Part Five: Dinah

PART FIVE

DINAH

Farthingale

Summer, 1899

1

A WEEK BEFORE THEY WERE TO SAIL VIRGINIA CAUGHT A COLD AND developed a deep bronchial cough which threatened pneumonia. Bracken suppressed all his impulses, postponed their sailing reservations, and wrote again to Dinah to explain one more delay. He had to write to Partridge too.

As soon as he had returned to New York he communicated with Partridge to inquire the status of his suit for divorce, and had already received a most unsatisfactory reply. The mousy, smooth-shaven man who had accompanied Bracken to Cannes had gone on with his investigations, aided by a photograph of Lisl, and had finally caught up with her at Biarritz. She was living at an hotel there as the travelling companion and amie, not of Hutchinson but of a South American named Serrano—which, wrote Partridge philosophically, was a distinction without a difference and would have served their purpose just as well. But Partridge went on to say that it was no good serving the papers until Bracken had established something like a permanent residence in England. And as the date of his return had appeared to be indefinitely delayed by the state of affairs in Cuba, Partridge had not seen fit to keep Lisl under observation at Bracken’s expense during all those intervening months. And what that amounted to was that once Bracken returned to England and took up his residence there as planned, she would have to be found all over again and duly served with papers. So except for the evidence they were not really much forwarder, Partridge concluded rather callously, and asked for Bracken’s sailing date.

When he had read that exasperating letter Bracken walked up and down the room and swore at Partridge. As he cooled off a little he was able to see that

Partridge had acted only with his customary prudence and economy. But Lisl might be anywhere by now.

Virginia got better slowly, and in the middle of February she was still coughing, and tired very easily, and Eden worried because she seemed so low in her mind. Bracken went into her room one evening to cheer her up and found her in tears.

“Here, here,” he said firmly. “I thought you were getting well.”

“Oh, Bracken, please let’s go back to England!”

“Well, my dear child, that’s what we’re trying to do, just as soon as you’re able!”

“B-but the doctor says I m-mustn’t start for another month!” she quavered.

“What? I never heard of such a thing!”

“He says a winter sailing would be too risky for my chest. Oh, Bracken, you don’t think I’m going to die of tuberculosis!”

“Good Lord, no, nobody in our family ever does that!” he reassured her.

“He says I’m badly underweight and run down. He says—”

“Oh, damn the doctor, Ginny, what does he mean by scaring you to death like this? Maybe you aren’t quite the thing just now, but you’ll be all right as soon as the weather warms up. Easter comes early this year, and we’re going to be in England for Easter. You tell the doctor that, with my compliments!”

Virginia looked more cheerful.

“I began to think maybe I was going to just pine away,” she said doubtfully.

“For love? That doesn’t run in our family either!” But he sat down beside her, really fascinated by such constancy. She had not had a word from Archie Campion since she left England, and yet his remembered image still outshone all the pleasant realities with which her life had been filled in the interim. He wondered how many proposals she had passed up, for Archie, who had done little but ignore her from the beginning. “I think it’s just stubbornness,” he said, to try her.

Virginia began to lay pleats in her damp handkerchief, and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. He noticed that her long, curving lashes cast pathetic shadows on her pale cheeks, and a wave of tenderness for so pretty and so funny a sister ran through him.

“I dream about him,” she was confessing, her slender fingers busy with the handkerchief.

“Good heavens!” Bracken murmured, keeping his face straight.

“And it’s a funny thing, in the dreams he’s always fond of me.”

“How fond?”

“Well, he—never quite proposes,” she admitted seriously. “But I always wake up feeling as though he might. You don’t suppose he’ll have married somebody else by now?”

“We should have heard about that. Dinah writes to me every now and then, you know. Clare is engaged, but Archie seems to be going on just as usual.”

“Oh, Bracken, you might have told me you’d heard again! Who is Clare going to marry?”

“Whom, darling. I don’t know his name, Dinah just said Clare was engaged to a man with pots of money and everyone was pleased, but she (Dinah) was glad she didn’t have to marry him.”

“It’s all right for Clare to marry some bounder for his money, but Archie is afraid of mine. Does that make any sense?”

“None whatever,” he assented, knowing exactly how Archie must feel, all the same.

“I thought perhaps if I were dressed very plainly and never wore any jewellery—”

“Ginny, as a matter of pardonable curiosity, why are you so set on Archie?”

She thought for a long minute, gazing into the middle distance.

“I thought you were in love too,” she said then. “Whatever became of that?”

“It’s waiting on the divorce. Which is waiting on my return to England.”

“Oh, poor Bracken, and here I’ve made you a month later by being ill!

“Never mind about that,” he said. “Just answer my question.”

“Could you answer it? Could you make out a list of reasons why you want to marry whoever it is?”

“Certainly I could. As long as your arm.”

“Well, then, he’s good-looking. And he’s well-born. And he knows how to behave. But those aren’t reasons, I could say that about lots of other people I wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole. I just don’t want anybody but

Archie. I’ve tried, honestly I have. But he makes them all seem gauche, and stupid, and bumble-footed.”

And Bracken, thinking of Dinah’s tiny bones and effortless self-possession, which had something to do with race and caste and national atmosphere, nodded gravely.

“Ginny, would you say that I was bumble-footed?” he asked humbly.

“Oh, you, if you weren’t my brother I’d marry you like a shot!”

“Well, thanks very much,” he said in some surprise.

“A girl could always be comfortable with you,” she went on frankly.

“You’ve got yourself on the leash. It’s the difference between champagne and raw whisky, I should think. You can get just as tight on champagne, and it’s nicer.”

Bracken stared.

“But that is the wisdom of the ages, speaking,” he said, dazed. “Where did you learn it?”

“Oh, I was born knowing that!” she said airily. “And that’s why I want Archie. He’s champagne too. Very dry.”

2

EASTER was early that year, but spring was late. They arrived at the station at Upper Briarly in Gloucestershire about tea-time on a bleak grey day when the tree-tops were showing just the faintest film of green, tossing in a shrewd wind.

But Virginia’s heart-shaped face was pink-cheeked and sparkling as they drove through the village to Farthingale, and she vied jealously with Bracken in pointing out to Eden all the matters of interest along the way.

Eden sat beside her in the barouche, wrapped in sables, enjoying her first sight of England in nearly three years, and determined to ignore the ache in her heart which reminded her that Cabot had meant to come to Gloucestershire too and see Dinah and the house.

Bracken, sitting with his back to the horses, looked lovingly on the rolling Cotswold Hills, and when he said, “There’s the Hall on the left,” he felt his heartbeat quicken. Then he caught the warning in Virginia’s eyes and thought how complicated it was getting, now that his mother knew about Dinah but wasn’t supposed to know about Archie. That wouldn’t last

of course. Once Eden saw Virginia in the same room with Archie she would guess.

In the drawing room at Farthingale a log fire burned and the tea-table stood ready, gleaming with Worcester china and old silver, and there was a big bouquet of Gloire de Dijon roses from the greenhouses at the Hall, with Lord Alwyn’s card. Virginia sniffed them superciliously, caught Bracken’s eye upon her, and grinned.

“Whisky,” she murmured. “Raw enough to choke you.” Her eyes went wistfully around the warm, lighted room. But because it held no message from Archie, it was as good as empty to her. “Who is at the Hall now?” she asked Melchett the parlourmaid when tea came in.

“They will all be down for Easter, I think, miss. Mr. Archie came yesterday and brought Master Gerald with him, and Mr. John and his wife are expected, and Lady Clare’s fiancé too, I believe.”

“Everybody well?” Bracken asked casually, and his far eyelid drooped at Virginia.

“Yes, sir, except the Earl had influenza at Christmas-time and they all but gave him up. He’s out and about again now, though. I was to say they had sent your horse back, sir, and two others for as long as you’d like to keep them.”

“Splendid,” said Bracken. “That’s very kind of them.”

Melchett was too well trained to add that Lady Dinah had ridden over with the groom who brought the horses and left a note for Bracken, so it was not until he went up to his room to change that he found it on his mantelpiece.

DEAR BRACKEN—[Dinah had written]

Sunbeam is back in her stall, waiting for you. I have had her out nearly every day since you went away, and she is in excellent form, though I think she missed not hunting. Edward is sending Daybreak and Misty too, in case Virginia and your mother want to ride. They are both very gentle.

This may sound as though I wasn’t the least bit excited about your coming home, but I am, it seems as though I can’t wait to see you! Can you ride out to our hill in the morning? I shall be there, just in case. I don’t think I’ve changed much, they say I’ll never have a figure, but

I’ve put my hair up and my dresses down and that helps. I do hope you won’t expect too much after all this time, because I’m just DINAH

When he had read it twice he sat down and put his head in his hands, which were not quite steady. Coming home, she had written, unconsciously.

Nearly two years since he had first seen her, wearing her brother Gerald’s Norfolk jacket and breeches, with her hair tucked up under a shooting cap.

More than a year since he had seen her at all, and now she was seventeen, and tomorrow he would have her back again, all to himself, on the hill. But he thought, I must tell her about Lisl—and that’s what tomorrow come to.

On his way through London he had conferred with Partridge, and the mousy little man had been sent for and again despatched to the Continent.

But no amount of reproachful profanity on Bracken’s part could alter the fact that Partridge had allowed the scent to get cold and that now it might take some time to get things under way again. Bracken censured himself, not for the first time, as he rose wearily and began to change to his dinner clothes. He should have told Dinah about the necessity for a divorce before he left England. He was not to blame for the delay in his return, but he could at this rate be to blame for Dinah’s falling in love with a man who had a wife already. I object, he told himself angrily, jerking at his tie, to feeling like a character in a Pinero play. And then, surveying himself in the glass in his immaculate black and white—Good Lord, I even look like a leading-man, he thought in disgust and went down to the cheerful American custom of cocktails in the drawing room.

He woke as the sun came up and lay a moment, savouring his own excitement, which was almost like stage-fright. His riding clothes were laid out and waiting on a chair. All the time he bathed and shaved and dressed he was telling himself that he must be calm, he must not lose a grip on things, he must remember to tell her about Lisl. That was quite enough to anchor him to earth. He was going to be free, of course, eventually. But he would certainly not be regarded as free now by Dinah’s family, and it was time Dinah knew what they were up against.

So at last he rode Sunbeam down the chestnut avenue in front of the house again, through the sleepy village where there were still ducks on the stream above the bridge, through the gap in the wall and out across the

hillside. Backward spring though it was, the air that morning had the first velvety mildness, the sun had that delicate caressing warmth of Eastertide, and the sky curved pale and virginal without a cloud. The pollard willows were feathered with green, but there was no blossom yet on the fruit trees.

Rooks were kissing in the elm-tops, and lapwings lamented joyfully in the meadow grass. And there was added to his own secret inner happiness the reckless, heathen exaltation that stirs in the spring of the year.

Dinah was before him at the rendezvous, dismounted, kneeling in the grass at the edge of the spinney to gather primroses, while staid little Dewdrop grazed near by. She waved as he came up over the crest of the hill, and he waved back and half-way down the slope he swung out of the saddle. As his feet touched the ground Dinah ran to meet him, straight into his outstretched arms, and before either of them had time to think about it, their lips had met. He let her go at once, partly from sheer astonishment, but the kiss had happened in spite of his good intentions.

“Dinah—darling—I do believe you’ve missed me,” he said rather shakily, and Dinah with her arms still hard around his neck and her slight body against his, said, “I feel as though I was the one who had come home!”

It took all he had of resolution after that to say lightly, “Let me look at you,” and hold her away from him, his hands resting on her shoulders.

She submitted with her usual composure, standing docilely before him, her face upturned and defenceless to his searching eyes. He saw again the clear, delicate skin which did not freckle, the direct blue eyes with their thick golden lashes, the long, lovely line of her lips, the resolute chin. She was just as he had remembered her—but with a new, soft, shining something which came of being seventeen in the spring.

“You see,” she said after a silent moment, “I told you. There is no improvement whatever.”

“Aren’t you taller?” he said rather at random, rather short of breath.

“It’s this hat.” She touched the smart low hunting topper she wore with some pride. “It came from Locke’s. They had to buy me new riding clothes, I had clean worn out the old ones. With most of my other things, though, they have just let down the hems or put insertion in, and flounces, now that I’m supposed to have long skirts. I can’t have anything new till after Clare

is married, but Miss French has bagged two of Clare’s prettiest dresses to make over for me because Clare is getting new ones.”

“Your hair has got darker,” he added, peering at it under the hat’s brim.

“Has it? I wear it up all the time now. Makes me feel lots older.”

“Do you want to? I suppose the first thing I know you’ll be coming out, and going to dances, and having proposals of marriage, and all that sort of thing.”

Dinah made a face.

“I hope not!” she said decidedly. “Besides, nobody will ask me, I’m not like Clare.”

He bit off the impulse to say that there was one proposal she might as well make up her mind to, and that was his. Instead, as they strolled on in step along the edge of the spinney, leading the horses which often paused to graze, he locked her arm in his with their palms together and said, “Tell me about Clare. Is this fellow all right?”

“I suppose he is. His name is Mortimer Flood, and he’s made a lot of money in hemp, or something, and is giving her the most wonderful house in Belgrave Square. I could never bear him myself even if he offered me Buckingham Palace to live in, but I doubt if I’ll ever get married anyway, so my opinion isn’t worth much.”

“That’s a very drastic state of mind,” he objected mildly. “What’s wrong with marriage?”

“The husbands people get, mostly. Bracken, do you mind—about Clare, I mean. Once I thought you were a little in love with her.”

“You know, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t. Besides—perhaps I should have mentioned it before—I have a wife, you see, and while we haven’t lived together for some time, I am still technically married to her.”

“Oh, I knew that,” she said easily. “Edward told me.”

“Well, blast Edward. I would have preferred to do it myself. Of course I had no idea of being away so long, and it seemed a stupid thing to put in a letter. How long have you known about it?”

“Since the fancy dress ball.”

“And you never mentioned it! What tact!”

“Well, I thought perhaps you’d rather not.”

His relief was anti-climax. Whatever she felt about him, it was in spite of Lisl. And she had still run into his arms.

“There will be a divorce eventually, of course,” he said. “And then I shall be free to marry again.”

“And shall you?”

“I hope so.”

“Oh,” said Dinah rather flatly. “Then it wasn’t—you aren’t breaking your heart over her.”

“My dear, I am anything but heart-broken. The whole thing was a sorry mistake from the beginning. My fault, of course, and I have paid for it very dearly.”

“I don’t believe it was your fault,” she maintained.

“Mine, anyway, to have married her at all. Nowadays I would know better.”

“Edward said—said she had left you.” Dinah was looking straight ahead.

“For another man.” He shrugged briefly. “Sounds bad, doesn’t it!”

“Oh, Bracken, that’s not true! Nobody would!” She was indignant as though a third person had slandered him.

“Why do you say that?” He paused and stood gazing down at her. Their faces were very near.

“Because you’re—because any woman would be proud and—and happy with you.”

He swallowed all the things he wanted to say, and said anything else.

“I hadn’t enough money,” he said. “Or perhaps I was stingy. Anyway, she wanted more than I could give her.”

“Then you’re better off without her.”

“I am. Most decidedly.”

“And that was why you never proposed to Clare,” Dinah reflected. “You knew she wanted a lot of money too.”

“Dinah, darling, I never would have proposed to Clare because I never was in love with her. Strange as that may seem.” He put his hand to the bulge in his coat pocket and took out a square black leather case. “Here’s your music box from New York,” he said.

Inside the case when she opened it was a silver box with a jewelled and embossed design of trees and a stream and a fisherman in an odd hat. He showed her how to press the catch and a tiny feathered bird with an ivory beak came up through a grid in the top and whistled an intricate tune. When you released the catch he popped down out of sight and it was just a box

again. Dinah was completely entranced, and held her breath each time lest the bird get caught in his little trap door.

At last she closed it up safe in its case again and they left the horses under some willows and went on, hand in hand and full of gossip, to where Dinah had a surprise for him. He stood silent with delight when he saw it—

a carpet of anemones, dancing white stars on stalks, trembling in a wandering breeze on the bank of the stream, spread as far as the eye could travel among the small bare tree trunks.

“I’ve been saving it for you,” she said with possessive pride. “If you hadn’t come this week it would have been gone. It’s all the present I have for you, I’m afraid.”

He dared not say that he had had his present when she kissed him. It would take so little now to jar Dinah out of her unawareness, and the time was not yet. They went on, treading delicately, and sat down on a log near the water, and Dinah heard about Virginia’s convalescence, and how Eden already loved the village and the house and how anxious she was to know Dinah.

“Clare and Edward will come to call, of course,” said Dinah. “Father’s not gone out much since he had influenza.”

“That will be charming of Clare and Edward, I’m sure. But I want my mother to know you. We must get Archie to bring you to lunch.”

“We can try. Archie’s rather queer lately. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in love.”

“That’s new, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Archie is always very mysterious. Perhaps that’s why I think so much of him. But it’s nothing like you and Virginia, you tell each other everything.”

“Well, not quite everything,” he qualified hastily.

“She must have been nearly out of her mind when you were shot. Which shoulder was it? Are you quite well again?”

“It was just here.” He tapped his right collar-bone. “The bullet went clean through so it healed nicely, though it will probably complain of wet weather for the rest of my life.” Dinah’s eyes rested on his tweed-clad shoulder as though she saw the blood and felt the pain, but she said nothing.

“I wouldn’t have worried you with it,” he went on, “but my handwriting

looked so funny for a while you were bound to wonder. Your watch was with me, and I like to think that made a difference.”

“And if prayers do any good, you had those too,” she nodded. “Please tell me how it happened. Your letter was just tantalizing.”

“It’s not really very interesting. I’d rather hear about you.”

“Oh, I haven’t done anything! Archie gave me The Light That Failed.

Was it anything like that in Cuba?”

“Not very much. Though Fitz behaved in a rather Kiplingesque way, I suppose.”

“Tell about Fitz,” she begged him.

“We all thought Fitz had a screw loose somewhere. We were never so wrong. That just shows you. Can’t tell about your own family, even!”

Sitting there on the log, absorbed in each other, they allowed half an hour to slip away while Bracken told about Daisy, and the beach at Daiquiri, and the balloon above the Bloody Bend. Dinah listened almost in silence except for a prodding question each time he seemed to slow down or tried to skip. Cuba had taken nearly a year of his life and had nearly killed him. She had to know about Cuba, and Bracken was the only one who could tell her. She kept him at it until she was satisfied, and the sun was high. And finally—

“I’m starving,” he said suddenly. “Look here, why don’t you come back with me to breakfast and say Hullo to Mother now?”

It seemed to her the wildest adventure, all of a sudden like that. Her eyes were round with it.

“Could I?”

“Why not? Well send Luke over with a message that I met you out riding and kidnapped you.”

“You can telephone now. Father hates it, but Clare made him put one in.”

“All right, come along, we’ll telephone!”

Before they left the bank they gathered some anemones to put with the primroses as a bouquet for Eden and strolled back hand in hand to where they had left the horses.

“You always make everything so simple!” she marvelled, looking down at him from Dewdrop’s saddle when he had tossed her up.

“Why shouldn’t it be simple? We’re both hungry, and Mother will be delighted.”

“It’s good to have you back.” Impulsively she laid one small warm hand along his cheek as he stood beside Dewdrop looking up. “Please don’t ever go away again.”

He caught her hand quickly and held its palm against his lips. Then he mounted Sunbeam and they rode almost in silence to Farthingale.

3

THEY found the breakfast table laid for one, and Melchett said that the ladies were having trays upstairs.

“Just lay another place and boil another egg,” said Bracken. “I’ve promised Lady Dinah something to eat.”

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to stay,” Dinah suggested anxiously when Melchett had gone. “Your mother might rather I’d wait till I was asked.”

“You are asked.” Bracken drew her into the morning-room which was streaming with sunlight and had a fire. “You wait here and I’ll go up and rout them out.”

Eden was covered with chagrin when he knocked at her door, for it was not her habit to breakfast in bed, though Virginia had done so since her illness. She explained that she felt perfectly well, and had only asked for a tray because Bracken seemed to have gone out, and the maid was unpacking and she could keep an eye on things—

Bracken kissed her apologies into silence.

“Take all the time you like,” he said. “Dinah and I will have breakfast together. Just a sighting shot. She’ll have to learn how I like my morning coffee sooner or later!”

Followed by Eden’s laughter, he ran downstairs to the telephone, which was in the morning-room, got through to the Hall and asked for Archie.

“Hullo, we’ve got your sister over here at Farthingale,” he announced.

“The little one. I went out for an early ride and found her picking primroses.

She’s having breakfast with us if you don’t mind.”

“Jolly good idea,” said Archie. “Sorry I wasn’t out after primroses myself.”

“Come and join us. Lots of time.”

“Thanks, old boy, I think I will. We’re all delighted to have you back, you know.”

“Good. As soon as you like, old boy,” said Bracken in the vernacular, and hung up, grinning. “He’s coming straight over,” he said to Dinah.

“Excuse me again.” And he went upstairs to Virginia’s room. “You’d better come out of that!” he yelled through the door. “Dinah’s downstairs and Archie’s on the way!”

“What? Come in! ”

He opened the door and stuck his head around it. Virginia made a very pretty picture propped against the pillows in a pink sacque, drinking tea.

“All right, Camille, get into something with lots of lace on it, the curtain is going up! But he can’t come up here, you know, you’ll have to use the sofa downstairs.”

“Oh, Bracken, why didn’t you warn me! How long have I got? Do take this tray, you chump, and hand me that robe, quick, and stop grinning at me! What shall I wear? Ring for Mary, can’t you? What did he say?”

“Can’t stop to gossip now, Dinah’s starving in the morning-room. I’d get a move on if I were you.”

He ran downstairs again and collected Dinah, who said as they entered the dining room together, “Maybe you can get Archie out of his shell, I can’t! He works all the time and never comes down for week-ends, and never has any fun. It’s such a waste. He’s much the nicest of us all and nobody ever sees him!”

Bracken herded her gently away from the sideboard towards the table, where beside his mother’s place there was a large silver tray with the tea and coffee things on it.

“You sit down in Mother’s chair and pour out my coffee the way she does. She has finished breakfast and will be down soon. What do you like for breakfast?” he went on, peeking under the covers at the sideboard. “Isn’t it odd how little we really know about each other after all these years? They have done us well this morning! Scrambled eggs—kippers—bacon—?”

“I think the eggs, please—and bacon. How do you like your coffee?” she asked.

“Hot milk—quite a lot—and one sugar.”

He set the plate in front of her and sat down with his own. Dinah handed him his coffee. Melchett brought in the toast in a silver rack and put it down

between them and went out. He watched while Dinah poured tea for herself and put milk and sugar into it. She looked up at his silence, with candid, questioning eyes.

“I like this,” said Bracken. “I think this was a very good idea. Let’s do it again some time!”

“You know, what I missed most while you were gone is the way you say silly things quite sensibly,” Dinah remarked. “Nobody in our family does that. I feel as though I hadn’t laughed since the last time you talked nonsense!”

He had to let it go at that, though he knew it wasn’t nonsense. He had to go on allowing Dinah’s sublime inexperience of the arrière pensée to retrieve his own reckless utterances, frustrated and enchanted by the way she accepted without blinking remarks which other girls would have tripped over and taken him up on. Virginia in Dinah’s place with, say, Archie instead of himself, would by now have been blushing prettily and behaving like a three-days’ bride. But he was grateful that it was so. Dinah went to his head and spring was in his blood and he felt gay and heedless and experimental. He longed perversely for Dinah just once to betray consciousness that he was a man, attractive enough, and that she was a female. His irreverent impulse was to impinge, ever so little, on that touching choirboy innocence of hers with his own surging emotion. And yet the last thing he wanted was to propose to Dinah in the subjunctive mood. If and when I get my divorce, will you marry me. Oh, no. That wasn’t good enough for Dinah. When he was in the clear, then he would ask her and they wouldn’t have to wait. Meanwhile, she baffled him. Not that he didn’t enjoy that too.

But Dinah, who was so much deeper than even he had any idea, was hearing over and over inside her head those apparently careless words on the hill…. then I shall be free to marry again…. and shall you? …. I hope so…. And while she had never really thought as far as marrying Bracken herself, those few words seemed to demonstrate once more her own chronic negligible state—too young, too thin, too schoolgirlish and dull to be anything but his faithful friend, for that she would be all her life, while he married someone like Clare, only nicer, who would grace his home as a wife should, a brilliant hostess, a famous beauty—all the things a person with red hair and no figure and a country education couldn’t possibly be….

Dinah ate her scrambled eggs and poured his second cup of coffee the way he liked it, and went on talking sensibly, replying to his questions about the past winter, recalling anecdotes for his amusement which she had saved up to tell him—how someone had left the front door at the Hall open early one morning and some deer from the park had come right into the entrance hall and cornered a timid housemaid with her duster till her screams aroused the rest of the household—“You’d have thought she was being murdered at least, and they were only asking for apples, they wouldn’t hurt a fly!”—and how a fox, hard-pressed on a six-mile point in the Friday country roundabout Moreton, set his mask straight for Blockley’s Farm and went to ground in the kitchen, where he was killed, and it made the most awful mess, because it was a very muddy day, besides the blood and all, but old Blockley only halloo’d them on and said Better the kitchen than his hen-house any day—and how Edward riding Thunderbolt had come down hard at the first water-jump in the point-to-point, and made a terrific splash, and Thunderbolt was found to have damaged himself so badly he had to be shot—

“That must have been just the least little bit in the world satisfactory to you,” Bracken suggested, and Dinah after an instant’s shocked surprise burst into delighted laughter.

It was the first time, he thought, that he had ever heard her laugh aloud, and Eden entered as she finished. Dinah jumped to her feet and made a schoolgirl curtsey when she was presented to Bracken’s mother, who barely refrained from taking her at once into her arms. Eden accepted the rather limp bunch of primroses and anemones with joy and spent some time propping them up in a small glass vase fetched by Melchett, while Dinah diffidently resumed her chair beside the urns. Then Eden said she thought she would have another cup of tea if they could spare it, and Dinah said Oh, there was lots, and poured it with grave dignity. As she did so, Eden noticed with a mother’s eye that Dinah’s poor little hands were red and chapped because it had not occurred to anyone to give her a lotion, and she thought, If we don’t get her out of that tomb of a house she’ll be having chilblains too, before she’s much older. All that was maternal in Eden rose up to take Dinah to its heart. And the look in Bracken’s eyes for his oblivious darling was something his mother had never seen there before.

Then Archie wandered in, clad in his well-worn riding clothes and polished boots, and more tea was sent for, and another chair drawn up, though he assured them he had already fed, thanks very much.

“Virginia will be down presently,” Bracken said, answering Archie’s unspoken question at once. “The fact is, we’re being rather careful of her and she breakfasts in bed since her illness.”

“Was it as bad as that?” asked Archie, surprised into lowering his guard, for Dinah had only told him that Bracken wrote Virginia had a heavy cold.

“It was nearly pneumonia,” said Bracken solemnly. “She’s had a wretched time, and we’re lucky it wasn’t worse. You’ll notice how thin she is, but don’t say anything, we try to keep her cheerful.”

Eden turned for a long look at him, as this was not his customary off-hand attitude about his sister. Bracken met her eyes blandly, and offered Archie a cigarette. Eden then had another look at Archie. Brother of the Viscount. Nicer than the Viscount. She liked what she saw.

At that moment there was a scurry of feet in the hall and Virginia arrived on the threshold, obviously under the impression that she was beating Archie to the dining room. At sight of him she checked neatly and entered with a royal leisure, wearing a cashmere tea-gown the colour of heliotrope with flowing sleeves and a foam of lace from throat to hem.

“Dinah, darling, it’s lovely of you to come over our very first morning!”

she cried, enfolding Dinah in a sisterly embrace. “How nice you look—

quite grown up! And Archie, is that really you? This is a surprise! Are you all still drinking tea? Would there be another drop for me? Dinah’s pouring out—doesn’t she look cute in Mother’s chair?”

Archie insisted that she should take his cup, which he hadn’t yet touched, and still another cup was brought for him, and they all settled down around the table again and nibbled rather cold toast and marmalade while Bracken and Virginia were brought up to date on the news of the countryside. Eden began to see daylight on Virginia, as Bracken had thought she would. Finally, out of consideration for the servants she rose, saying, “Children, we must let them clear away. Come into the morning-room and tell me more.”

But Archie said they really must be going, as some people were arriving by the morning train from Town, and anyway perhaps Virginia ought to rest

—and she must be sure to drink plenty of Bovril, he added earnestly, that

was the stuff, it had got the Governor back on his feet in no time after his influenza. Virginia, the picture of health, said she was allowed to go out now on mild days, and Archie told her firmly that the wind still had fangs and she must on no account risk getting chilled.

“But I get so bored, staying in all day!” she wailed, and Archie said Oh, well, in that case, would it be any good if he popped back for tea. Bracken assured him warmly that the sight of any new face, even that of Archie Campion, would cheer her up no end, and Archie said Right-o, he would bring his face back round about four-thirty, and departed with Dinah.

The door had barely closed behind them when Virginia hurled herself round her brother’s neck so that her feet left the floor, crying, “Bracken, you’re wonderful!” and danced away to review her wardrobe.

Bracken and his mother were left looking at each other quizzically.

“So that’s how it is,” said Eden.

“I thought you’d catch on,” he agreed.

There seemed still something to be said between them. Eden went and put her arms around him.

“Don’t have any doubts about Dinah, my dear. Just have patience.”

“But did you ever see anything so young?” he asked hopelessly.

“You watch. She’ll grow up all of a sudden and start mothering you!”

Eden promised.

4

THUS Archie cast his dearly bought discretion to the spring winds and allowed himself to convince himself that it wouldn’t hurt just to look at Virginia now and then, and try to cheer her up a bit, because after all, pneumonia was no joke—and at the end of a week’s teas and walks and rides and visits to the greenhouses at the Hall he was most wretchedly in love, just as he had known all along he would be.

And Lord Alwyn, who had been carefully cultivating a taste for the rather bovine daughter of a rich stock-broker friend of Clare’s fiancé, was put right off the whole idea by the proximity of Virginia’s dark-eyed vivacity, which as he pointed out to himself over and over again, was nothing, if you came down to it, but sheer American impudence and would be wholly unsuitable in a peer’s wife. But within the month Alwyn

proposed to Virginia again, and got the same answer, which was quite incomprehensible to him and made him very snappish for days.

Archie had eaten his dinners and been called to the Bar at the Inner Temple the previous year and was beginning to be very well thought of as an industrious Junior in the Chancery Court. It was steady work, and paid moderately well, and he had chosen it in preference to the Criminal Court, which was showier but less profitable, or the Divorce Court, which was likely to be easier but was considered not quite the thing. By hard work and fond attention to his Leader’s whims, he had amassed fees up to nearly two hundred pounds for his first year, which was pretty good going. In another ten years or so he would take silk, if he could afford it, and there was nothing to prevent him, by the time he was fifty, from being made a King’s Bench judge at five thousand pounds a year, and, if he lived long enough, from becoming Attorney-General.

Meanwhile he had taken to a single eyeglass, which became him, and when Virginia teased him about it he merely remarked that as only one eye was bad two lenses would have been extravagant. When he had got really tired of hearing about it, he did the trick few single-eyeglass men neglected to at least try to learn—he flicked the glass into the air like a coin and caught it in his eye as it came down. Far from silencing Virginia, however, this feat only roused in her an insatiable desire to see him do it again.

Shortly before they all left the Hall to go up to Town for Clare’s wedding, Virginia and Archie were making the usual tour of the greenhouses where the prize-winning roses were grown, and in the warm, scented semi-privacy Virginia suddenly said, “This Mortimer Flood Clare is marrying—tell me honestly, Archie, isn’t he rather a wart?”

“Well, yes, he is, rather,” Archie admitted unwillingly, for Mr. Flood had sort of stuck out as a foreign body on the informal family gatherings at Farthingale and the Hall during the past month—teas on the lawn, luncheon parties, a carriage picnic or two, in which, at least when they were initiated by the American household, the younger members of the Campion family were included.

Mr. Flood had usually been present at these little functions, in attendance on Clare. It was difficult to put one’s finger on the trouble with Mr. Flood. He spoke the hunting and county-house idiom, but one was somehow surprised that he had all his h’s. His clothes came from the right

tailor, but somehow they always looked new. He laughed in the right places and never told the wrong jokes. But the embarrassing fact remained that he did not quite belong. Young Gerald, home for the Easter holidays and aged fourteen, had come the nearest to putting it in a nutshell. “His collar’s too tight,” he had murmured in a scathing aside to Dinah, just as Mr. Flood was appearing at his picnic-lunch brightest and best. It wasn’t, really. But Mr.

Flood’s neck was too thick.

“Then why do you let Clare marry him?” Virginia insisted, when Archie did not rise to defend him.

“Clare thinks she knows what she’s doing. She wants that house in Belgrave Square and fifty thousand a year to spend.”

“Archie, why is it all right for a girl to marry for money, but not for a man?”

“Is it? Besides, men do it every day, I thought.”

“Would you?” she asked softly.

“Good Lord, no!”

“That’s what I mean. Why, would you believe it, there was a man who was terribly in love with me, and—I found out later—he never told me about it because he thought I was an heiress!”

“Well, aren’t you?” he put it to her.

“Not really. Not till I’m twenty-one. And then it’s only ten thousand a year.”

“Pounds?”

“No, dollars. The capital is all tied up, with trustees and things, Father saw to all that, and I just ask Bracken for what I want to spend. Archie—

would you think better of me if I didn’t have a penny in the world?”

“That would be difficult,” he said. “I adore you already.”

“Oh, Archie—!”

“Now please don’t misunderstand me,” he added hastily. “I couldn’t possibly ask you to marry me, Virginia, you couldn’t even dress on my income, let alone run an establishment.”

“I could dress on my income. Archie, you wouldn’t let a silly prejudice ruin my life?”

“It’s not a silly prejudice and I doubt very much if it will damage your life in the least.”

Virginia stood still in the fragrant aisle beside the Cloire de Dijons and looked up at him, allowing her large brown eyes to fill with tears.

“I can’t think why I love you so!” she whispered. “You’re about the most disagreeable man I ever knew!”

Archie reacted in the only possible way. And when he had kissed her—

“This is completely mad,” he said. “It’s the one thing I swore would never happen. I simply can’t do it, Virginia, have you any idea what my expectations are at the Bar? How could we live, even in the country, on what I earn? With any luck perhaps one day I shall land a sensational case and become famous and my fees will jump. Until then, I shall have to just plod along.”

“Archie, what do you do at the Bar?”

“Well, mostly now I just devil for a cranky old silk named Sir Gifford Kerr, on difficult points of law.”

“Do you like it?” she persisted curiously.

“Strangely enough, I do, you know.”

“I know what you could do, Archie! You could get Bracken’s divorce for him, that would be sensational enough!”

“Not in my line of country, I’m afraid. It will come up in the Probate and Divorce Court. I’m in the Chancery.”

“He’d pay anything to get that settled!” Virginia said.

“Well, it will be a nice plum for somebody, no doubt. His solicitors have already got their eye on the right fellow, you can be sure of that.”

She looked at him a long moment.

“You wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole, would you!”

“I’ve never done a divorce case, that’s all,” said Archie uncomfortably.

“It’s a special sort of job. My work is all with trusts and equity. You see, we specialize, rather, at the Bar. We do go over sometimes, especially in Criminal Court jobs, but you have to know your ground. No one man can know it all.”

“I see,” she murmured.

“Besides, they’ll take in a Leader, you know.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’ll engage a silk. A Q.C. Not just a junior like me. Somebody’s going to land Bracken with a stiffish fee, I expect. Just as soon not be the one. Can’t marry his sister at his expense, what?”

“Do you know what I think? I think Bracken will let us use Farthingale to live in as long as we like.”

“But that’s impossible, I couldn’t look him in the face with such an arrangement,” he objected promptly.

“Oh, there you go again! It’s very selfish of you, Archie, to let your own beastly pride make me so miserable! Just think, if I hadn’t put my own pride in my pocket and practically proposed to you myself, you’d have gone on like this to the end of time and I’d have died a spinster!”

“Would you, by Jove? But there must have been countless other chaps who—”

“There were, idiot, but I didn’t want them! I said No! Can’t you get it into your thick head, I’m in love with you!”

“Well, God knows why, it is pretty thick, isn’t it!” He kissed her again.

“I do believe you are!” he said then, rather dazed. “It’s jolly good luck for me, but how is Bracken going to take it, when you tell him you want to marry a fellow who hasn’t got a penny?”