When Arthur ran down the step and across the pavement, to take the hand which his visitor held out to him over the carriage door, Mr. Sarradet bowed politely, put his hat on, and turned on his heel. He was consumed with curiosity, but he had no excuse for lingering. He walked up Bloomsbury Street and along the east side of Bedford Square. But then, instead of pursuing a north-westerly course towards his home, he turned sharply to the right and, slackening his pace, strolled along Montague Place in the direction of Russell Square. He went about twenty yards, then turned, strolled back to the corner of Bedford Square and peered round it. He repeated these movements three or four times, very slowly; they consumed perhaps six or seven minutes. His last inspection showed the carriage still at the door, though neither the lady nor Arthur was visible. Evidently she was paying a call, as she had intimated; no telling how long it might last! "Well, I must go home," thought Mr. Sarradet, as he strolled slowly towards the east once more. He turned and walked briskly back. Just as he reached again the corner from which he had taken his observation, he made a sudden backward jump. He was afraid that he was caught! For the barouche dashed by him at a rapid trot, and in it sat the lady and Arthur Lisle. They did not see him; their heads were turned towards one another; they appeared to be engrossed in a lively conversation. The carriage turned westward, across Bedford Square; Sarradet watched it till it disappeared round the corner into Tottenham Court Road.

"That's quick work!" thought Mr. Sarradet; and in truth, if (as the visitor's words implied) she had never seen Arthur Lisle before, the acquaintance was going forward apace. Who could she be? He was vaguely troubled that Arthur Lisle should have – or make – a friend like that. The barouche somehow depressed him; perhaps it put him a little out of conceit with the dimensions of that precious dowry; it looked so rich. And then there had been the reserve, the distance, in Arthur's manner, his refusal to follow up leads and to take cues, and the final fact that the important question had (even though it were by accident) gone unanswered. All these things worked together to dash Mr. Sarradet's spirits.

He told Marie about his visit to Arthur. She was rather surprised at a sudden fancy like that (for so he represented it) taking hold of him, but her suspicions were not roused. When he went on to describe the arrival of the other visitor she listened with natural and eager interest. But the old fellow, full of his perplexities, made a false step.

"She was in the house nearly ten minutes, and then – what do you think, Marie? – they drove away together!"

"In the house ten minutes? Where were you all that time?"

"I was – er – strolling along."

"You must have strolled pretty slowly. Where did they overtake you, Pops?"

He grew rather red. "I can't remember exactly – " he began lamely.

She knew him so well; his confused manner, telling that he had something to conceal, could not escape her notice.

"I believe you waited round the corner to see what happened! Why did you spy on him like that?"

"I don't see any particular harm in being a little curious about – "

But she interrupted him. His spying after the carriage threw suspicion on his motives for his visit too. "Didn't you really go and see Mr. Lisle about anything in particular?"

"Anything in particular, my dear? What do you mean? I asked him to drop in to-morrow – "

"Did you talk about me?"

"Oh, well, you were mentioned, of course."

She leant her arm on the mantelpiece and looked down at him gravely. He read a reproachful question in her glance, and fidgeted under it. "Have you been meddling?" was what her gravely enquiring eyes asked. "Meddling as well as spying, Pops?"

He was roused to defend himself. "You've got no mother, Marie, and – "

"Ah!" she murmured, as a quick flash of enlightenment came. That was Aunt Louisa's phrase! She saw where it came from in a minute; it had always supplied Mrs. Veltheim with a much desired excuse for interfering. She went on in a hard voice – she was very angry – "Did you ask Mr. Lisle his intentions?"

"Of course not. I – I only took the opportunity of finding out something about his people, and – and so on. Really, I think you're very unreasonable, Marie, to object – " and he wandered or maundered on about his paternal rights and duties.

She let him go on. She had no more to say about it – no more that she could say, without revealing her delicate diplomacy. She would do that to nobody alive; she had never stated it explicitly even to herself. There she left the affair, left the last word and a barren show of victory to her father. How much mischief he had done she would find out later – perhaps to-morrow, if Arthur Lisle came. But would he – now? It was the effect of her father's meddling she feared, not that matter of the lady's visit. She knew that he had other friends than themselves. Why shouldn't one of them come and take him for a drive? It was Mrs. Norton Ward, very likely. Her quarrel with her father about his meddling even prevented her from asking what the visitor was like; whatever he might do, she at least would show no vulgar curiosity.

Yet it was the coincidence of the visit with the meddling that did the mischief. Without the first, the second would have resulted in nothing worse than a temporary annoyance, a transitory shock to Arthur's feelings, which a few days' time and Marie's own tact would have smoothed over. As it was, his distaste for old Sarradet's inquisition, an angry humiliation at having the pistol held to his head, a romantic abhorrence of such a way of dealing with the tenderest and most delicate matters, a hideous yet obstinate suspicion that Marie might be privy to the proceeding – all these set his feelings just in time for the unexpected visit.

The visit had been delightful, and delight is an unsettling thing. As Mrs. Godfrey Lisle – or Bernadette, as she bade him call her – purred about his room (so he put it to himself), still more when she declared for sunshine and carried him off to drive with her – in Regent's Park too! – he had felt a sudden lift of the spirit, an exaltation and expansion of feeling. The world seemed wider, its possibilities more various; it was as though walls had been torn down from around him – walls of his own choice and making, no doubt, but walls all the same. This sensation was very vague; it was little more than that the whole atmosphere of his existence seemed fresher, more spacious and more pungent. He owned ruefully that the barouche, the Cee-springs, the bay horses and the liveries, might have had something to do with his pleasure; he knew his susceptibility to the handsome things of material life – the gauds and luxuries – and ever feared to catch himself in snobbishness. But the essential matter did not lie there; his company was responsible for that – Bernadette, and the way she had suddenly appeared, and whisked him off as it were on a magic carpet for a brief journey through the heavens; it seemed all too brief.

"I came as soon as ever I could," she told him. "I got Esther Norton Ward's letter about you after we'd gone to Hilsey for Easter, and we got back only yesterday. But I had terrible work to get leave to come. I had to go down on my knees almost! Cousin Arthur, you're in disgrace, and when you come to see us, you must abase yourself before Godfrey. The Head of the House is hurt because you didn't call!"

"I know. It was awfully wrong of me, but – "

"I understand all about it. But Godfrey's a stickler for his rights. However Sir Oliver and I managed to bring him round ("Who's Sir Oliver?" asked Arthur inwardly), and when you've eaten humble pie, it will be all right. Do you like humble pie, Arthur?"

"No, I don't."

"No more do I." But she was smiling still, and he thought it was little of that stuff she would have to consume. "You see, you made quite an impression on Esther. Oh, and Sir Christopher came down for a week-end, and he was full of your praises too." She put on a sudden air of gravity. "I drove up to your door in a state of considerable excitement, and I had a momentary fear that the fat man with the black moustache was you. However it wasn't – so that's all right." She did not ask who the fat man really was; Arthur was glad – all that could come later.

In fact she asked him no questions about himself. She welcomed him with the glee of a child who has found a new toy or a new playmate. There was no hint of flirtation, no effort to make a conquest; a thing like that seemed quite out of her way. There was no pose, either of languor or of gush. The admiration of his eyes, which he could not altogether hide, she either did not notice or took as a matter of course – something universal and therefore, from a personal point of view, not important. On the other hand he caught her looking at him with interest and critically. She saw that she was caught and laughed merrily over it. "Well, I do feel rather responsible for you, you know," she said in self-defence.

Life does do funny things all of a sudden! He drove with her past the Sarradets' house. He seemed, for the moment, a world away from it. They drove together for an hour; they arranged that he should come to lunch on a day to be fixed after consultation with Godfrey – it appeared that Godfrey liked to be consulted – and then she set him down in the Marylebone Road. When he tried, rather stammeringly, to thank her, she shook her head with a smile that seemed a little wistful, saying "No, I think it's I who ought to thank you; you've given me an afternoon's holiday – all to myself!" She looked back over her shoulder and waved her hand to him again as she turned down Harley Street and passed out of sight. When she was gone, the vision of her remained with him, but vaguely and rather elusively – a memory of grey eyes, a smooth rich texture of skin, mobile changeable lips, fair wavy hair – these in a setting of the richest apparel; an impression of something very bright and very fragile, carefully bestowed in sumptuous wrappings.

He went to the Sarradets' the next evening, as he had been bidden, but he went with laggard steps. He could not do what seemed to be expected of him there – not merely because it was expected, though that went for something considerable, thanks to his strain of fastidious obstinacy, but because it had become impossible for him to – his feelings sought a word and found only a very blunt and ungracious one – to tie himself up like that. His great contentment was impaired and could no longer absorb him. His sober scheme of happiness was crumbling. His spirit was for adventure. Finality had become suddenly odious – and marriage presents itself as finality to those who are not yet married. If he had not been ready for the plunge before, now he was a thousand times less ready.

The evening belied the apprehensions he had of it. There was a merry party – Mildred Quain, Amabel Osling, Joe Halliday, and half-a-dozen other young folk. And Mr. Sarradet was out! Dining at his club with some old cronies, Marie explained. There were games and music, plenty of chaff and a little horseplay. There was neither the opportunity nor the atmosphere for sentiment or sentimental problems. In gratitude to fate for this, and in harmony with what was his true inward mood behind and deeper than his perplexity, Arthur's spirits rose high; he chaffed and sported with the merriest. Marie was easy, cordial, the best of friends with him – not a hint of anything except just that special and pleasant intimacy of friendship which made them something more to one another than the rest of the company could be to either of them. She was just as she had always been – and he dismissed his suspicion. She had known nothing at all of Mr. Sarradet's inquisition; she was in no way to blame for it. And if she were innocent, why, then, was not he innocent also? His only fault could lie in having seemed to her to mean what he had not meant. If he had not seemed to her to mean it, where was his fault, – and where his obligation? But if he acquitted Marie, and was quite disposed to acquit himself, he nursed his grudge against old Sarradet for his bungling attempt to interfere between friends who understood one another perfectly.

Marie watched him, without appearing to watch, and was well content. Her present object was to set him completely at his ease again – to get back to where they were before Mrs. Veltheim interfered and her father blundered. If she could do that, all would be well; and she thought that she was doing it. Had Mrs. Veltheim and Mr. Sarradet been the only factors in the case, she would probably have proved herself right; for she was skilful and tenacious, and no delicacy of scruple held her back from trying to get what she wanted, even when what she wanted happened to be a man to marry. There that toughness of hers served her ends well.

When he said good-night, he was so comfortable about the whole position, so friendly to her and so conscious of the pleasure she had given him in the last few weeks, that he said with genuine ruefulness, "Back to the Temple to-morrow! I shan't be able to play about so much!"

"No, you must work," she agreed. "But try to come and see us now and then, when you're not too busy."

"Oh, of course I shall – and I'm not at all likely to be busy. Only one has to stop in that hole – just in case."

"I mean – just when you feel like it. Don't make a duty of it. Just when you feel inclined for a riot like this, or perhaps for a quiet talk some afternoon."

This was all just what he wanted to hear, exactly how he wanted the thing to be put.

Yes, but Mr. Sarradet would not always be so obliging as to be out! The thought of Mr. Sarradet, whom he had really forgotten, suddenly recurred to him unpleasantly.

"That's what I like – our quiet talks," she went on. "But you've only to say the word, and we'll have company for you."

Her tone was light, playful, chaffing. He answered in the same vein. "I'll send my orders about that at least twelve hours beforehand."

"Thank you, my lord," and, laughing, she dropped him a curtsey.

He left them still at their frolic and went home rather early. He had enjoyed himself, but, all the same, his dominant sense was one of relief, and not merely from the obligation which officious hands had sought to thrust on him, regardless of the fact that he was not ready to accept it and might never be. It was relief from the sense of something that he himself had been doing, or been in danger of doing, to his own life – a thing which he vaguely defined as a premature and ignorant disposal of that priceless asset. Together with the youthful vanity which this feeling about his life embodied, there came to him also a moment of clear-sightedness, in the light of which he perceived the narrow limits of his knowledge of the world, of life, even of himself. He saw – the word is too strong, rather he felt somehow – that he had never really wanted Marie Sarradet to share, much less to be the greatest factor in, that precious, still unexplored life; he had really only wanted to talk to her about it, with her to speculate about it, to hear from her how interesting it was and might become. He wanted that still from her. Or at all events from somebody? From her or another? He put that question behind him – it was too sceptical. He wanted still her interest, her sympathy. But he wanted something else even more – freedom to find, to explore, to fulfil his life.

So it was that Mr. Arthur Lisle, by a fortunate combination of circumstances on which he certainly had no right to reckon, found out, just in time, that after all he had never been in love – unless indeed with his own comely image, flatteringly reflected in a girl's admiring eyes.

Poor tender diplomatist! But possibly she too might make her own discoveries.

CHAPTER VII
ALL OF A FLUTTER

"Bernadette's got a new toy, Esther."

"I know it," said Mrs. Norton Ward, handing her visitor a cup of tea.

"Do you mean that you know the fact or that you're acquainted with the individual?"

"The latter, Judith. In fact I sent him to her."

"Well, it was she who went to him really, though Godfrey made some trouble about it. He thought the young man ought to have called first. However they got round him."

"They? Who?"

"Why, Bernadette and Oliver Wyse, of course. And he came to lunch. But Godfrey was quite on his high horse at first – stroked his beard, and dangled his eye-glass, and looked the other way when he was spoken to – you know the poor old dear when he's like that? Luckily the young man could tell Leeds from Wedgwood, and that went a long way towards putting matters right. Godfrey quite warmed to him at last."

"We like him very much, and I hope you did – even if you won't admit it. He's got a room in Frank's chambers, you know."

"I didn't speak more than six words to him – he was up at the other end of the table by Bernadette. But I liked the look of him rather. Of course he was all of a flutter."

"Oh, I daresay," smiled Esther. "But I thought we ought to risk that – and Sir Christopher felt quite strongly about it."

Judith Arden appeared to reflect for a moment. "Well, I think he ought to be," she said judicially. "I wouldn't give much for a man who didn't get into a flutter over Bernadette, at first anyhow. She must seem to them rather – well, irresistible."

"She's wonderfully" – Esther Norton Ward sought for a word too – "radiant, I mean, isn't she?"

"And there isn't a bit of affectation about her. She just really does enjoy it all awfully."

"All what?"

"Why, being irresistible and radiant, of course."

"That's looking at it entirely from her point of view."

"What point of view do you suppose she looks at it from? That is, if she ever looks at it at all. And why not? They ought to be able to look after themselves – or keep away."

"I really think you're a very fair-minded girl," laughed Esther. "Very impartial."

"You have to be – living with them as much as I do."

"Do you like it?"

Judith smiled. "The situation is saved just by my not having to do it. If I had to do it for my bread-and-butter I should hate it like poison. But, thank heaven, I've four hundred a year, and if I spend the summer with them, it's because Godfrey and Margaret want me. The winter I keep for myself – Switzerland part of the time, then Rome, or Florence. So I'm quite independent, you see. I'm always a visitor. Besides, of course, nobody could be more gracious than Bernadette; graciousness is part of being irresistible."

"I really do think that being pretty improves people," said Esther.

"Well, as far as I can see, without it there wouldn't be any Bernadette," Judith remarked, and then laughed gently at her own extravagance. "At any rate, she'd be bound to turn into something absolutely different. Something like me even, perhaps!" She laughed again, a low, pleasant, soft laugh, rather in contrast with the slightly brusque tone and the satiric vein which marked her speech. The laugh seemed to harmonise with and to belong to her eyes, which were dark, steady, and reflective; the tone and manner to fall into line with the pertness of her nose, with its little jut upwards, and with the scornful turn of her upper lip. Her figure and movements perhaps helped the latter impression too; she inclined to thinness, and her gestures were quick and sometimes impatient.

"Come, you're not so bad," said Esther with her pleasant cordial candour. "Now I'm quite insignificant."

"No, you're not. You've got the grand manner. I heard Godfrey say so."

Esther laughed both at the compliment and at the authority vouched in support of it.

"Oliver Wyse was at lunch too on the occasion, was he? How is he getting on?"

"Sir Oliver is still his usual agreeable, composed, competent, and, I'm inclined to think, very wilful self."

"Patient, though?" The question came with a mischievous glance. Judith's retort was ironic, both with eyes and tongue.

"I permit myself any amount of comment on character but no conjecture as to facts. That's the distinction between studying human nature and gossiping, Esther."

"Don't snub me! And the distinction's rather a fine one."

"No, gossip's all right for you, living outside the house. I live so much inside it that I think it wouldn't be fair in me. And above all, owing to the footing on which I'm there – as I've told you – I am emphatically not a watch-dog."

"Where's the child?"

"She's down at Hilsey – with the old housekeeper Mrs. Gates – by doctor's orders."

"Again! Have you any comment to make on the doctor's character?"

"I think you're being malicious. It's really better for the child to be in the country. We're very busy, all of us, and very gay – a bustle all the time. If she were here, she'd only be with a nurse in the Park or in the nursery. And we're only just back from three weeks at Hilsey ourselves."

"Yes, I think I was being malicious," Esther admitted. "I suppose we're all jealous of Bernadette in our hearts, and talk like cats about her! Well, you don't!"

"It would be ungrateful of me. She affords me a very great deal of pleasure. Besides, she's my aunt."

"Well – by marriage."

"Oh yes, entirely by marriage," Miss Arden agreed with one of her fleeting smiles. She implied that no other form of auntship would be, as the advertisements say, "entertained" by Bernadette. "And even as to that I have, by request, dropped the titles, both for her and Godfrey," she added.

Though Judith Arden was only just out of her teens, she was older in mind and ways; she ranked herself, and was accepted, as contemporary with women in the middle and later twenties, like Bernadette and Esther Norton Ward. She had had to face the world practically by herself. An epidemic of fever in an Italian town had carried off father and mother when she was fifteen. She had got them buried, herself quarantined and back to England, unaided, as she best could. That was a developing experience. At home she came under the guardianship of her uncle, Godfrey Lisle, which was much the same thing as coming under her own. Godfrey was not practical; the care of a growing girl was hopelessly beyond him. Judith put herself to school at Paris; that finished with, she tried Cambridge for a term, and found it too like going back to school. She kept house for a while with an old school-comrade, an art-student, in Paris. The friend married, and she was by herself again. A visit to Hilsey led to the sort of semi-attachment to the Godfrey Lisle household which she described to Esther; from the position of a "poor relation" she was saved by her four hundred pounds a year – her mother's portion; the late Mr. Arden, author of books on art, and travel in the interests of art, had left nothing but some personal debts behind. To the maturity of her world-experience there was one exception; she had never been in love; the transitory flirtations of ball-rooms and studios had left her amused but heart-whole.

Her guardian had come by degrees to let himself be looked after by her a good deal. The inheritor of an old family estate worth some ten thousand pounds a year, Godfrey Lisle had been bred for a country squire, a local man of affairs, or (given aptitude for the wider sphere) a politician; such were the traditions of the Lisles of Hilsey. In him they found no continuance. He was a shy quiet man, tall but rather awkward in person, and near-sighted; his face was handsome and refined and, when he was not embarrassed (he often was), his manner was pleasant, if too soft. But he did not like society, and was shy with strangers; he would fumble with the black ribbon from which his glasses hung, and look the other way, as Judith had described. He was fond of beautiful things – pictures, china, furniture – but had not the energy to make himself a real amateur of any of them. His nature was affectionate – calmly affectionate, and the affections were constant. Once, and once only, he had blazed into a flame of feeling – when he courted Bernadette and in the early days of his marriage with her. The beautiful penniless girl – she would have stirred even a fish to romance; and it would not have been fair to call Godfrey fish-like. But ardours were not really in his line; too soon the rapturous lover subsided into the affectionate husband. Bernadette had shown no signs of noticing the change; perhaps she did not wish to check it. It may be that it coincided with a modification of her own feelings. At any rate, thus acquiesced in, it had gone further. Little of affection survived now, though they treated one another with the considerate politeness of an extinct passion. He gave her everything that she desired – even to the straining of his income; he was the only person for whom she ever "put herself out." Here were reciprocal, if tacit, apologies for a state of affairs which neither of them really regretted.

She had loved him, though, once. She did not claim it as a merit; there it was, a curious fact in her past life at which, in her rare moments of introspection, she would smile. She had loved not only all that he brought – ease, wealth, escape from sordidness; she had also loved him for bringing them. Even now sometimes she would love the memory of him as he had seemed in those days; then the considerate politeness would be coloured by a pretty tenderness, a sort of compassionate affection as for a man who had fallen from high estate, inevitably fallen but blamelessly. However these recrudescences on the whole embarrassed Godfrey Lisle, and Bernadette, laughing at herself, withdrew to a safe distance and to her real interests. Godfrey was not one of the interests of her life; he was only one of its conditions.

Into this household – though not, of course, below the surface of it – Arthur Lisle now made joyful and tremulous entry. His eyes were in no state to see clearly or to see far; they were glued to the central light, and for him the light burned bright to dazzling. Behold the vision that he saw – the vision of a Reigning Beauty!

It is a large party. There is no getting near her – at least no staying near. The crush forces a man away, however politely. But perhaps a far-off corner may afford a view, for a dexterous servant keeps clear a space just in front of her, and the onlooker is tall. They all come and speak to her, by ones and twos – ex-beauties, would-be beauties, rival beauties; for the last she has a specially cordial greeting – sometimes, if she knows them well, a word of praise for their gowns, always a quick approving glance at them. The great ladies come; for them a touch of deference, a pretty humility, a "Who am I that you should come to my house?" air, which gracefully masks her triumphant sense of personal power. The men come – all the young men who would adore if they might, and are very grateful for their invitations; they pass quickly, each with his reward of an indolent smile of welcome. The choice young men come; them she greets with a touch of distance lest they should grow proud in their hearts. No favour in them to come – far from it! Then an old man, a friend. Mark now the change; she is daughter-like in her affection and simplicity. Then perhaps a little stir runs through the company, a whisper, a craning of necks. A great man is coming – for beauty can draw greatness. There comes a massive white head – a ribbon and star perhaps, or the plain black that gives, not wears, such ornaments. He stays with her longer: there is no jostling now; the dexterous servant delays the oncoming stream of guests. Royal compliments are exchanged. It is a meeting between Potentates.

In some such dazzling colours may the ardent imagination of youth paint the quite ordinary spectacle of a pretty woman's evening party, while an old lady on one side of him complains that "everybody" is there, and an old man on the other says that it is a beastly crush, or damns the draught from a window behind him – lucky, perhaps, if he does not damn the Potentates too, the one for keeping him from his bed, the other for marching through rapine to dismemberment, or some such act of policy plainly reprehensible.

Strange to think – it is Youth that holds the brush again – strange and intoxicating – that this is the woman with whom he drives in the Park, of whose family luncheon he partakes, with whom he had tea yesterday, who makes a friend of him. She talked to him an hour yesterday, told him all about that hard childhood and girlhood of hers, how she had scanty food and coarse, had to make her own frocks and wash her own handkerchiefs; she said that she feared the hard training had made her hard, yet hoped with a sigh that it was not so, and seemed to leave the question to his sovereign arbitrament. She had made the little narrow home she came from real to him with cunning touches; she had made her leap of escape from it so natural, so touching. Of what the leap had brought her she had made light, had spoken with a gentle depreciation of the place her beauty had won – "Such looks as I have helped, I suppose, besides Godfrey's position" – and let him see how much more to her taste was a quiet talk with a friend than all the functions of society. How much better than the receiving of Beauties and Potentates was a quiet hour in the twilight of her little den with Cousin Arthur!

Could it be the same woman? Yes, it was. There was the wonder and the intoxication of it. He was quite unknown to all that throng. But to himself he stood among them, eminent and superior. See, hadn't she thrown him a glance – right across the room? Well, at any rate he could almost swear she had!

Arthur Lisle – in the flesh at his cousin's evening party, in the spirit anywhere you like – felt a hand laid on his arm. He turned to find Sir Christopher Lance beside him.

"Ah, Mr. Lisle, aren't you glad you took my advice? I told you you were missing something by not coming here. Don't you remember?"