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Although Jeanie Hallam had been born in America, she had been orphaned and sent to live with relatives in England at such an early age that she barely remembered the land of her birth. So the long coastal hills of Maine were a revelation to her, as was its white-capped ocean, and the grounds of Patrick Hayden’s domain, Uplands, with its garden and its lily pool.

Even more exciting than the beauty of her surroundings was the prospect of marrying Pat, for whom she had crossed the sea, and being a foster mother to his crippled niece Bertelle, a little pixie sprite who, like Jean, was without father or mother.

Already Jeanie felt she was halfway to heaven. And then somehow, with the simultaneous arrival from England of a young doctor with whom she had worked and her beautiful cousin Sylvia Clyde, the paradise special seemed to stop, leaving Jean stranded within sight of heaven but unable to complete the journey.

The Lily Pool

She awoke to that sweetest of sounds, a child’s singing—a little girl’s warm, clear voice singing in French about Mother Michael who has lost her cat. “Cry out the window. Who will bring it back to her?”

Jean Hallam sat up then, cushioning herself with the pillows, her chestnut hair rippling down over her shoulders, over the blue nightie, over the blue pastel sheets. The morning sun, rich and golden, filled the room, gleaming on its massive furniture, flooding warmth on the deep gray rug. Through the open casements Jean could see the long rolling coastal hills of Maine, the gleam of water dimpling in the sun. Her first day in America, and already she felt well up the road to heaven. She had been born in Boston, but had gone to relatives in England, orphaned and alone, at so early an age that she barely remembered the Common, the narrow streets of the city of her birth.

The small voice, like sounds coming from a gay, bright-colored music-box, was singing now about the good King Dagobert who put his pants on upside down and what good St. Eloi said to him. And then came a little girl’s laughter.

“Eh, Bertelle—” Jean Hallam shook the shimmering waves of hair back from her wide brow—“I am awake. I heard in my dreams a little fairy voice singing, and I woke up, and I was in a fairyland just as lovely as in my dreams. Come visit me, Bertelle.”

More laughter. A little silence that seemed still to hold mirth; then the sound of a rubber ferrule hitting the spaces between the rugs, coming bravely but, oh, so slowly, until she had crossed the threshold into Jean’s room. She appeared to float then, the crutch not seeming to matter—a dark little pixy of a girl with great blue-black eyes and jet curls—onto Jean’s bed and into her arms.

“My darling!”

“My real maman.” Slowly the little girl disengaged herself and looked steadily into Jean’s eyes, dark brown and filled with a shining love. “I didn’t dare call out to you; I was afraid you might have been only a dream and there would be no one in this bed. But you are Jeanie, that mother whom Uncle Patrick promised me, and you’re going to stay here at Uplands and marry Patrick and be my very own maman and make me able to walk and run. C’est ça, hein?” The convent speech was quaintly lovely.

“Ah, oui, c’est ça—it is so, Bertelle. All those things I am going to do. One day I shall have you climbing trees and dropping apples down on that big St. Bernard dog of yours.”

“Peter? Will you really, Jeanie? You told me to call you Jeanie the way Patrick does.”

“I like it, Bertelle. Let me comb your lovely hair. We must soon go down to breakfast.”

Was it only yesterday, she thought incredulously, as she ran the yellow comb through Bertelle’s thick curls, that she had stepped off the plane and into Patrick Hayden’s arms and into this little girl’s world? Only a few short hours ago since all this warmth, this heart-filling happiness, had burgeoned and bloomed within her? She had become engaged to Patrick six months ago in England. Young Bertelle was his niece, an orphan. Patrick was to be her husband; Bertelle Caron her ready-made family. And already she loved this little injured thing with all the deep passion of her heart.

“Bertelle—” she kissed the soft brown neck—“I could eat you for breakfast without salt or pepper, vinegar or mustard. I shall start and eat you now.”

Bertelle squirmed and wriggled in ecstasy. “Then you are a pretty whale and I am a small Jonah, and I shall be Monsieur Jonas in the whale’s belly!”

She had been brought up by the Ursuline sisters in Quebec and had an endless fund of folksongs and stories. Her father, Guy Caron, had been killed in the last days of the war; her mother Moyra, Patrick’s younger sister, had died two years after she was born. Between the convent and her holidays with Pat, her childhood had been as happy as it could be under the circumstances; then, a few months ago, she had been stricken. Hence the light aluminum crutch, the limp that was at once a heartbreak and a challenge to Jean Hallam.

In England Jean had worked with such little ones, showing a combination of love and skilled therapy that had made many of them whole again. She had met Patrick Hayden at a party in England when he was over about his timber business, and for the first time she had had eyes for someone else besides her “little lame birds.”

True, there had been a young doctor, Paul Blake, who had worked with her at Braithwaite Memorial Hospital. But Paul, like herself, was more in love with his work than with any pretty face, and there had been only a few scattered dates which invariably ended in shop-talk.

Pat Hayden was the first who had made her dream, made his way into her heart and found there a place for himself. She and Patrick had become engaged. Bertelle had been well and strong then, but the child was dearer to her now than if she had been whole and unhandicapped.

The big black eyes looked up at her as she combed the gleaming curls, looked up at her steadily. Then Bertelle said—one never knew what to expect from her: “Who is Sylvia?”

The comb stopped, and brown eyes stared into black.

“Do you mean Sylvia of the song, Bertelle—the ‘holy fair and wise one who was lent those graces that she might be adored?’ ”

“Perhaps. I do not know. Sing about her.”

Jean sang softly—

Jean looked up, feeling the pressure of eyes upon her, and Patrick Hayden was standing in the door—tall, wide-shouldered, tow-headed Patrick, with the blue eyes and strong blunt features. In the eyes now was an odd, troubled look—a look she had surprised in them twice before since she had come to Uplands—once at dinner last night, once as he had come with her to kiss Bertelle goodnight.

“Little question-box—” Jean hugged Bertelle close to her—“asked me who is Sylvia? I thought it was Sylvia of the song, but maybe you told her about our Sylvia, Pat?”

“Yes,” said Patrick quickly—too quickly. “I must have.”

“Who is that Sylvia, Jeanie?”

“My cousin. Her name is Sylvia Clyde. I grew up with her, Bertelle, for I was alone like you.”

A shadow passed over the smooth brow, as she thought of Sylvia to whom she had always taken second place in the big house where she had gone as a child, orphaned, to live on her uncle’s bounty. Sylvia so fair and beautiful, a creature of silver and light, who always took what she wanted, who had even made a strong play for Patrick after he and Jean had become engaged.

Jean put the thought of Sylvia away from her; she seemed to have no place here amid this sun-bright beauty—here with Patrick the beloved, small Bertelle the cherished. Sylvia was hard and greedy, and under the beautiful blonde façade, the willowy form, the thick platinum tresses, was neither warmth nor compassion nor understanding of the ills of others.

“You must go, Patrick.” The brown eyes danced up at him. “Don’t you know better than to barge in on ladies before they have a chance to put their faces on?”

“I heard the racket. I wanted to see the two of you together.”

“Do we please you?”

“So much, Jeanie,” he said, and his voice was unsteady. “So very much.”

There was something so odd, so constrained in his manner that she felt, as she had before, a sudden deep unease, a sense of bewilderment, such as might come to one who, thinking herself on solid ground, finds suddenly the earth shaking like a morass.

She put the thought away. Not hard on this lovely June day, not hard with Bertelle chattering like a happy thrush, singing her bits of songs to which she had added “Sylvia,” picking up the tune and words of that loveliest of ballads with the amazing quickness of the young.

“Some day, Jeanie,” she said, “you will tell me more about Sylvia. Were you and Sylvia little girls together? What games did you play? Was she nice like you? Or naughty—”

“Maybe I’ll tell you about her some day, Bertelle. She was very beautiful—beautiful like the silver fairy in your book.”

But she thought: I don’t want to tell her about Sylvia. I want to forget Sylvia Clyde. She was one of the things and people that made me glad to get away from home. I always walked in the shadow of Sylvia. I stood her tantrums, I had to kowtow to her always or catch the very devil from Aunt Mab. Uncle Will wasn’t so bad. I had to wear her old clothes until I could get out and work and earn my own, and in the end she tried to take Patrick from me, even when I had his ring on my finger.

The ring shone up at her now, a flawless blue-white diamond, soon to be accompanied by the plain band of gold that would make her and Patrick one forever.

The thought filled her with joy—the thought of living the rest of her life in this lovely old house on these wide acres among these hills and rivers of vast eternal beauty, helping Bertelle to grow in strength and seeing her become a beautiful woman; having little children of her own—noisy, flaxen-haired boys like Pat, dark little sprites such as she had been, living in a quiet happy world, able to take the hard knocks and to come up smiling every time.

It was good.

“Heaven,” she sang softly, “I’m in heaven—” And she bent and kissed Bertelle Caron, and Bertelle’s eyes, bright and dancing, reflected her happiness. “Darling, I feel as if I were shooting up to heaven on a lift.”

“You talk funny, Jeanie. What’s a lift?”

“Oh, well—elevator to you, though I fail to see how it can elevate you down.”

Bertelle giggled. “You’re shooting way up to heaven on a—a lift.” Her eyes were big. “Whatever would you do, Jeanie, if it got stuck halfway?”

Jean stared at her, frowned, laughed. “Wait for the repairman, I suppose. I’d send for you perhaps, and you’d get the silly thing unstuck.”

“Well, you bet I would—unless I’m there with you.”

From below stairs the soft chime sounded for breakfast, and Patrick was waiting for them in the sunny breakfast room that had French doors opening onto a side terrace sloping down to the branch of the river called Dutchman’s Creek. A ruddy-faced Scotswoman, Elspeth Craig, who had kept house for Patrick’s father before him, gave them an elegant breakfast of buckwheat cakes and honey and crisp and succulent brook trout.

The room was done in a warm rose color, and the dishes had a picture-pattern telling of the strange, sad and lovely history of the Acadian land, of which this section of Maine, above the Penebscot River, had once been a part. There were jonquils nodding over the yellow cloth, and Bertelle’s huge St. Bernard, Peter the Great, and Meg the harlequin cat, and from beyond the open doors came the good sounds of summer—the wailing plovers winnowing the soft blue sky, the robins chirping about the lawn, the distant clang of cowbells—

Heaven—well, a good halfway to heaven thought Jean, looking from Bertelle’s bright face to Patrick’s, with its strong jaw and high forehead, with the light hair waving back from it. In a little while she would belong to him, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, in the pure union of love. She would be all the way to heaven then. Pat Hayden was the first man on whom she had ever seriously fixed her strong young heart, his the first lips her own had pressed in swift consent. She would never want any other man, and in life she would want no lovelier moments than these. All the hunger—the love-hunger that had filled the heart of the little orphan, Jeanie Hallam, when she had gone to live among strangers—for such were the Clydes to her—found food here where love was needed, just as it had in the home for crippled children where she had worked in England.

“I’ll drive you around the country today, Jeanie, if you feel up to it,” said Patrick over his coffee. “It’s almost at its best now, and you might as well see your realm.”

It made her feel like a queen, sheltered and powerful in this man’s love. Then out of the corner of her eye she saw the wistful look on the tanned little face, the quiet acceptance of being left out and forgotten.

“Bertelle too,” she said quickly. “I must have Bertelle.”

How fast the sweet face brightened, how the eyes sparkled, and she saw no remarkable disappointment in Patrick’s. Pat loved the little one as much as she did herself, and for that she was truly glad.

After breakfast Patrick brought the big open car around in front of the house. “And you take a sweater, Miss Jean,” cautioned Elspeth. “We still have frosts in this country even at this time, and there’s a nip in the air until the sun’s high. And we’ll wrap the wee one well. By noon you’ll be able to worship the sun to your heart’s content.”

“Who is Sylvia? What is she?” She found herself softly singing the old song and she knew it had been running through her subconscious all during the breakfast hour, ever since Bertelle had asked the question.

What had the child meant by it anyway? Probably Patrick had told her about meeting the lovely Sylvia in England. Pat had visited a few days at Berlminster, the Clydes’ place which was still the only home Jean could call hers, and he had played tennis and swum and golfed with Jean—and with lots of other young folks, for Sylvia always had a retinue.

Sylvia had said one day as she stood with Jean watching Patrick play tennis, “Sorry you saw him first, Jeanie. I really do envy you that six foot plus of Yankee manhood. You must have worked fast to get him.”

Jean said simply, “He came to me and asked me—that was all.” But there was a fierce tide of resistance and anger that swelled her heart, and in that moment she could have hated Sylvia with her smooth, cool, blue and silver beauty. Hands off, her heart cried. Let him be, do you hear! You’ve snatched and schemed and finagled everything else I loved and cared for—taken it from me and then tired of it and discarded it. You won’t take him! You can’t take him. He wouldn’t be fooled by you anyway—you cold and shallow creature.

“Who is Sylvia?” The child in the next room was singing it now, and the thing began to get on Jeanie’s nerves.

She had thought with thankfulness in her heart, with a sense of being at last free and out of the shadow, that Sylvia would no more infringe on her life, that Sylvia’s easy cynicism would no longer spoil her bright hours nor Sylvia’s brittle laughter make somehow small and ridiculous the things she most cherished.

But Sylvia seemed to loom large even here in this lovely, far-off land.

Don’t be morbid, she told herself, putting on a pale blue cardigan, soft and woolly, over her dress, and knotting a blue foulard scarf about the thick chestnut hair. That’s all over and done with now. Sylvia is part of the past, and she will gradually grow fainter until she ceases to matter.

“You look pretty, Jeanie.” Bertelle stood in the doorway. “Your sweater is lovely. When we come back will you show me your trousseau?” She laughed at the word. “Votre beau trousseau, Jeannine, Jeanneton—see all the names I have for you! And your wedding dress, will you show me that, will you put it on? Or is it bad luck to put it on before the wedding? Elspeth says it’s bad luck to put it on any time. Her husband ran away; he was a sailor and he lives in Australia and won’t ever come back.”

“What a magpie!” Jeanie took her hand and they headed for the stairs. “I’m sorry about Elspeth, but I don’t think it’s bad luck to try on your wedding dress. Mine is yellow, like those daffodils in the garden, and has a tight waist and a bouffant skirt and I have a big yellow hat to go with it.”

“Oh! It must be lovely, and I shall see you in it. I shall see you in it before Patrick does. Now I know; it is only bad luck for the husband to see you in it before it’s time for the wedding.”

Jeanie shook her head. “Darling, you’re certainly starting life with a grand set of old wives’ tales and superstitions. Don’t believe all those silly things. Why, some men even design their wives’ wedding gowns, some great couturiers, so they must see them before the wedding.”

“Is that true—really?” Bertelle looked very doubtful. “I don’t think Patrick could design your wedding gown; he put my doll’s dress on backward and he has a hard time buttoning me up, even, if Elspeth’s not around. He’d make you look funny.”

“I believe you.” Jean laughed, thinking of Patrick’s great clumsy hands. “We’ll leave Patrick out of the dress designing. But you shall tell me how I look.”

“I can tell you now, with my eyes shut. You will look like a daffodil, like a flower-lady, and when you pass all the flowers will bow and wave. For you will be married in the garden, won’t you?”

“I hope so, Bertelle. I should like to be married down by that little pool where the water-lilies grow and there is a little waterfall and stones all covered with green moss and the willow trees droop over the water—”

Patrick put the two of them in the wide front seat. Peter the Great filled the rear, sitting up like a monarch, sniffing the air in joyous anticipation of the ride.

The road was full of twists and bends and sudden turns, now swooping up long steep grades that the car devoured with deep-voiced power, now shooting down into a valley to cross some brawling stream by long covered bridges which Patrick explained to her were so roofed, not to protect the passengers but the bridges themselves; long, dark tunnels barred by sunlight seeping through the cracks, echoing hollowly with the rumble of the car’s passage.

Through towns and villages with names from the Old Country, brought by the great exodus of a century ago, by those who, seeking a better life or, too often, the very means of living, would never see again the loved places whose names they set down so hopefully in the wilderness.

Jeanie loved it all—the dark brooding forests from which Patrick took the logs that fed his lumber mills, the lakes lost in the hills, the sweeping panoramas of sea and sky and river, the brown-faced people with their ready waves, their cheery smiles.

At noon, on a sandy beach that stretched for miles, they spread their picnic cloth and ate the good luncheon Elspeth had prepared for them, and Bertelle initiated Jeanie into the joys of clam-digging and winkle-gathering and the picking of dulse, a rubbery-looking sea weed that when dried had a strange sweet flavor.

Patrick was quiet, and often, it seemed to her, his thoughts were far away. He sat with her, idly smoking, while the two of them watched the child playing with Peter at the edge of the tide, throwing sticks for him and laughing with delight when he retrieved them and shook himself, filling the air with showers of brine and sand.

“It’s wonderful for her to have you, Jeanie,” he said after a while. “I had a number of nurses, the best I could find, but none of them seemed to give her what she wants and needs. The moment I saw her go to you there at the Boston airport yesterday I felt much gladness—”

“So did I.” She did not mind his not saying how much her coming had meant to him, but the soft mouth drooped a little and the brown eyes were wistful.

He seemed to sense what she felt; his big hand covered hers firmly. “I feel guilty, Jeanie. I—”

“Why should you?”

“For wishing such a job on you. After all, you’ve spent so many years of your young life looking after children like Bertelle—”

“So many happy years, you should say, Pat. I always loved my work. I was always happiest when I was with them.” She looked at her own blunt strong hands, withdrawing the one from the contact with him. “My best times were when I could bring strength and vigor back to those little limbs and make the life flow in them again.”

“I—well, I thought maybe you’d had enough of it now, that you wanted no more of crutches or braces or the like—that it was asking too much of you—”

“What are you telling me, Patrick?” She looked at him squarely, levelly, with all the rich candor of her nature showing in her eyes. “Are you sorry that I came?”

“Jeanie!” There was honest hurt in his deep voice, and it made her glad and at the same time nullified her. “You know better than that. This means everything in the world to me, this having you here. We’ll be married in a few days, and I’ll do my best to make you the happiest girl in all the world.”

“You won’t have to work at it too hard, Pat. And don’t be so serious about it.” Her laughter rang across the strand, and Bertelle, hearing her, waved and came to share it. “You sound like a crusader of old vowing to kill no end of Saracens to prove to his lady that he loved her.”

“You make me feel like that, Jeanie. You’re so good, so much a woman—”

“Oh, I can be wicked too, Paddy-whack. Don’t, I beg you, set me up as a plaster saint on any pedestal. I have the devil’s own temper if I ever lose it. Ah, it takes a lot to make me lose it.” She laughed again at his startled look. “I don’t think you’ll find me any shrewish Kate, but you do make me angry when you say you hesitated about asking me to come here to mother Bertelle. I love Bertelle; when I saw her my cup of joy was running over.”

“I love to hear you say it. And you can help her?”

“I think I can help her. Better still, you have great doctors in Boston and New York, and after a while maybe we can take her away—”

“Anything,” said Patrick. “Anything in the world. She is not dependent on me, you know. Caron was well-to-do, and when my sister Moyra died it all went to Bertelle—”

They lingered on the long beach until the sea began to dip toward the dark coastal hills and the quick night approached with a far-off rustle and whisper of the wind in the pines. They packed up their things then and headed for home.

It came to her that they had talked little of their own plans and not at all of their wedding. It had been of Bertelle, of things they had known in England, of a new mill Patrick was building in the northern part of the state. Ah, well, there was lots of time. She was so happy, so blissfully tired from the warmth and peacefulness of the day that she was glad to go early to bed in the big room next to the sun-porch where the little girl, her dark head pillowed on her arms, lay already sleeping.

Tomorrow, she thought, I must show her my wedding things—my yellow dress, my gloves and slippers, my bag—all the things she had gathered so lovingly, so many of which she had sewed herself, all tucked away in the little sea-chest she had brought with her when she came, a lonely child, to stay with her English relatives. How often Sylvia had chided her about the battered old box.

“Honestly, Jeanie, you look like one of Dickens’ forlorn little orphans, with your box—for all the world like Ruth Pinch in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit.’ You’d be all right waiting for the stagecoach or like David Copperfield for Barkis with his cart, but in this day and age—”

“I like it.” Jean could be stubborn. “I’m always going to keep it.” So many years it had contained all the little loved things she owned, her few books, her white fur muff, the few trinkets she had ever possessed, the pretty little frocks she had so soon outgrown.

It was a proud little trunk now, and it was with pride she had opened it and taken her trousseau things to her wardrobe and the big chest of drawers.

She got them out for Bertelle the next morning after they had spent an hour or so in the garden.

“Eh, mon dieu!” Bertelle gazed in ecstasy at all the pretty silken, rainbow things and soared to the clouds when she was allowed to put her hands in the little ermine muff and told that when the cold winter came again, she would be allowed to wear it.

Then the slips and the panties and the bras and all the wondrous things that went with being a bride. “Ah, Jeanie, you are just like the pretty queen! Such lovely things—”

“And for you, my darling, we shall have a dress of yellow just like mine, and you shall carry a great basket full of pink and yellow roses—” Bertelle could not believe it. The big eyes shone with wonderment, with tears of joy, and the little bud of a mouth that could look so sad sometimes was tremulous now with happiness.

“It will be so wonderful!” she whispered. “It will be like a fairy tale. I cannot seem to believe it—”

“You will be lovelier than the bride. Now I shall show you what you will look like. But you must go in the other room and close your eyes, and presently I shall tiptoe in and touch your cheek, and only then will you be allowed to look.”

Bertelle loved that. She was having such a happy, wonderful time, that warmth glowed in Jean’s heart just from watching her. “I shall not be long, p’tite, but there must be no peeking. Close the door.”

She hurried into the dress of yellow organdie, so fresh, so daffodil bright and crisp and lovely, clinging to her slender body, clasping the slim waist; then the droopy yellow hat and the chestnut-brown hair cascading from under it.

There! She was ready. She opened the door into the next room—and walked into Patrick’s arms.

“Oh!” She gave a little cry as his hands closed on her arms. Bertelle’s eyes flew open, and on her small face was a look of horror.

“He should not have seen you, Jeanie! Not until the time of the wedding. It is not good luck. Oh, why did I not hear you, Patrick—”

Patrick was staring down at the vision in yellow, in his eyes a strange and wondering look as if for the first time he saw the girl he was to marry. Then he seemed to shake himself awake. He looked at Bertelle.

“Eh! Oh, I saw you standing there with your eyes shut and I thought it was a game, so I tiptoed in. Have I done something I shouldn’t have?”

“Some old wives’ tale Elspeth told her,” explained Jean, “about its being bad luck for the groom to behold his bride in her finery before the hour of the wedding. Are you afraid, Pat?”

Oddly enough, he didn’t immediately answer her. “You’re lovely, Jeanie,” he said at last in a low, tense voice. “Lovelier than I ever dreamed. I know your road will be happiness all the way.”

She raised her face to his, and he bent and kissed her almost shyly, his lips warm and hard on hers.

“I’d better go now,” he said. “I don’t want to affront this bridal jinx or push my luck too hard.”

“Don’t think of it,” said Jean. “I just wanted to show our little flower-girl how she would look. Tomorrow we shall start searching for her own finery. May we be married in the garden, Pat—down by that lily pool where the willow trees make the green arches above the water?”

“Wherever you will, Jean,” he said softly. “Yes, that would be a lovely spot, and I am the most fortunate of men to have found one like you. I hope I—”

He didn’t finish. He looked at her and looked away, and then rested his hand on Bertelle’s soft curls. “I must be off,” he said. “I have to meet some foreign timber buyers in the city. I’ll be back at five.”

When he had gone, Jean drew the little girl close to her. Bertelle’s face was still grave. “Please, darling, don’t let that old superstition bother you. It has no truth—none whatever.”

Yet she was troubled a little herself, though she hated to admit it. She found it hard, that afternoon, to pin herself down to any of the countless tasks that confronted her. She finished her unpacking, read a little, wandered about the garden while Bertelle slept.

The phone on Patrick’s desk rang while she was getting a book from his room. She answered it, and her heart sang at the sound of his voice.

“Please, Jeanie,” he said, “look in my desk, the top drawer I think, and find a blue paper with a list of figures on it and read them to me. I should have taken them with me.”

Jean found it and read the list. He thanked her and asked about Bertelle and promised to come soon, then hung up.

As she put the list back in the drawer she saw the neat little pile of blue gray letters which she had sent him. She had often wondered if he kept her letters, and it made her happy to know he treasured them.

She drew out the topmost one. They were typed. She remembered the little portable on her knees or on a cushion in bed when she wrote to him. Idly she glanced at the topmost letter and had read a few lines before the thing hit her with the hardest, cruelest impact of any shock life had given her.

The letter was from Sylvia Clyde!

Jean stood unmoving while the old clock ticked out the long, long moments—unmoving, her eyes staring into nothingness, her thoughts making no sense. It was the darkest hour of her life.

She could piece it all together in a little while. She shook herself out of the numbing spell that held her as in a vise. Sylvia had taken him away, that time in England—taken him as she always took what she wanted. They had delayed, through shame or compunction, telling her the truth. Then Bertelle had been crippled—and Sylvia would have none of it.

“So they let me come,” she whispered softly. “Let me come on what I thought was the happiest journey—and the happiness, like everything else in my life, was just a hand-me-down—something she didn’t want.”

Upstairs, she heard Bertelle stirring, and presently the small, elfin voice singing—“Who is Sylvia?”

She was thankful that Bertelle lingered upstairs, hopping about, singing her little songs through which, like a hateful theme, seemed to run the Ballad of Sylvia.

Now she could see clearly so many things—the smugness, the more than usual condescension, the unwonted gentleness with which Sylvia had treated her on the few occasions they had met after Patrick Hayden went back to the States. Sylvia had owned him then: Sylvia had taken him, as casually as any of the dozens of other things that Jeanie Hallam had prized. Then when trouble loomed, when she was faced with the prospect of playing nurse and foster-mother to a little lame girl, Sylvia just as readily gave up the prize she had coveted and cheated to obtain. For Sylvia, there was always something just as good or even better.

And had she cheated to obtain the prize anyway? Jeanie had put the letter back with the rest. Maybe he had her own letters somewhere, but these were not hers. These had been done on the elegant white portable with its sharkskin case that Sylvia had bought and learned to use after Jeanie acquired an old beat-up machine of her own.

Sylvia—he must have spoken her name, must have given voice to his pain when she jilted him with the cruel, easy aplomb that was her hall-mark. And he must also have spoken about her to Bertelle, probably telling the child of her beauty.

“Thank heaven,” said Jean softly, “the little one was spared such a stepmother. She would find no love, no warmth or understanding in Sylvia’s heart; with her the maimed and suffering are things to be avoided and ugliness always should cause one to shut the eyes until it has passed. A mercy for Bertelle—but what is it for me? What am I to do?”

“Oh, here you are, Jeanie, Jeannine, Jeanette, Jeanneton—” Bertelle’s dancing dark eyes laughed up at her. “And what are you doing all alone here in Patrick’s old room? Books and pipes and pictures of dogs and horses—don’t you love it? And the way it smells—du bon et du rape—those lovely sweet tobaccos that Patrick smokes.”

“I love it, Bertelle.” But she thought of how, here in this room, her happiness had gone in a moment. Here—yes, it was here that the lift that was bearing her to heaven had stuck halfway.

“Were you thinking of my dress, Jeanie? My lovely yellow dress? I dreamed about it. I shall look just like you, and I shall dress my doll, Monique, exactly the same, and Monique shall be my flower-girl.”

Jean made a mighty effort and rallied her spirits, made the blood flow again where it seemed to have congealed and stopped forever. “And Monique—maybe she would have a littler doll whom she could dress the same, and we could have a long line of people in yellow organdie, growing smaller and smaller until at last you could not see them.”

Bertelle could envision that. She clapped her hands. “Oh, I cannot wait. Will you give me one more peep at your wedding dress, Jeanie? I’ve been thinking about it all the time, about Patrick’s seeing you with it on, so lovely a bride, and I think now it was a good thing, for it would let Patrick see a little how lovely his bride is going to be and he will be sure he loves you. Still, Elspeth’s man, Hamish, ran away to foreign parts. That’s what Elspeth says. ‘He went off to foreign parts and was never more heard tell of.’ But she knows he’s alive, because she sees him sometimes—his ghost, you know.”

“Oh, Bertelle.” She drew the child close to her and caressed her hair. “What would I do without you?”

“What did you do before?”

“I had a lot of other little girls to love and tend.”

“Like me?” asked Bertelle eagerly. “Were they—?”

“All like you, chérie—many of them much worse off than you.”

“And they were good?”

“So good! So brave. Just like you, little one—brave as lions.”

“Ah, it is not hard to be brave with one like you, Jeanie. I was not brave before you came—not with the others, sometimes not with the good sisters. I would cry and sulk and be a veritable little child of the devil. With you it is easy to be good—”

How deftly, how swiftly and surely did these little ones weave their strong cords, the gossamer thin strands of their love that soon, intertwining, became a cable with the strength of steel. With dismay, she thought, How am I ever going to break these bonds that she has managed in a few hours to make so strong? How can I ever bring myself to leave her now? Yet how can I go to him, knowing I am not the one he wanted, that I am only the second choice? What chance will there be for happiness for either of us after such a poor compromise instead of the shining thing I thought I had?

What to do? It troubled her through the long night, and the morning seemed to bring no answer. Patrick did not seem to notice anything amiss. He had fared well with the buyers from abroad, and there was work for his mills and for the hundreds of workers who were dependent for their livelihood on the enterprises he controlled.

Looking at him, so big and gentle, so open and direct in his ways, she found it hard to believe that he could have betrayed her so soon, so readily. But she knew Sylvia. He was the type Sylvia devoured two or three of as an hors d’oeuvre.

You should have told me, Patrick—her heart spoke to him. The moment you knew you preferred her to me, you should have asked to be free. I suppose it was that you didn’t want to hurt me, though I find it hard to understand that she didn’t. Well, by waiting, you have done me a far worse injury, me and this little hurt thing whose happiness is bound up in ours. If it weren’t for her I would leave this place today; as it is—

She knew she must stay; there was no running away now.

It seemed clear enough, she thought, as she drove Bertelle to the city next day to buy the stuff for her dress, to purchase the hat and shoes and all the dainty things that filled Bertelle with feverish delight.

Marry him! Jeanie smiled grimly. I’d marry the Grand Turk, whoever he is or was, just to see her that happy. And it’s not only that. This is good for her, this is the best medicine in the world for her, just as the shock and disappointment if I walked out on the wedding now might do her grave and lasting harm. But if it could only have been different!

So after a few hectic days in which she had little time to think about anything other than the colorful and supposedly joyous business in hand, she walked down the garden path all radiant and lovely in her yellow gown, tight-waisted, high-bodiced, the dark rich hair peeping from under the droopy hat; a small Bertelle, a lovely miniature of the bride, strewing pink and yellow roses before her—

Ah, bright the June sun shone on that lovely scene, and tall and splendidly strong Patrick looked in his blue double-breasted coat and fine cream flannels, and there was an admiring hush over the guests who thronged the garden as the sacred words fell softly with their eternal promise on the warm summer air.

She tried—yes, and for moments succeeded—to pretend that there was no fair blonde spectre there in the lovely garden. Her small hand rested warmly, confidingly in Pat’s, so brown and strong, and she knew that this was one of life’s supreme moments—mystic, fraught with beauty, touched with a sacred and abiding mystery.

She raised her eyes to his and saw only truth and devotion in them, and her heart went out to him whom she had loved so deeply and so well. But again came the cruel knowledge that he had been untrue to her, that he—the one thing in the world she had thought of and prized as her very own, the one that would make up for all the others—that even he had put her aside, that if Sylvia had wished it so, it would have been Sylvia who stood beside him here among the flowers, Sylvia’s finger on which he slipped the golden band of fealty, Sylvia’s red mouth that received the kiss that pledged him for as long as he should live.

Bertelle was like a laughing little fairy all through the wedding and the reception afterwards. It was her day, too—one she would always remember. But the excitement, the heat of the day, proved too much for the frail little body, and when the last guests had gone she wilted like a small bright flower and lay pale and feverish in Jean’s arms.

Dr. Mark O’Connor, who had been the best man, was there to look after her. He had worked with the other specialists when she was first taken ill and he didn’t like the look of things now.

“I’ll take her to the hospital at once. It’s all been too much for her, and I’m afraid she wasn’t as strong as we thought—”

“I’ll go with you.” Jean wore the powder blue suit that was to have been her going-away dress. She didn’t look at Pat, but she could sense the look in his eyes.

“But your honeymoon—” began O’Connor doubtfully. “Look—why can’t Pat follow us in his car and—”

“No.” Jean shook her head. “I’ll wait to see that Bertelle is all right. I couldn’t go and leave her this way, and Pat wouldn’t want to either.”

She glanced at him then and caught a look in his eyes of hurt, wonderment. She knew it had hit him hard that she was so willing and ready to forego her honeymoon, even though it was for the child they both loved.

“Of course,” he said. “It’s all we can do, Mark—and we’d better get about it.”

“Well, it’s a heck of a note.” O’Connor shook his red head in sympathy. “I’ll try to get her fixed up as quickly as possible. Anyway, once in St. Roman’s she will be all right, and there’ll be nothing to keep you from your honeymoon.”

But it didn’t work out like that. There were long hours of anxiety and patient nursing, and Jean wore a nurse’s uniform that night instead of the lovely filmy things that Bertelle had loved so much, while Pat, after hanging about the hospital for a while, went back to Uplands, to a lonely house.

She knew that he was hurt and puzzled and even a little angry. Oh, not because she had stayed with Bertelle, foregoing their bridal trip, but simply because she had done it so willingly, with so little regret apparently; and that she still stayed with Bertelle even when Mark said the child was out of danger and that the hospital nurses could safely take over.

“Maybe we had better put the trip off for a while,” he said stiffly. It was two days after the wedding and they were back at Uplands. “After all—”

“It might be best, Pat—”

He exploded then. “Damn it all!” The dark blood rushed to his cheeks. “What is this anyway? You don’t seem to give a hoot one way or the other about us. Mind, I’m not objecting because you wanted to stay with Bertelle; I love you more for your devotion to her and for the way you’ve nursed her and brought her back to health. But you treat our wedding as if it was nothing, and even before it I sensed a—oh, I don’t know what to call it except an indifference in you—as if you were just going through a ritual, like joining a lodge—as if your heart weren’t really in the business.”

They were sitting on the verandah in the early afternoon. She was tired and edgy, and for a moment her temper flared and she almost told him that he was not the one to talk, that the only reason he was married to her was because Sylvia had thrown him over.

“Maybe I wasn’t too sure,” she said at last. “Maybe we should have waited—”

“Well, I’ll be—” He stared at her, exasperation and anger in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. “What a time to find it out! So that was it! You were glad that Bertelle’s illness made us call off our honeymoon, glad you didn’t have to come to me. I’m not blind, Jeanie—I’ve noticed from the time you came here how you avoided my intimacies, kept me at arm’s length, treated me—”

“That’s enough, Pat.” She faced him squarely. Only her great love for him kept her from telling him that she knew the truth. She marveled at his air of injury, as if he himself were without blame, the party put upon and slighted. Well, she supposed even the best of men could act like that.

He looked at her sullenly for a moment, then caught her in his arms roughly, almost cruelly, and crushed his mouth against hers. She felt the strength of his arms, the hardness of his body, the weakness of her own as all her strength flowed out to meet his desire.

Then she fought loose from him. “No—no!” It was a choked whisper. “Not now—please, Pat, I can’t—”

“I know you can’t,” he said bitterly. “Don’t think I can’t tell. You don’t want me, do you? I was afraid of this. Something has changed you—something has come between us. Well, have it your own way, Jeanie; I’m not the man to force myself upon you. If you don’t want me, I’ll survive. For Bertelle anyway it’s worthwhile to have you here.”

“It was for Bertelle you wanted me here, wasn’t it?”

He looked at her with cold, quiet anger. “So that’s what you think, eh? Well—” he shrugged—“perhaps you’re right at that. I’d do anything for her—anything—”

“I know.” She turned away from him and walked to the verandah rail, looking with clouded vision out on the smooth waters of the river. “I’m sorry about all this, Pat.” She was twisting the knife that had been stuck in her heart when she read the words of Sylvia’s letter. “But I can’t go to you—not now anyway. Maybe after—”

“I see.” He spoke after a long, stunned silence. And she thought, Oh, no, you don’t see. You’re as blind as you ever were; you don’t see that a woman would be less than a woman to take second best the way you offer it. I’ll not understudy Sylvia Clyde in this thing that was to have been the loveliest adventure of my life. She was the one you wanted, and you would have put me readily aside to take that lovely doll’s beauty of hers to your bed. I’m not that soft, not that easy nor forgiving.

“Let’s not talk about it now, anyway. I have to go back to the hospital this afternoon.”

“Okay! Okay! Let’s not talk about it at all. But why didn’t you tell me what I was up against before you married me, before you let me promise all those pretty, meaningless things—”

“You would have sent me away, and it would have broken Bertelle’s heart if we’d called off the wedding.” She did not add that it would have finished the work of breaking her.

“My Lord!” he said softly. “So you marry me just so the little girl can see something pretty and take part in it! You make a mockery—”

Something in her eyes stayed him as she turned and met his accusing gaze. “Don’t say that. You don’t know— Anyway, after a while, after she is better, I’ll go away. You can have a divorce or an annulment.”

She brushed past him, ran into the house and up to her room—the room he had never shared with her, that she now felt sure he never would. She fought back her tears, fought them the hard stubborn way she had learned to combat the grief that Sylvia had so often caused her. She would not let him see her cry or let him know the depth of her hurt.

She loved him, and she would always love him. She knew it was not in her nature to put off an affection such as she had formed for him, and turn quickly to another. Yet he had done it, and, manlike, he expected her to overlook his defection—the old business of sauce for the gander coming from a different recipe—

She took the little English car he had given her for her own use and went off to the city of Dartland, ten miles away, where Bertelle was being treated at the excellently equipped hospital of St. Ronan’s.

Bertelle was mending fast now; in a little while she would be able to come home, and that, Jean told herself, would be better for everyone. She did not know how long she could go on living there with Pat, seeing him each day, loving him and wanting him. It was not in her nature nor in his, yet pride, a deeper pride than she had ever known she possessed, kept her from seeking the happiness she knew she would find in his arms. With Bertelle at home, needing her almost constant care, it would make things a lot less difficult.

There was a strange doctor in Bertelle’s room when she went there. She saw first only the back of a dark, proud head; then he got up from the bedside where he had been sitting, and recognition shone in his dark eyes and both hands went out to her.

“Dr. Blake—Paul—what in the world—”

“Jeanie Hallam!” Before she could think, she had taken the kiss he offered.

He held her at arm’s length, a dark, intense young man, a wizard at his work, from whom she had learned much at Braithwaite Memorial Hospital in England.

“I might have known whose gentle hand had done so much with this little one. But you—are you the Mrs. Pat Hayden—?”

“Yes,” she said shyly. “I’m the one. I came out here a few days ago and was married. Bertelle is my husband’s niece,” she smiled at Bertelle, who watched them, wide-eyed, “and mine too.”

“I’m so glad. I’m here for a few months to give some courses; then I go across Canada. Lord above, it’s good to see someone from home. I thought you’d marry me and we’d start a clinic of our own.” The black eyes laughed at her.

“You never asked me.”

“Well, you never seemed to have time for such a trivial thing as matrimony, Jean. I was utterly bouleversé when this breezy boy from the wide-open spaces of the U.S.A. came and carried you off your feet. What’s bouleversé mean, little bright eyes?”

He turned to Bertelle, who was watching the two of them with great interest. She was in love with the new doctor already, and she was glad that Jean liked him so much that she would kiss him. She had no idea that Jean wasn’t supposed to kiss anyone but Patrick from the time she married him.

“Oh, it means knocked over, Dr. Paul—just like a pin when you bowl the ball at it. And are you really?”

“I was really. You see, I didn’t realize until she was gone away and I couldn’t have her any more to help me just how much I needed her. It was too late then to do anything or say anything.”

“Oh, Paul!” Jean felt the color rush warmly to her cheeks. “Half the time you didn’t know I was there. You were so busy with your work, and it was far more important than I could ever be to you.”

“I wonder,” he said slowly. “I’ve been wondering; and seeing you again, seeing you married to another man, makes me wonder more. But I flatter myself. I know you probably would have given me a swift refusal if I’d asked you.”

She wondered. If Pat hadn’t come into her life—Pat with his breezy, laughing ways, his all-enveloping affection, his power to make her forget everything except the fact that she was a woman, and made for love—perhaps it would have been Paul.

“Well, I’m glad for you anyway, Jean,” he said soberly. “I met Pat Hayden a few times and he seemed okay to me. I hope you are very happy.”

“Oh, very,” said Jean.

He looked at her sharply, detecting the note of bitterness, the wry cynicism in her tone. He frowned, but did not press the matter further.

“A few days earlier,” he said, “and I might have danced at your wedding and made it happier for you. Isn’t there some old saying that nothing makes a girl’s wedding so completely satisfactory as having an old beau to see her wed the new one?”

“I don’t believe it, Paul. I don’t think—”

“It’s an old wives’ tale,” said Bertelle gravely.

Paul laughed. He sat on the bed and rumpled the dark curls. “Now what do you know about it, Little Woman? You talk like an old wife yourself. What do you know of old wives’ tales?”

“Well, I do know. Elspeth, who keeps house for us, told me that it was bad luck for the husband to see the bride dressed up in her wedding dress before the marriage. Elspeth said her man Hamish saw her—this was in Scotland—and they had bad luck ’cause Hamish went off to sea right after the wedding and never came back.”

“Poor Elspeth! Poor Hamish! Was he drowned?”

“No, he opened a pub in Australia, Elspeth says, and just wouldn’t come back.”

“Whew!” Paul whistled and began to laugh. “It sounds like Joseph Conrad. Why didn’t Elspeth go after the dog?”

“She thinks maybe he doesn’t like her, and she says she’s not the one to go where she’s not wanted.”

“Stout girl!”

“She’s nice. But it’s not true about the supe—superstition, because Pat saw Jeanie all dressed up in her lovely yellow dress, and Pat kissed her and they were married and they’re awfully happy.”

Paul’s deep-set black eyes went to Jean’s face, and his lips were pursed for a moment.

“Such stuff to put into a child’s head,” said Jean. “I could boil Elspeth in one of her big stew kettles.”

“You would have liked the wedding, Paul,” said Bertelle. “It was in the garden by the pool under the willows, and a big frog croaked every time the Reverend Mr. Stebbins asked a question.”

“Gosh!” said Paul in alarm. “Maybe our Jeanie is married to the big frog instead of Patrick.”

Bertelle looked stricken. “Yes, maybe the big frog was a fairy prince in disguise, and he loved Jeanie and he got his answers in first—”

“No, no!” Paul bent and kissed her. “We won’t let any old frog get her.”

“I was at the wedding too,” said Bertelle. “I had a yellow dress and a hat like Jeanie’s and I loved it, but I got tired.”

“You must have looked like a little yellow butterfly. I wish more than ever that I had been there; maybe you would have married me.”

“Oh, I’m not big enough, and I’m not well enough. No one would marry me—”

“But they would! And when Jeanie and I are through with you, you will be well enough to marry anyone you choose. Maybe, if the frog’s a prince, you could get him.”

“He’s nice. I know him. I see him there every day and once I held him in my hands.”

“Then he’s not a prince in disguise,” said Paul. “If he really was, he would assume his real form once you held him in your hands, Bertelle.”

“You’re worse than Elspeth,” laughed Jean. “Don’t tell her any more nonsense. What’s the news from what they quaintly call here ‘The Old Country?’ ”

“News! Let’s see. Oh, yes, I saw your beauteous cousin, Sylvia Clyde, believe it or not, the day before yesterday.”

“Oh! How’s Sylvia?”

“Very much herself. Devastating. Also, she told me she is coming out to Canada in a few days’ time—she and her father. He has pulp mills or timber holdings or something, and they plan to stay for the summer anyway. Not far from here, I believe—just over the Canadian border at St. Giles.”

Jean’s face was expressionless. She was thinking of Elspeth Craig and the old wives’ tale and wondering—wondering—

“Lovely,” she said. “Just lovely. I can’t wait.”

There was a letter from Sylvia in the next morning’s mail. She looked at it ruefully before she opened it—a scented, mauve envelope with the family crest and the initials S C embossed upon it. She picked it up from its resting beside her breakfast plate. Pat sat across from her, going through his own mail while they waited for Elspeth to bring them breakfast.

Pat glanced at her and then at the letter. “What’s the matter? Afraid it’s one of those things they had in the war, that will explode when you open it?”

“You know—” Jean looked at him pensively, thinking what a handsome brute of a man he was, the skin firm and deeply tanned over the strong bone structure of his face, the mouth full and mobile—the kind of man to be a foil for Sylvia’s blue and platinum type of beauty. “You know, Pat, you might just have something there—it’s a letter from my beloved cousin Sylvia—”

“Oh!” Pat’s tone was guarded. “I rather figured it out that you weren’t exactly crazy about the lovely Sylvia. What did she ever do to you?”

Stole my man, she said, but only to herself. Stole the great love of my life, the wonderful precious thing I thought was all my own. For him she said quickly, “Oh, I suppose it’s just the twenty-watt bulb being envious of the hundred. I was always the foil for Sylvia—sometimes the fool for Sylvia. But you know all this. I was rather glad to get away from Sylvia at last and find a world of my own where my twenty-watt light might show up a bit because it wouldn’t be outdazzled by her. I was being foolish. I wasn’t getting away. She’s coming out here.”

“Oh!” He showed no surprise, and she had a quick, sure suspicion that he knew the fact already. “Well, even if you aren’t exactly crazy about her, it will be nice to have some of your own people to visit you and take the edge of your lonesomeness—if you are lonesome. It can’t be much fun for you here, or maybe I don’t know what your idea of fun is. How did you know she was coming? You haven’t even opened your letter.”

“I met a friend from England at the hospital yesterday—a doctor named Paul Blake—”

“Old boy friend? I think I met him when I was over there.”

Jean colored. “We had a few dates together, and he visited the Clydes. He knows Sylvia, saw her a few days ago just before he left to come out here. She told him she and her father were coming out for a few months. Uncle Will has pulp and paper interests out here, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve had some dealings with him. I’m keeping you from reading your letter. What kind of a guy is Blake?”

“Paul? He—oh, he’s awfully nice. He worked with the children at Braithwaite Memorial; that’s where I met him. Crazy about kids. He was with Bertelle when I went there yesterday. She loves him.”

“I hate him already,” grinned Pat, “taking away both of my womenfolk—at least, taking away the one I really call my own.” His face clouded and he bent again to his mail as Elspeth brought in the preliminary bowls of porridge. Only pagan households, Elspeth maintained, didn’t eat porridge, and the decline of civilization was due almost entirely to patent breakfast-foods that made noises like percussion-instruments.

Jean slit open Sylvia’s letter, feeling rather like one who suspects she holds a poison-pen broadside.

Jean was tempted to tear up the letter right there. Darling little adder-tongue!

She read on—

Yes—Jean put down the letter—it would be very much like old times, with Sylvia putting the charm on Pat, wrapping the wicked tentacles about him once more. It would be still easier this time, for Jean wondered if she would even make the effort to hold him.

She realized that Pat was watching her, a little smile on his lips. “Better eat your breakfast, Jeanie,” he advised, “or you’ll hear from Elspeth about the sinfulness of waste as well as the dangers of not taking enough nourishment. Sylvia’s letter didn’t seem to make you happy.”

“Not much. I was rather glad to be rid of Sylvia. We never got along too well. As you said, it’s a case of the super-duper light bulb and the dim little thing like me. She and Uncle Will are going to occupy a place belonging to some Nash Colville at St. Giles—”

“Big house down on what we call the Gold Coast—sort of a small time Riviera—retired tycoons, an artist or two, a few titles. She may like it. Her father won’t hang around much: he’s working on some sort of a merger of the big pulp mills, I believe.”

“Sylvia expects to see a good deal of us.”

Pat shook his head. “Not too much, I think. You aren’t the type to enjoy the sort of crowd she will run with—and you may be sure I’m not. I’ve been to a few of their parties down there at St. Giles and they were pretty dull.”

“It may be different—with Sylvia there.”

“Why should it?” The look he gave her was challenging.

“Don’t you think,” he said when she gave him no answer, “that you give in too easily, that you’re even afraid to join battle, when it comes to dealing with your beautiful cousin? In the elegant slang of the day—what’s she got that you ain’t!”

Jean shook her head. “Nothing, I suppose. It’s just that she seems to have more of it or to have it concentrated in the proper places. She has that flamboyant, striking beauty”—this was a dig for him—“that dazzles the too susceptible male.” She felt sorry to have teased him so when she saw the quick flush rise under his tan.

Quickly, deftly, before he perjured himself by protesting that he had never been taken in by the bright allurements of Sylvia, she steered the conversation away from that highly explosive topic.

“Bertelle will be able to come home tomorrow,” she said, knowing how glad that would make him. Uplands was like a morgue without the child’s songs and happy stories. “Paul gave her a thorough going over and he thinks in time she can be almost cured. Oh, what it would mean to her, Pat—to be able to run, to dance. Right now, she is like a trapped sunbeam. It’s a godsend, having him here right at this time. He has the hands of a healer.”

“You seem to admire him a lot. I never knew—I didn’t think you’d ever bothered with men.”

She colored slowly under the light gold tan of her cheeks, and he thought how lovely she was, how like a dusky damask rose. “I never did. Anyway, Paul is like a priest, and all he has is given to his work.”

“Some day he will look up and see you, Jeanie,” said Pat with a strange intensity. “And all his priestly vows will be forgotten.”

She lowered her eyes before the strange gaze. If she could only believe him. Once she had believed him, and look what it had brought her—disillusionment, hurt, heartbreak. She was the only light in his darkness now, but let the new bright meteor swim within his ken—and her little light would be dimmed and invisible.

She had thought that perhaps in time she would forget the injury that he had done her, that after a while, quietly and humbly, she would go to him as his wife and, forgetting Sylvia, forgetting everything except the fact that she loved him, be what she had hoped to be—his lifelong partner and the mother of his children.

But that thought was pushed aside, now that Sylvia was coming again into her life.

A few days later, Bertelle was allowed to come home. Pat and Jean brought her in the big car, and just to have her with them once more seemed to make everything all right, to smooth things between them and awaken forgotten joys and unremembered laughter. She was the catalyst that settled the storm between them, and in fixing their love on her they could forget their own uneasy problems.

“Is it nice, being married?” she asked Jeanie when they sat in the garden in the warm afternoon. “Do you like it, Jeanie, and are you awfully happy, and has the lift taken you all the way to heaven?”

The glowing dark eyes were fixed on her face with that queer intentness and ancient wisdom that dwells in the young who have suffered.

“Oh, maybe we have a few more stories to go up before we’re all the way there, but it’s so near that it doesn’t matter; now that I have you back again with me, nothing matters.”

Bertelle frowned. “But I take so much from you, and it doesn’t seem right. You and Patrick were supposed to go away on your tour de noces, your lune de miel, your moon of honey, and because of me, because I was an old sissy and was taken ill, you could not go. Won’t you go now?”

“Maybe. But if we do we shall take you with us.”

“Should you? Don’t you ever want Patrick all to yourself or doesn’t Patrick want you? I love being with you, but you give so much to me. Paul said you loved all little children. He said the ones in England cried so much when you left that they made a pool of water and he had to buy some little ducks to put it in to make them stop crying. He’s funny, isn’t he?”

“He will stuff you with nonsense, if you let him. But he is a great doctor and will help you to grow well and strong.”

“Do you like him as much as Patrick?”

“I don’t think so, little quiz kid. You do ask some posers. I like him in a different way from the way I like Patrick.”

“Was the kiss you gave him a different kind from the ones you give Pat?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“How?”

“Well, his was just plain; Pat’s has peanut-butter on it.”

“Oh, I know. I thought it was like that.”

The next morning she had a phone call from Sylvia and heard again the honeyed, husky voice, rich and sultry, that was one of Sylvia’s stellar attractions.

“Jeanie, darling! We got in yesterday afternoon. What a country! We’re only eighty miles over the border from you. It was snowing at Gander—fancy it—and here the flowers are blooming. I’m in love with this place already. How I envy you!”

“You told me that before, Sylvia.” She tried to be cool, to match Sylvia’s calculated insolence with a hard, unyielding front, but already she was on the defensive. Even her voice, ordinarily so low-pitched and gentle, tended to get an edge in it when she talked to Sylvia.

“Oh, did I? Well, I really mean it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t—wouldn’t tell me and wouldn’t feel that way.”

“Why? Surely you will admit that you are to be envied! I’ve learned a lot more about Pat Hayden even in the short time I’ve been here. He’s a Maine timber baron. It seems all the Boston debutantes were camping on his trail—and you took the prize.”

There was real old Sylvia snake-venom in her tone now. Funny, mused Jean, that she hasn’t flung it in my face that she could have taken him if she’d wanted to, that she gave him to me simply because the conditions, the responsibilities, that went with marrying him, were too much for her. I suppose she’s saving that for a more opportune time—preferably when she has a crowd around.

“And how is the little girl, Pat’s niece—Berta—Roberta—?”

“Bertelle,” said Jean. Bertelle—the little injured thing you could not bring yourself to help or love, on account of whom you lightly passed up the love of a man like Pat Hayden. “Bertelle was quite ill after the wedding. She found the excitement too much for her. She was the flower-girl.”

“But how gruesome! Isn’t she terribly crippled, walking with a brace or crutch or a built-up shoe or something? I’d as soon have a goblin—”

“You probably will have—or one of the devil’s imps.” Jean was white to the lips. “How can you be so hard, so cruel and unkind? You’d think it was a sin to be crippled. No one would think except with compassion of the little one’s lameness. She was the loveliest thing at the wedding. Cripple—I think you are far more crippled than she is, Sylvia.”

“Really! Why, you are growing really acid, Jeanie, since you became Mrs. Pat Hayden. I didn’t mean anything against the little girl. You’re always being so noble and springing to the defense of the rest of the world.”

“Some people like to kick the underdog, Sylvia; others like to give him a hand.”

“Darling! You’re far too noble for me. You always were, but right now you kill me—you really do. Why, you sound like a new religious movement.”

“Do I? Well, it’s not new, Sylvia. It’s far from new. It’s a few thousand years old, in fact, and it’s too bad you haven’t heard about it yet.”

“Sweetness and light! I know what you mean. I never could see it, and I hate people who pretend to like what at heart they despise. However, I must say being a naïve little innocent has paid off for you, but how you must bore Pat if you go on like that all the time.”

“Oh, drop it, Sylvia.”

“Okay. I just like to needle you—such a serious little thing. You should learn to let your hair down once in a while. Maybe now that you’re married, you’ll be different.”

She would have talked for an hour but Jean managed to cut off the silvery flow. Sylvia and her father would drive up on Thursday. “It will be so wonderful to see you in your own little place, darling, the adored wife of a devoted husband. Whatta man!”

The bell-like laughter was cut off only by Jean’s setting the phone in its cradle.

She turned away from it, deflated, discouraged, unhappy in her heart—the way she always was after an encounter with Sylvia. She had no heart for a resumption of the unending battle with Sylvia; so often she had gone down to defeat, nearly always because she could never resort to the weapons that Sylvia used—every one in a lovely woman’s armament, and a few besides.

“ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ ” she said, looking out at the blue and green and the flash of water in the sun. “You think you’ve seen the last of the Sylvias of this world—and, bang, they pop right up again. She wasn’t woman enough to marry Patrick when he asked her, and she gave him to me. Now, as usual, she wants him back just because I have him. Well, if he’s willing to go, I’m not the one to keep him. But there’s always Bertelle, and I should hate myself if I gave her over to Sylvia’s tender care. Maybe it occurred to her she could have all the maids and nurses she wanted, and needn’t herself be bothered with the child.”

She went upstairs to look for the little one and found her in the big leather chair in Patrick’s study, the flower-like face pale, the eyes enormous under the crown of dark tumbled curls.

“Why, darling! You shouldn’t be up now! What are you doing? What—”

Something in Bertelle’s look stopped her in mid-speech, some deep, childish sorrow. Something had happened, for the small one’s spirit was strong and hopeful and gay. Now—

Jean’s puzzled look moved from her to the telephone on Pat’s desk, and a terrible, sickening thought came to her, so awful that she tried to put it away and ignore it. If it was so, she would hate Sylvia all her life.

And it was so.

“I’m not a goblin, Jeanie.” It was only a whisper that ended in a sob. “She said—”

Jean found it hard to speak. “Bertelle! You should not have been listening—”

“I wasn’t. I came here to call the village store to send me my comic books, and when I picked up Pat’s phone you were talking. I didn’t mean to listen. But I heard her say ‘crutch’ and then say she’d sooner have a goblin—”

Jean held the thin, shaking little body close to her, and the great love of her heart, its power to feel for such as this child, could drive out the bitterness toward such as Sylvia Clyde.

“You were a little yellow butterfly at my wedding, Bertelle,” she said with her lips soft against the tiny ear. “You were the one who made it most beautiful. Sylvia does not know—she has never even seen you. When she meets you she will love you the same as everyone else.”

“I will hate her.” Bertelle stiffened and the dark eyes flashed with Latin fury. “All my life I will remember what she said and I will hate her.”

“Oh, no!” Jean was appalled at the intensity of the little girl’s feelings. “It’s no good to hate anyone, Bertelle. Hate is a fire that burns the one who hates quite as badly—often worse—as the one who is hated.”

“I can’t help it, Jeanie.”

“Oh, yes, you can. When you see her and get to know her, maybe you will forgive her. She doesn’t think, when she says those cruel things, that she is hurting anybody. And then, you know, she couldn’t possibly realize that you were listening to her. You should have put down the phone right away.”

And you, she thought, should have put down the letter right away, the letter that killed your happiness. But you read on to your own misery and Bertelle listened on to hers.

“Is she coming here?” asked Bertelle after the tears were dried. “Will she visit us?”

“Yes. She and her father are coming in a few days. And you will like them. You must, you know, because I want you to. And if you hate them, God will not like you and not want to help you. Hatred will hinder you from getting better. You ask Dr. Paul if it’s not so.”

“I don’t care. I’m going to hate her, hate her, hate her—”

“Hello!” Pat Hayden loomed in the doorway. “What’s all this hating business, Bertelle?” His voice was stern. “That’s a new note, coming from you.”

Neither of them answered. Jean thought, Oh, dear, here’s where Sylvia gets a chance to be the injured party again. We can’t tell him the truth; he would want to believe only the best of that sweet creature.

“Who is it you’re going to hate, Bertelle?”

The dark head came up defiantly. “Sylvia.”

“Well! That’s funny. You haven’t even seen Sylvia yet and you’re all set to hate her. I don’t like this. I won’t have you hating people, you know. And you should be in bed anyway.”

He turned and left the room. Jean put Bertelle to bed, promising to go to the village and get her comic books in a little while.

Pat was waiting for her in the downstairs hall. He turned on her without warning. “Look, Jeanie, this is pretty small stuff—”

“What do you mean, Pat?” Her tone was weary.

“I mean poisoning the child’s mind against your cousin. I can’t figure you out. You know of course that she’d fall in love with Sylvia, but to let your own jealousy—”

“Let it ride, Pat. I don’t want to hear any more.”

“You’re not the girl I thought you were. I didn’t know there was any such malice—”

“No, you said it; I’m not the girl you thought I was, Pat—suppose we let it go at that!”

Jean had one thing, at least, to be sincerely thankful for in the days that followed—the Ballad of Sylvia was unheard in the land. Bertelle, when she got to hating anybody, was a real good hater. Mother Michael, Good King Dagobert, Mon Ami Pierrot, and all the rest of her cheery folk were sung about in the sweet music-box voice—but Sylvia was definitely out.

She will get over it, thought Jean. If Sylvia chooses to put the charm on her and really turns on that superatomic personality of hers, she can have Bertelle eating out of her hand. And something tells me that Uplands is going to see darling Sylvia at her very best. Ah, well, I suppose I’d better buy myself a new dress and put on a bit of war-paint of my own. I sure have a battle on my hands if I want one.

She had invited Paul Blake and young Dr. Mark O’Connor, also Martha Frayne, a lovely redhead from St. Ronan’s hospital, and Maud Keller, who owned the big dairy farm next to Uplands, a brown-faced, pretty country woman, widowed some few years.

They were all sitting under the great copper-colored maple on the lawn when the guests of honor arrived in a silver-gray, chauffeur-driven Rolls with gorgeous upholstery.

“Whew!” Paul Blake, sitting next to Janie, took a long drink of his Tom Collins and muttered, “ ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, his cohorts all gleaming in purple and gold—’ ”

That, thought Jean, was “The Destruction of Sennacherib”—this, I fear, is the destruction of Uplands.

Sylvia, oddly enough, was wearing purple, with white gloves and hat and bag. The beautifully sculptured, high-boned face broke in a smile of utterly dazzling beauty, the wide red lips parting over exquisite teeth.

Sir William Clyde, Jean thought, was beginning to show the years. Small wonder, after having two like Aunt Mab and Sylvia to contend with. He was a big man, with a big head of thick white wavy hair, and a big voice to go with it all.

“Ah, Jeanie—” He had always loved his sister’s child. “Fresh as a prairie-flower, I see—and as lovely. And as brown as the Indian maidens who once roamed these lovely hills—

And Patrick, my boy—good to see you again—and young Dr. Blake—” His geniality soon absorbed them all. Even Sylvia’s beauty often found it hard to steal the show from Sir William.

But she could do it. It was always the same, thought Jeanie. She didn’t even have to work at it. Paul Blake, of course, had known her of old and was fairly immune to the spell of the strange violet-blue eyes, the warm husky voice, the smile that flattered and seduced. Dr. Mark O’Connor succumbed at once.

Women all felt the same toward Sylvia, only in varying degrees; they hated her, from her platinum blonde topknot to her delicately tinted toenails. In a woman’s world Sylvia would have been given a nice desert island all to herself, and no boat.

She held Jean at arm’s length to look her over frankly and appraisingly. “The bride!” she said softly. “Little Jeanie, my sister and more than sister—and now you’re married. I find it so hard to believe. You must be radiantly happy in such a place—” the blue-violet rays swerved to Patrick—“and with such a husband. I’m so happy for you, Jean—and for you, Patrick. You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Of course, Sylvia.” Jean gently disengaged herself.

“And where’s the darling little girl—Bertelle?” She had no trouble remembering the name now. “I have been so eager to meet her.”

“Sleeping,” said Jean laconically.

Josh Agnew, the colored man who looked after cars and the garden, and who had once been a railway porter, served them drinks and canapés in a manner that won obvious approval from Sir William who, with Jovian democracy, looked at him benignly.

“Seen you before, boy,” he boomed. “Know that technique.”

“Yes, sir.” Ivory flashed in Josh’s dark face. “Yes, sir—put you to bed, Sir William, on the Toronto-Winnipeg run ten years ago, sir.”

“Great days,” nodded Sir William. “Great poker games, great thirsts—”

“Yes, sir!” Josh shared his nostalgia. “They sho’ was.”

At the foot of the garden was a beautiful crescent-shaped beach of white sand, and while Sir William, with Josh to tend him like an ex-batman, dozed on a glider, the rest went swimming, giving Sylvia a chance to make a monkey out of Aphrodite.

“You look so utterly, disgustingly healthy, Jeanie!” Sylvia rolled over on the sand and rested her chin on her slender arms. “You look like one of those lovely peasant girls one sees in Provence or Piedmont. I swear you could wear a gypsy costume and get away with it. You look different—and you’ve only been out here such a little while.”

“Long enough,” said Jean stoutly. She was very much on guard, very much ready for the big push, the all-out attack that soon would come; this was just the preliminary skirmish. Sylvia was probing now, poking around, to find some good spot for the first thrust.

Jean didn’t know what to do—whether to tell her right off that she knew the truth, knew that Patrick had taken her on the rebound, brazen it out and go from there, or let Sylvia spring it as a cutting surprise and then tell her that it was no surprise at all, that her eyes had been very wide open when she married Pat, and that she was being in no way disillusioned.

But Sylvia seemed troubled, uncertain and quite lacking in her usual poise. It was as if she were in the dark about something and needed briefing on some subjects before she could really go to work.

Keep her guessing, let her make the first move—the little inner voice of wisdom told Jean. She’s not at all sure of herself and she feels that here, so strongly entrenched as Pat’s wife, you have the advantage of her and she doesn’t know just where to begin.

Puzzling, though, thought Jean; I can’t make her out. She doesn’t look at all like a girl who graciously gave me the man she might have married. Perhaps she’s afraid of Patrick; it could even be that he warned her not to tell me that for a while at least he was untrue to our love.

To our love— She smiled without mirth and looked at Pat, brown and muscular, who was talking about cows to Maud Keller, telling her about the Holstein breeder who utterly squashed the Jersey fancier by snorting: “Jersey—too small for a cow and too big for a goat.”

They had changed and were back on the terrace when Bertelle came.

It was strange, her coming, for none of them noticed her approach until she was among them. Jean saw Sylvia’s eyes grow wide and wondering and her face lose for once its mask of beautiful serenity. She turned, and so did the others, and there was a strange wondering silence.

The little girl had no crutch. Elspeth was behind her, hiding the crutch behind her back. Bertelle had one arm around the mighty, tawny neck of Peter the Great, and she stood straight and proud as a princess. And she wore the lovely dress of yellow organdie that she had worn at the wedding, with its long ruffled skirt and high bodice. And from under the droopy yellow hat the short curls peeped, blue-black and gleaming, and her face was like a flower, so beautiful, so sweetly serene, the great black eyes wide and unwinking.

“Bertelle!” Jean rose but did not go to her. There was something here that filled her with wonder. The little girl was looking steadily at Sylvia, giving her look for look, and there was something of the eternal woman in the way she held herself, so proudly, so challengingly, as if she were saying, “So you are lovely and what of it? Are you the only thing in this world endowed with beauty?” The small red mouth smiled with something like disdain.

She moved forward with Peter and curtsied gravely to them all.

“God bless me!” said Sir William. “I’ve never seen a child so beautiful. Why, Landseer should be alive to paint that picture.”

Sylvia too found voice. “How good to meet you at last, Bertelle. And how lovely you look in your dress, so like a little fairy princess—”

Bertelle’s eyes never left her face. “You are too kind, mademoiselle.” The French accent was more pronounced than usual. “I can change, you know—sometimes I am a goblin.”

Sylvia started and looked at Jean with dagger sharp eyes, with open venom. Jean felt Patrick’s gaze upon her too. She went to Bertelle then and picked her up and put her in a lounge-chair, careful not to muss the wedding finery.

“Bravo, Bertelle,” she whispered. “You should not have done it, but I cannot blame you.”

Paul and Mark O’Connor came now to pay court to their prize patient. Elspeth laid the crutch unobtrusively in the grass by her chair. The little girl, as if aware of her triumph, sparkled and laughed, and Jean marveled at the fire and spirit that dwelt in one so young. No need to fear for her ever if, at this tender age, she could match wits with Sylvia and give her as good as she sent.

They had dinner, superbly cooked by Elspeth and served in style by Josh, who doted on company and gave them all the benefit of his long years on the de luxe diners of the trans-Canada flyers. Harbor salmon and sea trout and fiddle-head greens, which filled Sir William with delight and made him forget his digestive tablets.

He proposed a toast to the newly married couple, and the good Burgundy glowed in the soft light of the candles and the glow from the westering sun that came through the wide windows open on garden and river.

It was a happy time, despite the dark currents that ran below the smooth surface of the feast. It was the first time Jean had ever presided over her own table, and in the new gown of soft burgundy, with the thick chestnut curls upswept and the diamond ear-drops Patrick had given her, she shone with a serene and quiet beauty.

The full moon came up behind the hills and silvered the waters of the river, and they danced to the music of a band on some far-away hotel rooftop, magic, muted—

She drifted in Patrick’s arms. Sylvia was dancing with Mark O’Connor, who was already entranced by her loveliness. Paul was with the vivacious Martha Frayne, and Sir William did nobly with the brown-faced, gypsy-like Maud Keller.

Patrick was quiet. She wondered what he was thinking about, but did not question him. She knew she would hear about it in his own good time.

“You do throw a lovely party, Jeanie,” he said. “This is quite out of this world. Did you see how Bertelle’s eyes shone when Elspeth brought her down to see the dancing? She had a lovely day. She amazed me.”

“Me too,” admitted Jean frankly. “There’s good stuff in that little lady. For a few moments there she looked like some grand aristocrat of France, so utterly proud and beautiful.”

“I know. And I can’t say that I liked it or even understood it. Did you tell her to dress up like that in the things she wore at the wedding?”

“She asked me if she might and I told her yes. Are you not glad that she did? You were proud of her; I could see it in your eyes.”

“Yes, I was proud of her. But there seemed—oh, I don’t know—something deliberate and calculated about the whole business. And why did she say, when Sylvia told her she looked like a fairy princess, that she could change to a goblin—”

It was not in Jean to tell him, sorely tempted though she was, that in her childish way she was striking back, proudly and tellingly, at one who had injured her.

“Some childish fancy, I suppose,” she said lightly. “Forget it, Pat, and dance with me. Or do you find it rather boring dancing with me now?”

“Look!” His arm tightened about her, but in exasperation, and she knew he had an urgent desire to shake her. Perversely, it made her want to push him further. “I wish you’d cut out this kid stuff. What makes you think I find it boring dancing with you? For my money, you are the loveliest woman here—or anywhere.”

“Flatterer!” How she wanted to believe him, to press close to him, to have him cover her mouth with kisses. But then she saw Sylvia, looking like a moon-maiden, all silver and blue and with something like a nimbus of Stardust around the fair beautiful head.

“Jeanie—” Pat’s lips were close to her ear. In the light of the moon on the verandah where they danced she saw the craggy handsomeness of his face, the eyes deep-set and glowing. “What are you trying to do to me—to us? Why do you think I married you?”

“I’m still wondering,” she said quietly.

“You don’t think it was for love?”

“Love can mean a lot of things, Pat. It can mean one thing to one person, quite another to the next. No, since you ask me, I don’t think you married me for love—not love as I understand it. I think you were in love—the kind of love I mean—with someone else.”

“With whom then?”

“As if you needed to ask. She is watching you all the time she’s dancing with Mark O’Connor. Better give her a whirl, Pat. She must have a lot of things to tell you.”

He shook his head in anger and despair. “I wish you’d try to get rid of the inferiority complex you feel toward Sylvia. You’re so adult in everything else, Jeanie—why persist in acting like a silly brat where she’s concerned? You still have that ‘She took my doll—she swiped my candy’ complex toward her.”

“So I have. But it’s not quite so simple as you make it sound. You don’t know the whole story, Patrick-of-my-heart. I never minded the dolls she took, or the candy she wouldn’t share or all the other things.”

“I wonder. You were even afraid she would steal Bertelle from you, so you fill the child up with stories about Sylvia that make her ready to hate her before she has even seen your cousin.”

“Oh, Pat, how wrong can you be? I told her nothing whatever about Sylvia.”

“Then why—?”

The music ended, and she was glad. Almost with relief she freed herself from his arms. She wasn’t going to tell him why Bertelle was predisposed to dislike Sylvia. Explanations, she found, were seldom much good. She wondered if Sylvia would tell him about the goblin business; knowing her cousin, she felt pretty sure Sylvia would work it in some way.

Sure enough, when the last goodnights were said and Sylvia and her father had retired, while she and Pat smoked a last cigarette in the moonlight peace of the verandah, he taxed her with what Bertelle had said.

“That was a cruel thing to do, a downright miserable thing, to tell the child what Sylvia said so lightly over the phone—”

“It wasn’t said lightly, Pat.” She was so angry she would not even bother to tell him how Bertelle had happened to hear the unkind words. She was weary of the endless troubles that Sylvia could stir up. And he was so quick, so ready to believe the worst.

“Of course it was said lightly. She had the wrong idea. She thought Bertelle was an object of pity; she meant nothing malicious when she said the child would look like a little goblin. Why, she thinks Bertelle is the loveliest thing she has ever seen.”

“I believe it. She started right away to pour her special sugar-solution over the little one, to win her affections. That’s the way she traps her victims—covers them with this saccharine-serum she exudes—something like a beautiful butterfly—and they become paralyzed and then she sucks them dry.”

“Oh, Jeanie! For Pete’s sake cut it out! She’s not like that at all. Anyway, she couldn’t be as bad as you make her out.”

“She’s worse, Pat. I am the greatest living expert on Sylvia Marlene Clyde. I know every inch of her, darling—and every inch is pure snake. Bit you too, didn’t she?”

Pat stared at her for a long time, there in the moonlight-dappled shadow where a Virginia creeper grew on a fan-shaped trellis, making lovely patterns, arabesques and quatrefeuilles, on the tiled floor. He shot the cigarette he was smoking out onto the dew-wet and sparkling grass, and it made a long line of light in its passage.

She was frightened. She did not know what to read in that burning, intent look, in the tenseness of his great body, the shoulders towering above her. And she was weary of fighting—fighting him, fighting herself, fighting Sylvia.

She brushed past him and ran up to her room and locked the door and flung herself on the bed, there to lie while the moonlight crept slowly from dresser to vanity, to the door of Bertelle’s room. She heard the child stirring, and presently she came, a white filmy figure, across the room to stand and stare and finally, dropping her crutch, to climb onto the bed.

“You’re crying, Jeanie. Why are you crying? Was it that one—?”

“No!” Jean held her fiercely. “No, it wasn’t that one, Bertelle. She could never make me cry—and never let her make you cry. She’s not worth a tear either of yours or mine.”

Pat was taking Sir William on an inspection tour of some timber stands he owned along the Fundy shore. They left immediately after an early breakfast at which Sylvia did not appear at all. Jean was there, looking pale and tired, but if her uncle noticed any constraint in her manner toward Patrick he gave no sign of it.

Pat himself was very quiet, very subdued. She hardly looked at him. She had slept with Bertelle, warm and soft like a little kitten, curled up beside her, and in the little one’s sympathy and sorrow for her she found something that was like balm to a painful wound.

“Is it that Sylvia who made you cry? Is it that wicked one who wants to hurt everybody?” Bertelle was more than ready to blame it all on Sylvia.

Jean told her no, and she tried not to pile up too much of the guilt for all this trouble on the doorstep of the lovely Lady of Misrule.

“Darling, you look dreadful.” Sylvia found Jean on the terrace when she came there to wait for Elspeth to bring her coffee and toast and deviled eggs and grilled kidney, for, while she looked as if she fed on some distillate of roses, she had an excellent appetite, rather like a cobra. “Did you stay up much longer after we went to bed—you and Patrick? It was so lovely there in the moonlight. I always hate to leave moonlight when it shines on the water, but then I had no one to keep me up. It must be wonderful to be in love.”

“Haven’t you ever been in love?”

“Dozens of times,” laughed Sylvia. “In and out, but not, I fancy, the way you are in love. You’re one of those to whom love is her whole existence and you would have a complete case of it—like typhoid. With me it’s rather like measles or a rash—something that lasts just a few days.”

Jean could believe her. “I’d be afraid to fall in love the way you do, Jeanie. I shouldn’t like to give myself, all of myself, completely to any man.”

“Maybe if you loved you would.”

Sylvia shook her head. “Not I, dear child. I don’t know anyone, nor can I imagine anyone I’d defy that much. And that’s about what it is—to give all your hope of happiness, all your life, all your dreams, into the hands of one man—”

“It’s the chance you have to take,” said Jean softly, thinking of how much a chance it was; of how perhaps, Sylvia was right and a girl was a fool to entrust her happiness so completely to one man. But if that one man loved as she loved; if Patrick had cared for her as she had believed and hoped—

“You’re very happy with Pat Hayden, aren’t you, Jeanie?” Sylvia looked appreciatively at the silver-covered dishes Elspeth brought her and earned Elspeth’s undying hate by lifting the cover off the porridge and saying, “My gosh! Don’t tell me people still eat oatmeal!”

She didn’t wait for an answer to her question. She took some kidney and egg and toast and chewed with strong white teeth as delicately and earnestly as a beautiful Persian cat devouring a bird.

“Anyone could be happy with Pat. He’s so gentle and loyal and easy to handle. Or is he?”

“I don’t know.” Jean hated this business. “I haven’t had occasion yet to do any handling, any cracking of the whip or trying to gentle him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t try that. I’m afraid that would never do for you, darling. You’re not the type to manage men. You’re the clinging-vine type. I mean, if you’re smart, you’ll play the poor-little-me, see how helpless I am, you big strong lovely man—and let them think they’re looking after you and protecting you from a cruel world. I think perhaps you do incline to be a bit too independent. They hate that.”

Jean scarcely listened to her. She knew all about Sylvia’s philosophy of the male sex, and it was one she didn’t care to adopt. Sometimes she wondered if men—even such fine men as Pat Hayden—were worth the trouble and heartache they could cause a woman.

She had been waiting to tax Sylvia with telling Pat about Bertelle, what she thought was Bertelle’s reason for hating her. The little girl was playing with Peter now, down by the water’s edge.

“You shouldn’t have told Pat that I was trying to turn Bertelle against you, Sylvia,” she said at last. “He doesn’t know me well enough yet—maybe he never will know me well enough—to realize that I’m not the girl to stoop to such littleness. But you should know me better.”

“The little girl knew that I had called her a goblin, she knew what I said about her being flower-girl at your wedding. And how could she know those things if you didn’t tell her?”

“There’s an extension phone in Pat’s library.”

“Oh! Why, the sneaking little—”

“There you go again! Bertelle happened to pick up the phone to use it just when you were saying those things—”

“She didn’t have to listen.”

“One hears without listening, Sylvia. It wasn’t done deliberately. But just those few words burned themselves on that small heart, and she will always remember and hold them against you.”

Sylvia laughed. “Don’t be silly. She’s only a kid. I can make her forget all about the business after I’ve known her a bit. Young or old, they’re all alike, Jeanie—just butter ’em up enough, make them think that you think they’re wonderful, and it’s all duck-soup.”

Yes, thought Jean, I suppose it is. And maybe it will be that way with Pat—all you’ll have to do is whistle and he’ll come running back to you.

Bertelle came up from the river, Peter walking beside her. She gave Sylvia a little bob of a courtesy and a murmured, “Good morning, Miss Clyde.” She had promised Jean last night as they lay awake in the moonlight that she would be polite to Sylvia.

“Good morning, Bertelle.” Sylvia smiled at her with warm friendliness. “I hope you will like me better now. I did not mean to be unkind to you when I spoke over the telephone to Jean. I had never seen you; how was I to know that you were so pretty?”

Bertelle was embarrassed. She looked accusingly at Jean. “Oh, Jeanie, why did you tell her that I—”

“Self-defense, my darling little sugar-loaf. She thought I told you what she said, and she’s already got Patrick thinking I did too. Much as I love you, I have to keep their thinking straight or there’ll be no living here for me.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Bertelle,” said Sylvia in her softest voice. “I was all wrong about you, and I hope you will forgive me and learn to like me. You see, I want to be your friend.”

The black eyes were stubborn, but the little girl’s mouth softened a bit; her nature was so warm, so outgoingly kind, that it was hard for her to harbor malice. Still, she did not surrender to Sylvia’s blandishments. Young as she was, she had an old wisdom and a power to look deep into those about her. She pressed close to Jeanie and laid her head against Jean’s shoulder.

“Jeanie is my maman,” she said quietly, stoutly, as is proclaiming a great faith. “She will always love me best.”

“Well, you can spare me a little bit of your love, can’t you?” coaxed Sylvia. “I won’t be greedy and want it all, you know—but I couldn’t bear to have you hate me.”

“I won’t hate you. Jeanie says it is a bad thing to hate people; so does Patrick. I liked you very much once upon a time. When Patrick came back from England he brought your picture—”

“Oh!” Sylvia’s long lashes drooped over the violet eyes, and under them her swift, calculating look went to Jean. “Why, yes, I think I did give him one when he was over there. Do you mind, Jeanie?”

“Not I.” Jean was rather enjoying herself now. She was beginning to learn a few things. Now she knew how Bertelle had come to ask her about Sylvia. Pat had brought her picture—she always had as many as a screen star, always with some sultry lines scrawled across them. She wondered what had been written on Pat’s; she hadn’t seen it anywhere since she had come to Uplands.

“Why did Patrick tear up your picture, Sylvia?” asked Bertelle with the unabashed directness of the very young. “One day I saw him pick it up from his desk and tear it up and throw it in the wastebasket.”

Sylvia’s face was like a lovely mask, but Jean knew that inwardly she was seething and that it wouldn’t take too much to make her explode. She was taking a beating from Bertelle—a cruel setback—and she hated to have anything go against her. Jean could figure this one out all right: Pat had a rich Irish temper, and no doubt when he had received the letter—the one she had read in part—where Sylvia called off their romance so casually just because she feared she would have the task of looking after a crippled child—Pat had lost that temper and the lovely Sylvia had gone ignominiously into the wastebasket.

“I don’t understand, Bertelle. I can’t see why he would want to do that. I gave him my picture in friendship. We were great friends, you see, when he was over in England. I give my photograph to lots of people.”

“Jeanie doesn’t. Pat has only a little snapshot of her, and she is wearing a uniform, and it’s kind of blurred so you can’t tell how pretty she is.”

“Did you mind it when Patrick tore up my picture?”

“Well—yes, I did. I took the pieces from the wastebasket after Pat went to the city and I pasted them on a cardboard so that you couldn’t even tell where it had been torn—he just tore it across, you see.”

“Oh, that was sweet of you! You must have liked me then.”

Bertelle looked uncomfortable. “Well, I cut you all up and made a jigsaw puzzle out of you.”

Jean’s laughter was rich. Cruel, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. Sylvia was something to behold now—white with rage, the eyes snapping with sheer wickedness, her slim shoulders trembling. She wasn’t used to anything like this and it wasn’t in her to take it in good part.

She turned on Jean with cold fury. “Laugh, you little fool! Better get a laugh in now, because I promise you, there’ll be no more chances for laughter. If you knew—”

Jean stayed her with the palm of a brown hand. “Not now, Sylvia. I don’t want to hear anything more from you, and anyway, Bertelle has great big ears, haven’t you, darling?”

Bertelle giggled. “I’m sorry about your picture—really I am, Sylvia—but it was fun trying to get the pieces of your hair to fit right. Pat helped me.”

“It would be harder to get the pieces of someone’s heart to fit right, I fancy,” said Sylvia, cruelly sullen. “Maybe you’ll get a real jigsaw puzzle soon—a real hard one.”

“Of someone’s heart? Oh, I don’t think I’d like that.”

“Might be fun, you know.”

Jean was looking at her cousin—as she had so often looked—with wonder, with an utter lack of ability to comprehend such a nature as Sylvia’s. There was no wound too deep or cruel for Sylvia to inflict, no trick mean enough for her to balk at. Right now she wanted to destroy, to smash things. Why, Jean wondered, had she not come out with the reason for Pat’s tearing up her picture. It wasn’t like her to spare anyone’s feelings, least of all Jean’s. Maybe she was afraid of Pat, too wise to try any funny business in his house and with his wife.

Still, it wasn’t like her to be afraid.

“Bertelle—” Jean’s brown hands cupped Bertelle’s face, a bit stricken at the havoc her disclosure had wrought but with a rather happy look in the depth of her eyes—“you go and ask Elspeth to help you get ready to go to town. We have to see Paul at the hospital this morning. And I don’t think you should have told Sylvia that Pat tore up her picture.”

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think. I can give you the pieces, Sylvia, if you like.”

Sylvia didn’t answer. She was lighting a cigarette, and when she had it lighted she blew the smoke out in a jet of utter exasperation.

“Such childishness!” she said when Bertelle had gone. “Men never cease to act like schoolboys. I shouldn’t have given him my photo anyway.”

“Why not? You don’t think I’d mind, do you—even though he was engaged to me? I don’t mind at all—” Jean smiled, still thinking of the explosion over the jigsaw puzzle—“especially since he tore you up, darling. Now, if he’d tucked you away among his souvenirs, then I might be jealous. But one can’t—forgive me—one simply can’t be jealous of a jigsaw puzzle.”

“Listen, my sweet—” Sylvia turned on her like a puma—“I’ve had just about as much from you and little poison-ivy there as I can take. I’ve never heard you laugh at me before, and I don’t like to be laughed at—”

“Not even when you’re funny?” Jean for once was really having a good time with Sylvia. For the very first time she seemed to have the upper hand of Lady Machiavelli, but she was smart enough to know there was a lot more here than met the eye.

“Why did Pat tear up your picture, Sylvia? It seems a funny thing to do.”

Touché! Sylvia’s hackles fell slowly and into her eyes where, only a moment ago, had blazed fury, there crept a crafty, wary look. And the answer Jean had expected: “Because I refused to marry him,” did not come.

“Why, we had a bit of a flirtation while he was in England. Did you know? Did he ever mention it to you or talk about me?”

“Never. But I knew of course that you were trying to get him away from me—you were quite barefaced about that, you recall. What I did not know, Sylvia—” she was tired of fencing, tired of playing the too sharp, knife-edged game—“was that you did succeed in taking him from me.”

Sylvia’s lovely lips parted.

“You knew this all the time!” Her voice was strained. “And yet—I thought you said Patrick never talked to you about me—about us. Did he say—”

“He never mentioned your name, Sylvia—not once!”

A strange look passed over Sylvia’s face which she had managed to restore pretty well to its usual sweet composure.

“I see,” she murmured. “Well, look—how did you find out? We didn’t want to hurt you.”

“He didn’t, you mean. Not you—I know you too well to think it wouldn’t have made you very happy to tell me you’d managed to break our engagement.”

“Really, Jean—”

“Quite. The way I found out about it—you’d better know now, I think—was when I picked up an old letter of yours, thinking it was mine. It was the letter in which you told him to go ahead and marry me, that Bertelle was too much for you to take on—”

Sylvia, eyes narrowed, was staring out at the river. “And you didn’t tell him that you knew? You didn’t tax him with being ready to ditch you—”

“No. I said nothing. I kept my mouth shut, as I’ve learned to do from long years of knowing you, Sylvia. I waited for him to come out with it like the man I thought he was—but he didn’t say anything.”

“And you married him even while you were sure he loved me! You took him—”

“I married him on account of Bertelle.” She could say this; she could almost believe it. Yes, she could look Sylvia squarely in the eye and say it, but at heart she knew she had married Pat because—and only because—she loved him and wanted to be his, to belong to him on any terms. “Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheels, less than the flower that grows beside thy door—”

But pride would not let her tell that to Sylvia, and Sylvia, for some reason, had not rubbed in the fact that she had married Sylvia’s cast off lover.

“You’re not serious.” Sylvia did not seem to know what to believe, but she knew Jean well enough to marvel at her for taking Patrick on the rebound. “He didn’t say he was sorry about—having turned to me—didn’t rub his nose in the dust or—”

“I told you,” said Jean, “he didn’t even mention your name.”

“Well—” Sylvia seemed relieved. “And he still doesn’t know that you had found out about us?”

“Don’t know. And I can’t say that I care very much. He let me come over here, let me go on thinking I was the one, and that he was the same man I knew in England. And he had promised the little girl that she would have what she had never known and always craved—a new maman. We were all ready for the wedding and the little one had her goblin suit—” Sylvia flushed at the dig—“when I chanced to read your letter, thinking it was an old one of mine. A few lines and, bang, there went my hope of happiness. Sylvia, why do you do these things?”

“Why, it was one of those things that just seem to happen. It couldn’t be helped. He met me and fell in love with me.”

“You knew he was promised to me, yet you did everything in your power to take him from me.”

“Darling! You must admit you didn’t do much to try to hold him. You were always running off to work at those beastly clinics, always helping the poor and the maimed. Why didn’t you join the Poor Claires or some nursing sisterhood anyway? Being in love and being married is a full time job.”

“How can you tell?”

Sylvia smiled wickedly. “Just because I’m single. I marvel at how little the married ones try to hang onto their men. I never saw one I couldn’t whistle away with my little supersonic whistle.”

“Sometimes I think you are part devil.”

“So what? I’m not part fool anyway. Are you doing any more to hold Patrick’s love now?”

“Why? Are you going to try again to take him from me?”

“Would I be fool enough to tell you?” There was a shrewd, calculating look in Sylvia’s eyes, a look that warned Jean to be on her guard.

“Well,” she shrugged, “I should know what to expect from you by this time. I’ve had a long apprenticeship.” She gave Sylvia a coldly defiant look. “If you can take him from me, go ahead. In spite of all you say, I don’t think the man you have to fight for and scheme for and cheat for is really worth having.”

“Then you’re too naïve to be allowed abroad by yourself. The kind of love you dream about simply doesn’t exist outside of the Bronte sisters or the movies. Do you mean to say you wouldn’t even fight to hold Patrick’s love?”

“If I was sure I had it—yes.”

“If you were—” A sudden surmise came into those big violet eyes and the full mouth widened in a smile. Deep, deep thoughts inside that exquisite head—deep as the seas. Perhaps she has guessed that I’ve never given myself to Patrick, thought Jean. That would make her happy.

But if Sylvia had guessed the sad truth she said nothing about it. She seemed to feel better now, though; more assured of herself and more at ease. It didn’t bother Jean. She had long since ceased to lie awake nights trying to outsmart Sylvia with her snake-cunning and utter lack of scruples. She wasn’t going to begin again. If Pat wanted her—well—

She found Bertelle all arrayed in a little Alice blue frock and white linen jockey-cap, playing with a jigsaw puzzle while she waited. She looked down at the dark, sun-tanned little creature, so intent in putting together the Citadel of Quebec. Then she thought of the Sylvia jigsaw, of that beautiful, beautiful face all cut up to make a puzzle; of Pat helping Bertelle to put it together.

“When Pat helped you put Sylvia’s puzzle picture together, Bertelle, did he know what it was?”

“Oh, no. It was all colored, you know, and I got Elspeth to paste it on fibre-board, and it was cut out with a fretsaw, just like a real puzzle. I have it yet. I put it away. It was nice. Hard, too; all the pieces were small.”

“What did Pat say when he found what picture the pieces made?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, Jeanie—I mean I couldn’t say it because it’s a mortal sin.”

At St. Ronan’s Hospital, Paul had a new diathermic massage apparatus that he wished to try on Bertelle. He was hopeful, he had told Jean, who had passed on the glad news to Patrick, that in time, with long and patient treatment and manipulation, he could restore to Bertelle almost the full use of the crippled leg. This, too, he told to Bertelle, who, from liking him at the very first, had come to idolize him now as the god who would give her again the power to run and dance and walk proudly with her sisters.

Jean, with the supervisor’s permission, changed to a nurse’s uniform and helped Paul with the apparatus, which was a new departure but somewhat similar to one they had used in England.

She felt a thrill of happiness, a sense of fulfillment she had not known in weeks, as she stood beside Paul, looking down on Bertelle, into the black eyes that gazed up at them with perfect trust.

Paul’s hands were slender, deft, beautiful to watch. Now and then he glanced at her, and the dark eyes danced with a look of satisfaction and complete accord.

“Good to have my old team-mate back again, Jeanie,” he said, when they strolled out into the sun-lounge, leaving Bertelle to rest after the hour-long treatment. “D’you suppose you can come in here and work with me two or three times a week? The girls here are good, but a lot of this new stuff is hard on them for a while. You and I are a pair of old hands when it comes to treating the little lame ducklings.”

“Why—” She hesitated, not because she didn’t want to come, but because she wondered what Patrick would think about it. Then, remembering last night, she told herself it didn’t matter what he thought.

“I’ll be glad to, Paul. I’ll start whenever you want me to.”

“You’ve already started, angel-cake.” He grinned at her quizzically. “I suppose I’m doing the wrong thing by taking a brand-new bride away from her husband, but when it comes to these—” he waved his hand at the ward where the little children were—“nothing else seems so very important. Pat won’t mind too much.”

“No.” Jean’s mouth drooped a little. “He won’t mind at all. Anyway, Sylvia will be around all summer to console him.”

“Oh!” Paul looked at her in wise surmise. “So you think the moon-maiden is making a play for him.”

“She as much as told me so, Paul. I’m so weary of Sylvia, of the Sylvias of this world.” Her lips quivered slightly now, and Paul rested a brown hand on her arm and said, “Steady, young ’un. Take it easy. A wench like Sylvia Clyde is not worth a single tear from a woman like you. So I tell you, and so I know, for I’ve seen you in times and circumstances when one cannot be other than herself, and you were pure gold, sister—you assayed a hundred percent.”

“Thank you, Paul.” She took a grip on herself, and managed to smile at him. “I needed that, and it surely helps; it’s like giving the needle to one who is sinking.”

“Oh, surely not that bad, Jeanie.”

“I won’t weep on your shoulder, Paul—nor on anybody’s. It helps to know that I was good at my work and that I can go back to it again. Maybe I should have stayed at it. Certainly I was happy there at Braithwaite, and it was heaven being with the children. I was glad to have Bertelle to care for when I came here to Maine, but the whole thing is snafu now.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“You have enough to worry about without playing father-confessor or Dr. Kinsey or Mr. Fixit to me. I’ll spare you, Paul. I have an idea you know the picture pretty well anyway.”

“Well, I know what Sylvia can do with a man—just about any man. I get a bit dizzy myself when I’m with her in the moonlight, but I’m not fool enough to forget that the moon isn’t always full. She could make one forget. But surely Pat Hayden—”

“Pat fell in love with her. I don’t believe he’s ever got over it. And I’m not playing second fiddle to any woman.”

“I can believe you.” Paul’s eyes were soft and full of quiet admiration, maybe more than that, for this proudly independent girl he had worked with so long. What fools men were, he thought, to pass up such as Jean Hallam for the like of Sylvia. Beautiful too—solid, clean and wholesome, with little need for the lipstick, the eye-shadow and all the rest that was part of Sylvia’s stock in trade.

They had luncheon in the hospital cafeteria. It was all so like old times to Jean that she found herself enjoying every minute of it.

“You look like someone who has come home again after a long absence,” said Paul. “Sort of gets in your blood, this business.”

Jean nodded. “It has its deep satisfactions and its rewards too.” But she thought of many women she had known and she wondered if, when they were old and out to grass, they really had enough to look back on.

She had hoped for so many other things, new wonders of living, new delights to be explored, new ways of service and happiness, and here she was, thrust right back into the old familiar groove, and it would be easy—so very easy—to let herself go, to take up where she had left off. She could have a good job here tomorrow, she knew; already she had agreed to give a considerable part of her time to the work.

She took Bertelle to see Pinocchio for the third time and let her munch popcorn to her heart’s content. In the late afternoon they drove back to Uplands, the little girl tired but happy, falling into quiet moments of dreaming when, Jean knew, she pictured herself well and strong again, running through the fields and woods with Peter.

Pat and Sir William were back early. The jeep they were riding had skidded over a bank and given the older man a bad shaking and an injured leg that would keep him quiet for a few days. Sylvia, who deeply resented anyone’s getting hurt and upsetting the regular routine, hovered around looking very ornamental and utterly useless.

“You’ll have to put up with us for a while, Jeanie,” she said. “Father will persist in thinking that he’s still as nimble as a mountain-goat, and there’s no telling him to ease up.”

From some things that Paul had let drop during the course of their luncheon, Jean had gathered that her uncle hadn’t much choice about the matter; things were not going well for him and he had come on this trip in the hope of rebuilding his fortunes.

She tried to put away from her the thought that the fear of poverty had a lot to do with Sylvia’s revived interest in Pat Hayden, but she knew that Sylvia dreaded poverty worse than death.

She told Pat about the new treatment Bertelle was taking when they were alone in the garden that evening. Sylvia was sitting with her father.

“Paul has the biggest hopes for this cure. The thing really does wonders. I saw something of it in England and I’ve known it to accomplish cures where the case seemed utterly hopeless. It would be heaven for Bertelle.”

“Heaven indeed. She’s such a game kid. She has a real fighting heart. So much like Moyra when she was small—”

He fell silent, and Jean knew what he was thinking. His own life, without Bertelle, would have been a pretty lonely one. With all her heart she wanted him to be happy, wanted him to have what he really wished for—yes, even if it was the unpredictable Sylvia.

“I’m sorry about last night, Jeanie,” he said gruffly. “But I—well, I had a drink too many, I fear, and you women drive me crazy. I can’t figure you out and I don’t know where I stand.”

“Maybe your bewilderment resides in yourself, Pat,” she said gently. “Not in any woman. Maybe you don’t know what you want—or maybe you do and can’t have it. I—well, perhaps it’s just as well you wouldn’t have any of me. We don’t seem to have anything solid to cling to any more.”

“But we can’t go on like this—”

“For Bertelle we can—and we must. You’re not that selfish, I know. We’ll have to spare her any shock, any unpleasantness. I don’t think it will be so hard.”

“Oh, don’t you?” He looked at her, his lips narrowed, brows drawn down. “I thought you were a woman—real and warm. You don’t seem to be. But I can tell you I’m a man and I—”

“You have your work—you can have your love before long. As for me, I’m going to help Paul in the hospital—”

“You’re what?”

“Oh, you heard me well enough, Pat. Paul is lacking in skilled assistants there at St. Ronan’s until he can train some girls to manipulate these new machines. I worked on them in England, and anyway I’d be in there a great deal with Bertelle—”

He looked at her gravely for a moment before he spoke. “I see,” he said slowly. “I don’t think you ever got the hospital out of your blood anyway. It seems as if the work you did spoiled you for anything else. Well, if that’s the way you want it—”

He shrugged and turned away.

“It’s only a few times a week,” said Jean unhappily. “It won’t make any difference. Anyway, Sylvia will be around for a while, and Uncle Will—”

Pat said nothing. She felt sorry for him, then told herself that she was a fool for doing so. He would go back to Sylvia if she wanted him, and it seemed now that she really did. Bertelle no longer seemed an obstacle to their love, not a very formidable one anyway, for it was likely that Bertelle would soon be well and it would be easy to send her off to school some place where she wouldn’t cramp Sylvia’s style.

Maud Keller, who owned the farm next to Uplands, had invited them all—those who had been at Jean’s dinner party—to her beach cottage at Martin Head.

“Broiled lobsters, steamed clams—ambrosia,” announced Sir William. “Lame leg! Why, three or four of them wouldn’t keep me away from a feast like that. Used to go to them when I was out here years ago. Never knew food to taste so good.”

He was telling this to Jean the afternoon of the party. Jean had been nursing him, dressing the rather nasty gash he had received in his leg when the jeep overturned. She had always liked her Uncle Will Clyde, and always felt sorry for him. He was always gay, always ready with a cheery word and a merry laugh, but she knew he had never been really happy with his wife, and that Sylvia, in spite of her beauty, her popularity and all the glory she had attained in the social pages, was a bitter disappointment to him.

He sat in the garden now, looking like a nabob, with his shock of white hair and bushy brows and ruddy cheeks, a cigar clamped in his strong jaw. The keen gray-blue eyes studied her fondly as he recalled the small, lovely girl who had come to him after his sister’s death. Neither Mab, his wife, nor Sylvia, who ruled the world of Berlminster Court, had ever wanted her, but for one of the rare few times in his life Will Clyde had been firm.

“You’ll be good to this child,” he warned them. “I don’t expect you’ll ever be able to love her; that would be asking too much. But kindness and decency, that you can show her. She’s a quiet but spirited little thing and you’ll never break her, so don’t try.”

Well, they had never overdone the kindness, that was sure, but they were wise enough to know that in this one thing the easygoing Sir William meant what he said, and as long as he was about Jeanie was treated quite decently. Anyway, from the start, she was a helpful, willing child, and slipped, without showing any resentment, into the role of maid-in-waiting and general whipping-girl for the pampered Sylvia.

And she’d weathered the little snubs, the long years of taking a back seat to her cousin, and in the end, he thought, she had done far better than Sylvia would ever do, and had become, he was quick to admit, a far better woman than his daughter.

“Jeanie,” he said now, “I’m so glad to see you so well situated here, so happy, so in your proper place, presiding over your own ménage so capably and well. It’s what I always hoped for you, my dear. You were good and obedient and patient. And you’re happy now.” He looked at her shrewdly. “Hang onto your happiness, Jeanie; fight for what you have. Don’t let—”

He stopped and stared at the curling smoke of his cigar. Jean could tell what he was thinking. He was wise and he knew Sylvia.

“I didn’t want Sylvia to come with me,” he said presently. “And I’m not happy that she is here. But you’re strong, Jeanie. You’re able to face her now, aren’t you?”

She did not immediately answer, for she didn’t quite know what to tell this good man. She knew that all his life he had been forced to strain himself, to work harder than he should, to do things he really despised, just so that his greedy womenfolk could keep up a grand front.

Sylvia and Pat came up from the river, where they had been sailing in a sleek chrome-and-mahogany cruiser, knifing through the water at terrific speed. Sylvia’s long blonde hair, tossed by the wind, gleamed with silvery lights, and there was, for a rarity, natural color in her cheeks. She was laughing up at Pat Hayden, clinging to his arm, her eyes holding his in some shared secret.

Sir William swore softly. “See what I mean?” he said. “Gad! I’ve seen her work on you a hundred times the same way, the little pirate. You have to stop her this time, Jeanie—have to fight her. The trouble is that you will always fight fair, while she uses every trick in the book. My own daughter—but I have to warn you against her.”

“Don’t fret, Uncle Will; I’ll be all right. I know Sylvia as well as you do.”

“And you’ve always let her ride roughshod over you—just the same as I have. What we both should have done—”

Pat and Sylvia had come close to them now. Sylvia’s quick look went over them, and a mocking little smile quirked her lips. “Jeanie and the English uncle,” she murmured. “Far better than any old Dutch uncle. Jeanie’s the kind of girl Dad should have had for a daughter—the serious, solid type. Sometimes I think he wonders if I’m not a changeling. Are you still determined to go to this beach party, Father?”

“Oh, yes. Wouldn’t miss it. Pat can lend me a shoulder now and then if I meet any tough hurdles.”

“I’ll be right there, sir. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble. And Maud Keller’s parties are always good. I suppose we’d better soon get under way. We can all go in the station wagon; that way we can make you comfortable, Sir William.”

“Don’t worry about me, Pat—I could travel in a wheelbarrow if you could persuade Josh there to do the driving.”

“Just a great big kid!” laughed Sylvia, but there was a sting in the words that seemed to imply that her father should take a back seat.

Sir William didn’t like it. “Better that,” he said, “than to be born old, with too much of what passes for wisdom, Sylvia. There’s a beatitude that should have been included with the others: Blessed are the young in heart for they shall not grow weary.”

He looked, when he spoke, not at his daughter, who heard him with a bored smile, but at Jeanie, and his eyes were gentle. Pat saw the look and his own followed it.

They drove the short winding miles to Maud Keller’s cottage under a round moon, and the night was almost balmy with the lingering heat of the late June day. They heard the roll and crash of the great waves of the Atlantic as they drove onto the clam-shell area beside the cottage and sat in silence to watch the beauty of sea and sky.

The sea-food, the big Eastport lobsters, the succulent clams cooked in driftwood fires on the open beach, were fare that would please the gods, and all but brought the tears to Sir William’s eyes just as they brought the sodium bicarbonate to his bedside long hours later.

Then the same moon shone on the water that had lighted the guests the night at Uplands, and there was dancing on the verandah of the beach cottage, and when the surf shone like whipped silver in the moonlight the hardier ones went for a swim.

Maud Keller went, and Jean and Paul Blake and Mark O’Connor, running free and laughing over the sands still warm from the heat of the day.

“It’s awfully cold,” warned Maud. “Just a few degrees below freezing. Sure you two can take it?” She looked at Paul Blake and Jeanie. “It’s not so bad close inshore where the sand has warmed it, but watch out further out, and watch the undertow.”

But Jean found it utterly exhilarating, the savor of brine rich in her nostrils, the slow rise and falling of the billows rocking her softly, holding her up without the need for her to do much paddling.

There was a life-raft moored a fair distance off shore, and they swam out there and dived and played in the silver sea, until the night began to cool and the raft to rock and heave and tug at its moorings.

Jean and Paul Blake were the last to go, having stayed to finish the cigarettes that Paul had brought in the waterproof pocket of his trunks.

They were both strong swimmers. Often they had swum together on the North Sea beaches hard by Braithwaite Memorial, but this water was colder, wilder, even on a night of fair calm, than any they had ever seen.

And there was the tug of the undertow. Jean felt it reaching for her, clawing for her with hideous formless hands, holding her, pressing her away, away, from the shore she sought; the waves were higher, rising and falling in slow and terrible majesty.

She fought with all her strength, striving to keep her head and not yield to the panic that threatened to engulf her. She felt so small, so utterly feeble against the sea that only moments before had seemed so benign. She could not see the lights on shore; she seemed to have drifted a great distance.

She was lost and afraid, ready to fight blindly against the sea, knowing that to do so, to lose her head, meant certain destruction.

“Paul! Paul!”

Almost unnoticed he was beside her, even as a wave slapped her and drove her under, choking and blinded.

“Steady now!” His arms, his hands, had the strength of steel as he seized her. “Kick with me, strong and slow, and don’t be afraid. Don’t panic. We’ll get out of this, my darling.”

But it was a long, hard struggle that left her so spent and gasping, when finally they reached the blessed sanctuary of the shallows, that Paul had to gather her up in his arms and carry her up on the beach.

For a moment he held her, looking down at her face in the moonlight.

“Thank God!” he said, his own breath coming hard and short. “I was afraid for a while we weren’t going to make it. We’ve drifted a long way from the cabin.”

He put her down slowly, and for a moment, until her strength came back, she clung to him, cold and shivering.

His arms tightened about her as it seemed she was going to fall; then his head was bent to hers and his mouth kissed her sea-cold, sea-salt lips with a passion that warmed and fired them.

“Please, Paul—” She tried to free herself from his arms.

“Jeanie! Jeanie!” His lips found hers again. “If I had lost you. I love you so. I—”

Neither of them heard the footsteps in the sand. They heard Sylvia’s soft voice saying, “So sorry to interrupt, children. We just came around the big rock yonder, and for a moment we were sure you were two sea-deities—or rather just one, the way you were standing.”

Pat was with her. Even in the moonlight Jean could see the storm of anger in his eyes.

“I was caught in the undertow,” she whispered. “Paul pulled me out. I was—”

“And he starts right in to collect his reward,” said Pat savagely. “It looked like one of those South Sea romances. Couldn’t let you go. You’re not fooling anybody. Did he have to kiss you to bring you back to life—”

“Don’t be a fool, Hayden.” Paul faced him angrily. “Jeanie was almost drowned. I managed to fish her out and I kissed her, yes—because she’s the most precious thing in the world to me.”

“So I gather. You followed her out here, didn’t you—even when you knew she was coming out to marry me?”

“I—How do you—” Paul did not attempt to deny it.

“I happen to be on the board of governors of St. Ronan’s Hospital,” said Pat. “I know you passed up several better offers to come to us.”

“Well, I did—and, yes, if you want to know it, the fact that Jean Hallam was coming out here had a lot to do with it—everything to do with it. I didn’t think she was going to find happiness out here. I knew you had been two-timing her with Sylvia in England. So I came. I don’t think you’re the man for Jeanie.”

Pat bore down on him, and his fist shot out, sending the lighter man to the sand. But Paul was up almost before he hit the ground, and his own right cracked against Pat’s jaw with a sound like a rifle shot, sending him spinning.

“For heaven’s sake—” Jean called to them, and Sylvia ran to Pat who had fallen to his knees. Then Maud and Mark O’Connor and some others came from around the rock.

Jean looked at Paul, who in turn was looking at his hand. She knew what had happened; she had heard the crack of the bone—the exquisite framework of the hands of the healer.

“Is it bad, Paul?”

“I’ll live,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s run before you get pneumonia. Rugged country, this.”

The beach party broke up soon after that, all the laughing life knocked out of it; even the moon looked cold and wan and the wind from the sea blew chill. Jean had been given a hot drink and wrapped warmly and felt no ill effects from her close escape. The cold, the depression that held her and refused to be shaken off, came from the events that followed.

In the station wagon, on the way home to Uplands, only Sir William, who had really enjoyed himself, made any effort to keep the party alive and the conversational ball rolling, and even his skilled efforts soon bogged down against Pat’s dark silence, Sylvia’s demure forebearance and Jean’s weariness. The old man had a fair idea of what had happened, but he did not know it all and wouldn’t blame Sylvia, though he knew her propensity for causing trouble, until he heard the facts.

Jean went quickly to her room, not wanting to talk, not wanting to hear any more from Pat or from anyone else tonight. She was weary and beaten, her body from the terrible battle with the undertow, her spirit from the display of primitive emotion from Pat and from Paul Blake. She had never before seen two men fighting over a woman except in plays, and it had always seemed childish to her and without meaning. But there had been nothing at all childish in the way those two had gone about the business of marring each other; there had been something white-hot and savage and wicked, and it had frightened and unnerved her.

Sylvia, she knew, would have loved it. The sight of two men battering each other, thirsting for each other’s blood, would have satisfied some elemental hunger in her, but in Jean it caused only a great sadness.

She went quickly to sleep, smothered under vast waves of weariness. In her dreams she was tossed about by great green-crested billows, fighting hopelessly against the terrible pull and tug of the Fundy tide and when she awoke the taste of brine was on her lips and the feel of sand on her body and never before in all her life had she felt so utterly bone-weary and exhausted.

Bertelle, who always waited until she awakened, had looked into her room three times before she saw the dark curls and the bright eyes and called to her to come.

“You must have been bien fatiguée, Jeanie.” Bertelle climbed onto the bed and studied her with deep interest. “Eh, mon dieu, and there is violet color under your eyes like Sylvia’s, only I know you did not put it there. Was it not a good party you had at Maud Keller’s? Always there is a lot of fun.”

“It wasn’t so hot, darling.” Jean let it all come back to her. “Oh, it started out all right and we were having a grand time; then—”

“That one?”

In spite of her weariness and deep depression, Jean could not help laughing. “That one,” of course, was Sylvia, and Bertelle was quite ready to blame her for everything from rain to ruin.

“No, darling—not that one; this one.”

“You! I do not believe it. What did you do—pull her hair?”

“Nothing like that. I went swimming in the moonlight with Paul and I went out too far, I guess, and was caught in the undertow, and it was all Paul could do to drag me out, and then—”

She couldn’t tell the little girl the rest of it. She could hardly yet realize the stark facts of it herself. But Paul had admitted following her to Canada—Paul who had never spoken seriously to her of love, perhaps never had the courage—until it was too late.

“Were you frightened, Jeanie? When you were in the water and the tide was carrying you away?”

“I was frightened, you bet. I could never have got away from the current if it hadn’t been for Paul.”

“Paul should have a medal,” decided Bertelle. “One like Peter the Great’s. Once Peter swam out and saved a little boy who was drowning. It was right on that same beach at Martin Head where you were. Peter is strong as a horse. He caught that boy—his name was Barkley—right by the belt; then Barkley hung onto Peter’s collar. It’s a nice medal with a red ribbon, but Peter would sooner have a bone.”

“I dare say.” Jean began to comb the black, silken curls. “Peter has a true sense of values.”

“What did you give Paul for saving you—a kiss?”

“I—oh, don’t ask me, Bertelle.” She could still feel Paul’s lips on her mouth; she had never dreamed there was such passion in that quiet, earnest man. It unnerved her and made her uneasy, a bit afraid. Who was she to awaken such desire in any man? Such things were for Sylvia, for the girls with flirtatious manners and light hearts.

Paul had awakened no response in her—or had he? In those spent moments when they were freed at last from the threat of the tide, had she not been glad to relax in his arms and let her weakness lose itself in his great strength?

What do we do now? she thought. What shall I say to him when I see him? And his hand—his fingers that were so beautiful to watch—I hope that nothing has happened to them on account of me. I’m not worth it; no woman is worth it. A man like Paul—

She felt strangely humble that he should love her—humble and at the same time sad, for she knew that, much as she liked and respected him, she would never feel for him—or for any other man—the deep passion that had come to her when Pat Hayden first entered her life.

That, too, had been at a beach party, and the tall young American with his fair hair and blue eyes and body bronzed like an Indian’s had quickly captivated the shy, quiet young English girl, had made the slow red come to her cheeks when he first spoke to her, saying, “Are you really one of the party or a sea-maiden who has joined us unawares?”

From then on, “from that day forward,” it had been only Patrick, and the hours without him were empty and futile; those with him charged with golden sunlight and the colored beauty of a hundred gems.

And now—there was nothing, not any one thing, it seemed to Jean, left of all that loveliness. Misunderstanding, deceit, treachery, cheap compromise with a love that, for her, had burned with a pure white flame. Only the lovely face of Sylvia Clyde now, only Sylvia weaving the old unfailing spell about him; and now this new revelation of Paul’s love for her.

She wished, for a dark, low moment, that she had never seen these people and never come to this strange land. Then she looked down at the child, at the dark ripples of beauty under the comb, and felt ashamed at herself. This little one had needed her and now loved her, and her coming had done much for the poor, afflicted body, had brought new life and courage to her.

“Is ‘that one’ going away today, Jeanie? Is Sir William’s leg well enough for him to travel?”

“Yes, their car is coming at noon. Won’t you be sorry?”

“I’ll be sorry about him. He’s nice. He’s like Peter; he’s good and kind.”

“He’s all that, Bertelle. When I was a little girl like you he was very good to me. I was like you, small one—I had no parents and he was my uncle the same as Pat is yours. He had a great big house and garden and I went there to live.”

“Was it fun?”

“Not always. But it was my home and I was glad to be there and to have someone. Come now—we must go down to breakfast or Elspeth will scold us.”

It was a quiet breakfast-time. Sylvia, of course, shone and looked like a cat who could take just a little bit more cream. Sir William, walking on an ash-stick, found it hard to make his usual fun with Bertelle. Pat was sporting a black and blue mark on the upper part of his jaw.

Fortunately, Nash Colville’s big gray sedan rolled up the driveway shortly after they were finished, and the Clydes, Sir William with the aid of Josh Agnew, were soon ensconced in its rich depths. Then there was only Sylvia’s white-gloved hand waving goodby as they went down the winding road of crushed limestone.

Bertelle went off somewhere with Josh, who was pocketing a tip that reminded him of the old plush days of easy spending. Peter ambled after them. Old Meg, the cat, purred on the verandah rail, and there was only Jean and Pat standing there in the gray morning with the thick fog of Fundy rolling in from the sea, making Jean shiver as she thought again of the awful majesty of the tide.

Pat lit a cigarette after she had declined one, but he threw it away after a few puffs and glowered moodily out at the sodden trees. “I suppose,” he said, “I should say I’m sorry for the hassle Blake and I got into last night—”

“Maybe it would be just as well not to say anything more about it for the time being. There’s been harm enough—”

“Oh, his precious fingers, I suppose. Well, I—”

“They are precious, you know.” She looked at him gravely, pain in the brown eyes. “They do so much good; they heal and comfort and push away death and draw new life into the world. It seems sort of pitiful that they should be sacrificed for some little thing—”

“You call it a little thing?” His voice shook with anger. “You in his arms and—and not unhappy there—”

“I didn’t have strength to stand, Pat; that was why I was in his arms. He pulled me out of that terrible undertow and saved my life, and you reward him by trying to break him in two.”

“I told you why I did it. Maybe I shouldn’t have lost my temper—but there it is. And I knew about him from the start. He followed you from England—”

“Oh, nonsense, Pat! He was coming out here anyway, and it wasn’t on my account that he came.”

“He just about admitted that it was,” said Pat doggedly. “And I know it was. Why should he come to such a piffling place as St. Ronan’s? He could have had a big job in the best hospitals in North America. He as much as said he felt sure our marriage wouldn’t work out, so he was coming along to take you when you tired of me.”

“When I tired—” She shook her head. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

“You don’t care for me, Jeanie—not the way you’d need to care to find real happiness.”

“You never gave me much chance to care, and since I’ve come here you’ve given me no reason whatever.”

“You’re sore because of what Blake said about Sylvia and me. Well, I should have told you about that long ago. I was going to before we were married; then something happened and I—”

“You didn’t need to tell me, Pat. You see, I knew all about it already.”

“You—” Pat’s jaw dropped and he clapped his hand to the sore part and said, “Darn it! That doc packs a wallop like a coal-handler. What are you trying to tell me, Jeanie? You knew that for a while I thought it was Sylvia—”

“Oh, don’t try to kid me, Pat, and don’t commit a worse sin of trying to kid yourself. You were all set to jilt me—I guess there’s still a place for that quaint old word—to throw me over and let me go my lonely way, while you gave your love to her.”

Pat’s face wore a stricken look, an utterly penitent look, as if he had kicked a puppy by some mischance or hurt a tiny kitten. “Jeanie! I didn’t think you knew. I didn’t want you ever to know. I thought—”

“Yes, I suppose, being a man and being you, Pat, you thought that it could readily be written off and forgotten—after she broke off your romance just because she was afraid her precious happiness would be spoiled by a crippled child. What a rotten thing! What a poor and sordid thing! I’m sorry and ashamed to think that I had any part of it.”

“If you knew about this, why did you have any part of it? Or did you just find out? Sylvia didn’t—”

“She was as fatuous as you about it. How did either of you think you could keep a thing like that secret?”

“How did you learn about it, and when?”

“Just before the wedding, Pat—in the darkest moment of my life, I learned about it. Recall the day you telephoned from town for some figures from your desk?”

“Quite well.”

“There were some letters in your desk which I thought were old ones of mine—and I looked at one—and I knew then that I was being married through pity, through a sense of duty or an unwillingness to hurt me or shame or whatever you wish to call it.”

“Ah, you poor kid! You make me feel like something a bit lower than a snake. Why didn’t you ditch me then—”

“Bertelle—it was for Bertelle.” She could not tell him that it was also because she loved him—loved him with all the strength and purity of her young heart.

“I could not disappoint her.” She stilled the trembling of her mouth. “She had her little yellow dress and she was walking on the clouds. Like me, she was halfway to heaven when the lift stuck. So I went through with it, Pat, and now I hope you know why I can’t pretend to love you, why I can’t—”

Pat was silent for a long time. The moisture dripped from the eaves and splashed on the leaves of the lilacs, and the air was heavily sweet with their sodden scent.

“I begin to understand,” he said at last. “And I can’t say that I blame you. I’ve been an awful fool and you were the one who had to pay most for my folly. I can tell you I love you and want you for my wife—”

“And I can’t believe you, Pat. How can you expect it? If she hadn’t broken off with you, I wouldn’t be here now. She would be your wife and the mistress of Uplands. And I think she’s sorry now she ever turned down the opportunity.”

“Yes,” said Pat, “she’s sorry.”

“Well, she has it again now. I don’t think she need worry too much about Bertelle’s being a drag on her or cramping her style too much. Bertelle will soon be better, and by the time she is ready to go away to school she will walk as well as the rest of her kind. Paul has promised—”

“Yes,” said Pat slowly. “Paul. I wonder that you ever turned from a smooth operator like Blake, a man with a great intelligence and a great brain, to waste yourself on a big lumberjack like me. Well—” he shrugged—“I suppose as the French say, tout s’arrange—everything arranges itself—if you give it time. I won’t bother you, Jean.” He looked at her with serious, sorrowful eyes. “I’ve made a thorough mess of the whole thing, I see now, and I’ll always regret the hurt I brought to you, for you’re a good girl—far too good for me—”

He turned quickly away and went into the house, leaving her shaken, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth to fight back the sobs that shook her.

It was all out now and there need be no more pretending, yet she felt as if this bringing his defection out into the open and facing the ugly fact at last had served only to drive the wedge deeper between them. Better perhaps to have gone on pretending.

Pat went off to the city shortly after luncheon—a quiet, subdued Pat who treated her with deference, with a humility she hated. She felt now as if she were the guilty party and at the root of all their troubles.

Bertelle was quick to notice that things were not as they should be here in this house she loved so much, between these two who were all her world. From the start she had sensed something wrong, something lacking, and her heart was troubled. This was not like her stories where the prince and princess, after they were married, lived a life of unending bliss, and in her troubled heart she wondered if she was the cause of it, if in any way she spoiled things for them.

“Will you and Patrick have another little girl or maybe a little boy for me to play with?” she asked when Jean took her upstairs after luncheon to give her the treatment Paul had prescribed.

Jean looked down at her and smiled a bit wanly. “Oh, perhaps, Bertelle, but right now we want you to have all our love. You’re as good as a half-dozen little boys and girls. Are you lonesome? We must have a picnic for you all.”

“I’m not lonesome—not ever with you and Pat. But I should like a picnic very much, with all those kids from the hospital. They live in the city and it’s ugly. Will they think you and Pat are my real father and mother?”

“Do you want them to, darling?”

“Yes; but it wouldn’t be right to fool them, would it? They all have fathers and mothers. I said I was getting a new mother; that was you. And they think Patrick is my father; I didn’t say he was only my uncle. Is that a sin?”

“Only a very little one. Patrick is like a father to you and loves you just as much as if you were his very own little girl.”

“That one said she would like to have me for her little girl, but I don’t think I’d like it. She’s awfully beautiful, but you don’t dare to touch her. It’s like my dolls—I’d sooner have Black Mandy with the stuffing coming out of her than Petronella, who can walk and wink and say mama.”

“Oh, you!” Jean laughed at last. “I agree with you, ma poupée—I’d sooner have a Black Mandy than a Petronella any day. Mandy, I bet, can wash and cook and do a thousand things that Petronella knows nothing about.”

“Sure. And Mandy smokes a clay pipe. Petronella smokes cigarettes.”

“Go to sleep now, Chatterbox. The fog is going away. Maybe when you wake up it will be fine and we can go outdoors and play.”

“You sleep too, Jeanie. You look tired today, and you’re sad, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m not sad,” she protested, but she knew it was no use trying to fool those clear-seeing eyes.

“Okay. I’ll go to sleep if it will make you happy. I’ll go to the other room because you might snore and wake me up.”

But Jean found it hard to sleep; she felt as if she would never know the quiet bliss of sleep again, as if all the rest of her life would be like this, a time of turmoil, of emotions torn and defeated, of dark hours where shone no pinpoint of light.

This life, she knew, would be utterly impossible, unlivable, if it were not for Bertelle. Seeing Patrick day after day, hearing his voice, knowing his strength and kindness, and wanting him as in her deep heart she wanted him.

One day, when Bertelle could stand the ugly hurt, she would go away. Not now. The child was already possessed by some formless, haunting fear. This Jean could tell from her long experience with children. The little girl wanted security, the security that came from having a father and a mother. And she had hoped to find it with the coming of Patrick’s new wife, her new maman.

And she had not found it. Shadows terrible, formless and menacing were still with her, and in her sleep Jean heard little plaintive whispering sighs and knew that she was not happy.

At long last, Jean fell asleep, deep down into the cradle of the billows once more, lost and annihilated by the power of the tide. Then strong arms were reaching out to her, rescuing her, drawing her to safety—and there was the shore, and soft lips were on her mouth drinking of its salty sweetness—

But it was not Paul Blake who held her in her dream. It was Pat, and his kiss was long and deep so that she sighed with utter bliss—

Then she awakened and it was Pat, and he was kneeling by her bedside and his lips hovered above hers and his eyes burned with a deep and consuming desire, his hands resting on her shoulders.

“Jeanie!” he whispered. “Oh, my darling—I couldn’t help it.”

She struggled up on the pillow, ready to push him away, ready to repulse the slightest advance. Oh no, she thought, not so easy, not so quick and sudden. She’s gone now and you’re lonely and I’m a woman—and you could take me and find a few hours happiness, or days or weeks, and then go to her.

He saw the change in her and knew it for what it was; then she gave him a smile and raised her mouth to his, asking for his kiss.

“You do care,” he whispered, his hands hurting her. “You do want me!”

She moved her mouth from his. “Bertelle,” she whispered, “is watching us from the door. It’s only an act—and it’s over.”

The color had ebbed from Pat’s face when he stood up and his eyes, when he looked at Jeanie, held something that she was afraid to face. In that moment, she thought with a shiver, he could have killed her, murdered her with his big hands. He looked at them now, flexing the brown fingers. His lips were tightly compressed and there were white spots at their corners.

Bertelle came into the room, laughing, and Jean warned him with a look not to do or say anything that would destroy the girl’s illusion. It had made Bertelle so happy to see them so and had swept away a host of those formless fears that had haunted her.

As for Jean—what it had done to her she felt frightened to admit. Fire had run in her blood and flame was within her, and perhaps if Bertelle had not come—

“You were sleeping like the princess in my book, Jeanie, and you might never have waked up if Pat hadn’t come and wakened you with a kiss.”

“That’s it, Bertelle.” Pat drew her to him and ran his fingers through her hair. “It’s all a story, isn’t it? All a fairy tale, and there never was anything real about it. A few characters going through the motions of a pretty play. And that’s why we have fairy tales, because life itself isn’t pretty and people aren’t like the story-book ones.”

“Why can’t they be, Pat?”

“Oh, just because they are people, I guess, and are made of real flesh and blood and often they don’t act the way they’d like to, because things push them around.”

Bertelle listened to him gravely, eyes wide, lips parted, trying hard to understand what he meant but loath to surrender her own story-book ideas of what the love of a man for a maid meant, of the way events should go.

Paul Blake had a bone broken in his hand. Jean saw the cast the moment she entered the sunny room in St. Ronan’s where he had his office. She looked at him without saying a word, and he met her gaze with the abashed expression of a small boy who has done wrong and waits for the inevitable harangue and the sharp cut of the birch.

“Sorry, Jeanie,” he muttered. “Well, in a way I am. I’m sorry that I hurt you.”

It was so much like Pat’s apology that she didn’t know whether to smile or sigh.

“You made a mess of your hand, Paul. Is it very bad?”

“Oh, no. It won’t take too long to heal, and anyway, I’m pretty good with my left. These Americans have skulls as hard as marble. That was my Sunday punch I threw at your husband, guaranteed to fell an ox.”

“Oh, Paul. It’s all so childish, so silly—”

“Is it?” He looked at her, a stubborn gleam in his eyes, then looked away. “I don’t think it is. Men are still men, even in this gadgeted and aseptic world, still get the same old savage satisfaction out of slugging each other over a woman. Didn’t you feel any reaction?”

“Yes, I think I disliked both of you.”

“You weren’t cheering for either side, I take it. Well, the judges, I believe, would call it a draw. It was quite a fight and you’d know you were in a battle.”

“Oh, stop it, Paul. I won’t have you fighting about me, do you hear. You’ll have to forget this utter nonsense—”

“It’s not that easy,” he said softly. “I tried to forget it in England. After you went away I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me—off my work, off my food, moping around like a sick calf. Then I began to realize what it was that made the big gaps in my life—it was you I wanted and you I missed so much. But I’d had this offer to come out to Maine some time before you went, and I was glad to take them up on it and come here to St. Ronan’s. I think you need me—I mean you yourself, Jeanie.”

“I like having you, Paul, but really you only complicate matters. And pretending to be surprised to find me here the day I came to see Bertelle—”

“Well, I put on a pretty good act.” Paul was not in the least abashed. “A man has his proper pride, you know.”

“You shouldn’t have come here. And now—that things have worked out like this, I don’t see how I can go on working in the hospital.”

Paul’s dark eyes showed dismay. “Oh, but you must, Jeanie. I need you more than ever now that my hand is bunged up. You simply can’t leave me.”

He came close to her and put his finger under her chin, tilting her face up to his, looking into her eyes with a depth of tenderness that stirred and unnerved her. He kissed her lips lightly.

“I promise you there’ll be nothing like that—if that is what you’re afraid of. I’ll be good.”

She moved away from him. “Well, you’ll have to be. This is an awfully small place, Paul, and it doesn’t take much to get them to talking and gossiping and speculating. You may be sure, if Pat noticed that you turned down better offers in order to come to St. Ronan’s, some of the others will remark it too.”

“Let them! Don’t worry, Jeanie; we’ll give them nothing to gab about.”

“Just the fact that we’re working together and that we knew each other in England will probably be enough to set their tongues to clicking and their heads to nodding. Then if they get an idea that Pat and I—”

“What about Pat and you?” He looked at her wisely and with hope mixed with sympathy in his eyes. “You don’t get along so well, do you? That was the way I thought it would be when I saw what went on between him and Sylvia down at Berlminster. I’m not telling tales out of school—you know all about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Paul.”

“Well, we won’t. But if things go wrong, if they give you a dirty deal, I want you to turn to me, Jeanie. I’ll be waiting and ready, and it was to be by your side that I did come here. I won’t bother you, but you must not think of leaving me alone here; the children need you as much as I do.”

“Well, I’ll carry on, Paul. I like the work and I know you need help, but the moment there’s any whisper or any connection between your name and mine, I’m through. This was all your doing and I’m not going to be blamed for any of it.”

“There will be nothing to worry about, I promise you. As long as I keep up to my ears in work, the way I did at Braithwaite, everything’ll be all right. I never have any trouble when you’re near at hand. I was perfectly content there, just being with you. Then one day I noticed you were gone and then I was miserable. Now I have you again, I can work and lose myself in what I am doing. Let’s get at it now. I have two new cases today.”

Jean worked steadily with him in the weeks that followed. The summer always brought more cases of polio, just as the advent of the cold winds of autumn drove it away. Jean gave even more time to the work than she had originally promised, and Uplands saw her usually only at the end of a weary day.

It was a good life in that it provided lots of work and left her at day’s end too tired to worry much about its true futility and emptiness. Pat was much away, ostensibly supervising the construction of a new paper mill in the northern part of the province at Cinq Pistoles, but really, she thought, just trying to avoid any unpleasantness and to forget the emptiness of his own life.

Sylvia called after a week and asked them to St. Giles for the following week-end.

“We’ll have fun, darling! Bring all your prettiest things. There are some divine men, and there’s a wonderful dance orchestra at the hotel, and it’s almost as nice as the Riviera and infinitely more clean. And bring Bertelle—”

“And Pat—shall I bring him?”

“How you love to jest, Jeanie. Of course you must bring Pat. Not afraid to expose him to the charms of strangers, are you?”

“Not at all.”

“By now, no doubt, you have bound him to you with those sweet silken bonds that are tougher than steel. Such a dear, good little wife you must be!”

These were the things that used to make Jean grind her teeth, but now, to her surprise, she found herself taking them quite lightly. It was Sylvia herself who had always thrust Jean into the background, and she was still trying to play the queen even while it was Jean who occupied the throne.

Jean hung up after she had inquired about Sir William and found that he was playing golf. Perhaps, she thought, I won’t be the queen very long; it’s a pretty unsteady throne and the crown doesn’t seem to fit too well. Sylvia is just waiting for me to fall; then she will take over. She always makes my marriage sound like a kitchen romance, so dull and stodgy; and it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t really like that at all. There were glowing stars and bursting meteors and Northern lights and music from the spheres—

“Oh, Pat! Pat!” she whispered softly. “Why did you do this to me? Why did you put out all those lovely lights and make the music stop!”

Bertelle went with them on the trip to St. Giles. Sylvia had insisted on having “the darling child,” and for Pat and Jean the little girl acted as a sort of buffer and gave to their relationship a semblance of normality so that there were long periods when they could forget how little, actually, was between them, and could laugh and be content.

The narrow winding streets of the town were dominated by the towered and bright-tiled bulk of the big hotel, with dozens of sprawling, ornate summer residences flaunting their gables above the tall pines and spruce trees.

It was like a fairyland, and there were many children and long sandy beaches that made Bertelle’s eyes sparkle. The lodge where the Clydes were living was long and low and had its own swimming pool and acres of garden and parkland.

It was a fit setting for Sylvia. She and Sir William greeted them when they drove up to the wide verandah with its brightly colored chairs and lounges, its rose-covered trellises and emerald lawns. The place might have been built as a setting for Sylvia. Her slender body, beautifully tanned, was exquisite in a white frock touched with blue, the pale platinum hair upswept, the great eyes bright and eager.

Jean, looking at her, watching the way Pat greeted her as she put both her hands in his, felt the old sense of depression and despair—felt it for a moment, then put it quickly away. Sir William’s arm was around her and the kind eyes were smiling down at her with a fondness, a gentle understanding, that Sylvia, she knew, had never managed to awaken in them. And Bertelle, ecstatic with joy, was hoisted to the big shoulder and the wonders of Nash Colville’s fairyland were shown to them both.

Sylvia, in the short time she had lived here, had met about everyone worth meeting and had already gathered the usual train of courtiers about her. Through the afternoon she held court on the lawn while cars came and went and the tennis-court and croquet-ground lived with bright, animated figures. Bertelle went with a half-dozen other children to the beach, carefully supervised by a corps of assorted maids. No matter how many other admirers hovered near, Sylvia always managed to keep Pat close to her.

For Jean it was like a play in which she had often played a part—a minor one. She had seen any number of such parties in England, been invited to them because she was Sir William Clyde’s niece, “that quiet little gypsy thing, you know; pretty enough but quite outshone by her gorgeous cousin.” She had never cared very much about the parties, but she went because her uncle wanted her to have the same chances as Sylvia. Anyway, she knew pretty well what to do and what to expect.

Tennis, swimming and dancing. She could do all these things well and she found herself now rather enjoying the games and the fun, making friends readily with these strangers, not shy, no longer outshone or outdazzled by Sylvia. She had walked at last out of the shadow. She was Mrs. Pat Hayden now and, as such, quite a celebrity in her own right.

“But you’d think,” murmured one dowager to another, “that the blonde Sylvia still had some major rights in him. Why, she seems to be walking off with him right under his wife’s nose, and the wife doesn’t raise a finger to try to stop it.”

“She’s either quite sure of her power over him,” opined another, “or she just doesn’t give a darn, because there’s nothing she can do about it.”

The last speaker was closer to the truth. There was nothing much Jean could do about it. So she danced and made new friends and had a bit of fun of her own. She certainly could not play the jealous wife or tax Patrick with his neglect of her. He danced with her dutifully, spent a respectable amount of time at her side and fell not too far short of being the model husband. But to these experts at finding cracks and fissures in any marriage, it was quite obvious that the blonde Sylvia piped the tune to which he danced.

Jean wearied of it all and pleaded to be let out when Sylvia started gathering a crowd to drive down to the American border. Pat didn’t urge her to go; for one who had once said that parties and people of this sort wearied him, Pat was doing pretty well. There were “rose-lipped maidens and light-foot lads a-plenty,” and Pat evidently was trying to make up for the dull time and the troubled hours he’d been having.

“You go along, Pat,” Jean urged him. “Have fun. I’ll go up and see how Bertelle is sleeping and then I think I’ll go to bed. I’m out of practice for this sort of thing.”

“Okay,” said Pat. “I think I can hold my end up for a while yet.” He laughed, and it made a jarring note. “I’ll try not to waken you when I come in. Good night, Jeanie.”

She watched the open car roll down the drive and wished for a moment that she’d had the will to go on the excursion with them. Perhaps she had always been too slow, too backward, never letting herself go, never free with her kisses or quick with her friendships. Perhaps she had missed a lot—she didn’t know.

She only knew that she felt empty and terribly alone as she went upstairs to the suite of rooms that had been assigned to them, where Bertelle slept on a little bunk bed in a screened-in verandah overlooking the bay.

Bertelle slept soundly, arms outflung, the dark curls making a tumbled halo about the flower-like face. Jean quickly put out the light so as not to awaken her, then went to her own room and undressed and slipped into a white corduroy robe that had a monk’s cowl.

The weariness seemed to drop from her with the shedding of the ball-dress, the beneficent kiss of the water in the shower. She went out onto the sun-deck and sat there for a long while smoking and watching the bright stars over the darkness of the water, watching the wink and flash of the lights along the shore.

She could smell the garden flowers drenched with dew, roses and stock, phlox and peonies. After a while she went down the outside stairs to the garden, feeling the wet grass through the silken mules, drawing the monk’s cowl over the waves of her hair.

Car lights turned in at the lodge-gates and arrowed up the driveway. Jean stepped into the darkness of the pine grove. The car stopped in front of the house; she heard Sylvia’s laughter, Pat’s deep voice and then the shouting silence of a long caress.

In the dim light of the stars, presently, she saw him climb the outside steps and heard the downstairs door close as Sylvia went to her own room.

“ ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow,’ ” she murmured bitterly. “Why did she ever part from him or ever let him go? Why didn’t she snatch him back before he married me?”

She waited to give him time to go to bed. She went softly up the steps, thinking to slip into her own room unnoticed, but Pat was still on the sun-deck. She could smell the rich aroma of a cigar and see its glow in the shadows.

She stood irresolute as she came on the deck. He got up slowly. His voice was low. “No, Sylvia,” he said softly. “Better go back to your own room. I can’t go through with this. It’s not fair and I should hate myself. After all, I’m married to Jean and this—”

Jean figured it out in an instant. Sylvia had coveted this monkish white velvet robe with its peaked cowl and had worn it to the beach that afternoon, and Sylvia had made an appointment with him, brazen enough to let him make love to her while his own wife slept hard by.

She stood there, shivering, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. She felt all the chill of the night creep into her now, numbing her, and the stars were ugly and the night smell of the flowers was heavy and cloying and oppressive.

“How—noble of you!” she said at last. “I didn’t—think you would ever consider me, Pat. It’s a funny time to start. The song sort of ended before it began.”

“Jean! Why, what are you—”

“Just,” she said breathlessly, laughing with a touch of hysteria, “getting a breath of air. Sorry if I sort of walked on stage at the wrong time. Sylvia borrowed my robe this afternoon and for a wonder returned it; I suppose that’s what confused you, Pat. She probably saw me in the garden, so she won’t come now.”

“It all means so little to you,” he said sullenly. “It doesn’t matter to you, seemingly, what I do.”

“Should it?” she asked softly. “I think I’m doing the wise thing. I was burned once, and badly. I’d be a fool to go back to the fire before the smarting from the old burn has gone away.”

“All so clean-cut and calculated and clinical.” Pat’s voice shook with suppressed fury. “It wasn’t always like that, Jeanie; it wasn’t like that at first—”

“No, it wasn’t, was it? We sort of threw away the book at the start.”

“It was heaven. I didn’t know how much I had or what I was throwing away. Jean, I—”

He had come close to her, and suddenly she was held hard in his arms and his lips were on her mouth, on her cheek, on the thickness of her hair.

“You seem to forget a lot of things in your clinical thinking,” he said. “One of them is that I’m a man.”

“You were going to Sylvia. Let me down!”

“You were driving me to Sylvia. You’ve been doing so ever since she came here. You don’t give me a chance to prove myself. So I’m taking it now—do you hear! I’ve had too much of this—”

He carried her into the darkness of the room, where the only light was the faint luminance of the stars. She felt the wild beating of her heart, the thick flow and pulse of her blood, and everything in her cried out to yield, to give herself, to take what he offered.

To take it, to have it for a while, then to be put aside—

“Let me down, Pat.”

He laughed. “Not this time!” And there was something like a madness in his tone. “You’ve played hard to get too long. I’m a man, not a piece of wood or stone. And you want me—you know you want me—”

“So did she—and she might have had you.”

“I tell you no—”

“Let me down! If you don’t, I’ll call Bertelle. I will! I swear it. I’m not going to be a fool for you—not just another woman in the dark—and that’s all it would be.”

He set her down then and his hand crashed against her cheek, jolting her.

“Bertelle!” he said through clenched teeth. “It’s always the same thing. I think you just use the kid for an out, for a defense against me. I wonder how much you really care for her or if Sylvia wouldn’t give her more of real love than your blasted thermometer-affection, your antiseptic love—”

“Try, why don’t you? That’s the only way you’ll learn. I don’t want to hear any more from you. Go away and let me be. Go to your own room—or go to hers, for all of me. I think it’s where your heart is.”

She wondered if they had awakened Bertelle with their angry words, but they had kept their voices to a low pitch or a whisper, and it was not likely that the cruel words had carried. She wanted none of this ugliness, this emotional upset, to get to Bertelle. There was no telling what effect it would have on the child, so handicapped and so sensitive, to whom, above all things, love and security mattered.

She felt no surprise about Sylvia’s conduct. She had known Sylvia too long to let anything her cousin might do surprise her. Nor did she look for any shame or sense of guilt or even ordinary embarrassment, when she and Sylvia met again. You just couldn’t faze Sylvia about the reactions of the sexes: She had the simple code of the jungle—you took what you wanted, if you were strong enough; that’s all there was to it.

She avoided Jean most of the next day, however. It was not until early afternoon that she came to the beach where Jean had taken Bertelle for a swim. The little girl was happiest in the water. She was proficient far in advance of her years, and it made her happy to be in an element where she was better able to perform even than those who were whole in limb.

Sylvia threw a pale blue blanket down on the sand beside Jean and let her slender, curvesome body collapse gracefully on it. Under long lashes the mocking eyes slanted at Jean, and there was a smile of sheer mischief about her mouth.

“Bit of a mixup last night,” she said, taking a cigarette from Jean’s box and lighting it with Jean’s lighter. “Was my face red!”

“I won’t ask if you aren’t ashamed of yourself,” said Jean. “I know you think that sort of thing is cute. You’re always acting in some bedroom farce or Restoration comedy. Rather like an animated cover from Paris Nights.”

Sylvia giggled, quite unabashed. “Oh, Jeanie! You’re priceless, darling. How I should have liked to see Pat’s face when he found out it was you under that capuchin’s hood. But it was rather more like Boccacio, I think, than either Restoration comedy or La Vie Parisienne. What did he say?”

“Told you to go home; that he didn’t want you.”

“He never did! If so, he was just being noble.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“What were you doing there anyway, prowling around the garden in the middle of the night?”

“I wasn’t keeping an eye on my husband, if that’s what you think. Alley-cats never kept me awake.”

“I’d love to scratch your face, Jeanie,” said Sylvia softly. “I’d love to pull out some of your hair. It’s been so long—”

“Don’t try it. I learned a lot of tricks in the army and I could do a proper job on you—and wouldn’t I love it!”

“Are you going to give Pat a divorce or an annulment and marry that cute doctor of yours? That’s really where you belong. The two of you could go off to Tanganyika or the like and swat tse-tse flies and get your pictures on the cover of those Yankee magazines in a pith helmet, looking utterly noble. That’s really what you’re made for. You’ll never learn to dance till dawn, darling—never learn to drink the dew out of chaliced flowers—remember our English course at Miss Kaye’s?”

“Dew!” Jean laughed. “Who do you think you’re fooling, Sylvia? You never drank deep and never drank much and you never got the right liquor. Those emotional sprees you’ve gone on might have been induced by marijuana or nightshade or rue.”

Pat, tall and bronzed, in red trunks, strode down the beach to the water’s edge, apparently not seeing them or maybe not wanting to see them. He swam out to Bertelle, took her on his shoulders and swam with her to the raft; they could see her white rubber cap bobbing over the waves as Pat pushed forward with long, powerful strokes.

“I wonder if anyone, even a wife,” said Sylvia musingly, “can ever come to mean more to him than that wretched little girl. I never saw a man so wrapped up in anything; if she were his own he couldn’t care any more about her.”

“She’s the best thing in his life,” countered Jean. “And she’s not a wretched little girl, and you know it. She’s an exceptionally clever and gifted child; and she’s beautiful and proud and sensitive.”

“You may have her. I really think you care a lot more for her than you do for Pat, and I’m pretty sure he knows it.”

“Well, it won’t be like that when you get him, will it?”

“No, indeed. I’d send her packing in a moment—off to school or to the patient sisters who had her in the beginning.”

“He won’t stand for it, thank God. If you get him, you take Bertelle too. Wasn’t that the rock you split up on before—the lucky little gimmick that threw him into my lap?”

“I dare say. I told him I wasn’t taking on the job of nursemaid to a little cripple. I shouldn’t have been so hasty; there would have been lots of ways of dealing with her. Anyway, now it’s likely she will be cured, isn’t it? Aren’t you and your great admirer, Dr. Blake, doing some magic with her?”

“Paul is trying. He will succeed, too, I think. I know he will. She believes so in him; she’s so sure she will walk again. You wouldn’t need to worry about her then, Sylvia. She wouldn’t be in your way at all.”

“You always concede the game before it’s halfway through, darling.” Sylvia was wearing sun-glasses; she took them off now and squinted her gorgeous eyes to look at Jean. “You always give me the idea that the game is never of much importance to you. It was like that all through our lives.”

“Well, that’s the way it was, you see.”

“But then this man came along. I thought I detected the tiger streak in you then. I was quite sure you were going to fight for him. I looked for a real battle.”

“Was that why you went so sneakingly and underhandedly about taking him from me? I’m not sure of this, but I think you told him, or have since told him, that Paul Blake was my sweetheart, that, until he came on the scene, I was ready to marry Paul.”

Sylvia squirmed a very little and let the sand trickle over the golden skin of a rounded thigh.

“Well, all’s fair, you know. And he was such a serious, loyal sort of cuss. I didn’t know just what technique to use on him—”

“You don’t yet. You may get him, but he will never respect you. He’s not the sort of man to have much regard for the woman who tries to climb into his—”

“That’s plenty!” The rich mouth thinned and grew wickedly hard, and Jean could see in a revealing flash what Sylvia would be when she was old, when the dust of silver and mist of moonlight were gone from her; this was a beauty that would not last, the beauty of the poppy, not of the rose.

Pat came out of the water, carrying Bertelle on his big shoulders, laughing up at her. The little girl was always happiest with Pat, but she loved him with a shared love. Never had she showed any jealousy of Jean, but in her eyes when she looked at Sylvia there was a withdrawn look, a wariness and, though she seemed friendly enough with the stranger, something held in deep reserve, some place in her small warm heart that Sylvia could never unlock.

I shall never let her go to Sylvia, thought Jean, watching her and Pat now. No matter what shame or humiliation I have to go through, I’ll stay with her until she is well and strong, and I’ll give her all the love I have. Sylvia has put the charm on him. When his eyes rest on her he looks besotted. Oh, sometimes I hate all my sex—rags and bones and hanks of hair—

Pat sat Bertelle down on the sand between the two of them. “Here’s the champ,” he said, and Jean knew he was thanking his stars that he had Bertelle to save him from any fireworks that might otherwise have risen around his ears from these two women in his life. “The champ’s getting tired of the briny, I think. We’ll soon have to be heading for home.”

“Wouldn’t you like to stay with me for a few days, Bertelle?” Sylvia’s voice was at its lowest, sweetest pitch, dripping honey. “So we could really get to know each other and be real friends. I’d like to have you for my little girl.”

Bertelle’s eyes were wide. “But I am Jeanie’s little girl—Jeanie’s and Pat’s. I couldn’t be yours too. You’re never going away, are you, Jeanie?”

The eyes implored her. Jean felt her heart catch, her throat fill with a queer choking. “No, darling, I’m not going away—not ever.”

Pat was looking at her steadily.

“But you might, you know. Would you take me with you then?”

“You wouldn’t leave Pat all alone surely.”

“Pat wouldn’t be alone. He could get some other little girls—”

There was something wrong, Jean knew—some fear lately born in the small heart, some dark thing threatening her strange, oddly happy little world, and she wondered if Sylvia had had anything to do with it, if the keen eyes, the too quick fancy hadn’t put together this other jigsaw puzzle of their lives, a far trickier one than that made by the torn picture.

She took Bertelle now and left the beach as some of the other house guests came to join Sylvia. She was glad their visit was coming to an end. She liked a good time, liked dancing and all the rest of it, but she was no sun-worshipper like Sylvia.

Pat caught up with them before they reached the lodge.

“I think, if you’re willing, we’ll go back in the morning. You’re not having any fun here and I’m not either, so it’s no treat for Bertelle. We seem to be three badly adjusted people in this land of afternoon; as if the sun was too strong for us.”

“It’s up to you when we go home. Any time at all suits me.”

“That’s what I mean. You make it so very obvious that you aren’t enjoying yourself.”

“I was never a good actress, Pat—never any good at pretending. I think you’ve known me long enough to realize that. And I’ve seen too much of what they like to call the gay life. I never liked it.”

They had reached the lodge now, and she took Bertelle up to her room to rest, leaving Pat with a lot of things unsaid.

“I shall be glad to go home.” Bertelle looked gravely up at her. “I want to see Peter and our old cat Meg and Elspeth and Josh and play with my own things.”

“You’ll soon be home again, Bertelle. Maybe we’ll start out in the morning.”

“I’d like that.”

She kissed Jean before she went to sleep, and looked at her a long time. “I don’t think I’d like to have that one for a mother. Does she really want me for her little girl? Once she told me she loved me just as much as you do. Is that true?”

“No.” Jean didn’t hesitate a moment about giving the answer. “How could she?” This had to be light and laughing; Bertelle was far too serious about it. “I love you as much as all the world and the moon and the stars and the oceans—so how could she love you that much?”

“I’m glad. I love you too, Jeanie. Stay with me till I go to sleep, and then maybe I won’t dream.”

They did not return to Uplands next day nor for several days following, and when they went Sylvia Clyde went with them. Sir William and three other yachtsmen were drowned off Cape Sable that very night in the tail end of a terrific hurricane that bore up out of the Caribbean, leaving wreck and ruin in its wake.

The sunset, that evening, was an unholy crimson, dark-cored and with a saffron edge, and the wind whipped the tall evergreens in the park and whipped the waters of the great bay into long white-crested rollers. Fishing boats and coastwise steamers put into the handiest harbors and inlets for shelter, and the warning, “Terrific gale sweeping up from the West Indies” was broadcast at short intervals. “All shipping is warned to seek harbor at once.”

Sir William had gone with three Montreal men, skilled yachtsmen all, in the sloop Arluette, owned and captained by Roscoe Lennox, a mining millionaire, on a trip to Chester, on the south shore of Nova Scotia. The other two were Amos Brien, a partner of Lennox’s, and Carson Kramer, an engineer. The end of the hurricane, like the lashing tail of some leviathan, caught their cockleshell craft fifty miles off the Lurcher Lightship. Not even a spar was ever seen by the search-and-rescue planes that for days scoured the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic.

The waters of Fundy were calm and smooth as glass, and the sky was blue and soft, and there was a vast peace over the sea three days later when Sylvia got into the car with Pat and Jean and Bertelle and they drove away from the lovely playland, the fairy-tale chalets and all the gold and glitter.

They were stunned and subdued, all three of them; even Bertelle, who, like all children, had loved the big bluff, shaggy man, had ceased her gay chatter and sang none of the little songs she usually made up or thought about along the way. Thus Death’s wings in their swift passage fan the spirits of the quick who are near to the one who is taken.

He had been to Jean even more than a father. She could not remember her own—only this good man whose eyes were so kind, who seemed to understand so readily the minds of the young, who carried her on his shoulders and stood like a mighty fortress between her, so small and helpless and unwanted, and the great world that heeded so little the orphaned and forlorn.

What Sylvia felt there was no knowing. Certainly there were no hysterics, and even her weeping was most decorous. She had talked on the telephone to her mother, who was visiting in Biarritz, staying with friends, and Jean too had spoken briefly to her aunt. As in Sylvia’s case, there was no knowing what she felt. It had always been a mother-and-daughter combination in the Clyde family.

Jean gathered that Sir William, who had never been a very wealthy or—as the world measured it—successful man, had left little or nothing. The big house at Berlminster would go for taxes and other encumberances; it had been, in fact, in an effort to recoup his failing fortunes that he had made this unfortunate trip to the Dominion.

If he left them poor, she thought now, neither Sylvia nor Aunt Mab will forgive him. Mab Clyde had once been, like a Sylvia, a famous beauty, but she too was blonde and seemingly fragile and had long since began to fade.

“Mother didn’t say,” Sylvia told Jean, who had spoken only a brief few words to her aunt, “but I take it she will be coming over here after a while. There is nothing there for her any more. She’s not beautiful enough to be a professional house guest, and all her old boy friends have fallen away from her. So I’ll wait with you people until she comes.”

Jean didn’t at all look forward to the prospect, but it never for a moment occurred to her to make any objection. She wasn’t afraid any more of Sylvia—not of this Sylvia; she knew—Sylvia had openly told her—that the blonde cousin was out to take Patrick from her, and she had taken that in her stride, simply because she had never really had Patrick.

As far as she was concerned the status quo was much as it had been before she and Patrick were married. The marriage was unfulfilled; it didn’t really count, and she wasn’t the kind to use law or religion or papers signed and sealed to hold any man to her. It was just as if Patrick were still free to choose between them.

Sylvia was already playing the poor lonely orphan for Pat’s benefit. She was unusually quiet and thoughtful and gentle, and it was a good act. It might almost have fooled Jean herself if she hadn’t known her cousin better. The little sighs now and then, the bit of perfumed kerchief pressed to the great eyes, the trembling of the mouth, the way she leaned on Pat when she got out of the car— It was a marvelously good show, but Jean had seen it or at least the actress too often, and even Bernhardt must have been a bore to her maid.

Sylvia settled easily at Uplands. The life there, though a bit quiet, was the kind that suited her. Anyway, she had to stay in mourning for a decent while; later on she could wake things up. Right now, the aim was to entrench herself strongly, to show Pat that she was the one who should be his wife, the one by beauty and talent most fitted to run this big house.

For a while she wore black, which became her, of course, wondrously well. At the Memorial Service for Sir William, held in St. Ninian’s, the parish church, she looked like a madonna, and people thought it too bad that there were no Raphaels or Titians in these days to set such exquisite loveliness down on canvas.

She charmed everyone in the countryside. They had all liked Jean too, but she was “such a quiet, shy little thing beside that gorgeous Sylvia Clyde—”

So Sylvia stayed on. Pat said nothing about her presence there, but seemed to take it for granted. Sylvia put in the lovely summer days doing the useless things she had long since learned to use for time fillers, beautifying herself, toying with the garden flowers, writing little notes to friends abroad.

She knew now for sure that there was nothing between Jean and Patrick, nothing that really bound them together as man and wife. The knowledge made her supremely happy, and the lovely body seemed to take quick nourishment therefrom and become even more enticing, more calculated to stir a man’s blood.

Even Bertelle didn’t seem to mind her, but one day Jean found the little girl with a box of jigsaw pieces, and she was fitting one together, and it was the picture of Sylvia.

She looked up at Jean, and in her eyes was that strange furtive shadow Jean had seen before.

Jean looked at her pensively. Sometimes the child amazed her; at others she frightened her.

“Now what’s all this about, ma petite? I thought Pat told you not to make that puzzle. Maybe Sylvia won’t like it either.”

“Pat said she was like Humpty-Dumpty and could never be put back again—voyez-vous, Jeanie, Jeanneton-bonnet-de-coton? I never did get her quite all back again, but—”

She looked at Jean for a long time, then began to put the pieces together again.

Jean continued her work at the hospital and all seemed to go as smoothly as in the old carefree days at Braithwaite when she and Paul had put in long hours side by side, their relationship as impersonal as that of brother and sister, the welfare of the little ones their only concern. They used to call her Secton for a nickname, she was always so close to the dark, intense young surgeon, but no one, strangely enough, ever seemed to think of any element of romance in their association.

It wasn’t quite the same at St. Ronan’s. In a small city there is more concentrated gossip than in a metropolis, and the hospital gets its full share of tales of intrigue and scandal. There were others on the Board of Governors who had remarked Dr. Blake’s eagerness to come to such a small place and wondered at the reason for it. Now, when they saw the dark, soft-eyed Englishwoman who teamed with him in his superb feats of therapy and neuro-surgery—they talked.

There wasn’t anything whatever for them to go on. Now and then the two ate a hurried luncheon in the cafeteria; more often it was a cup of tea and a sandwich in the sun-lounge off the floor where they worked. Paul lived at the hospital, though he also had a small surgery in the city, and they never walked abroad together unless Bertelle was between them.

It was just something, perhaps, in the way the young doctor looked at her, in the quick happy smile that was for her alone, in the way the lines of fatigue seemed to be erased from his thin handsome face when she came to work with him and the sureness and skill of his technique when she stood, quiet and ready, at his side.

“A perfect team,” they said. “He looks like a man who functions with utter confidence just because she is there for him to draw on. They say it was the same in England, that she was always sort of a Jill to his Jack; they seem to understand each other so perfectly. It must be the common ground they have of all those crippled children.”

The growing heat of summer brought more and more of “the lame ducklings,” as Paul called them. From the beaches and the playgrounds, from the quiet fields of the country, where one day they were full of the joy of life and the wine of laughter, the next broken and stunned, the little children came, and a great love for them welled up in Jean’s heart, and with it a deep admiration for this good and tireless man who seemed to ask nothing else of life than strength and more strength to pour back into the weakened, wasted little forms.

“Paul, you’ll have to ease up, you know.” She warned him to shorten his hours, to take some time off, warned him until she was weary. He always promised, but she knew that even on the days he was supposed to be at his fishing camp or sailing on the Bay in the little marconi-rigged boat he had acquired, he was back at the hospital and working harder than ever.

She asked him out to Uplands, but there was still a coolness between him and Pat, and now that Sylvia was there he wouldn’t go under any circumstances except the one time Bertelle had a picnic and as many of the children as they could manage were taken in cars from St. Ronan’s and from other clinics and institutions in the district.

That was Bertelle’s great day. The lawns and gardens of the big house swarmed with dozens of her little friends, drawn close to her by the bonds of illness and misfortune. She had them all with her now to show them her dolls, her toys, her treasures, to let them sit on the mighty back of Peter the Great, and laugh at the timid ones who were afraid Peter would bite them, to ply them with cake and candy and ice-cream in the big blue and orange marquee that Pat had erected, and to ride them on the little carousel he had rented from the fair that was playing in the village.

Sylvia moved, but only briefly, like a pale vision of loveliness, a fairy princess, among all these maimed and stricken little boys and girls. Jean knew it was torment for her to come so close to the unbeautiful things of this world—the crutch, the brace, the built-up shoe, the withered leg or arm. Sylvia could never understand why people who didn’t actually have to, or weren’t well paid for doing so, would ever bother with those so afflicted.

But she made a show of deep sympathy and even handed out ice-cream bars and candy to some of the more attractive little ones, but she did not understand their wide wondering eyes or their shy friendliness and if, by chance, one of them touched her, she drew away.

“A shame,” said Paul, “to clutter up for even a few hours that shiningly perfect crystal world of hers. She can’t hear the music in their laughter, Jean, or see the reflected light of heaven in their eyes. I often think it was mostly for such as these that God lived and suffered. Bertelle is like a queen today.”

Bertelle was radiant; here, among her kind, she could move without shyness or self-consciousness, without always being on the defensive. This was the queer little world where she belonged, and here if someone tumbled or was ungainly or needed help, no one laughed, no one openly pitied or said, “Ah, the poor little creature!” There were even several respectable fights, and one boy had a black eye before the day was done.

“It was the loveliest day, Jeanie,” she said when the last car, laden with horn-blowing merry-makers, had gone down the drive, when she and Jean sat in the garden by the lily pool looking at the scattered remnants of the feast. “It was my first real picnic and everybody just loved it, and Patrick let them take back everything that was left, and the girls loved their little Indian baskets that Glooscap McCarthy’s mother Leonie made, and the boys were so glad to have the little birch canoes—”

Glooscap McCarthy was a little Indian boy, a great friend of Bertelle’s, who walked and would always walk with a crutch. The mother, Leonie, had been Bertelle’s nurse when she was little, but had left Uplands a few years ago to go back to the nomad life with her little boy and Dominique McCarthy, her man, who was, despite his name, a full-blooded Micmac Indian. They had a caravan, horse-drawn, and moved about the country weaving and selling baskets and making moccasins and beaded bags and the like to sell to the tourists. They were all more than a little “wanting,” as the natives put it, but they were kindly folk and harmless, and Bertelle adored them and was in return adored.

Bertelle went often to the hospital with Jean and responded slowly but surely to the treatment Paul was giving her. “You will be a great danseuse one day, Mademoiselle Caron,” Paul would tell her. “You will be like Moira Shearer, like Margot Fonteyn—in fact you will be better; you will be able to kick the lights out of chandeliers.”

Bertelle’s face would be transfigured with happiness then, and she would cling to Paul and reward him with a kiss. Jean often felt guilty about the long hours the child was left at Uplands and wondered if Sylvia ever did anything to help her while away the time. She didn’t think it likely. There were cars to drive, horses to ride, a golf course nearby, and Sylvia always managed to enjoy herself.

She never spoke of making a move. Her mother had written her that she expected to re-marry and would be going to the south of France to live.

“Of course,” said Sylvia, “she is bound that I shall come and live with her, but you know, Jeanie, what life with Mother was and you can readily imagine what it will be. This old bird, Martin Elmsly, has scads of money, but he always had a roving eye and I’m sure Mother will have a time with him. I feel happy here with you. Maybe I’ll marry one of your American millionaires and settle down here.”

Or maybe you’ll wait it out, thought Jean, until I go and you can have Pat. You’re waiting for something, that I can see, but you were never the one to wait too long; if things didn’t move you always managed to give them a push.

But Sylvia seemed quite content to have things go on as they were. As long as she was well-fed and warm and didn’t lack company she was quite content. Being in mourning for her father rather cramped her style for the moment, but she had odd dates with Dr. Mark O’Connor and a few others, and there was sometimes a bridge game in the afternoon.

On the surface it was a pleasant, easy life, with Sylvia behaving like a guest who might take flight at any minute. She made no further plays for Pat, that Jean could see; when he was around she was quiet, rather pathetic, the orphan alone and unwanted. And Pat was kind to her and did his best to make her feel welcome and wanted.

There was never the faintest sign of friction; even Elspeth Craig had been won over by Sylvia’s charm, and Josh Agnew, no matter what he might have thought of Sylvia’s demands on his services, revered her on account of his late good friend, her father.

But things were not right at Uplands. It was as if the warm heart that should be in every house had slowed its beat, had become so faint that it could scarcely be heard any longer. Something discordant, jarring, unsettled—

Then there came the day when Jean, returning from the hospital, found that Bertelle was gone.

She hurried, as always, to the sun-room off her own apartment where she usually found the little girl if she was not playing in the garden. Sometimes Bertelle hid from her and gave Jean the task of seeking her out, when she would fling herself on her maman with squeals of joy and cling to her with all the strength of her small arms.

But she was not hiding today.

Jean could sense, the moment she entered the sun-room, that there was something amiss, that the bright little tenant of this gay place had not been there for some little time. And on the table was the jigsaw puzzle of Sylvia’s picture, all put together with every last piece in its proper place.

Jean, looking down at it, thinking of the patient little fingers that assembled it, saw there something symbolic, something that struck her right to the heart. Her eyes misted for a moment, then cleared with sudden anger—against herself, against Sylvia, against Pat Hayden himself.

She recalled Bertelle’s recitation of Humpty-Dumpty. When Pat had torn up the lovely picture of Sylvia, it had been to Bertelle like the great fall of Humpty. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men weren’t able to put Humpty back again, but the child had seen Sylvia put together and restored to oneness, and she made the picture for herself.

Jean hurried to find Elspeth, to question Josh, to awaken Sylvia who was dozing over a book on a chaise-longue in the garden. None of them had seen Bertelle since after luncheon; none of them could imagine where she had gone.

“She went up to take her nap after luncheon, Mrs. Pat,” said Elspeth, her ruddy cheeks pale, her bony hands plucking at her apron. “It was just the same as she does every day when you don’t take her to the hospital. Usually she plays up there or in the garden when she awakens, and some days I see her and others I don’t. She needs no minding, as you know—such a good little thing. And Miss Clyde was there in the garden, and Josh is always about. Aye, I’ve noticed the little one was a bit quiet of late—didn’t sing or laugh so much. But she couldn’t go far, ma’am—doubtless hidin’ on you an’ playing one of her games.”

But the twilight came and their calls of “Bertelle! Bertelle!” sounded futile and somehow forlorn in the fields and parkland and along the silent shores of the river.

Pat wouldn’t be home until nine o’clock. Jean had called the police and two constables were there in short order, helping to search the nearby woods, looking speculatively at the river. They knew Bertelle, had often seen her playing down by the gate that opened on the post-road.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hayden,” the senior one assured her. “We’ll find her. We’ll have our dog here before morning, and if she’s in the woods he will locate her in no time. But it’s my idea she’s gone for a ride or been picked up by someone who thought she was a hitch-hiker. Kids do funny things, you know—things there’s never any accounting for. She may have gone to visit friends—”

“Everyone is her friend,” said Jean. “But they would tell us where she was.”

What shall I tell Pat? she thought; what will he think of me? I shouldn’t have left her so much alone, but she always seemed so content—

Sylvia was no help. “I never saw much of her through the day, you know. She always wanted me to play some silly game or other or do riddles or tell her stories. I dare say she’s climbed into someone’s car and gone off for a ride. What could happen to her anyway? Those good-looking policemen of yours will find her. Anyway, all you can do is wait.”

Pat was dumbfounded, then angry, then afraid. It was on Jean he visited his anger when Sylvia, wisely retiring early, left them in the garden.

“Bertelle was your reason for marrying me,” he said bitterly. “You told me so—and it was for Bertelle that you stayed on at Uplands. A great job you’ve made of it—”

“Oh, be fair, Pat.” She was too tired to match his anger. “You know how devoted I am to her. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken so much time from her to give to the hospital, but you mustn’t forget there are other children even more in need of help than Bertelle.”

“And Sylvia—what a useless bunch of females I have around me—”

“Oh, speak for Sylvia, if you’re going to talk like that! She was the one you picked, you know.”

“Well, between the two of you it seems you’ve driven the child away. I was a fool to think I could find anyone to be her mother.”

“Pat! You know you’re talking nonsense. You know that I never did anything to drive the child away, that I—”

“She saw you go off each day and leave her. She saw that other things mattered more to you than—”

“Maybe,” said Jean softly, “she saw that ‘other things’ mattered more to you, too—since you insist on telling home-truths. Children are quick to notice when things are not right, Pat, and they haven’t been right in this house from the very beginning.”

“It’s not my fault. I told you I’d play the game and I have done so. You can’t say I didn’t. If Bertelle guessed it was only a shell of a marriage, an empty thing, you are to blame; for it was by your choice that it was that way.”

“You really think that? You really expect a woman to overlook—”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Each affirmative was an angry explosion. “How long is this to go on? I told you I loved you when I met you. I told you again when I married you.”

“In the meantime you were thrown over—in the meantime you lost Sylvia—”

“Listen,” he said softly. “Sylvia was out of the picture. I told you that too. If she’s back in it, that is none of my doing. You don’t seem to mind her being back in it. You spend more time with your friend Blake than you ever do with me—”

“I work for him. You know that’s all it is.”

“Oh, I don’t know what I know or what to believe. Anyway, this is getting us nowhere. Bertelle is gone, and if anything happens to her I’ll never forgive myself, for I promised her mother I’d look after her. What about those Indians, Leonie and Dominique McCarthy? The little lame boy, Glooscap, was a great friend of Bertelle’s. Once they tried to spirit her away. They were around here for the picnic. I bought baskets and things from them.”

“I told the police about them and they are being checked.”

A report on the wandering Micmacs came in a little later. They were in Richibuctou, over a hundred miles away, and Bertelle was not with them. All the big transport trucks and vans that had passed on Route 2 were checked and re-checked, the news was broadcast over the radio, spread throughout the country by the press. There were the usual wild stories of kidnaping, mysterious strangers and all the rest of it, but there was never a sign of the missing girl.

The troopers brought their dog Wolf, an intelligent beast, who scoured woods and riverbank tirelessly but turned up nothing. How a little girl, one who could get about only with the aid of a crutch, could vanish so completely into thin air was a riddle that set the whole country on edge.

Jean, sick at heart, never could recall afterwards how she had gone through the days that followed. She saw little of Pat and even less of Sylvia, who wisely kept out of the way. The police questioned her as they did everyone else at Uplands, as to whether the little one had been happy. Had there been any friction? Any unpleasantness likely to cause her to want to run away?

None—of course not. Everybody adored Bertelle. She had been perfectly happy.

Pat searched tirelessly and enlisted the aid of his countless friends throughout the state. Each night he came home, beaten and tired and filled with exasperation.

“Look!” he told Jean as they sat in the garden after the police, making their fruitless report for the day, had gone back to their barracks. “I know as sure as I’m alive that the kid is all right. I know she is playing games with us, and it’s not like her to play such a cruel game or to stay away so long from the house and the ones she loves.”

“What are you trying to say, Pat?” She had been drawn closer to him in the last few days by their shared concern for the child they loved so much. This is a good man, she thought, who can love anyone so deeply and feel so much for her. He would give his life for the child.

“I can’t dope it out, but I have the oddest feeling that she’s not far away, that she’s some place where she knows what’s going on here—”

“But every inch of the countryside has been searched and re-searched, gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and there is no sign of her. I don’t want to discourage you, Pat—”

“Look, Jeanie—” He studied her there in the August dusk. “I know Bertelle is all right; I’m sure that she will come back to us, safe and sound, and we’ll be happy again. But things will have to be different. You know that.”

“Perhaps I do, Pat. But how, different?”

“I mean with you and me. She knew—she always knew that our marriage was a dud, a phony. When she comes back, Jeanie—it has to be one thing or the other. It has to be real, a man-and-wife business, or it has to end. Do you understand me?”

“Quite well!” She stiffened for a moment. “It seems as if I were given a sort of ultimatum, and I’m not sure that I like it. You’re telling me I’ll share your bed, or I’ll be on my way. I wonder how much you want me to stay.” She looked unseeingly into the dusk, watching the fireflies wax and wane, hearing the slow sad sounds of the dying summer. “It should be all right now. You have another to take my place, to step right back into the one she once rejected—”

“Suppose we leave her out of it, Jeanie? It’s you and me. I told you I loved you, I tell you so again. When Bertelle comes back—”

“All right then, when Bertelle comes back, Pat, I’ll give you my answer. Oh, I—”

She stood up, and Pat stood with her, and then she was in his arms.

“I want the answer to be yes, Jeanie.” He bent and kissed her cheek, then her lips softly. “I’ve come to know you so well, to see so clearly the kind of girl you are—”

“Please, Pat—” She loosed herself from his arms. “It’s not so easy for me. I don’t know what to say.”

“But you’ll give me your answer when Bertelle is found. You must, Jean—you have to. We can’t carry on this farce any longer. If you don’t care enough for me, if you want me to go to her—”

“So she’s to be second choice now, eh?”

“I think she always was. But you just didn’t seem to care whether I went to her or not. Maybe,” he finished wearily, “it’s still the same.”

Dominique McCarthy, the Indian husband of Leonie and father of the little Glooscap, named after the great gods of his people, drove in season a huge lorry which carried lobsters from the rich fishing-grounds along the Northumberland Strait, from Cocagne, Shediac, Buctouche and Richibuctou, down to the hungry Americans below the Maine border. The giant van was aluminum in color, had a monster red lobster with green eyes and green claws painted on it, and bore the legend Laurentide Lobsters Limited.

Dominique would much sooner have roved around in the horse-drawn caravan with Leonie and Glooscap’s brothers and sisters, but basket-weaving and berry-picking, even along with the government’s monthly present of five, six or seven dollars to each of the five McCarthys, wasn’t enough to pay inflated prices for food and clothing.

So Dominique tooled the monstrous van up and down the winding miles of Route 2 with its load of wriggling deliciousness, and with him, high up in the big cab of the truck, rode Glooscap, his son and heir—small, night-black, monkey-faced, with a mop of dark hair and a nimbleness, even with the crutch he might never discard, that shamed most of his contemporaries.

Jean knew the noble red man and his lively little sprite of a son. Ever since Leonie had worked for Pat Hayden as Bertelle’s nursemaid, the McCarthys had been sort of family retainers, and often a present of fresh lobsters or a pretty basket or a pair of beaded moccasins was left at the kitchen door. And any time the fish van met the station wagon or either of the cars from Uplands, there was always a joyous reunion.

Jean had been present at one of them the first week of her coming. She had taken Bertelle to the village to buy some odds-and-ends, and they were parked in front of the general store when the shadow of the monster van of the Laurentide Lobsters Limited fell over them, and a dark face leaned out the window as it came abreast and a shrill voice yelled:

“Eh! Salut, Bertelle! Comment ça va, la p’tite? On a beaucoup de langoustes fraiches, en veux-tu, chérie?”

Bertelle turned in the seat of the open convertible. “It is Glooscap and Dominique,” she explained. “He says they have lots of fresh lobsters and do we want some—”

Jean met the Micmacs. Dominique was an oak-hard quiet man with bright eyes and a gentle smile. Glooscap was like some gnome right out of a fairy-tale book, a red beret with the insignia of a famous Canadian regiment—cadged from his uncle—holding down the mop of hair, the hand-made crutch seeming a part of him. She was greeted by these half-wild folk with the native courtesy of the Indian, polished off with a bit of that of Old France.

Jean saw the big van pull into Westhampton Village the fourth day after Bertelle’s disappearance. The long, unwieldy box stopped in front of Joe’s Diner, and Dominique and Glooscap climbed down and crossed the road to have their lunch at what the natives called “The Greasy Spoon.”

The sight of the little figure flying along so briskly on its crutch caught at Jean’s heart-strings and brought an ache to her throat. Glooscap wore a gay red and white striped Basque jersey and blue, metal-studded jeans and his pert red beret of the Royal 22nd Regiment, the renowned “Van Doos,” of which his uncle, Armand Sioui, had been a distinguished member.

Jean’s small English car was parked in the shadow of another behemoth labelled Hershberg’s Herrings. She had been about to return to Uplands, but now she got out of the car again and crossed over to “The Greasy Spoon.”

The diner was crowded, but she saw Dominique buying tobacco and papers at the cigarette-stand. Glooscap was loading up with hot-dogs, Arctic bars, soda-pop and candy.

He seemed to feel her presence as she came up behind him, and his small body seemed to freeze for a moment. When he turned, his face wore the inscrutable mask of his people, and his smile was made only with the lips.

“We have not found Bertelle,” she said. “We have hunted everywhere.”

“It is too bad, madame. But Bertelle is the wise one.”

“She is small—so little, and not strong.”

“She is strong almost as I am,” said Glooscap. “She knows the woods. She knows how to fish, to catch things. You are not afraid, madame, that something has eaten her? Bears do not eat people. Bears are afraid of people.”

Dominique came over, touching the glazed peak of his cap that bore the legend: “Laurentide Lobsters.”

“Salut, madame.” He knew only a little English and rarely used it. He told Glooscap to hurry up, and the little boy passed that message on to the counterman, who was loading his purchases into bags.

“We must hurry, madame,” he said. “We must take our lobsters down to those starving Bostonians. Au ’voir, madame.”

Jean bought a pack of cigarettes, watching through the window as the McCarthys, father and son, crossed the road and climbed up into their van. She heard the mighty roar of the engine as Dominique kicked it into life; then the lumbering vehicle roared off down the post-road.

The counterman was watching it too. “Them Indians!” he said, grinning. “Where they put the stuff they buy I don’t know. Glooscap seems to get thinner every day, but he buys enough ice-cream, franks and pop to feed a dozen—”

Jean wasn’t paying him much heed. She was thinking of Glooscap’s leg, wondering if Paul could do anything for him. She must try to get him to come to St. Ronan’s. She smiled at the counterman. “Oh, kids are like kangaroos; they seem to have special pouches and can always find room for one more.”

“Beats me.” The counterman shook his head. “Dominique chews tobacco and drinks rum all the time, but that Glooscap—”

Sylvia was in the garden when she returned home, stretched out on a green lounge, wearing white shorts and a blue jersey and looking like some gorgeous confection. Jean looked at her and felt the old animosity, the irritation of long years, and the futility of warring with her.

She sat down wearily in a deck-chair and stretched out her own tired legs in rumpled gray slacks and tan moccasins.

“No word of ‘Little Girl Lost,’ I presume,” said Sylvia. “I think that brat is just playing games with us all, hiding out somewhere and laughing at us. Really, when she does come back, crippled or not, she should be given a proper spanking.”

“The way you used to,” murmured Jean. “How my heart used to bleed at the pathetic howls that came from you when your cruel parents—”

“Wise Wilhelmina, eh?” muttered Sylvia. “You know that no one ever laid a hand on me—”

“Quite. I got the blame always, and I got the switch too—and you let me take it!”

“You always seemed to fill the martyr’s role so well, Jeanie. And you rather seemed to enjoy suffering and getting it in the neck.”

“If I did, I don’t now.”

“I wonder.” Sylvia studied her speculatively in a way that had always been her wont since they were children, a trick she had when she was wondering how much Jean would stand, how far she could impose on her. Always before it had worked out that the traffic would stand just a little more, that Jean’s good nature would take still further punishment.

But now, Sylvia saw with sudden alarm, it was different. She was up against something stubborn, hard and unyielding. It was as if Jean—the long-suffering, patient, good-natured cousin—had at last come to a stage where she would be pushed around no longer. The disappearance of Bertelle, it seemed, had clarified her thinking and perhaps drawn her into Patrick’s arms.

That didn’t suit Sylvia at all, nor Sylvia’s plans. She was in desperate straits, far worse than her pride would ever let her make known even to Jean. Sir William’s affairs were in such disorder as to make the Jarndyce case look like ABC, but one thing was quite clear: there wasn’t any money and there wasn’t going to be any. Lady Clyde had not been at all insistent that Sylvia come back and settle down with her and her new husband in the South of France. She was rather glad to be rid of Sylvia. She was trying hard to stay young, and that would prove a rather difficult proposition if she had always at hand a daughter in whose lovely armor the cracks were, though almost imperceptible, already beginning to show.

Sylvia began to feel just how tough they were, and what she saw in Jean’s dark eyes right now didn’t at all help to reassure her. Jean, she knew, could be stubborn, and Pat, ever since that night at St. Giles when he had mistaken Jean for her, had managed to keep her at a distance.

That night—she knew it now—had been a mistake and a bad one. It had shown her hand all too clearly and it had put Jean and Pat both on their guard. Jean she knew, was right; Pat Hayden was not the kind of man to value highly the sort of woman who was over-willing to give herself to his love. She had lost ground with him that night, and Jean, without even a fight, seemed to have gained. Now this wretched little girl had fouled everything up by running away. They were both crazy about Bertelle, she knew; both worshipped her, and both would grieve for her, and their grief would give them common ground and drive them close together.

Already she had detected, with the delicate antennae of her woman’s cunning, a new rapprochement, a new understanding between them. She herself was at a decided loss, for she could pretend no great grief for the child and no great concern over her return. Privately, she thought it would be a mercy if the pixies had taken her. She knew in her heart why Bertelle had gone; the little girl was unhappy, uncertain, afraid that Jean would go away and that Sylvia would be her new maman. Anyway, she was unhappy in Sylvia’s presence, seeming to feel the lovely, cynical eyes on her poor leg and the ugly crutch, recognizing Sylvia’s contempt for the afflicted, even though Sylvia smiled most sweetly and talked softly to her and pretended to be kind.

The child was a problem, but one she felt sure she could cope with in time. She saw now a dozen ways in which, had she married Pat as they planned, leaving Jean in the lurch, she could have rid herself of Bertelle, even if, as now seemed probable, the lameness yielded to the new treatment.

But Jean herself was the problem now. This was a new, more determined, more self-assured girl than the easily compliant one she had dealt with in England, the one who never fought her or refused her requests or refused to obey. She was afraid of this Jean, and uneasy and uncertain in her presence.

Jean was always one to bring the battle out into the open, and she wasted no time now. “Sylvia,” she said gently, “you must know as well as I do that this is an impossible situation the three of us are in—you and Pat and myself. It simply won’t do, you know. One of us has to move out—you or myself. And Pat wants me to stay—”

“Through love or a sense of husbandly obligation?” Sylvia’s cheeks were white and her mouth looked hard. She wasn’t used to having anyone she considered as weak as Jeanie Hallam carry the fight to her and slug it out.

Jean shook her head. “It won’t do, Sylvia. Whether through love or a sense of obligation, I don’t know. The point is that he wants me for his wife and has told me so, and he has also told me that I must fill my part of the contract or I can’t stay here any longer.”

“And you’re going to stay?”

Jean looked at her squarely and quite calmly. “Yes, Sylvia, I’m going to stay.”

“Even though you know that I was the one—”

“Even so. I’m not walking out on this fight with you. I’m not quitting the field and I’m winning fairly. He loves me, and he told me that he loves me. And you were so cheap and brazen and unworthy even of your kind, Sylvia, that you offered yourself to him—and he refused you.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, prowling around in the night—”

“Yes, too bad for you, wasn’t it? Maybe you could have made sure of him then, could have established a claim upon him that he might think he had to honor.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Jeanie? For such a shy little mouse you’ve come a long way. And now you’re telling me that you can keep him from me—that I can’t take him away—”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I think he loves me now, and I’ve always loved him. So I’m not afraid of you any longer, Sylvia—I’m keeping my husband.”

“And what happens to me?” Sylvia’s laugh was an ugly sound. “I can go die in a ditch, I suppose.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that. We can help you, Pat and I—”

“But how good, how utterly big-hearted of you! I like that! You can help me, when I took him right from under your nose and would have had all this that you have now if I hadn’t been such a fool.”

“You’ll have to go away, Sylvia,” said Jean, and there was honest regret in the way she said it. All her life she had tried to be friends, to win her cousin’s love, all her life she had given Sylvia loyalty and deep affection, and it was like a defeat now to admit that the effort had been fruitless. Sylvia had never repaid her in kind, and if she stayed around Sylvia would just keep on causing mischief.

“Well—” Sylvia sat up and ran a comb through her thick hair—“you surely can say your piece when you have to, little cousin. You’ve laid your cards on the table and I’m not so stupid that I can’t read them. Right now, I haven’t any to match them. But don’t forget, Mrs. Hayden, that it was my parents who took you off the orphanage steps and gave you the chance to be where you are today.”

Jean shook her head. “I don’t forget. I never did forget, and your kind father knew it and told me that he was glad of what he had done for me. Oh, Sylvia, don’t be so bitter—”

Sylvia stood up. “Bitter! Why shouldn’t I be bitter! Seeing a smug little do-gooder like you get away with everything. And I, fool that I was, felt sorry for you. Well, the devil with you, and him too if he’s ready to settle down to the sort of sweet domesticity you’d tie a man to. Anyway, you can always remember he’s second-hand—just a hand-me-down like all the other things I’ve given to you.”

“That’s about enough, Sylvia. I had him first. For a while he wanted you, but not any more. I feel sure of that.”

“You’re just kidding yourself. He’d grab me tomorrow if you weren’t around all the time, looking so wifelike.”

“I don’t believe it. Anyway, he’s been given lots of chances to make up his mind in the last month or more. He’s seen you every day and close at hand. He’s swum with you, golfed with you—but he still wants me, Sylvia. Odd, isn’t it? He’s still asking me to be his wife.”

“Probably feels guilty about you. We should have been married in England when he first fell in love with me.”

“Why weren’t you?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t—I mean he’s one of those rare birds in whom chivalry hasn’t died. He didn’t want to hurt your delicate feelings, probably was afraid you’d drown yourself in the lake or go into a decline or do something like the girls in grandma’s day.”

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Sylvia?”

“He wouldn’t let me. Same thing—he kept putting it off and putting it off, and then the kid got polio and everything was fouled up. But it seems you’re going to have him in the end, Jeanie. I must admit you deserve a break, but you seem to be getting too many of them. Paul Blake is in love with you, more so I think than Pat is. I don’t like Paul: he knows too much and he can see too deeply into one.”

She went up the garden path, swinging the big straw sun-hat she had been wearing in the heat of the afternoon—slender, lissome, flawlessly beautiful and utterly lacking, Jean thought, in heart or conscience.

I feel guilty about sending her away, thought Jean, scratching Peter the Great’s elephant-ear, but it must be done or she will cause even more serious trouble.

“Peter—” She stared at the huge St. Bernard who stared gravely back. She smelled the air. Fish! There was no doubt about it—Peter gave off a richly potent piscine aroma. And Peter, oddly enough, didn’t look like a dog who was pining too much for his beloved young mistress.

Jean’s brow crinkled. There was something funny here—something that made her heart race and filled her with excitement. The big dog was always sitting by the hedge-gate, always watching the trucks go by.

Glooscap McCarthy! She remembered now the remarks of the counterman in The Greasy Spoon about Glooscap’s immense appetite for candy and frankfurters and ice-cream. It could be, of course, that Elspeth or Josh had given Peter some fish, but she didn’t think it was that. This rich lobster smell might have come from a small child’s jersey when it hugged the big dog briefly.

“Bertelle!” She got up from her chair. “I’ll bet she is in that huge van with those Indians. It would be a grand place to hide and, come to think of it, she was wearing a jersey and blue overalls just like Glooscap’s when she left home. I’ll call Pat. We’ll get the police after that lorry at once.”

But the police had already found the lorry, a few miles below Eastport on the road to the border. Its air-brakes had failed on a steep grade and it had run wild, smashing into a bridge and ending up on its side in a ravine.

It was Paul Blake who told her this. Bertelle was being rushed to St. Ronan’s. The Indians were badly injured, but she was the one who had suffered most. Paul sounded broken. “The ambulance doctor phoned me, but I’m afraid—”

“Oh, no, Paul!”

“Well, you stay there for a while. Take it easy, won’t you? We’ll do all we can, you know. I’ll call you when the ambulance gets here. You know I’ll need you, Jean—I’ll always need you.”

This was quite the hardest time, this short period of waiting, that Jean had ever known. She had put down the telephone blindly, instinctively, after she had taken Paul’s grim message. Long years of dealing with life’s direct emergencies, she had believed, had steeled her against weakness and shock, but she found herself now weak and distraught, and it was only with a great effort that she kept herself from playing the weak sister and giving away to tears and hysteria.

She had been right about Bertelle. All the time of her absence she had been with the Indians, either deep in the woods in the caravan with Leonie or—and probably most of the time—in the Laurentide Lobster van with Dominique and Glooscap.

They had passed the gates of Uplands any number of times on their way to and from Boston. They must have stopped several times to see Peter, who was wise enough to take up his stance at the gate where he had last seen his little mistress as she climbed into the van.

They were clever, those Micmacs; they had defied detection. Bertelle was dressed exactly like Glooscap and she could walk abroad with Dominique if she needed to, and all who knew them would think it was the tall Micmac and his crippled child. The few times the police had flagged them down, she had hidden under the blankets in the back of the cab.

Why? Jean wondered that she would do such a thing. It was the little boy, Glooscap, who explained to her when she saw him later in the hospital. “With us,” he said, “she was happy—sans peur—no fear; in the big house she think you are going away and the White One would be her maman, and she thinks no one wants her. We have good time together until Dominique, sacré fou, upset the truck and near kill us all.”

She broke the news to Sylvia whom she found in her room sitting in the slow-creeping dusk. Sylvia looked very much alone and forsaken, and Jean’s heart would have gone out to her, a stranger among strangers, if she hadn’t known that Sylvia was the last one in the world who needed sympathy. She might take it if it was offered, but secretly she’d be laughing at the softness of the one who offered it.

“Riding around in a fish van with a lot of crazy Indians!” She stared at Jean. “Honestly, Jeanie, it’s hard to believe. There must be some of that Micmac blood in her—”

“Well, I guess there is—from her father’s people. They’re rather proud of it too. I hope she’s not badly hurt. I’m just waiting to hear from Paul. He said he would ring me again as soon as the ambulance arrived from down the shore. Pat is with it. What an ugly thing!”

“Children like that are bound to be a problem,” said Sylvia smugly. “I knew that, which was why I balked at the job of taking on the task of bringing her up. You took it, and look what’s come of it; after all the love and tender care you lavished on her, she ran off with a pack of dirty savages.”

Jean was silent. She couldn’t understand. “The McCarthys must have offered her something that we couldn’t,” she said at last. “Some security, maybe, some happiness that it’s not in our power to provide no matter how much we may love her.”

“They probably didn’t make her wash or compel her to take baths,” said Sylvia with her usual dry cynicism. “Kids adore that. They’re naturally dirty little pigs anyway.”

“Oh, do keep quiet, Sylvia, won’t you? I don’t like—”

“Well, I don’t see the use in looking like the world’s end, the way you are. Don’t you learn anything in that noble profession of Florence Nightingale’s? To me you’re all still carrying lamps. This is the age of electric torches—flashlights to you. Why, you don’t seem to have much faith in your doctors and hospitals—”

“They’re good, but it all ends up with faith in God. There doesn’t seem much one can do sometimes except pray.”

Sylvia looked at her almost pityingly. She would never understand Jean, had never come near to understanding her in the long years they had lived together. They were as far apart as night and day; so it had always been and so it always would be.

Elspeth brought them tea and sandwiches, since neither felt like having dinner. Elspeth’s Scot’s heart was broken, her eyes red from weeping. “That bairn!” she wailed. “I’ll never cease to blame myself for the harm that has come to her.”

“Another Lady Jeremiah,” muttered Sylvia. Out loud she said, “Cheer up, Scotty. It may not be so bad as you think.” Then, with a sly look at Jean: “All we can do is pray.”

“Aye, Miss Clyde, that we can. But for that poor wee thing to run off with those black savages and go roarin’ around the country in their fish-stinkin’ caravan. I’ll never be able to fathom it—never—not if I live to be a hundred.”

Not any more than you’ve been able to figure out the disappearance of Mr. Craig right after he married you, thought Sylvia wickedly—you Scottish witch, you Highland crone—

The phone rang before they had finished their tea. There was an extension in Sylvia’s room, and she handed the mauve-colored instrument to Jean. “For you,” she said. “Dr. Paul Blake, I believe.”

Jean took the phone, trying in vain to still the trembling of her fingers. Sylvia watched her coolly, almost contemptuously. Sylvia could never understand people who went all emotional over the worries of others—death, illness or the like. This little cripple now—of what moment, of what great significance to anyone was it whether she lived or died? True, she might get better: it was wonderful how many people once doomed to misery could be salvaged. But even so—

Jean listened to Paul’s clear, strong voice, which always held a note of warmth, deep and caressing, when he spoke to her. What he had to tell her now needed that tenderness, needed all his doctor’s diplomacy, for it was far from good.

Bertelle was not too badly hurt. Jean’s heart leapt and rejoiced when she heard that. She could pull through readily enough if—and it was a momentous “if”—they could find the blood for the transfusion she needed.

“We haven’t enough of it, Jean,” said Paul, a note of desperation in his voice. “We’re beaten, and she will die if we can’t get more in the next few hours. We had some of the plasma luckily, but so little. Now we have called Boston and they think they can get us some—but not in time.”

Jean felt sickened. “It’s—you mean it’s some rare type of blood she needs?”

“Just that. It’s ‘B’ Rh factor negative—and we can’t match it. We’re stymied—” His voice, bitter now, hopeless and frustrated, broke off. “I suppose you’ll be coming in now. Oh, you can talk to her maybe. Pat is here. Chin up, Jeanie.”

“Paul! Oh, Paul, I don’t know—” She put down the phone and turned slowly away. This was a bitter thing, cruel and monstrously unfair. Bertelle could die for the lack of a pint or so of blood. Surely there must be something they could do, someone they could find—

“I’m here,” said Sylvia in a bored tone. “I take it you’ve heard bad news, darling. You look as if the last trump had sounded. Don’t look so tragic, so stricken. What’s the pitch?”

“I wonder if you care, Sylvia.” She turned furiously on her cousin, who was concentrating on her nails, buffing them, admiring the sheen, buffing them again. “I wonder if you care for anyone. Bertelle—” She lost her voice for a moment, clapped the back of her hand to her mouth.

“Well?” demanded the smooth, lovely voice. “Get on with it, can’t you?”

“I find it hard. Paul says she could live, but they can’t get the proper type blood for her to give her a transfusion—”

“Oh!” Sylvia’s arched brows went up. “So that’s it. She would have to be different. She was always a perverse imp.”

“I’m going to hate you if you talk like that.”

“I don’t think you have the capacity to hate, Jeanie. Yours is the loving heart. What’s the type of blood they need for little Hop o’ My Thumb?”

“I—oh, I forget—what’s it matter anyway?”

“Is it ‘B’ Rh factor negative?” questioned the soft voice, while the nail-buffer moved in brisk rhythmic measure.

“Yes, that’s it. Why—why—how do you happen to—”

Sylvia put down the nail-buffer now and fumbled in the drawer of her vanity, among a terrific confusion of old letters, cards and papers.

“Ah, here we are, my sweet.” She came up with a bit of pasteboard and held it between thumb and forefinger. Jean had come over and stood above her, in her eyes a look of hope mixed with incredulity, with fear and suspicion.

“You put your cards on the table a while ago, Mrs. Hayden.” Sylvia’s voice was softer than ever, and her laughter was not a pleasant thing to hear—mocking, sneering, triumphant—

She flipped the card onto her vanity, face upward. It was a blood-donor’s certificate, and after the print stopped dancing and shimmering in front of her eyes, Jean could read the magic symbols under the name of Sylvia Clyde—

Jean could not speak; her hands were clenched hard and her body was held in a vise of tension that went slowly out of her now.

“Sylvia!” she whispered. “Oh, Sylvia. I can’t believe it—this is too wonderful—”

Sylvia’s lips did not part when she smiled.

“What’s wonderful about it?” she asked at length. “I know it’s very uncommon, but one would expect something like that from me. One kind friend said my blood would be the same type as a python’s or a rattler’s.”

“Wonderful! I—I’m sorry for all the things—”

Sylvia threw down the gauntlet now and turned on Jean with the hideous swiftness of the snake.

“So you’re sorry now! So I’m wonderful now! So you think I’m going to give my blood to keep that precious brat alive to plague and annoy me? Why, she was the cause of all my troubles—all of them—she with her propensity for catching any plagues that are going. She made me break off with Pat, and now you expect me to keep her alive—”

“Sylvia!” Jean’s eyes were wide with horror. “What are you saying? What are you trying to tell me—that you’d refuse to give your blood, even to save a life, a little girl’s life—”

“I didn’t say so, my sweet. I didn’t say anything of the kind. I hold the big card now, the winning card, and, oh boy, am I going to play it for all the jackpot can yield!”

“What do you mean? We’d better hurry. I’d better call Paul.”

“Stay where you are, cousin.” Sylvia’s voice was still soft and silken, but there was an ugly note in it. “You can have my blood for your precious Bertelle. I have lots of it and it’s good, though some people hate it. I’ll give my blood for Pat’s niece,” she looked hard into Jean’s eyes, “but it’s going to cost you plenty!”

“Cost? I don’t understand. Oh, I know Pat will be glad—”

“How stupid can you be, Jean? I don’t want money—not any small reward like that.”

“Well, what do you want then?”

“I want Pat Hayden.”

Jean looked at her, unbelieving. “But I—”

“You’re the one I’m playing cards with, Jean—you’re the one who pays off. I’ll give my blood, but you’ll give me Pat. You’ll get out of here. Go off with Paul Blake. Give Pat a divorce. After this, I’ll be right back enthroned in his heart. Well, what do you say, coz? The time may be later than we think—”

“Sylvia, you don’t mean—”

Sylvia’s soft violet eyes never wavered from hers. “Don’t I! Just try me, little Jeanie. Just give me a trial. You know me, I think—”

Jean did know her. Cross her, and she had the will of Satan and his terrible defiance, and she’d let Bertelle die and laugh at the world’s opprobrium.

“All right.” Jean’s voice was only a whisper. “I—what else can I do? Yes,” she went on wonderingly, “I do know that you would stand by and let Bertelle die, and you’d feel no guilt or no remorse. I couldn’t. I’d do anything—anything. And you’re asking a lot—you’re asking everything—”

“Gambler’s chance,” said Sylvia. “All or nothing. A little while ago I was being given the gate; now I’m giving you the gate. Just a turn of the cards—that’s the way life goes. And don’t be afraid; Pat will be all right with me. He will have a livelier existence anyway,” she smiled wickedly, “than he’d ever have with you. And you—why, you can go off and marry your doctor, as you should have done anyway, and go through the world doing good and maybe win the Nobel prize before you’re through.”

Jean wasn’t listening to her. She dialed the hospital. It was a long time before she could get hold of Paul. His voice sounded strained and harsh.

“What is it, Jeanie? I thought you’d be on your way in here by now. Not that it’s going to help any—”

“Oh, it’s going to help, Paul—never fear. It’s going to save Bertelle—”

“What is? What are you talking about now? You’re not hysterical—”

“No—no.” She wondered if she wasn’t a little. “It’s that blood type you’re looking for—”

“The blood type—”

“Sylvia has it. She showed me her blood-donor’s card. We’ll be in there as fast as we can.”

“You don’t tell me!” Paul seldom raised his voice, but this was almost a shout of pure joy. “Sylvia Clyde, of all people! Why, I’d have sworn she had straight arsenic in her circulatory-system. Well, as long as it saves the kid’s life we should worry. Thank God, blood carries none of the character traits of the donor. I’d hate Bertelle to turn out anything like that spawn of the devil.”

“Oh, Paul—”

“What’s the matter, Jeanie? You sound beaten. You sound queer.”

“Do I? Well, I’ve been so worried. We’ll be along shortly.”

“Don’t drive too fast, but don’t loiter. It’s hard to believe this. You don’t get many breaks in this game, but this is surely one. Pat will be happy. He’s been almost crazy, poor devil. He will love Sylvia for this.”

Yes, thought Jean, he will love her and he will never cease to be grateful to her and he won’t mind too much when I bow out. She will always be the one who saved Bertelle’s life, who preserved for him the one he loves most in all the world. And she can go all her life playing on the lucky chance that she happened to have the same type blood as the little girl she scorned and hated. Was there ever anything more unfair, more cruel? But it’s the sort of thing that always happened to her. Wait till you see the harvest of glory she reaps out of this. Well, Bertelle will live—to walk, to dance, to laugh, to sing her little songs once more and play in the garden with Peter and Meg, and that’s all that matters. But I—

She knew a great emptiness. She stood on the front steps waiting for Sylvia to come. The late summer dusk was lovely in the garden, the brook sang its little song, and the young moon was reflected in the lily pool near which she had been married.

To leave all this beauty, all this peace! Her entire being rebelled at the thought, and anything else that life might offer to her seemed a poor compromise, gray and bleak and bloodless. Down there in the dusk by the pool she seemed to see the small figure of Bertelle in the pretty yellow organdy, like a beautiful butterfly flitting about among the flowers, the tall wide-shouldered figure of Pat, her husband—Until Death do ye part—

Sylvia was beside her, a fawn coat thrown over her shoulders, a white jockey-cap perched on the moon-pale tresses—Sylvia looking like something out of the glossiest of magazines, her mouth a deep crimson, her eyes shadowy pools of darkness and mystery—

“Let’s go, Jeanie. You know what you’re doing now and there’s to be no welshing.”

“I never welshed on you or anyone else—and I won’t now.”

“That’s right. It’s a hard bargain I drove, but I was in a tough spot. And you have to be hard in this funny world, hard and ruthless, or you’ll take an awful beating.”

“People have bargained with blood since the world began,” said Jeanie. “Yours is just a little uglier than any other such bargain I ever heard of.”

They got into the open car and shot down the driveway in the warm August night, lighted by the fireflies in the hedges, by the young moon over the water. They didn’t talk any more—the time for talk was finished.

At St. Ronan’s, Pat and Paul Blake were waiting for them, looking harassed and anxious, but it was to Jean that Pat turned first, his big hands resting on her shoulders, his eyes looking deep into hers.

“She’s going to be all right now,” he said. “For a while it looked as if we were done, but now—” He turned to Sylvia. “This is a wonderful thing, Sylvia. This is something we’ll never forget. It seems like an act of God that you should be here with just this particular blood type. Paul was almost in despair—”

Paul Blake said nothing, but his rapier-sharp black eyes darted from Jean’s pale face to the calm madonna mask of the other girl, and his thoughts were long and deep and wondering and wise.

“Okay, Sylvia. You’ve done this before, I take it, so you know there’s nothing to it.”

“I know, Doctor, but I didn’t do it before; it was done for me, you see! I was smashed up in a hunting accident. I carried the card so you doctors would know what blood I needed if ever I ran short again. But you’ll find it’s right enough—”

She went with Paul and another surgeon, and Jean was left alone with Pat.

Pat gave her a cigarette and they smoked in silence. She was thinking of Sylvia, her thoughts still chaotic and bewildered as the thoughts of honest, straightforward people are likely to be when they meet up with those that hold the devil’s own cunning.

She could see Sylvia now, lying on the cot, looking pale and beautiful and utterly noble. A prick in the arm and a bit of her blood flowing out of her, all over in a few minutes. But from that blood new life and strength would come to the broken little body that without it would lose the last spark of life.

“Jeanie—” She became aware that Pat was speaking to her. “I think God has been very good to us. I know you love Bertelle as much as I do.”

I love her more, Jean’s quick thoughts answered him. I love her so much that I give all my life, my love, my happiness for her.

“Yes, I love her, Pat. And we have been lucky. Thanks to Sylvia she will live—”

“And we can go on from here.” His voice was full of hope, and he reached out his hand and covered hers, and the contact made her heart swell to bursting.

She had to tell him—tell him now while she couldn’t feel any more pain, when she had reached the point where pain registered no longer.

“I’m afraid not, Pat. Remember—” her voice was toneless—“I said I’d give you your answer when Bertelle returned. Well, this is it. I can’t stay with you, Pat. I’m going away, and you can have a divorce, an annulment—whatever it is. It has to be like that, I tell you. It has to.”

She took only one look at his stricken face, the defeat and disappointment in his eyes, the droop of his shoulders.

“Blake, I suppose,” she heard him mutter, and she made no answer because she could not speak. She went blindly from the room, down the long empty corridor, walking aimlessly, not knowing, not caring where she ended, finally sinking into a chair in the semi-darkness of a sun-porch, sitting there dry-eyed and empty, as if all the life had been squeezed from her.

Paul found her there some half-hour later. He flashed on the lights and smiled at her, but the smile died when he saw the whiteness of her face.

“All okay,” he said. “Went as smooth as clockwork, and we got the white witch’s blood and put it into the good little fairy—and she’ll do. But you, my darling—” He came to her and caught her in his arms and she stood up, swaying. “What has happened to you?”

“It’s—oh, all the strain, I guess, Paul. I’m so glad—”

He shook his head.

“You aren’t fooling me, Jeanie. All the strain in the world—our kind of stress—couldn’t break you. What else?”

“Nothing, Paul. Really, there is nothing.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, Jeanie—” His own hands were on her shoulders now, lighter, more tenderly even, than Pat’s. “There’s something here that I have to look into—something that suggests William Shakespeare and his play, ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ ”

“Let it go, Paul, I tell you. There’s nothing—”

“I love you, Jeanie.” His voice was gentle and his eyes and his lips soft when they touched hers. “And you know what love means—true love—your kind of love and mine—”

“Yes, Paul, I know.”

Jean stayed at the hospital, partly to be near Bertelle, mostly to be away from Pat, from Uplands, from all she loved. She didn’t have it in her heart to go there. It was Sylvia’s domain now, and Sylvia, though not yet crowned, was already exercising the prerogatives of a queen. The newspapers, which had played up Bertelle’s disappearance with their usual famished appetite for what they thought was “human interest,” really went to work on the dramatic climax of the lovely English girl who had “by something approaching a miracle” been able to snatch her from the very jaws of death.

Even Bertelle, as she rapidly regained her strength, was impressed with the fact that she was now in possession of some of that one’s blood. But Jean suffered in her heart and Paul Blake, though he didn’t question her any further, wore a wise look.

It was Paul who suggested that she take Bertelle home to Uplands. She had avoided Pat, the times he came to the hospital to see Bertelle. Sylvia had been with him once or twice, and she wanted to see neither of them.

“You may take Bertelle home today if you like, Jeanie,” Paul told her. “I think you’re the one to take her. Now don’t balk—”

“But I—oh, Paul, must I? It’s not going to be easy for me.”

“I know, my dear. None of this is easy for any of us.” His mouth drooped a little, and he looked tired and no longer young. “But since when did you start to look for the easy way? Take the little one home.”

There was something in his voice, in his deep-set dark eyes, that made her obey. In a little while, in the warm September afternoon, she and Bertelle were in the car driving back to Uplands.

“You’re not angry with me now, Jeanie?” asked the small voice. “Pat isn’t, so don’t you be.”

“I’m not, darling. I never was and I never could be.”

There was no one about the big house when they drove up, but Josh came presently and told her that Pat was down by the lily pool, and it was there she found him.

Bertelle went into his arms and was hugged and kissed and raised aloft. Then he lowered her to the grass and told her to show him how she could walk, and to go find Elspeth and Peter the Great and Meg and surprise them all to pieces.

Then he turned to Jean and held his arms out to her.

“She’s gone,” he said softly. “She took a slip of paper and went—to England, I think. I didn’t ask.”

“But she made me—”

“Paul Blake told me what she made you do. Paul is shrewd; he knew she would never do a thing like that, give her blood, except for a price—and a big one.”

“The biggest one, Pat—she wanted you.”

“And you were ready to pay it. Oh, Jean, Jean—to think that, even for an hour, I was blind to your goodness, your rightness, your beauty. And there’s something I don’t think you know, Jean. She tried to stop your marriage after you came here—cabled and phoned—said she would come to me. But I’d seen you with Bertelle, and I loved you and knew it was always you. And you were no second-best bride—I could have had her if I’d wished.”

She was in his arms now, and all the blindness was gone, and the sun shone goldenly bright there by the pool where the lilies floated.

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.

[The end of The Lily Pool by Louis Arthur Cunningham]