"Oh!" answered Hubert. Perhaps it was excitement only, but he felt of a sudden as though he could resume his grip with pleasure. "It must have been a long affair."

The sneer was obvious. He never had been jealous about Helena before--but things were happening to-night.

"Oh," laughed the other apologetically: and Hubert realised what an a.s.s he was, wondered why he had ever got to know him, "we've been in some time."

"I see," said Hubert. "Well, good-night." He could not trust himself much longer. It was so dark, and that grip had been vaguely satisfying to some primaeval side of him....

Geoffrey Alison returned the greeting and slid away with definite relief. He had not liked the way that Brett said that "I see." It was so obvious he did. And then about the causerie having been long----!

When he grew cooler, sitting in the tube, he began to wonder nervously how this would affect his friendship with Helena (he always thought of her as that), and looked rather doubtfully along the future. Well, he should see. He wouldn't call again until she wrote.

Only one thing was certain. Her husband suspected him--and he felt wickeder than ever....

Hubert meanwhile let himself into the dark hall and merely throwing down his hat, without taking off his coat, strode full of war into the drawing-room. Helena had just finished the postponed yawn with some luxuriance and decided that Mr. Alison must get up very early and do all his work then, and that made him so dull at night. She turned delightedly as the door opened. Good: Hugh already!

"Helena," he said, storming in, "why did you pretend you weren't going to the show to-night?"

"What _do_ you mean, Hugh?" she asked, utterly surprised. "I wasn't."

She hoped that he had not been drinking. Men, she believed, mostly did when they got out alone.

"You must think me a fool," he said. "But I don't intend to have an argument about it. I only want to say at once that I think it would be far better if you saw less of your friend Mr. Alison. I meant to say it anyhow. People are talking."

"But I don't understand," she faltered, almost as a question.

He laughed scornfully. "I know you're ignorant but you are not a fool, so don't pretend you are. Of course married women don't need chaperons, I know all that, but a mere girl like you and that young a.s.s and almost midnight--but don't let's go into all that." He calmed himself, swallowing his wrath, and said more gently; "I know it's all right really, dear, don't think I don't, it's only--well, you know what people say."

"_What_ do they say?" she asked indignantly.

"As you ask," he answered, letting the words out coldly, "I heard one man telling another at the Golf Club yesterday that Mrs. Herbertson was saying she had not yet found out whether Alison or I was Mr. Brett, but thought _he_ was as you saw more of him. That's a local joke! It's jolly, isn't it?"

"_I_ think it's disgusting," she answered oddly calm. "I shouldn't ever care what people with that sort of mind think."

"Well _I_ do," he almost shouted at her, "and I want you to understand as my wife that I forbid you to see that young Alison again. I don't know anything about him except that I did him a favour once. And I don't mean to have it."

"I think you're excited," she said calmly, not at all like the child that he had always known. She gathered new strength from his sudden weakness. One of them must have reserve.

"Excited!" he mocked. "Well, who wouldn't be? A dirty-minded little cad like that!"

"Hubert," she said roused at last, "you've got no right to call him that. It's you and Mrs. Herbertson and every one that have the dirty minds. I don't know what you think. He's not a cad. He's _your_ friend and I like him. He's been nice to me." A devil tempted her, urging her on beyond the point of a good friend's defence. "I'm very fond of him," she said, provocatively.

And then that devil entered into Hubert Brett. It had been a full night and excitement all the way. He had not yet recovered from that garden scene. And now, listening to her words, hearing his rival praised, he felt again as he had felt when he thought that some harm had come to her. He seized her in his arms with an unreasoning pa.s.sion; held her there, resisting; kissed her furiously on lips, eyes, everywhere; laughing and saying: "You are mine, mine. You belong to me, I tell you. You're all mine!"

"Let me go, Hubert," she cried terrified. She could not understand.

He let her go, at that. She moved away and stood behind the table, as though that gave her protection. He gazed at her smiling, panting.

"I'm sorry," he said presently. "It was your fault: you were so maddening. You don't see what it means to me."

The little G.o.ds of Comedy laughed out upon the tragic spectacle of a man released by oddly joined emotions from his chains of Self and a wife who wondered in fear whether Kit Kats drank champagne....

"And how did the dinner go off?" she asked soon, in her usual tones.

CHAPTER XIII

SECRETS

Helena came to the conclusion that her mother had been right in one point: life was difficult. She decided further that it was the Mrs.

Herbertsons who caused the trouble. Things would be all right if no one ever thought about them!

But she had Consolations beyond this Philosophy.

For one thing, Hubert almost instantly relented, the next day to be precise, about poor Mr. Alison. She, giving way in turn, had said she would appease the vicar's wife and golfers by seeing less of him. So all that stupid fuss was over.

This, however, was not the real Consolation. No, she had a secret.

Helena Brett's secret was not a typically wifely one. It was based, rather, on her childish games. Every little girl has secrets--to the scorn of boys--and when, like Helena, she is an only child, she has them to herself. Of course it is less satisfactory, because although by its nature even a pretending secret needs but one, the whole fun lies in telling it to some one else.

Helena told no one about hers. And it was much more thrilling than those early Devonshire affairs, which largely hinged on the exact position of a fast-decaying mole.

The secret differed too from those of many wives in this, that it was all about a woman; a woman she had never met, a woman she could never meet.

For over a year now, since causeries and lectures on a.s.sorted topics began to fit into a shapeless enough whole--a something that explained or might explain what Helena called "Things"--she had put stray thoughts down into a shilling diary. At first they had been merely sentences that touched her or inspired, things heard and read. Then as her mind began to feel its way, she wrote these extracts down, and half ashamed at first, though n.o.body would ever see them, added her comments on their theories. How elementary the first had been! She blushed, re-reading them. "'The best pilots are ash.o.r.e'" (ran one on page two).

"Then are they really pilots?"

Soon, as was to be expected, she could not endure these accusing words, even herself; and throwing the slim volume pell-mell in the fire, bought and embarked upon a more ambitious tome.

Then indeed began the proper secret, for up till now though n.o.body had ever known, (she could hear Hubert laughing at her and calling her "so refreshing" ...) it had not been tremendously exciting.

Now it was, however, for the new book, started ambitiously enough as a sort of brief record of her daily moods--she had so much time now that she saw less of Geoffrey Alison--gradually burgeoned into something even more colossal.

They never had been quite her own sensations in this second volume.

Those were so extremely dull! No, they had been those of some one like herself: a young wife with a busy husband, some one who felt a fool and wanted not to, wanted very much, but he quite liked it really----oh yes, sometimes, the first day or two, she felt a cad. Hubert really wasn't the least bit like that; it was all over-done; but she supposed that it was easier--he always said it was--if you exaggerated than if you just kept to the truth. It all seemed rather horrid, somehow. She thought about tearing up the book.

And then--just about the time of the Kit Kat affair--began the real, astounding, secret.

Virginia, as she called the wife inwardly (for it was all in the first person)--Virginia began to grow!

It was not Helena's own moods and feelings now that went upon the paper: something endlessly more thorough, more intense, more--well, Helena's own word was "sloppy."

Frankly she despised Virginia. That scene about the Kit Kats came into her diary (it was not Helena's), quite different, about a different thing in fact, and more hysterical. She hoped she would not end up like Virginia! Yet in a way she saw herself there too, just as beneath the husband she could detect ever so cruel a parody of Hubert in his most naughty moments....

But oh, what fun it was!

When Hubert got up nowadays with some remark like; "Well, _I_ must do my work!" she no longer felt lonely or out in the cold or inferior or anything. She just said to herself: "And so must I."

It was too splendid, having secrets.