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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 50317
   :PG.Title: Scandal
   :PG.Released: 2015-10-26
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Cosmo Hamilton
   :MARCREL.ill: Richard Culter
   :DC.Title: Scandal
              A Novel
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1917
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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SCANDAL
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   .. _`Fraser immediately became the object of Beatrix' whole attention`:

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      :alt: Fraser immediately became the object of Beatrix' whole attention. FRONTISPIECE. *See page 192*.

      Fraser immediately became the object of Beatrix' whole 
      attention. FRONTISPIECE. See page `192`_.

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      SCANDAL

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      *A NOVEL*

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      BY

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      COSMO HAMILTON

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      AUTHOR OF
      SINS OF THE CHILDREN, ETC.

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      WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
      RICHARD CULTER

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      GROSSET & DUNLAP
      PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

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      Made in the United States of America

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      *Copyright, 1917,*
      BY COSMO HAMILTON.

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      *All rights reserved*

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..

   |  "For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
   |  And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
   |  Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,—
   |  How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."
   |                                    ROBERT BROWNING.

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   LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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`Fraser immediately became the object of
Beatrix' whole attention`_ . . . *Frontispiece*

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`"Don't you think we make a charming picture
of connubial felicity?"`_

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`"It won't be many days before we find scandal
rearing its head at us"`_

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`In this picture stood the vital figures of Beatrix
and Franklin, hand in hand`_




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   SCANDAL

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   \I

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"By Jove, there's Beatrix Vanderdyke!"

"Why not?"

"What on earth is she doing in New York at this
time of year?"

There was a laugh and a shrug.  "If it comes to
that, my dear fellow, what on earth are we doing in
New York at this time of year?  Anyway, I'm not interested."

"I am.  She's with that unpleasant brute, Sutherland
York again.  I wish to Heaven she wouldn't go
about with a second-rate portrait painter who only
gets commissions by licking people's boots, or any
other man, for the matter of that, at this time of
night."

Pelham Franklin laughed.  "I'm sorry I can't
squeeze up any interest in Miss Vanderdyke," he said.
"I've seen her going into York's studio round about
midnight several times, but it's her life.  She has to
lead it.  There's no accounting for tastes, you know.
You and I, for instance, have a penchant for the
Ziegfeld Follies.  I vote we walk, it's a little cooler
now."

And as the only son of the famous millionaire
Franklin, sauntered away with his friend, Sutherland
York, the "unpleasant brute," followed Miss
Vanderdyke into the elevator.

York had cultivated a peculiar habit of looking at
a woman as though she were the only one alive, and by
doing so had achieved a list of clients which made the
mouth of every other portrait painter in New York
water with envy.  He also had a way, which
amounted to a gift, of running his eyes over women
which made them feel that they had nothing on.  It
caused some to shudder, some to preen themselves, and
some—the coarser, indelicate type—to feel a pleasant
thrill of excitement.  Like many men who paint
portraits for a living, Sutherland York had discovered
that in order to pay the rent of a very expensive
apartment, keep a man, dress to perfection and dine
frequently at Sherry's and the Ritz, it is necessary to
know something more than how to paint.  Women
were his clients.  They provided him with his butter
as well as his bread, and he catered to them with
artfulness rather than with art.  Miss Vanderdyke came
in for all this man's eye-play in the elevator, but
without a flicker of a lash bore up against it.

The city had baked beneath a hot June sun that
day.  The night was airless and oppressive.  Beatrix
dropped her cloak and went over to one of the open
windows and stood there with the discreet lights
showing up the smooth whiteness of her shoulders, arms
and back.  Her dress was one of those so-called smart
things that one sees in the windows of fashionable
shops which affect French names.  It left very little
to the imagination and was as short as it was low.
In between it was ugly and foolish, and required a very
beautiful young body to live it down and put a check
on the ribald laughter of sane people.  On the other
side of Fifth Avenue the Plaza, with its multitudinous
windows all gleaming, reared its head up to the clear
sky.  Along the glistening street below intermittent
automobiles glided like black beetles.  The incessant
hum of the city came like music to the girl's ears.  She
preferred that sound to the God-sent quietude of the
country from which she had just come.

While a bottle of champagne was opened and
cigarettes were placed on the table, York stood with his
back against a heavily carved oak armoire in an
attitude of carefully considered gracefulness and
watched the girl with a sense of extreme triumph.
The fact that she was young—very young,—not
very much more than twenty,—and was generally
acknowledged as having been the most beautiful
débutante who had come out in New York society in
many years, did not matter.  He had painted her
portrait and had quieted his numerous trades-people with
a certain portion of the very substantial cheque which
he had received, but that also did not matter.  What
did matter was the fact that he, himself, had proved
attractive to a Vanderdyke—to the only daughter of
the man whose name was known all over the world
as the head of one of the richest and certainly the
most exclusive family in the United States, whose
house on Fifth Avenue contained art treasures which
made it more notable than the houses of European
royalty, and whose country places with their racing
stables, their kennels, their swimming pools and
tennis courts, golf courses and polo grounds were the
pride of all the little eager people who write society
paragraphs.  It meant a good deal to the son of the
man who had kept a dusty-looking antique shop with
dirty windows on Fourth Avenue to be able to assure
himself that he exercised enough attraction over this
girl to make her run the risk of gossip in order to
spend a few stolen hours from time to time in his
company alone.  With the use of consummate tact,
his well-practiced flattery, and at the right moment a
sudden outburst of passionate words culled from the
works of Byron and Swinburne, what might he not
achieve!

As these thoughts ran through his brain he turned
to the oval glass in an Italian frame that hung on the
wall and looked at himself with close examination.
He certainly wore his forty-seven years admirably well.
His dark, thick, wavy hair was all the more picturesque
for its sprinkling of white.  His high forehead
lent him an air of intellectuality which was most
misleading.  His straight, black eyebrows and large,
almond-shaped eyes gave him a Latin touch which
seemed to indicate temperament.  His nose, he told
himself, was undoubtedly aristocratic, and his
moustache—scrupulously lifted away from his
lip—added to the effect of a well-shaped mouth and large
white, regular teeth.  There was a slit in his chin
of which he had always been proud.  Striking was the
word that he applied to himself, and handsome was
the one which he knew was generally used about him.
The touch of humor which was his saving grace made
him very well aware of the fact that with any clothes
less well cut and carefully considered he might easily
fall in line with the glossy villain of melodrama or
with the conventional desperado so necessary to the
producers of moving pictures.

With fingers as expert as those of a woman he
smoothed his hair here and there, made a quick sign
to his man to get out, and moved across the
expensively rugged studio to the window.  "I was on
the point of going out to supper," he said, "when
you called me up.  It was very kind of you."

Beatrix turned towards him with the most disconcerting
air of candor.  Not for the first time he was
astonished at her perfect finish, her audacious
self-possession.  This baby was a complete woman of the
world.  "No, it wasn't," she said.  "I was bored.
I only got to town at half-past eight and the mere
thought of spending the evening with a garrulous
companion—a sort of toothless watch-dog—in a house
among Holland covers and the persistent smell of
camphor was more than I could stand.  I had no
intention of being kind.  Do we smoke?"

"Oh, please!" he said.

She followed him across the large, lofty room to
the refectory table which had stood in the back room
of the shop on Fourth Avenue for so many years,
there acquiring all the age of which it could boast.  A
silver Jacobean box was open and in it there were
Russian cigarettes upon which York's imaginary crest had
been stamped.  He had himself designed it.

"Thank you.  How is it that you're here?  The
last time I saw you, you said you were going to
Gloucester for the summer."

York put his face as near to the girl's round
shoulder as he dared.  "I went there," he said, "on the
last of April, but I had to come back last week to see
the architects of a new theatre.  They've asked me
to paint a series of panels for the foyer.  It's a
nuisance; but—although I dare say it's never occurred
to you—there are some people in the world who must
work to live."  He raised his glass, adopted an
expression of adoration in which there was a mixture
of humbleness and confidence, and added: "I'd have
come from the ends of the earth for the pleasure of
seeing you to-night."

Beatrix looked at him with a smile of amused
appreciation.  "How well you do that sort of thing,"
she said.  "Better than any man I know.  Was it
born in you, or did you achieve it?"

York placed what purported to be a Wolsey chair
just out of the line of light thrown by a lamp on the
table, and metaphorically hauled himself up for having
gone a little too far.  This imperious girl, as spoiled
as a Royal Princess, who had been brought up in
the belief that all she had to do was to put her finger
on a bell to bring the moon and the sun and the stars
to her service, needed more careful handling than a
thoroughbred yearling.  So York, whose business had
taught him far more than the rudiments of psychology,
hastened to become general again.  Like the filibuster
who starts out on an expedition to find hidden
treasure, he had always before him the vague, exciting
hope that some day he might stand towards this girl in
a very different relationship.  "How long are you to
be in the city?"

"I must go back the day after to-morrow," said
Beatrix.  "I've only come in to see about a costume
for a Shakespeare Pastoral that mother has arranged
to give in the Queen Anne gardens.  It's going to be
produced by one of the long-haired tribe, and the
house-party's to be assisted by a sprinkling of
professionals.  As it'll break the monotony of country
life I'm looking forward to it, especially as I'm
going to play opposite,—I think that's the word,—to
a matinée idol whose profile is Grecian, though
his accent is Broadway.  You must come and see us."

"I should love to," said York.  His interest in
pastorals was infinitesimal, but his desire to be included
in one of Mrs. Vanderdyke's house-parties was as
keen as that of any woman whose whole life is devoted
to the difficult gymnastic feat of climbing into society.
"When d'you begin rehearsing?"

"The day after to-morrow.  The people who are at
home at present scattered to-day and the new lot, or
many of them, will probably go by train on Wednesday.
Pelham Franklin is to be there.  D'you know him?"

"Very slightly," said York.  "He lives in the twin
studio to this, on the other side, but as he is mostly
away, either in Europe or big game hunting, there has
been very little opportunity for us to meet.  I caught
sight of him just now leaving the house.  He's a
good-looking fellow, isn't he?"

"Is he?  Yes, I suppose he is.  I've met him once
or twice and danced with him, but it struck me that
he needed some sort of crisis in his life to shake him
into becoming a man.  At present he's a sort of
undergraduate, skimming through life with his feet
above the earth.  I believe mother entertains secret
hopes that he'll one day ask me to marry him."  She
laughed.  "I hear her talking about the union of
the two families as though they were the only two
families in the world.  Aunt Honoria is all in favor
of it, too.  The question of my marriage seems to
affect them as though I were the daughter of King
George or someone.  Who would suppose that we live
in a democracy?  It's a joke, isn't it?  Probably I
shall run away with a good-looking chauffeur with
kinky hair, regular teeth, a straight nose and a
vocabulary which would put even George Ade to shame.
Or, I may fall in love with the matinée idol and fly off
with him in a motor-car at midnight, and so be in the
fashion.  My romantic-minded companion, Mrs. Lester
Keene, who lives on novels, cherishes the idea that
I'm going to elope with you."

"My God!" cried York.  "If only such a thing
could come true!"

The passion in the man's voice, the sudden flame in
his eyes and the sort of picturesque hunger which
suddenly pervaded him filled the girl with interest.  She
had always regarded him as a sort of Shaw play,—a
mixture of easy cynicism, self-conscious cleverness
and an obvious pose.  She had been leading a quiet
life since the season in town had ended, riding and
playing tennis and swimming in the pool.  She had
had no opportunity of trying her powers upon any man
who had been worth while.  Her parents' friends were
all rather pompous, responsible people who talked
politics gravely and whose wealth had taken the sting of
joy and effort out of life.  It was good to be able to
play with fire again.  It exercised her wits.  So she
seized the opportunity of leading on this handsome
person with whom so many married women had been
in love, to see what he would do.

"Is that how you feel?" she asked, instinctively
going into the light so that her slim triumphant beauty
and bewitching youth should be in full challenging
view.

York lost his head.  His inherent conceit led him
to believe that there was encouragement in the girl's
voice and attitude.  "You know it is.  You know
that ever since you came here to sit for me, from the
very first instant that I caught sight of you I've been
drunk with love.  You've revolutionized my life—almost
ruined me as painter—because to paint any
other woman is sacrilege."  He caught her hands
and kissed them hotly.

It was all very well done.  His words carried most
amazing sincerity.  His attitude was extremely graceful,
and his simulated passion lent a temporary youthfulness
to his face and tall, tightly compressed figure.
He managed to look the complete lover.  The stage
had lost a great actor in him.

Beatrix rescued her hands and stood up very
straight.  This transpontine outburst was foolish.
She had merely hoped for a witty passage of arms.
"My dear Mr. York," she said, "you and I are very
good friends.  Please don't run away with the idea
that I'm a young married woman in search of adventure."

York was angry.  He knew that he had made a
fool of himself.  He hated to look a fool at any time
and he was not sufficiently master of himself to recover
his ground by making a well-turned apology.
"Women don't come here to be friends," he said
thickly.  "They certainly don't come alone at this
time of night to talk ethics.  You've no right to snub
me—to lead me on and then cover me with ice-cold
water.  I'm not the man to stand that sort of thing."

"Your cigarettes are very nice," said Beatrix.
"May I have another?"

He held out the box and struck a match.  He stood
so close to the girl that the fragrance of her hair and
the gleam of her white flesh went to his brain.  All
the sensuality of the man was churned up and stirred
and his veneer fell from him like dry plaster.  He
really did forget for the moment that she was the
daughter of one of America's richest men and was not
simply the most exquisite young thing that he had ever
seen during his long career.  He bent down and put
his lips on her shoulder, with a hoarse, inarticulate
murmur.  He had always been very successful in his
love-making.  The type of woman with whom he came
most in contact couldn't resist the primeval.  He must
have imagined that this unbridled and daring outbreak
would carry the girl off her feet.  It had happened
before.

He was mistaken.  Beatrix was as completely
mistress of herself as though she were talking to a
hairdresser.

"That's a pity," she said.  "I'm afraid it puts an
end to my coming here.  I'm sorry, because I liked the
atmosphere of your studio and it broke the monotony
of my gilded exclusiveness to indulge in this sort of
mild Bohemianism, although I thought that you were
clever.  Will you please let me have my wrap?"

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes."

York obeyed.  He saw that he had completely
spoiled his very remote chance.  Also it was
obvious that his name would not now be included among
Mrs. Vanderdyke's list of guests.  "You fool!" he
said to himself.  "You damned infernal fool.  This
girl's an aristocrat—an autocrat—a hot-house plant.
You've treated her like the wife of a Wall Street
broker from the Middle West."  He put the wrap
about the girl's shoulders and stood back endeavoring
to assume a dignity that he did not feel.

That kiss on her shoulder was like the touch of a
slug on the petal of a rose.  Beatrix resented it from
the bottom of her soul, but her training, her breeding
and her inherent pluck gave her the power to hide her
feelings and maintain an air of undisturbed
indifference.  Her knowledge of men, already great, made
her very well aware of the fact that the least show of
temper might bring about a most unpleasant scuffle.
She dropped her cigarette into a silver bowl.  "I
shall look forward to seeing your panels in the new
theatre with great interest," she said.  "Will you
come down with me to the car?"

Realizing that he was no match for this young
privileged person and cowed by her superbly unconscious
sense of quality, York led the way across his elaborate
studio in which suits of armor gleamed dully and
massive pieces of oak reflected the light, to the door.
He rang the bell of the elevator and stood silently
waiting for it to come up.  Nothing else was said, except
by Beatrix, who gave him the one cool word
"Good-bye," as he shut the door of the limousine.

York's man-servant, of whom he was so inordinately
proud, had gone to bed.  Otherwise, he would
have been astonished to hear the sound of smashing
china.  The portrait painter took it out on a Dresden
bowl which, in his impotent rage, he dashed with a
characteristically coarse oath to the polished floor of
the room in which most of his love episodes had ended
with peculiar success.





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   \II

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The Vanderdyke house on Fifth Avenue faced the
Park.

It aroused the admiration of most people not
because it was an accurate reproduction of the famous
De la Rochefoucauld mansion in Paris, but because
on one side of it enough space upon which to build a
high apartment house was given up to a stilted
garden behind a high arrangement of wrought iron.  It
did not require a trained real-estate mind to know how
valuable was such "waste" ground.

The suite of rooms belonging to Beatrix overlooked
this large, square patch, with its well-nursed lawn, its
elaborate stonework and its particular sparrows.  In
the spring, what appeared to be the same tulips
suddenly and regularly appeared, standing erect in exact
circles, and lilacs broke into almost regal bloom every
year about the time that the family left town.  A line
of balloon-shaped bay trees always stood on the
terrace and, whatever the weather, a nude maiden of
mature charms watched over a marble fountain in an
attitude of resentful modesty.

When her windows were open, as they mostly were,
Beatrix and her English companion could hear the
pathetic whimpers of the poor caged beasts in the
Zoo in front of the house, and the raucous cries of
the Semitic-looking parrots above the ceaseless
cantata of motor traffic.

The morning after her lucky escape from York's
studio, Beatrix slept late.  Mrs. Lester Keene had
breakfasted alone with the *Times*, saving *Town Topics*
for her final cup of coffee.  She had heard her charge,
whom she made no effort to manage, return comparatively
early the night before, and could hardly contain
her curiosity to know what had happened.  It was
obvious that something had taken place, because, as a
rule, Beatrix came back anywhere between one and
two from her visits to the portrait painter.  From a
sense of duty and a fear of losing her comfortable
position, Mrs. Lester Keene forced herself to remain
awake on these occasions, sitting over a novel in a
Jaeger dressing-gown or writing a long, rambling
letter to a friend in London, in which, with tearful pride
in her former independence, she wallowed in reminiscence.

Mrs. Lester Keene was the widow of a man of
excellent family who had devoted all the best years of
his life to the easy and too-well-paid pursuit of
winding and unwinding "red tape" in a government
office in London.  He had died of it before he could
retire to a stucco house at Brighton on a pension, and
Amelia Keene had found herself in the tragic position
of being alone in the world in the middle forties with
nothing to bless herself with but an aged pomeranian,
her undisputed respectability and the small sum paid
to her on her husband's life policy.  This, with the
laudable and optimistic idea of placing herself forever
out of the reach of the lean hand of penury, she had
entrusted to the care of a glib city shark whom she
had met in a boarding-house and who guaranteed that
he would get her in on the ground floor of a new
company exploiting the Eldorado Copper Mine and bring
her in a regular three hundred and fifty-five per
cent. on her capital.  With this neat sum and others,
however, the expert philanthropist with the waxed
moustache and white spats paid his first-class fare to the
Argentine and set up a matrimonial bureau for
temperamental South Americans.  Poor Amelia Keene
sold her modest jewels and applied for work at the
Employment Agency for Impoverished Gentlewomen,
in George Street, Hanover Square.

It so happened that Mr. and Mrs. Vanderdyke were
in London at that time and in need of a refined
companion for their only daughter.  Mrs. Lester Keene
was one of the several dozen applicants and had the
great good fortune to secure the much coveted post
owing to the fact that her hair was grey, her complexion
her own and her accent irreproachably Kensington.
As Mrs. Vanderdyke intended to be the only
made-up woman in any of her numerous houses, the
other applicants were naturally turned down.

Like most English people the new companion had
never been farther away from her native land than
Boulogne.  She thrilled with excitement, fright and
the spirit of adventure when she joined the Vanderdyke
entourage on board the *Olympic*.  To be five or
six days at sea was in itself an almost unbelievable
exploit, full of hidden dangers and obvious terrors.  The
mere thought of shipwreck and the possibility of
floating for days on a raft, in perhaps most unconventional
attire, appalled her.  But the thing that filled
her nightly dreams with phantasmagoria was the
knowledge that she was, God and the elements willing,
to live in the United States,—a great wild country in
which, she had been led to believe, men shot each other
in the fashionable restaurants, broncho busters
galloped madly along the principal streets of the big cities
and lassoed helpless virgins, murderers in masks held
up trains, black men were hanged to lamp-posts, as
a matter of course, and comic creatures with large feet
hammered people on the head with mallets.  She had
arrived at this point of view from several visits to the
moving picture theatres in London, where American
films do much to prejudice untravelled Europeans
against the United States.  Her astonishment when
finally she arrived in New York and found herself in
what she described to her friends at home as the
Vanderdyke Palace, was almost childish.

In no sense of the word was she a companion to
Beatrix.  Her narrow and insular point of view, her
characteristic English method of clinging to
shibboleths and rococo ideas, and her complete and
triumphant ignorance of all fundamental things made her,
to Beatrix, more of a curiosity, like an early Victorian
stuffed canary in a glass case, than a useful and
helpful person.  Beatrix had been born sophisticated.  As
a child and a young girl her arresting and palpable
beauty had made her an irresistible mark for boys and
young men, and one or two only of her early episodes,
nearly all of which began well enough but ended in
sometimes very rough attempts at seduction, would
have crowded out of Mrs. Lester Keene's whole
humdrum, drone-like life every incident that she could
recall.  Beatrix at once became her companion's
guide, philosopher, friend and guardian, and derived
constant amusement from the little garrulous, plump,
hen-like woman, who knew no more about life than the
average dramatist knows about people, and who, though
completely dazzled by the hard, almost casual
magnificence of her present surroundings, delighted to live
in the past, telling long and pointless stories of "my
house in Clanricarde Gardens, you know," "Mrs. Billings,
my cook," "The summer when Algernon and I
took the Edward Jones's house at Bognor," "My
drawing-room was always crowded every second and
fourth Thursday, quite a Salon, in fact," and so on,
in a glorification of the commonplace that was as
pathetic as it was tiresome.

Before Mrs. Keene had waded through the first
few pages of her favorite weekly paper, a maid
disturbed her.  "Miss Vanderdyke would be glad to
see you," she said, conveying the kindly but
nevertheless royal command with full appreciation.

Mrs. Lester Keene was glad to obey.  Even if dear
Beatrix had nothing exciting to tell her, she had a very
curious piece of news to impart to dear Beatrix.  So
she gathered herself together, rather in the same way
as her prototype, the barnyard hen rising from a
bath of sun-baked earth, and made her way along a
wide passage hung with the priceless old prints which
had overflowed from the lower rooms, to the bedroom
of the daughter of the house.

Beatrix was sitting on the edge of a four-post bed,
in a pink, transparent nightgown, her little feet in
heelless slippers.  On a table at her elbow there was a
just placed breakfast tray and a new copy of *Town
and Country*.  Fresh from sleep, with her fair hair all
about her shoulders, Beatrix, the one alive and
exquisite thing in that too-large, too-lofty, pompous
room, looked like a single rosebud in a geometrically
designed garden.

"Come along, Brownie," she said, stretching herself
with catlike grace, "and talk to me while I feed."

"You'll put something on, dear, won't you?"

"No, dear Brownie, I won't.  No one can spy into
the room and there isn't a single portrait of a man
on the walls.  So please don't fuss.  It's far too hot
for a dressing-gown and in my case why should I
hide my charms from you?"  She laughed at her
wholly justified conceit, gave herself a very friendly
nod in a pier-glass in the distance and poured out a
cup of coffee.

Amelia Keene could never at any time, even in her
isolated spinster days in the heart of the country, have
brought herself to wear such an excuse for a
nightgown.  Flannel was her wear.  She was, as usual,
more than a little uneasy at the all-conquering individualism
and supreme naturalness of the girl to whom
she utterly subjected herself.  With the slightest shrug
of her shoulders,—she dared to do nothing further,—she
put the dressing-gown that she had offered
back in its place, and sat down.  At any rate she
could assure herself that she had endeavored to do her
duty.

"You came in earlier than I expected last night,
dear," she said, throwing the obvious bait of her
insatiable curiosity.

Beatrix laughed again.  "Why don't you say that
you're dying to know what happened and lay awake
all night making up exciting stories, Brownie?"

Mrs. Keene almost succeeded in looking dignified.
"You know that I'm very, very much against these
late visits to bachelor rooms," she said, "and have
always done my best to dissuade you from making
them.  Therefore I can truly say that I'm far from
being curious and am unable to feel any sort of
excitement."

Beatrix bent forward and touched her companion's
cheek with an affectionate hand.  "Good for you,
dear old wise-acre.  *You'll* never have to take any
blame for my blazing indiscretions, so don't worry,
and as you don't feel any interest in my adventures I
won't bother you with them."

Keen disappointment took the place of dignity.  "I
hope the time will never come," said Mrs. Keene,
"when you'll cease to make me your confidante, dear."

Feeling that she had teased the little, naïve,
narrow-minded, well-meaning and very human woman enough,
Beatrix finished her coffee and lit a cigarette.  "Last
night, Sutherland York dropped his pose," she said.
"I hadn't ever taken the trouble to analyze the
reason why I went to his studio, but thinking it over now
I see that it was because I knew that sooner or later
his assumption of super-refined Bohemianism would
break down and I wanted to be there to see the smash.
Well, dear Brownie, I saw it.  I also heard it and, to
go into the exact details, I felt it,—on my shoulder."
She put her right hand on the spot as though the touch
of his sensual lips still stung her.

Amelia Keene gasped.  "You don't mean that he
kissed——"

"Yes, I do.  Just here.  I think of consulting a
specialist on the matter."

"*My dear!*"

Beatrix got up, walked across the wide room and
stood in front of the pier-glass.  Through her thin,
clinging nightgown she could see the lines of her slim,
lithe, deliciously young form.  For a moment she
stood in frank and open admiration of it.  She had
a keenly appreciative eye for beautiful things.  Then
she walked about the room, like a young Diana, her
heels rapping as she went.  "It wasn't so amusing
as I hoped it might be," she added.  "Scratch a
gentleman and you find the man.  Break the veneer of
a cad and you discover the beast.  D'you think
that Pond's Extract is strong enough to cleanse the
spot?"

"He dared to kiss *you!*——  I can hardly believe
it."  Mrs. Keene looked like a pricked balloon.  "Surely
you'll never go near him again now."

"Only if I can get a policeman to go with me, or
an inspector of nuisances.  Brownie, dear, my
occasional evenings with art and old armor are over.  I
must find some other excuse for breaking all the rules
that hedge round the life of an ex-débutante."

"Thank Heaven!" said Mrs. Keene.  "I've only
seen that man once and he reminded me of a person
who used to go down the area of my London house
and try and persuade the maids to buy imitation
jewelry on the instalment plan."

Beatrix burst into a ripple of laughter.  "Well
done, Brownie.  That's perfect,—perfect."  But
again her hand went up to her shoulder.

And then the hen-like lady gathered her scattered
wits together and came up to her own little surprise.
"It's quite time that episode is at an end, my dear,"
she said.  "Only about ten minutes after you drove
away last night,—I was having a sandwich and a glass
of port wine before going to my room,—your Aunt
Honoria bore down upon me.  May I say that
without giving offense?"

Beatrix drew up short.  "Aunt Honoria!"

"Yes; she came straight up to these apartments,
looking more like a beautiful eagle than ever,—my
heart fell straight into my boots,—and asked, or rather
demanded to see you."

"Aunt Honoria!  But yesterday she was staying
with the Mordens at Morristown."

Mrs. Keene was delighted to find that she held a
full hand.  "I said that you were out.  My dear,
she didn't take my word for it.  She marched, or
rather sailed along the passage to your room and
stabbed your empty bed with her long, thin fingers.
Of course I followed.  Then she turned to me and
said: 'Where is she?'  I'm sure she didn't add
'woman,' but she as good as did.  She always does.
I was terrified.  I felt like a shop-lifter before the
Lord Chief Justice.  She always reminds me of a
great legal dignitary with her snow-white hair and
aquiline nose and the cold, direct gaze."

"Thank you, Brownie, dear, for your very charming
literary touch, but please go on."  Beatrix was
really interested and curious.  Her Aunt Honoria
Vanderdyke, the outstanding figure in New York's
most exclusive society, at whose entrance into her
box at the opera the whole house very nearly rose
to its feet, did nothing without a very strong motive.

"I tried to tell a lie—I did indeed—but somehow
it stuck in my throat.  Under those two mind-searching
eyes I *had* to say that you had driven away
with Mr. Sutherland York."

"Well, this is interesting!"

"'Ah!' she said.  'Indeed!  And how often has
Miss Vanderdyke stained herself with the paint of
that mountebank?'  'I really do not know,' I replied.
'Thank you,' she said.  'That will do,' and went, or
rather floated out of your bedroom and along the
passage.  I watched her from the gallery as she went
down-stairs and through the door and away.  A
wonderful woman!  If only Queen Elizabeth had been a
lady she might have looked like her.  I honestly
confess, my dear——"

Beatrix held up one pink-nailed finger.  "Brownie,"
she said, "I feel in my bones that there is going to be
a row in the family.  I've been seen going into York's
studio, Aunt Honoria has been informed!  She heard
that I had come to town,—came to spy——"

"Oh, not spy, dear.  She could never spy!"

"No, that's true.  Inquire first hand, then,—and
has now gone home to——"

The telephone bell rang.  Beatrix's eyes gleamed
with fun and a sort of impish amusement.  "Brownie,
I'll bet you any money you like that that's mother!"

Mrs. Keene rose.  "Oh, no, my dear.  Why should
it be?  It's the dressmaker, of course."  All the same
she hesitated apprehensively.

"Well, I'll bet you.  The row is simmering."

Mrs. Keene nearly dropped the receiver.  "It is
your mother," she said.  "She asks for you.  And,
oh dear me, how icy her voice is!"

Before going to the telephone, Beatrix lit another
cigarette, gave a tilt to a comfortable arm-chair that
stood near the little table, sat down, crossed one round
leg over the other in a most leisurely way and took
up the instrument.  She looked like a water-color by
Van Beers come to life.

"Good morning, Mamma!  How sweet of you to
call me up—I shall be glad to get away from the
glare of the streets and reek of gasoline, but I can't
leave until to-morrow.  I must try on my costume
twice before then—I'm very sorry, Mamma, darling,
but—Well, give father my love and tell him that he
simply must curb his impatience to see me, because
it's absolutely necessary—Aunt Honoria!  Is Aunt
Honoria there?"  She shot a wink at Amelia Keene,
who stood in an attitude of piteous trepidation.  "My
very best love to Aunt Honoria.  But it will be
impossible for me to leave town at once.  Well, then,
expect to see me at tea to-morrow.  Au revoir, Mamma.
I wish I could stay for a longer chat, but I'm just on
my way out, with so much to do."

She rang off and burst out laughing.  "A very
good thing you were not betting, Brownie."

"Did Mrs. Vanderdyke sound——?"

"Angry?  Yes, in a white heat.  Every word was
like a grain of Cayenne pepper."

"And is it about last night?"

"Yes, obviously, and probably the others.  There
has been a family council, that's easy to guess.
Scandal has been at work.  Isn't it absurd?"

"Oh, dear!  Oh, dear!" cried Mrs. Keene, who
dreaded disturbances, would do anything in her power
to keep trouble away from her charge, to whom she
was genuinely attached, and saw starvation facing her
if she were to lose her position.  "How very unfortunate
and distressing all this is!  And, oh, my dear,
how *could* you talk to your mother like that?"

"My dear good Brownie," said Beatrix, tipping off
the end of her cigarette, "what's the use of belonging
to this generation if I can't keep my parents in their
place?"

She was just the least little bit disappointed that
her companion failed to catch her touch of satirical
humor.





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   \III

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At the moment when her maid was getting a bath
ready for Beatrix and was waiting in a white marble
room filled with the pleasant aroma of scented bath
salts, Pelham Franklin wandered into the dining room
of his studio apartment with his friend, Malcolm
Fraser.  Both men were in pajamas, and even then
welcomed the occasional soft puff of air that came
through the open window.  Another hot day had
fallen upon the city and a blistering sun was already
high in a cloudless sky.

The dining room, like the studio and the passages,
was filled with antlered heads and stuffed tarpon, and
the skins of bear and tiger and wild-cat.  There was
something finely and healthily inartistic about the
whole place, which more nearly resembled the work-rooms
of a naturalist than anything else.  The same
note was struck by Franklin, who, with his broad
shoulders and deep chest, his six feet of wiry body and
small head, was obviously nothing but a man and not
one who had ever been accused of being handsome
either.  He shuddered at the word except when it
was applied to the royal mate of a fallow deer.  All
the same, he caught all discriminating eyes for the
shortness of his thick, dark hair, the cleanness and
humor of his grey, deep-set eyes, the rather aggressive
squareness of his jaw, the small, soldierly moustache
that covered a short upper lip and the strong, white
teeth that gleamed beneath it when he laughed or was
very angry.  He had the look, too, of a man who
mostly sleeps out under the sky, and the sun-baked
skin of one who is not chained to a city or doomed
to the petty slavery of the social push.

"This damned city," he said.  "This time eight
days ago we were well out to sea.  If I hadn't been
ass enough to put the yacht back for another stock of
tobacco the mail would have waited and grown stale.
Rotten bad luck, eh?"

Fraser grinned ironically.  "If it was a question
of my having to chuck a few fish and give up two or
three weeks of the open sea to come to the city to
see about adding a million or two to my capital, d'you
think I'd grumble?"

"But you're such a mercenary brute.  You think
of nothing but money."

"Yes, and the only reason you're not mercenary is
that you don't have to think about it.  Thanks, I'll
have a sausage.  What are you going to do to-day?"

Franklin groaned.  "Sign deeds and things most of
the morning at the lawyer's, having tried to make out
what the devil they mean, and after lunch I'm going
to buy a Rolls Royce.  Say why?"

"I was going to say why."

"Well, I say why not?"

"But you've got five cars already.  You don't
want another."

"My dear chap, don't rub it in.  I can't help being
one of those unlucky beggars who's got so much,
through no fault of his own, that he doesn't want
anything else.  Don't heave bricks at me when I wake up
with a mild desire for something I don't need.
Encourage me.  Help me to work up an interest in an
expensive toy.  Tempt me into getting rid of some of
my superfluous cash.  It helps some other feller,
y'know, and anyway the only thing I've never done
is to desire a Rolls Royce, and I dreamt about it all
night.  Will you come and let me see if I can break
your neck?"

"All right!  A good way of getting it in shape for
to-morrow.  You'll drive out to Greenwich, won't you?"

Franklin looked up quickly from the plate which had
been occupying his close attention.  "Greenwich?
Why Greenwich?"

Fraser grinned again.  He seemed to find a lot of
grim amusement in Franklin.  "You read me a telegram
that you sent off from the yacht accepting
Mrs. Vanderdyke's invitation for the Pastoral
house-party."

"Oh, my God, yes!"

"But perhaps you'll have to undergo a slight operation
or sit by the bedside of a sick relative, or something."

"No; I shall go.  I promised Ida Larpent I'd meet
her there."

"Oh!" said Fraser, dryly.  "I see."  He hoped to
draw further details.

But Franklin let it go.  There were so many far
more vital things to talk about than women.

"By Jove!" said Fraser, going off at a tangent.
"I envy you this house-party.  You'll be able to talk
to Beatrix."

"Well, that won't worry me much."  Franklin had
passed from sausages to Virginia ham and was still
going strong.

"Maybe not.  Your attention is occupied.  It
would worry me a whole lot, though.  That girl has
a strange effect on me.  Always has, ever since I met
her.  That was before she left this country to be put
to school in England.  I only have to catch her eyes
to begin to tremble at the knees.  Ever had that queer
sensation?"

"Twice," said Franklin, taking another cup of coffee.

"Who were they?"

"One was a tiger in the Indian bush, and the other
a crazy Chinaman running amuck in San Francisco.
They both made my knees waggle."

Fraser lit a cigarette, inhaled a mouthful of smoke
and let it dribble through his nostrils.  The first
cigarette is worth going through breakfast to achieve.
"Well," he said, without any of the self-consciousness
that generally goes with the pulling down of the fourth
wall, "I don't mind telling you, Pel, old man, but I'd
give ten years of my life to marry Beatrix Vanderdyke."

"An expensive hobby," said Franklin.

"Yes, quite.  But I knew her when she was a little
bit of a slip of a thing, before she realized what it
meant to bear that dollar-weighted name.  She was the
sweetest kid I ever saw.  She might have been left
behind by the fairies.  I watched the gradual change
take place in her and the disastrous effect of
governesses who licked the blacking off her boots and the
army of servants who treated her as though she were
the First National Bank come to life.  I was one of
the people, almost unnoticed, who stood on the pier
and watched her sail for England with her mother
and father and their retinue.  Since her return and
during the time that she was a débutante and every
newspaper in the country knelt at her feet I have met
her perhaps a dozen times—the opera, the horse
show, the races, and so on.  She has given me two
fingers and half a smile.  She has been utterly and
absolutely spoiled.  She doesn't seem to be even
distantly related to the little girl with the fairy face with
whom I used to play in the country.  And that's why
I should like to marry her, and would make a huge
sacrifice to do it.  You may laugh and call me all sorts
of a fool, but I should like to make it my business to
chip off the outer layer of artificiality and affectation
which has been plastered all over by her training
and atmosphere.  I would willingly die in hefty
middle-age in order to bring back into that girl's eyes once
more the look that she used to have as a child, so help
me God!"

With extreme surprise Franklin watched his usually
unemotional friend get up and walk over to the
window.  His voice had shaken with deep feeling and
there was a sincerity so profound in the sudden
disclosure of his soul that it put him outside the region
of chaff.  And so Franklin left him alone and swallowed
the badinage which he had intended to throw at
him.  "Ye gods!" he thought.  "I wonder if I shall
ever meet a woman who will make me think such
things as that, or go the eighth of an inch out of my
way.  I rather wish I could."  He possessed enough
humor and imagination to know that he was not
unlike the girl under discussion; that he, like her, had
been born in surroundings that were peculiarly
artificial and altogether unlike those of the average man;
that the enormous wealth to which he had succeeded
made any sort of effort unnecessary, and left him
without the urgent incentive for the good and glorious
grapple for a place in the sun, which made most of
his countrymen prove themselves and their worth.

He led the way into the studio where all that his
life could show hung on the walls.  Each head and
each stuffed fish and every one of the skins had its
interest, but as he looked round the huge room he told
himself that they all came to very little and proved that
he was a fine example of a man who had done nothing
but play games.  His toys were very empty and
meaningless.  A new and curious impatience with himself
came over him.  He was rather annoyed with Fraser
for having shown him the quivering nerve of his
hitherto hidden sincerity.  "My God!" he thought.  "I
wonder when I shall begin to live!"





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   \IV

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It was twelve o'clock before Beatrix left the house
with Mrs. Lester Keene and walked down to Fifty-seventh
Street.  To the relief of the gasping city, a
phalanx of dark clouds had put out the sun.  A storm
which had burst with great violence over Westchester
County was bearing slowly down.  The air was heavy
and windless, and the gasoline vapor from all motor
traffic hung like an oily veil everywhere.  The seats
in the Park were filled with listless people.  Men sat
on the tops of busses with their coats off.  The very
trees looked tired and sapless.

"I wonder how soon we shall get the storm," said
Beatrix.

Mrs. Keene fanned herself with an envelope.  "The
sooner the better.  This heat is unbearable.  Don't
you think, dear, that you can leave town to-night?
I'm longing to get back to the country."

Beatrix crossed the street.  The only cool figure
in the city was that of the rather too plump young
woman who stood naked and unashamed over the
fountain in the geometrical open space in front of the
Plaza.  "Oh, yes, I could, of course," she said, "but
if you can put up with another night here, I won't.  I'm
not going to allow mother and father and Aunt Honoria
to imagine that I'm awed by them—that would
be weak.  For the sake of the whole of the younger
generation I must maintain my attitude of complete
independence."  She glanced at the line of
automobiles which were drawn up outside the famous shop
in Fifty-seventh Street.  "The Dames from Virginia
seem to be keeping Raoul fairly busy.  I rather hope
that Tubby will be here to-day.  She is such fun."

"Tubby" was the nickname which had been given
to the astute woman who had started her dressmaking
business in London and extended it to New York,—a
woman who had married an Italian Count and who,
with consummate art and the assistance of an
imaginative press agent, ran herself as though she were an
actor-manager and her shops as though they were
theatres.  By charging enormous prices and calling
her frocks by poetical names she had bluffed the
gullible public into believing that she was the last
word—the very acme of fashion.  Like most charlatans who
succeed, she had grown to believe that she was what
she said she was,—an artist who had been sent into
the world not for the purpose of making money or any
such vulgar and banal proceeding, but in order to
design coverings for female forms which would leave
as much of them as possible open to the gaze without
causing the arrest of the wearer.

At the first sight of Beatrix there was a stir and a
rustle among a collection of tall, willowy and rather
insolent young women who were lolling about, and a
whisper of "Miss Vanderdyke" was passed from
one to the other.  Tubby's deputy wabbled forward,—herself
a lady of very generous proportions who shone,
like a fat seal, in very shiny satin.  "Oh, good
morning, Miss Vanderdyke!" she said, deferentially.
"Your costume is well advanced.  Will you be good
enough to step upstairs?"

Beatrix nodded.  "Is Tubby here to-day?" she asked.

The seal-like lady looked as though she had
received a prod from a sharp fork.  "No," she said,
"the Countess is feeling the strain of an even more
than usually busy season.  She is undergoing a rest
cure.  As you know, she's very high-strung."

"I'm sorry," said Beatrix.

Followed by Mrs. Keene, she went up a wide
staircase painted white and arrived at what Tubby
invariably called the "atelier," on the first floor.  Here
the Southerners, to whom Beatrix had referred,
were undergoing the apparently exciting process of
being tried on.  There were perhaps a dozen women
in the large airy room, and each one was surrounded
by fitters sticking pins into various parts of them and
paying no sort of attention to the suggestions or the
protests of their victims.

A very special girl came forward with the
Shakesperian costume that was being carried out, or
"created," as Tubby would say, for Beatrix.  It was a
sort of Titania costume, white, loose and airy, with a
shimmer here and there of silver, which could very
easily have been made at home for a mere nothing.
The special girl, with a quiet "If you will allow me,"
unhooked Beatrix's frock, murmuring one or two
well-turned compliments as to her figure, and helped her
into the robe that was to cause a sensation in the Queen
Anne gardens of the Vanderdyke country house.

Utterly unconscious of the other women in the room,
Beatrix swept up to the astonished Mrs. Keene, and in
a high clear voice, cried out: "Set your heart at rest;
the fairy land buys not the child of me.  His mother
was a votaress of my order; and in the spiced Indian
air, by night, full often hath she gossip'd by my side;
and sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands, marking
the embarked traders on the flood; when we have
laugh'd to see the sails conceive and grow big-bellied
with the wanton wind——"

"Oh, my dear!" cried Mrs. Keene.  "Do you remember
that there are people present.  That may be
Shakespeare, but really his choice of words is very
shocking."

Beatrix burst out laughing.  "You should have
waited for the next few lines, Brownie.  Even *I* am
going to blush when I spout them under the trees.
Yes," she said to the girl, "I think this costume will
do quite well.  Don't forget to let me have a wand.
The wreath I'll make myself of real flowers.  Shall
I have to come again?"

"No, Miss Vanderdyke, there's nothing to do now
except the silver belt, and we needn't trouble you as
to that."

"Well," said Beatrix, "I shall leave town to-morrow
directly after lunch.  Be sure you send the dress
round to my house in good time.  Thank you.  Good
morning."

Mrs. Keene gave a little cry.  "Oh, you've
forgotten to put on your frock, dear," she said.

"Have I?  It's so hot it didn't seem necessary."

Beatrix came back.  She had already arrived
half-way towards the staircase in what was a most
bewitching undress.  She never could resist the
temptation of putting Mrs. Keene on tenter-hooks.  She
stepped into her frock and submitted to being hooked
up.  She noticed that the girl who had tried her on
looked very pale and tired.  "Aren't you going
away?" she asked.

A rather wan smile passed over the girl's pretty
face.  "No, Miss Vanderdyke, not this year."

"What, you aren't going to take any holiday at all?"

The girl shook her head.  "My mother has been
very ill, and doctor's bills——"

"I'm so sorry," said Beatrix.  "What's your name?"

"Mary Nicholson."

Beatrix went over to Mrs. Keene, who was
examining a Paris model between the windows.  She
opened a bag which hung on the elderly lady's arm
and took out a cheque-book.  Armed with this she
made her way over to a desk, sat down and wrote a
cheque for five hundred dollars, payable to the girl
whom she had seen constantly on duty since the
previous October.  This she slipped into an envelope and
wrote on it, "Please take a little holiday to oblige
me?"  And having returned the cheque-book to the
ample bag in which Mrs. Keene kept enough necessities
to provide against shipwreck or other likely accidents,
slipped the envelope into the girl's hand and said
"Good-bye.  Let me know about your mother."

On the way down stairs the first crash of thunder
broke over the city and heavy rain beat against the
window.  "We shall have to drive home," said Beatrix.
"Will you ask them to call up a taxi?"

Her ladyship's deputy came forward.  "I hope you
found the costume to your liking, Miss Vanderdyke."

"Oh, yes," said Beatrix.  "It'll do very well.  I
shall have to be very careful how I'm photographed,
because if I stand against the light there'll be very little
left to the imagination."

"This's an artistic age," replied Madame, with a
sly smile.

Beatrix joined her companion under the shop's
awning, from the corners of which the rain came down in
long streams.  The uniformed man, with "Raoul"
on his hat, was making frantic endeavors to obtain
a cab, but without success.  The line of taxis outside
the Great Northern Hotel had been taken.

"I'm afraid we shall have to wait," said Mrs. Keene.

"I don't mind the rain," said Beatrix.  "Let's walk."

"I'd so much rather not, dear," said Mrs. Keene.
"Getting wet always brings on my rheumatism, and
will absolutely spoil my dress.  Have patience for at
least five minutes."

"D'you think I can?" asked Beatrix.  "Five
minutes is a long time."

Two men drove by in a new and beautiful limousine.
The one who was not driving turned round and saw
the two ladies standing under the awning.  The car
slowed down, turned and came smoothly up to Raoul's.
Fraser jumped out and stood bare-headed in front of
Beatrix.

"How d'you do?" he said.  "Pretty bad storm
this.  Can we drive you anywhere?"

"Oh, hello!" said Beatrix.  "I thought it must
be you.  Yes, it'll be awfully kind of you to give us a
lift.  Taxis seem to be at a premium.  Mrs. Lester
Keene—Mr. Malcolm Fraser."

"How d'you do," said Mrs. Keene, the thought of
rheumatism and a spoiled dress at the back of her
cordiality.  "It is very kind of you to come to our
rescue."

Fraser beamed at Beatrix.  His whole whimsical,
sincere and honest personality paid deference to her
loveliness.  "You owe me nothing," he said.  "I
wish you did.  I only happened to see you standing
here.  It's Franklin's car."

Beatrix smiled back at him.  He still seemed to her
to be the self-constituted brother—the round-faced
serious boy who used to look after her sled and carry
her skates and make himself generally and generously
useful.  "You have a gift for happening to see
people when they need you, Malcolm," she said, and he
was amply rewarded.

Franklin got out of the car and came to meet Beatrix
as she led the way under the rain-splashed awning.

"How are we to thank you, Mr. Franklin?"  Beatrix
held out a most gracious hand.  "You come just
at the moment when I was going to plough through
all this wet."

"You'd have been soaked to the skin in about a
minute," he said.  "It's tropical."  He held open
the door of the limousine.

He showed a touch of reproof at her impatience
which Beatrix was quick to catch.  She remembered
that invariably when she had met him there had been
a suggestion of antagonism in his manner.  For some
reason she was not, she knew, altogether to his liking.
It amused her.  "I'll ride in front, if I may," she said,
with the mischievous intention of seeing whether he
would try to coerce her as he had done once before,
"but I'll wait until you get in."

He, too, remembered the incident at a dance the
year before when he had told her that she was sitting
in a dangerous draught and asked her to move, and she
had declined.  He stood up to her.  This spoiled,
wilful girl needed a master.  He felt an impish desire
to prevent her from getting her own way.  "I'd
rather you rode inside," he replied.  "Then there'll
be no chance of your getting wet."

"Please let me ride in front," said Beatrix, and a
bewitching smile and a little upward look of appeal
settled the matter.

Franklin returned to his seat and, when Beatrix was
in, made a long arm over her knees and shut the door
with a bang.  "What a girl!" he said to himself.
"As pretty as paint; but, ye gods, how she needs the
spurs."

As sick as a dog that Beatrix was not with him,
Fraser handed Mrs. Keene in and yelled, through
another crash of thunder: "Go ahead, Pel!"

"Where may I drive you?"

"Anywhere you like," said Beatrix, airily.  "I've
nothing to do."

The rain was running in streams along the gutters
and the day had gone as dark as though it were late
evening.  The sidewalks were deserted and people
who had been caught were huddling under doorways.
A clean, fresh smell had taken the place of stale
gasoline.

Franklin was nonplussed.  He looked round and
saw the girl's delicately-cut profile with its short nose
blunted at the tip, its rather full, red lips and round
chin.  She was sitting with her shoulders back, her
head held high, and an air of supreme unconcern.  In
no part of the world, under any sort of sky, under any
kind of condition had he seen a girl so delightful to
the eye and so irritating to the temper.  He and
Fraser were on their way home and two men were
going to lunch with them.  It didn't matter to her
whether he were on his way to a wedding or a funeral.
She had nothing to do.

He sent the car forward, turned it into Fifth Avenue
and drove up to the Vanderdyke house.  Its great
doors were boarded up and no footman was ready to
spring out with a huge umbrella.

"I'm quite happy," said Beatrix.  "May I sit here
until this downpour relaxes a little?  It's a very nice
car."

Franklin sent out a big laugh.  This young woman
took the biscuit.  It might go on pouring for an hour.
But she was quite happy, *she* had nothing to do and
therefore he must cry a halt to life and its obligations
and engagements and be content, and even thankful,
to sit at her side until such time as it pleased her and
the storm to make a move.

"Please sit here as long as you like," he said.
"Fraser and I have some men coming to lunch at
one o'clock.  Will you excuse me if we get out and
leave you?"

"Of course," said Beatrix, without allowing him
to see the remotest inkling of the fact that she knew
how much he would love to treat her as though she
were an unbroken colt.  "Before you have to go, tell
me about to-morrow.  You'll drive, I suppose?  I saw
your name on mother's list for the Pastoral house-party,
and she told me that you had agreed to play a
small part."

"Yes, I shall drive," said Franklin, running his eyes
over her curiously, thinking how beautiful she was and
how badly she stood in need of coming up against love
or grief.  "Fraser's an old friend of yours, it
appears," he added, looking at his watch.

"Indeed, yes.  But mother doesn't know my old
friends."

"I see."  He knew that this implied question as to
why Fraser was not included in the house-party was
answered.  This girl might have served as First
Secretary to an Ambassador, or have been a leader of
society for twenty years.

Then he opened the door of the car and stood
bareheaded in the downpour.  "I hope you won't be
obliged to sit here long," he said.  "I'll send a man
along to look after the car.  Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Beatrix, with a perfectly straight
face, but laughing at him with her eyes.  "Thank you
so much for rescuing and looking after two lone females."

"Come on, Malcolm," said Franklin, shortly.

And Fraser, wondering what sort of madness had
attacked his friend, murmured things to the equally
amazed elderly lady, bowed to the calm, slight, alluring
figure in the front of the car and went.

Beatrix watched them duck their heads against the
slanting rain which bounced up from the pavement and
hurry away.  "I like him for that," she thought.  "I
didn't think he would do it."  Then she picked up the
speaking tube and called out: "Brownie, so that you
sha'n't get rheumatism and spoil your dress we're
going to enjoy this shelter until the rain stops.  And,
by the way, I think the house-party's going to be fairly
interesting after all."





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The Vanderdyke house at Greenwich was built
upon a point which jutted out into the Sound.  It was
not merely a house, it was an edifice,—a great florid,
stiff, stone building which might easily have been a
town hall, a public library, a museum, a lunatic
asylum or a hospital.  It had a peculiar green roof and
many turrets, and it formed a landmark which could
be seen for miles from all parts of the country.

A long drive through beautifully wooded gardens
ablaze with lilac and rhododendron, and wide lawns
bespattered with uncountable groups of erect tulips
did much to soften the angular pomposity of the
barrack which had been built by Beatrix's grandfather.
Stone pergolas covered with climbing roses on the
point of bursting into bloom shot out from the house
and hid the ample stables and garages.  An inspiring
and invigorating view of the Sound caught the eye
through the trees.  There had been a belated spring,
after a long and cantankerous winter, but now tree
and shrub vied with one another and the first fresh
green of them all was almost dazzling.  The chestnuts,
especially, were prodigal with bloom and looked
like great Christmas trees thickly covered with
bunches of white candles, and everywhere birds sang
and went merrily about the little business of their lives.

The car in which Beatrix and Mrs. Lester Keene
drove up was followed closely by Franklin's new Rolls
Royce, in the body of which all his baggage was
stacked.  Franklin, who had been driving, sprang out
and opened the door of the other car.  "I've been
dogging your heels," he said, "and incidentally
getting all your dust.  How d'you do?"

"Don't blame me for the dust," said Beatrix.
"Why didn't you overtake us and finish the journey in
bright conversation with the two grateful and admiring
females to whom you behaved like a knight errant
yesterday?  You and I always seem to have a great
deal to talk about, don't we?"

Franklin knew that she was pulling his leg.  Hitherto,
during their occasional meetings, their conversation
had been more or less monosyllabic.  He felt
tempted to say that he preferred driving to talking to
women, but held his peace.  There would perhaps be
plenty of opportunities of getting his own back.

They passed a double line of men-servants and went
into the large hall together.  Mrs. Keene gave one
quick glance round and, imitating a rabbit which hears
the approach of enemy, scuttled across to the elaborate
staircase and hurried away.  Mrs. Vanderdyke,—a
very finished, rather too tall, insistently slight woman
who never raised her voice and seldom laughed and
seemed to be continually watching herself in a
mental looking-glass,—met them.  Her dark hair was
dressed as carefully as a salad.  Her perfectly correct
and well-balanced face was as well painted as the
cover of a magazine, and without any undue
compression she wore a white frock which might have been
made for a girl of twenty-four.  She gave her left
hand to Beatrix and placed a mere suggestion of a kiss
on her left ear.  "So you've come," she said.  Her
right hand she gave to Franklin, to whom she added,
"You are very welcome."

"Thanks," said Franklin.  "I'm delighted to be here."

And then Miss Honoria Vanderdyke sailed forward.
With her white hair, thin, thoroughbred face,
rather frail, tall figure and old-fashioned dress she
might have stepped out of one of Jane Austen's books.
Without any attempt to act the part, she looked every
inch the great lady and stood frankly and proudly for
all that was best of the generation which is scoffingly
referred to as mid-Victorian.  She, too, gave Beatrix
a perfunctory greeting and the merest peck on the
cheek, and turned with the utmost graciousness to
Franklin.  "I'm very glad to see you," she said.
"Your father and I were old friends.  I hope that we
may know each other better."

Franklin bowed over her hand.  In all his travels he
had rarely seen a woman who so well lived up to his
ideas of dignity and beauty grown old gracefully.
"Thank you very much," he said.  "You're very kind."

Then Mr. Vanderdyke made his appearance—the
mere husk of a man—uneager, hypochondriacal,
melancholy-looking, grey-headed, with a white
moustache every hair of which seemed to be in a state of
utter depression.  Completely ignoring his daughter,
he gave a limp hand to Franklin.  "I'm glad to see
you," he said, without any warmth, and then backed
away and began to look at Beatrix with an expression
of such pained surprise that she almost burst out
laughing.

Her whole reception by the family proved to her
that she was now regarded by them as the prodigal
daughter.  There was obviously going to be a scene
presently.  Well, she didn't care.  She could hold
her own against all of them.  She almost wished that
there was enough in her relations with Sutherland
York to warrant their disturbed feelings.  It was like
eating an egg without salt to proceed into a row
without a cause.

"I dare say that you'd like to go up to your room
at once," said Mrs. Vanderdyke.

Franklin bowed, smiled and followed the footman
upstairs.

Through the French windows Beatrix caught sight
of a number of people having tea on one of the
terraces.  She made no effort to join them, but sat on
the edge of a long, narrow table with bulbous legs and
selected a magazine.  Beneath her short frock rather
more than two delicate ankles showed themselves.
She saw no reason why they shouldn't, knowing that
they were worth infinite admiration.  Her father
irritably acknowledged that he had never seen her so
lovely, so cool, so self-possessed or more utterly
desirable in her first sweet flush of beauty and youth.
She seemed to say: "Come on, all of you, and get it
over, and then let there be peace."

Her challenge was eagerly accepted by her mother,
who looked round to see that the hall was deserted of
guests and servants, and closed down upon Beatrix
with more anger in her eyes than the girl had ever
before seen in them.

"I don't quite know what's to be done with you,"
she said.

"I thought it was agreed that I shall play 'Titania,'"
replied Beatrix, glancing up with an air of
mild surprise.  "I've brought a charming costume
with me."

Aunt Honoria joined in.  "In my opinion the moment
is ill-chosen for this unpleasant business.  It
might better have been reserved until our guests are
changing for dinner.  However, there's every excuse
for your mother's impatience, Beatrix, and as the
matter is one about which we all feel very deeply it
will be well for you to take it seriously."

Beatrix gave a little bow.

"In the history of the family," said Mr. Vanderdyke,
with more feeling than anyone had ever seen him
display, "never before has one of its women been
connected with a scandal."

Beatrix laid down the magazine.  "Somebody said
that scandal comes from the mouth of Ananias."  She
gave them all the epigram for what it was worth.

Her mother spoke again.  "Aunt Honoria has had
a letter from a friend of hers telling her that you've
been seen going into the apartment of a portrait painter,
called Sutherland York, late at night."

"And coming out," added her father.

"I should naturally come out," said Beatrix, smiling
at him as though he had said an unintentionally comic
thing.

"It has been reported to me," said Aunt Honoria,
"that as often as once a week during the winter and
spring you've visited this man alone at night.  You
don't deny that?"

"Oh, no."

"Good God!" said Mr. Vanderdyke.

"And you don't deny that you were there last night?"

"The night before last," said Beatrix quietly.

Mrs. Vanderdyke almost raised her voice.  "What
you could see in a flamboyant creature of that
type——"

"That isn't the point," said Aunt Honoria.  "We
are not concerned as to whether Beatrix has developed
vulgar tastes and has found this painter attractive.
We are concerned with the fact that for some utterly
inadequate and inexcusable reason, she has surrounded
our name with a net-work of vulgar gossip which,
inevitably, will find its way into the scurrilous
paragraphs of the carrion press."

"For the first time in history!" Mr. Vanderdyke
almost wailed.

"We're very jealous of our good name," continued
Aunt Honoria.  "We've endeavored to set an example
to society.  It's inconceivable to us that it should
have been left to you, old enough as you are to
appreciate the truth of things, to put a slur upon us and
with an obvious disregard for our reputation
the subject of smoke-room gossip.  I don't think that
even *you* could make me believe that you've played the
fool with this picturesque person, who, I hear, makes
professional love to the silly wives of men with more
money than sense.  I can see that you've been merely
indulging your latent sense of adventure or trying to
persuade yourself that you've been playing the
heroine's part in a romance."

"I wonder," said Mrs. Vanderdyke.

Beatrix gave her a quick look.  The implication of
those two words hit her hard.  But she said nothing,
and gave the white-haired lady another little bow.

"A portrait-painting charlatan!" said Mr. Vanderdyke.

Aunt Honoria paid very little attention to these
interruptions.  "That's my firm belief.  Please God,
I'm justified.  You were asked to return last night, so
that this most unfortunate business might be gone into
quietly.  You exercised the right of modern youth to
tell us that we might go to the devil.  Let me assure
you, my dear Beatrix, now that you've chosen to come,
that we do not intend to be relegated to that person,
even to oblige you.  On the contrary, the point that
has been gone into during your absence is the place to
which we are going to relegate you."

"I don't quite understand," said Beatrix.

Her mother put in "probably not," to the peculiar
discussion which was being conducted, on the face of
it, as though its subject were politics,—without
outward heat, angry gesture or raised voices, but with an
intensity of feeling that made the air vibrate all round
these four ultra-civilized people.

"And I am very far from well," said Mr. Vanderdyke,
with curious irrelevance.

Beatrix very nearly laughed.  "Dear old Daddy,"
she said to herself, "how funny he can be."

"We came to a decision this morning," said Aunt
Honoria, "in which I think you'll be interested.
Your attitude over the telephone on top of my very
inconvenient visit to New York the night before last,—of
which, naturally, your companion told you,—was
a pretty conclusive proof that you're quite callous
of what has been and will be said about you and that
you show no inclination to accept our demands,
requests or pleadings to tone down your supreme
individualism to a normal level and give up playing the
ostrich in town.  In short, my dear Beatrix, we realize
that unless we assert our authority this once and make
it impossible for you to get us all into a deeper scandal,
you'll continue to 'carry on,'—I quote the expression
from the language of the servants' hall,—either with
York or some other equally impossible member of the
long-haired brigade."

"I'm old enough to take care of myself, I think,"
said Beatrix.

"We don't," said her mother.

"Nor of us and the family reputation," added Aunt
Honoria, "which, as I've said already, is the point.
You'll go through with the pastoral,—that'll avoid
comment,—then you'll see a doctor and it'll be given
out that your constitution needs an entire change of
air and scene.  About a week after the present
house-party has broken up you'll join me on a visit to my
cottage in Maine, and there you'll spend a quiet,
thoughtful year learning how to live from nature, with
my devoted assistance."

Mrs. Vanderdyke punctuated this sentence of banishment
with an inaudible comment.

A sort of groan came from Mr. Vanderdyke.  He
adored his only child.

With a supreme effort of will, Beatrix controlled
an almost overwhelming desire to scream at what was,
to her way of thinking, a form of punishment quite
barbarian in its severity.  She remained, instead, in an
attitude of polite patience, determining to die rather
than to show how awful the very thought of such an
excommunication was to her,  who was only really
happy when in the whirl of town life.  Her inherent
honesty made her confess to herself that, little as she
realized it at the time,—never having stopped in her
impetuous desire to go her own way and carry out her
own wishes,—she had laid herself open to every charge
brought against her.  She owned that her indiscretion
had been colossal, and instantly dismissed all idea of
giving her family a picture of the utter harmlessness
of her relations with York.  She disliked and regretted
having brought the family name into the mouth of
gossipers as much as the three people who stood over
her and knew perfectly well that they fully intended
to carry the punishment out to its bitter end.  But,—and
here her fertile mind began to work,—was there
a single living person so foolish as to believe that she
was made of the feeble stuff that knuckled down to
the loss of one whole exciting season in town for the
lack of a brain wave?  Had she ever yet, either in the
nursery or in school, so wanted in courage or in wit as
not to have been able to carry out a quick and effective
counterstroke against authority?  Not she!

She looked up, avoided the eyes of her father,
mother and aunt, and saw Pelham Franklin in the
gallery that ran round the hall.  He was standing with
his hands in his pockets, looking at a portrait of the
Vanderdyke who had come over from Holland to lay
the foundations of a great fortune.  A sudden impish
and daring idea took possession of her.  She would
use this man, as she had hitherto used any other likely
person, to triumph over her present quandary, and
trust to her invariable good luck to see her through.
It was the legitimate outcome of her autocratic
upbringing, the fact that she had had it instilled into
her from babyhood that she had only to raise her finger
to obtain her own way.  Acting, as usual, on impulse
and not stopping to give a second's thought to the
complications that might be caused by it, she turned back
to the three people who stood waiting for her to speak
with a very sweet smile, and the glorious knowledge
that she could turn the tables upon them and become
top-dog again.  She was going to fight for that season
in town with all her strength, never mind who paid for
her success.

"I'm very sorry about all this," she said, "and I
want you to believe that I had no intention of inspiring
unpleasant remarks or putting you to all this pain.
But you'll be glad to hear that this story about my visits
to Sutherland York is only half true,—like most
stories of the kind.  It hasn't occurred to you, has it,
that more than one man may live in York's apartment
house and that I may have been going to see him?"  She
saw, with a quicker action of her heart, that Franklin
was coming downstairs.

"It makes no difference whether the man you went
to see was York or another," said Aunt Honoria, in her
most incisive way.  "The fact remains that everyone
is talking about your visits to some man, alone at
night."

Franklin caught the words, gave a quick, sympathetic
glance at Beatrix, whom he rather pitied,—he
detested family rows,—and drew up to examine
another picture, with well-simulated interest.

Beatrix began to enjoy herself.  A wave of exhilaration
swept over her.  She had a surprise in store
for her family that would transfer her from the
position of a prodigal daughter to that of a Joan of Arc,
a Grace Darling, a Florence Nightingale.  Never mind
who paid!

She raised her voice so that Franklin should hear
her.  "I would willingly and without any argument
be sent to the backwoods for a year if I'd made a fool
of myself with a man like Sutherland York.  He was
never anything more to me than a poseur and a freak,
and as such he amused me.  But what will you and all
these people with nasty minds say if I tell you that I
had every right to pay midnight visits to the man who
lived in the studio opposite to York's, and if there is
anything attaching to our name it is not scandal, but
romance?"

Franklin wheeled round.  What on earth was the
girl trying to suggest to save her skin?

An amazing change came over the three accusers.
They all knew that Franklin's rooms were in the same
building as York's,—Franklin, the man whom they
would rather see married into their family than
anyone alive.

"W-what d'you mean?" cried Mr. Vanderdyke,
stammering in his eagerness.

Mrs. Vanderdyke lost her perfect reserve for once
and grasped her daughter's arm.  "Tell us!  Tell
us!" she cried.

Over Aunt Honoria's face the beginning of a new
understanding came.  "What is this right, Beatrix?"
she asked.  "What is it?"

Beatrix came to the jump, rose to it and cleared it
at a bound, with every drop of blood in her lovely body
tingling with excitement and a glorious sense of being
alive, being beautiful, being able to carry everything
before her.  She was leaping from one scrape to
another, but in this one she was dealing with a sportsman
who would help her somehow.

"The right," she said, throwing up her head, "of a
girl who goes to see the man to whom she has been
secretly married."

She rose, and with exquisite shyness and her fair
skin touched with the color that nature paints upon
the petals of apple blossoms, went across to Franklin
and ran her hand through his arm.


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In her relief at being able to put a stop to the ugly
story which coupled the names of Beatrix Vanderdyke
and Sutherland York, Aunt Honoria,—who invariably
took the lead in all matters relating to her family,—not
only at once gave out to the house-party the news
of the romantic marriage of her niece and Pelham
Franklin, but, with her characteristic thoroughness,
called up the editor of the New York *Times* and gave
it to him for immediate publication.  In her mind's eye
she saw the front page of the next day's issue setting
forth under big headlines, with photographs of the
happy couple, an elaborate account of the wealth and
importance of the families of Vanderdyke and Franklin.
This would be taken up and spun out by all the
other papers in the country, and then, she rejoiced to
know, would be killed the insidious scandal with which
the family name had been connected to the horror and
pain of all who bore it.

Neither she, nor any of the members of the house
party, stopped to ask a single question.  They had
swallowed the story of Beatrix and Sutherland York
whole.  They now swallowed the news of the secret
marriage with the same appetite.  It is the human way.
The details mattered nothing.  The motive which led
to so unusual a proceeding as a secret marriage, the
place and date of the ceremony, mattered nothing.
They had all believed without corroboration that
Beatrix had fallen a victim to the picturesque attractions
of the much-advertised portrait painter.  In the same
way they accepted the new and much more exciting fact
and hastened to congratulate their hostess and the two
young people concerned.

Beatrix found herself, as she knew that she would,
the heroine of the family.  Her mother smiled upon
her during the remainder of the day and frequently
placed her usually unemotional hand on her daughter's
shoulder and said: "My dear, dear child," or "dear
Beatrix."

Her father,—that rather pathetic figure, a man
who had never done a stroke of work since his birth—whose
immense wealth had utterly deprived him of the
initiative to do things, conquer things or achieve things,
and who found himself in late middle-age without
having discovered the master-secret of life—how to
live,—came out of his almost settled melancholia for the
time being and behaved at dinner like any ordinary
healthy, normal man, laughing frequently and cracking
little jokes with his guests..  Whenever he caught
his daughter's eyes he gave her the most tender and
appreciative smile, and came so far out of his shell as
to raise his glass to Franklin, who responded with a
very queer smile.

As for Aunt Honoria,—a past-mistress in the art of
graciousness,—so proud and happy was she that her
pet ambition of a union between her family and Franklin's
had been fulfilled, that she readily forgave the
unconventional behavior of the two young people, the lack
of a wonderful wedding and a great society function,
and beamed upon them both.  She caught Beatrix as
she was about to dash upstairs to change for dinner and
folded her arms about the girl, whose eyes danced with
the spirit of mischief and the sheer fun of it all.  "My
darling," she said, "you've made me very happy.  No
wonder you came home to-day defiant and with a high
head.  You held a royal flush.  You've won the love
of a man, my dear.  Honor and respect it, and may
God bless you!"

Upstairs in her room, whose windows gave a view of
the Sound that was indescribably charming, Beatrix
had a brief, almost breathless talk with Mrs. Lester
Keene, to whom the story of the secret marriage had
come as a frightful shock.  This amiable, weak
woman, hide-bound in her ideas of right and wrong,
met her with nerves unstrung, and incoherent in her
terror of being implicated in what she knew to be a lie.

But Beatrix waved her stammering reproaches aside.
"Brownie," she cried, at the top of her form, "whatever
happens you're safe, so don't worry.  I've jumped
out of the frying-pan into the fire, but I'm an excellent
jumper and I believe in luck.  I dare not think where
the next spring will land me, so I'm not going to think.
Sufficient unto the day, you know, and Franklin is a
sportsman.  All I know is that at this moment I'm
the little pet of all the world; that I had the unspeakable
delight of turning the tables on my people and that
I feel as beautiful as I look,—and that's saying a good
deal.  Now run away and tell Helene to come and
dress me as befits a young wife still on her
honeymoon."  She gave the elderly, disturbed lady a kiss on
both her cheeks, shooed her out of the room and broke
into song.

Only once during dinner did she permit herself to
meet Franklin's eyes and then, for the first time since
she had sprung her suddenly conceived surprise upon
her irate family, she received a momentary shock
which ran through her body like that of electricity,
leaving her tingling and frightened.  But with her
abounding capacity for recovery and her all-conquering
belief in herself and her gift for getting out of
scrapes she shook the feeling off and went through the
rest of the evening in the highest spirits.  No one
had ever seen her looking so brilliantly or so
exquisitely beautiful.  Her eyes shone like stars, her
dimples came and went and came again.  She was the
life of the house, moving from group to group like a
young Helen—a wood nymph—the very spirit of
joy and laughter.  Not for the ninety-ninth part of a
second did she permit herself to pull up and wonder
what she had done; where her impetuous, hare-brained,
autocratic desire for self-preservation might lead.
Never for an instant, or the fraction of an instant, did
she give a thought to the appalling difficult position
into which her spur-of-the-moment scheme had placed
Franklin.  What she had done she had done, and there,
for the time being, was the end of it.  Somehow or
other everything would come right, as it always did.
Why else was she who she was?  Why else had she
been led to believe that the earth, the sun and the moon
were hers.  It was all the natural correlation of her
training since she had been brought into the world.

Franklin allowed Beatrix to avoid a talk with him
until many of the guests had gone to bed.  Between
the moment when she had slipped her arm through his
and made that urgent and almost childlike appeal
which had carried him off his feet and left him
without caution and sanity, and the one when he stalked
across the pompous hall to her side and drew her into
an alcove, he had done some peculiar thinking.  He
was a straight-going, honest fellow, who, like Beatrix,
had gone through life having his own way.  No living
soul had ever before coerced him from the path that
he had chosen.  He was in no sense of the word a
lady's man, and he had no idea of marrying and
settling down until he had had enough of hunting
and camping.

He had watched Beatrix closely.  He had seen her
reinstated into the family favor, taking the
congratulations that were poured upon her by them and their
friends with a charming dignity that took his breath
away.  He guessed, of course, that he had been
"used" by Beatrix to save herself from punishment,
because he had been obliged to overhear the last part
of the family attack.  But he expected from moment
to moment that she would either permit him to deny
the story of the secret marriage or do so herself.  It
was inconceivable to him that this lie was to be allowed
to get them both deeper and deeper into a most
deplorable tangle.

He was blazing with anger when at last he found
her alone for a moment, and he made no attempt to
hide it.  "I want a word with you," he said shortly.

Beatrix tried to escape.  "A little later," she
said.

"No, now."

"I'm so sorry——"

Franklin took her arm and led her into the quiet
corner.  "Sit down," he said.

There was something so new and refreshing in receiving
orders, that Beatrix gave a little laugh and
obeyed.

Franklin took a seat at her side.  Their knees
almost touched.

"You evidently take me for many kinds of a fool,"
he said.

"Not at all.  May I trouble you for a cushion?"  She
bent slightly forward.

He placed one behind her back.  "Whether you do
or not, you've made me one,—the most colossal
example of a damned idiot I've ever struck."

"Oh, please don't say that."

Franklin's eyes flicked.  This girl could be flippant
under such circumstances, could she?  She could sit
knee to knee with an angry man and remain as
self-possessed and undisturbed as though she were
resting between dances.  Well, he would show her with
whom she was dealing!

"Before your mother goes to bed," he said, "I'm
going to put my foot through this yarn of yours and
give the game away."

"Oh, no," replied Beatrix, "you'll certainly not
do that."

"Why not?"

"Because, in addition to many other attributes, you
happen to be a sportsman."

"But how long d'you imagine I'm to let this thing
go on?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"Don't you see that you'd better begin to think
pretty quickly?"

"No.  Everything is going very well.  Why disturb it?"

"But look at it from my point of view."

"To tell you the truth—I usually do tell the truth—to-day
has been the exception that proves the rule,—I'm
only able at present to look at it from mine."

"You realize that every hour makes the whole thing
more impossible.  It'll all be in the papers to-morrow."

"Isn't that exciting?  I hope they'll be able to get
an attractive photograph of you."  Her heart was
beating more and more quickly.

Franklin began to pull his short moustache.  He
hardly dared to trust to his choice of words.
Yesterday he had told himself that this girl wanted the
spurs.  The thought came back to him as he sat
racking his brain for some way out of the ghastly mess
into which she had placed him.  He saw that it was no
earthly use to endeavor to talk sensibly to her and
that she had made up her mind to hold him to the
mad plan of escape into which she had dragged him.
Very good.  He would show her that sportsmen were
also very human men.

He raised his finger to a footman who was crossing
the hall.  "Have my things taken at once from my
room to Mrs. Franklin's," he said, and, as the man
bowed and went, put his hand under the elbow of the
girl—who had turned as white as the gardenia at her
waist—and added: "Let's go and say good night,
darling.  It's time for bed."

Beatrix turned upon him and wrenched her arm
away.  "You don't know what you're saying," she
said.

"Oh, yes, I do.  You've had your way to-day, I'm
going to have mine to-night.  Two can play your
game, you know, and I'm going to show you how
completely I can play it when I choose."

He took her hand in a grip of iron and led her to
where Mrs. Vanderdyke was standing with Aunt
Honoria.  He looked the loving husband to the life.
"Good night," he said.  "Bee and I are rather tired
after an exciting day."

Mrs. Vanderdyke gave him her hand, with her best
smile.  "And to-morrow we begin rehearsing and
shall all be very busy.  Good night."

"You look quite tired, my darling," said Aunt
Honoria tenderly.

Beatrix received the kiss, tried to return the smile
and to find even one word to say, but her heart was
trembling, and her hand was held so tight that her
fingers were crushed together.  She heard other
remarks as though they were spoken a long way off, felt
herself guided and controlled up the wide stairway as
if she were walking in a dream, and found herself
standing in the gallery.

"Which is your room!"

It was not a question.  It was an order, sharp and
short.

She pointed to the door, shaking like a frightened
deer.

But when she stood inside her room, heard the door
shut and locked, and saw Franklin with his white
teeth gleaming under his moustache, her voice came
back and she clasped her hands together in a very
ecstasy of appeal.

"Let me off!  Please, *please* let me off!"

Franklin shot out a laugh.  "Not I.  You've told
everybody that you're my wife.  Good.  Live up to it."

He took the key out of the lock and put it in his
pocket.  Then he sat down and crossed one leg over
the other.  "How long will you be?" he asked.

This girl needed the spurs.  He intended to use
them.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VII

.. vspace:: 2

The sound of the key turning in the lock of her
door had an instant and peculiar effect on Beatrix.  It
awoke in her the same primeval spirit which had
carried Franklin into her bedroom on the wave of an
infuriated impulse.  It made her realize that the time
for protest was over; that the moment when she could
appeal (with any hope of success) to this man's sense
of honor had passed.  It was through her own action,
and she knew it, that she had cracked the skin-deep
veneer of civilization and rendered Franklin the mere
savage which most men become under the influence of
one or other of the passions.

Self-preservation was the instinct which was now
uppermost in her mind.  Alone, without help, with
only her native wit to fall back on, she had to save
herself from the almost unbelievable crisis that she had
so lightly brought about.  She grasped this fact
quickly enough.  One look at Franklin's face made it
plain,—his blazing eyes, his set mouth, the squareness
of his jaw.

It was characteristic of her, however, that while
still under the first shock of his threat, his presence
and the knowledge that he intended to carry out his
purpose with all the cold-bloodedness and cruelty
which comes from wounded vanity, the thought of the
fight which faced her filled her with a sort of mental
delight.  Here, if you like, was something new upon
which she could bend her whole ingenuity—something
which sent the monotony of her all-too-complete
existence flying as before a cyclone.  Her blood
danced.  Her spirits rose.  Her eyes sparkled like
those of the mountaineer who stands at the foot of a
summit which has hitherto been unclimbed.  She gave
a little laugh as all these things flashed through her
brain.  She thrilled with the sense of adventure
which had always been latent in her character and
which was the cause of the amazing position in which
she now found herself.  Like a superb young animal
brought to bay, she turned to defend herself, strung up
to fight with every atom of her mental and physical
strength for that which counted for more than life.
That she regarded her antagonist with respect
surprised her a little, but she was glad to make the
discovery, because it made the fight all the more worth
while.  She recognized in this tall, wiry, dark-haired
man, who looked in the very pink of condition and
bore on his well-cut young face the tan of sun and
wind, someone who had in him every single one of her
own faults, whose training and environment were the
same as her own, who had been made as impatient of
control from the possession of excessive wealth as she
was, and whose capacity for becoming untamed the
very moment that the thin layer of culture which
education gives falls in front of passionate resentment was
similar in every way to that which had made her
lie to her family.

It was with the feeling that she was leading lady
in an extremely daring society drama, that she took
what she inwardly called the stage, as much mistress
of herself as she had been in the rooms of the portrait
painter.  When she turned up the shaded lights on
her dressing-table and over the fireplace she did so
with the rhythmic movement and the sense of time
which would have been hers had she rehearsed the
scene and been now playing it to a crowded house on
the first night of a metropolitan production.  She
seemed to hear the diminuendo of the orchestra and
to feel that curious nervous exhilaration that comes
from the knowledge of being focused by thousands of
unseen eyes.  It was surely an almost uncanny sense
of humor which allowed her to stand outside herself
in this way and watch all her movements as though
they were those of another person.  But,—she knew
her part.  She had the confidence of one who has
completely memorized her lines.  Her triumph would be
complete when she succeeded in making Franklin put
the key back into the lock of her door and remove
himself from her presence.

As Franklin examined the room in which he never
imagined that he would find himself and had no
desire to be his determination to get even with the
spoiled girl who had used him to get herself out of a
family fracas grew stronger and stronger.  It seemed
to him that the room,—almost insolent in its evidences
of wealth,—was symbolic.  It was not, he saw, the
room of a young, healthy, normal girl so much as of
a woman of the world, a highly finished, highly
fastidious mondaine, who had won the right to live in an
atmosphere of priceless tapestries, historic furniture,
and a luxury that was quite Roman.  He ran his eyes
scornfully about and scoffed at the four-poster bed in
which a French queen might have received, and probably
did receive, the satellites and flatterers of her
court; and saw through an open door not a mere bathroom,
but a pool, marble-lined, with florid Byzantine
decorations, discreetly lit.  This thing angered him.
It stood, he thought, as the reason for this girl's
distorted idea of life—of her myopic point of view.  It
stood for many thousands of misplaced dollars which
would, if sanely used, have provided much-needed
beds for the accident wards of a hospital.

Not for the first time in his life, Franklin
staggered at the sight of the abnormality of excessive
wealth, and felt that he himself, like Beatrix, was
nearer to lunacy than the ordinary human being
because of the possession of it.  The queer paradox of
his having been made the instrument to bring this girl
down from the false pedestal upon which she had
stood ever since she was born, also struck him.  He
had never been much given to self-analysis or to the
psychological examination of social conditions; but as
he sat there in that large, lofty and extravagant,
almost grotesquely furnished bedroom, more closely
resembling that of one or other of the great courtezans
than of an American girl in the first exquisite flush of
youth, he came to the conclusion, with a savage sense
of justice, that he would be doing something for
civilization by bringing this millionaire's daughter face to
face with the grim truth of things.

It was Beatrix who broke a silence which had only
lasted a few minutes.  "There are cigarettes at your
elbow," she said.  "Won't you smoke?"

Franklin looked up.  The note of camaraderie in
her voice surprised him.  The last time he had heard
her speak it was in a tone of agonized appeal.  "No,
thanks," he replied, "I've smoked enough."

"In training for one of your much-paragraphed athletic
feats, perhaps," she said, a quizzical smile playing
round her lips.

"I am," said Franklin.  "Though I doubt whether
this one will be as much advertised as the others."  He
looked steadily at her as he said this thing, caught
the merest flick of her eyes and marked up to his
credit the fact that she understood his meaning.

For several seconds these two eyed each other
deliberately, like contestants in a prize ring.  They
measured each other up calculatingly without any attempt
to hide the fact.  It was with unwilling admiration
that Franklin noted the girl's return to courage.  He
had to confess to himself that the fearless tilt of her
chin and the superb grace of her attitude, which was as
far from being self-conscious as though she were
standing in the corner of a crowded drawing-room, pleased
him.  It was to be a fight, then.  That was evident.
The spirit of the huntsman rose in him as he realized
this.

"Will you ring the bell for your maid?" he asked,
making the first attack, "or shall I?"

She shook her head.  "Pray don't trouble, there's
plenty of time."

"I don't agree with you."

"Does that matter?"

"I think so."

"It's a free country."

She sat down in a chair which Louis XIV was popularly
supposed to have used.  The yellow light of a
lamp on a silver pedestal fell upon her white shoulders.

Franklin got up.  His blood raced through his
veins.  He didn't intend to stand any nonsense.  He
was going to show her precisely what it meant to be
at the mercy of an impatient man.  He went across to
the door at the far end of the room and opened it.  It
disclosed a large and elaborate dressing-room lined
with full-length mirrors, lighted like a theatre, and
with a table covered with implements with tortoise-shell
backs.  There was another door beyond it.  He
turned the handle and threw it open.  This was
apparently a workroom, but much of it was in shadow.
He saw a young, dark-haired woman kneeling on a
chair with her shoulders rounded over a magazine
spread out on a table.  One black slipper had fallen
off and lay on its side on the rug.  A half-empty box
of candies was near to her elbow.  "Mrs. Franklin
is ready for you," he said, and marched back again to
his chair.

The maid, obviously French and with the characteristic
Breton good-looks, followed him out, unable
to disguise her amazement.  She stood waiting for
orders, with her hands clasped in front of her, in an
attitude of rather serf-like humility,—a quiet, slight,
black figure, touched with white at the collar and cuffs.
Beatrix crossed her legs and settled herself more
comfortably into her chair.  "You may go back,
Helene," she said.  "I will call you presently."

The girl bowed and slipped quietly away.  Then
Beatrix turned to Franklin, with a most tantalizing air
of intimacy.  "I'm not tired," she said, "and
although you are very thoughtful,—more so than most
husbands, which is perfectly charming,—I'm all for
a little bright conversation.  I was rather bored
during dinner and afterwards.  Don't you think you
might amuse me?  You seem to be a very amusing
person."

Franklin showed his teeth in a silent laugh.  "You
think so?"

"Well, the indications point to it."

"You have a very vivid imagination, my child."

"A man doesn't call his wife a child until he's been
married to her at least ten years, and then is
quarreling over her extravagances."

"You may be right," said Franklin, shortly.
"You'll oblige me by ceasing to play the fool.  I'm
not in a mood for it.  I'll do the maid's job if you
don't want that girl in here."

He got up again and stood over her, apparently the
very acme of importunity.

Beatrix only showed her fright by a slight
distention of her nostrils.  She burst out laughing.
"Among your other achievements, then, you know
how to unhook a frock."

"I do," said Franklin.  "Stand up, will you, please?"

"My dear Mr. Franklin," she said, drawling ever
so little, "I forget your Christian name,—isn't there
something just a trifle Oriental in your tone?"

"Very likely," said Franklin.

Beatrix sat back and put up a smiling face.  "How
old are you?" she asked.

"Does that matter?"

"Oh, yes.  I think so.  I'm trying to piece you
together like one of those picture puzzles that children
and septuagenarians play with.  It seems to me that
you must have spent a certain number of years among
the black races.  When you speak I seem to hear the
distant hollow noise of the tomtom and the quaint
semi-religious nasal voices of half-clothed savages who
stand cowed before you.  Am I right, sir?"  She
laughed again, disguising her trepidation with the
expertness of a finished actress.

Franklin turned away and helped himself to a
cigarette.  "You said that I could smoke."

"Of course."

With almost impish glee, Beatrix told herself that
she had won the first round.

.. vspace:: 2

When a man pauses to smoke it is usually a sign
either that he is tired or that he needs something to
keep his nerves under control.  Franklin lit a cigarette
for the latter purpose.  The girl's assumption of
utter coolness made him want to take her roughly by the
shoulders and shake her as he would a naughty child.
Her air of enjoyment and mischief made him all the
more determined to see the thing through to the logical
end of it.  He could see that she imagined she could
mark time and possibly wear him out by the use of
her wits, but that it did not occur to her how at any
moment brute force might come into the argument.
Ever since he had been old enough to go to school
Franklin had resented being made a fool of, and any
boy who had had the temerity to attempt to do so paid
for it.  He saw red on those occasions and could
remember each one of them in every detail.  He began to
see red now.  Not only had this young, wilful,
uncontrolled child of wealth already made a most colossal
fool of him, but there she was, calmer than he had
ever seen her, treating him as though he were a green
and callow youth, playing with him in order to break
the monotony of a dull evening.  His temper grew
hotter.

"Listen!" he said.  "It doesn't appear to be any
use to treat you as an ordinary girl."

"Have you only just come to that conclusion?"

"I have broken in many thoroughbreds in my time,
and unless you conform pretty quickly to the rules of
the game that you have forced me to play, I shall have
to use horse-breaking methods with you.  Do you
want me to put it plainer than that?"

"Before we go any further," said Beatrix, showing
a most tantalizing flash of white teeth, "don't you
think you ought to tell me what your Christian name
is?  I can't keep on saying 'My dear Mr. Franklin,'
under these unconventional circumstances.  It's so
formal."  She knew well enough, and he knew it.

"Get up!" said Franklin, thickly, keeping his hands
off her with the greatest difficulty.  "Either go to
your maid, or call her in.  I'm through."

With a little bow, Beatrix rose.  It was perfectly
evident to her that Franklin was rapidly becoming
dangerous and that at any moment he might let himself
go.  What could she do?  According to her family,
this man was her husband and, as such, had the right
to be in her room.  To scream would only make her
look ridiculous, unless she intended to give herself
away, and this she was not prepared to do under any
circumstances.  She might be able to fence with
Franklin a little longer and, as a last resource, to
pursue the ordinary tactics of a woman cornered and
throw herself on his mercy, with tears.  Humiliation,—that
was the thing she hated most.  And as she
faced Franklin again, with these things running
rapidly through her mind, she felt once more a renewed
sense of admiration for his grim determination to
punish.  She owned to herself with perfect frankness
that this odd and neurotic fight was between the two
most spoiled children of her country.  The sense of
humor which was her saving grace gave her the power
to see it in the light of something which was not
without value and meaning in her life.  If she had actually
to fight like a wild-cat, she intended that the morning
should find her as she was at that moment.

"Will you call Helene, then?" she said.

Franklin went across the room to the door of the
maid's cubby-hole and rapped.

Beatrix, seized with a new idea, followed Franklin
and with a touch of masterly audacity stood at his side
with her hand on his arm.  "Don't you think we
make a charming picture of connubial felicity?"

.. _`"Don't you think we make a charming picture of connubial felicity?"`:

.. figure:: images/img-074.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "Don't you think we make a charming picture of connubial felicity?"

   "Don't you think we make a charming picture of connubial felicity?"

"My God!" said Franklin.

The maid came out, and as she did so, Beatrix made
a dart into her room.  She had suddenly remembered
that she could escape through it into the main part of
the house, and that if she could get away and find
shelter in the arms of her fluttering companion she
would be safe for that night at any rate.

But Franklin was too quick for her.  He caught her
by the arm just as she was about to win the first
round.

"Oh, no, you don't," he said, and picked her up in
his arms, carried her back into the bedroom and
dumped her down on a divan as though she were a
bundle of feathers.

Then he turned to the maid.  "Just lock your door
and bring me the key."  And when in a moment it
was timidly handed to him, he added, sharply: "Now
get Mrs. Franklin ready for the night."

Beatrix stopped the girl as she padded softly over to
the dressing-room.  "Wait a minute, Helene," she
said, and turned towards Franklin.  "This is the hour
when I drink a glass of hot milk, oh, my lord and
master!  Have I your gracious permission to continue the
habit to-night?  If so, will you permit my
handmaiden to go below and get it for me?"

Franklin held out the key.  Helene took it, and he
turned on his heel.

With an eel-like movement Beatrix slipped from the
divan, made a dart at the French girl and in a quick
whisper told her to go and fetch Mrs. Lester Keene
at once.  Whereupon, under the firm belief that this
new manoeuvre made her top-dog, all her audacity and
self-assurance returned.  With Brownie there to
protect her she could really begin to enjoy herself and
make Franklin wish, not only that he had never
entered her room, but that he had never been born.  She
could play with him as a cat plays with a mouse.  She
could make him sting and smart under her badinage,
She could make him see that he had placed himself in
a position in which he would look the most egregious
idiot, and eventually rout him from the scene with
her laughter ringing in his ears.  "It will take a
better man than Mr. Pelham Franklin," she told herself,
"to break me in."

She began her new tactics at once.  She strolled
over to where Franklin was standing and sat on the
arm of a chair.  Her color had come back and her
eyes were sparkling.  She looked like one of Sir
Joshua Reynolds' pictures of Lady Hamilton come to
life.  "Tell me," she said, "what's your opinion of
York?  We may as well have a little bright conversation
while Helene has gone on her domestic errand,
don't you think so?"

Franklin looked at the girl with a sort of analytical
examination.  He admitted her courage and her
spirit.  He admitted her overwhelming beauty and her
inherited assurance.  But he began to wonder
whether,—in spite of the little piteous appeal which
had come involuntarily from her lips when she found
herself alone with him,—there was not a streak of
callousness in her nature which put her well up among
some of the almost degenerate young women of her
class.

"I only know York by sight," he said.  "That was
enough."

"Don't you think you take things too seriously?
His fur coat, Italian moustache and flamboyant tie
do put one off, of course, but he's one of the comics
of the city and, as such, well worth knowing.  I
wonder you haven't dropped in to see him sometimes.
He's conveniently near to you,—luckily for me."  She
gave a low laugh as she added the last words.

Franklin stood with his back against one of the
carved bed-posts, with his hands in his pockets.  In
various parts of the world he had met all sorts and
conditions of women, from the red-cheeked coquettish
daughters of mountaineers to the glum squaws of
dilapidated Indian chiefs.  Also he had come in
contact with the rather cold and quizzical society women
of England, the great ladies of Paris who have made
immobility a fine art, the notorious cocottes of all
nationalities and many of those unconsciously pathetic
but perfectly happy little women who, as artists'
models of the Latin quarter, live with exquisite though
temporary morality in an atmosphere in which morals
are as scarce as carpets and as little needed.  His
acquaintanceship with all these various types had been
casual, but he had been interested enough in them to
study their characteristics, their mannerisms and their
tricks.  But here, in Beatrix Vanderdyke, was a girl
who didn't come under any of the six types of women.
She didn't conform in any one way either to his
preconceived ideas of herself.  Even his brutality hadn't
disturbed her.  She was still as unruffled as a white
fan-tailed pigeon.  Her eyes still gleamed with
mocking laughter and there was not one single sign of
fear, or even of nervousness, in her easiness and grace.
His interest in her grew with every moment of
delay and her desirability became more and more
obvious with every moment that passed.  He might
have been inclined to let her off had she shown any
weakness.  His anger might have grown cold had she
let him see anything of outraged maidenly modesty.
But her present attitude egged him on, added fuel to
his fire and doubled his desire to break her will.

"What do you propose to do to-morrow and the
day after?" she asked, as though she had been
married to him for some time and wanted to make her
plans.

The question startled Franklin.  "Sufficient for
the night," he said.

Beatrix gave one of the tantalizing little bows
which were so annoying to her mother.  "I see!
Probably I shall take my estimable, but rather irritating
companion to Europe by the first possible boat.
As Mrs. Franklin, I shall be doubly welcomed in
English society.  The combined and much-paragraphed
wealth of our two families will make me a very
romantic figure even in England, where blood is wrongly
supposed to weigh more than money-bags.  It will
be very refreshing to be a free agent at last.  I
wonder what sort of thrill you'll get when you see my
face in the *Sketch* and *Tatler* among actresses and
cabinet ministers' wives and trans-Atlantic duchesses!
By this time, of course, the epoch-making news of our
alliance,—as Aunt Honoria calls it,—will have been
flashed to the far ends of the earth.  What'll you do
if any legal person asks to see our marriage lines?"

The sheer impertinence of this young woman left
him wordless, until, followed by the French maid,
Mrs. Lester Keene,—hastily dressed in a discreet
Jaeger dressing-gown,—fluttered tremulously in,
hurried over to the girl who was popularly supposed to
be in her charge, and put her arms dramatically around
her shoulders.  Then he cursed ripely beneath his
breath.

Mrs. Lester Keene was one of those numerous
women whose sense of the romantic, whose belief in
the lowness of human nature and whose relish for
melodrama were the result of having lived a placid,
uneventful, incompetent and wholly protected life.
Like a boy who is a constant attendant at the movies
and carries home with him a keen desire to murder
his baby brother and brain his little friends with his
father's wood-chopper, Amelia Keene had derived a
distorted view of the life and people beyond her
horizon from an absolutely quenchless thirst for sensational
novels, which she drank in, firmly believing that
they gave true pictures of men, women and events.

To Beatrix, who knew this kindly, ineffectual,
ordinary little woman through and through, it was funny
to see the manner in which she "believed the worst,"—to
use one of her own favorite phrases,—of what
she saw from a first quick glance.  The lofty,
museum-like chamber so little suggested the bedroom of
a young girl or of any woman except a painted
harridan who was accustomed to being surrounded, even
in her most intimate moments with grotesque acquaintances,
that the presence of Franklin there might have
meant nothing.  It was conceivable that he and
Beatrix, who had the same royal way of disdaining the
laws of convention if it suited their purpose to do
so, might have arranged to meet there in order to be
out of the family eye and to discuss the chaos in
which they both stood.  It was as unromantic a
meeting place as the great echoing hall of the Grand
Central Station or the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera
House.  But Amelia Keene, whose excitement since
her few minutes' conversation with Beatrix before
dinner had churned her into a condition almost
approaching apoplexy, seized with instant avidity at
the chance of adding drama to the scene in which
she had been called upon to take a part.

"Oh, my darling!  My darling!" she cried.
"Thank God you sent for me!  Am I in time?"

This was altogether too much for Beatrix.  She
threw one look at her unruffled reflection in the mirror
and another at Franklin, the very epitome of self-control,
and gave herself up to the enjoyment of a
burst of laughter which left her utterly weak.  Even
Franklin, who was in no mood for hilarity, smiled
at the obvious inanity of the remark.

Mrs. Lester Keene turned from one to the other
with an air of comical indignation.  *She* saw
nothing to laugh at.  If there had been any fun in all
this, why had she been sent for?  Her age and her
position in that house gave her the right to protect
her untamable charge.  The mere fact, if such a fact
could be mere, that a man was in the bedroom of this
young girl was in itself a frightful shock to all her
inherited ideas of propriety.  To her, novel-fed as she
was, Franklin could not be anything but a desperate
character, a menace to virtue, a man of the world.
He and Beatrix might look at it from the callous
modern angle, but she had made up her mind that she
was called upon to perform a great rescue and to
stand as the representative of Chastity and Moral
Goodness,—and like all the women of her type she
consciously dignified these terms with capital letters.
The only thing that she regretted was that she had
done her hair for the night and had not given herself
time to touch her face with a powder-puff.

As soon as Beatrix had recovered herself and was
able to speak again, she unlaced herself from
Mrs. Keene's plump, well-meaning arms and pushed her
gently to the nearest chair.  "Pull yourself together,
Brownie dear," she said.  "I hope I sha'n't have to
keep you out of bed longer than a few minutes.  I
sent for you because you had very little opportunity
of speaking to Mr. Franklin to-day and he's in a
particularly brilliant mood.  As you know, I like you
to share my pleasures, Brownie, dear."  She threw
a look of triumph at Franklin, which said as plainly
as spoken words, "My game, my friend!"

Franklin caught her meaning.  He shot out a laugh
and answered her aloud.  "Don't you believe it.  I
have all night at my disposal."  And after trying
several chairs he sat down in one that had arms
and a slanting back, made himself completely comfortable
and eyed the newcomer with such interest that
she bristled beneath his gaze.

Summing up the state of the game,—it was still
in this way that she regarded this amazing episode
inconceivable except when conducted by these two
products of a social system peculiar to America,—Beatrix
didn't like the look of things.  It had seemed
to her that the entrance of Mrs. Keene would reduce
the position to one of such absurdity that Franklin
would be only too glad to take himself off with as
much dignity as he could muster up.  His tenacity
took her breath away.  What sort of a man was
this who intended to stick to his point even in the
face of a witness?

Not having been endowed with as much humor
as would slip through a sugar-sifter, Mrs. Lester
Keene had the faculty of jumping in where angels
fear to tread.  Her love and admiration for Beatrix
were the biggest things in her life,—far bigger than
her nebulous marriage and her occasional social
triumphs in suburban London.  It gave her a sort of
false courage and carried her over all conventional
bunkers which her provincial up-bringing had erected
between herself and the truth.  There was therefore
a touch of heroism in the way in which she turned
upon Franklin.  "How long have you been here?"
she demanded.

"I'm not sure," said Franklin.

"Time flies when one is interested," said Beatrix,
with a charming smile.

"What right have you to be here at all?"

"Ask my wife," said Franklin, drily.

"She isn't your wife, and you know it."

"I am the only man who does," said Franklin.

"And for that reason your behavior is inexcusable
and unforgivable.  It is not that of a gentleman.  I
am astounded that a man who bears such a name as
yours could descend to these depths."

She had never spoken to anyone like this before,
not even to the little servant who, far away in the
past, had brushed her hair and mislaid her hair-pins.
She was surprised at herself.  She felt, with a thrill
of curious excitement, that she was rising bravely to
a great occasion.  Franklin remained patient.  He
felt sorry for this obviously weak woman who was
notoriously no more able to cope with Beatrix than
could a canvas screen with a fifty-mile gale.  She was
doing her best and he respected her.  It was not so
much her fault as her misfortune that the result was
farcical.  He caught a look of amusement in the eyes
of his antagonist, and waiving all feeling of enmity
in a moment of sympathy, smiled back at her.  He
shrugged his shoulders and said nothing, and so
Mrs. Keene, now oiled up, started off again.

"It doesn't require any imagination to know what
your intentions are," she said, her choice of words
becoming more and more high-flown and her rather
fat chin quivering under her emotion.  "You seek
to take advantage of a young girl who has placed
herself in a most dangerous position.  I have no
words in which to say how despicable—"  Her voice
broke.

Beatrix patted her shoulder.  "There, there,
Brownie dear!  There, there!  Don't take it so much
to heart.  The last half-an-hour has been full of
fun and I've enjoyed it all enormously, and presently
when Mr. Franklin comes to the conclusion that after
all this is the twentieth century, he'll recover his
chivalry and find some other way in which to pay
me out."

"Then all I've got to say is this," said Mrs. Lester
Keene: "the sooner he comes to that conclusion
the better.  You, my dear, ought to be in bed and
asleep.  And after my recent attack of lumbago, I
don't think anyone has the right to keep me out of
bed as late as this."

Franklin got up and held out his right arm.  "I'm
so sorry.  Allow me to escort you to the door," he
said.

"And you intend to go to your own room?"

Beatrix held her breath.  On the answer to that
question everything that she could see in the future
depended.

"This is my room," said Franklin.  And when the
little lady drew back he went behind her chair, put
his hands gently under her elbows, lifted her up and
ran her, a perfect mass of impotent protest, to and
through the door of the maid's room, which he locked.
He knew that Mrs. Keene dared not make a fuss,
and returned to face Beatrix once more, with a
curious smile, "All square at the turn," he said.

"Well played, sir," replied Beatrix, generously.

.. vspace:: 2

A lugubrious clock that was somewhere in that
unsuitable room struck twelve.  Through the open
windows came the raucous enthusiasm of the frogs on
a close-by pond.  Their imitation of the mechanical
noises made by a factory in full blast was more exact
than usual.  A local cock flung out his throaty
challenge to other barn-yard sheiks and was answered
from near and far.  A full moon in a sky that was
very mosaic of stars laid a magic light upon the earth
and water.

Beatrix heaved a little sigh.  She was beginning
to feel tired.  Excitement was burning low, and
Nature, whom she was in the habit of ignoring with
characteristic imperiousness, demanded sleep.  Franklin
was not to be beaten by tricks, it seemed, or turned
off by sarcasm.  She must change her tactics and see
how honesty would work.

"You'll go now, won't you?" she said quietly, with
an offer of friendship that was usually irresistible.

Franklin shook his head and stood firm.

"No?  Oh, I think so.  There isn't any need to
carry your strong man performance any farther.
You've quite convinced me that education and all the
advantages of civilization mean nothing to me.  I'll
take it for granted that they mean just as little to
you.  In a word, I'll own myself punished and give
you the game.  Will that do?"

"No," said Franklin.  "That's not good enough."

Beatrix stood thoughtfully in front of him, with
her hands behind her back, drooping a little like a
flower in the evening.  Her new and utter naturalness
made her seem startlingly young and immature and
different.  Franklin hardly recognized in this Beatrix
the brilliant, sparkling, insolent, triumphant creature
who had turned the tables on her family and claimed
his help as a sportsman without one iota of consideration
for him or the future.  But he refused to weaken.
He realized that if he allowed himself to drift even
into the approach of sympathy she would twist him
round her little finger.  She deserved no mercy.  He
would give her none.  She had had the temerity to
place him high up among the world's fools and she
must pay the full price for the privilege.

"Perhaps you don't know," she said, "how much
it costs me to retire from any sort of contest until
the result is hopelessly against me.  I've only done
it once before, and that was in a tennis tournament
at Palm Beach last winter, when I went on playing,
with a sprained ankle, and fainted.  I don't intend
to faint now, but I'm very, very tired.  Won't you
let me give up?"

Franklin shook his head again.  "This is not anything
like the little games that you kill time with," he
said.  "I'm not Sutherland York, nor am I one of
the green youths who help you to get through monotonous
days.  I have been just as spoiled as you have
and this can't end until my vanity has been healed.
You know that as well as I do."

"Oh, yes," she said frankly, "I understand.  If I
stood in your shoes I should feel as you do and be
just as brutal in my desire for revenge.  But put
yourself in mine for a minute.  You can if you will.  You
have imagination.  The mere fact that you've been in
my room for an hour and made me undergo the worst
sort of humiliation before my maid and my companion
ought to be sufficient to heal any ordinary type of
vanity, however severe the wound.  Come, now.  I
don't ask you to be fair.  I don't deserve that.  But
be big and get off that awfully high horse.  What
d'you say?  Shall I cry quits?"  She held out her
hand with the charming smile which had never failed
since the time when she was the little queen of her big
nursery.

Franklin compelled himself to ignore it.  "No," he
said.  "I'm here to make you feel the spurs for the
first time in your life, and I shall stay."

In a flash Beatrix changed back to the personality
behind which she hid her best and undiscovered self.
She threw back her head and squared her shoulders
and brought her exquisite slim young body into an
attitude of audacious challenge and ran her eyes over
Franklin with an expression in which there was
contempt and amusement.

"Then you may make up your mind to a long and
arduous job," she said.  "It'll take a better man than
you to break me in."

"We'll see about that," he said.

She burst into a derisive laugh.  Her blood was up.
This man had frightened her, amused her, interested
her.  He had won her admiration, even a little of
her sympathy.  Now he bored her.  He had stayed
too long, harped on one subject too steadily.  She
might consent to play at something else, but this game
was threadbare.  She refused to entertain the possibility
of his attempting to carry out his threat beyond
taking possession of her room, which, in itself, was
impertinent enough.

"What precisely do you imagine that you can do?"
she asked, with the very essence of scorn.

Franklin's patience had almost run out, too.  "I
don't *imagine* that I can do anything.  I know exactly
what I'm *going* to do."

"Is that so?  Do tell me."

"Conform in detail to the right you've given me,"
he said, "without any further argument."

"Beginning how, pray?"

"By tearing that frock off your back, unless you
have your maid in right away."

"You wouldn't dare!" she said, scoffing at him.

That was the worst word she could have chosen.
To dare Franklin to do a thing was to guarantee that
it was done.  With the blood in his head he laid
instant hands on her and ripped the chiffon from one
soft white shoulder.

There was an inarticulate cry, a brief, breathless
struggle, and the next instant he received a blow on
the face that made him see stars.

"You little tyrant!" he said, with a short laugh.
"That's your spirit, is it?"

He made for her again, angrier than he had ever
been in his life.  But she darted away like a beautiful
fish, and with her round shoulder gleaming in the
moonlight stood close to an open window, her breasts
rising and falling, her nostrils distended, her eyes
like two great stars, her face as white as the
feathers of a white dove.

"Touch me again and I'll jump out of this window!"

"I don't believe you," he said, but remained standing.

"I swear to God I will!"

He knew that she meant it.  "You'd break every
bone in your body," he said.

"That would be better than having your hands on
me again."

He made a spring and caught her by the wrists.
"Now jump!"

"Oh, very clever," she said, with superb sarcasm.
"You've evidently made a hobby of fighting with
women."

That stung Franklin.  "I don't call you a woman,"
he blurted out.  "There's been nothing of the woman
in you since the day you knew enough words to order
one of your nurses about.  You're a hybrid, the
production of a mixture of two species,—labor and
wealth.  The labor in you, inherited from the man
who made your first millions, is tainted with
revolt, the wealth with the damned despotism that
creates it.  You're no more a woman than this barrack
is a home, or this absurd place a bedroom.  You're a
grotesque who has been brought up in a nightmare.
You walk on a world that is too small for your feet.
You're out of drawing like a woman in a fashion-plate.
You're a sort of female Gulliver on an earth
peopled with pigmies.  You almost believe that you're
Almighty and that when you raise your finger life must
be reset like a chess-board.  And you're perfectly
right.  It can and is and will be so long as money
counts.  I know it and do it, for you and I hold a
piece each of the same wand.  But you're up against
*me* now, and you've used me as you might have used
a trained servant, or an eager parasite, ready and
willing to lick the blacking off your boots for the
sake of what may fall unnoticed from your purse, and,
by God, you're not going to get away with it."

He controlled her across to the door of the maid's
room and pushed it open with his foot.  "Come out,"
he said, "and get Mrs. Franklin ready for the night."  Then
he marched Beatrix to and into the dressing-room,
followed by Helene.  Reflected in the mirrors
there were not three, but thirty people.  "I'll give
you fifteen minutes," he continued, "and for the
sake of all concerned don't be longer.  Is that
agreed?"

Beatrix met his eyes.  Her spirit was unbroken,
her chin at the same tilt, her attitude not one whit
less contemptuously assured, but he saw in the slight
inclination of her golden head the acknowledgment
that he held all the cards.

He turned on his heel and left the room, went over
to an open window and drew in long breaths of air.

He and she, children of the same nightmare, as he
had called it, had both used the word vanity about
the thing which impelled him to punish.  But as he
looked out into the sane night, magic only from the
moon's touch, it came to him that to dismiss it as
vanity was to slur over the true meaning of that before
which he was urged.  It was the labor in him, the
revolt against the despotism of wealth that had come
back again in his fight with his fellow-hybrid, and
once more labor was top-dog.  How would he use his
power?

For fifteen minutes he stood there with his heart
thumping, his hands hot, the exhilaration of success
running through his blood like alcohol.  And then, to
the second, came the sweet diaphanous figure, which,
with the dignity of a brave but conquered enemy,
crossed to the foolish bed.

Franklin watched her go, her gleaming hair all
about her like a bridal veil, her head held high, her
lovely face untouched by fear.  He watched her
pause while the maid opened up the bed, and then
slip in.  He called the French girl, gave her the key
to her door and waited until she had gone.  Then he
walked to the foot of the bed and stood there silently
until Beatrix raised her eyes.

"If you and I," he said, with extreme distinctness,
"were the only two living people on a desert island
and there was not the faintest hope of our ever being
taken back to the world, I would build you a hut
at the farthest end of it and treat you as a man."

He wheeled round, unlocked the door, went out into
the passage and away.

Only by having seen the expression on Beatrix's
face after he had gone would he have known how
tremendously well he had revenged himself.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VIII

.. vspace:: 2

Franklin's bare statement to Malcolm Fraser that
he was going to the Vanderdyke pastoral party merely
to meet Ida Larpent left his friend interested and
speculative.  The lady's name was as familiar to Fraser
as to the other men who dined at houses a little to
the east and rather less than that to the west of Fifth
Avenue.  The lady's arresting face had often stirred
his dormant sense of psychology, but he never had had
the opportunity of saying more than "How do you
do?" or "Good-bye" to her.  He so obviously didn't
count in the scheme of things as they appealed to
Mrs. Larpent.

According to the Social Register, however, Mrs. Larpent
lived in East Fifty-sixth Street and was the
widow of Captain Claude Elcho Larpent of the 21st
Lancers, a nephew of Field Marshal Viscount
Risborough.  That was all.  If this precious volume,
which is the vade-mecum of so many people who
murmur the word society with a hiss that can be heard
from one end of the town to the other, had attempted
to do justice to the beautiful Ida, at least one-half of
the volume would have been devoted to the story of
her antecedents and career.  Born at Paterson, New
Jersey, the only daughter of a pushing and energetic
little chemist named McKenna, who had married in a
moment of the wildest kind of romance a little, slight,
white-faced Russian girl who had left her country
among a batch of unsavory emigrants and found
employment in a button factory, Ida,—who can tell
why?—was marked out from her tiniest years for the
oldest profession in the world.  One would have thought,
to look at her parents,—the father a pugnacious,
industrious, thrifty, red-headed Scotch-American, the
mother a wistful, grateful, self-effacing little woman
who, if there were any justice in this world, would
several times have received the distinguished service
order for her many acts of unnoticed heroism,—she
would have been a bright, brave, practical and perhaps
even pretty little girl.  Instead of which, to everyone's
astonishment and to the utter confusion of the chemist
and his wife, Ida resembled nothing so much as a child
of the aristocracy.  She was thoroughbred from head
to foot, perfectly made, with a small oval face and
large wide-apart eyes, tiny wrists and ankles and black
hair as fine as silk.  The paradox of her having been
born in the small common-place quarters above a
second-rate store, amidst all the untidiness of a place in
which the mother did her own housework, was not lost
on the parents.  They were proud of this fairy-like
baby, but they were also frightened of her.  They
realized that she was in the nature of a freak.  It seemed
to them that she had come by accident; that, as a
matter of fact, they had no right to her.  They almost
persuaded themselves into the belief, as the child grew
up, that she was a changeling; that an unseen hand
must have stolen their own sturdy, freckled and
rampagious infant, and for some unaccountable reason
slipped this exquisite little thing into her place.

There was, as time passed, an element of tragedy
about this miracle or accident or mistake,—these
words and others were used,—especially when Ida
began to find her tongue and her feet.  More and
more she seemed to be an indignant hot-house plant in
a little cabbage-patch.  Her parents, poor souls, grew
more and more awkward and unhappy in her presence.
They had the uncanny feeling always that she was
criticising them and their mode of speech and their
slummachy way of life.  The affection and love which
they had been only too willing to give her after the
shock of her early appearance wore away, turned into
reluctant deference and a constant self-conscious desire
to make their apartment and themselves more tidy for
her.  Even at the age of ten she turned her mother
into a maid, quietly insisted that her hair should be
brushed every night and saw to it that she was dressed
and undressed, manicured and shampooed.  She demanded
bath salts and scent from the store and the
best of soaps and powders.  "Do this!  Do that!"
she would say, and if they were not done she raised
her voice and stamped her foot, while a sort of flame
seemed to come from her eyes.  No one had ever seen
her cry after she had learned to walk.

The McKenna circle of friends, consisting of
fellow-storekeepers and the Austro-Hungarian musician who
was the leader of the little orchestra at the Paterson
Theatre, watched Ida's early years with almost breathless
astonishment and a kind of disbelief.  They
accepted her much in the same way as they would, under
the pressure of warm friendship, have accepted a pet
marmoset or a cursing parrot or a dog with a cat's
tail.  They noticed, with many comments, that she
grew up altogether without filial affection; that she
treated her parents as though they were paid
attendants, calling her father "Sandy," as his particular
friends did, and her mother "Alla," and with the
most startling self-assurance making them conform to
all her wishes.  It was most uncanny.  Michlikoff,
the bird's-nest-headed musician, who had a sneaking
belief in the occult and who read up all that he could
find on the subject of transmigration of souls,
endeavored to persuade his friends, in voluble broken
English, that Ida was a princess born again.  With
all those who came from places other than Missouri,
he succeeded.

It was a perturbed and constrained household in
which this unexpected child grew up,—a household
that, to the little bandy Scot's never-quite-hidden
disgust, was the subject of steady gossip in the town.
His first ambition naturally was to see the list of his
customers swell, but not at the expense of his pride
and self-respect.  Those two things, frequently
mentioned, were very dear to him.  It seemed to him, too,
that the family affairs of a man who kept a drug-store
should be out of the region of gossip.  He and his
still pretty wife were glad, infinitely glad, when the
time arrived for their daughter to attend the public
school.  It was only while she was out of the apartment
that the mother could go about her work in
comfort and without being constantly called away from
her domestic duties.  The freckled, red-headed little
chemist only felt happy when he saw this girl sail out
with her books and turn down the street towards the
school-house, with her chin held high and her astonishing
eyes filled with a sort of scorn for all the passers-by.
At school she was not a success.  She didn't mix well.
The other children held aloof from her.  She was
obviously out of place amongst them and they resented
her presence in the class-rooms.  The boys admired
her from a distance, fell into self-conscious silence
when she approached and whispered about her when
she passed by.  The girls were antagonistic.  They
were jealous of her pretty clothes, awed by her lofty
silences and surprised at her proficiency with her books.
On her seventeenth birthday Ida went to New York,
saying that she would be back to supper.  But with
supper came a cold-blooded note which ran like this:


"Dear Sandy and Alla:

"I'm through with your one-eyed town and the
drug-store and provincialism.  I'm going to begin to live and
dress as I ought to, and there's only one way to do it,—the
easiest way.  I applied for a job in the chorus of the
Winter Garden for the new show and got it.  It was
easy.  I looked very nice in my Sunday clothes and the
stage manager said I was a peach.  Rehearsals start
to-morrow and I shall stay at a boarding-house with some
of the other girls.  So please send me thirty dollars to
go on with and the rest of my things.  The address is
302 West 46th Street.  I will let you know when to send
me more money.  You will both be glad to get rid of
me, but not so glad as I am to be out of Paterson.  I am
starting on the bottom rung of the ladder and I am going
to climb to the top, whatever I have to pay for it.  Judging
from the way the men in the office look at me they
will have to do most of the paying.

"IDA."


This was read by Mr. and Mrs. McKenna in horrified
silence, but with a mutual deep sigh of relief, and
put away in a secret place.  The only time they ever
saw her again was once when they made a pilgrimage
to Manhattan and watched her from the balcony of
what was once a show ring in Broadway, and saw her,
almost nude, flitting like a butterfly in the glare of
light.

One other note they received from this curious
person, and this, enclosing a cheque for two hundred
dollars, contained the news that Ida was going to
England with a musical comedy company in which she
was playing a small part.  And that was the last they
ever heard of her.  She had come like a stranger and
like a stranger she departed.  The cheque they never
used.  With an odd sensation of having been insulted
by it they put it in a drawer among receipts and
specimens of patent medicines and left it there.  And then,
happy again, they returned to their habitual untidiness
and the daily routine of hard work and endeavored
to forget.  They regarded it as a blessing that nature
had punished them only once.  And when eventually
they removed themselves to a larger and more pretentious
store they left a photograph of a little wide-eyed
girl among their debris and felt as though a weight had
been lifted from their shoulders.

If they had been able to watch the London newspapers,
especially the *Sketch* and *Tatler*, they would
have quivered at the sight of this strange girl in many
graceful attitudes and in the scantiest of costumes as
she appeared in almost weekly photographic studies,
and they would have gasped if they had presently read
the glowing accounts of the marriage of Ida McKenna
to Captain Claude Elcho Larpent, nephew of Field
Marshal Viscount Risborough, at St. George's,
Hanover Square.  The headings of these paragraphs had
it that Society had once more made an alliance with
the stage, but the gushing paragraphs that came
beneath stated (how amazed the chemist would have
been) that the bride came of one of the best American
families, her father being a famous scientist whose
country house was at Paterson, New Jersey, and her
mother a distant connection of the Russian Chancellor.

Ida Larpent took her place in English society as
though to the manner born.  She became the beautiful
Mrs. Larpent without turning a hair.  She ran a little
house in Mayfair on her husband's excellent income as
though Mayfair had been her playground since childhood.
She entertained the younger set and a sprinkling
of duchesses with all the insouciance of minor
royalty, and plunged her husband into debt in the same
cold-blooded way that she had run up bills in her
native town, from which on clear days one can see the
Simelike unbelievable buildings of the great city.

Claude Larpent was passionately in love with his
beautiful and expensive wife.  With all the careless
pride of a mere boy of twenty-six he gave her the
reins, and so long as she made some return for his love
never grumbled at her recklessness or her intimacy
with men whom he, before marriage, would not have
touched with the end of a barge-pole.  He trusted her.
She was his wife.  She had chosen him from among
all the men who would eagerly have knelt at her feet.
In his weakness he stood lovingly by while she relentlessly
ran him on the rocks and into bankruptcy.  But
it was not until one bad night when he discovered by
accident that she had sold herself for diamonds to a
most atrocious vieux marcheur that he confessed
himself broken, exchanged from his crack regiment to the
Houssa Police and disappeared to the West Coast of
Africa, the white man's grave.  It was exactly three
years after the bells of St. George's had rung their
merry peal that the obituary notice in the London
papers contained a few lines to the effect that Claude
Elcho Larpent had fallen a victim to black water fever.
The truth was that this foolish young man had died of
whisky and a broken heart, and had been buried in the
bush mourned and respected by the sturdy little men
whom he had treated with that mixture of firmness
and camaraderie characteristic of the English officer.
His widow, still in the first flush of youth and beauty,
was left penniless, but bejewelled, and in the ordinary
course of events,—men being awake to the fact that
they need not marry her,—came under the protection
of a wealthy railway man who planted her temporarily
in a pleasant portion of Mayfair, rather sarcastically
named Green Street, Berkeley Square.  The beautiful
Mrs. Larpent thereupon lost a certain amount of caste,
but not very much.  Duchesses dropped her, but
semi-society drank her wines without a twinge and enjoyed
many week-ends at her beautiful house on the banks
of the Thames near Henley.  Younger sons and the
stage herded about her, accepting gladly enough her
lavish hospitality.  The only thing that Ida Larpent
had inherited from her father was thrift.  And before
the railway magnate disappeared from his surroundings
in an apoplectic fit, she had managed to put by a
large enough sum of money to bring her in somewhere
about six hundred pounds a year, and upon that,
feeling the need of a change of air and surroundings,
she returned to America.

When Franklin met her first, during one of his
brief visits to New York, he found her very cosily
ensconced in a tiny apartment, gracefully furnished,
over a dressmaker's shop in East Fifty-sixth Street,
from which, clothed to perfection, she drove forth
nightly in her limousine to dine at the best houses.
She had come to the United States to catch a husband.
Her experience had taught her that a husband is a
more permanent institution than a protector.  She was
determined to marry money.  The need of it, in bulk,
was essential to her comfort and peace of mind.  In
order to do so, she lived on her capital, thus conveying
the impression that she was very well off.  Time after
time she could have marched fairly rich young men off
to church by their ears, but she was very fastidious,—not
so much in regard to them, as men, as to their bank
accounts.  She didn't intend to make a second mistake.
Then she met Pelham Franklin at that sort of sham
Bohemian supper at which all the women wear
diamonds and all the men are clean and civilized.  She
fell in love with him before she found out who he was.
His brown face and outdoor manner and the air he
had about him of not carrying a superfluous ounce of
flesh, his utter incompetency as a drawing-room man,
which was proved by his not paying her a single
compliment or saying anything personal, delighted her.
She was sick of those others who all looked alike and
said the same things and counted for nothing.  Franklin
came as a change.  His masculinity appealed to her.
For the first time in her life passion stirred and her
self-complacency was shaken.  Before the night was
out she heard his name and gave thanks to all her gods
for putting him in her way.  He came at the moment
when her money was running out and the greater part
of her morning mail consisted of demands for payment
from impatient and long-suffering trades-people.
During the fortnight that Franklin remained in town
she concentrated upon him, using all her wiles to bring
him up to the scratch.  Malcolm Fraser was not in
town at that time, nor were any of the other men with
whom Franklin was on terms of intimate friendship.
Feeling lonely and at a rather loose end he saw a good
deal more of Mrs. Larpent, under those circumstances,
than he would have done in normal conditions.  He
took her to dinner at Sherry's and the Ritz, night after
night, and was delighted at her readiness to do the
theatres with him.  It was too cold-blooded a business
to see the plays alone.  Several times, too, he spent a
late hour after supper in her charming little
drawing-room smoking and chatting.  They knew many of the
same people in London and Paris.  He flirted a little
with her—certainly.  Why not?  Her beauty was
unique, her way of expressing herself quite brilliant
and amusing, and that air of regal mystery that was all
about her piqued curiosity.  He had never the least
intention of doing more than merely flirt, and not being
a lady's man and being therefore without conceit it
never occurred to him that his quick friendship could
be misconstrued or his frank admiration could possibly
lead her to believe that he nourished even the
germ of an idea of following these pleasant evenings
up with anything serious.  He went away under the
impression that he would be forgotten as quickly as he
had been taken up, and was utterly and blissfully
unaware of the fact that Mrs. Larpent had fallen in love
with him.  He would have roared with incredulous
laughter at the mere suggestion.

Thus things had been left when Franklin felt the
call of the sea and took Malcolm Fraser for a cruise
in the yacht on which he spent the best hours of his
life.  He wrote a little letter to Mrs. Larpent on the
morning he went out of town and thanked her warmly
for her kindness and "looked forward tremendously
to seeing her directly he got back."  Into these few
rather boyish and certainly sincere words Ida, making
a most uncharacteristic blunder in psychology, read
what she most wanted to read,—love, and, of course,
eventually marriage.  During his absence she marked
time impatiently, but with a new smile on her red lips
and a gentler manner towards those about her, keeping
her tradesmen in a good temper by throwing out tiny
hints of impending good fortune.  It was solely to
meet Franklin again that this sophisticated, ambitious,
luxury-loving, unscrupulous woman became a member
of the Vanderdyke house-party,—to see again the man
who, alone among men, had touched her heart and
awakened her passion.  Like a girl from a Convent
school, young and sweet and inarticulate, she went.
Imagine her anger and distress at finding on her arrival
at the Vanderdyke barrack that she was asked to add
her congratulations to those of the family and their
friends on the marriage of Franklin and that "damn
girl," as she called her.  Imagine it!  The shock, the
disappointment, the shattering of her one good
dream——





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When Franklin left the bedroom in which he had
gone through the strangest hour of his life, he went
into the room which had been allotted to him and
from which some of his things had been taken, and
stood for a little while at an open window taking in
long, deep breaths.  His mind was in too chaotic a
state to permit him to think patiently of going to sleep,
and in the back of it, now that his anger had cooled,
there was a growing feeling of self-disgust at the way
in which he had treated Beatrix Vanderdyke.  He was
sorry that he had allowed himself to be carried in front
of a wave of extreme indignation and he told himself,
a little ruefully, that after all it wasn't for him to take
the law into his own hands.  He called himself, with
unusual sarcasm, an egotist, an individualist, and cursed
his vanity which rose up whenever anyone attempted
to make a fool of him, and was aghast to discover how
very little it took to make a man lose the effects and
influence of civilization.

And when he endeavored to look into the future that
was staring him in the face—the future all disturbed
and upset by the unexpected entrance into his life of
the girl who had treated him merely as a pawn upon
her lightly considered chess-board, he found himself
wholly unable to see through the maze that stretched
out in front of him.  He was no longer in the splendid
position of a free lance.  He was no longer able to
pass through his days unencumbered with any sort of
responsibility.  He saw that he was to pay the full
price for that moment of aberration during which he
had permitted himself to fall in with Beatrix's daringly
manufactured lie.  It was with a feeling that gave him
back something of his self-respect that he realized
that it was impossible to give Beatrix away until he
had her permission to do so.  She had appealed to him
as a sportsman and it was as a sportsman, as a man
who stuck to the rules of whatever game he played,
that he endeavored to report daily to the particular
god that he worshipped.

Sick of himself, sick of his room, sick of everything,
he went out presently into the passage,—a wide,
dimly lit passage hung with old masters and carpeted
with Persian rugs which were beautiful and rare
enough to hang upon the walls of an art gallery,—and
went slowly down-stairs into the hall.  For some
moments he paced up and down this deserted place asking
himself how he was to kill the night.  He had no
patience for books,—he very rarely read anything
except technical things on hunting and fishing,—but
eventually he made his way to the library, the nicest
and most reasonable room in that uncomfortable,
luxurious house.  He was aware immediately of the
presence of someone standing at the window.  The moonlight
fell on a dark head and a tall, graceful figure.  He
turned up the lights and found himself looking into
the reproachful and rather sarcastic eyes of Ida Larpent.

She was still in the noticeably simple and very perfect
dress that she had worn at dinner,—a soft, black
thing not cut slavishly to the existing fashion, but made
to suit her peculiar beauty and slender, hipless lines.
Cut down to the waist at the back, it seemed to retain
its place in front by a miracle.  One large, star-shaped
brooch studded as closely with diamonds as a clear sky
with stars was fastened between her breasts, and jet
beads glinted here and there about the graceful skirt
that hid her feet.  A band of small pearls was placed
like an aureola round her head, from which hung one
large insolent diamond just where her hair was parted
on her low forehead.  She wore no rings.

She moved away from the window and leaned lightly
against one of the pillars, running her eyes slowly up
and down Franklin's tall, wiry figure.  She might
easily have been standing for an artist as the modern
representation of Lucretia Borgia.

"Well!" she said, with a just perceptible upward
inflection of her bell-like voice.

To Franklin she seemed to be symbolical of his lost
freedom, the unconscious reminder of the good days
when he could go and come at will, answer immediately
to a whim and move to a fancy as a sail to a breeze.
During the course of that afternoon and evening he
had not attempted to do more than pass the time of day
with her, and had forgotten, in the sudden whirlpool
into which he had been dragged by Beatrix, that he
had arranged to meet her under that roof to renew a
very charming friendship.  It was now easy enough to
see from her expression and manner that he was to
undergo a bad quarter-of-an-hour for his lack of
attention.  He deeply regretted to have hurt her feelings
but was not sorry that he had gone into the room.
If there was anything unpleasant to be faced it was his
habit to face it and get it over.  He did not suffer from
moral cowardice.

"Well!" he said.

"I've just finished writing you a letter."

"That's very nice of you."

There was a kind of laugh.  "I hope you'll think so
after you've read it."

"I'll read it now, if I may," Said Franklin, holding
out his hand.

"You may as well."  But she tore the letter into
small pieces and dropped them at her feet.  "No.
Why should I give you the pleasure of seeing how much
you've made me suffer?"

The word suffer and the unconcealed break in the
woman's voice puzzled and surprised Franklin.  Was
she acting?  He saw no reason why she should.  It
never entered into the very recesses of his mind that
there could be any sentiment on her part.  Why should
there be?  "That wouldn't give me any pleasure," he
said, with a sort of boyish sincerity.

She looked at him a little eagerly, saw that there
was nothing in his eyes that she needed, nodded two or
three times and shrugged her shoulders.  It was a
hard thing to be made to confess that this man who was
so desirable had merely passed a few hours with her for
the lack of a friend.  A new thing, too, after her wide
experience of men.  Nevertheless, she had run through
the last of her remaining money.  This was no hour
for pride.  She stood in dire and urgent need of funds.
It was impossible for him to be her husband, but well
within the range of her ability to see that he became
her banker.

"Did you know that I was in the library?" she
asked, making one more effort to prove herself wrong
in her quick intuition.  This was probably, she told
herself, a marriage of convenience.

"No."

"You just came in by accident?"

"Yes."

"I see.  Well, then, as we're here and we're both
obviously in no mood for sleep, shall we while away
the time with a little discussion on the short memories
of men,—some men?"

"Why not?" replied Franklin, and drew up a chair
for her.

But Mrs. Larpent gave a sharp, eloquent gesture.
The chair ought rightly to have wheeled itself into the
darkest corner.  "I'll stand, thanks.  Oddly enough
I feel volcanic like most women at the end of their
tether who have been chucked."

The abrupt, descriptive colloquialism came strangely
from her.  She was so finished, so apparently
fastidious.  Also she spoke with the slight drawl and
affectation that some English people acquire after much
practice, and imagine to be smart.

"Chucked?" he echoed.  "How?  By whom?"

This gave Mrs. Larpent a double opportunity to get
rid of her spleen and chagrin in an outburst of
hysteria and to work on Franklin's sympathies by
letting him see that she must have money or sell her
jewels.  It didn't matter to her what he thought of her
now.

"By you!  By you!" she said, her voice all broken
with emotion.  "You came into my life when I was
most lonely, most in need of tenderness and kind
treatment and on the very edge of a crumbling cliff.  I
didn't believe that you were playing the usual game
with me.  You didn't seem to be that kind of man.  I
thought,—yes, even I, who have grappled with life and
am without much faith in human nature,—that you
saw all that is good and decent in me and answered to
the love that you had set alight in my heart.  Why
else, I asked myself, did you come day after day and
night after night, in a city reeking with people who
would have been eager to amuse you, and claim me in
a loneliness that was almost equal to mine?  Why else
did you let me see the best of yourself and treat me
with the respect that a man only shows to the woman
whom he is going to ask to be his wife?  Most of the
men I meet are different.  They only see in me an
unattached woman living on a shoe-string, willing enough
to sell her beauty for cash.  But in you I thought I saw
honesty and sincerity and chivalry, and whether you
knew it or not you let me wander into a fool's paradise
and dream of a home and a great love and peace.  And
on the strength of the little note you wrote before you
sailed I saw the promise of security from dunning
creditors and hope rising over my unhappy horizon.  I
blurt all this out now only because I'm still suffering
from the shock of finding you married.  You must
forgive me."

She turned abruptly on her heel, with her hands over
her face, and stood once more in the window silvered
by the moon.  Even with those tears on her face and
that pain in her heart she was able to congratulate
herself on having made the speech of her life.

Franklin was appalled.  His knowledge of women
was as small as that of most men whose lives are spent
in the open.  Of the Larpent type he was wholly
ignorant.  He believed that she was telling the truth
and her confession, made with trembling lips and
streaming eyes and a broken voice, hurt him.  He had
never listened to anything so painful or so horribly
embarrassing.  What could he do or say?  How could
he possibly explain that her beauty had only made a
skin-deep impression and that he had only regarded
her as a most delightful companion.  And so he said
nothing.  It was too difficult.  He just remained
standing with his shoulders squared and his hands
behind his back and willed that woman, for God's sake,
to stop crying and tell him what he could do to make
things easier for her.  And the thing that he wished
with all his soul was that he was back on his yacht,
with the clean night air brushing across his face and
the laughter of his intimate pals ringing in his ears.

During the curious, uneasy moments that followed
he let his eyes wander about the huge room with its
pseudo-Gothic ceiling and pillars, its book-lined walls
and its numerous cases of old Bibles and first editions,
collections of rare and wonderful bindings, and the
assortment of deep arm-chairs and silky rugs which
gave it the appearance of a room in a public library
rescued from its cold formality by a lover of books,
who saw no reason why they should not be enjoyed in
comfort.  Only one end of it was lit, and the rest was
in shadow except for a shaft of silver light that pierced
one of the high windows and spilt itself on the plinth
of a pillar.  He wondered what Mrs. Larpent would
say next.  He hadn't missed her hint of the need of
money.  He felt more than ever unhappy and uncomfortable.
But on that point, at any rate, she could
count on his help, difficult as it would be to put it into
practice.

Mrs. Larpent gave another curious little laugh,
turned and came back.  Franklin glanced quickly at
her.  She moved closer and there was something about
her mouth and nostrils that showed him that he was
right in thinking that she had read his thoughts.

"What are you going to do about it?" she asked,
taking advantage of the light so that the softness and
whiteness of her body should not be lost.  One of her
smiles had never failed.  She adopted it then.  Even
she retained her optimism.

"What you say goes," said Franklin.

"You mean that, Pelham?"  Two or three steps
took her within arm's reach.  The light remained
upon her.  If this was merely a marriage of convenience
he might make a suggestion that would, at any
rate, give her a brief happiness.

"Of course.  I only want you to—to tell me what
I can do."

Optimism could not live under that suggestion,
however generously meant and delicately put, of payment
by cheque.  Nevertheless, Ida Larpent sat down.  It
was bitter to see that her love was not to be returned,
but good to feel that her diminished bank account was
likely to be substantially refreshed.  She felt like a
woman who had swum out of her depth, lost her nerve,
made a mighty effort and feels at last the sand against
her knees.  Metaphorically she drew herself wearily
out of the water and with a renewed sense of confidence
felt the warm sun upon her limbs.

There was something detestably cold-blooded in all
this, and Franklin hated it.  He had hitherto managed
to keep himself free from women.  They interfered
with his pursuits.  Why fate should have gone
suddenly out of its way to plunge him into the midst of
this woman stuff, as he impatiently called it, was more
than he could understand.

He looked down at Ida Larpent.  She was sitting in
a low, red-leather chair,—the sort of thing that is
supposed to belong to a room inhabited by men.  Her
amazing hair, as black as the wing of a crow, had been
touched here and there with the tongs.  It framed a
face as white as marble,—a curiously small oval
face,—with eyes remarkably wide apart and large and
luminous; a small aristocratic nose, with sensitive
nostrils which indicated passion as well as impatience, and
a mouth whose lips were full and artificially red.  Her
small round white shoulders were more daringly bare
than those of any woman he had seen, and her two fine
hands looked like those in the old French pictures
which hang in those houses in Paris that were spared
by the Sans-Culottes.  Indeed, the whole figure, from
head to foot, looked like an oil painting of a period in
French history when aristocracy had reached its acme.
As a companion for a man of enforced leisure and
unlimited means and no ties she had everything in her
favor, physically and mentally.  As Franklin stood
looking at her, however, with all the admiration that
was due to her, he found himself unconsciously
comparing her,—this exotic—this most exquisite of
rare orchids,—with the fresh, buoyant, healthy,
clean, proud, spoilt girl who called herself his wife.

"Will you be honest with me?" she asked.

"I haven't got much to bless myself with except
that," he answered.

"Were you married when you came to my apartment
in March?"

"No."

"Well, that's something," she said.  "When *were*
you married?"

"Does that matter?"

"Perhaps not.  The fact remains.  I'm naturally
interested and curious, so tell me this: Was it a
sudden infatuation for that child who rules the roost
here,—a sudden burst of sentimentality that doesn't seem
part of you, or—what?  I think I have the right to ask."

"You have," said Franklin.  "It was all very sudden.
That's all I can tell you about it."

"I see.  And now that you are tied up and more
than ever under the microscopic eye of the public—what?"

"Well—what?"

"Are you going to be a little careless in the matter
of marriage vows, or carry them out to the letter?"  She
stretched herself a little and smiled up at him, still
fighting for the dream that had made her for a little
while so young and gentle and unworldly.

"I asked you to believe that I am honest," said
Franklin, who had never in his life been so puzzled as
to a choice of words.

And then Mrs. Larpent got up.  "I see," she said,
and held out her hand.  "Well, I, at any rate, have
not beaten about the bush, and you have spared my
feelings with very real kindness.  And so good
night!"

"Good night!" said Franklin.

"You can think of nothing else that you would like
to say?"

Franklin had something else to say,—the question
of a certain sum of money.  But, like a horse brought
nose up to a high jump, he refused, shook his head,
and immediately added, "Yes.  I'm awfully sorry
about all this.  Please accept my humble apologies."

Mrs. Larpent bowed, but the gracious smile on her
lips was contradicted by her eyes.  They were full of
pain and anger.  And while she still held Franklin's
hand she registered an oath that she would leave no
stone unturned to make him forget his honesty before
many months had passed and lead her willingly into
a new and beautiful dream.

"How long are you staying here?" he asked.

"I'm leaving to-morrow," she said.  "It isn't awfully
amusing to go through the jealous agonies of hell."

"I'll write to your apartment," said Franklin,
stumbling a little over the words.

"Thank you."  She took his meaning and was
certain of his generosity.

He watched her go, moving with a sort of medieval
dignity, an almost uncanny suggestion of having
stepped out of an old frame to return to it before the
finger of dawn began to rub away the night.





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It was eleven o'clock before Beatrix opened her eyes
to a new day.  For two hours Mrs. Lester Keene had
hovered about the room like an elderly beetle, settling
here and there for a moment or two and then continuing
her aimless and irresolute flitting.  Two or three
times she had stood over the sleeping girl and gazed
with a sort of amazement at a face that looked
strangely childlike, with long lashes like fans upon her
cheeks and lips a little parted.  Then she would take a
magazine to one of the windows, read a few lines here
and there without taking in their meaning and gaze at
the illustrations intently without knowing what they
intended to represent.  The truth was that the loyal
and well-meaning lady was not herself.  Her constitution,
not of a very sound order, had been almost shattered
by her experience the night before.  She had kept
watch and had seen Franklin leave the bedroom shortly
after he had evicted her from it, and then, with
inexpressible relief and thankfulness, gone to bed, but the
terrible anxiety had told upon her.  Hitherto she had
never been called upon to undergo more nerve-strain
than is endured by a hen in a well-regulated chicken
run, seeing life and adventure and passion only
through the eyes of her favorite novelists.  She had,
however, slept very little and given orders that she
should be called at half-past seven, so that she might
go early to Beatrix and give her the benefit of her
advice.  She still remained under the impression, poor
little lady, that her advice was of the greatest
assistance to the wilful, headstrong girl, even though she
never made the merest pretence to follow it.

Beatrix awoke, finally, as a flower opens to the sun.
"Oh!  Hello, Brownie," she said, "ever-faithful!
Heigh-ho!  I've had such a lovely sleep.  All in one
piece without a dream.  I feel about fifteen."  She
stretched herself lazily and put her arms behind her
head.  "Will you please tell Helene that I want a cup
of tea at once,—at once, Brownie.  If it doesn't come
in five minutes it won't be of any use to me.  You're
a dear old thing to bother."  She gave a little musical
yawn as the fluffy-minded woman hurried to the maid's
room and gave the order with that sort of mysterious
urgency which is connected with embassies in moments
of national crises and theatres during a dress rehearsal.

When she returned, which she did at once,—her
mind being all astir with curiosity,—she saw that
Beatrix was sitting up in bed with her hands clasped
about her knees, her eyebrows meeting in a frown, her
lips set tightly and her eyes full of anger.  Mrs. Keene
had never seen this expression on the girl's face before.
If she had heard Franklin's parting remark she would
have known the reason for it.

"It's very late, dear," said Mrs. Keene; "after
eleven, and all the people have been rehearsing in the
gardens for an hour."

"Oh, well, it's a charming morning.  It will do
them good.  I wonder if the matinée idol has shaved
himself!  I understand that they don't do that thing
until about four o'clock in the afternoon."  And then
she began to laugh, more to hide her feelings than
anything else.

Not even to Brownie did she intend to show what
she felt about the episode of the previous night, or how
deeply she resented the humiliation to which Franklin
had subjected her.  Never in all her life would she
forget that, or forgive,—never.

"We certainly may be said to be living on the top
of a volcano, Brownie.  No monotony about life just
now, is there?"  And then she suddenly slipped out
of bed, alert and full of a new idea, "Go down and
see what's happening," she added.  "Be my secret
agent and come back with a full report of what
Franklin has been doing since breakfast.  Be very discreet
and smile,—smile all the time, bearing in mind that
you are the closest friend of a girl who has just been
happily married."

"Oh, my dear," cried Mrs. Keene, "don't talk like
that!  Please, please don't!"

Just for one instant Beatrix allowed her companion
to get a glimpse of the strain under which she was
laboring.  "How else should I talk?" she said,
sharply.  "Do you think I'm going about with my
tail down like a whipped dog——?  Run along,
Brownie, run along like a good little soul and do this
thing for me.  In the meantime I'll get up.  I feel in
my bones that things are going to happen to-day.
Thank Heaven I'm on the top of my form, ready for
anything and everybody, even Franklin.  We do
manage to live, you and I, don't we?"

She escorted the amiable, fluttering woman to the
door and closed it upon her, quite certain that she
would return with full information.  If there was one
thing in which Mrs. Lester Keene was really proficient
it was in spying out the lay of the land.

While bathing in the pool whose hideous Byzantine
decorations were never more inappropriate than when
they made a background for that sweet, slim form,
Beatrix ran her mind over the position.  She felt
convinced that Franklin, angry and disgusted as he was,
would continue to play up until he had her permission
to give away the game.  She knew a sportsman when
she saw one.  But she knew also, instinctively, that he
was a poor liar, and if,—as was quite likely,—Aunt
Honoria and her mother had been pumping him during
the morning as to when the marriage took place and
for the other details of this great romance, he had
probably made a very poor showing.  There might
have been inconvenient questions asked by her father
as to settlements, and so forth.  If so, she could
imagine how badly Franklin had come out without her
at his side to prompt and evade and put tangents into
the conversation.  She was anxious and owned to it.

When Mrs. Lester Keene returned to the bedroom,
slipping into it with an air of almost comic mystery,
she was surprised to find Beatrix fully dressed and
swinging up and down the room impatiently like a
boy.

"What news on the Rialto?" she cried, with a touch
of burlesque in her voice.

There was a very serious and even scared look on
Brownie's face.  "My dear," she said, "listen!  I
fear that the worst has happened."  In a sort of way,
Mrs. Keene reveled in the drama of it all.  "Mr. Franklin
was the first guest in the breakfast-room.
He was very quiet and short with the servants.  He
drank two cups of coffee and ate hardly anything.  He
was joined on the veranda by your father and they
walked up and down together talking earnestly for
thirty-six minutes.  They were then sent for by Aunt
Honoria.  They have been closeted——"

"Closeted is excellent," said Beatrix.  "Well done,
Brownie!  I thought so," she added mentally, with a
sharp intake of breath.

"They have been in Miss Honoria's room,—your
mother was there too,—until about ten minutes ago,
when Mr. Franklin came out alone, hurried downstairs
and out on the veranda, kicking one of the cane
chairs on his way into the garden.  My dear, God only
knows what took place in that interview!  Your
father, Aunt Honoria and your mother are still talking.
I don't understand—I really utterly fail to comprehend
how you can stand there with that smile on your
face, being in the midst of what seems to me to be a
very terrible situation."

Beatrix whistled a little tune to keep up her courage,
sat on the edge of a heavily carved table and swung her
legs.  "Well, what would you have me do?" she
asked, with consummate coolness.  "Stand on my
head, wail like one of the fat ladies in *Tristan and
Isolde*, or sink back on the sofa in an attitude of Early
Victorian despair?"  She got up and walked to one of
the open windows and stood for a moment in the sun
as though to get a little necessary warmth and
sympathy.  Then she went back to the table and looked
rather eagerly and girlishly at her altogether useless
but very faithful friend.  "What d'you think it all
means, Brownie dear?"

Mrs. Lester Keene gave the question her serious
consideration.  She was one of those women who looked
most ludicrous when most worried.  "If you ask me,"
she said, "I believe that Mr. Franklin has given you
away and told the truth."

This answer came as rather a shock to Beatrix,
but only for a moment.  "Well, I don't," she said.
"Shall I tell you why?"

"Indeed I wish you would."

"If Franklin had given me away he wouldn't have
kicked that cane chair."

Brownie gave another gesture of despair.  "If only
you had it in you to take things seriously."

"Seriously!  You dear old thing, I'm most serious.
I have every reason to be.  But that was a fine piece
of deduction and my spirits have gone up with a rush.
I'm now going to find Franklin, and I'll bet you a
diamond bracelet that he has stood by me like a Trojan
and is as angry as a caged hawk.  Now, the all-important
point is this: What hat shall I wear,—a simple,
naïve, garden thing, or this sophisticated effort?  I
must please his eye."

"Wear the smart hat," said Mrs. Keene.

Beatrix wore the other.  That almost went without
saying.

She sang on her way down-stairs.  She chose
Santuzza's song from *Cavalleria*, which she ragged in
the most masterly manner.  She did this to give the
impression, to anyone who might hear her, of
light-heartedness.  Her lithe, young, white-clad figure was
reflected by many mirrors as she passed.  She made
sure that none of her people were in the hall, and then
darted out to the veranda to look for Franklin.  The
members of the house-party had dispersed to pass the
morning away in tennis and with the rehearsals for
the pastoral.  She could see a number of people under
the trees to the left.  She swung round the veranda,
walking on the balls of her feet like a young Diana,
singing as she went, but darting quick, anxious glances
to the right and left.  There was no sign of Franklin.
She was about to make her way through the Dutch
garden, all aflame with flowers, to the summer-house
which overlooked the Sound shining beneath the sun,
when a footman came out carrying one of her mother's
petulant spaniels.

"Do you happen to know where Mr. Franklin is?"
she asked, pulling up short.

"Yes, madam."

The word made her heart pump.  "Well,—where?"

"Mr. Franklin ordered his car round ten
minutes ago, madam, and has driven off to New York."

New York!  Then he *had* given her away, after all,
and left her in the lurch.  What on earth was she going
to do now?





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XI

.. vspace:: 2

It was twenty minutes to one when Franklin brought
his car to a stop at the Willow Tree Club in West
Fifty-seventh Street.  Malcolm usually dropped in to
this rendezvous of writing men, artists and good
fellows generally to read the papers, about midday.
There was more than a chance that he might be
lunching there.

The city lay weltering under a pall of humidity.  As
about a great hive the people moved like tired bees.
Flags lay comatose around their posts, striped awnings
hung limply above the windows of those unhappy souls
who could not get away, and the buildings which
reared their heads up to the sky seemed to perspire.

Franklin enquired for his friend at the office, was
told that he had been in but had left half an hour
before, murmured a mere second-grade oath, and being
a member of the club himself, went into the reading
room.  He remembered that he needed certain things
from Spaldings', especially flies, and knowing from
long experience that he had better not trust to his
memory, decided to write a brief letter, then and there.

A pale man was sitting within easy reach of the
long magazine table.  He looked up with the slightly
antagonistic expression characteristic of men in clubs
who have had a room to themselves, and wondered
what sort of lucky creature the interloper was who
could afford to achieve such a superb tan in a world of
work and effort.

Franklin caught his eye, registered the fact that he
had never seen him before and didn't much care if he
never did again, and sat down at a writing table
behind a book-case in the corner of the room.

After a few moments he was aware of the entrance
of someone else because the pale man sang out a greeting,
but he had concentrated on his list and what was
said didn't reach him.  He searched his brain for
everything that he needed in the way of flies and
tackle, endeavored to make his writing more legible
than it usually was and was about to address the
envelope when he caught the name of Vanderdyke.  It
was not so much the mention of the name that made
him prick up his ears as the rather ribald tone in which
it was said.

"I was surprised to read all that glorification in this
morning's papers," he heard.  "Gossip had it that you
were very much in the running, York."

"I?  Oh, no, my dear fellow.  I had never entered
in the matrimonial stakes for that girl."

"Why not?  Beatrix Vanderdyke was worth winning,
surely?  Money to burn, beauty, youth,—what
else do you want?"

"I'm not a marrying man.  As they will be pretty
certain to say in my obituary notices, I am 'wedded
to my art.'  Besides, my dear fellow, I have the fortunate
knack of getting what I want without the consent
of the parson."  There was the kind of snigger that
only comes from men who belong to the lady-killer
tribe.

That, and the gross innuendo that preceded it, carried
Franklin to his feet.  The lust to hit had seized
him.  He stalked round the book-case into the middle
of the room.  His hands were clenched and he was
breathing deeply like a man who had been running.
He recognized in the tall, red-tied, flamboyant person
the man with whom he had seen Beatrix that night
when he had left the apartment house with Malcolm
Fraser.

"I was luckily in a position to overhear your
remark," he said quietly.  "I'm Franklin.  Miss
Vanderdyke is my wife."

The pale man drew in his breath, and a look of
excitement and pleasure flashed into his eyes.  The one
thing that made him feel that he had any blood was a
fight.

Sutherland York recovered himself quickly.  But for
the slight suggestion of whiteness about his mouth he
seemed to be perfectly at ease and nonchalant.  "I'm
glad that you're glad," he said, with a polite smile.
"Permit me to offer my congratulations upon your
very sudden and romantic marriage."

Franklin went a step or two nearer.  "If you were
not such a fat, unmuscular brute," he said, slowly, and
with the most careful distinctness, "if I shouldn't be
laying myself open to a charge of cruelty to animals,
I'd thrash you until you blubbered for mercy."  He put
his hands in his pockets.  "Even if I did, it would
have very little effect, except to send you to the dentist
and the beauty doctor.  Your sort of liar is never
properly cured."

He waited for a moment, obviously to give the
famous artist a chance to revenge himself in some way
for the insult that he had deliberately made as strong
as he could.

And the pale man eyed York expectantly, eagerly.

But York still smiled, although the whites of his
eyes took on a strange yellow tinge.  "I regret that I
do not possess the gift," he said, with a little bow,
"of making suitable tu quoque to cave-men."

Whereupon Franklin burst into a laugh, turned and
went out.

The pale man flung his magazine away.  He
resented being done out of legitimate excitement.

"A curiously uncivilized person," said York, putting
a shaky hand up to his vivid tie.  "Come to lunch,
my dear fellow."

"Thanks, no; I'm lunching at the Biltmore," said
the pale man, shortly.

It was when the portrait painter found himself alone
that the veneer fell from him like the silver paper from
a cheap cigar.  His face swelled and grew red.
"Curse these two autocrats," he cried inwardly.  "I
owed her something.  Now he's added to the debt.
Married, are they?  By God, we'll see about that.
Scandal?  Ah, that's where *I* come in."

Franklin drove home, and gave his goggles to the
chauffeur.

"Keep the car here," he said.  "I shall probably want
her again.  But come up and get something to eat."

It was something to drink that O'Connor wanted,
but he showed his excellent teeth in appreciation of
the thought and made things ship-shape.

The over-uniformed elevator man in the hall of the
apartment-house, which couldn't have been more pompous
and imposing if it had been that of an embassy or a
moving-picture palace, gave an exclamation of surprise
at the sight of Franklin.  "Didn't expect to see you
here, sir," he said, with that nice touch of deferential
camaraderie that is characteristic of all elevator men
in apartment houses where rents are so prohibitive that
they can boast of a waiting list.

"I didn't expect to *be* here," said Franklin.

"No, I s'pose not.  Well, is this hot enough for
you, sir?"

"I don't mind it.  Do you know if Mr. Fraser is in?"

"Mr. Fraser?  Yes, sir.  I took him up awhile ago.
He went out early."

Franklin nodded, got out and rang the bell.  He
had forgotten his latch-key as usual.  The elevator
man stood hesitating for a moment.  His smile was
so beaming that instinctively Franklin knew that if
his door wasn't opened quickly he would be obliged to
reply to very much undesired congratulations.  The
thing was all over the earth by that time, of course.
The door opened at the psychological moment,
however, and Franklin was spared.  All the same, he
turned before he went in, gave the man a nod, said,
"Thanks, all the same," and exchanged a very human
smile.  Good fellows, both.

The man who opened the door was unable to refrain
from raising his well-trained eyebrows, and his lips,
too, shaped themselves for felicitations.  But Franklin
gave him his hat and said: "Tell Mrs. Romanes that
I shall want lunch."  And then let out a loud and
ringing shout of "Who's aboard?"

Malcolm Fraser, who was sitting under an electric
fan in a suit of white duck, sprang to his feet.  "Good
Lord!" he said to himself, "what the——"

Franklin turned at the door.  "And, Johnson," he
called out, "bring me a claret and seltzer!  Sharp's
the word."  He glanced at the evening paper in
Fraser's hand and gave a snort.  There it was.  Oh,
Lord, yes!  In huge letters half-way down the front
page.  Far bigger than would have been given to an
ordinary war, or the discovery of a genuine cure
for consumption.  Photographs of bride and bridegroom,
too, of course, twined together with flourishing
lines and love-knots and orange blossoms.

Fraser shaped his lips.

"Now, look here, Malcolm," said Franklin, grimly,
"if you say it,—one word of it,—I'll heave this chair
at your head.  All the same, I'm darned glad you're
in, old man.  I never needed your level head so much
on earth."

An anxious look came into Fraser's blue and
palpably incorruptible eyes.  "Why?  There's nothing
wrong, is there?" he asked.

"Nothing wrong!"

But Johnson, who had dropped his usual heavy dignity
in the excitement of the moment and really moved,
came in with the claret and seltzer and Franklin cut
his remark short, took the refreshing-looking drink
and gave the glass back.

With his scrupulously clean-shaven and almost clerical
face wreathed in smiles, Johnson spoke: "Will
you allow me, sir, to offer you——"

Franklin jumped in quickly.  "Yes, thank you,
Johnson.  Very much obliged.  Leave the tray here."

"Very good, sir."  Johnson was hurt.  He had
framed what he considered to be a fine flowing
sentence.  It seemed a pity that he should not have been
permitted to give it full utterance.  On his way to the
door he resumed his usual iciness.

Franklin put two chairs close to the window.  "Sit
down, old man," he said, "and listen to this."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XII

.. vspace:: 2

Beatrix had courage.  Instead of shutting herself
up in her suite of rooms and hiding behind the excuse
of a headache until her family disclosed to her the
present condition of affairs, she took her place in the
rehearsals for the pastoral, was highly entertained by
the airs of the matinée idol, and presently met her
mother and father and Aunt Honoria at luncheon, with
her head as high as ever and laughter dancing in her eyes.

Imagine her relief when she found her mother cordial,
her father affectionate and Aunt Honoria peculiarly
gracious.  Obviously Franklin had not given her
away.  She was still the heroine of this family drama.
Up went her spirits.  Optimism came back like the sun
after a storm, and living once more for the moment and
leaving the immediate future on the knees of the gods
she became the life and soul of the house-party, teasing
the matinée idol, complimenting the producer, saying
little deferential things to her aunt, and playing the
game of badinage with the guests with all the finish and
daring of a champion.

Reaction set in early in the afternoon.  She was
tired.  The strain of living over a mine began to tell.
Mrs. Lester Keene's continual questions as to where
Franklin was and why he had gone to town got on her
nerves.  And so, leaving Brownie on the veranda as a
spy, she went to her rooms, gave orders that she was
not to be disturbed and composed herself to sleep like
a crown princess of a fictitious kingdom.

It was a little after four o'clock when Mrs. Keene
fluttered in, in a high state of excitement.  She found
Beatrix half-awake and half-asleep lying on her
pompous bed in the most charming dishabille, with
a little flush on her lovely face like the pink of apple
blossoms.

"My dear, my dear!" said Mrs. Keene, bending
over her.  "Mr. Franklin has just come back."

"Who has just come back, Brownie?"

"Mr. Franklin,—who else?"  Sometimes this patient
woman held that she had every right to show a
touch of exasperation.

"Oh, yes,—Franklin, the sportsman," said Beatrix.
"Heigh-ho!  I've been dreaming of dancing.  I invented
a new fox-trot and I danced it with Maurice
for an hour.  The band was perfect."

"Mr. Franklin glared at me and went up to his
room.  I didn't like the expression on his face at all.
Do please get up, dear.  Now, please do!"

Beatrix heaved a sigh, sat up, remained thinking for
several moments with her hands clasped about her
knees, and then sprang out of bed.  "Action!" she
said.  "Action!  Call Helene, please, Brownie.  I'm
seized with an insatiable curiosity to find out what's
happened.  Really and truly, if I had consulted a
specialist in the art of providing amusement for blasé
people he couldn't possibly have devised a more
wonderful scheme than mine for making life worth
living.  Now, Helene, pull yourself together.  Brownie
dear, ring down for a cup of tea.  All hands clear
for action!"

They did so to such good purpose,—Mrs. Keene
bustling herself into a state of hysterical agitation, and
Helene into breathlessness,—that barely half-an-hour
later Beatrix, in a new and delicious frock, sailed
downstairs, was told that Mr. Franklin had gone to the
summer-house and followed him, humming a little
tune.  She came upon him standing with his hands
thrust deep into his pockets and his eyes on the horizon.

"I knew I should find you here," she said, in a
ringing voice.  "Good afternoon!  How d'you do?"

Franklin turned and looked at her, and as he did
so Malcolm Fraser's outburst came back into his mind.
What a charming child she must have been before
the spoiling process had had time to take its full effect!
What a high-spirited, insolent, beautiful, untamed
thing she was now with the world at her feet.  "Good
afternoon!" he answered, with a curious quickening of
his pulse.

"Don't you love the view here?  It's wonderful.
I always come and drink it in when I feel the need of
being soothed."

"That's why you've come now, I suppose," said
Franklin, drily.

"No.  I'm utterly unruffled and at peace with the world."

"May I say 'I don't believe you' without hurting
your feelings?"

"Surely," said Beatrix.  "Say anything you like.
It's a free country,—a little too free perhaps."  She
bent down and picked a rose-bud and put it to her lips.

"Very good.  Then I'll add this at once.  I haven't
wasted time since I saw you last."

"Oh, how pleasant to think that I've had a good
effect upon you," she said, with a mischievous smile.
"You have the reputation of being a past-master in
the art of wasting time."

Franklin ignored the remark, although he noticed
that she had two of the most ravishing dimples he had
ever seen.  "You may not know it, but this morning
I went through a pretty bad hour with your people.  I
didn't actually lie to them, but I managed with a great
effort not to tell them anything that was true."

"Then I win my bet," said Beatrix.

"I don't know what you mean."

"It doesn't matter.  Tell me more.  You interest me."

"That's good," said Franklin, with a sort of laugh.
"After that,—and I dare say this is also news to
you,—I drove to town to get advice.  The end of
it all is that there's only one way in which you and I
can bring this farce to an end."

"No, no!" cried Beatrix, with mock horror at the
word, "not farce,—comedy, please."

Franklin would have given nearly all he possessed
for the pleasure of spanking that young woman until
she cried for mercy.  As it was, he pitched away his
cigarette, waited until the echo of her voice had died
away, and faced her up.  "Now listen!" he said,
sharply, "and if you are capable of it give some
consideration to me and my life and to the gravity of my
position and yours."

Beatrix waved her hand.

"We've got to go off at once," said Franklin, giving
each word its full importance,—"somewhere or
other, I don't know where,—and get married."

Beatrix almost jumped out of her skin.

Franklin went on quickly.  "For this reason:
I saw Sutherland York this morning at the club.  It
was perfectly obvious that he intends to make you pay
fully for something that you did to him.  From his
manner and his infernal cheek I gathered that he has
seen through the whole of this business, and he's going
to spread it about that this is a bluff.  He knows how
to do this sort of thing better than most men, I judge,
and it won't be many days before we find scandal
rearing its head at us.  Therefore, we must become at once
what you said we were,—married.  I'm sorry, but
there's no way out.  That over, you will go your
way and I mine, and from the moment that we separate
I will proceed to do that disgusting thing which
the laws make necessary for a man who wishes to be
divorced from his wife.  You will please be good
enough to make your plans to leave here not later
than to-morrow.  Some other girl must take your
part in the pastoral."

.. _`"It won't be many days before we find scandal rearing its head at us"`:

.. figure:: images/img-135.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "It won't be many days before we find scandal rearing its head at us."

   "It won't be many days before we find scandal rearing its head at us."

"Impossible," said Beatrix, quietly.

"Why?"

"Simply because it is.  I'm going to play that part
and I'm going to look very nice in the clothes.  Also,
I'm looking forward to a great deal of fun with the
matinée idol, shaved or unshaved."

Franklin whipped round upon her.  "It isn't for
you to say what you'll do or not do.  For your sake,
as well as for mine, I must take charge of this business,
and you'll please carry out my orders."

"Orders!"  She threw up her head.  "That's a
word that isn't and never will be contained in my
dictionary."

"You're wrong.  I've just added it to that volume,"
he said.

Beatrix gave a big laugh and stood up to him with
her chin tilted, her eyes dancing and a look of triumph
all over her lovely face.  "Take charge—you!" she
cried.  "Think again.  The whip is in my hand now
and I shall use it.  You dare not give me away.
You're afraid of the laughter that will follow you
wherever you go.  I think you're right.  But,—as
to being your wife, not in this world, my good sir, for
any reason that you can name.  I'd rather die."

And then she turned on her heel and swung away,
with the roses seeming to bend towards her as she
went.

Franklin watched her, with his hands clenched and
his mouth set.  "By God," he said to himself, "we'll
see about that!"  And he would have added more
angry words, thickly, to his mental outburst, if a new
feeling,—bewildering, painful, intoxicating,—had not
welled up to his heart.  All round him, as he stood
there in amazement, the air seemed to be filled with
the song of birds.  Then it came to him,—the
answer to the question he had put to himself impatiently
and jealously in his apartment in New York after
Malcolm Fraser's little story.  "I'm going to begin
to live—I've met the woman who can make me give
up freedom and peace of mind, take me to Heaven or
draw me down into Hell!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XIII

.. vspace:: 2

That rather charming haphazard air that is
characteristic of afternoon tea in an English country
house, to which young people from the tennis courts
and golf links slack in just as they are and find the
hostess presiding at a substantial table, assisted by all
the younger men who are born to carry cups and cake—they
always dance and generally play the piano—was
missing from the West Terrace of the Vanderdyke
mansion.  Mrs. Vanderdyke "dressed" for tea.
Her costume was a very beautiful and pompous affair,
not cut low enough for dinner or for breakfast but
quite low enough for the theatre, and she wore a
considerable quantity of jewels.  Brilliantly made up,
she sat under the awning with her back to the sun
chatting with royal condescension and studied charm.
It was one of the best things that she did.  It was
also her first public appearance of the day, most of
which had been devoted to a hard, stern and successful
fight against Anno Domini.

She was surrounded by members of the house party
who took themselves and her seriously and she, and
they, were under the expert attention of several
footmen.  Carefully chosen for their height and gravity
and truth to type, these men wore a very distinguished
livery with knee breeches and black silk stockings,
and they hovered from person to person with a rather
soothing quietude, moved by invisible machinery.

The vivacious little Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves who
talked continuously of "my daughter Lady
Bramshaw and that sweet old place in Hampshire" was
purring under the attentions of Admiral De Forrest
Wontner.  Although a grandmother, an event of
which she spoke as if it were rather a malicious lie,
Mrs. Reeves looked like a very young, blond, motion
picture star who tames cave-men and broncho-busters
with just one quick upward glance.  Her laughter
bubbled like boiling water and at odd moments she
clapped her hands and opened her blue eyes very wide
and pursed up her little red mouth.  Of her tiny
ankles she was very proud and hardly ever forgot to
expose them.  She underlined most of her words
with gushing emphasis and everything, from a sunset
to a new soap, was "*perfectly wonderful*."  Wontner
and she had been engaged to be married after a
dance at Annapolis somewhere in the seventies, but
while he was at sea on his first commission, Ettie
Stanton met, danced and ran away with young E. L. Reeves
of Baltimore and remained "terribly crazy"
about him to the day of his death.  It was indeed
a peculiarly happy marriage, blessed with three fine
manly boys and a girl who was always being mistaken
for her mother.  And now the retired sea-dog,
celebrated for his early Victorian gallantry, one of
the few remaining bucks in the country and a man of
wit, chivalry and golden heart, carried on a St. Martin's
summer flirtation with his former sweetheart,
the very sight of whom dispelled his accumulation of
years as the sun scatters the dew.  Most people were
amused at the affair and several were sympathetic.

Talking to Mrs. Vanderdyke, or rather listening
to Mrs. Vanderdyke, who either talked or went into a
trance, was handsome Percy Campbell, the man who
drank a bottle of whiskey before breakfast and played
golf all day in order to drink another before going to
bed.  He owned three streets in New York; he had
never done anything more serious than learn to play the
violin, about which he talked to everybody.  He was
now dangerously near fifty-three but since passing out
of Harvard he had not found time to practise more
than a dozen times.  He carried three beautiful
Strads wherever he went, however, and whenever he
became genuinely fuddled motored to the nearest
town, day or night, to buy a new stack of strings and
rosin.  His wife went with him as well as his violins
and received much less consideration although many
more cases.  They were popular people and Campbell's
shooting box in Scotland near Cupar, Fife, from
which his remote ancestors strayed, was always full.
No altogether Scot could compete with him in his
devotion to the national beverage.

Then there were Mrs. Lucas D. Osterpath, in
mourning for her son who had just married a Folly
from the New Amsterdam Theatre roof; the William
Bannermans, recently remarried after a most
amusing divorce; Philip Kawbro in his inevitable blue
and white striped collar and yellow waistcoat; Regina
Westerhaus, as regal as her name, but still a spinster
at the end of three seasons, and the Hon. Mrs. Claude
Larpent, the centre of attraction for those three vieux
marcheurs, Major Thresher, Roger Peek and Courtney Borner.

The young people avoided this function and got
whatever refreshment they needed from the bachelors'
house.

It was to this terrace that Beatrix made her way
after flinging her triumphant refusal at Franklin.
All the elation of a victor ran through her veins.
What did she care about the possibility either of being
blackmailed or shown up by Sutherland York?  Why
should she give the smallest consideration to Pelham
Franklin or join him in any plan to save his name
from scandal?  He had said an unforgivable thing
to her in her bedroom that memorable night, the sting
of which still made her smart.  She gloried in
having been able to make him pay something on account
of that huge debt and with characteristic high-handedness
turned a Nelsonian eye to the black cloud that
was moving up over the horizon.  She had always
taken chances.  It was part and parcel of her nature.
With a growing sense of exhilaration and the feeling
that she was merely at the beginning of a great
adventure she took a chance again.  If the storm was
fated to burst and Franklin gave her away to her
parents, well, let it burst.  There would be an
epoch-making family row, and unless her wits protected her
again she would be sent into the back of beyond.
That was an appalling prospect which, however, she
pushed aside.  She trusted to her usual luck to carry
her out of this tangle, if only by the skin of her teeth.
The great point at the moment was that she had scored
over Franklin and left him impotent.  But for that
parting remark of his before he left her room she
might have considered the possibility of falling in
with his plan.  The humiliation of being made to obey
his orders might have been lived down, greatly as she
resented humiliation.  But when it came to such a
deliberate attack upon her vanity—that was
altogether different.

Miss Honoria Vanderdyke, who had been hard at
work with a secretary all the afternoon organizing a
new society to look after women released from
penitentiaries, came out as Beatrix was passing.  The
graceful, white-haired woman put her arm round the
girl's shoulders.  "I've never seen you look so happy,
dear child," she said, with an unusual touch of tenderness.

Beatrix smiled at her and in her mind's eye saw
Franklin's expression as he stood outside the
summer-house with her refusal in his face.  "I have every
reason to be happy, Aunt Honoria," she answered, in
a ringing voice.  "Life has great compensations."

They fell into step on their way to tea—the elder
woman a little envious of what appeared to be her
niece's romantic love affair, because her own had ended
tragically and left her with a broken heart.  Must a
woman necessarily break her heart before she will
devote her life to the relief of other people's
sufferings?  An old philosopher, who must have been
something of a misogynist, once defined woman's happiness
"as that state in which all their immediate desires were
gratified, a self-satisfaction which left them blind to
the fact that other people littered the earth."  Maybe
he was right.

Aunt Honoria looked rather searchingly at the
beautiful girl at her side who, alone among all the
human beings that she knew, possessed the magic
carpet.  "Why do you talk of compensations?" she
asked.  "At your age, in your position?  You puzzle
me, child."

Beatrix laughed the question off.  "Oh, that's a
long story.  One of these fine days, when I am overmastered
by a desire to confess, I'll tell you all about it.
Look, isn't mother wonderful?  It's almost absurd for
me to call her by anything but her Christian name."

Aunt Honoria smiled a little dryly.  "My dear,"
she said, "all women could be as unnaturally young as
your mother is if they gave up as much time to it.  Tell
me about that very striking person who is completely
hemmed in by old men."

"Mrs. Larpent?  Isn't she attractive?  Isn't she
exactly like one's idea of a favorite in the Court of
Louis Quinze?  I don't know anything about her yet.
Wait until to-night and I will give you my
impressions."  She kissed her hand to her aunt, touched her
arm with an affectionate and respectful finger and
crossed the terrace to Ida Larpent's chair.  "May I
join your admirers?" she asked.

With a curious smile Mrs. Larpent drew closer the
chair out of which Courtney Borner had done his best
to spring.  "I should like nothing so much," she said.
It might be most useful to become the friend of the
wife of the man who had stirred her calculating heart
to love.  Who could tell?

In the meantime having immediately gained Mrs. Vanderdyke's
permission to ask a friend of his to dine
and sleep, Franklin shut himself up in the telephone
room, asked for the number of his apartment in New
York and told Johnson to call Malcolm Fraser.

"Old man," he said, when his friend's voice came
rather anxiously over the wire, "will you do something
for me?  Will you get a car at once and pack your
things for dinner and sleeping and rattle down here as
quick as you can?  I can't say anything now except
that I need you worse than ever....  Thanks.  I
knew you would.  So long."

In a secret corner of his staunch heart Fraser had
locked up his love for Beatrix.  He was now to be
consulted again as to how to put things right between her
and his best pal.  It's a queer world and full of
paradox.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XIV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XIV

.. vspace:: 2

A few minutes later Franklin was exuberantly
welcomed to tea by little Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves.  "I'm
*terribly* glad to see you," she cried.  "Come and tell
me *all* about *everything*.  I was *distracted* when I
heard that you had gone to town.  Admiral, have you
*ever* seen such an *intriguing* tie as the boy's wearing?"

Poor little comic lady!  She had much the same
effect on Franklin as that diabolical machine that drills
holes in steel girders.  He sat down at her side and
made ready to endure the continual tapping of her
uncontrollable tongue because he could see Beatrix with
the sun on her hair and the nape of her neck.  He
didn't quite know why, but he was queerly disconcerted
and annoyed to see that she was in animated conversation
with Ida Larpent and the fact that he received an
enigmatical glance through the latter lady's half-closed
eyes did much to add to this uncomfortable feeling.

"I've been talking to Mrs. Vanderdyke about your
unconventional behavior, Mr. Franklin," continued
Mrs. Reeves.

"Unconventional," echoed Franklin, listening with
half an ear.  "In what way?"

"Well, isn't it the usual thing for two young people
to enjoy a honeymoon after they are married, especially
such young people?"

The word honeymoon came strangely to Franklin.
If it had been mentioned the day before in connection
with this extraordinary business it would have caused
him to scoff inwardly and do his best to pass it over
with a forced smile.  As it was, on top of his sudden
realization that in Beatrix was the woman who called
him to live bigly and love to distraction, but who had
refused with utter scorn even to go through the form
of marriage with him, it acted like the sting of a knife.

But the word also gave him an idea and Mrs. Reeves'
remark about having spoken to Mrs. Vanderdyke
a new plan.  For some little time he remained
where he sat while the little woman babbled, going from
subject to subject in her characteristically unconcentrated
way.  He nodded where he thought that a nod
was due, smiled frequently and threw in a yes or no as
it seemed necessary.  Finally he got up, when the
Admiral drew his old sweetheart's attention once more
to himself, and went over to Aunt Honoria.

"May I take you for a little exercise in the garden?"
he asked.

"With great pleasure," she said, rising at once.  "I
have been trying to catch your eye for some minutes.
I want your advice."

As they passed Beatrix she had the audacity to
throw at Franklin a most connubial smile.  It gave the
elderly lady a thrill and very nearly threw Franklin off
his feet.  He heard the contralto of Mrs. Larpent's
voice and Beatrix's ringing reply: "Yes, he's a
darling."  Ye gods, but this girl must surely be a
surprise to Nature herself.

Miss Vanderdyke refrained from saying a word
until she was out of earshot of the cheerful group.
Then she drew up at the top of the Italian steps that
led into the geometrical gardens.  "I want you to
listen to this extraordinary epistle, Pelham," she said.
"It was sent to my sister-in-law before she left her
rooms this afternoon."  She drew it out of its envelope
and read it in her clear, incisive voice.

.. vspace:: 2

"Dear Mrs. Vanderdyke,

.. vspace:: 1

"I have just received a telegram from a leading motion
picture concern in Los Angeles offering me very big
money to leave to-night to do a picture for them.  Business
before pleasure, you know, so I have just time before
making a train to New York to write these few lines.  I
am sorry for the pastoral, but doubtless you will be able to
find a substitute for me, though not, I fear, with an equal
sense of rommance.  Thanking you for your kindness
and asuring you that I shall not require any fee for
rehearsals.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   "Sinceerely,
       "BRIAN YOUNG."

.. vspace:: 2

"Good Lord!" said Franklin.  "Pretty cool piece
of impertinence."

"I thought so.  And look, he spells romance with
two 'm's,' and assuring with one 's.'  He also makes
the inappropriate word, sincerely, look even quainter by
a superfluous 'e' in the middle.  Are all matinée idols
quite so illiterate, I wonder?"

"Hardly," said Franklin.  "What's to be done?"

Aunt Honoria shrugged her shoulders.  "Your
mother-in-law and I, after consultation with my
brother, who showed even less than his usual interest in
the matter, have decided to cancel the pastoral,
especially as we have all been discussing the
advisability of your taking Beatrix away."

"For a honeymoon?" asked Franklin involuntarily.

"Exactly," Aunt Honoria gave a little laugh.
"Because you two young despots have broken the conventions
by this secret marriage, I think it follows that
you should do something to stop gossip and comment
by conforming to an old custom.  What do you say,
my friend?"

Franklin put a curb upon his eagerness.  To get
Beatrix to sea on his yacht—that was the thing.  It
would give him a chance, just a chance, to win his way
to Beatrix's untouched and wilful heart, and go far to
show York that his intuition and cunning reasoning
were wrong.

"If you think so," he said, "I am perfectly willing
to fall in with your wishes."

"That's extremely nice of you!"

Franklin showed his excellent teeth and gave a little
bow.  But not being a lady's man he failed to produce
an Elizabethan compliment or one that might have
proved that there is gallantry even in these careless
days.

Aunt Honoria took the word for the deed, and
Franklin's arm down the steps.  The sun was dipping
into the Sound and the whole panorama of sky was
striped and splashed with red.  Young voices drifted
toward them from the tennis courts and a flock of wild
ducks high up in a wide V flew rapidly above their
heads.  The scent of flowers rose up to them as they
walked and a very golden day slipped gently into
evening.

"I don't know what Beatrix will have to say about
it," said Franklin.

There was a rather dry laugh.  "Oh, I had not
forgotten that Beatrix, although happily married, is a
factor to be consulted."

Franklin laughed too.  "No," he said, with several
memories very clear in his mind, "one could hardly
forget that."

And then the tall, white-haired, dignified woman,
about whom there was an intellectual humanity very
rarely met with, did an unexpected thing.  She stopped
suddenly and stood in front of Franklin, eye to eye
with him.  "My dear Pelham," she said, with a touch
of propheticism, "you will not find the woman in
Beatrix, nor will she have discovered the woman in
herself, until that precious moment when, quite
conscious of her abdication of a mock throne, she falls
in with your wishes like a simple trusting child.
When that moment comes, if ever it does, I shall give
praise to God, because the woman in Beatrix will be
very sweet and beautiful."

And then they continued on their way through the
sleepy gardens.

"So shall I," said Franklin quietly.

"The fact that the pastoral will not be given will
help us considerably.  Beatrix, who, by the way, has
taken small part in the rehearsals, will turn for
amusement to something else.  Her father and mother both
desire that she shall put an end to gossip and give our
good friends no further excuse to hold her up as the
most unconventional girl of the day.  That sort of
reputation so rightly belongs to young women of the
stage whose success depends far more on advertisement
than talent.  Where is your yacht?"

"Lying in the river, fully commissioned."

"Oh, well, then everything is easy!  Surely nothing
could be more delightful for Beatrix than to make a
cruise under these romantic circumstances.  Leave it
all to me, my dear boy.  I'll see that you get your wife
to yourself, never fear."

Beatrix ran her arm round Aunt Honoria's waist.
"Well," she said, with the smile that she always used
when it was urgently necessary to win a heart, "am I
to be allowed in this conference, or am I a back number
in the family now?"  She had watched this intimate
talk between Miss Vanderdyke and Franklin with
growing uneasiness.  Finally, in the middle of one of
Ida Larpent's best stories, she had sprung up, made
short work of the distance between herself and them
and broken into the conversation.

"We were talking about you, my dear," said Aunt
Honoria.

"No!" cried Beatrix.  "Impossible!"

Franklin caught her mocking glance and dug his
heels into the path.

"We were making plans for you, charming plans,
honeymoon plans as a matter of fact, and as the pastoral
is cancelled you will no doubt fall in with them
with enthusiasm."

"The pastoral cancelled?  Why?"  The girl's
voice was incredulous.  "But I've been to all the
trouble of getting a special costume, nearly all the
younger people in the house-party have been chosen on
purpose."

"Our friend the matinée idol has flown away to pick
up a bigger seed elsewhere."

A flush of anger colored Beatrix's face and her eyes
glinted.  "He said something to me this morning
about motion pictures.  I thought he was endeavoring
to advertise himself.  I never dreamed he would have
the impertinence to chuck *us*!"

"Well, his withdrawal simplified things, my dear,
as I will tell you later.  Come to my room ten minutes
before dinner and I will give you the latest family plan.
In the meantime, two's company, and I will get a few
words with my old friend, the Admiral, who is wandering
about like a lost soul."  Aunt Honoria nodded and
with her shoulders as square as those of a well-drilled
man, went gracefully to where the septuagenarian lover
was either chewing the cud of bitter reflection or
recovering from a long bout of exaggerated and
over-emphasized commonplaces.

And then Beatrix turned sharply to Franklin.  "Be
good enough to tell me what all this means," she said.

Franklin showed his teeth in his peculiar silent laugh.
"Why put a pin through Miss Vanderdyke's little surprise?"

Beatrix intended to know.  Her curiosity was
alight.  It was so obvious that she had been under
discussion and as the family was to be dragged in, so
certain that she was going to be coerced into something
totally against her wishes.  But she changed her tactics.

"Oh, look," she cried, "isn't that sail perfectly
charming against the sky?"

"Corking," said Franklin, not looking at it, but at
her.  By Jupiter, how lovely, how desirable, but how
amazingly perverse she was!  A man would have not
lived for nothing who could break her and make her,
even if she never returned his love.

"It's a good world," she said, with a little sigh,
waiting to catch Franklin on the hop.  "Sometimes I'm
consumed with a longing to be right away in the middle
of the sea—to get even with things."

She caught him.  It was uncanny.  "The chance is
yours," he said, easily beaten.  "It has been decided
that we go for our honeymoon on the *Galatea*."

She whipped around.  "Oh, so that's it, is it?
You've been working up a conspiracy to get me on your
yacht so that you may escape from gossip?  I see.
Quite clever to enrol my family against me, but my
answer to you this afternoon holds good."

For all the love that had come upon him so suddenly,
Franklin lost patience.  He put his hand on her arm
and held her in a close grip.  "Let it hold good," he
said.  "Stand out against being my wife until you
see sense and learn that others deserve consideration
besides yourself.  But conform now to your people's
wishes and put York off the scent.  That's all you're
required to do at the moment."

"Take your hand away," said Beatrix icily.  "This
is not a woman's bedroom.  I can call for help here
remember."

Franklin retained his grip.  He was very angry.
"You fool," he said, too completely out of control to
choose his words.  "Look at this thing sanely.  Come
out of your house of cards and play the game like a
grown woman.  The scandal that drove you into
taking advantage of me will be ten thousand times worse
if York gets to work."

"That doesn't worry me," said Beatrix calmly.
"I'll thank you for my arm."

"You don't count," said Franklin.  "Consideration
must be given to your people and to me."

"I'm perfectly willing and even anxious to protect
my people, but"—and she gave him two fearless
eyes—"I see no reason why I should worry about you."

"Why not?  Where would you be now but for my
having come to the rescue?"

Beatrix gave a most tantalizing laugh.  "When you
learned to play the trumpet you were a good pupil,
Mr. Franklin.  Any other man would have done as
well, you know."

Franklin dropped her arm.  "Good God," he said,
"you beat me.  I can't compete with you.  I might
just as well try to drive sense into a lunatic."

It was good, it was worth being alive to Beatrix to
see this man, this fine, strong, clean-built,
square-shouldered man, who had dared to conceive the remote
possibility of humbling her for what she had done, who
had had the sublime audacity to believe that he could
teach her a lesson, standing impotent before her,
self-confessedly her inferior, when it came to wits.  She
showed it in her smile, in her almost bland and child-like
glee, in her frank pleasure.  He had said a thing
to her that no man should ever have said to a woman
and expect to be forgiven.  She would remember it as
long as she lived and make him pay for it and pay and
pay again.

"Even lunatics have their sane moments," she said.
"Mine come whenever I think about you.  Isn't that
Malcolm Fraser on the terrace?  How delightful.
Suppose we go back now, after yet another of our little
wrangles, shall we?"

She stood silhouetted against the darkening sky,
with her hands behind her back, her head held high, the
very epitome of utter carelessness, the last word in
individualism, the thoughtless and selfish enjoyment of
the moment and of life generally so long as it was
without responsibility, concentration, or a call to do
anything for anybody but herself.

"Count me out, please," said Franklin.  "You must
get out of this business in your own way.  I shall leave
here to-night and go to sea.  I wish you luck."

He bowed, turned on his heel and walked away, and
as he went, he hoped that he might never see that girl
again.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XV

.. vspace:: 2

"Now, old man," said Franklin when at last he
found himself with Malcolm Fraser, "let's get out of
earshot of this chattering crowd and come up to
things."

"The sooner the better," said Fraser.

They left the hall and passed the ball-room, to which
everyone with a sense of rhythm, even if with no ear
for music, had been drawn by the irresistible syncopation
of a large banjo band of colored musicians.  The
drummer was already committing demented acts upon
a scavenger collection of tins, boxes, and whistles.
They went out into the moonlight and through the
gardens to the summer house.

The dynamic energy which radiated from Franklin
did much, so far as Fraser was concerned, to spoil the
exquisite peace and lassitude of the night.  All the poet
in him gave him the keys with which to open some of
the unnoticed doors to Nature's storehouses of beauty
and called him to stand very still and fill his brain and
soul with the sight that met his eyes.  He had never
felt prouder of his country than when he revelled in the
picture of the moon-touched Sound, magic with the
reflection of a multitude of stars, and ran his eyes along
the dim outline of shore to his right and caught the
bright eyes of thousands of cheerful lights.  It seemed
to him that Nature, with the proud consciousness of
her genius as an artist, had outdone herself in setting a
scene for the human comedy in which he had been cast
for the second male part.  Water and moon and stars,
the mystery of night, the feeling of illimitable space,
the scent of sleeping flowers, the whisper of fairies, all
as old and even older than the hills—surely this was
an appropriate setting for the working out of the
ancient and inevitable drama, the ever-recurring clash,
between a man and a woman.

"Go ahead, Pel," he said.  "This morning in New
York you left this strange story of yours at the point
where the entrance of York into it made you decide to
marry Beatrix.  I have not got the novelist's brain so
I can't for the life of me see what can have happened
in the chapter that has been begun since then."

"My dear chap," said Franklin, flinging the end of
a cigarette over the wall, "don't you know that more
impossible things are done every hour in life than ever
find their way into books?"

"Yes, I know that."

"Well, the thing that I should have thought the
very limit of impossibility happened here, on this very
spot, this afternoon when I got back.  Take a guess."

Fraser's answer came quickly.  "Beatrix loves you."

There was no mirth in Franklin's laugh.  "Guess
again."

"You love Beatrix."

"A precious clever fellow, aren't you?  What the
devil made you get to love so quickly?  I expected you
to flounder through a dozen guesses and then be wide
of the mark."

"A man and a woman and love," said Fraser.
"Why hire a detective to make a mystery of that?
It's any poet's job."

Franklin kicked the wall viciously.  "There's nothing
for a poet in this," he said.  "I do love this girl.
I wish to God I didn't.  I'd give ten years of my life
if she left me as cold as a flapping fish.  You know
what we talked over this morning.  We decided that
there was only one way for me to get out honestly of
that fool maze in which I'd been caught.  The reasons
were pretty obvious.  My family and the Vanderdykes
were at the mercy of that glossy charlatan and because
of the ungovernable impulses of this ... this—what
in thunder *is* the right word for Beatrix?  I give it up."

"Undiscovered girl.  Will that do?"

"No," said Franklin.  "Not a bit like it."

"Well, then, dollar-ruined, misnamed victim of a
false civilization.  How's that?"

"Too long and too pedantic.  I wanted one word.
However, let it go.  What's it matter?  It's a waste
of words to describe her and a waste of time to
consider her.  When I put things to her plainly and
bluntly, she told me to go to the devil.  I sent for you
to use your influence, hoping, as of course you can see,
that she might come down to solid things and see
sense,—hoping too that, married, I might be able to force
my way into her heart, if she's got one."

"Oh, yes, she's got one."

"I doubt it.  Very highly finished watch works is
all the heart she's got.  However, since that first talk
we've had another and that's made your kindness in
coming here utterly useless."

Fraser turned eagerly towards his friend.  He had
no hope of ever being any more to Beatrix than an art
student can be to a very perfect Gainsborough at which
he gazes from behind a rail.  He could neither buy her
nor win her.  She was completely out of his reach.
Not able to marry her himself, he would rather see
her married to Franklin than any living man.
"Why?" he asked.

"Because I'm off.  I'm out.  I'm through.  I'm not
an expert in love.  As a matter of fact I'm a boob in
the business.  It's new to me.  But it's hit me good
and hard, old son, and with any encouragement or with
half a chance, I'd go for it with everything decent
that's in me."

"Go for it," said Fraser, with an odd thrill in his
voice.  "You have all the luck."

Franklin shook his head.  "No.  I've done.  She
has no use for me.  She mocks me, twists me round
her finger, holds me up by the scruff of the neck, gets
more fun out of me than if I were a red-nosed
comedian and nearly drives me to murder.  I just *have*
to get away.  I'm going to-night."

"To-night?  But my dear old Pel, you—you only
found out that you loved her a few hours ago."

"Quite long enough."

"But, good Lord, you *must* let me see what I can
do.  When we were kids I used to have some influence
with her.  That is, once or twice she did things
for my sake.  To chuck the whole thing now,
when it looks far more serious than ever,—why
Pel, my dear man, talk about ungovernable impulses——"

"Oh, I know," growled Franklin.  "We're both
tarred with the same brush.  We're both money-maniacs.
However, in perfectly cold blood, standing
here to-night, I assure you that I am better out of her
way.  I can't help her.  She won't be helped.  She
doesn't give a red cent for anything that may happen.
All she cares about is just to go laughing through the
moment.  Well, let her.  But she'll have to go alone.
I love her in the sort of way that makes me want to
choke her when she starts her tricks.  That's the truth.
I'm sorry.  I don't want to be unsporting and all that
but, Malcolm, she isn't safe with me."  His voice
shook as he said this thing.

"Wait until the morning," said Fraser urgently.
"Let me show her the mess she's in."

"Can't be done," said Franklin.  "I've told Albert
to put my things in the car and I'm off to town right
away.  I shall go aboard in the morning and weigh
anchor at two o'clock.  I'll wait for you till then and
not a second later."  He laid his hand on Fraser's
shoulder.  "Get your things and come now.  There's
nothing to do here, worse luck."

"In any case," said Fraser, "I want to have a bit
of a talk with Beatrix now that I'm here."

"All right.  Well, then, so long, Malcolm.  It was
mighty good of you to come.  Don't fail to be in time
to-morrow."  He turned and went, walking quickly
and waking all the flowers with his energy.

Fraser watched him go,—his tall, wiry,
square-shouldered, muscular figure thrown out against the
moon-silvered stone-work of the terrace.  Then he
turned back to the scene that filled his brain with
imagery and that inarticulate worship which is offered
by all good students to the Master for the perfection
of His work.  The silence sang.  Many of the shore
lights had gone out.  But the moon rode high and the
stars were at their brightest.  The faint breeze had
fallen away.  Fraser raised his hand above his head in
a sort of salute and then wheeled round and followed
Franklin toward the elephantine house that made a
huge black patch against the transparent sky.  As he
got nearer to it the music of a Hula-Hula thing came
to him,—a fascinating, hip-moving mixture that
suggested both Hawaii and Broadway and he could see the
dancers flitting past the open windows of the ball-room.
Among them was Beatrix, in the arms of one of those
spineless semi-professional dancing men, a new,
curious and uncomfortable breed that has developed in
New York since the craze carried it on to its feet.
Her mouth was open and her teeth gleaming and her
young body moving with exquisite grace and ease.

Fraser went up to one of the windows and watched
her until the tune came to an end.  Every man has a
dream.  Somewhere or other in the life of men, all
men, there is one precious, priceless thing tucked away
in the secret drawer of the heart.  Beatrix, as a little,
frank, fearless girl, lived and was glorified, for Fraser.

He allowed himself just one short sigh.  "And
now," he said to himself, "to show for the first time in
history that a poet can be a man of action for the
sake of a friend.  If I fail, I'll, yes, I'll eat and drink
my self-filling pen."

.. vspace:: 2

It was one o'clock the next day when Franklin left
the chart-room of the *Galatea*, where he had been
planning out a cruise with the skipper.  He went on deck.
All hands had been busily at work since early morning,
cleaning and polishing.  The yacht looked like a
beautiful woman, fresh from the hands of manicure and
maid.

There was a shout of "Galatea ahoy" from the port
side.  Franklin took no notice.  It was probably the
arrival of the last boat-load of stores.  He stood with
his arms behind him and his mind back in the Vanderdyke
gardens with the afternoon sun aslant upon them,
and as he watched the retreating figure of the imperious
girl to whom he was less than the dust, a mere pawn
to be moved when it was necessary in her game, the
amazing thrill which had discovered to him the love
that was to be the greatest thing in his life, ran all over
him again, and shook him with its strength and passion.

Well, he was bolting from her, bolting because he
was afraid.  It was the act of a coward, perhaps, but
that girl had the power of making queer creatures of
men.  And he did not intend to be one of them.  That
was all.

A laugh, taken up by the breeze and thrown past his
ear like the petal of a flower, turned him round.
Unable to believe his eyes, he saw Beatrix, Ida Larpent
and Malcolm Fraser, standing on deck, while luggage
was being piled about them.  Fraser waved his hand
triumphantly.  Mrs. Larpent gave one of her slow
smiles and Beatrix, with the expression of an angel and
a touch of timidity and even humbleness that Franklin
had never seen before, came forward.  "Come aboard,
sir," she said, with a very proper salute.  "Malcolm
showed me the error of my ways last night and like
a good and faithful wife I am going on my honeymoon."

And then the old Beatrix returned and a mocking
smile turned Franklin's heart to ice.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XVI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XVI

.. vspace:: 2

Franklin was a man who inherited a horror of
scenes.  If he saw a crowd in the street reinforced by
running figures he turned on his heel and went the
other way.  Anything in the nature of an argument
sent him out into the street.  He was at any time
perfectly willing to fight, either for the sake of the
exercise or to punish an offender, but he shied at a fracas,
a domestic wrangle or the remote possibility of placing
himself in a position of being surrounded by many
people all talking at the same time.  He had camped
in solitary places, and communed with nature in her
forest cathedrals.  He liked the silences.

The moment that this amazing boat-load came
aboard the *Galatea* he saw himself plunged into a
scene, if ever there was one.  Malcolm Fraser was
bursting with information and explanations.  Mrs. Larpent
gave every indication of the fact that she felt
that some justification for her presence was required,
and behind Beatrix's impish laugh there was a
high-spirited story waiting to be told.

Just for one moment Franklin stood bare-headed in
front of Beatrix completely and utterly nonplussed.
She was the last person on earth whom he had expected
to see on the yacht.  He had, indeed, made up his mind
never to see her again.—to cut and run from the pain
of her, the allurement, the overwhelming attraction.
He gazed at her as if she had fallen from the clouds.
He had been treated like a child again, "used" once
more, and he was angry, but as he took in her charming
appearance, the calm audacity of her expression,
the indescribable loveliness of her face, he rejoiced.
Then he pulled himself together and tried to perform
the operation of smiling as a new husband should.
"You're in excellent time," he said, and gave a shout,
caught the eye of the mate and beckoned him to come
forward.  "Get everything ready for Mrs. Franklin
and Mrs. Larpent.  Look alive and have Mr. Fraser's
things taken down to his stateroom at once."

The mate was English.  "Aye!  Aye, sir!"  He
was also young and sandy and somewhat precocious,
and from the tail-end of his eye there came a look of
deep admiration for the owner's wife, whom he now
saw for the first time.

"Stop a minute," said Franklin.  "I don't see anything
of your maid, Beatrix.  You'll never be able to
get along without her."

"You're very thoughtful," said Beatrix, graciously.
"Anyone would think you had been on a honeymoon
before."  And then she laughed.  "For some reason
or other Helene is very much afraid of you.  I
brought her, but evidently she's hidden behind
something,—the baggage probably."  She called "Helene,"
and the pretty face and compact figure of the young
Breton appeared reluctantly from behind several huge
innovation trunks, hat-boxes, boot-cases, cabin-trunks,
and the Lord knows what besides,—enough, as it
seemed to Franklin, to supply half a dozen wives with
unnecessaries.

"Perhaps you'll go below with Mr. Jones and make
your own arrangements.  Otherwise, I'm afraid you
won't be very comfortable."

Beatrix smiled in her best social manner.  "It's too
bad to put you to all this inconvenience and worry,"
she said.  "I'm so sorry, but I dare say we shall all
fit in with perfect ease and comfort.  More like a
young liner than a yacht, isn't she?  And who named
her the *Galatea*?  So terribly suitable, as little
Mrs. Reeves would say.  Lead the way, Mr. Jones."

There was a touch of almost navy etiquette about the
way in which the mate saluted and obeyed.

Beatrix beckoned to Helene, who was as frightened
as a rabbit at sight of dogs, and the little party went
below.  Franklin watched her go, saw her look about
her with a touch of perfectly simple excitement, envied
the sun as she put up her face to catch it and the
friendly smile with which she rewarded the mate.  "If
only," he said to himself, "if only——"

And then Mrs. Larpent came forward.  There was
a most curious little smile round her very red lips and
wide nostrils, and a whole dictionary of meaning in
her eyes.  "You must be a little surprised to see——"

Franklin cut her short.  "Not at all.  Delighted!"
he said, bluntly.  "Would you be good enough to
follow Beatrix and take your choice of staterooms?  I
will endeavor to get a stewardess for you before we
sail."

"Thanks, so much!" said Ida Larpent, making no
attempt to disguise her sense of triumph at being on
the yacht.  "How delightful it will be to get away
from the land and its people for a time.  I congratulate
you on the *Galatea*."

Franklin waited until she had disappeared and then
strode over to Malcolm Fraser, who was watching
the arriving baggage, took his arm and marched him
out of ear-shot of the crew.  "What the devil have
you done?  You call yourself a friend and land me in
this mess!"  His voice was thick with anger.

Fraser looked as astonished as he felt.  "But you
called me down to the Vanderdykes to do this very
thing," he said.  "I've done it.  What's the trouble?"

"You colossal idiot!" said Franklin.  "Haven't
you imagination enough to see it for yourself?  Have
you forgotten every blessed thing that I told you last
night?  You haven't persuaded this girl to come
aboard to oblige her people or to keep my name out of
the papers.  She doesn't give a solitary curse whether
hers is in them or not.  She's come just to have the
satisfaction of playing with fire, and has brought Ida
Larpent because she knows instinctively that she is the
last woman on earth I care to see her with or have
on the *Galatea*."

All the way back to town, Fraser had been congratulating
himself on having achieved the impossible.
He opened his mouth to speak.

"I think you'd better dry up," said Franklin, "and
give me time to cool down.  At this moment I feel like
pitching you overboard."  He turned on his heel, went
forward and stood, with his hands thrust into his
pockets, gazing down the river.

Like all poets, Malcolm Fraser was a very sensitive
person.  He was deeply hurt at the way in which his
efforts were received by the man for whom he had a
very deep regard.  Like all poets,—even those who
confine themselves to gloomy verses, to graves and
broken hearts and wind in the trees,—he was an
optimist.  He had made up his mind that he had only to
get Beatrix away to sea with Franklin to bring
romance into their very strange, exotic story.  He held
the belief,—shared by many philosophers,—that in
most cases love is the outcome of propinquity,—especially
at sea.  He didn't possess much, but he
would give it all to watch the girl he loved become a
woman and find herself for love of his friend.  He
threw a sympathetic glance at the square shoulders of
his friend, and went below to his own familiar
stateroom.  From this he could hear Beatrix's merry laugh.
She, at any rate, seemed to be happy, and that was
something.  He could not for the life of him
understand,—with his friend's confession still warm in his
memory,—why, he, too, was not in the seventh heaven
of delight at the fulfilment of what had yesterday
seemed to be a dream.  To the amazing unconventionality
of the whole affair he gave no thought.  He was
an artist.

Finally, and with a huge effort to master his anger
and amazement, joy and sense of impending trouble,
Franklin summed things up to the best of his ability:
"Here's Beatrix," he said to himself, "not married to
me,—supposedly on our honeymoon.  I love her like
an idiotic school-boy—she loathes me like the devil.
Here's Ida Larpent, out for everything that she can
get, playing her own hand with all the cunning of a
card-sharp.  Here's Fraser, one of the very best, a
man with a heart of gold to whom friendship means
loyalty, with a love for Beatrix which has outlasted his
boyhood.  And almost in sight of us all is the open
sea.  Great Scott, what a mess!"

And then Captain McBean stood at his elbow.
"Orders stand, sir?"

"Of course," said Franklin.  "But before we put
off do what you can to get a stewardess aboard for
Mrs. Larpent.  You had better send Jones ashore.
He has a wide smile and does things pretty quick,
and,—wait a second, Captain,—let him bring back all
the latest novels that he can find.  We shall need
something to keep the ladies busy."

The Captain chuckled.  He had been married twice.





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   \XVII

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The *Galatea* was under way at two o'clock,—a
clear, bright, sparkling afternoon with a hot sun, a
transparent sky and hardly a puff of wind.  Built on
thorough sea-going lines, newly painted and in apple-pie
order and carrying a crew of forty men she was, as
well she might be, the envy of passing craft.  Men
who knew, ran their eyes along her graceful lines with
admiration and took pleasure in her swan-like
movement.  Others on tugboats, shifting a quid, made
rough guesses as to her daily cost in the manner of
women talking over the clothes, jewels and spendings
of a distinguished leader of society.

About one-thirty two things happened,—the first
of them comic, the other not without a touch of pathos.
The sandy-headed mate, Horatio Jones, whose middle
name of Nelson was dropped by him with a sneaking
sense of its unfitness, had used his wide smile and glib
tongue to some purpose and returned to the yacht with
Mrs. O'Dowd after a busy thirty minutes.  The young
Irish, childless, wife of a sea-faring friend of his, she
was not above earning good wages as stewardess and
taking a look at the world, her husband being away.
Also he brought with him a heterogeneous box full of
what the book-seller had called the latest novels, but
some of them had been out six months and so were in
ripe old age.  There was no time to make much of a
choice, but Jones had, as usual, looked after himself
by seeing that his collection included Rex Beach, Jack
London, Irvin Cobb, Robert Chambers, Gene Stratton-Porter
and Sinclair Lewis.  It was simply to make up
weight that he threw in Wells, Walpole, Dunsany,
Lucas Malet, Conrad, Galsworthy, and other drawing-room
"geezers," as he called them.  They meant
nothing to him.  He handed Mrs. O'Dowd over to the
chief steward and with an air of pride and satisfaction
followed the case down to the library and arranged its
pristine contents in a long alluring line on the centre
table.  It seemed to him that the hardly-ever read
sporting and technical volumes behind the glass of all
the cases turned up their noses in contempt.

The pathetic incident was the unexpected arrival of
little Mrs. Lester Keene, who came on board with the
air of a moving picture heroine chased by at least six
desperate and obviously made up villains armed to the
teeth.  A little bag into which she had placed all her
small items of jewelry and other treasures was clutched
in one agitated hand and she carried an umbrella in
the other.  She was one of those women who regard
an umbrella as the patent of respectability rather than
as a weapon of service.  She took it with her walking
or driving,—wet or fine.  It was a fetish, an
institution.  Deprived of her umbrella she would have felt
like an actor without his daily advertisement or an
Oxford Don caught naked by a chambermaid.  She
was assisted aboard, with many gasps, by a deck hand,
and drew up, expecting apparently to see pirates and
the skull and cross bones.  Franklin turned and saw
her and smiled a welcome.

For some reason which he didn't endeavor to define
he was glad to see the admirable little woman who had
won his complete respect and admiration in her
endeavor to put up a fight in Beatrix's bedroom that
memorable night.  "My dear Mrs. Keene," he said,
holding out his hand, "I'm delighted to see you.
Welcome to the *Galatea*!  I was wondering how it was
that my wife came to leave you behind."

Mrs. Keene bridled with indignation.  "Your
wife?" she said.  "Well, this is really a most
extraordinary country."

"I beg your pardon," said Franklin, "I should have
said Miss Vanderdyke."  It had seemed to him quite
natural to use the word "wife."

"That's why I have come," said Mrs. Keene, her
rather loose skin wabbling nervously.  "Need I say
more?"

"Nothing more, but I must ask you at once to oblige
me by remembering that everybody on this yacht
believes, and must continue to believe, that Miss
Vanderdyke is Mrs. Franklin.  You know why as well as
I do.  That is understood, of course."  His question,
behind which there was very palpably the suggestion of
a drastic course of action, achieved a bow from
Mrs. Keene.  He then pointed to a small suit-case.  "Is
that all you've brought?"

"I had no time to pack anything else," she said.
"Where is Beatrix?"

"Below, settling for the cruise."

"The cruise?  Is this to be a cruise?  Can nothing
prevent this rash act?"

Franklin shook his head.  "You know Beatrix,
Mrs. Keene."

The little woman, who had great grit and even heroism
beneath her indecisive and fluttering exterior, drew
herself up.  "Very good," she said, "I shall do what
I conceive to be my duty."  All the same she threw
an anxious glance about her.  It was quite obvious that
she was looking for life-belts, life-boats, rafts and all
the other paraphernalia of shipwrecks.  No one could
guess, nor did she herself quite realize, the immensity
of her triumph of mind over matter in trusting herself
at sea or the extent of the damage to her sense of
propriety that was made by her being obliged to lend
her countenance to a quite indescribable proceeding.
If she had imagined that she would ever find herself a
companion to a young woman who went for a honeymoon
with a man to whom she had not been married
she would willingly have starved in London or taken a
position as a waitress in an A.B.C. shop.

"I was not well last night," she said, with a quiver
in her voice.  "I had one of my most severe attacks
of neuralgia.  I overslept myself this morning.  I can
only think that Beatrix left me behind because she was
too thoughtful to disturb me.  Mr. Franklin, I am
not very strong.  I have had a terrible time to get here.
You must please forgive my agitation."

Franklin felt thoroughly inclined to put his arm
round the tremulous lady's shoulder and say, "There,
there!" as Beatrix always did, and soothe her with soft
words.  It seemed to him that she was, with her
pedantic and old-fashioned ideas, rather like the Dodo
in the century to which he belonged, or that she
resembled a faded stuffed canary under a glass case in a
room furnished and painted by cubists.  "You will
find your stateroom very comfortable," he said, "and
I will do all that I can to make you happy and
contented.  I'm very glad you've come."

"Thank you!  You are kinder than my former
experience led me to expect.  And now, please, where
are the stairs?"

Franklin smothered his laugh.  He was glad for her
sake that the mate was not in earshot.  He called up
one of the deck boys.  "Take Mrs. Lester Keene
below," he said, "and tell the chief steward to look
after her."

It so happened that Mrs. Keene was immediately
seen by Beatrix, and before Franklin moved away he
heard her high, clear voice.  "Brownie, you darling!
Fancy seeing you here.  I left you with red flannel
round your face.  You must have come by aeroplane."  And
then he heard the sound of someone bursting into
tears and moved away.

It was not until the *Galatea* had left her mooring
well behind her that Malcolm Fraser screwed up his
courage to face his friend.  He found Franklin
forward with his arms folded and a pipe between his teeth,
watching the amazing skyline of the receding city, and
running his eyes over the great docks that lined the
banks of the river, the gigantic ferries, the impertinent
tugs and a transatlantic liner being edged inch by inch
into her berth, her portside all a-flutter with waving
handkerchiefs.

For several minutes Fraser stood shoulder to shoulder
with his best pal, waiting for him to turn.  He
would have waited for an hour without a word because
he had the rare gift of imagination and therefore of
sympathy.  The two are twins.  But presently Franklin
turned and there was an irresistible twinkle in his
eyes.  "Now then," he said, as though continuing a
conversation, "how the blazes did you do it?"

To Fraser that twinkle was worth a great deal.
"Do you want to know the details, old man?"

"'Course I do.  Women aren't the only curious
animals on earth, y' know."

"After you had left," said Fraser gravely, "I
tackled Beatrix.  I had to wait until the dance was
over and most of the people had gone to bed.  Oddly
enough I caught her at a moment when she was more
like the little simple girl with whom I used to play
games as a kid than I've seen her for years.  Perhaps
it was due to the moon or the stars,—or both.
Anyway she took my arm and we wandered into the garden
and for quite a long time we talked of the old days and
some of the things that she used to dream about.  I
think the fairies must have been dancing somewhere
near.  Then I switched things round to the present and
told her, pretty plainly, what I conceived it to be her
duty to do to retrieve herself.  I spoke to her honestly
and bluntly, like a brother, and she was very patient
and listened to me without a word.  I didn't
exaggerate things at all.  I didn't see how I could.
They've gone to the whole lengths of exaggeration
already.  I talked about her family and their wholesome
desire to avoid scandal, and I painted a picture of
what York could do to put the name of Vanderdyke,
which stands so high, into the kitchen, the garage and
the reeking saloon.  I pointed out that if, for the first
time in her life, she didn't do something all against
the grain she would jeopardize the noble efforts of
Aunt Honoria and outrage all the endeavors of her
father and mother to build up an aristocracy in this
country.  I believe I must have talked for half an hour
and all the time she sat with her hands clasped together
and the moonlight on her face, more beautiful than I
have ever seen her look and more like the child that she
used to be before she discovered the intolerance of
wealth and had been spoiled by the obsequiousness of
everybody round her.  Just when I thought that I had
won my point and was beginning to feel the warm
glow of triumph, she got up.  'My dear old Malcolm,
no wonder you write poetry,' she said.  'You are a
sort of cherub, my dear.  You have a head—a very
nice head—and two wings, and that's all.  All the
same there is much heart in your eloquence and an
immense amount of common sense.  The only thing is, I
don't intend to marry Pelham Franklin under any
circumstances whatever, so God bless you, old boy, and
good night.'  And with that she turned away, sang a
little song and foxtrotted through the gardens on to
the terrace and into the house.  Presently I saw a
light in her window, gave the whole thing up and went
off to bed with my tail between my legs.  Imagine my
surprise when about eight o'clock this morning a
discreet man-servant brought me a letter from her.
Here it is."  He slipped it out of his pocket and read
it aloud:

.. vspace:: 2

"Dear Poet:

.. vspace:: 1

"I have altered my mind just to prove to you that I
am a woman after all, little as you think so.  Also,—two
reasons are better than one,—because I am bored stiff
and have decided to take a cruise on the *Galatea*.  But
you must come, because we shall need a fourth at
bridge,—make that an absolute stipulation,—and Mrs. Larpent
will make the third.  Pack your little trunk, dear
Malcolm, and be ready immediately after breakfast.
Heigh-ho, for the wind and the sea."

.. vspace:: 2

"H'm," said Franklin, "she beats me."





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   \XVIII

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As he sat down to dinner that night in the admirable
saloon, wholly devoid of the frills and furbelows which
are so dear to the hearts of incurable landlubbers,
Franklin threw an amused glance at Malcolm Fraser,
who read it, laughed and signalled back.  "Yes, by
Jove, a very different table from the one we're used to!
How about compensations?"

Franklin looked from one guest to another, with
close scrutiny.  He caught the meaning of Fraser's
mental question.  Compensation?

Beatrix Vanderdyke, dressed as though she were a
woman of thirty bound for the opera,—in the highest
spirits, her laugh ringing out frequently; Mrs. Claude
Larpent, with her irresistible touch of Paris, her
fingers gleaming with rings and a queer Oriental stone
which might have been the eye of some skeptical god
watching everyone from her hair; and Mrs. Lester
Keene, the very epitome of the Kensington of Thackeray's
time, her nondescript hair, much touched with
grey, scrupulously drawn back from her forehead, her
mouse-colored dress lightened by a lace thing round her
shoulders which might easily have been an anti-macassar.

Malcolm Fraser also ran his eye round the table at
which he had hitherto seen the open, healthy faces and
square shoulders of Franklin's sporting friends.  He
was not at all sure,—perhaps because he was a poet,—that
this new sight was not more pleasant to him than
the old one.  There was, however, one question that
he asked himself again.  "Why Mrs. Larpent?"  He
was not in any sense of the word a man of the world.
He believed that all women were chaste and devoid of
guile, but there was something about Mrs. Larpent
which made him a little sorry to see her in the
company of Beatrix,—he didn't know why.  The
portholes were open, as the night was hot.  They framed
round patches of a sky pitted with stars.  The steady
conscientious pulse of the engines and the slight swing
of the yacht were the only indications of her activity.
An excellent dinner was being served by four expert
stewards who had devoted the most minute care in the
decoration of the table in honor of "Mrs. Franklin."  In
the gallery a string quartette with piano was playing
*Bohême*, almost to perfection.  There was just the
slightest inclination on the part of the pianist to
syncopate the music.  The poor wretch had been doomed to
a cabaret for two seasons.

Franklin, partly recovered from his shock, was
determined to make the best of things.  The sight of
Beatrix in all the glory of her youth was a delight to
him.  It filled him with joy and pride to see her
sitting in that yacht of his, which he regarded as home.
His blood danced every time that her laugh rang out.
She added something to the atmosphere of the saloon
which he had always subconsciously missed and desired.
Nevertheless he told himself, and believed it to be true,
that he had routed out of his mind every thought of
making her his wife, even in name.  Her dislike of
him, expressed very definitely, and now shown by the
aloof but perfectly courteous way in which she
included him in the conversation, made the mere idea
of such a thing impossible and absurd.  She was on
board to please herself, to carry out a whim and an
impulse to do something new and different, and she
had taken care to surround herself with a body guard
in order to protect her.  He saw all that and shrugged
his shoulders.  He said, as he had said over and over
again, "She beats me.  I can't compete with her.  I
give it up.  She must have her head.  At any rate all
this will do something to put York off the scent, so
what's the use of worrying?  I bow the knee to
autocracy."  That was the mood of the man who had never
hitherto allowed himself to be beaten by men or beasts.
Women were not included in this list for the simple
reason that they had never been permitted to interfere
with his way of life.

As for Beatrix, she was not thinking, dissecting or
going to the mental bother of introspection.  She was
enjoying a new sensation, delighting in the thrill of a
dangerous and what would be to most girls an inconceivable
adventure.  She looked upon the whole thing
as merely an episode, an act in the drama of her life,
and with enough sense of excitement to spur her on
played her part of Franklin's wife with one appreciative
eye on herself.  She believed that York would
carry out his threat, knowing the man as well as she
did, and she knew that as soon as the whole house of
cards fell flat, as it was bound to do, her family,
headed by Aunt Honoria, would punish severely.
They would spoil her life at least for a year.  She had
gone on the cruise because the word "yacht" had
filled her with the desire to smell the sea and try a new
form of amusement.  That was all.  Franklin, either
as a man or an enemy, or as one who had come to her
rescue, counted for nothing.  He meant no more to
her than Captain McBean or Mr. Horatio Jones.  He
was merely the means of providing her with the
antidote against boredom.  She was out to enjoy a new
experience at his expense.  Hurrah for the open sea!
Sufficient for the day, so long as the day was fine and
the people in it kept her merry.

When it came to Ida Larpent and the way in which
she regarded her totally unexpected presence on the
*Galatea*, the mental processes of her mind were as
busily at work as the mechanical appliances of the
ship's engine.  This was no mere joy-ride for her.  It
was a business trip, the chances of which had been
grasped eagerly with all the cunning of a woman who
had lived on her wits and brought individualism to a
fine art.  She was going to use every moment to her
own ultimate advantage.  The fact that Beatrix had
placed her among her favorites was an admirable step
forward.  She was clever enough to know that the
sunshine of the beautiful young autocrat's smile might at
any moment cloud over,—that her reign as a favorite
was most ephemeral.  But she had already watched
things closely and had come to the conclusion that the
marriage which had caused so much rejoicing among
the Vanderdykes, romantic as it seemed, was an empty
and hollow affair.  She saw very plainly that the heart
of Beatrix was utterly untouched.  She had yet to
discover precisely how Franklin had been affected.  She
was no optimist, but it seemed to her that Franklin was
as cool as Beatrix.  He had, however, a way of hiding
his feelings that would make it necessary for her to
put him under her microscope.  As things appeared on
the surface, at any rate, everything was in her favor.
She measured herself against Beatrix without egotism.
The girl had all the advantage of youth and,—as her
knowledge of men told her,—many of the disadvantages.
She was going to set herself with the utmost
calculation to stir up Franklin's passion.  It seemed
to her that the propinquity forced upon them all by
living aboard a yacht would make that easy.  She had
examined herself in the mirror of her stateroom and
come to the conclusion that she had never looked more
beautiful or so completely feminine.  Without any
sense of loyalty to Beatrix, to whom she was indebted
for this chance, she had made up her mind to attract
Franklin with all the arts that she possessed.  To
become his mistress meant absolute freedom from money
troubles, and that would be excellent.  To become his
wife,—well, why not?  The laws of the country were
all in her favor.  Divorce was a hobby, an institution,
and Beatrix was a worshipper at the altar of Something New.

When it came to Malcolm Fraser, whom Beatrix
had called the fourth of the party,—he was usually
the fourth of every party,—what was he but simply
a man who could do no more than enjoy the glamour
of the impossible—a sort of star-gazer!  His love
for Beatrix dominated his secret life and he knew that
he could show it only in one way,—by being her
friend.  He had no pain in his heart.  He had no
right to possess a heart at all where she was concerned,
but no one could prevent him from placing her in the
throne of it and locking her in.  And so he just
revelled in her presence and was happy.

There remained little Mrs. Lester Keene, the last
member of this strange ill-assorted party, and she, who
took everything seriously, and whose god was convention,
was undergoing very genuine suffering.  To be
herself a party to any arrangement so unabashed in its
smashing of all the rules of life was bad enough.  Her
self-respect, which meant so much to her, was deeply
wounded, and when she thought of the girl who
seemed to her to be a sort of queen and for whose
beauty and purity she had the most intense admiration
and regard, her perturbation became painful, even
tragical.  She suspected Franklin.  Like all women
who have gone through life looking at the truth
through a key-hole, herself hidden, she believed no
good of men.  They were all wolves in sheep's
clothing.  They were the enemies of women.  She
conceived Franklin to be no different from those worldly
creatures of whom she had read so frequently in her
favorite novels, most of which had been written in the
period of her youth by women.  She was, therefore,
most unhappy.  She was also dreading sea-sickness.
Poor little lady, what a combination of mental disquiet!





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   \XIX

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Franklin and Fraser left the dining saloon after
a brief talk and joined the ladies in the little used
drawing-room.  They found that the orchestra, which
was as much a part of the yacht as the engines and
invariably played Franklin's favorite melodies during
and after dinner, had been dismissed.  The Victrola
was at work instead and the voluptuous strains of a
more than usually saccharine Viennese waltz filled the
charming room.

Franklin drew up short at the door and put his hand
on Fraser's arm.  "Look," he said, quietly.

With absolute lack of self-consciousness and a
nymph-like grace, her lips wearing the smile of a child,
Beatrix was dancing and winding her way between
the chairs and little tables.  With her white arms
outstretched and her hands moving like the wings of a
bird she seemed to bring the music to life and to give
it a sense of youth and beauty that turned the room
into a moon-struck wood of thin trees.

The two men watched her until the tune ran out
and in the hearts of both were love and desire.

Franklin went quickly to the Victrola, wound it up
and started the record again.

"What a pity you don't dance, Malcolm," said
Beatrix, panting a little.

"But I do," said Franklin, and took her in his arms.
He didn't imagine himself to be a fine dancer.  He
had a healthy contempt of the dancing man breed,—those
anæmic creatures who try so hard to look immaculate
and treat all women with a tedious mixture
of familiarity and condescension.  He waltzed well,
all the same, with a perfectly straight back, an
excellent sense of time and a steady left arm.  In fact he
danced like a civilized man who had achieved the art
of not being noticed in a crowd.

From her deep and comfortable chair under the
reading lamp Ida Larpent, with a determined exposure
of lace stocking, watched this little scene with
quiet amusement.  It seemed to her that those two
danced like people who had been married for years.
They said nothing.  They didn't look at each other.
They were as much two people as though they were
at opposite ends of the earth.  The almost grim
expression on Franklin's face made jealousy impossible.
So also did the slight air of social martyrdom that
was all about Beatrix.  Anyone less expert as a
psychologist than Ida Larpent could have told that
Beatrix merely performed a duty.  It would, however,
have taken a quite microscopic eye to have seen the
riotous blaze in Franklin's mind.

To Mrs. Lester Keene's mid-Victorian way of
thinking, this "exhibition," as she inwardly called it,
watching from behind the new number of *Vogue*,
was singularly bad form.  If she had known the
expressive word "stunt" she would have applied it with
all her British horror of such a thing.

"And now," said Beatrix, when once more the
popular tune arrived at its inevitable and hackneyed
conclusion, "for bridge.  Don't you think so?"

Franklin rang for a steward.  The blood was in his
head.  The intoxication of the girl's fragrance was
all about his brain.  "Good God," he said to himself,
"how am I going to go through this and come out
sane?"

"Splendid," said Mrs. Larpent, putting down "The
Dark Flower."  "I'd love a rubber or two."

"And I," said Fraser,—"that is if you don't want
to play, Mrs. Keene."

"Thank you, but I never touch cards."  The little
lady returned to her astonished examination of the
drawings of wispy girls in freak garments.  She
invariably waxed almost hectic over the bi-monthly
issues of her favorite journal, every word of which she
read with minute care.  It was to her rather like the
thing at which a dog barks consistently and with a
very fever of rage but wouldn't avoid on any account.

A steward appeared.  "The card table," said
Franklin.

"But before we play," said Beatrix, lighting a
cigarette, "perhaps you'll tell us the geography of the
yacht.  Pelham, I won't sleep peacefully unless my
curiosity is satisfied.  I asked Malcolm at dinner but
he's apparently as much of a landlubber as I am."  She
knew instinctively that this was the very best
way to please Franklin and she felt that she owed
him something for her unsocial manner in the dining
saloon.  She intended to enjoy the cruise and
therefore it would be tactful, to say the least of it, to keep
him in a good temper.

Franklin was obviously pleased.  The *Galatea* was
his favorite toy.  He picked up a photograph album,
laid it open on a table and pointed to an admirable
picture of the yacht lying at anchor in the Biscayne Bay.

Beatrix bent over it.  Her dress left very little to
the imagination.

"I bought her after the death of her first owner,"
he said.  "He was an eccentric invalid, as you will
see when I explain certain things.  She was built in
the Clyde about eight years ago.  Her tonnage is
sixteen hundred and seven, length all over three hundred
and sixteen feet, beam thirty-five feet six and she
carries a crew of forty, all told.  You can see how
beautiful her lines are.  To my mind she has nothing of
her class to compete against.  It's true that some
sailors carp at one thing in her appearance,—the way
her bridge is placed.  Do you see?  Instead of being
well forward as it usually is, you will notice that it's
away aft,—only a few feet from the funnel."

"Why?" asked Beatrix, not even mildly interested.

"To prevent anyone from walking over the library.
A cranky idea of the old man I told you about.  In
fact the *Galatea* was designed to meet his peculiar
notions."

"Why not?" said Beatrix.  "He had the money."

"Quite," said Franklin drily.  "Well, this, where
my finger is, is the flush deck, running from the bows
to the stern, broken here by a well between the
forecastle head and the fore part of the bridge."

Beatrix laughed.  "You're a regular sailor, aren't you?"

Franklin went on.  It was good to be so near to
this bewitching girl.  He would have liked to absorb
her attention for the whole evening.  "Running aft
from the bridge to within forty feet or so of the stern
are all the deck houses.  Do you see?  Here's the
library.  Abaft, here, the dining saloon.  Continuing
aft, on the port side, here, the pantry, the enclosed
space over the engine-room, and on the starboard
side a passage leading to this room and the
writing-room."

"And I don't believe you ever use either," said
Beatrix.

"I don't.  Now look.  The roof and sides of this
line of deck houses run out a few feet beyond the
aftermost room.  Do you notice that?"

"So that your malade imaginaire could have a little
sheltered nook to enjoy forty winks in out of the
wind?"

"Yes, that was the idea.  Very jolly it is too.
Here's the promenade, about nine feet broad and
smooth as a billiard ball.  It continues across the
forepart of the library and across the afterpart of the
line of deck houses, see?  So that there's an oblong
track round most of the yacht, covered overhead with
a thick awning."

"Ah!  I see myself taking exercise there morning,
noon and night."

"We all do," said Malcolm.

"Well, about thirty feet from the stern, here,
there's a double canvas screen running thwartships
from one side to the other, shutting off a good space
for the use of the crew.  Under the forecastle head,
on the main deck, are the officers' and petty officers'
quarters, very comfortable and excellent.  Under the
library is my sitting-room, which runs the whole
breadth of the ship.  This is where we usually
foregather,—I mean on the bachelor cruises."

"Which are now things of the past," said Beatrix
imperturbably.  "Are we to be permitted to peek into
this sanctum some day?"

"Of course."  Franklin's heart pumped a little.

And then, rising with her peculiar feline grace,
Mrs. Larpent joined the group round the table.  "All these
technicalities are Greek to me," she said.  "I want
to know how many guest rooms there are, how many
bathrooms, whether the mirrors are full length,
whether you bought all the rugs from the same place
and if so whether you got them cheaper and, in fact,
all those human details that I can understand,—poor,
untechnical me!"

Franklin gave a short laugh but was obviously
thrown out.  His description of the *Galatea* was in
the only language that he knew.  He was unable to
translate it into woman's talk.

Beatrix was quick to notice his quandary.  Nearly
everything that he had said was altogether beyond her
too and gave her no more intimate a picture of the
yacht than she would have obtained from a quick
glance at a blue-print, but, after all, she intended to
explore in the morning, so what did it matter?  Her
pricking conscience had alone brought the matter up.
"Never mind about the furniture," she said.  "Go
on from where your finger is, Pelham.  I'm following
you with keen intelligence and boundless interest."

Franklin gave her a grateful smile.  "Well, the
windows, here, abaft of my room on the port side
are the cabins of the major-domo, the Captain, the
head steward, the chief engineer, the purser, an
officers' mess room, the ship's galley, a steward's mess
room and other cabins.  Over here on the starboard
side are the guest rooms and suites,—twenty all told.
The lower-deck is given up to stores, coal bunkers,
the engine room, the stoke-hold, a stack of electric
accumulators which keep the electric lights going when
the engines aren't working, and the gymnasium.  The
engines are designed not for speed but for smooth
running.  We can whack up to twelve knots an hour
but our average is eight.  Finally we carry an ample
supply of boats as well as two steam launches, one
burning coal, the other oil."  He bowed and laughed
and said "I thank you" in imitation of the professional
guide, closed the album and put it away, having
thoroughly enjoyed himself.

"And this very beautiful and complete toy,"
thought Ida Larpent, looking after the owner of it
with calculating envy and admiration, "costs as much
to run per annum as would make an admirable capital
for a little lonely woman.  My dear, you will be
throwing away the opportunity of a life-time if you
don't make yourself very precious to this indecently
wealthy young man."

Then they sat down to bridge.





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   \XX

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The third day out, the semblance of peace and
contentment reigning on board, the *Galatea* ran into
bad weather.  The barometer had fallen sharply
during the night and the day broke behind a dull grey
curtain to windward which blotted out the horizon
and brought heavy rain as it came over.  Capricious
shifts of wind in puffy spells made the awnings rattle
and the sea agitated.  The Captain stuck to his course
until the squall caught him, and then, in deference to
the ladies, ran with the sea astern.  Before four
o'clock in the afternoon, however, the wind fell away
and the sky cleared and the sun came out again to the
immense relief of Mrs. Lester Keene, who had given
way to seasickness and to thoughts of disaster and
death.

The weather, like nearly everything else, had not
affected Beatrix.  With Mrs. Larpent and Malcolm
Fraser as spectators, she spent most of the morning
in the gymnasium exercising her limbs and her lungs,—the
former on the bars and rings and the electrically-worked
horse, the latter by frequent bursts of
merry laughter and constant talking.  The newness of
her surroundings had not yet worn off.  The sense of
being the heroine of a most daring adventure was still
upon her.  Then too, she found her new friend,
whose peculiar beauty had attracted her, entertaining
and, better still, interesting, and her old one as eager
to fetch and carry and as willing to pay her deference
as ever.  So far as Franklin was concerned he
remained the man who had said an unforgivable thing
and who was, by accident, her host.  He counted only
as such.

But that night, having laid a restraining hand upon
herself, Nature, who does not appear to be happy
unless she can exert her power in some way, churned
up a storm on the yacht.  She brought about two
incidents which, both quite unnecessary, did much to
make this so-called honeymoon cruise lose its outward
peacefulness.  It is her invariable way.

.. _`192`:

The first happened before dinner, the second after,
and both were led up to by the clash of temperament.
The return of the sun had something to do with the
first.  Its warmth and brightness sent Beatrix's
spirits, already high, up to set-fair.  Tea was served on
deck.  To Franklin's inward rage Fraser immediately
became the object of Beatrix's whole attention.  She
called him "Mally," talked almost tenderly about the
old days, drew him out on the subject of books and
life and then, utterly ignoring the others, paced up
and down with her arm through his, listening with the
rapt wonder of a little girl while he recited his recent
verses to her.

It was when he had run his not very retentive
memory down that she began to talk about herself.
"Mally," she said suddenly, "do you remember a
dream I told you about one spring morning when we
were sitting on a log at the edge of those dear old
woods?  You had been ill, I think, and your mother
had sent for you from school to feed you up."

"I remember," said Malcolm.  "You were eight
or so, and I had just struck fifteen and was consumed
with the idea that I was a man.  I had just introduced
myself to a razor.  Oh, a great moment in the male
career!"

"Don't talk so much, Mally dear.  This is my
innings.  I told you that I had dreamed that father
had lost all his money, every cent of it, and was
broken and helpless and that mother,—how queerly
right it was,—had gone to bed permanently from the
shock, and then I blossomed into a Joan of Arc
because the night before that funny little French
governess, Mademoiselle Hannebigue, had been reading
to me about her, and I went out into the world,—it
was New York, of course,—to build up a new
fortune for my unfortunate parents."

"What became of Miss Hannebigue, by the way?"

"That doesn't matter.  Don't drag red herrings
across our path.  I became a great artist in about a
minute and painted a picture that caused such a
sensation that I sold it to a gorgeous person with a golden
beard and blue eyes for oh, millions and millions of
dollars.  And just before some vandal woke me up,—not
Hannebigue because she was in mortal terror
of me,—I was carrying it all up to father in a big
brown bag.  Do you remember?"

"Yes, I remember.  Why?"

Beatrix said nothing for a moment, and as Malcolm
looked at her beautiful face and long fine lashes and
the little wistful smile on her lips he saw the fallen
log again, and the young birches just broken into leaf;
the little big-eyed girl who had ordered him about
and the pair of new brown shoes that he had put on
that day and which hurt him very much.

"Mally, I never read about Joan of Arc now," she
said.  "I'm ashamed.  Never again, as long as I live,
shall I ever have a chance to do big things, and
sometimes,—not very often,—but just for a minute when
I hear a wonderful piece of music or see the sun go
down as it did last night,—I wish that father had
really lost all his money and I was an artist or
something working for him.  Oh, Mally, old thing, I'm
not really much good these days and I might have
been,—I really might have been.  You're a poet.
You get closer to the angels than ordinary mortals.
What can I do?  How shall I become something?
Is there no way for me to justify having once been
able to carry that funny old bulging bag up to father?"

It was Malcolm's turn to say nothing for a moment.
From where they stood he could see Franklin's
clean-cut profile as he sat with his chin on his
fist looking out to sea.  And the man who was his
friend and whose story he knew, seemed to look
awfully alone and hurt.  And then he spoke, eagerly,
with a great and God-sent unselfishness.  "Dear girl,"
he said, "my dear little girl, open your heart to Pel.
That's the way."

The next instant the warm young arm was pulled
sharply away from his own and a scoffing laugh was
carried off like a bird.  "Not in this world," she
cried.  "Not in this world!"

And then, with a little devil on her shoulder, the
same little devil that had made her do all her foolish,
impulsive, inconsistent things, she went over to where
Franklin was sitting and stood with one foot on the
deck chair vacated by Ida Larpent, who had found it
difficult to get any attention.  The girl's brain was
suddenly filled with an impish desire to flick her host's
apparent imperturbability with the whip of sarcasm.

"Well," she said, putting a note of bonhomie into
her voice that Franklin had never heard before, and
liked.  "Thinking,—for a change?"

He got up and stood with his back to one of the
iron supports.  "Why for a change?"  Good Heavens,
what a picture she made, standing there!

"I've always been under the impression that
sportsmen never think."

Franklin laughed.  What did he care what she said
so that she spoke to him, and he saw the flash of her
teeth, the gleam of her dimples, the play of her
astounding eyes?  "You mean, being a sportsman, I
don't need and have not been given, the necessary
machinery for thinking?"

"I wouldn't for a moment go so far as that," she
said, with a curiously expressive gesture which
completely contradicted her remark.  "You spend most
of your time on the *Galatea*, don't you?"

"Yes, as much as I can."

"I don't wonder.  I'm beginning to understand
that there must be something very satisfying in being
the Czar of this little Kingdom,—it's really the only
way to feel the full power of wealth, unless you work
and control great interests and feed your vanity like
that Democracies worship the monied man, I know,
but there is really a touch of the old feudal system in
life on a yacht like this.  Officers and men, forty of
them, are your slaves.  It's "Yes, sir; No, sir; Come
aboard, sir; I'll make it so, sir," all day long, and,
unlike a mere world, the very yacht can be ordered to
change her course, put in or put out, at your imperial
command.  Yes, I begin to feel the fascination of
the life you've chosen."

She said all this thoughtfully, disguising the rank
impertinence of it under a sort of naïve admiration.

It puzzled Franklin.  He was too simple and direct
to get her point of view and not willing to believe that
he was being gratuitously "cheeked."  "You've got
me wrong," he said.  "I live on the sea because I
like it and because I hate cities and society and
newspapers and their gross publicity.  That's all."

She knew that he was speaking the truth.  She
knew also that her elaborate sarcasm had missed fire.
She tried again.  The little devil was still on her
shoulder.  "Oh, I see," she said, acting astonishment.
"You're like the little boy who builds a hut in the
back yard and forces himself to believe that he's
hundreds of thousands of miles away from home.  You
come to sea to dodge the responsibilities of real life.
You float lazily about on the water like a sportsman
and leave the earth to be run by mere men.  Well, I
daresay there's something in it.  Hullo, there goes
the first bugle.  I must go and dress."

She nodded and slipped away chortling, perfectly
certain that she had let Franklin see how very little
she thought of him, and on the way down to her suite
she flung the little devil away and paid her companion
a visit with all the sympathy and tenderness of a
young Madonna.

She was right.  Franklin felt the cut of her whip
on his conscience.  Many times recently, during lonely
hours, he had cursed himself as a waster of time and
opportunity and wondered how much longer he was
going to be content to be numbered amongst the
drones.  All the same he bitterly resented being
flicked by this girl, herself the queen of drones, who,
of all the women alive, had good reason to thank her
stars for his sportsmanship.  And he went below
angry, dissatisfied and indignant.  By jove, he would
get one back for this.

His chance came after dinner.  He left Malcolm
in the drawing-room waiting for the bridge table to be
set, heard the Victrola on deck and went out to find
Beatrix all alone, dancing like the spirit of spring.
Ida Larpent, seeing something in his eyes that drew
her out of her chair, followed him and hid.  He went
up to Beatrix.  "Dance with me," he said and took
her rather roughly in his arms.  He felt the urge of
holding her as he had never felt it before.  His very
anger fired his passion.  He would show this
unbroken thoroughbred that he was a man as well as a
sportsman.  And so he held her tight, mad with the
gleam of her shoulders and the scent of her hair,
danced her breathless and, as the music stopped,
imprisoned her in his arms and kissed her lips again and
again.

Ida Larpent nearly screamed.  The pain of her jealousy
was unbearable.

Beatrix fought herself free and stood panting
against the rail.  And as she stood there with heaving
breasts and her hand on her mouth, that unforgivable
sentence which had burned itself on her vanity seemed
to stand out in letters of fire on the deck house.  "If
you and I were the only two living people on a desert
island and there was not the faintest hope of our ever
being taken back to the world, I would build you a
hut at the farthest end of it and treat you as a man."  This
assault, this attack, was all the more nauseating
because of its apparent cold-bloodedness, because it
was made by the man who had dared to say those
words to her.  For a moment, with the blood in her
head, she was overcome with a desire to cry out for
servants and order them to kill that man.  All that
was imperious in her nature craved for instant
punishment.  Then, looking at the blaze in Franklin's eyes
and mistaking it for the beast in him, she mastered
herself and turned cold.

"Just now," she said, "I called you a Czar.  I was
wrong.  You're a polished gun-man."

Franklin laughed.  He was still drunk with the
taste of her lips.  "Can't a man kiss his wife on their
honeymoon if he feels like it?"

Beatrix put out both hands to keep him away.  She
was as white as moonlight and her eyes shone like stars.

Ida Larpent almost left her place to catch every word.

"Wife!  Thank God you will never be able to call
me that."

Franklin went nearer,—within an inch of those two
sentinel hands.  "I didn't begin calling you that.  You
chose the word, not I."  The way she had of putting
him in the wrong always, of making him a brute who
had tricked her into this impossible position was
mighty difficult to bear.

Holding her breath, amazed and delighted at her
sudden and unexpected insight into this marriage
business which had always puzzled her, Ida Larpent
watched these two young people as a cat watches
mice,—the girl standing out against the dark background
of sky in all the pride of youth, her bare shoulders
outlined by the moonlight; the man, tall, wiry and
amazingly vital, bending slightly forward, with his
hands clenched; the silence hardly broken by the
regular pulse of the engines, the humming of the breeze
and the soft swish of the sea.

"This is the end," said Beatrix.

"The end,—how?"

"You will put me ashore."

"Where?"

"I don't care.  Anywhere."

"Why?"

"Because, I tell you, this is the end."

"You're wrong.  This is the beginning."

"I don't intend to argue.  I state as a fact that you
will put me ashore to-morrow.  Whatever happens I
am not going to live this lie any longer.  Now let me
pass."

Franklin went closer.  The two hands were against
his chest.  "You amuse me," he said.  "It isn't for
you to give orders here.  I'm Czar of this Kingdom,
remember.  You chose to come aboard and you'll stay
aboard as long as it suits me."

"You're an optimist," she said, scoffingly.

"Very likely.  I'm also human and I'm on my
honeymoon."  He caught her by the wrists and before
he could control himself, kissed her again, threw her
hands away and stood back.  He was afraid of what
he might do next.

Beatrix suppressed a cry, and drew the back of her
hand across her mouth.  "Once more I'm wrong," she
said.  "You're not a gun-man.  You're a prize-fighter.
May I be allowed to go now?"

"To the devil for all I care," said Franklin.

"Thank you.  I prefer the bridge table."  And he
watched her go, walking like a young Diana.

Ida Larpent, with the tumult of a new chance in her
queer heart, dodged away.

Then Franklin turned his face to the stars.  He was
angry, sore,—and ashamed.  But as he stood there,
face to face with Nature, he said to himself, "One
day I'll make that girl ache for my kisses as badly as I
ache for hers to-night,—so help me God!"





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.. _`XXI`:

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   \XXI

.. vspace:: 2

Ida Larpent was responsible for the second incident.

With an amount of self-control that under the
circumstances seemed to Franklin to be almost
inconceivable, Beatrix played bridge until after midnight.
She went into the drawing-room with a high head and
a radiant smile and began by saying "Mally dear, you
will be my partner, and we will play together until
sunrise, if you like."  And as every hand was dealt for the
remainder of the sitting she babbled and laughed and
said little witty things that set the poet chuckling and
won admiration from the woman of the world.  And
all the while she smoked, telling Mrs. Lester Keene,
when that uncompanionable-companion ventured to
remonstrate, that she was no longer a débutante and if
she wanted to set up a smoker's heart, well, she could.
Every now and then, too, perhaps to prove the fact
to Franklin that at any rate there was one man aboard
who could be trusted, she leant across the table and
touched Malcolm's hand.  It made him very happy.
He was proud to be treated like a brother.

At eleven o'clock Mrs. Keene sighed, began to
arrange the magazines on the table at her elbow and said
"Dear me, how very late it is," several times, and
finally got up and wandered aimlessly about the room.
She hadn't the courage to say frankly and honestly
"Now, dear Beatrix, it's time you went to bed.
You've played enough and smoked enough and you
need all the sleep you can get," but in the inevitable
manner of all weak people she endeavored to get her
point by a series of the kind of nerve-wracking,
unspoken hints which are generally rewarded by a few
sharp and even unkind words.  Not so from Beatrix.
Noticing the worthy woman's restlessness and recognizing
her intention she cried out, "Brownie, you really
ought to have a nurse.  Eleven o'clock and still up,—and
you haven't got over that bad attack!  Run along
to bed, dear, and if I'm not too late I'll peep in for a
word or two."

Malcolm, not unsympathetic, smiled a little to see the
reluctant way in which the poor little rotund soul
obeyed the command of her princess.

It was a quarter past twelve when Beatrix drew
away from the table as a rubber ended.  "Thank you,"
she said, "that sees me through.  Good night, Ida,
sleep well.  Good night, Mally dear.  For a poet you
play a wonderfully sound game."  And then, with an
exquisite touch of shyness that took Mrs. Larpent's
breath away, staggered Malcolm and nearly made
Franklin jump out of his skin, she looked up at him
and added, "I won't say good night to you," and went
out singing a little song beneath her breath.

It was so well done, with an art so true, an inflection
so full of meaning, that for an instant Mrs. Larpent
asked herself if the angry and definite words which
she had recently overheard had ever been said.

They left Malcolm dazed.  *Was* she, after all, married
to his old friend?  They were the words of a wife.

The first shock over, Franklin understood.  She
had let him see that he was a creature to whom she
did not bid good night disguised in the soft voice and
inviting manner that was intended to keep Mrs. Larpent
ignorant of the true state of affairs.

"I'll go over the score in the morning," he said,
"and we can settle then.  Malcolm, I'm going to write
a few letters to-night, so——"

"All right, old man.  I'll turn in right away."  He
wondered if he did not look a little like the woman
at whom he had smiled earlier in the evening.

"So will I," said Mrs. Larpent.  "This is all very
delightful.  I sleep better in this gently-rocking cradle
than I've ever done before.  Well, good night."  She
divided a smile between the two men and glided away,
as graceful and as silky as a panther.

Franklin let out his foot and kicked a box of
matches, that had fallen on the floor, into the chest of
a sleepy-eyed young steward, who was already packing
up the bridge table.  "I'm sorry," he said.  If he had
had his way at that moment, he would have kicked
the earth into the limbo of forgotten things and
tumbled after it over the edge.

Malcolm followed him out.  He could see what was
going on in the mind of the man he knew so well,—the
man into whose life no woman had come to torture
and disturb till then.  "Old man," he said, "if
I can be of any——"

Franklin wheeled 'round and put his hand on
Malcolm's shoulder.  "No, no, my dear chap.  You
can't help, not even you.  Damned fools always pay
for their mistakes.  So long."

He had been in his room for ten minutes,—walking,
walking, with his hands clenched and the fever
of love boiling his blood, all alive to the fact that the
girl who called herself his wife was, figuratively
speaking, in reach of his hungry hand, when someone
knocked softly on the door.

"Who is it?"

"I," said Ida Larpent.  She shut the door softly
behind her.  "I want to speak to you."

It was not the first time that she had been in Franklin's
own particular room, but heretofore she had seen
it with daylight streaming through the portholes.  It
seemed to be warmer and more intimate and far more
suited for her purpose at that quiet hour, lit only by
one shaded reading lamp.

There was a curious confidence in her manner which
puzzled even Franklin, unversed in the ways and
moods of women as he was.  She took it for granted
that she was welcome, and deliberately looked about
for the most comfortable chair in the manner of one
who had the right to his room at any time.

"Where would you advise me to sit?" she asked.
"I don't mean to criticise or carp when I say that this
Holy of Holies of yours is more like the smoking
room in a man's club than anything else.  It fits your
character like a glove, Pelham.  But,—I need soft
things and cushions, you know.  Do what you can for me."

Franklin cleared a sofa of lines of fishing tackle and
a double-barrelled gun and collected his only two
cushions.  "How will this do?" he said, showing no
signs of his irritation and impatience at the sight of her.

She placed herself full stretch, worked the cushions
into place with her white shoulders and heaved
a little sigh of content.

She was too pleased with her lace stockings to hide
them.

"May I smoke?"

"I beg your pardon," said Franklin.  Good Lord,
was she there for the night!

For some few moments she sat in silence looking
interestedly about her, with a quiet air of proprietorship.
She inhaled two or three mouthfuls of smoke
and let it trickle out of her slightly Oriental nostrils.
In her dark hair, that was drawn tightly across her
forehead, the strange stone glittered.  She made an
attractive, if somewhat erotic, picture sitting there, so
slight and so feminine in her white satin dress cut
with impish ability to the very limit of decency.
Then she turned amused eyes on Franklin, who was
standing watching her, trying to discover what was
behind this obviously well-planned visit.

"All men are liars, saith the prophet, and you, my
dear Pelham, very palpably hold a diploma in class
A."  She laughed quietly, rather pleased with her way
of breaking the ice.

"Think so?"  What on earth did the woman mean?

"You undemonstrative, self-contained men lie far
more unsuccessfully than the Latins.  One looks for
a certain amount of duplicity from them.  Their wine
and climate and the quickness of their wits makes
truthfulness almost impolite.  Much the same point of
view is held of the Irish, who have an inherent
disbelief in the mere truth.  The strong streak of
Anglo-Saxon in you which gives you a horror of pulling
down the fourth wall behind which you hide your
sentimentality puts one off.  What one takes for
honest inarticulation and shyness is really a well-thought-out
pose, isn't it?  You manage admirably to give
the impression of rather aloof integrity, an unexpressed
contempt for dodgers.  It is historical, all the
same, how artfully you can live a double life and
achieve a statue in the market-place."

This wordiness bored Franklin.  He hated phrase-making.
Also it was late and he wanted to go to bed
to sleep and be healthy.  "The prophet said another
good thing," he replied.  "Cut the cackle and come
to the 'osses.  Did you ever hear that?"

She laughed again.  "You know that I have a
horse or two then?"

"Would you be here if you hadn't?"

"Why shouldn't I have come for the pleasure of
being with you, alone?"

"It's very kind of you to put it like that."

Mrs. Larpent flecked away the ash of her cigarette.
"Sarcasm doesn't suit you," she said sharply.  "If
you mean to imply that I am here for money, you are
wrong."

"I didn't mean to imply that," said Franklin.  "On
my honor."

"Thank you," she said, and was silent again.  The
conscientious beat of the engines made a sort of tune.
Then she got up and faced him, dropping artificiality.
"Why did you tell me you were married?"

"Ah!" thought Franklin, "it *is* that, then."  He
said nothing.  He was no match for women.

"Couldn't you have been honest with *me*, of all
people?  You know my feelings for you.  *I* was above
board.  Whatever the reason for hatching this
extraordinary story I wouldn't have given you away.  I
would have helped you."

"I can't discuss this with you," said Franklin, "you
were at the Vanderdykes.  You saw the papers.
Beatrix is on the yacht.  There it is.  I can't see any
reason why you should say that she and I are not married."

"Can't you?  Haven't I seen you together for the
last three days?  Wouldn't my eyes be the first to
notice any sign of love or affection between you, or
even toleration?  I came on the yacht expecting to be
made to suffer the jealous agony of the damned and
I find,—it's easy enough,—that this honeymoon is
a farce.  You are a bachelor entertaining two duly
chaperoned women."

What could Franklin do but lie?  "Beatrix is my
wife," he said, "and the way in which we treat each
other is our affair."

"Oh, no, believe me," said Mrs. Larpent quickly.
"That's where you're wrong.  I am in this.  You
were on the verge of loving *me* before Beatrix cropped
up.  You may decline to accept this as a fact but I
tell you that you were, and I know.  You stand there
looking at me in amazement because I am not afraid
or ashamed to tell the truth.  Women are more or less
a mystery to you and you've got a rooted idea that
we must go through life hiding our souls behind light
laughter and lace veils.  And so we do until the
inevitable hour when we come out into the open to fight
for love.  This is my hour, Pelham, and I stand in
front of you as common and as human as a peasant
woman or a squaw."

Her voice shook with emotion and she seemed to
Franklin to be taller and more beautiful and more
dignified than he had ever seen her.  All the same he
wished to Heaven that both these women had never
come into his life, that he were still a free agent, a
mere sportsman, as Beatrix called him so scornfully,
the captain of his fate.

"I don't like your talking like this," he said, with
a curiously boyish bluntness and awkwardness.  "It
isn't fair to yourself—or me."

"I'm not thinking altogether about you to-night,
my dear.  I said that this is my hour, my fight, the
moment when I let you see me as I am.  Now listen.
I overheard your quarrel with Beatrix on deck this
afternoon.  I deliberately eavesdropped.  I don't
want to know why you and she are playing this queer
game.  It doesn't interest me.  From the way you
kissed her, without loving her in the very least, I saw
that what you want is what I want.  You are free.
I am free.  We neither of us owe allegiance to a
living creature.  I love you.  You are the first man
who has made me understand the pain and ache of
love.  I make no bargain.  I ask for no bond.  I just
want you.  Take me."

She held out her white arms, with her head thrown
back and her lips slightly parted and her eyes half
closed.  There was something utterly simple and in a
way fine about her.  It wasn't so much an appeal that
she made as an offer of fellowship.  Nature spoke in
her voice and stood alluring in her presence.

Perhaps because of the subtle sense of isolation that
the open sea gives, or of the wonderful silence of the
night, or of the overwhelming strength of her desire,
Ida Larpent was nearer sincerity in what she said than
she had ever been.  It wasn't only because she saw a
chance to catch Franklin on the rebound that she had
gone into his room.  She had argued in cold blood
that by becoming his mistress she would strengthen
her position, put a claim upon his sense of honor and
win her way to independence.  But under the stress
of genuine emotion these sordid calculations lifted like
hawks and left her a woman in love, a very woman.

Franklin proved that he was very much of a man.
To him love and its rewards were only good if they
were won by fighting.  They were the spoils of the
chase.  This inversion of the old right way was
distressing, chilling and rather indecent.  What to say
and how to say it left him wordless.  He would rather
have found himself facing a lion with two empty
barrels.  Then he told the truth.  "You're very
kind," he said.  "But I love Beatrix and I'm going
to be true to that."

Ida Larpent dropped her arms.  Just for an instant
the supreme mortification of being turned down
put a red mist in front of her eyes.  She could have
fallen upon Franklin and struck him again and again.
Then the sense of self-preservation came to her
rescue.  Her cunning returned and with it the vista of a
doubtful and tricky future.  She hid her disappointment
and humiliation and impatience behind a perfect
piece of acting and told herself that, after all, Franklin
was difficult and different because he was a sportsman.
She held out her hand and said, in a very sweet
voice, "I love you.  You know where to find me when
you need a friend," and went away quickly before she
might be moved to spoil the effect of her lack of
drama.  She believed that in this way she would win
a warm place in Franklin's esteem,—the first step to
the goal that she intended to gain by hook or
crook,—and she was right.





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Beatrix slept too late the following morning to
take her usual exercise in the gymnasium.  She was
called at eight-thirty by Helene, who dared not give
her less than half an hour in which to get ready for
breakfast at the luxurious hour of nine.  It was a
delicious morning, with the sea in a very gracious
mood, the sky blue and cloudless and a gentle breeze
which brought the taste of salt to the lips.

Waking after a dreamless night, Beatrix found the
sun pouring through the portholes of her state-room,
caught the infection of health and high spirits, sprang
out of bed, gave the sturdy Breton a cheery word, went
into the bathroom and alternately sang and whistled
one of Jerome Kern's catchy little tunes,—while the
French girl gave thanks.  The world was worth living
in when her mercurial-mistress found it so—otherwise
death held many charms.

It was an easy matter to dress Beatrix for the
morning,—a white silk shirt with a turned down collar, a
grey-blue jersey cloth skirt with stockings to match,
white shoes with brown strips and a man's tie of blue
and white.  In these she stood in front of a glass and
turned about in careful examination before throwing
a little smile of congratulation at herself and her
handmaiden.  "I don't give a single whoop what the fool
fashions may ordain, Helene," she said, "the too
short skirt is for Coney Island only and makes women
look either comic or pathetic, according to their weight.
See that I never have anything shorter than this,
won't you?"

Murmuring a suitable reply and blessing her patron
saint for the good day, Helene opened the door and
Beatrix passed out, touching the girl's cheek with the
tips of kindly fingers.  "We go ashore to-day," she
said, "I will let you know when to pack."

Ah, there was, then, a fly in the amber!  Helene
gave one of those exquisitely eloquent gestures, that
are peculiar to the Latin race, and sat down suddenly,
her eyebrows almost lost behind her straight cut
fringe.  "What a life!" she said, addressing the
whole suite.  "Joost as we settle and tink to
breathe,—up and away.  Joost as Mistare Jones breaks his
Engleesh ice,—we go.  I leave a republic and come
to a democracy and I fall into the entourage of a monarch!"

From which it will be seen that Horatio Jones had
been playing the sailor again.

And then Beatrix went into the stateroom of
Mrs. Lester Keene.  "Why, Brownie dear, what's the
matter?  Have you had a bad night?"

The little lady was sitting up in bed in an early
Victorian white linen night dress with a discreet touch
of lace about the high neck.  Her mousey hair was
still done for the night and contained several long
brown kid curlers about her forehead.  Her face was
pale and a little petulant as of one who has a
grievance.  She might have been one of Cruikshank's
drawings come to life.

"I heard every hour strike until five," she said,
"and my neuralgia very nearly made me scream."

"Oh, you poor dear old thing.  I am sorry!  Why
didn't you come and call me?  I don't know what I
could have done but at any rate I could have listened
to your tale of woe and it always does one good to
keep someone else awake when one can't sleep, doesn't it?"

She bent over the devoted companion and put her
head gently against her breast as if it were the head
of a child.

"Oh dear, oh dear," whimpered Mrs. Keene, "I
shall never be able to get up in time for breakfast and
I do so hate being unpunctual."

"Don't worry, dear little Brownie.  I tell you
what.  You and I will have breakfast here.  Shall
we?  I want to talk to you about a most important
thing and afterwards you shall have a little sleep and
then Helene shall dress you.  What do you say?"

"Dear Beatrix, you're very kind.  I should like
nothing better, but——"

"Don't but.  No sooner said than done," and
Beatrix rang for a stewardess.  "Now, here are your
dressing gown and slippers.  Jump,—that is, struggle
out of bed and I'll have you all ready by the time
breakfast comes."

Mrs. Keene's attack of neuralgia had been very
painful.  She had really heard several hours slip by,
but, for the pleasure and ego-warming of having
Beatrix wait upon her and say kind things she would most
willingly have undergone twice the pain and almost
total sleeplessness.  Beatrix knew this.  Without
conceit or the smallest suggestion of inflated vanity, she
was aware of the fact that she was making her little
old friend and flatterer quite happy.  Her training
among sycophants had made her an expert in playing
upon the feelings of those about her.  The unbelievable
and unhealthy wealth which had placed a golden
halo round her head had cultivated in her the gift,
peculiar to Royalty, of dealing out easily given favors,
little acts of kindness which bound her subjects more
closely.  This dangerous knowledge acquired as a
child made her as dexterous in striking answering
notes as though she were a professional pianist.  Her
instrument was temperament and she was a past-mistress
in reading character.

The stewardess took the order, hurried to carry it
out, and presently found "Mrs. Franklin" arranging
her companion among many cushions on a sofa near
the table.  A message had been sent to the major-domo
that the two ladies would be absent from the
dining-saloon.

"Well," said Beatrix, pouring out tea, "well,
Brownie, and how do you like the sea?"

Mrs. Keene had removed her curlers and so had
regained her sense of propriety.  Curlers somehow
stood to her as very intimate things.  She felt in them
as most nice women do when they are caught by men
with their hair down.  "My dear, I shall never be
anything but scared to death away from land.  This
is a very beautiful yacht, of course, with every
modern convenience and invention, but I dread to think
what might happen to her in a storm.  I am sure that
I shall not be well again until I put my foot on solid
earth."

Beatrix gave a rather excited laugh.  "Then you
will be well again this afternoon," she said.

Mrs. Keene turned eagerly.  "You don't mean that
we are going to land, that this dreadful cruise is
coming to an end *this afternoon*?"

"Oh, yes, I do."

"But, Mr. Franklin?  Has he——?"

"Mr. Franklin doesn't count in the scheme of
things," said Beatrix coolly, "I've made up my mind
to get off the *Galatea* and there it is."

Mrs. Keene's first flush of pleasure and relief faded
before her next thought.  "But your Aunt Honoria
and Mrs. Vanderdyke,—what will they say?"

"Everything that human beings can find to say
and then some, my dear, but I don't think I shall go
home at once," said Beatrix airily.  "This seems to
be a good opportunity of seeing a little of our United
States,—of which I only really know Fifth Avenue.
I think I shall get a good touring car, take Ida
Larpent and we three will go for a joy-ride.
That will give me time to think out a plan of action.
It goes without saying that I shall have now to blow
the gaff before Franklin does.  There will be a certain
amount of satisfaction in getting in first.  After
that,—well, my dear little long suffering Brownie,
Aunt Honoria will lead the family against me and
unless I can get a really splendid brainwave you and
I will go into exile to gloat, like Napoleon, on our
brilliant misdeeds,—martyrs on the altar of adventure.
And I don't mind telling you in strict confidence that
all my courage oozes away at the bare idea.  I've been
an awful little fool, Brownie, there's no getting over it."

To her great surprise, Mrs. Keene felt a curious
glow of reckless triumph in being included in Beatrix's
wild scheme.  Even she, almost the last living
representative of the mid-Victorian era, had become used
to this sham marriage.  Modernism is strangely
infectious.  All the same an overwhelming curiosity sent
personal comfort into the cold and summoning up all
her courage she put a question that had begun to burn
her like a mustard plaster.  "What has happened?"
she asked.  "Have you had further trouble with
Mr. Franklin?  Has he tried——"

Beatrix lifted a cover from a dish.  "Try some of
these delightful looking scrambled eggs, Brownie dear.
I've heard they're very good for neuralgia."

A little flush suddenly swept over the elder woman's
face.  She had taken advantage of the princess's
condescension and received as usual a well-deserved snub.
Greatly to her relief—she had an inherent dislike of
apologizing—Ida Larpent sailed in, looking like a
French actress on a holiday.

"May I come in?" she asked, a little too late.  "I
was anxious about you, dear child, and so was
Mr. Fraser."

Beatrix got up.  She was not amazed at Mrs. Keene's
curiosity.  She sympathized with that.  She
felt it incumbent upon her, however, to register
disapproval for the sake of the future.  "You're both
very kind," she said.  "There's nothing the matter.
Come to the library.  Send for Helene as soon as
you're ready to dress, Brownie, won't you?  Au
revoir."  She nodded, took Mrs. Larpent's arm and
went out.

Poor little Mrs. Lester Keene.  When *would* she
remember that she was in the service of plutocracy!

"How would you like to break the monotony of
cruising by coming on a motor tour?" asked Beatrix.
The sun set her hair on fire.

Mrs. Larpent shut the library door quickly.  "But,
how do you mean?  Is Mr. Franklin going to bring
the cruise to an end?"  She also had decided upon a
plan of action,—and the scene of it was the yacht.

"No," said Beatrix laughing, "but I have.  I'm
going ashore this afternoon with Mrs. Keene and
Helene."

"Ashore—this afternoon?"

"Why not?  There's no reason why you shouldn't
be the only woman on board, I suppose.  It's a free
country.  But if you'd care to come with me, do.  We
may have some fun."

"Thanks most awfully," said Ida, trying quickly to
make order out of chaos.  "Yes, we ought to have
great fun.  I don't know much of America."  But
what would Franklin say?  Would he let her remain
alone on the *Galatea*?  If that could be worked the rest
seemed easy.  But it would mean, she knew, breaking
with Beatrix, who was, of course, an asset.  It was
the choice between a good thing and one that might
be made of incalculable excellence.  Mentally she
plumped for Franklin, her knowledge of men and her
confidence in herself and her beauty.  "Have you
told Mr. Franklin yet?"

"Yes, vaguely," said Beatrix.  "But as I haven't
the faintest idea where we can land I'm on my way
to see him now and clinch the matter.  I don't think
there will be too much time to pack.  Be in the gym
in half an hour and let's have some exercise."  She
turned at the door and a smile lit up her face.  "It'll
be a tremendous joke cutting about the country without
any man to look after us.  Four lone women on
the long trail?  Why, we shall *ask* for trouble."

Her merry laugh remained in the room and Ida
Larpent added a chuckle to it.  "Enjoy your joke,
my child," she said to herself, "but count me out.  If
I have to work a miracle I'll stay on the yacht and in
good time, with ordinary luck and great tact, I may
have something to laugh at too."





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   \XXIII

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Franklin was in his room talking to the Captain
about a fishing expedition when Beatrix knocked at
the door.

"Come in ... and if we lie at anchor for a couple
of days we can ship some grub on the big launch..."  He
stopped on seeing Beatrix, who stood framed in
the doorway, the most bewitching picture he ever
hoped to see.

"Am I disturbing you? ... I'll come back presently."

"Oh, no, please!" said Franklin.  "We've finished."

Beatrix had no intention of leaving whether she
disturbed or not.  "Good morning, Captain," she said,
"What a wonderful day!"

"Good morning, Mrs. Franklin.  It's good to be
alive in such weather, isn't it? ... Very good, sir.
I'll see about the fishing trip at once."  He picked up
his cap, dropped the ash of his cigar into a silver tray,
bowed to Beatrix and took himself off, wondering for
the hundredth time what sort of marriage this was in
which these two young people treated each other as
though they were casual acquaintances.

"Won't you sit down?"  Franklin pushed an armchair
forward.

"No wonder you like this room," said Beatrix.
"May I wander round for a moment?  How jolly
these Yale groups are, and I see you play polo,—the
only game that makes me wish I were a man.  And
what's this uniform?  The National Guard?"

"Yes, I hold a commission."

"I didn't know that.  Very versatile, aren't you?
And that's a tarpon, isn't it?  What a big fellow.
Probably gave you some trouble."

"About four hours," said Franklin.  Good Lord,
what was this extraordinary girl made of!  Yesterday
she had fought him like a tigress, to-day she was
as sunny and calm as the weather.

She sat down on the edge of a table, pushing back
a box of cigars and half a dozen well-smoked pipes.
"I've come to have a little friendly talk," she said, "if
you can give me ten minutes."

"I'm absolutely at your service."

"Thanks.  Don't stand there.  It makes me feel
formal.  And please go on smoking."  She gave him
one of those smiles that made obedience a delight.
"That's better.  I want to tell you that, except for
one incident, I shall look back on these days on the
*Galatea* with real pleasure.  You're sorry that you
committed assault and battery, aren't you?"

"Very sorry," said Franklin.  What else could he
say with those frank laughing eyes upon him.

"Yes, I'm sure you are.  I was too, but will agree
to forget, because otherwise you've been so nice and
kind."

Franklin bowed.  He knew that he was a fool, but
he felt that she had decorated him with an order.
What was behind all this?

Beatrix threw back her golden head and burst out
laughing.  "I'll tell you," she said, reading his
thoughts on his face.  He had not troubled to become
socially expert in disguising his feelings.  She got up,
ran one of the bachelor chairs near to Franklin, sat
down and bent forward.  Artificiality, self-consciousness
and that touch of the precocious that she took an
impish pleasure in adopting in a crowd, all left her.
"Look here," she said, "I'm going to be very honest
with you, for a change.  Can you bear it?"

"Go ahead," said Franklin, boyishly.  It seemed to
him that he was looking at and sitting close to a new
girl,—the girl described to him by Malcolm in that
emotional outburst of his.

"I'm awfully, really awfully sorry I played the
fool and let you into all this, Pelham.  I took a
horrible advantage of you and I'm beastly ashamed about it."

"Oh, that's all right," said Franklin, who would
willingly have gone through it all again to be treated
so charmingly.

"You say that because, at this moment, you and I
are friends and have put our cards on the table, but I
know jolly well that I've given you a very bad time
and have got you into a hateful mess."

"That's true enough," he said.  "But why not
fall in with the only possible plan to put us both out
of it?"

"You mean marry you?"

"Yes."  He did his best to hide his eagerness.

She shook her head, and put her hand lightly on
his arm, "My dear man, I can't.  It isn't fair to
you.  I think it's, well, immense of you to have
thought of it but I draw the line at divorce.  If you
had to go through all that horrid business I'm
perfectly certain it would be on my conscience all my
life."

Franklin saw his chance to put up a bloodless fight.
"But why should there be a divorce?"

"I don't follow you," said Beatrix.

"Let's be married for the sake of everybody
concerned and remain married."

Beatrix looked at him squarely and bravely.  "I'll
tell you why not," she said, after a pause.  "Deep
down somewhere in me there's a little unspoiled fund
of romance and sentiment.  I'm looking rather
wistfully forward to marriage as the turning point in my
funny life.  I want it to be the best thing that I shall
ever do.  I want it to be for love."

"And you don't think that you could ever love
me?" asked Franklin, trying to keep his voice steady.

"No," she said, simply, "I don't.  And what's
more, I'm not your sort of girl, I know that perfectly
well."

"Speak, you fool, speak!" cried Franklin inwardly.
"Get off your stilts and lay yourself at her
feet and give up this crazy idea of breaking her
splendid spirit and blurt out that you love her to
desperation and would gladly go to the devil for her."

But the moment passed,—one of those innumerable
moments in life which, if instantly seized, turn
pain into joy, misunderstandings into complete agreement
and are capable of changing the destiny of nations.

Beatrix got up and went back to her place on the
table among the pipes.  "No," she said, with an
involuntary sigh, "I've still to meet the right man and
you the right girl.  We mustn't smash our lives
because I've dragged you into a perfectly inconceivable
muddle,—and that's putting it mildly.  No, I've got
to face the music and take my punishment, much as I
hate it."

Franklin kept his ego away from her.  Her frankness,
her childlike simplicity beat him just as badly as
her imperious moods.  His pride, and the knowledge
that she would laugh at him if he confessed himself,
made it impossible to speak.  But she tempted him
almost beyond endurance.  He had never loved her
so much as he did at that moment.  "Well," he said,
"what do you want me to do?"

Beatrix laughed softly.  "How extremely nice you
can be when you try," she said.  "When you fall in
love I hope the girl will be a real corker."

"Thanks very much," said Franklin.

"I'll tell you what I want you to do.  Run in this
afternoon and put me ashore, will you?"

"Yes."

"Thank you.  I've thought it all out.  I shall get
a car,—two cars, one for the baggage,—and go for
a short tour.  While I'm on the road with Mrs. Keene
and probably Ida Larpent, I shall write as short a
letter as possible to mother,—whew, the mere thought
of it makes me hot all over,—and give her the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Then, one
fine day, I shall walk in upon the family and give
myself up to justice.  Aunt Honoria has the very jolly
idea of taking me into exile for a year during which,
I suppose, she is optimistic enough to think that I shall
'find' myself.  What I shall really do during that
appalling time will be to write the confessions of a
spoilt girl for the use of millionaire parents."

"It will make good reading," said Franklin.

"I'll see that it does," said Beatrix a little grimly.
"One chapter, at least, will have a scathing attack on
the sycophancy of the fashionable girls' school."  She
held out her hand.  "Thank you again, Pelham
Franklin, sportsman, for all you've done for me.  I
shall never forget."

Franklin sprang up and faced her.  He was beaten
then.  He was to fail in breaking in this amazing
girl.  He was not the man marked out by fate to
find the woman in Beatrix, to be the cause of her
abdicating a sham throne, to give that good woman Aunt
Honoria the longed-for opportunity to offer praise to
God.  Right.  He would take his beating.

He grasped her hand.  "You're sure you can be
ready to land this afternoon?"

"Quite."

"Very good.  I'll make it so.  Mrs. Larpent will
go with you, of course."

"Just as you like.  And Malcolm?"

"Yes.  I'll try being alone for a change."  He let
her hand go and stood back, waiting for whatever she
might do or say next.

Beatrix laughed again.  She rather liked the queer
boyishness of this man, the awkwardness, the inarticulation;
and it flashed across her mind as she looked
at him, strong and clean-cut and sun-tanned, that there
might perhaps have been a different conversation if he
had not bent over the end of her bed and rapped out
the offensive words that were rooted in her memory.

"Well, then, I'm off to the gym," she said, "for
the last time.  How happy you'll be to be rid of women."

And out she went, as graceful as a young deer.





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   \XXIV

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Franklin locked his door.

He knew very well that within ten minutes Ida
Larpent would be upon him and that inevitably, being
told by Beatrix of the latest move, Malcolm would be
down to see what he could do.  He had no wish to
see anyone at that moment, not even his best friend.

He quietly loaded and lit a pipe, sat down in his
favorite arm-chair, shoved his hands into his pockets
and his long legs out and settled down to think.  He
hadn't done such a thing since the night of his father's
death when for the second time in his young life grief
had seized him by the throat and there did not seem
to be one speck of light on his black horizon.

He went back to the night in New York, which was
still within easy reach, when he and Malcolm had
caught sight of Beatrix and Sutherland York.  He
was then his own master, heart-whole, a complete
individualist, in the almost uncanny position of being
free from responsibility, at the beck and call of no
living creature.  He was then one of the very few men
in civilization who was able to go through life
unattached either to a business or a cause.  He was able
to buy almost everything that caught his fancy.  The
one thing that all the money in the world cannot
purchase he was lucky enough to possess.  He had health.
He was sound in wind and limb.

He followed himself into his antler-hung studio and
stood again looking round its crowded walls, suddenly
and for the first time impatient of his games,
realizing that his toys were empty and meaningless.
Malcolm's surprising outburst about Beatrix rang again
in his ears.  He remembered that it had drawn from
him a sort of prayer.  "My God," he had said, "I
wonder when *I* shall begin to live!"

Then he went over the ground from New York to
the Vanderdyke House in the new car which had
provided him with a momentary thrill.  He had gone
reluctantly because his interest in meeting Ida Larpent
again was not keen.  Their friendship had been very
pleasant and agreeable but it had served its purpose.
And then he saw himself, the super-individualist, as
sceptical of Fate as all young men are, come down
into the hall to be met by Beatrix with her urgent plea
for help.

Without hesitation or motive, without thought or
fear of consequences he had given his help and in an
instant had lost his detachment, his splendid isolation,
and rendered himself liable to responsibility, signed on
to life's roll-call as the slave of a cause.

The amazing irony of it all only came to him in
its utter nakedness as he sat there, locked into his own
room, summing up the subsequent rush of events.  In
one careless moment he had flung his freedom away
for the girl in whom he had never been able to squeeze
up any sort of interest, the girl who had been the
unconscious cause of his discontent and self-disgust, the
girl to whom he had intended to give the spurs, who
had set the torch of love to his breast and who was
now to be allowed to go free and unpunished merely
because she disarmed him with a smile.

He got up and walked about.

It might be that what people call Fate,—he was
vaguely inclined to believe that their word for it was
not the honest one,—had suddenly, in the multiplicity
of its daily work, become interested in his particular
case and in that curious and almost ineradicable way,
given him a very good reason for beginning to live,—or
was it one of the haphazard incidents that come
into the lives of human beings from out of the clouds,
not in the nature of tests or trials, but as mere
accidents out of which to shuffle in the best possible manner?

He drew up short.

What was going to happen if he let Beatrix
go?  Her name and his, her family and his own,
would be the centre of such a scandal as the papers
had not been able to batten upon in his memory.  That
mattered.  He liked and respected the Vanderdykes.
He was intensely jealous of Beatrix's good name.  He
valued his own and detested publicity.  He didn't
care whether it would be a good thing for her character
for Beatrix to spend a year out of the stir, excitement
and flattery of society.  He loved and wanted
her.  He would be half content if he could bring her
to the point of common sense and make her his wife
in its mere empty meaning.  That step achieved there
were others that might lead to the fulfilment of his
incessant dreams, if not through love then through
tolerance and the acceptance of things.

Fate or accident, was he going to permit this wilful,
nimble-minded, imperious girl, this child spoiled by a
system, to make a fool of him again?  "No, she
shan't," he said.  "I'll put up another fight and break
her by other methods.  We'll both begin to live and
face things.  I'll see this through."

He threw out his arms and took a deep breath,
unlocked his door, went on deck, saw that the chairs
were empty under the awning and made for the gymnasium.
As quick as lightning he had made his plans.

There was Ida Larpent, introspective and calculating,
in one of her most artful dresses and a soft wide-brimmed
hat, sitting on a rolled-up mattress, with her
gleaming fingers interlocked.  There was Malcolm
Fraser, in white flannels, with rounded shoulders and
head bent forward, riding a fixed bicycle for dear life
with his eyes on the dial in front of him,—and there,
in blue knickers and a silk shirt with wide open collar
was Beatrix perched straddle on the electric horse,
with her hands on her hips, riding like a cavalryman.
Her eyes were dancing, her lips parted and her face
alight with health.

"Hello, Pel," she cried out, "here we are.  Get
into whites and come and show us the way on the bars."

A wave of sheer honest passion flooded Franklin's
brain.  Assuredly he would fight and go on fighting
to win this girl.

Malcolm staggered off the bicycle.  "Never was so
glad in my life of an interruption," he said, panting.
"This is not a poet's job."

And Ida Larpent rose slowly and touched a button
on Franklin's coat.  "Come out and talk to me," she
said, under her breath.

Franklin went into the middle of the gym.  "I'm
not staying," he said.  "I just came to say, Beatrix,
that the launches will be ready at three-thirty.  Can
you be packed by then?"

"Oh, yes," she said, breaking into a gallop.  "Too
bad to have to go, isn't it?"

"Go?  Go where?" asked Malcolm, staring at Franklin.

"Ashore, old man.  Beatrix is sick of the *Galatea*
and is taking her party off the yacht this afternoon."

"Her party?"  The words came sharply from Mrs. Larpent.

"Her party,—yes," said Franklin, "so sorry,"
and he gave her a little bow which permitted of no
argument.

Malcolm was staggered.  "Meaning me,—too?"

"Naturally, my dear fellow," said Franklin.  "The
ladies must have a man to look after them.  Don't
forget, three-thirty."

The first officer was on the bridge.  Franklin made
for the Captain's state-room.  McLeod, in his shirt
sleeves, with a pipe between his teeth, was reading a
magazine.

"Don't move," said Franklin.  "Just listen.  Make
a beeline at once for the nearest place where my wife
and her friends can be put ashore.  Then have the big
launch ready.  Load it with all the luggage except my
wife's.  Have hers ready to dump into the other
launch, but don't lower it.  Put Jones in charge and
get Mrs. Larpent, Mrs. Keene, Mr. Fraser and the
French maid into the launch.  As soon as she's well
away, the first officer will take a signal from me to
pass on to you on the bridge.  I'll raise my right hand
above my head.  He will do the same.  That will
mean full steam ahead and out to sea.  Jones will
land his party and come after us.  Is all that clear?"

"Quite clear, sir, thank you!" said the Captain.

"Good," said Franklin.

As one man left the state-room the other got up and
put on his coat and cap.  There was a smile of
approval on his face as he did so.  "A very pleasant
idea," he thought, "to run away with one's wife."





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   \XXV

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Lunch was a strange meal that day.

Mrs. Larpent was angry.  Her plans lay all about
her feet like a pack of cards.  If there was one thing
she resented more than any other it was to be coerced.
The cruise might have been so useful.  In his present
state of mind, as she wrongly judged it, she had seen
a way to bind Franklin to herself more closely than it
had appeared possible in her most optimistic moments.
She had been jarred by what Beatrix had said that
morning as to going ashore but had determined to
make a huge effort to remain aboard.  Franklin's
attitude in the gymnasium, however, made it quite plain
that he did not want her.  She was to go with the rest.
It was the most bitter disappointment of her life.
Her heart as well as her pocket was hurt, and both
needed comfort.  It required all her courage to enable
her to play up to Beatrix's incessant light-heartedness
during the meal.

Mrs. Lester Keene made very little attempt to
disguise her joy at her impending release.  Her own
personal comfort came in front of her anxiety as to what
must happen to Beatrix.

Malcolm Fraser was worried and puzzled.  His
sympathy was equally divided between his friend and
the girl he loved.  The cruise, which he hoped would
bring them together, was a failure.  Propinquity and
sea air had refused to work for once.  He was
intensely sorry.  He was in the dark as to what had
happened but he knew that Franklin was hard hit
because he wanted to be alone.  It was a sure sign.  He
refused to ask himself what was going to happen.
There must be trouble and scandal and heart-burnings
and probably punishment and he regarded them all as
the spoilers of life.

He knew enough of Beatrix to be certain that in
leaving the yacht in this abrupt manner she intended
to give herself up to her people and never see Franklin
again if she could help it.  What a pity!

Franklin was quieter even than usual, but there was
something in his eyes that made Beatrix curious.  Her
quick observation missed nothing.  Just before lunch
came to an end she looked squarely at him, with a
straight face and said, "You're going to begin to
enjoy yourself now, aren't you?"

"By Jove, yes," he said, with a ring of sincerity in
his voice which set Malcolm puzzling again.

And then the imp sat itself on Beatrix's shoulder.
"I wonder you ever bothered to get married," she
said, with a little laugh.

All eyes turned upon her.  Her audacity was epoch-making.

"It isn't good for man to live alone," said Franklin quietly.

"But you agree with modern thinkers that married
people need a holiday from time to time, is that it?"

"Something like that," he replied, showing his teeth.

Beatrix looked round the table.  She saw the same
expression on the faces of all her party.  "When
shall we all meet again, do you suppose?"

"The sooner the better," said Franklin, with that
touch of old-fashioned courtesy that he must have
inherited from his grandfather.  "Let's make an
engagement to dine together one night at Sherry's
during Christmas week.  There may be a good deal to
talk about by that time."

"I'll be there," said Malcolm.

"And I," said Mrs. Larpent, who had already begun
to set the machinery of her brain at work.  Many
things might be made to happen before Christmas.

"I shall have great pleasure," said Mrs. Keene.

"But, my dear Pelham," cried Beatrix, with mock
amazement, "am I to be a grass widow all that
time?"  She got up before Franklin could find an answer.
"Come along, Brownie.  Let's go and see how Helene
is getting on with the packing.  Hope the stewardess
is doing good work for you, Mrs. Larpent.  Your
lovely frocks need careful handling, don't they?"

Franklin waited until they had gone.  Then he
turned to Malcolm.  "Come on deck, old man.
You've got to know something."

They went forward and stood in the sun.  The
line of coast was much nearer than it had been for
days.  It needed no glasses to see its formation now
and the yellow line of beach on which a good-tempered
sea was breaking.

Malcolm leaned on the rail side by side with the
man with whom he had been at school and university
and on many a long trip since.  They had been as
close as brothers, these two, with no secrets.  They
had looked into each other's eyes over camp fires in
many places far away from the contentious hell of
cities and had talked on far into the night of life and
death and the great hereafter.  They knew each other
in and out, realized each other's good points and
weaknesses.  The everlasting loyalty of friendship that
passes the love of women was theirs.

"I knew that you were not going to wind up this
cruise, whatever has happened, without a yarn," said
Malcolm.

"Not likely," said Franklin.  "We don't do those
things."

Malcolm waited while Franklin lit a cigar.  Christmas
was,—he jotted the months off on his fingers.
There were six.  A good place Sherry's.  It ought
to be a merry party.  Beatrix would see to that,—if
she were not with Aunt Honoria in exile.

"I kissed Beatrix last night," said Franklin
abruptly.  "I had to.  She was in my blood....
You know her.  She blazed.  There was a quick spat
out here after dinner.  She ordered to be put ashore,
called me some extremely well-deserved names and
played bridge as if she were at peace with the world.
Old man, she's everything you said she was and a
whole heap more.  I wish to God I'd never met her,—and
thank God I have....  This morning she came
to my room.  I had no intention, by that time, of
obeying her orders as if I were a chauffeur.  I was
too damned angry.  But she translated herself back
into the simple kid that she was when you put her
skates on and sat at her feet.  She made pulp of me.
I agreed to everything she asked.  She was nearer
liking me than I ever hoped she would be,—I suppose
because she got her way so easily.  It's a habit.
When she'd gone I did some thinking.  I don't know
what will come of it,—probably nothing, because men
don't hit women as they sometimes deserve.  But I
made up my mind to have another hard try to win her,
to fight like the very devil to keep her and break her
in.  She got me into all this by a trick.  Very good.
I'm going to take a leaf out of her book.  Two can
play that game.  You're going ashore with Mrs. Larpent,
Mrs. Keene and the maid.  I do myself the
honor to escort my so-called wife as soon as the other
launch is ready.  It never will be ready.  Do you get
me?  The *Galatea* puts out again with the
honeymoon couple—alone."

Malcolm took a long breath.  "Ah!" he said.
"Now you're talking."

"Yes," said Franklin, bringing his hand down hard
on the rail, "and now I begin to fight.  You have a
cat's eyes and see in the dark.  You hear things that
other people don't catch.  When I tell you, standing
here in broad daylight, that I believe I'm marked out
to make this girl find herself, that it's for me and no
other man to bring her out of her casing of stucco,
you'll know that I'm not talking highfalutin; you'll
understand.  In other words,—I'm not much of a
hand in using 'em,—I don't think all this is just an
accident.  I'm going to try and carry out my job.
D'you see?"

"I see," said Malcolm.  "That's why I argued
with her to come on the *Galatea*.  Good luck, Pel,
and when we meet at Sherry's in Christmas week—don't
forget to let us all know the day—I hope to
drink to Mrs. Franklin."  He held out his hand.

"I hope to God you may," said Franklin, taking it.

"I hope so too if you wish it as much as all that."

They both turned.  Beatrix had just come up,
dressed for the land.

"Don't *I* shake hands with anybody?" she added
whimsically.

"With me," said Franklin.

"And me," said Malcolm.

And she gave them a hand each and divided one of
her best smiles between them.





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   \XXVI

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At half-past three Captain McLeod stopped the
engines of the *Galatea* and the big launch was lowered.
Under the supervision of Mr. Jones the baggage
belonging to Mrs. Larpent, Mrs. Lester Keene, Malcolm
Fraser and the French maid was loaded into her, leaving
plenty of room for the passengers.

Beatrix came on deck to find everyone ready.
Franklin met her.  He looked as imperturbable as
usual but his heart was going nine to the dozen.
"You're not going with the others, if you don't
mind," he said.  "Your things shall be put into the
smaller launch.  I want to take you ashore myself."

"Highly honored," said Beatrix gaily.  "Will all
my baggage get into the other launch?"

"Easily," said Franklin.

"What a lot there is of it,—enough for a regular
honeymoon!"

"Yes.  I was thinking so....  Excuse me while
I say good-bye to the ladies."  He went over to Mrs. Larpent,
giving a quick glance to see that the first officer
was on the watch.

"Good-bye," said Mrs. Larpent, softly.  "I hate
leaving the *Galatea*—and you."

"Thanks.  I'm awfully sorry too."

"I shall probably go and stay with friends at
Southampton but a letter sent to my apartment will
be forwarded if at any time you make up another
party and need a fourth for bridge."

"Oh, that's splendid!  Good-bye then."

She held his hand, gave him a look that was intended
to convey everything that she would have said
if they had been alone,—and did,—and then went
down, was handed into the launch by Mr. Jones in his
best manner and took her place.

Beatrix leaned on the rail.  "I wish I had a
kodak," she called out.  "You look like Lady Jane
Grey."

Mrs. Larpent smiled up at her.  "I feel like the
devil, my dear," she said to herself.

Then Franklin gave his hand to Mrs. Keene.
"Good-bye," he said.  "I'm sorry you haven't had
a good time."

"I can't honestly say that I have, but you've been
extremely kind, Mr. Franklin.  Thank you."

And once more Jones proved his right to be called
a lady's man.

"You look more hopeful already, Brownie,"
laughed Beatrix.

"Well, so long, Malcolm."

"So long, Pel."

"You know where to find me."

"Right."

Malcolm sat next to Mrs. Keene to give her his
moral support, and waved his hand to Beatrix.
"You'll find us on the quay," he said.

"All right, Malcolm.  Don't wander off till I
come."

"Let her go," sang out Mr. Jones and away they
went.

And then Beatrix turned to Franklin.  "Thanks,
once more," she said.

Franklin's heart was up in his throat.  "I can
bring them back with a shout."

She shook her head.

"A woman may always alter her mind."

"I'm not a woman yet."

"No, that's true."

She laughed.  His set face was as amusing as his
naïve remark.  "Well, it was very jolly.  I've got
quite fond of the *Galatea*.  I shall miss the sun
coming through the portholes in the morning and all my
exercise in the gym."

Franklin raised his hand high above his head.  The
first officer did the same.

"I ought to know where to find you with a letter,"
said Beatrix.  "Probably mother may want a statement
from you as soon as I let the cat out of the bag.
Whew!  Won't there be a row!"

She began to wonder why Franklin didn't answer.
She saw that he was standing with his chin up and
his shoulders squared and an amazing look in his eyes.
Was it laughter, anger?  "Why," she said, "we're
moving!  Or is it my imagination?"

"No, on we go again," said Franklin.

"But—what do you mean?  On where?  The
other launch isn't lowered yet, and my things——"

"Our honeymoon begins to-day," said Franklin.

For one instant Beatrix was unable to understand.
She saw her luggage unmoved, the launch away out of
hail, the coast receding, she heard the strong beat of
the engines, looked round at the first officer near the
bridge, the sailors standing about, and Franklin ready
to spring at her if she made a wild attempt to leap
overboard.  She smothered a cry of rage, stood for
a moment in front of Franklin with blazing eyes and
distended nostrils, and then going off at one of her
sudden tangents,—beckoned to the first officer.  She
would show these men that she was game.

"As you see, I've changed my mind about going
ashore.  Will you please have my things taken back
and tell the stewardess to unpack them.  Thanks, so
much."

The first officer saluted and gave orders.  Several
men moved smartly to carry them out.  From the
bridge the Captain watched the launch slide against
the quay, and grinned as he imagined the utter amazement
of her passengers at the sight of his vessel with
her dignified nose turned seaward.  A smart breeze,
lively water, unclouded sun, a clear horizon,—what
a picture the *Galatea* must make from the shore, he
thought.

"A contemptible trick," said Beatrix, looking at
Franklin as though he were a leper.  Other things
came to her lips, savage, unrestrained, white-hot
things,—not another living creature would have dared
to treat her like this, not one,—but the first officer was
in ear-shot as well as some of the crew.  Blood and
breeding told and so with one of her most gracious
smiles she turned and swung away, singing a little
song.  Without a maid, without a companion, without
a friend, she was a prisoner on this yacht-world,
at the mercy of the man who had given her vanity an
unhealing wound.  Her one hope, her one most eager
hope, was that she would reach the drawing-room
before her tears could be seen.

Franklin watched her go.  To his tremendous love
was added pride and admiration.  She had called him
a sportsman, but what could he call her?

"A contemptible trick,—yes," he thought.  "But
this is my job.  Fate has marked me out to make a
splendid woman of this spoiled girl, and I'll do it."





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   \XXVII

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Mr. Jones, with half a smile playing round his
elastic mouth, and an irresistible twinkle in his small,
blue, nimble eyes, quickly overhauled the *Galatea*, saw
the launch properly hoisted and reported to the first
officer.

"Well, that was a little bit of orl-right," he said,
rubbing his handkerchief round the wet leather-lining
of his cap.  "Neat, very neat."

"Did they say anything when they twigged the idea?"

The whole of Mr. Jones' cockney face puckered
into a grin.  "Yes, I don't think," he said.  "The
old hen cackled as if she had lost her pet chicken.  A
good little soul.  I believe she'd 'ave took a flyin' leap
back into the launch if Mr. Fraser 'adn't 'eld her."

"What about Mrs. Larpent?"

"Ma boy, the siren's langwidge under her breath
would 'ave lit a pile of shavings.  Oh, she's 'ot stuff,
that Larpy, and no mistake.  Personally, I'm bally
sorry she's off.  It was better than readin' a novel to
watch 'er sittin' about with a social smile on one side
of her face and a Board meetin' on the other.  The
way she was layin' bird lime for the Boss!  Clever?
Nor 'arf,—and, moreover, what a nice leg for a
stockin', eh?"

The first officer nodded sympathetically.  "Yes,"
he said, "you're right.  What about M.F.?"

Mr. Jones mopped his forehead and ran his handkerchief
round the inside of his collar.  The afternoon
was warm.  "I only 'ad time to chuck one
glance at Peter Pan," he said, giving Malcolm the
nick-name by which he was known on board, "somethin'
in his eyes puzzled me.  I dunno, but he 'ad the
look of a little feller who'd 'ad his finger caught in a
door and didn't mean to say anything about it.  Well,
it broke the bloomin' monotony, anyway, and the boss
'as my warmest congrats.  How did Goldie take it?"

The first officer rather resented this precocious but
good-hearted person's love of nicknames.  "Mrs. Franklin
changed her mind," he said, with some stiffness,
"and went along to the drawing-room singing."

"Um," said Mr. Jones, with a disbelieving sniff.
"Nevertheless, she can 'ave me.  I'd break my neck
and die 'appy for one of them heart-twistin' smiles of
hers.  All the same I shall miss Frenchy, we were
gettin' on fine.  Well, such is life."

The two men separated, the first officer to relieve
the Captain, Horatio Jones to go below for a cup of
tea.  Both intended to discuss the ins and outs of the
affair in full detail later on.  The whole ship's
company was intrigued as to the odd way in which
Mr. and Mrs. Franklin "went on."  It was almost the one
topic of conversation.  For constant gossip a yacht
easily rivals a suburb, an army post or a convent.

Franklin had carried a deck chair into the sun
forward a little while after Beatrix had gone to the
drawing-room, and he remained there reading Nicolls
on "Big Game in Bechuanaland" for an hour.  He
concentrated grimly on that delightful Irishman's
account of his hunting expeditions, but not one word of
several chapters reached his brain.  Beatrix, Beatrix,
Beatrix,—all the words became her name, on every
page he could see nothing but her face and her slim,
graceful, alluring figure.  Questions as to what he
was to do, to say, to think, rose out of the pages.
Finally he shut up the book and, with an empty pipe
between his teeth, sat gazing at the line of horizon
which rose and fell, and built up a dream in which he
and she went hand in hand as far as he could see.  He
was startled and brought back to the difficult task to
which, like a sort of crusader, he had bound himself,
by the voice of the deck steward.  "Mrs. Franklin
would like you to come to tea, sir."  Mrs. Franklin!
By Jove, he would sacrifice everything he had in the
world if only those words were true.  He got up,
curious and eager, and went back amidships on the
starboard side.  In front of a wicker table Beatrix
was pouring out tea while she talked to Captain
McLeod.  She had changed back into appropriate
clothes and looked the last word in smartness in a
black straw hat with a black and white ribbon, a suit
of white flannel and white shoes with black toe caps.
The reason that there was no sign of redness round
her eyes or of swollen lids was because she had refused
to give Franklin the satisfaction of seeing these things
by shedding tears.  No one would ever know the
strenuous fight that she had put up, alone in the
drawing-room, to achieve this end.

It gave Franklin a thrill of pleasure to see her
sitting there, so perfectly at home, so completely mistress
of herself and the situation, and the smile of welcome
that she gave him made him wonder whether he was
not back in his dream.

"Captain McLeod has condescended to patronize
the tea table for once, Pelham."

McLeod got up and placed a chair for Franklin.
"Hardly that," he said, with her note of invitation
in his pocket.

"Good for you, McLeod," said Franklin, tacitly
agreeing with Beatrix that, under the circumstances,
the presence of a third person made things easier.

"Lemon and one lump, isn't it?"  She made it so.

Franklin was not surprised that she knew.  He had
proved the keenness of her observation.

"Captain McLeod, these are cheese sandwiches,—very
nice."

"Thank you."  The skipper was not much more a
lady's man than his owner, although he had stumbled
twice into matrimony, and he felt preposterously at a
loss for small talk; but if, now that the guests had
gone, the monotony of feeding in the mess was to be
broken so pleasantly sometimes, he was glad.  He had
confided to the first officer days before that Mrs. Franklin
was "the best-looking thing in girls that he ever
wanted to see."

In the middle of her acting to play hostess to the
two men who had obviously planned the trick that
kept her on board and whom she hated for it, an
uncomfortable glimpse of self-analysis told her that she
was rather enjoying the excitement and the stimulation
of her effort and that her love of adventure and
new experiences was being fully gratified.  "You
weird person," she said to herself, "what are you
made of?"  And even then her brain began to work
on the germ of an idea that might lead to her escape.
Jones might be bribed.  Her blood began to dance at
the thought of it.  What joy to do the double on
Franklin!  "I don't mean to be unkind," she said,
"and of course there can't be any more bridge unless
Captain McLeod can be induced to play a three-some—"

"Indeed, yes, gladly."

"But it is a relief to be without Mrs. Keene, by
way of a change, and the others.  You must have the
gift of second sight, Pelham."

Franklin said nothing, but he caught her eye and
bowed to show her more eloquently than he knew how
to express it in front of the Captain that he admired
her pluck.

Beatrix caught his meaning.  There were one or
two good points about this man.  But she sailed on
and talked and laughed and said several charming
things to the Captain that went well home.  If Jones
proved loyal or cowardly perhaps McLeod might be
flattered into helping her to triumph over Franklin.
It was as well to make friends, at any rate.

But all the while the coast line was growing more
and more faint and the water between herself and the
protection of the two women wider and wider.  Well,
her desire to see life had led her to this almost
inconceivable position, and she was certainly continuing to
see it.  There was some satisfaction in that.

It was only when the Captain had gone, and the
deck steward had taken away the table, that silence
fell.  For a little while those two young people who
had come together by accident remained sitting
self-consciously, wondering what to say.  Franklin hoped
that Beatrix would re-open the question of his trick
so that he could renew the old argument as to the
all-round wisdom of marriage.  It was the one burning
subject of his thoughts.  Beatrix sensed this and so
determined to talk, if anything at all were said, of a
hundred other things.  She had no patience with his
eagerness to escape from scandal at such a price.  The
silence remained, broken only by the unceasing throb
of the engines, the swish of the sea and the song of
the breeze, until finally Beatrix broke it.  "Come over
to the rail," she said, "and let's watch the sun go down."

Franklin followed her, everything in him blazing
with love and the ache to touch.

All the west was draped with red, and the sun,
conscious of having given great joy to the fading day,
sank with the indescribable dignity of a beneficent
monarch to his rest.  Sky and water paid homage as
he went and the very breeze seemed to hold its breath
to watch the passing.

"Isn't it wonderful?" whispered Beatrix, touched
with the beauty and magic of it.

"Yes," said Franklin.

"I often wonder how there can be skeptics in the
world with such a proof as this of the great Father.
Don't you?"

"Yes," he said again.

"The sun, the moon, the stars, spring, summer, the
fall,—everything so regular, so honest, so gentle, so
awful, so human and spiritual and divine.  Why look
at anything but nature for a revelation of God?"

Franklin forgot the sunset and looked at this girl
of many sides and moods.  She had surprised him so
often that he half-expected to discover in her expression
the self-consciousness of a pose.  Instead he saw
the wistful, humble look on her lovely face that he
had seen on the faces of French peasant women who,
standing in the fields in which they worked so hard
for a bare living, bowed their heads at the sound of
the Angelus, and once again he was back in his dream
with her hand in his, standing on the threshold of a
home, listening with infinite joy to the laughter of little
children.

It was not until the sun had gone and the last redness
in the sky had faded that he heard her sigh, and
saw her shiver a little and turn away.





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.. _`XXVIII`:

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   \XXVIII

.. vspace:: 2

The met again at dinner.

The chief steward, after giving the matter very
considerable thought, had taken several leaves out of the
table, thus making the happy pair "more cosy-like"
as he put it.  Beatrix and Franklin were equally glad
to find that they were not going to sit in solemn state
at the opposite ends of a long and narrow board.  It
would have added difficulty to a position already
difficult enough.

Franklin had waited outside the dining saloon until
Beatrix put in an appearance.  The orchestra, with
quite unconscious irony, was playing the Entrance of
the Gods into Valhalla from *Das Rheingold*.  The
stewards were in their places.  With an irresistible
touch of mischief and her senses alive to the grim
humor of it all, Beatrix laid her hand on Franklin's
arm and went into dinner as though the saloon were
a stage, and the curtain had risen on a crowded
auditorium.  She deliberately switched her mind into a
belief that she was playing the part of a girl who had
been forced by her family into a marriage of
convenience with a man whom she hardly knew and that
the scene in which she was to take part was comedy,
one with an underlying note of tragedy in it.  She
told herself that she was required to portray a girl
of high courage and spirit who was to convey the
impression of being perfectly at ease although her
heart was full of fright.  She did this in order to
string herself up to go through an ordeal with pluck
and to prevent Franklin from having the satisfaction
of imagining that he was forcing her to do something
that went against the grain.  Not for one instant did
she intend to let Franklin see how intensely she
resented being compelled to remain on the yacht or
permit him to feel that he was winning.  As to that she
had absolutely made up her mind.

Franklin was glad beyond words to fall in with her
mood,—as he took it to be.  Not being psychologically
inclined he was unable to deduce the meaning
of it.  He simply told himself that she was fearless
and daring and added these things to the credit list
of her splendid points which was growing larger and
larger.  He led her to the table, placed her chair, sat
opposite and looked at her over an arrangement of
roses.  She was in a white dress with a string of
pearls round her neck,—a dress so simple and clean
in its lines as to prove the hand of a master in its
making.  She sat with a straight back, her chin up,
her golden hair shimmering.  She reminded Franklin
of a daffodil.

He utterly failed to find any answers to his
questions as to what he was to do with her now that he
had her alone, how he was to proceed to bring about
the end that obsessed him, or in what way he could
persuade or coerce her out of her supreme and
all-controlling individualism.  He was not one of those
curious men who, like Micawber, the master of the
silly art of self-deception, drug themselves into a
belief that all is well for the sake of wandering in a
temporary paradise to which they have paid no entrance
fee in the way of work and service.  He was
fundamentally incapable of indulging in that form of
mental delusion which enables children to turn the floor
of a nursery into a battlefield and slothful people with
the artistic temperament to wallow in the triumph of
a great achievement before they have even commenced
to lay the foundations of it.  He had the gift of
seeing straight.  He could find no point in looking at
life through the wrong end of a telescope.  He was,
in a word, honest.  While, therefore, he delighted in
seeing Beatrix playing the role of his wife so
perfectly and enjoyed her almost affectionate manner
and charming smiles he remained coldly truthful to
himself and the position in which they both stood and
realized that he was, if anything, farther away than
ever from, the fulfilment of what he had called his
"job."

All through dinner Beatrix talked well and quietly
about plays and books, as to which Franklin had very
little to say.  So with uncharacteristic tact she
switched off to shooting and fishing and all was well.
She liked hearing him give forth on his own subjects
and was amused to find how much more he knew
of the ways and habits of birds and beasts than those
of women.  She made up her mind to see what she
could do with Mr. Jones as soon as possible.

The night was warm and windless.  When Beatrix
rose from the table she went on deck and sat where
she could listen to the orchestra.  She asked the
leader to play three pieces for her,—the strange
mixture of which made him smile.  They were Brahms'
"Minnelied," "I Love a Piano," and "Lead,
Kindly Light."  Franklin, believing that she had had
enough of him for the time being, went off to smoke
a cigar with McLeod.  As soon as the little band
finished playing and went to dinner Beatrix walked aft
to where, about thirty feet from the stern, a heavy
canvas screen ran 'thwartships from one side of the yacht
to the other, shutting off the deck space allotted to the
crew.  In this a fiddle and a mouth organ were playing
one of those heavily sentimental vaudeville songs about
home and mother, and several voices were harmonizing
the air rather well.  The owner of the falsetto with
a pronounced tremulo Beatrix imagined to be a very
tall, soft-looking, fat man with a beard which grew
almost up to his eyes.  She was right.  He was the
butt of the crew until he opened his mouth to sing.
Presently the music changed to an Irish reel and
Beatrix saw Horatio Jones with an almost smoked
cigarette in his mouth come out, as though drawn by a
magnet, or the reed instrument of the Pied Piper, and
with droll solemnity proceed, all alone, into an orgy
of toe and heel with his back to her.

Seeing her chance Beatrix slipped nearer and stood
smiling.  "Very nice," she said, when the dancer
wound up with a resounding double smack.

Mr. Jones was disconcerted, not in being caught in
his ecstatic solo, which he was quite ready to repeat,
but because he had his cap on the wrong way round
and was wearing his second-best monkey jacket.  Being
a complete lady's man he was naturally a conceited
person and nothing put him out so much as to be taken
unprepared.  He grinned fatuously and put his cap on
correctly.

"It must have taken a long time to become so
proficient," she went on, giving him a dazzling smile.

"Oh, well, y'see, mam, my mother was a pro-dancer
in her young days and I caught it from 'er, I expect."

"That's very interesting.  Tell me about it,
Mr. Jones."  She began to pace the deck.

Jones fell in step, surreptitiously mopping his neck
with his handkerchief.  This was the moment of his
life.  During other cruises he had often had pleasant
chats with Franklin and his friends who found him
and his cockney accent rather amusing, but he had
never hoped to do more than pass the time of day with
this proud girl.  He was on his best Sunday behavior.

"Me father went down to the sea in ships, the same
as all me family," he said, with what he believed to
be a certain amount of style.  "At the time he met
mother he was skipper of the *Princess Mary*, carryin'
passengers from London to Margit, a seaside
resort on the Kent coast of the old country."

"I know it," said Beatrix, who remembered without
the least pleasure its ugly pier, stiff promenade, and
heterogeneous mass of trippers.

"Is that so, mam?  Ah, some little old place!  I
give you *my* word.  Well, dad catches sight of mother
sunnin' herself on deck and as he use ter say, she
stopped 'is watch, which is slang fer love at first glance.
Bein' skipper and all like that naturally she was a bit
bucked up when he spoke and asked if she was
comfortable.  That began it and instead of stayin' at
Margit she made the return trip the next day, 'ad a
fish supper along of father at the Anchor Hotel and was
spliced up before the end of the week."

"Very romantic," said Beatrix, "and what then?"

"Well," said Jones, with a little laugh, "then there
was me, the first of nine, and mother give up 'er
terpsichorean career, so ter speak."

"But she taught you all to dance?"

"Yes, mam, and the last time I saw the old man
was at a concert in aid of the orphans of seamen at
Barking Creek and me and me brothers and sisters,
with mother in the middle, give an exhibition of fancy
dancin' and I wish you could 'ave seen the old man's
face.  He died shortly after that."

"I'm sorry," said Beatrix, wondering whether he
meant from the effects of that evening.

"Thank you, mam, but he 'ad the satisfaction of
seein' his five sons well placed at sea and his gals doin'
fine business on the 'alls as 'The Four Delantys,' and
very, very 'ot stuff too, I give you *my* word."

"How splendid.  You must be very proud to belong
to such a family.  I'll get you to tell me some more
about this romantic love match while we're out."

"Any time, mam, with pleasure," and then with
great style the man, who was as good a sailor as he was
a dancer, saluted.  Evidently he was to be dismissed.
"Well, as I said before, she can 'ave *me*," he said to
himself as pleased as Punch.

"Have you to be up early in the morning?"

"Yes, mam, five o'clock.  We heave to for a couple
of hours for me to go ashore with the mail and pick up
the papers and magazines."

Beatrix nearly jumped out of her skin.  He was
going ashore!  Here was her chance without taking this
man into her confidence or bribing him to disobey
possible orders.  "I'll be up at five too," she said, trying
to keep her voice steady.  "You shall take me with
you.  Mr. Franklin has a birthday to-morrow and you
solve the problem of how I can get something for him,
as a little surprise."

"Very glad, I'm sure," said Mr. Jones.

"Good night, then.  Be sure you don't go without
me.  I won't keep you waiting."

She was far too excited to go to sleep and lay for
an hour making plans and already revelling in her
triumph over Franklin.  She had told the stewardess to
call her at half-past four.  It would be easy to
telephone to the town where Brownie and Mrs. Larpent
would have to spend the night and after all she would
have her motor tour.  She would leave the baggage on
the yacht.  What did it matter?  Life was very good,—and
her little lie about Franklin's birthday was brilliant!

She heard Franklin striding up and down the deck
like a sentry.  It made her feel even more like a
prisoner than ever.

Only Franklin and the watching stars knew who was
the real prisoner, sentenced for life to a love that set a
hitherto untouched heart into a great blaze.

.. vspace:: 2

The morning was dull and leaden and windless, the
sea as flat as the palm of a hand.  Dressed and ready
in good time and wearing a most amazing smile, Beatrix
slipped out of her stateroom and over to the port
side.  Mr. Jones was waiting in the small launch,
talking to one of the sailors.  She was going to escape
from her floating jail, yes, escape.  How she would
love to be able to see Franklin's face when she didn't
turn up for breakfast.

And then her arm was seized in an iron grip.  "No,
you don't.  Believe me, no."

It was Franklin, with an overcoat over his dinner
jacket.  He had obviously not been to bed.

She drew up and tried to bluff.  "I'm only going
to ring up Mrs. Keene and tell her——"

"Go back to your room!"

"But I must give her instructions as to what——"

"Go back to your room, I tell you."

She stamped her foot.  This man was unendurable,—and
his hand hurt her arm.  "What is all this?
Do you suppose that I'm going to take orders from you?"

"Jones, get off," he shouted, "and don't hold us up
longer than you need."

"Aye, aye, sir," answered the dancing sailor,
who wished he could have heard what had been said.

"As to taking orders from me, yes, from now
onwards.  Breakfast is at nine," and he gave her back
her arm and turned away.

Beatrix put her hand over her mouth to gag a scream
of anger.  But she would make him pay for this, with
the other debts.  She would indeed.  If Mr. Jones
couldn't be worked upon again, there were the first
officer and the Captain,—and they, unlike this
cold-blooded bully, were men.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXIX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XXIX

.. vspace:: 2

It had been a queer day for Franklin.

Beginning with anger it gradually led him into a
dozen other emotions,—a reluctant admiration for the
cunning way in which Beatrix had been going to take
advantage of Horatio Jones; amusement when she
didn't appear for breakfast and he thought that she
was sulking; loneliness when tea-time came and there
was still no sign of her; finally fright, sheer, honest
fright when he discovered at sun-down that she had
not rung for the stewardess during the whole of the
day.

He sent for the stewardess.  "Why do you suppose
Mrs. Franklin hasn't needed you?" he asked.

"I don't know, I'm sure, sir."  The woman was
evidently worried too.  She fingered her apron nervously.

"When were you in her room last?"

"At half-past eight, sir."

"Well?"

"Well, sir, I called Mrs. Franklin at four-thirty this
morning——"

"Yes, I know."

"And I went in again as usual at half-past eight to
see what I could do to help in any way and
Mrs. Franklin had gone back to bed, sir."

"Go on."

"Well, sir, I hung about for a few minutes and then
Mrs. Franklin half woke up and said: 'I'm tired,
don't come again until I ring.'"

"You're quite sure she hasn't rung?"

"Yes, sir.  I've never left my cabin,—had my
meals brought there, sir, in case——"

"I see.  Thank you."  He opened the door for the
sturdy little woman who seemed to have caught his
anxiety, and then killed the longest half an hour that
he remembered ever to have spent.  Was Beatrix in
her stateroom?  Had she by any chance got away?
That was absurd.  How could she with officers and
crew about all day?  Naturally she was tired, having
been up so early, but why stay in bed for so many
hours?  Her vitality and love of movement, her
constant desire to do things and take exercise, her
homogeneous nature which led her to talk to all and sundry
made it impossible for her either to wake or sleep for
such a long time.  She must be ill!  Yes, that was it.
She had fainted or done one of the queer things that he
had heard of women doing.  The stewardess must see
her at once.  Why?  She was no use.  For one thing
she stood in awe of this girl who gave such definite
orders and saw that they were observed.  For
another she was rough and untrained and probably
incompetent and like all her countrywomen
sensational.  She might scream or something....  For
Heaven's sake what was he to do?

With all his nerves jangling like a bunch of telegraph
wires in a gale he went aft.  The sun had gone.
It was almost dark.  One star had come up, the
outpost of the night.  There was, he saw, no light in her
suite.  He stood at her door, irresolute, with the hand
of fright on his heart.  He was homesick for the sight
of her and the sound of her voice, even if it should be
cold and antagonistic, or mocking and scornful.  He
felt oddly and strangely young and lonely and worried,
afraid of some intangible thing.  Suppose she had
done something——

He couldn't bear the thought.  He opened her door,
shut it and went in and stood in the dark.  It was the
sitting-room.  On the table in the middle there was a
reading lamp.  He groped about and found it and
turned it up.  There was a book on the floor, open
face down, its leaves all bent under.  It must have
been flung there.  A soft, black hat was lying up
against the wall.  It looked hurt.  And everywhere
there was the subtle influence of scent.

He went across to the bedroom door, hesitated,
turned the handle and went in.

By the light from the sitting-room door, he could see
the bed.  The blankets had been flung back and under
a sheet Beatrix lay, her cheek on one hand, the other
soft and flaccid, palm-up, on the cover.  A great fan
of golden hair covered the pillow.  She was lying on
her side like a child with her knees drawn up and one
bare shoulder gleaming.

The eternal yearning of Nature made Franklin want
to cry out at the sight of her.  He stood humble,
inarticulate, bewitched.  The room seemed to be filled
with the sound of sweet, far-away voices.

He went forward and bent over her, listening to
her breathing.  It was agony to be so near and so
far away.  After a moment she laughed softly and
stirred like a waking flower and drew up her hand
and moved it lazily as if trying to catch the figure of
sleep that was turning to go.

He drew back quickly, panting.

"Is that you, Brownie dear?  Oh-ho, I've had such
a lovely rest.  I've been lying all among buttercups and
clover far, far away from the sea.  It's good to be on
land again and hear the birds sing and watch the
grasses nod."  She turned over and stretched and
gave a long sigh and opened her eyes.  Then
she looked about astonished and sat up quickly,
startled.

"Who's there?"  Her voice was sharp and frightened.

"Me," said Franklin.

"You!"  She put her hands over her breasts.

"I'm sorry.  I thought you were ill."  How tame
it sounded!

"Ill?  Why?"

"It's late and you haven't rung for the stewardess
all day.  I wondered if anything was the matter.  So
I came in.  That's all.  Can I do anything for you?"

"Only—go," she said.

And so he turned and went out and strode forward
and stood hatless under the sky.  Other stars had
come.  The line of horizon had become merged into
the darkness.  The breeze left the taste of salt on his
parched lips.  The eternal yearning grew in the
silence and the call of Nature seemed to echo through the
world.  Everything that was true and clean and honest
in him answered to it.  All his dreams as a boy and
a youth, vague, unremembered; all the sudden, surprising
elations that had swept over him at the sight,
perhaps, of a priceless view of open country, the misty
interior of an old Cathedral, the appeal of a throbbing
melody, took shape and became the lovely body of
that sleeping girl.  He had never understood so
definitely, so conclusively, so permanently, that in
Beatrix was the epitome of all his hopes.

She dined in her own room that night and had
breakfast sent to her in the morning.  Franklin hung
about near her stateroom in the hope of seeing her.
He could hear her singing as he passed and talking to
the little Irish woman, but at twelve o'clock there was
still no sign of her on deck.  He was just going along
to the Captain's room in order to talk and be talked
to when the stewardess came and gave him a note.
He took it and blushed like a school-boy and carried it
down to his own room.

It had no conventional beginning.  It plunged
straight to the point.  "I'm not sulking, which would
be human enough, or suffering from shock, which
would be reasonable under the circumstances.  I'm
thinking and weighing things up.  I've told the
stewardess that I've got neuralgia so that the people of
your small kingdom may not run away with the notion
that their rulers have had a wordy argument.  I may
inflict myself upon you for lunch if by that time I have
found the way out of my mental maze.  If not, you
may be alone in all your glory for days,—weeks perhaps."

It ended as abruptly as it began.

Days,—weeks perhaps!





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXX`:

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   \XXX

.. vspace:: 2

Having written the note, Beatrix proceeded to dress
for lunch.

It was altogether a new thing to be without a maid
and a companion.  Never once in all her life, not even
at school, had she been permitted to raise a finger for
herself.  Helene and Mrs. Lester Keene would have
stood aghast and imagined that the end of the world
was at hand if they could have seen her that morning
doing her hair, putting on her shoes and choosing a
frock.  She did these things without assistance from
the stewardess, who stood by impotent and uneasy,
because she enjoyed the experience as a deviation from
the regular routine of her life and found plenty to
laugh at in her ridiculous inexpertness.  It was a game
and after her orgy of sleep she felt so electrically fit
and vital as to be ready to play at anything, especially
if it was new.

It was true that she had been thinking.  Sitting
like a tailor on her bed, with her hair in a flood about
her shoulders, she had gone over the last two incidents
of this queer honeymoon trip with great care.  She
was astonished, and even a little uneasy, to find that
she was beginning to look at the whole business from a
new angle.  She discovered, after an honest examination,
that the mere romantic side of this kidnapping
expedition, as she called it, no longer interested her,
nor its unconventionality, either, although she chuckled
to think of the mistaken complacency of her family in
aiding and abetting Franklin to commit a breach that
was without a parallel in the history of American
society: It was enough to make a cat laugh.  What it
seemed to her to lack was the element of personal
danger which had made the episode in her bedroom a
very real fright.  There was, it seemed to her, no red
blood in the business, no flare of sex.  Franklin was
either the most cold-blooded man imaginable or a past
master of the art of hiding his feelings.

This was what she wanted to find out.  Her thinking
led her up to the fact that her interest and curiosity
were centered on this one point.  She was perfectly
frank in acknowledging to herself that her vanity was
piqued.  All other men, except Malcolm, who, after
all, was not so much a man as a poet, had made it
plain that they were men.  Her femininity had
triumphed.  But with Franklin it was different.  Was it
possible that the more he was with her the less he was
attracted?  Here was something on which to concentrate
and use her wits.

It was, therefore, with the excitement of having
found something to do, a new game to play at, a new
chapter to begin, that she dressed for lunch.  The
muddle in which she left her stateroom,—skirts that
she had looked at, considered and discarded, stockings
and shoes all over the floor, shirts and ties all chaotic in
the drawers,—was a sight to see.

Only a few minutes late, she swung into the dining-saloon,
fresh and sweet, dancing-eyed and vital, ready
to seize the first chance of putting Franklin to a new
test.

He had none of the look of a man who had been up
all night, tortured by a desire that had kept him pacing
the hours away beneath a supremely indifferent moon.
He had just come in from a swim.  His body, having
been exercised, was grateful and in fine fettle.  His
skin was burned a deeper brown.  He was as hard
as nails.  He had not expected to see her, but from
force of habit had waited in case she should come.

"Good morning," she said, cheerily.

"Good morning."  He was cheery, too.

"You've waited for me, I see."

"Of course.  I hoped you'd come."

"You say that as if you meant it."

"I do mean it."

"So bored that you can even put up with me?"

"I'm never bored at sea."

Her laugh rang out.  "I gave you a perfect chance
to say something nice," she said.

"I'm not much of a hand at saying nice things."

"I notice that."

Franklin let the challenge go.  He had never felt it
more necessary to keep a gag in his mouth.  The
things that were on the tip of his tongue to say were too
primeval to put into words.

"Have you missed me?"

"We've all missed you."

"I asked if *you'd* missed me?"

"Yes."

"All right, my friend," she thought, "wait a bit."

She gave a nod and a smile to the stewards and ate
with such excellent appetite that their efforts were well
rewarded.  The sun was cheerful, the saloon was
cheerful, the stewards quick and willing, and Franklin,—yes,
Franklin was certainly a very good-looking
person.  Bother the yacht, and her people and what had
happened to Brownie, and the loss of a maid!  Life
was full of fun.

"The other day you said something about a fishing trip."

"Yes, I know."

"Tell me about it."

"Well, I'd arranged with McLeod to go off on the
big launch for three days but——"

"But what?"

"It's not much fun going alone."

Here was her first chance.  "Take *me*," she cried,
leaning forward.  "I'd love to go.  I've never fished,
but you could teach me."

Franklin looked at her sharply to see if she were
joking.  But her expression was that of a child eager
for adventure.  "But the launch has no cabin," he
said, "and we sleep under a hood hauled over her."

This was wonderful,—a test, indeed.  She pressed
the point eagerly.  "Why not?  I don't mind roughing
it.  I don't mind anything if it has compensations.
Come out and talk it over."

Franklin followed her.  She was leaning against the
rail with the breeze in her hair and the sunlight on her
shoulders.  What if he fell in with her impetuous
wish?  Jones and one of the crew would sleep, as
usual, up in the peak and he and she must lie almost
side by side under the awning in the stern.

"Please don't make difficulties," she said.  "Let me
have my own way just for once."

He could have yelled with laughter.  Confound it,
the girl was having her own way all the time, except in
unessential things.

"There are various degrees of roughing it," he said,
cursing his conscience.

"Yes, but if I don't mind,—if I want to?"

"Have a look at the launch, and then think."

"I'm tired of thinking.  Arrange it,—please arrange
it."  She didn't want in the least to go, and she
knew better than he did how absurd the idea was.
But here was a chance to force him out of inarticulation,
to see his self-composure crumble and break.

"Three days out.  Hardly room to swing a cat.
Two men with us——"

Beatrix gave an impatient sigh.  "I wish to heaven
I wasn't a girl," she said, and waited expectantly.

It was no good.  Franklin's hot words were choked
back.  He didn't know the Eden game that she was
playing and would be hanged before he would give
himself away to be laughed at.

And so the moment passed.

She walked up and down with him for an hour,
laughing and talking.  He was amazed to find that she
was more friendly and charming than ever before and
that her sleep seemed to have removed from her mind
all trace of resentment.  "Let's talk young stuff," she
said.  "What we believe in, what we think we might
do to solve all the problems of the world and all that,
shall we?  It's awfully good to get on a high horse
every now and then and sweep away institutions with a
phrase, knock down old laws with a well-aimed verb,
and topple big men out of their places with the tip
of a toe."

And they did so in the old-new way of youth, saying
things earnestly, with the air of prophets, that had
been labelled unpractical before they were born; letting
their tongues run away with them as far as they
could before they limped and halted; listening to each
other with their eyes while getting the next outburst
ready in their brains.  And after awhile, as usual, they
steered into personalities, likes and dislikes and mutual
friends.

"And what do you think of Ida Larpent?" Beatrix
asked suddenly.

"Very attractive, but——"

"But better as somebody else's dinner partner?"

"Oh, no," said Franklin.  "She made the average
dinner bearable.  She's in a class of her own,—beautiful,
well-travelled, tremendously all there, and
awfully good fun to take about."

"Take about?"  Her eyebrows went up.  "Did
you take her about?  But perhaps that's rather an
indiscreet question?"

"Not a bit.  When I was in town some months
ago, bored stiff,—all my pals being away,—she was a
real good sort and we did the rounds,—everything
except the Opera—which seemed to be having an orgy
of Wagner, and I can't stand that over-exuberant
German.  I did a cycle of him once in London and it
seemed to me that if he'd had the sense and honesty
to scrap sixty per cent of his stuff there would have
been enough over for two very decent operas.  What
do you think?"

She said something to keep the ball going but
nothing of what she thought.  So he could own to
having been so attracted by Ida Larpent as to take her
about night after night, but when it came to her,
Beatrix, he could remain perfectly normal.

And again she thought: "All right, my friend,
wait a bit."  If she couldn't compete with Ida
Larpent—good Lord!

But no, even under the rankle of this new thing,
and even though she went to dinner that night in a
mood as daring and devil-may-care as her dress and
stood looking out at the star-bespattered sky for a long
time with her arm through his, he remained brotherly.
In fact, and in not seeing it her observation was
uncharacteristically out of form,—her new delightful
treatment of him made him very happy and contented.
She was so charming and natural and breezy.  She
never once laughed at him or held him up to ridicule.
He could almost persuade himself that they were
really on a honeymoon, except when a whiff of scent
bewildered his senses or the gleam of her whiteness
made his heart tumble.

And so it went on for several apparently uneventful
days,—days full of sun and health and simple
confidences, of wide, gorgeous views of sea and sky, of all
the exquisite coloring of sunrise and sunset, and of
the sweet singing of far-away voices.  It was to bed
that she took her growing pique; in the quiet of her
own room that she asked herself, like the spoiled child
that she was, what was the matter with this man.
Under normal conditions, if they had been, perhaps,
members of a house-party, she would have liked him
extremely.  He had greatly improved on acquaintance.
He was something more than a sportsman.  He had
imagination, idealism, extraordinary simplicity and
even a touch,—odd as she found it in his type,—of
spirituality.  It came out in his deep appreciation of
Nature and love of melody.  Why didn't he find her
attractive,—even as attractive as Ida Larpent?

Only the nights were permitted by Franklin to see
the strength of his desire, the torture of his passion;
and these he killed and wore away by pacing interminably
up and down, throwing himself on his bed finally
tired out mentally and physically.

Very soon the game lost its novelty.  Getting nothing
to appease her vanity Beatrix gave it up.  Once
more the monotony of the sea bored her, the sensation
of being tied by the leg got on her nerves.  Franklin
said a rather impatient thing one morning in reply to
a sarcastic remark of hers and before she could stop
herself and remember to stick to her pose of complete
indifference she put her hand imploringly on his arm
and burst into an intense and genuine appeal.  "Well,
let's end it," she begged.  "Nothing can come
of all this, nothing at all.  You're only dodging the
issue, really you are.  Don't let's play the fool any
longer.  The more you try to force me to agree to your
plan the harder I shall fight.  Don't you know me yet?
I'm built like that.  I can't help it.  Oh, do be sane
about it and come down to facts.  We shall both grow
old and grey on this prison ship because I'll never give
in, never.  It isn't that I don't think you're right.
You are.  I'll concede that.  We ought to marry and
settle the whole trouble.  It's the easiest way.  But
I've said I won't, and I won't.  I tell you I won't.
I know I'm a fool.  I know I'm pig-headed.  I know
I deserve to be made to pay.  But you can't alter me
now.  It's too late.  So let me off and I'll take my
punishment and the whole thing will blow over.
People's memories are short and every day, every hour
other scandals come up, are talked about and forgotten.
Pelham, will you please be good and let me go?"

All this came with a rush.  Her voice was soft and
winning, her eyes full of tears, her hand warm and
sweet upon his arm.  But every word that she said,
every look that she gave him, every touch of appeal
that came into her voice made her more and more
valuable as the prize of his life, and the sight of her
tears, especially the sight of her tears, steeled him to
stick to his job to the very end.  All her spoiling, all
the falsity of her training, all the grotesque power of
the wealth with which she had always been surrounded,
had not completely changed her from the little girl
whom Malcolm had painted in his never-to-be-forgotten
picture, and of whom he had himself seen glimpses.

"No," he said.  "I'm as pig-headed as you are.  I
don't care if we do grow old and grey on this yacht.
You've got to marry me."

Beatrix drew back.  She was cold and angry and
bitterly annoyed with herself for having asked once
more for mercy.  "All right," she said.  "Then the
fight goes on, and I give you warning that I shall use
any weapons, fair or unfair, that I can find."

Before she could turn away and hide the marks of
her tears, Captain McLeod came up.  She smiled and
gave him a cheery word.  It was admirably and
characteristically well done.

"McLeod," said Franklin quietly.  "Tell Jones to
get the big launch fixed up right away.  He's to come
with me on the fishing trip."

Beatrix left them to talk over the arrangements.
What did she care where he went?  He could go to
the devil if he liked.  She whistled as she moved away
but her eyes were black with rage.  This man who had
the temerity, the impudence not only to stand up to her
but to set himself to bend her to his will should see now
of what sort of stuff she was made.  Up to that very
moment, in the face of everything that he had done,
she had not cared to believe that this struggle of wills,
this clash of temperaments, was worth taking with real
seriousness.  She had dodged it, laid it aside, treated
it as half a joke, believed that if she really exerted
herself it could be brought to a quick and definite end.
She had not taken the trouble to rouse herself fully and
set her wits at work to get away from the yacht.
The pleasure of playing with fire was too great.  She
really had wished to see how far Franklin would go.
But now, having humbled herself again and been
turned down, she went round another mental corner.
Her interest and curiosity in the affair had come
suddenly to an end.  What did it matter in what way her
family would presently revenge themselves?  *This*,—this
business,—was insufferable.  To be dictated to,
coerced, compelled, driven,—good Heavens, it was not
to be endured.  From that moment she would set herself
to outwit him, humiliate him and laugh in his face.
The work that she had begun with Mr. Jones in a
half-hearted way would now, of course, count for nothing.
He was going with Franklin.  But there remained
Captain McLeod and the first officer, and she would
have three days.  Revolutions had been brought about
in less time than that, and she had smiled other men,
including Franklin, into her service.

She went to the glass in her stateroom and rubbed
away the marks of her tears with impatience and scorn.
Then she stood back so that she could see the full
length of her figure and took stock, measured herself
up, made a cool and keen examination.  Finally,
having turned this way and that, she nodded at her
reflection with approval.  "Fair or unfair,—we'll see," she
said.  "There are the Captain and the first officer."

And then, smiling again and happy in having come
at last to a conclusion, she changed into gym kit and
in five minutes was perched up on the wooden horse,
riding hell for leather.





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.. _`XXXI`:

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   \XXXI

.. vspace:: 2

There, half an hour later, Franklin found her.

The horse was motionless.  She was sitting side
saddle with one slim leg crossed over the other, her
arms folded over her young breasts.  She was in deep
thought but there was a little smile of excitement
round her mouth which, if Franklin had known it as
well as Brownie did, would have put him instantly on
his guard.  Things happened when Beatrix smiled
like that.

The port-holes were open and several round patches
of sunlight made pools upon the floor.  One had
fastened upon the blue silk bathrobe which Beatrix had
thrown off.  The sea was as smooth as the waters of
a lake and but for the busy song of the engines the
yacht might have been lying against a quay.

Franklin pulled up at the door.  He had come up
quietly and unnoticed.  He held his breath and stood
looking, with a curious mixture of homage and ire, at
this mere kid, as she seemed to him to be, this
girl-child perched up on that toy horse like a fairy on a
toadstool, lost in a day-dream.  He asked himself, in
amazement, what magic there was all about her that
had swung him out of his course, put a new beat into
his heart, that could turn him hot and cold, churn him
into a desire that was at times almost beyond human
endurance,—which had put a reason and a meaning
into life that startled and surprised, laid enchantment
upon him, made him wretched and angry and eager,
feel like a king and a clown in quick succession.

For the first time since he had met her he had caught
her unawares, quiet.  It was extraordinary.  This was
not the young hedgehog, with all her defenses pointed,
the immature woman of complete sophistication, ready
at any moment to smile and answer back, to hide
behind a manner, to dart out with a flash of wit, to mock,
to wheedle, to inspire, to anger.  This was Eve in
exile, the original woman come upon suddenly alone
in a glade, away from any glistening pool in which she
could watch the reflection of her face and gleaming
body, from any Adam upon whom to try her wiles.
This was Beatrix, herself, at last.

Franklin moved to go.  He felt like Peeping Tom
at the top window of that house in Coventry from
which he gloated upon the beauty of Godiva "clothed
on in Chastity."  It was unfair, almost indecent, it
seemed to him, to take advantage of this lovely chameleon
in her original color.  And as he moved she heard
him and changed.

"Hello, Strong Man," she cried out, slipping from
the horse.  "What's the latest?"  Her expression
was impudent, her friendliness an audacity.

Franklin leaned against the door.  He had never
supposed that a time would ever come when he would
be obliged to play-act.  "I've cut the fishing trip for
to-day," he said, as though he were talking to a young
sister.  "Jones has damaged his hand and as he's the
only man I care to take, the thing's off."

"Oh, poor Mr. Jones!"

"You implied just now that you were bored stiff
with the yacht."

"Fed up, I meant to say, which is several degrees
worse."

"What about coming out on the small launch and
having lunch on one of the islands westward?"

Beatrix picked up her bath-robe and swung it round
her shoulders.  "It sounds too good to be true," she
said, without enthusiasm.  "Thank you."

Franklin blocked the door.  She was in his blood.
"Good God," he cried, all out of control, "why don't
you smash that damned shell and be yourself all the
time?"

She raised her eyebrows and swung a tassel round
and round.  "You don't like my shell, then?"

"I loathe it!"

"Well, nobody asked you to do anything else, you
know."

Her iciness and savoir faire, the fearless way in
which she stood up to him, the utter indifference to his
opinion one way or the other on any mortal subject
crushed his passion as effectively as a snuffer on the
flame of a candle.  He stood aside to let her pass.

But she had seen the sudden blaze in his eyes.  It
was not to be missed.  She mistook it for the sort of
passion that she had unconsciously roused in
Sutherland York and used her wits to quell.  There had
been none of this, to her way of thinking, in the
kisses that Franklin had snatched.  They were merely
to show her that he was owner.  She had never
conceived it possible that this inarticulate man could love
her.  He made it too obvious that she fell far short
of his ideal.  But she had now at last caught the
desired glimpse of that side of his character that she
had been working to find.  He was not then so
supremely self-composed as he made himself out to be.
He had shown her, in a flash,—and she got this with
a great throb of feminine triumph,—that however
well he had believed in the truth of his scornful
statement as to the huts on the desert island when he had
made it, he would lie if he repeated it now.

And with this balm to the wound in her vanity,
which had never healed, she passed him.  He lived as
a man again for the first time since the bedroom
incident,—and she liked him for it.  She got this too, as
she went off to her suite, and it came on top of her
determination to fight "fair or unfair," as something
of a shock.  To begin to like him when she ought to
detest him most!—"Good Lord," she said to herself
as she dressed to go out in the launch, with greater
pains than usual, "what a mass of contradictions you
are, my child.  What are you *really*, I wonder?—and
how will all this end?"

Franklin went slowly across to the port-side,
disheartened and depressed.  "What the devil's the use
of me?  Every time I open my mouth it makes everything
more hopeless.  I'm as bad as a bull in a china
shop.  I'd better let her go and chuck the whole blessed
thing and, after all, is there any gold to dig out or has
it all turned to brass?  I'll be hanged if I know."





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.. _`XXXII`:

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   \XXXII

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There was a certain amount of bustle going on.
The yacht had found an anchorage.  The small launch
had been let down.  A steward handed over a lunch
basket to Jones, who was "willing" hard to be taken
along.  Men moved at the double in the execution of
their duties.  The first officer stood by with a
watchful eye.  He had made a small bet with Jones that he
would be left behind.

It was midday and very warm.  There was not
enough wind to tease a curl.  When Beatrix appeared,
in the fewest possible clothes, she was followed by the
stewardess carrying a sort of mackintosh bag in which
were a bathing dress, a tin of powder, a brush and
comb, and so forth.

"Back about five," said Franklin.

The first officer saluted.  "Very good, sir.  Keep
an eye on the weather.  It looks like a change to me."

"All right."

Franklin got into the launch and handed Beatrix
aboard.  "You're taking a coat, aren't you?"

"No," said Beatrix.  "Why?  It's lovely and warm."

"I'd like you to."

She smiled up at him and shook her head.  She held
the cards now.

Franklin caught the eye of the precocious Jones and
jerked his thumb towards the yacht.  The first officer
grinned to see him nip aboard.  A dollar had its uses
but it was well worth ten to see Jones squashed.

Away went the launch, the happy pair in the stern,
the white silk shirt and red tie of the girl standing out
against the water, the midday sun beating down from a
cloudless sky on the trim and glossy boat.  Franklin
turned his head over his shoulder, and waved his left
hand at the Captain.  The pit-pit of the motor awoke
echoes.

"Owe you a bloomin' dollar," said Jones, with a
touch of temper.

The first officer let his laugh go.

The Captain left the bridge, went along to his quarters,
took off his coat, lit a cigar and sat down to write
to his wife.  It was not his day for writing, but on his
brain there was a very charming picture of a girl in a
white silk shirt and a red tie.

Beatrix crossed her legs and drew in a long breath.
"The prisoner goes for an airing," she said.

The chameleon had changed color again.  Franklin
caught her sunny mood with eagerness.  "Glad to
get off?"

"Oh, goodness, yes!  I feel like the man who after
living at the Plaza for a year sneaked into Child's
for his meals.  Anything for a change.  Which island
are you making for?"

Franklin pointed.  "That one.  It has a natural
landing-place, enough shade——"

"A good place to bathe from?"

"But you're not going to bathe, are you?"

"Oh, yes, I am!  There are my things.  Have you
got yours?"

"Yes, they're in the locker."

"I shall simply adore to swim.  If you'd been any
sort of a husband you'd have seen to it before."  She
shot this out without thinking.  Her spirits were too
high to bother about anything that he might say.
She had forgotten for the time being that he was a man.

"Being your sort of husband," he blurted out, "I
keep all suggestions to myself."

She gave one quick look at him.  Yes, she held the
cards now, all of them.  There would be no more
monotony from day to day.  This man was coming
through, like a negative in course of development.
She would be able to play with him as a cat plays with
a mouse, make him pay over and over again for having
hurt her so deeply, and as soon as it suited her bring
him to the point of being willing and anxious to let her
go, getting nothing from her.

She sat back and smiled.  How infinitely satisfactory
it was to resume her place in the world and in her
own esteem!  It wasn't her fault if everybody had
spoiled her.  It was theirs.  The point was, was she
worth spoiling?  And for Franklin to say yes,—Franklin
who had fought so hard to wear a mask and
had played the tyrant with such success,—that was
good hearing!

"What time do you propose having lunch?" she
asked, after a long and happy silence.

"Any time you like."

"Do you mean that?"

He looked astonished.  "Yes, of course."

"I ask because it will take time for me to get
used to your showing me any consideration," she said,
with the imp back on her shoulder.  "Your iron hand
has almost cowed me.  You have nearly broken my
spirit.  I am a humble creature now, grateful for
crumbs of kindness."

Franklin threw back his head and laughed until the
tears came into his eyes.

"What's the matter?" she asked, gravely.

He turned and looked her full in the face.  "The
devil was somewhere about when you were born," he
said.  "I wish to Heaven we were back in the good
old days when men could beat their women without
fear of police and suffrage and all the silly stuff that
protects you against your proper treatment."

Before she could answer he stopped the engine and
ran the launch alongside a low ridge of rock, sprang
out, helped her up, jammed a pin into a cleft and
fastened the painter to it.

She stood up in front of him, proud and glorious in
her youth and beauty.  "Well, here we are on your
desert island," she said.  "Beat me.  Why don't you?"

For a moment he said nothing.  He ran his eyes
over her,—golden hair, flower-like face, eyes in which
there was a lurking laugh, lovely slim body.  "I almost
think you're not worth it," he said.

Almost!—how foolish of him to say that.  One
day soon he should withdraw not only the almost but
the whole remark, on his knees,—and be left there,
like a fool.

"May I have that little bag, please?" she asked,
sweetly.

He hiked it out and gave it to her.

"You know the island, don't you?"

"Every inch of it."

"Where do you propose that I shall undress?"

"Come along and I'll show you."  He started off,
clambering over the brown rocks.

She followed to a place about a hundred yards away,—a
sort of cave on a tiny spread of beach.  "Oh,
how perfectly delightful," she cried.  "Built for
bathing, isn't it?"

"Don't go in before I come back.  There's a strong
undertow here.  Sing out when you're ready," and
away he went.

Beatrix chose a dry spot on the sand and without a
second's hesitation sat down and started to untie her
shoes.  She longed to get into the sea, to enjoy the
exhilaration of exercise, to feel the warm sun on her
wet limbs and be a child of Nature.  Franklin might
talk as glibly as he liked about the good old days but
he was a sportsman.  She had no fear.

He hadn't long to wait.  He got into his bathing
things and had only taken two puffs of a cigarette
before he heard her call.  Once more he climbed over
and down the rocks,—stopped for a moment and
drew in his breath at the sight of her,—and then went on.

She waved her hand.  She was standing ankle-deep
in the sea with a red rubber cap drawn tightly over her
hair, without stockings and in a suit that looked like a
boy's.  "Delicious," she called out.

It was the very word he had already discovered.

And in they tumbled, laughing and splashing, like
children.  "Let's dry in the sun," she said coming
out breathlessly, her face and arms glistening, the
wet suit as tight as a black skin.  She sat down and
peeled off the rubber cap and shook her hair free.
"This is the best thing I've done for months."

He stood a few yards away and threw pebbles into
the sea.  He felt awfully young and fit.  It was almost
as good as dreaming to be out there, like that, with
*her*.  He chucked as hard as he could, with all his
force, competing against each good shot.  "How
about that?" he cried out, with a laugh.

Beatrix looked at him.  She had merely accepted
him before.  He was like the bronze figure of "The
Runner" come to life, with his small head and broad,
deep chest, hard muscular arms, clean, hipless lines,
tremendous strength.  The sight of him gave her a
sudden, unexplainable sense of shyness.  She tried to
shake it off.  It was disconcerting and foolish.

He flung himself down and began to babble to her,
pouring sand through his fingers.  His dark, thick
hair was still wet.  His skin was tanned almost black.
The whites of his eyes were as white as his teeth.
His moustache, red as a rule, was burned to the color
of straw.  An odd thought flashed through her mind.
He must like her to have spared her, to have respected
her.  How easy to have broken her if he'd cared!

"Isn't it wonderful here?" she said, resenting a
feeling of self-consciousness.

"Pretty good, isn't it?  Malcolm and a whole
crowd of us bathed here last year.  Very queer.  I
remember he told me about you that morning,—how
well you swim, or something, and by Jove, you do
swim well,—as well as you do everything else."  He
was not paying compliments.  There was not the faintest
suggestion of flirtation in his eyes.  He made the
statement of an accepted fact, and went on boyishly.
"Do you wonder that I keep away from towns?  Just
look at it here.  No umbrellas stuck about.  No crowd
of giggling women and cocktail hunters.  No strings
of stinking cars lined up to carry off soft people.
Here's simplicity and truth.  Will you ever get to like
it, youngster?"

He was disappointing her.  She wouldn't for the
world have had him less charming than he was, or say
the things that some men had said to her after
bathing,—personal, fulsome things, caddish things.  But,—she
*must* look nice, she felt nice, and surely there might
have been just a little admiration in his eyes.  Anyone
would think that they had been boy and girl together.
He accepted it as a matter of course.

"Yes," she said, before she could stop herself, "with
you."

He laughed softly and gratefully, leaned forward
and kissed her foot, then sprang up and bent over her,
put one arm round her shoulders and one under her
knees, quietly gathered her up shoulder-high.  "Come
on," he said, "it's time to dress and eat," and he
carried her to where her clothes were lying, with his cheek
against her breast.

When he put her down and saw her face, something
went crack.  Good God!  They were not, then, in that
dream of his, married, hand in hand, with a baby boy
growing in the sun!

He bolted like a mountain goat.





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.. _`XXXIII`:

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   \XXXIII

.. vspace:: 2

The sight of him after he had put her down, scared,
with his hands out as though they had been burned,
and the complete acknowledgment of the ineptitude
of apology that he gave by bolting, made Beatrix laugh.
It caught her sense of comedy and left a picture on
her mind to which she would always be able to turn
to dispel depression.  All the same her heart was
thumping and her cheeks were hot.  She exulted in
the fact, now proved beyond argument, that she drew
him, that he was all alive to her attraction.  She
thrilled again as she thought of how he had kissed her
foot and the way in which he had carried her across
the beach.

She found herself trying to find the right word to
describe his strength and cleanness and physical
beauty, the odd boyishness of him, the passion that was
without animalism,—and failed.  She got as far as
to wish that she had run her fingers through his hair
as she felt a strong desire to do,—and then began to
dress quickly, drawing back, with an odd touch of
puritanism, from that kind of thought.

"I would like to come here every fine day," she said,
looking about, pretending that it was the view that
appealed to her, and the color and the gentle break of
the sea.  "And I'm as hungry as a hunter now," and
she knew that she was hurrying to see him again.

When she was dressed and had packed the bathing
things into the bag she stood still for a little while
under the shadow of the rocks, with dry seaweed all
round her in a vague pattern.  Privately and in a sort
of way in secret from herself, she tapped at her heart
and went in, afraid to take more than one quick look
around.  It was all untidy and chaotic.  Someone had
stamped about in that hitherto perfectly neat and
undisturbed place.  It was unrecognizable....  She ran
away from it.  What did it mean?  Why did she
begin to feel that she was not the old Beatrix, not
quite so high-chinned and self-composed, not quite with
the same grip on the reins, softer, simpler, with a queer
new feeling of homesickness for a home that she didn't
know?

"Now, now, my good girl," she said, "string up,
pull yourself together.  No sloppiness, please."  But
she went eagerly back over the uneven rocks and
something was making her heart more untidy than ever.

She found the food laid out on a flat place and
Franklin in the launch doing something to the engine.
She whistled and he looked up.  "I'm awfully hungry,"
she said.

"Right.  I'll come.  This engine's a bit groggy
somewhere.  I thought so as we ran in.  Careless
blighter, Jones."  He washed his hands in the sea and
came up, putting on his coat.  "I hate messing about
with machinery.  I know next to nothing about it and
if I can't get it right at once I have an unholy desire to
smash.  I've no patience with things I don't understand."

"That's why you're so impatient with me sometimes,"
she said to herself,—enormously surprised that
she didn't say it aloud.  Obviously something was
happening to her.  She liked the way in which he had set
out the lunch and put the cushion so that the sun
wouldn't fall on her face.  It was competent,—and
she admired that.  He was taller than he had seemed
to be on board and his grey eyes had a most intriguing
way of going black.

Franklin hid behind an abrupt and hard-forced
casualness, very conscious of having made a complete
idiot of himself.  He told her everything that there
was to eat, knowing very well that her quick eyes had
at once made an inventory, and looked after her with a
rapid politeness.  He immediately entered into a long,
detailed account of a most uninteresting hunting trip in
Central Africa and watched her like a hawk to pounce
if she made any reference to bathing or beaches.  Also
he talked her down when she made one or two tentative
efforts to lead the conversation to something human
and wilfully became more technical and dry and
endless.

Finally, having strained every nerve to stand it for
his sake, she gave a little scream, and he stopped.  But
before he could ask what was the matter she said:
"Nothing's bitten me and I haven't seen smugglers.
I'm simply fed up with red monkies and Croo-boys
and the whole of Central Africa.  Tell me just one
thing.  How do you feel after eating four hard-boiled
eggs running?"

He chuckled.  "Hungry," he said, and got off his
sweating horse.  She was not going to hold him up
to ridicule, and he was grateful.

They sat for a long time over lunch,—Franklin
with his back to a rock and a well-worn pipe going;
Beatrix leaning back on her hands with her hat off
and the light on her hair.  Suddenly Franklin sprang
up.  "Fog coming over," he said sharply.  He stood
over her and held out his hand.

She took it and he jerked her to her feet.  She
looked out and saw the *Galatea* a long way off,
disappearing behind what seemed to be a solid wall of
grey smoke.  "Does it matter?"

"Yes.  We'll leave these things.  Nip into the
launch quick and I'll make a dash for the yacht."  He
gave her arm an impatient tap and she caught up her
hat and got in.  Hauling out the pin he threw it
aboard, jumped into the stern, started the engine and
backed out, turning with a swing when he was clear.
The sea was at the stand, due to go out.  Already the
cowlike call of fog signals had begun far off.  But
he had taken his line for the yacht and went for her.
"With ordinary luck we shall make her," he said.
"I wish you'd brought your coat."

The fog rolled over them.  Minutes before it had
put out the sun.  "What fun!" laughed Beatrix.
"It will make my hair curl."

"It'll make mine like astrakhan," he said, "if this
cursed engine begins any tricks.  It's missing fire now,
damn the thing!"

"Don't mind me," said Beatrix airily, "if you
really feel the need to swear."

"I shan't."

She looked all around.  There was nothing to see
except a monotony of greyness.  They were pushing
through a thick, damp, mysterious series of closely
hung veils that dragged softly across her face, it
wasn't pleasant or funny.  It was,—but with Franklin
at her elbow it was disloyal even to let the word
take shape in her mind.  If only she had brought her
coat, her thickest coat.  She had hardly anything on.
How melancholy those sea-voices were.  She hated
eerie sounds.  She saw Franklin bend suddenly over
the engine and pry and touch and say things under
his breath.  Every now and then the thing had furious
palpitation.  Then it seemed to her to be quarrelling
together and throwing its parts about.  It kicked and
wheezed and struggled like a held rooster,—and
stopped.  She began to shiver.  A dozen distant cows
seemed to be calling anxiously for their young.  She
could hardly see the peak of the launch.  She wasn't
frightened.  Only just a little anxious, or rather
uncomfortable.  She loved new things but this was,
undoubtedly and without argument, too new.

"Hell!" said Franklin.

"Thank you," she replied.  "You've said it for me."

He peered into her face.  "Shall I tell you what's
happened or not?  I mean do you want to face things
or be coddled?"

"I thought you were beginning to know me," she said.

"Right.  Now listen.  This dirty little engine's
playing the fool.  I've done everything I know to it,
even to whispering endearing terms.  But in one
word, it beats me."

She nodded brightly, rubbing her thinly-clad knees
together and putting her hands under her arms.  "I
see," she said.  "Well?"

"That means that we're completely at the mercy of
this rotten fog, and presently we shall drift out, maybe
into trade lines.  Hear the bellows of the freighters?
We may be out all night with nothing to eat and drink
and the risk of being run down."

Her attempt at pluck was heroic.  "There aren't
any nice, soft, cozy Jaeger dressing gowns in the
locker, by any chance?"

"The Vanderdykes are all right," said Franklin,
with queer enthusiasm.  He pulled off his flannel coat.
"Put this on."

"No, no."

"Put this on."

"I won't put it on."

He wasted no further words.  He took first one
soft damp arm and then the other, drew the sleeves
over them, bent down and buttoned the coat up.

"Oh, that's lovely," she said; "as warm as a radiator.
But what about you?"

"That's all right.  Listen again.  When McLeod
finds that we don't get back he'll probably send off the
big launch to hunt us up.  The only way I can give
them a line is to keep shouting.  Very likely, giving
me credit for being less a confounded fool than I am,
he'll imagine two things,—either that I got off before
the fog lowered and am able to fake the engine if
anything happens to it, or that, seeing the fog coming
over, I decided to stay on the island, in which case it
would be possible for him to feel his way to land and
pick us off.  As it is, there's no compass aboard and
I've no means of telling which way we're drifting, and
if the fog lasts all night,—puzzle, find the yacht.
There you have the worst and the best of it.  Listen!"

"What is it?"

He put his hands up to his mouth and raised a
tremendous shout.  "Ahoy,—*Galatea*, ahoy, ahoy!"

There was no answer.  The sound seemed to fall
dead, as though up against a wall.

"Um," he said, and stood amidships with his legs
wide apart and with the utmost precision, with regular
pauses, turning his head to right and left, sent out
long, steady calls.  Some power-boat, feeling her way
in from fishing, might come within hail and give them
a tow, or the big launch might be poking about for
them and pick up his voice.  Good God, to think that
he had lived to be a man without being able to master
a damn fool engine!  That was one of the worst
points of being able to buy service.  It plucked initiative
out of the brain like the bones out of fish.
"*Galatea, ... Galatea*....  Ahoy."

How extraordinary it was, she thought, sitting all
together, as close as she could get to herself.  They
were like two children lost in the woods,—two
people, both of whom had been able to buy the earth,
played a trick upon and shown that the earth was no
more theirs than any other man's,—two people cut
off, brought all the way down the great ladder with
a run, to the desire for charity,—two people, young
and wilful and proud and vain, who had come together
by a lie, been kept together by a condition of
nature against which they, for all their money, and
youth and supreme confidence, were utterly
impotent,—two people mutually aware of being man and
woman drifting together in a new life to death, perhaps....

"*Galatea, Galatea*, ahoy."

She gave a little cry of wonder and fright.

In an instant he was bending over her.  "What
can I do?"

"Nothing else," she said, smiling up at him.

"You're shivering."

"Oh, no.  I'm only—cool.  That's all."

He flung open the locker.  There was nothing in it
but his bathing suit.  He had left a big, thick towel
on the rocks to dry.  He seemed to have left everything
on the rocks,—including his wits.  There was
nothing to put round her.

"*Galatea,—Galatea*, ahoy."

He was an hour making up his mind what to do.
During that time, listening hard for any near signal
or answering call, he shouted and kept up a jerky
conversation, talking to Beatrix as though she were a
child, trying to make her laugh with futile jokes that
he would have sworn he couldn't have remembered.
Like a Trojan she played up and duly laughed with
chattering teeth and many times whipped in quickly
with an "Ahoy" herself to help him out.

Suddenly she began to whimper.  She couldn't help
it.  She was so cold and so frightened and to her
it seemed as though this were the end of everything.

And that decided him.  He picked her up and sat
down, put her in his lap, wound his arms round her
and put his cheek against her cheek.  This girl-child
must have all his warmth.  He was responsible for
this inefficient business.  The fool engine had beat
him....  She was no longer in his blood.  She was
a beautiful human thing who must be kept from
crying, kept warm, kept alive.  The sex in him was
utterly dormant.  The desire to preserve had conquered
it.  He was a worried, anxious man with a delicate
lovely thing on his hands and it was his fault, curse
him, that she was whimpering and chilled and
horribly uncomfortable and up against death perhaps.
At any moment they might be run down,—at a loose
end, out there among the veils.  And he held all her
softness tight to him and presently began to rub
her,—shoulders and arms and legs, to make her blood
circulate, to stop her from whimpering, saying the sort
of things that men always say to children who have
hurt themselves, silly, little, queer things, over and
over again.

It was wonderful....  He was so strong and fine,
and she cuddled up to his big chest and put her arms
about him and gave herself up, wholly, without a
qualm.  With the same regularity he threw up his
head and shouted and she heard the rumble of his
voice, and for a long time he held her and rubbed,
never letting her blood stop, only cutting into his
murmur of comfort by shouting:

"*Galatea,—Galatea*, ahoy."

The boat was drifting.  The water gave it no more
than a gentle rock.  She shut her eyes and smiled.
She had retained the mind of a woman with the body
of a child.  It was brilliantly clear to her that out
there, then, in that drifting boat, all among those
closely hung veils of damp web, the spirit of this man
was alight, and that in his hands, that had been so hot
and eager to touch, there was now the supreme tenderness
that is without passion.  It was wonderful.  It
was not happening.  This was not earth.  He, such
a man, who had kissed her foot and put his cheek
against her breast, and she, who had exulted in her
power to stir and draw on.  It must be Heaven.
Their clashes and outbursts were over.  They had
died together and met again in spirit.  She had never
dreamed of anything like this.

"*Galatea,—Galatea*, ahoy," yelled Franklin.  It
was the pit-pit of an engine that came to his tired
brain.

"Ahoy to you."

It was not Heaven.  It was earth and they were
alive and that was Jones's voice.  She cuddled closer
and her heart began to thump.  She didn't want to
be taken away.

"At last," said Franklin.  "Steady, Jones," he
called out.  "We're drifting.  Slide up alongside and
take us on.  We're cold....  Well played, little girl,"
and he kissed her on the mouth.

That night he insisted upon her having dinner in
bed.  Ah, how good that steaming, hot bath had been.

Afterwards, strained and very, very tired, she fell
asleep at once, and went back to the little beach with
its vague patterns of sea-weed on yellow sand, and
they swam again and dried in the sun, and talked and
laughed, and he lay at her feet, brown and clean-cut,
with burning eyes,—but when he picked her up this
time and carried her to the cave she held him tight
and found his lips and lay with him on the warm sand....

It must have been midnight when she woke suddenly
and put her hand out to touch his face.

It was not true.  She was alone,—and she loved
him so!





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXIV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XXXIV

.. vspace:: 2

It was exactly half-past nine the following
morning when Jones rapped at the door of the Captain's
stateroom.  The dancing sailor registered the note of
irritation in the shout of "Come" with a comic grievance
and went in to find McLeod struggling to remove
a recalcitrant beard with a very disagreeable razor.
There was, God knows, every reason for a touch of
temper mixed with that sort of amazement that a man
feels when an old and true friend goes back on him.
Shaving at the best of times is a penance, at the worst
a catastrophe.  The Captain was a clean-shaven man
in the middle forties and although, as one of the Esau
tribe, he had used a razor since he was eighteen; he
had failed to understand the peculiar psychology of
steel and to appreciate the fact that the blade of a
razor is just as temperamental and just as much
affected by the vagaries of liver as the average human
being.  He made no allowances.

"What is it, Jones?"

"Sorry ter disturb you, sir, but there's a launch
comin' up on the port side with Mr. Fraser aboard.
Thought you'd like ter know, sir."

"Have you told Mr. Franklin?"

"No, sir.  Considered it my duty ter report it ter
you, sir."

"Well, nip round to Mr. Franklin and tell him,
will you?  I don't see what M.F. wants to trail us
for unless it's something important."

And so Jones nipped, little knowing that Malcolm's
unexpected visit was to bring about a new crisis in the
lives of Franklin and Beatrix.

Only just dressed, Franklin followed Jones out in
time to see Malcolm come aboard.  "Why, hello, my
dear fellow," he called out with immense cordiality,
"you're just in time for breakfast."  It seemed an
age since he had seen his friend.

The sky was clear again, the sun warm and gracious,
the sea just lively enough to make the yacht dance.
The fog which had come from nowhere for no reason
had gone back in the same mood.  Franklin had slept
in one solid, dreamless piece.  All was well with the
world.

There was a whimsical smile on Malcolm's cherubic
face.  "I wasn't quite sure that I should be welcome,"
he said, dying to know how things were going.
"The word breakfast never sounded so well to me.
I'm ravenous.  Where's Beatrix?"

"Not up yet.  Come to the dining saloon."  He
took Malcolm's arm and led him off, delighted to see
him.

"Just a second," said Malcolm.  "I think you'd
better tell McLeod to turn the yacht about at once.
It'll save time."

Franklin drew up.  "Turn the yacht about?  Why?"

"I have a good reason for breaking in on your
triumphant isolation," said Malcolm, "little as you
appear to suspect it, and if you——"

He stopped speaking.  Beatrix was coming towards
them.  His heart turned at the sight of her.  Never
in his life had he seen her looking so radiant and
lovely and like a rose with all its sweetest leaves still
folded, and in her expression there was something so
new in its sunny peacefulness that he caught his breath
with surprise.

"Malcolm," she cried out, and put her hands on his
shoulders and kissed him like a sister.  He had
expected to see a caged bird beating her wings and to be
rushed at as one who brought a reprieve.  His
curiosity nearly forced him into personalities.

"How nice of you to look us up," she said, taking
his other arm.  "You're just in time for breakfast."

The word breakfast used by them both struck the
most intimate note.  It is the most domestic of all
words.  The first stab of jealousy that Malcolm had
ever felt made him, before he could master himself,
break their astounding atmosphere of contentment,
this elysium of peace.

"Mrs. Keene is very ill," he said, sharply.  "Ida
Larpent and I have done what we could for two days
but she's crying continually for you.  I drove along
the coast as fast as I could and unless you come back
with me I don't know what may happen."

Beatrix turned and looked at Franklin.  He read
in her eyes an appeal to put her quickly at the side
of the little lady whose devotion was dog-like.  He
was wrong.  The look she gave him was full of
anguish at the thought of leaving him and the sort of
half-hope that he would play the tyrant and the bully
and refuse to let her go.

"Jones," he sang out.

"Sir?"

"Ask Captain McLeod to see me at once."

"Very good, sir."

"Malcolm, take Beatrix into the dining saloon.
I'll join you in about five minutes."

And as Beatrix went on with Malcolm, all her appetite
for breakfast gone, she said to herself with the
inevitable unreasonableness of a woman in love, "He
doesn't care, he doesn't care.  Any pretty girl would
do as well.  He's glad to let me go."

Franklin met McLeod.  "Mrs. Franklin must go
ashore as soon as you can get her there.  Mrs. Lester
Keene is very ill.  Mr. Fraser has a car waiting and
he will drive my wife back to where we landed the
party the other day,—Jones in charge.  I can't be
trusted with an engine now, y'know.  I shall drive
with them and come aboard again when you turn up,
which you will do with best possible speed.  Get that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Right."  He waved his hand and went below to
his own sanctum.  His valet was busy in the
bedroom.  "Moffat, pack things for me for a couple of
days, and tell the stewardess to do the same for
Mrs. Franklin.  Sharp's the word.  We're leaving the
yacht in half-an-hour."

Then he went to breakfast, having set things on the
move in his characteristic way.  Beatrix and Malcolm
were talking generalities in a rather strained manner.
The thoughts of both were busy.  It was very obvious
to Malcolm that something had happened to Beatrix.
Her whole attitude, as well as her expression, had
changed.  She even seemed to be dressed differently
in some subtle way.  She was, too, he thought, less
young, less confident, less on the defensive, less
consistently brilliant, less all-in-the-shop-window,—more
like the little girl who had tucked herself into his
heart.

"What happened?" asked Franklin, doing more
than justice to a liberal helping of scrambled eggs à
Ludovic.

He'd never be able to eat so well if he cared, thought
Beatrix.

Malcolm's eyes were clear again.  He was less than
the dust to the heroine of his boyhood and he had
prayed that she might be won by Pel.  After all, he
was a poet.

"Well," he said, "that kind, good soul began by
having hysterics on the quay.  She was the first to
realize, presumably because of a long course of novel
reading, that we had been emptied away like rubbish
and that the *Galatea* had turned seawards with Beatrix."

Franklin nodded and drank deeply of strong coffee.

Beatrix respected him for drinking strong, black
stuff with breakfast, but she would have given days of
her life to have had just one smile from him then.

"I knew the one-eyed place on which we had been
dumped, took charge of the three women—saving
Mrs. Keene from a watery grave—and drove to the
one possible inn.  Quite by accident I had some money
on me.  Helene and I did what we could to soothe
Mrs. Keene but she took to bed and sprang a high
temperature.  The local doctor attended her and called
it a nervous breakdown and that's what, being in the
confidence of you both, I believe it is.  Mrs. Larpent
surprised me by being very kind and sympathetic,
which shows how foolish it is to judge a woman by
her jewelry and the way she does her hair.  We have
had a very worrying time.  Finally I made up my
mind to hire a car and drive along the coast until I
came level with you.  I started before daybreak and
here I am.  Mrs. Keene never ceases to call for
Beatrix and I promised to bring her back.  You will both
help me to keep my promise, I know."

"Well, of course," said Franklin.

"Well, of course," echoed Beatrix.  Conceive it,
Beatrix,—an echo!  Love plays strange tricks upon
humanity.

Franklin went on eating.  "We leave on the big
launch in twenty minutes.  We shall drive back in
your car and stay at the inn until the *Galatea* anchors
off the quay."

"Thank you," said Malcolm.  "The sight of Beatrix
will do Mrs. Keene more good than buckets of
medicine."

Beatrix turned to Franklin.  "Does 'we' include
you?" she asked, with what Malcolm thought was a
most curious and startling note of humbleness.

"Rather," said Franklin.

Whereupon Beatrix began to eat.

Sitting in the shade of the veranda of the inn Ida
Larpent killed time with a new sense of hope.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XXXV

.. vspace:: 2

It was nearly four o'clock that afternoon when the
dust-covered car arrived at Malcolm's one-eyed place
some miles from Charleston, South Carolina.  It was
a long, tedious, hot drive through country which
Beatrix called untidily picturesque.  The telegraph posts
along the roads leaned at rakish angles.  Everywhere
there were cotton fields with irregular lines of plants
from which the blossoms had fallen, dilapidated shacks
with piccaninnies playing about them and uncorseted
colored women squatting on the stoops.  Strange
washing hung out to dry with great frequency and
every now and then there was a fine Colonial house
with a garden alight with flowers.

The inn, or hotel, as it insisted on being called, was
the only building in the settlement which seemed to
have received a coat of white paint for many moons
and it was obviously the centre of attraction.  Three
rather carelessly treated Fords were parked near its
main entrance and two drummers were rocking on
the unwashed stoop with soft damp cigars tucked into
the corners of their mouths.  Little families of
chickens ran after their conscientious mothers around the
building and several turkeys stalked aimlessly here
and there like actors out for a walk.  Numerous
outhouses leaned against each other for support,—one
or two of them showing an ingenuity in repair that
was almost Irish.  On the walls of several were pasted
glaring bills of motion picture plays then being shown
in Charleston, and one was entirely given up to the
glorification in large letters of a certain small pill.
There was, indeed, a curious intimacy, a sort of
who-cares-a-whoop air about the whole place.  You could
tease the turkeys, scatter the chickens, grin at the
Fords and spit with the drummers.  It was Carolina
and hot and the cotton was coming on.  What the
deuce, anyway!

From the beginning of the journey to the end of it
Franklin hardly opened his mouth.  Watched surreptitiously
by Beatrix, he sat silent and peculiarly distrait,
like a man who was either working out an engrossing
problem or bored to extinction.  After several dogged
attempts to get him to talk, Malcolm gave him up and
for some miles devoted himself entirely to Beatrix.
To her he told everything funny that he had ever
heard or invented without winning a smile.  She too
was as far away and as unresponsive as Franklin.
And so, giving them both up, Malcolm joined the
sphinxes and let his imagination run loose.  When
this unsociable party halted for lunch at a wayside inn
the conspiracy of silence was broken, but only as it
would have been by three people who were total
strangers thrown together briefly.  The few necessary
commonplaces were said.  Franklin and Beatrix went
on thinking and Malcolm continued to imagine what
they were thinking about.  The driver of the hired
car, a middle-aged man who had married an
argumentative woman in his youth, gave a great deal of
slow consideration to the matter.  His sense of beauty
pulled his sympathy towards Beatrix, but his sense of
brotherhood impelled him to stand by Franklin in
what he decided must be a matrimonial bust-up, and
so he remained neutral as far as they were concerned
and concentrated pity upon Malcolm, to whom, luckily,
sleep eventually came.

Franklin was suffering from inevitable reaction.
He had returned to earth from a dream.  He had
come back to a very practical world from the land of
make-believe.  He had fallen from the unnatural
height of a sublime, passionless love to the natural level
of a man whose passion pounded on the walls of his
heart and ran like electricity through his veins.  Out
of the brief mist which had shut out the truth of
things he stared to find that Beatrix was as far away
from him as ever.  He was in the pit of depression,
especially as he had a feeling that any chance he might
have had to win Beatrix was gone now that she had
left the yacht.  It seemed to him that she had escaped.

As for Beatrix, who had felt the beat of Franklin's
heart against her breast and would smilingly have
gone beyond the outpost of eternity in his arms,
reaction came with a shock that left her with no other
desire than to cry.  Suddenly to have found herself
and the meaning of life; suddenly, out there in the
fog, to have seen the sense and sanity of things and
burgeoned into a woman under the warmth of love
and dreamed all night of its fulfilment and then to
waken to *this*,—a man who neither looked at her nor
spoke, who hustled her from the yacht and would
probably leave her with her friends and go his way.
If he had loved her as well as been stirred by the
attraction of her sex he must have told her so that
morning.  This was the end of all her arguments.
Having her at his mercy he let her go, she told herself
bitterly.  Probably he had escorted her to shore to
renew his flirtation with Ida Larpent.  Ah!  That
was it.  Malcolm had said that she had remained at
the hotel.  She wouldn't be a bit surprised if the
Larpent woman had bribed Malcolm to come to the yacht
with his tale of woe ... and when, as the car drew
up, Ida Larpent sauntered out wearing one of her
most enigmatical smiles and a very becoming frock
the hitherto unknown demon of jealousy seized Beatrix
in his burning grasp and for the first time in her
life she became the little sister of all womankind, a
girl whose wealth had turned to ashes and whose
autocracy fell about her like dead leaves.

"How's Brownie?"  She ignored Mrs. Larpent's
hand and cheek, and passed into the house without
waiting for an answer.  The screen door went back
with a clang.

"Good Lord," said Franklin, summing up the
whole place in one rapid glance, "what a filthy hole!"

Malcolm pointed to the chickens.  "But look at
these," he laughed, refreshed.

"Welcome," said Ida Larpent, not so much clasping
Franklin's hand as embracing it.  She had the
knack.  "It's good to see you again.  Life has its
compensations."

"Thanks."

"Quite a good sort, after all," thought Franklin.
"Ripping hat.  Always makes me feel like a man
who goes behind the scenes after the last act."

A white-haired, chatty negro led Beatrix up two
flights of carpetless stairs, along a narrow echoing
passage to a door almost at the end of it.

"Don't knock," said Beatrix, and paid him with a
smile.

The room was bare and large and barn-like.  Its
three large windows were screened.  Its stained floor
was rubbed and almost colorless.  There was a cheap
writing desk of yellow wood, a glass-topped dressing
table to match, a stand with a water bottle on it and
a shiver-inspiring white cuspidor beneath, several
strips of thin-worn string matting and a lamp
hanging from the centre of a none too clean ceiling.

Mrs. Lester Keene was lying on a bed with brass
knobs which sagged perceptibly in the middle.  Beatrix
tip-toed to it and went down on her knees and put
her arms round the little lady's shoulders.  "Brownie
dear, I've come," she said.

There was a great maternal cry, and a passion of
tears.

"That's right.  Weep, Brownie, my dear little
Brownie, it will do you good.  You were frightened
for me, weren't you?  The others wondered what was
the matter with you, but you and I know, don't we?
There are no secrets between us and now you'll get
well, won't you?  I'm so sorry!"

And the little woman clung weakly and fondly and
stroked the face of the beautiful girl who meant so
much to her and for whom she liked to think that she
was responsible.  "Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried,
"you don't know what agonies I've been through, or
how dreadful it was to see the yacht going away and
you alone and unprotected with that man."

"Was it possible that *I* called him 'that man'
then?" thought Beatrix.

"I've been nearly distraught to think of all the
indignities that you have had to suffer.  I could not
close my eyes for fear of seeing unspeakable pictures,
though at night I thought I could hear you calling to
me to come and help you and you so young and proud
and fine and helpless.  Oh—oh! and are you all
right?  Will you swear that you're all right?"

"Yes, Brownie dear, I'm all right.  Can't you see
that I'm all right?"  But there were tears on her
cheeks and a pain at her heart because she was so much
all wrong.  Couldn't he have said just one word all
day, just one, to show her that she meant more to him
than a mere woman,—after all that they had been
through between life and death?  Couldn't he have
given her one look to show that he was something
besides merely a man and that he had held her so
perfectly in his arms and kept her warm to love and
comfort and hold always, always?

"Then why are you crying?" demanded Mrs. Keene, sharply.

"You make me cry, Brownie, to see you like this."

"I make you cry?  *You!*"  The voice was incredulous,
skeptical, amazed.  The elderly companion
whose dog-like devotion and affection had not blinded
her to the faults of this gold-child, this artificial flower
born and reared in a house of egregious wealth, helped
herself up in the bed and peered into the girl's face.
"There is something wrong!  I hardly know you.
Tell me, tell me!"  Her voice was thin and shrill
from anxiety and fear.

The girl's eyes fell a little and a sob shook her shoulders.

"*Oh, my God!  What has that man done to you?*"

Beatrix put a finger on her lips but the old note of
command had gone.  "Hush, Brownie, hush," she
said gently.  "Don't cry out like that, dear.  You'll
make yourself ill again."

The little woman's face grew whiter.  "Oh, my
darling!" she blurted out, conscience-stricken, "if only
I had been able to look after you, if only I had been
strong enough to refuse to leave you!  You don't
know what you mean to me.  I know I've been useless
and weak.  I know I've never really been able to
direct or guide you but I've done my best, darling, and it
will kill me to think that you, *you*, who have seemed
to me like a princess in a fairy tale, so pure and fine,
have been hurt by this man.  Oh, my dear, what has
that man done to you?"

"Listen, Brownie.  That man has made me come
all the way down to earth.  That man has taken
everything from me,—pride and scorn and shallowness, the
desire to experiment, the impatience of possession, and
put there instead something that makes me want to go
and sit down at the side of women with children and
hold their hands.  That man has brought me up to
truth and reason.  He has made me human and
humble and jealous and eager for his touch.  He has
made me love him and need him and want to serve
him.  Look at me, Brownie, look at me and see it for
yourself!"

She held up her lovely, tear-stained face, the face
that Malcolm had described, the picture of which was
locked up in his heart.  And Mrs. Keene, speechless,
looked and saw and wondered.

And suddenly the golden head was crushed against
the childless bosom.  "Brownie, Brownie, he doesn't
love me, he doesn't love me, and I wish I were dead."

Could this be Beatrix,—this?





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Finding that Franklin had left the bedroom that
had been allotted to him after washing and changing
his clothes,—the others had been flung about the
barrack-like room,—Malcolm went downstairs and out
to the veranda.  Ida Larpent was sitting in front of
a tea-table like Patience on a monument, dodging mosquitoes.

"Where's Pelham?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

"I was going to ask you."

"And Beatrix?"

"In with Mrs. Keene, I think."

Mrs. Larpent heaved a little sigh.  "Poor old
thing!  She'll get well now, and we, I take it, can go
our ways in peace.  I don't ever want to go through
this experience again."

Malcolm laughed.  "Well, I've rather enjoyed it,"
he said, "apart, of course, from the fact that
Mrs. Keene has suffered."

"Enjoyed it?"  There was a note of anger in Mrs. Larpent's
clear voice.  "Such food, such beds, such
cockroaches, such service, such an appalling place?"

"I've been studying the beautiful unselfishness of
the mother hen," said Malcolm.  "It's a revelation
to me."

Mrs. Larpent shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
"I've known one or two other poets in my time," she
said, "but I've never been able to make out whether
their childishness was a pose or mere stupidity.  It
requires no study to know that the mother hen is not
unselfish.  Like other mothers she is the creature of
overwhelming circumstances, the slave of nature.
However, what's the news?  What is to happen next?
Is the *Galatea* to deliver us back to New York or do
we find our own way back?"

"Don't ask me," said Malcolm, who wouldn't have
said anything else if he had known it.  Mrs. Larpent
was one of the few women of his acquaintance
whom he really disliked.  He found her hard and
without an ounce of idealism or imagination.  She
believed in nothing that didn't carry a certificate of
proof, in no one who was not duly entered in "Who's
Who," looked upon faith as a sort of patent medicine,
hope as a form of mental weakness and charity as a
sharp way of getting rid of people who either made
street noises or had pathetic stories to tell.  He and
she had not got on at all well.

To the great relief of both Franklin came up.
"We're waiting tea for you," said Mrs. Larpent.

"I'm so sorry.  I've been along to the post-office.
I thought I'd better wire this address to the Vanderdykes
as we shall be here till the *Galatea* lies off.
They had our next place of call for letters."  He
sat down rather heavily.  "Yes, tea's a good idea."

There was nothing of happiness about this man,
Mrs. Larpent told herself in a spirit of self-congratulation.
He had obviously gained nothing by carrying
off Beatrix except a little line between his eyebrows.
Serve him right.  She was glad to see it.  She could
have made him happy if the party had continued on
the yacht.

Tea came but no Beatrix.  Mrs. Larpent poured out,
and as she did so her spirits rose.  Things looked good.
She had never been able to find a reason for their
sham honeymoon, puzzle as she might.  It remained
an inscrutable mystery, and all her cunning endeavors
to trick Mrs. Keene and Malcolm into confession had
failed.  She argued that they knew,—Malcolm
because he brought Beatrix to the yacht and Mrs. Keene
because of her extraordinary nervous breakdown.  In
any case that business failed to be of interest now.
The point was how much, if at all, was Franklin in
love with or physically attracted by Beatrix.  If he
was in love with her and had been turned down,—his
whole appearance and attitude proved that,—her
opportunity to catch him on the rebound was most
excellent.  In her large experience men committed
matrimony or undertook obligations immediately after
being refused.  If he had been physically attracted
merely, and had met with no success,—which was
patent,—the same argument applied.  How glad she
was that she had seen the wisdom of staying in that
abominable shack, ostensibly to look after the woman
who got so completely on her nerves.  Her room was
next to Franklin's, too.  Could luck have been
kinder?

"Have you sent any tea up to Beatrix?" asked
Franklin, suddenly.

"No," said Mrs. Larpent.  "She'll order it herself
if she wants any, don't you think so?"

Franklin got up.  "Excuse me," he said, and
stalked into the hotel, asked the comatose clerk the
number of Mrs. Keene's room, waved away a gymnastic
colored boy who volunteered to show him and
went upstairs two at a time.  Sooner or later he
would be obliged, he had come to the conclusion, either
to put as many thousand miles between himself and
Beatrix as the map of the earth allowed or treat her
as a sister.  All the day's thinking had proved this
to him, who knew so little about women.

He knocked on the door, waited and knocked again.

It was opened by Beatrix, who was still in her
dust-covered clothes and hat.  He saw at once that she
had been crying and resented it as much as though he
had seen her arm in a splint.

"Have you had tea?" he asked bluntly, because he
wanted to kiss her beyond description and hadn't the
right.

"No," said Beatrix.

"Shall I send some up?"

"Will you?  I'd love it.  I'm so tired."

"Yes, of course you are.  Why didn't you ring and
make this rotten hotel run about?"

"I forgot.  It's awfully nice of you to have
bothered about me."

Franklin swallowed a rush of words, nodded, made
small work of the echoing stairs and stood in front
of the unoffending clerk with eyes black with
unexplainable anger.  "Why the devil haven't you sent tea
up to Mrs. Franklin?  Don't argue.  Get it done at
once or I'll pull this barn down board by board.  For
two, with hot buttered toast.  Quick!"

Two colored boys who had overheard these words
and caught the clerk's eyes went off like demented
athletes.  Left standing, the clerk pulled himself
together.  He felt as though a cart load of bricks had
fallen on his head.  What was the matter with this
man?  Anyone would think he'd bought the darned
earth!

Ida Larpent and Malcolm did most of the talking
while Franklin drank three cups of tea and ate all
the toast.  Malcolm knew that before long he would
be marched off somewhere to listen to his old pal's
troubles and so he waited with his characteristic
patience and all his sympathy on the boil, determined
not to permit his curiosity to lead his imagination into
any further maze.  It seemed to him to be disloyal.
Ida Larpent concentrated her strategic knowledge upon
a plan of action to be carried into effect during the
night.  She must act quickly because Franklin, like
Beatrix, went off at sudden tangents.  He might take
it into his head to leave the place at a moment's notice
and she might not see him again for months.

"How are you going to kill time until the so-called
dinner?" she asked, looking at Franklin.  "Can I
suggest anything?"

"No, thanks," he replied.  "Malcolm and I are
going to explore the quay, if there is such a thing."

She laughed softly.  He could do what he liked
with all the hours till midnight.  The others at
the beginning of a new day would be hers, if she
knew anything of men and life.  She opened a book.

Franklin got up, pushed the table away, dragged up
a chair for Mrs. Larpent's feet, made a mental note
of the fact that she was a good sort and took
Malcolm's arm.

"Come on, old son," he said.  "Let's get out of this."

Turkey and chickens made way for these tall
creatures, the two drummers at the other end of the
veranda concentrated a united gaze on Mrs. Larpent's
ankles, a Ford went off with a harsh rattle carrying
two men in their shirt sleeves, and a ragamuffinly
kitten gave a marvelous imitation of a bucking horse
and bolted up a tree.

As they faced the Atlantic Franklin squared his
shoulders and drew in a long, grateful breath.  The
line went out of his forehead and his mouth relaxed.
Here at any rate was an element that he understood in
all its moods, rough and smooth.

"Malcolm, will you come to Europe with me?"

"Any time," said Malcolm.

"Right.  To-morrow night, then.  I wish to God I
had an aeroplane.  We'd get away sooner."

He looked round impatiently.  The so-called quay
might have been made away back before the Great
Wind and carelessly patched together after it.  It ran
out into a small bay for the use of perhaps a dozen
cat-boats, a couple of nice yawls, a very spruce
shoal-draught sloop just in, a well put together lark and a
number of dirty little power boats belonging to the
negro fishermen.  Several bankrupt-looking sheds
added to the general neglected appearance of the whole
scene, which was heightened by three carcasses of
dead dories with all their ribs sticking out lying up on
the beach and all among dry seaweed and rubbish.

"What's the particular hurry?" asked Malcolm.

Franklin turned upon him.  "I'm sick of myself,
sick of life, sick of the whole blessed show," he said.
"I want to get right away.  I want to put all the sea
there is between myself and Beatrix.  If anybody had
told me before I went to the Vanderdykes that a bit
of a girl was going to turn me into a first-class fool
I'd have called him a sentimental crank."

"I know," said Malcolm.  "It all depends on the
girl, though.  All wise men, all men who fathom the
fact in time that life means nothing if it's selfish, fall
over each other to be made first-class fools of by the
right girl.  Besides, who says you've been turned into
a first-class fool?  You love Beatrix without success.
So do I.  That doesn't make us fools, either of us.
I hold that we have to thank our stars to have met her.
The fool part of it would be in not having loved
her.  That's my view of it.  And look here, Pel, old
man, don't be quite so ready to call people sentimental
cranks who talk about love.  What are we here for?
What's the use of living without it?  Clubs are built
for men who have missed the one good thing there is
to win in this queer little interlude between something
we can't remember and something we're not intended
to know."

Franklin listened to this unexpected outburst with
a sort of boyish gravity.  Malcolm had the knack of
saying things that were true, and this that he had
just said, with uncharacteristic heat, was dead true.
Franklin knew that.  Moreover he had the honesty
and the courage to say so.

"Quite right, old son.  I was talking through my
hat as usual.  But the difference between you and me
is this.  You're a poet and when you're turned down
you have the safety valve of verse.  You can write
about it.  I'm only a common or garden sporting cove
who has to grin and bear it.  And when you've got a
girl like Beatrix in your blood there isn't much
grinning, believe me.  Come on.  Let's walk and I'll put
you up to date."

And away they went arm in arm along the shore
while the sun went down.

And up in her bare bedroom Beatrix gave herself
eagerly into the hands of her maid.  "If I look my
best," she thought, "perhaps——"

Men and women and history,—repetition, that's all!





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Dinner was fairly good.  The word had been
taken to the kitchen that Franklin might stalk in and
kill the chef.  That dark mass of humanity outdid
himself in consequence.  Life was very dear to him.

One of the waiters at Franklin's table had been
fifteen years in the hotel.  The other twelve.  They
mutually agreed behind the screen that there had never
been two such beautiful ladies in its dining-room in
their time.  They too were on their mettle.

Beatrix played up.  She had bathed and slept a
little and poured out her heart to Brownie and felt
better from the fact that her presence had done her old
friend so much good.  Besides, she had grit and the
courage of a thoroughbred.  She was not going to let
anyone see that there was a pain in her heart if she
died for it.  And so she set the ball rolling and kept
the table merry.  It was well done.

Malcolm did his share and brought tears of laughter
from everybody by describing a scandal-mongering
conversation between two turkeys.  The younger of
the two waiters nearly had a fit.  Ida Larpent was in
excellent spirits and Franklin as cheery as he could
always be when he tried.

Afterwards they adjourned to a ludicrously-furnished
room called the drawing-room decorated with
tortured wood and chairs which had obviously been
designed by plumbers.  Everything in it was the color
of Virginia tobacco,—the epitome of biliousness.
Here they played Bridge while the proprietor's
over-plump daughter with a huge white bow on the top
of her head giggled and whispered to several girl
friends in the sun parlor and presently set a Victrola
going.  Between the tunes, which were redolent of
Broadway, the click of billiard balls could be heard.
Frogs in a nearby pond croaked their inevitable chorus.

At the end of the third rubber Beatrix rose.  "I
can't go on," she said.  "There are so many distractions.
It's almost like being in a railway accident.
Take me down to look at the sea, Pelham."

Franklin led the way.  He would have liked it better
if she had been angry with him and there had been
an excuse for quarreling.  He might then have had
a reason for blazing at her and losing his self-control.
To be treated like a brother,—it was better than
nothing, he supposed, but it made him feel like a man with
his arms roped to his sides.

They went along the sandy road lined with curious
stunted trees to the quay.  A full moon dominated a
sky that blazed with stars.  There was not even the
tail-end of a cloud.  The lazy sea plopped heavily
against the stanchions and made the small craft wobble
from side to side.  Ropes creaked and quivered.
There was hardly any wind.  On the tip of the quay
a girl was sitting with her head on a man's shoulder.
One of his arms was round her waist.  Their legs
dangled over the edge.  It was a night for love.

Beatrix said nothing for several minutes.  She
stood hatless, with her hands behind her back and her
shoulders square.  She looked dangerously young,
Franklin thought, and far too precious to be
unguarded.  But with another look he corrected
himself,—so young that her confidence was a better guard
than an armed man.  He wondered what she was
thinking about.

"You've never had a sister, have you?" she asked
suddenly.

"No," said Franklin.

"What a pity."

"Why?"

"She would have been a lucky girl."

"There you are," thought Franklin.  "Nothing
but a brother, you see."

She faced him unexpectedly.  "What are you going
to do with me now?"

He knew his answer but he made it, "What do you
want me to do with you?"

And she made hers, "Something must be done."

He stood looking at her.  He had no inkling that
they were at cross purposes because he was not a
woman's man.  Also because he was entirely without
conceit.  It was only when he dreamed and a miracle
happened, that Beatrix returned his love.  In her
new state, which was so new that she felt almost a
stranger in the world, Beatrix was without conceit
too.  She believed that Franklin, because she had seen
the nobility of his character out there in that strange
mist, had outgrown the attraction of her sex and had
become brotherly.  Some big moment was needed to
startle these two young people who were so much
alike into the truth,—these two who had always been
handicapped by excessive wealth and whose lives had
touched in a manner that was so bizarre and accidental.
What if the big moment never came?  Big moments
are not put in the way of everybody and even if they
are, go by unrecognized in so many instances.

"Yes," said Franklin, "we can't go on like this."

"You still think that the only way out is marriage?"

"I'm afraid so."

"And then divorce?"

"Yes."

Beatrix heaved a deep sigh.  "I've asked so much
of you.  I couldn't ask you for that."

"You don't have to ask me.  It's my suggestion."

"You certainly are a sportsman," she said.  And
then she gave a little gasp.  "Good Heavens, what
must I have been made of to have done that thing?  It
seems incredible as I look at it now."

He spoke wistfully, eagerly.  "Does it?  Why?
You're the same Beatrix.  You haven't changed."

"Are you the same Pelham Franklin?  Haven't
you changed?  Let's be honest out here to-night.  This
is the hour for honesty with the moon so plain and
the stars so gleaming and the sky so transparent.
Besides, I can't tell you why, but I have a sort of
premonition that you and I are going to be required to
face another crisis.  I got the feeling this afternoon,
when I was lying down.  A bird was singing outside
my window, a curious, jerky little song, and it seemed
to tell me that I must meet something squarely and
with courage."

"Courage?" said Franklin.  "You have that."

"You think so?"

"I don't know it if you haven't got it."

"That's the first really nice thing you've ever said
to me, Pelham."

It was a pity that she couldn't see the queer thing
that happened to his eyes.  "I don't say everything
I think," he said, with a sort of laugh.

"That's nothing to be proud of.  There's lots of
room for silence in the grave.  Let's go back."  She
was impatient again.  She couldn't understand why
things were not going as she would have them go.
They always had.

He stopped her.  "No, not yet.  I want to tell you
something, kiddie."

Tears came into her eyes somehow when he called
her that.

"Listen.  If anything *is* on the way to us,—and if
you think so I expect there is,—most probably it
will send me one way over the earth and you another
because this way has failed.  When I'm out of sight
I want you to remember one thing."

"I shall remember it all," she said.

"But especially one thing.  I set out to break you."

"You've done that," she said.

"No, please don't rot me,—not to-night, out here.
If ever my name flicks across your memory at any
time remember my idiotic attempt to give you the spurs."

"Why especially that?"

"Because you beat me,—beat me to a frazzle and
that's the only good thing about this episode."

"You're very generous," she said, and held out her
hand.  She had an insane desire to sit down on those
dirty boards and cry.  Everything he did and said
made her love him more and more.  What was the
matter with her that she had turned him into a
brother?  Life had appeared to be so easy to arrange.
It had become so difficult.

He took her hand and held it tight.  "I'm not
generous," he said, scoffing.  "Don't let any man
try the breaking business.  Remain as you are.  Be
the spoilt girl all the rest of your life, kiddie.  You're
all right.  Now come in and go to bed and sleep hard.
That thing you got just now may find us in the morning."

And they turned their backs to the moon and to
love and walked away without another word.

Malcolm and Ida Larpent had gone to bed.  And
the fat girl with the big bow and her young friends
had disappeared.  The Victrola was silent.  There
were no lights in the drawing-room or the sun parlor,
but the click of billiard balls came into the foyer and
the reek of cheap cigars.  Two colored bell boys on
the verge of sleep sat near the desk.  Outside the frogs
were still at work on their endless ensemble.

Beatrix nodded and smiled and went upstairs.  She
had left her key in Mrs. Keene's room.  Franklin
hung about aimlessly for ten minutes reading the
railroad timetables with no interest and the printed
notices to visitors and looking at the colored advertisements
of steamships and whisky and magazines, without
taking them in.  Yes, the episode had failed.  He
was beat,—beat to a frazzle.  What was going to
happen next?

Ida Larpent heard him stride along the passage, go
into his room and shut the door.  Through the thin
walls she could hear him shunt a chair and do
something to his windows and move about.

She wore a curious smile and an almost transparent
nightgown.  Her black hair was all about her shoulders
and in her eyes there was a strange eagerness.

For half an hour she sat as still as a statue watching
the hands of her little diamond-studded watch.  Her
opportunity had come.  She was going to seize it.
She knew men, no one better.  This one needed love
and she, yes, she of all women would give it to him.

In that long, peculiar half hour during which her
body was without movement, her brain worked and
her heart raced.  She loved and would make a
sacrifice for love.  That was the burden of her inward
song.  Not of the future, not of freedom from money
worries, not of mercenary things,—love, her first
great love and its fulfilment.  Of that she thought,
smiling, and thanking her stars.

And when the half hour was up she rose, put on a
peignoir, slipped out of her room on the tips of her
little pink slippers and tapped at Franklin's door.  He
called out "Come" and she went in.

He was sitting in a dressing gown in a cane chair,
under the electric lamp that hung from the middle of
the ceiling, with a pipe in his mouth and a book in his
hand and his feet on a cranky table.  There was a
cloud of good tobacco smoke round his head.

He sprang to his feet at the sight of her.  Although
there was nothing of the frightened woman about her,
the only thing that occurred to him was that she needed
his help.  A thief after her rings, probably.

"What's the matter?" instinctively lowering his
voice.  "Anyone in your room?"

She shut the door and smiled at him.  After all she
rather liked his naïve assumption that she had not gone
to his room for anything but his assistance in some
emergency.  It was very charming and boyish and
clean and all that.  It made things just a little
difficult to explain though.  "I see you're not in a hurry
to go to bed," she said, "so may I sit down and have
a cigarette?  I've lots to say to you and there has been
no other opportunity to-day."

"Of course," he said.  "Please do.  I hate reading,
and sleep is miles away."  He placed his chair for
her, the only more or less comfortable one in the
room, and got a cigarette and lit it.  "Awfully nice
of you to come in.  Well, what's the news?"

He drew up a stiff-backed chair and sat straddle
with his arms on the back of it.  A good sort, Ida
Larpent, he told himself, and extraordinarily picturesque.
He couldn't make out why she didn't marry
again.  She could take her pick.

"Please may I have a pillow?  I can feel every rib
of cane.  It hurts a little.  I'm sorry to be fussy."

"Not a bit."  He placed one of his pillows behind
her back.  "How's that?"

"Much better, thanks."

He went back to his chair and sat looking at her
with a most friendly and admiring smile.

She liked the last part of it but not the first.  It
was all more than a little disconcerting.  She knew
men but not of his type.  It would perhaps have been
better for men, to say nothing of herself, if she had
known one or two.  Give a dog a bad name and hang
him.  She was conscious of looking extremely
alluring in her geranium pink peignoir and slippers and
her silk nightgown cut very low and her thick, black
hair, which fluffed out over her shoulders, rather like
that of a Russian prima ballerina.

"There's no news," she said.  "The faithful Mrs. Keene
gave me a good deal of worry, poor, little soul,
and Malcolm Fraser has not been a very entertaining
companion.  He's by way of not liking me."

Franklin laughed.  "Why?  He likes everybody."

"Because I don't like him, I suppose.  I never get
on very well with poets at any time.  They always
seem to belong to the cherub family,—cut off at the
shoulders, I mean, and surrounded with Christmas
card clouds."

Franklin laughed again.  "You should see him
whipping a trout stream or crawling after deer."

"Mrs. Keene's in the next room," said Mrs. Larpent,
warningly.  Would he take the hint and be a
little less sun-parlorish?

"Is she?  By Jove, yes.  I mustn't make such a
row.  I wouldn't disturb her for anything."

No, he had missed it.  She crossed one leg over the
other.  Rather more than a slim, white ankle showed.
Well, the night was all in front of them.  "It was a
horrid trick, getting rid of us like that.  I had just
settled down on the *Galatea* and was preparing to have
the first really happy time of my life.  You alone
among men have it in your power to do that for me,
Pelham."  She felt that she was hurrying a little.

"Well, the *Galatea* can be at your service again.
Not yet though, I'm afraid.  Malcolm and I have a
plan in the back of our heads."  He got up and heaved
a sigh and walked about.  Beatrix came back into his
head at the mention of the *Galatea*.  He could see her
leaning against the starboard rail with the sun on her
golden head and her chin held high.  He would always
be able to see that picture, thank God!

"Tell me about it," said Mrs. Larpent, hoping that,
after all, she had not hurried too fast and that it was
not her remark that made him restless.  Any other
man almost would have caught her meaning.

"Not yet," he said.  "It isn't sufficiently formed."  And
then he lit a cigarette and sat down again, with
a chuckle.  "I can't fancy *you* in this one-eyed hole.
I thought, of course, that you'd stay the night here
and then take the first possible train to New York."

"Did you think what would happen to me after that?"

"No, I confess I didn't.  Southampton, or some
such place.  Society on the beach.  You said
something about Southampton, in the summer when you
had mercy on me that time and we did the theatres.
You were awfully good to me then."

She tried a daring move.  "You paid me well,
didn't you?"

Franklin looked as uncomfortable as he felt.  He
went off at a quick tangent.  "I don't think I shall
be in New York next fall," he said.  "I may go back
to South Africa."

Was he really quite so dense? she asked herself.
Had he forgotten every single word of that odd talk
in the Vanderdykes' library?  Would she have to
square up to him and blurt out the truth?  What was
he made of?

She would have one more try.  She got up.  "I
must go now," she said.  "It's getting late."

He got up too and opened his door.  "Thanks for
looking me up," he said.  "It was very friendly of
you."

She gave him one long, analytical look.  No, she
and her beauty meant nothing to him.  He was not
teasing her into a few uncontrolled hysterical words:
He was simply a big, naïve, unsuspicious man who
thought nothing but good of her.  She deserved better
than this.  She had never had any luck.  And she
loved this man.

She said "Good night" lightly and passed him with
a fleeting smile.  But in her own room she flung
herself face down on her bed and cried badly.

Franklin hurled off his dressing gown and switched
off the light.  But in front of his eyes as he lay in the
dark he could see Beatrix ankle-deep in a blue sea,
with the sun on her red bathing cap, clad in tights,
like a boy.

On her way out of Mrs. Keene's room Beatrix saw
Ida Larpent leave Franklin's.  Someone seemed to
have thrown a stone at her heart.





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   \XXXVIII

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Ida Larpent did not appear at the breakfast table.

Not for many years had she permitted herself to
enjoy the luxury of tears.  It was true that, since she
had been flung on her own resources and faced with
the disagreeable necessity of fighting her own battles,
there had been many hours when tears would have
helped her and made her more human.  She had
refused herself the indulgence for two reasons.  She
had no sympathy with what she called weakness and
she shuddered at the idea of spoiling her appearance,
even temporarily, by swollen lids.  Her beauty was
her only asset, her only stock-in-trade, and she
preserved it with the eager and consistent care of a
leading actress.  But Nature had been too strong for her
and she had capitulated like an ordinary woman for
once.  She had given herself up to an orgy of
disappointment, wounded vanity, anger and bitterness, and
after the storm was over had spent the rest of the night
trying to see into the future, balancing her account
with Fate.  She was not in immediate need of money.
Franklin's generosity had put her on her feet for the
time being.  She had paid her pressing bills and could
face the remainder of the year without anxiety.  But
there were other years.  What of them?  Her small
capital saved from the wreck that she had made of the
fond and foolish Clive's affairs had gone.  It was
certain that she had miscalculated the sort of man that
Franklin was.  Not having been able to "get him"
under what, with most men, would have been the most
favorable circumstances, she saw so little chance of
binding him to her and claiming some sort of protection
that she came to the conclusion that she must give
him up.  She had played Venus to his Adonis and
failed.  It was not pride that made her retire from
the game but the flat knowledge that he could do
without her.  Once more then she must go back into the
Street of Adventure and lay her snares for a rich
man, young or old.  One satisfaction was here, and
this was inconsistent with her materialism.  It was
better to have loved and lost than never to have loved
at all.

Beatrix *did* appear at the breakfast table.

She too, had had a bad night.  The shock of seeing
Ida Larpent coming out of Franklin's room was awful.
She sat for an hour chilled to the bone.  After having
loved no one but herself, and grown accustomed to the
habit of merely touching a bell to procure the earth,
it was startling enough suddenly to wake and find that
the earth meant nothing to her without the man who
did not seem to need her.  In itself that was so much
a shock that her whole perspective was shattered and
out of focus.  And even if Franklin only liked her as
a sister, which gave her sufficient suffering, she loved
him and had surrounded him with a girlish halo of
idealism which of all things did not admit the
possibility of such a visit as she had witnessed.

No one would have imagined who saw her and
heard her laugh that morning that she had sat in the
dark for many hours with life lying all smashed about
her like a beautiful stained glass window through
which a shell had burst.  She joined Franklin and
Malcolm at breakfast with her chin higher than ever,
readier than usual with banter and mischief, the
embodiment of youth, health and careless joy.  Her pride
came to her rescue and she intended to live up to Franklin's
estimate of her courage to her last gasp.  The difference
between Ida Larpent and Beatrix was breeding.

She found the two men on the veranda outside the
dining-room,—Franklin smoking his inevitable pipe.

"Good morning," she said.  Her ringing voice
turned them both around.  "Malcolm, if you don't
write a long and terrible poem on the early morning
noises of the country, I shall.  Even New York with
the explosions in the subway and the rattle of motor
buses is a city of the dead compared with this place.
Cocks began to scream at each other before daybreak,
hens have been brawling for hours and the gobble of
turkeys under my window has been worse than an
election meeting.  Is Mrs. Larpent down yet?"

"We've not seen her," said Franklin.

"I'm ten minutes late, am I not?"

"About that, but it doesn't matter," said Malcolm.

"I know it doesn't, but ten minutes' grace is enough
even for a woman, so let's go in and eat."  And she
led the way into the bleak dining-room, as glad as a
school-girl at the chance of being able to get a little
bit back, a very little bit, from Ida Larpent.

The waiters were almost ludicrously obsequious and
rolled their eyes towards Franklin with the nervousness
of pet monkeys.

"How's Mrs. Keene?"  Both men asked the question together.

"Up and about," said Beatrix.  "A little weak, of
course, but otherwise well.  Her trouble was wholly
mental.  Left alone with Pelham on a yacht, she was
convinced that, in order to preserve my honor, as she
puts it, I should have to jump overboard.  Poor, dear,
little affectionate Brownie.  If only she had taken the
trouble to find out the sort of a man Pelham is she
wouldn't have turned a hair."

Malcolm laughed.  "Is that meant to be complimentary
or reproachful?"

She saw that Franklin was watching her keenly.
"Both," she said, with a little bow, and sailed on
before he could butt in.  "I gave her a faithful account
of everything that happened and she is beginning to
believe, very reluctantly, that her favorite women
novelists don't know anything about men.  And now
what we both want to know is this.  Where are we
going, how are we going and how soon are we going,
or are we all going to spend the remainder of our
lives in this rural retreat to make a study of frogs,
farmyards and fogginess?"

Franklin was silent for a moment.  This was the
old Beatrix.  This was the Beatrix of New York, the
careless, superficial, sarcastic Beatrix of the house
party at the Vanderdykes' palace.  What a fool he
had been to imagine that he was the man appointed
to enable Miss Honoria to give thanks to God!  "The
*Galatea* will anchor off this place this afternoon," he
said.  "Malcolm and I will see you and your staff off
to New York on the night train."

"And where do you intend to go?"

"To Europe," he said.

"Is that definitely arranged?"

"Quite.  Malcolm and I settled it just now.  He
will spend a year or so pottering about London, Paris
and Rome and I shall go back to Africa."

With a mighty effort Beatrix held herself under
absolute control.  "But what about the party at
Sherry's during Christmas week?"

"Scratched," said Franklin, shortly.

"I see.  Well, now we know, don't we?  And
that's something.  How long, exactly, do you propose
that I shall remain a grass widow?"

"That," said Franklin, "is entirely up to you."

A bell-boy came in, rumbled grinning up to Beatrix
and handed her a telegram.  She took it.  "Will you
allow me?" she asked, and tore it open.  A curious
smile played round her lips as she read it over several
times.  "No," she said, "it isn't entirely up to me,"
and gave it to Franklin.

And what he read was this.  "Ask Pelham to bring
you home as soon as possible.  No one is ill but we
are all greatly perturbed by amazing rumors and daily
anonymous letters.  A consultation is necessary.
Much love.  Honoria Vanderdyke."

"H'm," said Franklin.  "Sutherland York at work.
May I show this to Malcolm?"

"Of course," said Beatrix.

Malcolm's remark, gravely spoken, was "Scandal again."

"Yes, we are back again at the beginning," said
Franklin.

Beatrix pushed back her chair and got up and went
out.  As she stood on the veranda with the sun on
her golden head there was not anxiety in her eyes, but
triumph.  If she really knew Franklin he would not
desert her at this new crisis.  He would not go to
Europe and to South Africa.  He would not consider
only himself.

He came out almost at once and gave her the
telegram.  "You may want to keep this," he said, and
stood in front of her for orders.

"Thanks,—yes."

They looked eagerly at each other, hoping against
hope that there was something in all this, something
more than mere accident, something which it was not
for them to pry into or understand, that was to bring
them as close as only love can bring a man and a
woman.

"Well?"

And Franklin echoed her.  "Well?"

They mutually wished to God that they were different,
of better stuff and more worth while.

"It's for you to speak," she said.

"You were right about the feeling that something
was going to happen to-day."

She nodded and put the telegram in her pocket.  It
didn't seem to matter much what the outcome of it was
going to be.

"We must all go back on the *Galatea* to-night," he
went on.

"You will alter your plans for me?  You will stand
by me again?"

He gave a queer sort of laugh.  "You didn't call
me a sportsman for nothing," he said.





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   \XXXIX

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New York again,—tired, hot, irritable New York.
A New York in the summer, careless of her appearance
like an overworked woman with a too large family
and, in consequence, a trifle blowsy, with stringy hair
and a rather dirty skirt.

Four cars drove away from the river which lay
glistening beneath an afternoon sun.

"Well," said Beatrix, sitting back, "all we need to
make the procession really noticeable is a mounted
policeman, a band and a banner."

Franklin laughed and looked over his shoulder.
Following them came Mrs. Lester Keene alone in all
her glory with the smaller cases.  Behind her, apparently
not on speaking terms, Helene and the valet with
a collection of hat and shoe boxes.  Finally an open
touring car piled high with luggage.

"What tune would you suggest for the band?"

"There'd be a nice touch of irony in 'See the
Conquering Hero Comes,'" she said.  "Don't you think
so?"

"Quite nice."  He congratulated himself upon
becoming an excellent actor.

"And now tell me a few things.  What about the
*Galatea*?"

"Oh, she'll remain in commission," said Franklin.
"McLeod is going home for a few days and the first
officer will be in charge.  Malcolm will stay aboard
too.  I shall let him know what happens."

"Why didn't you bring him with us?"

"Don't you think he might have been in the way?"

"And where's Mrs. Larpent going?"

"Home first and then to Southampton, I believe."

"I forgot to say good-bye to her in the hurry of
getting away from the yacht," said Beatrix, hoping
never to see her again.

"I thought you would," said Franklin, a little dryly.
His mind went back to the strained and uncomfortable
return trip during which Beatrix and Ida Larpent had
instinctively avoided each other as much as possible.
He couldn't for the life of him make out why.

"She's very beautiful," said Beatrix, as though she
were talking about a view or a horse.

"Yes, but better than that," said Franklin.  "She's
a good sort."

And Beatrix changed the conversation abruptly.
"Dear little Brownie!  It was very thoughtful of her
to insist on riding alone."

"Probably imagined that you and I had plenty to
talk about."

"Have we?"

"I suppose so, but I don't know where to begin."

And after that there was silence, for which both of
them were glad.  This was the first time since leaving
the one-eyed place with its frogs and chickens that they
had been alone.  During the return trip on the *Galatea*
they had both tacitly agreed that no purpose could
be served by being together more than was necessary.
Beatrix had kept Malcolm at her side consistently.
She confided nothing, spoke little and pretended to read
one of Jones's novels, keeping her false brilliance for
lunch and dinner.  Malcolm, glad to believe that for
some unfathomable reason his companionship was
necessary, stretched himself out in a deck chair and
wrote masses of *vers libre*.  When inspiration failed
he surreptitiously watched Beatrix and wondered why
her eyes were nearly always on the horizon with a
wistfulness that worried him.  Once or twice it flashed
across his mind that she loved his friend and was
hiding the fact because of pride, and the excitement
of the thought drove every other idea out of his head.
But when he saw that her manner to Franklin was
cheery and devil-may-care and boyish,—that word
seemed right to him,—he dismissed it.  "No such
luck," he said to himself and went on being quiet when
he sensed that she wished for quietude and broke into
voluble conversation when it seemed to him that she
silently asked him to chatter.

He was a lazy fellow, was Malcolm Fraser, a happy-go-lucky
procrastinating young-old man, was this very
dear chap, to whom the mere passing of time counted
for little so that it passed pleasantly and who seemed
to be content to absorb the color of life and revel in the
pageantry of Nature.  But he had been born a poet
and one fine day, when he took himself seriously,
ceased to be impressionistic and settled down to work,
his God-sent sympathy, the milk of human kindness,
of which he was full, and the exquisite imagery that
he had been collecting as a bee gathers honey, would
put him among the few men whose verse fills a hard
world with music and gives back to wounded souls that
gift of faith without which life is a hollow and a
useless episode.

All the way back Mrs. Larpent had kept to her own
room, giving out that she was unwell,—as indeed she
was.  Her mind was sick, and her body disappointed.
Franklin had told her the truth, she was obliged to
own, when he said that he loved Beatrix.  There was
no accounting for tastes and it seemed to her that a
man might infinitely better give his heart like a toy to a
toy-surfeited child than to this young autocrat.

And so Franklin had found companionship with
Captain McLeod, the first officer, and—it was enough
to make a cat laugh—with Mrs. Lester Keene.  He
spent hours trying to make the time pass a little
pleasantly for the elderly woman who was, he knew,
anxious, frightened and full of conscientious but
wholly unnecessary self-reproach.  They became good
friends before the yacht dropped her anchor off her
usual moorings,—even they.  One of Mrs. Keene's
resolutions was that, in future, she would revise her
novel-made opinion of men.  That was something to
have achieved, had Franklin only known it.

Through the mostly ugly, but sometimes queerly
beautiful and always unique city they went together,
Franklin and Beatrix followed by their entourage, and
it came to them both that, in returning to the house
in which they had joined forces in a manner that now
appeared to them to be inconceivable, they were
completing a curious and a useless circle.  They had
undergone strange feelings, placed themselves into difficult
and dangerous situations, disconnected themselves
from the irresponsibility, the right to which was theirs
by inheritance, given up an individualism that was part
and parcel of their training and environment, and all
for what?  To return discontented, disappointed and
dispirited to the spot from which they had set out.
He loved her and would lay his life at her feet and
she loved him and would gladly be his servant, and
both, being alike and having the same want of confidence
when it came to the fundamentals, had not found
it out.  Fate had played a pretty game with these two
for having dared to tamper with her.  And, oddly
enough, Ida Larpent was the only one of the
characters in this little comedy from which she had made
her exit who had guessed what Fate had done and now
peeked through the cracks in the scenery to see how
it was going to end.  And she, being a worldling,
suspicious of humanity, was not prepared to make a
guess.

"Well," said Beatrix at last, gathering herself
together.  "We're almost there.  In for a very amusing
evening, if I know my respected and respectable family."

Franklin turned and looked at her.  There was
something in her voice,—a sort of school-girl note, the
note of a high spirited young thing who had broken
bounds and been discovered and faced punishment,—that
made him shoot out a laugh.

"Why laugh?" she asked.  She never tolerated
being laughed at.

"You'd make a rattlesnake chortle."  He laughed again.

"Look out, or I *may* hit you," she said.  "It's one
of the things that makes my arm utterly irresponsible."

He made a gesture that was almost French.  "You
beat me," he said.  "By Jove, you beat me."

"If you'd beaten me it might have been different,"
she snapped back at him.

"One doesn't beat you," said Franklin.  "God
made you and that's the end of it, I find.  No
argument, as a man I know always says when the rain has
set in for the day or a bottle's empty.  You are you,
kiddie, and so are the sun, the moon and the stars."

"You're a fool," she cried, "a fool, a fool!"  And
then she put her hand quickly over her mouth.  What
kind of a fool would *she* look if she allowed herself to
fling out even the beginning of what was in her mind?

"I knew that five minutes after I grinned like a
Cheshire cheese and posed before your people as the
sheepish husband.  All the same it was worth it, here
and there."  He was damned if he'd give himself away
either.

"I think so too," she said.

The car turned and went through the great iron gates.

"I shall like the *Galatea* all the better because you've
touched her," he said.

She laughed because her lips insisted on trembling.
"I suppose you asked Malcolm to give you that.
Don't you think one poet in the family's enough?
There's mother's machine-made hair and Aunt
Honoria's perfect nose and dear old daddy's kind but
suspicious eyes.  'It's all right in the wintertime but
in the summertime it's awful.'"  She sang these
pathetic words beneath her breath and waved her hand
to the waiting family with an air of superb confidence
and affection.

He didn't laugh again.  Metaphorically he took off
all his hats to her and laid them at her feet.





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   \XL

.. vspace:: 2

The perfect Mrs. Vanderdyke, fresh from the
manipulations of her constant time-fighters, arranged
herself on the top step of the house.  With a light,
controlling touch she placed her husband on her right
and her sister-in-law on her left, so that, viewed from
below, they should be exactly framed in the elaborate
doorway.  She did this, as she did everything, with a
self-conscious sense of the decorative, of being like
royalty, in the public eye, of standing before an
imaginary battery of masked cameras as the chief
representative of American high society.

It was a good picture, she knew, and one of which
her country might well feel proud.  She was quite
satisfied with her own appearance.  Her head, which
had taken an hour to dress, was a work of art.  She
wore no hat.  After some consideration she had come
to the conclusion that a hat would spoil the intimate,
home-like effect that she desired to achieve.  Her face,
strangely un-lined and immobile, had the faintest touch
of color.  Her chin, held high in order that there
should not be the mere suggestion of sag, certainly
gave her the appearance of gargling, but what did that
matter?  Her dress, which had almost broken a
woman's heart, gave her youth.  Of her sister-in-law
she felt proud.  She added the right note of dignity
and autumnal beauty, with her white hair and eagle
nose and unconscious grace.  She wished that her
husband had taken more pains with his clothes and had
put up a better fight with elderliness but, after all, he
was Vanderdyke and a man.

She was pleased with the way in which Franklin
helped Beatrix out of the car and, going down two
steps, she welcomed the daughter of whom she knew
absolutely nothing as though she were a rather
interesting and important relation.  "How well you look,
dear Beatrix," she said, in a voice which gave the
impression of having been as well massaged as her face.
She placed a light kiss on the girl's cheek.  "But I've
never seen you so sunburned before," she added
reproachfully.

"The simple life, Mother," said Beatrix, knowing
that her satire was wasted.  She put her arms round
her father's neck.  "How are you, Daddy darling?
Glad to see me?"

Mr. Vanderdyke, whose to-days were just as
monotonous and uninspired as his yesterdays, was
unexpectedly emotional.  He held his only child closely
and kissed her several times and said, "My dear, my
dear," a little brokenly.  His little girl was
returning from her honeymoon.  It might mean so much in
the history of the family.

And then it was Aunt Honoria's turn.  With eager
tenderness and pride she gathered into her warm arms
the girl she would have given so much to own.  Her
broken romance lived again at that moment.  Her eyes
were blurred with tears.

Not her father and not her mother gave Beatrix a
sudden feeling of being a fraud and an impostor, but
this kind, sweet woman whose silence was so eloquent.
How different everything might have been if only she
had been her mother!

With what she intended to be marked cordiality
Mrs. Vanderdyke gave both her hands to Franklin,
who had never been so uncomfortable in his life.  She
wanted to convey to him the fact that even in the
face of rumors and anonymous letters she believed in
him.  "My dear Pelham," she said, "it is kind of you
to cut your honeymoon so short in deference to our
wishes."

"Not at all," replied Franklin.  He pulled himself
up as he was about to add, "I'm only too delighted."

Mr. Vanderdyke seemed anxious to support his wife.
"My dear fellow," he said, "my dear fellow," and
stuck.

Franklin returned his grip.  "I'm awfully glad to
see you, sir," he said.  "Er—what stunning
weather."  He caught the impish look which Beatrix
darted at him and gave it up.

"My dear lad," said Aunt Honoria, so kindly and
with a smile that was so maternal that Franklin put
her hand to his lips.  It was only as they all went into
the hall that he turned cold under the realization that
he was little better than a cheat among these people.
All the same, with one refreshing glance at Beatrix,
whose impression of half-shy, half-defiant young
wifehood was amazingly perfect, he played the son-in-law
to the best of his ability.

Once more they were back, these two, in the place
where life had taken a sudden and astonishing twist.
Months seemed to have gone by since they had been
there before.

"The Bannermans, Mrs. Gordon and Ethel, the Duc
de la Faucheroucould and Roy Stanton have been staying,"
said Mrs. Vanderdyke.  "By a very lucky chance
we shall be alone to-night and to-morrow.  We will
have a family council after dinner."

Beatrix looked at Franklin over her father's
shoulder, and drew down the corners of her mouth.
No, he was not the man to make her take things seriously.

Mr. Vanderdyke let out some of the uneasiness that
he had done his best to disguise during the welcome.
"I wish I'd acted on my intuition to telephone to my
lawyer," he said petulantly.  "Eventually we shall
have to take legal advice, I feel sure."

Aunt Honoria broke in.  "Now, now," she said,
"we agreed not to go into this matter until our young
people had settled down.  It is far too serious to take
up in a desultory manner.  Personally, my opinion is
that as soon as Pelham has all the facts and has dined
well and is smoking a cigar he will bring his practicality
to bear and possibly do away with any recourse to
the law.  I have great confidence in Pelham," and
she smiled at him in a way that made him cold again.

And then Mrs. Lester Keene came in and was
greeted graciously by the two ladies.

Beatrix went across casually to Franklin.  "What
on earth has happened?" she asked, in an anxious
whisper.

"I wish I knew," he whispered back.

"Do you feel curious?  I do."

He nodded gravely.  Beatrix and scandal,—they
were never meant to run in double harness.

And then the imp of mischief that was never very
far away from Beatrix took its old accustomed place
on her shoulder, and her eyes began to dance.  "I'm
not surprised at my family's confidence in you," she
said.  "There's something in your appearance that
could win you orders even for an encyclopedia.  What
fills me with surprise and amusement is the confidence
they seem to feel in *me*.  That's quite new."

"Not so loud," he said.

She sent out a ripple of laughter.  "Well, you
certainly are practical.  That, I know."

"Do you?"

"Don't I?"  She looked straight into his eyes and
her laughter ceased.

Mrs. Vanderdyke joined them.  "You have twenty
minutes for a little rest before you dress for dinner,
Beatrix.  You must be tired after your hot drive."

"No, Mother, thanks," said Beatrix airily.  "Pelham
talked all the way here and was so merry and
bright that the journey seemed short."  But she went
upstairs to the suite that he would never forget, and
her little touch of sarcasm found its mark.

"Come into my room," said Mr. Vanderdyke, "and
we'll smoke a cigarette."

Franklin followed him.

It was a curious room in which he presently found
himself,—a room which gave a pathetic keynote to the
character and life of the man who spent so many hours
in it.  Very large and lofty, it was crammed with ideas
at which he appeared to have made a beginning,
dabbled in and wearied of.  There were leather-bound
manuscript books in dozens, several of which had labels
on the back,—"Notes on Old China," "Impressions
of European Labor Conditions," "Butterflies,"
"Songs and Sonnets," "A Life of Russell Vanderdyke,
Book I.," "Trout Streams," "The Improvement
of Factories,"—it would have taken an hour to
examine them all.  The note of the dilettante was
everywhere,—in the pieces of rare silver that were
mixed with old pottery, Japanese lacquer, Jacobean
chests, Oriental curios, ancient Bibles, first editions,
faded prints, modern etchings, and one or two appalling
examples of so-called Cubist work which appealed
to Franklin merely as pervertism or the attempt of
men who had never been taught to paint to illustrate
delirium tremens.  It was the room of a man of confirmed
irresolution, of an inherited lack of grip, of an
intellect that was as unconcentrated as a flight of
pigeons.  It showed a scattering of interest that could
only belong to some-one who had never felt the
splendid urge of achieving an object in the face of dire
necessity.  It provided the most unobservant eye with
a complete history of an ambitious but vacillating life.
It conveyed to workers the impression of many acres
of dead-level ground long ago carefully staked out as
a garden city, with neat boards indicating here an
avenue, here a public library, here a country club, here
a huge hotel, here a railroad station, all very neat and
well weeded but without the fulfilment of one single
promise.

Franklin didn't get the feeling of the room at once.
It seemed to him to be rather intimate though somewhat
uninhabitable.  It was only while Mr. Vanderdyke
was talking in his vague impersonal way that the
pathetic incompleteness of it all came to him and hit
him hard.  Good Heavens, what if he, too, dwindled,
for the same reason, into a similar dabbler!  What if
he, too, scattered away his life with the same kind of
uselessness!

He was glad to get away to change and to think.
He was pretty certain that the time was near, whatever
might be the way out of the maze that he was in with
Beatrix, for him to do a good deal of thinking.  He
was pretty certain that when he left the Vanderdyke
house alone,—he couldn't see how else he could leave
it,—the effect that Beatrix had had upon him would
impel him to hitch himself on to life in some other
capacity than that of a mere observer.  For her sake,
in her honor, he would dedicate his life to a job that
should relieve the pressure in some way on the toilers
of the earth and help things forward.

When he returned to the hall he found the punctual,
punctilious family ready and waiting to go into dinner.
Beatrix followed him down almost immediately,
wearing a simple and charming frock.  Aunt Honoria met
her and brought her into the group.  There was something
about the girl, a new dignity, a riper air, an
uncharacteristic quietude that was caught at once by the
three Vanderdykes and especially by Aunt Honoria.
Her words to Franklin in the garden before the honeymoon
came back into her mind and with an emotion
that she was unable to suppress she said, "This is a
good night in the history of the family.  Our little
girl has found herself as we have prayed that she
would.  I speak for my brother and sister when I say
that we are grateful to you, Pelham."  She bowed to
him with old-fashioned grace.

Mr. Vanderdyke, obviously disconcerted, murmured
approval, and Mrs. Vanderdyke smiled.  She was a
little resentful of the way in which Aunt Honoria
always took the lead but this was outweighed by her
immense relief at the fact that Beatrix was happy and
disposed of.

Franklin was the most uncomfortable man on earth.

And then Beatrix did a thing that once more made
him wish that they were back in the stone age.  "Let
me speak for myself," she said quietly.  "Pelham, I
am very grateful, too," and put her hand on his
shoulder, stood on tiptoes and kissed him.

He was wrong, once more, when he told himself,
angrily, that she was deliberately fooling, getting a
thrill of amusement at his expense.  If he had known
her as she was now, he would have realized that she
had seized the public moment to do something she
would not have dared to do privately, that she was
thanking him for what he had done for her and saying
"Good-bye."  She had made up her mind to tell the
truth at the family council that night.





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While Helene had been brushing her hair and getting
her ready for dinner Beatrix had gone in for
honest thinking too.

She came at once to the conclusion that from every
point of view the sham that she had created in that
wild moment of self-preservation and devil-may-care
must be smashed.  Scandal had driven her into it.
Scandal was following at her heels and in a blaze of
scandal the episode must end.  The futile punishment,
which, as a girl, she had been so keen to dodge
mattered nothing to her now as a woman.  Let Aunt
Honoria drag her into the back of beyond.  She would
go gladly.  In silent lonely places she could sit in
dreams and live over again those wonderful moments
during which she had burst into womanhood.  What
did it matter now if she missed a season, many
seasons in New York?  She had looked into the eyes of
life.  She had no longer any desire to take her part
among the silly sheep that ran about in droves.  She
was sorry for the pain and humiliation that she must
cause her family to suffer.  There seemed to be no
way to prevent that.  To enter into Franklin's scheme
of marriage only meant a postponement of scandal.
Divorce would provide the gossipers with an even
more succulent morsel than the one that was waiting
for them.  Out of this smash, bad as it must be, she
would at any rate preserve her pride and set Franklin
free.

There were three things that hit her hard as she sat
in front of her looking glass that evening.  Her
failure to make Franklin eat the words that he had flung
at her vanity as he stood at the foot of her bed.  Her
failure to turn the sex attraction that she had
deliberately stirred in him into love.  Her failure to
compete with such a woman as Ida Larpent.  In fact
it was the word failure that seemed to her to be
written all over the episode into which she had entered
without a thought for anyone except herself,—and it
was the one word which had, till then, never been
allowed to have a place in her dictionary.

It was a bad hour that she went through as she
summed things up, and she came out of it startled at
the knowledge that she, even she, was required to pay
for her mistakes to the uttermost cent.

Well, she *would* pay and pay smiling.  She would
prove to Franklin that he was right when he said that
she had courage.

Dinner was a rather pompous, long drawn out affair,
watched, as usual, by several of Romney's rosy-cheeked
men, a beautiful Gainsborough woman, and a Reynolds'
legal luminary, cynical beneath a heavy wig.
Conversation was conducted, rather than allowed to
run easily, through the superfluous courses.  The
butler, with the air of a bishop, held an aloof place in
the background and silent-footed men-servants hovered
like hawks over the shoulders of the diners.

To Mr. Vanderdyke dinner was an institution, the
land-mark in his vacant days.  He trained for it with
assiduous care and self-restraint, enjoyed it with his
characteristic halfheartedness and took his punishment
and his tabloids as a matter of course.  To Mrs. Vanderdyke
it was a severe temptation which, for the most
part, she resisted with great pluck.  The smallest
increase of weight meant hours of treatment.  Aunt
Honoria just ate and let it go at that and so did
Franklin, whose appetite was the envy and wonder of many
of his less healthy friends.  Beatrix pecked a little
and said a little but smiled at everybody.  She was
keeping up the bluff until her cards were called.

How different and how wonderful it would all have
been if instead of acting parts she and Franklin were
playing them in reality!

After the ladies had left Franklin smoked a cigarette
with Mr. Vanderdyke and did his best to show interest
in his host's rather petulant criticisms of the ways and
methods of the Government.  He was very glad to
follow him into the drawing-room in whose stiff
immensity the ladies were almost lost.

He went straight up to Mrs. Vanderdyke, who was
leaning on a Tudor mantelpiece, torn from Little
Claverings in Essex.  She always stood for twenty
minutes after dinner.  It was part of her régime.
"I'm very keen to hear what there is to be told,
Mrs. Vanderdyke," he said.  "May we get to it now?"

"Isn't it a little early yet?"  Mrs. Vanderdyke
turned to Aunt Honoria, who was talking to Beatrix.
The energy of this tall, tanned man was a little
disconcerting.  "Will you——"

"I have everything here," said Aunt Honoria, "and
I agree with Pelham that there is no time like the
present.  I have given orders that we are on no account to
be disturbed.  You will sit down, won't you?"

Mrs. Vanderdyke did so, having glanced at the clock.
Mr. Vanderdyke lay back in a low chair with the
fingers of his long, thin hands together.  He would
far rather have been in the hands of a dentist than in
that room at that time.  Franklin sat bolt upright next
to Beatrix, who had her metaphorical bomb all ready
to throw into the middle of the group.  Only to these
two did the underlying drama of this curious meeting
appeal fully.

And then Aunt Honoria opened the proceedings
quietly, calmly and with all the dignity of which she
was a mistress.  "I have here," she said, "a bundle
of anonymous letters and a cutting from a scurrilous
paper.  The first letter came addressed to me.  Others
are written to my brother and sister, and there are half
a dozen which were sent to intimate friends of ours
and placed in my hands by them.  They are all in the
same handwriting, which looks to me as though it
were disguised.  They began to arrive the morning
after you left on your honeymoon, my dear, and have
come every morning since.  They take the form of a
series of questions.  This is the first one.  "Have you
taken the trouble to discover at which Church or
registry your niece Beatrix and Pelham Franklin were
married?"  And then they run in this order.  You
will see that I have copied them out.  "What will you
do when you find that your daughter, who imagines
herself to belong to the salt of the earth, is a common
wanton and liar?  What will you do to repair the
damage that she has done to your prestige in society
by humbugging the papers into printing the story of a
marriage that never took place?  How is it that
sophisticated people of your type have accepted a man
as a son-in-law without evidence of his legal right to
call himself so?  Do you think you set a good example
to all the people who copy your ways and manners
by allowing your daughter to go on the loose with
any man she takes a fancy to?  Have you a grudge
against society in which you assume a leading position
and have you made yourselves party to an unmoral
and disgraceful transaction in order to hold it up to
the ridicule of the world?  Would you speak to a
young girl, however well-born and wealthy, who to
hide a love affair with one man bluffed a marriage
with a mere acquaintance?  What decent man will
marry your daughter after she has been 'honeymooning'
with another?  Don't you know that truth will
out and that already tongues are busy with the names
of Vanderdyke and Franklin?  Aren't you sufficiently
worldly to have learned that people who condone are
classed with people who commit?  Why not, if you
have been as gullible as press and public, set things
right and make what reparation you can to the
members of your class?  Do you want the name of Beatrix
Vanderdyke to be placed among those of notorious
chorus girls?  Why not at once institute a search
among the registrations of marriages and force the
guilty couple, now basking in the light of a mock
honeymoon, to confession and penitence?"

"Don't go on, don't go on," cried Mr. Vanderdyke.
"I can't stand it, I tell you.  I can't stand it!"  His
voice was almost hysterical and his gesture almost
feminine.

"These dreadful questions," said Mrs. Vanderdyke,
in a low voice, "give me mental sickness."

Franklin sat quite still, with his hands clenched.

Beatrix looked as though she had been turned to
stone.  Had all these hideous things grown out of one
impetuous moment?

"I will gladly pass over the rest," said Aunt
Honoria, "and come to the cutting from the paper that
was sent to me three days ago.  This," she added in
a voice that became suddenly sharp with anger, "calls
for immediate action, Pelham, and is the reason of
your being here to-night."

"Please read it," said Franklin.

Aunt Honoria read, holding the clipping as though
it held contamination.  It was written in the usual
smart manner with the usual lascivious snigger.
"There is a very precious high life scandal in the
offing, so to speak,—one which will, it is said on the
best authority, flutter the dovecotes of all our Best
Families.  Much satisfaction was recently expressed,
and gallons of ink expended in fulsome congratulation,
upon the marriage of a well-known amateur yachtsman
to the beautiful and adventurous daughter of a
multi-millionaire.  No recent royal marriage was more
widely commented upon.  It is rumored, however, that
the high-spirited young lady who, even as a débutante
had shown a certain lofty disregard for the conventions,
is now conducting an ultra-modern experiment
with the good-looking amateur yachtsman by honeymooning
with him before the legal prescription has
been made out, with the view, perhaps, to ultimate
marriage.  This sort of thing has been perpetrated, it is
true, though without any attempt to mislead the public,
by persons of artistic temperament and no social
position to lose, but the question is being very generally
asked as to how this peculiar proceeding will presently
be viewed by American Society, which still clings to
one or two hard and fast standards.  I shall certainly
watch the outcome with immense curiosity and shall be
especially interested to see how soon the matrons on
and near Fifth Avenue will show how the wind is
blowing in their treatment of a certain member of the
girl's family who has constituted herself the guide
and mentor of her set for many years."

Although he had read this cunningly offensive thing
over many times, Mr. Vanderdyke squirmed in his
chair and put one hand over his eyes.  His fastidious
and beautiful wife, usually too self-centered to be
concerned with the troubles of other people, gave him
a glance of very genuine sympathy.  It had been the
fetish of them both to regard convention as a sort of
religion, and she knew, unable herself to translate her
indignation and disgust into words, how deeply her
husband took this utterly undeserved scurrility to heart.
Like him and like Aunt Honoria she had no suspicion
of there being anything in the least out of order in
the marriage.

Beatrix still sat as though she had been turned to stone.

But Franklin got up.  This poisonous collection of
sniggering words made him see red.  Oh, God, for five
minutes with that fat brute York!  He walked up and
down, watched with grim satisfaction by the family,
especially by Mr. Vanderdyke, who poked himself up
on his elbow and with a flush on his face and an eager
light in his pale eyes saw in that tall, wiry, sun-burned
man all the symptoms of an overwhelming desire for
the sort of physical vengeance in which he himself
would never be able to indulge.

Franklin got himself under control, stood in front
of the fireplace and asked himself what he was going
to do.  The moment had come when he could get free
of the girl who tortured his lonely hours and compelled
his adoration and was further away than Heaven.  In
a few words he could give her people, who deserved
most of the blame, the story of the result of spoiling.
Should he seize it?  Should he cut loose from an
empty tie and become his own master again?  Once,
at school, he had been summoned before the Head
Master to give evidence against Malcolm Fraser, who
had broken bounds.  He had lied through his teeth to
save his friend.  Under the eyes of these people the
feeling came back to him and pervaded him like a
perfume that he was standing again in the sanctum of
that stern, old task-master.  Not for a friend this
time, not for a man who could take his punishment and
grin, but for a girl who would be stained in the sight
of unbelievers, the girl of all living girls whom he
loved beyond words and whom, under any circumstances,
he must hold, he would lie himself black in the
face to defend.  That was settled.  It was almost
laughable to have supposed that there had been any
other solution.  He turned.  There was a curious
smile in his eyes.  "What is your proposition?" he
asked.

Aunt Honoria took a sheet of note paper from the
little table at her elbow.  There was something about
this man Franklin that reminded her of the one who
had taken her heart with him beyond the outpost of
eternity.  With some difficulty she steadied her voice.
"When we first read that paragraph with its abominable
suggestiveness," she said, "we had no intention
of being drawn into making a statement.  We agreed
that it would be undignified.  But since then, having
talked of nothing else, we have come to the conclusion
that we must send something to the leading papers.
What we suggest is this, if it meets with your approval."

"Please read it."  He noticed that Beatrix was
opening and closing her hands as though she had pins
and needles.

"My brother drew this up and he left the spaces for
you to fill in, Pelham."  Aunt Honoria then read the
statement which her brother had written and re-written
at least a dozen times.  "'From the recent account of
the romantic and closely-guarded marriage of Miss
Beatrix Vanderdyke and Mr. Pelham Franklin
published by us we omitted to give the name of the church
in which it was celebrated and the date of the
ceremony.  'The Church was —— and the date ——.'  All
you have to do is to fill in the facts and I will send
the necessary copies to town to-night by messenger.
If this doesn't put an end to letters and paragraphs we
must then claim the protection of the law."

Franklin took the sheet of paper.  All he had to do
was to fill in the facts!  Ye Gods, what was he to
do with the thing?  He glanced at Beatrix.  She still
seemed to be half frozen.  No help was to be had
from her.  He must put forward a good objection
and a good alternative at once.  "I think that your
first idea was the right one," he said.  "This statement
is a confession of weakness.  I want you, if you
will, to leave the whole thing to me.  I know the man
who's written those letters.  It will give me immense
pleasure to deal with him.  One visit to the office of
that paper will settle the editor's hash."  He spoke
with all the confidence that he could master and smiled
at the three Vanderdykes, who seemed to hang on his
words.  "And, after all, this is entirely my affair.
Beatrix is my wife and it is for me and no one else
to protect her."

Beatrix, now fully alive, sprang to her feet.  "No,"
she said, "it's not your affair.  It's mine, and it's for
me to put an end to it."

All eyes were turned on her,—the Vanderdykes'
with some surprise.  Franklin's with quick apprehension.
She was going to give the show away, he saw.
At all costs she must be stopped.  With what he tried
to make a newly-married smile he took her hand and
scrunched it so that she nearly screamed with pain.
"There's going to be a friendly argument between
us," he said.  "Would you permit us to conduct it out
in the air?"  And before another word could be said
by anybody he put his arm around Beatrix's waist,
controlled her to one of the open French windows and
out under the sky.

"What do you mean by this?" she cried angrily.

He held her tight.  "You were going to give
yourself away."

"Yes, I was."  She tried to shake him off.  "And
I will."

"No, you won't, if I have to gag you, you won't."

She gave her hand a violent wrench.  "Let me go.
I've had enough of it."

Instead of which he stooped down, picked her up in
his arms, carried her down the terrace steps and
through the sleeping garden to the tea house
overlooking the Sound.  Here he put her down and stood
in front of her, ready to catch her again if she tried
to escape.  In that place, not so long ago, he had found
her impossible.

"Now, then," he said, "come to cues."

She gave a scoffing laugh.  "What is all this?  An
attempt to play the primeval man, or what?"

"Be sarcastic if you like," he said.  "I don't care.
Be anything you please, but play the game.  You
started it."

"Play the game!" she echoed, blazing with anger.
"That's exactly what I was going to do."

"I don't agree with you."

"What do I care whether you agree or not?"

"I'm going to make you care."

"Make me?  You?  Have you ever been able to
make me do one single thing?"

"This is where I begin.  Sit down."

"I won't sit down."  He put her into a chair and
stood over her.  He was in no mood for conventionality.

"Dear me, how strong we are!" she said, like a
rude little girl.

"Impertinence is wasted on me to-night.  So
try something else.  We're back again at the beginning
of this game of yours, but to-night we start
afresh."

"So far as I'm concerned the game's over."

"Yes, but what you fail to realize is that you're not
the only one concerned.  There's your family and
there's me."

"I'm not going over all the old arguments again, I
assure you.  I tell you the thing is over.  You may be
able to prevent me from telling the truth to-night, but
there's to-morrow and the day after.  I'm in no
immediate hurry."

"I am though, and I'm going to keep you here until
you give in to me."

"Order breakfast for eight o'clock," she said calmly.

He ignored her audacity.  "You will do three
unforgivable things by telling the truth.  You will put
your people into a panic, hold me up to the ridicule of
the earth and hurt your reputation beyond any sort of
repair.  It isn't sporting to do the first two and I'm not
going to let you do the other."

"My reputation——" She began, and stopped.

The word sporting dried up her words.  It opened up
a new point of view.  She had harped on this word
in regard to him.  She held it in high respect.  For
the first time in their long and fluctuating struggle of
temperament he had scored.

He saw it and went on quickly.  "Because of your
people and because of you,—I can always
disappear,—I'm going to carry on your lie through thick
and thin.  If, when I've finished what I've got to say,
you go back and tell them that you're not married to
me I shall say that you're lying again.  I shall be
believed and I shall first break every bone in York's body
and thrash the paragraphist into a hospital.  Then, as
soon as McLeod's had his three days' leave you, being a
sportsman, will come aboard the *Galatea* with
me,—Malcolm's waiting,—and we will make a bee line for
the Irish Coast and get married in Queenstown.  It's
impossible in this country now."

"And then, what?" she asked.

"Africa for me, home for you,—or anywhere else
you like."

"I see.  And are you childish enough to think that
this precious plan will kill scandal?"

"Yes.  Why not?"

"Divorce,—what of that?"

"That's a small matter.  You can't get a divorce
without having first been married.  It's the question
of marriage that we're up against."

Beatrix was silent for a moment.  Her anger had
gone.  By the unexpected use of that one word
"sporting" he had convinced her that she couldn't go
back on a creed.  Here was a man who had the right
to enforce something to which he had lived up so
splendidly.  She had made her bed and must lie on it.

"May I get up?" she asked quietly.

"Please," he said, and stood back.

She went over to the wall and put her hands on it
and looked out over the silent water.  Was she beaten
at last?  Had this man broken her as well as
unconsciously won her love?  Was she to fail utterly in
her reiterated attempt to make him eat the words that
had hurt her so?  Was she, in fact, quite down from
the pedestal upon which every one had placed her?
A rush of tears blurred her eyes,—but only for a
second.  She forced herself under control and looked
round to see where Franklin was.  He hadn't moved.
He was standing where she left him,—not looking
very much like a man who had won, she saw, without
surprise.  He was not that kind of man, she knew.

"I want you," she said.

He went over.

"Will you tell me something?"

"Anything."

She felt the blood rush into her face.  "Why was
Ida Larpent in your room the other night?"

He answered simply.  "To smoke a cigarette and
have a yarn."

One awful weight fell from her heart.  "Will
you say that you're sorry for that horrid thing you
flung at me about the huts and the desert island?"

He thought for a moment, remembered and laughed.
"Yes," he said, "I'm sorry."

The other weight fell.  There was a third, heavier
than these two, that would always remain.  "I will
marry you," she said.

And he gave a queer groan and his hands went out
to catch her and fell to his sides.

And the other weight fell with what seemed to her
to be a crash that echoed all over the world.  Being a
woman, and a woman in love, she stood on tiptoe and
kissed him.

"Don't do that," he cried out.

"Why not?" she asked softly, standing so close that
the perfume of her hair made him shake.  "Aren't you
forcing me to be your wife?"

"No.  I'm only going to make you marry me."

"Then I won't marry you," she said.

"What the devil do you mean?"

She smiled at his roughness and held up her face
so that he might see what she meant in her eyes.  She
stood up straight, young and slim and sweet,—her
whole body radiating with love and joy and triumph.

And he looked and saw, gave a great cry like a
shipwrecked man who sees the shore, and held her against
his heart, out there in the night, under the stars, giving
praise.





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"Sorry you're going to leave us, sir," said Moffat,
putting a pair of shoes into a chamois bag.

"Thanks," said Malcolm.

"Mr. Franklin told me that you're going to make
straight for my village, sir,—London."

The valet chuckled at his little joke.

"Yes, London for the autumn, Paris for the winter,
and probably back to New York for the spring."

"And very nice too, sir, I'm sure."

Malcolm went over to one of the open port-holes of
his stateroom.  The *Galatea* lay in the harbor of
Queenstown.  The setting sun lay kindly on the
houses of the small Irish port that behaved as though
it were the hub of the universe.  In one of them, a
few hours ago, he had stood in the shabby little room
of the registrar of births, deaths and marriages,
making a mental and never-to-be-forgotten picture of a
worn, cheap desk, a worn, cheap man with a mop of
grizzled hair and an absolutely expressionless face, an
inkpot which looked as though it had never been
cleaned, a square of green blotting paper, a dog-eared
testament, and a strip of carpet across which, slanting
from the door to the desk, there was a threadbare
path made by the passing of feet.  Births, deaths and
marriages,—they were all the same to the registrar.
He had his quiet days and his busy ones.  Births and
deaths gave a little less trouble than marriages but they
all worked out pretty much the same.

And in this picture, a startling contrast to the shabby
and sordid room, stood the vital figures of Beatrix and
Franklin, hand in hand, the representatives of the
spirit of youth and love in that place which also
registered the beginning and the end of life.  The feeling
and the symbolism and the beauty of this scene made
their appeal to Malcolm Fraser both as a poet and a
man.  Here stood a man and a woman, in all the
glory of youth, at the second of the three milestones.
On to the third, hidden behind the curtain of spring
leaves, they would now go together.  God grant them
the gifts of give and take and the blessed fruit of love.
Here stood his friend and the woman he had loved
and loved still.  He wasn't losing her because he was
never in the running to win.  He wasn't losing him
because their bond was everlasting.  All was well,
then.  He had no complaints.

.. _`In this picture stood the vital figures of Beatrix and Franklin, hand in hand`:

.. figure:: images/img-372.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: In this picture stood the vital figures of Beatrix and Franklin, hand in hand.

   In this picture stood the vital figures of Beatrix and Franklin, hand in hand.

He followed his luggage on deck.  Beatrix and
Franklin were waiting for him.  How different they
looked, he thought.  No wonder.  They had found the
way to live.

"Don't go, Mally," said Beatrix, putting an arm
round his shoulder.  "Send your things down again
and come back with us."

"Yes," said Franklin.  "Come on."

Malcolm shook his head.  "Don't tempt me," he
said.  "I've been lazy long enough.  I'm going to
begin to work in the old cities.  With any luck I'll
have a thin volume ready, very expensively bound, for
your golden wedding."

They all laughed.  It was, somehow, a rather
emotional moment.  It was good to laugh.

"All ready, sir," said Jones, who regretted to be the
one to put good old Peter Pan ashore.

Malcolm gave his hand to Beatrix.  "God bless
you, my dear," he said.

"God bless you, Mally."

"Good luck, old man."

"So long," said Franklin.

They watched him into the launch and away, waving
their hands.

"Good old Malcolm!" said Franklin.  "Among
other things that he did for me he brought you on the
*Galatea*."

"But not for my honeymoon," said Beatrix with a
little look that made his heart jump.  "When do we sail?"

"As soon as Jones gets back."

"And then, where?"

"Heaven," he said.

They began to walk.  The sun was slipping away.
A new day was coming, a new beginning.

"I know one thing," she said.

"What's that?"

"You won't spoil me."

He saw the old mischievous smile lurking in her
eyes.  But she escaped his eager hands and ran into
her state-room.

And he followed her and shut the door.

.. vspace:: 3

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   THE END

.. vspace:: 3

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center medium white-space-pre-line

   "*The Books You Like to Read
   at the Price You Like to Pay*"

.. class:: center large bold white-space-pre-line

   There Are Two Sides
   to Everything—

.. vspace:: 2

—including the wrapper which covers
every Grosset & Dunlap book.  When
you feel in the mood for a good romance,
refer to the carefully selected list
of modern fiction comprising most of
the successes by prominent writers of
the day which is printed on the back of
every Grosset & Dunlap book wrapper.

You will find more than five hundred
titles to choose from—books for every
mood and every taste and every pocketbook.

*Don't forget the other side, but in case
the wrapper is lost, write to the publishers
for a complete catalog.*

.. class:: center small white-space-pre-line

   *There is a Grosset & Dunlap Book
   for every mood and for every taste*

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   EMERSON HOUGH'S NOVELS

.. class:: center small white-space-pre-line

   May be had wherever books are sold.
   Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.

.. vspace:: 2

THE COVERED WAGON

An epic story of the Great West from which the
famous picture was made.

.. vspace:: 2

THE WAY OF A MAN

A colorful romance of the pioneer West before the
Civil War.

.. vspace:: 2

THE SAGEBRUSHER

An Eastern girl answers a matrimonial ad. and goes out
West in the hills of Montana to find her mate.

.. vspace:: 2

THE WAY OUT

A romance of the feud district of the Cumberland country.


.. vspace:: 2

THE BROKEN GATE

A story of broken social conventions and of a woman's
determination to put the past behind her.


.. vspace:: 2

THE WAY TO THE WEST

Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Kit Carson figure in
this story of the opening of the West.


.. vspace:: 2

HEART'S DESIRE

The story of what happens when the railroad came to a
little settlement in the far West.


.. vspace:: 2

THE PURCHASE PRICE

A story of Kentucky during the days after the American
Revolution.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::