Part 3

"Well, that was more or less his idea. The trouble was he hadn't got a knife--he wasn't a sailor; but he had been the next best thing for the purpose--a dog-fancier."

"I thought you said he had been a burglar?" interposed Jane severely. Consistency in details she invariably insisted upon when told a story.

"Oh," gasped Miss Mayne, as the significance of the gardener's former pursuit suddenly became plain, "you surely don't mean----"

"He was in a hurry. P'raps the job was getting on his nerves after all. He started in, and when he was half-way through the lady sat up. She wasn't dead--only in a trance."

"What did the gardener do?" asked Cornelius James feverishly.

"At the time he ran away," replied Mouldy in sepulchral tones, "but later on he repented and joined the Church."

"And the lady lived happily ever afterwards?" insisted Jane the punctilious.

"Certainly," said Mouldy. "And now, before we have tea, I'll show you all the ring." He ran up the stairway at the end of the gallery and returned a few minutes later with a little casket.

"It is supposed to bring luck to any woman who slips it on her wedding finger," said the host, opening the lid and taking out a heavy plain ring.

"Let me put it on," said Georgina. She extended a slim sunburnt paw, and Mouldy gravely slipped it on the third finger of her left hand.

"What a weight," she said, and turned her hand admiringly, contemplating it after the manner of women, with her head on one side.

"Do you feel all funny?" inquired Jane, with obvious anxiety. "The luck----"

"No, silly," replied her sister. "Here, you put it on." She drew it off and slipped it on Jane's small finger. "Now Miss Mayne."

Miss Mayne shook her head laughingly. "No," she said, "my luck doesn't want any improving. I'm quite content with everything as it is."

Her host glanced at her quizzically. She certainly did not look as if she had many grounds for complaint, as she stood with her hands behind her back and mirth in her pretty eyes, a gracefully poised, perfectly healthy, happy specimen of young womanhood.

"Oh, Miss Mayne, but you must!" cried her charges in unison.

"You can never have too much of a good thing, you know," endorsed the host. Without quite knowing why, he was aware that his heart was beating a shade fast. He wanted her to put the ring on. He had an absurd inexplicable desire to put it on her finger himself.

"Just put it on the tip," pleaded Jane. "Please."

Miss Mayne was now blushing unaffectedly, and furious with herself.

"Why not?" asked Graeme with masculine obtuseness.

"You needn't put it right on," said Georgina soothingly. Abruptly Miss Mayne yielded. The affair threatened to develop into a scene; she felt self-conscious and embarrassed.

"Very well," she consented, and held out her hand to Jane. "Put it on the tip, it's too small for me to wear."

Jane complied, but Cornelius James intervened and pounced on her extended finger. "No, no," he cried, "properly! You must have all the luck!" and thrust the gold circle over her knuckle.

Miss Mayne tugged at it unavailingly. The blush had gone and a look of annoyance creased her brows. "It won't come off," she murmured.

"Never mind," said Graeme; "don't worry. We'll have tea, and then Mrs. Mackworth shall bring you some soap and warm water. Tea's ready now."

"I'd rather----" began the girl, and stopped. She had made enough fuss over the wretched thing, she decided. "Very well," she said reluctantly, and they descended to the dining-room, and the Gargantuan repast Graeme had prepared.

As the meal progressed, the friendly relations Graeme had established with the children increased to something approaching intimacy. Miss Mayne's annoyance disappeared and her whimsy of a smile returned. The incident of the ring was forgotten, and no one mentioned it. Only she remained somehow conscious of it as she sat with her hand unobtrusively concealed from view upon her lap.

Tea was nearing its conclusion when the butler entered and approached Graeme's chair.

"The two Miss Smedleys, sir, have called. I said her Ladyship was away, but they said, if they might, they'd like to see you for a minute."

"See _me_!" groaned the victim. "Oh, who wouldn't sell his little farm and go to sea? Why do they want to see me?"

"Couldn't say, sir," said the butler, with faint disapproval in his tone.

Graeme gazed at him with undisguised panic in his face.

"Look here, Hobbes," he said, "I'm not going to face those man-eaters alone. You can show 'em in here. I suppose they'll have to have tea."

Then to the children, who sat wide-eyed and silent during this confab, he appealed. "You'll all help me, won't you?"

"Rather!" exclaimed Cornelius James, all his martial instincts aroused by the reference to man-eaters, but quite at a loss as to what was expected of him.

"Course we'll help," echoed Georgina, with something nearer comprehension.

"Well, then, you must just pretend I'm your father."

"What fun!" cried Jane, and they rose as the door opened and the Misses Smedley stood, somewhat taken aback, on the threshold.

"How d'you do," said Graeme advancing. "I hope you don't mind a schoolroom tea round the dining-table, but the fact is, I--when the children are here--we always have tea together."

The Misses Smedley bowed confusedly to Miss Mayne.

"We won't stop, ta fearfully all the same--we only wanted to ask you to act in some theatricals," said Josephine; "they're next week, and we're in a tearing hurry. Think it over and let us know as soon as you can."

"_I_," said Graeme. "Do you mean you want _me_ to act?" He turned to the party round the table. "Children, can you imagine your father acting in amateur theatricals?"

The response was an outburst of unbridled merriment, in course of which Cornelius James, seated next to Miss Mayne, upset his teacup.

The Misses Smedley took advantage of the ensuing confusion to beat a retreat.

"Well," said Alicia, "we just popped in on the off-chance you would, don't you know, being next-door neighbours, and all that kind of thing. Now we must fly off and beat up someone else." Her insolent eyes roved round the table. She appeared to be preoccupied with some mental arithmetical calculation.

"Won't you have some tea first?" said Miss Mayne. The instant she had spoken she regretted it, but the intimacy of the afternoon, the feeling of knowing almost as much about the house and its contents as the owners, perhaps some faint promptings of loyalty to her sex, produced a spontaneous offer of hospitality that she knew was not hers to make.

"No, thanks really," said Josephine, already in retreat. "We haven't time now. Good-bye, and do try to persuade your husband to help us with these wretched theatricals."

Graeme and Miss Mayne stared blankly at each other. Through the open window came the sound of a car being cranked furiously.

The children's faces were eyeing their elders as if uncertain how to take this unexpected turn of events.

"They don't really eat men, do they?" said the awed voice of Cornelius James.

"You don't honestly think----" began Miss Mayne, her colour once more supplanting her smile. "Oh, couldn't you tell them--run out and say I--we----"

Graeme hastened after the visitors with belated promptings of conscience and the laws of hospitality, but before he reached the hall the splutter of gravel and the hum of the engine told the listeners in the dining-room he was too late.

"He's waving good-bye," said Alicia, as the car swerved and rocked down the avenue, looking back and brandishing her gloves.

"Let him!" snapped Josephine, opening the throttle. "Some men are the limit. Fancy all those children. Disgusting, I call it. Why, the eldest was fourteen, if she was a day."

"_She_ looked idiotically young," said Alicia.

"Probably their step-mother. Didn't she look daggers when we walked in! I suppose she is his wife?"

"'Course she is; didn't you see her wedding ring? I spotted it when that kid upset his cup and she started mopping up the mess. 'Course she's his wife."

"H'm," was the comment of the sporting Alicia.

5

Graeme Jakes accompanied his guests as far as the gateway to Glebe Farm when finally they departed. The sun was dipping behind the hills and rabbits were showing themselves along the lane; it was a golden evening of incredible peacefulness, but in Graeme's mind a shadow of remorse lingered.

"Look here, Miss Mayne," he began awkwardly when a temporary absence of the children, who had run to greet the farm terrier, made intimate speech possible. "I'm awfully sorry for the stupid mistake that Smedley girl made. I feel I am really to blame, although nothing was further from my mind----"

Miss Mayne was silent and Graeme shot a swift glance at her profile which, beyond enabling him to note that her eyelashes were long and curved up a little at the tips, afforded him no comfort. They walked a few paces through clouds of jigging gnats.

"Shall we not talk about it any more?" said Miss Mayne at length.

"I don't want to talk about it. I only wanted to reassure you, in case you might feel any annoyance. You see, they'll have found out the truth by now. They certainly won't waste time making inquiries----" He smiled grimly. "And if anything more comes of it, the worst will be a visit of apology to you from the pair of 'em."

He crinkled his eyes in the sunset light and scanned the figures of the children ahead of them.

"Why!" he murmured. "Of course it's absurd! It's comic! Fancy me----" and stopped on delicate ground.

Miss Mayne smiled too. "I hope I shall be spared apologies. As long as they realise at once---- As you say----" She hesitated and drove the point home. "The idea is--comic! And," she added graciously, "I'm not in the least angry with you."

So ended Graeme's party. He retraced his steps, puffing furiously at his pipe, jolted out of the accustomed orbit of his thoughts as completely as a maiden after her first dance.

On the whole he had enjoyed the afternoon immensely and found himself wondering why he had never done anything of the sort before. They were such jolly kids; the brown-faced, impulsive Cornelius James, aglow with imagination and as affectionate as a puppy; Jane, a feminine edition of him, with thick hair, "bobbed" above the nape of her white neck (he had discovered for the first time the witchery that lies in the back of a child's neck); and Georgina, shy, long slip of a thing with eyes like a fawn and hints of a not-distant womanhood in her quick changes of colour and the pretty immature curves of her young body.

Of Miss Mayne he thought with a queer mixture of compunction and pleasure. She so obviously would have enjoyed the afternoon had it not been for the lamentable business of the ring, and the ridiculous remark addressed to her by Josephine Smedley. Her husband indeed...! Somehow that possible interpretation never entered his head when he suggested temporarily adopting the children. The ring she was still wearing during tea must have been responsible for it. He wished they had got it off with soap and water when she wanted to, instead of leaving it till afterwards. "Comic!" The intonation in Miss Mayne's voice came back to him as she echoed the word. After all, why comic----?

He wondered, sailor-like, what manner of man her brother had been, that dead Guardsman who slept "in Flanders' fields." He realised with an unfamiliar thrill the fearless, frank way she had looked him in the eyes, the poise of her head, the gay quality of her laugh, and somehow wished he had had that man for a pal; he, who since boyhood had never really opened his heart to another human being.

He found a letter from his step-sister awaiting him on his return. It was a hurried epistle communicating the fact that Sir Malcolm was in bed with influenza, which at that time was raging in London. It postponed their return indefinitely and bade Graeme make himself as comfortable as circumstances permitted in their absence until the end of his leave.

Perhaps nothing more was necessary than this absence of Lady Manners from the scene to mature Graeme's friendship with his new acquaintances.

From the formal invitation to a return party at Glebe Farm penned by Georgina and signed by all three children, they passed by rapid stages to an easy comradeship. In a week the boy and both girls were as free of the demesne as Graeme was of the noisy teas in the farm parlour. Further, the latter unearthed a governess cart out of the stables, and harnessing a fat pony between the shafts, led them off on long rambling expeditions amongst the thickly-wooded hills, and lanes drowsy with the scent of honeysuckle.

It is not for me to attempt any convincing record of the imperceptible stages by which, as the days passed, Graeme fell in love with Claire Mayne.

She obtruded upon his thoughts as sunlight enters a room past curtains waving in the breeze, while with the dour perversity of his queer nature he tried to shut her out.

There were women about whom no one could cherish any illusions; with these Graeme Jakes was half contemptuously, half pityingly at ease. But in Claire Mayne he saw someone who approached so exquisitely to his ideal of womanhood that he dreaded disillusionment. Thus and thus must his goddess be fashioned, and the first word or act of hers that betrayed feet of clay would have filled him with bitterness and disappointment.

However, as time went on, one after another he drew forth timidly from the secret hiding-place of his soul some fresh idealism; draping them about his conception of her, until the real and the imaginary woman blended into that dear, everlastingly inaccessible unreality which is all mankind's first love.

Transports of this nature are usually apparent enough in the demeanour; but Graeme Jakes's oriental imperturbability of countenance gave not the slightest betrayal of the turmoil in his thoughts.

Claire Mayne herself remained serenely unconscious of anything in the air more vibrant than a grave friendliness and a shy, half-reluctant admiration. She would not have been the normal, healthy young woman she was had she not thought about him a good deal. When the children were in bed and the stars made visible the dark outline of the hills opposite, she sat by her open window, with the tiny room behind her in darkness; there, chin in hand, she tried to assign him to some known category amongst her limited male acquaintances, and found the task difficult.

Since girlhood her pet character in fiction had been Alan Breck; not for his swashbuckling gallantry, nor the efficient way with him in sword play, but because, as she herself put it, "he wanted looking after so dreadfully."

Graeme Jakes, in some subtle way that eluded analysis, appealed to her in much the same manner. His clothes lacked buttons at times and his hair was generally dreadfully untidy. She would like, she thought, to brush his hair for him ... in a brisk, sisterly fashion.

The tranquillity of her meditations would have been sorely disturbed could she have seen the object of her thoughts. Half a mile away, from a vantage point amid the dewy bracken, stood her devout lover, watching with all a lover's faculty for self-hypnotism a light burning behind a blind in one of the upper windows of the farm. Fondly he watched its orange glow through the darkness until it was abruptly extinguished, and returned home in a mood of exalted melancholy. Judge though how greater the melancholy had he realised the blind screened no other than the conjugal chamber of the farmer and his wife....

The days went by thus to merge into weeks, and the children's visit was fast drawing to a close. Graeme, too, had received orders to attend at the Admiralty for medical survey. The halcyon days were numbered.

They had planned an expedition to the coast, an all-day affair that was to include sea-bathing for the children, for the last day. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky, the air was clear and sweet with autumn scents, and the cavalcade set forth on the appointed morning in wild spirits. Mrs. Mackworth had provided lunch and tea, and the food, together with bathing things, cameras, and all the impedimenta of a holiday, were piled into the pony cart. Miss Mayne held the reins and Georgina walked at the pony's head; Jane and her brother ranged along the hedgerows like a couple of terriers; while Graeme brought up the rear, outwardly cheerful, but inwardly experiencing the varied sensations of a man who has decided to propose ere the going down of the sun to a damsel whose only concern appeared to be to avoid being left alone in his company.

They reached the sea about noon; Graeme had chosen a little bay where the sands were safe for bathing. The coast stretched away on one hand in a waste of dunes and marsh, and on the other rose in indented cliffs from a rock-strewn beach.

On the top of the cliffs they unpacked the baskets, turned the pony loose to graze, and, when the children had had their longed-for bathe, lunched al fresco as might the gods have eaten upon Olympus.

It was after lunch that Graeme made his first anxious bid for the company of Miss Mayne alone. "Supposing you three go and explore the caves," he suggested to the children, a clumsy argument which, for its very ingenuousness, roused no suspicions in that maiden's heart.

"But what about you and Miss Mayne?" inquired Jane.

"Well," said Graeme feebly, "p'raps we'll go and look for seagulls' eggs along the cliffs."

"Gulls don't lay eggs in September," said Miss Mayne. "Why shouldn't we all go and explore caves?"

Nothing was further from her mind than the imminence of the proposal shaping itself on Graeme's lips, but a pretty loyalty to the children's parents forbade her to let them out of her vision. "A nice business," said her conscience, "if one of them got hurt. Where was Miss Mayne? Philandering somewhere out of sight with a Naval officer.... Well, not philandering exactly, but----"

"I thought perhaps you might be tired," broke in the voice of the Naval officer upon her meditations.

"Not in the least," she replied. "Come along, we'll all go down to the beach."

So off they set and awakened the echoes of the shallow caves with their voices, explored the pools left by the tide; built with the aid of pieces of driftwood a sand castle that had cockle shells for windows and a tiny green crab as keeper of the gateway, and through all the absorption of this light nonsense Graeme was conscious of Claire Mayne, whether she spoke or was silent, in view or out of sight, as a man is aware of the sunlight and the wind on his cheek. She seemed inevitable--inevitable and indispensable.

The children found him dullish and rather distrait.

Curiously enough it was she who at last gave him his opportunity to speak his heart. The children decreed it was time for their next bathe, and while they undressed in the shelter of the rocks, Graeme set about unpacking the tea-things and boiling the kettle. He watched, kneeling, the three slim forms scamper across the short stretch of sands in the sunlight to meet the incoming tide, and suddenly Miss Mayne joined him on the cliff.

"I'll help you," she said; "I can watch the children from here and cut bread and butter at the same time. They are quite safe."

Her manner was unconcerned; she spoke in the unrestrained note of comradeship, and stood watching the children capering in the sunlit waves, with the wind moulding her garments to her long limbs and drawing loose tendrils of her hair in careless, happy disorder across the curve of her cheek outlined against the sky.

Graeme knelt observing her, suddenly tongue-tied. You can invent speeches to a goddess, aye, and deliver them effectively enough to a silent night of stars, but this radiant, composed girl was flesh and blood; he could almost see the warm vitality glowing through her skin. She needed no clap-trap speech about love such as fellows deliver in novels.... He rose to his feet. The wind and the sunshine and the sound of the sea seemed to sing and shout together. "Man! Here's your mate at last!" was the burden of the song. "Here's the goal of all your heart's desire; the haven of your soul's adventure! Look at her, shaped for you by incalculable forces and laws, beautified and perfected and handed down through infinite ages, to stand thus within your arms' reach. Yours, man, if you can but win her! Tell her, fool ... tell her."

"I'm glad you came," said the fool, and his voice, husky and unfamiliar, startled him.

A sound, distinct from the noises of wind and shore, obtruded upon his consciousness as he spoke, and the girl heard it too, for she wheeled sharply and stood staring, not at her companion, but back across the sheep-cropped turf.

Two horses were approaching at a canter, near enough already for their riders' faces to be discernible. One was Josephine Smedley; the other, a vapid-faced young man in extravagant equestrian attire. They drew rein and approached the cliff at a walk, Miss Smedley waving her whip in greeting. Her companion touched his horse with the spur, holding it on the curb while it curveted effectively.

"Topping day!" cried Josephine. "Watching the kids bathe, Mrs. Jakes?"

Graeme heard the girl give a little gasp. She stood quite motionless for a few seconds and then, still staring at the rider, he heard her say in a low voice, as if speaking to herself: "This has gone far enough; it's got to stop." Miss Smedley's cavalier had rather overdone the spur business and was having considerable difficulty in controlling his horse, which was plunging and pulling some distance away.

Graeme stepped forward. "I'll explain," he said. "Miss Smedley----"

"No," interrupted Claire Mayne, "leave this to me. You should have explained before this." She took a few steps in the direction of the other girl. "Miss Smedley," she said in a clear voice, "I think it only right I should tell you I am not married. I am not Mr. Jakes's wife." She paused, apparently from loss of breath.

In the middle distance the young man, obviously losing control of his mount, was shouting something over his shoulder. Miss Smedley glanced in his direction and then looked Claire Mayne brutally from head to toe. "Please don't apologise," she said, "I--we suspected as much." It took the short, hard laugh that followed the words to drive the insult home. She flicked her horse sharply on the flank and rode after her escort.

The sound of the horses' hoofs had died away before Miss Mayne spoke.

"Did she mean--was that woman trying to----?" she began, and stopped. Mechanically she knelt down and began setting out the tea-things as if in a trance.

"Why didn't you leave it to me?" expostulated Graeme, kneeling beside her. "I'd have explained properly. She misunderstood ... or pretended to."

The girl raised a face from which all vestige of colour had fled. Her eyes were wide and pitiful; she held a sugar basin in one hand, in the other a butter knife.

"But I did explain," she said. "How could I know...?"