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BESIDE THE LAUGHING WATER

That Giles had been unfaithful Lilith never doubted—the other woman and the compromising circumstances had been evidence enough. She had straight-away broken off the engagement and returned the ring. Giles died in action shortly afterwards.

The war over, Lilith accepted a post in the small Canadian town of Ashtondale—the home of Giles’ family and, significantly, of his younger brother, Gavin. In a flash she realised that the charm and manliness she had loved in Giles lived on in Gavin; in that moment the love she had stifled in sorrow was reborn in richer maturity. This time there would be no more doubting, no more heartbreak.

But the road was far from straight. How could it be when she came to suspect that there was a chapter in Gavin’s life she might not read? How could it be when she continued to hug her own secret which she ought at once to have disclosed?

This warm-hearted novel introduces to British readers one of the top-ranking authors of romantic fiction in North America.

It wasn’t hard for Lilith to single Archer Fenn out of the crowd that pushed against the barrier as soon as the silver ship had taxied to a stop—Archer’s six foot height and his thick black hair, wide shoulders and tanned face, the black moustache—he looked a bit like The Laughing Cavalier, Lilith had always thought. But the dashing looks were belied by his thoughtful, serious nature, by a love of poetry and philosophy, of the quiet life, in one built for high adventure.

“Welcome to our fair Dominion, Lilith.” He put his brown hands on her shoulders and looked down at her with smiling delight—into the brown eyes behind their horn-rimmed glasses, the clear-skinned face, its mouth only faintly touched with lipstick, at the rather severe way the gleaming bronze hair was drawn back and knotted in a chignon; at the sensible grey tweeds that fitted so well with this day in mid-September when the crispness of the Canadian autumn was already challenging the sun’s golden warmth.

“Archer, it’s grand to see you again. And it was wonderful of you to put in a word for me—indeed you must have put in a good many so I’d be given this post at Edgemere. After all, I had only a year’s teaching experience at home and this is really a splendid job——”

“Lilith, my darling, I laid it on as thickly as I could for you, but I don’t think I at all exaggerated your qualifications for the position of teacher of English and dramatics to the young ladies of Edgemere School. After all, I knew you pretty well during our four years at University and you may be sure you’ll have no trouble here.”

“Thank you, Archer.”

“One thing I didn’t mention, though, was that you were a raving beauty. I played that down. The president and the faculty members of Edgemere are delightful persons, charming ladies, but if you want to imagine the ultra-acme of absurdity, just try to picture them in a bathing beauty contest—you know, one of those parades where the female form divine is exposed in brief bathing-suits with a bright sash telling where the girls came from—Miss Moose Jaw, Miss Ecum Secum, Miss St. Louis de Ha Ha——”

“I take you, Archer.”

She let him guide her to a maroon station-wagon with the name Edgemere School on the door panels, surmounted by a shield with the school’s crest. A porter was stowing Lilith’s travelling-cases in the rear.

“Yes,” went on Archer. “And I was glad I got away alone to be a welcoming committee. Knowing you, I was afraid you might step off that skyship looking like England’s gift to Hollywood and that some of the Edgemere ladies—say, Miss Bolton, the maths teacher, or Miss Pellew, history, or Miss Tait, the headmistress—had been here looking for their new English instructress, Miss Lilith Graeme, M.A.”

“I thought of that, Archer.” He handed her into the station-wagon, jack-knifed his own long body under the wheel and lit cigarettes for both of them. He grinned at her and heaved a sigh of deep content.

“You don’t fool me, lady, Peek-a-boo! I can see under those school-marm glasses, under the pallor and the tight-drawn golden hair, under—er—the tweeds and the Perth brogues. You ain’t no Lilith Graeme, English teacher, you’re Lesley Gray, once of the London stage——”

“Ssh!” She put a slim cool hand against his lips. “Tell it not in Halifax, publish it not in the streets of St. John.”

For a moment, all the laughter, the banter, left her.

She had been only eighteen then, in the last year of the war, and luck, combined with the dearth of more skilled performers, had given her a small chance on the stage—the part of Diana Lane in “Crosskeys.” Archer had seen her in the part of the beautiful young sophisticate and she had shown him some of the stills during their time at University.

She had lost heart for the stage, lost heart for almost everything that early spring seven years ago, and the bright sun that had gone down then seemed as if it would never again arise. One must be young to love so deeply that there is actual heartbreak and she had loved Giles Wayland and her heart had taken from his betrayal of her love and from his death a wound that, it seemed to her, would never heal.

“Long, long thoughts,” said Archer, who had been watching the soft, piquant profile, the firm rounded chin and tilted nose. “No pennies here, Lilith, but I can offer you a nickel. No, that won’t buy anything either; I’ll make it a dime.”

“No sale, Arch.” She shook her head and pulled her thoughts with an effort back from the dead but not quite buried past. Giles Wayland had been killed in the last month of fighting. He was a Canadian; perhaps that was why she had been thinking of him now at her first setting foot in the land he had so loved.

The young eager thing who had walked breathlessly on the London boards while hell broke overhead—that girl had died in the battered city seven years now gone. She had begun to die the morning she came to Captain Giles Wayland’s flat and the girl named Poppy Ewart in flamboyant pyjamas had opened the door to her and laughed at her stricken face while Giles Wayland’s great voice came from the bath over the rush of the shower, singing—

And always—yes, until the last day of her life, she would see the wicked, triumphant look in Poppy’s blue eyes and hear her voice, “Oh, darling, won’t you wait to see Captain Wayland? We’ll be having breakfast shortly and I’m sure he’d love to have you——”

Lilith had not waited. Blindly she had stumbled from the converted mews where Giles, who had a job at the War Office, stayed when he was in London, and blindly found her way into the street. She had looked back only once, back and skywards and she had seen the bright red head in the bathroom window, heard the deep voice still singing—

I’ll take you to pieces, gentle swallow, said the song. And he, with his singing of it, had taken her to pieces, her heart breaking into very little bits, for in a few weeks they were to have been married, and this girl he had promised to put out of his life——

She had not seen Giles Wayland again. She sent back the ring and his letters, went off to a war-job in Scotland without leaving him any means of finding her. And the next she heard of him he was dead.

That brief time, so sweet, so bitter. She had been given the chance of a university course after the war and there she had worked hard and won honours. Friendship with Archer Fenn had led her to this strange land, to this moment——

“Sorry to be so dumb, Archer.” She shook off the old thoughts. “It’s just that I always wondered so much about this country. Once, long ago, for a little while, I thought it was going to be my home, then something happened——”

“Well, it was only a postponement,” he said lightly, guiding the station-wagon through the stream of cars, taxis and mail-vans at the airport gate. “You’re here now and I do hope you’ll like it. I’ve been here almost two years and it’s got me. I love it. When I was a kid”—he glanced at her a bit shyly—“I was crazy about Red Indians and when I got here I found the whole country rich with their tradition, rich still with them, too, though they’re hidden away on their own reservations and they are gradually losing the lovely old skills of their race—building the light birch bark canoe, basketry, leather-work and bead-work. In the vacation I go among them and try to help them—Sound silly?”

“No, Archer.” The big brown eyes were earnest. “Far, far from it.” She had always liked his enthusiasm, his quiet earnestness. She could see readily that he had found happiness here among strangers, that his own wounds—the loss of his parents and his sister—had healed cleanly enough and that he found life good.

“I paddled my own birch canoe on the big river,” he said. “I sat around their council fires and learned some of their speech. And, believe it or not, I’m a chief of the Malicetes.”

“Archer!” She laughed with him. “Not really? Complete with feathers, buckskin leggings, war-paint and tomahawk?”

“I,” said Archer gravely, “am known as Chief Eagle From Over the Water. Let paleface squaw beware. Ugh! Seriously, though, I’ve learned a lot and I plan to write a book on these people. Oh, not history or speculation about whether they’re descended from the Seven Lost Tribes of Israel, but a book about their songs, their poetry, their legends. Some of them are beautiful, Lilith—and the names—the great river that flows in front of Edgemere and St. Bride’s, my school—they called it ‘The Laughing Water’.”

“How lovely, Archer!”

“Isn’t it? When I first came here I didn’t know that. I loved the river, loved to swim in it, to sail on it, to fly over it on an ice-boat in winter—and I loved its voices. There was something about it, though, I couldn’t pin down, though I used to sit and listen to it by the hour. It wasn’t until I heard the name the Indians had for it that I realized what it was—it seemed to laugh, along the sandy beaches, in the reedy marshes where the ducks breed; it seemed to laugh and talk in little voices—you’ll notice it. The Indians always called it ‘The Laughing Water’.”

They drove along dark alleys of spruce and pine, fir and hemlock, through forests that had been born and died and reborn times beyond all counting——

“ ‘This is the forest primeval,’ ” said Archer. “It really is. Queer, you step out of a modern ship of the sky and in ten minutes you’re right back in the ancient lap of earth. And there are deer aplenty and moose and bear——”

A young fawn bounded out of the thicket as he spoke and crossed the road in front of them—a graceful, thrilling sight that made Lilith cry out.

“You see.” Archer was triumphant. “That’s Bambi. I had him trained to pop out just when he saw us coming. Lovely, gentle things. Your heart will break when you see their poor dead bodies draped over the fenders of the sportsmen’s cars when the season opens. Sport! God, it’s just like getting a bead on a cow: the poor things simply stand to be slaughtered. Well, enough of the flora and fauna of the new world; here is the river—the Laughing Water. I’ll pull out onto this sand-spot and you can listen——”

For a little while, her ears still attuned to the even hum of the motor, she could not distinguish the sound; then it crept slowly upon her senses, a strange, cosmic voice, a mélange of a thousand sounds, a blend of beauty. Here was the laughing voice of great waters.

Archer was looking at her eagerly as a boy, his dark eyes alight. “Hear it?” he said, almost in a whisper. “And see how it smiles and dimples in the sunlight. It’s over a mile wide right there and deep as the sea, but it is kind, it’s a goodly river—the Indians called it that too——”

“Up there is your school.” He nodded his head towards a wooded hill. “They don’t open until next week and only a few of the senior dragons are on hand. I dare say I’ll be asked to dinner while they try to draw me out about your lurid past. How I wish they could see you as you were in some of the plays at school—as Juliet, say, or as Thaïs better still.”

“Archer, I beg to insist that for a while, anyway, you leave my past alone. I’m Miss Graeme now, please remember—teacher of English Literature, of the drama——”

“They’ll love you. Never fear. They’re all wild about the theatre—even pay fellows like Michel St. Denis to come over and tell them how they’re doing. You’ll wow them.”

“I’ll what?”

“Lay ’em in the aisles, slay ’em, kill ’em dead.”

“You’re sure, Archer? You don’t think they’ll find I’m too young and want their money back or want to turn me in on an older model? I had to send a photo, you know, and the one I sent them looked like Jane Eyre——”

“Showed strong character, Miss Tait said. I was there, in her office, the day it came. ‘And such excellent recommendations. And your own high praise, Mr. Fenn. We are so fortunate to have one who knows the lady at first hand——’ ”

They drew up amid smooth lawns on a wide sweep of crushed limestone. “Here’s where the seedlings are shaped and moulded into the flower of Canada’s womanhood—and you’re one of the gardeners, Lilith.”

She felt her heart beat faster as she went with Archer up the wide granite steps into the high doorway of the lovely Gothic building that with five others and the chapel made up the school.

There was no one in the porter’s room, but a tall, slender woman came hurrying along the corridor, her hands outstretched.

“Oh, Mr. Fenn! So you found her and brought her to us safely! I’m so glad——”

“Yes, Miss Tait—here is your Miss Graeme.”

Marion Tait had iron grey hair, a kindly, rather angular face and keen black eyes which looked at Lilith with ready approval. “You’re too honest to be a good press-agent, Mr. Fenn,” she said, smiling, “though I did make the usual one-third discount on what you told us about Miss Graeme. Recommendations are so hard to give and no matter how lucidly you describe a person you can be sure your listener is forming a picture somewhat different from your own.”

While Archer poked through the small museum’s collection of arrow-heads and other Indian artifacts, Miss Tait took Lilith to her room, a large airy room with a dormer, with a good big desk and lots of bookshelves. Lilith’s trunks and boxes, sent by steamer, had arrived a few days previously.

“Here’s your cell, Miss Graeme. And I can tell you it’s a good one. I lived here myself when I first came to Edgemere eighteen years ago. Eighteen years—eheu fugaces—postume—postume——”

Miss Tait taught the classics and loved to throw out Latin quotations, not to impress her erudition upon her listeners, but simply because she loved the sonorous beauty of the Latin and the pith and wisdom of the phrases——

Lilith knew that one about the fleeting years. “It’s a lovely room,” she said, standing in the dormer and looking out at the parkland, at the vast silver sweep of the river. “I wonder if I shall be here that long——”

“You!” Miss Tait shook her head. “Oh, no, my dear. I shouldn’t think so.” She was looking wisely at Lilith and behind the prim pince-nez her eyes twitched as Lilith turned and met their gaze. She knew she wasn’t fooling this shrewd woman, that the good Miss Tait saw through the school-marm disguise and knew the rare beauty beneath it.

“It’s a good life, teaching. I had a year at St. Ethelreda’s School in Shropshire. I loved it.”

“Oh, yes, one can come to love it. And there are a hundred satisfactions to make up for the imitations and annoyances. But——” Miss Tait sighed—“comes a day when school opens for another term and you greet the new students, look into the bright young faces and hear the names—and it comes to you with a shock that these are the children of the girls you taught years ago. No, my dear, I don’t think you’ll ever grow old here. I think, if a woman is really going to give her life to teaching, she might as well go the whole way and take the habit of the Ursulines or some other sisterhood—But I’m giving you a lecture already——”

“I like it,” smiled Lilith. And she could have said, “I like you, too.” There was something good and brave about this woman, something devout and almost holy that one finds now and then among those who live with young minds and actually try to understand them, drawing something of eternal youth from their charges, renewing themselves with each year at the bright crystal fountain.

“The bell for dinner will ring in twenty minutes, but there are only a few of us and you needn’t worry about being a little late.”

“I’ll be on time,” promised Lilith. “And thank you, Miss Tait, and I—I am glad you don’t find me disappointing. I’ll give you the best I have.”

“I’m sure you will, child. And I hope you’ll be very happy here.”

At dinner, which Archer made lively by paying outrageous compliments not only to Miss Tait, but to Mademoiselle Léonie Frontin, the French mistress, and Miss Gale and Miss Vance, two very much set-in-the-mould teachers, Lilith knew a blessed feeling of ease and relaxation. These were good people, friendly people, and it was wonderful to have Archer Fenn there, a link with the past, a help in the present and one to count on in the future.

In the ruddy gold of the September evening Archer showed her over the grounds, the farm that supplied Edgemere and his own school, St. Bride’s, the apple-orchard, its trees bent with ripening fruit—MacIntosh Reds, Fameuses, Russets, Pippins—Archer knew them all, and filled his pockets with prize specimens for them to munch as they strolled through the blue dusk towards the river.

A young crescent moon floated in the pastel sky and only a few early stars twinkled faintly. Their walk wound through groves of evergreens, smelling of the forest incense, like some great cathedral where the thurifers have passed, leaving behind them the pungent odours of frankincense and myrrh. In the grove the birds sang, more softly, more slowly than in the heat of day, and overhead a great flight of wild geese darkened the sky as they passed in ever shifting formation, their wingbeats making a rustling sound in the stillness.

Archer had a canoe, one he had built himself from the lore the Indian chief, Louis Seneschal, had taught him—a long, slender, graceful thing, surprisingly strong with all its lightness.

“Archer, it’s lovely as a dream.” He settled Lilith on cushions in the curving prow and went, himself, tall and brown as any Micmac or Malicete, in the stern, paddling smoothly, the water dripping silver from the wide paddle-blade.

Archer’s voice, strong and resonant, sounded like the chant of some proud warrior. He told her how the Indians used to build their canoes of old, great war-canoes that bore a score and more of savage warriors.

“Now,” he said, “most Indians would get drowned if they tried to paddle a canoe. It’s just a few old chiefs, like Eagle From Over the Water here, who keep the art alive.”

“You’re doing a noble work, chief.” Lilith was trailing her hand in the cool water. “This should be part of every girl’s education. I didn’t know such peace existed.”

“It was here long ago,” said Archer gravely. “Here on these hills and on the Laughing Water when the white man came, but, as usual with the white man, it hasn’t been the same for very long. There you are——”

Two jets from the Chatham air-base streaked across the sky, bound for Greenwood—streaked with the speed of sound.

“Poor Hiawatha!” Lilith was laughing at Archer’s rueful parody. Archer had flown and fought in every theatre of the war. Yet there was nothing incongruous about his loving to paddle slowly, dreamily, over the moon-silvered water. Up there, no doubt, he had found something wondrous, too, something beautiful that lifted his heart, there in the rush and thunder and reek of battle; maybe even something close akin to this peace that he knew now, some closeness to God.

The night flowed on with the deep laughing voice of the river and all the sky was filled with stars so that their combined brightness, joined with the moon’s radiance, made all the world a realm of blue and silver light.

From the near-distant shore the village-clock chimed out ten slow strokes and Archer headed for land.

“Better not keep you out too late the first night, Lilith. You must be tired after that long air-journey.”

“Not in the least, Archer. This—this has been wonderful for me. I can’t tell you——”

“You don’t need to,” he said gently. “I think I can guess.”

“I feel so light, so relaxed, as if I’d moved to another planet.”

“I know. It was the same with me. And the spell will stay with you, but you’ll find—we all do—that you’ll get lonely. There will be days when the pull of the old things, the old life, the old land, will be strong.”

The canoe grounded smoothly on the beach. She helped him draw it up beyond the tide-mark. In the lovely light they stood close together. Archer looking down at her. She felt his bigness, his strength, and she knew his goodness, his warmth of heart.

He took her lightly in his arms and kissed her lips as lightly. Though she had wanted it and she loved it, yet there was no passion and from her no deep response. The stars stayed steady nor tumbled about, nor did the moon stray from its wonted path. And with love such things happened. She knew that. It had been like that with Giles Wayland—a song in the heart, a flame in the spirit, a dream coloured with wondrous hues——

“Lilith!” He released her and his hand touched her cheek. “I’ve always wanted to do that. It’s always been you since I first saw you walking in that English lane, and I thought maybe the years I’ve been away would make a difference. But it’s not there for you, is it?”

She looked up at him almost pleadingly. Why had this to happen on such a perfect night? Why had he not——? Yet she had known he would kiss her and she had wanted it, wondering what his kiss would do to her, if from her there would be any swift, flaming response. And there had been none.

“I’m afraid not, Archer. I—I don’t think it’s there for any man. Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I’d like you to be happy——”

“Think nothing of it, my sweet.” He spoke lightly, but she could sense the depth, the bitterness of his disappointment. “Maybe in time you’ll learn to assess at their proper value the pure gold of my qualities of heart and mind, the high-carat content of——”

“Oh, Archer, I know those things now. I’ve known them since I met you. When I’m with you I’m happy—happier, I think, than at any time. But I don’t——”

“I know.” He sighed. “I don’t set any bells to ringing, or fireworks to popping or sweet symphonies to playing. Just good old Archer with you, Lilith; and, damn it, you’re the only girl that ever made me want to ring bells and set off rockets and all the rest of it——”

“Let’s not talk about it any more, Archer. I’d better be getting back to the school. It was a grand evening, one of the happiest of my life.”

And it had been. Not since the night she had become engaged to Giles Wayland had she known such happiness. She was thinking of Giles—so tall, so strong, so full of life and fire, as they walked up the street and crossed the village green.

There a floodlight still shone down on the war memorial—a huge granite cross, and there was a bronze plaque set in it with the names of those from the village who had died——

She glanced down them idly and the letters of his name seemed to spring at her from the scores of others——captain giles wayland

For a long time, there in the quiet of the village common, in the warm, starlight night, Lilith stood looking with eyes that presently saw only a blurred jumble of letters, at the stark inscription that was all Ashtondale had now of the boy who had walked its lanes and gone to its schools and played on this very greensward where now a tall grey granite cross stood to commemorate him and the scores of others who had gone from these peaceful places——

“They shall grow not old——” She saw the inscription now as her vision cleared, and she thought of Giles Wayland as she had seen him last, not in that sick, hurried glimpse of him in the window of Westerham Mews, but a week before when they had danced together in a London club. Tall he was, with fine profile and slightly beaked nose, and his hair was red and thick, cut close to his head. And he was full of recklessness and gaiety and laughter. He had been Poppy Ewart’s friend when Lilith met him at a week-end in Kent, but after he had seen Lilith she was the only one.

He had told her quite frankly about his divorced wife, Avis, in Canada, about his two children, Peg and Rowan. It was all over, had been for two years. There had been nothing morally wrong on either side; it was just that they never could agree, that it was better to part amicably than stay together until they did some deep harm to themselves or to the lives of their children.

It had mattered to Lilith, that divorce—it had bothered her a lot. She came from a family that hated the very name, but there was something about Giles, his sheer male magnetism and lust for life perhaps, that drew her irresistibly and held her in its thrall. She knew Poppy Ewart hated her for taking him away and she remembered the dark, red-mouthed girl’s mocking laughter that ugly morning when she had found them again together in Giles’ flat.

“Know someone on the roll?” asked Archer. “I met a few of the Air Force boys—grand lads. I know some of the veterans here, too.”

“I know one,” said Lilith. “But I had no idea that he came from this part of Canada. He worked on a magazine in Toronto. That’s his name—there at the end—Giles Wayland.”

“Wayland! Why, the place here is full of them. I have several of that ilk in my classes at St. Bride’s. And I have met——” he hesitated slightly—“a Mrs. Avis Wayland——”

“She was his wife, I believe. Don’t stop me, Archer, if I say it’s a very small world. I was—was once engaged to Giles Wayland——”

“Oh, I see. I am sorry, Lilith. I didn’t know that you—that there ever had been a man who meant——”

“There was. It meant a lot to me. It was the first time I ever even began to glimpse what love could be. There was something about Giles that made all the world a different place; the sunlight was more golden, the fields a bit more green and the birds sang more sweetly——”

“You’re still remembering then? I begin to see. When I kissed you down there on the shore, you still cherished the memory . . .”

“Perhaps. I don’t really know. I think I got in too deeply that time and I was hurt pretty badly. Anyway, I didn’t want to try it again—I mean, climb again to those shining pinnacles; the drop is too sudden, too far. I felt then as if something had been ripped right out of me—here.” She touched her heart. “Oh, I know girls aren’t supposed to feel that way in this aseptic age; they’re supposed to shrug love off as a chemical reaction that can readily be reproduced—That’s not so, Archer. The heart doesn’t change and the mainspring of life is the love of a man for a maid——”

“As it was in the beginning, is now——”

“And ever shall be.”

They laughed then and his fingers for a moment pressed hers. They didn’t talk much as they walked back to the school. They said a quick goodnight. She went slowly up to her room, feeling no fatigue, only a deep sadness of heart as she thought again of Giles, tried to picture him here in this lovely village.

She was almost sorry now that she had told Archer Fenn about their brief love, but with him it would go no further. And that was as well: it was finished and done with. For all it mattered to these people it had never been. But she wondered what they were like—Avis and the boy and girl, perhaps some brothers or sisters. There had been at least one brother, she knew—Gavin, who had been a war-correspondent. But she had never met him.

After she had undressed, she put on a blue corduroy robe and sat in the window, in the moonlight. Sleep was far away and this was a time she loved when all the humdrum world lay sleeping and the vast peace of night descended like a benison upon the weary earth, when the most ordinary things seemed to slough off the drab lineaments of day and assume a newer, softer form. On the college lawns the shrubs, the cedars, cast long, blue-black shadows. There was no breath of wind. The river was a vast sheet of silver under the moon.

She could think now, clearly, almost dispassionately, of Giles, of the cruel upset in her young life; she thought a little wistfully of what it would have been like to come to this place as the wife of Giles Wayland. And she would see his children; perhaps—the thought pleased her and frightened her a little—perhaps she would have one of them to teach. The girl, Peg, would be sixteen now. And I shall look at her, thought Lilith, and see Giles in her face, in her eyes, and hear him in her voice. And Avis and perhaps his brother Gavin—I shall meet them all, the ones who might have played a big part in my life, the ones I never thought I’d see in this wide world.

The clock on the school-chapel tower struck twelve and the deeper notes from the village steeple drifted somnolently over the tree-tops. Lilith got up, stretched, slipped out of the blue robe and went to bed, and sleep came quickly—sleep deep and life-renewing and untroubled. The moonrays crept caressingly over the young lovely face and played in the thick deep auburn hair, then went away, faded and were followed soon by the golden, questing fingers of the sun.

She awoke to a world of beauty, dew-sparkling, with white mist in the hollows and over the river where it was already tinged with gold and melting away in the sunlight. She went quickly to her window and looked out on the lawns and gardens, the ivied buildings, and gave only a warm and happy thought to the granite cross on the common—“They shall grow not old.”

It was so true. To her Giles would always be young; all her life he would be the proud, young knight with the golden crest, gay and laughing, and here in these places where he had walked and played, where he had spent his happy boyhood, she would see him, think of him at every turn—and he would be always young.

At eight o’clock the bell rang for breakfast. In a grey skirt and pale blue jumper she went down to join Miss Tait and the three others who had been there last night—and one new one, a dark, lovely girl with a madonna face but with eyes that were deep and wise and mocking, eyes that took in every detail of Lilith’s form and dress in one long lazy look.

“This is Miss Lilith Graeme, our new English teacher.” Miss Tait’s long hand rested lightly on Lilith’s arm. “Meet our art-director—Avis Wayland——”

Avis! Lilith found herself looking as one hypnotized into those great eyes that were like pools of ebony, into the almost too perfectly boned face, at the full sultry mouth that was made for the long, deep draughts of passion.

“How do you do?” Her voice was throaty, slurred, languid. “I’m sure we’re glad to have you. You’re going to direct dramatics too, aren’t you?” The eyes narrowed with faint amusement and Lilith knew that she was not at all taken in by the severe hair-do, the horn-rimmed glasses, the absence of make-up. “I should think you’d be good at that.”

And with this little barbed-shaft—sort of a tracer—she turned to Miss Vance and began to discuss some local artists in her lovely deep voice, lightly tearing them to shreds and reducing them with a few choice sentences to the status of house-painters.

Lilith, though she had brought a good appetite downstairs with her, found it hard to eat, found herself mechanically absorbing porridge, toast, egg and sausage and tea. Avis—all she could think of was this gorgeous thing next to her—Avis Wayland, the woman who had been Giles’ wife, the mother of his children.

She recalled now Archer’s slight hesitation last night when he had mentioned Avis. Why, she wondered, hadn’t he told her that Avis taught at Edgemere. Maybe he thought she’d had enough Wayland for one night. Now she wasn’t at all sure that she was going to like working with this cool Canadian product with the wise eyes and the lovely body whose sleeveless white dress and sheer silk stockings and Roman sandals made no faintest concession to the austerity of the other faculty members. Oddly enough, they all seemed to like her, though she was among them like a gorgeous bird-of-paradise among a flock of crows.

Lilith felt that she was deliberately neglecting her all through the leisurely breakfast. She turned, though, and offered her packet of cigarettes when they were finished, and she smiled demurely when Lilith hesitated and looked at Miss Tait.

“Oh,” she said softly. “We won’t light ’em here. Taiter suffers from asthma and anyway you’re not supposed to smoke within these sacred walls. Let’s go out on the side terrace. She’s going to say grace now; she should have sung a requiem over that egg they fed me.”

She bowed her head, sweet and demure as a young nun, while Miss Tait gave thanks; then with a glance of her black eyes she drew Lilith with her and they went outside and perched on the warm stone coping of the flagged terrace. Avis looked at her with cool appraisal, the full mouth smiling, and Lilith returned the look with one as candid.

“You know,” said Avis, “there’s something about you that interests me—I don’t know what exactly it is. Oh, don’t think for a moment that I believe those cheaters you’re hiding behind or that I subscribe for that hair-do——”

“You’re very frank.”

“It’s been the curse of my life.” She brushed Lilith’s protest aside. “I can’t help it. I’m wondering whether you and I are going to be friends or foes——”

“Is there any particular reason why we should be either?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of record, there is; we’re bound to work together on the school-plays. I design the sets, that sort of thing, and I do the decorating. That’s one thing. Another is that you’re going to have my young daughter Peg in your English class and she’s pretty sure to get a crush on you—that lovely accent of yours and that startled fawn effect you give when you pretend you don’t quite grasp what one is driving at.”

“Really, you——”

“Why did you look like the startled fawn when you heard my name? You did, you know.”

Lilith stared at her coldly. “You’re assuming quite a lot, Mrs. Wayland. Imagining a lot too. I was, I grant you, a bit startled. Shall we say—by your looks?”

“I wonder. And I think you could do a lot of startling on your own if you came out from behind the camouflage——”

“Well, I have to teach school after all. When I’m going to a ball, I’ll wear the proper dress, I assure you.”

“Okay. I suppose it’s different for you anyway and they wouldn’t put up with any high-jinks from their English prof. I don’t live here, you see, and I’m pretty much a free-agent. The Waylands endowed Edgemere and they’ve given it just about everything from indoor plumbing to an automatic potato-peeler. Same thing with St. Bride’s. And I’m a Wayland—after a fashion. I was married to their pride and joy, Giles. We got a divorce. He was killed in the war. I have his two children.”

“It’s good of you to tell me all these things.” Lilith wondered if it would be a good thing for her to be as frank, to tell this woman of her relationship with Giles—and she decided against it—not now, maybe not ever. There was no use raking up that dead episode. Anyway, things between Avis and Giles had been over before Giles ever met her.

“If I didn’t tell you, someone else would.” Avis swung her long lovely legs and studied the exquisite ankles with the Roman straps criss-crossing them. “And I’d just as soon you’d have it from me. I teach here because of the money. The Wayland Trust pays me an allowance for myself and Peg and Rowan, but it’s not too much: they were always attached to the Royal Family——”

“I don’t see——”

“I mean the king’s picture on the banknotes. Old Jarvis was a millionaire but he used to ride down to Florida in a day-coach to save extra pullman-fare. He never approved of me or the way I spent money, which helped to foul things up between Giles and me. Giles was a swell guy and we had some grand times, but it just didn’t work out. He had hard luck with his women. He was going to marry another one in London and she ditched him too. I guess that about finished him; he went to pieces. He always had a lack of resistance towards a bottle and he capitulated completely, said he wanted to meet the shell with his number on it—and he did——”

She was looking far off at the river now and Lilith was glad, for each word she said seemed to sting and burn. Under her own flippant words, too, was a note of sadness, of bitterness, of pain, that life could sometimes deal so unkindly with mortals.

“I hope I haven’t bored you, Lilith—lovely name. You seem to invite confidences but I love telling my life story to anyone who will listen to it. Gavin—he’s another Wayland—says I should write it down and pass it out to strangers. You’ll like Gavin—he’s Giles’ younger brother—a real heller too. He’s just back from the East—war-correspondent with the army over in Korea. He’s going to call here for me shortly. I had a breakfast-date with Taiter to talk about some new classes. Tell me all about yourself.”

Lilith laughed outright; Avis joined her. “All right, all right, I can just imagine you letting down that back hair the way I’ve undone mine. Just the same, you must have a story. You’re an old friend of Archer Fenn’s, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes. We went to the University together. Do you know Archer very well?”

“Not so well as I’d like to. I’ve met him a few times; he had dinner with us once. He teaches my son Rowan at St. Bride’s. You can see why I must take a special interest in you two imports—you have Peg and Archer Fenn has Rowan. He’s Rowan’s hero anyway. He’s that rarest of birds—an Englishman who can play ice-hockey; he coaches the school-team. He’s a grand hunk of man. Are you in love with him?”

“I think not. I like Archer very much. He’s probably the best friend I have; he was instrumental in bringing me over here to teach. But in love with him——” She shook her head, thinking of that shy, tentative kiss Archer had given her on the beach last night, of how little it had meant to her, and she wondered if any other man’s kiss would mean more. There was none of the old wild rapture she had known in Giles Wayland’s arms.

“You’re not one of those cold, aloof, virginal women, are you?” Avis deftly shot her cigarette butt in a long trajectory out onto the still sparkling grass. “Don’t tell me—not with that bronze hair, those gold-flecked eyes. You must have known love.”

What, wondered Lilith, would you say if I told you I had known love—in your husband’s arms. Maybe it would jolt you out of that smooth, easy assurance of yours and give you something to think about——

On the other hand maybe Avis would merely shrug those slim square shoulders and drawl, “So what? Was it any fun for you?”

But she wasn’t going to tell Avis, which would be the same as telling the little world of Ashtondale, that she was the girl who had jilted Giles Wayland—the girl they blamed for his debacle, for his reckless courting of death, his eager seeking of the bullet that ended his life.

Perhaps it had really been like that. Young as she was then she had been forced to admit that there was in Giles a wildness, an emotional instability that too often sent him off half-cocked—hasty, tempestuous, unheeding of any consequences whatever. Maybe he had thought it was the end of the world for him, but why hadn’t he turned, as he had before, to Poppy Ewart or another one like her, for the consolation they seemed to give him?

But if they blamed her in any part for his downfall, it was all the greater reason why she didn’t choose to admit that she had ever known him. If they found out about her, she would have to defend herself and tell them why she had left Giles. She had no intention of being a martyr for the honour of the Waylands or a sacrifice on the altar of the family pride that, she began to see, was what mattered with them most.

“Well!” Avis had been watching the manœuvres of a roly-poly gardener with a balky motor-mower that at times ran away with him, at others stopped suddenly and all but sent him tumbling. “The march of progress. That’s old Pascoe, used to be a green keeper at St. Andrews years ago. He’ll never get to understand that mower if he lives to be a hundred. You don’t have to tell me about your love-life, you know. I am glad, just the same, that you don’t want Archer Fenn.”

“You would like to marry again?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, why——?” Lilith glanced at the lovely profile, the olive-brown skin and long lashed eyes, the mouth that, in itself, was an aphrodisiac.

“Good reasons. Besides my two children, who would give any prospective husband pause, it happens also that my good father-in-law fixed it so that my allowance from the Wayland estate terminates with my re-marriage. Cute, isn’t it? However, I don’t think that would stop me if I thought I could really have the man I wanted—nothing would.”

The mouth was sullen now, the eyes wickedly bright. Lilith knew that she was speaking the truth then. She had a gypsy look, primitive, reckless, that boded no good for anyone who stood in the way of her deep desire.

An ivory white convertible, top-down, streaked up the driveway and crunched to a stop on the gravel sweep in front of the college. There was a tall fellow in a jockey-cap at the wheel. He waved to Avis and got out.

“That’s Gavin Wayland, my brother-in-law. Handsome brute, isn’t he? Doesn’t like women. I guess he got burned too. The Waylands do seem to have tough luck with their love-life. Hi, Gavin! Come up here and meet the latest thing from London.”

He didn’t smile. He looked a lot like Giles, she thought, only he was taller, thinner and there was a seriousness about him that was older than his years. He acknowledged the introduction with cool indifference, looking at her only once and with no faintest flicker of interest, with, in fact, such a complete dismissal that she felt the anger rise in her, felt the challenge that every lovely woman knows when a man looks at her as if she were of no great import in his scheme of things.

“We’re driving up to the Belleisle.” Avis slid down off the coping and put her hand on Gavin’s shoulder for support. “Wouldn’t you like to come with us?”

Lilith didn’t wait to see if Gavin wanted her too. She rather thought he didn’t.

“Thank you, no.” Her fingers touched the thick chignon of her hair. Avis smiled mockingly. “I have to get settled; there are so many things one must do. I’m sort of starting a new life, you know.”

“Miss Graeme is going to have Peg in her class,” Avis told Gavin. “Isn’t that nice?”

“Why, yes.” He turned to her then and smiled and the smile was a good thing to see in that thin brown face. His red hair under the jockey-cap was bleached to a pale gold and it was thick and cropped close. “You’ll like our Peg,” he said.

He neglected to mention whether or not he thought Peg would like her. He didn’t say any more. He stood patiently while Avis went through the ritual of fixing up her face and tying a yellow bandeau about her head. Only once more, as he said goodbye, did his eyes again meet hers and in them was a look, wary, appraising, aloof and puzzled.

She watched them climb into the convertible and waved in answer to Avis Wayland’s parting salute. She stood there watching until the low-slung, beetle-like car was lost among the trees. She leaned wearily against the balustrade then, feeling lonely, deflated and strangely forlorn, here in this vast, bright land, among all these strangers who, but for a turn of the wheel, might have been her dear friends or bitter enemies, who now looked on her as just a strange girl who had come into their midst, who was to be casually welcomed, who might stay or might go—and who gave a darn either way?

“I’ve had enough Wayland for a while,” she decided. “I don’t know that I like the breed. That man, that Gavin—I hated the way he looked at me—with such utter indifference. I’d sooner almost——”

She knew it wouldn’t be too hard for her to banish the bored look from those blue eyes, to make them light with what she had seen long ago in his brother’s. And, suddenly, she found herself wanting to do just that, eager to accept the gaze he had thrown down, the challenge of his indifference.

“Looking at me rather as if I were a clay figure—and not a very good one at that,” she thought rebelliously. Then she smiled. It was a long time since any man had piqued her, disturbed her like this. She found herself thinking about him, speculating about his life, and she was aroused from this idle day-dreaming only by Miss Tait’s quick step on the terrace and her cheery, “Here you are, my dear. I suppose Avis Wayland talked the ear off you. Lovely thing, isn’t she? And you met Gavin, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Charming fellow—used to be pretty wild—they all were; but he’s tamed down now. He has been in Korea this past year. Plans to write a book about it, I hear. Somebody’s always writing a new book about something. He lives in that big old barracks of a house—the family homestead. You’d get lost in it.”

“Is he—married?” Lilith felt the question slip out before she could stop it.

“He was, I believe. His wife died. He doesn’t seem to care much for women—doesn’t trust them, I dare say. Giles, his brother, didn’t have much luck with them either—as Avis has no doubt told you. But all this Wayland story must bore you to tears——”

How little she knew, thought Lilith. Her own story was still, in a way, bound up closely with theirs; in the jigsaw puzzle of their history she made a piece without which the pattern would hardly be complete.

There were some hundred and fifty resident girls at Edgemere, with, in addition, about thirty more from Ashtondale and the country round. Lilith watched them come singly or trooping in, depending on whether they came by car or train or bus. Young, lovely things, some of them grave-faced and miserable at the prospect of a long separation from home; others, mostly the older ones, falling eagerly into the old routine, visiting their favourite haunts, gathering in little knots and swapping stories about what they had done during vacation.

Lilith loved seeing them, meeting them, watching the look in the bright young eyes, wary, speculative, trying to estimate her, whether she would be “hard” or “easy” with her students, “a holy terror” or “an easy-mark.”

It wasn’t easy for them to make up their minds about this newcomer. They had made life pretty miserable for her predecessor, Miss Keightly, a futile, near-sighted lady with a red nose and a perpetual sniffle, who always seemed to be preparing for a heavy rainfall, wearing rubbers in all sorts of weather and carrying a bright red plaid umbrella.

They used to have fun with “The Kite” as she had been christened in a school where everyone had a nickname, but the twenty-five girls who assembled for Lilith’s first class in English Literature arrived with wide-open minds and opinions quite unformed about the newcomer.

“Mother has met her,” Peg Wayland informed a group of her friends before class. “And mother says she’s an—an enigma. And that’s something, coming from mother. She’s the very dickens for anyone to try to fool. I saw this Graeme witch walking with Handsome—you know, that divine Mr. Fenn from St. Bride’s. Very tweedy and outdoorsy and the usual shell-rimmed specs and workhouse hair-do. But what a chassis—what I mean to say—long legs and very beautifully stacked, you could tell, even under the warden’s uniform. And she has red hair—a deeper red than mine—almost like bronze——”

“ ‘Redhead Gingerbread, five cents a loaf,’ ” taunted one of the girls and the rest giggled, loving Peg’s instant angry reaction.

“Nuts to you,” said the elegant Miss Wayland. “If you read history you would know that the most famous women have had red hair——”

“Maybe if you read further,” said a quiet voice, “you’ll find that some of the most infamous have had too.”

There was a confused murmur, low-voiced laughter, as they scattered to their places. Peg Wayland’s white cheeks flushed and she looked at Lilith with a suddenly born defiance. Pussyfoot, she thought resentfully—why creep up behind a person like that, you might have coughed, sneezed or tripped over your feet. She thought that, even though she knew it was unfair; that the others had seen Lilith coming and had deliberately failed to give warning. Anyway, she had been rather inclined to resent the new teacher. She knew vaguely that it was some girl in England they blamed for her father’s downfall, some girl with whom he had been infatuated, who had thrown him down cruelly and unjustly. Maybe some cool, beautifully made woman like this.

She carried her shoulders stiffly as she went to her seat, and her chin was high, her mouth stubborn.

“Giles Wayland to the life,” thought Lilith. “Too quick, too impetuous, too prone to make snap judgments. Is that a curse put on all redheads? She’s furious with me now just because I made the others laugh at her. It might occur to her that the laugh is also on myself. She’s a beautiful thing. Queer to think she might have been my step-child more or less. I don’t think it would ever have worked.”

She met the level gaze of Peg Wayland’s fine blue eyes, smiled briefly and looked away. “For the year’s reading we have, in this class, ‘Henry Esmond,’ ‘The Lady of the Lake’ and Lamb’s ‘Essays of Elia’——”

And she thought, we are also sure to have mental indigestion and spiritual biliousness. Who in God’s wide world ever selected that heavy literary fare for a group of gay, laughing young girls? She tried to recall whether or not Beatrix Esmond was a redhead, thinking it very likely. Maybe she could get Peg Wayland interested in that fickle and pampered beauty. Anyway, she could make them fall in love with Henry, having done so herself the third time she’d read the novel.

“You will also write me a page of English prose each day. Any subject at all——”

They looked at her in horror. It was a grim struggle to write a letter home for most of them and here this dame expected them to give her a page each day——

She saw their stricken looks. “It will be hard at first—it’s supposed to be; but it’s the only way you can learn to write. You will of course learn the rules of rhetoric, punctuation, and so on, but you will also put them into practice. For tomorrow,” she went on slyly, “you might pick as your topic ‘One Famous Woman of History.’ You can find no end of them in the library, but don’t copy the Encyclopædia word-for-word: it has a style all its own.”

The class went well. She liked these girls, liked their earnestness, their rapt attention. Maybe, she thought, as her glances moved from one eager face to another, maybe it’s because I’m new that I’m receiving such flattering attention, and it will soon wear off. I hope not. I have them with me now and I’d like to have them all the way——

There was only one notable exception to this model deportment and it was not at all flagrant nor did it hold in it anything she could pick upon: it was the red-headed Wayland’s lack of interest, an indifference feigned or real that Lilith was quick to notice.

“Well!” she thought. “Miss Peg is obviously not going to be the teacher’s pet. For some reason or other—probably she couldn’t describe it herself—she doesn’t like me or has decided she’s not going to. She would like me less if she knew that once her father loved me—or said he loved me. Lied to me—and they dare to blame me because he acted like a crazy juvenile and went charging recklessly into battle——”

She could analyse a lot better Giles’ reaction to being jilted, to being turned down by a girl whom he had been so sure of. Incredulous at first, then furious, then defeated, then defiant—“To hell with her, to hell with love, to hell with everything”—And back to the old wild ways, to girls like Poppy, to the callow hedonism that was the philosophy of so many, that was their only resource against fear, the only means of escaping reality.

The girl, she had an idea, was much like her father—quick, sensitive, touchy—the kind of person who is easily hurt, who can often fancy injury where none is intended, slight where none is meant. She could be troublesome too. Right now, while Lilith talked to them about catholicity of reading, telling them that anything, from a worthwhile thriller to “Sesame and Lilies,” was worth reading, if not digesting, Peg Wayland was busy with something else.

It looked as if she were sketching something. Lilith wondered if she had some of Avis’ skill with the pencil and crayon. Well, it was only the first day, and she promised herself she wasn’t going to tangle with Peg or anyone else for a while at least. Troubles in a class of students, she had learned, rarely grew worse; usually they ironed themselves out, passed away and were forgotten. If you liked your work, liked your students, and taught them with earnestness and sincerity, you had no trouble. And she knew, from that first hour, that she would have none with these.

Peg Wayland was the only one she had doubts about. And Peg, with time, would come around. She was, Lilith thought, too beautiful, too spoiled, precocious no doubt from trying to live up to a parent like Avis. Probably she didn’t recall very much of Giles, who had been in the war from the start. She must have been very young when he first went away and he had been home only once in the years of service.

Lilith loved the thick red-gold waves of her hair that flowed to her shoulders in a cascade of beauty, the milk-white skin, the few freckles on the pert nose, the wide sensuous mouth. She was like a golden lily, long and slender and budding swiftly into the beauty of womanhood.

Peg was among the last to leave the class-room when the noonday bell rang. By accident or design as she passed Lilith a sheet of drawing-paper fluttered from her notebook and floated to the floor almost at Lilith’s feet.

It was a sketch, and even at that distance Lilith recognized it—herself. So that was what had occupied the wayward Wayland all through the class! Instead of absorbing the beauties of English prose she had been busily engaged in making a drawing of the new teacher.

“May I see?”

Lilith put out a hand as the girl straightened from rescuing her sketch. The blue eyes met hers with a guilelessness, an utter innocence, too great to be real, and the low voice said, “If you really wish to see it, Miss Graeme. I really hadn’t intended——”

Lilith’s cool gaze stopped her and she stood there, her lips twitching impishly, then laid the sketch on the desk, and started for the door.

“Please wait!” She had resolved to have no trouble with any of them this first day, but this was a bit too much. This girl was obviously looking for trouble and it was just as well to have a showdown now as later.

Lilith studied the sketch—a very good likeness. Surprisingly good, she had to admit, even though she didn’t like the supercilious look, the touch of disdain that Peg had managed to convey to her. Under the sketch was printed “One of history’s famous—or infamous—women.”

“It’s really good.” Lilith looked up from studying it. “And I think you flatter me.”

The red crown glimmered as Peg shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m sure it doesn’t flatter you, Miss Graeme.”

“Why did you do it? You were supposed to be paying attention, you know.”

“Oh, I was.”

“You can’t do two things at once.”

“This is Canada. We can watch television or listen to the radio and do our lessons at the same time. I heard all of what you said. And I just had to make a sketch of you——”

“Why did you?”

“Something about you that bothers me—about your looks——”

She wasn’t being insolent, Lilith realized. They were all amazingly frank, these girls—Peg a bit more so than the others. And she felt a stab of unease, a sudden nervousness. The young eyes were studying her, dissecting her, even now.

“I don’t know what it could be, Miss Wayland—or shall I call you Peg?”

“If you wish, Miss Graeme. I can’t explain to you what it was made me draw you. I drew you first without the cheaters and I couldn’t make a go of it. You look like someone I’ve seen before. It’s as if I knew your face quite well——”

“Impossible. I’ve been in this country only a few days——”

“I know. That’s what puzzles me. You are a bit of an enigma, you know. That’s what mother says.”

“Should I be flattered or the reverse, I wonder.”

“Oh, flattered, I should think. It’s nice to meet someone different—someone who isn’t just one, two, three. And it’s fun too—there is a key to every enigma and it should be interesting trying to find the key to you.”

Lilith had no answer for this. The acuteness of the girl surprised and unnerved her. But this was nonsense about having seen her before. Unless—she put the thought away, but it came back at her with a nagging persistence—unless somewhere in this place there was or had been a picture of her. Giles had had one of the stills taken of her from “Crosskeys”, the play in which she had been appearing when he first met her. Had it found its way here and had this wise child seen it and found in it something that came to her as she looked upon her teacher? There wasn’t much of a likeness, Lilith thought consolingly, between the Lesley Gray of that long ago day and the Lilith Graeme who stood here in the class-room.

“May I keep it?” she asked. “It’s quite a tribute to be made the subject of a portrait at one’s very first class.”

“Keep it if you like. I wonder”—the eyes were very wise now—“I wonder if you’d pose for me some day without the glasses, with your hair down, with a bit of make-up——”

“I might.” Lilith laughed. “On the other hand, I think I’d be a bit chary of letting you loose on me. I have an idea you’d make me look like one of the infamous redheads.”

“Weren’t they the loveliest ones?”

“I really wouldn’t know. Now let’s go to commons. And please, after this, keep your art for your art-class. Do you take your meals at the school?”

“Noonday. I have my breakfast and dinner at home.”

They walked across the campus together and into the dining-hall. Just a pair of the famous women of history, thought Lilith. Peg, leggy as a foal, was almost as tall as herself and her freshness, reflected in her sweet flower-like face, was a joy to behold. Let us be friends, prayed Lilith—let us always be friends, you and I. Let me love you as once I loved your father. It’s good, it’s heart-warming to have again something, especially something like you, to remind me of that old love, to let me know that it never really died. I think, after I got over my hurt, the cruel shock of what had happened, that I could have forgiven him, that I could have taken him back. But in a little while it was too late.

But there was no blame for her. With a shock it came to her that some might blame her for Peg’s lack of a father. Apparently they still figured that she had helped Giles on his way and thought perhaps that but for her he might still be alive.

She could see Peg where she sat at the day-students’ table and could tell that those who were in her class were being regaled with a full and graphic account of what had happened between the two of them. She saw Peg’s chin go up in a quick, almost haughty gesture that startled and puzzled her, then made her laugh when she recognized it as her own.

She sat next to Avis Wayland whom she had not seen since the morning Avis and Gavin had gone driving. Avis nodded to her as to an old friend.

“Well, my dear, school’s in at last. Everybody’s back to the old grind and all the fun is over. How did you fare with your sweet young things?”

“Splendidly, I think. A bit early to judge, but they seem to have no higher aim in life than the acquisition of a good knowledge of English literature. They really are very earnest. You have to be rugged to face up to Walter Scott, Thackeray and Lamb, all in one year——”

“Winnie-the-Pooh would be the speed of a good many of them if you want to ask me,” said Avis. “Teaching the classics these days is like playing a zither in a boogie-woogie band. However, one can but try to keep the torch of beauty burning and seek to bear it high. How was my flame-topped darling? Or did you pay her any heed?”

“We tangled—isn’t that what you say?—first-off. She was expounding to her classmates the not untenable thesis that red-headed women have been the most famous in history—when I walked in and contributed the equally tenable truth that they have also been among the most infamous——”

“Oh, good! Was she furious? She has a temper and reacts like an irritated puma sometimes.”

“I’m not sure she liked it. But she was at least interested in me enough to make a sketch of me—really a rather flattering one—very appropriately labelled—One of history’s famous or infamous——”

“Saucy brat! I hope you told her off properly and gave her what-for.”

“Oh, no. I took the sketch.”

“May I see it?”

Avis looked at it a long time without speaking, her food neglected. “You know—I think she’s got something on the ball. I don’t really think it flatters you but it’s not hard to tell she was trying to see into——”

“The enigma?”

“What a chatterbox! Yes, I did tell her I thought you were something of a riddle, but I didn’t mean to get her started on a campaign to psycho-analyse you——”

“I think that’s just what you have done. She thinks she finds in me the after-image of someone she knew or saw some place—I can’t imagine where.”

“She’ll ferret it out if she really did. You never saw such a determined, persistent piece—goes with that red head—oops! No offence intended. I forgot about your own.”

“None taken, I assure you. I like having red hair and I always feel a bond with others of the same flamboyant tint.”

“I tell Peg it’s simply due to a lack of pigment in the body,” laughed Avis. “Makes her furious. Ah, well, most men adore it. She has no dearth of swains already, I can assure you. Brats who were in rompers only a few years ago it seems, now dashing up in flashy cars and dragging her off to parties. Makes me feel ancient, on-the-shelf, passée. But then, I suppose, you can’t have it twice, and if you do try for a second helping it doesn’t taste the same——”

“You seem to have a bit of the cynic in your make-up,” said Lilith with something of Avis’s own candour. “As Mr. Thackeray, one of our authors, quotes from Mr. Horace—aliquid amari——”

“You’re as bad as Taiter—always flinging off bits of Latin at us barbarians. What does it mean?”

“Something bitter,” said Lilith.

“Oh!” Avis looked pensive. “Yes, I suppose I do put a smidgin of my native venom into most of the pastry I dish out. It wasn’t always like that, though. I guess once you lose a husband—I mean the way I lost mine—through a breakdown in the matrimonial machine—you feel as if you’d failed somewhere and you feel guilty and maybe a bit ashamed. For me, you see, widowhood didn’t confer respectability. I never got to run again with the pack. Once you’re out, in this neck of the woods anyway—you stay out.”

She had a defiant set to her mouth, as who should say, “And for all of me they can go to the devil and take their smugness, their primness and cold respectability with them.”

But she wasn’t really happy. Lilith wondered if she’d ever been happy since the break-up between her and Giles. A pity, she thought, and was thankful in her heart that she had had nothing to do with it, that none of Avis’ dark discontent could be said to stem from her.

After luncheon she went up to her room and put Peg Wayland’s picture on the bookshelf above her desk.

“Among my souvenirs,” she thought. “I really do wonder if she could ever have seen my photo. It would be pretty well dated now if it was among Giles Wayland’s things. I don’t think there’d be any recognizing me from that dewy-eyed young thing of 1945.”

She told Archer all about it that evening when they went for a drive in the little car which, he said, was like a corner of some foreign field forever England.

“I feel as if I were driving a tank when I get behind the wheel of some of these American behemoths. This is really cosy, darling Lilith, and we can pretend to whizz along by Tring and Lillyhoo as a free man and woman may do—only here it will be those quaint old Malicete villages—Quispamsis and Nauwigewauk, Pequaket or Apohaqui. How did the day go?”

“Lovely. I had my portrait done.”

“By Karsh?”

“By Peg Wayland.”

“Well, well! Did you bring it for me to see?”

“I did.”

Archer stopped the car and studied the brave lines of the young girl’s sketch. He whistled softly. “ ‘Out of the mouths of babes—or from the pencils of sucklings.’ Lookee, Lilith, the child has made a brave stab at getting to the lovely essence of you. She has seen beyond the camouflage. A bit more and she’d have had you in all your fair beauty.”

“Spare me, Arch. Seriously, though, she thinks she has seen me somewhere before. Do you suppose she could by any chance have come across one of those theatrical photos? Maybe Giles had one—I think he did——”

“Could be. You don’t—you aren’t telling these people that you once were almost married to this Wayland chap?”

“No—no, I’m not, Archer. They seem to attach some blame to me for his crack-up and—for what reasons I don’t know—his death. I’m not to blame. I ditched him—but I had my reasons—the best in the world. You believe me, Archer.”

“You don’t need to ask, my child. And I think you’re wise to say nothing. ‘Let the dead past bury its dead——’ ”

“If it only will.”

“Aye—there’s the rub—if it only will.”

The crickets, the tree toads, through the golden hours, marked the slow death of summer, and the forest trees, as if to make up for the demise of the warm bright days, put on their most flamboyant dress and startled the eye with such gorgeous colours as even a mad painter would be hard-put to mix—such crimsons, golds and yellows as never came off an artist’s palette, such blue of sky and deeper blue of water. One glorious splash of colour before the dull mantle of winter descended on the weary earth. Along the overhead wires the swallows by the hundreds perched and talked over the imminent trip south.

Lilith, settled happily into the good routine of school life, loved this time—the flaming beauty of the sunsets, the misty glory of the dawns, the changing hues of wood and sky and river. Even the voice of the Laughing Water was different now, clearer, slower, as if the river too proclaimed that it soon would go beneath its thick blanket of ice and snow.

Before the days turned cool Archer taught her how to paddle his canoe: soon she could handle the light craft and as she was a good swimmer Archer let her have the canoe to herself whenever she wished. She liked best to paddle into the sunset when the water dripped like liquid red-gold from the paddle-blade and the light evening breeze sent faint ripples singing along the slender keel.

“But don’t ever forget,” Archer warned her several times, “that the Laughing Water can have its treacherous spells. You’d be surprised at the suddenness of its changes. And when it gets angry its laughter isn’t good to hear.”

She had never seen it angry and the many smooth and sunny hours she spent on it lulled her into a feeling of security that she soon learned was folly. The lovely colours of the autumn were mirrored in the water along the shore that day and there was scarcely a ripple when she pushed the canoe into the river and leapt lightly aboard.

Archer had also warned against going too far from shore. “Wide and deep,” intoned Archer in his Indian-chant voice, “is Winna-ma-kee-wis, the great-grandmother of waters, the wise old witch of waters—and she’s just waiting for greenhorns like you to venture too far out on her surface. Then she will start to kick up her heels and, man-oh-man, you’ll find it’s no summer-squall on a pond. You need to be able to do more than paddle then. It’s a battle and your arms must be strong and hardened by long, gruelling miles.”

Lilith’s weren’t. She knew that very soon after the sky’s sudden darkening, the drive of rain, the swift rise of the wind, the angry lashing of the waves against the little canoe that now seemed so weak and frail as the river began to lash about like an angry monster and show its mighty power.

She was far from the shore; she had been paddling towards a great rock on the far side of the river, called the Minister’s Face. She recalled now that Archer had told her of the immense depth of the water here, but anyway she knew she could not swim very far in those tumbling, crested seas. One broke over the canoe, drenching her and all but swamping the craft. It had been riding, up to that, very much like Longfellow’s “yellow leaf in Autumn”, but now it began to get awkward and unmanageable and there was no dropping the paddle to try to bail it out.

She prayed now to her God as fervently as ever the Malicetes, storm-caught, must have prayed to theirs. It was only a question of minutes before the canoe would be swamped and she would be bucking those wild, rushing waters, feeling their splash and sting on her face, suffocating, drowning in their black and secret depths.

She heard the deep thrum of the aquaplane only a few seconds before the canoe broached-to and turned over, throwing her into the mad maelstrom, blinded and choking. She glimpsed the white craft knifing towards her, sending up a huge cloud of spray and, as it slowed, she fought her way towards it, grasping with frantic fingers at the buoy flung out to her, pulling herself slowly along the sodden hemp until strong hands seized her under the arms and, like a gaffed fish, she was dragged into the speedboat and lay gasping and spitting water on the cushions.

“You must have heard harp-music that time, lady.” Gavin Wayland’s thin brown face was stern and his eyes angry. “What in hell is the idea paddling around in that cockle-shell in a blow like this? Somebody should have told you——” He broke off suddenly and stared at her, at the clinging slacks and sweater, the sodden red hair that hung mermaid-fashion over her shoulders. “Why, you’re the new teacher from Edgemere! I thought you were one of the brats. You’re just a kid yourself——”

“I—I’m not, I’m——” Her teeth began to chatter and Gavin flung a trench-coat around her shoulders with one hand, while the other deftly swung the wheel of the aquaplane as it skipped like a drunken dolphin over the running seas.

She saw the exultation in his face, the joy of conflict in the set of his jaw as the chrome and mahogany craft made a monkey out of the stormy water, shedding with lofty contempt the seas that hit it, leaping clear of the water and landing with a smack that could be heard above the din of the storm. It seemed safe and snug there in the tiny cockpit behind the thick glass screen.

“I almost missed you,” said Gavin. “I came through that channel by Mather’s Island and saw you wallowing about. Any Indian in you?” He was grinning at her now.

“None.” She managed to smile moistly back at him.

“Look in that seat locker beside you—you’ll find some towels. You’re awfully pretty—like a wet kitten; and you look ten years younger than the day I saw you.”

“My hair isn’t snow white then?”

“Far from it. I should say it’s redder than my niece’s. You know—Peg.”

“Oh, yes, I know Peg. She is one of my star pupils.”

“I can’t imagine you teaching those young she-bobcats. I don’t wonder that you try to add on years and dignity with those glasses and all the rest of it. You don’t look much different now from any of your students——”

The aquaplane ate up the distance to shore and coasted into a small sheltered cove among the tall spruces. There was a stone jetty and a log cabin among the trees.

“This is my camp—used to belong to my brother Giles. He built it himself—even the stone fireplace where you’re going to dry out in a few minutes——”

“But I——”

“But you what? Nothing else you can do—unless you want to catch pneumonia. This is October after all and we don’t go swimming here much after Labour Day—first Monday in September. You, of course, would have to be different. Come on, run for the cabin; you’re shaking like jelly.”

Laughing now, she raced him up the white, winding path among the trees and stood at the big deal door waiting for him to come and open it. This, she thought, was one awful spot for the new instructress at Edgemere to find herself in. She would probably be drummed out of school if they ever heard about it. But she made no demur when Gavin sent her into the bedroom to strip off the wet clothes, giving her an old Jaeger bath-robe and matching slippers in which to lose herself, helping her wring out her soaked slacks and sweater and stirring up the log fire to send a blasting heat into the long, log-walled room. He gave her a brush and comb for her hair and stuck a mirror up on the arm of the big settle bench where he’d made her sit.

“And don’t, for God’s sake, put your hair up in that Great Auk’s nest effect. Sure as hell you’ll have the starlings trying to nest in it. Why, you have the loveliest hair——”

She was combing it out now in long, shimmering waves that took on new golden lights as it slowly dried in the grateful heat from the fire. And through the gleaming silken curtain she watched Gavin’s face and saw in his eyes that look that she had so ardently desired to awaken there the day they met.

My wish, she thought, was granted a lot sooner than I expected and under circumstances—— She shuddered, thinking of how near she had been to death, living again those endless moments in the horrid turmoil of wind and water, feeling a tightness in her bosom as if the weight of water were again pressing upon her, driving her down into its very depths.

“I owe you my life, Mr. Wayland.” She parted the light cascade and looked directly at him. “It hardly seems adequate to say thank you; there is nothing much one can say. When I think of what might have happened to me—what most certainly would have happened had you not come to my rescue——”

“Don’t think about it—and don’t thank me. Old Johnny-on-the-spot Wayland they used to call me in the miscellaneous wars I’ve been privileged to cover. I’ve pulled a few others out of the jaws, snatched them from the hungry maw—but never a one like you. I’m glad it happened, in a way; you had no business hiding behind that academic front. Why do you do it? Oh, I suppose it might be a bit awkward with those old dames at the school. Jealousy is an ugly thing and the plain-faced ones hate beauty. I don’t suppose you could get away with it like Avis.”

“No—I’m not a Wayland.”

He looked at her sharply to see if she was trying to get a rise out of him, but her face was perfectly guileless.

“You’re better off,” he said presently. “I don’t think Avis is particularly proud of the name—and for the rest of us it’s only meant hard luck.”

“What do you call hard luck?” She knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear from his own lips what he had in his mind about the girl who had walked out on his brother.

“Women,” he said. “We always seem to fall for the ones who will bring us only grief. I won’t say anything about myself. I deserved all I got. I suppose I did. But my brother got stung twice and badly—the second sting finished him.”

“I don’t believe it. You know your Shakespeare—‘Men have died and the worms have eaten them—but not for love.’ ”

“Yes, I’ve heard it, but I also know what I know. I was closer to my brother than anyone else in this world, and I knew him best. He was the kind of man who gave all he had—to love, to his work, to a cause. He tried to make a go of things with Avis and it wasn’t his fault that he failed. With this other girl, this Lesley Gray, he thought that he had found the real thing at last. He thought he was going to have something he had always sought—a woman’s love—the love that sees all, knows all, forgives all—and she did him dirt, she walked out on him.”

“It’s happened to other men, and other men took it, with a grin, a shrug—and went on. But your brother——”

“Giles couldn’t take it. He went on the bottle and he didn’t care whether he lived or died. He had a job in London but he got a transfer to an armoured regiment, a tough outfit—and it wasn’t long before he got what he was looking for.”

“And you blame the girl—this Lesley Gray—for your brother’s death?”

He stood up and stared down at her. “Just as surely as if she murdered him, just as certainly as if she put a gun to his temple and pressed the trigger. I talked with him only a little while, a few days, before he caught it and he was finished then, fed-up, glad to be out of it——”

“And drunk and sorry for himself and——”

“Who are you to say? You don’t know anything about it.”

She didn’t answer that. She would have a hard time convincing this man that his brother—the brother he had looked up to and idolized all his life—was in any way at fault, and to tell him the truth, to let him know why she had walked out on Giles, wouldn’t help much either. Probably he wouldn’t believe her.

“This was Giles’s favourite hangout—this cabin.” He had cooled again, forgotten his sudden anger, the anger that always came to him when he thought of the girl who had made a mess of his brother’s life. “We used to have some grand times here in front of this old fireplace. Giles learned how to build a log cabin from his scouting days. He was a wonder with an axe. He built the fireplace too—swell, isn’t it?”

In his voice, in the look on his face when he talked of his brother, she saw the depth of his love for the man she had herself loved so well. Giles—you couldn’t help liking Giles, and it was no great chore to love him. His eyes were a deeper blue than Gavin’s, his face had been fuller, less grave, and he had a high and gallant heart.

“You cared a lot for your brother, didn’t you?”

He nodded slowly. “More than I shall ever again care for anyone, I sometimes think. There were only the two of us. No end of cousins and aunts and uncles; but in our immediate family, just old Giles and myself, and we fought and we laughed and we got drunk and we raised hell—and I cried when he died and wasn’t ashamed of it. He would have cried for me——”

There was a knock at the door, and before Gavin could go it opened and Avis, in a hooded green raincoat, came in, stepped as if she’d been hit with an axe, stared at Lilith and muttered, “God above! Don’t tell me! What is this anyway? Are you being seduced or abducted or something——?” Her roving eyes took in the drying garments by the fireplace. “Oh, you fell in the drink! Well, of all the—Boy! I just wish Taiter could see you now—that hair and that seductive outfit——”

“Miss Graeme almost drowned,” explained Gavin.

“If you’re still calling her Miss Graeme I expect everything is okay. But the girl’s a witch. I had an idea that underneath the moss she was pretty, but I really wasn’t prepared for this blaze of glory. What happened, Lilith?”

“I disregarded or forgot Archer’s warnings about the river, about paddling too far and I was almost across to the big bluff you call the Minister’s Face when the storm blew up——”

“ ‘Wild roved the Indian maid’—— Well, you surely were lucky that Gavin was on the river in that leaping catamaran of his. The water is awfully deep over there, they tell me. You look cute in that old dressing-gown and slippers of Giles’.”

Lilith started and stared down at the voluminous skirts of the robe. “I didn’t know—they’re awfully comfortable and—and warm. I was almost perished.”

“Giles left them here. They’re old—so very old—but he was always attached to them. It gave me a start seeing our sedate English prof arrayed in them. Look, my darling, when your things are dry I’ll be glad to drive you up to the school. You’ll probably get in the papers too. There must have been lots of anxious eyes watching from the shore.”

“It needn’t get in the papers,” said Gavin. “I can see to that. I’m sure Miss Graeme doesn’t want it—nor do I.”

“But, Gavin! It’s so heroic—and romantic, don’t you think? It seems to me that there should be a story with pictures. One of Lilith as she is now, with the golden tresses——”

“Let be, Avis. Play it down. And believe me, it wasn’t fun—for either of us. It’s a cruel way to die—in the angry water. Maybe you die wondering that you ever trusted an element that could turn so suddenly and treacherously and destroy you.”

“I don’t think you wonder much about anything—do you, Lilith?”

She couldn’t put it in words, the myriad images that were as one, that had come to her in those wild, stricken moments. But she had seen and remembered in brief flashes a thousand things.

“It’s just a jumble,” she said. “But it seemed as if the whole of your life was a reel of film and it all unrolled at once, in an instant—a frightening thing.”

“I don’t suppose you had much to regret.”

“We all have something to regret, Avis—I along with the rest of the world. But I don’t know that I’d regret anything so much that I’d want to die. Life is sweet no matter how dark it may be and I don’t think there is anything beautiful in death——”

She was thinking of Giles, of the man whose old beloved robe was wrapped so warmly around her, and wishing that he had come back to wear it again, to spend long happy hours in this cabin he had built, before the big hearth. The good years he might have had—here with his brother, with her—— And Avis—what about Avis? How would she have liked the woman Giles had taken in her stead? Friendly enough now, would she have been like that to the second Mrs. Wayland? Would she be as friendly, even now, if she knew that Giles had given his love to this stranger?

“Your things are dry now.” Avis felt them. “And there’s an iron here as I recall it. I used to press the kids’ things when they were little; they were always falling in the river. I’ll go and attach it. We’ll send you back to school looking as good as new. I wish you’d leave off the glasses and let your hair hang like that. I can just hear the cathedral silence of the dining-hall if you walked in as you are——”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea. I’m not sure that Miss Tait approves even of one’s wearing slacks——”

“She doesn’t. Taiter’s really one of the old guard. If she had ever found you here with Gavin with your—er—things hung up to dry—wowie! You might just as well have stayed in the water. The faculty of Edgemere School must be above reproach and they must not—simply must not—go falling into the river to be rescued by reformed rakes like Gavin Wayland.”

She helped Lilith press out the slacks and sweater; the straw sandals had dried too and the wetting had done no great harm. But it had chastened and subdued Edgemere’s English instructress.

“And poor Archer’s canoe—will it ever be found, do you think?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” comforted Avis. “It will drift around and someone is pretty sure to find it.”

“I’ll cruise about after the storm eases up,” promised Gavin. “See if I can get a line on it. Fenn should pin your ears back for being such a reckless little monkey.”

“No doubt he will. He loves that canoe. Maybe—maybe it would have been better to leave me and bring back the canoe.”

“Didn’t occur to me, in the hectic moments of the rescue,” grinned Gavin. “Too late now. I’m glad it came out so well.” And he looked gravely down at her. “You’re too young, too lovely——”

“I’ll never forget it, Gavin.” She held out her hand. She had pinned the glorious hair up again in all its severity and she wore the heavy-framed glasses, but she knew that he could really see her face now, see into the eyes that looked so thankfully into his.

Perhaps, she thought, when you know about me, when somewhere you discover that the Lesley Gray your brother loved and—as you think—died for, is the girl you snatched from death—then, maybe you’ll wish you’d let me drown——

“You coming with us, Gavin? I came down to collect you for dinner. In all the excitement, I forgot what brought me. Why don’t you come too, Lilith? We’d like it——”

“I would too, thank you so much. But I’m due back at the school.”

“Well, I’d love to, Avis,” said Gavin. “Sorry you can’t come, Lilith.”

“Thank you.” She knew it was an effort for him to say her name, but she was glad that he had used it and she liked the sound of it on his lips. She was thanking him as much for using it as for his expressed regret at her not coming.

“Won’t Peg be thrilled to hear about this!” Avis’ eyes shone as she mentally rehearsed the dramatic tale she was going to spin. “Lilith is one of her pet projects—for study and analysis. I think she started out with the idea of hating her teacher but there’s been a subtle change.”

Lilith had marked it too. And it was one of the things that made her very happy in this new school, this new existence. She could not have stood antagonism, secret or open, from Giles Wayland’s lovely daughter. She had noticed the slow, half-shy approach that Peg had made to her, the little tentative offers of friendship and loyalty. There had been no more inattention after that first day and the spirited young redhead stood high in her class, taking Scott, Thackeray and Lamb easily in her stride.

Avis drove fast through the driving rain-squall and went into the school with Lilith to act as a sort of buffer. “You may be sure they’ll know all about your experience. Grapevine isn’t the word for it here: they have a radar-screen and sometimes it seems to me they hear about things before they happen. You shoot up to your room. I’ll give Taiter the story as it should be told.”

“Thank you. But there’s nothing that I should object to her or anyone else hearing——”

“Of course not, you dear innocent! But it’s always nice, you know, to have a chaperon when you’ve been rescued from a watery grave—sort of lends tone, you know.”

Avis must have made an excellent job of it. There were sincere expressions of sympathy and of gladness that Lilith had come out of it so well. The Laughing Water had claimed a good many victims, it was recalled at dinner, and everyone seemed to feel some satisfaction that it had been cheated out of this one.

She did not experience the real effects of her near-drowning until after she had gone to her room and the swift dusk descended and the rain drove hard against her window. She felt the delayed reaction then and she began to shiver and to live over and over the time of terror when the waters had tossed her about and sported with her. There had been no music in their laughter then—only a mad, howling mirth, laughter from the pit.

Miss Tait sent one of the maids with hot cocoa for her before she went to bed, and by that time the reaction had begun to pass and she was able to look more calmly at the business, to see it as if it had happened to someone else, to recall a lot of little things—the strong clasp of Gavin’s fingers, the strength of his arms as he had drawn her into the boat, the angry way he had looked at her and scolded her for being so foolhardy.

And the hour in his log cabin had been a good and pleasant time—one she would always remember—the fragrance of the birch wood smoke, the flickering of the flames on the log walls, the swish of the rain against the windows; and she sitting there on the big settle lost in the old fawn robe, the big slippers, that had once belonged to Giles.

She lay awake for a while in the darkness of her room, listening to the beat and pound of the rain against the window and on the slates of the dormer. A good sound when one is sheltered, when one hears it from the warmth and security of a snug bed. But on the water, under the frowning battlement of the great bluff, it had been a dreadful thing, awesome, striking deep into the very core of life, showing how tenuous was one’s hold on the things that looked so fixed and solid.

She thought regretfully of Archer’s canoe and prayed that someone would find it and that it would not be smashed like an eggshell on the rocks. Archer loved that canoe and she too had loved it, but she wondered now if she would ever have nerve enough to sail in it again.

Perhaps, she thought, I’d better go right out in another one tomorrow. Isn’t that what they make a crashed pilot do to overcome his fear of the air? But the idea didn’t appeal to her at all. In her dreams that night she paddled endless canoes over white-foaming Niagaras, fighting with frail paddle to stay her headlong, hopeless course.

When she awoke to a grey and washed-out morning, she felt bone-weary and unrested and was most thankful that it was Sunday and that there were no calls upon her time. She dressed slowly in worn grey tweeds and high-necked sweater.

The mornings were cool now. Someone had reported a skin of ice on a rain barrel and already the more delicate of the garden flowers were blackened with the frost, and the wild geese, in swinging legions, were honking their southward way. Sodden leaves were pasted to the flagstones of the campus walks and littered the grass, waiting for old Pascoe to rake them into piles and light the autumn fires.

She found herself in the not-too-happy position of a nine-days wonder. Edgemere ate up her narrow escape and what it considered her most romantic rescue from the very brink of the abyss.

“I’d almost risk going to the edge of Niagara,” sighed Miss Vance, “if I was quite sure some dashing young man would snatch me to safety at the very last minute——”

The students were in the seventh heaven, especially those privileged to sit in class and hear the heroine of the week expound. But the heroine did no expounding when it came to her watery escapade. She was frankly fed-up with it and wondered if they would have made half as much fuss if Gavin had been a bit too late.

Peg Wayland was among the first to come to her and she knew with a warm flush in her heart that Peg was really moved and really glad that she had escaped harm.

“Mother told me about you—in father’s old robe and slippers and your hair hanging down. Oh, I wish I’d been there. She said your hair is lovely and that you’d make a swell ad for shampoo. I’m trying to sketch you. If I’d been at the beach-cabin——”

“I was rather pale and wan, Peg—I’d been in the water too long. I feel as if I’ve hardly dried out yet. Sometimes I seem to go ‘squelch’ when I move suddenly or walk fast.”

It was Peg who told her they’d found the canoe quite unharmed on a sand-spit over by the Minister’s Face. “My brother Rowan, and another kid found it. You lost the paddle and the cushions. Mr. Fenn was pretty glad, they said.”

“I can believe it.”

“Would you rather it had been Mr. Fenn who rescued you than Uncle Gavin?”

“Why——” Lilith couldn’t help smiling; the questions these girls could ask—“I don’t know that I have any preference, Peg. That’s like asking who rescinded your death-sentence. Right then I’d have grasped Mr. Stalin’s hand or General Mao’s if they’d offered it. One can’t be particular at such times. Should I have sent your uncle back to base to fetch Archer Fenn?”

“Oh, you know I didn’t mean that!” The blue eyes were reproachful. “What I mean is, Uncle Gavin is an honest-to-gosh woman hater and I don’t think he’d fall even for you——”

“Really, Peg! You’ve been seeing too many of those Hollywood heart-pullers. I don’t want him to fall for me——”

“You don’t!” Peg looked at her incredulously. “Why, every girl is simply nuts about Gavin—and about Archer Fenn too. Personally, I’d sooner be rescued by Mr. Fenn than by Uncle Gavin. Of course, it’s a matter of family relationship there—one can’t marry one’s uncle; it is within the forbidden degree of kindred, Mr. Carvil says.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“Oh, yes. Ages ago, when Uncle Gavin first came home, I had an awful crush on him.”

“And now it’s on Archer Fenn?”

“We all adore him. He’s so romantic looking and when he gives us a talk on poetry—oh, my——” She closed her eyes raptly.

“You should have heard what he said to me about losing his canoe.”

“Was he furious?”

“He said he wished we were Indians and he would beat me——”

“Wouldn’t you love it?”

“I’m not much of a masochist——”

“May I write that word down, Miss Graeme? It means someone who gets a kick out of being punished, doesn’t it? I’d like to spring it on mother.”

She wrote the new word down in her book while Lilith watched her with gentle eyes. Oh, to be that young, that sure of oneself, free from the fear that comes with the climbing years.

Archer called her on the phone after luncheon that day. “I suppose you’ve heard the glad news? Some of the boys found our canoe. We’d better go out on the river this afternoon. We’re off from half-past three to six——”

“But, Archer——”

“Orders,” he said sternly. “We always sent up the boys who crashed just as soon as we picked the splinters out of them. Supposed to restore your nerve—like some of the hair of the Schnauzer who snipped a bit out of you. Anyway, I’ll be with you this time. And in future any rescuing that’s to be done in your case is to be done by Fenn. Get me?”

“I was just talking about that with one of my students. She asked me which I’d rather have as my rescuer—you or Mr. Wayland——”

“And?”

“And I told her that, in such circumstances, one can’t be fussy.”

“Hum! But looking at it now in the clear light of the aftermath—— Don’t answer. It mightn’t be what I want to hear. I’ll see you at the beach then?”

“I’ll be there, Archer.”

But she didn’t look forward to facing the river so soon again. It might be called the Laughing Water and she had loved it and trusted it. Then, with sudden fury, with utter treachery, it had turned on her and sought to destroy her, and its laughter was a mad and chilling sound.

Today, when she came to the beach, the water was fairly smooth, talking with little chop-chop voices on the shingle, and there was the canoe drawn up and Archer sitting on a boulder smoking his pipe, a white sweater knotted around his neck, an old red visored cap shading his eyes.

“Scared?” He scrambled to his feet and cocked a wise eye at her.

“I am—a little, Archer. You never know how much water is in that river until there is nothing between you and the bottom. But let’s go.”

“Good girl! No—you’re to do the paddling. You’re good; you were becoming expert and I’m not going to let even a scare like that spoil a real canoe woman. We are a dwindling race, we children of the river and forest. Allons. Manitou watch over us!”

“Amen!” said Lilith, but she was soon able to still her trembling and steady the strokes of the paddle. Swiftly all the nervousness slipped from her and she felt the old exultant joy, the deep thrill of satisfaction, as the sturdy drive of her stroke sent the little craft over the slaty water.

Archer held up his clasped hands in token of victory and the smile on his brown face made her feel good. The sunlight was pale gold today and there was the faint tang of autumn in the breeze, the wavelets made a steady slapping sound against the canoe and once again it seemed a strong and sturdy opponent for the river, floating fearlessly over that mighty plain while the flashing paddle sang its own song to the river’s deep obbligato.

“I loved it, Archer,” she said, letting him catch her lightly in his arms when they grounded again on the beach, laughing up at him, her cheeks flushed under their golden tan, the gold flecks bright in the deep amber of her eyes. “I’m so glad you made me come. I’ll never fear it again but I’ll know enough to respect it.”

“That’s the only way to treat the mighty water that the old chiefs called Wool-ah-stook. I love it, but I’d have hated it for ever if it had taken you.”

The dark eyes were earnest, looking down into hers, studying each line of her face. She felt closer to him than she ever had before and when he bent his head she gave him her lips willingly, tried to return from the depths of her the deep seeking of his kiss.

“Better,” he said, when she moved slowly away from him. “A lot better, but still not—not what I’m seeking. I love you so, and I’ll keep on telling you until you love me in return.”

“I think——” She had been about to say, “I think I do love you, Archer.” But she wasn’t at all sure that this was love. Happiness she knew and security in the circle of his arms. One could find peace and warmth with such as he, a good life, even-tenored and happy withal—but was that the thing she sought, the high rapture she had felt the stirrings of when she was with Giles, when she danced with him and gave her mouth to his caress——?

Could she find again that vanished rapture, that old, immortal ecstasy, headier than the strongest drink, giving a joy incomparable, making you for a while—all too brief—one with the gods? Or should she give up the fading memory of it and take what offered now—this good, substantial thing that was tendered to her? With Archer there would be no tears of heart-ache, no uncertainty——

“I am being weighed in the balance!”

“If you are, you are not being found wanting.”

“What then?”

“Perhaps the want is in me, Archer. I don’t know. You are so good to me and sometimes you really do things to me.”

“I do? Bingo! Well, that indeed is something. I was beginning to fear you were one of the ice-maidens and there was no thawing you ever. Just wait until I really turn on the heat——”

She laughed, but she knew somehow that with him she never would get burned, would never feel the scorch and sear of the crimson flame.

I’m a fool, she thought, to pass up a love like his. And for what? For nothing that I know—not even a dream. But there is something I want and that I must seek. Maybe it is with him and in time I will find it—but maybe I must go further.

November came, dark and chilly grey, bringing a real touch of winter. In the country places the cottagers banked their houses with spruce-boughs, with sawdust, and the whine and screech of the rotary saw cut through the still air as piles of firewood grew mountainously in farmyard and shed. Wild winds stripped the last leaves from the hardwood trees but the deep green that is the dominant colour in this northern land remained unfaded and unfading. The birds of passage took off in their secret, eternal way—one day their song filled the grove; the next there was silence. But the brave bluejays came then, lovelier than any bird of summer, and the chickadees, and there were always a few misguided robins who either didn’t know the way south or had lost the ancient urge that moved the rest of their kind to seek the smiling lands.

Avis invited her to have dinner at the cottage that she and Giles had built—a low-eaved, cosy house of grey limestone quarried from the nearby hills. She met the boy Rowan, a dark quiet lad in the awkward feet-and-ears stage, but with his father’s quick, merry grin and bright blue eyes, with little traits that she remembered, that caught at her heart and brought back so many things that she had all but forgotten.

Peg was in her glory, arrayed in a new Paddy green woollen frock and a pair of her mother’s gold drop earrings that made her look like a young princess, the golden hair brushed and burnished until it shone.

Lilith both loved and feared the warm affection that Peg showed her. She knew that, in a way, she was sailing under false colours and she wished sometimes that she had told these people the truth. To have done that, though, it would have been necessary to tell them the whole story, and she could not. The children worshipped the memory of Giles, their father. Gavin had made a sacred thing of his brother’s memory and enshrined him in his heart as a sort of god. Even Avis, in her careless, flippant way, still showed that there was no great bitterness in her heart. Indeed, she often spoke of Giles as if they had never been divorced.

But Peg turned to Lilith with all the warmth of her young heart, all the open affection that was part of her nature. She displayed her books, her treasures and—surest measure of confidence—she told Lilith of her loves. And there was no denying her faith, her friendship; no keeping her at a distance, for Lilith could not bear to see pain in the great trusting eyes or dampen the bright, swift laughter that was the heritage of her youth.

“You know,” Peg told her, “I’ve given up trying to place you, Miss Graeme. Remember the sketch I made of you that first day in English, when you were telling us of the glories of English literature and I was being unruly——”

“Oh, yes, I still have it, Peg. I’ll always treasure it.”

“I said then—I told you, remember, that you made a gong ring somewhere inside my noggin when I first set eyes on you.”

“I remember it quite well. But you never——”

“I never did have any luck. I could see that face—that other face of yours, but it was always in a mist, tantalizing me; never quite clear. It used to make me rage. Now I don’t let it bother me any more.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“But sometimes I think you know quite well what I’m talking about and that you could help me if you wanted to. Look, you’re not some great name masquerading as a schoolteacher—some famous——”

“Or infamous character. Oh, no. Nothing like that. And I’m no exiled princess or deported queen or anything like that. Have you been fancying all those romantic things about me? I had a short spell with Secret Intelligence during the war, and it wasn’t anything like the thrillers you read. Mostly typing and decoding.”

“But that must have been fascinating!” Peg’s eyes shone. “And you must have had lots of interesting things happen to you.”

“I’d like to tell you I was a real Mata Hari, but I couldn’t lie to you, Peg——”

“I know that—Lilith.” The complete trust in her eyes, in the way she spoke, struck again at the sore spot in this happy association. And she told herself that she should never have become friends with these people, never won the love and confidence of this young creature, so intelligent, so vulnerable. But, after all, she had done them no harm; it was Giles who had let her down, turned from her with his vows of loyalty still fresh on his lips to go with a girl like Poppy Ewart who spent her life in the pursuit of men who could show her a good time.

Gavin, who didn’t share Archer Fenn’s ideas on the slaying of deer but said they caused endless damage to crops and gardens, had shot a buck, and the Waylands had roast venison for dinner, also some duck which Peg and Avis had downed on the Hampton marshes. It was fare for the gods.

Gavin came when they were drinking their coffee and had some with them in the glassed-in porch that looked down on the river. He had started on his book and he wasn’t too happy about it.

“I can’t write worth a damn,” he said despondantly. “Oh, I do all right in these newspaper stories—straight journalese, the kind of stuff you read every day—or don’t if you’re wise. But my English! My God! I have people enthused and cars careering around corners and fellows loaning things to other fellows and—such pinchbeck stuff——”

“Why don’t you get Miss Graeme to help you?” suggested Peg. “She’s a real wizard with words. Boy, can she sling the old mother-tongue around! With her at your elbow, Gavin, you couldn’t go wrong. And, after all, she owes it to you for saving her life.”

“Why, you mercenary little——” Gavin grinned at her. “It’s well seen you’re descended from a clan that swindled the Indians right and left. Here you expect Miss Graeme to ghost my book just because I——”

“Well, she’d have been ghosting anyway if you hadn’t hauled——”

She dodged the cushion Gavin hurled at her. “Please, vixen! I wouldn’t expect Miss Graeme——”

“Call her Lilith,” put in Avis. “And why not? I don’t think your stuff is one whit worse than the rest of the tripe that’s dished out all the time. Who knows the difference now anyway, when the ability to write even fair English prose is becoming a lost art? A few more generations and we’ll be back to picture writing——”

“Good speech, Avis,” applauded Gavin.

“You mean all they’ll read is comic-books?” asked Peg.

“We’re headed that way,” continued Avis. “But you really wouldn’t mind looking over Gavin’s script, would you, Lilith?”

“Not at all. But I’m not sure that I can be of much help to you. I’d really like to read it, though.”

“You would?” He was much relieved. “That will be a help. I have the stuff all right—I mean the material. I was there and I saw and I heard and I felt and I smelt—is that good? And I guess the writing is graphic enough. But I never studied belles lettres and I’d rather like my book to read well.”

“You’ll probably outsell Mr. Churchill,” said Avis. “What are you calling it—Green Korn From Korea—Korean Karousel——”

There was a lot more of this good-natured ribbing which Gavin enjoyed as much as the rest of them. At ten o’clock it was time for Lilith to return to Edgemere. Gavin offered to walk up the hill with her and, though she wished it were otherwise, she found herself out in the clear, moonlight night with him beside her, with the frost glistening on fields and hedges and the long bright streamers of the Northern Lights sweeping the winter sky.

They talked little, each thinking of the last time they had met. He asked her if she had ever gone canoeing again since that day and she told him of Archer’s homeopathic remedy and of how after her first few jittery moments she had lost her fear.

“I guess that’s the remedy—Spartan but usually effective. What is Archer Fenn to you?”

She looked at him, a bit startled. After all it was no concern of his.

“He’s my friend.” She spoke stiffly. “We were classmates in England.”

“I wondered. You see—I’ve been thinking of you a lot—oh, hell, what’s the use of lying? I’ve been thinking of you all the time, ever since I fished you out of the drink and saw the sea-hag changing, by the water’s magic spell, into a naiad——”

“Please! I wish you wouldn’t say these things to me——”

“Why? Don’t you like me?”

“Yes—I like you, but——”

“And I like you—if like is the word. You’ve got into me some way. I don’t know what it is. I wanted to call you a hundred times and I just about had to lock myself in to keep from going to you. Tonight was the final capitulation.”

She loved and feared to listen to these things which he said to her in a low, earnest voice. She wanted to stop him, wanted to run from him and yet his words held her—words so much like those Giles had spoken long ago, and his voice was like his brother’s, deep and resonant.

They crossed the common and it was close by the granite cross that he turned to her and swung her about to face him and drew her hard and close against him, his lips seeking hers. And this, that she had steeled herself against and had resolved to fight, found her suddenly weak and helpless and, more, wanting, even seeking, the ardour of his caress.

“No——” She broke from him at last, breathless, her eyes ashine. “Please, no! I—we can’t do this——”

“No?” His laugh was triumphant. “But we’ve done it. And it’s what I wanted more than I’ve ever wanted anything. And you—there’s nothing cold or nun-like or sexless about you—why, you’re all fire. How could you try to fool us so?”

She tried to think, to reason calmly, but there was no calmness in this moment, for the stars still tumbled about and her breath still came fast and in all her body was a warmth and a wonder that his love had made. She, too, had thought often of him, putting the thought away, thrusting it down, denying it, so that now, the lid off, there was no resisting the tide that swept upon her.

But it led nowhere, this love of theirs. From where she stood she could see the plaque on the granite cross, almost read the last name on that list of the dead. He would hate her and think this a sacrilege, but it had been none of her choosing.

“I must get back to the school. And this—we must forget this—do you hear? I don’t——”

“Forget it? Don’t be foolish. There is no forgetting what I feel for you, Lilith—not in this life.”

“You don’t even know me——”

“I’ve known you always. I mean you’ve always been with me somehow—the one I wanted, the woman I could give my life to. You won’t deny me, will you? I’ve been alone so long——”

“But you—you had a wife——”

He laughed bitterly. “If you’d call her that. Let’s not talk about it, now or ever. Believe me, it was nothing, less than nothing——”

“You must have thought——” Hadn’t Giles said much the same thing to her, talking of his life with Avis? Had they both taken a beating from marriage—or was the fault in them? She didn’t know what to do. She could end the whole thing right here and now by telling him that Giles, too, had loved her and said much the same things to her years ago. And Giles had lied. She could tell him of Giles’s love for her, but she could not tell him why she had sent back the ring and put Giles out of her life.

She walked on quickly, letting him follow and catch up with her.

“You’re not angry, are you?”

“No—not angry. Only sad.”

“But why?”

“Oh, don’t ask me. But this will get us nowhere and can lead nowhere.”

“But I love you——”

“I can’t take your love.”

“You don’t say, though, that you don’t want my love.”

“Oh, let me be, won’t you? I—I wish I’d never come here. I wish I’d never seen you—or anyone of your kind.”

He took that up wrong, thinking she alluded to the stories that went the rounds in Ashtondale about the wild Waylands. Some of the family, which had been here since earliest days, had been decidedly no bargains. Far back there had been a bit of privateering—polite for piracy—against the French and then the Americans, of later years the odd n’er-do-well and a few fair ladies fallen from grace.

“There is nothing wrong with us—fundamentally anyway,” Gavin said laughing. “We all settle down. As for me—well, I know only one poet, Masefield, and I love that line: ‘My dog and I are old, too old for roving——’ Only it’s my dogs—feet to you—that bother me; they’re tired. I’ve slogged it all over France, Italy, Germany and the Lands of the Rising Sun. All I want now is this——”

He indicated the distant humps of the hills, the wide and star-littered sky. “This and—and you, Lilith. With you it can all be so beautiful, so complete; without you—well, one gets so lonely.”

“But you—hadn’t you reconciled yourself to being lonely—before I came?”

“I don’t think so. I pretended to, but I always hoped that some day She would come along—the girl I waited for. And then you came and in a moment I was sure——”

“Not that first day—not when you saw me with Avis on the terrace there at Edgemere.”

“Even then. But I backed away from it then. It knocked me off my feet——”

“You didn’t show it. You didn’t seem at all unbalanced; rather the reverse. I thought you didn’t even see me or saw only a little schoolteacher wearing glasses and her hair in a bun.”

“I saw you and I was upset and puzzled at the reaction I felt to—as you say—a girl who obviously was playing down her charms. Maybe it was that—the fact that I sensed the loveliness that was really you. For I wondered about you and then the day I pulled you out of the water and saw you there in the cabin with your hair over your shoulders and your eyes so young—I was sunk. I knew it then. I was drowned in a deeper sea than the one I fished you out of. And I tried to swim clear, and I could not.”

They had breasted the hill now and come to the school gate.

“Goodnight,” she said, and held out her hand. “And thank you for walking me home. But the rest of it should never have been said and I should never have listened to it.”

“But you did.”

Yes, she thought, I did, and I loved it and I’ll always treasure these things you said to me, Gavin—always. They made sweet listening and it’s good for a woman to be so loved. But what am I to do? What can I tell you? That your dead brother said the same things to me and I listened to him and believed him and took his love for what I thought it to be—something permanent and strong and splendid. And it was a lie.

Suppose I tell you that? Maybe you won’t believe me, maybe you’ll go on thinking as you do now that the fault was mine, that I did him dirt, as you eloquently say—jilted him and messed up his life. I’m not taking that—not from anyone.

He stayed her with a hand on her arm when she started to leave him. “This doesn’t mean you aren’t going to help me with my book?”

She hesitated. She knew the wise thing to do, to wash her hands clean of all this; that, otherwise, she was most certainly headed for trouble. But she was trapped, as much by his earnest appeal as by her own wish to help him if she could.

“I’ll do what I can for you, but you must promise me that there will be no more of this.”

“You’re hard, Lilith. You ask a lot of me—maybe more than I like to promise.”

“It has to be like that, Gavin, if you want to see me again. This means much to me, believe me. I don’t want to get tangled up in a lot of things, emotions——”

“What are you afraid of? For there is something, isn’t there?”

She did not answer. She said goodnight again and ran swiftly up the white curving driveway to the school, through the side-terrace door and up to her room.

Here was blessed sanctuary and she closed and locked the door and stood with her back against it, breathing hard, closing her eyes, still living those moments when he had held her in his arms, when she had known, with frightened, exultant heart, that this was what she had sought, what she had missed in Archer Fenn’s embrace and what she could find in no other man’s.

This was it, the love she had known was waiting for her somewhere—a love stronger, deeper, than the young emotion that Giles had awakened in her. This was what made the world a different place and life just one glad song.

If you could have it—if it was not forbidden to you. In his arms, his rough cheek against hers, she had been lost and willed to stay lost for ever. Nothing mattered—nothing but this starshot rapture, this lifting ecstasy that filled all her being with such happiness as she had now hoped to find.

She did not turn on her light, the moonlight in her room made all things bright. And she loved it and would always see the glistening green of the common where she and Gavin had walked, where she had felt this glad awakening.

But she saw too the white shaft of the cross, the dark plaque that held the long scroll of the dead and his name there among them—Giles who had first spoken to her of love.

Here she had built about herself a web of deception which, after the first fine delicate strands began to mesh, was too strong for her to break out of and now it was so complex, so devilishly intricate that she could see no way of escape.

If she told them now, these Waylands, after having won their friendship and in Gavin’s case their love, they would look upon her with deeper distrust than if she had from the start admitted her connection with Giles. She could never now, if ever there really was a chance, make them believe that Giles had been the guilty one; and, anyway, she did not wish to blacken him in the eyes of those who loved him.

Trapped—every way she turned she was held, confined, frustrated, and it was made doubly painful by the way these strangers had received her and taken her to them. How could she bear to hurt them—Avis, who was so friendly, Peg who had given her such complete girl-worship, and Gavin——?

She heard the school-clock boom out the creeping hours of the night and watched the moonlight move along the wall and across the green braided rug and it was only a little while before the greying of dawn that she fell into tumbled sleep.

Young Rowan Wayland brought her a large manuscript envelope next day at noon. “From Gavin,” he said. “There’s a note inside. Don’t be too hard on him, Miss Graeme.”

She took the script up to her room, ashamed of her eagerness to read what he had written. But her fingers trembled as she opened the envelope and detached the letter clipped to the first page——

She read that letter twice, loving each word, lingering over it, before she tackled the typed pages of the book. She saw his trouble here: lack of ease, of spontaneity, a self-consciousness that made the piece stiff and stilted. But the material was good and the description of the things he had seen in the flaming hell of war revolted, yet fascinated her. For this he needed no lofty style nor rhetorical fireworks: it was a tale stark and cruel, but it could be told only in simple words.

She gave it all the time she could and sent it back next day with Peg, marking the passages she thought needed rewriting, correcting only a few minor faults of English. He had played his skill down too much: there was a good deal of journalistic fustian but there was also a vein of purest gold, of sincerity and earnestness, running through the work.

She determined to avoid seeing him, and that was not too hard, for her work at the school kept her busy and Miss Tait discouraged phone-calls. But she saw Avis or Peg almost every class-day and she had an idea that Avis, at least, was in Gavin’s confidence.

She learned the truth of this soon enough. Avis came to her in the rink where she was watching the girls practice figure-skating—Avis looking darkly lovely in a white fur parka and gay crimson scarf.

“What are you doing to Gavin?” she asked in her usual headlong way, without any build-up or finesse.

“Why, nothing. I never even see him—not since that night he was at your house and walked me home.”

“That’s what I mean. Maybe I should have turned my question around—what did Gavin do to you——?”

“Really, I don’t see——”

“Oh, come off it.” Avis had a wicked look in her eyes. “Are you afraid of him? Did he try to make love to you and scare you? Haven’t you ever met a real man before?”

“Yes to everything,” said Lilith.

That sort of fazed her—for a moment. “Then he did make love to you, and—— But why should you be afraid of him? He is a prince of a fellow. I made a play for him myself, years ago, but I don’t think he has ever quite forgiven me for not finding Giles quite the great, the noble hero that he always made him. But you seemed to like him——”

“I like him well enough. I like Archer Fenn too, but I’m not going to marry either of them.”

“Quaint character, aren’t you! What seems to be the matter? You’ve hooked Gavin, I can tell you that. I never thought he’d fall for a woman again, but here you come along and in a few months he’s running around all ga-ga about you, while you treat him as rather like the dust beneath thy chariot wheels, the flower beside thy door and all the rest of it. Even the literary aid is done by remote control like one of those ‘You Too Can Write’ courses. I don’t get it.”

“I just don’t have time for dalliance.” Lilith was a bit weary of Avis by now. “I came here to teach English, not to fall in love. I’m quite content with my work here——”

“My eye! No girl—certainly not one with your looks—is content without a man or the prospect of one. I wish I knew what was the matter with you. I like Gavin—he’s family, you see. I pretend I don’t think the Waylands are much but Gavin is tops in my book—and so, in his way, was Giles.”

And there, thought Lilith, you have it right in a small nutshell. Your precious men, your priceless family. I had my sad experience with one of them, now if I tell the story of that, after I’ve let myself fall for this one, I’ll have another sad experience—and so will he. Look at me, you black-eyed gypsy—I’m the girl who jilted Giles, your ex-husband. I’m the girl who made life so little worth living that he was glad to be out of it——

Archer and his hockey-squad, who had come to take over the rink for practice, tramped noisily in, shaking the snow from their coats and kicking it off their galoshes.

“Hello!” Archer came over to the sidelines, his smile taking them both in. “Going to stay and see my future big leaguers try to bash in each other’s heads and stave in a few ribs against the boards?”

“Such brutal sport!” smiled Avis, “Like wrestling, it always arouses the savage in me and I find myself yelling, ‘Kill the bum’. I suppose you’ve never seen the game played, Lilith?”

“I never have.”

“It’s quite simple,” said Archer. “One side tries its best to disable the other in the pursuit of a tiny rubber disc called the puck. It may prove a bit confusing at first but it takes hold of you like a drug.”

“Some other day, Archer.” Lilith hadn’t seen him for a long time, and now in his kindly eyes there was a hint of reproach, a look of hurt, of the small boy’s “what have I done now?”

“I don’t see much of you.” He seemed to have forgotten Avis. “Where do you keep yourself?”

“Right here. You know that. I have lots to do——”

“I understand you have a sideline—literary criticism.”

“Old blabber-mouth Rowan, I’ll bet, told you that,” said Avis, not to be left out. “Isn’t it good of Lilith to give Gavin a hand with his bid for literary fame?”

Archer nodded glumly and excused himself to go and put on his skates.

“What have you got that I haven’t?” Avis followed him with wistful eyes. “All he could see was you; I might as well have been a block of ice. You sure can draw them to you. I never can make that man give me more than a passing smile. It piques me.”

“He was always pretty serious.”

“Serious enough where you are concerned anyway. I suppose he would be relieved to find that he doesn’t have to fear Gavin’s competition.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he likes the idea, though, of my reading Gavin’s book. I don’t see why it should matter to him.”

“Men are little boys, especially when it comes to the woman they love. He just can’t reconcile himself to your collaborating even in a small way with some other man. Wouldn’t you like to see the two of them join battle over you?”

“I would not.”

“I’d love it—if it was over me. Once, during the war, Giles had an awful row with a Danish aviator who tried to kiss me. I loved it—even when the Dane put Giles to sleep with an uppercut. I think I’ll stay and watch the boys practice.”

And watch Archer at the same time, thought Lilith. Well, Archer would be good for you—too good. I don’t think you’ll ever succeed in interesting him very much.

She walked back to the school with the girls who had been skating, mostly older students from her own class. She thought of Archer and felt unhappy about him. Not for the world would she want to hurt that good, kind heart of his, and yet if loving Gavin meant that he must be hurt there was no way that she could help it.

There was another instalment of Gavin’s book waiting for her at the school and eagerly she hurried with it up to her room. She was interested in the progress of the work, but more still in the letters that accompanied the weekly chapters.

She was called to the phone then and asked if she could go with him. All the fine resolutions she had made about keeping out of his way, of putting an early end to what had sprung up between them, went like a weak levee at the onslaught of a tidal wave. She found herself saying, “Yes, Gavin. I’d like to go. You come for me about half-past three and I’ll be ready.”

“I’ll be there.” He sounded happy. “I—it’s been pretty lonesome without seeing you. It was killing me—to know that you were up there in that lay-convent only a short distance from me, and yet I couldn’t see you. As if you were cloistered. I felt like dashing up there and hammering down the door and abducting you.”

“That would have been another chapter for the book.”

“What book?”

“The one Miss Tait and the others have started about—about us. It began after you saved my life on the river. It seems that when one owes one’s life to someone else, the debt can never really be repaid. It’s as if the rescuer owned a lifetime interest in the rescued.”

“Swell! I never thought of that before, but it’s one of the best theories I’ve heard in a long time. And in your case, I shall press for my bond.”

You would find no trouble in claiming your bond from me, she thought, after they had hung up. All of me that matters seems to belong to you anyway.

Perhaps there is something in that rescuer and rescued idea. Had it not been for him I should not be here now, so in a way I owe him a debt that never can be repaid.

She knew it wasn’t gratitude alone, though, that had drawn her to him, that had sent her, with only a half-hearted, doomed-to-failure struggle, into his arms and parted her lips to his kiss. And she had missed him these past weeks and her ready consent to go with him had sprung from loneliness, from wanting, for an actual hunger to be near him.

“Let him hate me afterwards,” she said to the wide-eyed girl in the mirror as she made ready for their date, fixing her hair in an upsweep that transformed her in a minute from a bachelor-girl to a Bacchante. “A few grapes and I’d look like Amy Lyon——” She thought aside, “Let him love me now and afterwards, if he can, let him hate me. Let him learn to love me and nothing can hurt us—not even what happened with Giles. I can tell him, if I must—and he will believe me. He must believe me.”

It all seemed easy now. She felt a joy of heart, a lightness, an intoxication of love that made everything easy. Why, of course Gavin would understand. Even her innocent deceit would be clear to him when she would say, “Had you known from the start that I was once your brother’s love, you would have despised me and would never have come near me. I was wise to keep mum, to win you to me so that now it doesn’t matter——”

Something, some mocking secret voice, warned her that it wasn’t going to be quite so easy as all that. Avis would have to be told—and Peg. With Peg it would be hardest of all. Even more than Gavin she had made a major deity of her father and thought of him now as a sad, romantic figure, a proud knight, something like Henry Esmond in battle-dress, who had been the victim of some hard-boiled woman, who had actually thrown himself on the enemy’s spear-points because of her.

Lilith pushed aside the thought of what the truth might do to her, the truth, not about her father—that she could never bring herself to tell—but about the mere fact that the beloved teacher of English was that deep-dyed siren who had pushed her father to his destruction.

She would not think of unpleasant things this day. She was like a young girl getting ready for her first big date. There was a flush on her clear white cheeks that mocked at the touch of rouge, and the wide mouth was young and soft and in all her body was an expectancy, a craving for this man’s nearness, for the touch of his hand, the strong encirclement of his arms.

This was the ancient madness of which she had dreamed. The thought that she might have missed it, that she might never in all her life have met the man who could awaken it within her, appalled her and filled her with a great thankfulness that their paths—hers and Gavin’s—had crossed in time.

She wore a sheepskin-lined parka with a hood that framed her face like a nun’s coif, showing its madonna sweetness, the fine bone structure of cheek and jaw, the clear eyes with their long sweeping lashes.

Gavin whistled when he stepped out of the car and held the door open for her. She knew that whistle. She had heard it often in the rink when the girls were skating before an appreciative crowd of the boys from St. Bride’s. She felt as flattered now as any of her students, but the icy wind had already painted her cheeks——

“Lovely, lady,” said Gavin. “But lovely! When you do decide to shed the cocoon you certainly come out all gorgeous butterfly.”

She had let the hood drop back as she settled in the car and she saw with shameless pleasure the way his gaze lingered on her hair, and she did not move away when his hand reached up and touched its waves, lightly, reverently, while his eyes said a thousand things that tongue could never utter.

It was a clear blue and white day of early December, with a keen, steady north wind blowing small scattered clouds across a sky swept clean and hard. There had been a wonderful snowfall the previous day and the ploughs had passed, building up high white walls on either side and leaving a smooth snow-road that was fine for wheeling until the passage of many cars and the ugly behemoths of transport, the trailer-trucks, rubbed it and hammered it to treacherous ice.

Gavin drove slowly, heading nowhere in particular. He had asked her if there was any place special that she’d like to see, but she had no preference. She was content just to float along beside him in the big convertible, its top snugly tight, its heater humming softly. Just to drift along, saying little, content at the mere being together. She rested her head against the cushions and closed her eyes and smiled and Gavin, glancing at her, smiled too and reached over and took her hand and pressed it.

“What was the trouble, Lilith?” Presently he spoke, turning off on a side-road towards the hills where the going was not rutted, polished, treacherous. “Whatever it was, it’s over now—isn’t it? I mean the trouble between you and me that made you say the night I kissed you that there must be an end to it.”

She turned her head on the cushion and looked through languorous eyes, only half-hearing, only half-caring. “Over? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it now. We don’t have to, do we?”

“No, indeed. We don’t even have to talk. It’s odd, but it seems enough just to be together. I don’t know when I’ve felt so—well, so damned happy. If you knew how much I’ve wanted this, to be with you, to touch your hand, your hair——”

“I think I know. I wanted the same thing. This, as the radio plays say, is bigger than we are, Gavin. I don’t know how good we’re going to be for each other. I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but I——”

He stopped the car in a lonely stretch of woods and in a swift moment she was in his arms, straining against him, her mouth given eagerly to his eager seeking. All the denial, all the hunger, all the pent-up passion that was in her seemed to rise now and possess her——

“You——” He held her away from him, looking down at her with a shining wonder in his eyes. “My God, what a woman! I dreamed of you, of the fire that might be in you, but I could not know——”

She did not speak. Her eyes searched his face, searched his eyes. Was truth to be read in the eyes of love? So many men had looked like this into the eyes of woman, and worshipped and vowed an eternal loyalty—and they had lied.

She moved away from him, taking the cigarette he lit for her, feeling the tumult of passion subside slowly, wondering now if she had been wise—but not regretting—oh, never regretting.

“I’ll love you always,” said Gavin. “And I’ll never tire of telling you even though you should tire of listening.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever weary of that.”

“But why did you try to fight our love?”

Should she tell him now? It seemed the opportune time, the right moment, to speak of Giles, of that dead love and of what had caused its death. But she dreaded the idea, hating to spoil the perfect beauty of this time.

“Does it matter? Does anything else matter—anything but this?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t care what it was since now it seems to have gone or not to matter. We have each other now and I’d be a fool to stir up anything that might spoil this. You will marry me, won’t you? There’s nothing to prevent——”

“I have to finish my year at school.” And she thought; sometime in the months to come, sometime when this rapture is not so new, so fragile, I can tell him the story of Giles and me and it will be all right. It must be all right. “That’s only six more months and if you want me then——”

“Must we wait so long?”

“I think it would be as well. Maybe”—she teased him—“this magic spell will fade. I shall duck back behind my glasses and put my hair up in what you so charmingly christened the Great Auk’s Nest effect—and then you’ll wonder what you ever saw in me——”

“I still would find you fair, wench. You are Lilith—the first of women, the mother of Eve, the loveliest, and you are mine—for all time you are mine.”

She came into his arms again, believing, trusting, assuring herself that treachery in love, like lightning, doesn’t strike twice in the same place——

Love let me down once, she thought—oh, so badly—and I was sure it was the real thing—as sure as I am now. But it won’t again—it won’t! Life couldn’t be so cruel, and I won’t let it——

So she let herself believe what she wanted to believe and was happy and, even if sorrow came afterwards, she would always remember that she had been glad.

Maybe they did discuss the book that night during the dinner they ate at a log chalet in the hills, but they recalled about as much of that as they did of what they had eaten. In these golden, wondrous hours, the little things of earth had no smallest place. They lived, these two, in realms of beauty; moved in a world of their own that love had created—a world that each one found in the eyes, the speech, the handclasp of the other, in a smile, a sigh, a pressure of the knee——

It will always be like this, she thought; the rest of our lives together will be as lovely as today if we can but keep bright and untarnished this thing that we have found, if our eyes stay always as clear to see the qualities in each other we see now, if our ears stay keen to hear the gentle intonations of love.

It had not been like this, she knew—that other love she had known with this man’s brother. Perhaps the lift, the ecstasy, the out-of-this-world feeling had been as great, as intense—perhaps even more so; but what she had felt then had neither the depth nor scope of this emotion. It was young, immature, uncertain in its very certainty—cocksure, blind and headlong.

She was older now. The girl of seven years ago, feathery light and airy and dancing on silver shoes, was the woman of today, wiser, she hoped, formed in the slow turning of the years, able to judge and weigh the worth of the love that was offered.

With him it was, it had to be, the same. With him it should be even easier to know how real was their love, for he had gone all the way with his first love; he had married. Strangely, she felt no great curiosity about that early love of his. It had not been a good thing. He had told her so himself and it seemed as if he wanted to put even the memory of it away from him. Perhaps some day he would tell her. She could wait, she told herself, and she had nothing to fear from that other woman who had held him only briefly.

“All the golden years through, you’ll belong to me and I to you.” The radio played softly, a girl with a voice like a blunt chainsaw sang the old lyric from “A Pagan Love Song.” A log fire burned in the big fieldstone fireplace and the lights were soft. There were a dozen or more skiers in the lounge but they knew none of them, in fact scarcely noticed their presence.

The evening sped by and they were out under the star-rich sky, so bright-bedizened here in this northern clime, as if the heavens by putting on a special show, an added glory, tried to make up for the loss of summer’s brightness.

At the school door he took her hands in his and held them hard and looked long into her eyes—looked and spoke not, as lovers do—before he drew her hard against him and held her lips in a long, long kiss that left her breathless and trembling.

“It has to do me for so long,” he said. “Lord! How I wish I could take you away from this place——”

“But I like it! I’ve liked it here from the very first.”

“I can show you a thousand things you’ll like better and take you to as many places——”

“I’ll be okay, Gavin”—she touched his cold cheek—“just as long as I’m with you, just as long as you love me as you have today. I’ve been so happy. I knew that with you I would be and I—I guess I was a bit afraid of happiness. I thought once before in my life that I was in love——”

“Well, so did I. But I know—you have made me see so clearly—that what I had was a poor substitute for the real thing. Was it the same with you?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s over now. It was over long ago. And, yes, I can tell you it was never like this. I don’t know that it ever could have been like this.”

“He—the man——”

“He’s not here any more.”

“Nor is she. For us it is the beginning and I begrudge the years we lost.”

“We can make up for them,” she whispered. “And it will be all the better for the waiting.”

She watched him coast quietly down the drive to keep from waking the sleeping school, and then the bright array of ruby lights glowing against the snow.

“My love,” she said. “There goes my love.” And she felt the deep satisfaction that comes to a woman who knows she is all in all to the man she has chosen. She held it close to her, this precious, new-found thing that had come into her life, held it warmly, cherishing and nurturing it and taking from it a certain grace and beauty into her own being, so that in the days that followed she felt transformed, like another person, exalted and favoured of the high gods. And she wondered that the school and all the people she met did not notice it, and not say, “Why, this is another Lilith, this favoured, chosen woman! This is one marked out by Destiny to be of all her kind the happiest and most cherished.”

But, strangely, none of them seemed to notice any great difference. The Christmas examinations were in full swing now and her students were busy answering questions about Henry Esmond, about Margaret of Branksome sorrow-laden, and—leave it to Lamb—“A Dissertation on Roast Pig.”

Soon came the term’s end and the break-up for the vacation—a joyous time that had its touches of sadness. One day the school hummed and throbbed and was alive with young, bustling, eager life; the next it was like a tomb, only the sound of the clock booming out the hours forlornly in the winter stillness, the metallic scrape of old Joe Pascoe’s shovel as he scoured the snow off the chapel steps.

But Lilith didn’t mind. There was only one person in her world anyway, and he would never go far from her nor she from him. They were working hard on his book now, putting new life and interest into it, watching it grow with eager impatience, now cast down into the slough of despond when the chapters limped or the theme bogged down, now lifted to the pinnacles of hope and light when a part came off with a flash of fire and held in its re-reading a ring of purest tone like fine blown glass.

The book, they hoped, would sell, so that for a year or so at least they would not have to travel in search of other tales to tell, but could stay at home and savour the sweetness of rural life. Gavin had a small income, like Avis, from the family trust, but in these days it was far from sufficient. That bothered neither of them, so strong in the power of their love, so goldenly happy in each other. Why, there were a hundred new realms to conquer, a thousand tales to be told and they were young and—heyday!—all the world is ours.

Archer had asked her to have her Christmas dinner with him at a hotel in town where there was a dance afterwards, and without hesitation she consented. She owed this to him, she told Gavin, who seemed to understand—it was his Christmas-box and the least she could give him.

“I haven’t told him yet,” she said, “about us. But Archer’s psychic where I’m concerned. I think he knows——”

“And doesn’t like it much, I’ll bet. He had some ambitions himself, I think.”

“Yes.” She didn’t want to talk about what had been between her and Archer Fenn. To her it was sacred and she would always remember it and with it his gentleness, his quiet friendship and lasting loyalty.

“Odd chap. I met him during the war, in London. Oh, here and there. He wasn’t much for fun—always seemed to be seeking the Holy Grail.”

She looked at him, startled. “You know, that’s just what it is with Archer. I’ve always thought it but it never occurred to me to put it just like that.”

“Well, so it was. I spent a bit of time at the air-base where he was stationed and knew him fairly well. I don’t think he ever approved of me—not of any of the rest of the Joes for that matter. I guess I was a sort of a roustabout then. You can tell him I’m different now.”

She didn’t have to give Archer any sort of apology for Gavin Wayland. He had seen it coming, he told her, and he hoped and was sure she would find happiness.

“I’ll always regret,” he said. “I’ll always want you and I don’t think there’ll be another girl——”

“Oh, Arch, how silly! You’ll find some other girl——”

“ ‘With eyes as wise but kindlier——’ I’m not so sure. I’m cursed with the dreary faculty of knowing what I want from life, from love, and it’s not so good, I tell you. There is no compromise for us unfortunates, no second-best or alternative choice. It is this one or nothing—and you were the one for me.”

“Please don’t talk like that. You—you make me feel as if I had your happiness in my hands——”

“And you have, Lilith. But then, my happiness is yours, you see, and I’ll not mind watching your own bliss. You can believe that. Wayland’s a good chap, lots of dash and go to him and fine stuff in his make-up. He will do.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Archer. He said he’d met you overseas and that he didn’t think you had too high an opinion of him.”

“We all had a lot of puppy in us then, I guess. The good ones got it knocked out of them. We’re old dogs now.”

They were singing Christmas Carols that night, the people clustered around the tall fir-tree that had been erected in the middle of the city’s largest square and adorned with ornaments and strings of coloured lights that winked on and off. Archer parked his little car by the hotel and they walked over and joined in the singing.

“Strangers in a strange land,” he said, smiling down at her, and yet when they sang “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “Good King Wenceslaus” and the Westminster Carol, they knew that at this beautiful, this supernally lovely time of the Nativity, there were no strangers and no strange lands. Each thought of the friends they had left across the sea; of other Christmastides, of dear lost associations and happiness that would still carry some sweetness until the very end.

A chorus of French students sang their own Noels, their rich voices rising and falling in exquisite harmony on the frosty air, and when they had finished and were trooping across the park they broke into their beloved “Alouette”—

And fleetingly she thought of Giles, of the dark morning in the converted mews and the great voice booming from the bath and Poppy Ewart with the lipstick smeared across her cheek and on her smiling mouth.

She put the thought from her. It had no place here in this fine, clean hour; no place in her life ever. It was done with.

They had a quiet happy time together, she and Archer, at the softly lighted table with heaped plates of turkey before them and plum-pudding and a bottle of Chambertin that Archer had smuggled in. And then there was the dance and she drifted in his arms and felt good and cherished and a little sad that she was losing all this so soon, that when she was with Archer it would never again be quite the same.

But it will—it will, she told herself, like a child willing it to be fine even when the clouds lower and the thunder rolls; I’ll always feel the same way towards him, I’ll always love him after a fashion. I don’t want to lose him. I couldn’t bear to lose him.

“Archer——” She looked up at him pleadingly. “You don’t—you aren’t angry with me——?”

He smiled then. “I could never be angry with you. Oh, about the canoe, of course—but that was different. A woman’s only a woman but a good canoe is a way of getting across the water. No”—he dropped all the banter—“I’m not angry with you, my darling. I’ll never feel any different where you’re concerned. You don’t need me to tell you this, surely. You’re always tops with me, Lilith—always have been. And whenever you need me, why—‘whistle an’ I’ll come tae ye, m’ lass.’ ”

“And it will make no difference in our friendship? I mean when I——”

“When you go to the wigwam of the proud Pottawattamy chief, Eagle From Over the Water will sulk in his own hogan for a while, in his mud-wall hogan beside the Laughing Water, but presently, maybe on groundhog day, he’ll poke his nose out and call for a noggin of firewater.”

“Oh, Archer! What can I do with you——?”

“Just about everything. Your slave, madame. But I must needs jest with you. Can’t you see my heart is breaking?”

And he wasn’t smiling then.

The new year came in bitterly cold, pellucidly clear, with skies like blue ice and weeks of sub-zero weather. The Laughing Water was covered with ice as thick as an axe-helve’s length. She saw that the day Archer took her fishing, when he chopped a hole in the ice to let down his lines to catch the silvery hake, the small and succulent smelt which came swimming up from the deep waters of Fundy.

The laughter of the river was a giant’s rumble now, a thunderous frightening sound singing in a terrible bass against the ice, heaving it up in chaotically piled cakes, blowing air-holes in it, death-traps for the unwary, sending great zigzag cracks from shore to shore.

Gavin had gone to New York to see his agent and a publisher who had read and liked what he had done on his book. The villagers had put on the play “Twelfth Night,” which Lilith and Avis Wayland had helped them stage. The two schools, St. Bride’s and Edgemere, were combining their talents to try to enter a winner in the Dominion Drama Festival to be staged in St. John in the spring and Lilith and Miss Tait were busily going over a great pile of plays, old and familiar, or new and puzzling, in an effort to find one for a young cast.

“I think I’ve got it.” Miss Tait called to Lilith as she was passing the almost invariably open presidential door. “It’s just the thing—all about a family of teenagers and with a plot I always loved. You must have seen it played. It was very popular towards the close of the war. ‘Crosskeys’ is the one I mean. I saw it played at the Empire in London. I was over with the Ambulance Brigade. I loved it.”

Lilith looked down at the old familiar book and knew a deep nostalgia for that hectic, happy time, thinking how much pleasure was intensified when it came, as in war, in the midst of pain and suffering. Oh, she knew “Crosskeys” all right and if Miss Tait had seen the play at the Empire she had seen Lilith herself in the ingénue role of Diana Lane, the wild one of the play, the jazz-age product, the flirt, the wanton.

“I know that play quite well,” she said, rather wishing that Miss Tait had selected something else. She said, trying to steer the headmistress away from it. “Don’t you think that it’s a bit dated and too much bound up with the problems of the era? Almost ten years ago, as I recall——”

“Oh, no.” Miss Tait was a stubborn one. “I don’t think that at all. Nothing has changed—except for the worse—in the past ten years, and the problem of the play—the general brattishness and hopelessness of the youth of the day is the same in any age. Socrates accusatus est quod corrumperet juventutem—Socrates, in that bygone day of Greece, was accused of corrupting the youth of the country. Youth is always a live issue because we don’t have it long and most of our lives are spent regretting it. I think ‘Crosskeys’ is for us.”

“Very well, Miss Tait. We’ll go to work on it right away.”

“One of the things that struck me in the very first scene——” The Taiter, as Avis loved to call her, had very obviously worked it all out down to having the programmes printed—“was the character of the young girl, the wild one——”

“Diana Lane?”

“You do know the play well, don’t you? How lucky! Yes—that girl, Diana Lane. We have her right here in our midst—a natural, as the Americans say. I mean Peg Wayland.”

Lilith agreed. Yes, the part, she had to admit, was tailored for the lovely, arrogant, wistful daughter of Giles and Avis. All she would have to do would be to act naturally. And she was the one who had the best lines, the character who really carried the play along. The title “Crosskeys” came from the name of the big old house that tried to contain the unruly Lanes—a family in which, like the Esmonds, the men were all scoundrels and the women not much better than they should be.

Miss Tait gave her views on the rest of the cast and Lilith agreed with most of them. She looked forward now to doing the play, to watching young Peg in the part that she had played and liked so much, it seemed an age ago.

Peg was in ecstasies when the parts were allotted and the scripts given out; already she saw ahead of her a career akin to those of Helen Hayes and Vivien Leigh. Miss Tait was forced to speak quite sternly when she came to school wearing eye-shadow and mascara in emulation of the wild and woolly Diana Lane of the play.

“But one really must live the part, don’t you think, Miss Graeme?” She came to Lilith after reluctantly and rebelliously scouring off the demi-mondaine’s eye-allurements. “I was simply trying to keep in the mood for the play and if it’s to be a winner we must put everything into it. I don’t know, though, about the dogs; in the play Diana has two pure white borzois, Michael Strogoff and Anna Karenina, and I simply can’t switch from Pat, my English setter, and Hero, dad’s St. Bernard, though really they don’t put one in the same mood as Russian wolf-hounds would.”

As Lilith recalled it, those noble hounds in the original production had put her in the mood to commit mayhem, being rather harder to handle than a team of springboks. She assured Peg that she would be fine with the bourgeois breeds she had and that Pat, the setter, would serve every bit as well as Michael and Anna.

“I could borrow Jiggs Thayer’s corgis,” mused Peg, “but Gwyneth is in what Thackeray would call an interesting condition. No, I guess it will have to be Pat. She minds everything I say to her and she can be handsome enough if we bath her right before the play and keep her tied up away from mud-holes.”

Archer came to some of the rehearsals to watch his own boys, to whom he taught elocution, and who were all inclined, he said, to make even the tenderest speeches in a voice that shook the rafters. “If they’d only pipe down,” he said mournfully. “I guess I’ll have to invent a mute for them—something like jazz-cornetists put in their instruments. Young Peg is a budding starlet, Lilith. She makes a Diana almost as lovely as the one I saw in the play in London.”

“Thank you, Archer. I don’t think—I can’t imagine—that I had half the zest, the bounce, the sheer youthfulness that she brings to the part. I love watching her. It makes me live those days again—my first real chance, and all the magic world of the stage.”

“You had Stardust in your eyes all right, I remember. I saw that blessed play six times and got so I almost did some prompting when anyone fluffed a line.”

Gavin came once. He had never seen the play and it was all new to him. He had always adored his niece and it delighted him to see her now and watch her highly original interpretation of her part.

“Dear me!” Miss Tait saw her too. “That child! I’m wondering now if we really should have given her such a part. She simply lives it. I sincerely hope she doesn’t think she has to go out and get herself in trouble——”

Gavin choked on that one, so did Avis. “I think,” said Avis, “that Taiter is rather wishing she’d chosen ‘Little Women’ or ‘The Patsy’. She was pretty broadminded when she was in the S.J.A.B; but now she’s reverted to type. That Peg, though, I must say, doesn’t seem to have the least trouble when it comes to acting like a floozey.”

Gavin had brought good news back from New York. Some parts of the book had sold to a magazine and the book-publishers were definitely committed to its publication in the spring. “They liked the writing,” he told Lilith proudly, “and I could say to you, like Stevenson: ‘Take thou the writing, thine it is——’ ”

“I’m glad, and I’m proud, even to have you think I helped.”

“If I can always have you at my right-hand, the way won’t ever be too hard.”

Lilith came sometimes to the great old Wayland house, which, Gavin said, must have a real face-lifting and streamlining and he made ready to accommodate the new crop of Waylands.

Odd, she thought—there is the house that Giles would have brought me to. And I shall be its chatelaine after all and shall know love in it and bear children in it and see them grow——

And the ghost of Giles will walk here too, she thought—an unfriendly spirit perhaps. She wondered if Giles had died resenting her, even hating her. It was in him, as it was in Gavin, to hate as thoroughly as he could love. “Show me the man who can’t do a thorough job of hating,” he used to say, “and I’ll show you a man who can’t really love, for the emotions are too close akin.”

She didn’t think Gavin had that philosophy as deeply ingrained in him as had Giles. With Giles it had been a sort of religion and his was also the eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth credo, and with him there was no forgiving an injury.

It was the fear that perhaps Gavin would be the same that kept her from telling him about Giles, that made her postpone the confession from day to day, from week to week, making it harder and more repellent with time’s swift passage.

But it had to be said. It must be told in all its ugliness before she could stand beside him at the altar and make the vows that she would have made with his brother. Would he want them after he knew? Would they be the same to him or would he think: “These belonged to Giles and she denied them to him,” and would that thought be always with him darkening the brightness of their love?

They had told no one about their engagement; only Archer, who needed no telling about anything that concerned her, knew about it. But Avis guessed, and Peg, and in the school and the village everybody was happy about it as it seemed only natural and in true Hollywood tradition that, having saved her life, Gavin should fall in love with her and marry her.

He had bought her a ring, a lovely emerald, which she did not wear. “It will distract the class too much, Gavin. You have no idea how wildly romantic those girls are. They talk about modern youth and call it hard-boiled, cynical and materialistic, but these girls, believe me, are even more starry-eyed about love than their mothers and grandmothers. The more they pretend to consider it a lot of bunk, as something ‘strictly for the birds,’ the more they revel in it. No, my lord, the lovely emerald that I adore stays on the little altar in my room that I have made for it, locked in its little box.”

“When is it to be?” Avis sat in the back of the school auditorium with her. They had been discussing the sets for “Crosskeys.” “I mean the grand march up the aisle for you and Gavin?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t——”

“Haven’t decided on the date yet, eh? The betting is on June or early July, and in the chapel at St. Bride’s. The Waylands always get married in St. Bride’s. That’s where Giles and I——”

She stopped, remembering that day, perhaps wondering, still uncomprehending, what had happened to those high vows they had spoken there, those words that have in them the ring of eternity—“And forsaking all other, keep only unto her so long as ye both shall live——”

“Say, ‘I will’ ”—Avis murmured the preacher’s prompting now, and laughed mirthlessly at her fancy.

“I beg your pardon.” Lilith looked at her curiously in the dimness of the big hall. “Are you rehearsing or reminiscing?”

“Oh, reminiscing, most decidedly, darling. For me, I fear, the rehearsals are out. The play is ended. Him I love, loves me not.”

“Still Archer Fenn?”

“Like some far star,” sighed Avis. “That’s the way I look at Archer. Yet you could have had him, just by crooking your finger.”

Lilith had nothing to say to this; it was the truth, but she felt no pride in it, only a deep sadness and regret.

“You should have him for best man,” said Avis bitterly. “That I’d like to see. It’s always most fascinating, lends sort of a fillip to a wedding—like garlic in soup—when the discarded lover stands up with the groom——”

“Oh, stop it, won’t you!”

“Sorry! I didn’t know it would bother you so much. I left another boy when I married Giles—a fair-haired quiet chap. I’d like to say he never married, but he did—the very next month, the louse! This love business can be an awful headache. Peg has decided she will never marry now. She’s going to be like Diana in the play. So she thinks or so she says. Then the first thing some low-voiced charmer will appear and—bang—it’s love, still love.”

“Well, they haven’t found anything yet that seems to substitute for it. I think most of the trouble comes from our expecting too much from love and marriage and not putting enough into it.”

“There speaks the as yet unmarried. It’s not so simple as all that. In fact, it’s not simple at all. There’s always an unbalance—one who kisses, one who turns the cheek, one who gives, one who takes. And, damn it all, it has to be like that. If one side loves as much as the other, it’s even more hopeless and they destroy each other.”

“Are you trying to frighten me, Avis?”

“No. And nothing could. Everybody, it seems, has to learn the hard way about this wonderful thing called love. It’s dreamy at first——” She closed her eyes and there was a smile, softer than the usual rather disdainful one, on her lips. “But dreamy; I can recall my wedding day in all its full panoply of beauty. Giles in a spanking new morning-coat, double-breasted waistcoat and Ascot tie——”

Lilith listened, loving it too, but seeing Gavin in his brother’s place.

“The June sunlight was like gold in the college chapel,” continued Avis, “and it shone through the big stained-glass memorial window donated by—guess who? There’s an image of Sir Galahad; well, I guess it is or maybe it’s St. George, but I’ve never noticed the dragon. Anyway, there’s an image of a tall young knight leaning on his sword, a golden knight, and it looked like Giles if he’d swapped the morning-coat for a suit of chain-mail and, oh, it was one of life’s rare moments to stand there and think and dream——

A few weeks a few months, a year and then—well, for a little while I had it, I guess, but since then it hasn’t been good for me. I’m not trying to discourage you, Lilith.”

“I know.” She liked the dark girl, the strange girl whose defence against life was a brittle, mocking attitude that fooled most people—liked her better in this moment than ever before and she felt sad that love had passed her by or, stopping, lingered only briefly. She wasn’t at all afraid it would be like that with her love and Gavin’s. But did one know? Could one ever be sure about such a delicate relation as marriage? To reconcile the sighs, the smiles, the raptures of the early days with the hard cold facts of life and to realize that the golden acolytes had gone on to another wedding and that was the butcher’s boy knocking at the door.

They discussed the stage-setting for the play. They were on into February now and the Drama Festival was to be held in May.

“We have to work on this thing if we want to make a showing,” said Avis. “They take it seriously—and take themselves seriously. Honestly, Canada has more damn artists, writers and actors, self-constituted. It’s as easy as all that. For the plays, though, they hire some pretty tough bird from England to ‘adjudicate’—isn’t that a word! And this tough bird usually knows his stuff and tries to earn his fee by finding fault with everything from the lighting effects to the leading lady’s girdle. I know. I’ve been in the tournament of roses and rocks. Now we have to get these stage-settings just right. Got any ideas?”

“Some.” Lilith recalled the sets pretty well from the plays run in London. She marvelled that Avis had caught the mood of the piece so well. But there were several points on which her own experience helped.

“You seem to know this play pretty well. Ever do it before?”

“Yes, I—I did it in England years ago.” She didn’t want to talk about that, not to Avis Wayland, not yet. The time would come but it wasn’t right now. She knew that Avis was looking at her curiously, speculatively. Perhaps she too had seen the old photo that Giles had owned and in her as in Peg were stirrings of some all but forgotten memory.

“Well, that’s a help for us. I was wondering how you took hold of it so fast. Peg says you bring the whole thing alive, that you could make her see this character of Diana as if you had actually known her.”

Well, thought Lilith, in a way I did know her; from playing the part so often, I think at that time I got to talk like her and dress like her, but I never really did think like her. Too much of the Puritan, of the straitlaced Quaker in me.

The players assembled for the third act. Avis bent to her notes but she looked up to watch Lilith as she walked down the aisle to talk to the company.

“That dame still puzzles me,” she muttered. “There’s something about her that is as familiar as Aunt Jemima on the pancake-box, but I can’t put the old digit on it. Cagey as they come, too. I wonder what her story is and if Gavin has ever gone far enough back into it. Oh, of course not, for him she’s like the goddess who sprang full-blown and beautiful as the dawn right out of the sea.”

She watched and listened while with sure crisp directions and silk-smooth guidance Lilith shaped the third act of “Crosskeys.”

“Pro,” she decided aloud. “Just as sure as God made little fishes. She never learned that out of books nor in a class-room.”

“You have money in the bank obviously.” Archer Fenn dropped into the seat Lilith had so recently vacated. “Makes you talk to yourself.”

Avis laughed. She felt glad. She really did like Archer and she sensed that he knew it and was either indifferent or bashful. She liked to think it was the latter.

“If talking to oneself is a sign of money in the bank, this country is full of rich folk,” she said. “You just walk down any street in town or even in the village and count the number of passers-by you see with their lips moving.”

“Who, me?” Archer laughed. “Why, I do it myself. And you can imagine how much I can put in the bank out of my schoolmaster’s princely stipend. I daren’t even go into the bank to fill my fountain-pen. How’s the production coming along? My chaps think it’s too sticky, they wanted a Western play—six-guns and loaded dice, gambling-hells and a few lynchings.”

“Me too,” said Avis. “I adore Westerns. I’d love to live where I could wear a Stetson and leather gauntlets and have a pinto-pony——”

“You would!” Archer looked at her in awe. “Why, that’s the sort of thing I like myself—with some Indians on the warpath for good measure.”

“Maybe we’re kindred spirits, you and I.”

“Maybe we are.”

“Tell me, was Lilith ever on the stage in England? I mean, she seems to know so much about it, I’d swear she had been a professional.”

“Oh, yes,” said Archer guardedly, “she was on the stage for some little time before I knew her.”

“It’s as if I’d seen her somewhere—sometime——”

“If you saw her once, you wouldn’t be likely to forget her.” Archer was watching her now as she went up on stage to place an actor who had strayed from position. “It was in the theatre, in a play, to be exact, that I first saw her and I went back to it six times. I could never get enough of her.”

“You’ve lost her, I guess.”

“Yes—so it seems. But I never really had her. She never——”

“Much as I like Gavin Wayland,” said Avis, resting her hand on his arm, “I think she’s a poor picker.”

“You’re kind to me.” Archer smiled at her. “I like it, but I—you see——”

“Oh, I know. You don’t have to tell me.” She took her hand away.

Roaring March blustered by and April came, bringing the slow, reluctant spring. The ice was still in the river, stretching from shore to shore, though the sun, growing stronger each day, had breached and honeycombed it and here and there were stretches of open water that shone and sparkled and promised that soon, with a good wind and rain, the ice would break and go jostling and tumbling to the sea and the Laughing Water would be itself again, released from the long bondage of winter.

Gavin had finished his book which, adopting the laughing suggestion that Avis had made the night Lilith had agreed to help him, he had called “Korean Karousel,” the idea being perfectly borne out by the peace-talks which, better than any merry-go-round, had gone non-stop for ages. They had sent the bulky script off, air-express, to Gavin’s agent in New York, after making over it a very special Indian sign Archer had learned from a hump-backed Malicete supposed to be the last practising medicine-man of his tribe.

In the gardens the grass was taking on the new fresh green and the spikes of the tulips, the Lent lilies and crocuses speared right through the patches of ice and snow and mocked winter with their boldness. Now the Canada geese came honking in their sky-wide armies, up from the south, and the robins and finches and all the southern travellers were back in their old haunts, filling the dawn stillness with their crashing chorus, flitting about like mad in the quest for building material—straws and strings and just about anything else they could carry.

The frost bumps ironed themselves out of the paving by mid-April and the dirt-roads, thanks to a long spell of sunny, windy days, soon dried up and were fit to travel on. Gavin took her on many long drives then along the great rivers or down the Fundy shore to visit the little fishing-villages, to eat lobster and salmon fresh from the sea, to gather winkles to boil and clams to bake in the fires of driftwood that smelled so wondrously fragrant.

“Crosskeys” was ready; its cast, was, as Avis put it, champing at the bit, nosing the barrier and hell-bent to go. Peg had studied and practised the part of Diana Lane so much that some of her school-mates had taken to calling her “Di”; while the cattier ones addressed her as “Miss Fontanne”. It made no matter; she answered with equal blandness to both of them.

They were to give the play in Saint John a week before the festival in order to get the feel of acting before a large audience, and it was on the way to dress-rehearsal for that performance that Avis had the evil luck to strike a bad bump in the road, ditch her car and send Peg to hospital with some damaged ribs.

No play for Peg. The tragic look on that young face when the doctor told her she simply could not act in the city-production, would have done credit to Mesdames Fontanne, Leigh, Hayes or even la divine Sarah herself. It lightened a bit, though, when she was told if she was careful she could go for a while to watch the play and that she might be permitted to act in the festival-performance which was still better than a week off.

Her part in the first staging of “Crosskeys” would be taken by Lilith. There was nothing else for it. There had been no under-studies and there was no choice in the matter.

And this, thought Lilith, will tear it for sure if any of them chance to recall that it was a girl from this play whom Giles fell for. And anyway they will see me as Diana and——

There was nothing she could do, or wanted to do, about it. She had worked too long and too hard on this play to let it fall down now. The show must go on and it made things better for Peg that her beloved teacher was going to play her part.

“I’ll love watching you.” Avis had told her how amazingly capable Lilith was in the dress-rehearsal. “I’ll probably be so excited I’ll crack a few more ribs, but it really has happened for the best. I’ll be able to act in the festival-performance, Dr. Vinson says, and from watching you I know I’ll learn a dozen new things——”

Yes, thought Lilith unhappily, I dare say you will. And among them, you will doubtless learn where you saw my face before and right there, I suppose, will come the end of our friendship, of the liking and trust you have for me. She felt a bit down-hearted about that, but Peg would have to know the story soon anyway, and Avis and Gavin and all the rest. And she had nothing to fear, she told herself. She, not Giles, had been the injured party. But she felt like one who must stand at the bar of justice—or, what was worse, at the bar of public opinion and that, though her case was as strong as a woman’s could be, she was going to run into a lot of trouble from the jury.

Gavin drove her into town that evening. He was going, after he let her off at the theatre, to the hospital to bring Peg. Not ever before, not even, thought Lilith, at the play’s première, had she felt so nervous. Had it been before an audience of strangers in London or New York, she would not have minded so much; but this was before her friends, before her associates of Edgemere, her students and all the rest—and they were going to see a Lilith Graeme that not even the most imaginative of them had ever dreamed could hide behind that quiet, demure exterior.

And it would be a shock and an awakening to see the formal, reserved Miss Graeme turn into the cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking and amoral young wanton who was the Diana Lane of “Crosskeys.” For she could play the part as young Peg could never hope to play it. She had to play it and she couldn’t tone it down.

There was a scattering of applause in her first scenes, a growing crescendo of it as the play went on and then there was the greatest tribute of all, an awesome silence that spoke louder than a thousand handclaps. The little provincial town was getting a taste of the Big Time, seeing a real actress in a real part—and loving it.

“Oh-o-oh! God of our fathers!” Avis sat with Peg and Gavin. “Is that girl good! And what monkeys she’s made out of us. Holy cow! The Taiter will fire her for sure. And to think that I ever thought she was a mouse. Why, she plays that little tart as if——”

A sound, a movement, made her look at Peg and at once she sensed that something was wrong—and terribly wrong. Even in the dimness she could see the tense, stricken look on Peg’s face, its tautness, its pallor——

“Why, Peg! What is it? What is the matter, child——?”

“That—that——” It was a word from the kennels she used and from her it startled Avis and made Gavin seize her arm in swift reaction.

“Easy there, you crazy little snip! What in the name of——”

It was the end of the play and in the wild applause and stamping of feet no one noticed the trouble among the Waylands. But even in the hubbub Avis caught what Peg said—and so, after a moment, did Gavin.

“——foxed us all—she’s the girl that father—I can show you her picture. It’s in his trunk. Her name was Lesley Gray then and she played this part in London, but why did she do this to—to me—to us all——”

But they knew why, Avis and Gavin—and so would she when she thought about it, for what they felt now, their instant angry reaction, was just what they’d have felt if they had known about her from the start.

“Well——” Gavin stared from Peg’s ravaged face to Avis, who for once couldn’t seem to cope. “This would seem to be something. Are you sure of this, Pegeen?”

“I’m sure. All you have to do is ask her. Let’s go back-stage and ask her.”

Avis frowned at her daughter. “But no scenes, mind you. None of that red temper of yours. After all, you could be wrong——”

“I’m not wrong. I was suspicious of her from the first day I saw her. So were you, mother dear.”

“So I was,” admitted Avis. “I’ve seen that photo that came to us with your father’s books and things. That’s what rang the bell all right.”

Gavin took an arm of each of them and now that the crowd had diminished they walked down the aisle and went back-stage through the loge.

There was an excited group around Lilith but when the Waylands came they melted away and left the four of them standing there in a little island of shadow.

Lilith could see in the first glance that they knew, that there was trouble ahead. She looked from Avis, whose eyes avoided hers, to Peg, who stared at her as if at a stranger, to Gavin, who looked back at her uneasily and said, “That was a wonderful performance you gave.”

“The second best of your career,” put in Peg, and her voice shook. “The best, of course, is the one you’ve been giving since you came to Edgemere——”

“Peg!” Avis took her arm. “You must not say such things. Lilith, she thinks——”

“Oh, I know what she thinks. She’s quite right. I was Lesley Gray. You’ve seen my picture, I take it—the one I gave to Giles. And you know the story—his and mine—and you blame me for—for a lot of things—and you’re wrong—wrong, do you hear? I would have told you all this before but I saw you all so ready to condemn me——”

“Easy, Lilith.” Gavin with his hand on her arm sought to calm her as Avis had tried to still Peg. “We need some time to digest this. Avis, you can take Peg home in your car—she doesn’t have to go back to Edgemere; the doc said she’ll do. I’ll drive Lilith home.”

The Wayland women went without a word, Avis looking black as a thunder-cloud, and sullen; Peg still white with temper, still shaking with the terrible hurt she had felt when she realized that her adored Miss Graeme had been, as she thought, playing a game with her.

“You’re sure you want to wait?” Lilith still wore Diana Lane’s gay silver gown and the stage make-up, and even Gavin was startled at the difference.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You’re not the girl in that tramp’s outfit—not ever. And you never were. You’re Lilith. I’ll wait for you—sure, I’d wait for you for ever.”

“I’d like to know it now. Are you going to hold it against me—the fact that I broke off with your brother——?”

“No,” he said. “No—I couldn’t hold it against you if you’d killed him.”

“But you think——”

“Again I tell you not to be silly. You know how it is with me, with us. I love you—no matter what.”

“Thank you, Gavin. That’s what I wanted to hear, what I wanted to know. I’ll be with you in a little while.”

The garish neon lights of the city, blue, green, pink, flashed by, harsh and ugly, so that it was with a feeling of relief and relaxation that they crossed the bridge over the Great Marsh creek and headed towards the quiet peaceful starlight of the country places.

Scarcely a word was said until they had left the city well behind. Each waited for the other to say something, but it was Lilith who spoke first.

“I wanted to tell you this long ago, Gavin. I know now I should have told you and your family who I was when I first met you and before we became such friends. But our friendship seemed to grow so rapidly and I got to like you all so much—first Avis, then Peg, then—then you——”

“But why didn’t you tell us? It would have been——”

“You know the answer to that. You must know it.”

“Well, in a way I do. But we would have got over that in time——”

“So you think now. And perhaps you might have at that: but after—after you and I became lovers, after I found this happiness, I was afraid to risk it and I kept putting it off, putting it off—until now we have this unhappy showdown.”

“It was a hell of a shock, believe me. But it will pass. Peg will cool off, and Avis is not the one to harbour any grudge over a thing like that——”

“Look, Gavin.” She felt anger rise in her now. “All through this business, you people, you Waylands, looked upon yourselves, through Giles, as the injured parties and upon me as if I had done some terrible harm to you.”

“We—it seemed to us that you had wrecked his life. And you did, you know. Nothing can change that fact. You were all in all to him, you were the new life he had planned for himself, and you ditched him and it broke him. Once you quoted that bit about men dying and the worms eating them but not for love, and I told you it was as false as all these fine-sounding generalities. I know that Giles died for love——”

“And it would never occur to you that there might be another side to the story—my side? With you, with the rest of you, it’s all Giles. He died a saint, a martyr——”

“What are you trying to say now? What are you trying to tell me?”

“Something that I don’t want to say, that I hoped I’d never have to say. But if you and I are to have any peace, any happiness not tainted by this ugly business, we must put the record straight right now. You’re not going to like this——”

“I can’t imagine what you’re driving at, Lilith. If there had been anything, I’m sure Giles would have told me before he died. For he knew he was going to die. He was sure of it.”

“This is cruel.” Her hands were clenched in her lap and her mouth trembled. “I hate it. But do I seem to you the kind of woman who would do what you think, what you are so sure, I did—walk out on the man I loved and had promised to marry—for no good reason?”

“No—no, you’re not like that. I’m sure there must be something we don’t know. I couldn’t love you less, no matter what was the score. And you don’t have to tell me, Lilith. You don’t have to justify yourself with me—ever.”

“I believe that, Gavin.”

He had reached for her hand and held it tightly for a moment. “Whatever it is, why not let it ride?”

“I’d like nothing better. The telling is going to hurt you—and it takes a lot out of me. But I’d better speak now. You see what has resulted from keeping things back, from trying to pretend that things never happened. I’ve lost Peg’s affection, and I love Peg. And Avis——”

“Don’t worry. They’ll get over it, I tell you. When I explain to them that you had your own reasons for what you did, that you didn’t just throw the old boy over, didn’t give him a dirty deal——”

“It wasn’t like that, Gavin—I loved Giles——”

“But if you loved him how could you do a thing like that to him?”

“I loved him until I found him cheating on me, on our love—until I found him with another woman—in a way there was no mistaking——”

“Oh, no. You—you must be wrong. He wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t that kind——”

“I saw it, Gavin. I saw him. I saw the woman and they’d spent the night together. It was then I walked out on him. Now—now do you blame me?”

He was silent, stunned by what she had told him. Men were men, he knew, and in wartime one took what the moment offered. Most men did, but Giles was different.

“You’re telling me something I find it hard, almost impossible, to believe. No one in this world knew Giles better than I did. I never knew him to two-time a woman or betray a friend. It wasn’t in him to do it.”

“So I thought. I believed in him with all my heart, but I saw this, Gavin. I was there and saw it. I walked in upon them—and she taunted me——”

He shook his head. “Then I must believe you. I do believe you, Lilith. But this is a hard thing, an ugly thing. Avis could be told and, she, like myself, would find it incredible, but she would believe you. But young Peg, who is the one most needing to be put right—she’s the one we could never tell this to. She loved Giles and, even after seven years, she hasn’t forgotten the little she saw of him. We can’t tell her.”

“I know. I wouldn’t want to hurt her. I know how much this has shaken you, Gavin, but I had to make you see that there was a reason, and, to a woman, the best reason in the world for doing the thing I did.”

“I understand that. It will take a little while for this to sink in. But I don’t blame you; I don’t think I could have anyway——”

“I did love Giles, you know. After a while, when I had cooled off a bit, I thought I might forgive him and have him back—but it was too late then. I had been away from London—left the very day I found him and her together. When I came back, he was dead.”

They were nearly home now. The story was told. It had been hard but not nearly so hard as she had thought it would be. Perhaps the way it had been sprung upon them, through her appearing as Lesley Gray, had been the best way for them to learn.

“I never did know much about you, Lilith,” said Gavin now. “All I heard was that Giles had fallen in love with a girl, an actress named Lesley Gray, and got himself engaged to her. That was the only name I ever knew you had. I was flying back and forth between London and Italy and I never did have a chance to meet you.”

“I had heard as little about you. I knew Giles had a brother who had won a lot of fame as a war-correspondent—no more than that.”

“You must have been a marvellous actress, from the show you put on tonight. You certainly made a smash-hit there.”

“I wasn’t so hot. There were dozens who could put it all over me. Anyway, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to make a career of acting. I didn’t know really what I wanted to do after—after Giles died I——”

“Well, I’m glad that he meant so much to you. It’s good to know. I had the wrong idea—so did everyone else—we thought it was some femme fatale, some dame who was just giving him the run-around, stringing him along and making a fool of him—and I guess we hated her innards.”

“I’m glad you know the facts, Gavin—you know them anyway, and that’s what matters most.”

At the school he took her in his arms and kissed her gently, but it wasn’t quite the same. With a sadness of heart she knew they would never again recapture the perfect bliss of the first days of their love. She knew he was thinking now of his brother, remembering that Giles had once held her like this and spoken to her of love.

“Oh, Gavin!” She whispered against his cheek. “Don’t—please don’t love me less. I feel that I’ve spoiled things for us. I know it isn’t the same now and I’m afraid it will never be again what it was—our love.”

“It will be better, stronger,” he assured her. “This will make no difference. In a little while we’ll forget. What was it anyway that it should ever threaten our happiness? Let’s have no more of it.”

“But will you talk to Peg and Avis? Tell them as much as you can, as much as you need to convince them that I wasn’t unfair to Giles. Peg—the way she looked at me tonight.”

“Peg is a brat. Don’t fret: I’ll lay down the law to them both, talk to them like a Dutch uncle. Don’t worry, Lilith, it will be all right, I promise you.”

“I hope so. You make me feel better. I do so want their friendship. I felt sick all through that play, all the time I was flaunting myself about and laughing and acting like a light o’ love. I knew what I was doing. I knew that with each word, each gesture, each bit of business, I was digging my grave—a nice deep grave in which they would bury the Lilith Graeme they had liked so much.”

“They liked you. No matter what, they thought your performance was something out of this world. Believe me, I was spellbound and I was already pretty well aware of the fact that you were—well, you were something special. But the teachers, the students and all those who knew you and more or less took you for granted as ‘that quiet little English girl, Miss Graeme’—well, I think they all but fell out of their seats when they saw you making like Betty Hutton. You know, I think it’s rather a good thing that your brief time at Edgemere is ending next month. Those glasses and the Auk’s nest will never again in this wide world fool anybody.”

“I’ll be sorry when it ends. I’ve come to love the place. Maybe they’ll let me teach a few classes or do a play for them sometimes——”

“Maybe—if your husband can spare you. I’m afraid I’ll be greedy of your time. I’ll want it all for myself. Will you come tomorrow and tell the workmen what you want done with our house? And will you wear the ring I gave you?”

“Gladly now, Gavin. I—I was a little uncertain, you see. I didn’t know how much you would like me after you found out about Giles and me. I shouldn’t have let myself think like that, I suppose. Knowing you as I did, I should have trusted your love——”

“Yes,” he said grimly. “You should have indeed.”

“After—after Giles—what happened then—I was afraid of men, afraid to believe, to trust them. I didn’t want anything to do with them. I swore I’d never again let myself in for the hell I went through at that time. I was burned—and badly.”

“Poor kid!” He put her head on his shoulder and stroked her cheek, her hair. “It must have been pretty rough. None of us are perfect; you wouldn’t like us if we were, but few of us are downright blackguards and scamps. Don’t get me wrong either. I’m no exception, far from it, and I’ve lived a pretty rough life, but in it there’s been nothing I’d be ashamed to tell you about.”

“I’m glad of that. I didn’t think I was getting a paragon. I like you as you are, just the rude male animal, scattering pipe-ash, losing papers, forgetting to shave, at times unfit to live with, at others a prince from Wonderland—me, I’ll take it as it comes.”

The school was going to sleep as he drove away, the lights blinking off in the girls’ dormitories, in the seniors’ rooms. In the faculty corridor, the third, they were all on and Lilith knew that “Crosskeys” was the big topic conversation, and of course herself.

They were waiting for her—Miss Tait, Miss Vance, Miss Gale and the rest. They were drinking tea in the principal’s sitting-room and looked rather like a jury. Lilith could pick out the ones who had been crabbing, saying “disgraceful” and “giving the school a lot of ugly notoriety” and “who is this Graeme person anyway?” Ready to throw her to the lions. And the kindly ones—Miss Pellew, who was rumoured to take the odd nip of brandy, Mlle. Frontin, the French teacher, and, last but not least, the Taiter herself.

“My dear!” She was wearing her blue velvet and had her glasses on a matching ribbon. “I must congratulate you on a most wonderful performance. Little did we realize that we had in our midst, in such an unobtrusive person as yourself, an actress of such great skill. You had us crying, laughing, loving, hating, just as if you played on one’s emotions as on the strings of a harp.”

“You are kind, Miss Tait.” She smiled at the others who she knew were kind, and bowed to the critics. “I really don’t deserve a great deal of credit for what I did. You see, I was very familiar with the play.”

“One would think,” came from Miss Stenton—money and banking—“that you’d been born in a trunk. Isn’t that the quaint way they say that one has the stage in one’s blood? And the way you acted the part of that hard young girl——”

“Would make one think I’d been a hard young girl myself. Is that it?”

“Oh, now, Miss Graeme—nothing like that. It was just that it really did give us a shock to see our very proper English instructress suddenly turning by the alchemy of the footlights into a creature of another world. One day a madonna; the next a courtesan. Really, it frightened me—like Dr. Jekyll turning into the dreadful Mr. Hyde.”

“I don’t know whether to feel flattered or abashed,” said Lilith. “I happen to have some small talent for acting. I was on the London stage briefly under the name of Lesley Gray——”

“Why, now I recall you!” Miss Tait let her glasses drop almost into her tea-cup. “You played the part of Diana at the Empire in London during the last year of the war. I saw you. I loved the play. But, my dear child, why didn’t you tell us who you were? Here, all this time, we’ve had a celebrity in our midst——”

“But I’m not. I left the stage after ‘Crosskeys’ finished its run. I shall never, I think, go back to it. Tonight, of course, I had no choice. I couldn’t let the company down and Peg Wayland wasn’t able to go on. She will play the part at the Drama Festival, play it quite as well as I did—probably better, for she will bring to it the freshness that I may have lost.”

“Oh, never,” said Miss Tait. “Here now, you must have some tea with us. And tell us—we don’t wish to pry—but you and Gavin Wayland——”

“I think you know it already,” said Lilith wearily. “Mr. Wayland and I are engaged. We hope to be married in June and I do hope you will all come.”

They still looked at her a bit askance, some of them—put-out perhaps at having been taken in by her quiet and unassuming ways.

“Who would ever think,” said Miss Vance, “that you had once been a great star. Really, you must be a born actress, you know. I was quite carried away. It amazes me that you could ever turn your back on such a romantic and fascinating career to become a teacher. Most of us——”

“I have been very happy teaching. There is a lot of heartbreak in the theatre. All you see, of course, from out-front is the stage, and it looks beautiful and you lose yourself in illusion, but if you work there it’s different—you see the reverse of it—the dingy canvas, the ropes, the pulleys, the dust, the paste jewels and spangles, and between the ones who are really great, the stars, and the minor players there is an awful gap.”

They weren’t convinced. They looked upon her with new eyes—eyes that saw the great world of which they had only read, the famous people who were but names or glamorous pictures in glossy reviews. This young girl had rubbed shoulders with them, had talked with them, acted with them.

They fired a barrage of questions at her, but Miss Tait was quick to see that she was very tired and she was able to get away in a little while and go to her room—the peaceful, welcoming little room with its dormer, the books and pictures, the things she loved.

There was the sketch Peg Wayland had made of her that first day in class—the uncannily clever little drawing that had gone unerringly beneath the surface and discovered the girl who was deliberately playing down her loveliness, seeking to hide her glamour away from the world, asking only to be left to go her way unnoticed and unmolested amid the crowd.

No more of that now. The whole school had attended the performance of “Crosskeys” and the largest theatre in the city had been packed with those who loved the drama and with those who thought it was the proper thing to do, to show an interest in culture and the arts.

She was glad now that there was only a month before the school-year ended. She would say goodbye then to this good and satisfying life, to the students she had come to love and the school that, even in such a short time, had become like home to her.

But she would be going to a better life, to the fullness and joy of marriage with the man she loved, to a house of her own to manage and adorn, to children—her children and Gavin’s.

Yet tonight she felt uneasy, uncertain, deeply troubled in her heart, and all the solidity of her love seemed to have become undermined and she was no longer sure of its strength or permanence or its power to withstand the long years ahead.

She had known few unhappier moments in all her life than the one in which Peg Wayland, with stormy eyes and white cheeks—eyes that blazed with anger—had said those words which stung like the thongs of a knout. The young can feel so deeply, can love so much or hate so much. No half-measures with Peg. She felt that her love had lied to her and trust had been mocked, that the woman she had so much admired and emulated had only been laughing at her for a silly chit, making a fool of her, letting her bare the warm little secrets of her heart and only pretending to care, to understand——

In time, Gavin said, she would forget, would come around and perhaps learn to realize that she had been wrong. Time did a lot of things in the way of easing hurts and healing wounds and soothing the damaged ego. But between her and the lovely young Wayland she knew it would never be quite the same again. Peg’s idol had fallen with a crash that would echo in the far corners of her soul until life should end.

She did not think it would matter so much with Avis, who didn’t have too much faith in life or in people, who didn’t believe much of anything. Avis, after a bit, would laugh about it all and think it quite a game, the way the little provincial folk had been taken in. She would, too, make much of the fact that she had never been fooled, that from the start she had guessed that the new teacher was something different, something special. It would be good to have Avis for a friend. She had to live with these people and she wanted no friction to mar things at the very outset.

The next day was Arbour Day and there was a half-holiday that she welcomed. She hadn’t slept very well and she knew her eyes were shadowed, her face drawn and tired. Probably now the catty ones would say she was showing her years, the marks of the hectic life she had once led—“You know what these actresses are—cocktail-parties, marijuana, late nights and all the rest of it—and she doubtless had her share of it——”

Lilith could count all the cocktail-parties she had ever attended and all the theatre had meant for her was hard work and not much money, a deal of heart-ache and uncertainty. She had left it with no regrets and had never felt any great desire to return to it.

She had promised Gavin she would go to his house and see what the carpenters and decorators were doing, but she didn’t have much heart for it and she called him up and begged off. She felt wretched. Peg hadn’t shown up for morning class but of course her injury would readily explain that.

“I’m not too happy about last night, Gavin,” she said. “I’ve got a bit of thinking to do——”

“That will do you no good,” he said. “Look, please try to forget about the unpleasantness, won’t you? It will all blow over and be forgotten before the roses bloom in our garden. I’ve done a whale of a lot of thinking too, and it got me nowhere. Let’s go back where we were such a little while ago, you and I. You know—in a lovely country of our own where it’s always summer and sunshine. There’s no reason why we can’t, Lilith.”

“I know there isn’t. I’m being foolish, I know. Acting as temperamentally as the good ladies here seem to think I really should. I was quite a lioness last night when they got me indoors.”

“What did they say?”

“Some thought I was a shy genius, others thought I was probably a reformed hustler. It was fun in a way. Was it really so much of a sensation?”

“The whole town’s talking, I’m afraid. But it’s all in your favour. You’re quite the biggest thing that’s happened in the local theatre since before the war when we used to get Martin Harvey, Ellaline Terriss, Seymour Hicks and the like. You were really big time, you know.”

“Small pond, big frog. I wish I’d kept my light under that bushel. I feel as if I’d done a strip-tease in front of the bishop.”

He laughed gaily. “I don’t think you mind it a bit, you little devil. I think you actually got quite a bang out of it. I loved you anyway. Well, if you want to be morbid all by yourself, go to it. I’ll let you off for today.”

“I’ll feel better another day, Gavin. I know I will. Please plant a tree for me, won’t you—one that will last as long as our love—a sequoia, say.”

“I’ll plant one that will live for ever and you and I will sit in its shade.”

She was glad, later, that she had not gone to Gavin’s house. She sat in the big worn leather-chair that she had fallen heiress to, which had belonged, she understood, to poor Miss Keightly of the claques and snuffles, but which was, just the same, about as comfortable a one as Lilith had ever occupied. She read Housman and amused herself pondering on the mentality of men who insist on writing their own epitaphs. Housman, of course, went one better than the rest of them, doing an epitaph and a funeral-poem as well.

In the quiet time of the afternoon, just when the sunlight was turning a deep gold on the old green rug and resting warmly on the bindings of her books, there was a timid knock at her door which, when she was slow to answer it, was not repeated.

When she did open the door she saw the young girl at the head of the stairway, walking slowly, a woolly fawn coat thrown like a cape over her shoulders.

“Peg!” she called softly. “Oh, Peg—do come back, won’t you?”

Peg turned. The pallor of her face made her eyes seem larger than ever, the red mane hung down on one side and she looked tragic and injured and woefully young. She hesitated, then came slowly back along the corridor.

“I—I thought I’d better come to see you,” she said very low. “I’ve been in a dreadful stew——”

“Please come in. And sit in Miss Keightly’s chair if you don’t need to nurse your ribs in a straight one.”

“I’ll take the Kite’s if you don’t mind. We used to call it ‘The Judgment Seat’. She always had one or other of us on the carpet. Not like you.”

“Thank you.”

She watched the girl ease herself into the chair and went herself to sit in the window seat only a little distance away. She wondered what had brought Peg here so soon. She couldn’t yet tell whether she was forgiven or whether, for the sake of peace and tranquillity, the fiery young Wayland had decided to declare a truce.

“I’m glad you came, Peg. I—well, I’ve been in a bit of a stew myself over this business. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I shouldn’t have been so crude about breaking the story, but I—I didn’t know what to do.”

“I suppose not,” said Peg bleakly. “For me it was like—well, as if I’d been a fair performer on the fiddle, say, and met a man and he let me play for him and I played him pieces that I’d learned—‘Flower Song’ and ‘Amaryllis’ and ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ And he said, ‘My, you’re a swell player, a real artist.’ And I thought I was pretty good and some strangers came along then and said to him ‘Why, how do you do, Mr. Heifetz? Won’t you give us a tune?’ and Mr. H. took my poor fiddle and made it sing through Vieuxtemps’ Rondino and a few études by Paganini——”

“Peg! Oh, my darling! I didn’t know. I didn’t ever intend it to do that to you, to give you that idea.”

“No? Well, so it was, and how do you expect me now to stand up and play my little pieces after the great maestro has made the fiddle talk? How am I to go on stage and play Diana after what you did last night?” She shook her head. “That’s why I came—to tell you I can’t go on, that you’ll have to do the part again——”

“No.”

“But I tell you I can’t do it—not now. I had really begun to think I was pretty good and that I could turn in a pretty decent performance—until I saw you. I realized then that I——”

“Listen, sweet sixteen, you’re all wrong. You couldn’t be more astray about anything. You’re Diana Lane—the real Diana—the sixteen-year-old trying to be worldly wise and sophisticated and hard and being defeated by her own youth. I’m a hag. What I did was simply what we call a tour de force—do you want to write it in your book?” She smiled and Peg began to smile slowly, a bit mournfully.

“It was done with mirrors, I assure you,” went on Lilith, feeling now that she was getting somewhere with the reluctant Bernhardt, that she could win her around and pull her out of the slough of despond. “I’d played that part hundreds of times. I could do it in my sleep. I’m no Heifetz, believe me—I just know the one tune. I’m no Hayes or Fontanne either: I’m just good in that one part. The truth is, I flopped in the next two plays, if you want to know it.”

“You did!”

“I did.” It wasn’t strictly so: the plays had flopped first, but it helped a great deal to boost Peg’s morale.

“I don’t see how you could ever miss. You—you were wonderful and I guess I was an unruly brat to talk to you the way I did. Gavin says we were wrong about you, that you really weren’t to blame for—for my father—for what happened.”

“No, Peg, I wasn’t. If you will believe that, my dear, it will make me very happy. I couldn’t bear to lose your friendship. It was one of the things I looked forward to—having you all my life for a friend.”

“You might have been sort of a second mother, mightn’t you? I wonder how you and mother would have hit it off if you and father had been married. Not so good, I’ll bet. I think she always loved him and still does. She pretends to be looking for another husband, but I know she cries sometimes—and it’s not for any man living. She’s a lovely mother, Avis.”

Yes, Lilith thought, she seems to have done a pretty good job on you and your brother and it may be that she really loved Giles enough to regret him all her life. You can’t live with a person for years and love them and have children with them and then make another life for yourself from which they are shut out completely. Always, she thought, in any second marriage the old love must have a place and there was no hope for the oneness, the unspoiled unity of the real love.

“And you will go on with the show, Peg!” insisted Lilith. “You have to anyway. If I should do the part of Diana it would put us out of the running. The festival is for amateurs and I still rate as a professional. I know this man who will judge the entries, Garret Kane; I met him in London. And he knows me. He was a dramatic critic when I was acting in ‘Crosskeys’ and he gave me a lot of kind words. And he will have kind words for you—be sure of it.”

“Okay. I’ll try to give it the old one-two, but it’s going to be hard to act the little hellion with these busted ribs. Tell me—you wouldn’t mind, would you?—tell me about my father. I was only seven or eight when I saw him for the last time, when he was home for a month and he and mother weren’t getting along too well then and it wasn’t much fun. But I remember him so well. He looked a lot like Gavin, only he was bigger and his hair was redder and he laughed a lot more; at least, that’s the way I remember it now. He was always joking with us, carrying Rowan around on his shoulder and treating me as if I were grown-up. He was swell.”

“Yes, he was a grand fellow, Peg. He was just about all you’d want in a man—strong and gentle and understanding. I had some of the happiest hours of my life with him—wonderful hours which we managed to snatch from the war—a sail on the river, a picnic on the downs. I was only eighteen then—a few years older than you—and I was in a heaven all my own. I was the happiest girl in the world. We were all ready to be married, just a few weeks to go, and then——”

She could not go on. She could never tell this child what had happened—the sick horror in her heart at the sight of Poppy Ewart standing in Giles’s door, the soft, derisive laughter, the nasty words—“Oh, darling, won’t you wait to see Captain Wayland! We’ll be having breakfast shortly and I’m sure he’d love to have you——” and the deep voice singing “Alouette” and, when she went out into the yard, the sight of Giles’s red head in the window. That few moments had given the death-blow to her young love. Poppy had told her, when she and Giles got engaged, that she wasn’t giving him up, that she wanted him and what she wanted she always managed to get.

“But you really loved him, didn’t you?” asked Peg wistfully. “And you didn’t give him the gate because you were cruel and heartless or didn’t care for him?”

“Far from it. I can’t tell you, Peg, and it wouldn’t help you to know, and it wouldn’t make matters any different. It was just one of those things. Maybe it could have been overlooked. I’m not sure. But I was so young and I’d given my heart so completely and I’d believed so much and trusted so much.”

“I’m sorry I ever—for what I thought about Lesley Gray. I had you wrong then—so very wrong. I dug out that picture of you, from father’s trunk. It’s lovely. It was that I was reminded of the first day I saw you, but I hadn’t looked at it since it was sent home with his books and papers. You wrote on it—‘To Giles. For all the golden hours.’ That was lovely. I asked mother if I could keep it and she said yes, unless you wanted it back—do you?”

Lilith shook her head. “No, child, you keep it. I don’t think I even want to see it again. It doesn’t do me any good to think about that time, to have it all revived as it’s being revived now just because of this play that all my life then seemed to centre on. It was through the play I met Archer, and through some actor-friends I met Giles and this girl——”

She hadn’t meant to say that but she had been thinking of Poppy, wondering how long her triumph had kept her happy. She herself would never forgive the woman. “Poppaea,” the crowd used to call her; she had a Roman decadence about her, a sensuousness and a lack of restraint that was ugly and frightening. And she had taken Giles.

“I thought there must have been another girl. I don’t want you to tell me. It must have been bad enough to make you give up the love you had for him. I wish—oh, it would have been nice if you and he——”

She stopped, abashed. Lilith marvelled at the confusion of an age in which children sometimes love two mothers or two fathers, get along quite well with the dual parenthood but never know the blessed security that is in the heart of the children where the mother and father keep their love strong and steady and sure.

“Maybe you wouldn’t have liked me so much as you think, Peg. That was one of the things I was uncertain about, I recall; and one I feared—how I was going to face not only Avis, but two children like you and Rowan, who would resent me and always look on me as an interloper.”

“It wouldn’t have been like that. Oh, I’m sure it wouldn’t. We all would have loved you. But anyway, it wasn’t to be, was it? I hope you’ll find all you lost with Gavin. You like Gavin a lot, don’t you? May I see your ring? I know you have it, for I saw him looking at rings in Birk’s and he spied me and got red and pretended not to see me.”

Lilith took the emerald from the little silver coffer where she kept some rings and bracelets and a cameo that had belonged to her mother. She slipped the lovely emerald in its red-gold setting onto her finger and held it out for Peg to see.

The girl’s eyes shone. “Oh, it’s lovely. It’s like green fire. I hope I shall have an emerald when I——”

Lilith smiled at her. “Avis told me you had decided not to marry—ever. Have you changed your mind?”

The white cheeks flushed. She laughed then. “Oh, I don’t know. You make up your mind that you’ll be a nurse or a business-executive or a scientist and that that will be enough for you without men, but all the time you’re thinking of someone—you don’t even know what he looks like—who may come along and—bang!—there goes the ball-game. You can’t help it, can you? Like you and Gavin. It’s just too much for you.”

“That’s the way it is. Apparently it’s a game that has no rules, no fixed laws, and it can hurt you or make you the happiest person in the world.”

“It’s made you very happy, I know.”

“Yes. It’s all right now. Last night it wasn’t so good. I thought I’d spoiled a lot of lovely things. And today wasn’t much better—until you came. You’ve made it all perfect again, Peg. I value your friendship. It was really the first one I made in this country and I treasure it.”

“You kept my sketch—the one I made of you.” She got up carefully and walked over to the bookshelves. “I did have you taped about right too, didn’t I? I wondered all day what you were up to—a she-wolf in lambskin or, better, a butterfly disguised as a moth.”

“I was being Lilith Graeme, teacher of English at Edgemere School for Girls—simply that. I’d long since ceased being Lesley Gray anyhow. Maybe I over-played the schoolteacher business, but you see I was new here and first impressions are the thing. You know——” She laughed—“we redheads are handicapped in a way. If we have even fair looks along with the crown of gold, other women tend to distrust us and start tightening the reins on their menfolk. It seems to me I heard one of my students putting forth the thesis that redheads have been the most famous women of history——”

Peg laughed too. “You do have a memory, don’t you? Yes, I like to believe that—and of course you were right about the bad hats being redheads too. Still, I like being one, don’t you? I was going to use some henna for the show but I’m not sure——”

“Oh, no! Your hair is lovely as it is. And the upsweep is just the thing. I wore mine pulled tight in a knot for the time I played Diana. It gave me a headache.”

Peg made a move to go, but Lilith stayed her. The school always gave tea on holiday afternoons and there was seed-cake and chocolate-fingers, and they drank tea and ate cakes and peace and understanding descended upon them.

There was no trouble with Avis either. They did not meet until the next day at the noonday meal. Avis sat down breezily beside her and gave her a slanted look and a sly grin.

“I believe you and the rising young Bernhardt have become bosom buddies once more. She came home last night with chocolate-éclair on her bib and full of tea and looking all starry-eyed again. She really has an awful crush on you and I’m glad she got over her tizzy. You did sort of knock us off our stilts, you know. For a brief while I even debated with myself whether or not I’d keep you on my list of Touchables.”

“I’m glad you decided in my favour, Avis.”

“It wasn’t hard. Gavin helped along. The way he feels about you, nothing you ever did in your young life could make the least bit of difference. You might have gone around poisoning babies or burning down homes for the aged and Gavin would think it wonderful. So who am I to take umbrage—isn’t that a tall one?—at you just because for a while you were engaged to the man I married! You didn’t take him from me, you know.”

“I’m aware of that. And I’m glad. But do you really think a woman ever ‘takes’ a man away from another? It seems to me the man usually doesn’t need taking; he’s quite ready to go.”

“Oh, no, some of the dear lambs are really lured away by she-wolves. Most of them are suckers for a little soft soap, a bit of flattery, the ‘oh, aren’t you wonderful’ approach, accompanied by a sigh or two, a batting of the eyelashes and showing him the bruises your husband gave you.”

Avis rattled on all through the meal and when they left the commons asked her to come and see the new variety of trumpet daffodils that old Joe Pascoe had developed. Already the lovely, graceful things were nodding in the sun and the massed crocuses made lovely patches of blue, white and yellow.

“I suppose you love to garden?” said Avis. “I do myself, but I get some startling effects. I’m not so good at it. The seeds I plant never grow into anything like the pictures in the nursery catalogue and anything I nurture very carefully and water and cultivate is almost invariably shepherd’s purse or touch-me-not or some other rare flower.”

She skipped from gardens to Giles in her easy, babbling brook fashion: “You know, much as I like you, I can’t see that you and old Giles would ever have made a go of it. Oh, he was a peach of a chap. I always thought so even when I most wanted to kill him. But he was so slow, God love him. Slow in every way. I suppose though, seven years ago, you didn’t take time to think of things like that——”

“He didn’t talk much, I remember. But I liked that about him.”

“The strong silent type. He could make love. He was very much the dominant male and I suppose at that period in your life it was heaven to feel crushed and helpless in his arms. I used to be that way, too. But I could never stay romantic or entranced for very long and he thought I was shallow and did not appreciate him and—well, you can probably guess.”

“But you weren’t that way at all.” She thought of Peg’s telling her how sometimes, even yet, Avis cried for him.

“Not really. It was just that I—I didn’t want him to see how much it all meant to me. But I did love him in my fashion. I wasn’t serious enough for him I guess; which was odd, for he loved fun himself. He was always at me ‘to grow up’ and to ‘get out of pinafores and pigtails—remember you’re a big girl now——’ That’s when we used to quarrel and, oh, boy, we put on some real knock-down and drag-out hassles. We both rather enjoyed them for a while when it wasn’t so hard to make up, but after a while it got like Korea and the peace-talks ended in a bigger battle than the one we were trying to settle. Ah, those dear dead days! I can still hear the sound of shattering plates and the homely slam of doors——”

She shook her head, her eyes very pensive, and Lilith thought: why, she really loved it—the turmoil, the squabbling, the bickering. She really regrets it all and thinks of a good slanging-session as nostalgically as some others would a tête-à-tête in the garden.

“I knew his trouble,” pursued Avis. “And I could have held on to him if I’d had sense enough to tell him what it was the first time we got into a brawl. A very simple thing too, which he should have doped out for himself—he didn’t beat me enough. He didn’t beat me at all. And that was what I needed.”

“You think it would have made things different?”

“I most certainly do. Some women hate to be reasoned with, especially when they’re in the wrong—and I was in the wrong about nine-tenths of the time and he didn’t have sense enough to hang one on me or take me over his knee. He thought I was fragile—imagine—me!”

“You’re something of a masochist, aren’t you?”

“Eh? Oh, you can’t catch me on that one. Peg sprang it on me, said she got it from you—and I looked it up in the dictionary and found it didn’t mean a Greek bandit. Sure, I’m a masochist—every woman worth her Chanel is a bit that way inclined.”

They found Joe Pascoe grubbing among his flowers, an old bent man with silvery hair and the priest-like face, still apple-ruddy, that old gardeners often have.

“He was gardener here in grandma’s day. He’s pretty deaf now.”

The old man showed them his flowers, the new daffodil which Avis had christened “Pascoe’s Pride” and which she was doing a painting of.

“Nice to have a flower named after you—or to be named after one. I love flower names in girls—all except Poppy. I always think girls named Poppy should have bulgy eyes. Poppy—hey, wasn’t Giles sort of mixed up with a girl named Poppy—what the deuce was it? Some kind friend wrote me about her——”

“Poppy Ewart,” said Lilith. “She was pursuing him, I think. I knew her——”

“Sort of a——”

“Quite.”

“Well, think of that now! She was running after Giles and he was running away.”

“Not too fast, I fear.”

“Then you came along and sort of broke it up.”

You might put it that way, thought Lilith. But Poppy had won, Poppy had scored her ugly little triumph and stolen the first fruits of that splendid love. And Poppy had laughed her wild, wanton laughter, flaunting herself in the very face of the girl she hated so much.

“I don’t like Poppy either,” she said. “The flowers, yes, though they fade as you look at them, and they’re papery and unreal—and they store poison under their petals.”

“Was she——?”

“There’s a word for her—in any language.”

“Well, you surely didn’t care much for her. Was she the one who——”

“Oh, let’s not talk about her. It’s over. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Giles and his women.” Avis shook her head, marvelling. “He was a card, a throwback to the days when knights went jousting and poking each other in the eye with lances—all for a rose, a favour from their lady fair. He was a character from ‘When Knighthood Was in Flower’ living in an age when Knighthood was in the discard. Sort of a modern Don Quixote—or, maybe you’d say—Don Juan. Well, let’s skip it. Sufficient unto the day—and I think your troubles are over now; with Gavin you’ll have a good life, a happy one—and you seem to have it coming to you. I guess we were all pretty harsh on you. Please forgive us, won’t you?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. Just so you understand things. But don’t condemn Giles either.”

“I should be the last one on earth to do that.” Avis frowned. “At the same time, you’ll not mind my saying that if anyone else but you even insinuated that Giles would double-cross a woman, I’d call her a liar.”

Archer asked her to go canoeing the first warm day and she consented eagerly and went a bit dejectedly down to the beach the day following Peg’s visit—dejectedly, for this was another “last time”. The dinner at Christmas and the dance—that had been a “last time” too. Oh, she told herself, I’ll see a lot of Archer after Gavin and I are married. He will come to our house and we’ll go about together and have lots of fun. But she knew in her heart it wouldn’t work out like that. It wouldn’t ever again be the same. She knew it and he knew it too.

He was sitting on the boulder by the little canoe, puffing on his old pipe, his sweater knotted around his neck, just as she had so often seen him. He had congratulated her briefly over the phone on the success of the play. Now he said, “That was a wonderful show, Lilith. I could imagine myself back in the Empire, seven years was as nothing. It was so much the same. If anything, you were better than you used to be in those days. And I was so proud of you. I felt like hanging around the stage-door and asking for your autograph. I told everyone who would listen that I’d known you for years, that I’d seen you in the big time—in short, that you and I were buddies.”

“But you didn’t come back-stage to tell me how much you liked it or to give me moral support.”

“I didn’t know quite what to do. I saw the Waylands there and when the lights went out at the end of the show I knew your little masquerade was over. You had tossed a bombshell into their midst and I knew there was going to be a bit of a scene.”

“It wasn’t much. It’s all straightened out now and I think they understand about some things that they had wrong in their minds. I’m glad it’s over, Archer. I feel much better now.”

“You do look a bit lighter, now that you are relieved of your burden. I’m glad you could come with me today.”

They pushed the canoe into the water and paddled slowly out onto the smooth surface of the river and remembered the long, glorious hours they had spent there in the autumn. Beneath the giant profile of the Minister’s Face they sailed and the deep shadow the cliff cast, in contrast to the bright sunlight from which they had come, made her think of that awful day when she had fought for life in the angry water.

They had brought wieners with them and coffee and on a sandy shore they made a fire of driftwood in the evening and picnicked there beside the river, lingering until the early stars came out and the young pale moon. And they talked of anything but themselves and fell into long silences while Archer smoked and gazed pensively at the river that lapped and sighed on the shingle.

And he sang to her as they paddled home—old songs of the Malicetes that he himself had translated and made into music, haunting, eerie songs of the great god Glooscap, of his enemies the beavers, of the dark forests and the mighty rivers. And the water laughed softly against the frail canoe and the evening breeze whispered, with old, lost voices, of other lovers who long ago had gone sailing on and on until they came to the timeless sea.

He helped her ashore and, with only a momentary hesitation, took her in his arms and looked down at her, long into her shadowed eyes. “Lilith,” he said, “Oh, Lilith.” And kissed her deeply there beside the Laughing Water.

And it was goodbye.

She went the following afternoon to Gavin’s house to see what was being done by the carpenters and decorators he had brought from the city. It was a big old wooden house built in the days when the Waylands owned saw-mills and labour was cheap and no house was complete without a few turrets, dadoes and similar ornamentation. Gavin was having a lot of scroll-work knocked off the verandah and having the oil-furnace taken out and the former heating system put back.

“You couldn’t heat this barracks with all the oil that’s been wasted in Abadan,” he told her. “I know. I’ve had a few winters of it. I still own some good wood lots and I’ll guarantee to keep you warmer than all the magic cabinets the oil-dealers ever thought up. Those things that look as if they’d play ‘The Blue Danube’ if you dropped a nickel in them were never designed for spacious living—just gracious. Me—I like lots of room about me, indoors and out.”

Joe Pascoe’s daughter, Ivy, was the housekeeper. A capable, soft-spoken country woman, she had worked for the Waylands since she was sixteen. Unlike most old retainers, who with the years seem to become an important part of the family, she didn’t resent the newcomer, letting it be known that she thought it was high time the old house had a mistress and for Mr. Gavin to settle down.

There was a lovely old garden and lawns sloping down to the river and some huge Manitoba maples and a beautiful grove of pines. It was a lovely, quiet, restful place and she liked it from the start and felt that here she could be happy. She had not liked the hurry and clock-measured life of the city. This was a home where, if the clock ran down or someone forgot to turn the leaf of the calendar at the month’s end, it wouldn’t make a great deal of difference. Everything was slow-paced, unhurried; the summers would be lived in the garden or on the water, the winters around the great stone hearth in the living-room.

They were going over the page-proofs of “Korean Karousel,” which had come in the morning’s mail and which thrilled them both as with vast importance they made cabalistic signs learned from “The Writer’s and Artist’s Year Book,” wondering if the printers ever really bothered with them.

“I don’t think,” said Gavin, indicating a cute little mark to direct that a word be deleted, “that the printers need all this. The printers I have known, even when they were sober, were a pretty smart lot. I think I’ll just make my own signs after this——”

“Isn’t it a grand feeling, Gavin—to see your book in print?” Lilith was fondling the pages as if they were precious leaves from some immortal tome. “I get the grandest thrill out of it.”

“Well, after all——” He looked at her smilingly—“it’s all ours, yours and mine—our first baby, and begotten amidst tears and heartbreak, as I recall it.”

“Yes, I was all confused in my mind about a lot of things—you and Giles and the rest of it. I was almost afraid to undertake the job you’d offered me to help you with the book. But I couldn’t resist——”

“Me or the book?”

“Both of you. I loved the way it worked out—Peg or Rowan acting as cupid’s messengers and those lovely letters you would send me with each dollop of literature. How I loved them, Gavin! I’ll keep them always. No one ever wrote me a love letter before I met you.”

“They helped improve my style, darling. I used to dash them off before I began the daily stint, just to get the words flowing—loosen up the brain—sort of literary setting-up exercises for the maestro——”

“I’m glad my love served some useful purpose then. I always knew that writers were the world’s biggest opportunists. Everything that comes along is grist for the mill.”

“But of course. You didn’t think I neglected to keep carbons of those billets doux, did you? I’ll probably be able to work them into a novel—if I ever write one.”

“I never thought you could be so mercenary. Would you bare the secrets of our hearts for all to read? Would you sell the precious moments like cabbages in the market-place?”

“Well—since you put it that way, darling, no—not unless of course they offer a whopping big price and will take the movie rights.”

“Oh, in that case, of course, who could object!”

But this love they knew, here in this quiet garden, was theirs and theirs alone and could never be for the market-place; this no other man or woman could share. It was in them, a part of them woven into their lives, into the core and fibre of their being—and it was a wondrous thing.

“Peg came to me,” she said after a while. “It made me very happy.”

“I thought she would. Oh, I didn’t send her, mind you—or even urge her. I know my Peg and if I’d put it up to her as a matter of duty or noblesse oblige or anything like that she probably would have got her back up and refused to go near you.”

“She was very sweet. She had decided she would back out of the show, refuse to go on as Diana, but I showed her how wrong that was. She will play the part better now, I think, and even as it was she had nothing to worry about. I think she will be a sensation.”

“You certainly gave her a mark to shoot at.”

“That won’t hurt her. It won’t hurt any of them.”

“I hope the adjudicator isn’t too tough with them.”

“I have an idea he will be tough enough. I met him a few times.”

“Garret Kane—isn’t that the lad? I met him too. Used to be a newspaperman. He worked in Toronto for a while, then he was dramatic critic on some paper in London. Tough bird, as I recall. Looked like a pug.”

“Was one. He was a professional boxer for a while.”

“So that is why, I suppose, he won’t pull his punches——”

“Really, Gavin——”

“Sorry. What I mean is he won’t hesitate about telling the lads and lassies where they fall short of the standards, say, of the Old Vic, or how perhaps they could learn a few wrinkles from the other actors like Gielgud or Olivier.”

“I’d say quite positively that he’d relish telling them. He’s the boy who can do it. He was very kind to me when I played in ‘Crosskeys,’ but usually he was rough on the new ones. Slasher Kane, we used to call him. He made ladies weep and strong men gnash their teeth and swear. He may be different now.”

“Especially under the local influence of good Scotch and lobster Newburg,” said Gavin. “We know how to soften ’em up, babe. We’ll have Slasher telling them all that Shakespeare missed a lot by dying before he saw them.”

They worked on the proofs through the long afternoon, recalling passages they had disagreed upon, sentences they had wrangled over, rare paragraphs they had loved, feeling that the Muse had fleetingly smiled on them.

“Maybe,” said Gavin, “the book will be published and in the bookshops when we go to New York on our honeymoon. I can’t imagine a greater thrill than seeing a window full of ‘Korean Karousel’——”

“I can. Seeing a window empty of it—after they’ve sold the last of say a thousand they had on display.”

“And who’s being mercenary now?”

“Oh, it has to sell, Gavin. I’ll take a load on my back and go around and knock on doors if it doesn’t. It has to sell a million.”

“Wow! Don’t you know that first books are not supposed to sell? They’re to be given, autographed, to your relatives and friends, just to prove that you’re an author. After two or three books, maybe someone decides to buy one to give to Aunt Bertha for a Christmas present——”

“It’s not going to be like that with our book,” she insisted, and Gavin marvelled at the faith of women and how they can make themselves believe the darndest, most far-fetched things if it suits their purpose. “Anyway, you’re going to sell some here: it’s required for reading—or it’s going to be—in the English classes at Edgemere and St. Bride’s, and of course everybody would want a copy anyway.”

Gavin shook his head in silent admiration.

“We may also be able to have it mentioned in the Drama Festival. Maybe Garret Kane would casually allude to the flourishing condition of the other arts——”

“What about having a nice set of sandwich-boards made to wear with your going-away suit?”

“We’ll do better. We’ll have something chalked on the back of the car along with ‘Just Married.’ ”

“ ‘Just Wrote a Book,’ would be good. ‘Buy One and Help Along the Cause.’ ”

“Fine! And don’t forget that you have a speech to make tonight in town to the Canadian Club, and don’t neglect to stress the fact that you can only give a résumé of things ‘in the limited time at my disposal’ and that it will be necessary for them all to read ‘Korean Karousel’—repeat that—‘Korean Karousel,’ to be published June 24th, 8vo, Farmer and Stultz, New York, $3.50—slightly higher in Canada——”

“Like everything else,” muttered Gavin. “But that’s right. I’d almost forgotten about my speech. I’ll give it to you, my good, patient, not yet long-suffering partner—‘Ladies and Gentlemen: Of the making of books there is no end——’ ”

“Wonderful! How did you think that one up? It has a familiar ring——”

“But a good book is the life-blood of a master-spirit——”

“Oh, John Milton. Is it all going to be quotations from the classics?”

“Old things are best. However, I’ll toss in a few gems of my own—never fear. Now let me get it off my chest, then I’ll go and shave, and you can finish reading these proofs.”

“Darling! It’s almost as if we were married. Go ahead, I’m listening.”

It was a good speech, but even if it had been poor stuff and merely mumbled instead of given in clear honest English, she would have loved it. When it was done, she applauded loudly.

“I’m proud of you. If I didn’t have to work at the rehearsal for ‘Crosskeys’ tonight, I’d be right up in the front row leading the claque. Now away with you and off with that awful whisker! You look like Frederick Barbarossa.”

She watched him go with eyes bemused and dreaming, her cheek still stinging from the chin that he had rubbed against it when he kissed her. She had never known any greater happiness than this.

All our lives like this, she thought, here in this garden, this place like a modern Eden, this old house—all this and our love. It seems too good, too much to be given to one. I love every moment of it and treasure each thing he says. How could anything so lovely as this happen to me in such a little time? I hoped I would be happy when I left England and came to this country, but I had no idea that it would be like this, that anything so beautiful would come to me.

She bent to the proof pages then and read on slowly, painstakingly, careful of every comma, every dubious spelling, every broken letter or bit of smudged type. This was their book, hers and Gavin’s, their baby—and it must be perfect.

“——but Beauty lived there too; even in the blood and sweat, the flies and filth, the fire and thunder and smoke-reek of the battle, man, the ever hopeful, the seldom-despairing, found some things of Beauty: birdsong in the dawn, a rose full-blown in a ruined garden, a peasant woman singing to her child——”

She was lost in the easy flow of the words, carried away to the distant war-ravaged land. She did not know how long it had been going on and for a dazed moment or two she thought she had been dreaming it—that song she would always hear and, hearing, recall old bitter things——

Gavin, singing up there in his room—that clear rich baritone. But——

“I’m a—I’m a fool!” she muttered. “How could I imagine——”

But the voice was so much like that other voice that she had heard singing this old Canadian song that long-ago days in Westerham Mews—Giles Wayland’s voice. As the same rollicking chanson du pays went on and on there came to her another startling, troubled thought: Giles had been a poor singer, not able to carry a tune very well, but Gavin’s voice was true and deep and resonant—and so, above the rush of the shower even, had been that other voice——

She knew with a numbness creeping over her, into her heart, into the depths of her, where these thoughts were leading. Of all the insensate folly! It was the craziest thing in the world and yet——

She looked up at the window from which the singing came and now indeed her heart seemed to stop its rapid beat, and to falter and then go thundering on. He was looking out the window, talking to one of the workmen, and the red head, the set of the shoulders—they were Giles. They were so much like his brother that she closed her eyes and opened them again to see if it would seem any different.

“It could have been,” she whispered. “Oh, it could have been. But he would not—but it was one of them—it had to be one of them and if it was he——”

He had resumed the song again, dismembering the gentle swallow—the head, the neck, the beak, the eyes, the ears and on and on—until she wanted to scream, to beg him stop it for ever. She hated the thing. She would always hate it. But what would he, Gavin, be doing with that girl——

“Oh, don’t be such a ninny!” she blazed at herself. “What would any man be doing with Poppy Ewart! He’s no different from the rest, no better than any of the others. And Giles—if it was he, I have done something I can never undo now. If it was Gavin, I did a terrible wrong to Giles.”

She got up from the garden-seat and hurried down the path through the whispering pines to the river——

She had to get away from that song that was tearing her into little shreds and tatters, that was singing a laughing requiem, perhaps, for her love. Over and over she assured herself she was imagining the whole thing. And yet, she told herself, there was Giles’ reaction, the way he had taken her abrupt termination of their engagement. That wasn’t at all the reaction of a guilty man.

She walked to the water’s edge and stood watching the little waves roll up and withdraw, breaking on the pebbles. She tried to get a grip of herself, to still these wildly racing suspicions that made a fever in her brain. She had felt like this about Giles after that morning; and if it had not been Giles—if it had been Gavin——

She had not told Gavin where it was she had found Giles. She had not mentioned the name of Poppy Ewart. It was safe to assume that Poppy had not, that morning, mentioned her visitor and whoever had looked from the window of the flat had not seen her.

But he had! She was sure he had. And she had wondered then that he had not shouted to her or given some sign of recognition, and had thought that shame had kept him quiet.

“I can’t—can’t go on thinking like this. I don’t know what to do. I’ll have to stop it, but I——”

She sat down on an upturned dingy, covering her face with her hands. “Let the dead past bury its dead”—what folly! These things refused to stay buried, these things that she had thought were done with long ago. She could still fancy she heard him singing.

It came to her now that she was back where she had started from seven years ago.

“I doubt my love,” she whispered to the whispering pines and the laughing water. “I can’t trust my love. Oh, what if it was he. Say it was he; I couldn’t do to him what I did to Giles. I couldn’t again walk out on my chance of happiness. And I can’t believe it was he. If that she-devil lied to me that day she did it just to try to break it off for me and Giles—and she succeeded. What irony if now it should work again in Gavin’s case. She loved Giles and if Gavin was there——”

She knew Giles was often away from London. There were weeks on end when the little flat in the mews had no tenant or a half-dozen strange ones depending on the homeless friends of whom Giles seemed to have so many. Gavin, she knew, always came there when he was in London. And this time he had brought Poppy with him.

“I’ll never know,” she thought. “I’ll never ask him and, if it was he, I can be sure he will never tell. He must have known her all right. He knew Slasher Kane and most of the newspapermen. He couldn’t have missed Poppy and she would find him fair game since I had taken Giles away from her. If I could only know the truth——”

But what difference would it make now? She wasn’t going to break off her engagement with Gavin even if he had been involved in an affaire with that woman-of-affairs, the sultry Miss Ewart. He would have been only one of many and she had known the misery that results to a woman for condemning a man for being a man.

You couldn’t understand it, ever; you couldn’t imagine how men could be such fools as to fall for some piece of shoddy goods. But they did, and there it was. And if you were wise and tolerant enough, you could put it away from you and find your happiness.

But now she would always wonder—about him, about Giles. She would have no peace, she thought, or would she in time get used to it and would the passing months dull the knife-edge of this doubt that was cutting into her?

If I say anything to him, if I ask him about her—and if I’m wrong he’ll hate me, and if I’m right, he will think that I hate him—and maybe it would be so. I have no definition of hate but I think what I have for her is as near to it as I’ll ever come. I could kill her with my own hands and if she did a thing like that, played such a rotten trick on me—why, she deserves it and worse.

“What are you doing, darling—talking to the waves? King Canute proved you couldn’t do anything with them centuries ago.”

Gavin, shaved and wearing a blue suit, had come up behind her. She turned slowly and smiled at him and hoped he didn’t notice how stiff and unnatural was that smile nor the effort with which she spoke.

“I came down here to get away from your singing,” she said. “It was driving me mad.”

He laughed. He was still in the happy mood of the afternoon; no clouds on his horizon, no chill winds of doubt blowing about him. “Was it that bad? Why, I used to sing in the college glee-club, believe it or not.”

“Maybe it was the song then.”

“What was I singing? Oh, I know—Alouette. Everybody in Canada sings Alouette. They’re always fighting about what should be our national anthem, and there they have one all ready-made for them. It’s quite something to hear when you get a few hundred voices together.”

“Are you all ready to go, Gavin? You haven’t a great deal of time.”

“Oh, time enough. But what about you? Shall I run you back to the school?”

“No. I think I’ll stay and finish reading those pages. I haven’t many to do. There are a few French terms I’d like to verify—the ones you used in writing about the Royal 22nd, the French regiment, you recall?”

“There’s a good reference book in my study, darling. ‘Petit Larousse.’ You know the way about by now. Maybe I’d better go. But you seem tired. You are tired.”

He took her in his arms and she fought off the wild impulse to push him away from her, to pour out in furious spate the things that seethed within her. These arms that held her, these lips that lingered so thirstily on hers—had the arms held Poppy Ewart as tenderly, the lips kissed her with as great desire?

“You’re cold.” She had shivered in his embrace. “The wind of the water still seems to have ice in it. And you should be wearing a sweater. And you’re so pale. Is there something wrong, Lilith?”

“Nothing. I’m all right. Let’s go back now.”

He looked at her worriedly, in that hopeless, baffled way men do when they feel their inability to cope with the woman they love; when they know in their heart there is something amiss but having done no wrong that they know of, are completely at a loss to account for the trouble.

“If there is anything, I wish you’d tell me. Is it something I said or did—something that offended you. I can’t imagine——”

“Oh, Gavin, please! I told you it was nothing. Won’t you try to believe me? And do go now and give them what-for and make the speech of the year. I—I’ll hear you on the radio when I go back to school. It won’t take me long to finish the proofs. I’ll leave them on your desk.”

“I hate to leave you.” He stared at her, frowning. “I can’t figure what happened. But I can tell—being in love with a person, you can sense the faintest alteration in their mind and you——”

“Love’s little Geiger-counter! Don’t be so silly?”

“I’m not sure I’m being silly. If I’m imagining things—— But there! You do love me. Say you do.”

“I love you, Gavin.”

Yes, she thought—no matter what, I love you. I’m not going to let these wild suspicions change everything. Even should they prove true, I’ll not turn from you as I did from Giles.

He kissed her again and looked into her eyes and she returned his gaze smilingly. “It’s all right, Gavin,” she whispered. “Always for us it’s all right. Nothing in this world can spoil it.”

“I believe you. I’ll go now. I guess I was having a brainwave, but when you turned there at the beach and looked at me, you seemed for a moment to be a stranger, a girl I didn’t know. But there’s a lot to you that I don’t know, isn’t there?”

“Isn’t there to everyone? I mean a lot that the rest of the world—even those nearest to them—can never really understand? And isn’t it better that it should be so?”

“I’m not so sure. You’ll find in that French reference book the phrase, Tout savoir c’est tout pardonner—to know all is to forgive all. And it’s a good one.”

He left her then, going to the garage to get his car. And it seemed as if the last thing he said had been aimed right at her. To know all is to forgive all. She must try to digest that. In love it is often easy to condemn too quickly, to let the reason be carried away by emotion. The mere idea that he had been intimate with that other girl filled her with a fury that frightened her. Long ago, she thought she had conquered the fiery temper that went with the red-gold hair, but today it showed itself, fighting for expression, hair-triggered and dangerous.

She waved to Gavin as he drove away and got an answering wave.

“Oh,” she muttered, “thank God he’s gone. A little longer with him, a few more questions, even another ‘Is there something the matter, Lilith?’—and I think I should have been no longer able to keep from telling him. And it wouldn’t be good for either of us. There’s been such complete trust, but after this, if I should find out that I am right——”

She went back to the reading of the pages, trying with all her might to pin her mind down to the work in hand, but it was no use. She knew she would have to give it up. She would take the pages back to the school with her and finish them there, after the confusion of her mind had settled, after the ringing echo of “Alouette” had faded quite away.

She gathered up the unread sheets and put them in her briefcase. She took the others up to his workroom and laid them on his desk.

She liked the little room up under the eaves, its books, its worn old chairs, its pipes and all the miscellaneous junk that a man can collect in the university and in the army and in knocking about the world as a reporter.

She saw the big volume of Larousse, and remembered the words she wanted to check up on. Next to Larousse was a red leather folder beautifully handtooled and embossed and much too lovely for a woman to pass up. She reached for it first and drew it down and opened it and it was as if she had picked up a white-hot stove lid and couldn’t let it go.

The too lovely, sensuous beauty, the thick black curls, the great darkly lashed eyes, the warm flower-like mouth with its “come kiss me” curves, the plunging neckline of the red dress——

The face, even in the tinted photo, seemed to smile mockingly at her, to gloat over her. She stared at it as if hypnotized, and it blurred and became clear again and blurred again. A shaft of sunlight shone upon it like a spot—the kind that its original had always sought and usually found in night-clubs and revues.

She read the bold inscription at the bottom—“I would this night hedge thee within my arms and teach thy lips to graze my body’s pastures.”—Poppaea.

She snapped the folder shut and thrust it back in its place beside Larousse. She had forgotten completely about Larousse, about everything else that did not belong to this dark moment.

“I was right—so right. I knew when I heard him singing—when I recognized that song—that here was something. Well—she surely does seem to mess up my life, and she brings me only a lot of grief. This is really the pay-off. He must have forgotten he still had the photo, or maybe he was waiting, the way they do in the movies, until the night before our wedding to consign it to the flames where its original should have been consigned long ago.”

It wasn’t the end of the world, she told herself, as she walked slowly through Ashtondale. No matter what happened, you went on living, and all you could hope to do was make the best of things, carry on with what you had and hope that it would all work out in the end.

By the war memorial on the common she lingered for a while, idly reading the names of the dead, ending with that of Giles Wayland. There were always fresh flowers there on the granite steps of the cross and today the yellow daffodils and paper white narcissi made a brave show. Yes, and there too were some of old Joe Pascoe’s new variety that Avis had christened “Pascoe’s Pride,” and looking over the long list of names she saw that of Pte Heber Pascoe, and wondered if this were the old gardener’s son.

Giles must have had a rough time of it when she walked out on him—when his ring came back with never a word, when he could find no trace of her. It had been a cruel business, that, and she did not find it hard to believe, since she had known him so well, that it would play havoc with his life. For he had loved her.

“What an ugly thing! What a cruel trick to play on me and on him! And I—to fall so readily into the trap, to believe her rotten deception without giving him a chance to talk. ‘Captain Wayland,’ she said, and it did not occur to me that there were two with that rank—Gavin had an honorary captaincy as an accredited correspondent. I can see now why she laughed at me—for being such a fool as to swallow her lies. And now I’m getting it all in my face again. But there is no lying now. This time there’s no being mistaken.”

“You made a picture standing there—a lovely one—with that far-off look on your face and your head bent as if you were deep in prayer.” It was Avis with the English setter, Pat, on a lead. She wore a scarlet lumberjack-shirt and grey slacks and her black hair and eyes gave her a gypsy look.

“Memory can be a sort of prayer, I think. I was remembering Giles, wondering if I——”

“I’ve often stood there myself and looked at his name and wondered if I too had done the best I could by him. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. It’s awful to think you might have been wrong, that you might have been too hasty, too slow to forgive and quick to condemn——”

“Well, we all have that to reproach ourselves with, I guess—all of us women who have dealings with men, who love and are loved. But what’s the use of reproaching ourselves or of regretting or speculating about it when it’s all done? I love those lines——

There is a freshness, an immortality about them—those whose names are on the cross. We’ll grow old and turn grey and wrinkled and become feeble, but they will always be Youth. I’ll look in my mirror someday and see an old bent-up, ravaged hag of a woman, but the man who looks over my shoulder—there is one who looks over all our shoulders, you know—he will still be young and fresh-faced and laughing. And life, after all, is only a little while——”

“Sure, it’s only a little while, Avis—but that little while can be so sweet and can have such wonderfully happy hours. And they are so few at best. It’s cruel when even the few are denied to so many. And these men had so little, Giles had so little——”

“Even of you and me,” murmured Avis. “I’ll be honest with you, England: I miss Giles and have always missed him and always will. I have my dark moments—the days when I think I wasn’t much of a wife, that if I’d tried harder when we started out we might have made a go of things. But I dunno—it’s always so easy to think of the things you might have done——”

“We seem to be sisters, you and I——”

“In exclusive society, shall we say, called ‘Women Who Loved Giles’. No kidding, there were some others, weren’t there? At least one.”

“Yes—at least one. But I don’t think she quite qualifies.”

“You mean she loved him not with a love like ours.”

“Definitely not like ours. Maybe—if you want to look at it one way—she loved him more deeply than either of us. She loved him enough to lie, cheat, steal—do about anything—— Or is that love?”

“Some would call it love. Sort of a madness, I’d call it. You’re talking about this Ewart?”

“No one else. And I wish I could forget her. I wish I had never seen her.”

“W-e-e-l-l. You do feel strongly on the subject of the luscious Poppy? I gather she was quite a dish.”

“Topped with clotted cream, glacé cherries, crushed pomegranate and nuts.”

“Nuts to her from me,” said Avis inelegantly. “Want any help in hating her?”

“None whatever.”

“I wonder who’s kissing her now?”

“Someone, you may be sure—and he, probably is getting the kiss of death.”

They walked slowly through the village under the new green of the maples that lined the pleasant streets and lanes. Spring here, thought Lilith, was a thing most beautiful and wonderful to behold. One day all was ice and snow and bleak, blustery misery; the next, the air was warm, the skies a soft blue, the waters running free and the fields all green. Then there was a see-saw battle between winter retreating and spring advancing—and then the triumph of spring celebrated by the glorious Te Deum of the birds.

“Carrying your homework with you?” Avis touched the brown leather briefcase.

“Proofs of Gavin’s book. We were working on them.”

“Must give you quite a bang—to see something in print that you sweated over.” Her voice was wistful. “The joy of accomplishment.”

“Oh, it does. We loved going over the pages. I have to finish them. Gavin is making a speech in town and tomorrow he goes fishing up to that river——”

“The Mirimachi. Great spot for salmon. The men love it so much I often wonder that they don’t want to be buried in it, clad in waders and with their fishing-gear around them—like warriors of old. I was a salmon-widow weeks on end when Giles was living. You’ll soon have to learn to play second fiddle to a fish.”

“But they love it so. Gavin showed me his rods, his salmon-flies and all the rest of it. He was like a boy——”

“Bless them all, they’re just urchins at heart and when they are fishing they’re usually out of mischief. When they’re dressed up like tramps and wearing a four-days’ beard you don’t need to worry about them. It’s when they start to fuss about the way their tie is knotted or what the barber did to them that you need to watch out. I don’t think, though, you’ll have to worry much about Gavin. He was really soured on women until you came along. His own brief marriage wasn’t happy. A girl with too much money. Name was Janet Hall. She was killed in a motor-smash—she and some other man. The Waylands and their women—oh, mon Dieu!”

Avis, who said she had been commissioned by Peg to take the setter for a walk in order to keep her in trim for her walk-on part in “Crosskeys,” accompanied Lilith right up to the school gates, and her bright company was a help, a welcome distraction.

“You do seem a bit preoccupied.” Avis eyed her critically. “Oh, maybe it’s all the proof-reading and then love, of course, and all the rest of it—the play. Our Peg is throwing herself into it like the re-incarnation of Mrs. Siddons. Maybe she hopes to outshine you.”

“In her own way she will, never fear. They’re good, those boys and girls, if I do say it myself. And they’re going to give it their all. They’d better too. This man they’re sending to judge the entries, Garret Kane, used to be a brute even with the pros. When he was through there were lots of maimed and shattered egos—lying around the stage.”

“A theatrical ogre, is he? We’re having him out to our house after the show. I’m on the entertainment-committee for the festival. He doesn’t go around breaking glasses or chasing blondes or anything like that?”

“Not that I know of. He’s sort of a craggy-looking specimen, built like a bull, hands like a navvy and a voice like a frog. Still, some women found him fascinating as I recall it.”

“From your description, I should say he would be quite irresistible. I’m all prepared to be devastated by this monster.”

“Nicknamed ‘Slasher’ Kane.”

“Better and better. I simply can’t wait.”

“Oh, I think you will find him worth waiting for, really,” said Lilith.

She had never spoken more truly.

She finished the page corrections after the practice, sitting up until past one, glad that she could again give her mind to the work in hand. She felt better now and the sudden hot surge of temper had receded and left her cool and relaxed. These things had happened seven years ago and more, and their relation to the present was nothing to fret about. In how many lives, she wondered, were there no ghosts of dead loves, no memories of days that were golden. Poppy must have figured only briefly in his life. He could not have loved her and maybe he had learned to hate her. The sexy photo with its inscription meant nothing now and one day she would burn it.

She took the page-proofs to him next morning. She had control of herself now and could smile at him and give her lips to his kiss with a willingness that enthralled him.

“My girl!” he said softly. “My Lilith! You know, you had me worried about you yesterday afternoon. I couldn’t get it out of my head that there was something amiss and I couldn’t imagine what had occurred to upset you.”

“It was nothing. Let’s forget it.” Your lips, she thought, have long since been purged of her tainted kiss, your body of her unholy love. Maybe I can’t really forgive those things, but I can in time forget them. You are so good to me, so sweet. I shall never understand what you saw in her nor shall I ever try to. All I can go on is that what you have for me is a different thing and that I have a part of you that she could never own.

He told her about his speech as they wrapped the pages for mailing. “It was all I could do to keep them from rushing to the nearest phone to put in their orders for a copy of our book. The response was most encouraging and would have gladdened your mercenary heart. I think, though, that a lot of them got the idea that the volume is called ‘Korean Carousel’ and has to do with the lighter aspects of war—wine-bibbing, wenching and the like——”

“Which of course you were not familiar with.”

“Huh?” He looked at her, his red head tilted. “Now am I wrong in thinking that has some, if not all, the earmarks of a dirty crack?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Gavin.” And she was. “I wouldn’t for the world——”

“Of course not. You realize of course that I lived with the rude soldiery, shared their simple pleasures, even shared their hardships and their lonely bivouacs. I was not better than the best nor worser ’n the worst. Just a guy, just a Joe.”

He was all ready for the salmon-fishing excursion, wearing a green and red checked jack-shirt and corduroys and old army boots and a hat that was a marvel to behold, battered, misshapen, water-marked. “Been in every good salmon-water in the province,” he said proudly. “I love it.”

She helped him pack his gear in the car. “Next year,” he said, “I’ll take you with me, if I survive the fall hunting-season when I plan to teach you to shoot duck. You’ll love the fishing. Women are usually pretty good at it too. Goodbye for now, my lovely Lilith”—he kissed her and touched her hair tenderly, running the golden strands through his fingers. “I go forth to do battle with the king of the fishes. Keep the fry-pan warm.”

She was tempted, after he had gone, to go up to his study to see if the morocco leather folder was still there in its place on the shelf, but she fought off the temptation as small and unworthy and a concession to the dark enemy.

“Let her stay there till she moulders to dust for all of me, so long as I don’t have to look at her face.”

She mailed the pages at the village post-office, feeling important as she registered them and proud as Perry Nash, the postmaster, read the direction—“Author’s Proofs for Printing Only.” Everyone in Ashtondale knew about the book and took a friendly interest in it.

“Lot of work to having a book out, eh?” said Mr. Nash, making out the registry receipt. “Ain’t so easy as it looks, I’ll bet.”

“Indeed,” agreed Lilith. “But it’s interesting work. The book will be published June 24th, Mr. Nash. I do hope you’ll like it.”

“I got a book already,” sniffed the postmaster. “Postal Rules and Regulations. Fascinating reading, but I guess I can find time to read Gavin’s. ‘Korean Carousal,’ isn’t it?”

Lilith let it go. She didn’t care how they pronounced it so long as they bought it. Her dream was to see a copy on every bookshelf, every library in Canada. “No home should be without one.”

In the city, the Drama Festival had begun, with the arrival of groups from all over the wide Dominion, from Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, from Montreal, Halifax, St. John’s. Young hopeful, serious folk with plays ranging from “The Taming of the Shrew” to “Riders to the Sea,” from the “Jew of Malta” to “A Bill of Divorcement,” Shakespeare to Synge, Marlowe to Clemence Dane, and not a few pieces of native production.

Archer Fenn was there to meet some fellow from home who had brought down a group from a college in Ontario. He met them in the lobby of the Admiral Beatty Hotel, looking a bit bewildered, but quite able, in his ancient tweed jacket and baggy slacks, to pass for one of the players.

“My Lord!” He mopped his brow. “Is this the prelude to a drama-critic’s nervous breakdown! Would you believe it possible that so many people were hell-bent to act? And they’re all terrified of the adjudicator—as who wouldn’t be? Looks like a tough Prussian panzer-offizier or Erich Von Stroheim playing the same. I see where a lot of thespians are going right back to clerking and selling bonds after he’s through with them.”

“Garret Kane,” said Lilith, laughing. “Yes, I’d say you had him pretty well typed, Archer. I haven’t set eyes on him for more than seven weary years, but I can’t imagine his having changed much—ageless as the Sphinx and as tough as the pyramids. I’d know him in a real dark night on the banks of the Styx.”

“Seems as if he’d know you too,” said Avis. “I think that’s the gentleman you’re discussing, right over there between Falstaff, I presume, and Mavolio, I should guess. And he’s not listening to either of them, but his gimlet eyes—brr!—are fixed on you. Right enough! There—he’s walking out on them very rudely, and heading for us. Do turn on the charm, Lilith. Remember, my only daughter’s theatrical future may depend on a word from this executioner.”

Garret Kane bore down on them. Lilith turned with a smile and outstretched hand to meet him.

“I knew it!” he said with a grin that seemed to crack the stony-looking visage and gave it at the same time an odd, Puckish attractiveness. The agate-hard blue eyes were sparkling and the shaven bullet-head shone. “I saw you come into the lobby and in an instant I knew I had seen you before. Forgive me for staring at you so rudely, but I seldom forget a face and yours is still as lovely as it was when I saw you as Diana Lane in ‘Crosskeys’ at the Empire in London seven years ago. Right?”

“Quite right, Mr. Kane. I was Lesley Gray then, Now I am Lilith Graeme——”

“But, good God! What do you do in this galley? How in heaven’s sweet name did you stray into this chamber of horrors?”

“I’m putting on a play. I teach dramatics at Edgemere School, outside the town. Here are two of my colleagues, Mrs. Wayland and Mr. Fenn.”

“Wayland—Wayland——” He turned the sharp eyes on Avis, who gave him the business with her own gorgeous black orbs. “I seem to recall that name. Quite familiar—I’ll think of it later. I’ve never seen you though—I’d most surely remember one so utterly beautiful.”

Avis loved it.

“But tell me about your play——” He turned again to Lilith. “So many damned plays and I know them all off by heart except a few they just pulled out of the oven. What’s yours? Oh, I know now. Of course! What am I thinking about! ‘Crosskeys,’ eh?”

“Yes, I didn’t select it though. It was Fate, I guess.”

“I remember so well. You were the loveliest Diana ever.”

“And you were the kindest critic ever.”

“Yes, I began to wonder when I couldn’t find any fault with you, if I wasn’t getting soft. But time proved I was right.” He swung around to Avis. “Wayland! Now I know. There was a Canadian captain of that name—but wasn’t he engaged to you, Miss Graeme?”

“Yes. Giles was his name. He used to be married to Avis here before I met him.”

“And something happened. I know the picture now. Didn’t darling Poppy have her finger in the pie or her pointed stiletto in someone’s heart? Well, well, it seems like old times. I must dash now. See you at the slaughter, my dears—and Mr. Fenn.”

“What a man!” Avis looked admiringly at the ramrod-straight back. “Terrific. And those hands—they’re like steel. I couldn’t tear my eyes from them.”

“Crosskeys” was the last play to be judged, this having been so arranged to give Peg a chance to recover from her mishap, but Lilith, as the festival dragged along for days, rather wished they had got it on a bit sooner. Peg, Avis said, worried so much about how it was going to come off, that she was retarding her recovery rather than letting time speed it.

She had seen Garret Kane and listened to his comments on some of the other plays—comments which didn’t encourage her a great deal about the chances for her own success. Kane, however, seemed to have mellowed a bit with the years, or perhaps the fact that he was dealing with a lot of people who thought acting was fun, or even the Lucullan banquets they gave him, worked some chemistry in him and only once or twice did he really cut loose and blast some poor players off the boards.

The night of the play, though, Peg was her old, insouciant self once more, having fretted to the point where there simply wasn’t another worry or fear in her and, going all the way back, she just didn’t seem to care what happened.

“It’s like an emotional ‘law of diminishing returns,’ ” said Avis. “She piled so much dread and trembling and ‘if this should happen’ or ‘that should happen’ on herself, that it just got to a place where she didn’t react any more, like a guy who has drunk himself sober.”

And Peg was good that night. She didn’t seem to be acting. She was the reckless Diana, the wild young girl who mocked at life and love, who charged into everything and laughed at old fetishes, who was sure the world and all that was in it belonged to her and finally ended up hard against the wall of bewilderment and despair.

The crowd loved it. Even Lilith, who knew the piece so well and had been over it so often that it was hard at times for her to find life in it, was enthralled by the young girl’s acting of her part. She was seeing something different, something new, that she hadn’t ever thought could be drawn from “Crosskeys.”

“She’s got something there,” she whispered to Avis. “I think she will make even Slasher Kane sit up. It’s like seeing a new play, even for me. I didn’t think there could be anything different in the old warhorse, but the child has unearthed something that even the author didn’t know was in it.”

Between acts, they saw Garret Kane, sitting in solitary majesty, his gargoyle’s visage inscrutable, as he wrote—or pretended to write—detailed notes on a very small piece of paper.

“Probably figuring out his expense account,” said Gavin, thinking of his own long experience. “That’s the time when lecturers and judges and the like look most profound and dedicated to their work. He surely won’t need to hesitate over his decision here: our Peg is the greatest thing that’s happened to the Canadian stage. You’ll never pin her down to housework, cooking, wielding a broom, after this night of triumph. I could see it in the way she swept off the stage with old Pat on the leash as if he were a grand noble champion instead of a beat-up old setter. ‘Hollywood, here I come.’ ”

“If she doesn’t blow up in the last act,” whispered Avis who, for once, really showed her deep concern over the girl she seemed usually to treat as a kid-sister. “She can be unpredictable at times—takes after her father.”

“Don’t worry.” Lilith wasn’t afraid now. She had been at the business long enough to know that Peg was riding high, that what had come to her—the feel of the part, the surge of inner strength to act it—would carry her through to the end in easy triumph. After that—well, after that would be the let-down, the emptiness, the utter fatigue and all-gone feeling of one who has been drained, squeezed dry of emotion.

Peg carried it through to the end on the same high, inspired note. Lilith wondered if perhaps she wasn’t trying to pay her back a little for the humiliation the first performance of the play had brought her. Anyway, tonight she had triumphed, without cavil from judge or jury, without question from a delighted audience who made the hall shake with their applause.

“Now,” said Lilith, when she waited with her friends to hear the awards, “let’s see what the Slasher will do with that one.”

“Just try to read anything in that dead pan,” muttered Gavin. “He simply refuses to register.”

“The Great Stone Face,” said Archer. “He’s a better actor than all these chaps combined. Right now, he looks as if he were presiding at the Bloody Assizes and had made up his mind to have the whole crowd hanged by the neck.”

“I think he’s dreamy,” announced Avis. “If he gives Peg the best of breed, best in the show——”

“Hey! You’re getting mixed up,” laughed Gavin. “This isn’t the bench show, stupid.”

“Oh! Where was I? I’m afraid I’m a bit excited. Believe me, it’s not every day that a mother discovers she has brought forth an actress. Tonight, dear friends, a star is born, and I am a proud woman. If Mr. Kane gives her the prize I shall shut my eyes and kiss him.”

“Don’t plan,” advised Lilith. “He’s a very difficult person and I used to think he just shut his eyes and reached into his little bag of tricks and pulled out a brickbat or a bouquet, whichever came first to hand.”

But Garret Kane was in a gentle mood tonight, dealing fairly, if sometimes not too gently, with both plays and players.

“For the best production,” he said in his harsh, metallic voice but with a beautiful enunciation, “I unhesitatingly award the prize to the most creditable performance of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ Any group of players who can bring a touch of freshness, a renaissance of beauty, to an old dog like that, merits praise and should be rewarded. So to these young folk I award the trophy——”

And so it went on. “Crosskeys” as a production was placed third, but to Lilith it didn’t seem to matter. It was Peg she was thinking of—Peg who had worked so hard, suffered no little, given her girlish heart to this play as if there would never again in all her life be anything that mattered half so much——

“Now the prize for the best performance by a lady in this tournament of thespian talent,” said the Slasher—and took a little bow for himself, grinning his rare grin that Archer said surpassed in ugliness any of the gargoyles of Notre Dame Cathedral—“for the most outstanding and notable interpretation of a part, I have decided on one that, when I came here tonight, I was perfectly sure would never stand a chance. I had seen, years ago, an interpretation of this part which is still as fresh in my memory as if it had been only yesterday, an interpretation that had genius in it. This, tonight, I told myself will be but a poor echo of that exquisite thing. Then—then the part was enacted and it was, believe me, no echo. It was a new voice, a new talent—fine, strong, sure, vibrant with life, completely inspired. Only once before have I seen this part of Diana Lane in ‘Crosskeys’ acted as well.”

“I love him,” announced Avis. Lilith could not speak. She was thinking of the afternoon a week ago when Peg had come to her room, defeated, humbled, a poor player——

She saw her now going proudly up to Garret Kane to receive the award, and her heart was very full.

They were standing in the foyer afterwards when Kane came to them. It was to Lilith he spoke, but there was a kindness about him now, a new warmth, that seemed to embrace them all.

“You must look to your laurels,” he said. “The girl is good. She was you as you were in the play that other time—and yet she was not you. She was another Diana. I had expected to find some child who was simply understudying you and instead—I found an actress in her own right. You should be proud of your work. And you, Mrs. Wayland, should be proud of your daughter.”

Avis kissed him. The Slasher didn’t bat an eye. Nothing ever amazed him.

He recalled Gavin. He spoke of friends they had known during the war. “Now I’m supposed to go out to your place, isn’t that it? I’m looking forward to it. My wife flew in from Montreal this evening. She’s at the hotel now. Mind if I bring her? You mustn’t wait. We’ll taxi out there.”

They wanted to wait for him, but he would have none of it. “I won’t be long,” he promised. “Anyway, I think we’re all so happy tonight—you at your girl’s success and I at the end of my labours—that we won’t be upset by a little loss of sleep. I’m so happy to meet old friends; you, Lesley—I always think of you as that little redhead with the big blue eyes who lifted me out of my chair at the Empire—and you, Gavin; we shall have quite an old time get-together tonight, I promise you.” And he hurried away.

Peg joined them, rid of the make-up, looking fresh and radiant in a pale blue evening gown. She hugged her mother, kissed Lilith and Gavin and Archer Fenn. She was still a bit dazed, still treading carefully on the clouds and carrying the chalice of her happiness timidly, as if fearful of shedding a single drop.

“Well, darling, you’ve done it.” Avis did not try to hide the pride she felt. No flippancy, no easy wisecracking dismissal of Peg’s triumph. “I haven’t been so proud of you since your picture won the prize in the baby-contest. We had to buy so many of them though. Mr. Kane was very pleased with the show and with you. In fact, he thinks you’re wonderful. I gave him a kiss.”

“Oh, mother!”

“I love him. I think he’s wonderful and had been dreaming of marrying him. Now I find he’s married. He’s bringing his wife along to our house. And we had better go or there’ll be no one there to greet them.”

“It was lovely, Peg.” Lilith sat next to her in Gavin’s car, while Avis rode home with Archer. “I loved every bit of it.” She had watched a good part of it from the back row in the audience with Avis and Gavin and Archer Fenn. “You were riding high on the wave, I could tell from the start, and I didn’t have to worry about you. Also, you quite outshone me and avenged yourself for what you thought I did to you when I played the part last week.”

“I wasn’t trying to. You don’t really think I was, do you?”

“Not really.”

“I knew I had to—had to go down pretty deep into myself if I wasn’t going to falter and stammer and blow my lines and disgrace the whole school and you and all of us. I did what you told me. I just forgot about everything but Diana and it was the queerest thing—so queer it still frightens me—I was Diana. Everything I did seemed to be her doing; it was her words I spoke and even her thoughts that came to me.”

“I know. It’s what you call ‘living a part’ and it’s not in the power of many to lose themselves like that.”

“I’m not sure I like it. After it’s over, you feel as if you’d just come out of the ether and you’re weak and light-headed and all beaten up——”

“That’s the usual reaction. It’s hard work you’ve been doing. Don’t ever think it isn’t—and it’s harder still when you do it for your bread-and-butter.”

“Maybe that’s why stage-people take to drink. You really feel as if you needed——”

“Come on, Tallulah!” Gavin laughed: “Let me catch you so much as sniffing at the wassail and I’ll exercise the avuncular prerogative of spanking you. Need something, forsooth! I’ll mix you a nice stiff cherry-phosphate with an added dash of syrup.”

“Who is Mr. Kane’s wife?” Peg ignored him. “No one mentioned that he had one. She wasn’t at any of the plays.”

“She just flew down from Montreal tonight,” said Lilith. “I don’t know who she is.”

“Probably one of the witches from ‘Macbeth.’ ” contributed Gavin. “There was no plane from Montreal this evening that I know of—she must have come in on a broom.”

“I can’t seem to picture him with a wife.” Lilith frowned thoughtfully. “The women liked him, for all his ugliness, and seemed to like him more when he treated them like dust.”

“Women are born masochists,” said Peg. “We live to suffer.”

Gavin shook with silent laughter. “Listen, prodigy, you’ll make me ditch the car. You’re still being Diana in the play. And I want my little Peg.”

“Okay, Gav. I’ll climb down just for you. But you must have been a proud uncle tonight. You could just hear yourself saying in the not too far away, ‘Oh, yes, that’s my niece, Peg Wayland, co-starring with Olivier——’ ”

The night was clear with many stars and a cool breeze blowing off the river. Archer always drove like one whom the fiends pursue, and the little car that had brought him and Avis was parked in the driveway when Gavin drove up, and all the cottage lights were on.

“We should have a record of ‘Hail, the Conquering Heroine,’ ” said Gavin. “I can’t for the life of me see how such a small cottage will in future contain so great a star—a mansion in Bel Aire, a castle on the Loire, a rough log-hut with four baths at Banff——”

“Rub it in,” laughed Peg. “And when I do acquire all these places, why, then, my beloved uncle, you will have to eat crow.”

“I’ll come and live with you, baby, and eat breast of guinea-hen under glass and submarines in asdic. Well, let’s hasten and help Avis ready for the lion and his lioness.”

There was a good fire burning on the hearth and lights were soft and the radio played “Night and Day” until Gavin managed to turn it off.

“I wonder,” he said, taking the Scotch that Avis brought him and winking at Peg’s tall ginger ale, “what the Slasher is going to dish out to us. I defy any of you to hazard a guess about her that will come within leagues of being near the reality. What do you say, Avis?”

“Oh, a blonde, of course. All those hard-boiled, cave-men types fall for blondes. Look at Samson, look at Humphrey Bogart. She will be a blonde, will Madame Kane, and he will lose all his growling ferocity and come purring around her and she will probably call him ‘Ducky’ and he won’t even heave an ashtray at her.”

“A redhead, I’d say, since nobody asked me.” This from Peg. “Tall and willowy and ever so cool and remote, who will look on us as a lot of rude provincials and lift the haughty eyebrow and say, ‘Why, how divinely quaint.’ A real goddess, too; it’s always the homeliest men who have the loveliest wives; look at old drizzle-puss Gavin there and Lilith——”

“Okay, Diana! That’ll be enough from the new luminary of stage and screen. No mere star either—a veritable flying saucer. What’s your guess, Lilith?”

“I’ll pass, I think. I know him probably better than you do, Gavin, but frankly I find it hard to picture the wife of his bosom or to conceive of the type of woman who could manage to keep him content for very long.”

“And you, Archer?”

“A lady-wrestler,” decided Archer. “One who could hold him in a stout half-Nelson while she took the housekeeping-money from his pocket.”

They were all so wrong. The woman was Poppy Ewart.

The door of the cottage opened from a small porch directly into the living-room so that, when Avis opened it in answer to the bell’s soft trill, there was nothing at all to slow up Poppy’s entrance. She burst upon them full-blown, as darkly, sensuously beautiful as ever, as poised and smiling and assured. She wore her favourite colour, a rich velvet, burgundy red, tight-bodiced, with deep neckline, a white fur cape flung over her shoulders, a white flower in the thick black upsweep of her hair, capped by a diamond-studded comb.

Poppy never simply walked into a room as ordinary mortals would. For her the grand entrance, the spectacular arrival to the fanfare of trumpets, the crash of cymbals and roll of drums. It was stagey, theatrical, but with her it was effective, or always had been up to now.

Even Poppy was slowed a little in her sweeping advance by eyes that hit her with their chill and unpending hostility, by the sudden complete silence that fell upon the Waylands and the wide-eyed and incredulous amazement that Lilith made no effort to hide.

They all knew her. Peg, from one swift glance at Lilith, had guessed, and with Avis it was the same, and with Archer Fenn. They were all looking at Lilith and none of them at Gavin. Only Lilith looked his way, and she saw in his startled eyes the same expression that must have been in hers, and with a glad surprise she saw there the same hostility, the same deep dislike, reflected and intensified.

Even Poppy—the Poppaea of old, the very worldly and sophisticated Ewart—knew that she was not welcome here. She could feel them all, even the ones who were strange to her, banded together against her.

Only Garret Kane seemed to be at ease, to notice nothing at all amiss, to be enjoying himself hugely.

“The devil!” thought Lilith. “He knew what he was doing. He planned all this and he’s enjoying the whole thing more than any play he’s ever attended. Something told me we were in for a shock, but I wonder at her ever coming here.”

Avis took the white wrap she slipped from the lovely shoulders. The great black eyes went from her to Lilith—lingered on Gavin’s face and even longer on Archer Fenn’s. “Two I know,” said the deep, throaty voice. “Two from out the dear, dead, unlamented past. And three I must know——”

She was turning the full force of her charm on Avis, on Peg, on Archer. She saw and enjoyed the consternation of the others.

“Machiavelli here”—she gave Garret Kane a baleful look—“told me I was going to meet some old friends; he never said who they were, and I have old friends from here to Helsingfors.”

“Legions of them,” said Slasher. “Scads of them.”

“And I’ll wager too”—she ignored his gleeful interpolation—“that he didn’t enlighten you, Lesley, or you, Captain Wayland, about me.”

She took their silence for what it was.

“No, he wouldn’t. He loves surprises. Comes from too long an association with the theatre. Everything, to be any good, must have a touch of corn about it, if not a whole cornfield.”

She took the martini that Archer, who thought it time to do something, offered her. Kane had a Scotch.

“Good show,” he announced. “Thought I’d make your eyes pop with little Poppy—no pun. Not really.”

“You took me completely by surprise,” said Lilith, and her tone said more clearly than words that it hadn’t been a pleasant surprise. She marvelled that Kane had brought her here, unless he didn’t know all the facts and was trying in his devious way to learn them. Poppy, she was sure, had been as much in the dark about whom she was going to see as they had been.

She was glad that the cold, unrelenting look had not left Gavin’s face. Her heart sang a little triumphant song that whatever memories he had of Poppy were not fond or friendly ones. If they had ever been lovers, the love had long since turned into something, on his part at least, very much akin to loathing.

Peg had moved close to her side as if to tell her that she knew all about it, that she was her ally. Garret Kane talked about the play, about everything under the sun, but all the time he was watching, watching, like a puppet-master who isn’t quite sure what’s going to happen when he pulls the strings.

Poppy chatted with Avis for a while, but her eyes strayed often to Lilith. In that small room there was no isolating oneself. She looked uneasily about her, a little like a proud vixen that has been trapped, but, having been so taken before and having managed to squirm from her captors, feels she can do it again.

“It’s been ages”—she spoke to Lilith now—“since I saw you last, my dear. Just about the time ‘Crosskeys’ finished its run in London. When was the last——”

She stopped herself, knowing she was on dangerous ground, feeling she had strayed into a topic she wanted to avoid.

Fox, thought Lilith—you black, tricky fox! You know very well when was the last time you saw me and where it was and what happened and what you did to me then. Lies—you’ve lived a life of them. But you’re going to tell the truth tonight, about Giles and about Gavin—yes, even about Gavin. You won’t leave this room until you do.

There was only herself and Poppy here now. It was on her that all the dark girl’s hate or fear was centred now. Not on Gavin—she knew it was not on Gavin.

She hesitated only a moment. This had to be said, had to be talked out. She had thought to carry it with her, an unhappy burden, all her life—a thing to mar the perfection of her love, to tinge every bit of happiness with an old regret.

“The last time we met, I think you were about to say——” She looked Poppy full in the eyes and found there only a blandly innocent look.

“Why, yes—I was just trying to recall. But it’s been so long and so many things have happened——”

“I think you know quite well,” persisted Lilith. “I’m sure you do. But I’ll be glad to help you refresh your memory—it was in one of a block of flats in a converted mews—Westerham Mews—in the spring of 1945——”

“Oh, now I think I recall.” She was wriggling desperately, frantically. “Does it really matter? It’s not of such great importance——”

“But it is. To me, anyway. It was then and it is now. And I have to know. Please forgive me——” She took them all in, but saw only sympathy and understanding in Avis’ eyes, in Peg’s and Archer’s; deep bewilderment in Gavin’s and devilish delight in Garret Kane’s.

“I went there that morning early looking for Captain Giles Wayland, to whom I was engaged to be married.”

“Yes.” Poppy lashed back now. “Whom you stole from me—as you stole the part of Diana in ‘Crosskeys.’ ”

“It was no theft in either case. I won fairly. And don’t try to sidetrack me. I knocked at the door of Giles’s flat—and it was you who answered it.”

The room was very quiet now, quieter than ever the audience had been all through the drama-week.

“There was a man singing in the shower—singing a Canadian song—‘Alouette’—that Giles used to sing, and you said, ‘Captain Wayland will be disappointed. We were just about to have breakfast——’ Words like that, words that made me believe it was Giles in there, Giles who had spent the night with you. That lovely red robe and the lipstick all smeared——”

“But——” Poppy was doing better now. She was always at her best when she was telling the biggest lies. “This is all so silly. If you’d only waited—— You see, there was a Captain Wayland in there—but it wasn’t Giles——” She turned to Gavin—“It was you, don’t you recall?”

“Quite well,” said Gavin into the shocked and quivering silence. “I was in there singing ‘Alouette’ at the top of my voice—but your husband of-the-week, Jack Bisset, was in there too, taking a shower.”

Lilith ran to him and he put his arm about her. He took over now and Poppy had no defence against him. Bisset had been his friend and Bisset was dead now and she had been no good for him.

“So you let her go away thinking that you and Giles were there alone! You smashed things for her and for him too. You really killed him by that rotten piece of deception. I brought you and Jack Bisset home with me that night from a party—and that was the way you repaid me. And you fixed Jack too. He didn’t stay with you long. He sent me his books and stuff before he died. I think there’s a picture of you among them—one you gave him long ago, with a warm and loving inscription.”

Poppy looked for a moment as if she would brazen it out. Then she shrugged the lovely shoulders and turned to her husband. “We’d better go. You must be happy now. You were always so curious about my relationship to these people. You know all about it now. Are you satisfied?”

“Poppy.” Garret Kane gave her his gargoyle’s grin. “I love you. I think you’d have poisoned the Borgias if you’d been alive in their day. I’m sorry, my good friends, if we must hurry away, but this was really my main reason for coming. I knew some of this story—broken bits—I knew Giles Wayland and Bisset, and Poppy never would tell me the truth about why Lesley and Giles broke off. In fact, Poppy seldom tells me the truth about anything, but I flatter myself I’m the first man she ever really loved.”

“Some day, Kane,” said Poppy in her low, rich voice, in accents of deepest tenderness, “I shall kill you.”

“If I don’t beat you to the draw,” grinned Kane.

Then there were quick goodbyes from him, but Poppy had gone out to the waiting cab and all they could see of her was the glow of a cigarette-end in the gloom of the rear seat. Kane got in beside her and the car rolled away.

“And that,” said Avis when they had shut the door and gathered by the hearth, “was better than any show I’ve ever seen. You were all superb, folks—but I’m afraid Poppy won the award. She most surely tried to mess up your life, Lilith.”

“She succeeded in part—once.” She had almost succeeded again. “Gavin”—she looked up at him earnestly—“will you burn that picture of her tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” he said, “when I go home—on a pile of faggots. I’ll tie it to a stake.”

He kissed her hair, her lips, lightly. “I love you,” he whispered. “Never more so than tonight.”

In the chapel of St. Bride’s the June sun shone warmly through the stained-glass window, through the tall one, the memorial window, where were inscribed the names of the fallen. It shafted down on the wedding-party—the bride whose red-gold hair shone from under the wreath of orange-blossoms, the bridesmaid whose hair was of a deeper, redder gold; the tall groom and the dark, tanned groomsman.

The bride was looking up at the window where a young knight, in golden armour, leaned upon his sword—and from him she looked to the groom whose hair was pale gold like that of the young knight. And she did not hear the parson’s question: “Wilt thou have this man—forsaking all others—so long as ye both shall live?”

“Say, ‘I will,’ ” whispered Peg.

“I will,” she said in a low firm voice and to herself in her heart, “I do.”

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

When nested quoting was encountered, nested double quotes were changed to single quotes.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

Some pages of advertising from the publisher were excluded from the ebook edition.

[The end of Beside the Laughing Water, by Louis Arthur Cunningham]