Hare and Tortoise (Davison)/Part 2/Chapter 1

by Frank Cyril Shaw Davison

Chapter I

IT was the second anniversary of the death of Billy Salter. A summer breeze played over the hillock which was surmounted by two small tombstones. The branches of the trees which had sheltered the grave-diggers from hail on the day of the funeral were now tossing in a frantic effort to extend their shade to the rows of asters with which Katie and Louise had bounded the two graves.

"Seems less lonesome for Billy, don't it, Mrs. Eveley, when Rosie has a flower bed too," Katie had commented. Rosie Dixon had died before Billy was born, but her span of life had been as limited as his own, which had the effect of making them seem contemporaries.

As Katie had expressed it, "If both were living to-day Rosie would be twenty-nine and Billy fourteen, just going into long pants; but really they're only the same age—both twelve, poor babies!"

Louise recalled the remark this August afternoon as she and Trenholme Dare tied their horses to neighboring trees and ascended towards the deserted graves. "I couldn't help feeling that Katie had stumbled on an interesting idea," she said.

"She had," Dare agreed. "If Katie was a savant she might have developed it into an epoch-making theory of time."

"How far ahead would that have got her?"

"Not an inch. Metaphysicians are higher in the air, and their altitude gives them a more panoramic view, but they are traveling towards eternity at exactly the same speed as Katie and not a whit faster. The value of intricate theories is that they are reducible to homely, concrete observations like Katie's. Conversely the beauty of Katie's homely discovery is that it can be elevated into a formula and re-applied, even canonized, along with Newton's apple and adventures of other scientific saints. It's like art: the glory of music is that it is made up of vulgar sounds, and the saving grace of vulgar sounds is that they can all get to a musical heaven."

Louise was sitting on the grass, gazing down towards grey plains which merged into the distant brown hills, which in turn merged into a sky whose blue gave an impression of actual depth. It was not a canopy to-day but an ocean of air, or rather,—since it was bodiless and unglazed,—an ocean's ghost, with small clouds, like the ghosts of icebergs, drifting across its waveless surface.

The breeze which tossed the branches and stirred Sundown's mane came to sport with her own hair. Her hat lay at her feet, and with an arm limply outstretched she wielded a switch, flicking the dusty toes of her riding boots.

"By all that," she said, "you imply that philosophizing doesn't get one anywhere. Yet you philosophize as never was, and you seem to be getting ahead like a comet."

"Philosophy isn't the propeller, it's the log that records the progress and adventures of the mind at sea. If by philosophizing you mean the mental gymnastics which toughen thought for subsequent applied mentality, I dare say philosophy can be said to get one ahead; but it doesn't make one wiser in any real sense. The savant knows more than Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that doesn't make him a better liver than Katie. No doubt the man who can enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God's evolution depends on intelligence, and Herr Doktor Einstein is more intelligent than Katie Salter, unbedingt. But God is strangely ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. What we call our life is merely the instant when we are phosphorescent; the savant may be more luminously phosphorescent than you and me, but before he can say Jack Robinson he has relapsed into the ocean and new drops of salty water have formed, comprising left-over particles of dead hims and yous and mes, forming a new identity which is tossed up into birth to be luminous for a moment and say Jack Robinson and then disintegrate in favor of still further combinations of remnants . . . The folly of regarding Socrates as sublime and me as ridiculous is that we are one and the same entity, just as those asters are merely a continuation of the first aster seed, which was merely the continuation of a continuation."

Louise recalled the discussion she had had with her father on the day of Billy's funeral, when they had agreed to grant cats equal rights with Billy in the matter of immortality. "Would you go so far as to say that Socrates and Sundown were parts of the same entity?" she inquired.

"Even further. I should include the fly that his tail can't quite reach, the worms under his feet, and the leaves over his head. It's all in the ocean . . . Stones and mud aren't as self-assertive as radium, but who is to say that they have no phosphorescent potentialities? If you eat a speck of mud on your celery, doesn't it, or something chemical in it, become a part of you and take a more distinguished place in the realm of things vital?"

"Then how to account for the fact that we can talk, Sundown can only neigh, and stones can't even sigh,—even if they are full of sermons."

"By the fact that stones are figuratively phosphorescent in an extremely negligible degree, that Sundown is phosphorescent in an infinitely greater degree, and that you and I are so surcharged with phosphorescence that we simply burst into hissing flames of intelligence. Or, if you prefer, we're not so tightly packed as stones; our atoms are more free to roam and collide and become interesting. Human intelligence, with all its concomitants of reasoning and speech, is a sort of transformation which is analogous to the remarkable things that happen in a laboratory when certain combinations are subjected to intense pressures and temperatures. Degrees of vitality are like the gradations of electrical force: sluggish magnetic fields, live wires, dynamos, power stations. Everything has some vital status, just as everything has some electrical status."

"But you make everything seem so impersonal and arbitrary. Don't you believe that human beings can voluntarily increase or decrease their voltage and usefulness? If I determine to live up to my best instincts, can't I do so on my own initiative, without having been anticipated by Fate?"

"I think of it the other way round. Your strongest instincts, good or bad, will live up to you. They will determine your acts. The decision to live up to them begs the question, for it is they that prompted the decision, making up your so-called mind for you. You only said the words of your excellent decision after the excellent decision had surged and pulsated and battled and muscled its way through your system to the tip of your tongue. Taking a decision is like taking a train: in reality the train takes you."

"According to that theory there's nothing to stop the whole world from going to pot, morally speaking. What if bad instincts obtain a majority in the house?"

"Ah, but thanks be to God they won't! Nature hasn't gone to pot physically, for all the efforts of plague and dyspepsia. She won't go to pot morally, either, though we may always need prisons, or their future equivalents. Nature is, in the long run, economical; she balances her books; and morality, like health, is merely a question of thrift."

"And religion? What is it?"

"Oh,—for a slouchy metaphor, call it the sparks struck off by moral friction."

"That's deep water."

"Moral: accept the concrete and don't try to formulate the abstract. Katie would never have expected an apple to fall into the sky just because she had never heard of Isaac Newton. And when she feels that Rosie Dixon and Billy, despite arguments to the contrary, are the same age, she has got just as far as the hypothetical metaphysician who would turn her experience into a revolutionary theory of objective and subjective time,—except that Katie won't get a Nobel prize. If she lives to be three score and ten, snug in her three dimensions, and never hears time defined as qualitative multiplicity, she will fulfil a sublime destiny; she will with unerring instinct and awe-inspiring virtuosity obey complex laws which are none the less urgent for being unformulated in her narrow skull. And when she dies, her soul, like John Brown's, will, though in fearfully divisible, microscopic, and unrecognizable particles, go 'marching on'."

"Thank goodness Katie is miles down the road by this time where she can't hear what a hash she is going to be!"

"Yes, that after all marks the difference between people like Katie who are close to the earth, and those who do get up in a metaphysical balloon. Katie comforts herself with promises of a red plush heaven full of harps, where she at the age of seventy-three will repair in a white robe to rejoin her Billy, still twelve; whereas the savants who see the world as an ant-heap are not appalled at the thought of personal obliteration, I for one think it's rather a lark to be a sort of caricature on a school blackboard for three score and ten years then turn into a thin cloud of chalk dust when higher forces rub you off; it's fun to speculate on the future of the particles of chalk in the cloud."

Louise confessed that she could not gloat over the prospect, but let it be understood that, for the sake of feeling herself floating in the air amongst a distinguished metaphysical crew, including Dare, she cheerfully accepted the principle. Then something made her lean forward and gaze towards a distant bend in the road.

"Look! That's them!"

"What's who?" Dare asked, and added, "grammar be blowed!"

Three touring cars, an unprecedented sight, were winding their way up from the direction of the Valley.

"Keble's telegram said this evening," Louise explained, with a blank look at her companion, followed by a glance at her wrist watch. "And it's not three o'clock yet. Thank heaven Miriam is at home to give them tea."

"Them" referred to the English travelers, whose visit had been postponed in order that it might be embraced in a western tour which Lord Eveley and his assistants in the Colonial Office were scheduled to make on Imperial business. Keble had left the ranch a few days before to meet them in Calgary and guide them hither. All through the spring and summer he had been bringing his building work to completion, and Dare had been on hand several weeks now, partly in the rôle of contractor, partly in the rôle of friend. He had remained for the celebrations before proceeding to Japan, where he was to make notes and sketches for a commission in California.

"What a pity you won't be on hand to receive them," Dare sympathized.

Louise flicked her switch rebelliously. "If they say evening, they can't expect me to know they mean afternoon. There's no reconciling that discrepancy whether you call time qualitative multiplicity or plain duration. And they'll just have to wait." She smiled maliciously. "I hope they'll look blank at each other and say, 'Just as I thought'."

"Why? So you can fool them all by being excessively correct?"

She was delighted. "How did you guess?"

"The clue to you is always the same. You're a born actress."

To herself she was thinking. "Even the most enlightened men fail to understand that some women are capable of being the quintessence of themselves when they're most outrageously play-acting." And she was not at all sorry that Dare should fall into one of the traps laid for his sex,—there were so many he didn't fall into!

"I adore acting. And love being caught at it. And always go on till I am." This suggested a new thought to her. "That's why Keble and I are so often a hundred miles apart. I'm acting, and he doesn't know whether I'm acting myself or some other character, and that irritates me and I act all the harder, and it turns into farce or tragedy, and he still fails to catch me, and I'm too far gone in my rôle to stop, but yearn to be caught——"

"And spanked?"

"You and Miriam spank me sometimes. Then Keble sees, and laughs. But so distressingly late."

"Hadn't we bettaer be starting?"

The procession had passed the Dixon ranch and was vanishing towards Hillside.

"In a minute," she replied, without stirring. "We don't have to have seen them, you know." Then with an abrupt change of mood she surprised him by saying, "I dread it, Dare. It's worse than going up for examinations."

"You'll probably find them delightful."

"You're not their wild and woolly daughter-in-law."

He shifted his position on the grass and sat facing her, with curious, intent eyes. There was something subduing in his regard, as in his strength and grace. "I wonder what I am, really. I wish I knew,—my degree of being accepted as your friend, I mean."

She was pleasantly conscious of the urgent need to evade the intentness of his eyes, but temporized by mocking. "Don't try to formulate the abstract. Those are your words, and if you don't follow your own advice you'll be in the predicament Katie would be in if she tried to go up in a balloon."

The forthcoming meeting had unnerved her more than she cared to admit. An attack of stage-fright had made her say "in a minute" when he had suggested returning. To that was added a twinge of vertigo, as though she felt herself standing on a precipice from which force of circumstances would make her presently retreat, but which for that very reason had an indefinable lure. The eyes and hands and arms and thighs of her companion were challenging her. Meanwhile, in her subconsciousness, the talk of "in-laws" had set in motion a tune from The Mikado, and as she flicked her boots she sang a paraphrase:

"They married their son,—
They had only got one,—
To their daughter-in-law elect."

The ruse by no means succeeded in suppressing the rebellious desire to look over the precipice. "I wonder if they did right," she said.

Dare looked away, and she breathed more freely, hoping yet fearing that he would immediately resume his disturbing, overpowering intentness. "Sometimes," he said, "I resent it; at other times I'm thankful."

As he was still looking away she ventured an emotional step nearer. "Do you mind explaining that cryptic remark?"

"It's very simple. If their son hadn't married you, I undoubtedly would have. And it would have been a gigantic blunder."

"How do you know you would have?"

"I'm damned if we could have avoided it."

"In other words, those strong instincts you were talking about,—good or bad,—would have taken that funeste direction,—the direction of bringing us smack up against each other for better or worse."

"For a while it would have been heaven on earth. Then hell."

"Why?"

He still avoided her eyes. "Because strong things must clash. Because you and I don't permanently need each other; we're too self-reliant."

His unwillingness to look at her roused a demon. "I wonder if you believe that."

"Must one always say all one believes?"

She ignored the question and he continued. "Marriage, to be successful, must be entered into by one leading person and one following person. We were each born to lead. We could never play on the same team, but as captains of opposing teams we can be profoundly chummy . . . If the other element had been allowed in, the chumminess in the crucible would have flared up into a white flame, but the contents of the crucible would have been reduced to ashes."

"Like the Kilkenny cats," she assented, absent-mindedly.

She was now stubbornly determined to regain possession of that dangerous glance. "Isn't it grotesque," she went on, "that contemptible, weak-souled people repeatedly disregard scruples that give pause to the strong?"

Dare held his breath, and his profile showed that he was pressing his teeth against his lip. They had never steered so near the reefs in all their skilfully navigated acquaintanceship. Louise pulled weakly at the grass.

Frankness had been their support up to the present, and each was privately acknowledging that they could no longer depend on it.

Silence. Louise felt that she ought to do something to divert his emotions into more familiar channels. "I wish I were a man," she said, and the effort of uttering words made her conscious of the dryness of her throat. She also had a freakishness of breath to contend with.

Dare collected himself, sat up, with his back partly turned to her, so that his eyes looked over the plain. The breeze had gone down and the afternoon light seemed to be an intrinsic property of the objects it gilded rather than an emanation from the sun.

"What would you do if you were?" he asked.

"The incomparably splendid things you do," she promptly replied.

"I've come pretty near doing some incomparably asinine things."

"But you've stopped short. I would have, too, of course. Besides," she hesitated, then decided on one final plunge of frankness, "in a world full of people who don't do splendid things, you could almost have pleaded justification in not stopping short, I imagine,—if not actual provocation."

She saw his fingers open, then close. For once in her life, just once, she longed to see those strangely intent eyes fixed on her, wanted them to come closer and closer until her own eyes must close, yet she sat weak, watching the back of his head, then his fingers. For the second time in her life,—the first was during Walter Windrom's visit,—she saw deep into the psychology of infidelity: this time more specifically. Indeed with a crudeness that made her blush.

Suddenly he wheeled about. The look was there. She gave a strange little cry, raised her hands slightly from the ground, and in a flash found herself imprisoned by his arms, and mouth.

A few moments later he was on his feet, facing the valley again, his arms folded.

He walked to the trees and saddled the ponies. But as Louise made no move he returned and stood looking down at her. "There's still time to escape," he warned her.

She was again pulling at the grass. "There's only one way to escape from oneself . . . And that is not to acknowledge the danger."

"Even when mad things happen?"

"Mad things are no more disgraceful than the mad desires that precipitate them. If you admit the desires——"

"Yes, but—good God!" It ended in an explosive sigh at the futility of any reasoning faculty one might bring to bear on a problem that had its source somewhere so far beneath reason's reach.

He sat down again, at her feet, and their eyes met in a long, steady regard.

"Do you suppose it has been—just that, really, all this time?" he finally asked.

"Not only that . . . Partly."

He held out his hand and she placed hers in it, without hesitation. It was irrevocable. During the remainder of the afternoon time and scruples were burnt up in the white flame.

2

They rode side by side down the steep slope of the mound. The horses were eager to return, and once in the road their riders let them canter. Louise was ahead and as she came abreast of the Dixon ranch she reined in and waited. Her cheeks were still flushed, her eyes restless. She smiled with a blend of humor and frustration which Dare mistook for regret. In his face she saw a reply to her own countenance, a reply which took the form of a little plea for pardon, a plea grotesquely beside the point,—as if she hadn't manoeuvred the lapse from grace! Her frustration was physiological, the eternal waiting for an ecstasy which Keble and Dare could command at will, but which Fate still withheld from her. It was unfair and it was discouraging.

Dare drew up at her side. He was more handsome, more authoritative than ever, also more tender and humble than she would ever have guessed him capable of being. Yet also a little annoying. Men could be so insultingly sure of themselves. Here was a man who by all the signs ought to have been the man. She had assumed as much and behaved accordingly. But instead of bringing about the miracle, the duet for the sake of which she had been willing to risk Keble's dignity, he had merely achieved the old solo, with her as instrument. "Why can't they understand? Why don't they learn?" her outraged desires were crying in protest. She tried to read them a moral lecture, but that was of no avail. She was, after all, an animal, and it was folly to pretend that she was not.

Dare smiled tentatively, inquiringly, waiting for her to speak.

She looked down at Sundown's ears. "I suppose that is what I would have done, if I had been a man. Just once."

He shook his head. "The 'just once' would have been like diving into a sea in which you would have to sink or swim. I hope you don't mean just once literally, for that would be as good as letting me drown."

She was too proud to explain, and she would not raise false hopes. "We must forget that it happened," she finally announced.

He was bewildered. "You mean, you can forget!"

She made no reply.

"It was you who said that the fulfilment is no more disgraceful than the desire."

At that moment she hated him for his masculine obtuseness.

She gave Sundown's head a jerk. "I'm glad you're going to Japan," she said, and dug her heels into the horse's sides. A moment later she was lost to view in a cloud of dust.

Like some parched and hungry wanderer who had dreamt of orchards, only to wake up under a bruising hail of apples and pears that startled him into forgetfulness of his thirst, Dare gasped. "Already!" It was an ominously precipitate reminder of his theory that they were each leaders, that neither would be content to subordinate his individuality to the other's.

His mind bit and gnawed at the baffling knot in a tangle which a few moments since seemed to have yielded for good and all. As a psychologist he was somewhat too clever, and was capable of overlooking a factor that might have leapt to the mind of a kitchen-maid.

He took a trail that served as a short-cut to the ridge, and caught up with Louise on the new road that branched off towards the Castle. She turned in her saddle, and patted Sundown's flank. "Slowpoke!" she flung back at him, teasingly, but already relentingly. Men were such helpless, clumsy, cruel, selfish, amiable babies.

"Been thinking," Dare explained.

"To any purpose?"

"To excellent but piteously sad purpose. I've been breaking to my unhappy ego the meaning of your parting shot."

"What did it mean?"

"That I'm defeated."

"In a way, I'm sorrier than you are."

"For God's sake, why?"

She smiled with a trace of bitter humor, earnestly. "Well, some one ought to be able to subdue me. God, I need it!" Angry tears came to her eyes, and she thrust her foot petulantly into the stirrup. Riding alone, she had just been marveling at the narrowness of the margin by which she had avoided the disruption of her present life. But for a grotesque trifle, she might have been riding at this very moment away from Hillside, forever, with Dare at her side. "That's where I score," he reflected, lugubriously. "For at least now I taste the desolate joy of capitulation to a stronger opponent. While we were opponents I wished to keep a few points ahead. The fact that I no longer wish to do so, but ask nothing better than to be trampled on till I can't bear it another minute,—well, what do you make of that?"

"You're off your game," she evaded. "Buck up!"

They rode on in silence until they came within sight of the broad meadow at the edge of the pine ridge.

"Louise!"

"What!"

"Do I have to go to Japan?"

"More than ever."

3

When they dismounted and walked towards the house the sun was already far enough below the mountains to give Hardscrapple the appearance of a dark cardboard silhouette against the rose and green of the sky. Around their feet grew patches of scarlet flowers with flannel petals and brittle stocks. The lake below, seen through a clump of black pines, was grey and glazed. The Hillside crane, on his evening grub-call, flew over their heads towards his favorite island. As they watched his landing Louise noticed two white crescent-shaped objects on the dark floor of the lake near the stream which came down in steps from the canyon. It was as though some giant seated on an overhanging ledge had been paring his nails.

"They're on the water already!" she cried.

"Fishing. Quite true to type," Dare commented. "The minute rich old men get away from home they have an uncontrollable desire to kill."

Louise sighed at the prospect of unforeseen vagaries in her guests. "Will they be grumpy if they don't catch anything?"

"Probably,—and reminiscent."

"I'm glad the flowers came out so well," Louise remarked irrelevantly, with an affectionate backward glance at the garden as they reached the terrace. "With all due respect to your genius, I like my own roses better than all this."

"This" was indicated by a sweeping gesture which took in the Castle, the commodious outbuildings, and a pattern of roadways and clearings.

She was arrested by the sound of voices from the other terrace. A tall woman whom she immediately recognized appeared at the corner, leading a younger woman towards the parapet. With the air of a licensed guide she was pointing across the lake towards the "Sans Souci" cottages now tenanted by the Browns, and volubly describing points of interest.

"Over there, to the right of those three tall trees. Keble calls them Castor and Pollux."

Half turning towards her companion, as though Girlie's eyes could not be trusted to find any spot pointed out to her, Mrs. Windrom caught sight of the advancing pair.

"Ha!" she cried, and turned her daughter round by the shoulders. "There you precious two are at last!"

Louise hurried forward, with kisses. Girlie seemed as slow to bring her faculties to a correct focus on Louise as she had been in respect of the trees. She was a lithe, willowy girl with soft, colorless hair, a smile faintly reminiscent of Walter, and limp white fingers that spread across the bosom of a straight, dark-blue garment of incredible spotlessness, considering the dusty motor journey from Witney. "Being less clever than her brother," Louise was reflecting, "she has tried to get even by taking up outdoor things, which really don't go with her type."

"I was so sorry that Walter couldn't join you in the east," she said, addressing Mrs. Windrom. "But he has promised us a long visit next year."

Girlie was getting a clearer focus. "He did nothing but rave about the ranch after he and Mother were here," she contributed. "Now I see why. It's like a private Lugano."

Louise doubted it, but linked her arm in Girlie's. "The only way we could keep him here, however, was to give him a horse that broke his ribs. I hope you'll have better luck."

"Walter never could ride anything but a hobby,—poetry, or first editions. Nor play anything more energetic than croquet. As a partner at golf he's as helpful as a lame wrist."

"But a darling for all that," Louise defended.

"Oh, rather!" exclaimed Girlie, with an emphasis that seemed to add, "That goes without saying,—certainly without your saying it."

They proceeded towards wide window-doors and entered the drawing-room, where Miriam and the other two women had risen on hearing the hubbub. Louise went straight to the elder woman. "I'm Louise," she announced. "Full of apologies."

Her mother-in-law kissed her and presented Alice. "We arrived before we expected. Keble got a special locomotive to bring us through the pass, and couldn't let you know because the telegraph office was closed."

"It always is, in an emergency. And when it's open, the wires are down. We just guess back and forth. Please don't mind my get-up. You all look so fresh and frilly. Out here we dress like soldiers, in order to be in keeping with our slouchy telegraph service and other modern inconveniences."

"I'm sure you look very comfortable," said Lady Eveley with a maternal smile. She was bird-like, with an abundance of white hair and a coquettish little moiré band around her neck to conceal its ruins. When she smiled, her good will seemed to be reiterated by a series of wrinkles that extended as far as her forehead.

"Oh, I'm anything but! First of all I'm dusty, and second of all I'm parched."

"There'll be a fresh pot in a minute, dear," said Miriam. "Do sit here."

Mrs. Windrom was asking Dare to confirm her statement that the pillars were Corinthian, which he could not honestly do, and by a monstrous geographical leap their discussion wandered to a region beyond Girlie's focus. "Mother talks architecture as glibly as Baedeker, but she's really as ignorant about it as I am," she assured Dare. "I've been dragged to Italy goodness knows how many times, but the only thing I'm sure of is the leaning tower of Pisa."

Louise presented Dare to Lady Eveley and felt that she was being studied by Keble's sister. She went to sit beside Alice near tea, which Miriam had resuscitated. She gave Miriam's hand a grateful pat, then turning to her sister-in-law, expressed the hope that she had found her right room. "After living so long in a log cabin I assume that everybody will get lost in this warehouse. Keble is so methodical he refers to right wing and left wing, like a drill-sergeant. The only way I can remember which room is which is by the color of the carpet or what you can see from the windows."

Alice was laughing, her amusement being divided between Louise's mock-seriousness and the reckless velocity of speech which left no gaps for replies. She was a dry, alert, lean woman of nearly forty, who should never have been named Alice. She had none of Keble's grace, but something of his openness and discernment. Alice would make as good a judge as Keble, Louise reflected, but a less merciful jury. As to dress, she gave Louise the impression of having ordered too much material, and the white dots in her foulard frock merely emphasized her angles. Her hair had once been blond like Keble's, but was now frosted, and arranged in a fashion that reminded Louise of the magazine covers of her girlhood.

When there was a hiatus Alice assured her that they had all been safely distributed and had spent an hour running back and forth comparing quarters. "My room has a pale blue and primrose carpet, and I should think about forty miles of entirely satisfactory view! And gladioli on the table. How did you know, or did you, that gladioli are my favorite flowers,—and how did they ever get here?"

Louise accepted a cup of tea and motioned Dare to a seat nearby. Lady Eveley joined them and Miriam went out to stroll with the Windroms.

"I knew you liked them," Louise replied, "because you once mentioned it in a letter to Keble; and they grew in the greenhouse, for whose perfections Mr. Dare is to be thanked. Don't you think he has done us rather well?"

The two women agreed in chorus. Then Alice added, "Father couldn't believe his eyes. He remembered the lake from a hunting trip years and years ago. But when he saw what you and Mr. Dare and Keble have made of it,—my dear, he almost wants it back!"

"My husband said you had made the house look like a natural part of the landscape, Mr. Dare," Lady Eveley leaned towards him with her timidly maternal, confidential, richly reiterated little smile. Louise concluded that her individuality, at its most positive, was never more than an echo of some other person's individuality, usually her husband's.

"Most houses are so irrelevant to their surroundings," Alice interposed. "Our place in Sussex for instance. Of course it has been there since the beginning of time, and that excuses it, but it's fearsome to look at, and would be in any landscape. I wish Mr. Dare would wave his wand over it."

"Alice thinks Keblestone too antiquated," explained Lady Eveley. "But her father and I are deeply attached to it, and she and Keble were both born there. I do hope you will come and stay with us there next summer, with the baby."

"That priceless baby!" Alice exclaimed. "He pulled the most excruciating faces for us. Then I gave him a beautiful rubber elephant and he flung it square at his nurse's eyes,—nearly blinded the poor soul. Where did you find that nurse, Louise? She's devotion personified."

"He took to his grandfather at once. Sat on his knee and watched him as though he had never seen anything so curious!"

"Baby is very rude," Louise apologized.

"Brutally candid," Alice agreed. "If an elephant offends him he throws it at his nurse, and if a new grandfather is substituted, he solemnly stares him out of countenance."

"We shall spoil him, my dear," said the monkey's little grandmother. "We're so proud of him."

Louise replaced her cup on the table, got up from her chair, and implanted a playful but wholehearted kiss on the old lady's forehead. "I'm dying to see the grandfather who was too big to be flung in Katie's eyes," she announced. "Shall we walk down to the lakeside and meet the boats? There's an easy path."

She led the way, with Lady Eveley. Two or three times as they descended the winding path the older woman patted Louise's arm and smiled, apropos of nothing, reassuringly. In the end Louise laughed and said, trying to keep her frankness within gentle bounds, "You know, I'm quite floored by your friendliness. I've been racking my brains to think how I could put you at your ease, and now I find that everybody's aim is to put me at mine. I wish you were going to stay longer. Four days is nothing."

"We should love to, my dear, but you see the men have so many speeches to make, and they must be back on a certain date. It has been very exciting. All along the way there were deputations to meet the train. The mayors came and their wives—too amusing! And brought such pretty flowers. Alice doesn't object to the cameras at all, though she says her nose is the only thing that comes out. Alice resents her nose. She says she wouldn't mind its size if she didn't keep seeing it, poor dear . . . And banquets without end. I don't see how they find so many different things to say. My husband just stands up there——"

"And the words come to him," interposed Louise "I know."

"Isn't it remarkable? When I can scarcely find enough words to fill up a letter! I'm terrified when they ask me to speak at the women's clubs. Canadian women are so intelligent. And so tireless. Mrs. Windrom is much better at that kind of thing."

"Mrs. Windrom is very clever."

"Oh, very! She always remembers names. I don't, and Alice nudges my elbow. She is such a good daughter. Never forgets."

"Alice seems very alert."

"Oh, very!" Lady Eveley had a soft little voice and a careful way of setting down her words, as though they might break. "Very! She takes after her father. Keble does too, though Keble likes quite a lot of things I like. Perhaps the baby will take after me. Though I really don't see why any one should!"

Louise had an affectionate smile for this gentle grievance against creation, and slipped her arm about the black satin waist. "Of course Baby will take after you, dear," she promised. "I'll make him if he doesn't naturally. He takes after me when he throws elephants around, but he takes after his father when he opens his big blue eyes and grins a trustful, gummy grin. He's going to be quite like Keble when he acquires teeth and manners. Katie says so, and she's the authority on Baby . . . Perhaps you'll let me take after you a little, too. But I'm an awful hoyden."

"You're so clever, aren't you!" exclaimed Lady Eveley. "We knew it, of course, from Keble."

Louise was serious. "The worst of that," she mused, "is that clever people always have a naughty side. And I'm naughty."

"But if we were perfect our husbands would find us dull in the long run, don't you think?"

"There's that, of course," Louise agreed. How completely every one took it for granted that there would be a long run!

They had reached the new boat-slip, and were joined by Mrs. Windrom, Girlie, and Miriam. Dare and Alice followed, and the talk became topographical, Mrs. Windrom finding still more objects for Girlie to look at. Louise felt that Mrs. Windrom was even explaining the landmarks to her.

Girlie's attention, however, kept straying to the boats, which were hugging the shaded shores and advancing at a leisurely rate. In the first boat was an object on which Girlie's eyes could always focus themselves with an effortless nicety. This object was her fiancé, Ernest Tulk-Leamington, an oldish young man, who was Lord Eveley's secretary and a rising member of the Conservative Party. The first to step out of the boat, he was followed by Mr. Windrom and a freckled, orange-haired youth who proved to be Mr. Cutty.

"Any fish?" cried Mrs. Windrom. Her husband showed signs of becoming prolix, while Mr. Cutty, behind his back, stole his thunder by surreptitiously holding up a forked stick on which two apologetic trout were suspended.

When the necessary ceremonies were effected, Mr. Windrom declared that you could never be sure, in untried waters, what flies the fish would rise to. He went on the principle of using a Royal Coach when in doubt, but he had tried Royal Coach for an hour without getting a strike, and had ended by putting out a spinner, by means of which he had caught——

He turned. "Those two." But he saw that the irreverent Mr. Cutty had already displayed the catch, and he was a little vexed at the anticlimax, as well as at the showing, which was undoubtedly poor, viewed against a dark mass of water and mountain, with a half dozen animated ladies as spectators. Dare had sought Louise's eyes, and they smiled at the fulfilment of her fears.

The second boat was nearing the slip and Louise had a moment in which to study her father-in-law. It was a reassuring, yet a trying moment, for she became unnerved and felt suddenly isolated. For two pins she would have cried. There was no definable reason for the emotion, unless it was due to her double reaction from the graveyard episode and the friendliness of her mother-in-law. They were all strangers, even Keble. In some ways Keble was more of a stranger than Dare,—less an acquaintance of her most hidden self. Her loneliness was associated, too, in some vague way with the easy, manly intimacy of the two figures in the boat, who were links in the chain of her own existence yet so detached from it. Keble was undeniably an integral part of her identity, yet as he sat at the oars he seemed to be some attractive young traveling companion she was destined never to know.

Lord Eveley, a lean, hale figure in tweeds, a fine old edition of his son, was reeling in his line, and speaking in a voice which carried perfectly across the still water. Keble made replies between the slow strokes of his oars. The yellow had faded from the light, and with its disappearance the dark shades of the trees took on a richer tone, and the water turned from glass to velvet. The grey of the pine needles changed to deep, blackish green, the narrow strip of shallow water was emerald merging into milky blue, and the pebbles at the bottom were like ripe and green olives.

There was a lull in the chatter, and only the faint lapping noise of the oars broke the stillness. A wave of loneliness had engulfed Louise, despite the warm little arm that was still resting on hers. By some considerateness which only Keble seemed to possess, his eyes turned first of all to her. True, they immediately traveled away towards the others and his remarks were general, but the first glance had been hers and it had been accompanied by a quick smile,—a smile which seemed to condone some lapse of hers; she was too immersed in her present rôle to recall what the lapse had been. At any rate it was a most timely proof of Keble's reliability, and it rescued her. She smiled shyly as Keble directed his father towards her.

By one of those mass instincts that sense drama, every one had turned to watch. Being in the centre of the stage, she forgot her diffidence.

"Weedgie, here is a father-in-law for you. He's an indifferent angler, but a passable sort of pater . . . Father, this is Louise."

"Is it really! Upon my soul!" He bestowed a paternal kiss.

"You seem so surprised!" Louise laughed. "Did you think I was a boy?"

"By Jove, you know, you might have fooled me if it had been a shade darker. But if you had, I should have been uncommonly disappointed. Keble, I take it, makes you disguise yourself in boys' clothes to protect you from irresponsible lassos?"

"Oh dear no, he hates my breeches. Besides, I can protect myself quite extraordinarily well. The fact is, I'm at a disadvantage in these." She was pulling sidewise at "them". "For when you're got up as a man you're always giving yourself away: your hairpins fall out or you blush. Whereas in feminine attire you can beat a man at his own game without his even suspecting you're using man-to-man tactics. That's fun."

"Yes. I suppose it would be," agreed Lord Eveley. "Eve did it without much of either, they say."

"They say such shocking things, don't they! . . . Didn't you catch any fish?"

"Only three. Your better half caught seven,—cheeky young blighter! One beauty."

Mr. Windrom needed to know what they had been caught with.

"Royal Coach," said Keble. "It's the best all round fly."

Mr. Windrom was incredulous and pettish. "You must have 'em trained to follow your boat."

"Better luck next time, Mr. Windrom," Louise ventured. "Keble shall go in your boat, then they'll have to bite. Meanwhile please show him how to make drinkable cocktails. He needs a lesson."

She looked at her watch, then smiled at the circle of faces. "It's just exactly 'evening', so we can consider that the party has arrived. Dinner is in an hour. Nobody need change unless he wishes. I'm going to turn back into a woman for dinner, just to prove to my father-in-law what an awful failure I am as a boy. Meanwhile I'll race anybody up the hill."

"I'm on," said Mr. Cutty.

"Me too," said Dare.

"Any handicap for skirts?" inquired Alice.

"Ten yards," Louise promptly replied. "Measure off ten yards, Keble. Anybody else?"

"Come, Girlie," said Mrs. Windrom. "Any handicap for old age, Louise?"

"Fifteen yards for any one over thirty-five. Come on Mr. Leamington. Beat Mr. Dare. He wins everything I go in for . . . Grandfather, you be starter,—you're to say one, two, three, go. Miriam dear, you can't be in it, for you have to show Grandmother the easy path up. I showed her down, but one of the many delicious things she told me on the way was that she forgets things and has to have her elbow nudged." Louise shot a bright glance at Lady Eveley.

"Keble, when you've marked off the fifteen, sprint on up the hill and mark a line on the gravel so we won't go plunging on the bricks and kill ourselves . . . Oh!"

She stopped, and every one, toeing the line, looked around. Her nervous high spirits were infectious. Even Girlie was excited. Lord Eveley was holding up his hand in sporting earnest. His wife, under Miriam's wing, beamed.

"I'm trying to think what the prizes will be. Wouldn't be a race without prizes. Any suggestions, Mr. Cutty?"

"Might have forfeits for the first prize, and first go at the billiard table for another."

"Bright head-work, Mr. Cutty. Prizes as follows: the winner must choose between making a speech at dinner or telling a ghost story before bedtime. The loser gets his choice between first go at the billiard table, first choice of horses to-morrow, or ordering his favorite dish for breakfast,—can't say fairer than that. But if anybody tries to lose, God help him! . . . All set, Grandfather!"

The servants who were arranging the dinner-table thought the party had gone mad when it came reeling up the slippery grass hill in a hilarious, panting pell-mell led at first by Mrs. Windrom, who fell back in favor of Alice Eveley, who in turn was superseded by others. Towards the end Dare and Mr. Cutty, closely followed by Louise, were leading, then Dare stumbled and Mr. Cutty toppled into Keble's arms, the winner. Louise was weak with laughter at the sight of Mr. Windrom brandishing his fishing rod and shouting instructions over his shoulder to his faltering helpmeet. Girlie, her skirts held high, was abreast of Mr. Tulk-Leamington, whose gallantry interfered with his progress. Alice was far down the line but doing as well as possible under the disadvantages of high heels and foulard folds. In the end they all reached the line but Mrs. Windrom, who had collapsed on the turf, facing a noisily breathing throng.

"I'll have that big trout for breakfast, Louise," she gasped. "The one Keble caught. And no one can say I didn't try to win!"

4

At breakfast Louise counted votes for a picnic by the river. "Those who don't fish," she suggested, "can sit under the willows and pretend there aren't any mosquitoes, or play duck on the rock with Mr. Cutty and me."

They had all come down in comically smart riding clothes. Miriam, with her tanned skin and well-worn khaki, looked like a native in contrast to Girlie in her grey-green whipcord. Girlie, whose horsemanship had been loudly heralded, was eager to try out a Mexican saddle.

Mr. Tulk-Leamington stroked his prematurely bald head. "What will you do if your pony bucks?" he asked.

Girlie languidly buttered her toast. "Ernest," she chided, "you're always stirring up mares' nests."

"Dear me!" cried Alice. "Do they buck?"

"In wild west novels they do," said Girlie's fiancé. "What will you do, Miss Eveley, if yours does?"

"I shall hang on and scream for Louise."

Louise turned the tables on Ernest. "And you?" she inquired.

Mr. Cutty forestalled him. "He will soar into the firmament. You'll find him on some remote tree-top. Can't you picture a distraught owl trying to hatch out Ernest's head!"

"Mercy!" Lady Eveley exclaimed, in meek distress. "They don't really try to throw you, do they, Louise?"

This caused an uproar. Louise reached across the table to squeeze her hand. "Of course not, dear. They only try to throw teases like Mr. Tulk-Leamington and devils incarnate like Mr. Cutty. Sundown is a lamb; you'll like him so well that you'll be sorry when you arrive at the picnic. Besides I'll ride beside you all the way."

"Sundown wouldn't throw a fly," Mr. Cutty broke in. "Mrs. Eveley has to flick 'em off with her riding crop."

Groans drowned this sally and Mr. Cutty nearly lost a spoonful of egg as a result of a lunge directed at him by the prospective owlet.

Through the babel, Keble and the older men, having exhausted the immediate possibilities of prize cattle, were discussing the half-completed golf course, oblivious to frivolous issues. Only once did Mr. Windrom seek to intrude, having overheard something about "throwing a fly," and this sent the younger generation off into a new gale of unhallowed mirth.

Late in the afternoon the picnickers returned in various states of dampness and soreness, but exuding a contentment for which Louise's vigilance was largely responsible. Dare and Mr. Cutty rowed to a secluded cove to swim; Ernest went to edit his official memoranda; Mrs. Windrom retired to sleep; Lady Eveley racked her head for words to fill up a letter; the old men resorted to billiards; and Girlie challenged Miriam at tennis.

Louise held court in the kitchen, where she had gone to make some special pastries and to wheedle, scold, encourage, bully, sting, and jolly the augmented staff into supreme efforts. She swore that the future of the Empire hinged on the frothiness of the mousse. The cream was not to be whipped a minute before eight; the grapes were not to be dried, but brought in straight from the ice-box in a cold perspiration, and Gertie was for heaven's sake not to bump into Griggs on her way to the side table, as she had the night before.

When her batter was consigned to the oven she ran out to the greenhouse for flowers, and saw Keble and his sister stretched in deck chairs near the tennis court. She waved her shears and speculated as to the subject of their chat.

The subject, as she might have guessed, was herself.

"Why didn't you give us an inkling?" Alice was saying. "Here you've been married nearly three years, and you've kept this spark of the divine fire all to yourself."

Keble smiled with a mixture of affection and faint bitterness. "I didn't exactly keep her, old girl. There's no reason why you and Mother shouldn't have got yourself ignited before this."

Alice considered. "But we did ask her to come to us."

"There are ways and ways of asking. Do you suppose she can't feel the difference?"

Again Alice reflected. "You mean, I suppose, that if you had married Girlie, for instance, we would have commanded her presence, on pain of dragging her out of her lair."

"I'm glad you see it."

"Well, dear, wasn't it just a bit your fault?"

"No doubt."

"I mean, how were we to know what an original creature you had found out here? It isn't reasonable; there can't be another. We had nothing to go on but your laconic sketch,—'wild flowers', I remember, was your most enthusiastic description. But there are wild flowers and wild flowers, you know,—just as there are 'ways and ways of asking'. There were gaps and contradictions in your accounts, and the burden of proof rested on you. We didn't desire to place you in a false position. Even Claudia Windrom reported that Louise's tastes were very western. I might have known that she was prejudiced, and we certainly ought to have given you more credit for perspicuity. But men are so blind . . . Then we were thrown off by Louise's temperamental trip to Florida. You wrote a forlorn sort of letter saying that she had gone off on a holiday, and it was just after we had invited you both to come to the Riviera with us. That seemed strange."

"What did you think I had married, for God's sake,—an Indian squaw?"

"Don't be horrid! . . . We weren't at all sure you hadn't married a hand grenade."

Keble laughed. "I'm not at all certain that I haven't."

Alice watched him curiously, then abandoned the flicker of curiosity and proceeded to give Louise her due. "It's not so much her brilliance,—though that's remarkable,—but her tact! My dear, she could run a political campaign single-handed. I've never seen the Windroms so beautifully managed in my life. You know we can't manage them; at our house one of the trio is always falling out of the picture. But Louise! the instant she sees an elbow or a leg or a Windromian prejudice sticking out she flips it back in, or widens the frame to include it, and nobody the worse. Her way of setting people to rights and making them feel it is they who are setting everybody else to rights is impayable . . . And the best you could say for her was wild flowers!"

"Since Mrs. Windrom was first here a good deal of water has flowed under the bridges."

"I'll wager it has. Louise wouldn't be found camping by a stagnant pool."

Again she watched her brother curiously. He was gazing into the distance, at nothing.

"Sometimes I feel stagnant beside Louise," he admitted, put off his guard by the unwonted charm of a sisterly chat.

Alice patted his shoulder, with a gesture tender but angular. "Father is purring with pleasure at the way you've stuck to your guns, sonny, although, naturally, he wouldn't say so for all the king's horses and all the king's men. In the beginning he used to shake his head in scepticism and sorrow. Now he never lets a dinner guest get away from the house without dragging in you and your colonizing enterprise. Mother, of course, has always doted and still does; but she would have, if you'd gone in for knife-grinding. She would never conceive the possibility of any one doubting you. I frankly did,—not you, but your schemes."

"There's plenty to be done yet," Keble said. "It will take twenty years. Sometimes the future looks as steep to me as Hardscrapple."

"It won't look so steep when you've got your second wind. I'm full of rosy hopes for you. What's more, I'm jolly comfortable here. I thought I was going to hate it. I've been well fed and waited on. I've been amused and sauced by a witty child who isn't in the least awed by my accursed standoffishness. I think the most remarkable thing about Louise is that she is kind, through and through, without having to be; she could always get her own way without bothering to be kind . . . I've also discovered the thrills of being aunt to the most entrancingly ridiculous and succulent infant I've ever beheld. Most of all I've seen Father and Mother exchanging furtive glances of pride. What more could any old maid ask for."

Miriam and Girlie joined them. "It's too warm for tennis," Girlie complained. "We're debating whether to go for a swim."

Alice thought it an excellent idea, provided she was not included.

"But these mountain lakes are icy!" Girlie shivered at the thought.

"Not if you dive in, instead of wading," said Miriam. "Louise taught me that."

"I'm too tall. I might stick fast. Besides one looks so distressed in borrowed bathing clothes."

"And the only secluded cove is pre-empted!" Keble sympathized.

"Oh, without a costume I'd be afraid of sinking. It would seem just like a bath, and one goes straight to the bottom of the bath-tub."

The bathing project having died of inanition, Miriam and Girlie went indoors.

"I'm trying to think where I've seen her before," Alice said, following Miriam with her eyes. "I keep associating her in my mind with white sails, and strawberries. . . . Louise has known her a long while?"

"For years."

"Delightful woman! So sensible. How lucky that she is able to help you with your accounts. You never could add."

"Rather. I don't know how we could get on without her."

"Is she stopping long?"

"Well, we can't put her in a pumpkin shell, like Peter, and keep her forever."

"She must feel rather cut off from her own people, out here. Where is her home?"

"She used to live in Washington. She has seen what are known as better days."

"One guesses that . . . For heaven's sake, Keble, who is she? You know I'm only beating about the bush."

"She never speaks of her family. Most of it's dead."

"Cread—Cread." Alice was lying in wait for an image that kept eluding her, when suddenly she captured it. "Cowes! Of course. Before the war, at the Graybridge place . . . You remember Aurelie Graybridge,—she was Aurelie Streeter of New York. It was a garden party, after a race, and Admiral Cread was there with the American Ambassador. How stupid of me to have forgotten! I must remind her."

Keble was uneasy. "I don't think I would, Alice, unless she does first. She's uncommonly reticent about herself. She came out here for a complete change, you see."

"No, I don't see," said Alice, impatiently. "That's just the point. But I'll hold my tongue . . . I wonder why she hasn't married." It always seemed odd to Alice that other women didn't marry. "Some man like Dare. I suppose he's young for her,—yet not enough to matter."

"I've thought of that," Keble reflected. "Discussed it with Louise once. But they don't seem to be attracted . . . Dare is a splendid chap. There's no resisting him when he gets going. He has given us all a healthy fillip."

"You have been lucky in your companions, you and Louise!" Alice commented.

"Rather! Oh, hello, here's the car with the people from the Valley. We're going to show you some natives to-night."

"Who is the funny little man in front?"

"That is the best-informed and most highly esteemed 'character' within a radius of sixty miles,—and incidentally my father-in-law."

"The ominous lady in black looks like the Empress Eugénie come back to mourn her own loss!"

Keble was puzzled. "I haven't the faintest notion who she is,—good Lord! unless it's Madame Mornay-Mareuil, whom we've been expecting off and on for weeks!"

They had risen from their chairs. "Go and meet them," said Alice. "I shall lie down a while before dressing."