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BOOKS BY PHYLLIS BOTTOME

 

 

 

 

 

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

CHAPTER I

The room looked much as usual, very transparent and dazzlingly clean. A row of tulips took the pale light of the London day and held it before Vera’s eyes.

The question of breathing preoccupied her, but she could still think.

This violent illness, shattering the serene procession of her happy years with Edward, was a mortal surprise; and in Vera’s carefully planned and deeply controlled existence there were very few surprises.

She found it incredible that the room which she had created to express the cool balance of eighteenth-century wit should be at the mercy of anything so lawless as pain.

Her thin, arched eyebrows contracted with the effort to focus the objects in the room. Was that really the Viennese dressing-table Edward had given her, a lovely, wide, shining piece of furniture with crooked legs, on which her delicate trays and bottles gleamed like jewels; or was it the dark solid mahogany which was coming into fashion again now, but which had been so appropriately forced upon her by William, in her youth?

When the pain became too severe, Nurse Davis gave her a morphia injection, but there had been no morphia to dull the long ache of her life with William.

The worst of this fever was that it made her constantly re-live the clenched periods of resentment and the devastating battles which had constituted her first marriage.

Could it be that William as an enemy was more real to her than Edward as a lover? When she was well and the lid of her disciplined mind closed to everything but the glory of her romance, she did not have to remember how difficult it had been to break up that first marriage, to enchant Edward, and to achieve her freedom. She had swallowed Edward with the completeness with which large snakes swallow small fascinated animals. Swallowing Edward had been the romance of her life, but she could not help remembering that there had been difficulty in swallowing him. Edward had been her husband’s greatest friend; he was now her husband. He was a good man and for her sake he had done what good men do not do. She moved restlessly against the burning intensity of the sheets, impatient of his sacrifice.

They had been absolved, she told herself for the hundredth time, by the hideous cruelty of William!

Even in the swift accelerating world of pain through which Vera was being relentlessly hurried, the thought of William rose hard, as a separate thing. She had never been able to swallow William. He remained as he had always been—a fish-bone in her throat.

William had dragged her purity in the mud because she would not yield to him. Well! She had felt the strain as no other woman of her age and time could have felt it; but she had not yielded!

Nor had she yielded before a loss which she felt more sharply still.

Her mind, which had been turning from William to pain and back again to William, broke suddenly free from both.

Memory pushed her between the yellow tulips onto a terrace bathed in sunshine.

Once more she stood between stone pots filled with cherry-pie, and watched a small figure with a daffodil-coloured head move uncertainly towards her. For Edward’s sake she had given up her child.

She thought, with pride, that she was no impulsive Russian Anna to wear out her lover with her grief and end by throwing herself under a railway train.

She was intact now; but there had been a time when inwardly she had felt shaken, when love and freedom had cut her like jagged bits of glass, because they kept her from Ariadne.

But that was over. All the reaction and the risks were over. She had made, out of her grand passion, a model of domesticity.

Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra were no doubt deeply affectionate creatures, but they had lacked souplesse. Vera congratulated herself that she had known how to avoid daggers and asps. But the core of her trouble remained.

She sighed heavily, as she thought, that for all her self-control and for all her wit she had never been able permanently to annoy William!

William had not even suffered. He had divorced Vera; kept Ariadne; and, a few months later, married a good-natured woman who adored him.

Nurse Davis bent over her and asked her if there wasn’t anything she could take? And in a flash, it sprang into Vera’s alert and fever-driven mind that she could send for Ariadne! All these nine agonizing days since the operation she had not seen what her illness set her free to do!

She murmured faintly: ‘Nothing, thanks.’ For she did not dare to move for fear the pain would sharpen its grip and make her forget her purpose.

She lay quite still, watching the shadows steal through the transparent green curtains and reach the yellow tulips.

How could she get at Ariadne?

Not through Edward! He would make a direct appeal, and that would mean that William wouldn’t be annoyed.

Vera wanted no mild concession to a dying woman from William! It mustn’t be in the least like that!

How then was she going to attain to a sight of her child?

Light broke through the interlacing confusions of her mind—there was Jane!

Jane was a mercy, she had always been a mercy, though Edward, poor darling, couldn’t see what Vera saw in her.

Vera saw nothing whatever, nothing, that is, in Jane; but she saw, through the middle-class stodginess of Jane’s person, as if it had been a crystal mirror, the diminutive figure of Ariadne.

Jane, who was William’s first cousin, saw Ariadne at intervals. ‘She wears her hair cut straight across her forehead.’ Or: ‘She looks her best in blue.’ Or: ‘She is too old to play with dolls now.’... Things like that Jane could be made to say.

She was, too, the only one of Vera’s old circle who had stuck to her since the divorce.

Nurse Davis crossed in front of the light, and leaning over Vera said: ‘Your husband, Mrs. Middleton.’

The dark eyes she loved looked into hers, the sensitive strong hands, into which she had so safely put her broken life, rested on her own. Perhaps time and security had blurred a little Vera’s sense of Edward’s physical charm, but the eyes that looked into her own were still the eyes of youth. Pain tried to prevent her stiffened lips from smiling back at him, but Vera forced them to smile. She could do nothing, however, about her eyes. They held agony, as the yellow tulips in front of her held light.

She whispered: ‘Edward, I want—Jane!’ She saw his flash of surprise, and nearly as swiftly, his relief. He was so glad that she wanted anything he could give her.

He said: ‘Yes, of course, darling, I’ll fetch her at once!’ and was gone.

Vera was glad when he had gone, because although it was for Edward that she meant to live, the pressure of his anxiety upon her will was a great strain. She couldn’t do more than she was doing to outface death, and if she tried to do more, the whole passionate fabric of her will might collapse.

Ages passed without a landmark. The light waned, the yellow tulips turned black.

A long way off a door opened; footsteps drew near the bed.

Nurse Davis pushed a chair closer and murmured: ‘Not more than five minutes, please.’

There was Jane looming up at her, immensely solid, and out of focus; but still there was something reassuring to Vera about Jane’s large, shapeless mouth and silly uncertain eyes. Jane didn’t know in the least what to say or how to behave, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t refuse Vera anything.

‘I’m probably dying,’ Vera murmured with curt serenity. ‘Go and tell the child!’

‘Tell Ariadne——?’ Jane feebly stammered.

‘Tell her,’ Vera said, summoning her last reserve of strength, ‘that I may be dying—that I want to see her—but only if she wants to come. Don’t tell William or Edward anything!’

She was aware that Jane had begun some kind of rambling protest, but Vera could safely leave Nurse Davis to deal with her. Jane might protest, but she was subdued, she would do what Vera had told her to do. You could always frighten the unimaginative with death.

When Vera opened her eyes again Jane had gone and Edward was once more kneeling beside her. It occurred to Vera that she ought to tell Edward what she had done about Ariadne; but she was without the desire to tell him.

Edward had never spoken to her about the sacrifice of his career, why then should Vera speak to him of this other sacrifice, more heroic still, her sacrifice of Ariadne? She liked to feel that she had secretly outbid his generosity. Suppose, too, that Ariadne should refuse to come? Then it would be much better—much ‘kinder,’ Vera said to herself—not to let Edward know of her disappointment. If he asked her why she had sent for Jane, she would certainly tell him everything. But Edward, bending over her, absorbed in his deep anxiety, only asked her how she felt.

Vera always said ‘Better!’ to Edward; but this time, when she looked up into his fond and anxious eyes, she meant it.

CHAPTER II

The face which looked back at Vera from the lifted hand-glass astonished her with its fragile return towards beauty. It was very thin and drawn, with blue hollows under tired eyes; there were tightened lines of pain about the mouth; but about her white brow the shining mass of crocus-coloured hair, fine as a net, framed her whole face in gold. Her blue eyes with their thick black lashes looked enormous, and Nurse Davis, by clever touches of colour in her cheeks and lips, had deepened the colour and the life within her eyes.

Vera was forty, but it was not necessary to think of her age when one looked at her.

She had held it off, as she had held off all the other terrors which had beset her path.

She put down the glass with a long sigh half of relief and half of weariness.

This was what she was like, but what had she been like, when Ariadne last remembered her?

Did Ariadne remember her at all? The message that she was coming had expressed no emotion. Was she coming just to see a strange woman, because of a name attached to her, or merely because the woman, who had sent for her, was desperately ill?

Edward came in to see Vera before he went off to his office. He surprised her by being the only person who failed to try to make this ordeal of Ariadne’s visit easier for her.

He leant over her and kissed her blue-veined hand, but his eyes had a wistful look of reproach in them, and he murmured: ‘Why didn’t you tell me, darling, that you were going to send for the child?’

Vera remembered that she had thought of telling him yesterday, but he should surely have understood her silence, or if he had not understood it he should have accepted her slightest wish! How could he reproach a dying mother with her desire to see her child?

Vera’s lips quivered and her eyes filled with tears. Edward saw what she felt, though she said nothing; she only looked at him, with hurt astonishment, through her tears.

‘Never mind, dearest!’ he murmured—unwillingly, she thought. ‘I’m only too glad if it gives you pleasure. But it’s such a risk just now when you’re so weak!’

Her strength, which he had cruelly shaken, came back to her with a rush. If it were only his anxiety, she could forgive his reproachfulness; it was his rebellion which she couldn’t have forgiven.

‘I know! I know!’ she whispered tenderly. ‘You shall see! I’ll make no effort! I want only to look at her! Edward, I will be good.’

She smiled into his eyes, but Edward kissed her without returning her smile. Probably he was too anxious to make any gesture associated with joy. But it was curious that he left her with the feeling that, in spite of his anxiety, he had resented something.

Vera felt vaguely relieved when the door closed behind him and she knew that the house was empty and waiting for Ariadne.

Nurse Davis didn’t disturb the emptiness. She moved to and fro like a mechanical toy, executing Vera’s will.

Her sense of order was as scrupulous as Vera’s own: when Ariadne came each room in the house would shine, as a field in June shines, after the punctual dew.

It was thirteen years since Vera had seen Ariadne. She could legally have seen her daughter sooner, but her pride had held her heart from making the first advances to her own child.

If the child had been delicate or unhappy she would have insisted on her right, but Jane had always asserted that Ariadne was exceptionally healthy and strong. She had said once, without meaning to be tiresome: ‘a happy-looking child.’

But of course Jane believed that happiness is a blend of good food, open air, and boisterous chaff; she had brought her own children up like that and they were as hard and round, though not as bright, as marbles.

Jane wouldn’t know sadness if she saw it, unless tears ran down cheeks, and the cheeks were hollow. Still it had been possible that Ariadne was happy and that Constance was every inch a mother and that a summons from Vera might have broken into the smooth deep circle of childhood and brought only discord and alarm.

If Vera could have touched Ariadne, and not held her, she might have been willing to put out her hand; but she knew herself better than to suppose she could see the child and yet leave her alone.

Ariadne was old enough now to make her own choice. There was no obstacle to their meeting. Vera was too ill for her request to seem an exaction, and should they fail to desire a new relationship, this memorable hour snatched from pain need not tie either of them to anything more permanent.

Vera wanted to feel a mother again, if it were only for an hour, and she wanted—the old desire leapt out once more in a deep excitement—how she wanted to score off William!

‘Of course you’re nervous!’ Nurse Davis assured her soothingly, ‘but perhaps a little brandy and milk?’

Vera admitted with a faint smile that she was nervous; and she drank the brandy and milk obediently.

The day stretched before her, flat and interminable. Even the dreadful dressings might have been a diversion, but the doctor was not coming this morning—he wanted her to keep all her strength for the ordeal of her daughter’s visit. There was just the usual pain.

Although Vera could not believe that she had slept, she knew suddenly that the light had changed; the time of waiting had become as thin as the line on the horizon’s edge.

Nurse Davis bent over her again with a stimulant, and then the door opened softly and a figure stood there, in the clear afternoon light.

Everything swam for a dazzled moment before Vera’s eyes; then she saw the figure move swiftly forward. She felt herself touched by strong, tender hands. Eyes which poured out a passionate eager warmth drank up her face. She heard her own voice, stronger and very young, saying over and over again: ‘Mummy! Mummy! Oh, Mummy!’

Vera hardly knew if she had found words to answer the incoherent cry. She looked and looked into those fond frank eyes, which held everything she wished to know. This was her own child, and she was safe.

She hadn’t imagined an ugly girl, but this creature satisfied her deepest pride. And, more than this, she saw in Ariadne’s happy eyes that her dream, too, had been fulfilled; she had found the mother that she had wanted to find.

Vera put her thin trembling fingers on the firm young hand, and felt as if she touched the substance of a dream.

When she was young, she hadn’t been as tall as Ariadne, nor nearly so strong; nor had her eyes, darker than Ariadne’s and more mysterious behind longer, thicker lashes, revealed her heart with so disarming a candour. She had had the same creamy skin, the gold hair with just a touch of the rust of turning bracken, and the short upper lip above the beautiful curved mouth. Only Vera’s mouth had drooped a little and Ariadne’s turned up, so that she looked, even when she wasn’t smiling, as if she were going to smile.

The child’s face was like an April day: tears ran down it, and smiles drove back her tears.

‘You’ll get well now, won’t you, Mummy? You’ll get quite well now?’ she urged anxiously.

With every breath she drew, she thrust her young strength towards her mother’s heart. Vera smiled back at her triumphantly.

‘I am well now!’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t been well for thirteen years!’

The girl was silent for a moment. She looked at Vera with a quickened pity, but as if she didn’t quite understand its grounds. ‘No——?’ she agreed questioningly. ‘No——? But you’ve been happy?’

‘I’ve been loved,’ Vera replied. ‘I’ve been magnificently loved, and I’ve been able to love, Ariadne! That was my trouble before. I couldn’t—oh, I couldn’t love William!’

‘No!’ Ariadne answered, with a smile which might have expressed humour, if humour would not have been so out of place. ‘Poor old Dad! I couldn’t myself imagine being in love with him, you know. He’d pull such a long face over it!’

‘You don’t judge me? You don’t blame me?’ Vera pleaded. ‘Oh, my darling, I nearly died of leaving you! Half of me died!’

‘But it’s alive now?’ Ariadne pleaded.

‘Yes,’ Vera admitted, ‘all of me is alive now.’

She closed her eyes. Pain, which she had never wholly lost, was like something somebody else was suffering—a long way off. She could register it as severe, but not as more severe than usual; and it didn’t matter. If the pain had been worse it would not have mattered. ‘But, darling,’ she whispered, opening her eyes again, ‘why didn’t you hate me? Didn’t they try to make you?’

‘Oh, no!’ said Ariadne, her eyes wide with astonishment. ‘Why ever should they? Besides, I remembered you! You were always in my mind. I just waited.’

‘You waited for me to make you some sign?’ Vera asked anxiously. ‘And I was afraid to make it. My darling, how can I explain! I didn’t dare! Suppose you had judged me? Suppose you hadn’t wanted to see me? Jane said you were happy, that was after all what I cared about most—if I came into your life, might I not have shaken your happiness?’

‘I waited, too,’ Ariadne said, after a moment’s pause. ‘I thought it would just happen some day. I didn’t like asking about you, but I did ask Jane once when we were quite alone, if you were happy, and she said, “Oh, yes, my dear, Edward is everything he ought to be to your poor mother!” ’ They looked into each other’s eyes and laughed. ‘Besides,’ Ariadne said contentedly, ‘I remembered Edward. I didn’t want to open up things by talking about you to Father.’

‘He would have been horrid about me if you had?’ Vera persisted. Ariadne neither admitted nor denied this statement. She glanced away for the first time from her mother’s absorbed and eager eyes.

‘Was Constance unkind to you?’ Vera demanded.

Ariadne looked back, her lips curved again in a suspicion of a smile. ‘Oh, no!’ she said, ‘not unkind—just Constance!’

‘And your father—what has he been like to you, all these years?’ Vera asked. ‘Oh, if you knew—how I have dreaded and wondered!’

‘Oh, Dad’s been all right,’ Ariadne said hurriedly. She got up from her knees and drew a chair forward so that she could still slip an arm around Vera’s slender figure. ‘Everything’s all right now, Mummy darling,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m nearly nineteen, and I’ve got two hundred a year of my own, and an awfully jolly baby Austin!’

‘Baby—Austin?’ Vera murmured bewilderedly.

‘Oh, Mummy darling, a baby Austin car!’ Laughter pealed through the room. Vera accepted the laughter.

‘I must tell Edward that!’ she said, with a faint smile, and then with fresh anxiety, ‘Dear—Edward may be coming back at any moment now—ought you to stay?’ Again she met Ariadne’s astonished, almost reproachful, eyes.

‘But of course! Why ever not? I’m frightfully anxious to see Edward!’ Ariadne exclaimed. ‘Isn’t he a kind of father too?’

‘He’s my lover!’ Vera said sternly.

The hot, shamed colour stained the whiteness of her cheeks.

‘But of course! If he wasn’t I wouldn’t let you stay with him!’ Ariadne cried in puzzled relief. ‘But, oh, Mummy darling, I’m your lover too!’

Vera felt for a moment a vague uneasiness about the lightness of this moral judgment. She wanted Ariadne to see that this action which bound her to Edward had been a terrible one, forced on them by William—and Ariadne seemed to think it a trivial affair; not perhaps forced on them at all.

Their excuse was their love. It was more wonderful than any other love; but if Ariadne held they needed no excuse, would she not perhaps hold their love cheaply too?

But a warmth like sunshine rested on Vera’s heart and hurried her last scruple out of sight. Her child loved and accepted her; loved and accepted them both; what more could she ask than that?

It was the happiest moment of Vera’s life; but she was to know one still more happy.

The door opened cautiously. Edward stood there uncertain, diffident, trying to look cool and worldly, but only succeeding in looking kind and shy. He was not certain if he were welcome, or if he had not come too soon. Ariadne released her mother. She turned like a winged creature, and flew into Edward’s astonished arms. Edward, holding her close, looked over her golden head at Vera.

He looked at Vera with the passionate summoning look of a young lover. Vera tried to answer it, but joy, leaping up in her, consumed the last remnants of her strength: with a long sigh of ecstasy she gave up even the consciousness of joy.

CHAPTER III

Vera sat by the window of her bedroom, which overlooked the small green garden and the precipitous hill. Birds sang to her. London, in the distance beyond the dancing leaves, murmured as softly as a crooning dove.

Ariadne visited her every day; and Edward heard all about her visits in the evening.

Vera wasn’t sure when she first began to find that these long, beautiful hours of convalescence were not long enough; but there came a moment when she felt definitely cheated at Ariadne’s perpetual departures.

Ariadne dreaded them as much as Vera did. She always said every day when her hour struck: ‘Ah, why must I go, Mummy—just when we’ve really begun to talk?’ and Vera, murmuring in return, ‘Why, indeed, my darling?’ began to think out a plan to circumvent these partings.

Ever since she had married Edward she had thrown into making him happy all the ingenuity with which she had tried to get the better of William. But there had been something left over, and now it seemed as if she were going to be able to use these superfluous powers.

William naturally wanted Ariadne to remain with him. He would dislike, probably more than he had disliked anything since Vera had left him, having his child taken away from him. He had very soon won another wife, but he wouldn’t be able to replace Ariadne. The simple politics of the big house at the corner of Grosvenor Square were soon laid out before Vera. She saw Constance as she had never yet been able to see her. She wouldn’t have allowed a woman like Constance in her former home, and now Constance was ruling it! A good, substantial bishop’s daughter, rudimentary as to charm and intelligence and liking to be hounded about by William! Ariadne did not complain of her stepmother. Constance was neither cruel nor unfair; she was merely preoccupied and a little jealous. She was only twelve years older than Ariadne, and her children were twelve years younger; and William, who had never cared about babies, hadn’t wanted them. He had probably only wanted a young and companionable house-keeper—now he had two of them.

Ariadne’s social life had been grossly neglected. She swept about London with young marauding bands, having ‘good times.’ She had a vague idea of manners and none of birth. Civilization had stopped short at her hair and her finger nails.

Ariadne’s clothes were like everybody else’s clothes, only there was even less of them. Vera, who dressed with meticulous art, and a misleading simplicity, was privately shocked both at the cut and at the scantiness of her daughter’s garments, but she thought it too soon to criticize. She only listened. William was apparently fond of Ariadne, and in spite of her deplorable clothes and the gulf left by neglect in her social training, Ariadne was obviously better to go about with than Constance. ‘Even an idiot like William,’ Vera pensively mused, ‘must be able to take that in!’ But Constance was too young to care to be left behind a purdah ordering dinners and organizing her nursery. Vera would be doing Constance a good turn if she could succeed in getting Ariadne out of the house. It was perhaps a pity, that in order to annoy William, Vera must please Constance. Still she was willing to make that sacrifice. After all, she had never really disliked Constance; and now that, through Ariadne’s account, she knew more about her, it was easy to despise her.

You do not pursue a rabbit when you are on a stag-hunt. Unfortunately, Vera could not act directly upon either of these animals. Nor could she do much with Ariadne, for Ariadne was as bare of subterfuge as a wind-swept shore.

All Vera could think of was to send for Jane. Jane wasn’t very good material, but she wouldn’t see what Vera was up to, and she was the only material Vera had.

‘You seem very fond of Jane all of a sudden,’ Edward observed, when he was asked to ring her up again. Vera sighed plaintively.

‘One has to have soft food when one’s ill,’ she explained, ‘and when one’s head is like cotton wool—I suppose one only wants to talk to cotton-wool people.’

Jane came at once. She was enchanted to see Vera looking so miraculously better, and she had to talk a lot about will-power and outdoor exercise—two incentives towards recovery which she seemed to confuse. She was tiresomely inclined to think that Vera hadn’t perhaps been at death’s door after all. Vera was fond of death’s door, when she had once got away from it, and liked to talk about it; but Jane positively disliked its existence and preferred to think that people really hadn’t been very ill—rather than that they had been very ill, and through some subtle merit of the flesh or spirit, had miraculously recovered.

A little flushed and aggravated by each other, they reached the more harmonious subject of Ariadne. This was Vera’s diving-board; she was silent for a moment, deciding on the right curve for her flight; then she sprang.

‘Jane,’ she said earnestly, ‘I don’t know whether you realize how anxious I have always been for William’s happiness? It was partly because I saw I could never give it to him—that I made my great decision and joined Edward; but I have always wanted to see William made happy by some one else!’

Jane looked surprised but interested. It was a new point of view to her that Vera should desire William’s happiness, but not at all an unwelcome one. Jane had that happy disposition which would like to imagine that every one really wishes the well-being of his neighbour and struggles, though sometimes rather disastrously, to help him towards it.

‘Constance,’ said Vera, fixing her mysterious persuasive eyes firmly into Jane’s, ‘is, I think, exactly the wife for William!’ This was a further surprise for Jane. She had thought hitherto that Vera was inclined to take rather a jaundiced view of Constance.

‘You see, dear,’ Vera went on, seeing that Jane was almost too surprised, ‘I know now, through Ariadne, who has told me everything, all I was unable to know before, since you felt—quite rightly, I am sure—that your lips were sealed.’

Jane flinched. She knew that she had never left Vera’s room without having said more than she meant to say about the Grosvenor Square household, nor without being crushed by remorse for having said still less than Vera had wanted her to say. Vera always both ate her social cake and had it, while poor Jane found herself cakeless with a few unappetizing crusts left over on her hands.

‘I’ve always liked Constance,’ she said a little anxiously. ‘She went to the same school as we did, only much later, of course. She’s quite young, you know, not much over thirty.’

‘Yes,’ said Vera pensively, ‘that’s just it! She’s too young to be Ariadne’s stepmother! Ariadne is quite grown up now. She is rather nice-looking, poor child—she can’t help that—and it must tell. I’m sorry for Constance.’

Jane ventured to say: ‘But some people think Constance is quite nice-looking, too!’ Vera with a wave of her hand disposed of Constance’s good looks.

‘No doubt William has always liked those thick cottagey faces,’ she said gently, ‘but it doesn’t give her a chance, going about with Ariadne. Of course she feels it, and, of course, William notices it. It can’t be helped.’

Jane felt as if she had stepped on a board which, while it had looked perfectly secure, gave suddenly under her feet. Then Constance wasn’t after all going to prove so good a wife for William as they had hoped? ‘What can’t be helped, dear?’ she asked a little uncertainly.

‘Ariadne will cut out Constance,’ Vera answered concisely, ‘and William will despise Constance for being cut out; then the marriage will go to pieces. But, of course, it has nothing to do with me. If I were a friend of Constance’s, I should tell her at once that her only possible course is to get rid of Ariadne, before William really wakes up to the situation. Ariadne is only just out, and in another six months nobody will look at Constance, including William. Those strong brutal men have no pity for frumps.’

Jane winced; she didn’t like her cousin William, who always gave her such a good dinner once a year, being called a strong brutal man, although she had to admit to herself that William did look at a woman past her first youth, and perhaps a little beyond the more portable forms of fashionable slenderness, as if she were a frump.

‘But how very dreadful, dear,’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you really think poor Constance will lose him too?’ Jane saw in a moment that she shouldn’t have said ‘too’; at least not in connection with loss. Vera had thrown William away; she hadn’t lost him—that would have implied upon her part a carelessness of which she had never been guilty.

Vera’s eyes grew a little more fixed and a trifle less mysterious as they rested upon Jane. It was not really difficult for Jane to gather from them that she had been a fool.

‘If Constance,’ Vera replied, with a faint twist of her lovely drooping mouth, ‘were half as pleased to “lose” William, as you so charmingly put it, as I was, dear Jane, I shouldn’t be giving her my sympathy, but my warmest felicitations! However, we needn’t, at this time of day, go into that dismal old story! Presumably Constance loves him, and in that case she’ll hardly like to find herself playing second fiddle to her stepdaughter. The only thing for her to do, as I said before, is to get rid of Ariadne at once; then she won’t have to face any one’s competition. With no other woman there, I dare say William will go on putting up with Constance. Somebody told me the other day that he’d got quite fat himself. But Constance can’t risk having a daughter in the house, who is so infinitely the most charming creature in it; and yet who isn’t, as far as Constance is concerned, a daughter at all!’

‘But won’t Ariadne, who is so lovely, marry?’ Jane asked, suddenly seeing an easy way of escape from this torturing dilemma.

‘Marry from there?’ Vera asked, her delicate eyebrows lifting incredulously.

‘As far as I can gather, the only men they have in the house are the catastrophic trophies of William’s forensic skill. I always, you know, chose the men. We only had about twelve who came in and out, and four of them were famous. William has, I understand from Ariadne, simply lost them all. Constance comes from Bournemouth, doesn’t she? Even you must realize, dear Jane, that the only men who live at Bournemouth are the men who have ceased to live anywhere else.’

‘Then what,’ Jane vaguely and uncomfortably murmured, ‘what——’

Vera swiftly interposed: ‘Is the poor child to do? Well—come here, of course! Edward and I would take her in a flash! What place should she come to, but her own mother’s home? It doesn’t matter how lovely she is here! Bless her!’

‘But,’ said Jane, after a long, astonished, speculative pause, ‘would William like that?’ Vera’s dark blue eyes deepened almost into black. She opened her lips and closed them again a little suddenly so that her mouth looked rather too thin.

‘William,’ she said, ‘would be better off, wouldn’t he, if he continued to admire his wife? If he gets tired of Constance and lets his pride in Ariadne make him neglect her—then when Ariadne marries—and she certainly will marry, however badly—William won’t have anything left at all!’

‘How wonderfully generous of you to see it all like that!’ Jane said admiringly. ‘You always put things so clearly, too! Things I’ve never even thought of before! It seems almost a pity you can’t warn them what will happen!’

‘Well, as I said,’ Vera admitted, ‘it has nothing whatever to do with me. I can just sit here and see it all, and, of course, in my position I daren’t raise as much as a finger! But you could, dear Jane! There isn’t anything whatever to prevent you from telling Constance just how you see it. Of course you mustn’t mention me, nor even having seen me lately—that I can leave to your natural tact; but coming from you, Constance would, I am sure, quite take it in. She has only to suggest to Ariadne that she should come here for a good long visit—William would have to give in, if they both suggested it. You see, no one is in so good a position as you are to warn Constance, since you yourself saw our marriage come to smash!’

Jane considered this prospect, at first with dismay, and then with a faintly flattered sense of being after all really more intelligent than she had imagined.

Jane liked Constance; she admired William; she very nearly loved Ariadne; she had always wanted to please Vera, and if possible to please her by doing something rather clever.

Dreams of surprising Vera by her skill had haunted Jane ever since they were girls together at the same school. The difficulty had always been that Vera had been able to do everything so much better than Jane ever could. Even when Vera, after a long series of social triumphs, had passed into eclipse, she had taken her cleverness with her.

It was true that Vera had been strangely constant to Jane, but not, Jane dimly felt, for the sake of her intellectual light.

What Vera had wanted from Jane was fuel to feed hate, and Jane had had to refuse this fuel because she thought that hate was wrong. But what Vera was asking from her now was fuel to feed love, and if Jane succeeded in getting it for her, wouldn’t there be mingled with Vera’s gratitude a glimpse of the admiration which she had always withheld?

A faint gleam from it seemed to be flickering even now in Vera’s wonderful eyes.

And then Ariadne came in.

She swept into the room and kissed her mother as if she were taking the kingdom of heaven by violence. She kissed Jane in an aftermath of enthusiasm much harder than usual. And she said, before Jane rather hoveringly left: ‘It’s really getting too awful coming here, you know, because one’s always got to face going away afterwards!’

Ariadne knelt by Vera’s chair as she made this clarifying statement, and Vera shot a triumphant glance across her head, which fixed Jane for a brief moment at the door until she gave Vera a mute but satisfactory response.

‘Don’t you find stodgy old Jane rather tiring, darling?’ Ariadne demanded, when Jane had, with sufficient finality, closed the door behind her. ‘Rather like being fobbed off with tapioca pudding when you’d been expecting a meringue?’

Vera laughed softly. ‘There are moments,’ she said, ‘when a tapioca pudding can do for you what a meringue can’t!’

CHAPTER IV

It was hard for Edward to keep his eyes off Ariadne, but although she had shown him that she wanted his affection, and he had shown her that she had it, he knew the quality of it must remain unrevealed. He mustn’t, as Ariadne herself would have put it, be a road-hog. A steady thirty miles an hour was the limit for his affections, and he must slow up a little, even at that, should traffic appear upon the road. The last six weeks had been full of Ariadne, but not of Ariadne alone. She and her mother had been as inseparable as the best of mother-cats with the most playful of kittens.

Ariadne took liberties with Vera which Edward would never have dared to take, but though the sheathed claws struck back, they touched Ariadne with velvet. Vera liked Edward’s watching them; and his permitted presence seemed to her the truest form of sharing.

This was the first time that Edward had seen Ariadne alone. She sat curled up on a chair in his study. Her legs were crossed well above the knee; her skirt was a small matter. She smoked fitfully, her head flung back against a green cushion.

‘We must have an awfully serious talk,’ she announced. ‘I hope you don’t mind my barging in like this? I did it on purpose. Mother’s out, and I wanted to have you quite to myself. You never see the husbands of perfect wives properly, unless you get hold of them when the perfect wives are somewhere else. Do you?’

‘You must come in here whenever you feel like it,’ Edward said, wondering if he would ever know Ariadne well enough to point out to her that when her mother did come in she mustn’t sit like that. He used to think that modesty—physical modesty—was a beautiful thing in a woman; but as he looked at Ariadne his consciousness of beauty widened; he suddenly knew that he preferred a woman who treated modesty as if it were a puddle over which it was often convenient to step.

‘Can you really put up with my living here always, instead of just running in and out?’ Ariadne demanded abruptly, tossing away the end of her cigarette and suddenly leaning forward, her chin on her hands and her eyes fixed unwaveringly on Edward.

Edward was glad that his public school education had taught him not only how to hold his tongue, but how to look as if he were not holding it. Until Ariadne had spoken, he had no idea whatever that she was coming to live with them. His first response to her question was a bitter anger. Vera had taken his consent for granted. She who had always said that there could be no third person in their Paradise had been the first to fling open the gates. His second reaction was a still more bitter joy. He would have every chance, all the chances he couldn’t take, of getting to know Ariadne well enough to tell her anything. He looked down at the floor until his eyes ceased to show that he was either dazzled or angry.

‘Vera says,’ Ariadne went on, ‘that you’ll love having me. Of course it’s most frightfully jolly of you to say so, but I can’t help wondering what you really feel. Vera sees love everywhere just now, doesn’t she? But a third person, when you’ve been everything to each other—let suddenly loose on you, must be rather a bore!’

‘It’s not that,’ Edward answered, looking up at her with just the right amount of reassurance in his kind, grave eyes. ‘Vera’s perfectly right. The mere fact that you’re her child, not mine, is a reason the more for my wanting to have you to live with us. She thinks I’ve never seen, because she’s never let me, how starved she’s felt without you. But one knows these things when one’s married—what people call “happily married”—without words. I sometimes think words are better. They hurt, but they are more intimate than being spared.’

Ariadne nodded gravely. ‘I know,’ she agreed, ‘having things out on the mat saves a lot of worry. But, Edward, why do you say what people call “happily married”? You do adore each other, don’t you?’

Edward wished he had not used that qualifying phrase; but the words had escaped him out of the unplumbed depths of his secret resentment. He said quickly: ‘We do adore each other, but happiness isn’t only adoring. You’ll know better what I mean when you’re married yourself. Think, for instance, what it’s been like—this illness of hers. Well, that’s over, thank God—but before that, as I say, there couldn’t be unchequered happiness when I knew how she’d missed you. Your living with us won’t interrupt our joy; it’ll complete it, perhaps.’

He paused. Ariadne started another cigarette and leaned back. He met her eyes through a mist of smoke, regarding him thoughtfully. She could be silent, and she could look at him without self-consciousness.

‘I suppose,’ thought Edward a little miserably, ‘it’s because I’m old!’

‘What worries me most,’ he began, ‘isn’t that at all. It’s William. Don’t you think that your throwing him over for us must be rather hard on him? God knows it’s a little late in the day for me to come forward to protect William’s interests—but you see one minds that all the more——’ He broke off abruptly and lit a pipe instead of finishing his sentence.

‘Well, of course,’ Ariadne replied eagerly, ‘I’ve thought a lot about old William too. He’s been a perfect dear to me, and it’s no use pretending I’m not awfully fond of him. No doubt he’s got his faults. He likes to think he’s God Almighty—running Arks and Edens. He tinkers rather well, too, with public affairs, but, as I’ve pointed out to him more than once, public life’s all he’s got the right to tinker with. In private life one belongs to one’s self, doesn’t one?’

Edward hesitated. ‘William,’ he murmured, ‘certainly must have had to be told that more than once!’

‘That mailed fist stuff’s very superficial,’ Ariadne explained. ‘His heart’s in the right place. Constance is my real difficulty. You can’t blame her for disliking me. I don’t belong to her, and I do belong to William. There are heaps of things William likes doing better with me than with her, and then she cuts up rough. Not with William; she has a pre-war, top-of-the-basket attitude towards husbands; but she likes girls to go to the wall. Then there are the children. They’re quite nice children, but William doesn’t cotton to them much. I suppose he was rather too old to start a fresh nursery and had all that his paternal instinct required putting the fear of God into me. Not that he ever got much in, but he liked to think he did, and his trying to made pals out of us. If I clear, the children might get a fresh look in. Before Mother told me I might come here I’d been thinking I’d have to light out somewhere on my own.’

‘Still,’ Edward reminded her, ‘William will mind this more.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Ariadne assented; ‘but he’ll just have to lump Vera. He shouldn’t have driven her out of the house by all those Sheik tricks. He must have known once I saw her again that part of me must go back to her. It won’t be as bad for him as you think, either, living alone with Constance. He’ll find in the end that it pays better not to do things with me, and to have Constance pleased all the time. After all, if you’re in love with a woman—and I suppose in a stodgy way he is in love with Constance—it’s more comfortable to please her, isn’t it?—more comfortable, I mean, than any other little thing you have to give up for it?’

Edward bowed his head before this premature wisdom. Experience had rubbed it into him more deeply than he cared to admit.

‘If you hadn’t asked me here,’ Ariadne went on, ‘I should have had to live somewhere alone; and there you have the awkward side of William. He’d never have seen I couldn’t keep my car and dress decently on less than a thousand a year. All he’d have given me is a dress allowance and a father’s curse. Of course, Constance would say why don’t I earn money, or marry? Well! I dare say I shall marry when I’m ready. So far I’ve never met a man I wanted to spend more than a fortnight with; and as for earning money——!’ Ariadne started on a new cigarette and puffed luxuriously, wagging an enchanting foot above a precipice of air. It relieved Edward to observe that she never smoked any of the cigarettes out.

‘The cachet of earning your living doesn’t appeal to you?’ Edward asked with interest.

Ariadne shook her head. ‘I can play hockey,’ she explained, ‘and drive a car; but earning money—well—I think if they weren’t going to give it to me, they should have thought of that before!’

‘I see what you mean,’ Edward admitted. ‘Either parents should put the noses of their offspring to grindstones young, or they should provide the luxurious substitutes for grindstones without a grumble. Dissolve their pearls, to vary the metaphor, and hand them to Cleopatra to drink up! Well, you know our pearls—Vera’s and mine—are only Teclas; but, if you don’t mind sharing Teclas——’

‘You are rather a darling,’ observed Ariadne thoughtfully. ‘I can so well understand Mother’s running away with you!’

Edward ignored this comment. ‘By the bye,’ he asked rather hastily, ‘have you had “the burning moment” out with William yet?’

Ariadne gave a long delicious chuckle. ‘You may well call it that,’ she said. ‘Dear old William! he exploded all over the place like a bunch of rockets. He got off some good ones, too, but they burnt so fast they got by me. I can only remember one—“an undutiful daughter will make a belligerent wife and an unnatural mother.” I wanted to ask why a mother at all—necessarily; but I always spare William’s blushes. You’ve got to warm the water for William, haven’t you? He can’t take a cold plunge. However, I did the whole thing on velvet after the first five minutes. I had to tell him I only wanted to stay with Mother for a bit, that you’re awfully busy all day and, since she’s been ill, she needs some one on the spot to hold her down. I pointed out to William that you can’t be a dutiful daughter all round, if your parents are in two different places, and he ended by seeing it. He’ll allow me another two hundred. Rather mean when you think what he’s worth, but it’ll run me and the car without doing you and mother in. And I may stay here for six months! By that time you’ll be able to see if you can stand me, and Constance will have got William to appreciate having cotton wool all round him. After all, six months——’ Ariadne spoke with triumphant confidence, as if the whole of time had run into a mould, under her light hand.

The door opened and Vera came in. She looked first at Ariadne’s legs, but Ariadne did not see Vera’s startled glance. She sprang up, threw her arms around her mother, and lifted her bodily onto the sofa.

‘You shouldn’t go out alone,’ she scolded. ‘Here’s Edward been on hot bricks about you for the last half-hour; one eye on the telephone and his mind on the police. And here am I turned out of my father’s house, or walking out of it, if you like, all on your account, and wondering what doorsteps feel like when they have to be sat on!’

‘My darling child!’ murmured Vera. Then she closed her eyes and Edward rang for tea.

Ariadne poured out the tea, and while she was doing so she gave them a fuller and more picturesque account of her last interview with her father. William had thundered gallantly from his parental perch, but it had only been, as Ariadne explained, ‘autumn manœuvres.’ He had shown great skill and fearful powers of recrimination, but his heart had not been behind his guns. Ariadne, who knew perfectly where his heart was, had ended by spiking them all.

‘And what,’ Vera asked, refreshed by tea and with the spark of an undying warfare in her eyes, ‘did Constance have to say to it?’

Ariadne hesitated for the barest moment, then she gave a kindly account of the stiff farewells of her stepmother. Constance, poor dear, had been so glad to see her go that she had hardly been able to keep a decent hold upon her wifely duty. Called upon to ban, she had nearly fallen into Balaam’s craven lapse and found herself in the act of blessing.

Ariadne made their parting scene as funny as she could, but Edward saw that she had blurred some of the details. There had been things said by Constance which Ariadne did not think funny, nor kind, nor picturesque, and she purposely refrained from repeating them.

Vera, too, felt that there was something missing. ‘Surely,’ she said, after a little pause, ‘Constance would hardly have let such an opportunity slip without a hit, or rather more than one, at your abandoned mother?’

Ariadne flushed; it was a most beautiful colour, but the act pained her, and Edward, too, felt the pain of it. Ariadne wanted a way out, and her inexpert youth prevented her from finding it.

‘Well—don’t tell us any more,’ Edward said gently. ‘Don’t make her, Vera, repeat tiresome things. The worst Constance could say doesn’t matter a damn. Let her keep the privilege of her stings.’

Vera surprisingly assented. Her reason, however, was different. ‘I expect,’ she murmured, ‘that to have them repeated was precisely what dear Constance intended. So we’ll just have our tea in peace instead. Poor darling, I’m sorry you had to act as a target for my arrows.’

Ariadne gave them their tea with the air of a lady bountiful, tenderly dispensing alms to feeble but deserving old paupers. She saw that they had everything they could possibly want and urged them to take more.

‘Now,’ she said, when they had both assured her that their appetites were fully satisfied, ‘we’ll all be quite free to do exactly what we like for ever! Isn’t it too wonderful? It’s six o’clock already, and it’s time I went out with Tom.’

‘Tom——?’ Vera murmured. Her eyebrows faintly lifted. Edward, who was familiar with all Vera’s expressions, knew that this was an ominous signal, but Ariadne ran blithely past it.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, springing up and ramming a fascinating striped cap over her short curls, ‘I’d quite forgotten you don’t know Tom. Some day I’ll bring him in to see you. I must fly now. He’ll be frightfully keen to know what’s happened.’

She bent over the couch and kissed her mother, waved friendly fingers at Edward, and left her new parents gazing a little blankly at each other.

CHAPTER V

‘Who,’ demanded Vera, sitting straight up on the sofa, and barely waiting till the door closed behind Ariadne, ‘is Tom?’

But Edward gave her no satisfaction; not even the slender one which he himself possessed, that Ariadne had never met a man with whom she would care to live for more than a fortnight. He came quickly towards Vera, and sitting down opposite her, took both her slender wrists in his hands.

Vera looked up at him fondly, but she met no answering fondness. Edward’s eyes held a look of stubborn suffering. His look frightened Vera, but she was more annoyed than frightened. What, when she was so happy, had Edward got to suffer about?

‘Look here, my dear,’ he said gravely, ‘why did you not ask me first before you told Ariadne she could come to live with us?’

Vera withdrew her wrists from his hands, her eyes became hostile, a rigidity spread over her delicate features. Behind the mask of her hardness her thoughts flew in a panic. Why had she not told Edward? Was it not because she could not wholly trust him? Would he not have said: ‘Are we being quite fair to William?’ There was an indestructible and dangerous fallacy in Edward’s mind; he seemed to think that monsters had the same rights as victims. He agreed that William was a monster, and if he went as far as this, why could he not go the logical step farther and see that innocent defenceless women should take whatever advantage there was to get out of the fact of William’s monstrosity? Why should Vera be fair to William? Wasn’t it enough that she was always more than fair to Edward?

‘Asked you?’ she answered steadily. ‘Why should I ask you? Didn’t I feel sure that you’d want what I did? Haven’t we always wanted the same thing? I waited. I waited for six weeks to be perfectly sure you liked the child. I would never have dreamed of forcing her on you. If I hadn’t felt and seen how much you liked her, I’d never have shown you I even wanted it!’

‘For that you needn’t have waited twenty-four hours,’ said Edward dryly. ‘Of course you’re free to think that I like whatever you do; but you’re not free, not at least in my opinion, to come to such a decision without at least consulting me. Besides, there is an unfortunate difference between what one likes and what one thinks one ought to take.’

Vera’s breath came quickly. She wasn’t going to say that to her there was no such difference; she couldn’t have explained why what she wished had always seemed to her to be right; but she knew quite well that she wouldn’t have wished for anything if it hadn’t been right for her to take it. Still it seemed better to lay emphasis on her desires and Edward’s being, after all, the same.

‘Why should I ask you what I knew?’ she repeated.

‘Should you have liked my introducing a child of mine into our household without first finding out exactly what you thought about it?’ Edward asked her.

He thought Vera could hardly get out of this direct parallel, but she never even got into it.

‘I shouldn’t have waited for you to ask!’ she flashed. ‘If the child were yours, I’d have begged you to have it here. How could I bear to know that what was yours wasn’t mine too?’

‘Unfortunately, the child is not wholly yours,’ Edward said coldly. ‘For fifteen years Ariadne has been exclusively William’s.’

‘All the more reason,’ said Vera triumphantly, ‘for her to be mine now. Besides, as you’ve always said, Edward, at eighteen one has a right to judge for oneself; and Ariadne has judged. Constance makes her life unbearable.’

Before this argument Edward had nothing to say, but he still harked back to his absurd grievance.

‘Don’t you see,’ he urged, ‘that even if Ariadne has a right to come to us, and even if we have an equal right to take her, that I still don’t want to feel myself an accessory after the fact? Can’t you admit that I, too, have a right to be generous?’

Vera’s eyes held his with a cold defiance. ‘You had time to be generous,’ she reminded him; ‘you had six weeks.’

Edward hesitated; he wanted to explain that it wasn’t only his scruples, it was his deeper feeling for their privacy. But how could he say to those cold eyes, that bitter mouth, that rigid figure, ‘I love you too much to want any third person here; above all, not the one person who is so like you, when I loved you most’?

He had married Vera for love, he had broken up William’s home for passionate, helpless love, and he loved Vera still. The little clenched hands, the slim crouched figure were the central facts of his life; and he knew that they could be as beautiful as a day in June.

‘What,’ Vera repeated, aware of nothing but the success of her argument, ‘could be your reason for waiting—if you were so sure you liked the child?’

‘It’s a great experiment,’ Edward replied gravely. ‘You are acting, and you wish me to act, upon a wave of sudden emotion. You forget that such waves aren’t always permanent, nor are human beings always at their emotional best. A third person in a household, and of a different generation, won’t be easy to assimilate. How can you be sure that, if you break up her life with William, you will always want her?’

Vera gave a cold little laugh. ‘Of that at least we may be sure,’ she said. ‘I have never changed. I have always, always wanted my child!’

‘And you have never, never admitted it!’ Edward said bitterly. ‘Is that a part of your perfect confidence, Vera?’

‘I said nothing in order to spare you,’ Vera answered, with eyes that spared him nothing. ‘What would have been the use of telling you till now? When I’d given her up for you, how could I be so cruel as to force you to see what the sacrifice cost me? But now—now when I can have her—when I can have you both—why do you spoil my joy by being angry that I didn’t ask what I took for granted that you would always have been so passionately glad to give me?’

Her voice trembled and nearly broke, but Edward knew that she would always control herself as much as she wanted to control herself. It was he who couldn’t be sure what would happen to his outer or to his inner self. He buried his head in his hands with a long familiar shudder of despair. He wanted to make her see how robbed and shamed she had made him feel; but how could he? She always saw such different things, and with such terrible clarity. He was never so certain about his smothered sense of wrong as Vera was about her triumphant, vivid sense of right.

At his gesture of despair the rigidity melted out of her; she spoke with swift discerning tenderness.

‘My darling!’ she murmured, ‘surely we trust each other? We trust each other supremely. There is no need for you to mind any third person, and still less for me to. Don’t be afraid that the dear child will invade our privacy. If I hadn’t known that I could keep it inviolate, do you suppose that I would ever have consented to take her? If that’s what you’re afraid of, no wonder you’re upset. But indeed, indeed, you needn’t be. I’ve explained everything to her, and she understands to perfection. She’s to leave us always our precious week-ends free. You can’t think, dearest, how carefully I’ve arranged everything.’

‘Oh, yes, I can,’ groaned Edward, his face still buried in his hands. ‘The mistake was in your not having been called in on the sixth day of creation!’

She ignored his taunt and went on explaining to him reassuringly the cause of his unfortunate display of feeling.

‘I know so well how it’s all struck you,’ she asserted, ‘and I can imagine just how I should feel in your place. I am sure I shouldn’t have behaved half so considerately as you have. It’s been so marvellous, our life together, and any interference—even the presence of an angel—could be so easily the end of our divine solitude. But the angel—our Ariadne—won’t disturb our real lives; she’ll be a blessing the more, a gift we give to each other. Just the fact that she is of a different generation will be a simplification. A contemporary might cut into our inner life; a child will have no more pressure upon it than a flower. Try to see it like this, dearest. Look at me, Edward.’

He couldn’t look at her, but he said: ‘Yes, in a moment I will. It isn’t what you mean—or what you think. That’s all. You haven’t got my real reason; it’s something I can’t explain if you don’t feel it yourself!’

Vera waited with a gentle indulgence for him to throw more light upon his obscure and unfortunately misguided feelings. But Edward had no light to throw. He didn’t want to go on explaining. He knew by now that his feelings were misguided. He wanted quite enormously to get up and go out. He could come back, he knew, but he wanted to go out first. He wanted to find himself in the blatant, roaring street, not in the meticulous fresh room full of the ghosts of their manipulated talks. He wanted to go where people hurried and blundered, and where there were street accidents and rude noises. He didn’t want to see the way Vera sat, so alert and ready for anything he might say, dispensing with such an accurate confidence all the gifts she had. The very fact that she was now merciful and not angry made him all the more desire to go out and walk. Her anger was sometimes extravagant, but her mercy was always economical, and she expected, when she had finished giving, something definite back.

She was expecting it now, and Edward became more and more conscious of her expectation, and more and more repelled by the thought of the concession he would have to make. He knew that Vera had come in exhausted from her walk. He had watched her hand go out to steady herself, before Ariadne had caught her up in her whirlwind embrace. He had seen the concealed effort Vera had had to make even to sit up and drink her tea. She hadn’t made a fuss about her fatigue; the card of her ruined health was, oddly enough, a card she never played. On the contrary, Vera sedulously concealed her weakness as she had wickedly concealed the growing tumour which had all but cost her her life, and which might have been, had they taken it in time, a so much less terrible affair. Edward knew that even now she was making the least and not the most of her pounding heart and throbbing head. No doubt she felt like fainting, but she wouldn’t faint. All her life long she had made insane efforts to do things which were beyond her physical powers; it was a part of her inflexible arrogance. She often brought these efforts off, but after each brutal success her body had to pay a toll. Sometimes Edward thought she liked to keep him in the dark, so that she could, by the violation of her delicate body, cause him a more exquisite punishment. But there were other gentler moments when Edward believed that she hadn’t so much a desire to conceal a weakness as not to hurt him with it. She hurt him with an unceasing regularity, but Edward often felt that it was without motive; in the blind empty clarity of Vera’s mind, through which she moved like an owl through daylight, she was unaware of her blundering blows. Even when she was aware and the light of battle shone hard in her eyes, she often wanted to let Edward off.

Edward knew that he was an imperfect man, and that he sometimes deserved some form of punishment, but in these moments of his imperfection Vera invariably spared him. She punished him only for his innocence; nor could he ever be quite sure whether it was to spare him or to wound him that she concealed her dangers. He only knew that worse than to know of her pain was the sense that she was trying to delude him into an unsafe forgetfulness. She wouldn’t claim his compassion any more than she would claim his generosity, and it gave him the sense that she preferred her virtues to his own.

‘Edward dear,’ she said gently, ‘don’t you understand yet? Don’t you understand how I love you? Listen, beloved: even though you seem to me to have no reason to give me, yet at a word from you, I’ll stop Ariadne from coming. Even after what I’ve told her, I’ll tell her that I myself don’t want her to come.’

Edward abruptly let his hands drop from his face and looked at her.

‘Do you really think,’ he asked, ‘that that is what I want? Oh, Vera!’

He saw her lips quiver, and her eyes fill; the tone of his reproach had cut her to the heart. He saw behind her tears the helpless, frightened pain of a lost child. She was in a hell she had made for herself, and she didn’t know the way out. She had only to say, ‘Oh, Edward, I see I was wrong not to ask you!’ and there wouldn’t be any more hell. But he knew that this was what she wouldn’t say. He waited, with his eyes imploring her to see; but she only said again: ‘My darling, I do love you so!’

Her words seemed to cheapen the tie which bound them, and to bring it down to some poor little convenience on the level of a bootlace.

Edward stood up hopelessly. ‘I suppose we both love each other,’ he admitted grudgingly, ‘only you won’t see—you can’t see—what, if you love me, you owe me.’

‘I owe you everything,’ Vera said brokenly, her tears beginning to fall; ‘the house we’re in, the clothes I have on; I owe you my life, and, what I value more than my life, my self-respect. That’s why I thought I could—ask Ariadne here.’

He gave in then. He knelt down beside her, and she slipped in a flash between his arms. There at last she wept freely; at last she rested. Edward was horrified as he held her close, to feel the wild and feeble beating of her heart. There were moments when he wondered if it would go on, or if he had stopped it forever.

Vera clung to him, beyond speech, but not, as he looked down into her swimming eyes, beyond triumph. She had held out to the last; it was Edward who had had to give in.

CHAPTER VI

Vera was unwilling to admit even to herself that the vividness of her joy was dimmed.

Far off on a glittering strand she saw the flying foam, but it no longer broke in eager rainbow-coloured fragments at her feet.

She couldn’t have said that Ariadne and Edward blatantly failed her, but they ceased to give her the same high tribute of an unquestioning loyalty.

She didn’t accuse them of anything so vulgar as an active conspiracy: they rarely, if ever, met out of her presence, but there is a passive complicity of taste which goes deeper than mere rebellion.

It was this secret, scarcely conscious, understanding of which Vera became more and more aware.

When she was alone with Edward she was as sure as ever of their lovers’ comradeship; they saw almost everything eye to eye. When she was alone with Ariadne, there was no flaw in the child’s ardent surrender; but when both Edward and Ariadne were with her, she felt that they mutinied against the completeness of her sway.

They felt differently; not, as she would have expected, from each other, but differently from her.

They made light of their differences, but Vera could not make light of them; to her they were grave wounds against the solidarity of their mutual life.

Vera did not for one moment doubt Edward’s fidelity. It was the fidelity of his taste, not the fidelity of his heart, which seemed mysteriously to fail her.

He seemed, for instance, to like the fact (which Vera shrank from) that Ariadne was without veils. What Ariadne felt, she expressed, and what she thought, she did not hesitate to say. Vera thought that all women should hide themselves a little, and Ariadne never hid herself at all. Physically she wore as few clothes as possible; and mentally she went about as bare as a Greek statue.

She never concealed differences; or tried to make things smooth. She took obstacles in her swift oblivious stride, and moved about among the delicate sinister secrets of life, with an almost indecent sturdiness.

Edward did not resent the shock of Ariadne’s rough banter, although he was gentleness itself, and was used to an almost exorbitant gentleness from Vera.

Vera had never once in the course of their lives together said: ‘Edward, I don’t agree with you.’ Nor had she ever acted straight across the path of his expressed desires. She ministered to them, or guided them towards objects which she thought more suitable to his character and to their joint lives.

She was unaware that Edward had desires which she hadn’t found out, and couldn’t deflect, nor that one of them was for the charming candour of a child.

But the worst of their new differences was Edward’s fresh attitude towards William. Up till now Edward had always tacitly agreed to the blackest version of William. Their love had sprung from the villainy of William as roses spring from manure. They would never have given way to their romantic passion had William not opened the door to it by his butcher’s brutality. Why then was Edward shelving treacherously away from the decent sense of their hostility? When Ariadne said suddenly across the breakfast-table: ‘Hullo, it’s the first of June, isn’t it? I must go out and buy old William a present—it’s his birthday!’ Vera said very quietly: ‘Do you think you need do that now, darling?’ and there had been a perceptible pause, in which one of those agonizing differences had made itself felt. Vera saw in a flash that they were both against her. Edward went on pretending to read the ‘Times,’ but his eyes didn’t move.

Ariadne said quickly: ‘Oh, rather! Of course I must—more than ever this year when I’m not with him!’ and pushed back her chair abruptly.

After she had left the room, and she had a way of leaving a room without excuse or reluctance as if she really wanted to get out of it, Vera had said: ‘You know, Edward, the child simply doesn’t see William!’

Edward laid the ‘Times’ down and looked at her with that odd, withheld look she never was quite able to fathom, as if he was looking at a stranger. ‘No doubt she sees a different William!’ he said, ‘but can’t we leave her—hers?’

As if there was a different William to see! Vera didn’t say, ‘I think not!’ She felt too hurt to disagree aloud.

She gave him more coffee, and rose with her exquisite slow grace. She always made her farewells seem more like greetings than departures. ‘I must let you read your “Times” in peace, poor darling,’ she said, and left him, although she knew Edward hated to have her leave him before the moment came for him to face his city life.

She didn’t at once seek Ariadne; she reassured herself, against them both, by seeing that the house was running as it should.

Her house was the shell of her love for Edward; she had put into it her taste and her wisdom, her ardour and her passionate observation of his least desires.

Vera owed Edward everything, as she had told him on that painful occasion, more painful in retrospect than in actual endurance, when Edward had resented the arrival of the child. She owed him everything; but what did he not owe her? She hadn’t touched on that, she had left it to him to remember; but solidly behind her faintest reproach sheltered the array of her gifts. She knew no woman who spent her every thought on her husband’s well-being as she did; who on less than two thousand a year gave him a life as serene and comfortable, and as full of seasonable variety, as if he’d been a millionaire! She moved about the house, putting things right which barely needed it, preventing mistakes, arranging for felicities, ordering meals into which she poured poetry and efficiency combined. No! if Edward really thought of what he owed her, he’d be dumb; and it didn’t occur to Vera in the fine flight of her self-justification that he only too often was.

There had been many minutes, like the odd one this morning at breakfast, when Edward had pretended to read the ‘Times,’ and his eyes hadn’t moved.

She pushed the thought of his mute disloyalty away from her. Ariadne’s was the more open affair—and could, she felt, be more easily dealt with. She knocked softly at Ariadne’s door.

Ariadne shouted ‘Come in!’ but after she had smiled at her mother, she went on preparing to go out. Her preparations were ludicrously swift. She slipped her feet, which were larger than Vera’s, into walking brogues which Vera thought were unnecessarily stout, seized up her cap, and prepared without the form of farewell to dash off into space.

‘My beloved child! Gloves!’ Vera implored, her eyebrows gently raised. Ariadne obediently scrambled through a drawer which resembled a work-basket overhauled by a kitten, and produced a doubtful pair of gauntlets.

‘Darling, are you in a great hurry?’ Vera asked her. Ariadne hesitated.

‘I do like to get into shops before a troop of women are about,’ she explained. ‘They dither so—and I want to dash in and come straight away with what I’ve got. It’s ten now.’

‘They’ll be empty for another hour!’ Vera reminded her.

Ariadne tossed her gloves on the bed and drew a small wooden stool close to her mother’s feet. ‘Do you like your little room, darling?’ Vera asked, caressing her hair with a light hand. She wondered if Ariadne had any idea how right the room was—or what it had cost in thought and money to make it of that peculiar rightness.

The walls were silver, the curtains were a pure flame colour, and so was the wonderful old Chinese lacquer cabinet in the corner, smouldering away where the light caught it. Between the short curtains they could see the new leaves of an elm, and through this shining screen, they caught a glimpse of a short hill falling, with the abruptness of a cliff, into a sea of traffic.

‘It’s like you,’ Ariadne said, kissing the hand which rested on her shoulder. ‘Everything in this house smells and shines like you! You’re like a hedge rose, as frail and faint-coloured and sweet, and yet mother of all the roses that ever were!’

Vera laughed softly. ‘Not even Edward,’ she said, ‘says lovelier things to me! But he does them for me. Half the poetry of this house—if it has poetry—is his! And all the poetry of my life, till you came back into it again. Do you know, I felt suddenly this morning that I hadn’t told you enough! Enough I mean about how I came to leave you, and why? I didn’t want to go into all that old pain—but now that you’re mine, I want you to see how it happened! And the pain is so old, it can’t hurt either of us again!’

Ariadne turned her head so that her devout fond eyes rested on her mother’s face, but they were wide-open eyes and, in spite of their devotion, searching. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘tell me then! I’d like awfully to know.’

‘I remember so well,’ Vera began in a low resonant voice, ‘when your father first told me I was to meet Edward. I stood in the rose garden at Ricketts by the goldfish pool. It was a cloudless, golden evening. In the elms behind the house the rooks were cawing. They made so much noise that we all three met like ghosts. I looked up at Edward; and we both knew. He had just come back on leave from the front. I think he had a great career open before him and might have been a famous soldier. He gave that up for me. It’s one of the things I don’t let myself think of!’ She gave a sharp sigh. ‘As for me,’ she went on, ‘I’d been married eight years. For eight years I’d fought with my mistake, knowing it for what it was, but not knowing what else to do with it but fight. I felt old and tired and very worn out. I was weak, I had no money and no training. In those days women rarely earned their own living, certainly not women who had been brought up in a sheltered useless seclusion out of which they’d been suddenly dipped into the world, and married off at eighteen.

‘I knew nothing whatever about life—I doubt if the aunts who brought me up did; and the shock of it very nearly killed me. Your father had no understanding of a shrinking girl—and no respect for innocence.

‘He ignored my protests; he ignored every protest that I ever made, until I ceased to make them and became instead a living protest!’

Ariadne moved; she made a curious little gesture as if she were cumbered by too heavy a wrap. ‘Why didn’t you have it out with him?’ she demanded. ‘You oughtn’t to have let William play Sheik tricks. If you’d stood up to him, you know, you could easily have stopped him. Why Mummy, you could stop anybody doing anything by moving an eyelash!’

Vera gave a brief smile. ‘Not, my dear, then,’ she answered. ‘I knew nothing about the power of eyelashes. I think I could deal with William now. But remember twenty years ago I was a child—a very shy, helpless, carefully brought up child. I had no notion that I had any rights.

‘Since I couldn’t run away into a world which would have taken an even greater advantage of my innocence than a husband, I stayed where I was. I merely more and more deeply hated him.’

‘But,’ interrupted Ariadne restlessly. She stopped, and began again. ‘I doubt if the world would have taken a greater advantage of you. I mean one can play a lone hand if one wants to! Couldn’t you have got a job as a housemaid?’

Vera stiffened a little, her hands ceased to play with Ariadne’s shining hair. ‘I’m afraid not, darling,’ she said, ‘in those days I should have made such an indifferent housemaid. I knew how to walk in and out of rooms, and how to hold my tongue, but those are not the main duties of a housemaid. Soon after my marriage I added to these accomplishments by knowing how to hate. I knew every shade and variety of hatred before I learned anything about love. And I am bound to admit that I practised them all. But William rather enjoyed it than otherwise. I behaved what he called “well” in public, for my own sake, and my furious rebellions in private amused him as much as the frantic contortions of a bullied kitten. That, I think, was rather what I felt like most of the time.

‘When Edward came across my path it was a more serious matter.

‘I suppose your father was by then rather tired of being hated, or perhaps he believed, as I myself for a time believed, that our love was hopeless and would be a fitting punishment for a rebellious wife. Perhaps he didn’t even know that it was love. The doctor had told him that another child would kill me—but your father, though I think he had long ceased to care for me, never altered his habits. He never spared me anything. I never told Edward what I suffered, but I think he guessed. Neither of us by then could feel anything without the other feeling it. I knew that he loved me, although he had never spoken of it. His loyalty—my loyalty too—was adamant. We looked at each other as travellers in a desert look at water which they cannot reach. I lived as much as I could for you. I had that joy. Death was close to me and I hardly cared which took me, death or love.

‘I won’t say Edward carried me away against my will, for that was bound up in his; but I had reached a place where I couldn’t have resisted any firmness which delivered me. If I were to die, I wanted to die away from William’s eyes.’

Vera stopped abruptly. She closed her eyes and felt the swift warm lips of her child pressed against her hand. She thought that she had said enough.

‘Well, it’s all over now, isn’t it?’ Ariadne said, springing to her feet and bending over Vera to kiss her hair. She spoke in the cheerful, slightly final tone, in which a professional nurse checks too long a display of her patient’s symptoms. ‘It must have been a hell of a time for all three of you. I think I’ll just trot out now and buy that gawd for William.’

Vera opened her eyes. ‘Ariadne!’ she murmured, astonished, ‘Ariadne—after what I’ve told you, you will go out and buy a birthday present for your father?’

Ariadne was already at the door. She looked back at her mother with curiously shamed eyes—but not as if she were ashamed of herself. ‘Did you mean it to make a difference to me?’ she asked with blunt dismay. ‘I’m frightfully sorry, dearest, if you did! Of course, old William behaved like a beast! A donkey, I think, more than anything really jungly! That potentatish order-you-round-the-room stunt doesn’t mean anything! And after all, he’s paid for it! He did lose you—and he’s lost Edward—who is a love and a lamb!—and now he’s lost part of me as well! I can’t help that! But I think he ought to have his annual pen-wiper or what-not just the same, don’t you?’

Vera rose with dignity; she really had to go to the window to get a little air.

‘My darling child,’ she said, ‘you must do whatever you think right. I shall never try to influence you in any way against your father!’ She did not turn her head, but she heard Ariadne say, in a relieved but slightly puzzled voice: ‘Well—that’s all right then!’ The door closed after her.

A wood-pigeon clapped his heavy wings together and stood, framed in bright leaves, upon a branch of the elm. An odd bird to penetrate so far into the heart of London.

There was a cruelty in the shining day and in the heart of youth.

The worst of it was that Vera couldn’t tell Edward. She could not even draw him into the revival of those old magnificent dreams, which Ariadne had suddenly made as historically impotent as wheeled vehicles. Vera had an instinct which warned her that in spite of their dreams, in spite of Ariadne’s brisk callousness, Edward’s sympathy would have been with the child.

CHAPTER VII

Vera had a premonition that she wouldn’t like Tom. His father was a timber merchant and a friend of William. ‘He sounds everything one could wish as an engineer or an acrobat,’ she explained to Edward. ‘He races at Brooklands, and has a kind of little one-man yacht which he sails on bad bits of coast, and says, like the traditional Englishman: “Here’s a rock, let’s bump it!” Ariadne would, of course, have described his intellect if he had any. When he has influenza he reads Edgar Wallace; but I gather he has only had influenza twice. As to his social pretensions, she says, poor child, that he doesn’t care much about her other friends, and likes to go about alone. One can well imagine it.’

It wasn’t as if Vera hadn’t, as Edward knew, got on well with Ariadne’s other friends. These brilliant, but malleable young people had ‘fallen,’ as Ariadne called it, instantly and in heaps, ‘for Vera.’ They swept constantly through the small house in a gale of plans and laughter. They wanted only too much and only too often to include Vera in their procession of ‘good times.’ They were all extremely intelligent, and Vera had felt almost like one of themselves, only a trifle less ardent, and very much less strong.

Tom had never joined in these congenial rushes; he had been abroad on business for his father, so that Vera’s premonition against him hung upon the horizon, a substantial but hitherto unbroken cloud.

When Ariadne said one Saturday morning at breakfast: ‘Tom is turning up before eleven to take me out. I suppose you’re off somewhere, darlings, for the week-end?’ Vera said that they’d thought of Fittleworth—but wouldn’t be going till after lunch.

As soon as Tom was announced Vera saw that he was too big for the room; he moved about in it like a large and formidable animal insufficiently tamed. His eyes were blue and truculent; he looked at things too hard, without taking them in. He seized Ariadne’s hand, as if it were some kind of mechanical contrivance which might be made to work, and said: ‘Hullo, Ariadne!’ When Ariadne said rather haltingly, ‘This is my mother, Tom,’ he looked at Vera as if she wasn’t a woman at all—only an old woman. Vera had never been looked at like that before. She had felt no sense of loss as the years slipped by her; instead, she had felt as if all that she possessed of beauty and of wit were made more securely hers. A childless woman, deeply loved, has no measure of time. Tom’s cool stare relegated her to a place in the background, where she was tolerated rather than observed. If she had suddenly found herself to be invisible, Vera could not have received a sharper shock.

She sat down with her back to the light, forcing Tom to face her; but although he faced her, he still appeared to be unaware of her. He said, ‘I’ve brought my bike,’—or was it ‘the bike’?—to Ariadne. Ariadne flashed some kind of signal at him from behind her mother. Vera suspected it of being reassuring or consolatory, and felt that it was disloyal of Ariadne to be either of those things to so offensive a young man.

Edward offered Tom a cigarette, and asked him something about the weather, which was unequivocally fine.

Tom answered direct questions with monosyllables; indirect questions or mere statements of fact he never answered at all. He simply sat there, his large hands loosely clasped between his knees, clinging to silence, while subject after subject dropped to the floor, between him and his expert hostess.

Vera had to admit to herself that Tom’s silence seemed a sufficient defence, for after the first few minutes she realized that it crushed them rather than it crushed Tom. He was evidently used to his silence and they weren’t. Tom expected to be uncomfortable on social occasions, but he foresaw the moment when he wouldn’t be uncomfortable any more. Once or twice his eyes fixed themselves on Ariadne with the expression of a good dog watching for the signal which precedes a walk. He wasn’t going to hurry her, but he hoped she would give him the signal soon.

Meanwhile Vera laid herself out to torture him. She would have preferred to please Tom, if he had shown her a way of doing so, but she knew how to displease him without his showing her anything. She turned his ignorance inside out before Edward and Ariadne with the skill of an expert cook boning a turkey. Tom, she elicited by a series of cut-and-thrust questions, had lately been to Norway, Sweden, and Russia. He had travelled with the bandage of his ignorance closely fastened across his eyes, and he had brought back wood, which was what he had gone for. Russia, and a régime which was at least different from anything he had experienced before, not to mention the striking charms of Scandinavia, had failed to supply Tom with anything whatever to say about them. He thought Bolsheviks much the same as other people; Moscow rather pretty; and soap, in Russia, expensive.

Ariadne’s candid eyes, with a friendly light in them, rested by turns on Tom and on Edward; they sometimes met those of her mother without either appeal or defiance, but with less light. She didn’t by so much as a glance ask Vera to spare her victim; she hardly seemed to see that Tom was a victim.

Edward, however, was more permeable; he saw exactly how stupid Tom was and how much more stupid Vera’s brilliant tactics had succeeded in making him; and what he saw disturbed him very much.

Vera knew that if Edward didn’t suffer fools gladly, he preferred to suffer them unobtrusively, but she couldn’t pull up for Edward. She was, she reminded herself, a mother, and a mother’s first duty is to save her child. Tom was a danger; he might even, if Ariadne failed to take in the weight of his stupidity, be a mortal danger. He had the rough good looks which sometimes rouse first love in an intelligent girl, who is hoodwinked by them into overlooking the more necessary qualities.

Vera made a cruel pause after the subject of soap in Russia; and then once more thrust Tom back into the abstract.

‘I daresay,’ she said, ‘you felt you were not in Russia long enough to go deeply into its problems? But one would be so interested to know what on the whole your impressions were. Do you feel that this rather dreadful experiment will be a lasting one, and may still further affect Europe?’

Tom gazed hard at the carpet. ‘When the roads get better,’ he said at last, ‘I think they’ll buy up a lot of cars—that ought to be good for somebody, oughtn’t it?’

Ariadne gave the signal for which Tom had been waiting; she got up.

‘Where is Mr. Anderson going to take you, darling?’ Vera asked.

‘I don’t quite know,’ Ariadne answered without looking at Vera. ‘We’re just off for the day on Tom’s bike, aren’t we, Tom?’

‘You are not proposing to ride on a motor bicycle together, are you, darling?’ Vera asked her daughter. Her eyebrows rose precipitously over eyes which grew disastrously cold.

‘Yes,’ said Ariadne, and she said nothing more.

‘But that,’ said Vera gently, ‘is quite out of the question! I couldn’t, Mr. Anderson—I’m so sorry, but I really couldn’t let my daughter go out with you on one of those horrible machines. I’m afraid you’ll think me terribly old-fashioned for feeling that a girl shouldn’t be seen on one, though, of course, you have a side-car. But quite apart from appearances, they’re so terribly dangerous. I am sure you are a brilliant rider; my daughter has told me how gifted you are as—as an athlete, but still one hears of such horrible accidents every day. Do try and forgive me—and Ariadne too, but couldn’t you perhaps amuse yourselves in some other way?’

The two tall young creatures stood as still as if they were stuffed. Silence settled on the room like a spell. Edward was the first to break it. He spoke apologetically to Ariadne; but he supported Vera.

‘They are rather awful, you know, aren’t they?’ he murmured, ‘at any rate, to non-riders like ourselves. Couldn’t you perhaps do something else?’

Ariadne turned towards him. At last she did seem to be protecting Tom, but only against Edward.

‘Tom loves his bike,’ she said in a tremulous voice. ‘We’ve gone on it everywhere together—in all weathers. He’s awfully careful.’

Edward’s eyes rested on Ariadne with a direct appeal.

‘Still, you wouldn’t like to frighten your mother, would you?’ he asked her gently.

Ariadne did not immediately answer Edward. It was obvious that what she really did not like was having a mother who could be frightened. Her dignity was infringed by Vera’s authority; and she resented being bullied by Vera’s fears.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said shortly; ‘what shall we do about it, Tom?’ She turned to Tom as if it were for him to decide whether she were going to outrage her parents or not.

Vera felt this blow more sharply than she felt being outraged by Ariadne’s disobedience. Could a daughter of hers wish to be governed by a moron?

‘How’d it be,’ asked Tom, responding with surprising fluency to Ariadne’s appeal, ‘to take the bike round to the garage and hire a car instead? She couldn’t mind that, could she?’ He spoke as if Vera was an invisible police-trap which had to be skilfully avoided.

‘That’s a capital plan,’ said Edward eagerly, before Vera had time to speak. This took the ground from under Vera’s feet, for she never in public disputed with Edward.

Ariadne, too, accepted Edward’s sanction as final. ‘I’ll go round to the garage with you,’ she said to Tom eagerly.

Vera hesitated. Did they still intend to mount that bone of contention together in order to reach the garage? And if they did, should she carry her opposition any further, by asking Ariadne to remain where she was until Tom had brought round the car? But would Ariadne obey her if she did ask it? And might she not by her insistence disgust Edward? If Vera could help it, she never did disgust Edward, though the margin by which she escaped doing so was sometimes rather fine. She gave an appealing glance at Edward, but Edward did nothing to meet this particular appeal.

Vera sighed a little; perhaps she had done enough to save Ariadne; after all, she was a wife as well as a mother.

‘It’s very sweet of you both to be so charming about it!’ she murmured graciously, ‘and I’m deeply grateful. I suppose one ought to accustom oneself to the terrors of the road, but to this particular terror I fear I shall never accustom myself.’

Vera made her eyes definitely sparkle as they met Tom’s; but they soon ceased to sparkle. Tom was looking at her with the disconcerting gaze of a scientist confronted by a specimen, which, if it is really as strange as it looks, contradicts a favourite theory.

‘You ought to try,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ll take you out myself, if you like—some Sunday when I’m free. Once you’re on a bike, you’ll know better what you’re talking about. I can get a side-car put on, if you like. Ariadne and I never use one, they take up so much room going round corners; but you can always get one put on for old people.’

‘Or invalids,’ Ariadne interrupted hastily.

‘Yes, or invalids,’ said Tom, loyally amending a phrase which still seemed to him perfectly satisfactory.

Vera laughed. ‘That’s too kind of you,’ she murmured, ‘but I prefer trusting my old bones to the more certain luxury of a bath-chair!’

Ariadne was pierced by her mother’s irony; she turned away without a word and hurried out of the door. But Tom accepted the bath-chair without a qualm, as but another flaw in the character, strangely imperfect, of Ariadne’s mother. Still she was Ariadne’s mother, so he shook hands with her heartily, inadvertently crushing her rings into her slender fingers.

‘Now,’ said Vera with tightened lips, as the door closed firmly behind him, ‘we know who Tom is!’ She expected Edward’s ready sympathy, and she longed, as she had never longed before, for an expression of his admiration.

Edward gave her neither. He went to the window and stood with his back to her.

‘I think you made a mistake,’ he said at last. ‘If I’d been in your place, I’d have let him drive her through Piccadilly in a wheel-barrow!’

‘But why?’ Vera demanded. ‘It’s not only the look of the thing, it’s the actual danger. You’ve surely seen he’s as stupid as an owl. Why should I risk that darling child with a nerve-racking lump?’

‘I think you risk a good deal more,’ said Edward, ‘by ordering her about. Besides you make no distinction between traffic and conversation. He’s probably able to take her about a great deal more safely on a motor-cycle than he can steer his way through a drawing-room wrangle.’

‘Wrangle!’ exclaimed Vera, reddening with astonishment and dismay. ‘Dearest, when have you ever heard me wrangle in a drawing-room?’

‘Well,’ said Edward, giving up the window and turning round on Vera with a sombre gaze, ‘I don’t know what you call what you did this morning; but it certainly seemed to me to be rather in the nature of a street accident—and not the fault of the young man’s driving either! He was what you might call a “passenger” throughout!’

‘Do you think I should have let Ariadne go with him?’ Vera asked. She was more frightened than angry at this abrupt divergence of their views, and the fear in her voice touched Edward.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘It must be horribly hard being a mother so late; but don’t you see, my darling, just because it’s late, something has got to go. You haven’t—I hate to say it—but you haven’t the right to use authority now; and what I’m so afraid of is, if you do, she’ll go.’

‘Go where?’ demanded Vera. ‘To that man?’

‘Anywhere,’ said Edward; ‘to him, or back to William; but you’ll lose her. She adores you, but adoring’s not enough.’

Their eyes met. A horrible fear assailed Vera: if it was not enough for Ariadne, was it enough for Edward? She put her hand over her mouth to keep back the bitter words she had meant to say.

‘Don’t you think,’ she said slowly letting her hand fall and fixing her eyes piteously on Edward’s, ‘that I have any rights, Edward, because I left her? Am I to be punished all over again for that?’

‘You can’t call it punished,’ Edward answered gently, ‘when you love her and she loves you. There are no other real rights, are there?’

‘I should have thought,’ said Vera, still trying to fight down the rising tide of bitterness, ‘that when one loved, one should make some efforts to protect the object of it.’

‘Not now,’ said Edward; ‘the time for Ariadne’s protection is over. The ship is launched. Seaworthy or not, she’s got to meet the sea. All you can do is to warp her off from the beach. Well, to-day you weren’t warping her off, you were holding her back. And, after all, I doubt if there’s any harm in that young man. I’m not even sure that he’s as stupid as you think.’

‘Ah! that——!’ said Vera. She gave a hopeless gesture and turned away towards the door. If they were going to Fittleworth, it was time she packed her things; but the object in going there seemed to have suddenly faded.

CHAPTER VIII

A storm of thoughts and fears whirled through Ariadne’s head, like birds driven by implacable beaters. Did Tom mind? Why had Vera set out to hurt her best friend? What had she seen in Tom to dislike? And had Edward seen it? Had Edward agreed with her or with Vera? She sat stiffly in the little low car Tom had hired, after some withering criticisms, at the garage. She was afraid of what he might be thinking of Vera. If he thought of her angrily or contemptuously, how could she forgive him?

And yet her anger, her fear, and the queer pain at her heart, put an edge on the beauty of the summer day. Her blood danced, and she thought the sky had never looked so blue before. Tom and the small swift car were like one being: the car twisted and turned through the mean little streets of Notting Hill like an eel, and shot peacefully round the dangerous curve of Church Street into an intricate pattern of vehicles, edging and shuffling their way towards the barracks. A reassuring sense of how little Tom minded anybody came through to Ariadne. His critical sense was seldom roused except by the drivers of other vehicles. He might murmur, ‘Brute ought to be hanged!’ if a Rolls Royce took more than its share of roadway, but his condemnation was seldom a more personal affair.

The stiffness gradually went out of Ariadne’s shoulders. She began to forget the deadly quietness of Vera’s little room, where they had all been so uncomfortable together—with the summer only just outside.

Westminster suddenly stepped out of the blue sky, ancient and frosted, a sheet of flickering silver. London flashed and roared about them with a light laid on it, like the clearness of water. The hurrying, bickering vehicles wore the lustre of jewels.

Tom sat far back in the car, guiding it by the mere twitch of a finger. He looked as if he felt his tiny eggshell slipping between the vast bulks of motor lorries to be as secure as a fishing boat poised on the easy surface of a summer sea. Thoughts, if they entered Tom’s head, entered it singly and without panic. ‘I can get through here,’ or ‘I’ll turn for the bridge farther down.’ As they left the Embankment and stood checked for a moment on the close-packed bridge, Tom became conscious that Ariadne’s eyes were resting on his face. He didn’t return her glance, but he noted it, to think about when there was less traffic. It filled him with a deep sense of pride, for Ariadne very seldom just looked at him. Her eyes in general accompanied her speech; but Ariadne was not talking now—she had a fellow motorist’s consideration for a driver in heavy traffic; she was thinking of Tom, and noticing him, without his having laid any claim upon her light attention.

Ariadne did not speak until they had passed Southwick and the traffic, eased of its nerve-shattering city rush, had changed into a mere good-tempered purr; then she said: ‘Where are we going, Tom?’

‘Like a bathe?’ Tom asked. ‘We could get to Dover in time for one before lunch. I’ll put on pace when we get out of this.’

The sea flashed into Ariadne’s mind as a solution for all discomfort. Waves would surely wash out of her the hard, harsh memory, which wouldn’t stop assailing her, that Vera had meant to be unkind to Tom.

‘Yes, let’s go to the sea!’ she shouted back.

London flattened itself out into a torrent of small grey houses. The river glittered by them again; layers of pearl and blue sky slipped between the roofs of factories.

They were going much faster now, through hopfields and blossoms. A white sea of cherry darted upon them and covered the landscape with blown foam. Ariadne snatched her cap off and let the wind stream through her hair.

‘Why can’t we get to the sea nearer than Dover?’ she cried in rapture.

‘No difficulty,’ said Tom, increasing his pace. ‘We could go anywhere practically! But I know a jolly little place just beyond Dover. I’d like to see the castle again, too. Saw it yesterday from the steamer as she was getting in, and made up my mind to take you down there to-day.’

Ariadne was astonished at this statement. Tom, then, had connected her with his return to England? He had, with a leap of something very like imagination, linked her up with the squat rigidity of Dover Castle. Could he—it almost looked like it—have been as pleased to return to Ariadne as he had been to return to England?

Ariadne had never before seriously considered the tie which bound them to each other. She knew there was a tie. She preferred excursions with Tom, games with Tom, to those activities taken with other young men. But she had often taken fancies to other young men, and she hadn’t taken a fancy to Tom. Nor had he, as far as she knew, taken a fancy to her. He had once kissed her at a dance, but not seriously, and Ariadne knew that she had half incited him and half, when he had caught her in his arms, tried to evade his kiss. She hadn’t evaded it, but when she’d said, ‘Stop, Tom!’ Tom had stopped. They had gone back into their usual friendliness five minutes afterwards and never got out of it again. Love affairs, marvellous flurries of the blood, like good jazz tunes, were all very well. Ariadne had experienced them quite often; there had been men she had adored and forgotten in a fortnight. She had felt it an indignity to connect her thoughts of Tom with these brief, indiscriminate flurries. No! the thing they had was better. It wasn’t love, and as for marriage, since it wasn’t love they could completely ignore all prospects of marriage. Ariadne had definitely made up her mind not to marry till she was twenty-eight. Tom had agreed with her that no one wanted to run their heads into pokes unless they had to.

It wouldn’t do, of course, if Tom were to fall in love with her. But Tom, too, had other fancies; delicious little dreams dashed happily into his everyday existence and after he’d spent a good deal of money on them and worried about fresh ties and socks, and sometimes wished he were dead, if the effect produced by the fresh ties and socks had failed to be immediate, the dreams had dashed out again and were not thought of more.

Ariadne knew that girls liked Tom, and she knew that the effect of the ties and socks often was immediate; but she had noticed that there was in the end something wrong about the girls. They were either not at all like Pola Negri, or else perhaps they were rather too much like her—without the last most consummate art, possessed by that engaging film star, of disappearing when you’d had enough of her.

Tom’s eyes met Ariadne’s speculative, slightly veiled glance, with a brief untroubled look.

‘You can get good eats where I’m taking you to,’ he said gravely.

‘I’m frightfully hungry,’ Ariadne acknowledged.

‘Bathe first,’ Tom reminded her. ‘And next town we pass we’ll have to stop and buy something to put on. I hate hiring!’

Sand, scrub, patches of flying gorse, took the place of the flying orchards. A painful rash of small red houses broke out all around them; the air smelt suddenly of honeysuckle and the sea.

A moment later Tom said: ‘This’ll do,’ and they drew up before a large and cheerless draper’s. Walls of cold linoleum and cruel pink flannelette hemmed them in. Ariadne felt a guilty thrill of mingled disloyalty and delight. How shocked her mother would be at the skimpy black tunic which was all they had for girls, and which Tom said at once was ample. Tom’s microscopic tribute to respectability was even slighter; even Tom couldn’t have used the word ample in connection with it.

They flung their small packages into the car, climbed a steep hill and saw the castle. Ariadne found herself looking at it with more interest than usual. The castle must have looked, to any one coming from the sea, extraordinarily safe and trusty. It stood very solid and grey, but not very high, on the firm sheep-nibbled green of the downs, with a streak of white cliff below it; and it seemed more like a home than a castle. It was funny that the castle had made Tom think of her.

Tom didn’t refer to it again; in fact, he took some trouble to avoid even glancing at the castle, and dashed off into a lane behind the downs, as if the sooner they got away from it the better.

‘Here’s Saint Margaret’s Bay,’ Tom explained; ‘it was rather a nice little place, my father says, when he was a boy; sort of pre-war look about it still, I think, don’t you? But of course you can’t find anything fit to look at on this coast, anyway. There was rather a nice little place in Norway I’d have liked you to see: jutting rocks, and hills as green as a billiard table. Awful bilge they talk about the bathing there, though. Water’s cold enough to skin an eel. I’ll leave the car at this junk shop; it’s where we’ll feed after we’ve bathed.’

‘I don’t think,’ began Ariadne nervously, as they walked down a steep hill towards a blue lane of sea, ‘that Mother was well this morning. She’s been, you know, most awfully ill.’

‘She did look a bit off colour,’ Tom agreed. ‘Everybody’s at lunch, thank God,’ he added hastily. ‘We’ll be able to bathe in peace. I hate fly-paper beaches.’

The yellow sand beneath them was as empty as a plate. The bathing houses looked hermetically sealed. The sea, roughened by a fresh off-shore breeze, slapped playfully at the green seaweed-covered rocks.

They hurried along the line of blank bathing huts, trying each door as they passed; the last in the row was open.

‘Nip in,’ said Tom. ‘People’s own fault if they aren’t here to take the money. I’ll hunt up a rock.’

Ariadne, with her hand on the latch, looked wistfully at Tom. ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Mind? Mind what?’ Tom asked, turning hastily away from her.

‘Mind,’ said Ariadne in an agonized rush, ‘her being so beastly—slippery and prickly, and having you on! She isn’t a bit like that really—if you only knew her. She—well, of course, she’s my mother—she’s——’

Tom plunged into invisibility behind the bathing hut just as Ariadne’s voice broke.

‘All right,’ he called back gruffly from his hidden post. ‘Perfectly all right, of course! Don’t be an idiot! I never could talk to people, you know; and as for your mother, she was welcome to have me on if she wanted to. But honestly she ought to try a motor bike some time—do her good!’

Then he had felt hurt! He had known, all the time, what Vera was doing. He had understood, and if he had understood he must have minded, Vera’s pointing out how little he could talk.

Ariadne sat down on a wet sand-strewn bench of the bathing hut and wept. Something hard and horrible rose in her throat, and had to be swallowed before she could take off her clothes. She couldn’t bear to think Tom had been hurt. Up till now she hadn’t been able to bear that Vera had tried to hurt him; but now, as she slowly and drearily pulled off her stockings, trying to avoid the damp spots wantonly left by former bathers, she only remembered Tom.

CHAPTER IX

Racing across the wet sands towards the sea, grief blew away from Ariadne. She and Tom took the first sharp coldness of the foam together and waded out breast-high through the dancing waves. The deep water accepted them as if they were its accomplices, helping them on their way. They moved steadily up the slopes of waves; they balanced for a moment on foaming crests like autumn peaks touched with snow; and slid down them into valleys as familiar as a home, with the sky roofing them in. Behind them the yellow beach tilted upwards like a wall. Ariadne turning on her back watched a seagull winging its steady flight over her head with indifferent, mindless ease. She wondered for a moment how deep the sea was beneath her, and if the sky seemed to the seagull as deep above. Did the gull feel as she did, that it could fly for ever with infinity as its plaything?

She was happy at last. Anger, small close rooms, the strangeness in Vera’s eyes, all these things were remote and insignificant, washed clear of malice. Tom, too, was happy; reinstated by his own powerful strokes, and freed by the innocuous forces of the sun and air. A funny thing, Ariadne thought drowsily, how empty the sea would have been, how rather frightening that wary-eyed gull, if Tom had not been there!

‘Better turn,’ Tom said at last.

Ariadne changed her stroke, and faced the white cliffs glittering beyond the dark floor of the sea. They swam for a long while in silence, their ears full of the little intermittent murmurings of the wind against the waves.

When Ariadne glanced at the cliffs again she wondered how far away they were. She began to feel as if distance was once more important; the sense of the infinite and her kinship with it drew beyond her reach.

‘How far out are we, Tom?’ she called.

‘Couple of miles,’ Tom called back. ‘Tired?’

‘Not exactly,’ Ariadne answered. ‘Only the shore looks such a long way off.’

‘Want a tow?’ Tom shouted in answer.

Ariadne shot forward indignantly. Did Tom really think she was the kind of girl who had to be towed when she went out swimming? Time stood still, only the waves moved; they were very playful and friendly, but, however much you wanted it, they wouldn’t stop being playful and friendly.

Tom swam close to Ariadne. ‘Bit of current,’ he said conversationally. ‘Tide’s running in strong, but we don’t seem to be making much headway.’

Ariadne glanced at the land again. It was no nearer.

‘Better try swimming for the point on the left,’ Tom suggested. ‘I think the current’s setting for it; we can switch to our own beach when we get nearer in.’

Ariadne turned over on her back and floated. There was no doubt about it, they were being carried.

‘Just keep going,’ Tom advised. ‘No need to push; the tide’ll take us in.’

The white cliffs approached with magic swiftness, the floor of the sea narrowed. They could hear the intermittent, hungry pounding of the surf.

‘There’s more sea on!’ Ariadne shouted.

‘Wind,’ Tom admitted briefly.

Ariadne closed her lips. She lay deeper in the water and swam with long, rhythmic strokes. A long time passed, and then she heard Tom’s voice with an anxious note in it: ‘Are you all right?’

Ariadne was not thinking of how she was, she was thinking that the water was heavier and less accommodating, and that she did not like the sound of the approaching surf.

‘How much longer, Tom?’ she asked.

‘A bit longer,’ Tom admitted. ‘Tell me when you’re tired. We want to keep away from the cliffs now, and get back to our own beach. Swim for all you’re worth. We’ll soon be in.’

The cliff showed a persevering desire to meet them more than halfway. Swim as hard as she could, Ariadne could not prevent its too rapid approach.

Tom swam ahead of her. He called back to her, as if he had discovered a pleasant alternative, that they had better make the other beach after all.

Ariadne tried not to think of the surf; it was making a continuous angry sound like a shouting mob. She found Tom beside her again.

‘Put your hand on my shoulder,’ he said.

Ariadne refused.

She was so surprised when Tom shouted: ‘Damn you, Ariadne, do what I tell you!’ that she did it. It was an instant rest.

The cliff came suddenly forward out of the sea; they rounded its point and saw where they were. In front of them was a small rocky beach with heavy surf breaking over it. They were almost in the first line of the breakers.

‘Keep your mouth shut!’ Tom shouted. ‘Turn and duck under when the waves break. It’ll be fun getting in!’

Then the waves caught them. They could snatch a mouthful of air as they turned, but they had to be quick about it, swim a stroke or two, and plunge under the next roller. The shock of the waves made their limbs grow heavy, and the long plunges under the running walls of foam sapped their strength. Ariadne was conscious of two things: she mustn’t let go of Tom’s shoulder, and she mustn’t cling to him; beyond this all was chaos. Once she forgot to keep her mouth shut and the whole sea rushed into it. Her head felt as if it must split, and she nearly let go of Tom’s shoulder.

At last, above the startling roar of the surf she heard Tom’s voice, very calm and reassuring.

‘We’re in our depths.’

Two black stunted rocks, dark and menacing, danced close up to them. Ariadne tried to stand; a wave broke over her and all the water in the sea was in her ears again. Tom’s arm closed round her like iron; she was so tired, she wished that either he or the sea would let go of her.

All of a sudden the waves miraculously fell back, and they were stumbling forward over the wet sand together, staggering like drunkards, terrified of a little line of surf that ran over their feet.

Ariadne pitched face forward on to the beach. She could stretch her hands over the sand without their sinking in. The sun beat down on her; she felt desperately weak and ill.

‘Try to be sick,’ Tom said encouragingly.

Ariadne hated him for a moment; then she was sick, and hated him no more.

A long time passed before she opened her eyes and sat bolt upright. Tom had disappeared. The beach was extraordinarily small and hemmed in by cliffs. She was glad to hear Tom’s voice behind her saying: ‘It’s quite all right, Ariadne. How are you feeling?’

Ariadne said a trifle shakily that she was feeling grand.

‘I’ve just been prospecting a bit,’ Tom explained. ‘I hope you won’t mind if we have to wait here rather a long time? Tide won’t be up yet, and this damned little cove hasn’t any outlet.’

Ariadne yawned and suggested that they should climb the cliff.

‘ ’Fraid we can’t,’ Tom answered ruefully.

‘The beastly thing was built for squash rackets; can’t fit your toes in anywhere. There’s a cave quite handy, but that’s where modern comfort ends.’

Ariadne felt a little cold touch of foam run up against her feet. She had thought they had finished with the sea, and there it was again, as playful as ever.

She started to her feet and faced the cliffs. She had not wanted to look at them before. They rose sheer, as if they hadn’t intended to have a beach at all, and were determined not to cater for it.

Ariadne met Tom’s eyes. He looked vaguely embarrassed, like a host who has pressed a friend to come and dine and finds nothing in the house.

‘We are safe, aren’t we?’ Ariadne abruptly demanded.

‘Oh, perfectly safe,’ agreed Tom in a shocked voice, as if safety were a matter they had a right to take for granted. ‘Only we can’t get back for four hours. That’s all there is to it. I’m most frightfully sorry. ‘Fraid it’s a rotten poor show for you.’

‘Let’s go and have a look at the cave,’ said Ariadne graciously. She put her hand in Tom’s, partly to reassure him as to his having been responsible for the current, and partly because it was nice to have something to hold on to.

It had all been great fun, no doubt, that long struggle with the surf, but Ariadne felt that she had had enough of it to last her for some time.

It wasn’t a large cave, and it seemed to Ariadne rather near the beach. You could step into it from the top of a rock.

‘This unique bijou residence——’ began Tom; then he stopped short and glanced uncertainly at Ariadne. ‘It’s well above high-water mark,’ he said, as if that was what her eyes were asking him. ‘But we don’t need to go into it yet; it’s heaps nicer on the rocks in the sun.’

Ariadne was glad that there was no need to go into the cave just yet. She lay down on the sunniest rock, stretching herself carefully like a pocket-handkerchief spread out to dry, and Tom lay somewhere near her like another pocket-handkerchief. For a long time neither of them stirred nor spoke. Ariadne had no thoughts, she noticed that Tom had never let go of her hand, but she decided that it was too much bother to take it away from him.

At last she heard a too-familiar sound, and lifted her head anxiously. ‘What’s the sea doing, Tom?’ she asked.

Tom crawled to the edge of the rock. ‘Romping in,’ he reported. ‘The wind keeps freshening all the time. Lucky job we’re out of it!’

‘I suppose the cave’s really high enough?’ Ariadne asked a little uneasily.

‘Absolutely,’ said Tom, with refreshing conviction. ‘Dry as a bone.’ He ended this sentence with a word that sounded like ‘darling.’ But surely Tom could never have said ‘darling’? Many of Ariadne’s other men friends prefixed her name, or that of any other girl, with ‘darling,’ much as those of an earlier generation had said ‘Miss’; but Tom had only once, in a fit of frantic emotion, provoked by a dog-fight, gone so far as to call her ‘old thing.’ She glanced at him hastily, but there was no emotion whatever in Tom’s face; he was looking straight in front of him at the sea. Ariadne came to the conclusion that, owing to the noise of the surf, she must have made a mistake.

‘Let’s chuck pebbles into the water. I’ll go and get some,’ Tom suggested. He collected the pebbles, and they spent a pleasant half-hour playing ducks and drakes with the incoming sea.

‘We might as well move into the cave now,’ Tom nonchalantly suggested, when the game began to pall.

The wind blew into the cave and Ariadne felt very cold, then numb, and then at last the cold got beyond her control, and she began to shiver violently.

Tom asserted in a tone of self-reproach that she was cold, and Ariadne, with her teeth chattering and her lips blue, denied it flatly.

Tom stood her shivering for about five minutes longer, then he suddenly leaned forward and took her in his arms. ‘Well, you won’t be so cold now,’ he observed in a tone of satisfaction.

Ariadne knew that she ought to get out of Tom’s arms, but as she did not want to get out of them, and as it was warmer for both of them, she remained where she found herself. She told herself that being wet in a cold cave could not happen often; nor did Tom behave as if having her in his arms made the least difference to him. He looked over her head at the sea. Sometimes he said cheerful but histrionic things about the tide’s falling, and sometimes he just held her close and said nothing at all.

Ariadne avoided his eyes by shutting her own. Suddenly she felt the cold sting of a handful of spray.

‘We’ll move back a bit.’ Tom said gently, and carried her into the cave as far as there was room to carry her.

Ariadne opened her eyes and saw where the sea was. ‘Oh, Tom, you never told me!’ she cried reproachfully.

‘The tide’s turned,’ said Tom quickly.

The next wave broke at the cave’s mouth, and the spray drenched them.

‘It’s only spray,’ Tom said comfortingly.

Ariadne wasn’t sure if he kissed her hair; her face was hidden against him, but it seemed to her that his lips were near.

When he said again: ‘It’s all right, old girl, the tide really has turned,’ Ariadne could not believe him, although, to make it easier for Tom, she pretended to believe him. For a long time after the tide had begun to fall neither of them really believed it. They only knew that they were safe when they had ceased to reassure each other.

‘That was a near run thing,’ Tom admitted at last. ‘If the wind had been blowing a trifle harder, we’d have been drowned like cats in a sack.’

‘Then it was all bluff!’ Ariadne said indignantly, ‘about our being safe! Why did you want to be alone in it, Tom?’

‘I didn’t,’ Tom said quickly. ‘I was jolly glad—I mean I was far more frightened than you were. Anyway, it’s all over now, isn’t it? Still cold?’

Ariadne had moved out of his arms when they saw that the tide had begun to fall. She was still very cold, but she said with dignity that she was not. She thought Tom was smiling at her, but she did not choose to look at him to make sure.

When the waves left the beach free they ran races with each other to get warm, but it was a long time before they could get round the point. Ariadne insisted on trying before the tide had fallen low enough, and they had a mad dangerous scramble over the half-covered rocks.

They hoped that the beach would be empty, but people popped up from everywhere. Tom’s clothes had been found under a rock. A stolid policeman and a short-tempered coastguardsman reprimanded them severely for not being drowned, and a good many friendly ladies gave them good advice. It was a long time before they could get hot drinks and collect their clothes, and longer still before they could shake off superfluous ministrations.

Tom telephoned, and was lucky enough to get on to Edward. Edward was concerned and kind, and understood everything. He said that Vera had been so tired, they’d given up Fittleworth, and that Ariadne and Tom must get plenty to eat and not hurry. If they got home by ten, that would do beautifully.

‘Good man, Edward,’ Tom said to Ariadne, as he laid down the receiver. ‘Now we’ll eat.’

All dinner time Tom talked more than Ariadne had ever heard him talk before. He told her about his journey abroad, and it turned out that he’d seen a good deal, after all, besides wood. Ariadne was so thrilled, she forgot all about the cave or about having to be more careful than usual with Tom. She listened intently while Tom extracted the last episode of his travels from the inexpressive but retentive depths of his mind. Portions of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia had adhered to Tom, but nothing whatever of Tom had remained behind. He said several times: ‘I should have liked you to have been there,’ and once he said: ‘Those mountains would have been rather nice to look at, if you’d been there.’ But Ariadne saw that he hadn’t attached the slightest significance to what had happened in the cave. It had made no more difference to Tom than it had made to her.

They reached home without further misadventure. Edward came out to receive them, and pressed Tom ardently to come in and have a whisky and soda; but Tom wouldn’t come in, though it would not have mattered if he had, since Vera had gone to bed.

Edward explained Vera’s disappearance to Ariadne after Tom had gone.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘she was most frightfully upset. Your being nearly drowned and all that—it shook her to pieces.’

‘I should have thought,’ said Ariadne gravely, ‘that it would have shaken her awake, and not asleep. Wouldn’t you, Edward?’

But Edward, not meeting her eyes, murmured: ‘When a person’s been so ill——’ He did not want to have to tell her that Vera wouldn’t have gone to sleep if Ariadne had been half-drowned in any one else’s company.

CHAPTER X

Vera had gone to bed not only to punish Ariadne but to recover from Edward.

Two or three times during their married life Edward had said terrible things to her. He had not been angry with her when he had said these things; he had been mortally sad. It was as if he were defending, rather than attacking, Vera.

After Tom and Ariadne had gone out, Edward had said one of these things. It had made Vera give up going to Fittleworth.

‘You’ll kill the child’s love for you if you’re not careful,’ he had asserted bluntly.

When Vera said piteously: ‘But what did I do, Edward?’ he hadn’t let her off. He had answered: ‘You know quite well what you did. You showed up a shy young man’s helplessness as if it were a crime.’ Vera hadn’t been able to pretend that Edward hadn’t minded Tom’s being a raw lump. He had agreed that it would be a disaster if Ariadne married Tom. But he had shown Vera that, not only was it cruel to lay the young man out on the cold slab of her wit, it was extraordinarily silly. It was the most likely thing she could do to attach Ariadne to Tom. Vera hadn’t admitted her folly; she had grown cold as a stone, and out of her coldness she had struck back at Edward. She had succeeded in silencing him; but he did not take back his words.

Vera undressed and lay down on her bed, but though she turned the light out, she made no further attempt to sleep. Edward’s words haunted her. She felt no regret for what she had done to Tom. He was a mere black speck dancing before her eyes, without shape or significance. But Edward’s judgment of her cut into the depths of their romance. She wanted Edward always to see her as supremely wise, beautiful, and tender; why did he force her to be another Vera, a cold, merciless woman, grown mute and repellent, without the power either to see or to accept a retreat? She would have sacrificed her physical life for Edward, but she would sacrifice Edward himself rather than give in. Edward did not understand this strange compulsion which made her feel as if her will had the sanctity of law. He seemed to think that there were things outside Vera’s sense of right which were more important still. It was as if he had chosen Ariadne rather than Vera. She tried to fight back the rising sense of anger in her heart. Surely she was not jealous of her own child? She could not be! If Ariadne loved her, she was safe. But suppose Edward was right, and she had killed this love? Ariadne had never left her before without a glance back—a happy promise of return! If death had taken Ariadne, how could she have borne the memory of that blank parting look? What was it Edward had said? ‘We must take her as she is now, and not try to change her. We haven’t the right.’ Anger seized Vera again; why hadn’t she the right to change her own child? Why should Ariadne torture her with unworthy tastes? Edward was only a man. He liked Ariadne as men like women, for the sake of their own pleasure. He only wanted to please and to be pleased by her. But as a mother Vera cared first for the child’s welfare. Ariadne’s pleasure or displeasure was a small thing compared to her safety. Why had they not let Vera’s instinct be their guide?

She had been right about Tom. He was a besotted, ignorant young nincompoop, and he had risked Ariadne’s life. Vera had felt in him the stupidity which causes accidents. Why couldn’t Edward admit that she’d been simply more far-sighted than usual? If he would only come upstairs and let her explain everything again! She listened feverishly to the soundless house. Had there been another accident? Had that wretched dolt, not having succeeded in drowning Ariadne, wrecked his car and killed her on the way home? But to this imaginary danger Vera’s mind refused to react.

The silence broke at last. She heard the far-off thrill of the electric bell, and the opening of Edward’s study door. Then she heard Ariadne’s voice—that gay, precious voice, as clear as running water: ‘Is Mummy there?’ Then a sudden blank ‘Oh!’ of disappointment and surprise. Edward’s door closed again. It was only Edward who would know this new Ariadne—the Ariadne who had escaped death. To-morrow, with the swift ease of youth, Ariadne would have outpaced experience and left danger behind her. But to-night she would have the great escape fresh in her, and Edward would take it from her lips and eyes.

Vera sat up in bed and turned on the reading lamp by her side. She longed to unmake the bitter gesture of having gone to bed. It would be so easy to run downstairs and clasp the living Ariadne in her arms! But if she did this, she would be throwing dignity after displeasure. It would be a tacit admission that Edward was right, and that Ariadne’s behaviour needed no rebuke. She must stay where she was, but the decision cost her cruel pain. Why had this happiness, which had swept like a flood over the empty spaces of her hungering years, withdrawn itself? Why should Edward have it all?

Ariadne and Edward talked for a long time. Edward should have sent her straight to bed, not only because the child must be physically exhausted, but out of loyalty to Vera.

The Empire clock on the stairs rang out the hour with a mellow mockery. There was no other sound. Vera had a vision of them sitting together in Edward’s lamplit room. She could see the soft glow of the Davenport; the gleam of the silk Persian rugs; the firm lines of the clever etchings she had chosen; all the little, pitiful landmarks of their love, set out to adorn a new relationship—a relationship which shut her out. A voice within her told her that all she had to do was to go downstairs and join them, but she disregarded this voice as if it were an impertinent heckler interrupting an important speech. She knew that she would have been welcome; she didn’t, however bitterly she felt, accuse them of rank infidelity. They might share each other’s thoughts, but they were incapable of forgetting Vera. Even now they were cruelly and yet tenderly thinking of her as asleep. Edward would have told Ariadne that Vera was worn out; he wouldn’t have let her guess the brutal thing he had said before Vera went upstairs: ‘My dear, you may be tired, but you are certainly acting, not from fatigue, but from spite!’

‘Spite!’ What a word to use to her! Could a lover use such a word to his beloved and love her still? Was this weight upon her heart the knowledge that Edward had ceased to love her?

Vera quivered through and through, as if a weapon had reached a mortal part of her. But Edward still loved her! If he had not he would have let her escape his ruthless judgment.

The clock struck again through all her being. Ariadne and Edward had been together for an hour. If she went downstairs now, mightn’t Edward think she was jealous? Better let them do what they liked, talk till dawn if they chose, than pay them that last awful compliment.

A moment later she heard Edward’s door close and Ariadne’s light step on the stairs. Ah, if only the child would come in! But the steps crept past the door. Edward was alone now. Why didn’t he come up at once? What kept him in his room alone? Was he thinking of Ariadne, or of Vera? Was he, too, unhappy? If he had come up at once Vera could have asked him everything. It would have been a sign that there was no real estrangement between them. But his staying on downstairs held them fatally apart. She knew now that she couldn’t ask him anything.

He came at last. She heard him moving softly to and fro in his dressing-room. She watched the line of light under the door. He would sleep there to-night. He wouldn’t come in, for fear of disturbing her, unless she called him. Her whole being called him, but her lips refused to form his name. The light clicked out, and all sound ceased. The blood withdrew itself from Vera’s hands and feet and collected like a weight against her heart. Her hands slowly unclenched themselves and lay beside her lifeless. The clock struck again; it was midnight, Ariadne would be asleep now.

Vera rose softly. She slipped like a shadow through her room and out into the passage. Ariadne had forgotten to draw her blinds, her room was a pool of moonlight. All her clothes lay in a heap on the floor, one shoe had been flung on its side under the bed, the other stood upright, and its bright buckle sparkled back at the moon. Ariadne lay on her bed as flat as poured out milk. She hardly seemed to breathe, and Vera held her own breath as she stood looking down at her. Ariadne might have been lying stretched out on a dark shore, tossed there by cruel waves, and forever still. A passion of relief and longing shook Vera; it reached Ariadne through the veil of sleep. She stirred uneasily and murmured: ‘Mummy!’ but sleep held her fast and Vera made no sound. She only waited for a moment, and then took up the glittering shoe and laid it by its fellow, and very softly smoothed and tidied the crumpled heap of clothes. It made her heart feel lighter to touch Ariadne’s things with her hands.

When she reached her own room again it felt emptier than ever. Vera hesitated before she laid her hand on the door between her room and Edward’s. She hadn’t been able to call him when he was awake, but sleep made him hers. She only wanted to look at him, just to make sure he was there, and alive like Ariadne. In her thoughts they had both become unreal monsters of her pain and her tortured imagination; but Ariadne wasn’t, now Vera had seen her asleep, a monster any more, so perhaps even Edward might have become human.

His room was darker than Ariadne’s, she could not see the outline of his body, nor hear him breathe. Her groping hands touched the bed. What would she feel if she should find it empty? Her pride broke in her, and she bent over him and murmured his name. Edward did not answer her in words, but she knew that he was awake, and that his arms were open to receive her. The pain of her constricted heart relaxed against his breast.

‘Edward,’ she whispered, ‘do you still love me?’

His arms tightened round her. He did not say the words she longed to hear him say, but her heart, beating against his heart, knew itself forgiven.

CHAPTER XI

Vera herself carried up Ariadne’s breakfast tray. It was a wooden Tiroler platter painted daffodil yellow and covered with the filmiest of white tray cloths. Vera had spread a set of hyacinth blue china upon the delicate lace, and laid a June rose with petals of orange and pale gold by Ariadne’s plate.

Ariadne woke up to see her mother floating into the room, dressed in a forget-me-not blue nightgown, with a loose cloak over it, the colour of a peacock’s breast, and carrying the tray with the lightness of a Botticelli angel. Vera’s eyes were just a shade deeper and more shiningly blue than her blue gown; they rested upon Ariadne with an intensity of tenderness.

‘My darling!’ breathed Vera. ‘I came up last night after you were asleep. I couldn’t bear not to see you alive!’ She put the tray carefully on a breakfast table by Ariadne’s bed, and pulling up the blind let the sunshine stream into the room. ‘I would have waited up for you,’ Vera added, facing Ariadne, but with her back to the light, ‘but my heart was so stupid, Edward wouldn’t let me. I wonder if you felt that I was in the room. You stirred once in your sleep while I looked at you.’

Ariadne was still sleepy, but her eyes left the lovely hovering figure and rested for a moment upon her own clothes neatly folded, as she knew she hadn’t left them last night. She remembered that she had kicked her shoes off; and they were now placed side by side.

Apparently this proof of Vera’s presence did not touch Ariadne as Vera had expected it to touch her; on the contrary, a faint fold appeared on her smooth brows and she said with less than her usual equanimity: ‘I awfully wanted to see you when I came in last night, Mummy!’

‘I know, my darling!’ Vera answered quickly, ‘but I just couldn’t bear you to see how stupidly my heart was upset! Edward, poor lamb, was terrified, and we neither of us wanted you to get another fright after the awful time you’d been through already!’

Ariadne opened her egg with a sharp efficient tap. She looked hard at it—as if somehow or other she couldn’t visualize Edward’s terror, or if it had existed, as if she were not prepared to share it. Vera’s heart beat painfully. She felt for the first time how callous the new generation was; and how unable to respond to delicate claims upon emotion. Ariadne settled stolidly to work upon her egg, as if her mother’s heart were neither here nor there.

‘It wasn’t so very awful!’ Ariadne said at last, referring apparently to her own experiences. ‘Most of it was great fun!’

‘I saw it all night long!’ Vera said shudderingly. ‘That cruel, pitiless sea!’ Ariadne made no immediate answer. She was thinking that what had seemed to her really pitiless had taken place in the morning before she had gone anywhere near the sea. Ariadne thought she ought to feel compunction at having upset her mother, but the memory of how her mother had tried to upset Tom intervened. She couldn’t transfer to her mother the sympathy she had felt for Tom. She wanted to say how much she loved the little orange and gold rose, but she couldn’t even say that; instead, she remarked a little sulkily: ‘People can’t help strange currents! Neither of us had ever bathed there before. We’re both strong swimmers. It was just a piece of bad luck!’

‘It may be very silly of me, darling,’ Vera murmured with the first vague hint of reproach in her voice, ‘but I have the feeling that nobody should have let you bathe from a strange beach without finding out first about currents!’

‘If you mean Tom ought to have found out,’ said Ariadne, taking rather more salt than she needed and making a face after it, ‘all I can say is, he saved my life. I couldn’t have got through that surf at the end without him. I’ve got a tongue in my head as well as Tom, you know. I could have asked about currents if the beach hadn’t been empty. Everyone was tucked away for lunch! Besides, I’d have swum out farther still if Tom hadn’t made me turn.’

‘I’m sure, dearest,’ said Vera, carefully choosing her words, and not unwilling that Ariadne should notice her care, ‘that the young man is physically very strong, and would, of course, not want to save himself without you! But it was his expedition, wasn’t it? And do you think yourself that he should have taken you to a strange empty beach and risked unknown currents?’

‘Well, Mother,’ said Ariadne, pushing away the tray with an irritable movement, ‘I don’t know what you mean by strange! There weren’t cannibals or sharks or tidal waves to be expected at Saint Margaret’s Bay. People do bathe from there and come back to tea afterwards. Accidents happen anywhere! The great thing is to be in an accident with a person who knows how to get you out of it. I was.’

‘Yes, dear, of course!’ Vera agreed soothingly. ‘But I do sometimes wonder about accidents!’ Vera’s eyes, as wistful as rain-drenched violets, rested appealingly upon Ariadne. ‘One can’t, of course, help what the insurance companies call “the hand of God,” but a clever man once said to me that no sensible person, who moved slowly and thought clearly, need ever find himself in an unnecessary danger. Don’t you think that’s true? Don’t you think that anything that would save one, if it could be found out, ought to be found out?’

‘If it is true,’ said Ariadne defensively, ‘it’s as true of me as of Tom! You keep talking as if I were a baby, being trundled along in a pram by a careless nursemaid! Tom’s no more responsible than I am!’

‘But, darling,’ said Vera, with her tenderest smile, ‘you needn’t defend your friend so gallantly! I never said you weren’t equally responsible! And all I care about is that you’re safe now—and that you’ll keep as safe as you can hereafter!’

Ariadne looked a little baffled. She didn’t want to appear to be gallantly defending Tom. And, after all, why was she defending him? It was she, not Vera, who had persistently named him.

‘Do have some more breakfast, darling,’ said Vera plaintively. ‘It’s Tiptree jam!’

Ariadne drew the tray nearer her and resumed her breakfast, but it seemed to her to have less taste to it. She felt that she had been unfair and a little rude to her mother—and she was not quite sure how to make up for it. It is not easy to resume intimacy with a person to whom you have just said: ‘Why do you keep talking?’ Nor did Vera make it any easier; she continued to look wistful, tender, and a little crushed.

‘What are you going to do with your Sunday?’ Ariadne asked at last, and then she saw from Vera’s face that this looked as if she wished to get rid of her mother.

‘Oh, we’ll just drive and drive,’ said Vera, with artificial cheerfulness. ‘Edward always has a dozen little Paradises in his mind for week-ends. And we’ll drive to the nearest Paradise and sit in a garden or on a green bench under a tree, and thank God that you’re alive. That’s all I really want to do to-day, I think!’

Ariadne was silent; she was quite sure she had been a beast now; but she still wanted to oust her mother’s deity and insert Tom. Surely Vera, who could so really mind about her danger, might be a trifle grateful to the person who had brought her safely out of it?

‘If the clever man,’ Ariadne said at last, ‘who thought danger unnecessary, had had to swim as hard as we had, to get out of it, I think he’d know one can’t always help oneself! Especially when—on the top of the current—there was the beach with cliffs you couldn’t climb, the tide coming up again and that awfully little cave! Tom was really splendid. He made me believe the tide couldn’t come up to where we were; and when it did, he——’

Ariadne broke off; she seemed to see in Vera’s eyes how much Vera disliked the cave having been so small. It made Ariadne suddenly remember that Tom had held her in his arms. She hadn’t forgotten it when she woke up, but she hadn’t remembered it in the same way. Vera didn’t ask Ariadne any questions. She seemed to take no special notice of her broken sentence. She waited tranquilly for Ariadne to finish it; and when she saw that Ariadne wasn’t going to try to end it, she said, without changing the kindly casualness of her own tone: ‘I’m sure Mr. Anderson behaved as a decent man should behave in such a situation to a girl he respects. I’ve always found that men—except, perhaps, your father—behaved as women expected them to behave. But I think what my clever man meant was that when you’re in a current you can’t help what happens; the whole thing really is like any other great force of nature—falling in love, for instance—you get swept away. But if one knows one has taken a fancy to an unsuitable person, one must not put oneself in a position where one can be swept away! Of course, currents carry one off one’s feet, but feet, like hearts, you see, don’t need to get where they can be carried off!’

Vera met Ariadne’s wide, fierce grey eyes with a kind but dreadful firmness. Ariadne looked like an animal which has not made up its mind whether to fight or fly, but Vera’s eyes had no fight in them—they were as clear and candid as a crystal stream. Ariadne couldn’t, though she looked for it, see anything to fight about; so she flew instead.

‘Well, it’s all over now, isn’t it?’ she said, with would-be airiness. ‘I’m going to golf with William to-day.’

‘With William?’ Vera asked her. ‘A—er—your father, do you mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Ariadne, ‘I generally do, you know, on Sundays. We both adore golf.’

‘And what does Constance do,’ Vera asked smilingly, ‘while you’re adoring golf?’

‘Constance,’ Ariadne replied, returning Vera’s smile, ‘goes to church, takes the children to the Zoo, and calls on her aunts. She has a nice little row of rich aunts, who are expected to pop off and leave their comfortable hoards to the children. Constance just keeps a casual eye on the popping.’

Vera gave a friendly little laugh and then sighed. The laugh was to show Ariadne how thoroughly she sympathized with her in all her feelings about Constance, and how discreet she was going to be over the feelings she couldn’t share about William; but the sigh came from another source.

Vera wished that she could golf with Ariadne, swim with her, make her eyes shine with kindred athletic triumphs, and not always have to play the same passive part. Why should she be confined to the role of dainty, helpless Madonna, lying so often on sofas, or so glad of the easiness of chairs? She knew that she had the spirit of Joan of Arc, and it was hard to be as brittle as a Dresden china shepherdess.

She was not jealous of Ariadne’s physical powers. She loved to look at the slim, efficient child, and feel that she was responsible for a vitality so much stronger and more sustained than her own.

If only she had had strength enough to share the objects of this long-limbed daughter’s energies, how easily Vera could have eliminated the Williams and Toms! But she couldn’t hit balls or plunge into rough seas; or even relax unconcernedly in furiously driven small cars.

Had she been able to do these things, would there have been a need for this tortuous, intermittent combat of wills? She could have risked Ariadne’s immature tastes and out-shone her trifling intimacies. Vera and Edward between them could have been all in all to the dear, uncritical, impulsive child!

‘Why are you sighing, Mummy?’ Ariadne asked in a softened voice.

‘I was thinking,’ said Vera, rising gracefully from her chair, and steadying the tray which Ariadne had pushed perilously to the edge of the table, ‘that I had lost something!’

‘Oh, what is it, Mummy?’ Ariadne cried, ready to jump out of bed in an instant search for Vera’s lost possession; but Vera laid a restraining hand upon Ariadne’s arm and laughed softly.

‘I’ve lost thirteen years,’ she said, with a lightness which touched Ariadne, as no appeal to her sympathy had yet touched her, ‘and not even you, my darling, can lay your hand on them again!’

CHAPTER XII

Tom had always had a quiet mind; his affections were deep and steadfast, but they were not easily roused. He was extremely attached to his family, but he never saw more of them than he could help. People, he dimly felt, were less made to go about with than to go away from; they were necessary for games and at meals, but intimacy was a clutching thing which had always filled him with terror. Even his dogs had to learn when he wanted them and when he didn’t.

What had first drawn Tom to Ariadne was that she seemed a girl who was very easily detached. She never asked him why he hadn’t turned up, nor when he was coming again. Tom knew that he was the kind of man girls take to, if he takes to them; but it seemed to him that it would be a pity to get married and so be tied down to only one of them. Ariadne was nice to go about with. She played fair and she showed pluck, but she was not at all Tom’s ideal woman. She was pleasant to look at, but not provocative. What excited Tom’s fancy was a woman whose lips were stiff with carmine and who carried a complexion he would have to dig through to find the cheek. He did not want his lady’s hair to look too real, and he hoped she would be thinner than Ariadne and look as if she could writhe easily. She might have one or two pasts, but she was to find Tom more misleading than she had found any one else. Her tastes were to be the same as Tom’s, but she was not herself to wish to do any of the things Tom did. Ariadne always wanted to drive cars and sail boats. Tom’s ideal woman would wish to be driven, and lean back against cushions while Tom rowed or sailed his own boats. But there are upheavals in human relationships which alter the landscapes of entire lives. The smooth green hill of Tom’s affection for Ariadne became suddenly volcanic. When he held Ariadne in his arms in the mouse-hole of a cave he knew that she was the only thing in life that mattered to him. He did not want to bother her about it, but he made up his mind that if the tide didn’t go down in time, he would tell her. If it hadn’t been that it hurt him horribly to think of her little body being dashed to pieces against rocks, he would have been almost disappointed when he saw that the tide had turned.

He was so full of Ariadne that he stayed away from her for a whole week afterwards. It frightened him to find that he didn’t want to be alone any more. He smoked an inordinate number of pipes while sitting in his suburban garden by himself, listening to his portable gramophone. With extraordinary subtlety and great economy of the English tongue, he succeeded in finding out from his father that Ariadne’s father knew that she had taken no harm from her adventure.

Tom flattered himself that a few half-swallowed words and a non-committal grunt had entirely deluded his father into thinking that Tom had no interest in Ariadne but merely the worst manners of a generation notorious for its social lapses. After this—five days after—Tom felt himself at liberty to ring Ariadne up and ask her to dine and dance at the Ritz. He hadn’t expected her to say ‘Yes,’ nor did she at first; but by dint of relays of pennies and a determination which veiled itself behind chaff, Tom finally succeeded.

Ariadne would come; but he hadn’t expected that she would come as she did. The girl he picked up in the hall was not Ariadne; she was Paris. She wore a white dress with a daring touch of black; every line of it was perfect, and there hardly seemed anything to it but lines. It made Ariadne look desperately fair, and at the same time rather wicked. She wore a black cloak with an immense white feather collar. Tom couldn’t connect this sophisticated vision of an Ariadne, who might be going to lead a ballet, with the little wet body he had held in his arms in the cave. He was shocked by this new and startling apparition, so erect and so smart, so vivid and so mature; but when he met her eyes, he saw in them a curious and pleasant fear, as if Ariadne were finding him rather strange and terrifying too. They were both a little stiff with each other in the taxi. Tom asked her what she had been doing all the week, and Ariadne said nonchalantly: ‘Oh, heaps!’ But she didn’t tell him that what she had been doing oftenest was wondering why he hadn’t rung her up before.

When they reached the Ritz, Tom ordered a short, good dinner, with a sound wine. They knew each other’s favourite tastes, so there was no time lost. Neither of them seemed particularly hungry.

‘Pity we couldn’t have had some of this chicken and asparagus in the cave,’ Tom remarked; but he saw that he had made a mistake—from the expression on Ariadne’s face he gathered that there had been no cave.

Tom noticed with a deep and curious pride that everyone round them was looking, as often as it was polite to look, at Ariadne. Ariadne was quieter than usual; she sat very still and blushed rather easily. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off her rust-coloured hair, a little wavy and very thick. Her eyes between her dark lashes were precious as jewels. There was a bloom about her face, a vague softness like the down on a moth’s wing, which Tom did not remember having noticed before. Paint would have spoiled it, and scent, if she had used any scent, would have been a pity. Once, when riding, Tom had jumped a hawthorn bush in full bloom which had been as white as Ariadne’s shoulders.

‘We might dance now,’ he murmured, because it would have been rude to go on looking at Ariadne.

She seemed more real when she came into his arms; her beauty and her nearness quieted the rapid beating of his heart. He could speak to her now, as he had not been able to speak while all those people were round them and the table was between.

‘It was a hell of a long week!’ Tom whispered, with his lips against her hair.

‘Yes,’ said Ariadne. Her eyes looked into his and the light wavered in them and shone like small blue flames.

‘Then—why——?’ She forgot to pretend that she hadn’t noticed his not having rung her up before.

‘What happened to me the other day,’ Tom explained, holding her closer, ‘was rather a serious business. I had to think it over.’

‘It happened—to us both—didn’t it?’ asked Ariadne.

‘Well, I dunno,’ said Tom, ‘if you mean what I do? That’s what I’ve got to find out. You’re not talking about being half drowned, are you? Nothing in that, when you come to think of it, one way or another!’

Ariadne’s eyes disappeared for a moment, her lashes covered them, and Tom wished they were not so long; but suddenly they lifted, and the light in her eyes took his breath away.

‘No,’ said Ariadne quietly. ‘I didn’t mean only the sea either.’

Tom couldn’t for a time go on talking; he could only try not to kiss her hair. A mysterious delight floated between the flying phrases of the music, sharper than any smooth completed tune. They were borne along on it, irrespective of any efforts of their own, and when the dance was over they were suddenly forced back upon their own initiative, so that they felt exposed and strange.

Tom didn’t know how they managed to get to the chairs under an upholstered-looking palm, but once they reached this shelter he felt as if they had been sitting there always, and that he had always been looking at Ariadne’s head, a little bent, while she thoughtfully regarded the diamond buckle on her shoe.

It was apparently necessary to speak again. ‘I didn’t know till then,’ Tom said reluctantly, with pauses between the words, as if he were out of breath with running. ‘I do most awfully care, Ariadne! I hope you don’t mind! Of course one never knows.’

‘No,’ breathed Ariadne again, with that incredible softness which was so unlike the usual briskness of Ariadne’s voice. ‘But that’s just it, Tom,’ she added, giving up the sparkle of the buckle to meet his eyes, ‘one can like a person so awfully, can’t one, and not be sure?’

‘I didn’t say I wasn’t sure,’ said Tom firmly. ‘I’m perfectly sure. It’s you I meant. I think all other girls are beasts.’

‘Was that why you didn’t ring me up?’ asked Ariadne.

‘One of the reasons,’ Tom admitted. ‘I wanted to think about you. I had before, of course, but not—like that.’

‘But can’t you think about me when you are with me?’ Ariadne demanded.

‘No,’ said Tom. After he had said ‘No’ he went on looking at her.

‘Let’s dance,’ said Ariadne.

They danced again; but this time there was no floor beneath them. What they passed over was air. Tom was perfectly happy; he didn’t want to say any more, nor, for a time, did Ariadne. But she was less happy than Tom, and less sure. Fears, all sorts of fears, were part of her happiness.

The dance was over far too quickly. A wild cascade of short phrases pelted each other into silence. Tom took his arms away from Ariadne with increased difficulty. It seemed to him preposterous to have to dance in a room full of other people, and more preposterous still to have those people continue to be there when the music had stopped. He was a little startled when Ariadne said, on their way back to the chairs under the meretricious palm: ‘Tom, we needn’t get married or anything, need we?’

‘Hadn’t thought about it,’ he admitted. ‘But people do, don’t they, sooner or later, who feel like us?’

‘Yes,’ Ariadne said sadly. ‘And then they turn into husbands and wives, and start trampling on each other. Look at the way most married men have such a disappointed look—even Edward. And women have a patient expression, as if they were putting up with something. Tom, I couldn’t bear it, if I made you look sad, or you made me look patient.’

Tom said: ‘Let’s go and have a drink. I don’t feel at all sad—yet!’

Ariadne watched him smile, and it suddenly seemed to her as if she had never seen Tom smile before. There were so many things in his smile, so much kindness, such strength, and such fun. You couldn’t be so very stupid if you had fun hidden in your smiles. She was too curious about Tom to go on worrying about marriage. This man who danced with her, and talked with her under the palm tree, wasn’t the usual Tom. He was passionately alive, gayer than she had ever seen him, and yet more in earnest, and she herself wasn’t the same humdrum Ariadne. She felt a sense of power, as if she carried the whole of beauty about with her, loose in her hand. Tom, though he thought that women should be controlled, felt this power and submitted to its challenge. Nothing was real to him except Ariadne. The lights, the men and women around them were faint obstructive shadows. He couldn’t have said if the room were hot or cold, or if there were a great many or only a few people in it. He scarcely realized that they were in a room. He didn’t know if he had drunk his cocktail or not. The only thing he did know was that he must sometimes take his eyes off Ariadne, and that doing so inconvenienced him.

‘Let’s go outdoors,’ Tom said abruptly.

Ariadne went into the cloakroom and put on the new black cloak with the white feather collar. The girl who looked back at her from the glass of the cloakroom startled her. She was a beautiful stranger with the happiest face Ariadne had ever seen.

‘I didn’t know I looked like that!’ Ariadne thought a little gravely. ‘I suppose it’s being in love.’ It made her hesitate before she went back to Tom. But when she saw him, she forgot what the strange girl had looked like.

Tom gave a deep sigh of relief when they found themselves in the taxi. He told the driver to drive slowly through the park.

‘I know,’ he said apologetically, ‘that it’s not considered nice to kiss people in taxis, but I hope you don’t mind?’

Ariadne had a moment before his lips met hers to wonder whether she minded or not. For this moment the world seemed very light, and crashed noisily all round them—and then she felt Tom’s arms around her ... and the lights and the noise both disappeared.

CHAPTER XIII

Edward knew that he ought to send Ariadne straight to bed. She wore a pair of apple-green pyjamas and carried in her hands a teacup full of crême de menthe and a large wedge of chocolate cake. Her eyes were full of fun and confidence. It was a midnight picnic.

The strange and lovely summer night breathed through Edward’s thin bronze curtains. He knew it was a conspiracy; yet how could Edward tell Ariadne it was a conspiracy when she thought it was a picnic? How could he explain that her mother would bitterly resent their talking together; resent the night; resent their solitude; resent, above all, their fun? He couldn’t say: ‘Go up to bed, because if Vera were to come downstairs to see what I was up to, as she sometimes does, she’d be furious to find us together.’ That would be to give Vera away; it would give himself away as well, for it would unlock their difference. If Vera were to be angry, Edward ought, of course, to be angry too.

Ariadne placed the crême de menthe and the chocolate cake on the floor, and sat cross-legged on a cushion in front of the open window with her back against Edward’s knees.

‘You ought,’ he said feebly, ‘to be in bed, oughtn’t you?’ He tried to make his voice sound repellent and mediæval, but he didn’t succeed; it only sounded as if he wished that he were Ariadne’s age.

Ariadne, if she had known of Edward’s wish, would not have sympathized with it. The beauty of Edward, to her, was that he was as old as the hills, with all the wisdom of high places in him. He was Experience, Achieved Romance, and to-night she meant to turn him into Destiny.

‘Oh, no!’ she said serenely, sipping at the crême de menthe. ‘Bed! Certainly not! I’ve come down to talk for ever! I’ve got awfully special things to talk about. Don’t you like being told awfully special things in the middle of the night? There’s lots more of Vera’s party cake in the pantry, if you won’t take crême de menthe, and it’s wonderfully full of chocolate.’

Edward, hiding a shudder, waved the chocolate cake aside. ‘It depends,’ he said cautiously, ‘what kind of special things they are. D’you think you ought to tell me special things which you haven’t told Vera? Or does she already know them?’

‘Oh, rather not!’ said Ariadne. ‘No one in the world is to know but you, Edward. I don’t know that I know them myself till I’ve told you. But you’re easier to talk to than any one else. Father you can’t talk to; all I can ever say to him is: “Of course you’re right!” or “I think it starts at ten-thirty!” Talking to Mummy, of course, is different. It’s quite lovely, like eating the very best peach. It’s so beautiful, you want to get all the juice you can without being stopped by the stone. I could ask her anything, of course, but not exactly tell her things. And, besides, these special things are about Tom. You can’t expect me to talk to her about him, can you?’

She turned and laid an elbow on Edward’s knee, half facing him. Edward shook his head. He couldn’t tell her not to put her elbow on his knee: he could only sit back a little stiffly; hoping that she wouldn’t take it off again.

‘Tom came rather suddenly on to Vera’s horizon,’ he explained. ‘There’s a good deal of him, and not the kind of stuff she’s used to. You know yourself what fine and delicate things Vera’s life is full of. Tom, wandering about in them, would be rather like an elephant in and out of a bed of lilies. I can see her liking him outside her life, if you know what I mean; and I can see for myself that he’s awfully good stuff. But it’s easier for a man to like another man than for a woman to, unless he puts himself out to please her. Couldn’t Tom put himself out to please Vera?’

‘No,’ said Ariadne regretfully, but with deep conviction, ‘he couldn’t. He doesn’t get out. But he’d love to do things for her—anything practical, you know, like mending something she’d broken, or taking her out for a run. She might get used to his not talking, don’t you think? He doesn’t a bit interfere with your talking. He likes it, as long as he isn’t expected to answer. I don’t think Tom’s the least bit vulgar, do you?’

‘No,’ Edward agreed promptly, ‘I can see he isn’t. He’s only rather solid. Vera can do anything with quicksilver people. She likes all your other friends, you see, so much; that’s what makes it perhaps more difficult for her to accept Tom. How serious is it that she doesn’t like him?’

Edward’s pipe went out after this question. Ariadne turned so that she faced him. Her eyes had an intent and wistful look.

‘It’s awfully serious,’ she said gravely. ‘I’m afraid I love him.’

It was Edward who felt embarrassed. He had half anticipated Ariadne’s feeling, but not her direct expression of it; nor that, after having said she loved Tom, she would say no more. It left upon Edward the full weight of her young heart.

‘Have you ever loved any one before?’ Edward asked diffidently. ‘One wants, you know, about anything very serious, to have a standard for comparison. After all, you’re not quite nineteen.’

‘Juliet was fourteen,’ Ariadne reminded him, ‘when she said: “Oh, happy dagger, this is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die!” and stuck it in rather than live without Romeo. Well, I’d feel the same if Tom were dead.’

‘And other men?’ Edward asked, after a short pause, ‘have you ever felt anything for them?’

‘Oh, lots and lots,’ replied Ariadne. ‘I’ve wanted to dance with them for ever. Sometimes I’ve quite liked being kissed, but only quite liked it, you know. That’s not the real thing. I haven’t ever felt turned upside down before, and yet quite comfortable, as if the thing, whatever it is, had got into the air.’ She leaned away from Edward and looked out into the quiet square. ‘It’s like that,’ she said vaguely, ‘like air all round me!’

A little wind blew in and ruffled her rust-coloured hair. Edward watched her grave and absorbed face. He wondered that he had thought it like her mother’s; its strength was so untried. The lovely setting of the bright, candid eyes, and the clear jutting forward of her small, straight nose were the same as Vera’s, but the upturned lips were wider than Vera’s—not so beautiful—but so much more generous! He watched the sudden transfusion of deep rose, which came and went over the whiteness of her skin. Her blood spoke quicker than her thoughts.

‘I’m so happy!’ said Ariadne at last. She spoke out into the night, not as if she were speaking to Edward.

‘Then I’m happy too,’ Edward replied, moistening his lips, which felt curiously dry and hard.

Ariadne turned back to him and laid her hand on his knee.

‘That’s why I could tell you,’ she said gently. ‘I knew you would be. Only, Edward, need people be married? Must love be shut up in a box? I’d like to go all over the world with Tom, live under hedges with him, whirl about in his car, be with him whenever he was off on an adventure, but I don’t want to settle down.’

Edward thought this over very carefully. It met an echo in his own heart: he, too, had never wanted to settle down. He had wanted to carry his poetry off with him to unknown lands. But this sight of Ariadne’s hand upon his knee, this nearness to her which was too beautiful to claim, too fugitive to lose, was as close as he had ever come to escaping with his poetry intact. First love and last love, he thought, were, after all, the same; they were like the veils of faint obscuring mist which cling at dawn and sunset to the dullest landscape, transforming it into a mysterious beauty, which day or night must equally dispel. There is no difference, he told himself, between these beautiful half shades, except that after dawn comes day, and after sunset night.

‘Couldn’t you,’ he said at last, ‘settle down too? You could have the adventures, I mean, even the hedges, and of course the whirling—that goes on all the time now—but behind them, safe and solid, everything else as well?’

‘But, Edward,’ Ariadne pleaded, ‘there’d be babies and bottles and ever so many things tied round one’s ankles. One would never really get away. And then you’d see each other every day; and sometimes, even if I wanted to see Tom, I might not want to be seen by him! And it’s not only myself. It’s Vera, and her feeling, that would get in the way. If she goes on hating him, shouldn’t I, if I were always with him, lose her? You don’t know what she is to me, Edward. It’s not like other girls, who have always had mothers, and used up the feeling. That’s it, you see. I’m awfully afraid of used-up feelings. I like them better with the edge on them. And I’ve seen such a rotten lot of marriages. Only yours is right. And, Edward, you won’t mind my saying something dreadful, will you? I’ll let you say anything back you like about Tom and me. But is your marriage exactly right?’ Her hand gripped his knee; her eyes looked up into his, burning with their fearless desire for truth.

Edward could not cheat her: he must tell her all the truth; but only the necessary truth—he must protect Vera.

‘What is it exactly that you want to know?’ he asked, after a pause. ‘Whether love after marriage, after a long marriage, is as great as it might have been if that life hadn’t been spent together? Or whether married love is the same as the untried love you feel now? I can tell you that it is much greater, but I can’t tell you that it’s the same. It’s not so—exciting.’

‘Why is it different?’ Ariadne demanded. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

‘Well,’ said Edward slowly, ‘you’ve heard of instantaneous death? It’s a thing you can imagine—so quick and painless that it’s a kind of ecstasy—an escape. It’s true it has to be described by someone who hasn’t had it, but I take it that there is a difference between the thing which blots you out in full vigour and the thing that meets you at the end of a long, exhausting strain. New love must be something like instantaneous death; you get cast into a swift new element, and you’re cast whole. You’ve suffered no strain, no shock. Marriage and a long life together is often as painful as an illness; it’s the whole process of love. A gold sovereign is worth the same whether you get it fresh from the mint, or whether it has been used a thousand times; but if it has been used, the glitter is gone. I don’t think it’s the fault of love. Life’s a painful business, Ariadne, and it gets more painful as you get older, because it holds more. When you’re young, it only holds yourself.’

‘But you—but Vera’—Ariadne murmured—‘do you think of her the same, Edward?’

Edward took time to relight his pipe and draw at it thoughtfully. He would have liked to have stopped at the merciful abstract, and not gone on to what he thought of Vera.

‘When Vera nearly died the other day,’ he said at last, ‘I knew that if I’d lost her when I first loved her, I’d have had another life—my own—to fall back upon. Probably what people call one’s heart would have broken; certainly I’d have had a great grief and gone partially under to life, but not the whole of me; and of what went under most would have come up again. But if I lost her now I should go under and stay under.’

Ariadne listened intently. ‘But are you happy?’ she whispered. ‘Happy as I am; as happy as gold?’

Edward shook his head. ‘Some of our life together has been happy,’ he said, ‘and some of it has been horrible. And I believe that marriages are generally mixed like that. How can it be otherwise if you’re both intelligent and human? Two people feeling that they belong to each other, and yet wanting to be themselves. You tear against each other, and it’s your own flesh you tear. What does it matter to me what any one else is like? But if part of myself is different, how can it not matter to the rest of myself? Storms come in all lives, and in married life you are inclined to hold the other person responsible for the storms. I think this is unfair, but I think it happens; and it replaces the earlier feeling of love—the belief that only joy comes from the beloved. But storms are not the whole of anything, either, they go as they come. If instead of the storm going, the person you loved went, you would know the difference, because after the storm has gone the landscape remains; but if the person you loved went, there would be nothing real left. That is all I can tell you about married love, Ariadne.’

‘But, Edward,’ Ariadne asked in a low voice, ‘can you think now, after you’ve loved Mummy all these years, could you think of any one else as you used to think of her? That’s what I’m so afraid of. I shouldn’t mind storms, or being unhappy sometimes, nor even tearing each other up, but if I were to find I could want—want any one else as I want Tom now, that frightens me. Could that happen, Edward? I wouldn’t want to break up a home—a home with children, perhaps. I’d rather never make one!’

Edward had wondered if Ariadne were going to ask him that. He tried to remember how he had first loved Vera. Women wore long dresses then and had masses of hair. He could remember Vera’s hair, but her eyes turned suddenly different. Vera’s lovely eyes were always mysterious, and the eyes which Edward saw had no single shadow in them and were as clear as a southern sea. The face he succeeded in remembering, looking away from Ariadne down the long years, was Ariadne’s face.

‘We didn’t have, Vera and I,’ he stammered at last, ‘quite the same chance as young lovers. We couldn’t have children. Children may be a bother, but they blot out other things, other dangers. They give you all the youth you want. They stop its seeming a magic thing. If you haven’t had a child, youth’s too beautiful—you can’t keep your mind off it. Vera and I never had each other’s youth to remember. We had to begin too late, and we never had the fresh youth of a child to make up for the loss of our own. I never could imagine——’ He broke off suddenly. ‘I should have liked to have seen Vera young!’ he murmured under his breath.

‘But she was young!’ Ariadne expostulated; ‘only twenty-six or twenty-seven when you first met her, Edward, and she must have been beautiful then! She is beautiful now!’

‘She was so beautiful,’ agreed Edward, ‘that old people used to turn in the street to look after her as if she were sunlight moving away from them. But she wasn’t young. I mean she’d grown up, and you were five years old.’

‘You minded her having had me?’ Ariadne asked gently.

Edward nodded. He had not known till then that he had always minded it.

‘And that,’ said Ariadne, after a long pause, ‘made you, years and years afterwards, like someone awfully young?’

‘I have never been untrue to Vera,’ said Edward slowly, ‘not what people call untrue; and I’ve always loved her. I told you I love her more now with all the weight of all our years together. She’s fixed in my heart. Just because we haven’t had a child, she’s been my child. There’s been everything except our youth together.’

‘And you mean,’ said Ariadne, who, dearly as she loved Edward, couldn’t keep her thoughts continuously off Tom, ‘you mean it would be different for us; we could have our youth too; we could have everything?’

‘Yes,’ Edward agreed, dragging his mind away from the light on Ariadne’s hair, ‘you could have everything.’

‘And would that be enough?’ Ariadne persisted, ‘enough to last one all one’s life?’

‘I think it would,’ said Edward, ‘as long as you are sure of all the grounds of your love. I don’t mean sure that you’ll never disappoint or annoy each other. You’ll have to do that; you’ll have to hate each other sometimes. But you mustn’t have to be ashamed of each other—that’s a pain you shouldn’t have to suffer. You ought to be sure before you marry Tom that his faults will only make you want to box his ears, not to hide yourself away from him.’

Ariadne was silent for a long time. Edward began to hope that perhaps he had said enough. He was a reserved man, and Ariadne had dragged at the roots of his being. He hoped that she wouldn’t, after challenging each of his gods in turn, find her way to the door of the Mysteries which is the final privacy of the human heart. He almost wanted to go to bed, for fear that Ariadne would find that door. But Ariadne was not yet quite satisfied.

‘Tell me, Edward,’ she said at last, ‘have you ever—have you ever wanted to hide away from Mummy? I know I oughtn’t to ask you, but I must know. Because, after all, I’m a part of Mummy.’

‘Isn’t that a reason,’ Edward asked desperately, ‘for your not knowing?’

‘Ah! now you’ve told me,’ said Ariadne triumphantly. ‘You have wanted to hide! Just like I did the other day when she hurt Tom! Why does she do those things, Edward, when she’s so beautiful? Why does she throw her beauty away?’

‘She doesn’t know she’s doing it,’ Edward said in a low voice. ‘Of course in a sense she knows. Knows, I mean, what she’s doing to the other person. But not what she’s doing to herself. And it’s not all her fault, Ariadne. She was brought up not to know herself. You’ve never had to swallow the funny, muffled up things she was forced to swallow. She’s awfully clever, she knows far more about modern thought than either of us do, but the mould of her mind isn’t modern. She can’t see straight.’

‘But you are as old as Mummy, and you aren’t like that,’ Ariadne objected. ‘You don’t hit people in the dark.’

‘I had my English public school training,’ Edward answered; ‘poor sort of loose dog-fight stuff, but not morally treacherous. Women, in our day, haven’t even got that chance. They’d got to pretend one thing and be another. They never lived out in the open at all. Vera has a very high standard; the trouble is it’s too high. There are moments when the human being in her breaks out. If you’re a human being from the start, with a standard to match, you don’t need to break out. You are, as it were, out.’ Edward stopped, withdrew his pipe, filled it slowly, lit it, and began, almost contentedly, to smoke it. The worst was over now, and he could look at Ariadne again.

Ariadne stared straight in front of her, her hands grasping her slim ankles. Edward could see one bare foot, the pink toes very straight and slim, and an arched instep like Vera’s. Only Vera’s feet were smaller and the toes not so straight. They both had the same beautiful wrists and ankles, but the spirit of their bodies was different. The spirit of Vera’s body was withheld, ungiven, tortuous; the spirit of Ariadne’s body was as direct and simple as the air.

Ariadne was thinking over what Edward had said, with her soft brows drawn together.

‘I’m glad you love Mummy better than you did,’ she announced finally. ‘She, you know, thinks your marriage perfect; she hasn’t any doubts. But I’m glad you’ve told me what you really feel. It makes me think better of the whole thing than if you hadn’t. But I don’t feel as if I’d ever want to hide from Tom. It’s nothing about Tom that I’m afraid of. Don’t you see, Edward, I might want to be hidden, because I was treacherous? That’s what worries me.’

‘I don’t think you’ll need to hide,’ said Edward reassuringly. ‘And I don’t think you’ll ever make a man want to hide himself from you. There’s much less hiding done now. We can all live openly, with our sins and virtues, outside their shells. It’s a great relief!’

A sudden draught of cold air blew between them. The door had opened. Vera stood on the threshold. She stood there without attempting to come in and she looked at them without a smile.

CHAPTER XIV

Vera stood quite still. She felt as if there were ruins all about her, ruins of her faith and of her fortitude. Her body felt rigid and fragile like glass—if she moved unguardedly it might break.

She would not have been so angry if it had not been for Ariadne’s pyjamas. Her bare feet and ankles, the loose jacket open at the throat, her unconscious leaning against Edward’s knees revolted Vera’s taste.

Edward drew peacefully at his pipe; he was not touching Ariadne, but his eyes rested on her as if he liked to look at her. It was the middle of the night, and they sat there together as if each other’s presence was an accustomed thing. The bitter sense of stricken vanity which must have caught at the soul of Madame du Deffand as she came alone and blind upon the circle of her own friends hanging on the lips of her companion, Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse, was a slight disaster compared to Vera’s emotion as she saw before her, enclosed in the hush of the summer night, Ariadne and Edward. She did not ask herself what their purpose might be; there could be no innocence in any relationship which excluded herself.

Edward, lost in his deep absorption, never looked up, but Ariadne felt the stir of air caused by her mother’s entrance. She turned a cheerful face towards the door, and called out gaily: ‘Hallo, Mummy! you ought to be in bed!’ But meeting Vera’s eyes, which were blind with anger, she huddled herself up and turned to stone.

Edward rose and drew a chair forward, but Vera did not take his chair. She sat outside the little pool of orange light as if she were judging them from the ramparts of another world. She knew that Edward’s eyes were on her supplicating her for mercy, but she would not meet them. She had no mercy. She sat down only because she doubted if she could both stand and speak.

‘I am sorry,’ she said in a low voice with a deadly precision, ‘to have disturbed you; may I ask how long this has been going on?’

She was not sure in her own mind what she meant, but she was quite sure that she must strike, and strike hard, at these bitter enemies who had been her lovers. A curtain of flame hung before her eyes. Edward stood behind this curtain of flame like a house eaten through and through by fire, only the outer frame of which remains. Ariadne sank altogether out of sight.

‘Nothing has been going on, Vera,’ Edward said patiently and clearly, as if he were speaking to someone who was so ill as to be hardly conscious. ‘Ariadne had something which she wished to consult me about, so she very sensibly came downstairs to talk to me about it.’

‘Very sensibly, in those indecent night things!’ said Vera scornfully; her eyes passed from Ariadne’s figure to the sinister manifestation of chocolate cake on the floor. ‘Please don’t explain,’ she went on; ‘no explanations can cover this clandestine interview—this midnight orgy—and your connivance at it! I am punished for ever having had a child!’

‘My dear!’ said Edward sharply, ‘don’t, for God’s sake, talk such nonsense! You know as well as I do that the child meant no harm. She had a reason for coming to see me rather than to see you; not one you could object to, or fail to understand. As to time, what is there worse about twelve o’clock at night than any other time? I’m always with you when I’m at home, and if she was to see me alone she hadn’t much choice. Ariadne, I have no right to give away your confidence, but I think if I were you, I should tell your mother what you came downstairs to tell me.’

Ariadne had not moved; her face was drained of colour, but she looked curiously resolute and alert: her chin was raised and her blue eyes glittered like ice.

There was a moment’s silence after Edward had stopped speaking; Ariadne did not break it.

‘I do not want to know what her explanation is,’ Vera said at last. ‘I only know that a relationship which excludes her mother is not one she should form with her mother’s husband.’

‘A relationship!’ said Ariadne in a low voice. ‘Oh, Mother! Is a talk a relationship?’

‘A confidence which is also secret is the proof of a private relationship,’ said Vera.

‘I hope you will not say any more, Vera,’ Edward broke in. ‘You will regret it if you do, even more than we shall. You are utterly in the wrong. There has not been one thought of harm to you in anything that Ariadne has said or done. Please tell your mother what you have told me, Ariadne!’

Vera closed her eyes. Regret! What did either of them know of regret? They had had so many objects; she had lived only for them. She remembered, in cruel flashes, the long months before Ariadne’s birth, when her body, too slight and delicate for maternity, had been convulsed and tormented by the weight it bore; she thought of the thirty-six hours’ agony which had given Ariadne life. And what were these short pains of the flesh compared to the long agony of hate and rage in which she had lived for five years after her child’s birth, rather than desert her? Yet even now she might have forgiven both of them if Edward had not said ‘we.’

‘I don’t want to tell you anything ever again,’ said Ariadne in a tone of dry disgust. ‘But if Edward insists, and for his sake, I’ll tell you what I came to talk to him about. I only didn’t tell you because you hate Tom. He wants me to marry him. I haven’t made up my mind yet, though I love him. I wanted to understand more what marriage was like. If it’s like this, I don’t think I shall marry him. I’d rather be his mistress.’

‘Go to bed, Ariadne,’ said Edward angrily.

Vera stiffened, but she did not rebuke Ariadne; she left that to Edward.

‘No, I won’t!’ said Ariadne, ‘and leave Mother to tear you to pieces behind my back! Vera, Edward, at any rate, has played the game. He told me to go to bed the moment I came down; and he didn’t want me to talk to him about anything which I hadn’t previously had out with you. I understand why now. He knew you’d kick up this ugly dust. I never dreamed of such a thing! I used to mind your having left me, Mother. Now I’m glad you did!’

‘Ariadne, will you go upstairs to your room!’ Edward demanded. He was the only one who raised his voice.

Vera saw that Edward wanted to spare her; he guessed that Ariadne’s words were like death to her—like death pressed against her lips. She drank them in, and they steadied the dreadful trembling of her body as nothing else could have steadied it.

‘It is I who am the intruder, Edward,’ she said, rising slowly to her feet. ‘I will leave you together—as I found you!’

But Ariadne, in one supple bound, was across the room and through the door. She slammed it after her, with an atrocious bang which crashed through the hushed silence of the grown-up house, and left Vera and Edward staring blankly at each other.

Vera grasped the back of the chair she had risen from, and the blankness in her eyes changed to a long questioning look. It was a sign of yielding, but Edward would not meet it.

‘Have you anything to say to me, Edward?’ she asked him. ‘I don’t, you know, accuse you of anything worse than of having robbed me of my child!’

‘No, I have nothing to say to you,’ said Edward, deliberately ignoring the fact that Vera had moved a little towards him, ‘except that you have robbed yourself.’

He, too, left her. She was incredulous at his desertion, but she heard first the door of the room, and then the front door, close after him.

The night had grown thin; between the swaying bronze curtains Vera could see the sallow sky. The water-tower had waded out into the pale light and stood there like a solitary sentinel pointing at emptiness.

Vera sat down near the window and wondered what was left to her now that Edward had gone. She knew that he would never come back; the formal, faithful husk of him might come back, but not her lover. He had not felt for her that pity which, stronger than love, heals all wounds. His pity had been for Ariadne.

Vera had lived upon Edward’s admiration and his sympathy. They had been the spiritual bread of her life: sympathy for what she had suffered and admiration for what she was. Now they had slipped out of her hands, like precious jewels through careless fingers, into a fathomless sea. But what had really happened? Surely nothing so very dreadful? Nothing irreparable? Ariadne had gone up to bed, and Edward had gone out for a walk. It was summer time, and very hot, it would not hurt him.

What made her heart ache like some animal cruelly trodden on, crawling into a ditch to die? She had only said what was the truth. They had a relationship which shut her out. It was a cruel disloyalty, and she had been the victim of it. But try as she might, her anger shelved away from her like shifting sand. What did Edward mean by: ‘You have robbed yourself?’ Why hadn’t he stayed and explained what he meant? She hadn’t wanted him to go away. He was still Edward. If he left a room, the life went out of it. And Ariadne? What was it thundering behind Vera’s numbed heart which Ariadne had said? Better not try to remember just now. She had said a cruel thing; but youth did not mean its atrocities, it fell into them as if they were holes in the dark. There was nothing which Ariadne could say or do which was beyond Vera’s forgiveness. The fact of her coming downstairs to talk to Edward was not as atrocious as Vera had at first thought. She had not known that Ariadne had only come down to speak of Tom. It was odious and absurd that Ariadne should consider herself to be in love with such a man; but if she suffered from this delusion, it was perhaps not so surprising that she should shrink from confessing it to Vera. Vera was ready to admit this excuse. She would send the child’s breakfast up to her, and then go upstairs herself for a little talk. She would show Ariadne firmly, but kindly, that appealing to Edward, midnight interviews, and above all pyjamas, were out of place.

No! perhaps she wouldn’t speak again of those pyjamas. It had been a false note to allude to them. Neither Edward nor Ariadne had attempted to answer her. But Vera herself had felt that she shouldn’t have mentioned them; it had somehow involved her in an indecency rather than Ariadne.

What they neither of them guessed was how vulnerable that one great sacrifice of her chastity had made Vera. It had been ‘the immediate jewel of her soul,’ and she had given it up for Edward. Ariadne, whose virtue had never been menaced, could speak lightly of being her lover’s mistress, but Edward should have guessed that to Vera the mere thought of lightness in her daughter was sharper than a knife against her breast. It was unforgivable that Edward should cease to be, even for a moment, at her feet. She had suffered too much for him; how could he dare to take anybody else’s side? The curtain of flame hung again between her and Edward. But this time the flames sank quietly into ash.

The dawn wind shook the curtains. Vera put out the little orange lamp and crouched further away from the vague pallor of the new day. Since Edward was not at her feet, what was she to do? What did it matter now if he did come back to breakfast, since he would never come back to worship? If she left him, she would have three hundred a year to live on in pensions abroad, pretending to like mountains. Nobody would uphold her cause again, against a second husband, and an only child. Besides, she cared for no one else. She had too private a heart to want other lovers; if her body were not too old for them, her heart was too old. Some women lived for their own beauty, or for religion, or for the mere pleasure of civilized comfort; but Vera was a Romantic—none of these things meant anything to her by themselves.

She could die? She had no fear of death, nor would she shrink from taking her own life. She had the kind of courage which could drive her soul through any gate. She saw that death was the one way left to wring their hearts and to escape their judgments. Her suicide would break into Ariadne’s youth with a frightful shock. Beneath Ariadne’s callous shield of lightness she had a very sensitive and tender heart. Vera’s death might make her give up the mad blunder of a marriage with Tom; and it would give back to her her mother’s image free from stain.

Vera admitted to herself at last that, startled by the sight of their secret intimacy, she had exaggerated the wrong they had done her; but since she had gone so far there was nothing left for her now but to go farther. She must show them the awful price she was willing to pay for her mistake; the price would exonerate her, in their eyes, from the blunder. Ariadne was young and supple; she would eventually recover from the shock—but Edward?

Vera saw Edward living with bowed head for the rest of his life. He wouldn’t follow her example, because of Ariadne, and because his death would be too much of a ‘tu quoque.’ But he would never have a moment’s happiness again. Vera did not misjudge Edward. He had lived for her as truly as she had lived for him. She got up stiffly. The sallow houses moved out of the mist and closed around her. The streets lay like streams of dead light between high, grey banks. There was a faint thudding sound of life towards Notting Hill Gate; the hot, airless London day had begun, and she knew that she must go on living.

She could not face that picture of Edward bowed for ever under a sense of wrong. Not even to win back his pity and his love could she so wholly sacrifice his happiness; not even to know herself for ever free from his contempt. She had always loved him better than herself. She had given up Ariadne to be his wife, and when worn to the edge of her endurance by physical pain, she had given up the ease of death. She couldn’t now put herself first even to save her vanity.

Vera did not call this obstacle her vanity. It was still, to her, this thing in her which Edward had struck at, her self-respect. She still believed that she was in the right; but the right was hollow beside her love for Edward.

CHAPTER XV

When Edward came down to breakfast he found Vera sitting at the table crumbling a piece of dry toast; her eyes were those of a martyr tied to a stake and awaiting the application of the torch. She had heard Edward come in and go up to his dressing-room, but she hadn’t gone to him. She could not bring herself to ask for forgiveness; but the very fact that she claimed none of her rights was an appeal for his forgiveness.

She asked him no questions, and she told him at once that Ariadne had left the house. She had taken a small suitcase with her, but she had not breakfasted. Vera had not seen her go, but one of the servants had, and she had left a letter for Edward.

The letter lay unopened on Edward’s plate. There were things which Vera would do in certain moods and never dream of doing in others; but there were things which she would never do, however dire the temptation. Edward wondered compassionately how long she had sat, with those starved and burning eyes fixed on Ariadne’s untouched letter. He would have liked to carry it off to read by himself, but he could not increase the suspense of that agonized silent audience. He tore it open quickly, steeling himself to show no kind of emotion while he read it.

Edward handed the letter over to Vera. She read it slowly, as if it were written in some mysterious cypher.

When she had finished reading it, she handed it to Edward. ‘You mean—to go and see this man?’ she asked in a voice so weak that it hurt him.

‘Yes,’ said Edward, ‘I think I’d better see him.’

Vera poured out his coffee with a shaking hand. ‘Do you know who this Dr. Blake is?’ she asked. ‘They are so strange nowadays! Can he be another lover?’

‘It’s possible, of course,’ Edward admitted uncomfortably, ‘but not in the usual sense of the word, or there wouldn’t be this message to Tom. She wants a little time, I suppose, to think things over quietly; and if she got into direct communication with Tom, he wouldn’t give her time. As for us—well, she couldn’t stay here, I suppose, because she feels your opposition so acutely.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Vera quietly. ‘It’s not that; it’s what I said last night. I made her hate me. I think I hated her for a moment—but only for a moment.’

She rose to her feet, her hand resting on the table to support her weight. Edward sprang up and would have put his arm about her, but she shrank away from him. She stood there for a moment trying to speak. ‘Make him marry her!’ she said at last, and left the room.

Edward wanted to follow her, but he realized that it was no use. Even if a lie would have comforted Vera, he could not tell her a lie. Ariadne had hated her. But if she had hated her, she hadn’t wanted any one else to hate Vera. That was why she had asked Edward to go and see Tom. Edward would know better than she herself knew how to shield Vera. If Ariadne had seen Tom, she would have had to tell him everything—even if she had written to him, something would have had to come out. It was extraordinarily nice of Ariadne not to have gone to William; that would have put the lid on! Edward felt a warmth rise in his heart, and was surprised to find that the reason for it was not that it showed Ariadne in a gracious light, but that it was an escape for Vera. It was hard enough for Vera to have to lose the child she had only just found; it was harder still to have to lose her to Tom; and hardest of all to have to urge the course she most wished to avoid in order to escape a catastrophe.

On the way to the city Edward felt his anger evaporating. Vera had put herself in the wrong; but there seemed wrongs, into which she hadn’t put herself, accumulating around her.

It was for her sake as well as for Ariadne’s that Edward prepared to face the most distasteful interview which had ever been asked of him. He couldn’t acquit Vera when it came to her attack upon Ariadne, but by having the whole thing out with Tom, he could perhaps find a way of escape for both of them. If only he could make up his mind what to say to the fellow! He hadn’t been able to avoid Vera’s judgment altogether; and if Tom was a fool, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to turn him into an olive branch.

Tom’s father’s office was an immense glass-fronted affair, taking up a corner of Queen Victoria Street. It blazed out upon the public with a reassuring costliness which had the opposite effect upon Edward. Edward’s own office was an old-fashioned room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, very dingy and respectable, and not even very easy to find. If he had to apologize for his wife, he would rather have done it there, than in acres of plate glass and magnificence, belonging to the victim. But, of course, he wouldn’t apologize for Vera. She had broken his pride to pieces, but that was his own affair; he would merely try to make light of the lesser attack she had made upon the more vulnerable object of her daughter; and he wouldn’t even do that if he found Tom as stupid as he had seemed.

Edward was taken at once into a large inner room, where Tom was sitting in a scarlet leather armchair, smoking a briar pipe. He seemed pleased, but not at all surprised to see Edward.

‘This isn’t an hour for interrupting your work,’ Edward began nervously, ‘but I have to be at my own office before eleven, and Ariadne sent you a message which I wanted to deliver in person.’

‘Oh, I’m not doing any work!’ said Tom reassuringly, with a casual glance about him, as if work was the last thing to be thought of in an office. ‘I just sit here on show till the Guv’nor comes, and then he hoofs me out.’

Tom drew forward another vast leather armchair, which Edward sank into with a sigh. Tom did not ask Edward what Ariadne’s message was.

The desk of Tom’s father rose menacingly above Edward. How did you say to a perfectly ordinary young man at ten o’clock in the morning: ‘My stepdaughter wants to be your mistress, but please don’t let her!’ And yet, after all, what else had he come there to say? Edward had been talking most of the night after a hard day’s work; he had been walking the streets since dawn, and beyond a cup of coffee, half of which he had been unable to swallow, he had had nothing since last night’s dinner. He hoped he wasn’t going to faint or do anything idiotic, but he felt uncommonly like it. All the separate pigeon-holes of Tom’s father’s desk showed an awkward desire to run into each other.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ said Tom sociably, and without waiting for Edward’s answer he opened a large mahogany cupboard, out of which he drew a bottle of whisky and a syphon.

Edward felt better after he had taken a drink. He had not noticed Tom pour out the whisky; but he thought that he must have dealt very lightly with the syphon.

Tom pushed a box of expensive cigars towards Edward. ‘Beastly hot weather,’ he murmured, relighting his pipe. ‘Do you smoke these things?’

‘No,’ said Edward, ‘I prefer a pipe.’

This created a bond between them. Edward filled his pipe with Tom’s tobacco, lit it, and drew at it in silence.

‘City heat makes you feel as cheap as ready-made trousers,’ Tom dropped, after a comfortable pause. ‘I rather like a hot day in the country though, when you can sweat it out over a game of tennis. Ariadne all right?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Edward, grateful for this sudden lead. ‘She’s gone off to Cornwall on a walking tour. She wanted me to let you know. Have you ever heard her speak of a fellow called Dr. Blake?’

Tom shook his head in a mystified manner, but after a moment a light broke on him, and he asked: ‘Sure it’s a man? There’s that Blake girl—Nora! She’s a doctor, too, now I come to think of it. The one Ariadne took the child to, to get spliced up.’

This deepened Edward’s sense of moving about in worlds unrealized. What child? Whose child?

Nobody’s in particular, Tom enlightened him; only a kid knocked down by some silly ass of a cyclist, and Ariadne, who was passing in her car, picked up the kid and took it to the nearest doctor; turned out to be this girl, and she and Ariadne made friends over it.

Edward’s face showed his relief. A gleam of compassionate amusement lurked in Tom’s eyes, but he asked no further questions about Ariadne’s sudden tour. He simply drew comfortably at his pipe, as if their just sitting there together, smoking, was what Edward had come for.

It flashed through Edward’s mind that Ariadne had been right when she had asserted so positively that Tom wasn’t the least bit vulgar.

‘I thought I ought to let you know,’ Edward began formally, ‘that Ariadne has told me of your proposal to her.’

Tom took his pipe out of his mouth, nodded, and shoved it back again.

‘Of course, it has nothing whatever to do with me,’ Edward continued, his formality increasing, ‘but probably that very fact made it easier for her to tell me. No doubt you will have it out with Sir William later on. She’s only nineteen, and I understand you’re not much older.’

‘Twenty-one,’ Tom admitted. ‘But what’s age—you can have too much of a good thing, can’t you?’

‘You’re rather young,’ Edward said reflectively, ‘to enter into anything at all final. Still, she’s let me know that she’s extremely attached to you.’

Edward paused. This time Tom did not take his pipe out of his mouth or even nod. He seemed not to have heard what Edward had said.

Edward drew out Ariadne’s letter and laid it open on his knee. ‘In this letter,’ he said gravely, ‘she wishes me to repeat that her feeling for you is quite unchanged; but that she doesn’t wish to marry you. She seems set against marriage altogether. You know, of course, her family circumstances? Perhaps they explain her feeling. She was too young to realize, but she must have suffered from, the smash of her parents’ marriage. She was, in a sense, the victim of their unhappiness. They got out of it, but she didn’t. I’ve often thought of how seldom children ever get out of things like that, and Ariadne must have the knowledge of it in her bones. It’s made her feel nervous of starting a home of her own. And I gather that what she suggests to you instead is some form of irregular union, at any rate to begin with?’

‘Lots to be said against marriage,’ Tom observed thoughtfully, ‘but nothing whatever to be said for the other thing. Same bothers without the advantages of marriage. Got to have a roof of your own. Got to have kids. Got to have the police on your side, then do what you damn please; that’s the way I look at it.’

‘I’m glad you feel like that,’ said Edward cordially. ‘It’s the way her mother and I feel. But what are we to do about Ariadne’s idea—it seems extremely strong?’

The gleam of half-compassionate amusement shone once more in Tom’s metallic blue eyes.

‘Girls,’ he said reflectively, ‘do what you want as a rule, when they take to you—if not, of course not. But you’d be surprised to see the way their notions peel off, once they see you’re set.’

It suddenly seemed to Edward as if Tom was older than he was; he knew about girls; Edward only knew about women, and even about women he had never known very much. Ariadne seemed to him a creature apart, enskied, mysterious and very powerful. He had never thought of her as a specimen of a race on a level with his own. Edward knew that if he had been in Tom’s place Ariadne’s message would have completely floored him; but Tom did not look floored. He continued to look more and more assured.

‘I get my holidays,’ he observed, ‘in about a week or ten days’ time. I’ll run down to Cornwall in my car and pick her and the Blake girl up. They’re sure to have had enough of it by then. Walking’s all very well, but you can’t get anywhere to walk to—without a car. Takes you over the dull bits.’

‘But I don’t know where she is,’ said Edward helplessly. ‘How can you find her? She’s only given a post-office address—and we don’t want the police called in!’

‘She’ll have written to me by then,’ said Tom with calm assurance. ‘A week’s a long time.’

Edward sighed. Even a year had ceased to seem to him any time at all; but perhaps Tom knew best how Ariadne would feel about a week. There was something else which had got to be said. The fear of saying it had left Edward, but the necessity remained. Tom would not give him the lead this time, for whatever else Tom might say, he would not mention Vera. What Edward had to tell Tom was that Vera would no longer be an obstacle to their marriage; but he did not know how to do this without admitting how much of an obstacle she had wished to be.

‘When you say you’ll join Ariadne,’ he began cautiously, ‘do you mean that you’ll try to persuade her—to consider an immediate marriage?’

‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘I shouldn’t have been in any particular hurry, if she hadn’t put up this hurdle. Now we’ll have to get over it, and the best way of getting over it is to take the whole thing at a jump. Then there’s another thing. I bought a Moth the other day, a topping little flier, and I thought we might take a trip abroad in her. Seems a pity to waste a perfectly good holiday, doesn’t it? I’ve got a month. We can get the marriage done down there at the registry office, without any of the usual cake fuss, and then fly over to France. Of course, they don’t give you anything to eat at breakfast; but the bathing’s good, and Ariadne talks French like a native.’

‘You’ll have to get her father’s consent,’ said Edward doubtfully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t get it for you. You see, we’ve not been on speaking terms for years. But I came to bring you her mother’s consent.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Tom reassuringly, as if he were excusing Edward for a social solecism in bringing any one’s consent. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Ariadne will square William! Have another drink?’

Edward took another drink, but this time he poured the soda in himself. He had come to his last fence. It wouldn’t do for Tom to think that everything was all right. He would have to tell Tom that Vera and Ariadne had fallen out. Edward had dreaded talking to Tom about Vera as much as a man would dread being led out at dawn to be shot. But the dread had left him. There was nothing he couldn’t tell this quiet pipe-smoking fellow, with eyes in which no desire to score had ever shone. Tom’s impersonal expression was as soothing to Edward as autumn sunshine. Although he never seemed to be busy about anything, the harvest was secure.

‘Look here,’ said Edward bluntly. ‘There was a row last night between Ariadne and her mother. My wife and I usually take the same point of view, but with the most united couples differences do take place. I saw the trouble from Ariadne’s point of view, and that made things worse. We needn’t go into what was said, but I am afraid Ariadne felt pretty sore. It made her want to go and walk it off. But she cares a lot for her mother, and her mother for her. This consent to your marriage is one of the signs how much her mother cares. I thought you might be able, if you knew about the row, to soften things down.’ Edward stopped, his eyes met Tom’s and said more than his words.

‘Bit of red in Ariadne’s hair,’ Tom murmured after a pause. ‘But she isn’t one to brood. She’ll be sure to come round all right. I’ll send you a wire when I catch up with the girls. I took a trial trip in the Moth yesterday. I thought I’d do the Channel and prospect a bit this week-end. Would you care for a flight?’

Edward felt that he would have liked a flight with Tom better than anything; but he remembered Vera: behind the relief he felt about Ariadne, there was still a core of pain.

‘I don’t think I could manage this week,’ he said regretfully, ‘but I’d like to take a flight with you one day immensely. You really think, then, you’ll be able to convince Ariadne of the necessity for marriage?’

‘Bless you, yes!’ said Tom with a chuckle. ‘Young Ariadne’s got sense!’

Edward rose to his feet. This was the way, he said to himself a little ruefully, that lovers now thought of their ladies. ‘Young Ariadne!’—‘Sense!’

‘Sense’ was precisely the quality with which Edward, who adored Ariadne, would not have credited her. She seemed to him to have every beautiful and valuable quality except sense. And yet she had gone to Cornwall, when the disastrous thing would have been to have returned to William, and the most torturing thing to have stayed where she was.

‘I suppose you understand her best,’ said Edward with a sigh.

Tom made no direct answer to this statement, but he shook hands with Edward very warmly at the office door, and urged him once more to ring up at the earliest opportunity, so that they might settle about a spin together in the Moth.

CHAPTER XVI

‘Come alone Croydon aërodrome Saturday morning eleven love Ariadne.’

Edward read the telegram through carefully. It sounded a clear statement, but it left many questions unanswered. The only fact that it really cleared up was that Edward must come alone. He knew instantly that he would go; but ought he to go alone? Ought he to go without letting Vera know that he was going? And yet if he told her, she would certainly expect to go with him. She had shared with him Tom’s earlier succinct telegram: ‘Found girls.’ She had then admitted that previous to this information she had written to Ariadne at the Saint Ives post office. There had been no answer; but Edward knew what Vera’s letters were like. This letter must, Edward felt sure, have convinced Ariadne that she had misunderstood her mother. She must be feeling, what Edward himself had always felt after receiving one of Vera’s explanatory letters, precisely what Vera wanted him to feel.

But if Ariadne had forgiven her mother, or at least felt as if, owing to some strange factor which she had overlooked, there was nothing to forgive but a great deal to draw them nearer together, and to make Ariadne feel that she had been a little stupid, but that it was perfectly all right now, why hadn’t she sent the telegram to Vera? She had not only sent it to Edward, but she had sent it to his office, so that Edward, feeling confused, guilty, but eager, dressed on Saturday as if he were going to play golf, was kissed by Vera as if he were going to play golf, and went instead direct to Victoria en route for the Croydon aërodrome. It was a perfect day for a flight. The empty heavens were a pale, windless blue, the sunshine was warm and steady.

Several practice machines were in the air and a few people stood about watching. A slim youth, in breeches and wind jacket with a leather helmet on his head, stepped out of a shed and threw his arms round Edward. The youth was Ariadne. She looked several years younger and was very sunburned. There was a freckle or two across her nose and her eyes were astonishingly bright.

‘There you are at last!’ she exclaimed with relief. ‘I wouldn’t have started without you. I hope you’re pleased!’

‘I’d be pleased, or at any rate I should be prepared to be pleased,’ Edward admitted, ‘if you’d kindly tell me what there is to be pleased about? I’ve had a telegram from Tom and a telegram from you; but they leave a good deal to the imagination!’

Ariadne smiled; and then Edward knew that there was sufficient ground for his increasing sense of satisfaction.

‘Well,’ she said in a low, eager voice, ‘we did get married, you know, though we had to go to Penzance. Not that I think it counts any more than I did; nor that marriage hasn’t perfectly ghastly drawbacks! Look at ducks—how well they manage without it! But Tom says it’s more convenient, and he hates living at Chislehurst with his people. They only let him keep one dog at a time, and don’t like Alsatians. But they’ve given us marvellous wedding presents! Tom’s father has given him a Riley 9 H.P., very pretty, 78 m.p.h. on the road, and has lasting power if you don’t flog it too much. Of course I’d have asked Mummy to come too, this morning, but you see, William’s here. You don’t mind, do you? He doesn’t. He says he’d rather like to see you again. He’s standing there by that Moth they’re running out now, near Tom.’

‘William!’ Edward exclaimed. He reminded himself that William wasn’t just ‘William’ any more, he was Ariadne’s father, and had every right to be there. The fact that he was there would inadvertently make it much easier to explain to Vera why Edward had been asked to come without her.

‘William said as long as it wasn’t——’ Ariadne began, and then pulled herself up short. ‘You must give Mummy heaps of love from me,’ she hurriedly substituted. ‘Is she well?’

‘Yes,’ said Edward, ‘she’s much as usual. If she’d known I was coming, she’d have sent you a message.’

‘She wrote,’ said Ariadne rather shyly.

‘Awfully beautifully, of course. Is she good to you, Edward?’

‘Oh, always!’ said Edward, looking away from the shining eyes, which seemed suddenly too near his own.

Ariadne murmured: ‘Poor darling!’ and Edward wasn’t quite sure if she meant her mother or him. But probably if she’d liked Vera’s letter, she meant her mother.

‘And she’ll be good to Tom now,’ Ariadne went on after a curious little pause. ‘She seemed to want me to marry him, after all. I was rather surprised about that; aren’t you?’

‘She’s accepted him now,’ said Edward loyally. ‘Your mother never does things by halves, you know. She’s sure to be tremendously nice to him.’

It occurred to Edward that Vera would probably be nicer to Tom than any of them—even perhaps than Ariadne. She would so enjoy bringing Tom round, and being able to cut out William.

Edward glanced towards the prostrate Moth and saw, standing at a respectful distance from it, a middle-aged man, rather stout and well set-up. Edward would not have known it for William, had there been any one else there whom he could have taken for William instead. Thirteen years had muffled William’s features and increased his girth. The sight of his successful, replenished figure made Edward feel strangely meagre, and as if he would never be able to hit quite so hard at tennis again.

The Moth itself, Edward thought, looked far too small. He did not like to think of those unstable pieces of wood, with horrid little gaps for seats, like empty eye-sockets, carrying Ariadne up into the enormous naked spaces of the sky.

‘Have you ever flown before, Ariadne?’ he asked her anxiously.

‘Oh, dear, yes!’ said Ariadne, ‘heaps of times; but not over the Channel. What frightful fun it will be! Oh, Edward, it’s all rather fun, isn’t it?’

Edward hoped he had said ‘Rather!’ with sufficient conviction before he turned away. He felt a lump in his throat and a queer emptiness at the pit of his stomach. He knew that he could not want a meal so soon after a substantial breakfast, but his symptoms were those of a person in want of a meal.

The thing that worried him was that when you were on the top of a wave you couldn’t stay on the top. You could rise on a wave, you could even for a little while ride on its lifted height, but in the end it toppled over and stretched you out flat. Edward could not bear that this rigorous truth should include the triumphant figure of Ariadne.

He joined Tom, who was talking in what sounded an unknown tongue to a young mechanic. Tom, Edward saw, was also on the top of the wave. He was as insanely happy as Ariadne, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He was arranging, for the sake of Edward and William and the young mechanic, an elaborate bit of camouflage. The Moth, he tried to suggest to his audience, was really the point of his rapture.

‘She’ll go like a bird this morning,’ he said, shaking hands with Edward; and then in a confidential undertone he added: ‘Got my wire?’ He evidently thought that ‘Found girls’ had told Edward everything.

Edward congratulated him warmly, and Tom grinned shamefacedly, and called out to Ariadne, who was taking a demonstrative leave of her father: ‘Look sharp, over there!’

Ariadne looked sharp. She clambered expeditiously into one of the empty eye-sockets, wriggled a little, set her foot on a miniature suitcase, and called out: ‘Ready!’

Tom took his seat and touched his helmet in the direction of William.

‘Stand back a bit, sir!’ the mechanic advised Edward.

The Moth made an ugly little scrambly run along the field, rather like a fluttered hen. ‘She takes off well,’ observed the mechanic reassuringly; and then, like the same panic-stricken fowl roused by a crisis to the use of its wings, the Moth plunged suddenly from the ground into the air. Once up, her flight was as steady and as noisy as the drilling of a tooth. She seemed firmly fixed into the path of the sky, and bored straight forward.

Edward was conscious that there was another figure who had taken the place of the mechanic by his side; but he could not take his eyes from the fast vanishing wings.

‘We didn’t have those things in our youth,’ said a deep, rather pleasant voice. ‘Don’t know that we missed much, though—what? D’you remember that tandem I used to drive?’

Edward had not heard this voice for thirteen years, but for the ten years before that he had heard it oftener than any other; and for eight months out of those ten years he had heard it, always deep, and almost always pleasant, in the trenches of the Dardanelles. He was glad to hear it again; so glad, that for a moment or two he said nothing.

‘People say,’ the voice went on, ‘that after thirty you either swell or shrink. Well, I’ve swollen and you’ve shrunk. Still, I should have known you anywhere.’

Edward turned and looked into William’s eyes. They made him forget the bitter disastrous things they had said to each other on their last meeting. What they had said to each other then, had not been true, it had risen out of the moment, like the fumes from some dissolving chemical. The chemical had rectified itself with time and the fumes had vanished. Nothing was there now but the tolerant, kindly, rather weary look in William’s eyes.

‘Let’s sit down somewhere,’ said William. ‘It’s hot, and there’s no hurry. Morning’s broken up anyhow. Can’t get anywhere, in time to do anything, from this God-forsaken spot, between twelve and lunch-time.’

They sat down on a bench near by, and their eyes returned to the speck in the sky, smaller than ever now, a mere dot, soaked up by the vast blind light.

‘They can’t be the same as we are, can they?’ Edward asked wistfully, ‘with all these new stunts going on, getting about so much, and so quickly, and filling their time up? Why, at twenty they must have forgotten more than we’ve got to remember at forty! We must seem to them frightfully limited old fossils.’

‘Well,’ said William, without regret in his voice, ‘I don’t care much what we seem to them myself. Pretty raw, most of ’em. What is it old Shakespeare says: “Ripeness is all?” Well, you know, I wouldn’t call any of ’em ripe. I don’t fancy they’re so different from what we were, either. Pace has altered, I admit; but the things they’re in a hurry about are much the same.’

They were silent for a moment, then Edward said diffidently but with a sympathy which was so deep in his heart that it had to find expression: ‘I think I’m rather sorry for fathers.’

‘You mean I shall miss her?’ William admitted. ‘There’s no denying her marriage coming so soon was a bit of a wrench. One liked going about with her, you know. Pride, I suppose. And yet I don’t think I had much part in the making of Ariadne. She takes, don’t you think, in her looks, more after her mother?’

Edward hesitated; he tried again to go back in his mind to what Vera really had looked like, without hollows or lines, or that rather fixed look about her thin lips. He remembered that she had had any quantity of cobwebby golden hair which smelt like meadow-sweet, and that when he looked into her eyes, he forgot everything else.

He dragged himself out of his memories with a jerk. ‘Ariadne is much stronger than her mother,’ he said evasively.

‘More hygiene,’ William agreed, ‘and a damned sight less emotion. I don’t say Vera hadn’t anything to get worked up about. I dare say she’s told you I bullied her like the Devil. I hadn’t learned then. She used to get under my skin somehow, and I paid her out by nigger-driving her. I tried the other method with Ariadne, gave her her head in reason, and it worked. I can’t remember her ever trying to get out of things, or telling me a lie. Of course I controlled her to a certain extent; you have to do that with children; but I drew it mild, partly on account of her not having a mother. My wife’s an excellent woman, but she’s got children of her own. They’re my children too, but—funny thing—I haven’t the feeling for them I have for Ariadne. You might say Ariadne was the only bit of romance I’ve got out of my life. You can’t get romance out of nigger-driving, nor out of marrying excellent women either. I’ve rather envied you sometimes, Edward!’

Edward found himself wondering if William had missed very much after all. It was true that Edward had known Romance. The bird had lighted on his shoulders and eaten out of his hand. He could remember hours, days, weeks, without a cloud, nor so much as the fear of a cloud. When the fear had come, when he knew how easily clouds rose, how they blotted out all landmarks and devastated the fields of asphodel, so that remembered radiance was a cruel thing, he wondered if William had not, after all, chosen the better part.

‘Gone, by Jove!’ said William, with recovered cheerfulness, looking up at the empty sky. ‘Pity we didn’t time it!’

‘Like our youth,’ said Edward in a low voice, ‘gone out of sight and sound!’

William grunted. It was a companionable, reassuring grunt, as if what they had lost wasn’t really of much account to sensible men like themselves.

‘I know a good place to lunch,’ William observed. ‘Not far off. My car’s waiting. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have lunch together, do you?’

‘No! Oh, no!’ said Edward. But he didn’t move for a moment, he was still looking wistfully at the empty sky.

‘Rackety thing, youth!’ said William, getting up rather clumsily. ‘A couple of sticks and a little machine ticking away inside ’em... and there they are off in the sky on it! I don’t envy them!’

‘Happy as birds!’ said Edward with a sigh; he could get up much more quickly than William.

‘They’ll have a pretty substantial nest, those two!’ said William with a chuckle. ‘Seen to that, you know. Very good settlement old Anderson’s made; twenty thousand down on the girl and the children; I’ve added ten; and of course Tom’s the only son—plenty later on. Not much to the blood side of the business; come up since the war; but stout fella, Anderson; and the boy takes after him.’

Edward saw that William didn’t want to talk any more about romance. The car was waiting for them. It was a Rolls Royce, with a beautifully decorated interior, and moved with the smoothness of spilt cream. Edward reminded himself that William, who was getting on for fifty, was one of the most successful barristers in England, and had an eye on the Woolsack, and that Vera might now be sitting in this car, if she hadn’t preferred romance. He wondered what romance was still worth to her.

But he knew that he should never find out. He must not mention the car to Vera, nor the weak-kneed lapse of his lunch with William; and even his views on romance had better be kept to himself.

CHAPTER XVII

When one has perfect confidence in a person it is sometimes as difficult to ask a question as when one has no confidence at all.

Vera, standing in the hall to kiss Edward good-bye on Saturday morning, felt that she could not say: ‘Edward; are you really going to play golf, or are you going to meet Ariadne?’ Suspicion devoured her, and she knew that it would go on devouring her all day, but her pride let her be devoured.

Edward gave her the kind, bleak kiss of a person who is preoccupied by keeping something back. Vera clung to him, but clinging did not work. Edward said hastily: ‘Take care of yourself, darling, it’s going to be frightfully hot,’ and tore himself away from her.

Vera stood on the steps to see him off, and then went back into the house. She felt as if the walls closed in on her like a coffin. To break up this feeling of mortal stillness, she went into the kitchen to order Edward’s dinner.

If he were really playing golf in the heat, he would need a good and yet light dinner, and white wine would be better than whisky.

She ordered clear meat soup, iced; cold salmon and cucumber, roast chicken, and fruit salad.

She wouldn’t, Vera explained to Emma, have any lunch. She had a headache and was going to lie down.

Emma was concerned and urged a lamb-chop in the middle of the day, in spite of the fact that she would like to escape cooking in the heat; but Vera gave her a very kind smile, shook her head decisively, and drifted out of the kitchen.

The house felt extraordinarily empty, until she went into Edward’s study opposite the water-tower. She stood at the window between the orange curtains. The water-tower jerked the eye upwards, but it gave no impression of grace. Memories of all the towers she had seen and loved with Edward came back to her. She saw again the slender, faintly coloured lily of Florence; the gaunt brave tower of the Maggio in Siena; the cluster of towers in San Gimignano out of which, after the death of Santa Fina, wallflowers had sprung.

The street stared back at her, pale with London heat, but Vera was afraid to turn round and see what else was in the room behind her. She knew that Edward sat there still, with Ariadne in her green pyjamas curled up at his feet.

At last she turned to face them. They looked quite harmless now, as if there had been no need for her to sit there frozen on the edge of her chair, outside their circle of light.

She tried to brush the memory of their startled faces out of her mind, but they remained as solid as stone.

Vera had had no explanation since with Edward. They had gone on with the motions of life, talking at intervals about what was happening in the newspapers and discussing plans for their September holiday. They had even kissed each other and done small kind actions for each other’s relief or pleasure; but none of their actions or their dutiful caresses had softened the watchful antagonism of their souls. Much may be done with the present; something, Vera thought, might even be done with the future; but the terrors of the past are uncontrollable, you cannot drive them away.

How silent the room was! She missed Ariadne’s careless whistling on the stairs, the bang of doors, her clear, impatient voice calling: ‘Where are you, Mummy?’ It was only less dear than Edward’s quieter: ‘You there?’ as if there could be only one ‘you’ and no other place existed but the spot on which Vera was. These sounds would never be the same again. The thought was so unbearable that Vera left the haunted room and went into her boudoir, where she was more used to being alone.

The row of pink geraniums on the balcony needed watering; and Vera watered them with care; then, putting on gloves and a little apron, she cleaned the brasses and the pewter jugs. Suddenly she remembered that she had told Emma that she was going upstairs to lie down. It would never do to tell the servants one thing and to do another. It was silly to feel frightened, as if she had received a summons to meet some form of punishment; but she took a long time putting her gloves and apron neatly away before she went upstairs.

When Vera reached her room, she didn’t lock the door, but she drew the curtains across the open windows. They were green, semi-transparent curtains, and with the sun shining through them the room was filled with the vague light of water.

It was the same room in which, three months ago, Vera had lain, suffering pain so acute that she wanted to die to escape from it, and had had to remind herself that by not dying she would please Edward and could see her child again.

Well, she had survived the pain; Edward had been pleased; Vera had seen Ariadne.

As she lay facing the Venetian table on which the yellow tulips had stood, she knew that the pain she had suffered then was a mere premonition of the pain that she was suffering now. Physical pain was measurable; there was a life outside it. It did not go beyond the strength of the will. Now there was no other life. Her will was swallowed up like the cry of a bird in a street full of traffic. She had wondered, in the grip of physical torture, what death still held in store for her. Now all her wondering ceased; she knew that death held nothing. Last autumn she had seen a cherry-tree flaming against a green hill: a very small tree with a few scarlet leaves on it. The tree burned in the sunlight into her very heart. Even in youth she had never felt so sharp a thrill of beauty. This could not happen any more.

When Edward came back to her after the night of that dreadful scene, Vera had thought they could go on, if not quite the same, at least not very differently.

Like some one who feels within himself the first horrifying symptoms of a dread disease, she shrank from the exposure which might be in time to save her. She knew that the trouble between her and Edward was deep; she could not face the thought that it was mortal. Edward had come back to her, but he had come back estranged. His spirit was still with Ariadne.

A faint breeze blew the green curtains softly apart, the casual noises of the street flowed through her consciousness, without disturbing the solid isolation of her thoughts. She relived year by year the long joy of her relationship with Edward. Had it always been quite sound? There had been moments when Vera had felt a slight constriction of the heart. The serene sunshine had clouded over, without her quite knowing why. There had been other plainer moments when their opinions had differed, differed with the curious violence of lovers who cannot bear to be separated from each other even by a thought.

Vera had felt occasional astonishment at the unexplored depths of their differences; but she had felt no continuity between them. The bridge of love stood firm beneath her feet.

She had said to herself, in these moments of aberration, that Edward wasn’t well, or that he was irritated by his office work, or that her own ill-health worried him. She had made ready excuses for him, and slipped past the danger signals without altering her direction or her pace.

But excuses for herself? For them she had not even looked! Since, in the past, she had never acknowledged a defeat, she found that she could not now seek the refuge of an excuse.

How could she say to Edward: ‘I distrusted you! You haven’t, for years, looked at me as I saw you looking at Ariadne! I felt that you no longer loved me, because you had found me to be a cruel, pretentious, and tyrannous person. You are quite right, I see now that I am such a person. When I look into the future you are no longer there, and since you are the whole of the future to me, as you were the whole of the past, nothing is there any more, except a black hole into which I shall presently plunge!’ These were not reasons for retaining any man’s love.

She must be silent now, since she had let the time pass when speaking could have saved them. The coffin walls closed in on her, till she could neither move nor breathe. She had buried herself alive, and there was no way out.

She tried to see some real thing in her life, outside her love for Edward; but she had no other deep relationships. Her parents were dead; she had estranged Ariadne.

She was in the centre of life, far enough away from youth to have lost the pleasure and incentive of self-development, and with death still too far off for her to fill the short crowded space with the love of fugitive things. She had no obligations to fulfil, since she had recognized no duties except her duties to Edward. She had not been a separate being; and she had therefore no separate life.

It would be happier to be Mrs. Bax, the charwoman, whom she could hear in the distance flogging the passage with a broom. When a charwoman’s heart was broken and she had to think about it, she did her thinking over a pail with an aching back, wondering while she was doing it where the next pair of boots was to come from. These various annoyances must have the relief of counter-irritants. The faithlessness of an alienated husband would merely be one item in a long list. But Vera’s list was short; Edward was the only item on it.

Love was over. This happened to a great many women at forty; but had it happened so often that they strangled it while they were congratulating themselves on a perfectly sustained romance?

Vera had always relied on her power of sustaining relationships. The continuous perfection of her life with Edward was part of her justification for having left William. How marvellously soon, and with how little actual effort, had she not won her daughter’s love? It was incredible that Ariadne had left her! Ariadne would no doubt return, probably she was even now arranging with Edward the conditions of her return, as she had talked over before, with Edward, the question of her marrying Tom. The questions themselves did not matter now. Vera would agree to any conditions; even the disaster of Tom had become as faint as a blotted-out numeral. What mattered instead of the questions was that Ariadne did not discuss them any more with Vera. Edward had been right when he said: ‘You have robbed yourself of your child!’

There might come a time when Vera could remember these words without the sickening jolt of pain which she felt now, but there would never come a time when the sense of their weight, pressing down upon the ruins of her self-esteem, would be lifted from her.

The strength of a fact is that it has taken place. It has not been invented. Vera had not shown that ideal love upon which she had prided herself. Ideal love would have accepted Ariadne’s relationship with Edward unshrinkingly; it would have survived the pang of seeing Edward’s eyes grow tender at the beauty of youth. Ideal love would have answered Ariadne’s laughing words: ‘You ought to be asleep, Mummy,’ with answering laughter.

Ideal love had broken down. There had been, in that brief time of their coming together, no disciplined habit of sacrifice behind Vera’s loving. She had been caught unawares by suspicion and jealousy, and they had whipped her dreams of a selfless maternity out of court.

But even after Ariadne had left them, Vera saw that she could have saved something. If she had cried: ‘Oh, Edward, I’m jealous! Forgive me!’ he would have responded to her cry with sympathy.

Next to ideal love, which couldn’t be jealous, was the mere adoring, forgivable human love which couldn’t help being jealous. Edward would have accepted such a love; but he would have pitied and not admired Vera for it. It was intolerable to Vera to miss his admiration, so she had overreached herself and lost both his pity and his love.

‘If I had told him the truth,’ she said to herself despairingly, ‘he would not have left me!’

She put away from her her own thoughts of herself and began to think of herself as Edward saw her. There had been moments in her life when in all the blinding eagerness of physical passion she had tried to empty herself of being to unite herself to Edward; but she had never so accomplished the end of her personal self as she accomplished it now, bereft and alone. She was Edward: she felt within herself his little silences; those faint remonstrances which never reached the emphasis of words—the turning away of his eyes, the weakening of attention in his voice.

If only she had held up the swift traffic of her consciousness to find out what he wanted! If she had invited his criticism, drawn out his remonstrances into the light of day, she would have saved their love!

A thousand times Edward had tried to protect her from herself, a thousand times she had rushed past his outstretched hands, and forced the issue.

She had fought William; she had outraged Ariadne; she had ignored Edward. This was where her great tact of living had led her!

Even William had had perhaps something to be said for him. Not very much. Vera could not admit, even in the blinding light of her unveiled consciousness, that there was much to be said for William. Still, a coarser, simpler woman might have made him a better man. Probably Constance was coarse and simple, and had improved William. Vera’s mind passed over them without its usual jolt of hatred. She almost envied them their unimaginative security. They had not parted with their all to gain a pearl—only to let the jewel they had won slip between their fingers!

Were those shadows that lay across the bed? And was the whole day gone? Days could go, then; they could go, Vera thought to herself with a shudder of dread, quicker than nights.

She heard a faint sound at the door, it opened softly, and she saw Edward.

But his coming into a room could make no real difference now. It could only break solitude, and not, as it used to do, bring with it the whole of joy.

Edward came in on tiptoe, and stood looking down at Vera with anxious eyes.

‘You’ve got a headache,’ he said accusingly, ‘and you’ve had no food all day!’ His voice sounded kind and concerned.

Vera could not answer it at once.

Edward sat down beside her and took her hand in his. Vera knew that it would never thrill him again to touch her hand; but she liked his kindness. He said, as if she had answered him—and indeed she had tried to smile: ‘I’ve seen Ariadne. She asked me to go and meet her at the aërodrome at Croydon. She would have asked you too, of course, but she couldn’t because William was there. I hope you won’t mind too much, darling; she’s married to Tom!’

‘I don’t mind in the least,’ Vera answered listlessly. ‘The marriage was important, and I’m glad it’s been accomplished so quickly and quietly. It would have been awkward to know where to marry her from. It’s a relief it’s over.’

‘She’s very happy,’ Edward said gently. ‘She sent you her love. It was strange seeing them soar off like that, into the sunny air! A lovely day for a flight. I asked Tom to wire from Le Bourget, so that you shouldn’t be worried, and he did. They got there safely and will be in Paris by now.’

He paused, and Vera felt, in the tension of his fingers over hers, how anxious he was not to hurt her. Her eloquence and all her ready wit slipped away from her. She clung to the two small words that children say, and even those she could not for a moment free into speech. ‘I’m sorry!’ she whispered at last, pressing her lips against his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Edward, for what I said to you both that night.’

She closed her eyes; she felt the astonishment of the long pause that followed, but she could not see the light in Edward’s eyes as they looked down at her.

‘I understand,’ he said at last, reassuringly. ‘I know what you must have felt at finding us there together, discussing her future, without you. Of course I wished you hadn’t felt it! The disloyalty you thought—was no real disloyalty. But it would have been difficult to realize, in a flash, her perfect innocence.’

Vera raised herself on her pillow. She could still explain what she felt about Ariadne; what she felt about Edward she could not explain. If she lived she could make her meaning clear, but not in words.

‘Yes,’ she said after a moment’s pause, ‘I know now that she was wholly innocent. I misunderstood her. Perhaps if we’d both had her always, everything would have been easier. Her youth and her beauty broke on us like a storm. I didn’t know how to take them. I loved them, but I wanted them differently, with the blood and bones left out. I wanted a little daughter, smaller than life-size. Ariadne was too big to fit into my life. If I had been older or she had been younger, if I’d loved you more, or perhaps if I’d loved you less, I shouldn’t have broken down. I was too much a wife and too little a mother. I couldn’t stand seeing that you loved her!’ Vera held her breath.

Edward sat quite still; he did not deny loving Ariadne.

‘It came too late for me, too,’ he said at last. ‘But nothing alters what we have had together, Vera. It wasn’t that kind of love—it was only—her youth.’

She leaned back once more; the suspense was over. He had done what was better than denying his love for Ariadne: he had trusted Vera with the truth.

‘I know,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ve been thinking of that too! You never had mine. You wanted somebody’s youth. So did I; and I wanted it selfishly, all for my own, to hoard and not to share. I’d always kept Ariadne in my heart away from you—all these years. Partly to save you the pain of knowing how much I wanted her, but partly too because I liked to have a secret dream. When she came here she broke up all my dreams, and was... how funny that is, Edward!... your real child—not mine!’

‘But you do love her too?’ Edward pleaded.

‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Vera, ‘I shall always love her; but, as you yourself said, I’ve lost her.’

‘Not really lost her. It was only... she didn’t...’ Edward’s protest died out falteringly. Vera’s silence was so sure of itself that he saw there was no use trying to break it up into kind little lies. But as she lay there, still holding his hand, she was aware of something—not his words—which reassured her. A great kindness had risen up between them; not the old unhappy strain of loving, but something that was like being folded into the mercy of night.

THE END

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