"Please forgive me, Noel."

"Oh, there's nothing to forgive," he returned hastily. "Of course, if you feel like that, it's all over."

He looked at her steadily and Alex felt the suspicion rush over her that he was trying obliquely to convey a warning to her that if she dismissed him now, it would be of no use to recall him later.

Alex felt pa.s.sionately that in the depths of his stubborn vanity lay the truest presentment of himself that Noel would ever show her. If there was another side to his personality--and she was dimly willing to believe it for all her utter ignorance of him--the power to call it forth did not dwell in her.

Her momentary feeling of anger gave way to humiliation, and she half held out her hand.

"Good-bye, Noel," she said humbly.

As though to atone for the lack of feeling in his tone, Noel wrung her hand until it hurt her, as he replied automatically: "Good-bye, Alex."

"I suppose we shall never meet again," thought Alex, with all the finality of youth, and felt dazed as she saw him open the door.

Mechanically, she rang the bell in order that the servants downstairs might know that he was leaving, and come into the hall to find his hat and stick and to open the door for him.

Lady Isabel had instilled into Alex that it was part of her responsibility in grown-up life to ring the bell for departing guests, as unostentatiously as possible, at just the right moment, and every time that she remembered to do it, she always felt rather proud of herself.

This time she thought:

"It's the last time Noel will ever be in this room with me. He is going right out of my life."

She was quite unconsciously trying to awaken in herself an anguish of regret that might yet justify her to herself in recalling her lover.

If he turns round at the door and says, "Alex!" She tried to cheat herself with a hope that was yet not a hope.

Noel turned at the door.

In a solemn, magnanimous voice he said:

"Alex! I don't want you to feel--ever--that you need reproach yourself, whatever any one may say. Remember that, if"--he suddenly looked like a rather frightened little boy--"if there's a great fuss."

Then the door closed very quietly behind him, and Alex heard him go downstairs slowly.

It seemed to her that Noel's farewell had plumbed the final depth of his inadequacy.

Presently she sank into an armchair before the fire, and tried to visualize the effects of her own action.

She was princ.i.p.ally conscious of a certain amazement, that a step which seemed likely to have such far-reaching consequences should have been so largely the result of sudden impulse. She had not thought the night before of breaking off her engagement. It had all happened very quickly in a few minutes, when the sense of tension which had hung round her intercourse with Noel had suddenly seemed to reach an unbearable pitch, so that something had snapped. Was this how Important Things happened to one through life?

Alex felt that she could not believe it.

But a broken engagement--could there be anything more important, more desperate? Alex felt with melancholy satisfaction that at least it was real life, as she had always imagined it, full of drama and tragedy.

With, of course, a glory of happiness as final climax, that would make up for everything.... More physically tired than she knew, Alex abandoned herself dreamily to the old, idle visions of the wonderful, perfect love that should come to crown her life. There was no faint, latent sense of disloyalty to Noel now, in returning to her old dreams, that had been hers in one form or another ever since her childish ideal of a perfect friend who would always understand, and yet love one just the same.

It was with a violent start that Alex came back to reality again. She had dismissed Noel Cardew, had given him back his beautiful diamond engagement-ring, and now she would have to tell her father and mother, with no better reason to adduce than her own caprice.

She felt sick with fright.

She remembered Sir Francis's silent but unmistakable pride and pleasure in his engaged daughter, and Lady Isabel's additional display of affection, and even of deference to Alex' taste in choosing her frocks and hats, and her own sense of having at last atoned to them both for her unsatisfactory childhood and lack of any conspicuous social success, such as they had coveted for her.

Alex, cowering in her chair now, wondered how she could face them. Her only shred of comfort lay in the remembrance that Lady Isabel had said to her:

"My darlin', I'm so thankful to know you are marrying for love."

Alex, in bitter bewilderment, remembered those words again and again in the days which followed.

No one reproached her, she heard hardly a word of blame, and the most severe censure spoken to her was in her mother's soft voice, far more distressed than angry.

"But, Alex, do you know what people say, about a girl who's behaved as you have? That she's a vulgar _jilt_, neither more nor less. To throw over a young man after being engaged to him for four weeks, with no reason except a capricious fit.... Oh, my darling, _why_ couldn't you have asked me first? To go and give him back that lovely ring, and hurt and insult him.... Of course, he'll never come back. Your father says how well he's behaved, poor boy.... Alex, Alex, what shall I do with you?"

Tears were running down her pretty face, so slightly lined even now.

Alex cried too, from pity for her mother and wretched, undefined remorse, and a growing conviction that in acting on her own distorted impulse she had once more involved herself, and, far worse, others, in far-reaching and disastrous consequences.

"Thank Heaven, we hadn't announced the engagement, but, of course, it will all get about--things always do. And there's nothing worse for a girl than to get that sort of reputation, especially when she's not--not tremendously sought after, or pretty or anything."

Lady Isabel had never before come so near to an avowal that her eldest daughter's career had proved a disappointment to her, and Alex in the admission, rightly gauged the extent of her mother's dismay.

"Why did you do it, Alex?"

Alex tried haltingly to explain, but she could only say:

"I--I felt I didn't care for him enough."

"But you hadn't had time to find out! You accepted him when he proposed, so you must have been quite ready to like him then, and you'd only been engaged for four weeks. How could you tell--a little thing like you?"

wailed Lady Isabel.

"Oh, Alex, if you'd only come to me about it first--I could have explained it all to you--girls often get fancies about being in love."

"I thought you wanted me to marry for love. You said so," sobbed Alex.

"Of course, I don't want you to marry without it. But it's the love that comes _after_ marriage that really counts--and a boy you'd known all your life, practically--that we all liked--you could have been ideally happy, Alex." Lady Isabel looked at her almost resentfully.

"I don't know what will happen to you, my darling, I don't indeed. I sometimes think you are just as headstrong and exaggerated as when you were a little girl. And, Alex, I don't like even to say such a thing to you--but--there's never been any one _but_ Noel, and I'm afraid this isn't the sort of thing that makes any man.... Nothing puts them off more--and no wonder."

Alex thought momentarily of Queenie, but she knew that was different. In the supreme object of woman, to attract, Queenie stood in a cla.s.s apart.

Nothing that Queenie could ever do would ever rob her of the devotion that was hers, wherever she chose to claim it, by mysterious right of attraction.

From her father, Alex heard very little. She was left, in her abnormal sensitiveness, to measure his disappointment and mortification by his very silence.

Feeling again like the naughty little girl who had been responsible for Barbara's fall from the bal.u.s.ters, and had been sent to Sir Francis for sentence, she listened, in a silence that was broken only by the sobs that she could hardly control, to his few, measured utterances.

"You are old enough to know your own mind." Sir Francis paused, swinging his gla.s.ses lightly to and fro in his hand. Then he deliberately put them across his nose and looked at her.

"At least," he added carefully, "I suppose you are. Your mother tells me that you appear to have been--er--rather suddenly overwhelmed by a fear of marrying without love. I don't wish to say, Alex, that such a sentiment was not more or less proper and natural, but to act upon it so hastily, and with such a heartless lack of consideration, appears to me to be the action, my dear child"--Sir Francis paused, and then added calmly--"of a fool. The word is not a pretty one, but I prefer it to the only other alternative that I can see, for describing your conduct."