering what they were all talking about. Then, perhaps realising that something more was required of him, added: "I'll be quite all right alone. Have no end of a time. Don't either of you hurry back on my account."

"There are no engagements to bring us back till the end of the week, are there Emily?" queried Sir Malcolm.

"Not that I can remember." Lady Manners walked to a bureau and consulted a little tablet of memoranda. "Oh, I had forgotten, I wrote this morning to the governess in charge of those children staying at Glebe Farm, asking her to bring them to tea the day after to-morrow. They are the children of Admiral Halliday; you remember, we met him and his wife at Portsmouth the year before the war--when we stayed with the Farehams."

"Pretty woman, was she?" inquired Sir Malcolm. "Or was it the one who liked boiled eggs with her tea?"

"It's immaterial," said his wife. "The children have had chicken-pox and are convalescing. I understand they are free from infection."

"They've stopped peeling," said the voice of Graeme.

"Eh?" said Sir Malcolm, wheeling with a surprised expression. He had a way of forgetting his brother-in-law's presence and being startled when he spoke. "That needn't bring me back from town, need it?"

"Not at all," said Graeme cheerfully. "They'd probably start again if they thought they'd dragged you back."

The baronet looked still more confused. "Start what? I don't understand. What have I got to do with these children and their complaints?"

"Nothing," said his wife, in the tone the keeper of an imbecile might adopt. "They are only coming here to tea when we are away. Graeme, of course, would consider it beneath his dignity to entertain children"--she smiled rather frostily--"so Mrs. Mackworth must give them their tea and show them the picture gallery, and--er--Baines shall take them round the gardens. That will leave Graeme free from all responsibilities in our absence."

"Thank you," said the officer referred to. "Always grateful for small mercies." He looked at his watch, and lounged off towards the stairway. "I'm going to shift for dinner." At the first landing he paused and looked back. "By the way, Emily," he said, "have they accepted?"

"Who?" asked Lady Manners, her head once more full of the affairs of the about-to-be-repatriated.

"Those children."

"No. If a letter comes you had better open it, and let Mrs. Mackworth know if they are coming."

"I will," said Graeme. "But, oh, who wouldn't sell his little farm and go to sea!"

3

Cornelius James claimed the right to be the bearer of the acceptance to Lady Manners' invitation by virtue of having been the first to discover Graeme.

Georgina, doomed to an hour's violin practice, was immured in the stuffy farm parlour amid waxen fruit, daguerreotype portraits and family Bibles. Jane, after a spirited bid for the post of messenger, sought consolation in the region of the sheep-dip, speedily becoming as excited and almost as wet as the struggling animals themselves. Miss Mayne, having borrowed an iron from the farmer's wife, retired to the sitting-room, where, with pretty brows knit in the preoccupation of _blanchissage_, she was no longer a governess, but a slim priestess before a vestal altar, aloof, mysterious.

Cornelius James, turning his back on these feminine activities, pursued a stony lane that climbed through sloping fields and presently debouched upon the main road. The lodge gates of his destination stood a few hundred yards higher up, but boylike he disdained so formal an entrance, and nosed along the high palisade surrounding the park until a displaced board gave him access.

The trees grew thick and untended as in a wilderness, with moss clinging to their bark and the verdure wellnigh shutting out the sky. Underfoot the dead leaves of countless autumns' garnering rustled crisply and, as the boy advanced, twigs snapped at every step; something startled by his footfall bounded away through the fern unseen. To the ears of boyhood, Pan's pipe has not grown dim, and it was with a heart that thumped responsive that Cornelius James crept forward.

His imagination, acutely vivid and rather childish for his years, insisted that this was a desperate business, demanding caution and woodcraft of no mean order. Indians, painted and feathered, slipped like shadows from bole to hollow; a tiny pool amid the bracken was the nightly drinking-place of beasts a hunter of his experience could recognise from their spoor.... A squirrel, low down on an overhanging branch, suddenly sent his heart into his mouth as it broke into a scolding chatter at his approach.

The trees grew fewer and gave glimpses of great stretches of lawn, vivid green in the brilliant sunlight. Beyond, entrenched behind flower-beds and a stone balustraded terrace, stood the great house. Had Cornelius James but known it, romance clustered thicker round those hoary buildings than any he could imagine in his woodland transports.

Monks had chanted matins and vespers in the vaulted chapel whose roof caught his eye amid the greenery. Brave gentlemen had died at the end of the alley-way bordered by yew hedges on the right--fought and died for the light love of a lady. Dawn had paled candles behind the deep-set oriel windows and seen a fortune, aye, ten fortunes, change hands across a little baize-covered table. The births of great men and famous women and their deaths had the old house known for twenty generations, and once (so the chroniclers record) murder most foul.

But the boy was less concerned with the house than the gleam of a lake beyond the lawns. Water always called him, were it sea or river or puddle by the roadside.

He emerged from the park, a hot, dishevelled, breathless little figure, and set off at a trot to where the ornamental lake was situated. A stream meandered down to the head of the lake, and following it he came presently to the stone coping (it had been a fish pond in monastic days) and espied a tall figure, lazily whipping the surface of the lake with a trout rod. It was Graeme Jakes, and so intent was he upon his occupation that not until Cornelius James panted to his side did he turn his head.

"Hullo, sprite!" he said. "Where have you sprung from?"

"I've got a letter," gasped Cornelius James, "about our coming to tea with you."

"Oh," said the prospective host, and then in a tone of anxiety that would have astonished his step-sister: "You are coming, aren't you?"

"Rather," said the boy. "We're all coming." He held out the letter. "This is for Lady Manners. Shall I go in and give it to her?"

"That's all right," said Graeme, possessing himself of the missive. "I'll take it."

He wound in his line and stood staring across the lawns in the direction of the old house.

"We are looking forward to coming," said Cornelius James. "Frightfully. Jane hopes we can play hide and seek."

"Of course you can," said Graeme. "You can do any blessed thing you like."

"And you'll play, too?"

"I?" Graeme's tone was one of apprehension, but mingled with it was a note of pleased anticipation the child's ear was quick to catch. "Are you sure you want me? I'm not much good at games; it's rather a long time since I played hide and seek, you know."

"Of course you'll have to join in," replied Cornelius James. They were walking side by side in the direction of the house. "That's all we're coming for." He looked up into Graeme's face with a boy's frank affection in his gaze.

There are men proof against the blandishments of women, charm they never so wisely, but none entirely unsusceptible to a child's naïve advances.

Graeme flicked the supple rod to and fro over his shoulder.

"Right-ho!" he said gruffly, and then after a half-awkward pause added: "Would you like a peach?"

The boy signified assent to the proposal, and they skirted the flower-beds, leaving the house on their left and entered the walled garden.

Cornelius James rapidly disposed of two peaches and a pear while Graeme stood watching him with a smile lurking about the corners of his mouth.

"Better take some back for the other sprites," he said, and gathered four peaches. "Here you are--two each. Shove 'em in your pockets."

Cornelius James gravely accepted the gift, and prepared to depart.

"Thanks awfully," he said, and hesitated. "I say, would you mind if I took one back for Miss Mayne? She loves peaches."

"I'd forgotten Miss Mayne," he said. "Of course she can have some. Here! Where's your cap?" He selected and picked the fruit with a preoccupied air, then suddenly; "Does--does Miss Mayne play hide and seek?"

Cornelius James nodded. "She plays everything," he said with enthusiasm. "You wait!"

They had regained the terrace and stood looking out across the smiling countryside.

"You haven't seen Miss Mayne yet, have you?"

"No," said Graeme. He stood motionless for a minute after his visitor had departed, watching the small figure dwindling in the distance. Then drawing the letter from his pocket he opened and read it. It was a formal acceptance of half a dozen lines written in a clear, round, rather girlish hand and signed "Claire Mayne." But the reader scrutinised it as if it had been a photograph, and re-read it twice ere he replaced it in his pocket and walked slowly back to the house.

"I wonder what she looks like," he said, musing, and then remembered rather uneasily that he had omitted to mention to his visitor the absence of the mistress of the household. In the hall he encountered the housekeeper.

"Oh, Mrs. Mackworth, those children are coming to tea to-morrow. I shall be in, and I will--er--entertain them."

Mrs. Mackworth, who had had in contemplation a tea-party to two cronies in her own room, looked relieved at the intelligence.

"Then you won't require my presence, Mr. Graeme?"

"No, thank you," replied Graeme, with the desperate calm of a man who had deliberately burned his boats.

4

The following morning found the children in a glow of pleasurable anticipation which their landlady, on learning of the impending visit, cheerfully fanned to fever pitch. She had been a housemaid "up at the house" in her youth, and held the children spellbound with her description of its glories.

"There's armour there enough for a regiment of soldiers," she said with fine disregard of modern military equipment, "and pictures by the mile. Chimney-vases hundreds of years old, worth their weight in gold, standing about in corners like dirt. Mind, too," she added, with a ring of sombre reminiscence in her tones, "they break if you so much as look at 'em. Don't forget to see the tapestry that was wove by a queen and her ladies, and if Mr. Graeme's there, get him to show you the secret passage--there's one behind a sliding panel in Sir Malcolm's library."

"Oh!" gasped Jane and Cornelius James in chorus.

"Graeme will be there," cried the latter with dancing eyes.

"And a nice young gentleman he is," said the woman. "Comes here to get my husband to go ferreting and drops in afterwards for a cup of tea. Quiet, you know, and unassuming; happier, they say, with us farmer folk than with lords and ladies of the County. That's the gossip in these parts, but I was never one myself for----"

"Did you say we should meet him?" inquired Georgina of her brother, with lofty indifference a shade over accentuated.

"Yes," was the reply, "and you needn't put on airs because you are going to have tea with a grown-up man."

"And a silly little boy," retorted Georgina, nettled. She sighted Miss Mayne.

"Corney's frightfully jealous that we're going to steal his beloved Mr. Jakes from him," she scoffed.

Miss Mayne laughed merrily. "Cheer up, Corney," she said. "We don't want your old Mr. Jakes, whoever he may be." She rumpled his hair affectionately.

The child slipped his arm through that of the woman.

"No," he replied, and looked up at her fair face quizzing down at him; a little smile lit his eyes in innocent roguery. "No, but he may want _you_!"

"Oh!" exclaimed Miss Mayne. "Why, I do believe Georgie was right!"

"How right?"

"I believe you are a silly little boy, after all."

Beneath another roof in the country Graeme Jakes formed the topic of conversation that summer morning. The Misses Smedley were alone in the music-room of The Garth, where Alicia was practising a "Jazz" waltz on the piano. Josephine, swaying her body sinuously to the rhythm, smoked a cigarette while she stared out of the window.

"He's not what you'd call good looking," she said, "exactly."

"No," replied Alicia, turning her music and nodding jerkily as the tune progressed.

"All the same," said Josephine, "there's something rather----" she writhed expressively.

The fair Alicia played in silence for some moments. "Don't work up a 'pash' over him till you know more about him. For all you know, he's married already--or wrapped up in another girl. Sailors are devils."

Josephine took three "Jazz" steps across the room and threw the stump of her cigarette into the fireplace. "I like devils," said the supple virgin, "'specially ugly ones."

Her sister stopped playing, wheeled round on the music-stool, and taking a cigarette out of a box on the piano, bounced it end-on with merciless violence against her thumbnail before putting it in her mouth.

"I believe you are so dev'lish intrigued with this man because he snubbed you the other day," she drawled.

Josephine laughed. "There are some men one would rather like to be beaten by---- Al, can you think of an excuse to go over there this afternoon? What about those theatricals at Aldbury--can't we ask him to act in them? He won't, of course--that sort's too self-conscious--but it would be a decent excuse."

"Obvious," said the more experienced Alicia.

"Rot--be a sport."

"But he leaves me cold," objected the "sport."

"So much the better. Didn't I help you when young Maunder was staying at Norton Hall? You owe me one over that."

"Oh, all right, then," assented Alicia. "I shall have to gas to Lady Manners all the afternoon. 'Snice, I don't think."

"Lady Manners is away. Gone to town with old Sir Stick-in-the-mud. But, of course, we shan't know that--get all in a flutter----"

Alicia opened her heavy-lidded eyes wide. "My dear!" she cried, and then, spinning round to the key-board, vamped the opening bars of Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

"Shur-r-r up!" shrieked Josephine, with a burst of abrupt laughter somehow suggestive of the cry of the green woodpecker.

All unconscious of the tremors he had awakened in the maidenly bosom of Josephine Smedley, Graeme Jakes sallied forth to meet his guests. He had mapped out a programme for their amusement with considerable care, harking back in memory to the far-off days when as a little boy he was bidden to spend adventurous afternoons at adjoining country houses, where there were always swarms of children, and the gardeners locked the doors of the wall-gardens as a precaution----

Well, there would be no doors locked that afternoon. He had seen to that, and the tea, with its piles of cakes and pyramids of fruit, bowls of cream and dishes of Mrs. Mackworth's famous preserves, materialised the vision of a meal he had always dreamed as a child, and somehow never achieved in waking hours.

He met his guests half-way up the avenue through the park, a demure-looking little group from which first Cornelius James and then Jane detached themselves and sped to greet him.

"Look," said Jane, extending decorously gloved fingers, "tell Miss Mayne you hate people with gloves. She made us wear them--Georgie and me."

"Did she?" said the host, and advanced to welcome the autocrat who had decreed gloves. Of course, Emily would expect children to wear gloves----

He was face to face with Miss Mayne, with Georgina at her side. The governess had overheard Jane's protest, and was laughing as they shook hands. Graeme approved of her laugh; it produced tiny wrinkles at the side of her nose, giving her face an ingenuous and infectious merriment. Despite the pre-occupation of the apology he was mentally framing, Graeme noticed that her eyes were grey, and that there were freckles powdered like gold-dust about the attractive nose.

"I ought to have let you know before," he said. "I hope you don't mind, but the fact is, my step-sister is away. She and her husband have had to go up to town."

The smile faded from Miss Mayne's face. "I'm sorry. We didn't know."

Her regard, meeting the man's, somehow reminded him of the searching look Cornelius James had given him at their first encounter.

"Emily entrusted me with the job of explaining her absence and apologising. I should have done both sooner, but, somehow, it never entered my head. I have been looking forward so much to having a party----" He grinned boyishly and flushed.

Miss Mayne Was sophisticated enough to interpret aright all that quick flush meant. Her smile returned like a reassured rabbit sallying forth again from its burrow.

"It's very brave of you," she said, "and we are ever so grateful, because we've been looking forward to this afternoon, too, haven't we, Georgina?"

Georgina awkwardly confirmed this; she was at the shy age of girlhood--the age at which youth finds itself a trifle superfluous in Nature's inexorable scheme.

"Very well, then," said their host, "we will proceed according to plan, as the Hun said when he retreated," and led the way towards the house.

For the first time in his life he played the host, and the rôle became him. True, the house was not his, but he knew and loved it, in his shy, unobtrusive fashion, and showed a knowledge of its contents that more than once caused Miss Mayne to glance at him with a half surprised, veiled appreciation. She herself spoke little, but, when she did, displayed a love of the beautiful and no small knowledge of many of the arts that beautified the interior of the mansion. The little party had reached the portrait gallery, and at Georgina's request Mouldy Jakes furnished them with thumb-nail sketches of the life histories of the originals. He talked in a dryly humorous fashion that held the children alternately entranced and convulsed with laughter, warming to his self-imposed task as Miss Mayne caught the infectious mirth and echoed the children's gurgles with her own clear sweet laugh.

"And who is that?" inquired Georgina, pointing to a bloodless-looking dame in blue satin holding a toy spaniel in her preposterously tapering hands.

"Ah!" said their host, "now we're getting to the really interesting ones. I was saving her for the last. There's a story about her you won't believe."

"Tell," commanded Jane, possessing herself of his undamaged hand.

"Well, this particular lady died--or at least they thought she was dead, and they planted--that's to say, buried her, in the vault attached to the chapel--I'll show you the place later on. She had a wedding-ring which was supposed to carry special luck to its wearer--it was rolled out of a piece of gold looted from a joss-house by some adventurous Manners. Anyhow, she was buried with this ring on, and in the night, one of the gardeners thought that, being alive and having use for good luck, he might as well have the ring as leave it where it was."

"Oh," said Miss Mayne, "I know the story--never mind, go on!" She turned and stared curiously at the impassive features of the lady.

"Well, the gardener got hold of the ring; he'd been apprenticed to a burglar as a lad before he took up gardening, and he had strong nerves as well. The trouble was that he couldn't separate the ring from the lady, and he didn't want her. He pulled hard, but he couldn't get it off. Not for nuts."

"I know what _I_ should have done," said Cornelius James. "I should have cut off her finger."

"Corney!" protested his shocked sisters.