Full Text: My Little Sister

by Elizabeth Robins, 1913

TABLE OF CONTENTS (Chapter by chapter access, for on-screen viewing.)

Permission to publish this work by Elizabeth Robins in an electronic edition is granted by Mabel Smith, literary executor, Elizabeth Robins Estate. Hypertext Markup copyright Joanne E. Gates. See full disclosures, citation guidelines, and contact information in: Notes and Commentary.

Chapter I
First Impressions

     She is very fair, my little sister.

     I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went.

     I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without touching the quick.

     I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written "was" or "seems."

     And that, in sum, is my story.

     We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot clearly remember what life was like before.

     Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen, I cannot tell. I do not

     My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is wide and green.

     As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse; always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with the infinite possibilities of existence--from the discovery of a wheat-ears' hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing, leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.

     We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and

     To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina.

     And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill.

     Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at large in our green dominions was an enemy.

     So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate. My mother! . . . who had moved through all our days with changeless calm. And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock blew across her face.

     Mélanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Mélanie could not even understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been there with my

     Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond.

     I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away. Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange woman kissed Bettina?

     The new nurse lied.

     And I said no word.

     But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at Duncombe was ever to

     Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare confess it.

     For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge of the lie.

Chapter II
Lessons

     There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our mother as fledglings in a nest.

     Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness.

     In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in our lessons--so much so that we were a long time in finding out the dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made stimulating, and the easy things she made delight.

     No; there was an exception to this.

     Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister.

     Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my "Étude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle."

     "Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge."

     I began again--allegro, as I thought.

     But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands.

     "How can I? You expect me to be as quick as God!"

     I think this must have been after that act of His which gave use a sense of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her playing, and saw the way in

     Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections of old English song:

Where are you going to, my pretty maid?"

     We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the first thing she sang in English.

     I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the mythology stories were in French.

     And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium.

     We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green--brave little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had been taken from the people.

     Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been only a superior sort of farmhouse.

     Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did.

     We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds.

     The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone.

     That was a blow.

     Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit less to those broad acres rolling away--with foam of gorse and broom on

     Two miles to the south was our village--source of such supplies as did not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus, the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a children's school-treat?

     And she never did any of these things.

     Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had beguiled Bettina with chocolate.

     I was furious and miserable.

     I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream. . . . But the servants gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I thought about little else in our walks.

     Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I persist."

     Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of my mother's character.

     I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in.

     But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of--I knew not what. But I knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our walks where different, because we were always thinking we might meet him.

     I prayed God to give my mother strength--for Christ's sake not to let it happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer.

     Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken the matter in hand.

Chapter III
A Thunder-Storm

     Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite suddenly the croisée of the casement showed as ink-black lines crossing a square of blue-white fire.

     The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain. Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight.

     Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her paleness ghostlike.

     She drew back from the window. Before the

     "Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue. My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen.

     I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging together.

     "That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and daylight struggled back. We went on with our

     Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother, with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the drawing-room door for the bearers to pass.

     Their feet left muddy marks in the hall. . . .

     We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had been taken away.

     People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric current.

     I knew God had heard my prayer.

     But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was riven from foot to crotch.

     That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You expect me to be as quick as God."

Chapter IV
Nimbus

     I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No. He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon.

     Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of fear.

     I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones.

     We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships.

     My mother seemed to hug the thought of home

     More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."

     I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.

     I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind use like people who knew themselves pursued.

     Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music

     "Now we are safe and sound!" she would say.

     I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger.

     In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had barred him out.

     That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy, craftier, deadlier than any that might

     I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was there.

     Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless.

     As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds were out. You heard a

     Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and often seemed upon the verge of understanding.

     There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that look, listening, foreboding.

     There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively, to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look when the fringe of shadow

     There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or moods. She was merely gentle and aloof.

     She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times when she must have been unhappy, too.

     She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs to do lessons in the morning-room--which was our schoolroom under the cheerfuller name.

     Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that?

     I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons,

     And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast.

     Then I would shut the window.

     Bettina ought never to hear such music.

     For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it "between the lights."

     As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper still.

     As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy places.

     Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and consolatory suggestions of supper.

     Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our mother--when she would break off and come to find us--help us to hurry through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours? . . . I never quite knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our father's order and his watch. We had turned over the

     We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them wonderfully--as though they were alive.

     And we, too--we were always happier after we had seen them.

     We knew that she felt, somehow, safer.

     So did we.

Chapter V
The Mother's Vow

     We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own. But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent distance, but with a closeness of devotion.

     In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family.

     The reason for the first is clear.

     As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort.

     Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour, partly as symbols of our national greatness.

     From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter, or to her sailor-son,

     Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath.

     It was let to different people, from time to time,

     Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother.

     If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would stop to ask how my mother was.

     The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother ought to have a nurse. She said she had me.

     That was the proudest moment of my childhood.

     I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her.

     Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick room.

     In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape, and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching Bettina play at church-

     I could not bear to see Loring, or Mélanie, doing anything for my mother. I think they humoured me, and that Mélanie performed her service chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid was able to come downstairs.

     She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different.

     Not only thin. Different.

     Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people who "called to inquire."

     We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon "indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her malady.

     We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought.

     When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children.

     In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look. I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?"

     One day Dora shook her head.

     "Why not?"

     She was going back to school. "Aren't you going back to school?" she asked.

     "Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school."

     Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us.

     "You like having to go to school!" I said.

     She loved it. "So would you."

     "I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction.

     She couldn't think why.

     Neither could I--beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of pity--"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at home."

     Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified to hear we had never had one.

     Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a strange woman those hours she spent with us.

     We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so helpless. Or she would sit under the wild broom in Caesar's Camp watching the birds; or lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors

     Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in all things else.

     I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I recognised her accomplishments as among our best family assets--reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger, soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the paths appointed.

     Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected against colds, against fatigue.

     There is, in almost every house, one main concern.

     When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable.

     But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable.

     I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or away from our mother, until--but that is to come later.

     I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car--the first we had encountered at close quarters--a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded her dreadful errand--to invite us children to come and stay at her house in Brighton from Friday to Monday!

     We stood there, blank, speechless.

     Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse.

     Relief and pride rushed together. I could

     "Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor.

     The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs.

     Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will not let anyone take you away--no, never. Very well, you shall not pay visits."

     And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not never?"

     "Not never."

     Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word!

Chapter VI
Martha's Going--Yet Remaining

      When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had been with us since she was fifteen--at first a little scullery-maid. Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of her youth and her love of fun.

     We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring us our presents at the same time--perhaps out of fear of the cook, who held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was elderly, and very easily annoyed.

     She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if

     So was Peter.

     So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to go down the garden and wait for them--wait so long, sometimes, that we fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning.

     Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye--though she wasn't ever coming back, the cook said.

     Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room.

     In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom what had become of Martha.

     Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone under.

     "Under? Under what?"

     Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!"

     I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person.

     I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She chased me out with a hot frying-pan.

     We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter.

     As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon she went away.

     We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.

     Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of gorse. And she would

     I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died. And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they had four little children left. And one or other of the children was always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a fearful lot of poultices.

     Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too, and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."

     One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs. Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr. Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had been like this for two days.

     "Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper;

     I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages. Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.

     I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to. That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common clay, Martha Loring.

     The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two years or more after she "went under."

     Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well again--so well that she insisted on going for a walk.

     My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings and overshoes.

     But, after all, we only stayed out about ten

     At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be obvious later--I remember we had delicious things to eat that day. Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being urged to eat more than she wanted.

     My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take.

     When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic, because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire. We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there had been this trouble to make Bettina eat--specially breakfast. My mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow cold. So a

     While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now and superior, a face looked in at the window--a pinched, unhappy face, with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down--heavy leaden drops out of a leaden sky.

     I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily. The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the hop-fields.

     At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What are you doing? Shut the window in-

     Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head. "Go away!"

     "Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story. My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases.

     "Go away!" she said. And again that gesture.

     I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered.

     My mother measured out the tonic.

     My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other, lesser instances, came back to me--strange lapses into hardness on the part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm, she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words. If

     The woman with her burden had moved away--a draggled figure in the rain.

     A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart--an impulse of actual hatred towards my mother--as the hop-picker disappeared.

     Hatred of Bettina, too.

     I kept thinking of the pudding in the fires. And of Martha Loring. If Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright above the greyness of that wretched time.

     Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered, something of her spirit still survived.

     Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with the misery of having to admit the sentence just.

     I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink.

     It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina.

     Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions dawning--wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal?

     The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course, Bettina must not tease the cat."

     With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety.

     But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it.

     The hop-picker haunted me.

     Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow, to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for yourself,

     The hop-picker accepted the arrangement.

     Peace came back.

     In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I didn't know about had made her like that.

     In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind.

     Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures, and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick world's infection through our windows.

     To-morrow?

Chapter VII
A Shock

     When to-morrow came we knew.

     We had been using up our capital.

     Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone.

     What was to become of us?

     Should we all have to sell Duncombe House? I asked.

     Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone.

     But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of three.

     For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow.

     And should we always have the pension?

     Yes, as long as she lived.

     Not "always" then.

     A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world and of our littleness, came down upon me.

     We seemed to have almost no relations.

     We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all.

     My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the past. When we where little we took no interest in these things. As we grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs. Harborough.

     "Aunt Josephine?"

     "Well, your father's step-sister."

     All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly.

     "She couldn't have known you," Bettina said.

     "That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with unwonted bitterness.

     Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial condition was to harass and depress my mother. The con-

     "We shall manage," she said.

     I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts. Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed out of mind. Out of my mother's mind.

     I thought constantly about these things.

     One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die together. My mother was horrified.

     "But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live--Bettina and I, without the pension?"

     "You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you."

     I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence.

     My mother went alone into the garden.

     She came in looking tired and white.

     Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went

"Where are you going to, my pretty maid?"

     But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest Hall--since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently came my lady. Very

     Bettina's singing had broken off abruptly. I heard her running upstairs.

     And then a cry.

     "Come--oh, quickly, quickly!"

     Bettina had heard the fall overhead.

     Our mother lay on the floor, Bettina standing over her, agonised, helpless.

     We lifted her on to the bed. We loosened her clothing, and brought water, and bathed her temples.

     She opened her eyes and smiled--then the lids went down. Still that look, the look that made her a stranger.

     Was this death? . . .

     Bettina shrank from it. But I told her not to leave the room a second. I would bring the doctor quickly.

     Bettina's face. . . . "I cannot stay alone," she whispered.

     "I will send up one of the servants."

     She held my arm. "Suppose . . . while you are gone-- Oh, I am afraid."

     "I will run all the way," I said.

Chapter VIII
Annan

     I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water.

     I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for other people we said. "Other people must take their chance." I remember that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the postmaster wrote out a telegram. We were "taking the chance" now. Such a little thing--my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my mother her life.

     The postmaster rang up Brighton.

     The doctor was out.

     What could be done but leave a message!

     I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not thought of that before?

     Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. Her recommended the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the driver to Littlecombe.

     "Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too, waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted mind.

     That new acquaintance of the Helmstone's! Was he not a sort of a doctor? "The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch arrogance--"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We had not seen him--at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from other golfers.

     I ran most of the way to the farm.

     As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the pathway with a sort of rigidity of

     He did not want to come; I could see that.

     He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner.

     I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given him no idea of the urgency of our heed. I had to explain that all we asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our regular doctor would be with us very soon.

     He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish brown.

     "We mustn't lose time," I said.

     As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf clubs thrown down in a stone passage.

     He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for a warning.

     The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed, at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.

     What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered young golfers in Norfolk jackets--far too like them, to help in so dire a need as ours.

     I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps, why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan would go far." He had gone too

     And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help."

     We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my younger sister was not to know if my mother--

     "Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster--almost at a run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me without an effort.

     Mother, mother!--

     Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing. "Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning."

     Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children.

     Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles?

     "I am taking you the short cut," I said.

     "Of course."

     We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All that gentleness and beauty--

     What a richness had been lavished on our lives!

     I had never begun to understand it before this evening--never once had thanked her.

     Mother, mother!--

     The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was nearly over now. And her time-- Was that nearly over too? Where would she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet . . . and that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that evening.

     "Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once who was always made faint by it."

     He did not look at me again.

     But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind.

     Now we could see the red tile roof.

     Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my running.

     As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of Duncombe garden.

     Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever.

     Before I entered the house a strange thing happened.

     A great peace fell on me.

     I knew, without asking, that all was well.

     Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic light was this, then, that was shining on the world?

     He saw my mother, and told us what to do.

     Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his verdict.

     As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me--eyes suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh.

     "You don't think she is going to die?"

     "Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always hope--"

     "Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My mother! . . . "

     He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning.

     I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's life--and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and soul.

     Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald and red-gold and azure--a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was like the quickness of God.

Chapter IX
Eric

     For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some direction.

     There seemed no need to talk.

     Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it.

     Then it would come again.

     He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a great misery behind him.

     No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give.

     The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I hadn't the heart to worry her with questions.

     We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an air.

     She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs.

     There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as engaged, she

     We were all agog. When was she going to be married?

     She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards.

     Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance.

     I wished we three had a pittance.

     For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would die. Then he would have plenty.

     Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged. Hermione flirted a good deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought over some of his photographs

     But we never told Hermione.

     As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing.

     If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses were up--all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would find I had been gone for hours.

     The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old devotions paled.

     Mercifully, nobody knew.

     I looked for him all the next spring. In the

     Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my mother.

     I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.

     No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.

     I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.

     I had not dreamed him. He was true.

     The next day brought him.

     I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The others seemed gladder to see him than I.

     He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe,

     The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.

     Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made him confess he could not tell Indian from China.

     "Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no one noticed.

     It was wonderful to see him again--to verify all those things I had been thinking about him for

     But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without embarrassment.

     I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him, too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird. Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any sisters."

     He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.

     But the confession seemed to have brought him

     "Oh--" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were "all right."

     The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.

     My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was "like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling still to keep up the property--a losing battle. And a second brother, not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was "trying to grow tea in Ceylon."

     Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.

     I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing out the word research with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.

     That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve--a forefinger sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper lip--and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner of the Hidden Field--that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.

Chapter X
The Bungalow

     My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the dévot, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint.

     I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.

     Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing Schwärmerei, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics.

     The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor.

     Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.

     But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.

     She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?" -- a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put.

      "Three weeks."

     "A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."

     He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays--thank God!--in a laboratory.

     Which was scarcely polite.

     "Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."

     He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.

     "No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance--oh, naturally, not her kind.

     What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.

     Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moon-

     They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."

     "Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper.

     Hermione was not a bit dashed. "You may look for romance in bottles if you like. For my part . . . " she stuck out her chin.

     "Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"

     "Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain."

     He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said, would be waiting for his foursome.

     A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of "story-telling."

     "You said you were only going to stay three weeks."

     To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."

     "--and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."

     I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.

     "What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.

     "Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in the country?"

     "Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.

     As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara seemed to speak for him. "--just to live in for a while," she said quite gently.

     "Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.

     "What do you want a bungalow for, then?"

     "--mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.

     Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have some place to keep one's traps," he called back.

     Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face almost beautiful.

     I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.

     A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron, painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard.

     The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.

     Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.

     As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on. And those noises--which he was, strangely, still more sensitive to--produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at "country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us--Eric rather out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit:

     "--wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At four, this kind of

     The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him.

     And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked.

     I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable.

     She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in at first one window and then another. She said there was nothing

     The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after all, she said.

     Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?"

     "Oh, quite well, thank you."

     "Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read the whole day and half the night."

     No, he didn't read all the time.

     "What do you do then?"

     Ah, there was no telling.

     And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he didn't want to.

     Hermione announced that she had been to call.

     "Yes," he said, "I heard you call."

     She stared.

     "You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?"

     "Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at his ease.

     Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my life I ever saw Hermione blush.

     "What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!"

     "Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I always am busy when I'm at the Bungalow."

     She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.)

     "Yes, I heard you try the door."

     "Well, you are an extraordinary being--shutting yourself up with brown paper pasted over the windows--"

     "--only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."

     "Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"

     He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."

     I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."

     "Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."

     She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he makes bombs."

     "Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.

     "No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make counterfeit money."

     "If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be counterfeit."

     One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of creatures--poor little darling guinea-pigs.

     She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.

     "No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"

     He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.

     But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You know perfectly well the Chows are pets."

     "Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never heard of keeping guinea-pigs."

     "'Keeping them'--I used to have them to play with; but you know quite well you don't mean to 'keep' them."

     "Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."

     Of course she hadn't been able to keep them

     Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed.

     Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only a child."

     But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said, that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the dogs such whippings as you do."

     Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now and then, they'd get out of hand.

     "Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For your pleasure. And profit. Not

     In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.

     Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said. "I shall just notice how long you keep them."

     "Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."

     Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air, she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them for?"

     "Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect, after all, to make my fortune."

     Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well, here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My

     "But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they run away? Ours did."

     While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."

Chapter XI
Awakening

     There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go into the Bungalow.

     This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said, according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle eyes and very long arms and legs.

     Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that he

     "I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.

     "Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it."

     I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back--the best Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person.

     We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came.

     That pleased me more than anything.

     He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient, and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his

     Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they "proved the spirit."

     A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was worse--long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse; they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes-- Then he died.

     Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It was a fine way to die."

     He said the self discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the governing class, out of touch with the real work of the

     They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other, wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with those other "preachers:--in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of merely living off the sheep of his pasture.

     But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of talking.

     We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were show the Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed up his moustache and

     Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of wisdom.

     "When I ope my mouth let no dog bark."

     No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his work--humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact--these kept him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away from the limelight. He was unwritten about--unknown. Even when,

"--she was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single damn."

     He was not complaining.

     All this was wholesome.

     "Science!"

No high-piled monuments are theirs who chose
     Her great inglorious toil--no flaming death.
To them was sweet the poetry of prose,
     And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath.

     "Who wrote that?" my mother asked.

     With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of the human race."

     And he told us about him.

     I asked to have the verse written down.

     Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; but

     When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then to steal a look.

     When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon that background.

     My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption--the long, blessed hours while other people slept.

     To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric, had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint, this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving.

     All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since she was born--till that

     Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Mommouth and carried Eric off. I thought they had all three gone to the links.

     I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said, rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the more delicate fruits on the wall.

     All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started, and stood as still as the apple-tree.

     Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other bending down. He kissed her--Eddie Monmouth.

     I turned and fled back to the house.

     The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of my dreaming.

     Bettina!--old enough to be kissed by a man!

     So she was the first to be engaged . . . my little sister, who had only just had her sixteenth birthday.

     I tried that night to lead up to a confidence.

     But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to tell me her great secret just at first.

     So I waited.

     Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding.

     Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for India. The bride a girl they had never heard of.

     I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up courage to steal a glance--not a cloud on Betty's face.

     Here was courage!

     But what the poor child must be going through. --I could not leave her to bear this awful thing alone. . . .

     When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew.

     She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little. Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mind like that!" she said. "He was very nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas."

     At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering alone.

     But I was wrong.

     Bettina did like Ranny Dallas best!

     He liked Bettina, and flirted with her.

     I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly.

     But I saw more than that.

     I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or with waking now and then to thrill at stories about other

     It was then the Great Idea came to me.

Chapter XII
Our First Ball

     Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away without a word about the radical change that had come over a life outwardly the same.

     That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my mother--French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me.

     I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall.

     I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "liked

     I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny.

     All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was "chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants."

     I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of being so--chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean. And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he looked.

     I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn. Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say that he wouldn't be seen rid-

     After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them--and, for all I could do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina.

     I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there Ranny got the chaffing.

     "What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what he'd come for.

     "Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship."

     "Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would say to us: "Here's

     When Lord Helmstone said that--which, in the way of facetious persons secure from criticism, he did a great many times--a colour like a girl's would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh--?"

     "In this weather?"

     "Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep down superfluous tissue. Eh--what?"

     People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly.

     When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well, but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone, she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way.

     I said that was quite different, and we very

     This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South.

     They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step."

     Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two. There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers, and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behave

     We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us.

     My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in the morning."

     So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked different to me--this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of the

     We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold; but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air of justification-- "Such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss, just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so divinely!"

     I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said.

     "Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had promised him--" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent her dancing at all with Captain Boyne.

     "But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded her.

     "Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she forgot to keep her voice down.

     My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called.

     We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he say?"

     I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in particular--he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he danced badly.

     "Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me."

     "Yes, I admitted, "he does dance best with you."

     Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione, and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on. Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up.

     And he began badly: "'you've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'"

     Betty said "No."

     "'Why not? Why haven't you told him?'"

     "He would ask for a reason."

     "'Very well, give it.'"

     "'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said.

     "'The reason is . . . ' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and--we waltzed that time too."

     "Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that."

     No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the cotillion."

     "Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous."

     She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there."

     "I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that hor