BETTINAvoNHUTTEN

 
 KINGSMEAD
 
 "I love you," she whispered, "so I obey you'
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 A NOVEL 
 
 BY 
 
 BETTINA VON HUTTEN 
 
 Author of PAM," PAM DECIDES; 
 
 OUR LADY OF THE BEECHES," etc 
 
 WITH FRONTISPIECE 
 
 By WILL FOSTER 
 
 NEW YORK, DODD, MEAD 
 
 AND COMPANY, MCMIX
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909 
 BY BETTINA VON HUTTEN 
 
 Published March, 1909 , 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
 
 LOVING TOMMY AND RESPECTING HIS 
 
 YOUTHFUL GOODNESS 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS STORY OF HIS FIRST LOVE 
 TO 
 
 MY LITTLE BOY, BUBI 
 
 CASTEL SAN GIORGIO, POKTOFINO, ITALY 
 New Year's Day, 1908
 
 PREFACE 
 
 WHEN I wrote " Pam " I had no intention of ever tell- 
 ing " What Became of Para." 
 
 When I wrote " Pam Decides " I knew nothing of 
 that horrid girl Brigit Mead of "The Halo." And 
 when I found Tommy in " The Halo " I had no idea 
 that he meant to grow up and be a book all to himself. 
 
 And now that all these things have happened, I can 
 do no more than humbly acknowledge, before the nimble 
 critic can jump at them, the remarkable discrepancies 
 that occur in this little series of stories more or less 
 about the same people, in the matter of dates, compara- 
 tive ages, etc. 
 
 The people have grown up and grown old all too 
 soon, for, not intending to write more about them, I 
 have planted them higgledy-piggledy, in their youth 
 and in their mature age, anywhere, it seems, between 
 1895 and 1905, poor Pam advancing in years at a 
 horrible speed. 
 
 However, having started the group in or about the 
 year 1895 and they and their new friends having carried 
 me on with them, I can now do no more than hope that 
 this apology for their eccentricities may be sufficient 
 for those who care to see more of them. 
 
 2228477
 
 PART I ^ CHAPTER I 
 
 IN spite of the amazing whirls that modern days and 
 modern ways give to the poor old wheel of chance, it 
 was even now a more or less unusual experience that 
 lay before Lord Kingsmead that November day as he 
 got into the dog-cart that was waiting for him at the 
 little station. 
 
 A supremely correct little dog-cart, conventional in 
 every way, similar in its perfect appointments to hun- 
 dreds of other dog-carts ; and yet its very perfection, 
 the immaculate immobility of the blue-chinned groom, 
 the beauty of the muscular grey cob, the smartness of 
 the grey cob's harness all these things in themselves 
 accentuated the unusual quality of the situation. 
 
 " It is like eating white truffle salad for the first time, 
 or seeing one's first Botticelli," the young man thought, 
 tucking the rug round his legs and turning up his coat- 
 collar, " or like what that chap of Keats' must have 
 thought, what 's-his-name on a peak of Darien. It 's a 
 real adventure." 
 
 Without meaning to do so he uttered the last words 
 aloud, and the groom turned, touching his hat. 
 
 " Beg pardon, my lord? " 
 
 1
 
 2 KINGSMEAD 
 
 And then another curious thing happened. For 
 Kingsmead answered, addressing him by the name of 
 the last servant who had driven him over that muddy 
 winding road : " Nothing, Thomas I was thinking." 
 
 And Thomas, whose name was William, wondered. 
 
 Kingsmead, as the cart bowled briskly along, recalled 
 the last day, much such a day as this one, when he had 
 driven that way, stolid Thomas Berry by his side. It 
 had rained then as it was raining now, in little gusts 
 that seemed blown down from the bare trees that edged 
 the road; it had been chill then as it was chill now; 
 but that other rain had rained on a distressed and sad 
 boy of sixteen, whereas it rained now on a young man 
 of twenty-three, neither distressed nor sad, although 
 there was in the circumstances of his present coming a 
 certain element of the pathetic that he would have 
 been quick to recognise in the case of any other than 
 himself. 
 
 Ah ! there to his right the church, looking with its 
 squat tower like a mouldy pudding in an unsuccessful 
 green-brown sauce. Then came the village, an ugly 
 village, dating, the greater part of it, from the painful 
 architectural period of the eighteen-forties and fifties. 
 There was the inn, the Plough and Pig, relic of an 
 earlier period, presenting a pleasant arched doorway 
 with glimpses of a courtyard that stirred vague 
 Pickwickian memories in Kingsmead's mind. Then 
 the sweetstuff-shop, with apparently the same jar of
 
 KINGSMEAD 3 
 
 almond-rock that had tempted him in his childhood. 
 Then came the bridge, and at its farther end the old 
 toll-house, still showing signs of a former red hue. 
 
 " Is that a little Spink? " asked the young man sud- 
 denly as they passed this last house. 
 
 The groom, as he touched his hat, blushed. 
 
 " No, my lord," he stammered, glaring at the vio- 
 lently waving child who was the object of the inquiry 
 as if he had never seen it before and thoroughly dis- 
 approved of its existence, " it 's mine I mean to say, 
 my lord, I I married Louisa Spink, my lord." 
 
 And Kingsmead suddenly felt lonely, and old, and a 
 relic of a former generation, for he had known Louisa 
 Spink, and given her a white rabbit and secretly ad- 
 mired her red curls, when she was the age of the child 
 that waved. 
 
 After a ten-minutes' trot between bare and lumpy 
 fields, trees again lined the road, and behind the right- 
 hand row a stone wall was just visible in the evening 
 light. Kingsmead looked at this wall and saw that it 
 appeared lower and sadly shabbier than of old, when it 
 had been to him a barrier unscalable by any but a giant. 
 
 " Is old Mills still alive, Thomas what is your 
 name, by the way? " he added suddenly, catching him- 
 self up. 
 
 " William, sir I mean to say my lord," touching 
 his hat again, while his interlocutor wished it were not 
 necessary for one young man to so often touch his hat
 
 4 KINGSMEAD 
 
 to another. " No, my lord, 'e 's dead, old Mills is, 
 thank you, my lord." 
 
 "And Mr. Green?" 
 
 " Mr. Green 'as left, my lord. A year ago he went. 
 'E did n't get on well with Mr. Teddy, my lord." 
 
 "Humph!" 
 
 Kingsmead pulled his coat-collar closer about his ears, 
 for it was raining hard now. " And Mr. Smith? " 
 
 " Dead, my lord, thank you. They say it was 'is 
 liver. Will your lordship not 'ave the umbrella ? " 
 
 But Kingsmead shook his head and sat huddled in 
 his place, unconscious or comfortably disregardful of 
 his discomfort, his hands in his pockets, his quick, light 
 eyes looking eagerly about him. 
 
 This quiet, inconspicuous eagerness appeared to be 
 a thing very characteristic of him, and it was. 
 
 The cart turned in at the lodge-gate, where a bril- 
 liant electric light showed new paint and a general air 
 of spick-and-spanness at which Kingsmead smiled in his 
 collar. 
 
 " There 's an oak gone over there to the left," he 
 observed presently, at a turning in the avenue, "a 
 big fellow with huge roots." 
 
 The groom's eyes followed his. " Yes, my lord, that 
 went two years ago, and last year a big helium near 
 the 'ouse was struck by lightning and they 'ad to cut 
 it down." 
 
 "A-a-a-h!"
 
 KINGSMEAD 5 
 
 Without turning his head the servant looked at 
 his companion and saw that his irregular, pale, small 
 face was lighted up with a sudden brilliant pallor of 
 excitement. 
 
 " The carp-pond ! Good old carp-pond ! There used 
 to be an old brute of a fish in it that they said was 
 over a hundred years old. Do you happen to know if 
 he's still alive, William?" 
 
 William did happen to know. 
 
 " Yes, my lord, one of the stable-boys was a-talking 
 about 'im only the other day. 'E said 'is back was all 
 covered with moss, my lord." 
 
 Kingsmead burst out laughing, his small white teeth 
 flashing under the baby moustache that looked so much 
 more like a finely grown eyebrow. " Don't you believe 
 it, the stable-boy is a poet ! I 've known that carp 
 all my life, and there 's no moss. Ah ! " His voice 
 dropped suddenly, for they had taken another turn, and 
 there in the dusk, some of its windows already lighted, 
 stood the beautiful old Tudor house. 
 
 Tommy Kingsmead had arrived at the home of his 
 fathers.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 KINGSMEAD is built round three sides of a quadrangle, 
 and opposite the open side, to the left, is the low, in- 
 conspicuous door under its ivy-hung archway, more like 
 the door of a small church than the principal entrance 
 to a great house. 
 
 This door opened as the cart stopped, at Kings- 
 mead's orders, in the middle of the courtyard, and the 
 young man got out. For a sharp second his heart 
 seemed to stand still as he stood looking about him to 
 the sound of the cob's retreating hoofs. 
 
 Years had passed since he had seen it, the old place, 
 and the opening, on a dark, wet evening, of the door, 
 and its beautiful revelation of light and comfort within. 
 Not heeding the old man who stood in the doorway, 
 Tommy stood looking slowly about him. 
 
 Some of the upper windows were lighted, and as he 
 watched, those of the great hall burst into gorgeous 
 flower against the darkness. 
 
 It was, that part of the silent building, very fairy- 
 like, for the pointed windows in the hall were of ancient 
 painted glass of wonderful colouring, and the slender 
 fluted pillar that halved each of them looked like the 
 stem of a huge magic flower. Against the black sky the 
 
 6
 
 KINGSMEAD 7 
 
 graceful chimneys were barely discernible, but Kings- 
 mead knew them so well that he could almost see them. 
 
 And then, just before him the open door; the black 
 panelled walls ; the crimson streak of the stair-carpet ; 
 the blaze and cheer of the leaping fire. 
 
 " Poor dear old place ! " Kingsmead spoke aloud, 
 quite unconsciously, his voice made musical by his tender 
 appreciation of the occasion. 
 
 It was, he felt, quite without morbidity or even an- 
 alysis of his own sensations, an episode that was des- 
 tined to become a memory. He would remember, years 
 hence, this wet home-coming that was yet coming to the 
 gates of a stranger. And he would recall, resee, the 
 open door and the firelight within. 
 
 " It it is raining, my lord." 
 
 The old man at the door poked his head a trifle for- 
 ward, with the movement of a respectfully anxious 
 turtle. " Would your lordship not like an umbrella ? " 
 
 It was a rather absurd question, but Kingsmead real- 
 ised as he smiled at it that his standing serenely there 
 in a pouring rain gazing at a barely visible house must 
 look at least as absurd as the speaker. 
 
 " Thank you, no. I will come in." 
 
 Thus he entered the house he had last seen on the 
 occasion of his mother's funeral, and put his hat down 
 on the table on which as a lad he had been wont to toss 
 his cap a dozen times a day. 
 
 The hall, he saw with a little thrill of relief that sur-
 
 8 KINGSMEAD 
 
 prised him, for he had not expected to find it the same, 
 was unchanged. He was glad, too, this time without 
 any surprise, not to be met by powdered footmen. 
 
 The butler looked a decent old chap ; but then Lan- 
 sing had certainly been born with the most extraor- 
 dinary sense of the correct. 
 
 " My luggage," he said, giving his clothes a shake 
 and turning down his collar, " is coming on in a cart 
 or something. I suppose Mr. Lansing is in? I mean 
 young Mr. Lansing." 
 
 The old man, fixing on him two very shrewd and 
 kindly blue eyes, hesitated. " No, my lord, I mean 
 to say Lord Kingsmead, 'e 's out. That is to say, 
 I think 'e is." 
 
 Tommy, absent-minded, smoothed back his wet fair 
 hair and wiped his face with his handkerchief. 
 
 "Then will you tell Mrs. Lansing, please? You 
 know who I am." 
 
 " Yes, my lord I mean to say I I am Mr. 
 Lansing." 
 
 If one of the ancient and rusty weapons on the walls 
 had suddenly gone off with a loud report poor Tommy 
 could not have been more startled. 
 
 " Accidents! " he exclaimed, his face scarlet. 
 
 Then, holding out his still damp hand, he laughed 
 a situation-saving laugh that was priceless at the mo- 
 ment. " Then why on earth," he cried, " if you have a 
 mania for opening your own door, have n't you the
 
 KINGSMEAD 9 
 
 grace to come out of that corner so that a fellow can 
 see you ? " 
 
 Old Analyte Lansing shook his hand warmly. 
 
 " It was n't that, my lord," he exclaimed. " I mean 
 that you could n't see me. My butler is much grander 
 than me. You 're very kind not to be annoyed. But, 
 you see, you won't tell Teddy I did it, will you ? But 
 I just wanted to tell you that I wanted you to under- 
 stand that " He broke off nervously, fingering his 
 
 old-fashioned tie with short red fingers that shook, and 
 clearing his throat. 
 
 Then, with the air of a man taking his first fence on 
 a strange horse, he hurried on: 
 
 " It may be just one of my blunders to say it, but 
 I 've been thinking about it ever since Teddy told us 
 that you were coming. It 's this, my lord I mean to 
 say Lord Kingsmead. Much as I love Kingsmead 
 and I do love it, even if I ain't altogether up to appre- 
 ciating it much as I love the old place, sir, it it 
 goes to my heart to be receiving you in it, when it 
 ought to be the other way round. Not," he added, 
 with a little laugh, " that you 'd ha' been likely ever 
 to invite me." Tommy's mouth, which had deep-set, 
 upturned corners, gave one twitch. Then he met the 
 respectfully pitying eyes of his host with a beautiful 
 gravity. 
 
 " I really am d-delighted to come, Mr. Lansing," he 
 returned with his slight stammer. " I know what you
 
 10 KINGSMEAD 
 
 mean, and it is charming of you to think of it, but 
 I really am delighted to come." 
 
 The old man drew a deep breath of relief. " Well, 
 it 's kind of you to take it like that it is indeed, my 
 lord. But you see we have made a few changes in the 
 place not many, but still a few, my daughter Inez 
 being very cultivated and I thought it was bound 
 to be a little painful to you at first. So I made up my 
 mind that I 'd tell you, on the quiet, that although I do 
 enjoy owning it more than anything in the world, I do 
 'ave every sympathy with you, and that I 'm well, sir, 
 just damn sorry for you! " 
 
 This unexpected finish was vastly better, and Tommy 
 laughed quite frankly, much relieved. 
 
 " I can only repeat that I am really very glad to 
 come, and please don't be sorry for me. You see, it 's 
 all quite satisfactory ; you needed a house and I needed 
 money, so we are both content. And let 's be friends, 
 Mr. Lansing, shall we? " 
 
 He held out his hand again, and the beaming old man 
 shook it warmly. " Zte-lighted, my lord Lord Kings- 
 mead delighted and proud. You won't tell Teddy, 
 though, will you? " he added hastily, cocking his head 
 on one side and looking toward the stairs. " I believe 
 that 's 'im, after all " 
 
 As he spoke the light on the landing was switched on, 
 and a young man came down the stairs. 
 
 Now the Kingsmeads were a handsome race, with the
 
 KINGSMEAD 11 
 
 exception of the present earl. Tommy's father had 
 been very handsome, and his grandfather, and the 
 house was full of portraits of beautiful Meads, men 
 and women, of all periods. Yet no Mead had ever 
 made, coming down the old black stairway, a more 
 splendid picture than did now the son of old Bath-tub 
 Lansing. 
 
 He was just Tommy's age, but nearly a head taller; 
 he was blond, and curly-haired and straight-nosed, and 
 a dozen other odious-sounding things, but because he 
 was also broad-shouldered, narrow-flanked, and strong- 
 necked he escaped any taint of femininity or manniquvn- 
 isme and gave as much joy to any unprejudiced, un- 
 jealous eye, male or female, as did ever a beautiful ath- 
 lete in the days of Greece's glory. 
 
 "Hello, Tommy!" 
 
 " Hello, Lanner ! " 
 
 The two young men shook hands in a way that be- 
 spoke real affection, the splendid Teddy beaming down 
 at his guest, and Tommy, delicate, spare, twinkling of 
 eye and faunlike of mouth, beaming back up at him, with 
 a sweet, crooked smile. 
 
 " Glad to see you, old chap," went on Lansing, his 
 left hand still on his friend's shoulder. " I meant to 
 go and meet you, but I I was out, and to tell the 
 truth, did n't notice how late it was and then I fell 
 asleep over a book." 
 
 " Never mind, I have been having a talk with your
 
 12 KINGSMEAD 
 
 father. I say, Teddy, lend me a pair of shoes, will 
 you? My feet are soaked." 
 
 Teddy burst out laughing. " Good old Miss Tabitha ! 
 Right-ho, come along to my room." 
 
 " Won't you 'ave a whisky and soda? " put in old 
 Lansing anxiously. " You may 'ave taken cold, and 
 there 's pneumonia about, I 'm told " 
 
 " No, thanks. I am a hopelessly abstemious young 
 man, as Lanner will tell you. But I should like some 
 tea." 
 
 The two young men went slowly upstairs, Teddy's 
 arm round Tommy's shoulder, and old Lansing watched 
 them out of sight. 
 
 Then, rubbing his hands together in a satisfied man- 
 ner, he proceeded down the narrow panelled passage to 
 the Great Hall.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE Great Hall was, of course, brilliantly lighted, and 
 close to the enormous fireplace, in which burned a bright 
 fire, stood, as it seemed to Tommy, when he and Teddy 
 came downstairs a few moments later, several tea-tables. 
 
 This overabundance of silver and food was due, he in- 
 stantly and rightly decided, to the cultivation of the 
 daughter of the house. 
 
 This young lady, dark-faced and shrewd-eyed, sat 
 behind a large bubbling kettle, and from the breastworks 
 of silver surveyed the newcomer with the greatest self- 
 possession. Miss Lansing wore a dark coat and skirt 
 and a pink shirt, and looked as if she had just come in 
 from a walk. 
 
 Now Tommy was very young, and had lived for the 
 last few years in a remote part of Italy, far from Eng- 
 lish girls and their ways ; yet he knew by a kind of in- 
 stinct, as he made his bow to her, that Inez Lansing's 
 natural choice in the matter of a costume to be worn at 
 tea would be an elaborate and fluffy tea-gown. He 
 seemed to see her, with the trick of semi-involuntary vis- 
 ualisation that was his, draped in a pale pink garment of 
 flowing lines and artistic sleeves. And he knew that her 
 
 present rough country clothes were not the outcome of 
 
 13
 
 14 KINGSMEAD 
 
 a personal taste, but of a close observation of what some 
 woman she admired wore in the country. 
 
 He knew that the girl did not like the country ; that 
 she did not like walking; that she did not like heavy 
 shoes ; that she admired high-heeled slippers, and liked 
 sitting in warm rooms eating chocolate and reading 
 novels. And he knew, this curiously illuminated Tommy, 
 that the sense of the correct he so admired in Teddy 
 became, in the girl, a decidedly unpleasant and monkey- 
 like gift for imitation. Meantime, Miss Lansing was, 
 he felt, giving him a very clever representation of a 
 young lady pouring tea for a gentleman. 
 
 " You must have got jolly wet," she began, shaking 
 the teapot knowingly. " I wanted to send something 
 with a top to it, but Ted says you loathe motors." 
 
 " I do. I 'm proud to say I have n't been in one of 
 the things for over four years. Do you like 'em? " 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders again, he felt, in good imi- 
 tation of her to him unknown model. 
 
 " Oh, no but they do get one about quickly, don't 
 they? Sugar?" 
 
 " Yes, please, lots. No, no, three 's enough. Yes, I 
 do hate the brutes motors, I mean nasty, smelly 
 things. I have been living for the last three years in 
 a blessed spot where the roads are so bad no motor could 
 get within a mile of me. Could they, Lanner ? " 
 
 Teddy, who was eating cake with an innocently dis- 
 played gourmanderie rather pleasant to see, shook his
 
 KINGSMEAD 15 
 
 head. " Not they ! Nor anything else bar humans and 
 donkeys. Lord, that climb on a hot day! How are 
 they all, Tommy Emilia and Battista, and that j oily 
 little beggar of the washerwoman's ? " 
 
 Tommy beamed. " All right, the dears. Emilia gave 
 me a blessed medal when I came away. I was to wear 
 it as a charm to keep off the evil eye. The baby has a 
 little sister now the reddest hair you ever saw. Not 
 so jolly as our baby, though." 
 
 Teddy took his tea and more cake. " Remember that 
 ripping thunderstorm one night? And what's-his-name, 
 Emilia's son, the fisherman, down on his knees in the 
 kitchen praying? Rum lot, the Italians," he ended 
 complacently. 
 
 Tommy grinned. " Yet when one gets to know them," 
 he returned, " they seem almost like human beings." 
 
 But Lansing did not understand, and only nodded, as 
 one who yields an unimportant point. 
 
 There was a short pause, and then Tommy turned 
 again to the girl behind the tea-table. 
 
 " Do you like living here ? " he asked politely. 
 
 She hesitated for an almost imperceptible second, 
 
 and then returned, as she reached for some bread and 
 
 butter, " Oh yes, I adore the house as who would n't? 
 
 but the people are a bit stodgy, don't you 
 
 think?" 
 
 Tommy's clear light eyes met hers as she finished, and 
 with a little start, as of one who hastily retraces a mis-
 
 16 KINGSMEAD 
 
 step on a strange path, she added, " You see, Lord 
 Kingsmead, as to the people, I don't know them. It is 
 a very old-fashioned neighbourhood, and lots of the 
 people have n't called. I suppose because of the Bath- 
 tubs, which is," she laughed lightly, " ungrateful of 
 them, for I am sure there are no such good bath-tubs 
 in the world as the Analyte ! " 
 
 It was well done, but it was an excellent imitation of 
 what tihat other young woman whom Tommy did not 
 know would have done had her social path been blocked, 
 fo to speak, by a bath-tub. 
 
 Tommy handed her his cup. " Do you know my 
 sister?" he asked slowly. The moment had come, he 
 knew, when he must ask it, although his sister had 
 written to him about Inez, so that he felt, as he waited 
 for her answer, a thoroughly dishonourable person. 
 
 Jnez smiled. " Ah yes. She is different. Because 
 she is well, above noticing bath-tubs ! How beautiful 
 she is, Lord Kingsmead ! " 
 
 It was again almost painfully clever, and Tommy 
 was in a curious way distressed by her cleverness. 
 
 " Yes, she is very beautiful. And very dear. She 
 does n't know I am here. I must go to see her to- 
 morrow." 
 
 Inez stared, and this stare was genuine. 
 
 " Does n't know you are here? " 
 
 " No. You see she would have wanted me to go 
 to her. And I wanted, first, to come to Kingsmead.
 
 KINGSMEAD 17 
 
 I am, you will think, a very romantic little beggar, ancj 
 I may be. But well, I just wanted to come straight 
 here on landing." 
 
 Teddy laid his hand on his friend's thin knee. 
 
 " Of course you did, old chap. It will be a jolly sur- 
 prise for her, won't it? " 
 
 Tommy's smile was more than usually crooked as he 
 answered : " Yes. It has been two years since I was 
 here. She was at the Castelletto then, you know, Lan- 
 ner, on her way to Japan." 
 
 " I saw her the other day on my way to to see a 
 friend. And she 's the best-looking woman in these 
 parts, even yet." 
 
 Tommy's eyebrows climbed toward his hair in a comi- 
 cal way. " Even yet? " 
 
 " Ted is an idiot," put in Inez. " She is perfectly 
 beautiful, and she will never lose her looks." 
 
 Lansing laughed, a little annoyed. " Who said she 
 would, Inez? I only meant little Lady Brinley is 
 only twenty, ad Mrs. Albert Strangways well under 
 thirty " 
 
 Inez laughed. " I don't know Lady Brinley. Oh, 
 Lord Kingsmead, she will amuse you. She was Lottie 
 or Tottie somebody of the Gaiety, and now she is 
 too deliciously grand for words. Most particular as to 
 whom she knows, and Bath-tubs are much more than 
 she can bear ! " 
 
 Tommy joined in her laugh.
 
 18 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " How painful for her ! I did n't even know poor old 
 Brinley was dead." 
 
 " Yes, he died a year ago, was n't it, Ted? And now 
 the little dancing-girl reigns at the Hall. It is funny. 
 She amuses Lady Pontefract extremely, by the way." 
 
 But Tommy had forgotten little Lady Brinley and 
 was thinking again of his sister, his Brigit, his plain 
 face a little flushed as he realised that only one night 
 must pass before he should see her. When he spoke 
 again it was in answer to a question, and his stammer 
 was a little more marked than usual, as it always was 
 when he was moved. 
 
 " How long is it since you left Oxford? " Inez asked. 
 
 " T-three years. I was t-there only one term, Miss 
 Lansing, as Teddy will have told you. The W-wretched 
 Beast, my health, began to growl there, and they packed 
 me off to Italy. I did n't much mind, though," he added, 
 so great was his dislike for his interlocutor. 
 
 Then, before she could answer, he added gravely, 
 " That is, I did mind, only it could n't be helped." 
 
 Inez looked at him. " I understand," she said in a 
 soft voice. But Tommy knew that she did not under- 
 stand ; that there was between him and her a gulf that 
 no cleverness, no adaptability on her part could ever 
 bridge. She might pretend, she might even believe, in 
 her curious eagerness to approach those who were in 
 any way above her, that she understood him, but it was 
 not, and he was glad to think never could be, true.
 
 KINGSMEAD 19 
 
 However, Tommy's was a gentle spirit, and looking 
 at her he smiled in default of the to him fundamentally 
 impossible lie the smile that had endeared him to more 
 people than he had ever dreamed of. 
 
 And as he sat there, smiling, by the fireside that 
 should have been his, old Lansing, who had come in in 
 time to hear his remarks about his health, watched him 
 with a strange feeling of sympathetic comprehension. 
 Lansing was, he believed of himself, ignorant, vulgar, 
 and a ball and chain on the socially ambitious leg of his 
 son. Yet somehow the old man knew that he, and he 
 only of the three people present, understood the poor 
 little poverty-stricken earl sitting there by the fireside 
 that should have been his. 
 
 " It was a shame, that was, Lord Kingsmead, that 
 you should 'ave 'ad to leave Oxford." The old man's 
 voice was so much more assured than usual that both 
 his son and his daughter glanced at him in astonishment. 
 
 Tommy nodded gently. " Yes. I loved Oxford. But 
 the Wretched Beast clamoured and t-then, I love 
 Italy. I have there," he went on after a short silence, 
 " a little old castle by the sea the remains of a forti- 
 fied place of the middle ages. It is only a tower, 
 probably once one of several, and a scrap of bastion 
 and a tiny garden in which grow the most peaceable 
 vegetables, under its battlemented wall. There are four 
 rooms, including the kitchen, and the path leading up 
 it is on a very high hill overhanging the sea goes
 
 20 KINGSMEAD 
 
 through olive-groves. On the wall of the bastion grow 
 big prickly-pears, and as one looks down one sees the 
 grey lace of the olives, and the blue sea the very blue 
 sea. That is where I went after my banishment from 
 Oxford after a year's wandering with my tutor. And 
 there is where I have lived, quite alone since Mr. Erskine 
 left me. It was lonely, I suppose, but I loved it, Mr. 
 Lansing and there I learned to read. Anyone can 
 learti to read in solitude, whereas at Oxford," he laughed, 
 " only the very big ones have time for books ! " 
 
 Inez, watching him, resented, somehow, his manner 
 with her father. He was with the old man talking with 
 open visor, as he had not done with her. 
 
 Suddenly she leaned across the table. " You used to 
 play the violin, didn't you?" she asked crisply. And 
 Tommy shrank as though she had struck him. 
 
 " Give me some more tea, will you, Inez ? " exclaimed 
 Teddy with a fierce frown. 
 
 The girl stared, and Tommy, in the midst of his sensi- 
 tive pain, saw that she had spoken in all innocence. 
 
 " I used to try, Miss Lansing," he returned distinctly, 
 " but the Wretched Beast again think how depress- 
 ing, to be at the mercy of a W. B. ! the Wretched 
 Beast growled, and tore my fiddle from me. It was 
 hard, but though I loved it, I had, after all, no very 
 great talent. It is," he added less lightly, " a great 
 thing to be able to appreciate good music, and that I 
 think I can do. Do you like music? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 21 
 
 " Yes, very much. I adore it. That is," she added, 
 to her own surprise, as she met his quiet gaze, " I know 
 very little about it." 
 
 " Good ! How wise of you to acknowledge the fact ! 
 Now should you think me too greedy if I asked for 
 another cup of tea? "
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE two young men sat late that night over the fire in 
 the smoking-room, for it was over a year since Teddy's 
 last hasty visit to the Castelletto by the sea, and many 
 things were waiting to be said. This accumulation of 
 thoughts that can and must be communicated to differ- 
 ent friends is a curious thing. There are those whose 
 brains seem pigeonholed and stored with motley assorted 
 ideas labelled, if only subconsciously, " for Mary," " for 
 Jack," etc. And the contents of those pigeonholes are 
 quite uninterchangeable. 
 
 Tommy Kingsmead was one of these people, and 
 his Teddy pigeonhole was full; whereas Teddy, un- 
 pigeonholed, could almost as easily have told his 
 collection of impressions and ideas to the first friendly 
 comer. 
 
 Almost, but not quite, after all, for the two had 
 been friends during Tommy's one term at Oxford, their 
 rooms had been on the same landing, and often and 
 often they had sat together, as they sat now, talking 
 until morning over a friendly, sleepy fire. These 
 tete-a-tetes at night, in the midst of dark stillness, are 
 things that knit people's hearts and minds rather closely 
 together. 
 
 22
 
 KINGSMEAD 23 
 
 " Tommy," began Teddy after a long pause, during 
 which he had tenderly filled his pipe, " I was awfully 
 sorry about what Inez said about your playing." 
 
 "Dear old chap! Didn't matter a bit. I jumped, 
 rather, and you saw it, but that 's only because I am a 
 silly little ass." 
 
 " Silly little ass be blowed ! " muttered the beautiful 
 Teddy, unsentimentally as to words, but, his friend 
 knew, very sentimentally as to thought. "I it is a 
 shame about it. I suppose you never play now? " 
 
 Tommy looked at him with a whimsical grin from 
 the hearth-rug where he sat clasping his knees, rather 
 groomlike in the faint firelight. 
 
 " I never did play, you know. Used to try used 
 to scrape. You used to listen, like a dear." 
 
 " I liked it." 
 
 " Well yes, perhaps you did, but then you always 
 did have thundering bad artistic taste. No, I never 
 * play ' now. You see when I went down they forbade 
 me to touch the fiddle for a year. At the end of the 
 year we were in Florence, and it was spring I 
 began again. Have I told you? There was a little 
 chap, a hunchback, who came to teach me. And he was 
 rather hopeful about me. So I well, overwork I did, 
 and break down I did and that has all happened re- 
 peatedly. You see," he added quietly, " I 've not the 
 strength for it. It 's the hardest work in the world. 
 Besides, I go mad over it it upsets me so frightfully
 
 24 KINGSMEAD 
 
 because I love it so. I '11 tell you, Teddy, what I feel 
 when I hear a real violinist violining." 
 
 He paused and gazed into the fire, a quaint look of 
 age on his young face. 
 
 " I feel as if the music not what is being played, 
 but the tones of the violin was a voice a voice that 
 used to be mine. Understand? " 
 
 Teddy nodded dubiously as he puffed at his very evil 
 pipe. 
 
 " Well as if it were my own voice of some other 
 incarnation telling me all about that other incarnation. 
 And in those days it appears," he smiled amusedly, 
 " that I used to be a large, strong, muscular person of 
 genius. That I was beautiful and useful and athletic 
 and brutally healthy like you only that I could 
 play. My word, how I could play when I was that other 
 youth ! And the violin, you see, goes on telling me these 
 vainglorious things until I almost believe it, and then 
 when it stops I look down at my little present self in 
 a kind of amazed horror." 
 
 " How how awfully odd ! " said Teddy seriously, 
 half shyly. 
 
 " Yes. Odd, and enthralling, and very exhausting. 
 The other Tommy was really rather splendid, and never 
 got tired, whereas this Tommy, poor little worm, is 
 as you know him." 
 
 "And the fiddle?" 
 
 Tommy took up the poker and pushed back into the
 
 KINGSMEAD 25 
 
 glowing ashes a charred bit of wood that had forgotten 
 to go on burning. 
 
 " Oh, the fiddle," he answered, smiling, " is upstairs 
 in the yellow room. I always have it with me. I love 
 the thing, just its own self, even apart from the fact 
 that Joyselle gave it to me. It 's the one, you know, 
 on which he played when he first played in public be- 
 fore he got his Amati." 
 
 " I know, you told me. I say, Tommy, where is he 
 now? " 
 
 " In Normandy, with his own people. He is very ill, 
 you know." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Teddy said no more, for he was discreet, but Tommy, 
 after a pause, went on : " He was charmingly good to 
 me when I was a kid. Used to play for me, and I have 
 stopped in his house for weeks at a time. Ah, Teddy, 
 there was a man! A great, big, strong, cheery chap 
 with thousands of snow-white teeth, so that he looked 
 when he laughed as if he were lined with ivory. And so 
 gay, and so childlike ! And then, when he played, it all 
 went, and he was just Music in person. He was a god 
 when he played, no matter how grotesquely he was 
 dressed, and he always overdressed. That 's what genius 
 is, having the power of letting the god in one vanquish 
 the mere man." 
 
 "The god?" 
 
 " Yes, I mean the divine, the highest, not the holiest.
 
 26 KINGSMEAD 
 
 He certainly was n't holy, the Master ! In fact," added 
 the sage on the hearth-rug, " I never heard of a great 
 artist who was, bar little old Fra Angelico, and he, poor 
 dear, had to be, as he was a monk." 
 
 There was a long, cosey pause, during which Teddy 
 smoked hard. 
 
 Then he said slowly, not looking at his friend : " My 
 governor likes you awfully, Tommy." 
 
 " Hooray ! I like him. What a clever face he has, 
 Teddy." 
 
 " Yes. He said that you and he understood each 
 other from the first." 
 
 " So we did." Tommy's smile was internal. 
 
 " Well, I 'm awfully glad, old fellow. You see, 
 he 's very shy, my father, with with people like 
 you " 
 
 " People like me? " asked Tommy quickly, looking up 
 with a little frown. 
 
 " Yes I mean that he is too clever not to know the 
 the difference " 
 
 " O Lord ! You mean * people like me,' earls and 
 things. Teddy, Teddy, I am ashamed of you ! " 
 
 " I knew you would be. But it 's true. You are such 
 an arrant " 
 
 " I 'm not an arrant anything, but I know you are on 
 the point of having a snobbish fit, and sur ci I am going 
 to bed." 
 
 He rose and stretched lazily, eyeing his friend with a
 
 KINGSMEAD 27 
 
 kind of friendly sternness. " Come along, it 's after 
 one, and I want my beauty-sleep." 
 
 Teddy knocked the ashes out of his pipe and rose 
 obediently. It was quaint to see the way the splendid 
 youth obeyed his little friend, and quite evidently it was 
 a habit of long standing. 
 
 They went upstairs in silence, and at the door of his 
 room Tommy struck Teddy on the shoulder. " Good- 
 night, my child," he said gravely, but with an affec- 
 tionate gleam in his eye, " don't be an ass."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE silk-and-lace counterpane drawn smoothly over her, 
 Lady Pontef ract lay in bed, reading her letters. It was, 
 for her, very early, the stable clock having just struck 
 half-past nine. 
 
 On a little white lacquered breakfast-tray, a very 
 dwarf among tables, its tiny feet buried in the lace of 
 the counterpane, stood a delicate flowered cup and 
 saucer and chocolate-pot. On the Turkey carpet near 
 the bed lay a scattered heap of envelopes torn and 
 crumpled, tossed down by the hand of the beautiful 
 woman now engaged, as she drank her chocolate, in 
 reading their contents. 
 
 It was a charming room, with gay chintz curtains 
 and chair-covers, and through the big windows pleasant 
 glimpses of misty parkland. 
 
 One of these was open, and on the hearth burnt a 
 wood-fire, whose flickering light danced over the room, 
 drawing glimmers of crystal and gold from the lace- 
 covered dressing-table, and flirting with its own reflec- 
 tion in the great mirror opposite the door. 
 
 On the mantelpiece stood a delightful group of por- 
 celain figures Harlequin and Columbine ; a gypsy 
 dancer; a black-coated but worldly-looking young 
 
 28
 
 KINGSMEAD 29 
 
 abbe, pon Manon's des Grieux, perhaps ; a shepherd 
 playing his flute to his fair priceless, poetic, and 
 suggestive. 
 
 And on Lady Pontefract's awakening her maid had 
 brought in several vases of roses, whose delicate scent 
 quickened the warm air. 
 
 The bed, a thing of gilded wicker and carved wood, 
 ancient and beautiful, stood out from the wall, and over 
 it hung, distinctly gorgeous and different from the 
 simple prettiness of the flowered chintz, a wonderful old 
 rose-coloured drapery of fringed satin brocade, held at 
 the corners of the thin fluted pillars, gleaming faintly 
 with ancient gilding, by delightful, impossible, pot- 
 bellied little gold cupids, with heels in air and roses in 
 their foolish mouths. 
 
 A marvellous bed, but no more marvellous than the 
 lady who lay in it, her black hair plaited and lying like 
 long, quiescent serpents by her sides. 
 
 She wore a rose-coloured silk jacket over her night- 
 gown, and in the flattering light of her surroundings 
 looked not a day more than five-and-twenty. 
 
 " Celeste ! " 
 
 " Madame la Comtesse? " 
 
 Celeste was old and severe-looking, and wore a long 
 black dress fastened at the throat by a very depressing 
 cameo brooch representing a maiden weeping over an 
 urn under a willow. 
 
 "Ou eat his lordship?"
 
 30 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " His lordship est a la bibliotheque, my lady." A 
 polyglot person, Celeste. 
 
 Lady Pontefract set down her cup and crushed her 
 napkin on to the little table. " Take the tray, please, 
 and then ask his lordship to come to me." 
 
 She laid down the letter she had been reading and 
 took up another, which, however, she at once deserted 
 for the other one, when, a few minutes later, her hus- 
 band came in. 
 
 " Ponty dear," she began at once, " do you remember 
 the pretty little woman who lives at a place called 
 Greene, near Isherby ? " 
 
 Lord Pontefract sat down on a low chair and crossed 
 his legs comfortably. He was a rather fat man, much 
 older than his wife, and had a kind, weak face. 
 
 " Greene? No, my dear, I don't think I do. Are you 
 sure I ever saw her? " 
 
 She laughed. " No. I wondered. She is very pretty, 
 so as you don't remember I dare say you never did see 
 her. You would not have forgotten. Well, I met her 
 at the Lansings. It appears she and her motor once 
 frightened poor old Mrs. Lansing's pony-cart (the old 
 woman in it), and that she then insisted on taking the 
 old lady home in her car, and was altogether very kind. 
 The enterprising Inez then called, of course, and Mrs. 
 Gilpin and the Lansings have since then seen a good 
 deal of each other. I met Mrs. Gilpin there one day, 
 and she is really quite remarkably pretty, in her way
 
 KINGSMEAD 31 
 
 Irish, I should say. I called one day, when I had been 
 to Isherby and it was beginning to rain, besides, I 
 rather wanted to see her again, but she was out, and 
 she called, and then I asked her to dine that time the 
 Dunstanburys were here, and she could n't. Only, what 
 a long story ! Well, I 've j ust had a letter from her 
 asking us to dine. Shall we go? " 
 
 Pontefract lit a cigarette without asking for permis- 
 sion, which act, as a sign of the terms on which he and 
 his wife lived, was illuminating. 
 
 " Go ? Why not, if she 's amusin' ? Can't hurt 
 us," he added, innocently and unconsciously arrogant. 
 "When is it for?" 
 
 "For Tuesday. This is Thursday, is n't it ? Yes, 
 Thursday. The note is rather nice read it." 
 
 She handed him the austere-looking little sheet of 
 grey paper and watched him as he read. 
 
 "DEAR LADY PONTEFRACT: I wonder if you and Lord 
 Pontefract will come and dine with me on Tuesday at eight? 
 The Lansings are coming the son, I mean, and Inez but 
 no one else, for I know no one else here. I hope you can 
 come, for I should like to show you my fuchsia, which is 
 really rather lovely in its way, and it would give me great 
 pleasure to see you again. 
 
 " Yours sincerely, 
 
 "NANCY GILPIN." 
 
 " Nice name, is n't it, ' Nancy Gilpin ' ? " asked Lady 
 Pontefract, as her husband laid the letter back on the 
 bed. "Well, shall we go?"
 
 32 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Just as you like, my dear. Particularly if she 's 
 pretty. What does she mean about the fuchsia? " 
 
 " Oh, nothing. It is a very big one, and she is very 
 proud of it. She seems fond of gardening. She really 
 is charming in her way. Then I '11 write and accept." 
 
 PoHtefract nodded. " Right, my dear." 
 
 This instant agreeing of his to any project proposed 
 to him by his wife was among his friends a joke of long 
 standing. He was a slow-minded, adoring, kind soul, 
 and in return for his adoration the beautiful Brigit 
 Mead had given him, to everyone's more or less openly 
 expressed surprise, a gentle, unwavering faithfulness, 
 of thought and word apparently as well as of deed. 
 
 They had been married for nearly nine years, and 
 both of them seemed, in spite of many prophecies cast 
 for them on the occasion of their marriage, quite as con- 
 tent as their neighbours. 
 
 Before the marriage there had been stories, one of 
 which was in its main fact undeniably true. 
 
 Brigit Mead had at one time been engaged to the son 
 of a world-renowned violinist, and there were those who 
 said that she had loved not the son but the father. He, 
 buoyant, irrepressible creature of genius, had, some be- 
 lieved, loved her to the very verge of folly, while still 
 others insisted that all the love had been on her side. 
 
 These details had never been substantiated one way 
 or the other, but this much was certain : the engagement 
 had been broken at the time of the violinist's wife's sud-
 
 33 
 
 den death, and for nearly a year no one saw Lady 
 Brigit. 
 
 Then she had suddenly reappeared, and a month or 
 so later was married very quietly, from her mother's 
 house, to Lord Pontefract. 
 
 As has been seen, the stories told about her first 
 engagement were various, and absolutely irreconcilable 
 with each other, but the plain, every-day-to-be-observed, 
 and therefore indisputable facts were that whomever she 
 might have loved, or by whomever she might have been 
 loved before her marriage, Brigit Pontefract had been, 
 in her passive, indifferent way, an irreproachable wife, 
 and that Pontefract was a very contented and proud 
 husband. Moreover, none could deny that she had cured 
 him of his one vice, and changed him from a roystering 
 blade who would have been greatly at home in the society 
 of the disreputable first gentlemen of Europe, into a 
 mildly bustling country gentleman, a plucky rider to 
 hounds, and a conscientious if not brilliant justice of 
 the peace. 
 
 That the worker of these miracles herself wore a look 
 of chronic, mild, well-bred boredom surprised nobody, 
 for as a girl her face had been much less genial even 
 than it was now. It was at present at least a conven- 
 tional mask, whereas in the old days it had been a 
 frankly and bitterly rebellious one. So much for the 
 lady in the gilded bed. 
 
 Pontefract rose, kissed his wife gently, and returned 
 3
 
 34 KINGSMEAD 
 
 to the library. He was gladdish, as he would have ex- 
 pressed it, to be going to meet a pretty woman. He 
 was of those who cannot live in town, and yet who con- 
 stantly, if without venom, grumble at the dulness of the 
 country. 
 
 " I 'm driving to Isherby," he said, at the door. " I 
 have to see Jenkins. Will you come with me? " 
 
 She smiled at him. " No, dear, thanks. I have a 
 million letters to answer, and Mrs. Probyn is coming to 
 lunch. Shall you be back? " 
 
 He did not know. It depended on Jenkins. He liked 
 to feel himself a busy man, driven to death by his stew- 
 ard and his attorney. 
 
 So he nodded again and left her, closing the door 
 very quietly.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 " THE Housemaid's Joy," as the world-known adver- 
 tisement, written by old Lansing himself, calls the An- 
 alyte bath-tub, is a very remarkable thing. 
 
 Every housemaid knows what a nuisance, what a 
 wearying, back-ache-y job it is to keep at the point of 
 perfection even the best of ordinary enamel tubs. 
 
 Tiles are very attractive, but even they have to be 
 kept rubbed, and then the cement between them changes 
 colour and makes a horrid little dingy pattern amid the 
 glaze. Whereas the Analyte! That is its beauty. Im- 
 agine a glorified tile in any colour you like, though 
 pink is the favourite made liquid and then poured like 
 thick cream over the curved, unbroken surfaces of a big, 
 convenient tub. Then imagine that this thick, creamy 
 substance, instead of rolling down, stops where it is 
 poured, and sticks like a benevolent barnacle to the 
 whole tub, drying without a ripple, without an edge, 
 and developing, as it dries, the most marvellous, glass- 
 like glaze. Then realise that nothing can crack this ex- 
 traordinary glaze, nothing break it, and that no degree 
 of heat, no degree of cold nothing affects it in the 
 least ; that you can use it every day for fifty years and 
 leave it, when you exchange it for a narrower, drier, 
 
 35
 
 36 KINGSMEAD 
 
 and more sombre tub, as good, as glossy as the day you 
 got it. Imagine these things and you have the Analyte. 
 
 The Housemaid's Joy indeed! The pretty young 
 woman in the picture can smile no more contentedly 
 than could your own Emma Jane if you had your tire- 
 some old tubs torn out and Lansing's Analyte bath-tubs 
 put in your house. 
 
 Moreover, think of the joy of having your whole 
 bathroom made of Analyte, so that it is like a beautiful 
 tinted shell ! The young Countess of Lillaston, so blond, 
 so rosy, so youthful, has her own bathroom done in the 
 coolest shade of green, the tub shaped like a sea-shell, 
 the walls changing from a real sea-green near the floor 
 to the most delicate of pale Nile-greens on the ceiling. 
 Later the colour will not be so becoming, but at present 
 her ladyship greatly enjoys seeing her little person, all 
 pink and white, surrounded by the cool sea-colour. 
 
 Then there is pale blue, not bad, and even mauve is 
 pretty. But the shade which the famous Housemaid in 
 the picture is beaming over is pink; and pink was the 
 room, pink the tub, in which, a few minutes after her 
 husband had left her, Lady Pontefract lay, only her 
 beautiful head visible in the creamy water into which 
 the grim-visaged Celeste had put some sweet-smelling 
 powder. 
 
 It was very pleasant, lying there, very restful and 
 luxurious ; and the beautiful woman smiled as she 
 thought of old Analyte Lansing. She liked the old
 
 KINGSMEAD 37 
 
 man, and his unabashed pride when she told him that 
 her house was tubbed throughout by his invention had 
 pleased her. It was the first time, she reflected, that 
 she had ever seen him unoppressed by society, for even 
 in his own house he felt, she knew, as if the waves of 
 that painful and unfamiliar organisation were batter- 
 ing at his walls. " And the more it does n't batter," 
 she smiled to herself, " the more the poor old thing 
 fears it. That Inez is really a terrible person." 
 
 And then came, in the midst of her amused thoughts, 
 a knock at the door. 
 
 " Celeste? " 
 
 Another knock an excited, nervous knock, that 
 somehow thrilled her as a voice might have done. 
 
 " Who is there? Celeste qui est la? " 
 
 And then, at last, came the voice, a voice with a 
 quaver in it that was very nearly a break. " Bicky 
 Bick, dear old girl! " 
 
 The creamy water quivered for a moment, making 
 tiny waves that curved softly against its rosy shores, 
 and quick tears sprang to Lady Pontefract's eyes. 
 " Tommy! " 
 
 " Yes, Bick, it 's m-me." 
 
 " Oh, Tommy, you you angel ! Oh, you lamb I 
 can't wait to see you ! " 
 
 The creamy water was by this time empty and evi- 
 dently a prey to a violent if momentary storm ; and 
 still another moment and Lady Pontefract, in a loose
 
 38 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Turkish-towelling bath-gown tied round her waist by a 
 blue cord, stood looking down still down, mind you, 
 for Tommy had never grown as he should have done - 
 at her brother, both her arms round his neck, her face 
 wet with unexpected and even yet unconscious tears. 
 
 " When did you come, Pig, and why did n't you let 
 me know? Oh, my Tommykin, how lovely you look, and 
 how glad I am to see you ! " 
 
 Tommy's small face was white, his mouth quivering. 
 
 " Bick darling oh, my blessed old girl ! " 
 
 They had not met for two years a little matter of 
 seven hundred and thirty odd days and during that 
 time, eighteen months of which had been passed by 
 Lady Pontefract in the Orient, her little brother had 
 grown from boyhood to manhood. Much had happened 
 to them both, they had each met people and learned 
 many things, and yet, meeting again now, there was no 
 break, no hiatus ; they were, they both felt with a throb 
 of joy, as close to each other, as understanding of each 
 other, as ever. And this is what the blood tie, and only 
 the blood tie, can do. Friends without it can, and also 
 do, grow apart ; friends with it, as these two were, who 
 love each other, meet with a wonderful and inexplicable 
 shrinking into nothing of the yesterdays, that allows, 
 nay, forces them to an instant resumption of the old 
 relationship. 
 
 Friends, and brother and sister. Surely the most 
 beautiful and inextinguishable relationship in the world.
 
 KINGSMEAD 39 
 
 So they cried a little, and laughed at each other and 
 at themselves, and then wiped each other's eyes on 
 Tommy's big hanky, and sat down on the sofa to talk. 
 
 " And you came yesterday ? Straight from the 
 Castelletto?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " And you were," she paused and took his hand in 
 hers, to show, he knew, that she quite understood, 
 " there? I mean, at Kingsmead? " 
 
 He nodded. " Yes. You see, I I rather wanted to 
 go there. I I love it, Bicky." 
 
 That was all, but it was quite enough. 
 
 A few minutes later she went back to the subject by 
 saying suddenly, as she dangled an absurd little slipper 
 on her toes, " I like the old man." 
 
 " So do I. The old lady is n't bad, either." 
 
 " The girl is horrible, Tommy." 
 
 " Pretty poisonous," agreed Tommy the truthful, 
 " but I 'm sorry for her." 
 
 Brigit nodded. " Yes, one would be, only she well, 
 I don't like her, that 's all. She, of course, means to 
 marry you." 
 
 "Oh, my lord!" 
 
 " Exactly ; she intends to be ' my lady.' But we shall 
 easily nip that little ambition in the bud. Only, you 
 are young, Master T, and you come from the top of a 
 mountain. So look out ! " 
 
 Tommy laughed. It was so good to be sitting there
 
 40 KINGSMEAD 
 
 with old Bick; so good to see her beautiful face that, 
 whatever it might have been for others, had always been 
 kind for him; so good to be holding in his the hand 
 that never once since they parted had failed to write 
 to him every week; so good to hear her laugh. 
 
 " And your health, little brother mine quite all 
 right? " 
 
 " Quite, dear. Sunshine and sea-air and absolute 
 idleness have cared me. But I am a good-for-nothing 
 little wretch. It is a habit, comme une autre, looking 
 at the sea and the sky, and wondering which is the 
 bluer! San Luca is the dearest place, though you did 
 hate it." 
 
 "Didn't hate it!" 
 
 "Did too!" 
 
 She had unplaited one of her plaits and was brushing 
 her beautiful hair with the short, tangling strokes of 
 the maid-accustomed. 
 
 " I liked it if only because you were there," she 
 answered ; " but poor old Ponty could n't quite stand 
 spaghetti twice a day and not even the ghost of a morn- 
 ing paper ! Oh, Tommy, Japan ! " 
 
 "And India?" 
 
 " Yes, but Japan is better. India is too Anglicised, 
 or too savage. Japan is delightful, because it is so 
 very " she paused for a word, and he provided it for 
 her, with a grin " Japanese? " 
 
 " Yes, idiot, that 's exactly what I meant. It 's abom-
 
 KINGSMEAD 41 
 
 inably damp there, but oh, Tommy, do you think 
 you really can stand November in England? " 
 
 He rose. " Of course I can. I really am quite all 
 right. You see, it was all because I was growing so 
 fast" with a derisive glance at his own small propor- 
 tions. " If I had n't been such a beanstalky great crea- 
 ture they never would have sent me away." 
 
 Nonsense, most of it, that they talked, but nonsense 
 good to hear. Then suddenly, with the slight stammer 
 that meant shyness, he asked her a question : " Brigit 
 you are really happy? " 
 
 She hesitated, quite frankly, her dark eyes fixed on 
 his. 
 
 " I am very content," she answered after a pause. 
 " He is very good, and I I do my best. I am nicer 
 than I used to be." It was a curious speech, and one that 
 would have amazed anyone who chanced to hear it, but 
 Tommy was not surprised. 
 
 He nodded gravely, and went on quietly, " And 
 he? " 
 
 " He has lived there, you know." 
 
 " La-bas? " Using the phrase " down there " as if 
 it were the name of a place. 
 
 " Yes. Ever since the second stroke. Th6o told me 
 that he is failing rapidly now." 
 
 " You have not seen him again dear ? " 
 
 She went to the fireplace and stood looking down 
 into the glowing ashes, her bnth-gown draping her beau-
 
 42 KINGSMEAD 
 
 tiful figure as if it had been the robe of some splendid 
 statue. 
 
 " I heard him play in Paris on our way back from 
 India. He played well, Tommy." 
 
 " I am glad." 
 
 " So am I. Then, last June he had the second stroke, 
 and can never play again. But his mind is clear, 
 Theo says. He asked for you not long ago." 
 
 "And you?" 
 
 She shook her head quietly; the bitterness of the old 
 sorrow had gone. " No, he has never mentioned me. 
 Theo can't make out whether he has forgotten or " 
 
 " Or whether he has n't, dear? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Tommy went to her and leaned his head on her 
 shoulder for a second. " I am going to see him 
 soon," he said, as quietly as she had spoken. " I loved 
 him too." 
 
 " And he you." Then they talked of other things.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 MRS. LANSING sat in her great chair near a window in 
 one of the small upstairs rooms, and played patience. 
 
 A wonderful invention, this of playing cards by one- 
 self. Thus to be guaranteed a silent, pleasant-tempered 
 adversary, one who never rows one for making mistakes, 
 and whose own blunders one regards with kindly indul- 
 gence, is a great thing. 
 
 And Hannah Lansing was one of those to whom the 
 comforting pastime has meant most, for she was a very 
 lonely woman, nailed to her chair, as the French ex- 
 pressively put it, by her great weight, and also for less 
 tangible but no less disabling reasons. She could play 
 thirty-four different games, one of which required three 
 packs of cards, and six of which she had herself invented, 
 and long practice enabled her to play with almost incred- 
 ible rapidity and correctness. She could play while the 
 rest of the family talked, or even quarrelled round her ; 
 she could play by a light by which no one could possibly 
 see to read ; she could play, in default of a table, with 
 extraordinary skill on her very hard but usually silken 
 lap ; on a newspaper ; or at a pinch she would produce 
 a pack of cards no bigger than a large man's thumb-nail 
 and play quite happily on an open six-shilling novel. 
 
 43
 
 44. KINGSMEAD 
 
 And while she played she could, if she chose, carry 
 on a conversation with anyone on any subject, and make 
 no mistakes in either her statements or her cards. She 
 was, in spite of her preposterous bulk, a pleasant-looking 
 old woman, with a humorous red face and twinkling blue 
 eyes. There were lines in her face, lines that told, 
 Tommy Kingsmead thought, as he sat that November 
 afternoon watching her, of sorrow and trouble and even 
 sordid worries. 
 
 Tommy had watched her for a long time, while her 
 chubby pink hands fluttered over her cards like unwieldy 
 but intelligent butterflies, and then, in the unbroken 
 silence that the old woman maintained, his thoughts 
 drifted away from her and he was alone. 
 
 He sat on a stool, on the side of the window not 
 occupied by her, his thin arms clasped round his knees, 
 his chin on his arms. It was a characteristic attitude 
 and a favourite one with him, and he sat quite still, 
 apparently, in the faint light, hardly even breathing. 
 
 On the rampart made by his dark blue coat-sleeves 
 his white, narrow face was brought into rare value, its 
 remarkably clear pallor almost a luminous spot in the 
 dusk. 
 
 Suddenly he smiled to himself, a sudden smile, humor- 
 ous and knowing and boyish, all at once. It was the 
 smile, in its quick upward twist, that was the charm of 
 his ugly face; for whereas his light, quick eyes, clever 
 and clear, were a little too shrewd to be quite comfort-
 
 KINGSMEAD 45 
 
 able to the person they watched, the crooked smile soft- 
 ened and redeemed their gaze to one of the kindest, 
 though most intense, interest. 
 
 It was quite dusk now, in the old room shadowed by 
 its plum-coloured curtains. In the walls, which, too, 
 were hung with shabby plum-coloured satin, were set 
 narrow, gilt-framed mirrors, blurred and bluish with 
 age and from years of neglect. 
 
 Tommy sat quite motionless in the room that had 
 once been his very own. In it had first come to him the 
 idea of being a violinist. He remembered one night 
 when he had sat up in bed reading, eagerly, with burn- 
 ing eyes, all that the Encyclopedia Britannica could tell 
 him about Amati violins. 
 
 He could almost see, so well did he recall the scene, 
 his sister coming in one afternoon at the same period 
 and finding him coiled up in one of those uncomfortable 
 but dingily gorgeous chairs, writing an advertisement 
 for a tutor for himself. Absurd little boy! And dear 
 Brigit had not laughed. Very gently she had read the 
 words he had written. She had always been very gentle 
 with him. 
 
 " The devil ! " exclaimed Mrs. Lansing suddenly, add- 
 ing, obviously to herself : " Where on earth is that ace 
 of diamonds? " 
 
 Tommy smiled vaguely, for only his ears heard her ; 
 his brain was busy, far back in the young years with 
 that funny little Tommy and his beautiful, kind sister.
 
 46 KINGSMEAD 
 
 The silence continued. 
 
 To live with people requires talent ; to live alone one 
 must be an artist in living ; and Tommy, having for the 
 last year lived literally almost quite alone in his Castel- 
 letto by the sea, silence was to him a thing beautiful and 
 not to be apologised for, and his calm possession of this 
 possibility, so unusual to people of any age, and almost 
 unknown to young men, gave him a certain quaint 
 cachet of his own. 
 
 Thus they sat, in the dark, the old woman and the 
 youth, together and yet happily and cosily apart. 
 
 At last, however, Mrs. Lansing's fat hands dropped 
 quietly to the table, for night had come. All the old 
 mirrors had melted into the surrounding gloom, save 
 bne, on whose faint streak of light Tommy's eyes were 
 fixed, as if it were through it, as through a magic 
 window, that they were looking back beyond Time. 
 
 He was a little boy again, thin-legged and busy- 
 minded, living in the beautiful old house as its future 
 master, yet at the same time not quite at home with his 
 mother and her guests. Something that might be called 
 the shadow of a frown crossed his brow as he recalled 
 that part of his life, for he had not loved his mother as 
 a child, and now, as a man, he realised that she had 
 been a bad woman, and this hurt him a little. 
 
 The shadow fled as quickly as it had come, for 
 there had always been Brigit. Dear Brigit, most beau- 
 tiful of girls, best of sisters.
 
 KINGSMEAD 47 
 
 Now, through his magic window, he saw Joyselle 
 again Joyselle whom he had loved, and who, he knew, 
 was the only man who had ever been loved by Brigit. 
 Even then the little sensitive boy had felt the tragedy 
 in the air; but little boyhood, however sensitive, how- 
 ever knowing, is, Heaven be thanked, still an innocent 
 thing, so that his understanding had been mercifully 
 limited. 
 
 Brigit had told him, one starry night on the ram- 
 parts of the Castelletto, the whole unlovely truth : that 
 she, engaged to the son, had loved and tempted the 
 father, and that only the timely and happy death of 
 Theo Joyselle's sweet-souled little mother had saved 
 many people from the catastrophe of a prodigious and 
 ruthless selfishness. 
 
 " You ought to know, dear," Lady Pontefract had 
 whispered, while the soft sound of the sea, prowling on 
 the rocks below them, filled the warm air, " I was very 
 wicked." And while he was too honest-minded to attempt 
 to contradict this statement, even to himself, her con- 
 fession had had the effect of making his love for her a 
 little stronger than ever. It was rather wonderful, life. 
 
 With an unusual and rather beautiful clearness of 
 vision the young man realised, as his thoughts went on 
 in the silence, that he himself now stood with his face 
 set toward a new phase of existence. 
 
 Only the other day in Italy he had been an almost 
 penniless boy alone in his ruined tower, with his books
 
 48 KINGSMEAD 
 
 and his thoughts. To-day found him here in his own 
 country, a modest competence secured to him by the 
 safe investment of the money he had received for the 
 old house, a man with the world before him. Freedom 
 had come to him, and manhood, hand in hand, and he 
 must tighten the straps of his armour, sharpen his 
 sword, and set forth. Adventure would come to him, 
 he thought, with a quickening of the blood, for the world 
 is full of romance, and sorrow, and love. 
 
 And because he had read much and dreamed much in 
 his old tower the little young man with the quiet faun- 
 like smile was, for all his shrewdness, very romantic, and 
 carried the thought of love close to his heart, like an 
 amulet.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 " Busss us and save us ! " Mrs. Lansing started as the 
 footman, opening the door, flooded the room with a 
 blaze of light, under which the shabby, shadowy hang- 
 ings seemed to shrink. " Tea-time ! Now, 'oo 'd 'a' 
 thought it?" 
 
 She was an indisputably common old woman, one 
 whose presence behind the counter of a country shop 
 would have excited no comment whatever. She had some 
 h's, but used them in such a cheerfully and incurably 
 haphazard way that they were of no ornament to her 
 discourse, and she used certain very rough words both 
 from long habit and from a sense of malice, for they 
 greatly annoyed her children, and that amused her, for 
 hers was a bold spirit not to be quelled even by the dis- 
 approval of her beloved son. 
 
 " 'Oo 'd 'a' thought it was so late? Is your master 
 in, 'Enry ? And Miss Inez ? " 
 
 'Enry arrayed the tea-things and pulled the curtains, 
 but he could give no information regarding the where- 
 abouts of the family. 
 
 " Miss Lansing said at lunch that she was going to 
 the vicarage," observed Tommy, who had risen and was 
 walking up and down because one of his feet was asleep 
 and his arms were badly cramped. 
 4 49
 
 50 KINGSMEAD 
 
 "And Teddy?" 
 
 It was rather remarkable that neither of this appar- 
 ently ill-assorted pair made the slightest reference to 
 their almost absolutely silent two hours. 
 
 When Tommy sat down, he answered slowly, " Teddy 
 is out. He did n't say where he was going." 
 
 The old woman put her cards into their little paper 
 cases, and thrust them into the yellow satin bag in 
 which they lived out of working hours. Tommy, watch- 
 ing her, thought they must be glad to rest. 
 
 " Shall I pour the tea, Mrs. Lansing? " 
 
 "Yes, please, if you don't mind. Out, is 'e? As to 
 that, it 's where 'e halways is. There 's something, Lord 
 Kingsmead," she went on, solemn but sudden, " on that 
 boy's mind." 
 
 Always decisive, sure of her words and quite unfear- 
 ful of their possible effect, she spoke now with a con- 
 viction not to be confronted by polite expression of 
 doubt. 
 
 Kingsmead gave her a napkin and a cup of tea before 
 he answered. Then, beginning to cut a very dark and 
 opulent-looking plum-cake, he said slowly, " Do you 
 think so?" 
 
 " I know so. And what 's more, I '11 take the crusty 
 piece, please, so do you." 
 
 " Did you ever hear of the Duchess of Wight ? " 
 Tommy retorted unexpectedly, the bit of cake pierced 
 with the end of his knife "I mean the dowager? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 51 
 
 Mrs. Lansing stared. " Of course I 'ave ; why ever 
 do you ask me that? " 
 
 " Because you remind me of her sometimes, that 's 
 all." 
 
 " Of whom does the mater remind you, Lord Kings- 
 mead? " Inez Lansing came, in as she spoke, her skirt 
 muddy, her crimson tam-o'-shanter dewy with rain. 
 
 Tommy wondered who wore a crimson Tammie. 
 
 " Of the Dowager Duchess of Wight," he answered 
 promptly, drawing up a chair for her. 
 
 The girl stared. " The mater ! " 
 
 " Now don't you look so surprised, my girl," put in 
 the old woman, dipping a great bit of cake into her tea ; 
 " it 's vulgar to despise your mother." Her chuckle was 
 frankly malicious. " Besides, the Duchess of Wight, for 
 all 'er being such a swell, is only an old woman after all, 
 is n't she, Tommy? " 
 
 She had never before called him Tommy, and the 
 young man recognised in her use of his name a kind of 
 mental reaching out of her hand for his. 
 
 " She is an old dear" he returned decidedly, " and 
 you often remind me of her. Cake, Miss Lansing? " 
 
 "Yes, please. Been playing patience, mother? " 
 
 " Yes. It 's a game most people play, in some way 
 or other, at some time or other, my dear. And where 
 'ave you been? " 
 
 Inez took off her cap and smoothed her hair care- 
 lessly.
 
 52 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Taking a walk. It 's pouring now, but when I went 
 out it was rather decent. I saw your sister in her 
 motor, by the way," she added to Tommy. " She did n't 
 see me." 
 
 And Tommy thought this likely. 
 
 Old Lansing came in just then, and seating himself 
 in a corner drank his tea with an exaggerated noise- 
 lessness, that seemed to Tommy, all of whose feelers 
 were out, to tell a tale of former boisterous five-o'clock 
 rites suppressed by the cultivation of his daughter. 
 
 " Where 's Teddy ? " he asked presently, munching 
 cake. 
 
 " Out, 'Enry. 'E 's always out, as I was saying a 
 moment ago to Tommy." 
 
 The old man started. " Now, 'Annah, you must n't 
 call 'im Tommy. You really must n't," he insisted nerv- 
 ously. " I 'm sure Teddy would n't like it." 
 
 Tommy flushed in an agony of embarrassment, but, 
 as so often happens, succour was at hand from an unex- 
 pected quarter. 
 
 " Rubbish, father," said Inez, laughing. " Mother 
 is an old woman and he 's Teddy's college chum. 
 Don't be a silly old dear ! " 
 
 " Quite right, Miss Lansing, that 's just what he was 
 being! Now then, sir, what have you to say to me? " 
 
 Old Lansing's blue eyes met his deprecatingly but 
 delightedly. 
 
 " Nothing," he answered, " not a word, if that 's 'ow
 
 KINGSMEAD 53 
 
 you feel. My wife usually does what she wants to, 
 anyhow. I did n't mind her." 
 
 " No, it was Teddy you were afraid of, 'Enry," re- 
 turned the old woman, laughing cheerily ; " and as to 
 me, I ain't afraid of anybody, not even that boy. 
 But I wish he 'd come in to tea like a Christian and 
 not go ranging all over the country in that Merseedy 
 of 'is." 
 
 " Jolly little car, just the same, mater." Inez took 
 a piece of cake as she spoke. " More tea, father ? " 
 
 " No, thank you, my dear. You young people are 
 dining some'eres to-night, aren't you?" he added. 
 
 " Yes, at Nancy's." 
 
 " That 's good, Inez ; you '11 meet some nice people 
 there. Going to wear a new dress? " he added anxiously. 
 
 " Yes. But there won't be anyone. She does n't know 
 anybody, either." 
 
 Tommy stared at her. For the first time he saw her 
 as herself, for she had for the moment forgotten her 
 model, that embarrassing and encumbering ghost, and 
 spoken out her real thoughts in her real manner. 
 
 " Does n't know anybody ? " he asked, almost uncon- 
 sciously. 
 
 " Yes. Ah, it 's vulgar and mean, I know," she went 
 on, still alone, without her ghost, " but I am bored to 
 death, and I do want to know people and be amused. 
 We 've been here nearly a year, and Ted knows lots of 
 the people, but only a few have called, even of the ones
 
 54 KINGSMEAD 
 
 I met at your sister's. Now, she is nice to me, Lord 
 Kingsmead, although she does n't like me either." 
 
 Breaking off, as disregardful of her father's and 
 mother's presence as if they had been in China, she 
 stood looking defiantly, angrily, almost tragically at 
 the wretched Tommy, who shrank from pain he could 
 not help as instinctively as he was drawn toward that 
 which he could help. 
 
 And he could no more have said that Brigit did like 
 her than he could have flown away out of the window, 
 as he would have liked to do. 
 
 " She 's going to ask us all to dinner very soon," 
 he stammered. " She told me so. And I '11 tell her to 
 make it a big dinner. A b-big dinner is so very jolly, 
 don't you think? At least, most people think so." 
 
 But she shook her head and gave her right shoulder 
 an impatient shrug. " Thanks very much, but it 's no 
 use. We had over ten letters of introduction, and have 
 met several people, but they don't like us. Not even 
 the Greens have asked us to dine. The Analyte offends 
 them, I suppose." 
 
 " Oh, come, Miss Lansing ! " 
 
 She laughed harshly. " What else ? Not an aristo- 
 cratic aversion to us. Old Green made his fortune 
 selling poisonous beer in the East End of London, and 
 Herbert Green did n't even go to the University. I 've 
 met him in town. Oh no, it's just the joyous British 
 instinct to kick the man on the rung below one, that 's
 
 KINGSMEAD 55 
 
 all. However, it is hard to see much difference, socially, 
 between beer and enamel, is n't it? " 
 
 Mrs. Lansing shuffled her cards rapidly, her eyes 
 fixed on her daughter with an expression of pity that 
 struck Tommy as she spoke. 
 
 " It is n't the enamel," she said decidedly ; " enamel 
 might do if it was for woodwork or chairs ; it 's the 
 bath-tubs. It 's the 'Ousemaid's Joy that does it." 
 
 Old Lansing grunted suddenly the grunt of some 
 sleepy beast prodded unexpectedly in a tender spot. 
 
 "What's that, 'Annah? " 
 
 " Nothing, old man. I was just telling Inez that it 's 
 the bath-tubs that these people can't swallow. It 's 
 that picture of the 'Ousemaid's Joy that does it." 
 
 She laid out her cards in ten little piles as she spoke, 
 and began her game. 
 
 Lansing rose, and Tommy saw that his commercial 
 pride was touched. 
 
 " It 's the 'Ousemaid's Joy that did the trick, any'ow, 
 'Annah Lansing," he said angrily, his face flushed, his 
 eyes staring ; " it 's the 'Ousemaid's Joy that made the 
 money. The enamels were all very well, but what was 
 I yes, and what were you ten years ago, before I 
 discovered Analyte? Nothing. Where did you live? 
 Bay swater ? Where 'd you get your clothes ? Not at 
 that woman's who makes 'em now, I can tell you, miss." 
 
 Turning to his daughter for a moment, he hurried on, 
 while Tommy, watching him, knew that this too was a
 
 56 KINGSMEAD 
 
 revelation of character. The old man, usually so timid, 
 so humble, had been hit in his most sensitive place, and 
 he had reverted to the real, combative, noisy nature 
 without which he could never have made his great though 
 not immense fortune. 
 
 " You want Oxford for your boy to Oxford 'e 
 goes. And you, miss, you want a year in a Paris school 
 to Paris you go. You want a big 'ouse 'ere it is. 
 You want motor-cars three of 'em at your orders. 
 And 'oo gives you these things? The 'Ousemaid's Joy. 
 Yes, the 'Ousemaid's Joy. So remember that, please." 
 
 He left the room, leaving behind him that most elo- 
 quent tribute to eloquence, a silence. 
 
 He had spoken well; his short, rough phrases had 
 made themselves felt, and Tommy sat down without a 
 word. 
 
 After a long pause, during which Mrs. Lansing had 
 not faltered in her game, she shook her head. " You 
 ought to know better, Inez," she observed. " 'E 's always 
 touchy about 'is tubs, and you ought n't to rile 'im. 
 Besides, it 's all true, what 'e said, every word of it. 
 Only " her voice softened as she swooped down on a 
 knave of clubs and fastened him into the waiting fold 
 " I am sorry for you, my girl, and I wish things were 
 different." 
 
 Inez took up her cap and the long pins that had 
 fastened it to her black hair. " I 'm sorry, mater," she 
 said, in a rather odd voice, and Tommy saw with sur-
 
 KINGSMEAD 57 
 
 prise that she did not remind her mother that it was she 
 who had suggested the infuriating idea to her husband. 
 
 Then the girl, still, he felt strangely, alone, without 
 her ghostly model, turned to him. 
 
 " Excuse me, Lord Kingsmead, will you ? Excuse us 
 all for making a scene before you. It 's I suppose 
 it 's because we are Analyte people only if we are, 
 our enamel ought n't to crack so easily ! " 
 
 She left the room without awaiting an answer, and 
 her mother, without looking up, murmured in a pleased 
 voice, " Queen, king, ace "
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE Kingsmead motor arrived at Greene just as Ponte- 
 fract's huge limousine drew up at the door, so the two 
 parties went in together. Brigit, bulky in a long sable 
 coat Pontefract was a very rich man, but it was not 
 for his money alone, any more than it was for love, that 
 she had married him put her arms round her brother's 
 neck and kissed him affectionately. 
 
 Then she shook hands civilly enough with Inez, and 
 turned to Teddy. " Beautiful boy," she said, giving 
 him her hand, " why do you not come to see me ? I 
 am having a splendid white marble pedestal built for 
 you " 
 
 As she spoke the door opened, and in the sudden out- 
 rush of light his blush was plainly visible. 
 
 " Oh, don't, Lady Pontefract," he pleaded, in a voice 
 of genuine distress, "please don't. That 's just why I 
 don't come, your ragging me. If you knew how I hate 
 that name ! " 
 
 And Tommy loved him for the blush and the distress. 
 " She sha' n't tease you," he said, as he followed Miss 
 Lansing into the house. " Bick, you are a pig." 
 
 The house was small, it seemed, and only a trim maid 
 stood in the little passage. 
 
 58
 
 KINGSMEAD 59 
 
 Tommy, still glowing with admiration of his beauti- 
 ful friend's modesty, took, as usual, rapid mental notes 
 of his strange surroundings, as he and Teddy stood at 
 the foot of the stairs waiting for the two women, who 
 had been shown into a room to the right of the door. 
 
 An oldish house, he decided, wondering why Teddy was 
 biting his lips so nervously, done over by someone with 
 excellent good taste and a first-rate architect. 
 
 Above the dark panelling of the walls an old-fashioned 
 but fresh green-and-white striped paper was relieved by 
 half a dozen ancient and very good hunting prints in 
 narrow black frames. The floor, well waxed, was bare, 
 as were the stairs. At the foot of the stairs, to the left, 
 just opposite where Teddy and Tommy stood, a queer 
 circular room had been added to the original building, 
 and its green walls were cheered by the light of a huge 
 wood-fire under a very beautifully carved mantelpiece. 
 In this room Tommy's quick eyes observed a round table 
 on which was spread an orderly array of magazines and 
 papers, several remarkably comfortable-looking green 
 leather chairs, and a curving line of well-filled bookcases 
 under latticed windows, in which grew in boxes some 
 kind of neutral-tinted flowers. 
 
 A very charming room, thought the young man, and 
 he wondered what the flowers were. " Mignonette ! " he 
 exclaimed suddenly, and to his amazement Teddy turned 
 to him with a quick frown. " Eh? How d' you know 
 that? " young Lansing asked.
 
 60 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy stared. " How do I know what ? " he re- 
 turned, and Lansing, for the second time in five minutes, 
 blushed. 
 
 " I beg your pardon, Tommy," he said with his beau- 
 tiful smile, " I am an ass. But to tell you the truth, 
 old man, I am all over the place, as you may have 
 noticed." 
 
 " Is thy brother a fool? Of course I have. Equally 
 of course I know why and all about it," returned 
 Tommy with great gravity ; " but that is really another 
 story." 
 
 Teddy laid his hand on his friend's arm. " Tommy, 
 how could you possibly know? I haven't even told her 
 yet." 
 
 Tommy sighed, with real pity. " Dear old chap," he 
 said gently, " I have seen it before, have n't I ? And 
 besides, I seem to have a kind of trick of knowing things. 
 But it 's no good, Teddy. She 'd only be furious if 
 she knew." 
 
 Teddy started. "Furious? Why? And besides, how 
 do you know? " As he finished speaking, Lady Ponte- 
 fract and Inez joined them, and Pbntefract, who had 
 been having a heated altercation with his chauffeur, came 
 in at the same time. Tommy made his way up the 
 gleaming stairway, wondering what on earth was the 
 matter with Teddy. He, Tommy, had of course seen 
 long ago that Teddy was in love, and he decided during 
 the short journey from the foot of the stairs to Mrs.
 
 KINGSMEAD 61 
 
 Gilpin's drawing-room that he would speak to Bick 
 about it. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin's drawing-room was a long low room with 
 latticed windows and a little conservatory, evidently a 
 new development, opening from the far end of it. 
 
 The walls, creamy white, were adorned with several 
 fine etchings, two good water-colours, an old-looking 
 copy of La Bella Simonetta, and a portrait of a beauti- 
 ful dark-haired girl under a gaily coloured Japanese 
 parasol. 
 
 The furniture, scant and thin-legged, wore, it occurred 
 to Tommy, well-fitting tailor clothes of pansy-strewn 
 chintz, and the three tables, each shining with wax, but 
 undraped, bore knickknacks, all good, each one chosen 
 apparently by a person hampered neither by thoughts 
 of economy nor haste. It was much emptier than most 
 English drawing-rooms, and the individual-looking 
 tables and chairs were pleasant to one who liked good 
 lines and grace rather than drapery. 
 
 A charming room, evidently expressive of its owner's 
 personality, and possessed of a marvellous quality of 
 extreme cleanness and quiet; even the soft mauve silk 
 curtains hanging in straight folds at the windows seemed 
 to add to its tranquil, shut-in charm. 
 
 There were several large bowls of mignonette, and one 
 window was wide open, so that the air, pungent with the 
 scent of pine-cones in the fire, was delicate with its pure 
 fragrance.
 
 62 KINGSMEAD 
 
 By the fire, a small, thin figure in pale grey, stood 
 Mrs. Gilpin. A little silver mirror, such as Italian 
 ladies wore long ago one has to think of them, some- 
 how, in Venice hung from her waistband, and as she 
 advanced to meet her guests its small surface seemed 
 to flash a second welcome to them. 
 
 This, at least was Tommy's idea as he was introduced 
 to his hostess and then stood watching her talk to his 
 sister. His idea, too, that Mrs. Gilpin was like the 
 demure, sweet flower she so evidently loved. 
 
 She even wore, he saw, a little bunch of it where at 
 the edge of the exquisite old lace that edged her corsage 
 a small diamond-and-pearl brooch was fastened. 
 
 The Mignonette Lady ! 
 
 It was a charming name, and she looked a charming 
 person, standing there by the fire. 
 
 She was small, shorter than Tommy, but so slight and 
 well built that she would, he knew, look, when alone, tall. 
 Her bare arms were quite beautiful in their round slim- 
 ness, and her throat carried her head in a delightful way. 
 Her eyes were dark blue, very dark, and remarkable for 
 a deep serenity of expression. Her mouth was too wide, 
 but of a fresh warm pink colour and cut in a way that 
 made one's eyes turn reluctantly even to the smooth 
 whiteness of her cheek, or the smooth darkness of her 
 hair, that, parted in the middle, was brushed back quite 
 simply into a knot on her neck. 
 
 The Mignonette Lady !
 
 KINGSMEAD 63 
 
 " I say, Teddy, why did n't you tell me? " 
 
 He meant, " Why did n't you tell me that we were 
 going to dine with this dearest of dears ? " 
 
 But Teddy flushed nervously. " Because well, I 'm 
 not at all sure she will, yet," he returned, " and I 
 can't talk about her, Tommy, even to you. But now 
 that you 've seen her " 
 
 And Tommy opened his eyes very wide. " Then 
 it is n't Brigit ? " he asked. 
 
 "What isn't Brigit?" Teddy's eyes were stupid 
 with the blankness of utter miscomprehension as dinner 
 was announced at that moment, but Tommy understood. 
 
 So it was the Mignonette Lady !
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 TOMMY was placed correctly, on his hostess's right, and 
 opposite him, of course, sat his brother-in-law. Ponte- 
 f ract's pleased smile as he sat down conveyed to his wife, 
 as he intended it to convey, the fact that he was glad he 
 had come. She certainly is, he obviously thought, quite 
 pretty enough to give one great pleasure. 
 
 Tommy, as delighted in his way as Pontefract, gave 
 a quick, half commiserating, half teasing look at Teddy, 
 who, it was easy to see, was not quite happy. 
 
 " Poor old Teddy," thought Tommy, " what a bore 
 for him, my having a title." 
 
 Now Tommy was one of those rare beings, a sincere, 
 quite non-political Radical, and if it had been possible 
 for him to give his empty little earldom to Teddy, who 
 would have prized and made use of it, he would have 
 gladly done so. But his indifference to matters of the 
 kind having been born with him, and having grown with 
 his bone and years, he never talked of it, and even his 
 sister did not know what a thorough-paced if passive 
 little socialist he was. 
 
 Perhaps he did not know himself. These things 
 happen. But in the meantime Nancy Gilpin was near 
 to him, so pretty, so well bred, so dainty-minded-looking ; 
 
 64
 
 KINGSMEAD 65 
 
 and he was pleased, and having learned Teddy's secret, 
 his incorrigible interest in his neighbours and keen yet 
 so far removed from any taint of vulgar curiosity led 
 him to study her. 
 
 And the first remark he made to her was, " How very 
 romantic ! " She looked at him, her serene eyes full of 
 inquiry. Then, her gaze following his, she smiled, show- 
 ing small, white, slightly crooked teeth, and a tiny 
 dimple in her right cheek. " Ah yes, the glass. Is n't 
 it?" 
 
 It lay on the table between him and her, a large pink 
 rose from the vase in front of her reflected in its narrow 
 oval surface. She took it up and played with it as 
 women play with fans. " You like it? " 
 
 He nodded. " It is charming. Tell me the story." 
 
 "Its story? How do you know," she asked slowly, 
 her delicate ungemmed fingers twisting the pretty thing 
 thoughtfully, " that it has one? " 
 
 " Because everything has a story, even modern things. 
 Whereas your glass, as you call it, is old. May I look? " 
 
 She nodded again. She often nodded instead of say- 
 ing yes, he noticed. Taking it, he looked at it carefully. 
 
 It was a slight oval thing, in a narrow silver frame 
 whereon sported a circle of dancing, laughing Cupids. 
 Their wee heads thrown back, their little legs firmly set, 
 the creatures were apparently playing a game in which 
 the object was to pull each other down. An amazing 
 piece of work, Tommy said; each little figure was per-
 
 66 KINGSMEAD 
 
 feet, each face full of expression, some of genuinely 
 childish and one of maliciously freakish mischief. 
 
 And on the ground, trampled or about to be trampled 
 by the dimpled feet, lay roses. It was very beautiful, 
 and the relief, once bold, was worn to a delightful vague- 
 ness, gaining poetry and romance, as Tommy had sug- 
 gested, by its loss of distinctness. 
 
 " The story? " he insisted gently. 
 
 " It was given to me in Venice, years ago." 
 
 He flushed. " I did n't mean that. I meant the story 
 that goes with it the beautiful lady prisoned, or 
 stabbed, giving it to her lover ; or the signals it flashed 
 in the sun to the cavalier waiting in the gondola 
 
 He smiled, full of a joyous sense of the picturesque. 
 But she shook her head again. " It is not very 
 exciting." 
 
 On the back of the pretty toy a word was roughly 
 scratched. 
 
 "What is it? Ve " 
 
 " Veronica. Some day I will tell you, but it is a very 
 simple tale." 
 
 " Veronica ! I will make a story about it, then. No, 
 no, I don't write; I am a good young man, but I will 
 burst into romance this once about Veronica and her 
 mirror." 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin looked at him for what seemed a long 
 time, without speaking, and then with a little blush, as 
 if she was by a great effort overcoming her habitual
 
 KINGSMEAD 67 
 
 shyness, said quietly: " Well, there is a story, and if you 
 like I will tell it to you. But I can't tell it well." 
 
 " Yes, do let us have it. It must," Tommy went on, 
 unconsciously accepting her speech as if it had been 
 made for him alone, " be very romantic." 
 
 He took the glass in his hand and turned it over. 
 " Veronica. A beautiful name. Was she a Venetian ? " 
 
 " Yes. The story is this." 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin told it very quietly, with no attempt at 
 dramatic effect, her hands clasped on the edge of the 
 table, her eyes fixed on the flowers before her. 
 
 " There was once upon a time, years ago, in Venice, 
 a young man, a goldsmith's apprentice. I don't know 
 his name. And every day, at noon, as he went home 
 from his work he used to see high up in a balcony in an 
 old palace a beautiful young girl. She was always 
 sitting there behind a row of flowers in pots, and she was 
 very beautiful or," she added naively, " he thought 
 she was. And he fell in love with her. 
 
 " I forgot to say that it was in the summer. 
 
 " So he wrote her a letter, and one day when he saw 
 a basket let down from the balcony, for the tradespeople 
 to put food and so on into it, he wrote her a letter and 
 told her that that he loved her. But she never an- 
 swered, and she never looked at him when he stopped his 
 gondola under her window. And he wrote again and 
 again, and got no answer." 
 
 Everyone at the table was listening with the deepest
 
 68 KINGSMEAD 
 
 attention to the simple story, and Tommy, glancing 
 from Mrs. Gilpin to Teddy, felt his heart stir in his 
 breast. They were both so splendid, and love was such 
 a marvellous thing. 
 
 " At last," Mrs. Gilpin continued, " he made her this 
 mirror made it all himself; and learning that her 
 name was Veronica, sent it to her ; and the next day 
 I hope it was Sunday, and sunny he went to see her 
 father. He asked if he might marry her." 
 
 She paused, and Tommy realised how valuable as an 
 artistic asset absolute simplicity can be made. 
 
 "Well?" asked Lady Pontefract, leaning forward. 
 
 " No, he could n't marry her, for she was blind. 
 He had sent a mirror to a blind girl." 
 
 " He might have married her," protested Teddy, 
 flushed and eager. 
 
 She shook her head quite as if she had been the young 
 Venetian's mother explaining the matter to a sentimental 
 outsider. " No, no, how could he? She was blind, and 
 who would have taken care of his house ? " 
 
 Tommy looked into the mirror. " It is a sad story," 
 he said. " Sad to think that she never saw her beauti- 
 ful face in the glass he fashioned for her and she, I 
 suppose, scratched her name here? It is unevenly 
 and roughly done as if, poor girl, she had done it 
 with a pair of scissors or a knife." 
 
 " I don't know. The story goes that she never mar- 
 ried, and that he never did, either. And that every day
 
 KINGSMEAD 69 
 
 of every summer he used to pass her house to and from 
 his work, and that she would be there sitting in the sun 
 
 in her darkness playing with the glass* and that it 
 used to flash down at him poor fellow." 
 
 " I hope," said Tommy seriously, " that it is all true 
 
 even the sadness. I hope they really did love each 
 other always and wish they could have married." 
 
 " You are a sentimental little miss, Tommy," returned 
 Lord Pontef ract with a sudden laugh ; " quite time you 
 came back to England to live." 
 
 " Are n't English people sentimental? " 
 
 " Of course they are, up to a certain point, but not, 
 thank God, like your Italians ! " 
 
 Tommy smiled as those do who know Italians as they 
 really are, but he said nothing. 
 
 Everyone was silent for a moment, for the little story 
 had made its impression of white simplicity, and the 
 mirror in Tommy's hand seemed like an eye-witness of 
 the dead-and-gone love-tale. 
 
 At last someone began to talk, and Tommy laid down 
 the glass and went on with his dinner. 
 
 " I say, Tommy, tell Mrs. Gilpin the poem you wrote 
 when you were a kid," Teddy exclaimed suddenly ; " she 
 will enjoy it." 
 
 "Get out!" 
 
 " No, do tell her. It 's a pearl, Mrs. Gilpin. Make 
 him recite it." 
 
 " The one about the toad, Tommy? " asked Brigit.
 
 70 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " No, no about the snow, I mean." 
 
 Tommy laughed. " All right, you need n't urge me. 
 I 'm rather proud of my early verse. It was full of 
 promise all strictly unfulfilled ! Do you yourself want 
 this one, Mrs. Gilpin? " 
 
 " Oh, please." 
 
 So Tommy, laughing, but perfectly ready to be 
 laughed at, recited his verse. 
 
 "The snow is very white and clean, 
 And hardly anything else is seen ; 
 Two houses on the hill abide, 
 And all the families are inside. 
 
 Cosey, is n't it, ' all the families being inside '? " 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin smiled at him. 
 
 " Is that all? " she asked. For a moment he was 
 shocked ; but a sense of humour is not an absolute neces- 
 sity, he reflected, and dear old Teddy had n't much 
 himself. 
 
 " Yes, that is all," he answered her. 
 
 The dinner went on, a little dull but very pleas- 
 ant, and everyone was contented. The little hostess, 
 quite unconsciously, was a great success. Her shy- 
 ness was pleasant, and in its unusualness rather 
 picturesque. 
 
 Tommy, studying her closely, decided in his own mind 
 that she was probably always a little shy, even when 
 alone ; it seemed to be a quality inherent in her, and not 
 at all the result of her environment.
 
 KINGSMEAD 71 
 
 And always on the table beside her lay the glass, a 
 little coil of flexible silver chain round it. 
 
 After dinner the three men sat over a remarkably 
 good bottle of port and a little later went to the 
 drawing-room. 
 
 It was, Tommy saw on opening the door, empty. 
 " Where are they, I wonder ? " he asked, but as he spoke 
 something flashed into his eyes from the conservatory, 
 and he knew. 
 
 " ' Veronica's glass ' showed us the way," he observed, 
 as he found the three ladies sitting down in a bower of 
 delicate green leaves ; " it nearly blinded me." 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin laughed. " But not quite. Sit down, 
 Lord Pontefract. I have been showing Lady Pontefract 
 my fuchsia. And she likes it, do you not? " 
 
 Brigit smiled kindly at her. " I do indeed. It is 
 charming. Such a pretty, old-fashioned flower it is too, 
 is n't it, Tommy?" 
 
 Tommy, who stood with his back to them, looking at 
 the wide-spread, flower-strewn plant in question, nodded. 
 " Early Victorian. ' Delicate female ' kind of flower. 
 How old is it, Mrs. Gilpin? " 
 
 " Only a few years, but I pet it and humour it." 
 
 She sat there in her wicker chair, her hands clasped 
 on her little mirror, such a picture of content and peace 
 that they all smiled at her, and then exchanged glances 
 with each other glances that said, " Is n't she a 
 dear?"
 
 72 KINGSMEAD 
 
 The coffee was good, and the liqueurs, and the air in 
 the little conservatory pleasantly warm, while a suddenly 
 risen wind howled without. 
 
 Young Lansing sat with his blue eyes fixed on his 
 hostess's face, and once, looking up, she blushed vividly. 
 Tommy felt that he had tumbled into a most charming 
 romance and rejoiced that silly old Teddy had at last 
 fallen in love with a woman fit for him. As to her con- 
 sidering Teddy fit for her, that splendid youth's cham- 
 pion did not pause to consider ; and indeed young Lan- 
 sing's looks were of the compelling order that allow in 
 such contingencies but little doubt. What woman could 
 possibly resist him? 
 
 "Won't you please sing?" he asked suddenly after 
 one of the comfortable pauses that Nancy Gilpin's tran- 
 quil presence seemed to foster. 
 
 Inez leaned forward. " Ah yes, do" she added ; " sing 
 the Greek song." 
 
 Before she was answered Teddy had gone into the 
 drawing-room and returned with an ancient guitar of 
 honey-coloured wood on which hung a festoon of faded 
 blue ribbons. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin took it doubtfully. "It is very old- 
 fashioned," she said, faltering a little ; " shall I, Lady 
 Pontefract?" 
 
 " Please" returned Brigit decisively. 
 
 And then, in the slightly stirring shadows of the green 
 leaves under which glowed a shaded electric light, came
 
 KINGSMEAD 73 
 
 the poetic, sentimental murmurs of a skilfully tuned 
 guitar, and the soft throbs of a few preliminary strokes 
 before the singing began. She played in the Spanish 
 way, with the back of the hand, drawing the fingers in 
 rapid succession over the strings, so that the chords 
 came in a sort of continuous arpeggio like the sound 
 of running water, except that that is a cool sound, 
 whereas this was a warm, romantic, throbbing sound. 
 
 " The Greek song, please," repeated Teddy, and look- 
 ing at him she nodded again. 
 
 To Tommy the words were vaguely familiar, but the 
 music, a delicious, simple melody, was strange to him. 
 And the words, sung in a not very strong, beautifully 
 trained mezzo-soprano voice, and pronounced with great 
 distinctness, as if to the singer each one was too precious 
 to be lost, were these : 
 
 " Oh, how I loved thee, Atthis, long ago, 
 In that far, perished summer by the sea. 
 Did we falter when love caught us in a gust of wild desire ? 
 Did the barley bid the wind wait in its course ? " 
 
 Tommy, his eyes fixed on Teddy's face, heard and 
 felt the song to the deepest roots of him. It was won- 
 derful, it was beautiful, and the whole thing was to the 
 utmost degree satisfactory. Teddy, even splendid old 
 Lanner, could have found no one worthier of him than 
 this lovely, gentle woman singing in the shadows of the 
 leaves. And no song could be more perfect, or more 
 perfectly sung.
 
 74 KINGSMEAD 
 
 When it was over no one spoke for a moment, and 
 then Lady Pontefract rose. 
 
 " You have nearly made me cry," she said, " and I 
 am going home. But you must come to us soon, 
 must n't she, Ponty? " 
 
 An hour later, as they arrived at the gate of Kings- 
 mead, young Lansing exclaimed roughly to his sister, 
 " Oh, do be quiet, Inez whistle it again, Tommy." 
 
 And Tommy whistled very softly : 
 
 " Does the barley bid the wind wait in its course ? "
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 TOMMY KINGSMEAD had a very peculiar and unusual 
 habit, due, most probably, to his long residence in a 
 country where summer is a flaunting thing of heat and 
 blaze the habit of rising early. 
 
 And this habit, a rather uncomfortable one in Eng- 
 land in November, when night rules for many more 
 hours in the twenty-four than she has any legal right, 
 is one that it is very difficult to shake off. 
 
 One's brain, once taught to stir at five in the morn- 
 ing, is as unmanageable as a wakeful child and refuses 
 to remain inactive until eight, as leisured British brains 
 undoubtedly should do. 
 
 The darkness, the chill, possibly the very subconscious 
 knowledge that everyone else in the house would sleep 
 on for at least another hour and a half, had subdued 
 Tommy's mind to the point of leaving him snugly un- 
 conscious until six, at which ungodly little hour he every 
 morning awoke, as if he had been a well-made clock and 
 his first restless stirring its chimes. 
 
 Six o'clock on a dark, rainy English November morn- 
 ing a woful and a chillsome thing. 
 
 Just six hours after he had dropped to sleep to dream, 
 such is the absurdity of dreams out of novels (in which 
 
 75
 
 76 KINGSMEAD 
 
 people pass their sleeping hours in living the most op- 
 posite and poetic and relateable events), that he was 
 trying to stuff a live owl with chestnuts and sausages, 
 something happened, and he was awake. 
 
 Now a good way to judge people would be, if 
 practicable, to read their first thoughts on awakening 
 the very first thoughts they have when they are 
 still a quarter asleep and quite alone with themselves. 
 Tommy's thought was enlightening. 
 
 " Hooray, tea ! " And rubbing his eyes he sat up in 
 bed and switched on the light. 
 
 It was cold, and abominably early, and he could not 
 have a fire for another hour and a half, when the earliest 
 servant would come and make one for him (due, this, to 
 his bad trick of having a fire late every night, to go to 
 sleep by). 
 
 Yet he awoke with a pleasant grin, and a really cheer- 
 ful thought in his mind, though only a thought of 
 physical comfort. 
 
 "Hooray, tea!" 
 
 Leaning on one elbow he lighted his etna, and then lay 
 back on his pillows while the indignant water was coaxed 
 by the fire to wake up and boil. 
 
 Not beautiful in bed, Tommy, as was his sister. A 
 small white face under a mat of very untidy fair hair, 
 thin wrists in loose pink sleeves, a red nose, due to a way 
 he had of sleeping with that feature buried in his pillow. 
 
 " Raining again. Teddy won't be able to take the
 
 KINGSMEAD 77 
 
 Mignonette Lady motoring. Hard luck. Oh, damn, 
 can't you boil? " The last phrase, reprehensible in it- 
 self, was uttered aloud in a perfectly pleasant voice to 
 the kettle. 
 
 Then his thoughts went back to Teddy and his love. 
 There was in Tommy a decided streak of benevolence 
 that was to strangers hard to reconcile with his undeni- 
 able and frankly active curiosity. He wanted to know 
 all about people, and when possible he said that he 
 wanted to know, and asked questions in a very primitive 
 way. But the point in which he differed from most 
 other curious people was that he wanted to know about 
 people because he loved them. 
 
 It is strange and rather depressing, the reflection that 
 by far the greater amount of interest in others displayed 
 by people is based on a kind of unexpressed enmity 
 toward their kind. " You must have been up to some- 
 thing, or you must have had some underhand motive for 
 doing that," is the thought behind most questions ; " and 
 as I 'm sure it is something to your discredit, I '11 see 
 if I can't get it out of you ! " 
 
 Not so Tommy. He was destined to become a delight- 
 ful, whimsical, benevolent old gentleman, and allowing 
 for the difference in age between him and that future 
 Tommy, and the influences that the divers ghosts of 
 him must necessarily have on him, he was now to a great 
 extent what he would be later. 
 
 He was now, at twenty-three, a delightful, whimsical,
 
 78 KINGSMEAD 
 
 and benevolent young gentleman, inappropriate as the 
 last adjective may seem applied to a person of three- 
 and-twenty. 
 
 And being, as the benevolent and whimsical often are, 
 a born match-maker, he looked forward, now, that raw 
 autumn morning, with exquisite enjoyment to watching 
 and aiding in many little ways Teddy's courting. 
 
 He would arrange to see a great deal of Mrs. Gilpin, 
 the dear; and if he went often to her house, no one 
 would talk of Lansing's frequent visits there; for 
 Tommy was not minded to allow gossip or even kindly 
 amusement to brush the bloom off these golden hours 
 of Teddy's. 
 
 " It 's a real romance," he said aloud, as the kettle's 
 sudden audible hissing drew his forgetful hand to its 
 straw-bound handle. " A real, true, Love's-Young- 
 Dream romance, the two beautiful creatures, and it is 
 a blessing I am here to look after them. They are the 
 lovers in the garden and I will be the gardener, keep 
 the flowers a-bloom, the grass green yes, and the in- 
 trusive stranger off the grass ! " 
 
 He went on talking to himself as he brewed his tea 
 and then drank it to the accompaniment of several 
 biscuits. 
 
 " If that girl saw it she 'd be knowing, and put 
 their backs up or she 'd raise a row. I suppose Mrs. 
 Gilpin is no one in particular, or she 'd tease him out- 
 right, and that would be perfectly horrible. Oh no,
 
 KINGSMEAD 79 
 
 teasing not liked at all. Good old Teddy, he thinks he 
 is suffering, I suppose, because he is n't sure of her, but 
 wuff, how hot ! I dare say, if he only knew, it *s 
 really the very best time of all. Now this motor ride 
 will be knocked on the head by the rain, which is hard 
 luck. Oh, if they were only in town, they could go 
 and look at each other at the National Gallery. A 
 very pleasant place for lovers, I should think. I 
 wonder " 
 
 He wondered on and on, this little unbeautiful youth, 
 his eyes bright with excitement. 
 
 He had observed the Mignonette Lady very closely 
 all the evening before, but her friendly aloofness was 
 such that even his keen eye had failed to penetrate it. 
 If she loved Lanner she hid it very well ; if she did not 
 love him she most cleverly hid the pain his love for her 
 must certainly cause her. 
 
 For she must know. She was not stupid, and anyone 
 short of a person fit for an idiot asylum must have seen 
 the whole story in Teddy's face as she sang the Greek 
 song. Yet Brigit and the rest had, after all, appeared 
 to notice nothing ! 
 
 " I 'm like that boy who could see bacilli and germs 
 and all sorts of bugs in a glass of water," Tommy 
 thought with a glow of vanity, " the boy with the mag- 
 nifying eye, they called him. I really do believe it *s 
 safe yet, the secret. What a nuisance that girl was last 
 night, sitting up with us till Teddy could n't keep
 
 80 KINGSMEAD 
 
 awake another moment. He 'd have talked to me. I 
 wonder " 
 
 Suddenly he looked at his watch, and finding to his 
 surprised satisfaction that it was past seven, he rose, 
 and putting on a peculiarly gorgeous dark blue silk 
 dressing-gown (a present from his sister), he turned off 
 his light and left the room. Teddy surely would be 
 awake by this time, and in case Teddy wanted to talk 
 he would go to him. 
 
 For this was not one of the matters in which Tommy 
 felt more than justified in giving vent to his interest 
 by the putting of artless but acute questions. He had 
 in these affairs a very rigid code of etiquette, and 
 Teddy's came under the unnamed but definitely marked 
 class of those in which only spontaneous offerings of 
 questions could be even considered. 
 
 Teddy was sound asleep when his visitor arrived, but 
 a cold douche of light waked him with a start. 
 
 " Good gracious, Tommy, what 's the matter? " 
 
 Tommy, wrapped in his princely garment, looked at 
 him for a moment in silence. Then he said truthfully, 
 " I 've been awake a long time, old chap. Do you mind 
 my coming in ? " 
 
 "Not I. What time is it?" 
 
 " Between seven and half-past. That is, it 's ten past 
 seven. May I light your fire? " 
 
 Teddy nodded, and getting up, peered out into the 
 cool black dawn from behind the curtains.
 
 KINGSMEAD 81 
 
 " Rain ! " 
 
 Tommy, who was kneeling on the hearth-rug, gave a 
 sudden nod to the kindling flames, as much as to say, 
 " Hear that voice ? How 's that for disappointment ? " 
 
 " Pouring. Is n't it a bore ? " 
 
 " Rotten." 
 
 Teddy, looking in his white silk paj amas like a statue 
 not quite unpacked, yawned despondently. 
 
 " Beast of a climate ! What on earth can we do 
 to-day?" 
 
 Tommy squatted by the fire and visibly basked. 
 
 " You '11 not get your motor ride." 
 
 " No. Oh, Tommy " 
 
 Tommy's eyes met his, bright with encouragement and 
 sympathy. 
 
 But Teddy was English, as much a slave to habit as 
 his betters, and he turned away a little uneasily, almost 
 regretted his hasty confidence of the night before. 
 Tommy still sat by the fire, but he no longer basked. 
 
 " Had your tea, old chap? " asked his host briskly. 
 " Just touch that bell, will you? I want mine." 
 
 And thus Tommy, bitterly disappointed, but true to 
 his self-ordained code, knew that the one subject was 
 not to be broached, and hastily asked some questions 
 about the local hunt. What is more, he even listened to 
 Teddy's discourse, and half an hour later returned to 
 his room as ignorant as he had left it regarding the 
 garden in which he was so eager to work.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 " YES, it 's going to be fine," remarked Inez Lansing 
 an hour or so later, from the sideboard where she was 
 foraging for herself. " You and Nanny are going to 
 Pinchbroke, are n't you, Ted? " 
 
 " Ugh ! " grunted Teddy in indifferent consent, tak- 
 ing more marmalade. 
 
 His sister came back to the table and sat down 
 opposite Tommy. " Will you give me a lift? " she con- 
 tinued. " I want to see Clara Train, and Arkwright 
 says he can't take me out to-day something gone 
 wrong with the car." 
 
 She spoke, the horrified Tommy saw, even in the shock 
 of his horror, quite innocently ; she had no idea that her 
 proposal would be unwelcome, although the chances were 
 that she would in any case have made it. 
 
 Teddy hesitated and in another second would have 
 been lost. 
 
 Tommy's quick brain understood that whereas he had 
 meant to be a simplifying and cherishing gardener in 
 the garden of his friend's Young Love, the gods had 
 cast him, in their irony, a very different role. If Inez 
 went, all the poetry would be gone out of the drive. So 
 Inez must not go. 
 
 82
 
 KINGSMEAD 83 
 
 "Is it v-very necessary, Miss Lansing?" he asked 
 suddenly. " I mean to say, for you to go to-day ? Be- 
 cause I if you don't really mind, I I think I '11 ask 
 Teddy to take me instead. It is rather important for 
 me to go to Pinchbroke to-day." 
 
 Inez was surprised, for his request was not only a 
 strange one for anyone to make, but a quite astounding 
 one coming from Kingsmead. 
 
 But, luckily for Tommy, the girl's model was an in- 
 souciant person whose nature prompted her to take care- 
 lessly everything that came her way, and never, on any 
 account, to show amazement. And Inez was, so early 
 in the morning, carefully guarded by her idea of what 
 her model would do. 
 
 So she reached for salt and answered with a quick 
 protrusion of her lower lip : " Oh yes, by all means, 
 Lord Kingsmead. I only thought of going faute de 
 mieux" Then, for she was curious, she added : " Do 
 you know the Clarks ? " 
 
 Tommy, without looking at Teddy, answered guiltily, 
 " No." 
 
 "The Markhams?" 
 
 " No." 
 
 " The Carchesters then? " 
 
 And Tommy, staring solemnly at her across the broad 
 white table, answered for the third time, and quite with- 
 out any polite evasions or even qualifications of his 
 statement, " No."
 
 84 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " He 's going on business, Inez," put in Teddy, with 
 a grateful glance at his champion. " Why are all women 
 so curious? " 
 
 " It was n't curiosity, it was only well, absent- 
 mindedness," she returned adroitly. 
 
 " Like the old woman who added to her inquiries for 
 another old woman's health, ' Not that I care a curse,' r 
 laughed Tommy. 
 
 Then he went on with his breakfast, a faint flush in 
 his cheeks. 
 
 It was late ; old Mr. Lansing had long since had his 
 breakfast and gone, and as the three young people loit- 
 ered over their grapes the motor came to the door. 
 
 " Come along, Tommy, you don't want any more 
 grapes. We want to lunch at Pinchbroke, you know. 
 I 'm going to take Mrs. Gilpin to the Jolly Trout, she 's 
 never seen it. Will you lunch with us? " 
 
 " I 'm not sure whether it will be convenient," de- 
 clared Tommy, rising obediently ; " I '11 decide later, if 
 I may." 
 
 In the hall, as they put on their coats, he turned to 
 Teddy. " Do you realise that I 'd rather walk barefoot 
 to Pinchbroke than go in a motor? " 
 
 " I do. You are a brick, old chap," Teddy chuckled. 
 " Fancy Inez with us ! It is really awfully good of 
 you." 
 
 But he said no more, and Tommy, miserable little 
 human sacrifice to the god of Love, closed his eyes when 
 the motor tore round corners amid a terrified scattering
 
 KINGSMEAD 85 
 
 of slow-legged country children, and tried to console 
 himself with the thought of being so useful. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin saw them from the window and came down 
 at once, a slim little cinnamon-brown figure with a cap 
 tied in a very ship-shape manner under her chin by a 
 gold-brown chiffon veil. It looked, this veil, casual and 
 unstudied, as if it had been chosen because it was first 
 to hand ; but it was remarkably becoming, and her blue 
 eyes seemed to take from it a quite special warmth and 
 glow. 
 
 " It is so delightful to be going," she said, as she 
 got in and was followed by Teddy, who tucked a fur 
 rug round her in a way that filled with joy the heart 
 of the Sacrifice. " Why did n't Inez come? " 
 
 " Kingsmead had to go to Pinchbroke on business 
 so we are giving him a lift." 
 
 The mendacious speaker laughed as he spoke, and 
 Tommy in his heart vowed vengeance. This, however, 
 he thought, as the motor dashed down the little avenue, 
 was not the time or the place for vengeance; Teddy 
 was to be made happy, and to that end Tommy must 
 efface himself. 
 
 So the chauffeur, a true-born Frenchman with a broken 
 nose, the result, he always hastily explained, not of a 
 motor accident but of a blow received years ago in a 
 barrack row, was suddenly surprised by a remark in 
 a French that caused him to glance suddenly at his 
 companion. 
 
 ** Monsieur n'est pas Franfais? " he asked abruptly.
 
 86 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy laughed. No, he was not French, but he had 
 had a French tutor for two years, and it is a habit 
 like another, he added, that of speaking a language as 
 it is spoken by those to whom it is native. The chauffeur, 
 who was a deep-dyed anarchist and who had spent his 
 leisure time perusing hopeful but inflammatory social- 
 istic literature printed by subscription on the left side 
 of the Seine, nodded with the simplicity abrogated to 
 themselves by his kind. 
 
 Chauffeurs are, some think, the missing link between 
 masters and servants. 
 
 And so, while the big machine tore through the erst- 
 while quiet countryside, Teddy Lansing, watching the 
 conversation going on in front of him, felt, as he was 
 meant to feel, as good as alone with his beloved. 
 
 Pinchbroke is about twenty miles from Kingsmead, 
 and Tommy had never been there before. Also, he had 
 never wished to go. And he did not know what on earth 
 he would do when he did get there. For naturally he 
 did not mean to lunch at the Jolly Trout. 
 
 He intended to get out of the motor on approaching 
 the village, but beyond that he seemed unable to plan. 
 It was a curious feeling that came over him. Useless 
 to plan, useless to even try to think what he would do. 
 He could not even ask Teddy if there was another inn, 
 because he knew that if he did so Mrs. Gilpin would in- 
 sist on his joining them, and he had set his heart on 
 their lunching alone.
 
 KINGSMEAD 87 
 
 He hoped the Jolly Trout would prove a low-browed, 
 old-fashioned inn with latticed windows and a rubicund 
 landlord ; he hoped there would be a small, glowing fire 
 in the dining-room, and spotted china dogs on the 
 mantelpiece ; and geraniums in the windows ; and an 
 engraving of the young Victoria being told of her queen- 
 ship. If, besides being a mere earthly guardian angel, 
 he could have reconstructed the Jolly Trout! 
 
 " There is the church, Tommy," exclaimed Te'ddy, 
 suddenly leaning forward and laying his hand affec- 
 tionately on his shoulder. " Rather jolly, is n't it? " 
 
 A little red church, with pointed roofs and pointed 
 windows and a square battlemented tower. 
 
 Tommy looked at it, his eyes eager. " Oh yes 
 Norman, by Jove, and untouched. I say," to the chauf- 
 feur, " let me out here, will you ? I think I '11 go and 
 have a look at it," he added to Teddy.. " I will j oin 
 you, if I may, after lunch." 
 
 Tommy gave his hand a quick squeeze, and they let 
 him go. 
 
 " How very nice he is," commented Mrs. Gilpin, 
 watching the little alert figure springing over the frozen 
 grass toward the churchyard. 
 
 " He 's one in ten thousand," returned Teddy, his 
 voice warm with affectionate gratitude. " There 's noth- 
 ing I would n't do for Kingsmead."
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE motor-party reached Kingsmead in time for tea, 
 and went straight to the Great Hall, where Inez sat 
 reading. 
 
 The drive home had been bitterly cold, and Tommy 
 was chilled to the bone and went straight to the fire, 
 where he stood holding purplish fingers to the blaze. 
 
 " I am so afraid," remarked Mrs. Gilpin gently, " that 
 Lord Kingsmead has taken cold." 
 
 It was a tactless observation, one that most women 
 would have hesitated to make about a young man, but 
 her voice and the kind look in her eyes took from it 
 any sting that he would assuredly have felt had Inez 
 been the speaker. 
 
 " No, no, I 'm all right ; indeed I am," he assured 
 her. " I get blue and violet, but it does n't matter, and 
 I I would n't have missed the drive for anything." 
 
 " Then you have got over your horror of motors ? " 
 laughed Inez, not quite pleasantly. 
 
 " I certainly greatly enjoyed going to Pinchbroke, 
 Miss Lansing." 
 
 " A compliment for you, Nanny ! " 
 
 Teddy, who, his curly hair ruffled, his brown cheeks 
 whipped to a deep crimson by the wind, stood near Mrs. 
 
 88
 
 KINGSMEAD 89 
 
 Gilpin, looking most splendid, Tommy thought, shot a 
 quick, grateful glance at his friend. 
 
 Something had happened, Tommy knew had known 
 from the minute he had joined the other two in the very 
 satisfactory (though unlatticed-windowed) dining-room 
 of the Jolly Trout. There had been at that moment 
 a new light in Teddy's eyes, a new carriage of the head, 
 which, while not yet quite triumphant, yet clearly in- 
 dicated that triumph lurked near to him. 
 
 And Tommy hoped that when Mrs. Gilpin had been 
 driven home Teddy would at last speak. It was unlike 
 Teddy, the taciturnity he had maintained on the one 
 subject since his little enlightening outburst the even- 
 ing of the dinner-party, for Teddy was a precocious 
 youth and had loved more than once before, and Tommy 
 had always been his confidant. 
 
 Yet somehow his very silence, his very hugging to 
 his heart of his precious secret, was not at all dis- 
 pleasing to his friend. It showed that the secret was 
 a sacred thing, enshrined in his holy of holies, and 
 Tommy the romantic respected his attitude, even while 
 his, Tommy's, mental shoes were, so to put it, already 
 unlaced, ready to be taken off for his entry into the 
 holy place. 
 
 Nancy Gilpin, sitting erect in her high-backed chair, 
 was, it seemed to the watcher, a little absent-minded, 
 and the beautiful pallor of her curved cheek was perhaps 
 somewhat whiter than usual.
 
 90 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Inez, the jarring note, struck, as is the way with 
 jarring notes, with horrid pertinacity. She had been 
 to the village to do three errands and had met young 
 Herbert Green. He had j oined her and they had talked 
 about the coming festive season. 
 
 " They are having a big house-party," the girl 
 went on dejectedly. " Lord Ascot 's coming, the big 
 racing man, you know, and the Meyer-Llewellyns, 
 and Lady Chatterdale, and two guardsmen, one of 
 them in the Grenadiers, and a lot more really smart 
 people." 
 
 " The Meyer-Llewellyns are awful" remarked Teddy 
 concisely. " He was at the house and is a little beast ; 
 she is fifteen years older than he." 
 
 " That does n't matter. She is the Marquis of Lith- 
 gow's daughter." Inez spoke with an unlovely snap, 
 and Tommy came slowly toward the table. 
 
 "When is Christmas?" he asked. "This is the 
 twenty-eighth, is n't it? I do love Christmas. When 
 I was a youngster," he went on, obviously trying to 
 tide over the unpleasant moment, " we used to have big 
 parties here." 
 
 " Jolly ! " added Mrs. Gilpin gently. 
 
 Teddy, who was eating jam with a spoon, looked up. 
 " Last year I went to some people near Sevenoaks for 
 New Year's day. We had a good time sat up all 
 night playing games and so on, telling fortunes, and 
 that kind of thing."
 
 KINGSMEAD 91 
 
 Inez rose with a despairing gesture curiously too 
 poignant for the occasion. " And here are we with this 
 great house and plenty of money, and it 's all no use. 
 Oh, it is too beastly! That Leonora Green and her 
 guardsmen, indeed ! She is n't even pretty ! " 
 
 She was odious in her envy, and her bad taste was 
 blatant, but Tommy was sorry for her. In silence he 
 drank his tea, while gentle Nancy Gilpin proposed a 
 little party for New Year's eve at her house. " We 
 can play games, and have some music," she suggested, 
 half timidly. " Will you come? " 
 
 " Oh yes, we '11 come and it 's awfully good of 
 you," returned Inez, now nearly crying with shame and 
 helpless anger with fate, " but " 
 
 Rising, she left the room abruptly, and Teddy shook 
 his great shoulders with a movement of relief. 
 
 " Poor old Inez," he said, " it 's a pity, is n't it? If 
 the Greens were n't so successful it would n't be so hard 
 for her. What she does n't understand is that every- 
 one likes Nora Green personally. She 's plain, but she 's 
 well, a nice little thing though not a bit clever, 
 which Inez is," he added hurriedly. 
 
 " Indeed she is," agreed Mrs. Gilpin, looking at him 
 with what Tommy considered an angelic sympathy in 
 her large eyes. " Why don't you get some of your 
 friends down for Christmas Teddy ? " 
 
 Something in her voice proclaimed the fact that it 
 was the first time she had, after long solicitation, called
 
 92 KINGSMEAD 
 
 him by his Christian name. Mentally Tommy hugged 
 himself. 
 
 " No use," Teddy answered, flushing. " My friends 
 are all men the ones who would come. You see," 
 he continued, a little shamefacedly, " mother and father, 
 whom I dearly love, are not used to to things, and 
 
 well, you know what I mean," he ended, floundering 
 helplessly. 
 
 Tommy eyed him with severity. " For Heaven's sake, 
 Lansing, don't be a bounder," he burst out. "I I 
 do loathe you when you s-say underbred things like 
 that!" 
 
 But Teddy, though embarrassed, stuck to his guns. 
 " Rot ! You know I am devoted to my people, and 
 proud of my governor for having made his own fortune 
 
 and all that. But not being an utter idiot I can't 
 shut my eyes to facts as they are. Mrs. Green died 
 years ago, and Green, who is a dishonest scoundrel, and 
 ought to be hanged for murder, considering the poison- 
 ous stuff he sells as beer old Green is clever, and has 
 picked up a very decent accent, and well, glare as 
 much as you like, Kingsmead, those things do count." 
 
 Tommy was deeply disgusted, and looked it, rumpling 
 his nose as if he smelled something unpleasant. 
 
 " O Lord," he said, half under his breath, " O my 
 Lord!" 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin rose. " I must go," she said, " it is late. 
 And please don't quarrel, you two ! "
 
 KINGSMEAD 93 
 
 Teddy seemed for a moment about to cast himself at 
 her feet in his self-abasement. " I was a brute to dis- 
 tress you, and I dare say I am a snob. But oh, 
 Mrs. Gilpin," he went on, coming close to her, " it really 
 is that I know what I 'm talking about. When my gov- 
 ernor used to come to Oxford, do you think I didn't 
 know how the fellows laughed at him? Even while they 
 liked him! He is a brick, my governor, and the best 
 father who ever lived, but whatever Kingsmead may say, 
 he and my mother are impossible socially, and there 's 
 not a bit of use in denying it." 
 
 Tommy, confronted with a phase of his friend that 
 he bitterly detested, came a step closer. " Look here, 
 L-Lanner," he asked, his face flushed, his voice eager, 
 " do you w-want to bet ? " 
 
 "Bet what?" 
 
 "That they are all that?" 
 
 " That you can't get people really smart people," 
 Tommy winced, " to treat them as equals ? My 
 dear Kingsmead, I 'd bet you my head ! It is n't any 
 pleasure to me, knowing this. If for no other rea- 
 son, I 'd do my best for poor Inez. I 'm frightfully 
 sorry for her, poor girl. But it 's no use, I tell 
 you!" 
 
 Nancy Gilpin, who was tying over her cap the gold- 
 brown veil, turned toward them. 
 
 " Oh, don't speak to each other like that," she said, 
 " you are so fond of each other "
 
 94 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy laughed, and put his hand, which was very 
 cold again, on his friend's arm. 
 
 " Dear Mrs. Gilpin," he answered, " don't be afraid. 
 I love Teddy. Only he is disgusting when he gets snob- 
 bish. If he only knew it, it really is ill-bred, and it is 
 downright vulgar. Only," he smiled up at Teddy, his 
 smile just a little tremulous this time, "it's not 
 really him, you see. It 's irritation and a lot of 
 things like that. Well, Teddy, will you bet? " 
 
 " Bet what ? " growled Teddy, looking away, but not 
 withdrawing his hand. 
 
 " That that your people can't know and make 
 friends with people every bit as glorious and ' aristo- 
 cratic,' save the mark, as the Greens ? " 
 
 Nanny bestowed on him a look so grateful, so under- 
 standing, so perfect in every way, that he blushed scar- 
 let with happiness. 
 
 " Old ass," he said, laughing, to Teddy, " you really 
 are a sickener sometimes ! "
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE next morning Tommy went for a walk. It was a 
 clear day with a cheerful tinge of blue in the grey sky, 
 and a sprinkle of hoar frost on the road and hedges. 
 
 Tommy strode along enjoying the feel of the first 
 English winter he had seen for years, and throwing out 
 his chest rather proudly as he realised that although the 
 weather had ever since his arrival been abominable, he 
 had not had even the vestige of a cold. He was used to 
 being delicate and had never rebelled over his enforced 
 care of himself, but he was young and his energy had 
 not diminished as does the energy of most semi-invalidish 
 people, and this daring to be in England in winter filled 
 him with a rather pathetic pride. 
 
 There were so many things he had never forgotten 
 and always meant to do, such as riding, fencing, and 
 swimming, and now the chances of his being at last able 
 to do what other young men do seemed good. 
 
 " I '11 go up to town after I 've stayed with Bicky, 
 and take lessons in things and see if I can't get up a 
 bit of muscle," he reflected, positively enjoying the 
 chill air. " I 've got to do boy things as well as men 
 things, for I 've never done 'em. It is a fine thing to 
 be well." 
 
 95
 
 96 KINGSMEAD 
 
 He hurried on, thinking cheerfully about this new life 
 that lay before him; the whole world seemed to await 
 him. Everything in the world is his who longs for 
 knowledge and appreciation and not for possession. And 
 young Tommy knew this great fact by instinct. He 
 had enough money, thanks to the sale of Kingsmead, to 
 live comfortably, to travel, and to learn the world's 
 lesson, and therefore be in his restored health and 
 his hopeful youth a rich man. 
 
 As he crossed the bridge near the village he met a 
 young man who looked vaguely familiar to him but 
 whom he did not at once place a sturdy, broad-faced 
 young man with a small moustache and pleasant grey 
 eyes. As they met the young man stopped. 
 
 " I say," he began, " you don't remember me ? " 
 
 " I know your face and wait a moment, I seem to 
 see behind you a fresco of of Aurora in her chariot 
 Italy somewhere, of course." 
 
 " Right-ho ! Florence the Hotel des Palmiers. My 
 name is Green." 
 
 Tommy held out his hand and liked the grip it 
 received. 
 
 " Of course I remember. We went to Certosa to- 
 gether, and you broke your majolica orange of char- 
 treuse in the cab coming back and ruined my tutor's 
 top-coat. How funny to find you here ! " 
 
 Young Green laughed. " Not so funny, considering 
 that I live half a mile away on the Hithermere road.
 
 KINGSMEAD 97 
 
 I 'd always supposed you 'd turn up, for I knew you 
 were Lady Pontefract's brother." 
 
 Tommy stared at him for a moment and then laughed 
 merrily. " So you are an enemy ! I mean you are a 
 Capulet. We of Kingsmead are Montagues. Somehow 
 I never connected ' the Greens ' here with my Florentine 
 Green." 
 
 " The name is not uncommon. Rather funny, the 
 feud, isn't it?" 
 
 " Well, yes, I suppose it is. Only I hate 'em feuds, 
 I mean. Such a waste of time. I say, where are you 
 going? I'm walking over to my sister's; come part 
 of the way with me if you 've nothing better to do, will 
 you?" 
 
 Green assented, and they started briskly through the 
 little village. Tommy was glad to see the pleasant- 
 faced youth, whom he remembered quite distinctly, and 
 apparently the pleasant-faced youth was nothing loath 
 to have words with this ally of the enemy of his house. 
 
 " My sister," he began presently, " wanted to call 
 when the Lansings first came, and my father would n't 
 let her. That 's what started it." 
 
 "But why wouldn't your father let her call? Mrs. 
 Lansing is a dear old lady." 
 
 " Business. Beer versus Bath-tubs. Not rivalry, of 
 course, but well, Lansing has said very nasty things 
 about my father, and my father has n't spared him, 
 either. I," he added, lighting his pipe, " am rather
 
 98 KINGSMEAD 
 
 sorry. Young Lansing looks a conceited brute rather, 
 but I 'm told he 's not bad. I 've met Miss Lansing in 
 London. Do you like her? " 
 
 Tommy's nervous flush flashed over his face. 
 
 " I arrived only a few days ago and have not seen 
 much of her. She has been very kind to me, though. 
 She has very pretty hair, too." 
 
 " Yes, and shoulders. She dances rather well. How- 
 ever, it 's, as you say, the Montagues and Capulets over 
 again only the Montagues and Capulets of trade. 
 Rather a pity, I always think, but it can't be helped. 
 When we meet we glare. It 's a fine sight. Going to 
 be here long? " 
 
 Tommy told him of his plan to stay on in the neigh- 
 bourhood for another month and then go to London. 
 
 " I want to take some fencing lessons and so on," he 
 added. 
 
 " Ah yes, a good thing. Living in Italy is no good 
 for sport," assented Green with the usual superior air 
 of young Britons in such matters. And Tommy thought 
 it hardly worth while to tell him that the Italians are 
 the best fencers in the world and look down with pleas- 
 ant tolerance on the English as mere well-meaning 
 bunglers in the art. 
 
 Now, as he walked, Tommy began to feel guilty. He 
 had in his heart a plan hatched in the night, and which 
 he was going to submit to his sister, and this plan was 
 a blow, he suddenly realised, at the social supremacy of
 
 KINGSMEAD 99 
 
 the family of his present companion, if not at his com- 
 panion himself. 
 
 Was he being quite honest in holding friendly con- 
 verse with this Capulet? 
 
 Would the Capulet not, later, have reason to reproach 
 him with a kind of treason? 
 
 This thought made Tommy very uncomfortable, for, 
 young as he was, he possessed the wisdom of knowing 
 that no one can, in his position, remain neutral. Even if 
 he were not forging weapons to be used in the Mon- 
 tague cause, could he, a guest in the Casa Capulet, quite 
 fairly listen to a Montague's view-points? 
 
 " I say, Green," he began suddenly, but young Green 
 had spoken at this same moment, and did not pause. 
 
 " The Lansings don't seem to know anyone about 
 here, do they? " he asked. 
 
 " They know my sister and Mrs. Gilpin." 
 
 "Mrs. Gilpin? Do they? I've seen her. Very 
 pretty. But she does n't know anybody either. Now 
 Nora, my sister, is n't a bit pretty, and not nearly so 
 clever as Miss Lansing, yet Nora is asked nearly every- 
 where. Everyone likes her, and I hear that Miss Lan- 
 sing is very unpopular." 
 
 He was not boastful, he even seemed, to Tommy's 
 sharp ear, to be speaking rather regretfully, but Tommy 
 was obliged to answer. 
 
 " I have heard that your sister is charming," he re- 
 turned with rather old-fashioned politeness. " Miss
 
 100 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Lansing is, as you say, clever. As far as her being un- 
 popular, how can a person who is not known be either 
 popular or unpopular? ' 
 
 " That 's true, by Jove ! Well, as I said, I 'm sorry 
 about it all, for I 've danced with her, and I should 
 have liked to see her down here. But it can't be helped. 
 Father says old Lansing's English is something fear- 
 ful, and of course people can't stand that." 
 
 " Don't you be so sure," returned Tommy, shaking 
 his head. " You never can tell ! " 
 
 " What do you mean? " 
 
 " I mean they don't know anyone now, bar my 
 sister, you understand but they may shortly know 
 people. No earthly reason why they should n't. Mr. 
 Lansing's English is bad, but his mind 's good and his 
 
 heart 's good, and his " He broke off abruptly, 
 
 for to the son of the man who made bad beer for the 
 East End he could hardly add " and his commercial 
 honour is untouched."
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE Duchess of Wight sat in a small sitting-room 
 downstairs, in her house near Berkeley Square, a large 
 Angora cat in her lap. It was half-past two on a rather 
 fine afternoon, and in the crude yellow light that came 
 in at the two tall windows the old lady looked very frail 
 indeed. 
 
 She was not reading, for an open book, on which lay 
 her spectacles, was on a table at hand, and her eyes were 
 fixed on the portrait of a handsome old man that hung 
 opposite her. An open fire brightened the room, which 
 in itself was cheerful and pretty, but the portrait, in a 
 curious way, seemed to dominate it, as if the old man, 
 looking down as he stood with his hands behind his back, 
 had been a tutelary spirit. 
 
 And this feeling was the Duchess's own, and accounted 
 for her having of late lived in this small room so much 
 of her time, deserting for it the big drawing-room 
 upstairs. 
 
 A pleasant-faced old woman, wrinkled and lined, with 
 bright, tired, worldly, kind eyes. Her opinions were 
 definite, her tongue keen-edged, and many people feared 
 her, which knowledge gave her an unholy j oy. 
 
 For over an hour she sat by the fire with her cat, for 
 
 101
 
 102 KINGSMEAD 
 
 she had for a wonder lunched alone, and was now await- 
 ing a visit a visit the anticipation of which caused her 
 a pleasant little flutter, even while it had thrown her 
 thoughts suddenly back into the gone years and caused 
 her bright eyes to soften somewhat under their wrinkled 
 lids. 
 
 The wood burning on her hearth was hissing now, in 
 a comfortable and cosey way, and the light being bright, 
 she closed her eyes. 
 
 Then she had slept an hour, and woke to find a little 
 young man standing before her, his hands in his pockets, 
 a sympathetic smile under his baby moustache. 
 
 " Bless me, Tommy Kingsmead, how did you get in ? " 
 she cried, rising and giving him her hand. "I was 
 asleep. Now let me look at you. Ah, my dear," she 
 added, her voice suddenly faintly regretful, " you are not 
 a bit like him ! " 
 
 " Like whom ? " asked Tommy, drawing up a chair 
 and sitting down. 
 
 For answer, the old lady pointed to the portrait. 
 " My dear old friend Yeoland." 
 
 " Oh ! " said Tommy, who was too young even to have 
 heard of the once well-known friendship. 
 
 The Duchess laughed. " I suppose you know that he 
 was your grandmother's half-brother? " 
 
 " Yes, I know that, but " 
 
 " Well, and I nearly married him, and we were the 
 best of friends all his h'fe, so I hoped you might look
 
 KINGSMEAD 103 
 
 like him. However, you don't, any more than Pam 
 Lensky does, but it can't be helped. Now tell me all 
 about yourself. Or no," she added, warming with her 
 own words, " let me tell you what I know about you. 
 Shall I? You are delicate-looking still, but you must be 
 sound or you would n't be braving this unspeakable 
 climate. You look nice. Are you ? " 
 
 " Yes," returned Tommy gravely. 
 
 " And good? " 
 
 " Yes, I think so. Go on." 
 
 But the old lady clapped her hands in delight and 
 then held them out. " Bless your heart," she cried, with 
 the natural gaiety that was destined to survive in her to 
 the end, " that was like him ! Not the being good 
 Oswald was never t hat but your face when you said 
 it. I am so glad you 've come, you dear little creature. 
 Now go on and tell me what it is that you want." 
 
 Tommy kissed her hand and very simply told his story. 
 
 " I have been in Italy ever since I saw you," he began, 
 folding his arms on his breast, " living in my tower. 
 And I am, as you said, quite sound again, though I am 
 not, as you see, a giant of strength. I have sold 
 Kingsmead." 
 
 " I know. I was very angry, but Pam told me about 
 the mortgages, etc., so I suppose you could n't help it." 
 
 " No, it had to go, the dear old place. Did Madame 
 Lensky tell you that I sold it to the father of my college 
 chum old Mr. Lansing, the Housemaid's Joy man? "
 
 104 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Yes. I 'm going to have Analyte tubs put in here ; 
 I understand they are quite excellent. Well go on." 
 
 " They, the Lansings, have been living down there for 
 a year or so, and when I decided to come home I 
 wanted to go there. So I invited myself, and they 
 were very hospitable and down I went. I was at Oxford 
 my one poor wee term with the son, Teddy, of 
 whom I am very fond. He is," he added adroitly, "really 
 quite extraordinarily good-looking. There is also a 
 daughter." 
 
 The Duchess glanced at him sharply. 
 
 " My dear Kingsmead, money won't gloss over every- 
 thing," she ejaculated. 
 
 " My dear Duchess, for Heaven's sake don't you be 
 a snob ! " Tommy was very grave and he watched her 
 anxiously. 
 
 " My dear Tommy, I want you to marry money, but 
 there are still, Heaven be praised, some few well-born 
 young Englishwomen who are not paupers. Is it neces- 
 sary for you to marry the bath-tub girl ? " 
 
 " My dear Duchess," declared Tommy, the emphasis 
 of truth in his voice, " I 'd rather die than marry Miss 
 Lansing." 
 
 "Then?" 
 
 He hesitated, for he could not betray Teddy's love- 
 story even to the sympathetic old friend. 
 
 " Dear Duchess I admit that you are older than I," 
 he began, at last.
 
 KINGSMEAD 105 
 
 " That is generous of you ! " 
 
 " And of course you are wiser. Probably you are 
 thinking me a silly, meddling little ass. But do you 
 think you could believe that I really have a beautiful 
 reason for what I 'm asking you to do ? That it is n't 
 just childish love of managing things? " 
 
 " Oh, you funny little boy ! Yes, I think I can admit 
 all that. Are you," she added, smiling at him, " really 
 as quaint as you seem? " 
 
 " I think so. I mean to say I think I don't seem to 
 be things I am not, and if I look quaint to you, I must 
 be quaint. It is a rather odious word, though." 
 
 He spoke regretfully, with a slight flush, but before 
 she could answer, hurried on : 
 
 " You know Brigit. Well she is neither managing 
 nor quaint, is she ? " 
 
 " No," returned the old lady, stroking her cat. 
 
 " Well she likes the Lansings too, and if you will 
 come for Christmas, so will she." 
 
 Now this was Tommy's trump-card for the Duchess, 
 just as she was his trump-card to others, and he laid 
 it down, so to speak, with an air of frank triumph. 
 
 " H'm ! Does she know the beautiful reason? " 
 
 " No. At least, I have n't told her. But she likes old 
 Mr. and Mrs. Lansing, because they are simple, and 
 kind, and good. Last night I found Mrs. Lansing, 
 who is very intrepid indeed, as a rule, crying quite 
 piteously because some people Inez had known in town,
 
 106 KINGSMEAD 
 
 when she went to stay with a school-friend, had refused 
 to come to visit Inez. She, Inez, was awfully disap- 
 pointed and I imagine, not very kind to her mother 
 about it. It was very sad, Duchess." 
 
 " The girl must be a beast." 
 
 " Yes, rather, poor thing. But then, you see, she 's 
 miserable." 
 
 " What happened to the school-friend who used to 
 take her about ? " 
 
 Tommy laughed a little ruefully, as if he objected to 
 his own mirth. " Well, she died, and " 
 
 " And Inez, as you call her, takes her death as a per- 
 sonal slight? I know the type of woman." 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 " Well in two words, I want you to be a Swell, and 
 come down for Christmas." 
 
 "Be a Swell?" 
 
 " Yes. Dear old Mrs. Lansing says it, quite seriously, 
 as if it were a title. Will you? " 
 
 But " 
 
 " Please, no * buts.' You know you like Kingsmead, 
 I mean the place, not me, and they have a wonder- 
 ful chef " 
 
 " Who," asked the old woman, " has been telling you 
 that I am greedy ? " 
 
 " Brigit," he returned, unabashed, " and I do hope 
 you are, for he is a marvellous cook. And then you '11 
 make them so happy."
 
 KINGSMEAD 107 
 
 He was very persuasive and his great-uncle's eye, as 
 she glanced at the portrait, seemed to be saying to her, 
 " Oh yes, my dear Eliza you are bound to get some 
 fun out of it." 
 
 "But- -" 
 
 " And ah, do say yes, please say yes. If you don't, 
 my whole scheme will go to smash, for the Greens, 
 ' our ' hated rivals, have a countess coming, and we 
 must then wipe their eye." 
 
 "The brewers?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Odious man ! He refused point-blank to give Pam 
 a cheque for the Orthopaedic Convalescent Home for 
 Children, after she had talked to him most pleasantly at 
 a dinner to which she went on purpose, and then the 
 brute had the cheek to tell her that if I asked for it I 
 should get it. I did n't ask, either, and I refused to meet 
 him, so I had to give a cheque myself ! " 
 
 Tommy suppressed a smile. " Well, here 's your 
 chance to avenge yourself. And then, poor Inez " 
 
 " But," protested the old lady, who had very strong 
 dislikes as well as very strong likes, " I did n't at all 
 want to do that hateful girl a good turn." 
 
 " Yes, you do, because then she '11 be nice to her poor 
 old mother. Ah, Duchess dear " 
 
 " I ought to go to Egbert and Beryl for Christmas." 
 
 " And you know you 'd be bored to death there. I 
 know all about them! " returned Tommy the audacious.
 
 108 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Oh, very well, you little torment, I '11 come. Poe 
 will be furious, but I '11 come." 
 
 "Who's Poe?" 
 
 " My maid. She has very aristocratic tastes how- 
 ever, you are a dear, and I do enj oy you, so I '11 come. 
 Whom else will you get ? " 
 
 " I know a chap in the Scots Greys fellow named 
 Axendale-Murray, met him in Rome, and I dare say 
 he '11 come and then we '11 ask anyone you want, and 
 Bicky Brigit, I mean says she '11 try to get the 
 Pains." 
 
 " Ah yes," agreed the old lady alertly, " the Pains are 
 always delightful. Jack is a great friend of mine." 
 
 Tommy kissed her hand and left her sitting by the 
 fire more amused by the prospect of the Christmas party 
 than she would have believed possible. 
 
 " A delightful h'ttle fellow," she declared aloud, 
 looking at the portrait.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 TOMMY, being what he was, could not fail to take a 
 deep and living interest in his launching of the Lan- 
 sings on the social sea. He loved doing things ; passiv- 
 ity was irksome to him, except that kind of bodily 
 passivity that means the most violent mental activity; 
 and as he left the house in Berkeley Square he could 
 hardly restrain himself from giving little skips of joy 
 as he looked forward to the immediate future. 
 
 " It is rather rum, my going to work like this to get 
 that girl her heart's desire," he thought, turning up 
 Charles Street, " but it will be so jolly to turn her from 
 from what she now is, poor thing, to a satisfied and 
 therefore pleasant person. Affliction, even social afflic- 
 tions, may be good for very fine natures, but I really do 
 believe Inez will be much much less ob j ectionable 
 when she has wiped the collective Green eye. And 
 then " he smiled so charmingly at this point that an 
 alcoholic flower-girl forgot to urge on his attention the 
 bunch of damaged carnations she longed to dispose 
 of " and then, Teddy and the Mignonette Lady will 
 make friends with a lot of amusing people and be invited 
 to stop and dear old Lanner will love courting under 
 the auspices of a duchess." 
 
 109
 
 110 KINGSMEAD 
 
 For adoring as the aesthetic part of him did Teddy, 
 Tommy was by no means blind to the defects in his 
 friend's character, and this snobbishness, not sufficiently 
 violent to be offensive, he firmly believed would pass. 
 
 Quite unconsciously, without pose of any kind, he 
 looked on Lansing in an almost fatherly way, viewing 
 the beautiful youth's little weakness with tender regret 
 that only once in a long while waxed impatient. 
 
 And now that the Duchess had entered with him into 
 conspiracy, he felt that, all occasion being gone for 
 snobbishness, Teddy would never again be a snob. For 
 surely if the Duchess and the other people whom he had 
 in his mind's eye came to Kingsmead and were friendly 
 with Mr. and Mrs. Lansing, Teddy and even the objec- 
 tionable Inez must see how worse than silly they were 
 to be ashamed of their parents. At this point, just as 
 he hailed a hansom in Piccadilly, Tommy winced. He, 
 also, knew what it was to be reasonably and hopelessly 
 ashamed of a parent. 
 
 His next call was made in Westminster at a small, 
 dingy brick house in a deserted square near Great 
 Peter Street. 
 
 The maid who admitted him left him in the square 
 hall, where burned a cheery fire, and retired to announce 
 him to her mistress. Tommy, taking off his coat, 
 prowled up and down, pausing by the fireplace to look 
 at the portrait above it, a gypsy-like girl's face smil- 
 ing down at him, stopping to examine a carved
 
 KINGSMEAD 111 
 
 Corean chest in one of the window-niches. This atten- 
 tion to detail was deep-rooted in him, and long custom 
 had brought it to a kind of art of observation. After 
 five minutes in the hall in Westminster the young man 
 could have given, had he been asked to do so, a descrip- 
 tion of it worthy of Sherlock Holmes. 
 
 He was standing once more by the fire when a step 
 on the dark, narrow stairs caused him to turn. 
 
 " Mother sent me " began the girl, when he in- 
 terrupted her. 
 
 " Bless my soul," he cried in an absurdly grand- 
 fatherly manner, " you can't be Pammy ! " 
 
 The girl laughed. " Why not, Tommy Kingsmead? 
 Well, I am Pammy, thanks. And mother will be down 
 in a minute. Roddy got home yesterday for the holi- 
 days, and has celebrated by cutting one of his thumbs 
 off, or nearly, with his jig-saw. How are you? " 
 
 Tommy was well; he trusted the thumb in question 
 was not entirely dismembered, and he had forgotten 
 that Pammy must of course be arrived at her present 
 mature age. 
 
 ' Yes, I am nearly seventeen. When I 'm twenty I 
 sha* n't be so fat, but at present there seems to be no 
 help for it," she answered, laughing, and displaying 
 in her own round, overred cheeks two very becoming 
 dimples, " because I am so horribly greedy always. It 
 is awful to have a big appetite so vulgar, don't you 
 think? " she added pensively.
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy laughed. " No, it 's glorious. But, my word, 
 you are a big girl! How tall? " 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. " Oh, don't ! I 'd rather 
 die than tell; but as a matter of fact I am five feet 
 eleven ; is n't it terrific ? Father says he 's going to buy 
 me a commission in the Grenadier Guards." She was, 
 as she said, very tall, and her erect, well-developed 
 figure was much too broad for her height, so that she 
 had, standing by Tommy, something the air of an ocean- 
 liner anchored near a sailing yacht. 
 
 Her chestnut hair, silky and bright, was bundled into 
 a net at the back of her head, and her grey-blue eyes, 
 edged with long but blond lashes, looked sleepily out 
 from under heavy white lids. She wore a well-cut blue 
 coat and skirt and a white silk shirt with a rather low 
 collar that looked almost yellow against the dazzling 
 fairness of her neck. 
 
 Tommy eyed her interestedly. " You it is funny 
 seeing you like this," he began abruptly ; " you see, I 
 had forgotten all about you." 
 
 " Had you ? " Her surprise was genuine. " Well, 
 I 'm Pammy. And my real name is Wantage, and 
 mother adopted me before she married father. It 's all 
 very romantic, only it 's a pity I am so fat. Ah, here 
 she is ! " 
 
 Madame de Lensky came downstairs as lightly as if 
 she had been twenty ; she was one of the thin, narrow- 
 footed women whose figures never grow old.
 
 KINGSMEAD 113 
 
 Tommy had last seen her nearly ten years ago, and 
 her grey hair shocked him, although the youth of her 
 expression and the charm of her smile comforted him 
 somewhat. His habit being to feel himself the contem- 
 porary of those with whom he was thrown, he had really 
 never before quite realised that this friend of his sister 
 was ten years older than Brigit ; but a moment after 
 her coming into the room he had lost the first impres- 
 sion made by her hair, and found himself talking to her 
 as to one of his own age. That Pammy's grown-upness 
 had surprised him he told Pammy's adopted mother, who 
 laughed and smiled up at the great girl standing beside 
 her. 
 
 " Yes, is n't she a monster ? We call her Germania. 
 Brigit says she is going to be good-looking. We hope 
 so, don't we, Pammy ? " 
 
 Pammy laughed, showing a vast number of very white 
 teeth. " We do, mother dear. But as long as my 
 appetite continues what it is now, we hope in vain. 
 Shall I go?" 
 
 Pam hesitated. " Shall she, Tommy? " 
 
 But Tommy had now, in his thoughts, gone back to 
 Pammy's age, and even while he was, in relation to 
 Pam, practically six-and-forty, he wanted his other con- 
 temporary to stay. 
 
 " No, no, don't go. Let her stay, Madame de Lensky. 
 You see, it 's a plot, and the Duchess wants you to help 
 us; will you? " 
 8
 
 114 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Oh dear, yes," assented Pam briskly, " I lore a plot. 
 What is it? " 
 
 And Tommy explained in fewer and less alluring 
 words than he had used to the Duchess, for Madame de 
 Lensky, he realised, approached the subject already 
 sufficiently prejudiced in its favour by the mere fact 
 of the Duchess's adherence. 
 
 Pam listened with the deepest interest, her thin, dark 
 face touched from time to time by a quick smile, and 
 her eyebrows expressing sympathy and understanding 
 in a rather un-English way. 
 
 Pammy, on the contrary, large peach-coloured 
 Pammy's face was impassive, almost stolid, as she list- 
 ened, and her eyebrows were, so to say, quite silent. 
 
 Tommy, fresh from Italy, where more than half of 
 every conversation is carried on without words, was 
 more comfortable in his role of raconteur with the elder 
 woman. 
 
 " And so you see," he wound up after five minutes' 
 hard talking, " the Duchess is coming down to stop, and 
 we want you to come too." 
 
 " But I can't, my dear infant ! What do you think 
 would become of my husband and my children if I de- 
 serted them and went skylarking at Christmas? " 
 
 " They," returned Tommy imperturbably, " are to 
 come too. There is plenty of room at Kingsmead. Oh 
 3 r es, you certainly must come. The Duchess is com- 
 ing to see you this afternoon. She says you will do
 
 KINGSMEAD 115 
 
 whatever she asks you, because she is a lonely old 
 woman." 
 
 " She is a wicked old fraud. However, Pammy, a 
 few days in the country might do Lieschen good." 
 
 Pammy frankly grinned. 
 
 " Oh, mother dearest, do let 's go ! It all sounds such 
 fun, and we have been in town so long, and father won't 
 mind." 
 
 " It is a rather large order, Tommy," mused Madame 
 de Lensky, drawing her brows together thoughtfully. 
 " ' We are seven ! ' For my old nurse has come for 
 Christmas, and I could n't desert her, and then Eliza's 
 nurse would have to come " 
 
 Tommy rose. 
 
 " I," he said, with much grandiloquence, " am a min- 
 ister plenipotentiary ; full power have I to house for 
 this week, in the home of my ancestors, unto seventy 
 times seven! So you must come, and you will like the 
 old Lansings, and you will show the young Lansings 
 that h's and accents are not everything, and that the 
 lack of early education is not necessarily an insurmount- 
 able barrier between people and the elect of their kind." 
 
 " We are not at all grand people, though," put in 
 Pammy at this point, " are we, mother ? " 
 
 Pam laughed. " We reflect, to the gaze of some hu- 
 man beings, much glory from the Duchess, dear," she 
 returned. 
 
 Then she shook Tommy warmly by both hands, prom-
 
 116 KINGSMEAD 
 
 ised to arrive with the members of her tribe on Christ- 
 mas eye, and sent her love to Brigit, whom she had, she 
 said, not seen for ages. 
 
 Pamray went to the door with Tommy and gave him 
 her large, smooth hand. 
 
 " I 'm jolly glad we 're coming," she said. " I hope 
 we are to dance? " 
 
 Tommy smiled up at her. " Rath-er ! " he answered.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MRS. LANSING, very red in the face, sat before her glass 
 while her maid dressed her hair. 
 
 The great moment was over ; the Duchess had come, 
 had drunk tea and eaten a vast amount of bread and 
 butter, and, apparently, had not so much as noticed her 
 hostess's slip in twice calling her " your grace." 
 
 " The Duchess wears diamond earrings, Horton," 
 commented Mrs. Lansing, " so I don't see why I can't 
 wear mine." 
 
 " No, madame." 
 
 The words were all that could be desired, but Horton 
 was haughty and her mistress knew it. Horton had 
 lived for several years with a Somersetshire lady whose 
 own sister-in-law was a countess, but even Horton had 
 never before lived in a house where duchesses came to 
 stop, and her superiority among the other servants was, 
 the proud handmaiden knew, shaken by the appearance 
 of her fat Grace of Wight. No longer could she, Hor- 
 ton, Spater the housekeeper's room with tales of the 
 " Countess of Cumberland, my lady's own sister-in-law 
 and very dearest friend." 
 
 And a drop from heights of superiority is always dis- 
 pleasing, as nearly everyone knows. 
 
 117
 
 118 KINGSMEAD 
 
 So Horton maintained an injured silence as she rolled 
 her plebeian mistress's scant hair into a number of little 
 hollow sausages and impaled them savagely on small 
 hairpins. 
 
 " I wish to see Mrs. Cockran to-morrow morning, 
 Horton." 
 
 " Very good, madame." 
 
 Mrs. Lansing eyed her shrewdly in the glass. The 
 situation was not devoid of amusement. 
 
 " I don't quite know about the bed in the yellow room," 
 she continued indifferently. " Mr. Teddy wants Sir Wil- 
 fred Oxendale-Murray put there, but " 
 
 The hairpin of the moment missed fire under a con- 
 vulsive movement of its director's hand, and ran into 
 Mrs. Lansing's scalp. " Good gracious, 'Orton ! " 
 
 " I beg pardon, madame." 
 
 And Horton considered, as she went on with her 
 task, the advisability of leaving her present very com- 
 fortable position and, if she could not find one with 
 what she called a real lady, to at least find one where 
 she could enjoy the prestige of her come-down in the 
 world. 
 
 It had at least been better than nothing to be able to 
 pity Mrs. Cockran the housekeeper, and the other ser- 
 vants, for the commonness of their mistress and her 
 friends, and the countess in Somersetshire had been 
 worth much gold to her as a means of enhancing her 
 own importance.
 
 KINGSMEAD 119 
 
 But now Wilson the butler had already begun 
 to put on airs on the strength of the duchess's pres- 
 ence, and even Henry the first footman had laughed, 
 at tea, at her comparing the countess to his lady's 
 duchess. 
 
 " Chummy as hanythink they were," he had observed. 
 " / did n't know our old girl 'ad that kind of friends. 
 Which just goes to prove that you never can tell, don't 
 it, Miss 'Orton? " 
 
 So Horton's heart was full of bitterness as she ar- 
 rayed her lady in black velvet, according to strict orders 
 from Inez, who had shown a very unusual interest in 
 her mother's appearance. 
 
 As the maid clasped a necklace of fine pearls round 
 Mrs. Lansing's billowy neck, Inez came into the 
 room. 
 
 " Oh, mother, how nice you look ! " 
 
 Mrs. Lansing stared, a half-amused smile on her lips. 
 " Thank you, Inez." 
 
 Tbe girl, who was very well dressed in pale yellow, a 
 shade remarkably becoming to her, particularly with the 
 unusual colour that there was to-night in her pale 
 cheeks, came closer. 
 
 " She 's a dear is n't she ? " 
 
 " Who? Nanny Gilpin? " 
 
 Mrs. Lansing's voice was malicious, but Inez laughed. 
 
 " No, the Duchess. And she seemed to like you so 
 much, mother."
 
 120 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Mrs. Lansing shrugged her vast shoulders, an act 
 that caused a kind of tidal-wave of flesh to rise from 
 her pale mauve bosom and roll up in a threatening 
 way. 
 
 " Like me, does she, my dear ? I dare say. Tommy 
 told 'er to." 
 
 The girl stared, her keen eyes full of amazement. 
 
 "Tommy?" 
 
 " Yes, Tommy." 
 
 " But you must n't call him by his Christian name, 
 mother, really you must n't." 
 
 The old lady took up her gloves and chuckled. " Why 
 not?" 
 
 " Because why, because you don't know him well 
 enough." 
 
 " Oh, 'e 's only a boy," returned Mrs. Lansing com- 
 fortably, " and it 's cosier calling people by their 
 names." 
 
 She did not look at her daughter, but there was a 
 suspicious twist to her lips as she spoke. 
 
 " It may be cosier, mother, but it 's not done. So 
 please don't do it again." 
 
 " Anything to please you, my dear. I '11 call 'im 
 Lord K., then." 
 
 " Mother ! " 
 
 Inez was frankly angry now, and ignoring the pres- 
 ence of the maid in a way that would have done credit 
 to one born in higher spheres, she burst out angrily,
 
 KINGSMEAD 121 
 
 " You are only doing it to annoy me, and it 's horrid 
 of you. Do as you like, only remember that the Duchess 
 will think you very vulgar if you call him anything but 
 Lord Kingsmead." 
 
 Miss Lansing's indomitable parent laughed heartily 
 as she struggled into an overtight glove. 
 
 " Never you mind about the Duchess, my dear. The 
 Duchess won't care a pin what I call anybody. She and 
 me '11 get along all right, because she J s clever enough to 
 dislike affectation, and because I 'm clever enough to 
 seem just what the Lord made me. The thing she 
 won't like is your being grand. Don't you be grand, 
 Inez Maria, or she won't like you. If you are n't 
 born grand it 's vulgar to try, mind that, and it 
 does n't fool anyone, not even servants does it, 
 'Orton?" 
 
 Horton, who was a consistently malicious person, 
 and who thoroughly enjoyed rows, pursed her lips 
 primly. 
 
 " I 'm sure I don't know, madame. I J ve card Lady 
 Cumberland say " 
 
 Mrs. Lansing waved her half-gloved hand indul- 
 gently. " Yes, I remember your telling me that. 
 Well, Inez, come along, let 's go down. And you 
 take my advice, and be natural. Then if the Duchess 
 don't like you she just won't like you; she can't laugh 
 at you, or think you vulgar. Whereas if you wince 
 when I drop an ' h ' or look bored when your father
 
 122 KINGSMEAD 
 
 and I talk, then she '11 despise you. Give me your arm, 
 my dear." 
 
 Inez was silenced. All her life she had failed to under- 
 stand her mother, and the old woman, for the sake of 
 peace, seldom spoke out what the girl had an uneasy 
 sense was in her mind. But when, as on this occasion, 
 Mrs. Lansing did speak out and assert her authority, 
 her mental weight hopelessly outbalanced her daughter's, 
 and Inez, baffled and angry though she was, came nearer 
 than at any other time to admiring her. 
 
 " I did n't mean to be rude, mother," Inez said as they 
 went very slowly downstairs. 
 
 " You were n't rude, but you don't always understand 
 things, and I am your mother and must tell you. I 'm 
 glad for your sake that the Duchess has come, and 
 Tommy was a dear to arrange it. And as to me well, 
 she is a clever woman and I like her, and we get on to- 
 gether very nicely." 
 
 Inez did not answer. She herself, modelling her 
 manner closely after the young woman whose existence 
 Tommy had so quickly discovered, had met the Duchess 
 calmly and gracefully, but she knew that the ducal 
 advent had been in reality very upsetting to her, whereas 
 her mother's tranquillity was, she fully realised, perfectly 
 unaffected and deep-rooted. 
 
 The difference between her mother and herself was 
 that she strove for what her mother, in spite of her 
 educational defects, possessed as a natural gift. And
 
 KINGSMEAD 123 
 
 as they went down the hall the girl hated herself for 
 her eternal attitude of pose. Why could not she be 
 natural be well bred naturally ? 
 
 It was a difficult question, and her mind was not 
 capable of answering it. When they entered the draw- 
 ing-room they found Tommy alone in it, sitting close 
 to the fire. Rising, he came toward them. 
 
 " Well," he cried eagerly, " how do you like her? " 
 Mrs. Lansing with a grunt of relief lowered her 
 huge body into a chair and leaned her stick against 
 a table. 
 
 " I like 'er very much," she returned simply, while 
 the half-reluctant admiration for her again surged in 
 her daughter's mind. 
 
 "Yes, isn't she nice? She really is a dear. Has 
 Habberton come, Mrs. Lansing? " 
 " Yes, he came an hour ago." 
 
 " He amuses the Duchess," explained the Master of 
 Ceremonies quite seriously. " He writes, you know, and 
 she likes having him about." 
 
 " This is all very kind of you, Lord Kingsmead," be- 
 gan Inez suddenly, her dark face flushing ; " nobody has 
 
 thanked you " 
 
 " My dear Miss Lansing, please don't. I love it 
 not being thanked, but having the party. You must 
 remember that I have been living the life of a hermit 
 for years, and that I love people. Also, I am by nature 
 the most meddlesome little beggar ! "
 
 124 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " That you 're not, Tommy," declared the old woman 
 decisively. " If you don't want to be thanked you 
 sha' n't be, but I won't let you call yourself names. I 
 think this party delightful, and so does 'Enry, and 
 the nicest part of it is 'aving you with us. I think you 
 are about the nicest boy I ever knew. So there ! " 
 
 Tommy's little sensitive face flushed scarlet, but it was 
 with pleasure, not with embarrassment. He was never 
 embarrassed unless he found himself forced to save a 
 situation by an implied or an expressed lie. This child- 
 like confidence, not so much in himself as in others, was 
 one of his strongest characteristics. 
 
 " Thank you very much," he said, bending over her 
 fat old hand and kissing it gently, "I I do so like to 
 be liked." 
 
 " Well, well, well ! Making love to my wife, are you, 
 Lord Kingsmead ? " Old Lansing stood beside them, 
 his quick blue eyes twinkling pleasantly. 
 
 Tommy laughed. " She has been making love to me," 
 he answered; " have n't you, Mrs. Lansing? " 
 
 " That I 'ave, 'Enry. Shocked? " 
 
 Her smile up at her little old husband was very sweet, 
 and Tommy suddenly saw her, in one of his lightning- 
 flashes of visualisation, as she must have been in their 
 wooing time. And because he knew that she had been 
 a poor girl, a factory girl, he seemed to see her, brown- 
 haired and bright-eyed, standing by a large wheel in 
 a dark wheel-filled room. The wheels, he fancied, were
 
 KINGSMEAD 125 
 
 looms, but no loom was ever in the least like the one of 
 his imagination. 
 
 For a moment, thus, he stood looking on at the youth 
 of his old host and hostess, and his romantic heart beat 
 loud in his breast.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE Duchess, whose interest in Tommy's plan was per- 
 fectly unaffected as well as keen, enjoyed her excellent 
 dinner with a zest which very few old women attain to ; 
 for over half a century of exaggeratedly luxurious feed- 
 ing does not tend to strengthen the digestive apparatus 
 of most people. 
 
 " I, however," the old lady declared with the gay air 
 that made her matchless among her contemporaries, 
 " am an ostrich ! And the ostrich is an excellent and 
 contented bird, is n't he, Tommy ? " 
 
 Tommy nodded, his most faunlike smile curling his 
 mouth. " The king of the feathered kingdom," he re- 
 turned, " or the queen. I too am a devotee of the table. 
 My favourite dish is maccaroni and sago maccaroni 
 cooked in gravy, full of crumbs of some perfectly 
 indistinguishable meat." 
 
 Lady Pontefract smiled down the table at him. " And 
 wee song-birds fried in batter ! " 
 
 He flushed. " I 've never had 'em again, Brigit 
 really never" The episode of the song-birds, served to 
 them at dinner one night at the Castelletto, had been a 
 painful one, for Tommy had torn his hair in despair 
 over the untimely and horrid fate of the tiny tilings, 
 
 126
 
 KINGSMEAD 127 
 
 while his cook and factotum, her hands on her hips, 
 regarded him in kindly, scornful wonder. Brigit had 
 never forgotten the scene. 
 
 There were various such pictures in the back of her 
 mind, waiting only for the flash-light of memory to 
 bring them into vivid prominence. 
 
 Another was Tommy lying in bed tossed with fever, 
 racked with pain, listening to Victor Joyselle playing 
 the violin. He had been full of gentle kindness to her 
 little brother, the great man whom she had loved 
 whom, in part, she should always love. And that 
 autumn evening, as he played to the sick child, his face 
 had been full of a kind of glory. 
 
 Lady Pontefract ate her dinner as her neighbours 
 did, answered old Lansing, who, liking her, was not 
 frightened by her grandeur, but talked to her quite 
 naturally and amusingly, and to the other people at the 
 table looked perfectly self-possessed and as usual. But 
 in reality her mind had gone back ten years or more 
 and she was re-living the one year of her life that had 
 been real life. 
 
 How they had abused him ! How her mother had 
 reviled her! How, after the death of his wife, she, 
 Brigit, had suffered! 
 
 But they had let her try to help him. Theo had been 
 good to her, and only the Master's own gentle indiffer- 
 ence to her presence had at last broken her down and 
 sent her away from him.
 
 128 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " I was very wicked," she told herself tranquilly, 
 facing, as she had always done, her own iniquity, 
 " and he did try to be loyal to his son. It was I who 
 would n't let him. But he did love me a little, and if 
 I had been good he would have loved me much as a 
 daughter." 
 
 Ancient history, all this, but it was in the mind of 
 more than Lady Pontefract that evening. For the 
 Duchess had last dined at Kingsmead during the first 
 visit of the violinist, and now she too, as she listened to 
 the epigrammatic and slightly forced wit of the pale- 
 lipped novelist beside her, recalled the night she had 
 watched the beautiful girl and wondered how the love 
 of a pleasant but negative youth like Theo Joyselle 
 could so transform her. 
 
 " What does one hear of Joyselle, Brigit ? " she asked 
 suddenly. 
 
 Lady Pontefract looked at her. " I was just thinking 
 about him, Duchess. He has had another stroke and is 
 living in Normandy. Theo tells me that his mind is 
 quite clear and that he seems very contented, although 
 he can never play again." 
 
 She spoke without a shade of embarrassment, her 
 sombre, dark eyes fixed on the old woman's face. 
 
 " Poor man, poor man ! I heard him play in town 
 two years ago. He was magnificent that day nearly 
 drove his audience mad. A most majestic creature he 
 was."
 
 KINGSMEAD 129 
 
 " Yes. I last heard him in Paris at the Chatelet, 
 just after we came home from the East." 
 
 The Duchess's eyes glowed. " Did you see him to 
 speak to? " She was very curious and had not the 
 gentle tact that kept Tommy's curiosity so well within 
 bounds. 
 
 Brigit smiled. " No. It would have upset me, and 
 he would not have liked it," she returned ; " but Ponty 
 saw him at the Cafe de Paris one night. He was greatly 
 en train, throwing flowers, etc." 
 
 " A delightful vaurlen," murmured the Duchess, a 
 little disappointed, for though she liked Brigit it would 
 have amused her to detect in her some sign of emotion. 
 Tommy it was who answered her. 
 
 " Vaurien, Duchess? He? How can you!" 
 
 " My dear Tommy, don't teach your grandmother 
 etc. A great musician, a genius, a charming and a good 
 friend all these things I will grant you ; but oh 
 yes, quite decidedly a vaurien as well. Loved not wisely 
 but too often that kind of person. Ah me ! " she 
 heaved a deep sigh as she removed a drop of mayonnaise 
 that had fallen on her bejewelled old bosom, " how true 
 it is, in matters of love, that to him who has much will 
 be given. The creature loved dozens of women, and 
 hundreds of women loved him." 
 
 Old Lansing, who vaguely remembered a story about 
 the great fiddler and Lady Pontefract, coughed diffi- 
 dently at this point and drew a herring across the trail, 
 9
 
 130 KINGSMEAD 
 
 in the shape of a sudden question about the Duchess's 
 dog, whom he had seen being carried upstairs by her 
 maid. 
 
 "Oh, Flafla? Nasty little dog. I hate little dogs, 
 but my maid likes 'em, and as Flafla is very valuable 
 (somebody gave her to me), Poe is very attentive to 
 her. She enhances Foe's importance, I dare say. Do 
 you like dogs, Mr. Lansing? " 
 
 Old Lansing's wistful, wrinkled face suddenly broad- 
 ened delightedly. 
 
 " Yes, your grace, I love 'em. I 're got a terrier, 
 Pincher, 'oo is as intelligent as most 'uman beings. 'E 
 sits up and begs just ' 
 
 " Just like a man? Yes, yes, dogs, in their unattrac- 
 tive qualities, are very like men. They are greedy, 
 low-minded, time-serving and capricious. I never 
 saw a dog who wanted ever to be where he was. If 
 they 're in they want to go out, and if they 're out they 
 want to go in. Hate 'em! " 
 
 Everyone laughed, for her arraignment she deliv- 
 ered in a pleasant, soft voice, while she beamed at old 
 Lansing, who was much surprised by the result of his 
 question. 
 
 The Duchess, old as she was, usually found herself the 
 centre of attraction at dinner. She was shrewd and 
 kindly, and wise with the great wisdom of those old 
 people who have lived every moment of their lives. 
 
 So she smiled at her audience, as the others had tac-
 
 KINGSMEAD 131 
 
 itly constituted themselves, and with a gay wave of a 
 well-kept, curiously veined old hand, dismissed it as an 
 entity and made it recede into individuality. 
 
 " Who," she said in an undertone to old Lansing as 
 two or three different conversations began at the same 
 time, " did you say this charming little creature in 
 white is? " 
 
 " Gilpin," whispered Lansing behind his hand. " A 
 widow. 'Usband in the army. Great friend of my 
 girl's." 
 
 " I like her nice hair nice eyes. Have you ever 
 met Pam Wantage, Mr. Lansing I mean Pam 
 Lensky? They are coming to-morrow." 
 
 Lansing glanced at her quickly, some of the shrewd- 
 ness and self-possession of his business personality flow- 
 ing for a moment through the shy dulness of his society 
 manner. 
 
 " No," he returned frankly, " never even 'eard of 'er. 
 This party, Duchess, is really Tommy's, as you must 
 see." 
 
 " I gathered as much. As a matter of fact, indeed, 
 he told me so. Oh, I quite understand," she went on, 
 " and I like it, too. It 's hard for a young thing like 
 your girl to see gaiety going on and not be in it. As 
 to Tommy he is my greatest j oy. He ought to 
 be handsome and he is n't, but his funny face is 
 charming, I think. Is he in love with your daughter? " 
 
 Lansing started and then laughed. " Not likely, is
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 it ? Of course ' is n't. But I think 'e likes my wife 
 and me. Teddy 'e loves. Why 'e should take such a 
 lot of trouble about us I can't quite see, but there 
 it is. It amuses 'im, I suppose. 'E 's romantic, Tommy 
 is." 
 
 The Duchess was very glad she had come. Her great- 
 nephew the present duke was a model landlord and a 
 budding pillar of state, if a pillar can be said ever 
 to do anything so poetic as bud, but he was a dull 
 dog, and she would have loathed Christmas with him 
 and his prolific and red-nosed wife. It was a great 
 grievance of the old lady's, this fact that just her great- 
 nephew should be so indisputably the dullest duke in 
 England, for she herself was as unquestionably the gay- 
 est dowager-duchess, as well as the second oldest. It 
 bored her beyond words to hear people praise the young 
 man who kept his strawberry leaves so stodgily under 
 a bushel, and she used sorrowfully to enumerate the bold, 
 bad young dukes who should have been her nephews. 
 
 " Charlotte St. Edmunds mourns over that Gaiety 
 daughter-in-law of hers," she had been heard to cry, 
 " whereas I would welcome her with open arms. A de- 
 lightful, amusing little thing, who raakes St. Edmunds 
 stantl round and wait on her as if he were a slave and 
 she a queen. Most amusing! And as to his debts and 
 his breach-of-promise case bless us and save us, I 
 would pay someone to sue Egbert if there was any chance 
 of getting even some fun out of it, But there are n't
 
 KINGSMEAD 133 
 
 twelve men in England who would n't bring in a verdict 
 for him against any possible evidence. A most horrible 
 young man, my ducal nephew ! " 
 
 But then Eliza Wight was a shocking old woman, and 
 those of her contemporaries to whom, as to Solomon 
 and David, time had brought a certain amount of plated 
 piety, used to shake their heads over her outspokenness 
 and comfortably forget in their dove-coloured presents 
 their own more or less purple pasts. 
 
 Therefore, her old spirit of adventure still, as she 
 herself would have put it, " going strong," the Duchess 
 smiled at pretty Nancy Gilpin and handsome Teddy, 
 and was glad that she was here and not with Egbert and 
 Beryl at Wight Castle.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 " IT is," Tommy told himself several hours later, as he 
 walked up and down his room, his hands in his trousers 
 pockets, " the end of the first part. Or rather, possibly, 
 the introduction. My coming, my grasping the situa- 
 tion or no, I did n't grasp it, it just seemed to soak 
 in, as if I were a * sponge-finger ' and it the rum and 
 sugar was the introduction the prologue. Teddy, 
 the dear, and his dear old father and mother, and Inez. 
 She stands for unrest, Inez, and mental discomfort. 
 Quite obviously the one to be pacified, the one requir- 
 ing sops. And then the Mignonette Lady ! She, in 
 her way, is perfect. And it is a good way. She is not 
 brilliant, but brilliant women are a bore in the long 
 run. She is beautiful, and quiet, and sympathetic, and 
 good. 
 
 " And Teddy adores her. He will always adore her. 
 It is the Blessed, Marvellous, Real Thing. 
 
 " In this galere arrive I, Tommy the Small and Inter- 
 ested. And I wonder at first, and then, of course, I 
 squirm. (If that girl could only realise, poor thing, 
 that it 's the squirming feeling one gets when with her 
 father and mother and her that matters !) I like the old 
 ones, and am sorry for the young one. 
 
 134
 
 KINGSMEAD 135 
 
 " And then, as if a worsted warrior suddenly remem- 
 bered that deep in one of his pockets do warriors have 
 pockets ? he carries a forgotten weapon, I remember 
 my forgotten weapon. 
 
 " Teddy's love-story must be told in a beautiful gar- 
 den, not in a not in a crowded room full of scolding 
 people. Inez must be placated, poor girl! Father and 
 mother must be shown at their real value, so that she 
 will not enhance the squirmy feeling. Tommy the In- 
 significant must go forth nonce, and the Right Honour- 
 able Earl of Kingsmead burst forth from that modest 
 chrysalis. Hey presto ! a Duchess, a Scots Greysman, 
 the much-sought-after Madame de Lensky. 
 
 " Christmas, full of sentimental possibilities, the 
 Mignonette Lady in the house with Teddy, a dance 
 New Year's eve in the Great Hall of my fathers, 
 ' Peace on earth, good will to all men,' " concluded the 
 soliloquiser, suddenly serious, quoting the beautiful 
 phrase as the old version hath it, for he had lived of 
 late in a country where the ancient form prevails. 
 
 His window was open, for the cold weather had broken, 
 and a warm, light rain had just stopped falling. Stand- 
 ing there looking out into the mild night, Tommy's face 
 wore a quaint expression of pride and wistfulness. He 
 had taken things into his own hands ; he loved managing 
 people and nursing situations ; and up to this all had 
 gone well. 
 
 Yet something arrested his thoughts and made him
 
 136 KINGSMEAD 
 
 pause with a little mental start. He had set going a 
 somewhat complicated machine. What would happen 
 now? Teddy in his strength and beauty meant to him 
 something so romantic; Teddy's love for the gentle 
 little Mignonette Lady something so poetic ; should he, 
 as gardener, be able to do all that he wished? Humanity 
 is so impotent. For a moment the young man's small 
 face was wan with anxiety. Then, hearing a low sound, 
 he leaned out of his window, and saw at a neighbouring 
 window Teddy sitting gazing up at where he stood 
 Teddy watching the Mignonette Lady's light. Tommy 
 smiled delightedly. 
 
 " Yes," he said aloud, " it is only the end to the pro- 
 logue. La commedia comwcia"
 
 PART II *%* CHAPTER I 
 
 THE comedy, as Tommy called it, in the Italian sense, 
 meaning not a farcical play, but a play of men and man- 
 ners untouched by black tragedy, began auspiciously. 
 His feeling that he was in a way the magician who had 
 called from the vasty deep spirits who were to lend their 
 aid to his earthly proteges, this feeling of anxious pro- 
 prietorship Tommy shared with two people. 
 
 The Duchess, summoning him to her bedside the morn- 
 ing of Christmas eve, told him in so many words that 
 she regarded him as a conspirator. " You are masterly, 
 but I see through you and your ' beautiful reason,' " she 
 declared, smiling at him from under the lace scarf that 
 disguised her lack of hair ; " masterly but also manag- 
 ing. Your great-uncle Oswald used to declare that I 
 had a finger that longed to be in every pie, and I declare 
 that you have. You are a meddling, match-making 
 person ! " 
 
 Tommy sat down and burst out laughing. 
 
 " Match-making? " he asked with obviously artificial 
 ingenuousness. " Now what can you mean by that? 
 My great-uncle Oswald was more discerning than you, 
 I fear." 
 
 137
 
 1S8 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Get out ! You mean the Sun-god to marry the 
 pretty person with the eyes." 
 
 " Well? " Unabashed, Tommy helped himself to a 
 bit of toast from her tray and crunched it boldly. 
 " Could anything be better? " 
 
 The Duchess finished her tea and set down the cup. 
 " My dear boy, no mortal has ever yet profited a ha'- 
 pennyworth by the experience of any other mortal, but 
 I must tell you that match-making is a snare of the evil 
 one. Moi qui vous parle, I know it." 
 
 " And moi qui vous parle agree. Only " Tommy 
 beamed delightedly at her " it is such fun, is n't it ? 
 Besides," he amended hastily, " I have not plotted to 
 make a marriage; the marriage, humanly speaking, is 
 made. I came here and found it already begun and 
 going strong. All I want to do is make things easy 
 and pleasant for them. They are," he added, " both 
 such dears." 
 
 " Oh, dears, yes. And I like her. She is a lady, and 
 she is quiet. Also, she is quite delicious to look at. 
 Who is she? " 
 
 Tommy shrugged his shoulders. " Have n't an idea. 
 I believe her name was Blair. Her husband was killed in 
 some native uprising in India. She was very fond of 
 him. But he was, I believe, years older than she. Teddy 
 told me these things. She never talks about herself." 
 
 " Any money? " 
 
 " Two thousand a year. But he has no end, you see."
 
 KINGSMEAD 139 
 
 Foe, her grace's maid, coming into the room to bring 
 the post, pursed her lips disapprovingly at the sight of 
 the plotters. The Duchess might be as old as the 'ills, 
 but there are limits, Poe thought. 
 
 Poe in her youth had been quite joyously unmoral, 
 but that she had, no doubt, forgotten. 
 
 " He 's very much in love," pronounced the Duchess, 
 disregarding the woman's presence. " I like to see it." 
 
 " So do I," agreed Tommy gravely. Then he burst 
 out laughing at his sententiousness, for he saw his youth 
 and was amused by it in a .way unknown to most 
 youngsters. 
 
 " How wise I sound, don't I? " he asked with a little 
 chuckle. 
 
 " Very. Were you ever in love yourself? " 
 
 " Ah no ! Not that. I am only three-and-twenty," 
 he returned, suddenly grave. 
 
 " H'm ! I have known people however, to get back 
 to our muttons. What will the father and mother 
 say?" 
 
 " Say ? They '11 be delighted, of course. Why not? " 
 
 " You never can tell, as Father Bernard Shaw says 
 such a nice composite name for the two reforming B's, 
 is n't it ? They might think her too old for him. She 
 must be seven-and-twenty." 
 
 " She is, exactly seven-and-twenty. And he is twenty- 
 four. But what," he added, " can that possibly matter? 
 She is so beautiful, and then she is so quiet and and
 
 140 KINGSMEAD 
 
 good. Teddy," he went on, choosing his every word 
 with obvious care, " is a splendid fellow, but he has of 
 course the faults of his qualities, like everybody else 
 except thee and me ! And the more I see of her the more 
 I am convinced that she is the one woman in the world 
 who can make of him what he is capable of. I mean to 
 say to be such a perfect balance-wheel for him " 
 
 " Chorus girls or cards? " inquired the Duchess dis- 
 concertingly, and the foolish Tommy actually blushed. 
 
 " What a horrid old woman you are ! " he declared 
 with a frown of disapproval. " Who suggested any- 
 thing so awful? " 
 
 " You did n't, but you meant 'em. So he 's wild, 
 the Sun-god, and her r61e is to tame him. Poor thing ! " 
 she added drily. 
 
 " Jolly lucky to have him marry her, nice though she 
 is," declared Teddy's champion with warmth. " He 's 
 splendid, Lanner is, and I love him dearly." 
 
 " What an essentially un-British speech ! Italy 
 again ! " 
 
 " What do you mean ? " 
 
 " Well, I mean that the Italian sun, brazen old crea- 
 ture, seems to burn in to Anglo-Saxons who live under 
 him a certain warmth and frankness unknown to us 
 stray stay-at-homes. Pam Lensky was much like you in 
 that way. She spoke in English but she thought in 
 Italian. However, go on. What were you saying? 
 That he was very fast and needed a brake on his wheel."
 
 KINGSMEAD 141 
 
 " Not a bit. That well, that he loves her and 
 that if, as I believe, she loves him, she can bring him to 
 the highest possibilities of his nature. And another 
 thing. Miss Lansing, up to this, has not noticed, and 
 do help me to keep her from noticing. She she 's 
 very fond of Teddy and she likes Mrs. Gilpin, but if 
 she saw, I 'm sure she 'd say things tease them! " 
 
 He shuddered at the thought, a genuine, anticipatory 
 shudder of horror. 
 
 " It would be too awful. Mrs. Gilpin is so well, 
 you know what I mean, so dainty-minded. It would spoil 
 everything for her if Miss Lansing said anything. Do 
 you know what I mean ? " he added anxiously. 
 
 The old woman nodded. This was the second young 
 thing who had stirred her by a subtle resemblance to the 
 Oswald Yeoland of her youth. The second young thing, 
 and the first was now a middle-aged woman with grey 
 hair. 
 
 The Duchess closed her old eyes for a moment. She 
 felt very ancient, as if she were destined to go on living 
 forever, watching young people love, lose their illusions, 
 their beauty, their youth, while she herself remained, 
 as it were, anchored in an amusing but at the same time 
 desperately weary old age. And Tommy realised her 
 mood and liked it. 
 
 " You do understand," he said, laying his hand on 
 hers as it lay on the counterpane, " you do, and you will 
 help? Let 's be romantic and old-fashioned, Duchess
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 dear you be their fairy godmother and I '11 be your 
 page-boy or something. Let 's draw a web of unre- 
 ality round them, the young lovers ; keep the wind from 
 blowing on them, and the rain from raining on them. 
 Let 's manage for them, arrange that they may be alone, 
 send them for walks and drives, and win away from the 
 others little wonderful half -hours at the piano a 
 piano must be a good chaperon and little quick min- 
 utes at windows at night. Let 's build for them a wall- 
 less palace in which the dears shall think themselves in- 
 visible. That 's all they want to be alone alone 
 among all of us. It ought to be warm summer with 
 roses, but at least dusky minutes of crumbling fires can 
 be theirs " 
 
 He broke off, glowing with delight and beautifully 
 unashamed of his outburst, as he stood holding her old 
 kind hand in his young kind one. 
 
 She looked at him, her eyes wet with the ready, unfail- 
 ing tears of emotional old age. 
 
 " You are a poet," she said gently. 
 
 " Ah no ! I am only a musician rate failed. But 
 the whole world seems a poem when I look at them. Is 
 it a bargain? " 
 
 " It is, my dear," she answered. " Give me a kiss." 
 And his baby moustache just touched her faded cheek.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 " WHAT are you not to do, Pammy? " 
 
 The young girl laughed but answered promptly: 
 " Not cross my legs ; not laugh too loud ; not sing ; 
 not make a beast of myself over my food." 
 
 Lensky nodded. " Right, oh ma fille desesperante. 
 Also control your habit of butting into people in dark 
 passages, and above all don't ask questions." 
 
 " And don't bite your nails," added Pam. 
 
 Pammy turned indignantly. " Now, really, mamma ! 
 As if I ever bit my nails now ! However, all my pleasures 
 seem to be forbidden, so perhaps I 'd better get out and 
 walk back to town." 
 
 She had a pleasant, wide smile, showing very white 
 teeth, and under a black mushroom-shaped hat her 
 bright hair and red cheeks looked rather charming. 
 
 The three, with a small fourth, sat in the biggest of 
 the Kingsmead limousines, the fourth, young Thaddeus, 
 curled up with his nose glued to the window. 
 
 " There 's a cow," he cried delightedly. " I am glad 
 to see a cow." 
 
 Pammy laid a large dogskin hand on his shoulder. 
 " Q. K.," she observed. 
 
 " I won't be called a quaint kid, need I, father? " 
 
 143
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Thaddeus, turning, displayed a brown face full of help- 
 less indignation. Pammy was so big that even a great 
 fellow of eleven stood no chance against her. And 
 Pammy was an inveterate bred-in-the-bone tease. 
 
 " Shut up, Pammy," commanded Pam carelessly ; " if 
 you tease him you '11 be sent home." 
 
 Pam's hair was very grey, but she had not grown old. 
 She never would grow old. There are a few such women, 
 and curiously enough they are always women who sin- 
 cerely do not mind the process. Your dyed-haired, care- 
 fully made-up middle-aged young woman never belongs 
 to the elect few who remain, till the day they die, chil- 
 dren with children, maidens with maidens, young women 
 with the rest of the world. 
 
 For the thing, the growing old and fading of which 
 really matter, is not, as is generally supposed, either the 
 skin or the light of the eye. It is an inner thing, for 
 which no satisfactory name has yet been found, though 
 perhaps " spirit " is the nearest expression of it. And 
 Pam's spirit was young. 
 
 So, laughing and talking, the little party reached the 
 small door in the court at Kingsmead and were received 
 into the warm heart of that hospitable house. 
 
 In a second motor, closely following them, came an 
 old, delicate-looking woman in a rather grand black 
 dress and a very bugle-y bonnet, and a rosy, black- 
 haired girl of fifteen. These two were Jane Pilgrim, 
 once Pam's dearest in the world and still tyrant in the
 
 KINGSMEAD 145 
 
 household, and the elder Lensky child, Eliza, the Duch- 
 ess's goddaughter. 
 
 Convoyed by the attendant sprite Tommy to the pres- 
 ence of their hostess and the Fairy Godmother, the little 
 party was soon seated, with the exception of the grand 
 Miss Pilgrim, round the fire in the hall, eating and 
 drinking and talking. 
 
 Mrs. Lansing, busy with her cards, listened to all that 
 was said, put rapid questions, gave rapid answers. She 
 was greatly pleased with the change that had taken 
 place in her household. 
 
 The Duchess was charming, the guardsman affable 
 and obviously glad he had come, the novelist was quite 
 as unobjectionable as a novelist could possibly be, and 
 best of all, they all liked 'Enry and brought him out and 
 made him talk, and listened to him when he did talk! 
 
 Thus Inez, impressed by the deference paid by the 
 younger members of the house-party to her impossible 
 parents, had begun to lose the anxious look that was so 
 ungracious in a young girl, and to be more natural and 
 pleasant than her mother could remember her ever hav- 
 ing been before. 
 
 Tommy, of course, author of all this bliss, Tommy 
 had always been perfection. That he was wonderful and 
 comforting she had known from the first ; but that even 
 he could at will bring a beneficent rain, so to speak, of 
 simple-mannered swells to check the drought that had 
 
 so long continued at Kingsmead, she had not dared to 
 10
 
 146 KINGSMEAD 
 
 believe. Yet even this had happened, and the Duchess 
 had called her " my dear " twice as they played double 
 patience together ! 
 
 " You will play for us, Jack, after dinner? " 
 
 De Lensky bowed ceremoniously. " With pleasure, 
 Duchess." And it occurred to nobody that the Duchess 
 might have waited until Mrs. Lansing should ask 
 him. 
 
 Inez, who was really looking pretty, and to whom the 
 guardsman was making cautious love in the billiard- 
 room, looked out at the merry group by the fire and 
 laughed. 
 
 " Is n't he a dear little fellow, Tommy Kingsmead? " 
 she asked. 
 
 Captain Sir Wilfred Axendale-Murray screwed into 
 his eye the old-fashioned eye-glass of dandyism. 
 
 " Rum little cove, is n't he? Sister drew all the looks, 
 didn't she?" 
 
 Lady Brigit, who sat with her hand on the arm of 
 Madame de Lensky's chair, looked indeed very lovely in 
 the firelight. Inez nodded. " Perfectly beautiful," she 
 agreed warmly, for she was happy, and her small nature 
 needed happiness to bring out its savour. 
 
 Sir Wilfred shook his head. " Ah no, not that" he 
 protested in an appraising voice ; " must have been ten 
 years ago though. Too cold to suit me. I like," he 
 added, with a sidelong glance, " more colour and more
 
 KINGSMEAD 147 
 
 And Inez laughed, for she had plenty of go when 
 there was anything to go at. 
 
 The guardsman was hard up, and the guardsman had 
 expensive tastes. Tommy had known what he was about 
 when he had asked him down, for very solvent, thrifty 
 young guardsmen are at a premium, and had, he knew, 
 been all snapped up for the holidays by the early 
 mamma. Inez was not plainer than most rich girls, the 
 young man thought, and there was only one son. Also, 
 she would no doubt like to be my lady even if her 
 husband was only a baronet. ' " And money, I '11 be 
 bound, to b-u-r-n." 
 
 Thus the second wooing sheltered by Tommy's mild 
 wing. 
 
 Tommy himself, crossing the billiard-room, nodded 
 at the two talking over the table. 
 
 " Oh, what it is to be young ! " he grinned to him- 
 self. Axendale-Murray was, he knew, rather an ass, 
 but he was a nice ass, and if Inez pleased him why 
 not? 
 
 " I think I '11 start a matrimonial agency, Duchess," 
 Tommy began a few minutes later, sitting down by the 
 old woman and taking up a peacock-feather fire-screen. 
 " I seem to have been born for that purpose." 
 
 "Why, my dear?" 
 
 " Well I don't know. Here 's Axendale-Murray 
 casting the eye of approval on Miss Lansing, and Teddy 
 and Mrs. Gilpin have disappeared and no one noticed,
 
 148 KINGSMEAD 
 
 because I went with them as far as the library to look 
 at the Faerie Queene, which does n't exist " 
 
 " You don't mean to say you have taken to lying to 
 help on your proteges ? Oh, don't do that ! Telling the 
 truth is so much more original ! " 
 
 He shook his head gravely. " Certainly not. I mean 
 I never lie. Teddy did, though all he said was, * Want 
 to see the Faerie Queene ? ' And she is his Faerie 
 Queene, is n't she ? Though I 'm bound to admit that 
 that sanctifying thought originates in my mind at this 
 moment. Hello, he 's going to play. I have n't heard 
 him for years." 
 
 Jack Lensky had opened the piano, and, his fine, 
 white profile sharply outlined against the dark panel- 
 ling of the walls, began to play, touching the piano at 
 first in an almost apologetic manner, as if saying to it, 
 " My dear creature, I know I 'm not worthy of the 
 honour, but do sing to me a little." And the piano 
 sang. 
 
 He was not a finished musician; indeed, he played 
 entirely by ear; but that ear was extraordinarily cor- 
 rect and fine, and his memory quite remarkable. 
 
 So it was very delightful to sit there in the great, 
 softly lighted hall and listen to him. Tommy, as he 
 listened, also observed the other listeners, and he won- 
 dered what he should see if he could have read their 
 thoughts. 
 
 Lady Pontef ract, sitting alone in a deep window-niche.
 
 KINGSMEAD 149 
 
 was leaning back, her face in the shadow, her beautiful 
 mauve skirts spread out like the petals of a huge flower. 
 She of course was thinking of another musician who had 
 played long ago in that room. Tommy knew, and his 
 lips quivered for an instant. 
 
 The Duchess? Vaguely he realised that she was far 
 away in her youth, listening to other music. 
 
 Old Lansing sat by his wife, his square, thin hand on 
 her soft white one Darby and Joan in a very modern 
 edition. 
 
 Pam Lensky, who did not like music, was reading 
 near the fire, its light dancing on her slim, upright 
 figure and thick grey hair. At last, as her husband 
 played on and on, changing from one air to another, the 
 music affected even her musically deaf soul, for it was 
 he who played, and she dropped her review and turned 
 and watched the musician, a thoughtful smile on her 
 lips. 
 
 "Ever heard that story?" whispered the Duchess 
 suddenly, glancing at her. 
 
 Tommy shook his head, awakened from a dream of 
 blue water and sky and yellow light drenching an olive- 
 green slope. 
 
 " I '11 tell you some day. Her romance, poor dear ! 
 I never knew it till two years ago, when he died. Then 
 she told me." 
 
 Tommy nodded, and after a moment crept quietly 
 down the room and up the stairs. If they were there he
 
 150 KINGSMEAD 
 
 would open the windows so that the music could reach 
 them 
 
 At the top of the stairs he stood still, smiling with 
 happy tenderness. 
 
 The long gallery, hung on its inner wall with dark 
 portraits of his forbears, was lighted in three ways: 
 by one small cluster of electric lights far up in the 
 pointed roof; by a slumberous wood-fire; and by the 
 last rays of a pale sunset that came in touched with 
 glory through the ancient stained-glass windows. A 
 mystic, suggestive, poetic light it was ; and near the 
 fire, her white woollen dress rosy with its warmth, her 
 smooth head touched with a golden shaft from the 
 window behind her, sat Nancy Gilpin with Teddy. On 
 her lap she held a great book, and his arm, not touching 
 her, was stretched across the back of the dull-green sofa 
 on which they sat. 
 
 They were not looking at the book, and they were not 
 talking. 
 
 Their eyes were held by the faint fire, and they sat 
 there in happy silence, together. 
 
 Tommy watched them for a moment, and then, turn- 
 ing very quietly, he crept downstairs.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 WHEN Tommy rose from tucking a fat red-and-black 
 hassock under the Duchess's feet he felt that great prog- 
 ress had been made in his campaign. For here in the 
 old Kingsmead pew, in which he had sometimes sat as a 
 child, he had marshalled his forces, and at one glance 
 he saw that the Green collective eye was beautifully and 
 picturesquely wiped. 
 
 There they sat in their pew opposite, father, mother, 
 son, and daughter Green, and with them their countess 
 and their guardsman and their Jewish Welsh financier 
 people. Swells, in a way, all of them, poor Mrs. Lansing 
 would have admitted, but swells in a small way, a less 
 effulgent way than that of those in the Kingsmead 
 party. 
 
 The countess, in the first place, was a plain one, and 
 evidently a dull one; judging from her angular genu- 
 flexions as the service began, also a High Church one. 
 As a countess, an asset ; as a member of a house-party, 
 tiresome. 
 
 And even Tommy, glancing from the Duchess's dan- 
 cing plumes and brave furs to the ancient sealskin j acket 
 and strange bonnet of her unconscious rival, realised 
 that the merely middle-aged lady opposite was in some 
 
 151
 
 152 KINGSMEAD 
 
 mysterious way socially years older than the really 
 ancient Duchess. 
 
 The Duchess had gone first into the pew, because a 
 corner and a cushion had been two of the conditions 
 under which her reluctant grace had consented to come. 
 
 Then Mrs. Lansing, then Mrs. Gilpin, Teddy, Inez, 
 the guardsman, Pam, and Tommy mounting guard over 
 his little flock. Lensky never went to church, and the 
 novelist was en mal de composition and had cried off. 
 
 Now the vicar of Kingsmead was of the prosy order 
 of clerics, and his voice like the somnolent buzz of a large 
 bee. The church, heated by a so-called American stove, 
 made in Germany, was unfragrant and overwarm. The 
 village choir, so poetic in verse, is less soul-satisfying in 
 real life, and most of the parishioners were afflicted with 
 bad coughs. So that the service was not remarkable 
 for beauty or comfort. Yet it may safely be believed 
 that there were in the congregation at least five per- 
 fectly happy people. Happiness can as little be gener- 
 alised about as other things, and no two of these five 
 people were happy for the same reason. 
 
 Yet in the mind of each of them there was at least a 
 leaven of the malicious joy that the woes of one's fel- 
 lows are said to cause us. 
 
 Teddy, even in the midst of the bliss of a certain 
 look that Mrs. Gilpin had given him as he helped her 
 out of the motor, could not fail to notice young Hubert 
 Green's stare of amazement at seeing the Duchess.
 
 KINGSMEAD 153 
 
 Old Lansing, unselfish in that he would far rather 
 have spent the morning at home but had come to gratify 
 his daughter by flaunting before their enemy their great 
 prize, smiled a little grimly at the expression of old 
 Green's face. 
 
 Inez's whole mind was full of the joy of revenge, and, 
 very feminine, she took occasion to whisper a word or 
 two confidingly into the guardsman's ear at a moment 
 when she knew young Green was looking at her. But 
 still dearer to her was the Green girl's stare of amaze- 
 ment at recognising Axendale-JVIurray. Her guardsman 
 was an unfledged young creature with an imperfect com- 
 plexion and no moustache at all! 
 
 The Duchess was happy because her corner was dark 
 and she might hope, with any luck at all, to get a snatch 
 of sleep while that stupid old parson blundered through 
 his work and because Tommy was, she knew, full of 
 
 joy- 
 As to Tommy, that scheming nobleman was almost 
 
 shivering with vicarious rapture, for he too had seen the 
 Look at the churchyard gate, and felt that his hopes 
 were to be crowned with success. His feeling of guilt 
 regarding young Green had perished painlessly, and all 
 the esprit de corps in him and there was much 
 was tingling with joy as he watched the rival factions. 
 The young lady at the organ, knowing the eye of the 
 world to be on her, played rather worse than usual, 
 which was unnecessary; the children in the choir blew
 
 154 KINGSMEAD 
 
 .? 
 
 their noses loudly and at the most inopportune moments ; 
 the American stove glowed like the eye of a dethroned 
 demon and belched forth gaseous hot air; the crooked 
 evergreen arch at the chancel steps nearly, fell down as 
 Mr. Knox touched it with his shoulder on his way to the 
 pulpit. 
 
 And then came the sermon : the Duchess dropped quite 
 cosily to sleep, and everyone settled down to undisturbed 
 investigations of his or her own personal problems. 
 Sermons nurse egotism. Tommy, whose mind was now 
 several months farther on, somewhere about Easter, 
 arranging a very simple but artistic wedding, caught 
 Hubert Green's eye and nearly laughed aloud. 
 
 For young Green had by a single grimace managed 
 to convey to Tommy the question, " How on earth did 
 they get them down ? You and I are surprised, are n't 
 we? " 
 
 " And as, moreover," droned Mr. Knox, clearing his 
 throat, " this holiday season is dear to us all, and full 
 of innocent mirth as well as of deeper sentiments " 
 
 " Is n't he awful? " whispered Madame de Lensky 
 without turning her head. And because she was just 
 his own age in that mysterious way of hers, he whispered 
 back, " Rotten, poor old chap ! " and went back to his 
 planning. 
 
 At last the final Amen was said, and the squeaky 
 organ burst into a carolling, rather larky recessional, 
 and at the church door the two factions met.
 
 KINGSMEAD 155 
 
 The Greens could have done no more than bow and 
 pass on, but the captive Countess pushed her way 
 through the crowd and held out her limp hand to the 
 Duchess, who with a very brisk air, as if she had not 
 been asleep for hours, was chatting with Tommy. 
 
 " This is a surprise, Duchess ! " 
 
 " How do you do, Margaretta? Yes, is n't it? What 
 on earth are you doing down here? " 
 
 Lady Chatterdale looked hastily round. "Oh, I am here 
 with the Greens, you know. Algy and Alexandra are in 
 Egypt, and I 'm trying to get Mr. Green to contribute 
 to my little Convalescent Home. It 's very tiresome, 
 being here, but I stay in my room most of the time." 
 
 " How nice for them," assented the Duchess cordially. 
 
 " The motor is here, Lady Chatterdale," called Mr. 
 Green at that moment, coming toward them with " Duch- 
 ess " writ large on his mean face. 
 
 Lady Chatterdale looked imploringly at her old 
 friend. " May I? " she murmured hastily. " He '11 like 
 it so much." And the Duchess nodded, and shook hands 
 with the man whose bad beer was a crying shame but 
 whose money was, he was wont to declare, as good as 
 anybody's. He was one of the dreadful vulgarians whose 
 underbreeding expresses itself by familiarity. Com- 
 pared to him old Analyte Lansing appeared a model of 
 deportment. He called the Duchess " Duchess " at once, 
 asked her how her nephew, whom he called a clever, a 
 really quite remarkably clever young man, was, and
 
 156 KINGSMEAD 
 
 asked her if the music that morning was not the worst 
 she had ever heard. 
 
 And for Tommy's sake she suffered him gladly. 
 
 Meantime Inez had been talking to young Green, and 
 Miss Green, a pleasant-faced girl, who, judging from 
 her father, must have " taken after " her mother, was 
 chattering with Madame de Lensky. Tommy, the im- 
 pressario, stood in the doorway watching his puppets 
 dance, and rejoicing that, the day being dry and cold, 
 Nanny had consented to walk home through the firwood 
 with Teddy. 
 
 Nanny, in a quaint grey beaver bonnet and some 
 fluffy silver-grey fur round her neck, was very lovely 
 that morning, and it seemed to Tommy that if he had 
 been a young woman loved by the most enchanting of 
 wooers his imagination could demand no time for shy 
 surrender like the hour of walking home from church 
 on Christmas day. 
 
 At last old Green released the Duchess and going up 
 to Inez boldly held out his hand. He had refused to let 
 his friendly daughter call at Kingsmead, not only be- 
 cause the Lansings " knew nobody " but also because old 
 Lansing despised him and he knew it. 
 
 Yet now, confronted by a Duchess, his views changed. 
 " How do you do, Miss Lansing ? " he said ; " glad to 
 see you. You are pretty bad about coming to church 
 as a rule, are n't you? We always come. Does the vil- 
 lagers good."
 
 KINGSMEAD 157 
 
 Inez looked at him with a very good imitation of 
 haughtiness. 
 
 " Ah ! " she said. Then she walked away. " Come 
 on, Sir Wilfred," she said to her splendid soldier, " I 
 don't mind walking, as you want to." 
 
 The Duchess, who had taken Tommy's careful arm, 
 gave it a little shake. " Magnificent ! " she exclaimed ; 
 " are you satisfied? " 
 
 " More than. It was perfect. I know young Green, 
 did I tell you ? and I rather like him. The girl 
 looks nice, too, don't you think? But the old man," he 
 added vigorously, " has a thoroughly evil face." 
 
 The old woman, who had taken his arm as she went 
 down the path among the tombstones to the motors, 
 gave a little laugh. 
 
 " You the charitable saying that ? " 
 
 " Don't call me names, Duchess. And you know it is 
 a bad face, even if we were in blessed ignorance about 
 the beer." 
 
 " If the beer was so very bad they would n't let him 
 sell it, you know," she protested, not because she ob- 
 jected to hearing old Green abused, but because she 
 loved to experiment on Tommy. 
 
 But he shook his head as she nearly crushed him to 
 the earth by her weight as she climbed into the motor. 
 
 " He keeps within the limits of the law, of course," 
 he returned drily, " old brute." 
 
 His small face was quaintly stern as he looked after
 
 158 KINGSMEAD 
 
 the retreating figure of the only person the Duchess 
 had ever heard him say a word against, and there was 
 a kind of sombre glow in his pale eyes that gave the old 
 woman a queer feeling of being in the presence of an 
 unexpected, unknown person. 
 
 Yet she had known Tommy since his neglected baby- 
 hood. 
 
 " You could be very hard," she said, faltering a little. 
 
 Oswald Yeoland, whom she had loved, had never been 
 able to be hard, and she had recognised the fault in his 
 nature. 
 
 Tommy smiled at her. " I hope I could," he said 
 simply.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 " LORD KINGSMEAD " 
 
 " Miss Wantage " 
 
 " Tommy, then." 
 
 " Hooray, Pammy mine ! " 
 
 Tommy, who had politely risen from the divan on 
 which, in the room that since it had ceased being a 
 schoolroom had become a kind of lumber-room, he had 
 been lying, smoothed his ruffled hair. In the middle of 
 his smooth head grew a wild and uncontrollable curl, 
 stiff like a small sickle, and this, when the rest of his 
 hair laid down obedient to his master hand, stood up 
 doggedly. 
 
 Pammy eyed it and laughed. 
 
 " Funny lock. Oh, you are wanted." 
 
 "By whom?" 
 
 The young girl eyed him critically. " I heard the 
 Duchess suggest to mother that I might marry you," 
 she returned irrelevantly, " when I 'm grown up, of 
 course." 
 
 " My dear, if you are going to grow any more !" 
 
 His expression made her laugh again, and Pammy 
 laughing, with merry dimples in her downy crimson 
 cheeks, was a pleasant sight in spite of her vast 
 proportions. 
 
 159
 
 160 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Well, I don't want to, either," she went on, vague 
 in her words but quite comprehensible to him as to her 
 meaning. " The Duchess thought Miss Lansing wants 
 to, but she 's wrong. She 's afraid of you, Miss Lan- 
 sing is, though I don't see why," amiably, " anyone need 
 be afraid of a dear little man like you." 
 
 She spoke with the utmost seriousness, for she had no 
 sense of humour and was a curiously literal person. 
 
 Tommy ruffled his hair again and roared. 
 
 "Go on, Germania! But who wants me? Why am 
 I routed thus out of my well-earned repose? " 
 
 " Oh yes, I forgot. Well, it 's this. What 's-her- 
 name, the lady with the looking-glass she 's in the 
 gallery and wants you to come." 
 
 " Where 's Lansing? " blurted Tommy, indiscreet in 
 his sudden anxiety. 
 
 " Mr. Teddy has gone for a walk with Aunt Brigit." 
 
 Pammy had not caught the significance of his remark, 
 which was lucky. 
 
 "All right; will you tell her I'll come at once? I 
 must go and brush my hair." 
 
 Pammy nodded and strode solidly out of the room, 
 curiously majestic in her leisurely movements. 
 
 " She '11 be good-looking some day," reflected Tommy, 
 as he crossed the passage to his room. 
 
 A few minutes later he went into the gallery by a 
 small door that was almost invisible in its panelled wall, 
 and found himself face to face with Mrs. Gilpin, who
 
 KINGSMEAD 161 
 
 was sitting in a big chair playing with her little silver 
 mirror, and who started as she saw him. 
 
 "I did n't know there was a door there," she 
 said. 
 
 Tommy said nothing, for he having come through the 
 door at that very moment its existence was an obvious 
 fact that needed no verification. 
 
 " You wanted to see me? " he asked. 
 
 " Yes. Sit down." 
 
 He did so, but before she spoke again she rose and 
 going to the fire laid another log on its diminishing 
 flames. 
 
 " I like a fire," she murmured, brushing her nervous 
 hands together. Then, sitting down, she folded them 
 over the mirror and looked placidly at him. 
 
 " I want to ask you," she said in her gentle voice, 
 " why you are doing all this." 
 
 "All what?" 
 
 " Getting the Duchess and the rest to come ; and 
 well, all the things you are doing." 
 
 He stared, more surprised than was reasonable. Her 
 quietness had never looked like stupidity, yet, while he 
 had more than wondered that Teddy or old Mr. Lan- 
 sing had not noticed his benevolent plottings, it had 
 never occurred to him that Mrs. Gilpin's mild eyes 
 might be seeing it all. 
 
 " Is it so very er wonderful ? " he asked. 
 
 " No. It is very kind. I think you are very kind. 
 11
 
 162 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Also, you are skilful, for so young a man. It has all 
 gone remarkably well, you know.'* 
 
 " Yes it has gone well. But why do you think 
 I had any particular reason? It has been a pleasant 
 party and the ball will probably be a great success. 
 You like dancing, of course." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 He was deeply interested, and leaning forward in his 
 chair watched her with an almost menacingly clear look 
 in his light eyes, as she twisted her little mirror, sending 
 flashes of light into his face. 
 
 She was, or had seemed, such a pre-eminently passive 
 person ; so much a beautiful tool to be handled most 
 reverently, but still handled by him for Teddy's good. 
 And now here was the tool asking him questions. It was 
 strangely, vastly interesting. 
 
 " I like Mr. and Mrs. Lansing," he began in a hesitat- 
 ing way, as she did not speak ; " don't you ? " 
 
 " Yes." Her eyes met his unwaveringly. " Yes, I 
 like them very much, and I am sorry for them. Inez I 
 do not like. Neither do you. Neither does your sister. 
 But we are all sorry for her, because she is so very un- 
 attractive. I understand your wanting to help them 
 all because you are so kind. I think," she ended, lean- 
 ing toward him a little and smiling at him with gentle 
 radiance, " that you are very good." 
 
 Tommy flushed helplessly. With a few words, uttered
 
 KINGSMEAD 163 
 
 in all sweetness, she suddenly brought him face to face 
 with what seemed to him at that moment his appalling, 
 his raw youthfulness. 
 
 She was a widow ; she was seven-and-twenty ; she had 
 lived and loved and lost ; and he had been, in his absurd 
 arrogance, trying to help and protect her, to smooth 
 her path! 
 
 And all the time she had evidently been regarding 
 him as a well-meaning child. 
 
 For a moment he seemed to have lost his foot- 
 ing and to flounder helplessly, wondering if he really 
 were a child. Then, gradually, there came back to 
 him the reverent superiority so often felt by the 
 man not in love for the blissful babes-in-the woods who 
 are. 
 
 "Are you laughing at me? " he asked ; adding hastily, 
 " No, I know you are n't. But you think me a meddle- 
 some youth bent on controlling the temperatures of 
 other people's pie with his green finger ! " 
 
 She shook her head seriously. 
 
 " I don't know what you mean. What I mean to ask 
 you is this: are you trying to make a match between 
 Teddy and me ? " She spoke with a visible effort, as 
 though it cost her something to put into words a ques- 
 tion her conscience obliged her to ask. 
 
 Tommy rose. 
 
 " Good heavens," he cried, " you make me feel an 
 utter brute!"
 
 164 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Ah no, Lord Kingsmead. But I wanted to ask 
 you that was all." 
 
 "Well, what do you want to ask me? Now you 
 make me feel, all of a sudden, like an old grey-headed 
 wiseacre." 
 
 The fire, clasping the new log in its little red ten- 
 tacles, flashed up as it caught a great rough piece of 
 loose bark, and danced gaily in her mirror, which she 
 was still twisting nervously. 
 
 " Only this. It is best to speak plainly. Do you 
 think it wise for a young man to marry a woman 
 who who is a widow ? He is so young, you see, 
 younger than you in some ways " 
 
 This was true, but it was astounding to Tommy that 
 she should know it. 
 
 " Yes ? " he said, as she paused. 
 
 " And I am nearly four years older than he. And 
 I have been sorrowful. Sometimes I think," she went 
 on firmly, " that he should marry some something as 
 young as himself." 
 
 Tommy, now quite at home in his new role, shook his 
 head gravely. 
 
 " Dear Mignonette Lady, that is my name for you, 
 I hope you don't mind? no man is ever too young or 
 too I don't know how to express it, but I quite under- 
 stand what you mean, for a woman of your age. And 
 if if you care for him, as I hope " 
 
 " Yes ? As you hope ? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 165 
 
 She rose and going to the fire put her small grey-shod 
 foot on the fender and stood with her face turned away 
 from him. She looked so young, so perturbed, so lonely, 
 that every chivalrous fibre, and there were many, in the 
 young man vibrated almost painfully. 
 
 " I think," he said slowly, " that if you love him as 
 he loves you, he is the most b-blest man in the world." 
 
 As he finished, a firm, clear footfall came ringing up 
 the stairs, and Mrs. Gilpin turned. 
 
 Tears were on her cheeks, and Tommy, tearing open 
 the little door in the panelling, hurried her through and 
 closed it before Pammy appeared. 
 
 " Mother wants you " began the young girl, add- 
 ing, frankly curious: "Why, where 's Mrs. Gilpin? "
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 TEDDY'S wooing was a slow one, somewhat to Tommy's 
 surprise. Tommy himself would, he knew, have been 
 quite capable of deliberately lengthening the delicious 
 hour before dawn, as the state of mutual undeclared love 
 appeared to his sentimental mind, for it was obviously 
 a state of exquisitely delicate bliss probably never to 
 be recaptured. 
 
 But young Lansing was in spite of his beauty a prac- 
 tical youth, a youth of quiet grip with circumstance and 
 of determined bending of that circumstance to his hand, 
 so that his thralled hesitation now surprised his friend. 
 
 All through Christmas week Tommy and his now 
 deeply interested Duchess kept watch and ward over the 
 lovers, lest they should be awakened from their dream. 
 
 Tommy, suggesting to them before everybody a walk, 
 would start off with them, desert them on some cheer- 
 fully transparent pretext, and an hour later pounce 
 discreetly on them as they made their way homeward, 
 so that none but the Duchess ever suspected their tete- 
 a-tete. The old lady, too, who was past master in the 
 art of feigning sleep, sometimes asked the Mignonette 
 Lady, as she, adopting Tommy's nickname, called Mrs. 
 Gilpin, to come to her sitting-room. 
 
 166
 
 KINGSMEAD 167 
 
 " I need rest," she would say, " for I am an ancient 
 old lady, but you, Mignonette, are small and quiet. 
 Come and sing to me." 
 
 Then she, sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire 
 in her sitting-room, would listen for a few minutes to 
 the young woman's delightful voice, and then, quietly, 
 but with an evident air of starting from a prolonged 
 dream, would drop her head against her pillow and close 
 her eyes. 
 
 And twice it happened that Teddy, sent to the room 
 by Tommy on some ingeniously contrived errand, would 
 enter, in answer to a hushed " come in," to find his lady 
 almost better than alone, as, her guitar still in her lap, 
 a finger to her lips, she whispered, " She was very tired, 
 dear old lady." 
 
 That the Duchess deliberately eavesdropped cannot 
 be denied, but the hopeful reader may assume that in 
 case of any real love-making she would have waked up. 
 
 For, as she told Tommy, they did n't make love at all. 
 
 " She is such a silent person ; she sits quite motion- 
 less, her hands folded, looking into the fire for the most 
 part (I can see through closed eyelids), and he looks 
 at her. They talk very little for fear of waking this 
 dear old lady, but he looks at her, and very beautiful 
 he is with his heart in his eyes." 
 
 Tommy nodded. " Splendid ! He never was really in 
 love before, you see, and she is marvellously romantic. 
 I could never fall in love with a muddy-footed cigarette-
 
 168 KINGSMEAD 
 
 smoking, rough-headed girl, either. Women ought to 
 be small and delicate and restful." 
 
 " You are a Turk in your soul, Master Tommy ! " 
 
 But he shook his head gravely. " Not I. But you 
 see, I know Teddy pretty well, and I I am glad he has 
 had the sense to fall in love with her." 
 
 " H'm ! Well he is a deliberate lover. Yesterday 
 he asked her for a sprig of the mignonette she wore at 
 her waistband." 
 
 " Ah ! Did she give it to him ? " Much excitement 
 was in Tommy's face as he put the question. 
 
 " Yes. Without a word - with her eyelashes hiding 
 her eyes." 
 
 But this very small episode was the only one, in con- 
 nection with Teddy and Mrs. Gilpin, that broke the 
 pleasant monotony of Christmas week. 
 
 The house-party was a great success, and Inez had 
 the gratification not only of being out when the Greens 
 called, but also of being able to refuse their invitation 
 to dine because Admiral Lord Albert Hardcastle, a 
 cousin of the Duchess, had come down to pass the night 
 and say good-bye to his old relative before sailing for 
 distant waters somewhere. 
 
 " Cheek of them to ask us, after all this time," Miss 
 Lansing observed to Tommy, looking up from the note 
 she was writing for her mother. 
 
 " But you wanted to know them," he answered inno- 
 cently.
 
 KINGSMEAD 169 
 
 She laughed. " Yes faute de mieux. But now, 
 thanks to you and the dear old Duchess, we don't need 
 them. I know I 'm a snob, Lord Kingsmead, but I was 
 dreadfully lonely and after all I am far better edu- 
 cated than most of the girls around here." 
 
 " I 'm sure of that," he agreed eagerly, for this was 
 true. 
 
 " And as to father and mother I was wrong about 
 them, but that was because education can't supply 
 breeding. I mean the fact of my having a good educa- 
 tion does n't make me well bred inside. You think I 
 don't know, but I do ! Now, again, thanks to you, I see 
 that well, you know what I mean." 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 " Yes. Your father and mother are so kind and so 
 unaffected, as well as clever, that people like 'em. Now 
 Green is a brute. I can't understand anyone receiving 
 him. Personally, I should n't, but that 's because he 
 grinds down his workpeople and because his beer is poi- 
 sonous filth. Whereas your father ah, Miss Lansing, 
 think of his having to have a secretary just to answer 
 the letters that came to him to wish him a happy 
 Christmas ! " 
 
 This story had come out on the unexpected introduc- 
 tion by old Lansing to his guests of a pallid, spectacled 
 youth with moist hands and a nervous trick of sniffing, 
 as " my secretary." Investigation as to this appari- 
 tion's field of usefulness proved quite fruitless until the
 
 170 KINGSMEAD 
 
 young man himself confided to Madame de Lensky that 
 he had that morning written sixteen letters of thanks, 
 in answer to almost illegible communications addressed 
 to his employer on the glorious occasion of Christmas. 
 
 " I am really very tired," added Mr. Holiday plain- 
 tively. 
 
 " You must be. How very nice of him to answer 
 them all." 
 
 " Yes. He signs each one. They are not begging 
 letters. These, he tells me, are attended to by his 
 nephew, Oliver Smith, at the works. And it is, to me, 
 very curious that the letters are written, so to say, from 
 an equal. I mean to say, they all call him * Dear Henry ' 
 or most of them and they seem not to realise the 
 difference that his money makes." 
 
 " Old friends," suggested Pam ; " and he is too nice 
 to outgrow old friends just because he has made a big 
 fortune. He is a dear old man. I do so like him. Only 
 I think," she added, " that he would be annoyed if he 
 knew you told." 
 
 " I will not tell anyone." 
 
 Mr. Holiday, whose gladsome name accorded so ill 
 with his world-weary aspect, put his thumbs out of joint 
 several times in rapid succession, as if the dampness of 
 his hands had softened his bones and made that peculiar 
 gymnastic exercise easy to him. 
 
 " Quite right, quite right, Mrs. Lensky," he mur- 
 mured, feeling somehow that it would be taking a liberty
 
 KINGSMEAD 171 
 
 to call her " Madame," " but I it seemed all right to 
 tell you." 
 
 The secret, nevertheless, got out, as secrets will, and 
 old Lansing, when taxed with it by his son, nodded 
 shyly. 
 
 " Yes, yes. They are my men, and my women. They 
 are n't afraid of me, you see, for it is n't so long since 
 I was one of 'em myself. And a letter means an effort 
 to 'em, too." 
 
 He was, these days, blossoming like a rose in the 
 desert, for there was in him not a vestige of real vulgar- 
 ity, and the wise Duchess and the kind Pam knew just 
 how to treat him. He told little stories sometimes, 
 funny stories, all strictly proper, and his laugh had 
 become very frequent. 
 
 Still, he was a quiet, unobtrusive apparition, regret- 
 ful of his social deficiencies as his wife never was of 
 hers, although she too quite recognised them. 
 
 Somewhat to Tommy's surprise, Brigit and the old 
 man really liked each other. That Pam the democratic 
 should enjoy him astonished no one, but Lady Ponte- 
 fract's indifferent kindness rarely melted, her brother 
 knew, to anything warmer. Yet, possibly because old 
 Analyte's admiration of her beauty was so evident, 
 though always scrupulously unexpressed, the great 
 lady again and again went out of her way to be polite 
 to her official host, and talked to him with an appearance 
 of deep interest that meant, her friends knew, real liking.
 
 17S KINGSMEAD 
 
 Mrs. Lansing, for her part, was backed and braced 
 by the Duchess's love of colour, giving full play to her 
 taste for the gorgeous in the matter of dress. 
 
 On Christmas night she appeared at dinner clad in 
 yellow velvet embroidered in gold, in which she gave 
 one the impression of being a heathen altar of some 
 kind. 
 
 Another day she boldly huddled together all sorts of 
 colours, so that Tommy told his sister, later, she looked 
 as if she had been struck by a rainbow ! 
 
 It may be seen, therefore, that Kingsmead was filled, 
 that year, with very happy Christmas folk. 
 
 Inez was followed closely by her shadow the guards- 
 man, who one day proved his fundamental ignorance 
 of human nature by confiding to Tommy that, having 
 a perfectly appalling lot of debts, and the girl being 
 really not so bad, he hardly saw how he could do 
 better. 
 
 Tommy's answer to this ill-placed confidence had been 
 a frankly contemptuous stare and a prompt withdrawal 
 from the smoking-room, where it had taken place. 
 
 Jack Lensky and his wife, usually together, walked 
 a great deal, although he, fastidious to the marrow, 
 hated mud and wet. The children greatly enj oyed them- 
 selves, and, petted by Mrs. Lansing, grew rosy and 
 round-cheeked in the change from fog to real live air, 
 as young Thaddy put it; and Pammy, deep in an at- 
 tack of adoration for Mrs. Gilpin, fell, in his efforts to
 
 KINGSMEAD 173 
 
 keep her away from the object of her worship, for the 
 greater part of the day, to Tommy's share. 
 
 All these people seemed to Tommy much like the 
 arabesques in the border of an old missal; they were 
 bright and vivid in their way, and pleasant to see 
 ornamental. But their usefulness was limited to that 
 one idea: they were ornaments to Teddy and the 
 Mignonette Lady. He and she, painted with exquisite 
 care, were the real picture, the story; the rest com- 
 posed a mere border. 
 
 Thus the Christmas week sped with pleasant, deliber- 
 ate haste, and New Year's eve arrived, the night of the 
 ball a clear, cold, starry night it was, as if the old 
 Year wished to leave behind him an agreeable memory.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 JUST before dinner, Tommy, who had had a weary after- 
 noon with Pammy, who had been unusually indefatigable 
 in her pursuit of her idol, Mrs. Gilpin, went downstairs 
 to look for a letter that he had left in the great hall. 
 The vast room had been cleaned, and the housemaids had 
 apparently just left it, for the lights were turned out, 
 all but one, and in the window-niches stood huge vases 
 filled with strong-scented, giant crimson roses. It was 
 in its beautiful simplicity one of those rooms that want 
 no decorations, and the one fault in it, a row of ugly 
 Georgian pillars upholding a gallery of the same period, 
 had, since Tommy had gone out of the place after tea, 
 been made into a really lovely bower of smilax and ferns. 
 
 Thick garlands of smilax hid the pillars, and the 
 gallery itself, an excrescence due to the bad taste of one 
 of Tommy's forbears, was apparently transformed into 
 a bower of delicate pale green ferns. Tommy's artistic 
 eye at once claimed this bower for Teddy and his fair. 
 
 " What could be nicer for them," he thought, stand- 
 ing, a rather pathetically small figure, alone in the midst 
 of the vast polished floor, " than to run away from the 
 dancers and sit up there among the greenery hearing 
 the waltzes, but seeing only each other? " His hands 
 
 174
 
 KINGSMEAD 175 
 
 in his trousers pockets, he frowned intently. " If I can 
 just quietly bag the key," he thought, " I '11 give it to 
 old Lanner." 
 
 Just then he started, for, looking down at him through 
 the delicate breastwork of foliage, he saw Mrs. Gilpin 
 herself, as if she were a creature of his brain appearing 
 obediently at his thought. 
 
 " How did you get up there? " he asked. 
 
 " Walked," she answered him in all seriousness ; " the 
 door was open. It is lovely come and see." 
 
 He ran up the narrow stair that opened in the panel- 
 ling, and a moment later stood by her in the lovely place. 
 
 Above them the mysterious darkness of the ancient 
 panelled ceiling, all about them the quivering vaporous 
 greenness of the maidenhair. And there were only 
 two chairs, and on the floor, close to the ferns, four 
 vases of the fragrant roses. For one wild moment 
 Tommy felt in his amazing sensing of the situation 
 that he could for the moment himself be Teddy, and 
 ask, in the character of his friend, Nancy Gilpin to 
 marry him. 
 
 " Is n't it lovely? " she asked slowly, sitting down. 
 
 " Heavenly." But Tommy wished that Teddy were 
 there in his stead; it was so clearly a case of the time 
 and the place without the loved one. 
 
 " I am glad to see you alone," said Mrs. Gilpin, pass- 
 ing her hand lightly over a spray of fern that leaned 
 toward her.
 
 176 KINGSMEAD 
 
 "Are you? Why?" 
 
 " Because Pammy interrupted us before, and I had n't 
 finished. Do you really think," she went on with a firm 
 resumption of the week-old subject that surprised him, 
 " that it does n't matter my having loved another man ? 
 Because," she added with an odd little shudder, " I did 
 love him." 
 
 She looked very young in the pale light, in her white 
 frock, and he saw that one wing of her smooth hair was 
 a little ruffled, as if she had been sitting with her head 
 in her hand. 
 
 " I think," he returned gravely, in a kind of passion 
 of adoration for her, " that you are wonderful. And 
 I am glad that you loved him." 
 
 Her blue eyes met his steadily. " If if it were you," 
 she asked, " would you feel that way ? Things are so 
 different when one judges for someone else." 
 
 But Tommy, with the freedom given him by 
 his deep affection for Teddy, laughed. " No, no. 
 I am perfectly sure. If it were I, I should be sin- 
 cerely glad that you had loved your husband. 
 Only I should want you to love me as much, you 
 know." 
 
 She continued to look at him with her peculiarly clear 
 gaze, but she did not speak, and after a moment he con- 
 tinued : " And as you are so frank with me, you will 
 not mind my asking you if you can love Teddy as 
 much as you did him ? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 177 
 
 " I adored him. I was very young. I was only seven- 
 teen, but I adored him." 
 
 " How long ago," he asked, laying his hand on the 
 arm of her chair in a kind of reverent caress, " did 
 you lose him? " 
 
 " Five years ago." 
 
 " Oh, you poor little thing ! You were only two-and- 
 twenty ? How awful ! " 
 
 " Yes, it was awful. Very awful. I I nearly died," 
 she added in an undertone, but still looking keenly at 
 him, though a faint colour came to her cheeks. 
 
 Ah, if it had only been Teddy to whom she was telling 
 her simple, piteous tale! Tommy was very white with 
 sympathy, and laid his hand on hers as she finished 
 speaking. 
 
 " Teddy told me he was killed in India " 
 
 " Yes in what they call a border skirmish. We 
 women who lose our husbands in them call them 
 battles." 
 
 There was a long pause. 
 
 To think that she in her exaggerated delicacy could 
 think that this story of her first love could in any way 
 hurt or wrong Teddy ! 
 
 "Mignonette Lady you don't mind?" 
 
 " No," she assured him with a faint smile. 
 
 " I think Teddy, as I told you, greatly blest. And 
 you see I do know what you mean if Teddy were of 
 the small type of man who is suspectingly jealous 
 12
 
 178 KINGSMEAD 
 
 even then, I think, he would regret your first marriage 
 only for you, because you suffered through it. Because 
 
 you have through your long mourning lived such a 
 
 a cloistered life that yes, that is the right word, 
 cloistered you seem to have regained girlhood." 
 
 Pie spoke slowly, in broken phrases, not because he 
 was embarrassed, but because he wished to find the ex- 
 act words to express his very definite thought. 
 
 She held out her hand. 
 
 " Thank you, Lord Kingsmead," she said, with her 
 grave simplicity that he so admired. 
 
 Then with another pause, after which he asked, and 
 this time, in spite of his temperamental curiosity, his 
 question was put with a view to solacing her rather 
 than of gratifying himself, " Could you tell me about 
 him?" 
 
 She nodded. "Yes. He was older than I. So 
 much older that most people thought it must have been 
 his money. But it was n't. He was gentle to me, though 
 they said he was hard and fierce with others." 
 
 " With his men I mean the men under him? " 
 
 " Yes. He he loved me. Ah yes, he loved me. But 
 I had to lose him. I used to think there was no God." 
 
 Tommy sat with bent head. It was very sacred to 
 him, this story. 
 
 " When he went away afterward I used to cry and 
 beat my hands on the floor. I was nearly mad. Then I 
 was ill."
 
 KINGSMEAD 179 
 
 " What was his Christian name ? " asked Tommy 
 suddenly. 
 
 She stared. " William. I used to call him Bill. It 's 
 not a beautiful name, but I loved it." 
 
 " There was a Godfrey Gilpin whose portrait I once 
 saw in London at some exhibition, I think Shannon 
 did it, a fair man in full regimentals " 
 
 " No. I have been asked that before. He was a 
 Gunner. He was n't one of the Warwickshire Gilpins." 
 
 Tommy nodded. " Where were you when it hap- 
 pened? " he asked. 
 
 " At Udaipur. I had just come. We had been in the 
 south for some time, and I was to go to the hills not 
 being very strong. It was an ' insignificant ' battle, I 
 believe," she added, without bitterness ; " you '11 see it 
 in the papers of the time as * a slight skirmish in which 
 two officers and eight men were killed.' ' 
 
 The horror of war overcame Tommy and made him 
 almost sick for a moment, as he watched the poor little 
 victim of the insignificant battle tell her story the 
 horror of men killing each other; the horror of greed; 
 the horror of savagery. 
 
 And yet he was made of fighting stuff, little Kings- 
 mead, and in case of war would have been, such was his 
 blood and his breeding, one of the first to volunteer. 
 
 " Dear Mrs. Gilpin," he said, after another long 
 silence, rising, " we must go and dress. It is half-past 
 seven. But I thank you for trusting me, and I
 
 180 KINGSMEAD 
 
 hope, oh, with all my heart, that you that you do 
 do love Teddy." 
 
 " I told you all that because I wanted advice. And 
 
 you think it not unfair to marry again after such 
 a story? " 
 
 Her exaggerated delicacy appealed to him, although 
 it seemed to him slightly absurd. 
 
 *' I think it would be wrong to marry if you if you 
 could not love," he began, but she interrupted him with 
 an unexpected fierceness. 
 
 " Love? Ay, that I can. And I do. I think only a 
 few women in the world can, but I am one of them. It 
 
 it hurts me, it is so intense." 
 
 Gathering up her long skirts she stood by the door 
 looking past him with narrowed, intense eyes. 
 
 " Then," returned Tommy, old-fashionedly, as she 
 started downstairs, " God bless you both."
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 LIKE a parent giving a bean-feast for his children 
 Tommy wandered about the house looking to see that 
 everything went well. The responsibility , in itself a j oy 
 to him, yet lay rather heavily on his shoulders, for if 
 this ball should prove a dull one, then should he be in- 
 deed but a bungling impressario, deserving of instant 
 dismissal; and the knowledge that no matter how hide- 
 ously he might fail, the household affection assured him 
 a continuance of his incompetency but made things 
 worse. 
 
 Even Lord and Lady Leatherhead, " the Marquis and 
 Marchioness," had come, and were at present, having 
 watched the dancing for a few benign moments, playing 
 bridge in the drawing-room with the Duchess and a 
 friend whom they had brought with them, one Major 
 Portrush. 
 
 Tommy had placed a screen between the Marchioness' 
 back and the fire, and provided a footstool for the 
 Duchess ; after which he had left the room, closing the 
 door to insure the illustrious party the quiet required 
 for their brain-exhausting game. 
 
 Then he went to the ballroom, as the hall was called. 
 Perfection apparently reigned there. The tenth dance 
 
 181
 
 182 KINGSMEAD 
 
 was in full swing, and as he watched he saw Inez swing- 
 ing by with young Green, Sir Wilfred with a martyred 
 air piloting about a local young lady of heavy build, 
 and Mrs. Gilpin and Lensky. 
 
 Where, then, was Teddy? 
 
 Tommy skirted the wall, brushing the green-draped 
 pillars, narrowly escaping annihilation as Pammy and 
 her partner, the depressed Mr. Holiday, galloped by, 
 and at last found, near the smoking-room door, a worn 
 and bored-looking Teddy, talking to the second Miss 
 Morland, the local doctor's daughter. 
 
 " I say, Teddy excuse me one moment 
 Tommy drew his friend aside, pressing something angu- 
 lar and cold into his hand. " Here 's the key to the little 
 gallery. Get Mrs. Gilpin up there now introduce 
 me to that girl " 
 
 " Miss Morland, Lord Kingsmead wishes to be intro- 
 duced to you." Teddy, radiantly smiling, the key in his 
 waistcoat pocket, disappeared in the crowd, and Tommy 
 broke into animated conversation with the second Miss 
 Morland, who squinted, but who, he observed with his 
 rather unusual quickness at seeing the good points of 
 his acquaintances, was blessed with a delightful little 
 Greek nose. 
 
 Miss Morland the second adored waltzing (although 
 Tommy, when they tried it, wondered why), and she 
 loved dancing with the young man in the shadow of 
 whose house, so to speak, she had grown up.
 
 KINGSMEAD 183 
 
 They pounded genially round the room two or three 
 times, and then Tommy took her to the buffet and ad- 
 ministered to her, with anxious intent of consolation, 
 iced coffee in a tall glass. 
 
 " Jolly ball," she observed. 
 
 He nodded. " Very. Good house for a ball, rather 
 as I may now, alas, say without boasting." 
 
 The second Miss Morland was a little frightened. 
 
 " Yes it seems such a pity " she began, and then 
 
 helplessly broke off, licking her spoon. 
 
 " Oh no, not a pity. The Lansings, you see, love it. 
 And if I had kept it it would have had to j ust die a 
 natural death, so to speak, with no doctoring to keep it 
 alive." 
 
 " I see. Miss Lansing is a lovely girl, is n't she? " 
 
 Tommy glanced quickly at her, but she was sincere, 
 he saw, as he followed her eyes to where Inez, slimmer 
 than usual, clad in pink satin, was talking to young 
 Green. 
 
 " She would be an excellent match for Bertie 
 Green," went on the second Miss Morland with an abys- 
 mal sigh. 
 
 " Green ! Oh, I say, Miss Morland ! Their fathers 
 are n't friends at ah 1 , and they hardly know each other." 
 
 " Don't they! " Her air was that of one initiated 
 into social secrets above the ken of her companion. For 
 the moment she forgot his earldom, and beheld him as 
 a mere stranger.
 
 184 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " They used to dance together in London. He is very 
 intimate with the Lord Mayor's family. And someone 
 told me he admired her very much." 
 
 " Bless us and save us ! " 
 
 " Yes. 7* n't Tie handsome? " 
 
 Tommy, who saw no beauty in young Green, was 
 saved answering by the solitary arrival of an elderly 
 maiden, who, driven from her original lair in a corner 
 of the ballroom by the thong of hunger, had defied the 
 ever-ready criticism of a country ballroom to forage for 
 herself. 
 
 And Tommy ached for her as he observed her hesitat- . 
 ing manner and slightly trembling voice. " How do you 
 do, Miss Marble? " he said, shaking hands with her very 
 warmly. " How strange that I should n't have seen 
 you before ! Very crowded, though that is, fairly so. 
 Let me get you some champagne. How is Mrs. Marble ? 
 How well I remember your giving me plums when I was 
 a kid! And is Miss Edith here too? " 
 
 It was a God-sent gift, this of remembering faces and 
 names, and the little young man's way of going straight 
 to the point and not allowing embarrassed people time 
 to answer him until they had time to recover themselves, 
 was as surely a real gift. Poor Miss Marble, old and 
 disregarded, flushed with pleasure, and till the end of 
 her days she will talk of the ball at Kingsmead with 
 proud delight. 
 
 When, after giving them food and drink, Tommy
 
 KINGSMEAD 185 
 
 convoyed his charges back to the ballroom and found 
 them two chairs, he excused himself with a busy air, and 
 went back to the drawing-room. Things were all right 
 there. 
 
 Besides the Duchess's table there were now two others, 
 at which played the De Lenskys, Brigit, the vicar, Mr. 
 Green, and three people whom Tommy did not know. 
 
 In a corner, her green leather board on her crimson 
 velvet lap, Mrs. Lansing was busy with a game of 
 patience. 
 
 Leaving the room unobtrusively, after a word with his 
 hostess, Tommy went upstairs, and going down a long 
 passage opened the door into the gallery. 
 
 Here, too, things could not have been improved upon, 
 for all the window-niches but one were occupied by 
 couples, men and maidens gazing down, as they talked, 
 at the dancers they had quitted. 
 
 The lower parts of the stained-glass panes had, for 
 purposes of ventilation, long ago been removed from 
 their cases and swung on central pivots, so that they 
 must, pushed outward as they then were, have looked 
 from below like dazzling bannerets hung sideways. 
 
 Going to the one vacant window-niche, Tommy 
 glanced down at the whirling couples below and then, 
 rapidly, toward the little gallery. 
 
 It was empty. 
 
 Tommy was conscious of a positive pang of disap- 
 pointment. His efforts, then, had been in vain. He had
 
 186 KINGSMEAD 
 
 locked the door and given the key to Teddy, and Teddy 
 had not made use of his beautiful opportunity. Why? 
 
 The whole universe seemed for a moment a great 
 question-mark, and then, with an impatient patience, the 
 young man turned away, and went to find the recreant. 
 As he went back down the corridor he passed the door 
 of the Duchess's sitting-room, and from it came the 
 sound of voices. 
 
 " Oh, charming, no doubt," a man was saying, not 
 quite pleasantly. " And of course a guardsman is a 
 guardsman no one ever doubted that ! " 
 
 Tommy did not recognise this voice, but it was Inez's 
 that answered with an affected laugh, " A hard thing 
 to doubt, rather, wouldn't it be? And another would 
 be that he dances far better than anyone else here. It 's 
 really too delicious " 
 
 Tommy, naturally, did not pause, but as he hurried 
 past the man returned, rery angrily now, " Then it is a 
 great pity to be wasting your time here. Shall we go 
 down? " 
 
 It was evidently a quarrel, and Tommy involuntarily 
 wondered who the man could be. 
 
 As he reached the short flight of steps leading to the 
 front stairs the door behind him closed with a bang, and 
 he heard Inez say again with the detestable, unreal laugh 
 that he hated, " You really are in a bad temper 
 to-night." 
 
 Hurrying on, Tommy succeeded in gaining the lower
 
 KINGSMEAD 187 
 
 floor without learning who her companion was, but it 
 struck him, even in the midst of his annoyance with 
 Teddy, as an incomprehensible thing that the to him so 
 fundamentally unattractive Inez could have found a 
 man to torment. 
 
 . " None of my business who it is," he told himself, 
 " but it is a queer thing." He had reached the ballroom, 
 and at that very moment something happened that put 
 the incident violently out of his mind. He had just met 
 Mrs. Gilpin, who had been dancing, and who turned 
 from her partner to him with evident relief. 
 
 They were standing chatting and he was about to 
 ask her what had become of Teddy, when with a quick 
 change of expression she touched his arm. 
 
 " Look," she said, pointing to the door. Three men 
 stood there, their hats on their heads, their faces white 
 and menacing. No one spoke to them, but while the 
 unseeing orchestra played on, the dancing suddenly 
 ceased, and the dancers, drawing back from the new- 
 comers, formed a solid phalanx, facing them, as if they, 
 the four roughly clad men, were actors about to begin 
 their scene. 
 
 There was a deep silence, and then one of the men, the 
 smallest, the fiercest, cried hoarsely, to no one, or to 
 every one, " Where 's 'Enry Lansing? " 
 
 As he spoke, old Lansing, who had been in the 
 smoking-room, made his way through the crowd. 
 
 " Julius," he exclaimed, " what is the matter? "
 
 188 KINGSMEAD 
 
 The small fierce man stood looking at him. 
 
 " This is what 's the matter, 'Enry Lansing," he said 
 slowly : " while you 're 'ere amusing yourself there 's 
 ben an explosion at the works and fifteen souls is lulled. 
 Two of 'em," he added, " were my wife and Joe, 'ere, 
 'is son. That 's all." 
 
 Old Lansing's face turned a curious grey colour. 
 
 " Julius ! " he cried, and Tommy stepped quietly to 
 him and took his arm. 
 
 " Yes. While you 're amusing yourself " 
 
 " God damn you," cried Lansing, " stop that, d' you 
 'ear? Stop the music, somebody, and go home, all 
 of you. I I will come, men."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 KINGSMEAD knew that he would never forget that night- 
 ride to the town, nearly two hundred miles away, where 
 stood the famous Analyte Works. He and Mr. Lan- 
 sing left the house just before half-past eleven, in 
 Teddy's big Mercedes car. 
 
 The bearers of the bad tidings had been given food 
 and drink and taken to the station, where in an hour's 
 time a slow cross-country train would bear them to the 
 scene of the disaster ; but Lansing told them, tears run- 
 ning down his suddenly old cheeks, that he could not 
 wait. " You '11 understand, Julius, and you, Joe Evans," 
 he said, taking a hand of each of the afflicted men. 
 " They were a-working for me, they were my friends, 
 and I must 'urry." 
 
 The men nodded. They had come unreasoningly, all 
 but one of them dully and uncomplainingly, like children 
 coming to a parent. And the one exception, the man 
 Martin, a badly balanced, ignorant turner-over of half- 
 understood grievances, suggested to him by socialistic 
 writings, had come to accuse the rich man of being rich 
 in the poor man's hour of tragedy. Yet even he had 
 been set right by old Lansing's distress. 
 
 He was dazed and silent now that his frenzy of anger 
 
 189
 
 190 KINGSMEAD 
 
 had died under Lansing's distress ; and he and his com- 
 panions sat in the smoking-room among the tables, on 
 which still stood several siphons and brandy and whisky 
 bottles, and where on a low chair Tommy found and put 
 into his pocket a frivolous long white glove forgotten 
 by its owner. 
 
 The dreadful tawdriness that even the most innocent 
 scene of revelry wears when grim tragedy has stepped 
 into it seemed to blemish the room, and Tommy quietly 
 moved the chairs back into their places and put the 
 dissipated-looking siphons and bottles together on a 
 table in a far corner. 
 
 The story was told in a few words. The foreman of 
 the place had offered extra pay for extra work that 
 evening, to meet some large order, and something, 
 Tommy could not quite grasp what, or how, had ex- 
 ploded, killing fifteen people, three of whom were women. 
 
 And Julius Martin, always a rebellious, jealous- 
 hearted man, had, against the wishes of his comrades, 
 insisted on coming himself to tell his employer the bad 
 news. 
 
 Joe Evans, a gentler spirit, his brother-in-law, had 
 come with him, chiefly to try to quiet the man's furious 
 state of nerves, and the two other men had come, Tommy 
 gathered, more for the ghastly fun of the thing than 
 for any other reason. 
 
 Confronted by Lansing's grief, however, these two 
 were disappointed, for his misery, so personal, so far
 
 KINGSMEAD 191 
 
 removed from mere sympathy, was so strong and com- 
 pelling an emotion that even Martin was awed, and for- 
 got his bitterness and jealousy in watching it. 
 
 " My men, working for me, God 'elp me ! " Lansing 
 said, over and over, as they waited for the motors to 
 come round. Outside, on the half-frozen gravel of the 
 courtyard, carriages and motors hurried up amid a con- 
 fusion of voices to take away the guests so rudely dis- 
 missed by their host. 
 
 Tommy, when the four men were safely shut in the 
 smoking-room, and Martin's wrath had melted into mere 
 human misery, returned to the ballroom and found every- 
 one on the point of leaving. 
 
 Mrs. Lansing, Madame de Lensky told him, was cry- 
 ing herself to a jelly in the drawing-room, her tears 
 blotching and ruining the two new packs of patience- 
 cards initiated that evening in honour of the occasion; 
 Teddy stood talking to Mrs. Gilpin, whose face was 
 whiter than Tommy had ever seen a face; and Inez, 
 looking very shocked and troubled, was with the Duchess 
 saying good-bye to the guests. 
 
 The Marquis and Marchioness, kindly, simple people, 
 returned, when their carriage had come, to the drawing- 
 room to say a last word of sympathy to the Duchess, 
 and Tommy saw that it was as he had expected. 
 
 Not one of the guests had taken in bad part old Lan- 
 sing's outburst and dismissal. People are kind, after all, 
 to misfortune. The Duchess, old as she was, her white
 
 192 KINGSMEAD 
 
 wig askew, her ancient face haggard, was worth gold 
 in the emergency, for even the small people went away 
 cheered by a ducal word, thus assuring to the ill-fated 
 ball an at least pleasant envoi. 
 
 Away they went, then, the revellers, in motors, car- 
 riages, and flys. And before they had all gone, while 
 yet some twenty were huddled in their cloaks awaiting 
 further conveyances, the big whirring roar of the Mer- 
 cedes was heard, and Tommy put on his coat. 
 
 " Tell Teddy to go to his mother, will you, dear ? " 
 Lady Pontefract came out of the drawing-room as he 
 passed it. " She is dreadfully upset, and he may be able 
 to quiet her." 
 
 Teddy, obedient to a hurried word from his friend, 
 left Mrs. Gilpin, with whom he was still standing, and 
 hurried to his mother. 
 
 " Go to bed, Mrs. Gilpin," suggested Tommy, " you 
 look dead. I am just off with Mr. Lansing." 
 
 " Poor old man ! " she returned. " Those men were 
 dreadful" 
 
 " Yes. They, or rather the one, was not polite. But 
 never mind that. Try to sleep; and remember," he 
 added with the ghost of a whimsical smile, " that every 
 morning you read in some paper of far worse accidents, 
 and go on eating your eggs and bacon. This was just 
 brought unpleasantly near to you." 
 
 She looked at him vaguely. " Yes, of course," she 
 added, and he knew that she had not been listening. 
 " When will you get there? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 193 
 
 " I don't know early to-morrow morning, I sup- 
 pose." 
 
 " But why do you go? " 
 
 " Why? To see Mr. Lansing through. Besides, 
 there are many wounded people, and some one must see 
 about nurses, etc." 
 
 Her bright blue eyes changed. "Ah yes, nurses 
 she began, but he had hurried on, for old Lansing and 
 the four men were coming toward him. And Tommy, to 
 avoid the people who still stood at the front door, took 
 them all five, quite unresisting, out at a small door near 
 the billiard-room. 
 
 The motor that was to take the four men to the sta- 
 tion, ten miles away, at which they could get a train 
 stood in front of the other, and Tommy, going to 
 the chauffeur, told him to go back to pick up his 
 cargo. 
 
 When the machine had backed away from the con- 
 fused group of motors and carriages struggling to 
 get to the front door, Tommy spoke to the French 
 chauffeur. 
 
 " Mr. Lansing and I will join you opposite the carp- 
 pond," he said ; " he does n't want to say good-bye to 
 anyone." 
 
 The man nodded. " Blen, milord," he said, and 
 Tommy turned back. 
 
 " I am coming with you, Mr. Lansing," he said to 
 the old man, whom he found alone, watching his work- 
 13
 
 194 KINGSMEAD 
 
 men as their motor started off. " Teddy is with Mrs. 
 Lansing. " 
 
 ** Yes, yes, my lad ; thank you. Teddy would not do. 
 Blood sickens him, and we shall 'ave to face lots of 
 blood." 
 
 Tommy took his arm and led him unresistingly back 
 into the billiard-room, upstairs, through the gallery 
 and the long passage, and then down the back staircase 
 through the kitchen, which was empty save for a pretty 
 scullery-maid being made love to by the odd man. 
 
 " Jacquart is waiting for us near the carp-pond ; let 's 
 hurry." 
 
 Old Lansing nodded. .** Yes, yes. Let *s 'urry. They 
 were my people, working for me. I used to do the same 
 work, not so long ago. A-a-h ! n 
 
 His long, gasping moan was so full of pain that quick 
 tears came to Tommy's eyes. 
 
 " Have you a warm coat on? n the young man asked. 
 
 " Ay. My coat is lined with fur. I am warm and 
 
 comfortable, whereas they " It was that most rare 
 
 thing an almost anarchistic sentiment expressed by a 
 prosperous man. If he had been poor and cold and 
 someone else wearing his handsome coat, his tone could 
 not have been more bitter; and Tommy realised the 
 thoroughness of character that had brought this un- 
 educated man untouched through success. 
 
 Ahead of them, in the moon-shadow of a large tree, 
 stood the big motor, waiting. Off to the right, in the
 
 KINGSMEAD 195 
 
 pale moonlight the old carp-pond glittered faintly ; and 
 the sound of horses' feet and motors filled the cold air. 
 
 Tommy helped Mr. Lansing into the tonneau and got 
 in after him. Then, as he wrapped a big fur rug round 
 the old man, who sat quite passive, his brows pulled 
 down over his eyes, Tommy started. 
 
 Someone a mere shapeless bundle of fur sat by 
 the chauffeur. As the motor sped down the avenue the 
 bundle turned. 
 
 " You must n't mind my coming/* Mrs. Gilpin said ; 
 " you will need a woman, and I am not afraid." 
 
 " But it is an awful j ourney , and there will be 
 dreadful things to see," faltered Tommy, appalled. 
 " Please go back." 
 
 " Xo. I do not fear dreadful sights," she returned 
 quietly. " I had n't time to change, but I have a dress 
 in my dressing-case. Please don't fuss." 
 
 " But there will be plenty of people to help it 
 is a big village and you are so so " 
 
 " Be quiet," growled old Lansing in a surly voice. 
 " Let her come : it won't hurt her. She is right. Why 
 should she be spared any more than them as work? "
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 LOOKING back on that unforgettable night journey, 
 Tommy's mind always paints for him a long light stripe 
 through blackness ; a moving circle of red light, dark 
 bare trees and hedgerows ; a pale moon shedding paler 
 light ; and ahead of him, outlined against the red light, 
 Nancy Gilpin's little form shapeless in her furs, all but 
 her head, which, in its well-pinned-down motor-cap, was 
 curiously distinct and characteristic. 
 
 Twice Tommy fell asleep, once to be awakened by loud 
 talking, to find Jacquart the chauffeur angrily demand- 
 ing of a drowsy man in a cottage window which turning 
 he must take to get to the next town on his map. 
 
 The next time he awoke the moon had gone and a 
 strange pallor in the sky meant dawn. 
 
 Lansing apparently had not stirred from the attitude 
 he had taken on getting into the car, and Mrs. Gilpin's 
 small head was as erect as ever. 
 
 " I have been asleep," announced Tommy, moving his 
 cramped legs. 
 
 Lansing nodded. " Yes. That yonder is the town. 
 On the 'orizon." 
 
 The motor sped on, climbing low hills without falter- 
 ing, dashing down them at breakneck speed, continuing 
 
 196
 
 KINGSMEAD 197 
 
 all the time its low murmur as if it were talking to itself 
 to keep up its courage as it tore on and on through the 
 night. 
 
 And then, at last, the town: an ugly, grimy, manu- 
 facturing town that would have been a village but for 
 its factories. The hideous brick chimneys standing 
 against the paling sky looked like giants' ringers point- 
 ing accusingly at the God who allowed them to exist. 
 
 It was the first day of the New Year, and the town 
 was silent as the travellers reached their goal. 
 
 And fifteen human souls who yesterday, at the same 
 hour, had gone to their work looking forward to a long 
 rest to-day, lay dead. 
 
 Tommy shuddered. He was very tired, and he was 
 also hungry, though he did not know it. 
 
 It was half-past four when the motor rushed in be- 
 tween huge black gates at the far side of the town and 
 drew up with a j erk at a low flight of steps on both sides 
 of which stretched a long line of lighted windows. 
 
 Lansing got out, and quite disregarding his compan- 
 ions, went into the building. 
 
 Tommy crawled from the encumbering rugs and 
 wraps, and going to the front seat of the motor took the 
 rug off Mrs. Gilpin. 
 
 " I am quite stiff," she said, trying to rise. 
 
 " Let me help you." 
 
 *' Attendez, milord, je vais descendre madame." 
 
 Jacquart the surly jumped down from his place, but
 
 198 KINGSMEAD 
 
 before he could come round to the steps she had risen, 
 and placing one hand on the seat, the other on Tommy's 
 shoulder, sprang lightly out. " I can't bear to be 
 touched by strange people," she whispered as they went 
 up the steps. 
 
 The bare corridor was empty, but a light at the head 
 of another flight of steps led them to a room from behind 
 the closed door of which came voices. 
 
 " You had better wait," Tommy suggested. " Sit 
 down and I '11 go in and see." 
 
 He opened the door and went in. 
 
 The room was a large one, and its use was evidently 
 that of a kind of office, for there was a big desk and a 
 safe in it. In its squalid cleanliness burned a double 
 gas-j et, and behind a small group of people at its farther 
 end Tommy saw five or six mattresses on the floor. 
 
 One of the men standing near them turned as the door 
 opened, and Tommy saw that he must be a doctor a 
 worn, harassed face with an authoritative look on it. 
 
 " What do you want ? " he asked sharply. " That 
 door should have been locked. If you are a reporter 
 you may go." 
 
 " I am not a reporter. I came with Mr. Lansing. My 
 name is Kingsmead, and I want to be of use if 
 possible." 
 
 The other man's face cleared. 
 
 " Afraid of ugly sights ? " he asked. 
 
 " No."
 
 KINGSMEAD 199 
 
 ' Then move out of the way, Mrs. Jenkins, please, 
 
 and ' to Tommy again " help me dress this 
 
 burn, will you ? " 
 
 Tommy, taking off his coat, knelt by the boy on the 
 end mattress. 
 
 " It 's an ugly business, as you can see give me 
 that cup of oil, will you? don't bother, he's quite 
 unconscious " 
 
 The other people in the group were two work-worn 
 elderly men and a half-fainting girl with beautiful 
 curly red hair that looked flauntingly, cruelly out of 
 place in the sad room. 
 
 " Those two at the end are dead," observed the doctor. 
 " These are their people." 
 
 Suddenly a man left the group and kneeling by one 
 of the mattresses began to sob hoarsely. 
 
 It was very painful. 
 
 " Take your girl away, Jacob," said the doctor, ris- 
 ing, after laying on the raw chest of his patient a thin 
 layer of oil-soaked cotton-wool ; " she '11 faint in a mo- 
 ment." He spoke roughly and without looking up, but 
 Tommy knew that he was exhausted with hours of har- 
 assing work, and was sorry for him. 
 
 " Thanks, Mr. I 've forgotten your name. That 's 
 all I can do here; will you come with me to the next 
 room? These," he added as they went out into the pas- 
 sage and turned to the left, " are the ones who were too 
 bad to move. Four, as you saw, are already dead. The 
 other one will probably die."
 
 200 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " And the dead ones ? I mean those who were 
 killed outright Martin's wife and Evans's son ? " 
 
 The doctor glanced at him. " Taken home what 
 could be found. They were pretty well blown to bits 
 hello, who is this ? " He had opened a door as he spoke, 
 and they stood on the threshold looking at a curious 
 scene. 
 
 In a small room, one side of which was completely 
 taken up by a large iron furnace, lay another of the 
 piteous, shabby mattresses hastily brought, Tommy 
 knew, from the nearest houses ; and on the mattress lay 
 a naked child, while beside it, the crude gaslight glaring 
 full on her white-and-silver evening frock, knelt Nancy 
 Gilpin, busily engaged in pouring, from a broken blue- 
 and-white tea-cup, oil on the poor little creature's raw 
 chest. 
 
 By her lay a roll of cotton-wool, and something in 
 her way of supporting the faintly groaning boy with 
 her left arm while her right hand let the healing oil roll 
 over the dreadful hurt, caused Tommy, as well as the 
 doctor, to wonder. 
 
 " The woman who was looking after him got sick and 
 had to go," Mrs. Gilpin declared quietly ; " she would 
 have fainted if she had stayed. Would you mind holding 
 his head?" 
 
 Kneeling, the doctor did as he was bid, and the young 
 woman, deftly preparing a thin layer of oil-soaked 
 wool, laid it on the child's chest.
 
 KINGSMEAD 201 
 
 " It 's a bad burn," she remarked critically, " but I 
 think he '11 pull through. Where can I find a shawl or 
 something for him ? His clothes are ruined " 
 
 " Would you," asked the doctor, addressing Tommy, 
 " mind going downstairs, to the first door to your right, 
 and asking Mrs. Golightly to give you some covers ? " 
 
 Tommy obeyed, finding Mrs Golightly without any 
 trouble and obtaining from her an old green plaid shawl, 
 which he brought back without wasting any time in 
 words. 
 
 As he opened the upstairs door again, he heard Mrs. 
 Gilpin say carelessly, in apparent answer to a question 
 from the doctor, " No, thanks, I 'm not at all tired I 
 used to be a nurse Bart's." 
 
 Then, as Tommy handed the doctor the shawl, she 
 looked up and met his astonished eyes. 
 
 " Yes," she repeated with a faint smile, " I really did, 
 but I never told you." 
 
 It was a strange scene, and her beauty, delicate and 
 elusive, had never before seemed to him so exquisite as 
 they went together from squalid room to squalid room, 
 each of them doing the best they could to alleviate the 
 awful suffering they found at every turning. 
 
 The worn-out doctor, glad of quiet, competent help, 
 led them even to the great hall where the accident had 
 taken place, and it was a very solemn and dreadful 
 sight. 
 
 The dead and wounded had been removed, but the wet
 
 202 KINGSMEAD 
 
 floor was still covered with blood and fragments of 
 stuff, and the walls spattered and blotched in a hor- 
 rible way. Tommy shuddered and his chin shook 
 convulsively. 
 
 His was a high-strung nature and he suffered rudely 
 that night, but his courage was good, and he as well 
 as the others worked unceasingly until broad day stared 
 in at the great dingy windows. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin, still in her ball-gown but with some 
 working woman's crude red shawl now wrapped about 
 her, was 'of varied and great assistance to the doctor. 
 
 At last, as the factory clock struck seven, the doctor 
 rose from where he had been kneeling by a dying man, 
 surrounded by the man's family, and looked at her. 
 
 " We will now," he said, " go to my house and have 
 breakfast. Ah ! " Crossing the room to the window in 
 two strides, he put his arm round Tommy and slid him 
 gently to the floor. 
 
 Tommy had fainted.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 DR. COLE lived in a small house on the top of the gentle 
 eminence that, lying to the north of the sluggish river 
 that ran through the town, was called the Hill, and 
 which was where the few gentry of the busy place had 
 their dwellings. 
 
 As he was a bachelor the doctor's old sister kept 
 house for him, and very well she did it, too. 
 
 Even there on the Hill a constant war with blacks 
 and dust had to be waged, for the town was direfully 
 dirty, and the house of Admiral Kennedy himself, he of 
 five house-servants and a carriage and pair, looked a 
 little dingy. Whereas Miss Martha Cole's white paint 
 was as white, her chintzes as fresh as if the little house 
 Laurel Lodge was its poetic name had been buried 
 in the green depths of Devon. 
 
 So Tommy, poor exhausted small Tommy, when his 
 faint was over, opened his eyes in a lovely little bower 
 of a room all pink roses and white varnished furniture, 
 and saw bending over him a little old lady with white 
 hair and the whitest cap ever seen out of a fairy tale. 
 
 " I am so sorry," cried Tommy rather loudly, for 
 fear of speaking weakly. " I am awfully ashamed 
 where am I, please ? " 
 
 203
 
 204 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Miss Martha patted him. 
 
 " You are at Dr. Cole's, and you fainted at the Ana- 
 lyte Works, after being a perfect little hero, George 
 said, so we brought you here. And the lady is having 
 breakfast, and you shall have yours at once, now that 
 you 're all right." 
 
 Tommy sat up. They had put him to bed, and he 
 found to his amusement that he had on, for the first 
 time in his life, an old-fashioned nightshirt with narrow 
 red braid as trimming. " You are very good to me 
 Mrs. Cole? " 
 
 "Miss," corrected Miss Martha composedly. "Mother 
 died long before you were born, my dear." 
 
 " I beg your pardon. It was a rather exhausting 
 night," he explained, " and I am a wretchedly delicate 
 little brute, after all." 
 
 He sighed, for he was greatly disappointed in him- 
 self. Only a fortnight before he had pranced, he re- 
 flected, proudly along the road to Brigit's, boasting to 
 himself that he was well and strong and could do the 
 things that other young men could; and here he was 
 going off in a dead faint like a silly little ass, and being 
 a perfect nuisance instead of the help he so longed to be. 
 
 " Where is Mrs. Gilpin? " he asked after a pause. 
 
 " She has gone out with my brother. The nurses 
 have come, but George says she is worth a dozen of them. 
 Now if you '11 just lie still, Mr the lady forgot to tell 
 me your name "
 
 KINGSMEAD 205 
 
 Tommy explained, greatly pleased that Nanny had 
 forgotten, and the good lady continued : " I will bring 
 you a nice bowl of soup and some toast, and then you 
 must try to get a sleep." 
 
 But Tommy had no mind to waste time in trying to 
 sleep, so when his kind hostess had left him he darted 
 across the passage, wrapped in a blanket, took a bath, 
 and when she returned, was nearly dressed and stood 
 by the fire trying to smooth down the rebellious curl on 
 his crown, that seemed that morning to be particularly 
 devilish, as he said to himself in Italian, in which the 
 word is musically so successful that it sounds rather like 
 a term of endearment. 
 
 Miss Martha Cole had had orders from her brother 
 regarding her guest, but she was an intelligent old 
 woman and saw at a glance that Tommy meant to have 
 his own way. 
 
 " Very well," she agreed promptly, " if you must you 
 must. Only it is a bitterly cold morning and you are 
 pretty well tired out, and you must at least drink your 
 
 soup like a good like a " she blushed prettily at 
 
 her own slip, but Tommy smiled at her. 
 
 " Like a good boy? Very well, I will. It looks very 
 good indeed, with the sprig of smilax in it." 
 
 "Smilax? It's parsley," cried Miss Martha, de- 
 lighted, and she continued to smile while the young 
 , man swallowed the soup and ate a bit of toast. 
 
 " You '11 find the houses of the poor things the far
 
 206 KINGSMEAD 
 
 side of the factory. You go down the hill, and turn 
 to your left, you can't mistake the High Street 
 and then at Bellingham Avenue you turn to your right 
 and go straight on. It 's about a mile from here. My 
 brother and Mr. Lansing are going from house to house 
 it is all dreadfully sad. Henry Lansing is a good 
 man, and he has never gone away from his own kind." 
 
 Tommy flushed. This phrase filled him with a real 
 happiness, for it so exactly expressed old Lansing. 
 That was what it meant, the old man's bad English, his 
 social blunders, what his son, truly loving him, called 
 his social impossibility. He had not grown away from 
 his own kind. 
 
 And Tommy saw behind the discomforts and small 
 annoyances involved by the old man's faithfulness its 
 great and simple beauty. 
 
 He had made a large fortune. He could, had his 
 motives been other, have long since made himself into 
 a more or less successful " gentleman " in the shallow 
 sense of the word ; but he had, Tommy now understood, 
 not done it because he had not chosen to. He, the work- 
 ing man, had not chosen to grow away from his own 
 kind. 
 
 Therefore the old man's harmless vulgarity, his in- 
 offensive lack of manner, became at once in the eyes of 
 the little gentleman who had always liked him, and now 
 nearly loved him, not a weakness, but a strength. 
 
 It was such an illuminating phrase, that of the little
 
 KINGSMEAD 207 
 
 old lady, it settled so many things in such a beautiful 
 way, that Tommy would have liked to put his delighted 
 arms round Miss Cole and hug her. 
 
 Not that he had needed enlightening regarding Lan- 
 sing. No, he with his sensitive antennae had at once 
 realised the old man. But Miss Cole had put into his 
 hand a beautiful weapon against those who scoffed at 
 Lansing ; she had writ across the heavens in large and 
 glorious letters an explanation of the man's being that 
 it seemed to Tommy no one could refuse to accept. 
 
 " He has never grown from his own kind ! " 
 
 Tommy's crooked smile held Miss Cole's attention by 
 sheer force of the happiness it expressed. 
 
 " You I am so glad you 're better," she murmured, 
 incoherently, not at all knowing why she felt as she did, 
 or why she so greatly liked the boy. 
 
 " So am I. And I can't tell you how grateful I 
 am to you. Oh," he added, bursting out laughing, " not 
 only for the soup but well I can't explain. I 
 just so I liked what you said about Mr. Lansing." 
 
 " I 've forgotten what I said," she answered frankly, 
 her candid young eyes, so sweet in her old face, fixed on 
 his, " but he is a fine man." 
 
 A few minutes later Tommy was on his way down the 
 hill, a h'ttle shaky on his legs, but greatly uplifted in 
 spirit, as if he had just been listening to fine music. 
 
 And it was well that he was thus caught up in the 
 clouds, for sad sights awaited him.
 
 208 KINGSMEAD 
 
 The crowds of excited people in the street showed 
 him without words which way he was to go, and when he 
 reached the long double row of little houses in which the 
 Analyte workmen lived, even the grotesque element of 
 tragedy was not missing, and it, of all, is the saddest. 
 
 " 'E 's in there, Lansing is," a man told him, pointing 
 to a door before which stood a small coffin, while the boy 
 who had brought it was knocking. " Been up all night. 
 Bill 's an old friend. And Bill 's missus wanted a white 
 coffin for the child though there ain't much left of 
 it to put into a coffin.'* 
 
 Tommy shuddered. " I don't quite know about the 
 accident. I came last night with Mr. Lansing, but 
 we were too busy to ask." 
 
 " Boiler burst and blew 'em up," explained the man 
 laconically. " Nobody's fault. Some of 'em tried to 
 make out it was, but it was n't. Sooner or later boilers 
 do burst." 
 
 Tommy looked curiously at his imperturbable face. 
 " None of your people hurt, I suppose ? " he asked. 
 
 " No. Good reason for that ain't got no people. 
 The young lady is in there too. She 's got a lot of 
 nerve. Most ladies faint." 
 
 Something in Tommy's face struck him, for he added 
 slowly: "Are you the young gentleman as wasn't 
 well? " 
 
 " I am the young gentleman who fainted," returned 
 Tommy with deep shame.
 
 KINGSMEAD 209 
 
 The man nodded. " They said you were very brave 
 and useful, sir," he said, " and you don't look over 
 strong." 
 
 Before Tommy could answer the door of the house 
 opened and Mrs. Gilpin appeared and said a few words 
 to the boy with the coffin, whose knocks had hitherto 
 been unheeded. When she saw Tommy she came down 
 the path toward him. He never forgot her face as it 
 was then. She was very pale but quite calm, and the 
 corners of her mouth were deep-set and firm. He could 
 see that she had been working hard, that she was very 
 tired, but that in spite of her tender heart she was, in 
 the midst of suffering and pain, in her element. 
 
 The little slight creature was that rarest of women, a 
 born nurse. 
 
 " Are you all right? " she asked, giving him her hand. 
 
 "Quite. How is he?" 
 
 " He is with them. Going about from house to 
 house mourning with them, poor things, and that 
 helps more than anything else. He is very splendid, 
 Lord Kingsmead." 
 
 " Is he in here now ? " 
 
 "Yes. It it was the only child. The father's 
 nearly crazy. The mother well, it is very hideous, but 
 perhaps it helps her through the mother is drunk." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 This hurt Tommy, and she saw it and smiled, a quiet 
 nurselike smile for the weakness of the untrained. 
 14
 
 210 KINGSMEAEl 
 
 " Will you come in ? " 
 
 He followed her, wondering how he could have been 
 so dense as not to see from the first that her beautiful 
 serenity was in part at least the result of training. 
 
 In the cottage he found Lansing sitting by the fire 
 with the father of the dead child. Both men sat with 
 their heads in their hands, but Lansing's left hand lay 
 on the other man's knee. 
 
 As the door opened the other man looked up. 
 
 " That 's not a parson? " he asked harshly. 
 
 " No, no, Bill. No one shall come whom you don't 
 want." 
 
 The boy who had brought the coffin went out, and 
 Tommy stood leaning against the door, sick at heart, 
 as the old phrase so wonderfully expresses it. 
 
 On the bier in the corner lay, a small thing covered 
 with a green plaid shawl. The clock ticked cheerfully, 
 and in the silence a brutish sound came from the next 
 room the sound of drunken snoring. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin, after a short pause, went to Lansing and 
 touched his shoulder. He rose and came to her. 
 
 When he saw Tommy his haggard face melted to a 
 half-smile. " You must go," he said gently. " They 
 don't want strangers and you can't help. Even she 
 can't help." 
 
 He put his hand on each of theirs, all his shyness 
 gone. He was master here, master by nature, by be- 
 longing to the people, and his worn face expressed the 
 gratitude of an officer to his good soldiers.
 
 KINGSMEAD 211 
 
 " I want you both to go home now," he said. " Tell 
 my wife I '11 stay, with them. It 's my place." 
 
 Even Tommy, usually understanding, might have pro- 
 tested, asked to be allowed to stay, to try to help, but 
 Mrs. Gilpin answered at once. 
 
 " Very well, Mr. Lansing, we will go. Good-bye." 
 " Good-bye. And thank you. Thank you both." 
 He was polite as well as grateful, but he wanted to 
 be rid of them and showed it plainly. 
 
 So with a last look at the poor little form on the bed 
 Nanny opened the door and they went out.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 "!T seems rather like deserting the ship," remarked 
 Tommy as they opened the gate and turned to the left 
 among the little knots of excited people who stood talk- 
 ing over the horrors of the accident. 
 
 Nanny laughed. " That 's the amateur point of view. 
 As a matter of fact we are simply obeying orders, which 
 is the fundamental law in most things." 
 
 Her little brisk air sat oddly on her, but he recognised 
 it as her nursing manner, and he liked it. He knew that 
 he should never forget seeing her working among the 
 stricken people through the long hours. It was a new 
 side of her beautiful character, and he reverently loved 
 it. There were so many loving and lovable things about 
 her, and each one endeared her to Tommy for Teddy's 
 sake. She would so help Teddy, so bring out the good 
 that was in him, so encourage his good points and mini- 
 mise his bad ones. Tommy would have given half his 
 little income for that year if the comfort-loving, ugly- 
 sight-fearing Teddy could have seen her tending the 
 dying and wounded the night before, her lilylike gown 
 stained with blood and darkened with the dust of the 
 floor she knelt upon. 
 
 " Have you a sister? " he asked suddenly. 
 
 212
 
 KINGSMEAD 213 
 
 She looked at him, her eyes twide with surprise. " A 
 sister? No. Why?" 
 
 " Because I wish you had." He blushed. 
 
 " But why? I never even had one, so I don't miss 
 her." 
 
 " I know. B-but I was thinking I wish you had one 
 just like yourself and that I might m-marry her," he 
 answered bravely. 
 
 Her face was very gentle and she did not smile. 
 " That is a great compliment, Lord Kingsmead, and I 
 fear you think far too highly of me." 
 
 " No, I don't. But I like you so much, Mrs. Gilpin." 
 
 Suddenly he saw that she had no hat on. 
 
 "Where is your hat? " he asked, aghast, for it was 
 cold. 
 
 " I left it at the factory last night forgot it. It 
 does n't matter, but I must buy a cap of some sort 
 before we go back. I want to go in here for a moment ; 
 will you come? " 
 
 The cottage was a very poor one, and inside the door 
 three women were talking loudly. 
 
 When Mrs. Gilpin and Tommy entered they turned 
 and stared, hostile. 
 
 " I wish to see Mrs. Carney. How is she? " 
 
 " She 's asleep you 'd better not go in it J s 
 twins." 
 
 " I am a nurse, so I will go in. And please," she 
 added with her air of quiet authority, " do not talk so 
 loud."
 
 214 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy, making himself as small as possible, stood 
 with his back to the wall watching. He was de trop, 
 but Nancy had brought him and so he stayed. 
 
 The three women on hearing that she was a nurse 
 lowered their voices, and one of them offered Tommy 
 a chair. 
 
 Presently the inner door opened and Mrs. Gilpin re- 
 appeared, bearing in each arm a small flannel bundle. 
 
 " A boy and a girl," she said to Tommy ; " lovely 
 babies look at them." 
 
 And Tommy being a male thing was rather appalled 
 as he inspected the small mulberry-coloured faces in 
 her arms. The babies, he thought, were very horrible 
 to behold, but all the manhood in him stood at attention 
 and did reverence to the womanhood in the Mignonette 
 Lady as she stood there smiling down at the new-born 
 little creatures. She looked so strong, so tender, so 
 motherly something in Tommy's breast leaped, 
 turned over, and fell with a queer sensation that made 
 him almost faint for a second. 
 
 " P-poor little things," he stammered, laying his 
 hand on one of the bundles, " how s-small they are." 
 
 " Yes," she returned seriously, " twins are usually 
 smaller than single ones. Are n't they dears ? " 
 
 Bending her smooth black head she kissed one of the 
 babies very delicately, and went back into the other 
 room. 
 
 So that was the way women feel about babies !
 
 KINGSMEAD 215 
 
 Tommy's eyes were a little wet and he stood looking 
 at the fire for a moment. He was a very sentimental 
 person. 
 
 Five minutes later Mrs. Gilpin came out and took him 
 away. 
 
 " I must go and buy a cap," she said, " and then 
 we '11 start back at once. The car is at the inn, the Grey 
 Rat. Odious name for an inn, is n't it? " 
 
 They went quickly back to the High Street, almost 
 in silence until Tommy burst out, " I say, Mrs. Gilpin, 
 I am awfully ashamed of fainting last night ! " 
 
 " I only wonder that you stood it so long. The smell 
 of burnt flesh," she added, " is so unpleasant." 
 
 " You did n't faint ! " 
 
 " No. But I was in a hospital for two years." 
 
 " So I heard you tell Dr. Cole. Was it before 
 your marriage? " 
 
 " Both. We were very poor at first. When we were 
 married I had been in for a year, and I stayed on for 
 nearly another. Then he came into a little money and 
 we were ordered to India." 
 
 " Did you like it ? Nursing, I mean." 
 
 " Yes. I like sick people." 
 
 " I saw that you did," returned Tommy. " Ah ! this 
 looks like a shop where you could get a cap. I '11 see 
 if I can knock them up." 
 
 After five minutes' loud rapping a woman opened a 
 window over the shop and was told what they wanted.
 
 216 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " I can't sell things to-day," she declared roughly ; 
 " it 's agin the law." 
 
 " Not to-day ? This lady spent the night at the 
 Analyte Works, helping the doctor, and forgot her 
 cap there. We are going home now, in a motor, and if 
 you won't let us have a hat of some kind she '11 have to 
 go bareheaded." 
 
 " Dear me ! Wait a minute and I '11 come down." 
 
 A moment later the two were in the shop, and a flat 
 grey cap was chosen, which Tommy paid for. 
 
 " 'Orrid accident, wasn't it, sir?" asked the shop- 
 keeper curiously. " They say it '11 be in the London 
 papers. Legs and arms all over the place, I 'm told, 
 and a little boy with 'is 'cad blowed clean off." 
 
 Tommy shuddered. " Oh, don't! " he answered im- 
 petuously. " We saw it or much of it, and it does n't 
 bear talking about." 
 
 " I beg your pardon, sir." 
 
 The woman was abashed, and held up a scrap of a 
 mirror in silence while Mrs. Gilpin pinned the cap on her 
 smooth hair. It was a very common shop, filled with 
 all sorts of cheap and unlovely articles of apparel, and 
 one side of the wall was lined with huge pigeonholes full 
 of Berlin worsteds, crude reds and greens for the most 
 part. 
 
 Tommy looked around as Mrs. Gilpin pinned on the 
 cap, and just as they were about to go two women in 
 dark blue cloaks and bonnets came in.
 
 KINGSMEAD 217 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin, a slim grey figure, pressed back against 
 the gay worsteds to make room for them, when suddenly 
 the second of the two, staring hard at her, exclaimed, 
 " Why, Aileen Donovan what are you doing here ? " 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin looked at her gently. " There 's some 
 mistake," she said, " my name is not Donovan." 
 
 The nurse blushed. " I beg your pardon. My name 
 is Nurse West Jessie Hart and I thought you were 
 an old friend of mine. I am very sorry." 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin smiled at her. " Not at all," she an- 
 swered. " I mean, it does n't matter a bit. You have 
 come to look after the poor people who were hurt last 
 night? " 
 
 " Yes, madam." The nurse's change of tone was 
 almost ludicrous. " There 's been a baby born and I 'm 
 looking for baby-linen for it. Nurse James, here, is 
 after cotton-wool ; the chemist is out of it." 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin nodded kindly. Hers was a wonderfully 
 kind face, Tommy thought for the hundredth time. 
 " Will you lend me a sovereign ? " she asked Tommy. 
 
 He gave her the sovereign and she pressed it into the 
 hand of the still embarrassed nurse. " Buy some little 
 thing for the poor baby, please," she said. 
 
 Then she and Tommy left the shop.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 " FATHEE and I," declared Pammy, rushing to the 
 motor, as toward six o'clock it stopped at the door, 
 " are the only ones left! " 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin, whose hand was being held by the young 
 girl, smiled at her a little vaguely. " Are you ? " she 
 asked. 
 
 But Tommy, as he helped her alight, put the illumi- 
 nating question: " What has happened? " 
 
 That Pammy was in a state of most pleasurable ex- 
 citement was plainly visible, and at such moments her 
 future prettiness seemed to get the better of her bulk 
 and insist on recognition. Her crimson cheeks were less 
 red than usual, her eyes bright and dark, and her wind- 
 blown silky hair very charming indeed. 
 
 " Well, you see, they have all had an attack of aver- 
 sion to type that 's what father calls it. But do 
 come in and have tea, and I '11 tell you all about it." 
 
 Leading the way to the great hall with a semicon- 
 scious air of hospitality, she helped Nancy Gilpin get 
 out of her coat, kissed her noisily, took off her fur 
 gloves, and paying no attention to Tommy's statement 
 that they had had tea an hour ago at a wayside pub, 
 made the travellers sit down by the fire, which she poked 
 
 218
 
 KINGSMEAD 219 
 
 with an air of giving a solemn person a dig in the ribs 
 and telling it to cheer up. 
 
 " Well, go on we 're dying to hear the news," said 
 Tommy, much amused by the young girl's manner as 
 well as really curious to know what had happened. 
 
 Then Pammy sat down, the poker still in her hand, 
 and drawing a deep breath, began : 
 
 " Well, poor Mrs. Lansing was awake all night, and 
 when she woke up it was eleven o'clock ! " 
 
 " How could she wake up if she was awake all night ? " 
 
 " You know what I mean. And she was dreadfully 
 upset about her husband's being there without her. The 
 Duchess tried to comfort her, but could n't. Mr. Teddy 
 spent all his morning looking for telegrams from you 
 and when none came he got frightfully cross, and 
 even mother thought him rude. Then at last Mrs. Lan- 
 sing decided to go too I mean to Ramsbury. The 
 Duchess thought it nonsense, but Mrs. Lansing told her 
 she did n't know what she was talking about, and that 
 they were her people, and she had worked in a factory 
 herself, and so on. So at twelve Mr. Teddy and she left. 
 Poor Mrs. Lansing seemed quite helpless without Mr. 
 Lansing, but she would go." 
 
 Tommy nodded. " And the Duchess ?" 
 
 " The Duchess was going to-morrow anyhow, you 
 know, so she decided to go to-day instead. She gave 
 Mrs. Lansing her own handkerchief at the last moment, 
 for she had lost hers Mrs. Lansing had, I mean. And
 
 220 KINGSMEAD 
 
 when Mrs. Lansing cried so awfully she patted her on 
 the back the Duchess patted Mrs. Lansing. Well, 
 the Duchess being so old mother would n't let her go 
 alone with Poe, so mother went with her. They went to 
 Lady Yeoland's they wired first to see if it would be 
 inconvenient, and mother is coming back to fetch us 
 to-morrow. Then Lord and Lady Pontefract went home 
 too, I 've forgotten why they went and Sir Wil- 
 fred left an hour ago ! " 
 
 Tommy burst out laughing. " Why did he go ? " 
 
 Pammy's large face lengthened with mysterious im- 
 portance. " He went because because Miss Lansing 
 refused him ! " 
 
 " Good gracious, Pammy, what an appalling person 
 you are! How can you possibly know that? " 
 
 The tea, which had arrived, stood unheeded on the 
 table, even Pammy forgetting it. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin lay back wearily in her chair, gazing 
 with half-closed eyes into the fire. 
 
 The reaction from her night of painful hard work 
 had set in soon after they had left Ramsbury, and for 
 the greater part of the journey she had been quite silent. 
 Tommy looked at her anxiously as he put his amused 
 questions to Pammy. 
 
 " I Icnow. Because," declared the young girl cheer- 
 fully, " I heard him ! " 
 
 " Heard him ? You little brute, you 've been eaves- 
 dropping ! "
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy rose disgustedly. " Don't say another word, 
 we refuse to listen to you. Come, Mrs. Gilpin," he 
 added gently, " you must go upstairs and rest. I '11 tell 
 Miss Lansing that you are too tired to dine." 
 
 " No, no, I am not tired. I am far stronger than I 
 look, Lord Kingsmead. Please don't worry about me. 
 I '11 go and see Inez, poor girl." 
 
 Taking up her gloves, she left the room, and Tommy 
 turned to the extremely discomfited Pammy, whose round 
 eyes were, he saw, full of tears. 
 
 " Don't howl," he said cheerfully, " but keep your 
 crimes to yourself. I will have a cup of tea, after all." 
 
 Pammy winked hard to keep the tears from falling. 
 
 " You need n't have been so beastly," she muttered, 
 sitting down at the tea-table ; " I 'm not a sneak." 
 
 " All right. We '11 call it an accident, three bits 
 of sugar, please, but you must n't tell me, please. 
 Where 's your father? " But Pammy was possessed of 
 a vast though gentle pertinacity, and intended to tell 
 her story. 
 
 " He 's playing with Eliza with her electric railway, 
 upstairs. They were here and I came down the stairs 
 from the gallery. I was n't walking quietly " 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 " Well," she asked with great indignation, " do I ever 
 walk quietly ? " And he, with a laugh, was obliged to 
 admit that her coming was always heralded by almost 
 elephantine footfalls.
 
 222 KINGSMEAD 
 
 "Well and they just didn't hear me. It wasn't 
 my fault. I heard him say would n't she reconsider, that 
 he loved her very 
 
 " Oh, chuck it, Pammy, if you have any decency," 
 interrupted Tommy. " Can't you see that you are being 
 a bounder in telling? " 
 
 " No, I can't. And she said," the girl continued, as 
 unmoved as a bale of cotton by a charge of duckshot, 
 " that she would n't. I told the Duchess, and she said, 
 ' The girl is a fool,' for it seems he is well born and so 
 on, and he is in the Scots Greys ! I," biting meditatively 
 into a jam sandwich, " am going to marry a naval 
 officer." 
 
 "Why?" asked Tommy, relieved at the advent of a 
 new topic. 
 
 " Because they 're always away. Oh well, the next 
 thing that happened was Mr. Green the young one 
 called and took Inez for a walk. That was at four, 
 and they are still walking. Father says young Green 
 is a very nice boy. Inez is n't bad, either. She gave 
 me a string of corals the other day. But I prefer 
 pearls." 
 
 Tommy rose, laughing. 
 
 " No accounting for tastes, is thererf* Did my sister 
 leave no message for me? " 
 
 Pammy jumped nearly out of her chair and began 
 rummaging in her short serge skirt for a pocket. 
 
 "Oh yes; what an idiot I am she left a letter.
 
 KINGSMEAD 223 
 
 Here it is I hope you don't mind its being rather 
 squashed." 
 
 Tommy took the letter gingerly. " It *s a moot point 
 in law," he said, removing a small lump of some sticky 
 yellow substance from the back of the envelope, "whether 
 this piece of toffy belongs to you or to me or even 
 to her ! However, I am a generous young man, so I '11 
 cede the point." 
 
 Pammy took her toffy, looked at it doubtfully for a 
 moment and then not unregretfully threw it into the 
 fire. Tommy meantime was reading the note. 
 
 " DEAREST L. B. : Ponty is what he calls too fed up for 
 words, so we are off. Pam (or probably the voluble Pammy) 
 will tell you the news and why you and Mrs. G. will find the 
 house empty but for Inez. It was very sad last night, and 
 to-day things have been worse. 
 
 " The Leather-heads are dining with us to-morrow, as their 
 friend the Irishman wants to see Ponty 's buffalo-hide. Won't 
 you and Inez and dear little Mrs. Gilpin come too ? Do. Heaps 
 of love. 
 
 " BICKY." 
 
 Pammy was watching him closely, her face, in its 
 loss of animation, heavy and almost dull. " Why did 
 they go ? " she asked, but obviously not much caring 
 what the answer to her question might be. 
 
 Tommy laughed. " To make little girls ask ques- 
 tions. Ah! here they are." 
 
 But Inez Lansing came in alone, and sinking down 
 into a low chair asked Pammy to give her some tea.
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " I 'm sorry all this has happened," she began 
 abruptly. " It was nonsense for mother to go. They 
 will all be horribly embarrassed by her, and I told her 
 so. Those people want to be by themselves when they 
 are in trouble." 
 
 Again Tommy wondered who was the woman whom 
 she so obviously was imitating. Whoever she was the 
 young man knew he should detest her. 
 
 " I can't imagine," Miss Lansing went on, taking her 
 tea from Pammy's large white hand, beside which her 
 own, thin and small and dark, looked like a monkey's, 
 " why she went." 
 
 " I know," declared Pammy. 
 
 "Why, then?" 
 
 Tommy tried to speak, but it was too late. 
 
 " An aversion to type." 
 
 Inez stared for a moment and then flushed a deep red. 
 
 " Aha ! And who told you that? " 
 
 " Father." 
 
 " You have n't got it right, you little goose ! " burst 
 out Tommy, sincerely sorry for the elder girl as he 
 watched her. " Miss Lansing, do have some cream in 
 your tea that looks poisonously strong." 
 
 " No. It may be another case of reversion to type," 
 she returned bitterly, " My liking black tea. They 
 always do." 
 
 Swallowing the tea hastily she rose without another 
 word and left the room.
 
 KINGSMEAD 225 
 
 " You are a little horror, Pammy," declared Tommy, 
 seriously annoyed. " You should n't repeat what you 
 hear, and you should n't use words you don't under- 
 stand." 
 
 " I 'm sorry. Did n't mean to make her angry, but 
 you have n't any right to scold me. Besides, what did 
 I say?" 
 
 Pammy's large face was crimson and her eyes full of 
 tears. 
 
 " Well, you 've hurt her feelings and you have been 
 meddlesome, which is a perfectly horrid thing to be." 
 
 " ShaU I go and tell her I 'm sorry? I '11 tell her I 
 don't know what it means " 
 
 Pammy's humility touched Tommy, who laughed 
 ruefully. 
 
 " No, no. Let bad enough alone, my dear. But never 
 repeat things, Pammy, it 's awful it is n't cricket." 
 
 Pammy wiped her eyes, in default of a handkerchief, 
 on her sleeve. 
 
 " Oh, Tommy ! But I won't, indeed I won't ! " 
 
 15
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE next morning Tommy went for a long walk after 
 bidding the Lenskys good-bye, and did not come back 
 until dressing-time. The evening before had been dull, 
 but not so painful as he had expected, for to his surprise 
 Inez had appeared much as usual at dinner, and talked 
 most peacefully with Lensky, who, quite innocent of the 
 fact that his amused remark had been repeated by his 
 sharp-eared and indiscreet adopted daughter, met her 
 with a kind question about her father. 
 
 Jack Lensky was considered one of the most charming 
 men in London, and his smooth, fair face with its per- 
 manent monocle and his seraphic pale-green gaze was 
 well known to everyone who, as the phrase goes, was 
 anyone. 
 
 He spoke many languages, his discretion was absolute, 
 his devotion to the beauty of women never involved him 
 in the toils of a devotion to any woman, and he and his 
 wife were cited in these days of cheerfully accepted in- 
 fidelity as a model couple. 
 
 Tommy, whose capacity for admiration was so very 
 great, had ever since his little boyhood been devoted to 
 the dapper little Pole, and in his impersonal way Lensky 
 was fond of him. 
 
 226
 
 KINGSMEAD 227 
 
 The younger man had as a boy frequently visited the 
 Lenskys when they lived in the country, but of late, since 
 Lensky's position at the Russian embassy had grown 
 in importance, they lived altogether in the old house in 
 Little College Street. 
 
 Three years of their married life had been passed on 
 the Continent, two of them in St. Petersburg, but they 
 both loved England, and in spite of hints from high 
 quarters that an ambassadorship might be the reward 
 of a few years' more patience, he had retired from the 
 diplomatic service, and accepted a permanent position 
 of some more or less undefined kind at the embassy. 
 
 So Pam Lensky was at last a real Londoner. 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin liked Lensky, and he and she talked 
 about Russia at dinner that night. She had been there 
 and had liked it. She looked very tired, in spite of her 
 asseverations to the contrary, and her voice dragged 
 with weariness, dropping at the ends of her sentences as 
 if with relief. 
 
 Inez and Tommy upheld a desultory and quite unin- 
 teresting conversation, and Pammy, who had received 
 a very sharp scolding from Tommy, sat enveloped in 
 gloomy silence. So that everyone was glad when dinner 
 was over, and the evening was shortened by an early 
 withdrawal of the two women, Pammy having disap- 
 peared immediately on leaving the dining-room. 
 
 So when Madame de Lensky arrived in the morning, 
 Tommy bade them all good-bye and went for a walk.
 
 228 KINGSMEAD 
 
 He was not a walker in the real sense of the vain- 
 glorious word. That is, he sometimes did other things 
 too, and even at times would not take a real walk for 
 days if he was busy with an interesting book, or if 
 it was dusty or wet. He hated dust as the Utopian 
 parlour-maid should, and the wet hated him and caused 
 his Wretched Beast, as he called his delicate health, to 
 stir uneasily. 
 
 But there were times when only an overlong tramp 
 could rest his mind, and that second of January was one 
 of them. 
 
 So off he started under a threatening grey sky, and 
 turning to his left on leaving the park gates climbed a 
 steep path to the downs, from the top of which the sea 
 was distantly visible. 
 
 " I wish I were at the Castelletto," he remarked aloud 
 to himself ; " there is probably daylight there." 
 
 He could, as he marched on over the rapidly soften- 
 ing ridges of the yesterday icebound road, see the little 
 high-perched pile of grey stone ; the grotesque prickly- 
 pears stretching their contorted arms in the yellow 
 sunlight; the brilliant, Japanese-looking fir-trees sil- 
 houetted against the vivid blue of the wide-spreading 
 sea. 
 
 " The wallflowers are green by this time," he thought 
 regretfully, " and irises all over the place ! And in the 
 garden under the wall violets. Oh, paese beato! " 
 
 And, shocked and hurt as his sensitive organisation
 
 KINGSMEAD 229 
 
 had been by the awful sights he had seen the night 
 before the last, the little rocky promontory, grey and 
 green and sunny, did indeed seem to him to be a blessed 
 land. 
 
 If it would not, to his peculiar mind, have seemed, 
 in spite of the fact that he was bound to England by no 
 duties, cowardice to go away he must certainly have 
 fled to Italy that very day. It would be bad to leave 
 his sister, but he could always come back ; and with- 
 out attempting to analyse feelings the recognition of 
 which would have caused him keen self-scorn, he felt 
 that that was home the Castelletto and that here, 
 in the cold grey land where awful things happen, he was 
 a kind of voluntary outlaw. 
 
 He was, in fact, suffering from overstrung nerves, 
 but he knew only that things were going agley, that the 
 world was out of joint, and that something menacing 
 seemed to be waiting for him, hidden behind the imme- 
 diate hours. 
 
 If Tommy had had a wise mother she would have 
 kept him with her that morning, talking of cheerful, 
 indifferent things ; and without his suspecting it, she 
 would have seen that he did not sit in a draught, eat 
 anything indigestible, or hear anything harrowing. But 
 his mother was dead, poor soul, leaving behind her a 
 record of variegated unwisdom and futile passions, and 
 so the young man was walking, chilled and depressed, 
 over the downs, looking without interest at the grey
 
 230 KINGSMEAD 
 
 sea, so different from the blue one he wanted and 
 needed. 
 
 When he reached home, tired out, he had but just 
 time to dress for dinner, and then he and Inez and Mrs. 
 Gilpin set out together for Pomfret Abbey. 
 
 " I saw Lady Pontefract to-day," Inez announced, as 
 little Nanny sat down between her and Tommy. " I 
 was in the chemist's shop and she came in. She won- 
 dered you had not been to see her." 
 
 " No I just tramped. I am going to stop with 
 her in a few days, you know. Perhaps," he added, " I 
 had better be there when Mr. and Mrs. Lansing come 
 back." 
 
 " No, no. Oh, please ! You will make things so 
 much easier if you don't mind ! Father will be very 
 savage, poor dear, and mother is so fond of you. 
 You are," she added in her gentlest voice, " a very com- 
 forting person." Tommy sighed silently. " Is n't he, 
 Nanny?" 
 
 " Yes. That is because he is so kind," Mrs. Gilpin 
 answered, laying her hand, in the darkness, for one 
 instant on his arm. 
 
 And somehow Tommy felt better for her little friendly 
 caress. After all, he thought, she really did need him, 
 and so did Teddy. Teddy, poor darling fellow, must 
 be having an awful time at Ramsbury. He was utterly 
 and hopelessly out of place among the people from 
 whom he had sprung, and his consciousness of it only 
 made matters worse.
 
 KINGSMEAD 231 
 
 Poor little Mignonette Lady too! She as well must 
 be feeling lonely to-night, with him so far away. 
 
 Tommy's tense nerves yielded a little at this thought. 
 
 After dinner he would take her to see something in 
 the library and cheer her up by talking about Teddy. 
 During the rest of the dinner he chattered gaily, suc- 
 ceeding at length, to his own delight, in making both 
 the women laugh with real enjoyment, and the homesick 
 vision of the Castelletto receded comfortably into the 
 back of liis brain.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 POMFRET ABBEY was a depressingly large house, and its 
 dining-room, a huge place, sombre and magnificent, was 
 Brigit's bete noir, although it was, in its way, too per- 
 fect to be altered. So on ordinary occasions the Ponte- 
 fracts dined in what was called, for no particular reason, 
 the white dining-room. 
 
 This room, while not white, was light-coloured and 
 cheerful, besides possessing the peculiar characteristic 
 of being perfectly round. Its dull blue hangings, broken 
 by three windows, made a becoming background, and 
 the round table gave to small parties a feeling of par- 
 ticular confidence and cosiness. 
 
 It was in this charming room that the dinner that 
 night took place, and everyone, sitting down, felt a little 
 pang of pleasure. 
 
 Lord and Lady Leatherhead had at the last moment 
 been unable to come, but their guest, Major Portrush, 
 in whose honour the party had hastily been arranged, 
 was there. 
 
 Pontefract, after talking for a moment with Mrs. 
 Gilpin, drew his little brother-in-law aside. 
 
 " Tommy Joyselle is dying." 
 
 The young man started, and he glanced hastily toward 
 232
 
 KINGSMEAD 233 
 
 his sister, who, dressed in white, was composedly chat- 
 ting with a tall girl with dyed hair Miss Clark of 
 Welland Park near Pinchbroke. 
 
 "Dying?" 
 
 " Yes. The'o wrote. The letter came this morning. 
 I asked her," the kind man went on, " if she did n't want 
 to put off the dinner, but she did n't. After all,** he 
 added cheerfully, " she has n't seen him for years." 
 
 " Oh, that " Tommy began, and then stopped 
 
 short. 
 
 " Does n't matter, you mean ? Well, Tommy," Ponte- 
 fract returned, his hand on Tommy's shoulder, " you are 
 wrong. Years do matter, so do even months. She 
 you know Brigit, she never was afraid of the truth 
 told me to-day that that well, he was the only one, 
 really, but she is fonder of me than you 'd think. 
 She saved me, for one thing." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 Pontefract's protruding eyes followed his wife with a 
 very pathetic expression as he spoke. " I don't think 
 she 's unhappy," he added. 
 
 Tommy, touched, smiled at him. 
 
 " No more do I, Ponty. She is certainly very fond 
 of you. But it must have been a shock to her, all the 
 same. You did n't know him. He he was splendid ; 
 I loved him too." 
 
 Then he crossed the room and slipped his arm through 
 his sister's.
 
 234 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " You have heard, dear ? " she asked, walking to a 
 window with him. 
 
 " Yes. Ah, Bick it is sad " 
 
 " No. It is good. I am glad, Tommy. Theo is 
 there, and he he sent me this and oh, Tommy, his 
 blessing. The"o wrote that he mixed me up with his 
 nieces until the very last, and then he remembered, and 
 begged my pardon, and said it was all his fault. And 
 would I forgive him I ! and would I wear 
 this?" 
 
 Tommy remembered the big diamond ring that hung 
 on a thin chain round his neck. Joyselle had worn it 
 on his right hand, and before Brigit and he had known 
 the great man they had seen the thing flash on his finger 
 as he played in the concerts which were then driving 
 sober-minded, emotional London mad. 
 
 Ah, Bick dear!" 
 
 " Yes, Tommy it *s Amen. I I am glad. I 
 
 could n't bear to think of his suffering, and Theo says 
 
 he does n't suffer now. It is a beautiful letter. And 
 
 it was wrong, but it was n't wicked in itself, dear. 
 
 And I still do, you know I always shall." 
 
 He had never before so clearly understood her lone- 
 liness in the midst of her luxurious surroundings. She 
 had not, on losing the man she loved, turned to good 
 works, except to the good work of marrying and saving 
 Pontefract; she had lived the usual life of people of 
 her class, travelling, enjoying, spending money. But
 
 KINGSMEAD 235 
 
 Tommy knew now that she had, like the red Indian to 
 whose glorified type people had so often compared her 
 dark beauty, been all through the years silently endur- 
 ing. Without religion, without children, without vanity 
 to console and occupy her, the woman went, and would 
 continue to go, her way, stoically enduring. 
 
 " Darling old girl," her brother began, but at that 
 minute dinner was announced, and he could say no more. 
 Tommy, placed between Mrs. Gilpin and a young man 
 named Boscawen, a cousin of Pontefract's, was very 
 silent during the first part of the meal, while his sister 
 and Boscawen talked cheerfully about Pam Lensky, whom 
 the young man knew and liked, while Ponty, delighted 
 with Mrs. Gilpin, as he had been during his short stay 
 at Kingsmead, was telling her quite frankly how pleased 
 he was to have her next him that evening. 
 
 "You will sing, won't you?" he added, smiling at 
 her. 
 
 " Yes, with pleasure." 
 
 She wore black, and Tommy was sorry, for he loved 
 her best in white and grey. But at her throat, hanging 
 by a delicate platinum chain, hung a large pear-shaped 
 diamond which he had never seen before, and which gave 
 her a quaintly travestied air, as of a nun in worldly 
 attire. *. 
 
 " Sing the song about the wind and the barley," went 
 on Ponty, leaning toward her, his red face beaming. 
 
 But that was Teddy's song and must not be sung in 
 Teddy's absence.
 
 236 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " No, no, Mrs. Gilpin," broke in Tommy abruptly, 
 " please not that one. Sing the Spanish thing about the 
 fan." 
 
 She turned and looked at him. 
 
 "Don't you like the Greek song?" she asked, and 
 it seemed as if there were in her gentle voice a hint of 
 reproach. It was, she seemed to mean, her favourite 
 song; did he, then, not like it too? 
 
 " I like it, ah yes, I did n't mean that" he assured her 
 as Pontef ract turned to speak to Inez ; adding in an 
 undertone, " but it seems like Teddy's song, somehow. 
 And he, poor fellow, is not here." 
 
 To his great happiness her pale cheeks flushed a deli- 
 cate shell-pink at his words and she dropped her eyes. 
 
 " You are very thoughtful," she returned. 
 
 " Yes. It makes me happy to think of people I love, 
 and Teddy gli voglio unfran bene I bear him," he 
 translated, whimsically, " a great good will." 
 
 She did not look up in answer, but the shyness in her 
 drooping face was enough to satisfy even his exigent 
 loyalty. 
 
 Boscawen's voice, as he talked to Brigit, broke the 
 dreamy spell under which Tommy sat for the next few 
 minutes. 
 
 " It was a very brave sight," Boscawen was saying. 
 " He simply sprang under the great horrible thing and 
 dragged the child back into safety. It was a miracle 
 they were not both killed."
 
 KINGSMEAD 237 
 
 Lady Brigit, her most beautiful that night, an un- 
 usual look of softness in her dark eyes, bowed her head. 
 
 " That shows that people are not so bad even yet," 
 she answered. " I don't mean you, Hal, of course 
 but that the people were so touched by it. Even very 
 mean people seem to thrill back at a deed of great 
 courage." 
 
 " Right, my dear," agreed her husband eagerly. " I 
 remember a chap once telling me about an escaped con- 
 vict, long ago, in New South Wales, coming out from 
 his hiding-place in a barn and going into a burning 
 house to save an old woman who was bedridden. The 
 crowd recognised him afterward, but they never laid a 
 finger on him and he got off scot-free." 
 
 Major Portrush, a brown-faced man of fifty, sitting 
 on Lady Pontefract's right, lifted his wine-glass and 
 looked into it thoughtfully for a moment. 
 
 " The bravest deed I ever saw done," he said slowly, 
 " was in India in a little battle near the Afghanistan 
 border." Something in his voice was very arresting, 
 and Lady Pontefract turned toward him. 
 
 " Tell us the story," she commanded gently. 
 
 Dinner was drawing to a close, and little pink ices 
 stood before each guest. 
 
 Major Portrush emptied his champagne-glass, wiped 
 his large moustache with an upward gesture, and began, 
 amid a slight silence that grew in intensity as he went 
 on, until the whole room seemed breathless.
 
 238 KINGSMEAD 
 
 In a few well-chosen words he described the position 
 of the lonely little border stronghold, the long, rather 
 enervating peace that had lulled the suspicions of the 
 men within it, and the alarm in the night. 
 
 " No one dreamed of an attack," he said sternly, all 
 the superficial gaiety gone from his face; "we were sup- 
 posed to be on peace terms with the prince, who, indeed, 
 we afterward found, was altogether against rebellion, 
 and forced to it by rebellion among his men. 
 
 " It was a cold night we were very high up and 
 I, for one, was sound asleep, when suddenly the buglers 
 sounded the alarm. 
 
 " In ten minutes' time we were firing down into a 
 crowd of black devils mad with fighting, and utterly un- 
 afraid of death. There were between thirty and forty 
 of them to one of us, besides." 
 
 Tommy watched the story-teller as he went on, his 
 terse, technical details brightened and warmed by his 
 Irish sense of words, his power as raconteur stimulated 
 and strengthened by the eager attention of his audience. 
 The room was vibratingly silent now, and the little pink 
 ices, like forgotten roses, faded unenjoyed. 
 
 " Suddenly," the Irishman went on, with a dramatic 
 gesture of his strong brown hands, " crack the flag- 
 pole was struck and down it hurtled away from us 
 among those devils. One of our men a soldier ran 
 down and opening the door was out among them like a 
 shot. He was drunk with blood as they were, the
 
 KINGSMEAD 239 
 
 niggers. And just as he reached the place where it had 
 fallen, over he went, struck by a bullet." 
 
 The narrator paused, conscious of something more, 
 greater, to come. Tommy, glancing to his left, caught 
 sight of Mrs. Gilpin's hands, tight clasped on the edge 
 of the table, so tightly clasped that they looked blood- 
 less and stiff. 
 
 Horrified at what he knew she must be suffering, he 
 was about to speak, when Portrush, now with a strong 
 brogue, hurried on, telling how one of the officers, a 
 cool-headed, silent man, untouched by the fever of battle 
 that had urged the soldier to risk his life so uselessly, 
 had gone down among the fighting quite quietly, and 
 picking the wounded man in his arms, started back. 
 
 " The niggers were driven back at that moment by a 
 terrific rain of fire from our men, but it was only for a 
 moment, and just as he reached the door, which was 
 ready to open for him, down he went on his face, shot 
 through the back, God save him ! " 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin was as white as the table-cloth, Tommy 
 saw, and under cover of the exclamations that followed 
 the story, Tommy laid his hands on hers, which, still 
 tightly twisted, now lay on her lap. 
 
 " Drink some wine," he whispered. " I am so sorry." 
 
 " Oh yes, dead as a door-nail," finished Portrush. 
 " We buried him there at sunrise. I shall never forget 
 his dead face. Rather fine it was. He had a great scar 
 on one cheek that had always rather disfigured him, but
 
 240 KINGSMEAD 
 
 after his death, somehow, it did n't show. At least it 
 (Ed n't seem to matter. His name was Gilpin Bill 
 Gilpin and he was a gunner." 
 
 Everyone started, and Lady Brigit hastily rose, with 
 a warning glance at Portrush. 
 
 Tommy had his arm round Mrs. Gilpin, for she was, 
 visibly, barely able to sit upright. 
 
 " Damnation ! " growled poor terrified Pontefract 
 under his breath. " I say, Brigit, this is awful ! " 
 
 Portrush turned helplessly to Inez, who stood, as she 
 had sat, on his right. " What is the matter? " 
 
 " He was her husband." 
 
 " Her husband ! But " 
 
 " Hush ! " said Tommy authoritatively. " Come, 
 Ponty, take her other arm, will you? "
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 IN the flower-filled drawing-room Nancy Gilpin soon 
 recovered herself. Tommy, forgetting that he, as a 
 male thing, had no right there at present, sat by her 
 couch and held near her face a big engraved glass 
 smelling-bottle, while Brigit opened a window and let 
 in a rush of cool air. 
 
 " I am so sorry, dear Mrs. Gilpin," Brigit said over 
 and over again ; " the poor man of course had never 
 caught your name." 
 
 And the poor Mignonette Lady smiled tremulously 
 and answered, each time, that she was sorry to have 
 been so weak. 
 
 " It was a splendid story, though," suggested Tommy 
 at last, putting down his smelling-bottle and gently 
 chafing one of her cold little hands. It was the one 
 with the wedding-ring on it, and he thought, as he 
 touched it, of the poor hero who had put it where it 
 was and then, only five years later, ridden blithely away 
 to his death. 
 
 She nodded. " Please don't talk about it, Lord 
 Kingsmead." 
 
 So he stopped, and sat silently by her whom he felt 
 to be, in Teddy's absence, his charge. 
 16 241
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Brigit, at the far end of the long room, stood by the 
 fire talking to Inez and smoking a cigarette. The win- 
 dow was still open, and the coolness was pleasant. 
 
 On the low chintz-covered couch Nanny's little black 
 figure lay quite quiet, her face as pale as the pillow on 
 which it rested. Only, as she breathed, the great dia- 
 mond on her bosom rose and fell, sending out flashes 
 of crimson and green fire. 
 
 Tommy was greatly distressed, and as he sat there his 
 peace became gradually disturbed by a dreadful fear. 
 It came so quietly, the fear, with the relentlessness of 
 a slowly moving great force. If she could be so moved, 
 after nearly five years, by the story of her husband's 
 death, could she possibly, he wondered, really love Teddy 
 as he deserved? And if not, it seemed that the world 
 would come to a piteous end. 
 
 It is hard to say why Kingsmead loved, as he certainly 
 did love, young Lansing. Teddy was a handsome, truth- 
 telling, clean-lived youth; but beyond that there was 
 little to be said about him. He was remarkable in no 
 other way whatsoever, and what is more, Tommy realised 
 it. Yet his affection for his friend closely approached 
 adoration, at times, even while he perfectly recognised 
 Teddy's limitations. 
 
 And as he sat there by the woman Teddy loved, there 
 began in his breast, even while he gently rubbed her 
 small soft hand, something very like resentment against 
 her for the woe she might be going to work, something
 
 KINGSMEAD 243 
 
 curiously akin to jealousy of the poor dead man for 
 his friend. 
 
 He was glad Teddy had not been there that night, 
 and yet if she could never really love him, he might 
 as well know it. 
 
 Suddenly, without moving, Nanny spoke. 
 
 " Do not be angry," she said, very low, so that Lady 
 Pontef ract and Miss Lansing did not hear her. "I 
 I could not help it." 
 
 Looking at her he saw that great tears stood in her 
 eyes. " Oh, I am not angry, please don't cry. It is 
 only that that that it all went with him. Oh, 
 I am not blind, and I can see." 
 
 " You think I can never love again. Well, you 
 are wrong. I love now far more than I ever loved 
 him." 
 
 She still spoke in an undertone, but the intensity in 
 her voice was such that he turned, half alarmed, toward 
 the others. 
 
 " I loved him, yes, but that is over and gone, that 
 love. It is dead. And this," she laid her hand on her 
 heart with the gesture of a child or a very great actor, 
 " is alive. I love as women love, not as children do. 
 Ah yes, I love, I love, I love ! " Rising all in one move- 
 ment she went toward Lady Pontefract. 
 
 Tommy was dazed, and the backs of his knees 
 twitched, as was always the case with him when he was 
 greatly moved.
 
 244 KINGSMEAD 
 
 She was splendid, more splendid even than he had 
 dreamed. And Teddy oh, thrice blessed Teddy ! 
 
 He was standing looking idly and quite unseeingly at 
 a little ivory idol that his sister had brought from Kioto, 
 when the other men came in. 
 
 Major Portrush joined Tommy at once. 
 
 " I say," he began abruptly, " I am awfully sorry to 
 have upset Mrs. Gilpin so. I had n't heard her name, 
 and besides, I thought his wife died just after he was 
 killed. I do feel such a brute. Will you tell her for me 
 some time, when she 's quieted down again ? Poor 
 little thing ! " he added kindly. " I have his watch, by 
 the way, and must give it to her. I was sent off just 
 after the row, you see, and took it with me. Tried to 
 find his wife, wrote letters and all that, and then the 
 story got about that she was dead. The watch I have 
 locked away somewhere. He had just joined us, sold 
 out from some smart regiment, they said, because he 
 was hard up. A queer, silent chap, who never mentioned 
 his own affairs. Afterward no one was ever sure 
 that he was married, though some of us had heard it 
 from outside sources, and then we heard she had died 
 of the shock." 
 
 Tommy nodded. 
 
 " All right, I '11 tell her some time. I say she J s 
 going to sing ! " 
 
 And she was. 
 
 Sitting at the piano she struck a few chords sharply*
 
 KINGSMEAD 245 
 
 as if to attract attention to her song; and then, to 
 everyone's amazement, for she had always said she 
 played badly, broke into a very complicated accompani- 
 ment, which she played with remarkable accuracy and 
 fire. 
 
 It was an Hungarian song full of rather stereotyped 
 surprises in harmony, but she sang it well, and with a 
 greater power of voice than any of them had ever before 
 known her to possess. 
 
 Then, without pausing, she began the Greek song. 
 
 Tommy stood facing her, and she seemed to be looking 
 with her wide-open eyes full into his face. 
 
 The chill air from the open window blew across him, 
 a bowl of roses smelled strongly, the fire snapped quietly, 
 and the audience stood listening with curious intentness 
 to the beautiful little song. 
 
 " Oh, how I loved thee, Atthis !" 
 
 How he had loved her, the dead hero ; how she had 
 loved him "a thousand years ago." Tommy's heart 
 thumped tremendously. Yes, to all intents and purposes 
 it had been a thousand years ago, for there had been 
 no mistaking the passion in her voice when she said, 
 " I love, I love, I love ! " 
 
 And now, in singing, she loved. She was alive, the 
 little quiet creature, every fibre of her, and as she sang 
 she showed, voluntarily, proudly, it seemed, a side of 
 her nature that he had never seen before. 
 
 " Did we falter when love caught us in a gust of wild desire ?"
 
 246 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy's eyes glowed as he watched her, for he knew 
 she would not falter. 
 
 No, she would not falter. This, as had been the sight 
 of her at the factory, was a new phase. Tommy had 
 often heard her sing, but always to the romantic soft 
 chords of the guitar, and it had seemed an old-fashioned, 
 rather quaint little accomplishment the echo, almost, 
 of a real string the memory. 
 
 It seemed, now, as if that other singing had been the 
 reflection of her love for her dead husband, for the dead 
 are not loved as the living are ; it was a tender reminis- 
 cence of singing, that other, a mild souvenir of finished 
 things. Whereas this was pregnant with present 
 emotion. 
 
 The thumping of Tommy's heart would have warmed 
 an older man, but in his innocence he listened full of j oy 
 for his friend. 
 
 Her heart was not buried there in the little hill for- 
 tress; it was living and beating now with a strong 
 present feeling. She loved, and her song was ex- 
 pressing without reserve the force and vitality of her 
 love. 
 
 " Did the barley bid the wind wait in its course ?" 
 
 Everyone listened tensely, and when she had finished 
 her song she played on for a moment, and then, as if 
 irresistibly impelled to do it, began it again: 
 
 " Oh, how I loved thee, Atthis !"
 
 KINGSMEAD 247 
 
 Tommy glanced at his sister. Lady Pontefract sat 
 in a high-backed chair, listening with bent head. Alas, 
 poor Brigit, vivid music is not good for such as her. 
 
 But Tommy's mind was at that moment capable of 
 only the passing tribute of the thought. 
 
 What held him was the voice at the piano the small, 
 usually so reserved face against the background of 
 palms and ferns Teddy's Mignonette Lady. 
 
 No one in the world was at that moment more beauti- 
 fully happy than Tommy, in his unselfish affection. 
 And then it happened, the inevitable. Or possibly, he 
 never knew which, it was simply that he at that moment 
 realised a thing that had happened days before without 
 his knowledge. 
 
 And for a moment he caught at the arms of the chair 
 in which he sat, and held his breath while he whirled 
 through horrid black space. 
 
 It was very awful, and it took, the revelation, this 
 form. He saw, as if some malignant hand had suddenly 
 held it before his eyes, a photograph that Pammy the 
 inquisitive had brought from Mrs. Gilpin's room to 
 show him. 
 
 A man's face, strong, purposeful, and ugly. 
 
 And there was on it no scar.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 KINGSMEAD never could remember which of the two great 
 shocks came to him first, as Nancy Gilpin sang the 
 Greek song: the knowledge that he loved her, or the 
 knowledge that something was wrong, that she was not 
 what she seemed. 
 
 He remembered walking out of the open window into 
 the cold garden before the last note of the singing voice 
 had died away. He remembered walking very briskly, 
 as though he had something important to do there, to 
 the East Lodge, quite a quarter of a mile from the 
 house. He remembered going slowly back, with drag- 
 ging feet, to get his coat and hat, for the pitiful reason 
 that he knew if he walked home without them he would 
 take cold and be ill. He remembered sending a polite 
 message of excuse to his sister by the butler. And 
 he remembered the long dark walk home to the home 
 that was his by tradition and love, but no longer his 
 in reality. Many slightest details of his walk he never 
 forgot the clear barking of a distant dog ; the strik- 
 ing of a church clock ; a motor thundering past him. 
 
 But whether he first knew that Nancy Gilpin was a 
 swindler, or that he loved her not as a friend, not as the 
 future wife of his dearest friend, but as a man loves the 
 
 248
 
 KINGSMEAD 249 
 
 woman he wants for his own, this he could never 
 decide. 
 
 He remembered the meeting with the nurse in the shop 
 at Ramsbury, and the quiet voice in which Mrs. Gil- 
 pin had corrected her : " My name is not Donovan." 
 Donovan ! 
 
 He recalled her having told him that she had been 
 married at seventeen, and her subsequent story of having 
 been a trained nurse for three years. 
 
 She had also once told him that people had said she 
 married " him " for money, which was not true, and on 
 the occasion of the slip about the nursing she had said 
 he was poor at the time of their marriage. 
 
 He had not noticed those discrepancies before, but 
 now he recalled them with cruel distinctness and memory. 
 
 All little slips that, singly, might have been explained 
 away, but that now, facing him collectively, in a solid 
 phalanx of evidence, were utterly convincing and 
 damning. 
 
 What the truth was the young man could not even 
 guess. It might be anyone of several hideous possibil- 
 ities that swept through his tortured mind as if taunt- 
 ing him with the easiness with which they become facts. 
 
 All he knew was that in some way or other his Mignon- 
 ette Lady, Teddy's love, and also his own love as well 
 now, was a swindler. 
 
 Beautiful and dear as she was to him, and piteous 
 though she seemed in her smallness and quietness, he did
 
 250 KINGSMEAD 
 
 not even attempt to find for her a milder epithet than 
 that odious one swindler. She had become known 
 to them all under pretences ; she had won the friendships 
 of Brigit, of the Lansings, the Lenskys, and the worldly- 
 wise old Duchess. Pranked in her assumed personality 
 she had won her way close to their hearts, and she was 
 a swindle. 
 
 Worse, she had gained Teddy's honest young love, 
 and Teddy must suffer. 
 
 As to his own feelings Tommy was as yet too dazed 
 to think much. He had adored her, he had tried to be 
 her friend, he had given her a close place, as Teddy's 
 wife, in his future. 
 
 But now with bewildering and cruel enmeshment he 
 knew her to be not the self he had known she was a 
 stranger, an unknown person, a liar, a swindler. And 
 he loved her. 
 
 Of that fact there was no doubt, nor did he attempt 
 to deny it in his own mind, any more than he attempted 
 to mitigate her crimes. 
 
 It was, the one thing, just as was the other. 
 
 And he was very young, little Kingsmead, and his 
 dream of love had been to him a most holy and beautiful 
 thing, and had meant much to him. 
 
 Now, at a blow it was shattered, killed outright before 
 his eyes, for instead of loving the wonderful woman 
 made for him, he loved one, he knew, all unworthy. 
 
 Sitting in his room he heard the motor come in and
 
 KINGSMEAD 251 
 
 stop at the door. Then he heard Mrs. Gilpin's voice, 
 saying good-night to Inez. She was content with the 
 evening, she believed that she was still undetected. 
 
 And she would no doubt go to bed and dream of 
 Teddy. Tommy groaned aloud. 
 
 Poor Teddy ! Yes, and poor Nanny ! For she loved 
 Teddy. It was all so mixed! 
 
 If he had made, he now began to realise, one discovery 
 alone, either of them, it would have been so much easier 
 to bear. If he had suddenly found that he loved Teddy's 
 future wife, how simply he could have gone back to the 
 Castelletto to fight the thing down. It would have been 
 hard, but his course would have been so obvious that it 
 would have needed no reflection. It would have been 
 like a hard white highroad stretching in front of 
 him. 
 
 Or had he learned, in that wonderful moment while 
 she sang, only that she was not herself, not the self he 
 knew and had believed in, then, too, things would have 
 been easier. Teddy, of course, must not be allowed to 
 marry a swindler, and it would have been painful to 
 make that clear, but the brutal complications, the para- 
 doxical difficulties, would not so have torn at his mind. 
 
 It was one o'clock when, at last, the young man found 
 himself standing by the open window, conscious of the 
 night and the time. 
 
 For nearly two hours he had been tramping up and 
 down his room. He was very tired, and he was cold,
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 for his fire had long since died to a mere wreath of 
 palely gloomy embers. Closing the window he went to 
 the fireplace and looked down at it. There was wood 
 in plenty in the box on his right, but nothing to kindle 
 it with. 
 
 Suddenly he saw on his table a letter addressed 
 by him to Teddy, which he had forgotten to have 
 posted. 
 
 It was a very pale and grim Tommy who tore the 
 close-written sheets out of their envelope, a Tommy 
 whose face seemed to have suddenly grown older; from 
 which something, not quite youth, but something con- 
 tained in the essence of youth, had quite gone. If the 
 Duchess had been there she would have told him that 
 he looked at that moment like his paternal grandmother, 
 the Lady Kingsmead who, someone said, had never for- 
 given her husband for a love-affair that he had had, in 
 a joyous, absent-minded way. The story went that 
 although she lived under his roof without scandal, until 
 his death, fifteen years after the love-affair, she had in 
 all that time never addressed one word to him when they 
 were alone together. 
 
 And Tommy, as he reread the letter he had written 
 that very morning to his absent friend, looked like this 
 obstinate and relentless old woman. 
 
 " DEAR LANNER : I was awfully sorry not to find you here 
 last night, though I 'm sure you did well in going, and I was 
 not the only disappointed one.
 
 KINGSMEAD 
 
 "We got back at six, after two pauses, and she was very 
 tired. I wish, dear old chap, that you could have seen her 
 there, at the factory. So little and lovely and delicate-looking, 
 her beautiful white dress quite forgotten, as she helped the 
 doctor dress wounds, the awfulness of which I cannot bear to 
 think of, even now. She was so gentle, so capable and un- 
 afraid. I, wretched little nuisance, did my best, but it was a 
 poor best, and at last, when the work was done, I toppled over 
 in a faint, and they got me to the doctor's house before I came 
 to. All right again, now, however. . . . 
 
 " I am glad I was there, Teddy. It was a privilege to see 
 her. It is a privilege to know her, and I can't tell you how 
 happy it makes me to think of her marrying you. You are 
 very fortunate, for there surely is no one so good and so dear 
 in the world. . . . 
 
 " But here I am orating, and it will bore you. I am writ- 
 ing in bed, and must get up. Come back soon. I miss you. 
 Also when you do come, don't waste any more time. I am 
 sure she cares for you. 
 
 " Yours, 
 
 rp 
 
 Thus the letter, read slowly with that grim smile of 
 the grandmother he had never seen. He could, it was 
 clear, never forgive her. Just as he never paltered 
 about his love for her, he never paltered about her 
 unforgivableness. 
 
 Making long twists of the two sheets- of his letter he 
 inserted them delicately under a rough, dry bit of wood 
 that he chose from the box, and set a flaming match to 
 the paper. He watched it gravely while it flickered and 
 finally caught the loose mossy back of the log and settled 
 on it. Then going to a corner he brought back a long
 
 254 KINGSMEAD 
 
 box which he opened and from which he took a violin, 
 unstrung and unused-looking. 
 
 There was a bearskin rug in front of the fire, and 
 lying down on it, the violin in one arm, he closed his 
 eyes and tried to rest.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 " MRS. GILPIN expects me." 
 
 Mrs. Gilpin's pretty parlour-maid stepped aside and 
 let him enter, and, when he had taken off his damp coat, 
 led him upstairs. It was two days after the dinner at 
 Pomfret Abbey, but Tommy had not seen Mrs. Gilpin 
 since he walked away from her singing voice that 
 evening. 
 
 The following day he had stayed in his room, say- 
 ing, with truth, that he was not well; and when she 
 went back to Greene after lunch he had sent word by 
 a footman to ask if he might call on her the next 
 afternoon. 
 
 The maid, opening the drawing-room door, announced 
 him, and then closing the door on him, left them alone. 
 
 It was a desolate, rain-drenched day, but the long 
 white room with its bowls of mignonette and its delicate 
 silken curtains looked very cheery in its slightly prim 
 way. There was a bright fire, and what would Eng- 
 land be without her open fires ? and Mrs. Gilpin her- 
 self, all in grey, with her little mirror flashing as she 
 rose to greet him, looked a personification of picturesque 
 domesticity. 
 
 " I am glad you have come," she said. 
 
 255
 
 256 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy looked at her very gravely. He loved her and 
 she was a swindler. She was a swindler and he loved her. 
 
 There was something rather awful in the adamantine 
 irreconcilability of these two facts. 
 
 " Why," he asked in a quiet voice, " have you lied to 
 us all?" 
 
 For a moment she stared at him as if she did not 
 understand. Then a little smile stirred her pink lips. 
 
 " I am glad you know," she said, her voice as even as 
 his. The clock struck three as she spoke a cheerful, 
 silver-toned little clock it was. Tommy turned and 
 looked at it as if it had been an intrusive human being. 
 
 " Sit down." Mrs. Gilpin, as she spoke, sat down 
 herself, and took up her work, a long, delicate white seam 
 of some kind. Her cotton had slipped from the eye of 
 her needle when she rose, and the needle lay, a narrow 
 flash of light, on the rug before her. 
 
 Tommy leaned down and picked it up, and while with 
 trembling hands she rethreaded it, he drew closer to the 
 fire one of the slim-legged little chairs and sat down. 
 
 " How," she began, looking at him, " did you find 
 out?" 
 
 " Through Portrush's story and something he 
 said later. Then, while you were singing," he went on, 
 telling his tale quite simply, " it came over me. I 
 remembered the photograph you showed me " 
 
 " Yes. There was no scar. I was foolish to keep the 
 photograph, but I loved him."
 
 KINGSMEAD 257 
 
 There was another pause, while she stitched daintily 
 at her transparent frill. 
 
 "It isn't your real name, I suppose?" he asked 
 suddenly. 
 
 " No. I never set eyes on Bill Gilpin. But I may as 
 well tell you the whole story now. You are probably 
 imagining all sorts of things that are n't true." 
 
 " I am trying not to imagine anything. And I 
 should like to know the truth. If you lie to me now," 
 he added, his lip quivering for a second, " I shall know 
 it." 
 
 " I will not lie to you now. And believe me, I am 
 really almost glad to tell you the truth. I have minded 
 that part, deceiving you." 
 
 "All right. Goon." 
 
 He did not know how grave, how inexorable he looked 
 as he sat there in his little chair, but his graveness, his 
 inexorability were very great, and she knew it. 
 
 " Then," she began, plunging boldly into the middle 
 of her story, " I never have been married to anyone, 
 and my name is " 
 
 " Aileen Donovan." 
 
 " Ah, you remember. Yes, Aileen Donovan. Poor 
 Jessie West ! How well I remember her and the rest, 
 at Bart's. Well, my father was an Irish vet, and my 
 mother was a lady. Never mind her name. He died 
 when I was about twelve, and we lived until I was seven- 
 teen at a little place near Down. Then she died. 
 17
 
 258 KINGSMEAD 
 
 She died very suddenly, and there was no money. The 
 clergyman there, a nice old man, got me some music- 
 pupils my mother was a musician and had taught me 
 well and then, for it bored me, the life there, got me in 
 at Bart's. I was there one year, after my probation was 
 over, and I liked it. I like sick people and they like me. 
 
 " One day," she was still sewing placidly, " I got into 
 a row with one of the surgeons, and was sent away. So 
 I went back home and was stopping there quietly 
 at the inn, which was kept by an old servant of ours, 
 until I could decide what to do. 
 
 " And he came. I '11 not tell you his name. He 
 was still is, I dare say a stock-broker, and rich. 
 But that did n't matter. I loved him, and he loved me. 
 I was a perfectly good girl, and he knew it, and he said 
 he 'd marry me. 
 
 " We went to London and he gave me," she added 
 with great distinctness, " a little flat in Baker Street. 
 He gave me clothes, and jewels, and anything I wanted, 
 but he would not marry me, now that he had got me, and 
 I could n't go away, because I loved him. He was," she 
 added, " very good to me." 
 
 She had stopped sewing now, and her hands were 
 clasped on her work. 
 
 " Then well, there 's no use in going into details 
 he married. But he gave me enough money to have 
 always two thousand pounds a year, and he bought me 
 this house."
 
 KINGSMEAD 259 
 
 "Oh," groaned Tommy, "how could you?" 
 
 She looked at him, a little tender, almost pitying smile 
 on her lips. " How could I not? I was hurt to death, 
 and I wanted to be alone, and not to do the usual 
 thing." 
 
 " The usual thing? " 
 
 " Yes, go from bad to worse. I did not want to do 
 that. I was ill, too, oh, quite in the romantic way, 
 for a long time. Then I found the deeds and so on of 
 the house, which he had not mentioned to me. It was 
 a kind thought." 
 
 " Have you seen him since? " 
 
 She raised her eyes, her beautiful clear eyes, to his. 
 " Never. We should neither of us wish to. Well that 
 is all there is to that part of the story." 
 
 " Yes. And now," his voice was grim, " tell me how 
 that poor dead man came into it." 
 
 She was silent for a moment. 
 
 Her calmness, as free from the affectation of amuse- 
 ment or carelessness as from any real nervousness, was, 
 he vaguely realised, amazing. 
 
 She sat there in her low chair as serenely, in spite of 
 the little touch of shyness that he had never seen leave 
 her save among the wounded people at Ramsbury, as 
 if his visit had been a most ordinary one ; as though she 
 had not been caught in a situation which she must know 
 would forever bar her out from the man she loved. 
 
 It was, in its way, very admirable, her undemonstra-
 
 260 KINGSMEAD 
 
 tive courage, and he knew it, her relentless young judge, 
 yet he had no mercy in his heart. 
 
 " Yes, that is another story," she began softly. 
 " You see, I was badly hurt. And I wanted solitude. 
 And I wanted to be good. Well I had lived then 
 in London, under my own name, only as as 
 Mrs." 
 
 At this, for the first time, she faltered, and her white 
 eyelids quivered a little. 
 
 " So when it was finished, and I was beginning 
 over I wanted a new name. And I happened to find, 
 while I was packing an old newspaper with the 
 story in it. The story of Captain Gilpin, as Major 
 Portrush told it the other night. The article told that 
 he was quite alone in the world, so far as people 
 knew, and that his wife died at Udaipur several days 
 after the battle. She, too, came, the newspaper said, 
 from no one knew where. They seemed to be as lonely, 
 as as unbelonging as I myself. Even her death was 
 not announced as a positive fact. They seemed like 
 dream people. He had joined the regiment only a short 
 time before, and no other Gilpins claimed him, so that 
 even his watch was kept by Major Portrush. It 
 seemed," she went on quietly, " a lonely story as if 
 they might, being so lonely themselves, have forgiven 
 me. And so it was n't a prominent story I looked 
 it up in the papers and it was only very briefly men- 
 tioned I decided to to be his widow.
 
 KINGSMEAD 261 
 
 " And I have been his widow. I have lived here quite 
 quietly ever since. I am, you see, a home body by 
 nature, so it has been very easy." 
 
 This, Tommy knew, was all true. 
 
 Gullible as he had been before, his wits were now 
 sharpened to an almost uncanny acuteness, and he knew 
 that she had not lied in the slightest particular. She 
 was, as she said, he felt, looking at her sitting by her 
 hearth-fire, essentially a home body. 
 
 The pity of it ! 
 
 Rising, he went to the nearest window and stood 
 looking out into the grey, rainy afternoon. As he stood 
 there the clock struck four. 
 
 " That 's all," she said presently. 
 
 " Yes. I am convinced of that." 
 
 She rose and coming close to him looked into his eyes 
 with her serene yet half-shy gaze. 
 
 " You will not betray me? " she asked.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 " BETRAY you ? Of course I won't. You need n't fear 
 that," he returned, not even attempting to conceal in 
 his voice the contempt that surged up in him at the 
 question. 
 
 But her eyes were still dark with anxiety. " I did n't 
 think you 'd put it into the papers," she went on, her 
 hands lightly clasped in front of her. " I mean you 
 will not tell Teddy." 
 
 He stepped back and looked at her from a little 
 distance, as if she, as well as his mind, needed 
 focussing. 
 
 " That," he said, " I leave to you." 
 
 For the first time her high courage faltered, and one 
 of her hands went quickly to her throat as though she 
 could not breathe. 
 
 "Tome!" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " But, Lord Kingsmead, there is no necessity for his 
 knowing. What good could it do ? " she asked, coming 
 toward him, sincere wonder in her face. " It would only 
 hurt him." 
 
 Tommy's stare was as sincere as her own, for he rec- 
 ognised the utter lack of comprehension of his view-point 
 
 262
 
 KINGSMEAD 263 
 
 and saw that he must explain. They were speaking in 
 different moral tongues. 
 
 " Listen, Mrs. Gilpin," he began with a new gentle- 
 ness, as of a patient missionary explaining the story 
 of the Cross to a savage, " you don't understand. Won't 
 you sit down, please, and I will try to make you." 
 
 Obediently she sank into the chair she had vacated, 
 and sat looking inquiringly at him. 
 
 " You surely," he began unsparingly, but still with 
 the gentle look in his eyes, " cannot expect to marry 
 Teddy now? " 
 
 " Yes. Why not? No one but you knows. No one 
 need ever know." 
 
 "Why not, you ask? But don't you realise that 
 you have done a terrible thing in deceiving us all in 
 winning his love under false pretences ? " 
 
 She flushed with a little proud movement of her head. 
 
 " * Winning ' implies an effort, Lord Kingsmead. I 
 made no effort to make him love me. For a long time I 
 did n't even see that he did." 
 
 " That may be. But don't you see that he loves 
 Mrs. Gilpin a a widow with " it was bitterly 
 hard work, and he stumbled over the ungracious words, 
 but went on doggedly " with an honest record? He 
 did not even know Aileen Donovan." 
 
 She winced, but he could see with his painful pre- 
 science that it was at his voice more than at the meaning 
 of his words.
 
 264 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " He never will know Aileen Donovan," she said. " I 
 have n't a relative in the world, and no one will ever ques- 
 tion his wife." 
 
 Tommy crossed his legs impatiently. 
 
 " Oh, this is awful ! " he burst out. " It would be 
 ridiculous if it were not terrible. You can't marry him, 
 that 's all. If you can't make up your mind to tell him 
 the truth, you must just go away disappear." 
 
 " But I can't. Where could I go ? This is my home. 
 I love it. And besides," she added gently, with a little 
 coaxing smile, " I am not bad. I will not hurt him. I 
 have never hurt anyone in my life." 
 
 Through Tommy's whirling brain came a bar or two 
 of beautiful music the phrase in " Tosca " where the 
 suffering woman says 
 
 "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore, 
 Non fici male ad anima viva" 
 
 that she lived in her art, in her love, and never had hurt 
 a living soul. It is a pathetic bit of melody, tender and 
 haunting, and as the distressing interview went on it 
 seemed to echo and re-echo in the quiet room as if a 
 heart-broken voice were singing it in the distance. 
 
 " I believe that you have not hurt people, that you are 
 kind," he answered, using the phrase she had more than 
 once applied to him, " but all that does not help. You 
 must see I must make you see that you cannot marry 
 Teddy."
 
 KINGSMEAD 65 
 
 " That," she answered with a ghost of her wistful 
 smile, " is what no one can make me see." 
 
 Tommy was for the moment at a loss. Had she met 
 him with irony, with tears, with indifference, he would, he 
 thought, have been able to cope with her ; but this atti- 
 tude of gentle misunderstanding puzzled him utterly. It 
 was half-past four. 
 
 In the silence Mrs. Gilpin put out her hand and touched 
 the bell by the fireplace. 
 
 " Tea, please, Carson," she said pleasantly to the 
 parlour-maid, and then, as the door closed, she added 
 to Tommy, " Tea will help us think, it clears the 
 brain." 
 
 But whatever tea might do to the brain, his head for 
 the moment seemed a whirling confusion of infant 
 thoughts struggling for growth into comprehensive 
 manhood. 
 
 Rising he went into the little conservatory and stood, 
 his hands in his jacket pockets, before the fuchsia, whose 
 graceful little bells, stirred by the gusts of rain blown 
 against the glass walls by the rising wind, seemed to be 
 playing a little mocking carillon to him. " Ah," he 
 thought, with a consciousness of his disabling youth very 
 unusual, " if I were only older ! " 
 
 When the tea was brought in he took quite mechanic- 
 ally the carefully prepared cup she gave him, and bal- 
 anced on his thin knee a tiny flowered plate of bread and 
 butter.
 
 266 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Try to eat," she said kindly, her eyes almost mater- 
 nal in their gentle anxiety ; " you look tired out." 
 
 He shook his head. " I am not tired. I am 
 troubled. I hate to hurt you, yet there are things that 
 must be said " 
 
 " Say them, Lord Kingsmead, say them. Only if you 
 think me a bad woman, you are wrong. I am not bad. 
 I I loved him. Not as I love now," she added, as if 
 touched by a leaping flame of feeling, " ah no ! But 
 I was very young, and lonely, and he loved me, and was 
 good to me. I was good to him, too." 
 
 She sipped her tea as she spoke, her small face still 
 flushed by the touch of the flame, the delicate shell-like 
 flush that was to him so marvellously beautiful, but 
 her hand was quite steady, her brow as smooth as a 
 child's. 
 
 " You see I met many men while I was with him. He 
 used to bring them to dine. And they, like you, 
 did n't understand. I know that more than one of them 
 cared for me. Yet because I cared for him so much, 
 not one of them ever dared to try to show me, even with- 
 out words my loyalty was such that it made them 
 loyal, and they all treated me just as if I had been his 
 wife. 
 
 " Later, too, when he began to tire of me (it was not 
 his fault, it was because I am so quiet and stay-at- 
 home), I was good to him. I never let him see how it 
 hurt. He never knew, even at the last. He had been
 
 KINGSMEAD 267 
 
 good to me, and it would have been unfair to make 
 
 scenes 
 
 Tommy set down his cup with a little crash. 
 
 " Damn the fellow ! " he cried fiercely. " He should 
 have married you." 
 
 She smiled at him, her eyes bright with gratification. 
 
 " Yes, he should have. He was not very good, per- 
 haps, but he was good to me in everything but that. So 
 when he left me I just said good-bye to him and let 
 him go." 
 
 It was a strange little story, strangely told, and it 
 took a sharp effort on Tommy's part to turn his mental 
 back to that aspect of the case and again face the imme- 
 diate future. 
 
 " I am deeply sorry for you," he said slowly, " please 
 believe that. Please believe, too, that the whole thing 
 hurts me horribly. But I must also make you see 
 that Teddy must not marry you." 
 
 " No." 
 
 Her delicate pink mouth set firmly as she spoke, and 
 she rose. " I am, in spite of everything, a good woman, 
 and I can make him happy and do him good as no one 
 else could. You know that as well as I." 
 
 Her words were very arresting, for in his mind he was 
 forced to acknowledge that she would do Teddy good. 
 Teddy was a rather vacillating nature, he was lazy, he 
 needed a goad, an impetus. And Nancy Gilpin, as she 
 remained to Tommy, would be those things, and bring 
 out all the good that lay in him.
 
 268 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Ah, if only she had been Nancy Gilpin, the brave Bill 
 Gilpin's widow, how comparatively easy it would have 
 been for Tommy to see her his friend's wife! 
 
 As it was, he knew, with the deep, unwavering convic- 
 tion of what was right and what was wrong that had 
 been born in him, that he could not allow the marriage. 
 
 It was a horrid gibe of fate, that of forcing him of 
 all people into the position of judge in the matter, but 
 here he was, and he must do his best. 
 
 " You cannot marry Teddy," he said abruptly, spring- 
 ing to his feet. " You are, God help you, not a fitting 
 wife for him." 
 
 " Then," she answered, " you do think me bad." 
 
 He was silent for a moment, but she saw that his eyes 
 were swimming with tears. 
 
 " I am just what you have seen," she pleaded, stand- 
 ing close to him but still keeping all her curious remote- 
 ness that had seemed to him so beautiful. " I am the 
 quiet little woman living alone, seeing few people, never 
 talked about doing no harm respecting herself and 
 others " 
 
 But his racked nerves could bear no more. 
 
 " I know all that," he cried roughly, the tears now 
 rolling down his cheeks, " but you were a man's paid 
 mistress and you are still living on his money. Now 
 do you understand ? " 
 
 Her face ash-white, her lips parted with a look almost 
 one of stupidity, she stared at him.
 
 KINGSMEAD 269 
 
 "Oh!" she said. 
 
 " Yes ! I I hate myself for hurting you. Take 
 your choice about about telling him, or going away. 
 If you go away I give you my word of honour I '11 never 
 tell him. And you see I trust you not to to fool 
 me again which will you do? " 
 
 There was a long pause, and then she said, twisting 
 the chain of her little hand-glass so tightly round her 
 hands that they were red and swollen, " I will do neither. 
 You are good and kind, and I I like you, Lord Kings- 
 mead, but you are only a boy. I am older than you, and 
 I know that I shall be able to do him good. I will 
 marry him." 
 
 She spoke quite firmly, and he saw that the twisting 
 of her hands meant determination, not nervousness. 
 
 "You mean that?" he asked, suddenly very stern 
 though his white cheeks were still wet. 
 
 I do." 
 
 " Then good-bye. I am going back to Kingsmead 
 to tell him myself." 
 
 " Surely," she protested, " you will not do that. It 
 would be betraying me." 
 
 " If I did n't I should be betraying him." 
 
 "But- -" 
 
 " There are n't any ' buts,' Mrs. Gilpin. Oh," he burst 
 out, " can't you see? You have n't even a name ! " 
 
 Even then she was not angry. Instead of anger or 
 fear there was in her eyes the strange look of wonder.
 
 270 KINGSMEAD 
 
 He puzzled her, quite evidently, as much if not more 
 than she puzzled him. 
 
 " Listen," he said gently, "I it makes me very 
 miserable, but won't you try to see? I 'm not a prig, 
 but " 
 
 She smiled faintly and laid her hand on his arm. " No, 
 you are not a prig. How how young of you to think 
 of that! But you are just that. So young! You 
 don't understand. You see, I am j ust what you thought 
 me. I am me and he loves me, and I shall help him. 
 Can't you see that ? " 
 
 Tommy groaned. " But you are not what he thought. 
 That is just what is so awful. I know he loves you, God 
 help him, and I know that you love him. And that is 
 why you must tell him." 
 
 " I will not tell him." 
 
 The corners of her mouth set hard, but her eyebrows 
 did not stir, and she continued to look at him with the 
 strange tranquillity so characteristic of her. 
 
 "You refuse?" 
 
 " I do," she answered. 
 
 " Then," Tommy declared, drawing a deep breath 
 that seemed to move his heart several inches, " I will. 
 Good-bye." 
 
 Without a protest from her, or an instant's hesitation 
 on his part, he left the room and the house.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 IT must be remembered that Tommy Kingsmead at this 
 crisis was only three-and-twenty ; it must be remem- 
 bered that he had just awakened to the fact that he 
 loved Nancy Gilpin; it must be remembered that he 
 was a reverent, passionately idealistic youth, and that 
 at the very moment of his realisation of his love for the 
 gentle woman he had worshipped ever since he knew 
 her, had come the realisation that she was unworthy of 
 his love. 
 
 He was, as he left the house, quite forgetting the 
 motor in which he had come, the chauffeur of which was 
 at that moment being pampered with port and cakes in 
 the kitchen, in a mental turmoil that, luckily, few young 
 men can even conceive of. 
 
 Tramping doggedly along through the wet even- 
 ing, over mile after mile of muddy, slippery road, his 
 wheeling thoughts, so tumultuous at first, gradually 
 quieted down to a dead-level of patiently accepted 
 misery. 
 
 That he must, added to all his other suffering, add 
 the horror of telling the dreadful story to Teddy, had 
 seemed at first almost unbearable ; but Tommy, despite 
 his delicate little body, was possessed of a proud cour- 
 
 871
 
 272 KINGSMEAD 
 
 age that could accept without even mental murmur the 
 things sent to him. 
 
 So, while he tramped along, his coat-collar turned 
 up, his cold hands buried deep in his pockets, his 
 thoughts were not for himself, but for his friend. 
 
 He, Tommy, at least knew all already; for him no 
 hideous surprise lay in ambush ready to spring on him 
 and tear at his breast with cruel claws. 
 
 Whereas Teddy Teddy, then at Ramsbury, sur- 
 rounded by sordid tragedies that he could not help 
 was, no doubt, hugging at that very moment close to 
 his soul the thought, the memory of the woman he loved. 
 
 This, somehow, made Tommy's agony the more acute, 
 and the prospect of the inactive night before him the 
 more awful. The next day he would go to Ramsbury. 
 Not, thank God, by motor ; not over the roads by which 
 he had passed with Nanny while his adoration was still 
 green. He would take an early train, and, on arriving, 
 go straight to his friend and tell him the truth. 
 
 Only one pang was, in that long evening walk, 
 spared Tommy. He at least was not torn by any mis- 
 taken sense of loyalty to the woman he loved. He loved 
 her, yes, and he suffered for and with her, but quite 
 clearly he saw his way unblinded by prejudice or pity. 
 The gods, in trying him so hard, had at least held their 
 hands from doing to him the horror of uncertainty 
 regarding right and wrong. He knew, quite certainly, 
 that no matter how sorry he himself was for the poor
 
 KINGSMEAD 273 
 
 woman, she was not one whom Teddy could marry. 
 The rain ceased when he was about half-way home, and 
 as night crept up the sky from the dark sodden earth, 
 a few stars came out. 
 
 On Tommy hurried, his clothes splashed with mud, his 
 face still wet with rain. 
 
 " Poor Teddy, oh, poor Teddy ! " he thought. 
 
 Later, he vaguely felt, he would think " poor 
 Tommy," but the piteousness of Teddy's present con- 
 fident happiness filled him with a kind of horror that 
 deadened all other feeling. 
 
 Half-way up the dark avenue a motor passed him 
 from behind, and he stood still. It was Teddy, he knew, 
 although it had been too dark for him to see. Teddy 
 had returned, winged, no doubt by his longing to see 
 his love 
 
 Tommy's steps flagged and his tired mind faltered. 
 He must, then, tell his sorry tale to-night. 
 
 Realising suddenly his own great fatigue, he longed 
 for one night's respite for a long bodily rest in his 
 bed. He was so unutterably weary now that he felt 
 he could not talk. 
 
 Very slowly he crept on toward the house, and when 
 he reached the door and the butler confirmed his knowl- 
 edge that Teddy had been in the motor (if knowledge 
 can be confirmed) he went at once to his room and sank 
 down in his rain-soaked clothes in a chair by the fire. 
 
 Five minutes later and he was sound asleep, his wet 
 18
 
 274 KINGSMEAD 
 
 boots smoking in the heat, his chin dropped in utter 
 exhaustion. And it was thus that Teddy, an hour later, 
 having by chance heard of his arrival, found him. 
 
 When Tommy woke, gradually, pleasantly, to find 
 his dear friend smiling down at him with a look of deep- 
 est content, he for a moment forgot the horror of things 
 actual, and smiled back at the beautiful young man his 
 sweetest, crookedest smile of affection. 
 
 " Poor old Tommy, you look tired to death," ob- 
 served Teddy, " and your clothes are soaked, silly young 
 ass." 
 
 And then Tommy, looking down at himself, remem- 
 bered. He was stiff and aching all over, but he rose at 
 a bound and stood with his back to the dying fire. 
 
 " Don't b-bother about me," he said ; " I I was 
 walking. Where are your father and mother? " 
 
 Teddy gave a half shamefaced, chuckling laugh. 
 
 " Still there. It was an awful business, Tommy. 
 And father takes it to heart even more than he need. 
 He and mother will stay for the funerals the day 
 after to-morrow. I," he added, suddenly grave, 
 " could n't wait. Tommy, have you seen her ? " 
 
 " Yes. I have seen her." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 All the delicious impatience of the lover rang in his 
 voice as he said the word, and Tommy shivered. 
 
 " Well? You don't think she won't? " 
 
 Tommy at that made a mighty effort.
 
 KINGSMEAD 75 
 
 " Look here, Teddy," he said slowly, " there is some- 
 thing I must tell you something very bad. I it 
 h-hurts me but I must." 
 
 Teddy laid his hand on his shoulder and eyed him 
 sternly. " It 's not," he asked with a quaver in his 
 voice, " that that you have been making love to 
 her?" 
 
 Even in his pain Tommy was conscious of the old 
 pang of pitying disgust that slips of the kind in Teddy 
 occasioned him. 
 
 " Don't you know me better than that? " he asked 
 impatiently. 
 
 Teddy flushed. " I beg your pardon. Go on." 
 
 " It 's it 's this. She you can't marry her, 
 Teddy. Her name is n't even Gilpin. She has fooled 
 us all." 
 
 Teddy stared at him for a moment, and then burst 
 out laughing. " You 're dreaming, old chap ! Of 
 course her name 's Gilpin. What should it be? " 
 
 " It 's Donovan," returned Tommy wearily, feeling 
 as if he had already told the story so often that his 
 tongue refused its duty. " Aileen Donovan. She never 
 was in India. She never saw Gilpin. Her father was 
 an Irish vet, and she has never been married." 
 
 It was said, and in his relief he sat down. 
 
 " Do you mean to say that she is just a fraud, an 
 .adventuress ? Why, you 're mad, man ! " 
 
 Teddy laughed at the absurdity of the tale.
 
 276 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy looked at him. " * Adventuress ' does n't 
 seem to be exactly the word," he protested mildly, 
 " but it 's true, what I said. Her name is Aileen 
 Donovan." 
 
 The pretty red faded from Teddy's brown cheek, but 
 he refused to be convinced. 
 
 " It 's laughable. Some j ealous woman has been lying 
 about her. How can you be such an ass as to believe 
 such a story ? " 
 
 " I 'm not an ass. She told me herself." 
 
 Then at last young Lansing became alarmed, and in 
 a sharp, high voice new to his friend claimed circum- 
 stantial detail. And Tommy told it much as it had 
 been told to him, without embellishment, without any 
 attempt at palliation. 
 
 " You see," he added when he had finished, " I tried 
 to make her understand that she must tell you. And 
 I failed. Therefore I had to tell you m-myself." 
 
 " She has never been married? " repeated Teddy with 
 a puzzled frown. 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Then she is n't a widow at all." 
 
 " No." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 Tommy looked at him. " Dear old Teddy ! Poor 
 dear old chap ! " 
 
 Lansing stared stupidly at the fire for several sec- 
 onds. Then he rose.
 
 KINGSMEAD 277 
 
 " Well I 'm going to marry her just the same," 
 he declared. 
 
 And Tommy saw that his eyes were very bloodshot. 
 
 " You are tired, Teddy ; come along to bed, and we 11 
 talk it over to-morrow," he answered gently. 
 
 Teddy looked at him. " You may go to the devil," he 
 answered in a quiet voice. " I don't care what becomes 
 of you. I 'm going over to to her at once and make 
 her marry me." 
 
 And poor Tommy, wise for all his youth, let him go 
 without another word, for it was not the time for words.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 OBEDIENT to the clamorous call of the great gong, 
 Tommy hurried into evening clothes and went down to 
 dinner. He would in his present mood rather have 
 faced a dragon than Inez Lansing, but he was in a meas- 
 ure her guest and his undefined code did not permit of 
 his causing inconvenience by staying upstairs. To his 
 relief, Inez, who wore an almost ingeniously unbecoming 
 blue frock, was distrait and silent herself. 
 
 When dinner was announced she explained shortly 
 that Teddy had gone out, and then, in silence, they went 
 into the dining-room. The small table looked small 
 indeed in the great room, and poor Tommy glanced 
 appalled at the long menu that stood in a silver frame 
 before him. 
 
 Must he eat, or pretend to eat, or even watch Inez 
 pretend to eat, all these things? 
 
 " I 'm not a bit hungry, are you ? " she asked sud- 
 denly, as if she had read his thoughts. 
 
 " No, not at all. What have you been doing all 
 day?" 
 
 She gave a little laugh. 
 
 "I? Nothing at all. Oh, Hubert Green called, and 
 we went for a walk." 
 
 278
 
 KINGSMEAD 279 
 
 " Nice chap, Green." 
 
 She laughed again. " Do you like him ? He has very 
 bad manners, I always think." 
 
 Tommy took some beef and looked at it with actual 
 physical loathing. 
 
 " Bad manners ? No, I never thought so. In what 
 way do you mean? " 
 
 It was a hideous effort to talk, but he felt that he 
 must do his best to entertain his hostess, and silence in 
 itself was at present of no comfort to him. 
 
 " I mean to say he is very outspoken." 
 
 " Oh yes, he is that," returned Tommy, forgetting 
 Green entirely and thinking of Teddy ; " but one 
 must n't be too hard on him. It is not very easy for 
 him." 
 
 She stared. Then she flushed. 
 
 " What do you mean? You can't have seen " 
 
 Tommy drank some water. 
 
 " I 'm afraid I 'm being very stupid, Miss Lansing. 
 But as to Green, I can only say I 've never seen him 
 guilty of bad manners." 
 
 " He was very rude about Captain Axendale- 
 Murray." 
 
 " Oh, rude about Axendale-Murray, was he? Per- 
 haps he perhaps he did n't like him " 
 
 As he floundered on, sitting very erect in his chair, 
 old Lady Kingsmead opposite him in her black-and- 
 gold frame seemed to be fixing her cold, unyielding eye 
 on him. It was an awful meal.
 
 280 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " As if it was any business of his how many times 
 I danced with Captain Axendale-Murray." 
 
 " Of course it was n't," assented Tommy dreamily, 
 his thoughts again with Teddy ; " why on earth should 
 he care? " 
 
 Inez stared and then was silent, her face looking un- 
 pleasantly sulky, although Tommy did not notice it. 
 He was in a curious mental condition. 
 
 As yet no feeling of jealousy had come to confuse him, 
 and his one thought, presenting itself in a thousand 
 different aspects, was how he was to convince Teddy 
 that he could not marry Mrs. Gilpin. 
 
 He, Tommy, saw it so clearly that it baffled him 
 utterly to realise Teddy's blindness on the point. At 
 that very moment, he knew, Teddy and Nanny were 
 together. Nanny ! Nanny Gilpin ! An absurdly bour- 
 geois name, unromantic and amazingly unlike one 
 assumed. 
 
 But it suited her in her homely prettiness. And the 
 very heart and soul of the tragedy was that she could 
 see no tragedy at all. 
 
 She could not see why she must not marry Teddy, 
 and Teddy would not see why he must not marry her. 
 Only Tommy knew, and he, it appeared, was such an 
 idiot that he could not communicate his knowledge to 
 them. That, of course, was awkward, but he was very 
 tired, and might be better able to explain to-morrow. 
 No, he did n't want a sweet, and he could in his exces-
 
 KINGSMEAD 281 
 
 sive nervousness have screamed when the footman offered 
 him one. Why couldn't they let him alone? 
 
 " You don't look well, Lord Kingsmead," exclaimed 
 Inez as he very gently refused the sweet and leaned back 
 in his chair ; " shall we go, if you are not hungry ? " 
 
 " Yes, yes, let 's go." 
 
 Tommy felt that any other room in the world would 
 be better than that one, but the drawing-room was as 
 bad, and Inez walking restlessly about nearly drove 
 him mad. He sat by the fire trying hard to make con- 
 versation for nearly an hour, and then, suddenly, relief 
 came. 
 
 " I am dead tired," she said ; " do you mind if I go 
 upstairs ? " 
 
 And he was alone. Alone, poor Tommy, to sit on 
 the floor by the fire and try to piece together in his 
 mind a speech sufficiently logical to convince Teddy 
 that he must give up Nanny. He would explain to 
 Teddy. In the morning, when he was less tired, he would 
 explain. He would say, " Teddy, dear old fellow, you 
 know how awfully fond I am of you." 
 
 No, he would be simply just; he would say, "I am 
 sorry, my heart aches for you both, but she is not, 
 poor thing, the kind of woman one marries." 
 
 And then if Teddy was angry, and told him to mind 
 his own business? 
 
 Poor little Tommy, he felt so keenly that it was his 
 own business! Teddy's affairs had always been his;
 
 282 KINGSMEAD 
 
 he loved Teddy so much that nothing could be more 
 personal to him than things that were Teddy's. And 
 because he could see where Teddy could only feel, he 
 was unto himself so fully justified that not even the 
 fear of his friend's anger could make him hesitate. 
 
 The marriage would be hurtful to Teddy, therefore it 
 must not take place. 
 
 As the slow hours passed, this fact remained upper- 
 most in his mind, unobscured, such was his unconscious 
 unselfishness, by any lesser thought. And then, toward 
 midnight, he fell asleep and was awakened as he had been 
 that afternoon, to find Teddy standing before him. 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 " Why don't you go to bed? " returned Teddy in a 
 queer voice. 
 
 "I I have been thinking." 
 
 Young Lansing sat down and put a log on the dying 
 fire. 
 
 " She has told me," he said slowly. 
 
 " Yes." Tommy had known that she would not deny ; 
 that she would be with poor Teddy as frank as she had 
 been with him. 
 
 " It 's a hard-luck story, Tommy." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Teddy was leaning forward staring into the fire, 
 which now crackled merrily as if it were laughing at his 
 griefs. But this thought was Tommy's. 
 
 " She O my God, Tommy, she cried ! "
 
 KINGSMEAD 288 
 
 Tommy did not speak; he could not Somehow he 
 had not imagined that Nanny would cry, and it was 
 almost too much for him to bear. 
 
 " I I did n't think she 'd cry," he faltered. 
 
 " Well, she did." 
 
 There was a long pause, and then Lansing went on, 
 still looking into the fire : " I 'm going to marry her, 
 Kingsmead." 
 
 Tommy drew a deep breath. " Her crying, poor soul, 
 does n't change things, Teddy." 
 
 " It is n't that. But I love her, and I want her to 
 be happy. She is very good too. I mean to say," he 
 continued, blushing over the necessity of explaining the 
 word, " very true. She says she will marry me, but 
 she must have cared an awful lot for that beast, Tommy 
 she told me quite frankly that she that she only 
 likes me." 
 
 Tommy stared, his haggard little face ash-white. 
 
 "Only likes you?" 
 
 " Yes. I suppose there are some women like that, 
 who can love only once. And I can't tell you how 
 I respect her for telling me." 
 
 It seemed to Tommy at that moment as though some- 
 thing were really physically breaking in his breast. 
 
 "I don't understand, Teddy," he said faintly. 
 
 Teddy did not notice his emotion. 
 
 " Well, I 've told you. You 're all wrong or you 
 were all wrong about our marrying, and you don't
 
 284 KINGSMEAD 
 
 understand her at all, but I know you meant to do 
 the fair thing by me, and it must have been a damnable 
 thing to have to do so I 'm telling you now. After 
 to-night," he added with a new dignity, " we '11 never 
 mention it again. I will make her love me I say, 
 what 's wrong? " 
 
 He broke oif , for Tommy had leaned back in his chair 
 and closed his eyes helplessly. 
 
 "Nothing. I'm tired. I'll talk to you to- 
 morrow, Teddy. I 'm tired " 
 
 Twenty minutes later Tommy lay in his bed fast 
 asleep. He was worn out, mercifully, and too tired to 
 grapple with the new problem suggested to him by 
 Teddy's confidence.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE next morning, brightened by a pleasant, pale sun, 
 was so much warmer than its immediate predecessors 
 that it seemed to Tommy, as he made his way to Creene, 
 almost impossible that it could have been only yesterday 
 that he had rushed homeward over the frozen road. 
 
 It was a mild, warm, muddy morning with a warm 
 gleam in the sky and boughs dripping that the day 
 before had been frozen hard and black. Tommy 
 walked rapidly, for he had great need of seeing Mrs. 
 Gilpin. 
 
 When he reached Creene and was about to ring the 
 bell, he saw that a little green door in the garden wall 
 was open, and yielding to a feeling that was more in- 
 stinct than curiosity, he went on and pushing open the 
 door looked down into the sun-filled enclosure. 
 
 It was a small garden, evidently devoted to flowers, 
 for the ground was neatly divided into manure-covered 
 beds, while down two sides a row of straw-swathed stand- 
 ard roses stood like wounded warriors keeping stiff 
 guard over the rain-drenched box borders. 
 
 At first, as he stood in the gateway, Tommy thought 
 the place was deserted, but hearing a slight sound to 
 his right he turned and saw, bending over a narrow bed 
 
 285
 
 286 KINGSMEAD 
 
 of tender green leaves, Mrs. Gilpin, as yet unconscious 
 of his presence. 
 
 Her grey skirt well held up about her ankles, her 
 narrow feet in ugly rubber shoes, she was examining 
 with great interest something that Tommy could, at 
 first, not see. 
 
 Then she moved a little, and he beheld at her feet, 
 pale and spectre-like in the winter sun, a snowdrop. He 
 caught his breath. She herself in her simple gown with 
 something white at the throat, something in the droop 
 of her delicate head, the poise of her little body, was h'ke 
 the flower at her feet; and the horrible incongruity of 
 his finding her, come on the errand on which he had come, 
 standing daintily poised in the wet garden watching the 
 poor little overbold thing as it opened its foolish heart 
 to the false sun, struck him like a physical pang. 
 
 Suddenly she turned and saw him. 
 
 " Ah," she said, " come and look at this snowdrop ! 
 This is the kitchen wall, so they are always early here, 
 but this is very early." 
 
 She was, he saw, very pale, and for the first time in 
 his knowledge of her her eyes were dark-rimmed and 
 heavy, which somehow made her still more like the little 
 rain-drenched flower. 
 
 " It is very pretty," he said, without moving. 
 "May I talk to you?" 
 
 " Oh yes if you must." She drew a deep sigh. 
 " Shall we go in ? If you don't mind I 'd rather stay in 
 the air."
 
 KINGSMEAD 287 
 
 " Let us stay here, by all means, Mrs. Gilpin I 
 can't say the other name Teddy told you." 
 
 " Yes. He was here last night for hours. He was 
 angry with you until I told him that it was absurd 
 of him. I was sorry for him. He is very young." 
 
 " Yes," agreed Tommy, innocent at the moment of his 
 own youth, " very. I am going away to-day. But first 
 I had to see you. I had a note from him this morning. 
 He says in it he is going to marry you as soon as he can 
 persuade you to marry him." 
 
 " Yes, I know." Her voice had a little break in it, 
 and Tommy glanced at her sharply. 
 
 " And you mean to ? " he asked. 
 
 " He cares for me," she faltered ; " and he is the 
 only person in the whole world who does. I I am 
 very lonely." It was ineffably sad to him, the unex- 
 pected little plaint, and his heart sank, as they paced the 
 wet gravel from end to end of the garden, she still hold- 
 ing her skirts carefully out of the wet, Tommy holding 
 his hat in his hand. 
 
 " Then you persist in marrying him ? " 
 
 She stood still, looking at him steadily with her weary 
 eyes, that for all their weariness had lost none of their 
 marvellous blue clearness. 
 
 " You really think it would injure him? " she asked. 
 
 Tommy bowed his head. " Yes. And you have no 
 right to do it." 
 
 " I want to marry him, Lord Kingsmead."
 
 288 KINGSMEAD 
 
 She stood with her hands clasped, looking at the 
 ground. 
 
 " Why do you want to marry him? You don't love 
 him." 
 
 She started. " Oh, he should not have told you that ! 
 How could he? " 
 
 " He did. We are friends. And / know that there 
 is someone whom you do love." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Then?" 
 
 She looked up, more really beautiful in her anguish 
 than he had ever seen her. 
 
 " That other person does not love me," she returned 
 simply. " If he did I would not marry Teddy." 
 
 Tommy set his teeth. He knew. He had known ever 
 since Teddy told him the night before that Nanny did 
 not love him. 
 
 " That person," went on Nanny, " despises me." 
 
 " That person," interrupted Tommy grimly, " has 
 nothing whatever to do with it. Never had, and never 
 will. We are thinking of Teddy. You must not 
 marry him." 
 
 Her mouth trembled and she turned away, a sad little 
 grey figure in the gay sunlight. 
 
 " I know," she answered humbly. " And so I must 
 marry Teddy. I I wish why do you think I should 
 hurt him? " 
 
 Tommy was silent.
 
 KINGSMEAD 289 
 
 " I have been quite honest with him," she added plead- 
 ingly ; " d-do you really think it would hurt him? " 
 
 And Tommy knew that she did not mean to be cruel. 
 
 " I do. Because because as things now are, he 
 would change toward you. I don't quite know how to 
 
 put it, but people who marry " he broke off, and 
 
 she finished his sentence for him. 
 
 " People who marry must, you mean, respect as well 
 as love? And you think that I am beyond respect." 
 
 It was very painful. Tommy eyed the swaying snow- 
 drop, which they were again approaching, and felt as 
 if he were forced by some cruel law to grind it into the 
 earth with his heel. 
 
 " You hurt me," he faltered. 
 
 " Yes? Well, you hurt me. If you were older," she 
 went on, still quite unresentfully, " you would not be so 
 hard. You would understand that it is a woman's nature 
 that counts, her soul, rather than what circumstances 
 have made her do." 
 
 " Yes. But the the right nature could not have 
 been forced into all that. The first part I admit. 
 You were young, and you loved him that is an excuse. 
 But there is no excuse for your living on his money all 
 this time." 
 
 " I have told you why I did. I wanted to be good." 
 
 Tommy groaned, and she repeated her words : " Yes, 
 it is true, I wanted to be good. To get away from 
 those others, who, even at once, while I was ill, kept call- 
 ID
 
 290 KINGSMEAD 
 
 ing and writing. His money made all this this 
 quiet life and this respectability, possible." 
 
 " You might have worked." 
 
 The four syllables rang out sharply like a gunshot. 
 That was the weak point in the strange armour of gentle- 
 ness, and he had aimed at it. 
 
 They had again reached the snowdrop, and she 
 stopped, almost as if the shot had indeed hit her. 
 
 "Work? But how?" 
 
 She looked at him, as she had done yesterday, with 
 honest inquiry in her face. It was very defeating. 
 
 " There was nothing I could do well, and things have 
 to be done well nowadays. I was very delicate for a long 
 time after my illness I needed southern air, and wine 
 and and things " 
 
 But Tommy, strong in his young inexorableness, re- 
 fused to let his quivering nerves influence him. 
 
 "If it had been I," he declared, "I should not 
 have considered what I could do or what I needed. 
 It would have been better to die than to take his 
 money." 
 
 The horror of her inability to understand, of the 
 overmastering love of comfort underlying her mislead- 
 ing but perfectly sincere simplicity, was strong on him, 
 but he refused to let it soften his words. 
 
 Grimly he looked down at the snowdrop, his face white 
 and haggard in the strengthening sunlight. 
 
 At length she spoke.
 
 KINGSMEAD 291 
 
 " Do you wish," she asked him quietly, " that I had 
 died?" 
 
 " God knows I do ! " he burst out in anguish. Then 
 he turned and walked away, frightened. 
 
 For several minutes she did not move, and then she 
 came slowly to where he stood. 
 
 " I understand now," she said, laying her hand on his 
 arm. " At last I understand." 
 
 And in the midst of the whirlwind of conflicting feel- 
 ings that caught him up at her touch, he thought, with 
 a ghost of his familiar smile, that if she did it was more 
 than he did. 
 
 For the one thing that was clear to him was his con- 
 viction that no matter at what price, and he was already 
 paying himself, his friend was to be prevented from 
 marrying the woman whose comprehension was so 
 strangely limited. 
 
 That was it, she really did not know. And, Tommy 
 felt, people have no right to not know certain things. 
 Her lack of moral comprehension was as awful as would 
 have been the lack of a child born not only without 
 sight but without eyes. 
 
 He turned to her. 
 
 " No, you do not understand," he said gently ; " that 
 is what is so so hopeless." 
 
 " But I do." 
 
 She had drawn away from him, and in the sun her 
 little mirror glittered so that he covered his eyes for a 
 moment with his hand.
 
 292 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " Veronica," he said suddenly. " You remember the 
 story you told us the blind woman in Venice? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Well d-don't you see," he stammered in his eager- 
 ness, " you said you yourself said that he could n't 
 marry her because she was blind and could not look after 
 his house. Now, don't you see? Ah, Nanny Gilpin, 
 can't you see that that's why? Teddy mustn't marry 
 you. Look! " Holding up the little glass he mirrored 
 her face in it. " Look at yourself. Your eyes are not 
 blind. Look at your poor blind self. That is why. 
 You are blind, my dear, my dear and you could n't 
 look after his house ! " 
 
 There was a long pause, during which she looked 
 steadily at her face in the glass he held in his shaking 
 hand. 
 
 Then she closed her eyes and took the glass from him. 
 " Yes, now at last I understand," she said quietly. 
 " I told you before that I understood, but I did n't. 
 I thought you meant worldlier things. Now I do 
 understand." 
 
 Miserably they stood in the sun, both of them hope- 
 lessly looking down at the hopeful earth. 
 
 " And I give you my word that I will not marry 
 Teddy." 
 
 Taking her hand he bent his smooth sandy head 
 over it. 
 
 " Thank you."
 
 KINGSMEAD 293 
 
 For a moment she looked into his eyes, and then, 
 going swiftly from him, she stooped and picked the 
 snowdrop. 
 
 " Keep this," she said. 
 
 Before he could answer he was alone.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 THE relief derived from the promise and his unquestion- 
 ing faith in it carried Tommy back to Kingsmead as if 
 wings had grown at his heels. Teddy was safe ; no more 
 talking would be necessary, and Tommy felt as if the 
 obligation to talk was one of the most painful in the 
 world. He could go away, quite quietly, and events 
 would shape themselves. 
 
 Teddy, most probably, would write to him and revile 
 him when he found that after all Nanny had been in- 
 fluenced by Tommy. But Tommy would not answer the 
 letters, and with time Teddy would not forgive him, 
 for he needed no forgiveness, but understand. 
 
 And Nanny since the giving of her promise the 
 necessity for calling her by her unreal real name had died, 
 leaving her a fixture in his mind as Nanny would, he 
 felt sure, although he had left her with not a word when 
 she had given him the snowdrop, do nothing to fan 
 Teddy's resentment. It was even, he realised, quite 
 probable that she would refuse to marry him, without 
 explanations of any kind, or any further mention of 
 Tommy's name. 
 
 There was in her no malice, no unkindness, not even 
 any of the spasmodic cruelty that makes so many very 
 kind women hard to deal with. 
 
 294
 
 KINGSMEAD 295 
 
 He, by great good luck, had, it seemed, succeeded in 
 convincing her that she must not marry Teddy; that 
 by marrying him she would injure him. Therefore she 
 would not do it. 
 
 Deeply relieved, he went upstairs at the end of his 
 long walk, and to his room. 
 
 Teddy's man was, as he entered, just putting the last 
 touches to his packing. 
 
 " Mr. Teddy is out, my lord," Park said, looking up 
 from his work with a rather sharp glance. " He left a 
 note for your lordship." 
 
 The note said merely that Teddy was off to Greene 
 after a necessary visit to one of his father's tenants, and 
 that he hoped Tommy would never again mention the 
 matter they had discussed the night before. 
 
 Tommy winced as he read, for it was very obvious 
 that poor Teddy had started off with a high heart. 
 
 However, he, Tommy, could, he saw, just catch the 
 noon express, so he hastened downstairs to say good-bye 
 to Inez. 
 
 " I will write to Mrs. Lansing," he said to the girl, 
 whom he found walking aimlessly about the drawing- 
 room ; " you have all been very kind to me." 
 
 " You have been kind to us, Lord Kingsmead. I 
 ought to tell you that Madame de Lensky has asked me 
 to visit her, and that the Duchess is coming back here in 
 the spring. So you see our days of social obscurity are, 
 thanks to you, practically over."
 
 296 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " I am glad," he returned simply. Then he added, 
 looking at her closely: " I hope nothing has happened? " 
 
 She was, he saw, depressed and nervous, and in her 
 present mood he came nearer to liking her than he had 
 ever done. 
 
 " Happened? No, of course not. I have a headache, 
 that 's all." 
 
 He made no reply to this long since canonised lie, and 
 a few minutes later was tearing down the avenue in a 
 motor. 
 
 How many things had happened since he had arrived 
 at Kingsmead only five weeks before ! How many times 
 he had, since his first sacrifice on the day of the drive 
 to Pinchbroke, been in motors ! He had now almost got 
 over no, almost forgotten his dislike of the things. 
 They had dwindled to no importance in his mind. 
 
 But Teddy's love-affair ! Alas, he had fostered that ! 
 He had loved and tended it as if it had been a flower, 
 and now it had changed to a poisonous weed. 
 
 He, Tommy, had meant well, but he had bungled. 
 Even his great Christmas party had ended in tragedy, 
 though that was of course not his fault. 
 
 " I am a meddler," the young man told himself as the 
 motor drew up to the station, " I ought to mind my 
 own business. When I am older I '11 look back on this 
 all as the result of the indiscreet exuberance of three- 
 and-twenty." 
 
 He smiled at the thought, for, however mistaken he
 
 KINGSMEAD 297 
 
 had been, he had done his best, and Teddy at least was 
 saved. 
 
 He bought his ticket, and, being early, walked up and 
 down until the train came in. 
 
 Just as it left, he comfortably installed in an other- 
 wise empty first-class carriage, the door was torn open 
 with the irritating bustle of guards, and young Green 
 jumped in. 
 
 " I thought I was late, by Jove ! " the newcomer ex- 
 claimed. "How do you do?" 
 
 Tommy replied that he was all right and unfolded 
 a newspaper. He did not want to talk, he wanted to 
 rest. 
 
 He was going back, as fast as boats and trains could 
 carry him, to the place of rest, the Castelletto, and he 
 wished not to think more than was necessary of the 
 people he had left behind. But young Green was rest- 
 less and insisted on talking, and suddenly, before Tommy 
 saw what he was about to do, had blurted out, " What 
 brutes women are ! " 
 
 "Women? Why?" 
 
 " Because," young Green bit his cigarette in two and 
 threw it away, " they are all snobs and and cheats. 
 Upon my word, I I hate 'em ! " 
 
 Poor Tommy, confronted thus with another exposi- 
 tion of the eternal problem, moved restlessly. He too 
 would have liked to forget the ungentle sex for a time 
 if he could.
 
 298 KINGSMEAD 
 
 " What 's wrong, Green ? " he asked kindly. " Any 
 one been ill-treating you? " 
 
 " Oh no it 's a chap I know, rather a pal of mine. 
 It makes me sick, Kingsmead. The girl led him on - 
 made him think you know all last season, and then 
 gets a bee in her bonnet and carries on so under his 
 very nose that that he sees she never cared a curse 
 for him any of the time. I 've I 've had a beastly time 
 with him." 
 
 " What did he do ? " asked Tommy wearily. 
 
 " Nothing. Went away they 're Cumberland peo- 
 ple. She the girl is engaged to a chap she thinks 
 ' smart? I suppose they are all alike, girls it 's too 
 disgusting." The young man subsided into silence, 
 and Tommy suddenly realised that he was very 
 hungry. 
 
 " I 'm sorry, Green," Tommy repeated, wishing he 
 had eaten more breakfast. " It does seem hard luck, 
 but perhaps he '11 get over it." 
 
 Green gave a short laugh. " Of course I 'm boring 
 you," he said ruefully. " I know I am. You 've prob- 
 ably never cared about a girl, and until you do you can't 
 understand. It 's I tell you, Kingsmead, it 's just 
 plain hell." 
 
 He was, this casually-met young man, as powerful a 
 magician as ever a wise man of old, for in a trice, called 
 up by his simple words, the wall built by his relief over 
 Teddy's escape between his mind and his heart crumbled
 
 KINGSMEAD 299 
 
 away, and Tommy was face to face with his own per- 
 sonal misery. 
 
 Did he not know? He, with his poor little snowdrop 
 crushed in a bit of paper against his heart? 
 
 " There must be a restaurant car in this train, is n't 
 there ? " he asked with an effort. " I had a very early 
 breakfast and am hungry." 
 
 Young Green shrugged his shoulders. " Yes, oh yes, 
 there 's a restaurant car. I '11 not go in, I 'm not 
 hungry," he added, a note of rather ridiculous reproach 
 in his voice. 
 
 So Tommy went and ate cold beef and potatoes and 
 drank a bottle of ale, and watched with his outward eye 
 the flying sunny landscape, but his inward eye saw with 
 terrible distinctness the small white face under its wings 
 of smooth dark hair that he knew had come to his 
 memory to stay. 
 
 Poor snowdrop!
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 " OH, please tell me, Tommy. Dear Tommy, please tell 
 me ! If you don't I really think I '11 burst." Pammy 
 clasped her hands entreatingly and eyed him with an 
 almost tearful curiosity. " I '11 never tell, not even 
 mother!" 
 
 " But there 's nothing I can tell, Pammy ! " 
 
 Tommy laughed a little as he sat in the charming 
 old-fashioned drawing-room, up and down the walls 
 of which gorgeously imaged peacocks strutted. 
 
 His train leaving Victoria at eight-thirty he had come 
 here to Westminster to get away from the new and as 
 yet almost unbearable misery that had assailed him in 
 the train, and, as on the other occasion, the occasion 
 when he had come with his mind full of absent but kindly 
 plots for the Lansings, he found Pam busy, and Pammy 
 an important substitute for her. 
 
 " Nothing you can tell," repeated the young girl 
 sharply, pouncing on the word ; " that means that you 
 could but won't. Ah, Tommy, please! " 
 
 But Tommy shook his head. " I am a tomb ; a lock- 
 box; a safety-vault. I never tell secrets," he declared 
 with a mock solemnity that sat ill on his worn face. 
 '* You tell me things, Pammy dear. How are you all, 
 and have you seen ' Peter Pan '? " 
 
 800
 
 KINGSMEAD 301 
 
 " Yes. But I don't much like it. Mother and father 
 have been seven times, and father always cries. I think 
 it rather silly." 
 
 "Ah, my dear!" 
 
 " Yes, I do. There are n't pirates ; and children 
 can't do all those things ; and there is n't any Never 
 Never Land." 
 
 Poor Tommy drew a sharp breath. It seemed to him 
 that the whole future was a Never Never Land a land 
 whither he could never go, a land where snowdrops grew 
 and Nancy Gilpin had never been Aileen Donovan. 
 
 Pammy watched him with the shrewdness that sat so 
 oddly on her fat face. 
 
 " You look very seedy," she said at length. " I '11 
 not tease you any more, only I 'm sure it 's a love-story, 
 and I adore love-stories. Would you like some tea? " 
 
 It was only four, but Tommy accepted her offer with 
 pleasure. He was desperately tired, and he liked tea. 
 
 Pammy rushed away, the house shaking under her 
 energetic tread, and, left alone, the young man closed 
 his eyes for a time. 
 
 It had come, love. He had hoped for it and it had 
 come, but instead of coming as an angel to take him by 
 the hand and guide him through life, behold it was a 
 menace, a terrible danger from which he must flee. 
 
 And the pain was almost more than he could bear. 
 Ah, the face of her, the blue gaze of her eyes, the music 
 of her voice !
 
 302 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Mignonette Lady! Poor little Mignonette Lady! 
 
 She too was suffering, for she had promised to give 
 Teddy up. He remembered her voice in Brigit's 
 drawing-room as she said, " I love, I love, I love ! " It 
 was indeed a rigid law that had bent him to being cruel 
 to her. 
 
 It was cruel and relentless, but even in the midst of 
 his pain he knew it to be law and not caprice, for his 
 was a just mind. 
 
 " I must write to Bicky, the darling," he thought 
 suddenly, " but I '11 not tell her. It would only make 
 her miserable. I '11 say I want sunshine and quiet 
 and that is true. Poor Bicky, she would understand, 
 but there 's no use in hurting her.'* 
 
 Just then Pammy came in bearing a huge silver tea- 
 tray on which stood an array of things the weight of 
 which would have staggered many a grown man. 
 
 " I told Williams I 'd bring it myself," she announced, 
 quite undisturbed. " She 'd have had to bring it in 
 piecemeal, and I 'm strong. Oh, matches have you 
 any?" 
 
 She lighted the spirit-lamp and arranged the things 
 on the tray very quietly with her big hands. 
 
 "Do you like sponge-cake? There are little choco- 
 late ones, too. Mother will be down in a minute or so. 
 Pilly is ill, poor old thing." 
 
 "Who is Pilly? no, a sponge-cake, please." 
 
 " Pilly 's mother's old nurse. She 's frightfully old
 
 KINGSMEAD 303 
 
 and frightfully cross, too, though mother adores her. 
 She does n't like me, Pilly does n't, though she used to 
 before mother was married. She 's always saying who 
 could believe that I was such a lovely baby which is 
 nasty of her. Would you like a whisky and soda? " Re- 
 garding the young man with an almost ridiculously 
 motherly air the huge girl sat behind the tea-table. 
 
 Tommy laughed. 
 
 " No, my dear, thank you. I loathe whisky. Why?" 
 
 " Well there 's a glass, look at yourself, and 
 you '11 know why I want to give you things." 
 
 Tommy winced. Only a few hours before he had 
 told her to look in a glass, his poor little blighted 
 snowdrop. 
 
 " I 'm not ill," he said patiently, " I 'm only tired." 
 
 She nodded. " I know. Well, here 's your tea, good 
 and strong. How 's Inez? " 
 
 Tommy drank a long draught of tea, which was good. 
 "All right why?" 
 
 " Because she was all wrong the day we left. Crying 
 her eyes out. I think she 's in love. Mother says I 'm 
 always thinking about love, but I 'm not, unless other 
 people do. And it seems to me," added the sage of six- 
 teen, munching a chocolate cake with primitive enjoy- 
 ment, " that most of 'em usually are." 
 
 " So you think Miss Lansing 's in love? " 
 
 " Yes with Bertie Green. She refused what 's-his- 
 name, the guardsman, you know, and the Duchess told
 
 804 KINGSMEAD 
 
 mother yesterday that there must be someone else, and 
 that if it was n't you it must be Mr. Green." 
 
 "It certainly isn't me," declared Tommy hastily, 
 and as ungrammatical as even an earl could be. 
 
 " Then it 's him." 
 
 Tommy frowned. The friend from Cumberland, then, 
 was Bertie Green himself. " If she loves him why 
 does n't she marry him? " he murmured impatiently. 
 
 " Perhaps he has n't asked her." 
 
 Pammy was clumsy in her methods, but this time she 
 had hit the mark. This, then, was what Green had 
 meant by his dark hints in the railway carriage ! 
 
 Tommy sighed. Poor fellow, he had certainly looked 
 miserable enough. 
 
 And Inez's face last night, and that morning. Ah 
 yes, misery everywhere. And this was such futile, un- 
 necessary suffering. It would be so easy to make them 
 happy if only someone would take the trouble. 
 
 " She cried like anything the other night," resumed 
 Pammy, swallowing more cake than is usually disposed 
 of at once. " My room was next to hers. Funny, is n't 
 it? Now if I were going to fall in love it would be with 
 a big man like Kitchener. More tea ? " 
 
 But Tommy did not hear. He, it was clear, was the 
 only person who could straighten out this other miser- 
 able love-affair. And he had n't much time. " Can you 
 get me a cab? " he asked abruptly. 
 
 " Yes, of course why? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 305 
 
 " Because I must be off. Shall I ring? " 
 
 When Mrs. de Lensky came downstairs she found her 
 caller just going. 
 
 " Excuse my rushing off like this," he said, " but I 
 I have to catch a train." 
 
 She looked at him wonderingly, with her great dark 
 eyes that had once been so beautiful. 
 
 " Is anything wrong, Tommy? " 
 
 " No that is, yes. Please don't tell Brigit, Madame 
 de Lensky. I I shall be all right." 
 
 Laying her thin hand on his shoulder she continued to 
 look at him, a little whimsical twist to her lips. 
 
 " Has it come to you so early, poor Tommy ? " she 
 asked, and he knew that in spite of her smile she was not 
 laughing at him. 
 
 " Yes, it has come," he answered truthfully. 
 
 " Then," she said, releasing him, " treat it well, how- 
 ever it has come, and it will not hurt you."
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 TOMMY went straight to Pomfret Abbey, and, arriving 
 at the middle of dinner, sat down by his sister and said, 
 " I am going back to Italy, Bick, and have come to say 
 good-bye, and to ask a favour of you." 
 
 "Back to Italy?" 
 
 " Yes, I want the Castelletto and the sun." 
 
 Lady Pontefract looked searchingly at him, and see- 
 ing much, said nothing. 
 
 Lord Pontefract, on the other hand, seeing nothing, 
 said much. Was the climate too much? Could n't 
 Tommy stand the Bath-tub people any longer ? Or was 
 the girl, what 's-her-name Irene Iris making love 
 to him? Or had he fallen in love with her and been 
 refused? 
 
 In his rather clumsy way Pontefract was a genial, 
 jocular man, and, liking his queer little brother-in-law, 
 was glad to see him, and did n't want him to feel dull. 
 
 " How 'd you get away to-night," he added suddenly, 
 " and why are n't you dressed ? " 
 
 " I 've been in London," returned Tommy, taking a 
 large pale yellow pear and eyeing it absently as it lay 
 on his plate. 
 
 Brigit said nothing for a minute, and then, looking 
 306
 
 KINGSMEAD 307 
 
 at her husband, remarked quietly, " He has something 
 to tell me, Ponty dear shall we go ? " 
 
 Ponty, the soul of good-nature, rose instantly. " No, 
 no, I '11 go. Eat your pear, Tommy, and drink a glass 
 of port. Give him some port, Brigit, it '11 buck him up. 
 You '11 stop the night, Tommy? " 
 
 Tommy took up the pear, which looked to him about 
 as eatable as St. Paul's Cathedral. " No, thanks, Ponty, 
 I must be off. I 'm leaving to-morrow morning leav- 
 ing London, I mean for Dover. Thanks very much, 
 however." 
 
 When the door had closed and the brother and sister 
 were alone he said at once, " Brigit, I must see Inez 
 Lansing to-night." 
 
 " Inez ! " Lady Pontef ract knew her brother well, but 
 for a moment she lost her reasoning power and stared 
 at him in utter dismay. " You don't mean to say " 
 
 Tommy burst out laughing. " Poor old Bick ! No, 
 I most certainly don't mean to say that. But I must 
 see her. Please don't ask why, it 's not my secret." 
 
 He looked very ill and very young, and she wanted to 
 take him in her arms and comfort him. But at the same 
 time he looked very resolute and sure of what he wanted, 
 so after a short pause she rose and kissed him. 
 
 " I '11 telephone her to come over, shall I? Unless 
 you want but I suppose you don't want to go there." 
 
 " No, no. Yes, do ask her to come here. Don't men- 
 tion me, though, please."
 
 808 KINGSMEAD 
 
 When she had gone, her long amber skirts trailing 
 after her, he sat quite still staring at his pear. It 
 seemed, now that he had done it, a most quixotic and 
 foolish thing, this rush back into the neighbourhood of 
 his danger. And he seemed, in his weariness and dis- 
 couragement, a mere busybody. 
 
 Why could he not let other people manage their own 
 affairs in their own way? Surely Inez Lansing and 
 Hubert Green were not children. Indeed, they were both 
 older than he, and yet here he was playing fairy god- 
 father to them. 
 
 He laughed a little mirthless laugh at the thought. 
 And yet Inez was here possibly even now crying 
 like anything, as Pammy said, and Green, hurt and 
 proud, had gone back to town to try to forget. 
 
 Without his, Tommy's, interference they might be 
 miserable for months, or even forever. And at twenty- 
 three " forever " is a terrific word. 
 
 " She 's coming, dear," Brigit announced, her hand 
 on his shoulder. " Shall we go to my room? " 
 
 He nodded. "Yes. Thank you, Bick. What did 
 you tell her? " 
 
 "Only that I wanted to see her. I couldn't hear 
 what she said, except that she 'd come." 
 
 Together, her beautiful bare arm on his shoulder, 
 they went upstairs into Lady Pontefract's morning- 
 room, a pleasant little room where she sat and read 
 or wrote when alone. The windows were open and
 
 KINGSMEAD S09 
 
 the moonlight lay in great lozenges on the polished 
 floor. 
 
 " You are tired out, poor Tommykin. I am glad you 
 are going back to Italy. I will come and see you soon." 
 
 He smiled up at her. " Dear old Bicky ! Thanks so 
 much for not asking. I '11 tell you all about it some day. 
 And," he put his hand on hers, "I I have been think- 
 ing about him the Master. Poor Bick ! Life has not 
 been very good to you." 
 
 "I perhaps I was n't good to life, little brother. 
 But I am glad it is nearly over for him now." Her eyes 
 were wet, and he was glad, as she spoke. 
 
 They sat down near a window in silence for a long 
 time. Then Lady Pontefract, leaning forward, saw that 
 he had fallen asleep. 
 
 Rising, she covered him tenderly with a great fleecy 
 white shawl and closed the window. 
 
 It was nearly an hour later when the sound of the 
 Kingsmead motor roused him, and she, switching on 
 the light, folded away the shawl. 
 
 "Better?" she asked. 
 
 " Yes, dear, much." 
 
 Inez Lansing was brought directly upstairs, and when 
 she saw Tommy started back in unaffected amazement. 
 
 " Why, Lord Kingsmead," she cried, " what on earth 
 has brought you back here? " 
 
 " You," he returned quietly as Brigit closed the door 
 on them.
 
 310 KINGSMEAD 
 
 "Me?" Still enveloped in her furs, the girl stood 
 staring at him. " And where 's Nanny? " 
 
 "Where's Nanny? What do you mean?" Tommy 
 was very white as he spoke, and he leaned against the 
 back of the chair from which he had risen. 
 
 Inez shrugged her shoulders. " Well, I must say you 
 seem to me to be as mad as hatters, all of you. I sup- 
 pose you know she 's gone? " 
 
 " No. I did n't know it." 
 
 She unfastened her big cloak and slipped it from her 
 shoulders to the floor, her eyes still fixed curiously on 
 his face. 
 
 "Well, she has. Teddy is nearly out of his mind 
 about it. He went there this morning at about twelve, 
 and she had left an hour before for London. He 
 came raging home, swearing you had taken her going 
 on like a lunatic. It was awful. Didn't you," she 
 added, " go to London ? " 
 
 " I did. From Kingsmead station." 
 
 " Well, she went from Isherby station, so you went 
 in the same train. Did n't you see her at Victoria? " 
 
 " I told you that I did n't know she had gone." 
 
 " But you were there this morning," persisted the 
 girl. 
 
 He nodded wearily. Her vulgar curiosity as to de- 
 tails, now that he had convinced her of his ignorance of 
 main facts, disgusted him. 
 
 " Yes. I was there. But she did not tell me she was 
 going away. Where is Teddy now? "
 
 KINGSMEAD 311 
 
 " At home behaving abominably. I am glad you 
 are here, for I am sure he would have gone off to Italy 
 to look for you and her. I suppose you know he 
 wants to marry her." 
 
 Tommy did not answer. He was wondering where 
 poor little Nanny could have gone, and whether she 
 had taken this step to avoid involving him in a more 
 serious quarrel with Teddy. It seemed, this supposing, 
 very likely, and it touched him with great poignancy. 
 
 Suddenly the clock struck. 
 
 " I am going," he said, glancing at it, " back to town 
 to-night, so I must waste no time in telling you why I 
 came back. You must forgive my meddling I do 
 it for the best. I went up to town this morning with 
 Bertie Green, and he is very unhappy." 
 
 The girl's face changed, but she gave her head a little 
 toss. "Unhappy? Poor darling, why?" 
 
 *' Because," explained Tommy patiently, " he loves 
 you and you are unkind to him. He thinks you are 
 engaged to what 's-his-name, Sir Wilfred and he 's 
 miserable." 
 
 " Really, Lord Kingsmead, I am at a loss to under- 
 stand - -" 
 
 It was the last he ever saw of the young woman's man- 
 ner as interpreted by Miss Lansing, for with a wave of 
 his hand Tommy cut her short. 
 
 " Don't. I am in a great hurry, and I am very 
 earnest, and whether or no you think me impertinent,
 
 312 KINGSMEAD 
 
 I must tell you what I think. I think that you love him 
 and are sorry you tormented him. And now," he added 
 with a little smile, " I think you want to cry, and I don't 
 mind if you do." 
 
 It was well that he did not mind, for the girl broke 
 down helplessly and sobbed on the satin back of a chair 
 until she could sob no more. 
 
 " I did n't want to care for him," she cried, blowing 
 her nose on Tommy's handkerchief, " but I could n't 
 help it. And I tried to accept Sir Wilfred, even the 
 Duchess said he was a splendid match and I loathe 
 his father Bertie's, I mean, and they have no real 
 social standing " 
 
 "Oh, blow social standing!" interjected Tommy 
 vulgarly. 
 
 " I know. You 're quite right. And then I was 
 horrid to him, and things went from bad to worse, 
 and I have been so miserable, and then to-day he went 
 away without asking me." 
 
 " Having blown social standing, my dear Inez, I 'd 
 advise you to blow your nose and wipe your streaming 
 eyes, like the carpenter or was it the walrus ? And as 
 to Green, how could the poor wretch ask you, with you 
 devilling him for all you were worth? " 
 
 " But what can I do? " she asked, between a laugh and 
 a final sob. " I can't ask him ! Oh, Lord Kingsmead, 
 what must you think of me? " 
 
 " I like you better than I ever did, if you really care
 
 KINGSMEAD 313 
 
 to know," returned Tommy honestly ; " and as to what 
 you can do, write him a note and ask him to come to 
 see you, and then be commonly decent to him and see 
 what '11 happen ! " 
 
 " Do you really think so? " she asked incoherently. 
 
 " I really do. And now I must be off. Will you take 
 a message to Teddy for me? " 
 
 " I '11 do anything on earth for you." 
 
 " Well this is easy. Tell him that I assure him 
 on my word of honour that I do not know where 
 where Mrs. Gilpin is and that I have no intention of 
 ever seeing her again. And then, tell him to to write 
 to me some day." 
 
 " Yes. I will tell him. He was very angry with 
 you." 
 
 " I know. Some day he will get over it, and I 
 shall always be ready to make up." 
 
 " It is very strange," began the girl, but he snubbed 
 her gently. 
 
 " Don't be curious. Go home and write to Green." 
 
 She put on her coat and held out her hand. " I can't 
 ever thank you," she said, a little catch in her voice. 
 " I was so miserable. I suppose Pammy Lensky will 
 call it an aversion to type ! "
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE long journey from Kingsmead to London, from 
 London to Paris, passed to Tommy like a dream. 
 
 The channel had been in a very tempestuous mood, 
 and he, a good sailor, was glad, for it to a great extent 
 freed the deck of encumbering people, and he paced up 
 and down in the cold wind, his head bent, his hands in 
 his pockets, undisturbed, among his confused thoughts. 
 
 And alas, poor Tommy's thoughts were indeed very 
 confused; for now, having in his queer way done all 
 that he could for other people, he for the first time since 
 the blows had fallen on him, the so curiously united 
 blows, left with no one to care for, not one to whose aid 
 he could come, felt his own personal misery stand out 
 boldly before him. 
 
 It had been a relief to hear from Pammy that a 
 friendly hand was needed to steer the uninteresting 
 Inez's little bark into harbour ; a comfort to rush back 
 to Kingsmead to show the girl the way to happiness. 
 
 But when he had said good-bye to Brigit and got into 
 the motor that was to take him to the station, the closing 
 door seemed to shut in with him, leaving him utterly 
 at its mercy, the unveiled image of his own misery and 
 aloneness. 
 
 314
 
 KINGSMEAD 315 
 
 The road led past Greene, and at the little gateway 
 he touched the button that brought the motor to a stop. 
 
 The house was dark but for a light downstairs in the 
 servants' quarters. He got out and in the mild darkness 
 that seemed to hang from the bare trees went up the 
 drive. 
 
 The door her door, the windows of the drawing- 
 room, the semicircle of windows of the downstairs lounge 
 he looked at them all. 
 
 Then he went to the door of the walled garden and 
 tried it. It was locked. 
 
 This seemed to him appropriate and almost allegori- 
 cal. The garden was closed to him, and the snowdrop 
 gone. If he asked the servants where she was, he would 
 probably be told, for he felt that they had not been for- 
 bidden to tell him. He and she, she believed, of course, 
 were allies, since she " understood." 
 
 But he did not ask. He did not wish to know. And 
 with a kind of sob he went back to the motor and started 
 back to the Castelletto. 
 
 " My first love," he said in the darkness, " is over." 
 
 It was not what he had imagined it would be, that 
 first love. The adoration that should have been its chief 
 component had been cruelly slain at the very moment of 
 his recognition of the love ; and gone the adoration, the 
 reverence, the best of the love, had gone too. 
 
 What was left was chiefly pain, and pain of a highly 
 complicated and tentacled variety.
 
 316 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Had Nancy Gilpin remained Nancy Gilpin things 
 would not have been nearly so bad, for Tommy knew 
 that he could have forced himself to love her in a way 
 worthy of his friend's wife and worthy of himself. He 
 was bound to have suffered in any case, but it would 
 have been the suffering of a clean wound from a clean 
 blade, whereas this was the festering of an ugly thorn. 
 The thoughts and feelings involved brought the young 
 man clearly face to face with aspects of life that had 
 hitherto troubled him very little, and some of them 
 displeased him. 
 
 Love to him meant a beautiful whole ; the rose, rooted 
 in the earth, to be sure, but blooming proudly in the 
 purity of the sun and rain of heaven. 
 
 And now, with his curious, unanalysed relentlessness 
 of mind, he could not call his crying longing for Nancy 
 Gilpin love. 
 
 " I do not love her," he said over and over again, " I 
 just want her." And then the desire to see her dear 
 little face, to hear her voice, tore at him like a demon, 
 so that he groaned aloud. 
 
 At Paris, where he could get in the south-bound 
 express no sleeping accommodation, the gods were very 
 good to him, for in his queer way he derived real com- 
 fort from the fat \ that there was in his compartment 
 a young woman, a Greek, with an ailing child. This 
 woman speaking no French at all, and being in deep 
 distress over her husband, to whom she had been called
 
 KINGSMEAD 317 
 
 by news of his sudden illness, was almost helpless in 
 her grief, and on Tommy's addressing her in Italian, 
 of which language she understood a few words, clung 
 to him with a faith that might under other circum- 
 stances have been almost embarrassing. 
 
 As it was, however, his sympathy for her was a bless- 
 ing to him, and all night he talked to her, holding the 
 baby for the greater part of the time in his arms, for 
 the little creature seemed to like being with him, and its 
 piteous whining ceased for longer and longer intervals 
 as the train rushed into the morning. 
 
 Once Tommy made tea for his companion, for she had 
 a well-equipped tea-basket, which her apparently consti- 
 tutional helplessness appeared to render quite useless to 
 her; and as they sipped the boiling liquid from the 
 dreadful enamel cups, that looked as if they had been 
 stolen from their chains on some public drinking foun- 
 tain, he learned much of her history. 
 
 Her husband, a civil engineer, had been sent to Paris 
 a year ago, and she had just joined him there. They 
 lived high, very high up in an old house near the Sor- 
 bonne there were iron balconies at the windows, she 
 added vaguely. 
 
 And they were happy. The baby was fourteen months 
 old. No, she did n't look so old, for ! jhe was very deli- 
 cate. Her ankles were weak. He was strong and well 
 and big and busy oh, twice as big as Tommy, she 
 explained, with pride.
 
 318 KINGSMEAD 
 
 And he had been sent to Turin, something about a 
 bridge, a fortnight before. She was very lonely, for she 
 could never learn French. No, he was Italian, a Cala- 
 brian. And that afternoon had come the telegramma, 
 " ah, io idio telegramma, I hate them," saying he was 
 ill and she must come; and she knew he had been hurt, 
 on the bridge or something, and that she would find him 
 dead. 
 
 The baby slept now, its pallid face on the mother's 
 sealskin muff, and the tea was becoming drinkably cool. 
 
 " You can't know," Tommy declared encouragingly. 
 " You must n't imagine the worst." 
 
 But she shook her head with a touch of absurd im- 
 portance even in the midst of her bitter grief. " I do 
 know. E in famiglia" she stumbled in her bad Italian. 
 " When a death comes we have a feeling. It never fails, 
 never." 
 
 Then she wept again, mopping her fussy dark face 
 with a blue-edged handkerchief. 
 
 At Modena Tommy took her keys and went and got 
 her luggage through the customs. When he came back 
 he brought her a big packet of milk chocolate, which 
 she ate with deliberate greed, devouring every bit of it 
 in half an hour. 
 
 Toward morning Tommy slept for an hour, and woke 
 to find her giving lumps of plum-cake to the baby. This 
 seemed to him unadvisable and he said so, but she as- 
 sured him that the baby liked it.
 
 KINGSMEAD 319 
 
 At the station before Turin two men got in and dis- 
 cussed the local politics of their town in a loud tone. 
 
 Tommy, still grasping at anything that kept his 
 mind away from himself, listened gravely to the story 
 of the misdemeanours of the Sindaco and the Virtues of 
 1'illustrissimo Morro. " She, la Curini, has much to do 
 with the appointment of that imbecile Massimo Ter- 
 retti," the younger of the two men declared, with a 
 wink ; " he is a good-looking youth." And the older 
 man picked his teeth with a gold-mounted goose-quill 
 and answered with a shrug : " My dear Carlo, wherever 
 there is mischief there is a woman, and wherever there is 
 a woman there is mischief ! Ah, le donnS! " 
 
 Tommy helped the Greek get out at Turin, and called 
 a porter to carry her luggage, then, wishing that she 
 might find her husband better, he bade her good-bye and 
 got back into his carriage. 
 
 The two men had got out too, but to his relief more 
 people got in a German bride and groom, and an 
 Englishwoman who, he thought, must certainly be a 
 suffragette. 
 
 All the way to Genoa, where they arrived at half -past 
 six, the German bride and groom talked chiefly about 
 the scenery, which they called either prachvoll or 
 grossartig. 
 
 They were a solidly built couple in new snuff-coloured 
 clothes, and both of them wore glasses. Her name was 
 Clotilde and his Arthur, and they ate a great many 
 lunches.
 
 320 KINGSMEAD 
 
 Tommy's German was scant, but he talked to them, 
 and they told him that they were going to Spezia, which 
 they understood was wunderscTion and colossally cheap. 
 
 They were nice simple souls and he liked them even 
 when they held hands, which showed that he was not 
 insular in his prejudices. The suffragettish-looking 
 lady read Baedeker all the way and ate two buns. 
 
 Tommy bought at a station a sausage-roll and then 
 wished he hadn't, for the sausage was very garlicky. 
 
 Clotilde and Arthur liked Tommy extremely and 
 roared with laughter at his bad German and his jokes, 
 for Tommy was very hilarious. 
 
 At Genoa, however, he left them, though they were 
 going on by the same train, and sat huddled by a win- 
 dow of his compartment, his face very white, his unsee- 
 ing eyes turned toward the moonlit sea. 
 
 At last, at the end of a long tunnel, the train stopped 
 and Tommy got out at a small station. 
 
 Giving his luggage receipt to a man who hoped his 
 signora was well, he got into a little one-horse victoria 
 and was borne rapidly along one of the most beautiful 
 coast roads in the world towards the Castelletto.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 IN the quiet of the warm night, a quiet that had a vel- 
 vety quality unknown to northern climates, the Castel- 
 letto lay glowing in warm moonlight. The pleasant 
 pale moon that had shone on Tommy half-a-dozen nights 
 before as he left Kingsmead was not here. This was a 
 glowing globe of gold whose shadows dropped over the 
 still world shadows as light, as distinct as that made 
 by the sun. 
 
 And all down the hill, as Tommy sat, a small quaint 
 figure perched on the parapet of his terrace, he saw 
 grey olives asleep in the mellow night, except where 
 broad-stretched firs spread out over the deep border of 
 softly crashing foaming waves that eternally stroked 
 the rough piled rocks. In the interstices of the stoutly 
 built old tower grew prickly-pears, and in one corner of 
 the terrace, near the warm wall of the kitchen, a mass 
 of delicate purple irises stirred as if dreaming. 
 
 Tommy was alone, but for his servant, Battista, 
 and Battista, too, slept. 
 
 It was the third night since that one when he had come 
 
 back. He had been alone ever since, alone with himself, 
 
 and bravely he had faced himself, and his fight was still 
 
 going on. He was lonely with a horrible loneliness; 
 
 21 321
 
 322 KINGSMEAD 
 
 sad with a great sadness; young with a cruel youth. 
 But he was his self's grim and uncompromising antag- 
 onist, and he was beginning to get the advantage over 
 the arguments and excuses with which his antagonist 
 confronted him. 
 
 Easy as he knew it would be for him to find Aileen 
 Donovan, as he was teaching his mind to call her, he 
 knew, had known from the first, that he would never 
 seek her. It was not a determination, it was the convic- 
 tion of a fact. 
 
 He would not seek her ; he could not, as yet, forget 
 her ; but, quite without any attempt at cynicism, rather 
 as a child holding out a hand in the dark for help he 
 knows, in spite of terror, to be there, he told himself 
 that time cured all things. 
 
 It hurt him to think of Nanny cut adrift by her own 
 will, in order to keep her promise to him, from her 
 pleasant anchorage at Greene, but even as it hurt him 
 he remembered with a smile that she was not of the stuff 
 of which renunciation is made. " She will not allow her- 
 self to suffer bodily," he thought. 
 
 No doubt, loving Teddy as she did, she would suffer 
 in losing him, but her gay frocks, her big fires, her 
 simple, perfect meals she would never give up. 
 
 The money given her by him seemed to her quite 
 honourably her own, he knew, and she would never dream 
 of giving it up. 
 
 But as he sat there on the broad parapet, on the outer
 
 KINGSMEAD 323 
 
 edge of which grew a narrow bed of rosemary, Tommy 
 was not thinking of Mrs. Gilpin. He was thinking of 
 Brigit of the story she had told him on just such 
 a night, on that very spot her story and Victor Joy- 
 sclle's, that, after all the years, not even his death could 
 quite end. For she still loved him. And realising now, 
 as he had not of course hitherto, through his ignorance, 
 what it meant to her, his heart ached as he thought. 
 What pain for her, too, to have given all the love of her 
 heart to a man she could not marry. 
 
 She had told him, that night under the stars, that 
 when Joyselle's shock over his good little wife's death 
 had been dulled by time, he had wished to see her. But 
 she had refused, for she had known then that his love for 
 her was not great enough to satisfy her, and she had 
 her life to lead. " It was she, Felicite, whom he loved 
 most," she had told her brother, her hand in his, " and 
 when she was dead no, I could n't see him." 
 
 He knew that the story had caused much talk, some- 
 thing closely approaching a scandal ; and he also knew 
 that Brigit had not feared what people might say. 
 
 Now, it seemed to him, he understood it all. And 
 how he loved her, his beautiful Bicky! 
 
 As soon as soon as he could, he decided, he would 
 go back to England and be much with her and try to 
 help fill her empty life. She loved him, and he could 
 at least try to make her happier. 
 
 Quite simply he sketched his little plan, and as he sat
 
 324 KINGSMEAD 
 
 there, thinking not of himself, something of his misery 
 seemed to slip from him. 
 
 The world too, was huge, and beautiful, and interest- 
 ing. And people were charming. 
 
 As soon as soon as he could, he would go back to 
 them. But not quite yet. No, for a little while he must 
 be quite alone. Crouching on the parapet he gazed 
 seaward, the fresh warm breeze blowing his soft hair 
 back from his forehead. 
 
 Then a knock at the outer door. 
 
 " Chi e? " Without waiting for an answer he hurried 
 to the far side of the terrace and looked down through 
 the narrow aperture through which centuries before men 
 had shot at their enemies. 
 
 Below him, at the top of the narrow, dangerous flight 
 of stone steps, stood, in the darkness, two figures, one 
 of them a man with a lantern. 
 
 " Signore, it is a lady," and before the lantern light 
 flashed on the face of the lady, as she looked up, he knew. 
 
 He went down to the door very quietly, and pushing 
 back the huge rusty bolt, let her in. 
 
 She looked at him from under her flat black travelling 
 hat with something like fear in her eyes, but she did not 
 speak until they stood together on the terrace near where 
 he had been sitting. 
 
 " I have come." 
 
 "Yes. And why?" 
 
 She sat down on the parapet and unfastened her
 
 KINGSMEAD 325 
 
 cloak, which, falling back from her shoulders, displayed 
 her little figure dressed in a neat grey tailor-made frock. 
 
 " Why have you come ? " he repeated quietly. 
 
 " Because because I wanted to see you. Listen." 
 
 As once before, her self-possession amazed him, for 
 he could see that she was at the same time very nervous 
 and shy. 
 
 " You said I could not marry him. And I went away. 
 But ah, Tommy, it is because I love you that I have 
 come. You love me, I know." Anxiously she watched 
 him. 
 
 " Then," he asked sternly, " why did you try to marry 
 him? " 
 
 She clasped her hands. " Don't scold me. He wanted 
 me, and you did n't. And I liked him, and it all be- 
 gan before you came. I and then loving you made 
 rne more lonely, and you did n't care, Tommy ! " 
 
 Tommy faced her in silence for a moment. 
 
 " And you said I was not fitted for him," she went 
 on " as his wife and you are more than he and 
 the other day I I knew that you loved me. So I 
 have come." 
 
 " Ah, don't, don't ! " he cried, " I never told you so. 
 You must not say so." 
 
 " But you do. I have known it ever since the day 
 you came to tell me I could n't marry him. But I 
 thought I could. Marry him, I mean. And when 
 you made me see I could not well, I love you, so I
 
 326 KINGSMEAD 
 
 have come. I do not want you, you know," she added, 
 very reasonably, " to marry me." 
 
 Tommy's eyes filled with hot tears that did not fall. 
 Ah, the piteous humility of her ! 
 
 " Tommy I was going to marry him because, 
 though you say I am bad, I don't like being not a real 
 self. And I liked him and I could have helped him and 
 been somebody a real person. Then you came 
 she leaned toward him until her shoulder touched his, 
 almost to his undoing, although even at the moment 
 he acquitted her of any attempt at vulgar seduction. 
 
 " You do love me," she added, not as a question. 
 
 Then he spoke in a queer voice that he could not make 
 like his own : 
 
 " You must go. I am sorry you have come. I will 
 send my man down to the town with you or no, on 
 to Sant 'Elena, where there are good hotels." 
 
 " You will not send me away ! " 
 
 There was deep agony in her voice, and her small pure 
 face quivered as she looked at him. " Not that, not 
 that! Let me stay as your friend however you 
 like. But I cannot go." 
 
 " You must." 
 
 '* Then you do not love me." 
 
 Tommy clasped his hands tight. " If I do," he said 
 roughly, " it is not in the right way. Oh, go, go, go ! " 
 
 For she was lovely in the moonlight, and he was 
 twenty-three.
 
 KINGSMEAD 327 
 
 " I will give back the money," she faltered, obviously 
 bringing herself to the greatest sacrifice of which she 
 could conceive, " and the house." 
 
 " You must go. And please go soon." 
 
 Leaving her he crossed the terrace and knocking on 
 a small curtained window by the iris bed waked his ser- 
 vant. " Dress, Battista, and light a lantern. You must 
 take this lady back to Sant 'Elena. You can wake 
 Giacomo to drive you on." 
 
 " Si, signore; is the lady going by the one-o'clock 
 train? " 
 
 Tommy hesitated for a moment and then said firmly, 
 " Yes. She is going to Florence." 
 
 When he came back to where she stood he told her in 
 a gentle voice to sit down. " You heard? " he asked as 
 she, without resisting, obeyed. 
 
 " Yes, I am going to Florence." 
 
 They were both silent for a moment, and then she 
 said, " I will never see you again, Tommy. Are you 
 sure ? " 
 
 " Yes ah yes, poor dear," he answered, " I am 
 sure. We are both sure. As to my caring the 
 snowdrop," he touched his breast, " is here. But it 
 has to be." 
 
 The servant, a handsome middle-aged man with the 
 dignity of carriage that so clearly reminds one of the 
 ancientness of Italian civilisation, came out of his room, 
 a lighted lantern in his hand. After seeing by Tommy's
 
 328 KINGSMEAD 
 
 turning that he was seen, he quietly went down the steps 
 and closed behind him the outer door. 
 
 " If if I had n't done that," she said, " you would 
 have married me? " 
 
 There was much dignity in the humble question, and 
 Tommy recognised it. 
 
 " Yes," he said simply, " but don't think of that. 
 And now good-bye." 
 
 He took her small hand and held it between his for a 
 moment, and to his surprise she read his thoughts. " If 
 I had been really all right, I could not have done 
 it you mean that. It is me, not what I have done." 
 
 " Don't think me a prig," he cried with youthful 
 terror of that bugbear among faults. 
 
 But, her great blue eyes full of tears, she bent and 
 kissed his thin wrist. " I love you," she whispered, " so 
 I obey you. Will you keep this and sometimes think of 
 me? " 
 
 From under her cloak she brought the silver mirror, 
 and put it into his hand. 
 
 " I will keep it. Yes. Now good-bye." 
 
 For a moment they looked at each other, and then 
 she left him and went down the steps, without turning. 
 
 He, the glass in his hand, stood on the parapet above 
 the path looking after her as she went, following through 
 the olives the dancing round light of the lantern. 
 
 The moonlight shed, as it fell through the olive-trees, 
 lacy shadows about her, and he could see that her head
 
 KINGSMEAD 329 
 
 was bowed. He did not think that she was crying ; she 
 was not a tearful woman, just as she was not a rebellious 
 one. 
 
 Her extraordinary step in following him to the Cas- 
 telletto was, he knew, very indicative of her gentle 
 courage, but her quiet departure without a scene, 
 without any display of passion or resentment, was as 
 characteristic. 
 
 She had gone and he would not see her again. 
 
 This he knew. She had accepted his decision, and 
 she was gone. The lantern bobbed in and out, down 
 the steep path, and he still could see her little figure 
 pathetically following it then at a sharp turning it 
 was gone. 
 
 After five minutes or so he saw again the bobbing 
 light, but it was among thick-set fir-trees now, and the 
 moonlight could not penetrate them. He no longer saw 
 her. 
 
 At last he drew a deep breath, and walking slowly 
 back to the sea-front, knelt by the parapet, and putting 
 the little mirror down on the rough stones between his 
 outstretched arms, laid his cheek against it. 
 
 The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000118026 4