"Kind regards to all. Write soon, "Yours ever, "CECIL."

As I folded up the sheets and thrust them into the envelope, Mac looked across at me. Seeing that I had no inkling of his thought he remarked with some slight irritation:

"Wonder when the deuce that chap's coming back?"

"Where's he gone?" asked Bill, holding up the collar bag to see the effect.

We did not even know that.

"Oh," I said, "Mediterranean, I suppose."

To us the Mediterranean is a far-off beautiful dream. We sat trying to visualize for ourselves the incredible fate of visiting the Mediterranean as we might take the cars for Broadway. I heard Bill sigh softly. Mac's voice, when he spoke, was gruff.

"I'd ask the kids if I were you," he said.

"I can do that," I agreed dreamily.

Sometimes, it must be admitted, we get homesick. It generally happens when we have letters from home. We felt rather keenly then, the shrewd poignancy of Mr. Carville's description of himself as an alien. But to us it implied a subdued if pa.s.sionate desire to see again the quiet landscape of England. The painter-cousin's sketch of the aeroplane near a rick, sunk in the ditch by a hedge, in the clear transparent afternoon light of late October, appealed to us.

To see a quickset hedge again ... we sighed.

No doubt we would have allowed the daily flow and return of life's business to oust our neighbours' fortunes from our minds, and waited patiently for Mr. Carville's reappearance, had not a most exciting game of cow-boys, a game in which I for the nonce was a fleeing Indian brave, led to an abrupt encounter with Mrs.

Carville. Benvenuto Cellini's scalp already hung at my girdle, visible as a pocket-handkerchief; and he lay far down near the cabbages, to the imaginative eye a writhing and disgusting spectacle. The intrepid Giuseppe Mazzini, however, had thrown his lariat about me with no mean adroitness, and I was down and captured. This thrilling _denouement_ was enacted near the repaired fence, and any horror I may have simulated was suddenly made real by the appearance of Mrs. Carville, who had been feeding her fowls.

When one is p.r.o.ne on the gra.s.s, a clothes-line drawn tight about one's arms, and a triumphant cow-boy of eight years in the very act of placing his foot on one's neck, it is difficult to look dignified. The sudden intrusion of an unsympathetic personality will banish the romantic illusion.

It may be that the sombre look in Mrs. Carville's face was merely expressive of a doubt of my sanity. For a grown man to be playing with two little boys at three o'clock of a Tuesday afternoon, may have seemed bizarre enough in her view. To me, however, endeavouring to disengage myself from my conqueror and a.s.sume an att.i.tude in keeping with my age and reputation, her features were ominously shadowed by displeasure.

"If I disturbed you," I said courteously, "I am sorry."

She put her hand on the paling and the basket slid down her arm.

She seemed to be pondering whether I had disturbed her or no, eyeing me reflectively. Ben came up, no longer a scalped and abandoned cow-boy, but a delighted child. Perhaps the trust and frank _camaraderie_ of the little fellow's att.i.tude towards me affected her, for her face softened.

"It's all right," she replied slowly. "You must not let them trouble you. They make so much noise."

"No, no," I protested. "I enjoy it. I am fond of children, very fond. They are nice little boys."

They stood on either side of me, clutching at my coat, subdued by the conversation.

"You have not any children?" she asked, looking at them. I shook my head.

"I am a bachelor," I replied, "I am sorry to say."

"That accounts for it," she commented, raising her eyes to mine. I agreed.

"Possibly," I said. "None the less I like them. I suppose," I added, "they ought to be at school."

"There is measles everywhere in the school," she informed me. "I do not want it yet."

"Mr. Carville," I said, seizing an opening, "told me he did not believe in school."

"That is right," she answered. "He don't see the use of them. Nor me," she concluded thoughtfully.

"That is a very unusual view," I ventured.

"How?" she asked vaguely.

"Most people," I explained, "think school a very good thing."

"It costs nothing," she mused and her hand fell away from the paling. The two little boys ran off, intent on a fresh game. I scanned her face furtively, appreciative of the regular and potent modelling, the pure olive tints, the pose and poise of the head.

Indubitably her face was dark; the raven hair that swept across her brow accentuated the gloom slumbering in her eyes. One unconsciously surmised that somewhere within her life lay a region of unrest, a period of pa.s.sion not to be confused with the quiet courtship described by her husband.

"True," I a.s.sented. "By the way, is Mr. Carville due in port soon?"

She turned her head and regarded me attentively.

"No," she said. "Do you wish to see him?"

"Oh, not particularly," I hastened to say. "He was telling us some of his experiences at sea, you know. It was very interesting."

"I do not like the sea," she said steadily. "It made me sick ..."

"So it did me. But I enjoy hearing about foreign lands; Italy, for instance."

"This is all right," Mrs. Carville replied in the same even tone.

"Here."

"And he will be back soon?" I said, reverting to Mr. Carville.

"Sat.u.r.day he says; but it may not be till Monday. If bad weather Monday ... Tuesday ... I cannot tell."

"I see," I said. "I hope we shall see him then. He was telling us ..." I paused. It occurred to me that she would hardly care to be apprised of what her husband had been telling us--"of his early life," I ended lamely.

"Of me?" She asked the question with eyes gazing out toward the blue ridge of the Orange Mountains, without curiosity or anger. I felt sheepish.

"Something," I faltered. She turned once more to glance in my direction. I was surprised at the mildness of her expression.

Almost she smiled. At any rate her lips parted.

"He is a good man," she said softly, and added as she turned away, "Good afternoon."

CHAPTER XI

MR. CARVILLE SEES THREE GREEN LIGHTS

As happens on occasion the weather changed with dramatic suddenness in the last week in November. One might almost imagine that our august emperor of the seasons, the Indian Summer, protracting his reign against all the wishes of the G.o.ds, stirring up the implacable bitterness and hatred of winter, had gone down suddenly in ruin and death. I remember well the evening of the change. I had spent a tiring day in New York, working gradually up Broadway as far as Twenty-third Street. Seen through the windows of the Jersey City ferryboat, the prow-like configuration of lower Manhattan seemed to be plunging stubbornly against the gale of sleet that was tearing up from the Narrows. The hoa.r.s.e blast of the ferry-whistle was swept out of hearing, the panes resounded with millions of impacts as the sleet, like thin iron rods, drove against them. An ign.o.ble impulse led me to join the scurrying stampede of commuters towards the warmth and shelter of the waiting-room. There is something personally hostile in a blizzard. In the earthquake at San Francisco there was a giant playfulness in the power that shook the brick front from our frame-house and revealed our intimate privacies to a heedless mob. There was a feeling there, even at the worst, when the slow shuddering rise of the earth changed to a swift and soul-shattering subsidence, a feeling that one was yet in the hands of G.o.d. But in a blizzard one apprehends an anger puny and personal. There is no sublimity in defying it; one runs to the waiting-room. And once there, nodding to Confield, who sat in a corner nursing his cosmopolitan bag, pressing through the little crowd about the news-stand, I found myself urging my body past a man wearing a Derby hat and smoking a corn-cob pipe. I had a momentary sense of gratification that even a seasoned seafarer like Mr. Carville should feel no shame in taking shelter from the inclement weather.

"Good evening, sir," he said imperturbably. "Homeward bound?"