"Well, Helena had asked that man, without consulting me, to stay at my house, and she sprang the announcement on me, on Thursday, the invitation being for Saturday. I had to tell her then and there--that he couldn't come."

"Naturally. How did she take it?"

"Very ill. You see, in a rash moment, I had told her to invite her friends for week-ends as she pleased. So she holds that I have broken faith, and this morning she told me she had arranged to go up and lunch with Donald at the Ritz next week--alone! So again I had to stop it. But I don't play the jailer even decently. I feel the greatest fool in creation." Cynthia smiled.

"I quite believe you! And this all happened in the first twenty-four hours? Poor Philip!"

"And I have also been informed that Helena's 'views' will not allow her--in the future--to take my advice on any such questions--that she prefers her liberty to her reputation--and 'wants to understand a bad man.' She said so. It's all very well to laugh, Cynthia! But what am I to do?"

Cynthia, however, continued to laugh unrestrainedly. And he joined in.

"And now you want advice?" she said at last, checking her mirth. "I'm awfully sorry for you, Philip. What about the little chaperon?"

"As nice a woman as ever was--but I don't see her preventing Helena from doing anything she wants to do. Helena will jolly well take care of that.

Besides she is too new to the job."

"She may get on better with Helena, perhaps, than a stronger woman,"

mused Cynthia. "But I am afraid you have got your work cut out. Wasn't it very rash of you?"

"I couldn't help it," he repeated briefly. "And I must just do my best.

But I'd be awfully grateful if you'd take a hand, Cynthia. Won't you come up and really make friends with her? She might take things from you that she wouldn't from me."

Cynthia looked extremely doubtful.

"I am sure last night she detested me."

"How could you tell? And why should she?"

"I'm twenty years older. That's quite enough."

"You scarcely look a day older, Cynthia."

She sighed, and lightly touched his hand, with a caressing gesture he remembered of old.

"Very nice of you to say it--but of course it isn't true. Well, Philip, I'll do what I can. I'll wander up some time--on Sunday perhaps. With your coaching, I could at least give her a biography of Jim Donald. One needn't be afraid of shocking her?"

His eyebrows lifted.

"Who's shocked at anything nowadays? Look at the things girls read and discuss! I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. But I really couldn't talk about Donald to her this morning. The fellow is such a worm! It would come better from you."

"Tell me a few more facts, then, about him, than I know at present."

He gave her rapidly a sketch of the life and antecedents of Lord Donald of Dunoon--gambler, wastrel, _divorce_, et cetera, speaking quite frankly, almost as he would have spoken to a man. For there was nothing at all distasteful to him in Cynthia's knowledge of life. In a woman of forty it was natural and even attractive. The notion of a discussion of Donald's love-affairs with Helena had revolted him. It was on the contrary something of a relief--especially with a practical object in view--to discuss them with Cynthia.

They sat chatting till the shadows lengthened, then wandered into the garden, still talking. Lady Georgina, watching from her window upstairs, had to admit that Buntingford seemed to like her sister's society. But if she had been within earshot at the last five minutes of their conversation, she would perhaps have seen no reason, finally, to change her opinion. Very agreeable that discursive talk had been to both participants. Buntingford had talked with great frankness of his own plans. In three months or so, his Admiralty work would be over. He thought very likely that the Government would then give him a modest place in the Administration. He might begin by representing the Admiralty in the Lords, and as soon as he got a foot on the political ladder prospects would open. On the whole, he thought, politics would be his line. He had no personal axes to grind; was afraid of nothing; wouldn't care if the Lords were done away with to-morrow, and could live on a fraction of his income if the Socialists insisted on grabbing the rest.

But the new world which the war had opened was a desperately interesting one. He hadn't enough at stake in it to spoil his nerve. Whatever happened, he implied, he was steeled--politically and intellectually.

Nothing could deprive him either of the joy of the fight, or the amusement of the spectacle.

And Cynthia, her honey-gold hair blown back from her white temples by the summer wind, her blue parasol throwing a summer shade about her, showed herself, as they strolled backwards and forwards over the shady lawn of the cottage, a mistress of the listening art; and there is no art more winning, either to men or women.

Then, in a moment, what broke the spell? Some hint or question from her, of a more intimate kind?--something that touched a secret place, wholly unsuspected by her? She racked her brains afterwards to think what it could have been; but in vain. All she knew was that the man beside her had suddenly stiffened. His easy talk had ceased to flow; while still walking beside her, he seemed to be miles away. So that by a quick common impulse both stood still.

"I must go back to the village," said Cynthia. She smiled, but her face had grown a little tired and faded.

He looked at his watch.

"And I told the car to fetch me half an hour ago. You'll be up some time perhaps--luncheon to-morrow?--or Sunday?"

"If I can. I'll do my best."

"Kind Cynthia!" But his tone was perfunctory, and his eyes avoided her.

When he had gone, she could only wonder what she had done to offend him; and a certain dreariness crept into the evening light. She was not the least in love with Philip--that she assured herself. But his sudden changes of mood were very trying to one who would like to be his friend.

Buntingford walked rapidly home. His way lay through an oak wood, that was now a revel of spring; overhead, a shimmering roof of golden leaf and wild cherry-blossom, and underfoot a sea of blue-bells. A winding path led through it, and through the lovely open and grassy spaces which from time to time broke up the density of the wood--like so many green floors cleared for the wood nymphs' dancing. From the west a level sun struck through the trees, breaking through storm-clouds which had been rapidly filling the horizon, and kindling the tall trees, with their ribbed grey bark, till they shone for a brief moment like the polished pillars in the house of Odysseus. Then a nightingale sang. Nightingales were rare at Beechmark; and Buntingford would normally have hailed the enchanted flute-notes with a boyish delight. But this evening they fell on deaf ears, and when the garish sunlight gave place to gloom, and drops of rain began to patter on the new leaf, the gathering storm, and the dark silence of the wood, after the nightingale had given her last trill, were welcome to a man struggling with a recurrent and desperate oppression.

Must he always tamely submit to the fetters which bound him? Could he do nothing to free himself? Could the law do nothing? Enquiry--violent action of some sort--rebellion against the conditions which had grown so rigid about him:--for the hundredth time, he canvassed all ways of escape, and for the hundredth time, found none.

He knew very well what was wrong with him. It was simply the imperious need for a woman's companionship in his life--for _love_. Physically and morally, the longing which had lately taken possession of him, was becoming a gnawing and perpetual distress. There was the plain fact. This hour with Cynthia Welwyn had stirred in him the depths of old pain. But he was not really in love with Cynthia. During the war, amid the absorption of his work, and the fierce pressure of the national need, he had been quite content to forget her. His work--and England's strait--had filled his mind and his time. Except for certain dull resentments and regrets, present at all times in the background of consciousness, the four years of the war had been to him a period of relief, almost of deliverance. He had been able to lose himself; and in that inner history of the soul which is the real history of each one of us, that had been for long years impossible.

But now all that protection and help was gone; the floodgates were loosened again. His work still went on; but it was no longer absorbing; it no longer mattered enough to hold in check the vague impulses and passions that were beating against his will.

And meanwhile the years were running on. He was forty-four, Helena Pitstone's guardian, and clearly relegated already by that unmanageable child to the ranks of the middle-aged. He had read her thought in her great scornful eyes. "What has your generation to do with mine? Your day is over!"

And all the while the ugly truth was that he had never had his "day"--and was likely now to miss it for good. Or at least such "day" as had shone upon him had been so short, so chequered, so tragically wiped out, it might as well never have dawned. Yet the one dear woman friend to whom in these latter years he had spoken freely, who knew him through and through--Helena Pitstone's mother--had taken for granted, in her quiet ascetic way, that he had indeed had his chance, and must accept for good and all what had come of it. It was because she thought of him as set apart, as debarred by what had happened to him, from honest love-making, and protected by his own nature from anything less, that she had asked him to take charge of Helena. He realized it now. It had been the notion of a fanciful idealist, springing from certain sickroom ideas of sacrifice--renunciation--submission to the will of God--and so forth.

It was _not_ the will of God!--that he should live forsaken and die forlorn! He hurled defiance, even at Rachel, his dear dead friend, who had been so full of pity for him, and for whom he had felt the purest and most unselfish affection he had ever known--since his mother's death.

And now the presence of her child in his house seemed to represent a verdict, a sentence--of hers upon him, which he simply refused to accept as just or final. If Rachel had only lived a little longer he would have had it out with her. But in those last terrible days, how could he either argue--or refuse?

All the same, he would utterly do his duty by Helena. If she chose to regard him as an old fogy, well and good--it was perhaps better so. Not that--if circumstances had been other than they were---he would have been the least inclined to make love to her. Her beauty was astonishing. But the wonderful energy and vitality of her crude youth rather repelled than attracted him.

The thought of the wrestles ahead of him was a weariness to an already tired man. Debate with her, on all the huge insoluble questions she seemed to be determined to raise, was of all things in the world most distasteful to him. He would certainly cut a sorry figure in it; nothing was more probable.

The rain began to plash down upon his face and bared head, cooling an inner fever. The damp wood, the soft continuous dripping of the cherry-blossoms, the scent of the blue-bells,--there was in them a certain shelter and healing. He would have liked to linger there. But already, at Beechmark, guests must have arrived; he was being missed.

The trees thinned, and the broad lawns of Beechmark came in sight.

Ah!--there was Geoffrey, walking up and down with Helena. _Suppose_ that really came off? What a comfortable way out! He and Cynthia must back it all they could.

CHAPTER VI

"Buntingford looks twice as old as he need!" said Geoffrey French, lighting a cigarette as he and Helena stepped out of the drawing-room window after dinner into the May world outside--a world which lay steeped in an after-glow of magical beauty. "What's wrong, I wonder! Have you been plaguing him, Helena?" The laughing shot was fired purely at random.

But the slight start and flush it produced in Helena struck him.

"I see nothing wrong with him," said Helena, a touch of defiance in her voice. "But of course it's extraordinarily difficult to get on with him."